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I'm going to say some stuff that's going to bother some people people who are listening to this and are not making as much money as they want they have to Mr
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Alex Heros the100 Million Man ult preneur investor and philanthropist taking the Internet by storm this guy
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really really does understand how to build a business I was 22 I had done everything that my dad had wanted me to
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do and I was looking out from the condo that I had been able to buy with this job that I had and um I always hoped I
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wouldn't wake up the next day I cherish the fact that it was so miserable that it got me to change pain motivates sign
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iFly faster and stronger than pleasure does if you are angry use it if you are sad use it or it uses you I didn't know
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whether I would succeed but I did know I wasn't going to stop right around that point is when I met my wife and then she just changed my life how did she change
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you like didn't think we were going to go
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here um she just she believed in me she stood tall when everything in my
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life was crumbling around me I was like dead broke in her parents house and I was like I I think you should leave
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me she pulled my chin towards her and she was like I would sleep with you under a bridge if it came to
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that 6 months later I have $3 million in the bank account all of that was the first N9 months of our relationship for
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have that kind of belief was was very it was deep for
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me and I think that's what most guys want truly
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what makes a really good entrepreneur leer I'll answerer this differently than I have in the past and I'm going to tell
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a story that hopefully people don't take the wrong way but I had a cat before this episode starts I have a
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small favor to ask from you two months ago 74% of people that watched this channel didn't subscribe we're now down
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to 69% my goal is 50% so if you've ever
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liked any of the videos we've posted if you like this channel can you do me a quick favor hit the Subscribe button it
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helps this channnel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets as you've seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this
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[Music]
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episode Alex I spend several hours consuming all
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of your content across multiple channels what is the aim what is the mission what
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is the the intent if you were to try and summarize the content you're producing and the value
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you're trying to add and to who are you trying to add it to to make business accessible for
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everyone that was the mission of the company and so our whole idea was we'll put everything out there uh
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for free so no pay walls so there's like we have courses on the site the books I have for 99 cents um so that anyone can
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get them and you know we'll continue to produce as much as we can and we share the learnings that we have
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from our portfolio companies in order to keep the stuff that we are putting out there relevant new fresh Cutting Edge
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because this is what's working today and by doing that it also brings other
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companies to us because they get value from the stuff and our goal is always to hopefully provide more value to a
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company before they've ever spoken to us um like kind of pay for ourselves as in advance is kind of like the thought
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process even though we're buying in um and that's that was kind of the thesis when we started it I didn't know if it
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was going to work uh but it seems to have gone pretty well uh and it was just kind of just like if we just give and
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keep giving and keep giving we just focus on the value and delivering to the audience um it'll come back eventually
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what are you giving them and who are you giving it to entrepreneurs at all stages um we've
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surveyed the audience 25% of the audience uh has a business 75% does not have a business but wants to start a
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business and so that's just kind of overall um and then within that 25% then it just kind of categories all the way up to you know business is doing 100
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million plus a year and so it's everyone and so we try and our one of the things that we talk about is like going wide
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and deep it's like how can we figure something that is relevant to somebody who's you know launching their first product and also make it accessible or
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interesting to somebody who's launching a new product line within a division of their conglomerate right I'm just trying
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to think about both people at the same time which becomes more challenging but it's also kind of fun it's kind of like a funnel isn't it in some respects um
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that's EX exctly what I saw from your content you're you're making great content that's helping people that are at the start of their Journey or you
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know 100 employees deep into their Journey trying to figure out how to scale you're making content that's
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bringing down some of the barriers whether psychological or practical to enable them to reach whatever dream they have let's go way Upstream
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then what do I need to know about you to understand the life you've LED take me
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way back to your childhood in the early context both parents are IM immigrants to the US uh mother was born in France
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came here father was born in Iran um they met in medical school in Europe uh
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and then my mother brought him back with her to the US and then uh they had me
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and uh they split my mom had a lot of demons she had a lot of things she struggled with when I was coming up so I
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pretty much was raised by my dad uh had no siblings it was just me and my dad for until I was about 15 um he got
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remarried it was a short s in terms of uh how long I was like kind of in the house you know like right at that stage
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just when you can drive and I was kind of on my own almost at that point um as soon as I could work and drive I was kind of out of the house um and then
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from there did the thing that most people try and do which is uh I I I worked hard at
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school mostly because I just didn't want my dad to be upset with me which was uh the main driver for most of my
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achievement in my career for the first half um was all just trying to gain his
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approval um did all the things that I thought he would want me to uh got a job
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at a Government Contracting uh consulting firm a defense Contracting it was space cyber and ISR uh so it's
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intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance uh for the military sounded really cool was less cool when
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you were in it um and I was very very sad um at that point in my life and so
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it was very much like I didn't I always hoped I wouldn't wake up the next day um
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and it truly you really mean that 100% 100% because I remember when I was
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looking at um a lot of people have like rock top moments sorry Rock Bottom moments I think I had more of a rock top
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moment which was um I was 22 I had done everything that my dad had
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wanted me to do at this point I was looking out from the condo that i' had been able to buy with this job that I had and um I was like is this it in the
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whole time I just really didn't enjoy my life um and it was just you know not
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wanting to wake up and it
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was the the decision to leave Baltimore which is where I was
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from to quit that path to decide to start a business of my own was still to
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this day the hardest thing I've ever done by far all the things we've been through to to build what we have the
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hardest decision was taking the leap for me uh and it was because like I knew that my dad
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so much wanted me to do what I was doing because he was so happy that I was doing everything he wanted me to do at that
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point and I had told him over and over again that I wanted to do this other stuff and he's like yeah like later you
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know later um and so I knew that it would probably put a big dent in our
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relationship um if I left but for me it was actually confronting the fact that I
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didn't want to be alive anymore which was the thing that gave me enough courage or whatever you want to call it
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to actually make the decision to leave home and so I started driving across the country I mean it took me six months to
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do this like when I between when I decided I really wanted to do this and when I actually did it took me six months and I called him when I was like
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halfway across the United States and I was like I'm going to California I'm gonna open a gym I'm going to get into
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fitness and he was like why are you so extreme and he like lost it and then we didn't really talk much for a long time
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when you started realizing that your life um was one where you didn't want to wake
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up in the morning when you had that job in management consultancy MH did you
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experience suicidal ideation is that what you're saying when you say I don't want I didn't want to wake up into my life every day it was never like I've
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never had a like this is how I would kill myself nope never had that I just always like the idea that I could not
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wake up the next day sounded good when you look back in hindsight
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from that moment backwards what are the series of decisions or the the the things that led you to find yourself in
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the position and I asked that because there's a lot of people that can probably relate and and there's probably quite a
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consistent set of frog pads or stones that one has Walken down for whatever
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reason that leads you to a position where you go what the [ __ ] whose life is
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this I think the like the on line summary for me was that like I felt like I had to let my dad's dream die for mine
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to live and I felt like my entire life it had always up to that point had been like go to the school do these studies
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you I mean it's it's a common thing like it's not like I had something that a lot of people don't have many people and to be fair I'm very grateful for the skills
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discipline Etc that that instilled in me um because I think you you you have the
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the hard hand of an authoritarian um parent when you're growing up and it teaches you a lot of skills and then you
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know the flip side is if you have a very less aair parent like you never learn those skills which then benefit you later so you know who knows um but for
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for me um I knew that he just wanted me to be a doctor that's what he was that would
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have been his dream I went to school as Premed um and then I I was like even changing my degree from Premed to just a
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business degree was like a huge deal um but he was okay with that as long as I followed like the business path and so
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when I did my two years of consulting which is kind of the typical like two to four years you do Consulting and then you apply to go to business school
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um when I was going through that process I was answering the question for like the Harvard NBA and he was like how will
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Harvard NBA help you shorten long-term goals and I sat there for like two days trying to answer the question and I was
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like it just isn't I want to start a business and so that was when I kept trying to you know start that
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conversation with my dad and it just wasn't really happening um and so that's what that was kind of the breaking point
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for me was like I just felt terrible about my life and I didn't didn't like the way it was going and I for me it was such a key point
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because the biggest line of reasoning I had for myself in order to convince myself to in front my father or at least disappoint my father or the version of
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myself that he wanted me to be was to say that like I have to be comfortable dying in his eyes and a lot of people
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like and many people might think that is hyperbole but for me it was very true like I I knew that I would die in his
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eyes and I did um to give you
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context so I had the gyms and I opened up multiple after that got to about six
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locations sold those started a gym turnaround business did that for 2 years um
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all the while we weren't really in you know we were like okay in touch um and then we started the licensing business
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which is gym launch and that's the one that like really took off and we hadn't been super in touch and I get a call out
