Alex Hormozi’s Blueprint To Making Money Blew My Mind

Alex has just stepped me through his blueprint to make any business work and make you a million doollars; business from opening gyms to launching software startups. Alex knows how to make any business worth a million dollars. So Alex, what are we going to learn today from you?

So we're going to go through nine steps. Number one is figuring out who you are. Number two, who to sell to. Number three is what to sell them. Four, got to get them to buy. Number five, how many times; so this is getting them to buy more times. Number six, who's going to help you do that even more. Number seven is you're going to keep your advantage, cuz now you're starting to get ahead. And then stick with it, because this is usually when it's like, okay, I feel like business, uh, business is starting to get boring. And then you just keep getting better, and you never stop. And so those are nine steps to building a million-dollar business as I've gone through in my life, and I try to translate from my audiio.

So tell us how people figure out who they are. What, what was the process that you went through, and what's the process people need to go through?

So I think there's a lot of, um, confusion around identity, and I think a lot of it is around like, I want to have these, I want to have these traits, or like, I wish I were born, was I wish I were more charismatic. I wish I were more patient. And I don't think people translate them into the behaviors that create the trait. And so the traits themselves are just bundled terms. So let's say someone's charismatic; they're like, I want to be charismatic. All right, well, if I look at somebody and say, cool, be charismatic, someone would just stare back like, how? Right? Well, you need to do small, easy—no, but that's—and so what's interesting is that you've already went to start translating it, but charisma, patience, a lot of these things are what I call bundled terms. And so there's single words that actually have series of behaviors underneath them that, when we see them in, in the wild, we then describe that person as charismatic. So they nod up and down when you talk; right? They repeat back what you say at the end of whenever you take a pause during your breathing, breathing; they, they smile; um, they increase the volume of when they talk, uh, and they have different tonalities, as in like they go up and then they go down; they speed up; uh, they emphasize words. And so it's basically looking at all of these micro-behaviors, and if you do all of these things, they shake hands firmly; uh, they make eye contact. And so all of these things, then it's like, oh, so I don't, I don't need to try and be charismatic; I just need to nod when people are talking. I need to repeat back to them what they just said. I need to smile when they walk in the room. I need to be able to enunciate and speak with volume and not just be monotone. I need to be go up and down and up and down and speed up and slow down when it's important. I need to shake people's hands, uh, with confidence. I need to make eye contact. If I do those things, other people will describe me as charismatic. And so when I look at, you know, the version of who I would like to be, I say, what are the traits that I think of, and then what are the behaviors that associate with those traits? And then that way it makes something that seems unattainable, like, man, I wish I were more X; it's like, well, you can be that if you just think what must occur in order for someone to describe someone as this thing. And so that's been honestly one of the big things that like, it really changed my life, because a lot of these things feel like out of your control; it's like, I wish—but it's just a lot of times we just break skills down. Same thing when we're teaching someone; if I said, um, hey, build a company, you can go do that because you have—because that would be like a big bundled thing. Can you just go build a company? Sure, I can. Now leveled down one; it's like, okay, so do you know how to advertise? Do you know how to sell? Do you know how to create a product or a service? Do you know how to hire people? It's like all of those are bundled skills underneath, and you can basically derive everything all the way down to turn on the computer, turn on Internet Explorer, type in in a website. And so at every level whenever someone gets confused about what to do, it's like, just break it down. And that's fundamentally how we like to train teams, but also it started with me, which is like, who, what do I need to do? And I think this is my, um, this is something that I'm going to be hitting on really hard, doing is being.

And so if you've ever heard that the saying, be, do, have; have you heard of this? Yep. I hate it, because people are like, have to become this type of person to do this type of stuff to have this thing. But if the doing creates the having, then we don't need to worry about having, because doing is the actual thing we control. And if we describe someone only by the behaviors they do, then being also happens as a result of doing, which means it's just do. So Nike is always had it right.

It's true though. Yeah, like I definitely wasn't charismatic when I was older, younger, and, and I think this also, people almost embarrassed to call themselves a certain label, but you can train to be anything. This is my thing about entrepreneurship, that kind of like anyone can be an entrepreneur.

True. And people get really annoyed me when I say that. Oh, no, it's no, it's tough, you know, you got to worry about cash flow. Well, if you can't get a good accountant, you know, like, you know, I, I think it's interesting because people always have a reason why it's such a bloody hard thing to do, and if you break it down like this, it's not, right?