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of the blue and he wasn't like a cold call you know what I mean I was like this is weird so I pick up the phone and
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he's like you're going to want to sit down for this and I was like okay uh what's up I was thinking
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like cancer you know I mean I'm just like what what is it going to be he was like like I'm sorry and I was like for
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what he was like you know everything I was like
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okay and I was very angry still because and this is what I told him so I was
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like like you know that point when people like get on stage and they accept the awards and mind you at this point I
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think we're do we're probably taking home one and a half million a month you know what I mean and take home like
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personal income from the license it was it was a decent like a I'm not you know conglomerate like probably but it was
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decent sized business and I was like you know when people get on stage and they accept
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awards for things I was like the first thing they always say is like hey I just want to thank my mom and dad for always believing in me and I was like I'm not
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going to say that I was like because you didn't I was like you're only saying this now once everyone believed because
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it's not belief anymore it's fact it's evidence I was like so you're I was like this apology means nothing to me
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and besides that I stopped caring what you thought 6 years ago which is why I
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left and so I had like that's like I I could have just accepted it and I and I
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I didn't do that um how' you feel about that I probably like today I probably
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would have just said thanks I appreciate it I know where he was trying I he was trying to extend an olive branch um and
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I just wasn't there I was still seething I was still very angry that I had not gotten any support during that process
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and maybe that was very woe as me um but I was still very very angry at that point and you know to give also a little
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bit of context you know his response to that was like well we'll see how long it lasts you're joking no so like my father
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and I like he is a very strong personality and so do I and we both
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think we're right are you angry about it now honestly no I mean like I think I
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can still feel the emotions but I feel like I've you know thought about it
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enough to say that I can logically say I think he absolutely did the best he could what he had he's a single dad
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another country raising a kid trying to get that kid to fit in and do the things that like one of the things that I think
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my dad always wanted me to be able to do is like because he's darker skinned than I am he's Middle Eastern um he always
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wanted me to like have access to like the back rooms where like deals were made that he felt like he wasn't a part
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of and so he just wanted me to have that and so I think he just drove me as much as he
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could to to get that it's just like when you're on the other side of it like all you feel is never
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succeeding but I can appreciate it now in retrospect um but it definitely was
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still it hardened me a lot but that hardness I think has has
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benefit me a lot in business I had someone on the podcast say a quote which I've never managed to forget they said
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you've got to realize that everybody you encounter everybody that does you wrong if you were them and you had been
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through what they've been through and you had their brain you'd be doing the exact same thing yeah and it sound it's
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obvious on one hand but it's also very kind of Illuminating that think about the person that's wrong you the most if you've been through their shoes and you
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had their genetics you'd be doing the exact same thing doesn't mean you have to let them off but at least evoke some
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empathy if you heard um you cannot both hate and understand someone at the same time
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true like if you truly understand someone then you can't hate them because you understand why like a lot of times
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the hate is from the unknown and not like because you hate because I mean you almost say you're like how could like
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it's it's literally a statement of not understanding like how could you if you understood then you would know how and
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that resentment is a byproduct of just not understanding as well I was just thinking about resentment that I've had in my life when I think someone's wrong
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me that sense of Injustice you're right how could yeah how dare you did you ever
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manage to get your fuel to burn less dirty are you burning less dirty now yeah I think so you think so yeah I
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think so I my my team tells me um that that's true and if you look at like because I do have some older videos that
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I made from like you know years ago um and there's definitely a different vibe I'm I'm significantly friendlier
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now than I was then um I me even the way I interacted with customers and you know the team was like purely fear driven
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like I was absolutely because I didn't understand influence as well yet um so
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only only the stick I had was like if I if people are afraid of me then they will immediately comply
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and it's effective for short durations but not for long durations um and but I
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didn't know any better at the time and then I slow that's when I you know right around that point is when I met my wife and then she just you know changed my
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life um and she started running all the businesses and I'd see her and everyone loved her and I was like man should do
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more more of that stuff and less of my stuff um she changed your life oh yeah
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for sure far not I mean she's like the best
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how did she change you she has brought out the absolute best in me like in in just about every way
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like didn't think we were going to go here um she just she believed in me
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and I think that's what most guys want truly at least for me that's what I
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want or needed I'll tell you a story to
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illustrate it so we met talk for four hours on the first
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date only about business because that's all I wanted to talk about and I pitched her on working
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for me I was like quit your job work for me and she was like I just met you logically makes sense she was a a
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personal trainer I had a bunch of gyms and I was like if you're this good you should totally work for me she was like
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well let's you know let's see how this goes um and so I had this idea for the
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turnaround business and it was right as I had five five locations at that point and I wanted to try this thing out so I flew out did three turnarounds flew back
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and they started working and then um I sold all my gyms because it was like okay this this makes even more money I
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took all the money and put it into uh this gym that one of the guys I was doing a turnaround with was like dude you just crushed this like I'm a really
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good operator instead of turning these gyms around and walking away with just the money he's like you should just keep
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owning them and I'll just fill up fill them up behind you so I could I could launch one two three gyms a month and
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then own them all he's like you're leaving so much money on the table I like okay so we did this first launch I put all the money in he was like of
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course he had financial difficulties and I had to personally gu you know personally guarantee the lease normal
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stuff um and so I crushed this launch and then I wake up in morning I check
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the bank account and uh it's completely empty I was like what's happening so I called him up
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and he was like well I know you're you're skimming from the business and I was like what he's like I know you're I know
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you're you're skimming I was like I'm we just what no um he's like well that was
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my half uh and so I was like what is happening so I I printed all the bank
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the bank statements I went line by line I was like let me I'll I'll walk you through all the bank statements let's just let's get to the bottom of this and
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I remember we went sat to the meeting and he was like I don't need to see that he pushed it off the table and I was like oh okay I immediately was like oh
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he I just got [ __ ] and he'd already been indicted for fraud um and I knew this getting
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into business with him and it was just a big misunderstanding and you know the saying goes like uh when experience meets money
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money gets the experience and experience gets money um very much live that and so after I had all my gyms I sold them put
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all the money in this thing and then they all got taken um and so I had nothing and um lela's with me at this
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point for this like this exciting period so I was like okay she's like hey you
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know maybe we should keep doing these turnarounds instead of this weird launch and go thing you side sidelined for I
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was like okay we'll do that and so I was going to launch a gym the next month um and there was a guy who was local to
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that gym and since I was refocusing I was like all right I'm going to build all the infrastructure I'll send this sales guy out to do this thing and uh he
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crushed the launch did like 120,000 which for us was a big launch um in like three day uh in 3 weeks and so now I'm
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at lelo's parents house because uh like we don't really have a house at this point um and I'm the guy that she met
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from the internet that she quit her job for uh who just lost everything and uh I
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was I I needed this 100 Grand to come in from this launch so that I could recapitalize
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and the money wasn't hitting I was checking the bank account I was like where's this money like and I I could
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see the processing the transactions and it was all success what's going on so I called the the process process her up and I was like what's up and they uh
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they said it's a routine check I was like I've been with you guys six years it's never been a routine check and they're like call again later and I was like okay so I call about the next day
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next day nothing and then finally it was Christmas Eve and I owed this guy money for the commissions from the
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sales and I was like I will not get off this phone until you send me the money
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that I am owed and uh to the payment process mhm and they were like long
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story short uh you were doing stuff in different locations and I was running this all through a local gym business
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even though I was all over the nation and they were like this is a little irregular we're just going to hold on to this for 6 months [ __ ] right now I owe
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the guy $222,000 in commissions I in total now had $23,000 so I wired him the money and I
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had $1,000 left and it was December of 2016 and I was like I screenshot it
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because I still have the screenshot on my bank account so I went from like six gyms turnaround business all this stuff to $1,000 and I was like this sucks
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and Leila had just got six of her friends to quit their job to come do this turnaround business with me and
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they were starting two days later from the 24th so the 26th of December because I planed on getting this 100 Grand in
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and then being able to launch six gyms because they took about you know whatever uh it was $3,300 a day in cost
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to have six guys out there in the field selling 3,300 a day that I did not have
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and so I saw out a credit card that $100,000 limit on it um and so I'm at her parents house like in in an extra
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bedroom having lost everything and the my one hail Mar play of this launch the money did not come through and I was
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like I I think you should leave me um I I think I am a a sinking ship right now
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and I would respect you like we're cool if you want to walk away like we're good
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like I won't think less of you like I would walk away from you right now cuz this could this has a very high likel of not going
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right and um she pulled my chin towards her and she was like I would sleep with you
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under a bridge if it came to that and it's hard to comprehend but like I had nothing you know like for
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have that kind of belief was was very um it was deep for me so I was like [ __ ]
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it let's go you know what I mean and so then we we launched the gyms doing $3,300 a day and uh mind you I had no