Um, but how do people, this, this thing of who you are, though, is it a genetics thing, though, as well? Like maybe some people just can't be charismatic, maybe they can't smile. I mean, you know what I mean? Like it's because I think my, my wife is, and she, she never listens to this stuff, so I can say this; I wouldn't describe her as charismatic. I describe her as beautiful and intelligent, um, but she doesn't, she doesn't really bother shaking hands firmly; she just who she is, you know. So do you think this is a personality thing here, or anyone can learn to be charismatic; that's the end of it, or is it going to be feeling a bit false for—

No, I think 100% of people can learn. I mean, I have a fundamental belief about the world, which is all things are trainable; it's just that not all things are worth training. Yeah, you got to be motivated to be, to turn—I think about it from return on resources. So it's like, even if like, I think as a, I, I believe someone genuinely with Down Syndrome could learn to become, or at least rather learn to do brain surgery; would the amount of resources required in order to teach that person be a good use of resources? Probably not. If intelligence is rate of learning, then it's the rate of behavior change; like how quickly can we get someone to change behavior? At least for me, that's how I define intelligence. And so if I were to train my team and say, hey, do this thing, and the next time they walk in they do that new thing under the same conditions, they've learned quickly; they're a more intelligent person. And so, um, I think it's simply that the rate of learning differs between people, but all people are trainable; that's how we learn everything.

Plus what you're saying, if you reverse it, if you train yourself, then it's not about us deciding the resource you get; it's about you deciding the effort you make; is it right? So, so, so to concluding this bit, I mean, who you are is who you, what you want to be, is it? So, so that goes back to modeling yourself and perhaps the people you admire or the people you have the life you want.

Sure. And then go learn what they know, MH, and do what they do. And I think that's, and, um, I'll actually give one that I think, um, is helpful for a lot of people is like, it's making sure that we're doing the things that they did at that stage. And so, you know, uh, if you want to become a billionaire, doesn't mean go fly on private jets because billionaires fly on private jets; if you want to become tall, it doesn't mean you go play basketball. And so it's, it's conflating what, like, what was the cause, what was the effect, right? And so, um, we want to not model where people are today and how they act today, but we want to model the rise; we want to model what they did at the beginning. And so one of the tough parts about that is usually when you're in the grind; like one of my biggest regrets in the world is that I have zero sales that I had recorded when I was in person, and I have over 4,000, 101 sales that I done, and all the stuff I learned there, I never had any recordings. And so it's like, because I didn't think, oh, I'm going to later someday in the future have a YouTube channel and I'm going to be teaching this stuff; I was like, just trying to sell memberships, you what I mean? And so I, I, I say that because I try and remember to the best of my ability, and I do that through teaching, you know, our teams and whatnot; like, hey, do this and do this. And so, um, we do our best to remind everyone who's coming up, like, this is what I was doing; don't look at what I'm doing now, look at what I was doing then.

Oh, I think yeah, doing things so powerful because that's how also you remember; you can read, you can hear someone tell you how to do something, you can listen to this video, but if you don't go out and apply it, you probably won't remember it.

Yeah, yeah, nothing will happen; that's the guarantee. So that's a good place to start. You can be anything; maybe decide what you want to be. I mean, a lot of people in sales, for example, um, say, oh, you need to be an extrovert to do sales; I'm like, my biggest salesperson in my last company was my accountant; no one more introverted; no. And do you know what, cuz she was introverted, she was slightly more trusted; yeah, cuz she would only say things that people—she'd go to a meeting, CFOs, and talk about how brilliant our company was; those CFOs who also introverted would go back to the office, talk to the CEO and say, you should get Simon's company in, cuz I just heard from the CFO what they're doing there; you know, best sales technique ever, but she didn't think she was a salesperson. If I interviewed her and said, welcome to the company, you're going to be our number one salesperson, would have even started.

Yeah, but yeah, so it's all about using your personality traits to also be applied, right? What next?