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way to process money still so I'm collecting 60 to 80 contracts a day that I can't process and we're getting calls
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from customers like hey why haven't you run my card why haven't you run my card I'm calling all these processors to like hey can you pleas and as soon as you get
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shut down from a processor it's like a black mark it's like going bankrupt for credit cards um they're like oh no
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something's weird we they just won't theyve other people they can process the money for finally I get like a highrisk
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processor that does like porn and casinos and stuff to like give me and they were like yeah so it's going to be
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like 8% processing and we're going to hold 10% as like Safeguard and I was like Jesus okay yes and they're like and
00:24:02
we can only give you $50,000 as your limit and I was like I was like I need like 200 he's like well and I got this
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on the 29th of January so this whole time 3,300 a day is running on this card and I have no money and I have no way to
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process it and 29th of January I can run 50 Grand I run 50 Grand in a day and
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he's like but it's by month he's like so February 1st you can run another 50 so February 1st I run another 5050 that 100
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covers my cost from the month before and then I get two more processors for 50 boom boom run those and then like I
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got a third one or fourth one like two weeks later and I was able to like start moving things around um and at the end
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of February uh we had made like a $330,000 profit and um I was like okay I
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think we might be out of this the next month we did a little bit more and I was like okay I think this is working and
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then all of a sudden Lila Taps me on the shoulder one morning and she's like she like turn her laptop towards me and it's our bank account and has all these
00:25:01
negative transactions like hundreds of them and I was like what's going on she was like well all these clients are
00:25:07
calling me saying that the gym that we did this launch at month and a half ago the guy got in his chair and was like
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hey there's too many of you here like just go home just refund because I was the one who held the money they had to
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do the delivery that was the model it's like I would fill a gym up I would sell I'd keep the money and then they deliver
00:25:24
on the services and after that they could keep the customers that was kind of like the the setup and then another gym the next week said
00:25:32
hey this guy made 100 grand out of my gym the average gym owner makes $36,000 a year take home like this kid from the
00:25:38
internet took 100 grand out in a month screw that kid and so he told all the customers who were there after we had left hey I'll keep Del living your thing
00:25:44
refund him just pay me half what you paid him so you out right it was a
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flawed model like I didn't understand like I didn't get it at that point and so we had $150,000 in refunds that I had
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to cover and I had had no way of doing it mind you like Leela's like we're
00:26:01
going to do this I believe in you and so I'm like I'm like I can't sleep I
00:26:07
remember because what would happen is like the more we sold the more the refund like it was a vicious cycle so I had to sell more to cover the refunds
00:26:13
from the ones that were coming in and so our sales were going up and it was just like I just I couldn't breathe and I was
00:26:18
just I would wake up at night anyways and so I'm like writing down these ideas of like what I think I could do we had
00:26:26
eight launches that were supposed to launch next month so I said hey you have this little weight loss business cuz she had her personal training business she
00:26:31
converted her on her inperson clients to online during this whole process so she was making like $3 or $4,000 a month and
00:26:36
mostly is like I'm not stable I'm like making all this big money and losing it all then making it and then losing and she's just like paying groceries and
00:26:42
actually like making sure that I can eat and I was like tell me more about that I was like what's your overhead how much
00:26:48
time does it take you and then blah blah blah I was like we're going to we're going to do your thing we're going to
00:26:54
we're going to call Queen transformation I'm going to start running ads for it and we're going to take the sales team and we're going to put it on your thing
00:27:00
and so within 14 days she starts taking the phone calls because she was a good salesman um she's doing a th Bucks A Day online no no all margin what's that
00:27:08
product it was a 16we like weight loss program that online yeah online exactly and so it was 500 bucks she was selling
00:27:14
two of them a day and so I was like man if we get the eight eight guys going we'll have 8,000 a day 240 after ad span
00:27:22
I was like I can make 150 in profit and like we'll be in the clear so I called the eight guys that were supposed to launch the next month with the the gyms
00:27:29
so I get on the phone with the first guy and I was like Hey we're going another Direction you know we're going to we're going to be a weight loss company s
00:27:35
directed consumer and he was like dude you launched my buddy's Gym like two months ago and like he he can't stop
00:27:41
talking about you it's like it's packed um because there there are other gyms that everything went fine with just the
00:27:46
ones that didn't is the ones that crushed the business he's like I know you can do it um and I just refinanced
00:27:52
my house and I maxed out my credit cards to to to make this gym happen and I I'm
00:27:57
going to lose it and given what I had been through up to this point I was like that's tough
00:28:03
man um sorry about that and then finally he was like can you okay instead of flying can you just show me what you did
00:28:10
to help my buddy out can you just give me like the system and since I was like I'm going to
00:28:15
get out of this gym business I was okay like selling my secrets and so I was like all right man I'll I'll give you
00:28:21
everything I have but I'm not going to fly out there to save your ass if you can't sell he said no no it's fine and so I picked up the highest number I
00:28:26
could think of because he already told me he was broke so I figured I could just get him off the phone so we could move on and I said $6,000 and he was like 6 grand I was
00:28:34
like yeah he was like oh done and I remember like looking at the phone and
00:28:39
being like holy [ __ ] $66,000 and I was like oh what card do
00:28:46
you want to use for that wrote on like a cardboard box and then the next call had the same thing and I was like well shoot
00:28:51
I have to make this thing now and I was like same conversation he's like how much I was like eight grand and he was like yeah okay
00:28:58
and I each of the calls I was like next call same thing 10 grand next call same thing 12 Grand and then the next you
00:29:03
know at the end of the day I'd sold $60,000 in in licensing packages for all of the stuff that we did to do the
00:29:09
turnarounds is that monthly or is that just one it it was a it was a I didn't even have any I was just like I'm just
00:29:14
giving you everything I do yeah it it became more like more uh it became a
00:29:19
recurring model over time but it was a PDF or something um it was actually on my internal stuff so it was like what I
00:29:25
used to train my sales teams that would fly out and like I would use to train them on how to do nutrition orientation like it was all the internal stuff the
00:29:31
only thing I actually made external was I had to create the uh the advertising
00:29:36
material so I had to basically make a white label landing page for the gyms that they could put their logo on and
00:29:42
then I gave I licensed them the ads themselves that we already knew converted right so like the videos the copy everything they used like videos of
00:29:48
me that we knew converted and I taught them how to run them and then that's that's what it did it and uh we made
00:29:54
$60,000 in a day and I like Lea came in from doing her two sales for weight loss and I was
00:30:00
like I think we're still in the gym business and she was like what I thought we were doing weight loss like you just
00:30:05
told me you sold me on weight loss being like the next thing I was like I just I
00:30:11
just think we were doing it wrong and so I explained what had happened and she was like so is this what we're going to
00:30:16
do now and I was like I guess I was like I can call the other 30 gyms that we did the turnarounds for I was like they know
00:30:22
we can do it cuz we just did it for them and so I called all those guys up and we did like $300,000 and Sal was that month
00:30:28
and it was basically all profit and I covered the refunds and I covered the everything and we were like in the clear
00:30:34
and then and then it was just and then all those gyms that we did that we sold the average gym did uh $30,000 in extra
00:30:40
cash collected in their first month using our our system and so the key was
00:30:45
that like if they didn't have to pay the overhead of the sales guy who's there every day at the hotel the commission
00:30:51
for that guy like the rental car the PRM like all the stuff that you have to incentivize and just like rent it out of
00:30:57
their own gym and work the Le themselves it became incredibly profitable uh for them and um and then it just took off
00:31:04
like wildfire like we went from like our first full 12 months of uh like January
00:31:10
to January uh we did 26 million Topline 17 million in iida our first 12 month
00:31:17
like it was it was insane like it's hard to comprehend that like I like that was
00:31:22
the the moment I had been like dead broke in her parents' house and then
00:31:27
like six months later I have $3 million in the bank account and then like 12 months after that I've got like 20 Mill I was
00:31:34
it was it was insane and um I didn't even know how you could pay taxes like I didn't like I was figuring all this
00:31:40
stuff out but through that whole thing Leila was just like you can do this like
00:31:45
we can do this like we've got this um and I think sometimes you just need one voice behind you that just just keeps
00:31:51
believing what happened then so that's 2016 um you turned things around over
00:31:57
the next couple years is what happens you know leading up to where we are today in terms of your business can you
00:32:02
give me a Topline summary in terms of what's yeah I'll give you the tldr um
00:32:07
continued to grow gym launch uh two years later we started a subl company called Prestige Labs at this point we
00:32:13
had thousands of gym owners that had licensed uh the business model and the ads and all the stuff that we were doing and so we sold through that distribution
00:32:19
base that company grew pretty good pretty big pretty quickly um a year after that we started a software company
00:32:24
that um also helped gyms get leads in the door was just like an automated lead thing and then um
00:32:32
2021 we sold all three of those companies uh the supplement and the
00:32:37
licensing company we sold to American Pacific group which is a private Equity Firm out of San Francisco for uh 46.2
00:32:44
million for uh we sold two-thirds of the company and then um the software company
00:32:50
we actually sold to a strategic buyer who had like a massive base and we just had a better monetization system than they did um and that was an all stock
00:32:56
deal um so we're just it's continuing to grow under their umbrella and they'll probably sell in four or five years um
00:33:02
but from that and what we had taken in dividends um during the licensing business for the five years that it was
00:33:09
Rock still is rocking and rolling um we started acquisition. so that became kind
00:33:15
of our family office and so we started our first Investments I think First Investments we did was in 2020 so there
00:33:20
is some overlap there um and part of the reason that I was willing to sell it was because the the Investments the first
00:33:25
three or four Investments we did did really well um and I was like okay this is what I
00:33:31
want to do as the next thing that you know I didn't want to be the gym guy for the rest of my life um because I'd been
00:33:36
you know at this point it had been I think more than a decade um that I'd been from like sleeping on the gym floor
00:33:41
to having multiple occasions to doing the turnaround business to doing the licensing like I'd been in that game for a long time and I think that maybe I
00:33:48
could have stayed there and could have just continued to compound it and started doing Acquisitions under that Fitness umbrella but I wanted
00:33:55
to do more General business stuff and so that was uh that's what we did and so uh
00:34:01
now we now we buy chunks of companies usually uh usually minority Stakes 25 to 49 is percent I mean we have one that
00:34:07
we're in the talks of that we were originally minority stake in and we're going to take majority because it's been a great company and they want to the
00:34:13
founder in the same position as I was like just wants to do other stuff and it's a great business um so but that's
00:34:19
kind of how we we see it as like growth Partners um we come in we write a check we add value we help grow the business
00:34:26
what are you brilliant at you know you kind of you kind of come to learn what you're good at based on comparison but
00:34:32
you kind of understand your area of expertise what is your area of brli Brilliance or expertise I really want to
00:34:38
ask Caleb um Caleb where's Caleb we can barely
00:34:43
see so Caleb sat around on the sofa in the corner of the studio he is um friend and creative director of Alex and I'm
00:34:51
asking Caleb what Alex is good at what's his era of brilliance
00:35:02
I like it solving problems um for companies simplifying complex things into more digestible actionable um
00:35:10
Solutions as well and how would you answer that question if you were answering it for yourself I feel like I
00:35:15
fundamentally a lot of times don't understand the world and so I think the reason that some people have found the content and things like that um good or
00:35:24
useful is because they feel like they can understand it it's just because like I didn't get it right like terms like value right people
00:35:30
like provide more value like what does that mean and so I just make a make an attempt to define the terms that a lot
00:35:36
of us use every day and then it makes a lot easier to solve for those things in business and so you know a lot of people
00:35:41
like I want to grow my business I'm like all right what does that mean like well get more customers make them worth more okay so it's one of those two things all
00:35:47
right well how do I make get more customers like well there's eight ways to do it here are the eight ways which one do you feel like you're best at and
00:35:53
just like kind of thinking through Frameworks that way is it's just for me it's just been my way of being able to be relatively competent in
00:36:00
a world that feels confusing like there's a few things I feel like I can understand and I just hold on to those I mean that's the very
00:36:07
nature of innovation isn't it like asking the question you we so so um
00:36:12
often in our lives just accept words and phrases and ways of doing things then there's a few people who are really good like elon's one of them at just like
00:36:19
asking why and then when you ask why like why can't you make an affordable
00:36:24
quote unquote electric vehicle that is fast everyone else said you can't yeah like why but why you know and then
00:36:31
he he's great at breaking it down into like the core components of that Innovation so well if we buy the metal
00:36:36
on the the iron exchange and we do this and this then we can do it yeah it's that's such an important thing in
00:36:41
entrepreneurship isn't it there's some people who just ask why naturally yeah it's like to to the
00:36:49
point like to Elon it's like I don't understand why we can't yeah like just explain to me why we can't so that I can
00:36:54
not think about this and I feel like that's you know I would say that that's the most common thing like why isn't this company
00:37:00
growing like I don't get it like explain it to me and then usually a lot of people it's like they're they're in this
00:37:06
caught in this Loop you know what I mean of doing what they've always done um or like believing that this is the only way
00:37:12
um and I think a lot of times I've benefited from like not knowing because I my questions don't seem stupid to