Um, so the second one is like, okay, so you have to acquire enough of these traits, bundled terms, to just take action. So if I had to do the, what's the TL;DR of the last page, which just do something; that's it. Like if all of this was around doing, it's do something, because currently nothing is happening in your life. And so in order for something to change, you have to do something. Now once you decide, okay, I'm going to take action, then it's like, okay, who am I selling to? This is one that people get really confused about, and I think people want to start with what do I sell; like two and three, what to sell, are very much interrelated, right? Because who you sell to is going to determine what you're going to sell, right? If I decide that pilots are going to be my, the people that I feel like selling, then I can't be like, oh, well, I have these, you know, this, uh, this insurance thing that does for houses; it's like, I don't know if that's really the, the right match for that particular thing. And so sometimes you come in with some past experience, um, and so I like to, I know I'm going, I'm going out of order, but hopefully it'll, it'll work out in the end, um, but I think there's three Ps around, uh, what people figure out, and I, I tend to talk more about services than products, and I do that because at least in the US, 8% of businesses of services; great way to start as well; service is very easy business, right? At the end of the day, you're just doing something that other people don't want to do for money, right? And so pain, profession, and then passion. And so almost all businesses can get derived from one of these three things, which is like, you had some painful experience you overcame. And so that's, you know, a mom who helps, uh, her kids pack lunches who have, uh, food allergies; it's like, if you figured out how to overcome that, then you can help other people do it, too. If you overcame some sort of depression thing, it's like, you can help other people do that. If you didn't know how to advertise your big business and then you figured out how to do Google Paperclick, it's like that's something that's, it's a pain; pain is, you know, uh, relative, but time saving; if you can save people time, is way translating it.

Oh, totally. And then the second one is profession. So a lot of people do have jobs but want to start a business. And so, um, whatever you do in a company fundamentally is something that other companies probably want. And so you can always fractionalize whatever your professional skill is between multiple companies. And so that's just taking a skill that you already have in the workplace and just selling it to other people. And then passion is like, okay, well, I love, uh, I'm really interested in model cars. Okay, well, can you build a, a business around model cars? Absolutely; you could build a subscription on building them; you could build the actual products around them; you could make a channel about painting model cars; you like, there's a zillion things that you could do there, but in each of these, it's usually something you overcame, some sort of professional skill that you learned, or some passion. And so that usually goes into what to sell. The most common person to sell to is someone like you. So most, if you look at, uh, like Y Combinator and a16z, some of the best, uh, venture startup investors, uh, one of the, one of the requirements that they often have is what they call living with the problem. And so they want people who've had a lot of surface area, a lot of exposure, many repetitions over years with many different types of solutions and why they don't work. And so on one hand, sure, you can be like, I'm going to just, I'm going to think of this beautiful idea, but most of the times it's like, what do I hate? What, what bothers me, um, because you—because then you don't have to do all this market research to figure out like, how do these people talk? Like what are, what are their innate desires? You just say like, well, what do I want? And it's a much faster path. And I think that's where, um, this is where a lot of people, um, end up starting in terms of who to sell to; they sell people like that; you don't much research in the market when you when you know exactly your own problem. And interestingly, even at the top level, like Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook to solve his own awkward problem of being socially awkward. Yeah, he didn't, he wanted to meet girls; he wanted to be liked; he wanted friends, but he found it socially awkward to go out, so he built a platform to solve his own problem; turns out a lot of people have that problem. So I think this like you thing is a really easy way to sell, I guess.

Um, passion and purpose, do you differentiate the two?

Um, no, I just, not to say that it's not true, I just, I usually use those three Ps, CU; I think if people, I, my, I believe in sales, it's a, it's a, there's three steps, right? Which is like, people do it the one way around normally, but the first step is, do you like the person? Does the person like you? The relationship stuff; I don't know, people spend enough time doing that. Second is, do people need what you're selling? Sure, a lot of people spend a lot of time selling something they don't need, right? And then the third step, of course, is like pricing and all that sort of stuff, but I think a lot of the time, like, I, I took 9 years to get to Apple as a client, n years, but it's because I had a passion and a purpose to build a company; I wanted to build something that was respected; Apple being a client would, would help my company be, be respected; I think that purpose really helps you get through in the end on sales.

Oh yeah. And so, um, yeah, these are, I mean, this is kind of like the, the, the cycle of, of, of figuring it out. And then when you, once you're like, okay, well, I get it, pain, profession, passion, but underneath of those things, um, like, what, what really is it? And so typically you're going to have, you can either sell products, so that's physical stuff, right? Tangible things; you can put it in someone's hand. There's services, which is you just do stuff for other people, which is fundamentally services are wrapped to time. And there's two types of time: one is the time to learn the skill, and the other is the time to do the skill. So underneath it's some sort of information advantage that you have, and then the actual doing and execution. And so those are F, like services can be as simple as I know how to, how to mow my lawn; I just don't want to do it. Um, on the other hand, it could be, be, hey, uh, I know how to code, and I can code this, you know, site a certain way; it's like, okay, not only do I not want to take the time to do it to learn it, I also don't want to take the time to do it. And so when you're thinking about products or services, those are those are the two, um, kind of buckets as I think about them. And then you have SaaS, or software; you've got software as a service; you've got apps, things like that; um, you have something that I like to go into, which is just access; you've got risk; you've got money. And so these are all things that people can buy and sell; banks buy and sell money; insurance buy and sell risk; access; if you think real estate, there's physical access, they digital access; um, SaaS is basically these things just put in a digital format. And so this gives, gives you kind of like a, a jump start of like, well, what do I, how do I take my passion? It's like, okay, we'll pick one of these ways; it's like, you could sell the model cars; you could build the cars for people and then sell them; you could have SaaS that helps people design their own cars; you could have events where you bring people together, uh, and they can show off their cars and race them and whatever, and then you can charge for T, you know, for access to that, or media access; like if you have, um, like for me, like this would be like education would still kind of fit inside of here; it's like access to some sort of media; risk; you could ensure people's collections around their cars if they have really valuable car collections, uh, you know, model cars; and then money is, hey, maybe, uh, people need lending for this stuff; who knows? And so fundamentally, like that's how I think through, um, what am I going to sell?

I think as well it's very interesting around the service side, because in my agency business, for example, I was selling the services, someone else's design ability, their time, to someone; I wasn't even doing the service, but I helped the person; the designers didn't like to sell; they're shy; they want to sit at their computer creating, right? So I didn't even have the skill to do the design, but I was able to sell the service. I think, I think this list is brilliant. Um, so when, okay, so people have who to sell to and what you're going to sell are interl—so you've decided what you're going to do here. I'm going to add…

One thing I think will be helpful for people starting out, and so I talk about this a ton in my stuff, is pricing. In my opinion, one of the things that matters a ton is pricing. It's a lot easier to sell 100 people a $10,000 thing than it is to sell 10,000 people a $100 thing. There's just so much more distribution that you need to get. So, for me, I look at: do the people that I want to sell my thing to have the money for my thing? And if everybody's broke in this particular market, then I might consider, well, is there anything else I know how to do, or anything else I'm passionate about, or anything else that I have a professional skill around?

So the first thing is money. The second thing is how easy are these people to find? Is it really hard to find this particular subset of people, or can I find them pretty easily? Are there directories or associations? If so, then it's easy for me to reach out or show up at those conferences or whatever.

The next thing is, I'd rather have the market be growing. If I'm about to pick what business I'm going to get into, I'd rather go into one where there's more demand than there is supply. I'd rather just have the tailwind rather than a headwind. One of my friends had a business that sold to newspapers. Brilliant guy, and basically, he was trying to transition them from print ads to give them a second ad product that was digital. He could convert all their print ads into digital ads onto their website. It makes sense; it's like, hey, you just have another product you can now sell; you don't have to do anything; you just make more money; it's a good offer. The problem is that newspapers, at least in the US, were shrinking by 25% per annum every year, compounding in the wrong direction—25% a year. So now, he had to gain 25% market share every year just to keep his company the same size because people were just going out of business, even in the digital space, which is the growing part, right? But they didn't have any money to pay for that service.

Yeah, and then the final one is, if I had to pick between two things, I'd rather have one where people are in pain. So, good at dra excent is you want searing hot pain whenever you can. And when I say pain, it doesn't necessarily mean like people are like, "Oh my God, like, you know, I've got cancer; I'm going to die," but just that the annoyances of taking out the trash every day—it's just the problems are things that people would rather not do. And again, it's going to be things they'd rather not learn or just things they'd rather not do, and those are the easiest things. Now, when you combine these things together is when you can charge a lot more. Like, a lot of times when you start out, very, very early days, you probably don't know anything that other people don't know—I'm just being real, right? And so a lot of the earliest businesses you start are what we probably consider blue-collar businesses. So it's like it's cleaning, it's lawn care, it's painting. These are not—you can learn how to do it in a weekend, but that's okay because business takes a really long time to learn. So it's like, okay, well, at least let me—I'll just have something simple that I can do here, and then I can learn all the other skills around business by practicing it. So I just—these are kind of the four characteristics of, if I'm going to get into a market, I want to make sure that they've got the money, they're easy to find, it's growing, and they're in pain. I hope you're writing this down, folks. I wish I'd done this when I was younger. I mean, I built a service business—we're talking about it off-camera—and sometimes you're selling so hard to a market that doesn't have enough money. It's so much harder. Anyone's going to face it—sales—if you put yourself in a place where the people don't have enough pain, they've got too many choices. You've got to have that pain to create the closing situational selling. And this is actually—I think this will be really relevant for your history with the creative agency.