00:37:19
me but only to somebody who like knows what they're doing um it seems stupid and so from there we're able to like I
00:37:25
guess to your point innovate um just by being like I don't understand that's what Steve Jobs from from
00:37:31
everything that I've read about Steve Jobs and my brief conversation with Steve wnc Once Upon a Time um is he was
00:37:37
just the the the voice in the room that never understood why they couldn't and even like when we think
00:37:43
about him removing the keyboard and doing you know not refusing to use a stylus and all these other crazy things
00:37:49
he did not using JavaScript I think at the time and changing the port and removing the iPhone Jack that that is
00:37:54
somebody who is so strong in their conviction in terms of like doing things a new way
00:38:00
how important do you think that is generally like what in your view what makes a really good um entrepreneur
00:38:08
leer I think that they have to have the power to influence and that is across lots of things just they have to be able
00:38:14
to move other people and you can Define sales as the ability to get people to comply with your request you can define
00:38:20
leadership the same way um management marketing to a degree is getting people to comply with a larger request you know
00:38:26
publicly um but I think that fundamentally is a skill that people have to have if they're going to be successful at entrepreneurship um they
00:38:32
have to have tremendous Drive whether that's a combination of towards or away so they have a big mission that they really want to achieve or they have some
00:38:38
very big fear that they're running away from either way I think the fuel works
00:38:43
uh just from a pure entrepreneurship perspective um third piece is impulse control is that they have to be able to
00:38:50
say no to things on a regular basis for an extended period of time
00:38:55
um and I think they have to to be able to boil down the success of their business into inputs and outputs like if
00:39:02
you do not know the inputs that are going to get the output that you want then what are you doing and so I think for for most
00:39:08
entrepreneurs like if they have those things if they have the ability to lead other people SL sell just influence they
00:39:15
have some big motivator they can control themselves long enough to keep on going during that period of time and they are
00:39:21
doing the right things because they know the inputs and outputs uh to be successful to create their the thing that they want um becomes a very
00:39:28
difficult person to beat on that first point then sales one of the things I I
00:39:33
read um in some of your work is this idea that if everybody just went and spent two years doing door-to-door sales
00:39:40
that oh my God why is that important why why do you think do door sales is a key thing I think it's um just for w for
00:39:48
broader definitions for the audience I think it's just high volume transactional sales so whether that's you doing door to door or you cold
00:39:54
calling um or you working the front desk at a gym where you do 20 consults a day like just having a high volume because
00:40:01
in order to learn a skill you want to have as much exposure as you can to
00:40:06
repeat the action and then you want quick feedback loops so that you can learn what you did wrong so the perfect
00:40:11
scenario would be Mentor mentee repeated exposure fix this try again fix this try
00:40:18
again and um in sales if you can survive that long then you are good enough that you will have gotten enough feedback
00:40:24
like for most people if they can weather the first three months of say sales then they'll usually be fine and so for the
00:40:30
people who are coming up I always tell them like go Shadow the best guy and do twice the volume he's doing because
00:40:35
you're not as good as him so like do twice the volume that they're doing work all of the hours and you will get better
00:40:40
faster because you're doing you have to suck for X period of time and so if you can condense how how long that takes you
00:40:46
in terms of calendar days not hours um you can get there faster but I think that it's important because one you have to learn how to get re rejected and
00:40:52
still keep going and I think that's a very valuable skill and then two there's lots of like little things that you learn and just interpersonal
00:40:58
communication that allow you that you can use with teammates later you can use in marketing because a lot of the best
00:41:03
marketers started as salespeople and marketing is just sales one to many as least as as I understand it um and so
00:41:11
having that kind of repetition just develops a deep understanding of human psychology I think um and I think it's
00:41:16
important for if you want to get people to give you money for the thing that you have um having that as a base skill
00:41:22
comes in handy I think a lot of people aren't orientated towards developing
00:41:28
skills I think they're orientated to Lifestyle to what I can post on Instagram to cool whatever's cool um but
00:41:37
this idea of developing skills requires this thing that's kind of absent in modern culture which is patience and a
00:41:43
lot like you said rejection who wants that you know it wasn't there was no glamour in what you said Alex yeah it's
00:41:50
funny because a lot of us want traits right we want to be patient we want to be humble we want to be you know longsuffering whatever words you want to
00:41:56
use um um but in order to if I would say hey how would you create if you had to
00:42:02
create a human what would you put them through to make them tough it probably wouldn't be a really
00:42:08
chill life yeah what would you put them through to make them patient you probably wouldn't give them things immediately and so it's like we want
00:42:15
these traits but each of the traits has a price tag attached to it and it's just like do you want to pay the price tag to
00:42:21
get the thing and so I think if if people reframe the the period of life that they're going through as the price
00:42:26
that they're paying out of their wallet but the wallet is their time it's the seconds of life that they're trading for it then I think more people will be
00:42:32
willing to make the trade because at least when I look at myself like when I'm 80 something years old and I'm looking back on my life I want to have
00:42:37
these traits but in order to have those traits I know I have to go through these things and I think for me that's given me a lot of comfort in hard times one of
00:42:46
the things kind of adjacent to that which causes patience is the belief that you are at some point going to get there
00:42:53
so like you know it's all well and good you saying to me you do this for 5 years Steve um you'll build the skill but I go well
00:42:59
listen if I want to be a millionaire um and I and I have a low self-belief I'm going to have low conviction so I'm not
00:43:04
even going to take the BET yeah so how does one build that self-belief self belief is such an interesting thing
00:43:10
because it feels like this real it's clear to some degree that you had it in that moment of turmoil also the reason I
00:43:16
say to some degree is because it didn't seem like you had a plan B anyway
00:43:22
so you were already in your like your parents-in-law like playroom or whatever so I had nothing to lose yeah you had
00:43:29
nothing to lose so I don't know how much self belief is applicable but regardless to to keep gracing those hurdles self
00:43:35
you need some kind of conviction that like this is the right way to go how do people build that so I I hear that and
00:43:41
to like to to to Echo the point you just made I hated my current existence and so
00:43:48
I think some people like don't hate their current existence enough and so like I don't think you like you either
00:43:54
have to really believe that this thing's going to happen or you have to know that your life sucks and I knew that my life
00:43:59
sucked and so I knew that if I did something else it would have it would have a higher likelihood of changing my
00:44:05
life than not doing something and at least that's how I would say that I probably saw it in the beginning it's
00:44:11
like I didn't know if it was going to work but I knew that I wasn't going to stop I read I heard a quote some 10
00:44:17
years ago which from just came to mind when you said that on some YouTube family Vlog where he
00:44:22
said change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change and in your
00:44:29
situation now it sounds like well this is less painful 100% I think and I think that's the basis of of most either you
00:44:35
have to have a reward that is that that incentivizes you it's the away towards her away it's either we're going away
00:44:40
from pain or going towards pleasure and I think a lot of people really looking for that passion that's going to be towards but I think early days and I
00:44:45
talk a lot about this but like I think negative motivation is poo pooed too much like if you are angry use it if you
00:44:54
are sad use it because like what else are you going to do with
00:45:00
it like you might as well let it help you like or it uses you you know what I
00:45:06
mean and so I always like to see when I was in my earlier days I felt like I was wielding my anger at least in a
00:45:12
direction and I think also a lot of people think that they have to get like it right on the first shot but one of
00:45:17
the beliefs that I had was that I just want to be directionally correct like if I move I like I know that I don't like
00:45:22
this and so this way is not where I am and so I will start taking steps way and from the story that you at least heard
00:45:28
it's like I'll ping pong a little bit to try and directionally move that way and it's funny because Caleb's seen plenty
00:45:34
of things from what we do at acquisition. comom where we're like we'll try it out and if it doesn't work then we're like
00:45:43
oops all good do you believe in yourself I think
00:45:49
that I have a high likelihood of repeating activities that I've done in the past and up to this point I have
00:45:54
lots of evidence that would suggest that it that I will continue why didn't you say Yes um
00:46:01
because I based the answer on that question on what I've done before and I think it's been it's just based on evidence now so it's it's not like a
00:46:08
like a Charisma thing at least for me it's just like I've done these things
00:46:13
and so I think it's probable that I'll be able to continue is there a deeper reason to why
00:46:18
you didn't just say yes that's actually how I think about
00:46:24
it is that because it's that feels difficult to say you believe in yourself
00:46:29
yeah it feels weird I don't know if hokei is the right word um for what that feels like for me but like saying the
00:46:35
way that I said it is how I is how I feel about it h have you been on a journey of in
00:46:42
terms of Self Doubt over over the last you know 30 years for sure I think it was um
00:46:50
but I mean fear was my big fear and anger hand in hand were my big motivators in the beginning and I
00:46:57
maybe that's from soft out but I would say that the I I was very certain and I can I can I can feel this and I I
00:47:03
remember this um I was always certain that I wasn't going to stop like that I can I didn't know I
00:47:11
didn't know whether I would succeed I thought it was probable but I did know I wasn't going
00:47:17
to stop and so for me that was like enough to get me going or keep me going was like what are the controllables me
00:47:26
okay well if I do this so like I'm big on making like unreasonable like unreasonable that it doesn't work out
00:47:31
statements just like if I do sales and I do more volume than everyone else on
00:47:36
this team and I Shadow the guy who's the best and I do that for five years it's unreasonable that I won't be at least
00:47:42
mediocre it will be probable that I'm above average and it's also probable that I'll learn other things along the
00:47:48
way and I'll also have the resources at that point in 5 years that I can jump
00:47:53
into things now that I have more context or perspective from which to make a judge on what a good next opportunity is
00:47:59
and so I like very easy to believe statements and then having the input output equation being like the output is
00:48:05
that I will be a very good salesman the inputs is that I have to do I have to collect 5,000 NOS if I collect 5,000 NOS
00:48:12
I'll be a very good salesman and that for me like when I was a kid when I played video games I would beat the same
00:48:17
level over and over and over over again so that when I got to the next level I would crush everybody because I'd had all the experience points maxed out and
00:48:23
so like those input output equations are really helpful for me like when I took the GMAT to get into Harvard my first
00:48:29
score was like okay it wasn't great um but I I read the study on how to do well
00:48:36
on standardized tests and they had this graph and it went like this it was just a straight line it said number of
00:48:42
problems practiced on gmath score so like the more problems you did on
00:48:48
average the higher your test score was and I was like done so I bought 16 phone books of like they like these thick like
00:48:55
test prep books and I did four hours of problems every day for three months every day I'd get home from work I would
00:49:01
eat dinner I would do four hours of problems had a timer did every day and then I scored a 99 Point whatever percentile because it was just input
00:49:08
output like I didn't I I didn't I was naturally not even that good at math um but I just was like if I do 10,000
00:49:15
[ __ ] problems like I'll start to just understand how these problems get asked and so like I always trying and find like what's the input output for this
00:49:21
the content game I was like okay well if we post once a day on one platform we will get some some eyeballs if we post
00:49:28
on every platform every day we will get more eyeballs if we post multiple times a day on every platform we'll get even more eyeballs so let's do that let's
00:49:34
build that system 100% And so like those are the like I try and make statements
00:49:40
that I believe are unreasonable that if I do it enough it will be true and so that's for me that's what gives me the
00:49:45
confidence to say like what if it's not working like it will eventually like if we just keep doing it it will
00:49:52
work what does it take to want to do something potentially for years so that
00:49:57
you can get good at it cuz you know there's going to be people thinking well I want to be a
00:50:03
great DJ but I just can't find the motivation to spend every day three hours practicing Alex yeah like you
00:50:11
probably won't be a good DJ but I be I would be like you like
00:50:16
your current state enough that you like the pain of change thing right like
00:50:21
you're not in enough pain I've said that to plenty of people we go speak and someone's like how do I get motivated I'm like you're not going to get motiv
00:50:27
like you have to hate for me like it I automatically go there I'm like you have to hate something like for me I just
00:50:33
hated my current existence and so for me that was powerful enough to get me out there's got to be another way though you
00:50:38
know I was thinking to you that moment where you took the leap MH you know and there's I feel I often feel like most
00:50:43
people that listen to this podcast often are at a point in their life where they're considering a leap yeah feel
00:50:49
like we drag those type of people in we kind of like we're a magnet to those people so if they if they're in a situation that they don't like but it's
00:50:56
not that painful you know it's comfortable well that's the worst it's comfortable but little bit miserable
00:51:02
yeah how do you get them to take the leap when it's so comfortable my boss is promising me a
00:51:11
promotion I think about death all the time it's like I'm going to die and I
00:51:17
think you have to agitate the pain for yourself like you have to stoke the pain like if you can't get through through
00:51:23
cuz like it would be it it would be odd that you would be motivated by some weird passion like not everyone's Mozart
00:51:29
and just like I just love music and I've been I see in you know see numbers in colors you know whatever like some people are like that but most people
00:51:35
aren't and so if you're not that
00:51:40
then you only start really liking stuff when you get good at it in my opinion and you only get good at it by doing it
00:51:46
a lot of times before you're good at it and so if you this is why I'm a big big believer
00:51:54
in this is that when you are starting out I think got to find the thing that's the pain and like pain motivates
00:51:59
significantly faster and stronger than pleasure does like people are like no passion is the right way it's like point of gun at a family member all of a
00:52:06
sudden 10 out of 10 motivation pain and so like I think people should use their
00:52:13
pain more and if they don't have enough pain then one maybe that's fine and you're a dreamer and that's okay but I
00:52:19
will tell you that a word that I can I read in my like six-month Journey between when I wanted to quit and when I
00:52:25