So there's this story that I really like a lot where a father gives his son an old car—you might have heard this one—but a father gives his son an old car, and he says, "If you want, you can sell it, and then you can take the money and, you know, buy yourself some—something else." And so he says, "Why don't you go down to the pawn shop and see what they'll—they'll give you?" And so he—you know, kid goes, comes back, and he looks a little bit down. He's like, "What's up?" He's like, "Oh, they said they'd give me $2,500." He's like, "All right, well, go to the dealership, see if you can trade it in there for, you know, for something else." So he goes there, comes back; he said, "Well, hey, they—they'll give me $5,000." He's like, "Okay, that's an improvement." And he says, "Hey, why don't you go down to the—the old—the old collectibles auction house, see—see what they'll do." And so the kid goes there, and he comes back, and he—he comes back; he's jumping; he's like, "Dad, you won't believe it; you won't believe it!" He's like, "They say this is an old collectible car, and it's worth $100,000!" And he was like, the biggest lesson here is that sometimes it's the exact same thing, but who you sell to changes everything. So within the services that you have, if Simon had gone back and sold to really small businesses—the like branding and creative and logo design and things like that—I would bet that the vast majority of those businesses couldn't appreciate what the service was and what the value of even branding is to begin with, because they'd be like, "Yeah, but how's this give me leads?" Only a more advanced business can appreciate the upside of how much return on advertising, return on throughput, you get by having kind of a brand halo effect, but you have to be of a certain size. And so if you had that skill set and then you were like, "Hey, Alex, Simon, I started my business, but no one wants to buy it," the first question we'd probably ask is, "Okay, well, are you good at your thing?" And if you check the box—he's like, "Yeah, I think this guy's good"—well, who are you selling to? It's like, "Well, I'm just trying to sell to—to local lawn care services." It's like, "Well, that's—that's not surprising to me that they wouldn't buy." But in that moment, you might think, "Oh, I suck at business." You were just selling to the wrong people. And I think that's why this is so important is making sure who you sell to is one of the biggest levers that you can have on success.

Can I tell another story?

Yeah, go please.

So there was a CRO company that came through here that we were looking at to invest in, and it was—it was great. So this guy was a really good coder, really good CRO—you know, conversion optimization for websites—and he had a really, really cool business. But what was interesting is he and I had this conversation. We said, "Oh, yeah, when I work with a million-dollar-a-year e-commerce store and I, you know, raise their throughput by 10%, he's like, 'It only adds $100,000 to the business.'" He said, "But when I go to an e-commerce store that does $100 million and I add 10%, it's the same amount of work," he's like, "I add $10 million to the business," and so I can charge so much more money for the exact same work because, in a very real way, it is more valuable. I did create more value, but it wasn't because of me; it was because of them. And so one of the biggest levers you can have on success is doing the same work for better people.

Yeah, I—you know, the stories really, really resonate with me, and again, I wish I'd heard you speak 20 years ago. I remember when I first started the business, we were selling graphic designs. We'd go to someone: "Do you want a logo? Do you want a brand?" And they pay a certain amount, and I managed to get quite good fees out of it because we were good. But then one day, I gave ideas to someone for free, yeah, and they said, "Oh, I would have paid a lot for that." And what I realized is we shouldn't be selling the creative; we should be selling the concepts. The creative is almost like a commodity. So we started selling the ideas; that's where we were getting millions of dollars from, and then the execution was like, well, lots of people could design it. Now you just give them the brief—you know, go-fer—and they'll—they'll go make exactly that. Got commoditized, which, by the way, is a little bit unfair, 'cause the actual creative part is really tough, but people don't value it. Pain isn't—pain is in the idea. So we go to CNN and give them an idea, they—well, that's—that's valuable, but just the execution almost is secondary. So you can always take your existing service and just tweak it a bit, and you'll get a lot more out of it if you do that. All right, so people hopefully have made a list of who they're going to sell to and what they're going to sell. What's next in this? So now we've got to get them to buy. So it's like this is all great; you know, we've got some of these character traits; we decided to start taking action; we figure out who we want to sell to; we figure out what we want to sell; so now—and we're going to write—there we go. I need to have a purpose in this. See, this is it; I get to write one. And so now we've got to get them to buy. And so—I know you've got your—you've got your sales framework; the one that I've been teaching for years is—is closer. There are a million sales frameworks out there; this is just the one that's—it's just consistently worked for me teaching—you know, teams of guys out in the road, whatever—and for years, I actually just taught close, and it was only probably in the last four or five years that I added the R on there. Hope you trademark this; I don't know; who knows; CL—I hope everyone just learns how to sell.