actually quit there was this word that just like pissed me off and it was this in the self Hub or entrepreneur book and
00:52:30
it said there are entrepreneurs and there are wantrepreneurs and I was like and it was
00:52:35
like wantrepreneurs or people who read these books and don't do anything blah and I was just like I don't want to be I
00:52:41
was like I am one of these right now and I just it just like felt so powerless and I think that my entire
00:52:49
life has been a lot of trying to have power and I mean that in the true sense of just being able to direct
00:52:55
influence and events um I've wanted to have more power to protect myself protect the people I care about Etc um
00:53:01
and I felt very powerless and I think that I was in that comfortable like my dad approved of my current situation I
00:53:07
had a job that when I told people they were like oh that's fancy but I felt powerless and I I hated that more than
00:53:15
anything and so I think I think if I want to say this to anyone who's listening if there's anything you listen
00:53:20
to all the stuff that I described that was really tough that I went through was not as hard as me quitting my
00:53:28
job by far the hardest decision of my entire life far
00:53:33
none because the things that I was actually caught up with were the
00:53:38
opinions of other people opinions of my father and the opinions of the people that I went to school with who I thought would judge me for leaving this good job
00:53:44
to probably become a failed gym owner and how lame that would sound compared to consultant going to Harvard and bl
00:53:51
like I was going to go from Peak white collar to a very blue color you know
00:53:57
profession making significantly less because I quote loved it and like it I
00:54:04
I'll say this again but like sometimes you have to let other people's streams for your life die for yours to live and
00:54:09
for me it was like when I when I continued to every day not want to wake up that was my wake up call where I was
00:54:16
like either I continue to live this way and not want to be alive or I just risk the fact that I'll
00:54:24
die to everybody else and I think that like it was the hardest decision in my entire life by far all the all the hard
00:54:30
stuff we went through still the hardest decision in my life how much was money on your mind when you made that decision the desire to be financially free to the
00:54:37
point where you had Millions it's weird money um Caleb would know this money doesn't really motivate
00:54:44
me uh I would say that it I mean I love the game for sure um but I love playing
00:54:49
the game and the tokens are there um but for me it was it was it was it
00:54:56
was beating my dad you know what I mean I didn't want him to be right like that's what it was like I didn't want him to be right I just I just I remember
00:55:03
like I I'd be sleeping on the floor I'd be miserable I had you know when I had my gym and I had no trainers I was
00:55:08
teaching all the classes and so I'd wake up I'd do 4:00 a.m. 5 a.m. 6 a.m 7 8 a.m. sessions and then I would then uh
00:55:15
work out for myself and then I would uh do uh I'd do all the marketing and the
00:55:21
ads and the stuff that I have to in the middle of day and then I would teach the four the 4 p.m. the 5: p.m. the 6 p.m. the 7:00 p.m. and then I would do sales
00:55:27
consults at 8 9 10 11 and then I would do the billing for all the all the contracts from 11: to like 12 12:30 and
00:55:34
then I'd wake up again and I did that for like six months and like I started to like lose my mind because I wasn't sleeping um but even during like those
00:55:42
times I just literally I would Envision going back to Baltimore to my father and
00:55:49
have and knowing that he would give me the false modesty of like why know you
00:55:55
tried about it now let's get you back on this thing and I knew that from that moment on he would own me and I just
00:56:02
couldn't I I couldn't I couldn't do it I was like I will do anything but go back to that and for me that was my I I would
00:56:10
do anything and so whatever that maybe you need to agitate some pain in your life
00:56:16
you know to get out of your current circumstance um and just as a total side note play it out what if you just never
00:56:23
do anything is like maybe May some people just need to stop
00:56:28
dreaming maybe they need to accept their current reality and actually enjoy it
00:56:34
because there's a lot of people in their 70 and 80 and they didn't do their dreams and if they went back like they didn't do anything but that whole time
00:56:40
they were dissatisfied because they didn't try but what if they were just like I have a good life I have a wife
00:56:45
who loves me I've got some kids I have a job that I you know like I don't mind it pay the bills I mean if you go back 500
00:56:51
years it wasn't people are like man this is my passion he's like dude I'm just rowing rowing a boat across a ferry and
00:56:57
that's what I do and that's what my dad did and his dad did like this is how we eat and so like we have these these um
00:57:03
idealized versions of purpose that I think Instagram and all this stuff kind of make terrible but like I think there's a lot of honor and work period
00:57:10
And I think a lot of people uh fool themselves by thinking that what they do for some reason is not honorable and I
00:57:15
think a lot of it is like the internal versus external scorecard of like I was saying what I said earlier
00:57:21
about like I believe these things to be true about the universe or like the world but a lot of those are like what do I believe about myself which is like
00:57:28
I can choose to do work in this way which then I can derive Joy from so like if I'm Shoveling
00:57:34
[ __ ] I can choose to be like I will be the best [ __ ] shoveler because I believe that I will figure out how to do this
00:57:40
more efficiently and I will you know I will I will get better and I'll have calluses on my hands and I'll have a better back and whatever um but I will
00:57:46
do this well and I think you can find joy and work if you decide to do it well so on
00:57:53
one hand if you are if if you if your dream causes you so much pain then you will quit what you're doing and do it
00:58:00
and if it doesn't cause you enough pain that you're not pursuing it or that you don't like if you don't feel like you're in a cage right now then maybe you're not in a cage and
00:58:08
maybe you just need to like the life you have and that's cool too a previous guest on this podcast called moat said
00:58:15
we're unhappy when our expectations of how we think life is supposed to be going are unmet and in that there's
00:58:22
something very sort of linked to what you just said there which is we have this external expectations set by Instagram or whatever by People Like Us
00:58:33
yeah who who who um are in a position of um Financial Freedom and have built an
00:58:39
audience who you know admire those people for what they've achieved and if someone wants to be admired they think
00:58:44
well I need to be like Alex right um and that I could be working in a shop actually objectively like subjectively
00:58:51
having a great time in the shop but I look up at Alex and go my life sucks right and and like so in that I'm like it's
00:58:58
very difficult um because of the pressure of external I was just thinking when you said it that I was thinking this whole idea of like passion and
00:59:04
purpose is probably like 60 years old yeah it's all brand
00:59:10
new and it probably originated when we were like connected you know like radio
00:59:15
TV yeah all of this ad advertising which made us change our expectations of our
00:59:21
own lives when living in the village and like helping out at the bakery was probably delivered the same amount of
00:59:27
Happiness core happiness than being on the private jet and whatever else does now I think most people are just as
00:59:33
happy and just like you're 50% happy 50% sad for most of your life if you're in an extreme circumstance then change your
00:59:39
life if you're not like conditions like people get handicapped they break their legs you know they they can never move
00:59:46
again and they have a dip in their subjective well-being and they go back to the same Baseline and so like the
00:59:52
Baseline is independent of conditions and so the world World wants to tell us that we need to change our
00:59:57
you know change our circumstances and then we will be whatever but like every modern religion every Buddhist monk will
01:00:04
tell you that all of that's from the inside not the outside um but these are words and words that me and you yeah can
01:00:10
say don't follow yeah because I'm sure that you've you've experienced like the attainment of a
01:00:16
goal and then I just need three times more yeah I'm referencing a study there where they they ask people how much money they would need to be happy and
01:00:23
all the way up the income wealth Spectrum people said three times more than they have now so people with 10K said 30 people with 3 million said you
01:00:29
know 9 million fing can do math three time 3 * 3 yeah um and you you I imagine
01:00:37
you still experience that now right yeah different reasons but yeah for sure when
01:00:42
is enough enough um I don't think it's enough thing I think it's more like who I want to be who do you want to be I
01:00:48
want to be the person capable of of doing that doing X like we'll get
01:00:54
to a billion and then after a billion I I'll make it 10 I already know that you know what I mean but like I love playing the game what is the game game of
01:01:02
business to what to what end or just just for the play to play yeah I'm I'm
01:01:07
sure you know more about this than I do but like just Game Theory like the finite and infinite games Simon sonck
01:01:13
has a great piece on it um but yeah with infinite games you have known and unknown players you have no greed upon
01:01:20
rules and the point of the game is to keep the game going and so a lot of te people will take a finite game game
01:01:26
where you have known only known players agreed upon rules and a set outcome um
01:01:31
for winning and they will apply it to an infinite game so people are like I want to they apply a finite contract to health they're like I want to win Health
01:01:37
it's like you don't win Health like okay you're in shape now what you stay in shape you keep staying in shape I want
01:01:43
to win at marriage you don't win at marriage you keep the marriage going that's playing the game of marriage if
01:01:49
you want to you don't win at business you keep playing the game of business and so we want to take these finite contracts and put them on on on infinite
01:01:56
games and I think that's where people get get in trouble because they're they're like I have to keep moving the
01:02:01
goal post but if the goal post is to play then you win by playing and so for that re like sure we set goals for the
01:02:06
company but like I'm a th% super motivated and at the same time if we never hit it I'm just going to be happy
01:02:12
that I was able to play I also know that in three generations everyone will forget who I am I saw your post about the queen yeah
01:02:20
was that a stab no no no it wasn't it wasn't for me if I'm being honest um but uh but it's
01:02:27
an interesting what did the post say remember well she amassed more wealth than 99.99% of the world she ruled for 70
01:02:34
years uh was you know a female Monarch which is insane especially 70 years AG
01:02:39
could just like all it's had amazing family all this amazing whatever I I don't know the tabls you do um and when
01:02:47
I posted it it had been I think five or six months since she had died exactly and I was like you probably
01:02:53
haven't thought about her today except for this post she probably accomplished more in her life than we probably
01:03:01
will so if you afraid of other people thinking about you just remember that six months after you die they're not
01:03:06
going to be and so it's like we have all these fears about other people but like most of them won't even show up to your funeral because they're going to be
01:03:14
busy and so like I I think about death all the time and that's that's what I
01:03:19
think for me has given me a lot of uh freedom to take big shots because like
01:03:24
at the end of the day I think that it's not going to matter no one's going to remember people in Thailand don't know
01:03:30
who I am today let alone in five 10 years 100 years it's a trap that the
01:03:36
mind can quite easily fall into though thinking you are the center of the universe and with that comes an immense amount of weight and pressure and anxiety totally I I have a trick I've
01:03:43
never talked about this before but whenever I feel myself slipping into the
01:03:49
Trap of kind of overstating my importance and what I mean by that is like thinking my problems are big
01:03:55
problems I go on YouTube and I type in um there's this one video that shows a
01:04:02
camera on Earth that just zoom out and it keeps going and eventually Earth
01:04:07
becomes this tiny Speck then Earth becomes this tiny Speck which is the Galaxy then the Galaxy becomes this tiny Speck in a bunch of galaxies then you
01:04:14
can't see any of it anymore and then also this idea that like hundred years ago I didn't feel anything didn't think
01:04:21
anything nobody KN knew me 100 years from now exactly what you said absolutely I mean [ __ ] five minutes after I die I
01:04:27
think but um and that feels really liberating it like relieves stress from my
01:04:32
body which is an interesting thing because a lot of people don't like thinking about the death you know a lot of I love thinking about it yeah all the
01:04:38
time I know from doing this podcast that a lot of people won't click if we we post something about death they won't
01:04:43
because they don't even want to confront the concept of it which is people are afraid of it just because they don't understand
01:04:50
it it's kind of like the Hate Thing how do you feel about death I'm good with it
01:04:56
when you say I'm good with it what do you mean if I die tomorrow I'm good with
01:05:01
it like I want to leave it all on the field I'm going to try as hard as I can
01:05:09
and I know that no one will remember me on a long enough time Horizon and I'm
01:05:14
good with that like I'm cool with it if I told you you were going to die
01:05:21
tomorrow would you be sad I'd probably hang out with Lila
01:05:26
a little I guess a little more than I always do but like um I would say I wouldn't be sad I'd be bummed be like
01:05:33
man there's all [ __ ] I want to do uh but I don't think I'd be like depressed I think I'd be I mean my D to be fair
01:05:38
maybe I'll find out and maybe I'll get hit by a bus tomorrow but um no I think
01:05:44
like I've lived life the way I want to live life and I'm good with it if you were to go
01:05:51
today had you really like given it everything had you lived the life you you feel like you were really destined
01:05:57
to live me absolutely an interesting Mind Trick around the same topic is so when
01:06:06
when Betty White dies right at 99 or whatever like people are like she lived a good life but when Kobe dies before
01:06:13
his time right it's a big deal and I see that as a contrast
01:06:19
between expectations in reality and I'm going to tell a story that hopefully people don't take the wrong way but I
01:06:24
had a cat and really liked the cat and it died at two years old really liked it
01:06:31
young guy heart thing or something whatever and I remember being like really bummed about it and I was like
01:06:37
huh how can I not think this and so I was like the only reason I bummed is
01:06:42
because I think that he should have should being the the big word that Everyone likes to use he should have
01:06:48
lived longer I was like what if cats only lived 6 months and I got to have
01:06:53
him for two years I was like I probably be pretty stoked about that and all of a sudden I was significantly less sad
01:07:00
about it and I was like I got to have him for two years I was like awesome and
01:07:05
so I think like for for me for us whatever um if we were to change our
01:07:10
expectation like people think they should live until everyone thinks they're going to live to 100 which is
01:07:16
kind of interesting because like the average life expens is 74 and if you're like 36 you're middle-aged if you
01:07:22
actually do the math which no one wants to do uh being middleaged 36 I know right I know right I want to go yeah but
01:07:29
I think if we shift our expectations then like expectations is the thing it's the it's the thing right and so we can
01:07:35
if we expected if I expected that I was supposed to have lived 20 years and I made it to 33 stoked Jesus lived till 33 he did a
01:07:44
lot more than I have you know what I mean and so I'm good with it if I die tomorrow like only reason I would be
01:07:51
upset is is if I demanded from the universe that I live longer
01:07:57
but like 500 years ago average life expectancy was like 35 you know it was
01:08:02
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01:09:07
repetitions earlier working hard is quite a controversial Topic in 2023 which is weird do you see what I
01:09:13
mean though yeah I'm probably not in the circles where it's
01:09:19
controversial it's like they're like gravity's controversial now I'm like I don't know sure man it's controversial
01:09:26
in the sense that there's like toxic work oh my God you know there's toxic hard work and there's I think Society
01:09:33
prescribes a certain amount of work which is good yeah by their definition of like
01:09:40
I'm going to say some stuff that's going to bother some people I work all the time I have no Hobbies besides working
01:09:46
out if you can consider that a hobby like four times a week that's it I work all the time that's all I do and I work
01:09:53
until I can't work meaning like my put per unit of time starts to drop precipitously and then I know that I
01:09:58
just need to take a break of some sort and then I usually bend some sort of Television because that's what for me
01:10:03
Works some people are like I Garden that's not me Netflix I'm good you know what I mean or dark room in a movie theater rocking
01:10:10
um comma and that's okay like why do I need to take their expectation of what they want like they're like that's not
01:10:16
healthy I'm like Define healthy I do as much as I can of the thing that I want to do with every minute of my day why is
01:10:24
that not healthy why do you want me to do something that I would prefer to do less cuz I do what I do every other of
01:10:30
the day because that's what I want to do almost like how dare you cast your expectation of your life onto me and to
01:10:37
be fair the same degree they cannot work at all doesn't affect me like I'm a I'm a big big
01:10:44
advocate for destroying should the word in general should is just like the
01:10:49
expectation motor of like all of our psyches you should go to school you should get a degree you should do this
01:10:56
job you should marry her you shouldn't stay up so late you shouldn't work so hard you shouldn't you should be more balanced you shouldn't be working out so
01:11:01
much you're not working out like it's there's all these shs that other people tell us and it's like and you zoom out
01:11:08
and then you see that it's a galaxy with a little dot of dust it's like should what there is no should do what you want
01:11:15
to do at least that's how I see the world that pressure applies to both ends
01:11:20
of the spectrum doesn't it because people that quote unquote overwork they get hit come back into the middle and
01:11:25
that people that underwork they get hit work harder and then the presumption there in within Society is that there's
01:11:32
this sweet area in the Middle where it's optimal and like the question should become then like what is the measurement
01:11:38
like what are we measuring is it are we measuring when we're defining this amount of work as good work or healthy
01:11:44
whatever is the is the real measurement my happiness and my fulfillment in your view is that what
01:11:50
you're like is that your measurement or is it just [ __ ] how you feel I work because I enjoy working and I'm
01:11:58
sure that if I stop enjoying working I won't work as much like just being really like not not being per I'm not
01:12:04
being simplistic to be you know Annoying um I work because I enjoy working and if
01:12:11
I and if for some reason I didn't get reinforcement from work I'm sure that my amount of work would go down is there is
01:12:17
there a I think about like human needs yeah but are there any human needs that are being sacrificed by always
01:12:25
working in your case I'm good um yeah I mean which gets
01:12:33
to the point of the measurement which is like how do I feel I'm good yeah I a lot of people really overanalyze a lot of
01:12:39
things and like I don't think well I do I do I do spend a lot of time thinking about death and things like that but I usually use those as frames to give
01:12:46
myself permission to do the things that I want to do and just do them without hearing the
01:12:51
Judgment that I know that other people would probably cast on my life they're like why don't you have kids like cuz I
01:12:56
haven't wanted to yet and that's okay and if I want to later I
01:13:02
will I'll okay I'll tell you an argument that I got into so I was at you got into
01:13:07
an argument I did I got into an argument um with my stepmother so Lea's
01:13:13
father's whatever doesn't matter okay it wasn't her different person it's fine
01:13:19
anyways I was at in the kitchen table and she said
01:13:26
I would never want your life and I was like what she was like
01:13:31
it's so unbalanced I was like okay how I
01:13:36
was like do you feel like I'm not in shape physically I was like do you feel like business-wise financially I'm I'm
01:13:45
not fit do you feel like romantically like my marriage is in some way like not
01:13:52
good and so I I like we where do you feel like I'm unbalanced or
01:13:57
it's just that I do more than you or I do things differently than you do because to the same degree I wouldn't
01:14:03
want your life and that's why I don't have your life and that's why you don't have my life so it's good that we don't
01:14:08
want each other's lives because that would be tough wouldn't it and so that was the argument that we got into in in
01:14:15
in so many words and it just came down to the idea that like I think that person was casting judgment
01:14:22
on themselves because maybe on some level maybe they did want some aspect of the life that we had and I hope that
01:14:28
doesn't sound like weird but it's just like I think we all do this we see something we're like and then we look at our Delta and then we either say man I
01:14:35
would like that or we cast stones at it so that we don't feel bad to our ego and say like no there's something wrong with
01:14:40
it they're not happy whatever and I just I would say that if there's one thing
01:14:46
that I I will try and beat out of me until I die is caring what other people think and I think everybody cares what
01:14:52
other people think and I think over time we just care a little bit less and so I feel like I'm 30% better than I was 10
01:14:57
years ago and maybe in 10 years I'll be like 30% better than that but that 30% has been very
01:15:03
meaningful for me because it's enabled me to do things like I got married in eight days none of my parents were there
01:15:09
and I'm cool with it because that's what I wanted to do and I work with my wife every hour of every day and people are
01:15:15
like is that healthy I'm like I don't know we like it why do you care like how
01:15:20
does it affect you here's here's a trap though I can relate in many in many ways
01:15:25
to what you're saying and I mean my team will know that instinctively um one of the traps we can fall into one of the
01:15:31
risks when we have that perspective is that we kind of cast that expectation on others people that work with
01:15:37
us I think entrepreneurs oftentimes when they have that drive which is sometimes driven by
01:15:44
a shame or an insecurity that comes from their childhood too often um so often maybe not too often but so often um that
01:15:51
when they lead people who don't have that same insecurity shape whatever that
01:15:56
predisposition to you know workaholism whatever you want to call
01:16:02
it they struggle to relate you know yeah have you have you had that
01:16:08
sure but I think that's okay have you had to work on that Leela's
01:16:15
better I I say that judg but like realistically I think we we try to maintain a culture of high performance and we're like on the screening Parts on
01:16:21
the front end we're like these are the values we have here examples of those values to play so it's like if your
01:16:27
shift ends at 5 and somebody asks a question that's going to take 30 minutes to answer at
01:16:32
459 what do you do that's an interview question we're like and we need you to be honest because if you say you would
01:16:39
work but you would actually be dissatisfied you're not going to do either of us Justice because you'll come in and you'll get fired quickly and
01:16:44
that'll be hard for you and hard for us so like we want you to win at whatever you do in life so lela's very big on
01:16:50
like human first in terms of how she does everything that we do in the company is like human first than everything else you can tell that's why
01:16:57
like we're yin and yang for this this kind of thing um but I think it's really just about expectation setting and being
01:17:04
very truthful and as transparent as humanly possible about like this is what we expect if you don't like that or if
01:17:09
your worldview is contrary to this then you shouldn't work here because there's another company that totally shares your
01:17:15
worldview and you would do great there and there's other people who feel like Misfits in the companies that they're in and then work all the time and they're
01:17:21
frustrated that no one else does and they're all like telling them they should slow down come hang with us cuz
01:17:27
we'll work we'll respond slack at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday cuz we're on that's but
01:17:32
like I just I just hardcore reject there is a right way to do things in that example you've touched on
01:17:39
something I wanted to talk about which relates to your first book I believe offers making offers to people yeah I
01:17:46
read that you said um if there's one skill you have it's making offers what
01:17:52
do you mean by making offers so so uh offers are the terms of
01:17:57
exchange so I right before I started my first gym I went to this weekend
01:18:03
Workshop to learn how to Market and get this this 2013 it was on Facebook ads and so I got
01:18:11
lucky so I learned how to run Facebook ads in 2013 two weeks before I started my gym this is when you're getting Penny
01:18:18
clicks and you could put a girl with a bikini and say weight loss click here and it would run and so at this thing I
01:18:25
hadn't opened my gym yet and the guy was like a gym marketing dude and he said do
01:18:30
you know the secret to sales cuz he could see I was wayar over my head all the other guys there were gym owners except for me and I was like yeah
01:18:36
because i' never at that point had never sold anything I didn't even know the word sales was a thing that's how out of it what I was and so he pulled me over
01:18:42
the side and he asked me that question I like pulled my notebook out to like learn the secret to sales as though it was one line and it kind of was he said
01:18:49
make people an offer they'd be they'd feel stupid saying no to and I like wrote it down and I
01:18:55
highlighted it and that actually became like a core concept that we do in every bu in every business that we have which
01:19:01
is like how can we make this offer better how can we make it more valuable
01:19:07
and that was why defining value was such a key thing because people like provide more value make valuable content I'm like what does this mean and so we
01:19:13
boiled down value into four variables um
01:19:18
and then there's things that enhance value but like core variables and then things that enhance so like one is like
01:19:23
what is the overall dream outcome of the the customer and so a difference inje position is like for guys if I say I can
01:19:30
help you make more money versus I can help you lose weight most guys would pay more for the thing that will give them more relative status and so in that way
01:19:37
between two types two categories of outcomes this one will be more valuable okay cool now within everything and
01:19:43
let's call it weight loss because that's an easy one everyone can understand within weight loss every other thing
01:19:49
between a $5 ebook and a $50,000 liposuction surgery the difference in those prices are the other value
01:19:54
variables and so the second variable is perceive likeu of achievement which is if I buy this thing How likely do I
01:20:01
think I will get the outcome and so if I have a surgeon that's going to do this liposuction for example and it's the
01:20:06
first surgery they've done out of medical school and there's another surgeon that has done 10,000 and has 10,000 F Stars which one would I be more
01:20:14
likely to go to the 10,000 festar surgery even if it actually takes that guy less time to do it how unfair but my
01:20:21
perceived lik of getting what I want is significantly higher so it's actually opposite of risk those are the things that we try
01:20:27
and enhance in the offers we try and have a very compelling dream outcome try and make it very likely that they're going to succeed and give it there's
01:20:33
lots of elements that make someone feel like it's likely they'll succeed on the bottom half of the equation so it's a fraction there's two
01:20:40
on the top two on the bottom you have time delay between when they buy and when they get so if someone were able to
01:20:47
click a button on a website and immediately look at their stomach and have a six-pack that would be incredibly
01:20:52
valuable right on the flip side if it takes them two years in order to get that it's significantly less valuable
01:20:57
and so for that same reason you have to arm russle someone to get them to buy a personal training package you have to spend an hour and a half to get them to
01:21:04
buy a 20 pack of trading trading sessions whereas women walk into the doctor's office to do liposuction and
01:21:11
drop 20 times that amount of money because the time delay is nothing you get on the table you wake up and you're thin
01:21:17
right then the last the last variable is uh effort and sacrifice which is two sides of the same coin so effort are the
01:21:24
things that you have to start doing that you don't want to do as a result of this purchase waking up early getting sore
01:21:30
like in the workout example eating Foods you hate on the flip side the sacrific are the things
01:21:36
that you have to give up that you don't want to give up as a result of this purchase and so that might be sleeping in eating the foods you enjoy Margarita
01:21:43
Mondays whatever and so when you look at these variables each of them has a has a has a evil twin right so you've got
01:21:49
perceived like of achievement which is the positive and then you've got risk which is the negative you've got a time delay which is the negative version
01:21:55
you've got speed which is the positive version you've got effort and sacrifice you've got ease right and so when we're
01:22:00
trying to make an offer we try and think through each of these elements of value and think how can we maximize the upside
01:22:05
make it super super likely they're going to hit it paint the vision that they have it and then on the bottom side minimize the time delay between when
01:22:12
they buy and when they get and how much they have to do because in a perfect world The the moment someone says I want that thing that beautiful dream outcome
01:22:19
they'd be virtually guaranteed they would get it it would happen immediately and it would be effortless and I think that is the perfect ideal that we look
01:22:24
at in terms of value and as entrepreneurs we innovate our way to just keep trying to Chisel towards that perfect ideal outcome that we'll never
01:22:30
actually get to the other variables are like scarcity if I have one gatorade bottle left on planet Earth it's
01:22:35
significantly more valuable I didn't change anything about the bottle itself but it's significantly more valuable than if there's unlimited Gatorades
01:22:41
right urgency is if Gatorade no matter how many Gatorades there were on planet Earth I'll give a different example if
01:22:47
JK Rowling uh decides that uh she's no longer going to sell Harry Potter digital copies ever again as of tomorrow
01:22:54
there will be a lot of sales of the digital copy even though there's unlimited units scarcity is a function
01:23:00
of units urgency is a function of time and so scarcity and urgency add to the value by enhancing those other four
01:23:07
variables there's more but like those are the core things that we look at in terms of when we're trying to make an
01:23:13
offer uh for a business and so that becomes very relevant when we're trying
01:23:18
to increase price uh for a business that we take on so I'll give you an example we had a PR Company that we invested in
01:23:24
that was a generic PR Company for like small business owners and they had really high turn but they had a really
01:23:30
good sales engine I was like okay like there's something here but like I think we need a tweet I just really like the
01:23:35
founder 85% of their customers were small business owners and turned out in like three or four months 15% of their
01:23:42
customers bought the most expensive package and stayed like forever and I was like hey crazy idea
01:23:50
what if we only served these customers and they were people who wanted to get fundraising very different than the traditional like dry cleaning store
01:23:56
plumber whatever and so we redid the entire business model around finding
01:24:01
only that Niche we only cold called cold emailed people who were in that very
01:24:07
narrow window were able to 10x our prices because we and we got higher response rates to the emails than we did
01:24:13
before because now we were targeting and speaking very specifically to an avatar and now we could provide so much more
01:24:18
value to that specific person and so that's the maybe if Caleb answer from a
01:24:24
business perspective like solving that equation is probably the thing that I enjoy the most because it is how I feel
01:24:32
like I've unlocked the most value in a business which is like what are all the what are all the good things this
01:24:37