So the first thing is—is like, basically, okay, now that I'm in front of this who and I've got the what, how do I get them to give me money? And so this is basically a structure for our conversation, which is the first thing that we like to do is clarify why they're there. So the person—and the nice thing with any sales conversation is that there's always something that someone has done to indicate interest. Like, you can't—unless someone is still listening to you—they opened the door, they clicked on the email, they responded with—with a comment, they DM'd you, they opted in on your site. Like, someone has to take some initial move towards you in order to—they indicate interest. And so all you have to do then is just ask them why. Say, "Hey, why did you—why did you respond to my post? Hey, why did you—why did you DM me? Hey, why did you opt in on my site?" And you're just asking them why; you're clarifying the problem, right? And so the second step—and this is all listening, right?—you're just asking questions. So, "What brought you in today? What was the main reason? What are you struggling with right now?" And then—and this is just a very small step but super important—which is we label them with a problem and say, "Okay, I got it, John—so it sounds like you're here, and you want to get here, and this has been the thing in your way. Does that sound about right?" And this is also active listening. So for me, from a rapport-building perspective, if you say back to someone what they just said, they're like, "Oh, this guy's great; this guy—this guy's brilliant; charismatic," exactly. And so we label their problem, and we have: you're here, you want to get here, here's the gap. Okay, so then—and this is just out of just experience—we overview the past experiences that they've had, and I call this the pain cycle. And I didn't know why this worked; I just knew that it did work. And so—so the key point here is you say, "Hey, so what have you done so far to try and solve this? What have you done?" And then they're going to start listing out: "I did this," and then we just ask, "Okay, well, how'd that work for you?" And then obviously, they're talking to you, so it didn't work, so it's a loaded—you know, like you're—you're just pushing on this pain, getting them to realize it.

Yeah, basically, yeah. And so I have this fundamental belief that all salespeople are just motivational speakers, fundamentally just on a one-on-one basis. And so all we're trying to do is motivate someone to take action. And so if you know that—at least for me—if I think that that's—that's what it is, it just comes down to motivating someone, then what creates motivation? And so I spent a really long time trying to think through this, but it's actually the opposite is what creates motivation: deprivation creates motivation. So if I'm starving, then I'm very motivated to eat. If I'm—if I'm exhausted, I'm very motivated to sleep. And with that same concept, what we want to do is basically remind them—we want to deprive them—remind them of how deprived they are of this thing and how much pain they've gone through up to this point. And so we try and ask them what they did, ask them how that worked, ask them what they liked and what they didn't like about that thing. When they say the things that they liked, you associate that with, "Oh, I think if you like that, you're going to love this," and if they hated that, it's like, "Oh, that's great; I understand why you struggle with that," because later we're going to take notes of that, and we're going to make sure that we don't talk about that stuff if we have anything similar to that in our product. And so after we've gone through this pain cycle and you just keep asking, "Anything else you've done? Anything else you've tried?" until they're like, "No, that's—that's about it," they say, "Awesome, John, I think that you're going to love what—what we've got for you. Can I tell you about it?" So this is where we ask for permission to make the sale. And so—I go sell the vacation. So I have this little moniker about—selling that a lot of people sell the plane flight and not Maui or Hawaii or whatever your vacation spot is. And so they—they then go right into, you know, jargon; they're like, "Oh, we're going to—we're going to do these color tones, and we're going to have this palette for your logo," and like, they're like, "What is—is going on?" But what people want—it's—you know, people don't want to buy drills; they buy holes, right? The drill is just a vehicle. And so what we want is to talk about the—the—the light breeze in their hair, what it's like at sunset, what they're going to feel like when they've got their feet in the sand and they're drinking the cold, you know, mai tai at the beach and they're with their loved ones and making a memory that they'll have for the rest of their lives. So—so the sizzle, not the steak. It's a simple—we—exactly. But what we don't want to sell is the TSA, the plane, checking—take your shoes off, the guy farting next to you, the terrible—I don't know why they have—sell planes flying in the air; that's not the enjoyable part, is it? Unless you're in business class, maybe, but I really—it's not enjoyable. Why do they sell that? Every airline listening should change right now what they're doing. And so I do something that I call a three-pillar pitch. And so I almost always try and chunk up my—basically my selling points—to three points. Why three? I don't know, but three is just always worked really well. And so the three-pillar pitch, I like to have basically one statement and then a metaphor. And so if there's—and I used to teach this for fitness sales all the time. So it's like there's three things: fitness, nutrition, accountability. And with that, it's like you want to have a three-legged stool that if you're missing one of the sides, it's not going to work, right? And so it's like if you just work out, then you're—and you're not eating well, then you're—it doesn't matter; you're not going to lose weight. If you just eat well but you're not working out, you're going to lose muscle, and you're going to rebound back, is that right? And if—because we just knew about their pain cycle, they're like, "Yeah, I've had that happen before." Like, "No, exactly." So you know that. And if I give you the best fitness and the best training in the world—I say the best fitness and the best nutrition plan in the world—but you don't actually do it, 'cause no one holds you accountable, it's not going to happen either. And so you've got to have all three, and when you have all three, you can't lose, right? And so that's the three pillars. And so when I would create scripts for—I was—to like a completely opposite script; I made a script for a B2B mortgage sales company. And so I was like, okay, they were selling leads to Realtors. And so it's like, okay, so I spent the whole morning; I was like, "What are the three things?" It's like, okay, you want leads that are exclusive to you; you want them to be qualified; and you want them to be timely. You want them to be like—they just stopped in; they've got—they're really interested, and no one else is calling them but me; that's what you want in leads. And so it's like these are the three things. And so then for each of those three things, you then just make one analogy or story that relates it. And so if I wanted to—you know, explain accountability, I would say, "Okay, have you ever heard of The Amazing Race?" It was a show that happened—even if they had—doesn't matter—they're like, "Yeah." So there was actually this—this couple that won so many times they had to change the rules. Do you know what they did differently? They're like, "What?" He's like, "So what they did was whenever they land into a new area and they had to find the new location, they would immediately grab a local and say, 'Hey, can you get in the back of the car and just tell us where to go?' And by doing that, they always beat everyone else." And so the thing is is that you want to guide. And so that's exactly what we're going to do with the accountability. And so I have like six different accountability stories, but that's one of them, right? And so it's like you just want to have one story for each of the pillars, and then you just say, "Does that make sense?" They say yes, and then you just move on to the next pillar. And you'll notice that—at least for me, especially in high-volume transactional sales—so I would say like B2C sales, consumer sales, where it's one-on-one kind of sales—I found that like when I'm like on fire in terms of selling, the person's walking out the door and they're super excited; they're like, "I don't even know what I just signed up for," because the thing is is that the more—and the weeds we get, the more questions they're going to have about it. And as long as you're confident whatever it is that you sell, just know that you're going to take care of them because you're explaining the macros and the calories and the rep schemes—like they don't even know what it is anyways. And so they're going to nod along and try and ask questions; they don't even know why they're asking the question—like what kind…