business has what are all the things it can do okay is there a way that we can rearrange it for a specific customer
01:24:43
that will make significantly that will make what we do significantly more valuable to them and then that's what we
01:24:49
try and repackage and when we do that that's often times when we get like with launch for me I had the knowledge of how
01:24:56
to help people lose weight have the the nutrition plans I knew how to sell I knew how to Market but it was only when
01:25:03
I like rearranged the variables that I went from making a few million dollars a year in topl line revenue and basically
01:25:08
no profit to millions and millions and millions of dollars a year in topl line and bottom line profit simply by
01:25:14
rearranging the variables and that was just so ingrained in me that from that point going forward I was like I just have to make things that are so good
01:25:21
that people will feel stupid saying no and if we can't get enough people to say yes we need to make the offer better and
01:25:27
to me that's been like the single thing that it affects all aspects of the business it's the highest leverage thing
01:25:32
I think you can do in the business which is why it was the first book because answering the question what do I sell is
01:25:37
the first book the second book leads is to whom do I sell it I got to get leads right and that's the second book but
01:25:43
that affects pricing it affects profit affects marketing it affects sales affects delivery like getting the offer
01:25:49
affects everything and it's one of the hardest things to change because it affects everything but it also has the
01:25:54
most ability to unlock incredible wealth or value in a business and the concept there is incredibly transferable when
01:26:00
you were going through the equation sounded in some parts similar to an equation we used to have for
01:26:05
competitions when we were trying to get people to sign up to competitions the idea when we sort of like a it was an equation where on one end little
01:26:11
investment so just click here and you're entered High perception that um you have
01:26:16
a chance of winning so if there's 10 prizes and you can see there's 10 entrance your brain goes okay all I had
01:26:22
to do was click and then um in the competition aspect we thought a lot about credibility because that's a
01:26:29
big factor in competitions like do I think anyone's going to win and do I trust these people to even give out a prize um and it's even the same thing
01:26:37
and it's even the same thing in content when you're thinking about a
01:26:43
title for your YouTube videos five minute six pack abs
01:26:49
yeah yes is a fantastic equation little investment high potential reward apparent
01:26:55
um and that's also yeah there's even another thing which I've thought about which I've not been able to necessarily
01:27:01
explain which is why people are more likely to click on things I guess it's ease when it says things like five steps
01:27:08
to finding love versus like how to find love five steps I guess it's that ease
01:27:14
Point feels more accessible just five steps yeah perceive legga of achievement like what's my risk of not achieving if
01:27:20
there's five steps that feels easier than just how- to maybe when you um when you think
01:27:28
about where you are in your journey um as an
01:27:33
entrepreneur and you think about it maybe as like Steps how far are you up that
01:27:39
staircase would you not know I was like I I felt like that was going to be the
01:27:44
question that you were going to ask and I was thinking I was like I feel like every entrepreneur feels like they're just getting started like you talk to guys in their 70s they're like I'm just
01:27:50
getting started you know um I mean I I'm about to cross a decade of being no I am
01:27:55
right just at at the decade point for me from the first business I started to now um so I feel like I've got a few seasons
01:28:03
left you know if I can keep living uh which I'd be stoked about if I can um
01:28:08
let me ask a different question Caleb in the corner who works for you he's your cretive director if Caleb said to me no
01:28:13
Caleb said to you he said Alex I want to be a millionaire
01:28:21
yeah what would you say to him what advice would you give to me he says listen I've heard you doing all these
01:28:26
podcasts you're running around I've been filming the camera but I've been filming I've been listening yeah and this millionaire stuff this sounds amazing
01:28:32
yeah so what advice how old are you Caleb 29 what advice would you give to
01:28:38
29y Old Caleb if he said to you Alex how do how do you knowing me how do you think I become a millionaire so there's
01:28:43
a lot of ways to do it it just depends on which way you want to go so say first off you can stay at acis.com that'll
01:28:49
probably happen on a long enough time Ron just because we're going to get really big we're already pretty big and
01:28:55
we're just getting started um so like I I genuinely believe that and that's 100% my goals that every
01:29:00
single person that that we have um becomes very very wealthy um because I'm
01:29:06
going to die and it's not going to matter anyways and if everybody else can make some too great um so that is a path
01:29:12
another path is he peels off and goes on his own and starts a business of some sort and so it depends on whether he wants to make the business itself what
01:29:18
his core skill is which would be like media and maybe services around Media or
01:29:25
using the skill that he has of media in an opportunity and get two or three other people to maybe co-found it with
01:29:30
who have other complimentary skills and then he just runs that division or portion of the business uh within the
01:29:36
larger context and that's like a classic question of like I'm really good at making wallets like what do I do it's
01:29:42
like well you can continue to make them and then when you can't make as many as you have demand because you're so good
01:29:47
at it you can either raise the price and just continue to keep raising the prices until eventually become Versace of of of
01:29:54
wallets and you make tons of profit but you don't have tons of units and that's okay and you're a luxury brand or you
01:30:00
put on the put on the business owner hat and you say okay how do I mechanize the wallet building process and I become
01:30:06
more busy and so I think it's like do I want to be the artist or do I want to be the entrepreneur both of them are fine
01:30:12
it depends which one you feel like you're more naturally inclined to or have a higher likelihood of success doing I like the game of business I've
01:30:19
played lots of different games in terms of Industries like I like the game overall I don't feel like I have a particular are like I don't think I'm
01:30:24
really good at any aspect of business I feel like I've been decent enough to not make one of them the constraint like I'm
01:30:31
not a great copywriter but I'm good enough that that's not going to be the limiter like I'm I'm good enough like
01:30:37
I'm good enough at hiring that I can make sure that that's not the limiting factor right and so that's kind of how I think about it in terms of business
01:30:43
growth overall and so it' be the same thing with Caleb is like we have to identify what the constraint of the of the system is and then
01:30:54
so this is one of my favorite topics um many skills like 1 plus 1 equals five
01:31:03
when you put them together so let's say you have somebody who's really good at math in the beginning that as a skill
01:31:08
not super monetizable right okay well then you learn bookkeeping okay well now you had a proclivity for math but you
01:31:14
learned something that um has value in the business World okay then you learn to you know you get your CPA now you become an accountant okay more valuable
01:31:21
um then you start studying around uh tax law and insurance and you're like oh
01:31:27
significantly more valuable then you learn how to how Capital markets work and how debt markets work right and and
01:31:33
you understand how mergers and Acquisitions work and all of a sudden you're a CFO and then you learn how to sell and promote a little bit all of a
01:31:39
sudden now you're a rain maker and so you still needed to be good at math but when you stack these other skills on top
01:31:46
of it the original math skill becomes significantly more valuable when you
01:31:51
have these skills on top but each one kind of requires the one before which is why one of the things I hate about kind
01:31:56
of the entrepreneur World a little bit is like they'll learn something new and then poo poo the thing before it's like I'm not upset up the teacher who taught
01:32:02
me arithmetic as I learned algebra one was necessary for the next and so um as
01:32:09
entrepreneurs a lot of times it takes I think the self-awareness to say like where am I at on my skill stacking
01:32:17
Adventure right and each skill every skill you add to your skill tool belt
01:32:22
makes the rest of your skills more valuable which is why I think it's so cool which is why I'm such a big
01:32:27
advocate for Education overall and that's I mean mission of acquisition knon make business accessible to everyone um that's why we put all this
01:32:33
free stuff out there is because like if we can give people enough skills they'll be able to stack them on their own and then just achieve whatever they want in
01:32:38
a totally different way if you'll allow me to go there it's like you look at Jay-Z right maybe he was somebody who
01:32:43
naturally had Rhythm right and so then all of a sudden he learned how to rap okay took his rhythm put in a WAP okay
01:32:49
and then he made his first CD okay and then he learned how to promote o
01:32:55
significantly more valuable and then he learned how to make a label and then he learned how to recruit other artists and
01:33:00
so he still needed to learn how to know how to promote the other artists if he didn't know how to promote at all he wouldn't have been able to do it but
01:33:07
once he had the label he got significantly more leverage on the skill of promotion and he could recognize
01:33:12
people because of his skill in rapping and Rhythm and so like each of these skill stacks on top and then eventually
01:33:18
he he pinnacled into Beyonce as his as his top skill I'm just kidding um like
01:33:24
where's he going um but no but like that's the idea so like it and that's why I'm just like learn the skill find
01:33:30
the next skill and and the nice thing is that it doesn't even matter how disperate the skills are like if Jay-Z
01:33:36
is really good at math and understands Capital markets and understands the label those combine into another cool
01:33:42
malange right a little French word like mix of skills that's like unique to Jay-Z and the longer you play the game
01:33:48
the more skills you get and the more unique your mix of skills is and that to me is like the coolest part about
01:33:54
business and just like education in general I I I stumbled across a bit of a
01:33:59
a similar but maybe adjacent idea um in my career where when I learned when my
01:34:05
company went public on a Stock Exchange in um Europe I then learned from an
01:34:12
investment Bank when we were having the meetings with the banks we went on this road show met 20 different investment Banks we considering an IPO um in
01:34:19
another country they told me that our business would be worth four times more
01:34:25
if it was just on a different stock market if you move it to the NASDAQ the exact same business would be worth four
01:34:31
times more which meant that my net worth would be Forex just by taking the exact same business and moving it to a
01:34:37
different Stock Exchange and I thought about that a couple of years later when I was thinking about the skill set that I had acquired over my career which was
01:34:43
this skill set of marketing and social media and Entrepreneurship and I was thinking you have to not just have the
01:34:51
skill but know what Market to apply it to and what ended up happening I've
01:34:56
never told this story before but um I looked I looked for an industry
01:35:03
where my skill set was in least Supply but highest demand and return the greatest and it turned out that industry
01:35:10
in terms of social media marketing and storytelling I felt was most in demand
01:35:15
and would return the greatest value for companies that were about to IPO because essentially when you're
01:35:22
going to IPO if you have a good story it can swing your valuation by hundreds of millions or in the case of the first
01:35:28
company I worked with when their IPO listed at 3 billion um billions yeah and
01:35:33
so my skill set of social media and marketing I could do what with it I could go help a local gym and get paid a
01:35:39
th000 bucks or I could go help a company that was in the leadup to an IPO that was you know where I where I can
01:35:45
potentially had hundreds of millions in value and take 7 million yeah as part of an equity deal so upon leaving my first
01:35:51
company the equity Arrangement that I had was valued somewhere between four uh I'm
01:35:57
going to say between depends because the share price fluctuated but I think on the day of the IPO the equity that I got for for the 9 to 12 months work that i'
01:36:05
done was worth in the region of 7 to8 million
01:36:10
right nine months work yeah basically freelance yeah you know same skill stack
01:36:16
but apply to an industry that would would pay me more for the same skills um and so I thought a lot about that and
01:36:22
that's ultimately why we started our company which is now called flight story we have um probably the time of the Airing there about 100 people we started
01:36:28
the company about about a year and a half ago oh crazy and that's basically that's applying the skill set we have to Industries where that need it and we
01:36:35
started out in the IPO Market did a little bit of work in this um biotech Market um and now we've kind of
01:36:41
broadened out but people don't think about that a lot you're like my skill set where is it in highest demand and can pay the most 100% I thoroughly agree
01:36:49
with everything you just said I also think that that's a skill
01:36:55
I wish some just said it to me oh yeah totally and that's the like information to be like the most like uh you know the
01:37:02
biggest debt one of the things I um I love saying this but like the biggest debt all of us pay is ignorance and so I
01:37:08
I heard this close at this pitch years ago and this guy got on stage and he and he was like Hey ma'am he was like how
01:37:15
much do you make she was like $50,000 so he wrote $50,000 on the Whiteboard and
01:37:20
then he wrote A Million Dollar on top of the 50,000 and he subtracted raed it and said $950,000 he said you pay life
01:37:27
$950,000 every single year for not knowing how to make a million dollar a year and it was a crazy concept he was
01:37:34
using it to close the audience but I like the most expensive thing that all of us are paying for is the information
01:37:39
that we don't know and that's like both frightening and also incredibly exciting because
01:37:44
like fish in the best ponds right like a good fisherman knows where to fish and
01:37:50
everybody can put a hook and a and a thing and stick it over the water but like the best fishermen know where and when Etc and that's exactly the story
01:37:56
that you said was like I had the hook and I had the The Reel and all that stuff but like I went to where the best where the best fishing was and like to
01:38:03
me that's skill same work yeah same amount of time same Rod more zeros one of the things in the first
01:38:10
book is like you want to like sell better customers so if you want to sell
01:38:15
better customers yeah like the it's the exact same thing you just said which is like if I were to do cro work so
01:38:21
conversion rate optimization for a website that's e-commerce and I work for a store that's doing a million dollars a year and I say cool
01:38:27
I'm able to increase your conversion onite by 20% Okay cool so now that's doing $1.2 million a year I made
01:38:33
$200,000 in value and maybe I can get 10% of that I get 20 grand okay cool I
01:38:38
do the same work to a business doing $100 million a year I make them $20 million for my 20% bump and I get 10%
01:38:45
that and I make $2 million 20,000 2 million 100x same work
01:38:52
to your point and to me me that's skill like to know that simple simple fact
01:38:57
like I had this tweet that went super viral which was uh solve rich people problems they pay
01:39:02
better lot of controversy around that um but it's true and so find the people and
01:39:11
a different way of saying it is find the people who value what you have the most and I'm sure you've heard this have
01:39:17
you heard the story of the the father and the son with the car no okay so maybe I have it's good it's good so
01:39:25
there's there's a father who givs his son an old beat up car and he says you
01:39:30
know hey I don't know if it drives or not but you can take it down to the um the dealership down the street see if
01:39:36
you can trade it and get some money he's like okay so he goes down the street goes to the dealership they say we'll
01:39:41
give you a th000 bucks for it and he come you know hears him out comes back home he's like Dad they say give me a th bucks he's like okay he's like go to the
01:39:48
impound yard where they you know break the cars up just for Metal He's like see what they'll give you goes there and uh
01:39:54
the guy's like ah I don't know this might be 500 bucks of metal kid like you know comes back home he's like Dad you
01:40:00
know he said it was going to be500 he's like okay he's like hey go down the street to that uh that antique uh
01:40:07
dealership see if they've got anything that use car lot he's like okay so he goes down there talks to the guy comes
01:40:13
back home super EXC he's like Dad you won't believe it he's like this is a historic car there's only like 10 of
01:40:18
them left he's like it's worth $100,000 and so the father smiles and
01:40:24
he's like and the lesson I want you to know is that it's not necessarily who you are but the people that value you
01:40:29
the most and so you can talk to different people and go to the people who value you and I just I I love that
01:40:36
story because from a it's a Hu it's a huge business story in terms of like sell sell where the fish are where the
01:40:43
big fish are like if you if you're going to go Hook Fish go to go where the whales are um it takes a same work but a lot of it's just belief people don't
01:40:48
think it's possible and so a lot of times you have to just keep leveling up and you sell your first $10,000 thing you sell your first $100,000 thing sell
01:40:54
your first multi-million dollar package you realize it's the exact same thing it's just so maybe if I'm list if
01:41:01
anybody's listing right now it is the same thing it's the exact same thing and sometimes it's easier it's normally easier like you
01:41:08
know you've seen that Meme that says like uh so what exactly am I going to be getting for this $50 thing right and
01:41:14
then it's like uh $50,000 clients like wire sent yesterday like what do else do you need like it's and that's totally
01:41:20
true um but I think there's a skill in understanding where to fish certainly a skill um information
01:41:29
it's information it's even knowing that there was another Lake over there in part and and that's why like listening to conversations like this is so
01:41:35
valuable for people because it lifts a curtain and you go what the [ __ ] you guys were behind here the whole time partying that's what my business life
01:41:41
has been like it's like gradually like I think I heard Kevin Hart describe on Joe Rogan one time where he said there's
01:41:48
this other room yeah where these people are playing this other set of money games yeah and then when you get in that
01:41:53
room you get you're almost pissed off that nobody told you this room existed but then there's another door yeah yeah
01:42:00
and then you get through there maybe a couple of years later and you find these other people these [ __ ] billionaires that are playing another set of games
01:42:05
and you're going what and they're chilling yeah they're just smoking cigars they're not even doing any hard
01:42:11
work can you go tell me the games that you guys have been playing in here yeah and then again the frustration is and
01:42:16
that's kind of what I feel like in my business life it's been like where at the jump I'm charging I don't know I remember my first we found our first day
01:42:23
from 2014 charging I remember the package we did gold silver and bronze it was like you know like $200 package for
01:42:29
like support and then $500 and then the gold package where we threw everything in for $1,000 and I remember my one of
01:42:36
my first clients um accepting that and then I think today like the only difference okay there's skills that have
01:42:42
increased but information is the big thing knowing how to do it you know
01:42:48
um when you think about curtains that have lifted that have really shifted the games you play from a value money
01:42:55
perspective like where someone's Turned the Lights On You [ __ ] of course yeah is there anything else that comes to
01:43:01
mind like big macro games yeah um I think a big you know when I the
01:43:09
big I will answer it with the stair steps of how each order of magnitude
01:43:14
change in my income so when I went from being an employee to self-employed I went from making four figures a month to
01:43:20
five figures a month and that was for me just like like I'm now in control the level above that was I started having
01:43:27
other people who worked for me I didn't even know that was possible sounds crazy like I was like you can hire people because my my members in my gym were
01:43:32
like you know other people can work here I'm like cleaning the floor and doing the marketing and teaching class they're
01:43:38
like I was like didn't think about that bottleneck right and then went to six figures a month right and then from
01:43:43
there stayed there did the turnaround business still had the same organizational structure had another
01:43:49
degree of Leverage and so the next degree of Leverage was that I started licensing so digital right so the cost
01:43:54
for you cost of goods is basically nothing and then that's when things started skyrocketing that got me to
01:43:59
seven figures a month and then eight figures a month was using leverage through Capital which is where you know
01:44:04
we're at now and I would imagine that nine figures a month will probably be some level of technology or more uh
01:44:11
media on my side but all of these things are about leverage and so this is like one of my favorite Topics in the whole
01:44:17
world but if we Define leverage as the difference between what you put in and what you get out so if you have a lot of Leverage you put a little bit in you get
01:44:22
a lot out if you have no leverage or low leverage you put a lot in you get a little bit out and a lot of times people who are listening to this and are not
01:44:28
making as much money as they want they're putting lots of input in and not getting a lot out they have low leverage opportunities and so understanding how
01:44:35
to get more for what you put in is the game overall and so the first level that
01:44:41
I described was Labor it's just work first I was working for someone else then I worked for myself then I got other people to work for me first level
01:44:47
each of those levels was more leverage above that I had media which is the thing that I was licensing out so
01:44:54
another degree of Leverage I made it once and I could license it out Infinity on top of that I have capital I can take capital I don't have to sacrifice time
01:45:01
in order to get something for it so it's high input output um above that would be some sort of Technology you build the
01:45:07
code once in theory obviously you continue to improve the code but theoretically you build the thing once and then a million people can use it and
01:45:13
so you want to Stack as many types of Leverage as you can and as much of them as you can because like Joe Rogan also
01:45:20
has a show and somebody else has a podcast they both technically are using media as their as their as their vehicle
01:45:26
for leverage but he has significantly more of it so it's not just like I'm goingon to use all these right yes but
01:45:32
it's also how much and to what degree but like Facebook had other people's money he used media had other people's
01:45:37
work Max leverage Amazon same thing right they used every element of Leverage and they maxed all of them out
01:45:43
and um that's that's at least the the curtain that and nval talks about this if you're familiar with Nal rant um he
01:45:50
talks about these things as the as the the P the elements of Leverage or four types of Leverage um and understanding
01:45:56
that for me has kind of been a blueprint for wealth overall and then you know Capital there's degrees of capital right
01:46:03
like you first you can get friends and family to give you money then you can get you know institutional money and
01:46:08
then you can get public money right which you know you saw like the IPO money like the fact that the NASDAQ was
01:46:13
Forex uh the dorf exchange is that where it was right um there's just significantly more capital in that
01:46:20
market and so it same work more zeros um and so I love this topic because I
01:46:27
think that that's fundamentally like the people who move faster in life don't actually move faster they get more for
01:46:32
every step are you happy I'm stoked Max Stoke
01:46:40
you know not asked this question for for a long time but thought I'd ask it because it's kind of similar to what
01:46:45
we've um been talking about today but if um if happiness was like a list of
01:46:50
ingredients and it was a recipe is there anything missing from your recipe that would make you even more
01:46:56
happy and sometimes that recipe is about balancing the ingredients you need two eggs and 100 eggs yeah one cup of flour
01:47:05
yeah um for me it's always been about autonomy I just be able I want to I want to be able to do what I find interesting
01:47:12
um and that's that's been the core of it and what I do will change but the core
01:47:19
of having the freedom to do it has been the center of it and so for me I don't think my freedom has I mean not in
01:47:25
recent history my freedom hasn't fundamentally changed in any way and so I would say that I'm the same level of
01:47:30
contentedness as I was last year um but I find engagement in what I do and that that's
01:47:38
that's I'll give you my definition of Happiness which is doing what you like to do with people you like and doing
01:47:44
that as much as you possibly can and that's my simple
01:47:50
definition interesting I I've tried to I've tried to figure
01:47:55
that out that like professional like I guess it's not even a professional thing but I've tried to figure out and summarize that's a wonderful summary the
01:48:03
the place i' got into is if you're surrounded by people you love you're doing something that challenges you which I think is an interesting one
01:48:09
you've kind of encapsulated it just by saying things you like but yeah that challenges you gives you a sense of forward motion and
01:48:14
progress um towards a meaningful goal and that's a subjective thing could be raising a kid or making a million
01:48:20
dollars whatever I think that's kind of what I call it Mya guy if I find if I'm in that state and it's a state um I
01:48:28
think I'm happy we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest
01:48:35
oh without knowing who they're going to be asking it to I'm terrified why why does everyone
01:48:42
get so scared when I do this like aren't my questions scary like everyone someone's going to like
01:48:48
try and stick the neck like okay I'm going to think of it what going to get we have these um
01:48:53
conversation cards where we've taken all the questions written in this book and we've made them into cards so people can play at home um I'm actually gonna slide
01:49:00
them over to you and just ask you to pick one conversation card okay um I've picked a couple there that I think are
01:49:05
stitch-ups so go from the middle okay see what else we got here and the question is what are the failures you
01:49:12
cherish the
01:49:17
most I'm going to give two I am very grateful that I hated the
01:49:24
job that I had because I think that I am the type of person because of how hard it was for me to quit that if I had
01:49:30
liked a job enough I don't think I would have left and I think I would have gone to the business school and done the next
01:49:35
thing like if I had had a job worked for people whatever it was that I enjoyed enough just enough I might not be where
01:49:42
I am now and I think that I cherish the fact that it was so miserable that it got me to
01:49:49
change like that that that job changed my life from a like Soul
01:49:57
perspective um going through what I did with Leila I cherish those times
01:50:06
because a lot of people live worst case scenario years into their marriage years
01:50:11
into their relationship and then they kind of like see what the other person is made of I got to do that before I married the
01:50:18
person and so there haven't been any surprises since then and it's something that's like shared misery to a certain
01:50:26
degree but like spiritual strength or spiritual whatever you want to call it um I know she's got my back and there's
01:50:33
an element to that story that I didn't tell but when we really needed money at one point I flew Leila out to do this
01:50:40
launch I couldn't go with her and I actually I don't want to say broke up with her but I was like I can't do this
01:50:47
right now and so for 28 days we were not together and
01:50:53
most girls people would probably been like screw this guy um but instead Leila set the
01:51:01
all-time record for a launch that still hasn't been broken
01:51:09
and when she came back I was like she stood tall when everything in my life
01:51:14
was crumbling around me and she like made it happen and I knew that wherever I wanted to go I needed someone like
01:51:19
that with me and so I cherish the failures that of that entire season
01:51:25
because there were many um because I wouldn't know what I have today if I
01:51:31
hadn't been through those tests with her then man that's beautiful in the Diary
01:51:37
of a CEO we have hundreds of questions that have been left by our guests and we've put them on these cards and on
01:51:44
these cards you have the question that's been left in the dire of a CEO the name
01:51:49
of the person who wrote the question and if you turn it over there's a QR code if you scan that code you can see which
01:51:57
guest answered the question and watch the video of them answering it every time I've done this podcast and every
01:52:02
time we've asked the kind of questions we ask here I feel a tremendous sense of affinity to the guest and our aim with
01:52:08
these cards is that you can create that sense of connection through vulnerability at home with the people
01:52:14
you love the most and I have some good news for you as of today you can add your name to the waiting list to be the
01:52:21
first in line to get your own set of conversation cards at the conversation cards.com we have a another question
01:52:28
which is the question that people leave in the book I thought I just nailed it I thought that was it I thought this is the new tradition we talking about the
01:52:34
old tradition one last question Alex but you did nail that so I'll be honest you
01:52:39
stuck that Landing um when do you feel the most emotionally connected to
01:52:44
yourself literally my like heartbeat thought was when I'm working like the first heartbeat thought and then like if
01:52:51
I had to be really specific when I'm in the throws of writing um I had a a
01:52:57
writing scholarship coming out of high school I uh was the vice editor of the newspaper I was the editor-in chief of
01:53:03
the literary magazine when I was in high school I've enjoyed writing um it's one of those things that for me like you
01:53:09
said like challenge like writing is a thing is a monster that only gets stronger and stronger and you get better
01:53:15
and better at writing and you see the flaws in your writing the better you get at writing and so it always feels like
01:53:21
it matches the difficulty matches my ability at all times and so it's it is the thing that I experience the greatest
01:53:28
degree of flow in the most
01:53:33
regularly makes a lot of sense answers a lot of questions that we talked about earlier on as well Alex thank you so
01:53:39
much for your time um and being here it's been an incredibly diverse and enlightening and honest and vulnerable
01:53:48
and inspiring and soul filling conversation in so many respects and um
01:53:54
I I know for sure you're just at the very start of your journey I asked you about the staircase I know that you've just got one foot on the first step and
01:53:59
I think it's going to be incredible to watch um the next couple of seasons of your life because you're destined for
01:54:05
incredible things there's absolutely no doubt in that so thank you Alex appreciate your time I appreciate that thank you those kind
01:54:11
words I've now been a Hu Drinker for about four years roughly so much so that
01:54:17
I ended up investing in the company um and I play a role on the board of the company but they also very kindly sponsor the podcast and to be honest
01:54:23
I've never said this before but hu believed in this podcast before anybody else the CEO Julian um told me before we
01:54:29
even launched the podcast how successful it would be and that hu would back it and I absolutely have a huge amount of gratitude for them for that support but
01:54:36
an even greater sense of gratitude for the fact that they've helped me stay nutritionally complete throughout the chaos and hecticness of my tremendously
01:54:43
busy business schedule so if you haven't tried out hu which I hope most of you have at least given it a go by now try
01:54:48
it out it's an unbelievable way to try and stay nutritionally on course if you have a hectic busy schedule and let me
01:54:55
know what you think send me a tweet and a DM tag me let me know what you think quick one as you guys know we're lucky enough to have blue jeans as a sponsor
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and supporter of this podcast for anyone that doesn't know blue jeans is an online video conferencing tool that allows you to have slick fast good
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let me know how you find it [Music]