Of certifications you have, we just ask which ones you're looking for, and they're like, like, right. So you're just—they want to seem like they're in, like they're asking informed questions, but they just don't know what to do. And so we do a three-pillar pitch, and and then we say, great. So then we transition to the close; so we ask for the sales. That makes sense. Awesome. You want to get started on Monday? Yes or no, whatever. And then you start moving through it.

Now, if they say anything but yes, away says explain away. I'm writing vertical concerns, all right. So you want to explain away their concerns. And so most concerns—mind if I erase this top here?—so most concerns, at least as I, I think through them, is you've got timing concerns, which is I'm really busy right now. You've got um, uh, preference concerns, which is I don't like this particular thing about your solution. You've got uh, money. Right? You've got money, SL, ROI, whatever. You've got stalls, which is uh, sounds similar to timing but completely different, which is can you give me some time to think about it versus I don't have time. They both have the word time in it for sales guys. Off finally, you want to just cover past experiences. And so this is where I, I signed up with a creative agency, you just learn like yours, and they burned me. So so you want to make sure that you have something to overcome um, that particular thing.

And so once you understand what the core things that people have in that they present with that are the reasons why they don't want to do something, you just need to understand the logical arguments for each of these these bullets. So with timing, uh, this is all about priorities. So everyone's got the same times; you just say, hey, how important is this to you? Okay, then it means that there's something else in your 24 hours a day that we need to trade that's less important than this. As long as you explain that to them, then you're good. Preferences is they want your result their way. If you change the variables of the way that I do it, if you just want to do Fitness and Nutrition, not accountability, then you're not going to get the result. So if you change the variables, you change the outcome. And so it's just like always thinking they want my results their way. You can't uh, you can't just—I mean, the amount of times I'd have, you know, ladies trying to lose weight be like, can I just eat what I'm currently eating and then do your program? And I was like, no, because what you're currently eating is getting you what you're currently getting. Right.

And so then we have ROI, which uh, we solve with logic, proof, and payment terms. So logic is just understanding like, if this does this, is it worth it? Okay, so if it is, then the problem is that they don't believe you. And so then it's all around proof, like how many different varieties of testimonials can I demonstrate that are as similar to them as possible to get them to believe me? And you know, we have our little belief-breaking formula, but I won't even get into that. Uh, and then you've got uh, payment terms. So it's like, okay, the person logically understands, they believe they could happen, then it just gets into Logistics of payment, which is like, okay, can you break this up for me? Can I do half now, half later, whatever. You've got stalls, which is again, I need to think about it. Um, but here what we do is we walk them through a logical decision. So we say, okay, do you think that you'll be more successful uh, if you do this than if you didn't do it? Yes. Okay. Do you think that uh, if you do it on your own versus doing it with us, you will get close to your goal? Yes. Do you have access or know somebody who has access to the money to get started? Yes. Yes. Yes. Great. Then you made a logical decision. And so a lot of people are just afraid of making mistakes. And so um, with stalls, we want to figure out what the fear is. And so the number one triage question that we ask is, if you have less Rapport, we just say, what's your main concern? If you have a little bit more Rapport, I just ask like, what are you afraid of having happen? And you can lower your voice a little bit. They're like, I just don't want my husband to say that I spent money on this thing again. You're like, totally understand. What if this is the thing that 5 years from now you look back on and you're like, what if I hadn't done that? And you're sitting there completely changed your lifestyle, and you, you know, your husband and you guys are so much better now. I was like, what if you look back on this one moment? Because I think about this with my wife. I'm, I'm swiping on my phone. If I had left on the app and I hadn't met Lea, my life would be completely different than it is right now, eight or 9 years later. And so it's like, I just don't want that to happen to you. Like, oh man, okay. And so then I didn't know you met on an app. Did you? Should give him a plug. Who was it? It was Bumble. Oh really? There you go. Bumble. Hold on.

And so this is uh, so if someone has a past experience, so hey, I, I worked with a creative agency before and it didn't work, therefore you won't work. Yeah. And so I have yet to have an overcome here. Um, there's also decision-maker. I use, I use for this one, but oh, this one's killer, so I'll tell you how to do it. So um, with burn you twice, you just say, listen, you had something bad that happened in the past, and the only thing worse than having a bad investment is letting a bad investment prevent you from making a good one. Right. Right now, great. And so then we do a metaphor. So it's like, hey, are you married? A lot of times if you're old, like they're like, yeah, you're with somebody. Yes. Okay. Did you ever date anybody before that person? Yeah. You ever date like middle school or high school? Yeah. Yeah. Now imagine after your first Middle School boyfriend or girlfriend you said—so it just means that that person wasn't right for you; it doesn't mean that all people aren't right for you. And so there's a big difference. And so they're—I get it. It's like you don't want to let that person burn you twice: once for when it happened and once when it stops you from having the good thing. And then there's decision-maker, which is uh, I don't have the authority to make the decision. I don't bring that one up because it's one of the hardest ones to overcome, and people have a lot of uh, harsh beliefs in the comments about how I overcome this stuff, cuz they're like, you should always get permission from this spouse. And it depends. If you're buying a house, yeah, you're going to need permission from the spouse. Kind of. Yeah. And so obviously you want to bring that person if you know that whatever you sell requires somebody else; you want to make sure the decision-makers are on the call. But there are times when you're in a selling situation where like you've got one shot. And so for us, I try to overcome decision-maker um, or authority to make the decision by, by first saying, okay, well, uh, what if they say no? And so if I have a guy, I'll lean into his ego and I'll be like, what if your wife doesn't give you permission? Yeah, better ask for forgiveness than permission. I used that at the very end. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so what if she, what if she doesn't give you permission? Cuz then it makes them really—and they're like, no, I could—it's like, oh, great, let's get you going. You know what I mean? As soon as they bounce back, you're good. But if they say no, I wouldn't do it, then you say, well, what do you think they'd be against? So now I'm still not on—I'm now isolating towards variables, like what, like what are the actual things that they would say no to because I can overcome that, not the decision. And so they're like, oh, they'd be over, you know, it'd be this particular thing. But now I'm off decision. Now if they're still like no, it, it, it doesn't matter, it's like, okay, well, just do they know that you're here right now? They know that you're struggling with this thing. Yeah. They know that you're struggling. Are they, are they, are they do they approve of that? They don't know, they don't approve of it, they're not happy that I'm that I'm struggling with this. It's like, oh, then why would they be against something that they already don't approve of? So they go relying on past agreements. So it's like you, you already have the permission, they know that you're struggling, why wouldn't they want you to solve it? And it's like, well, if your wife's anything like my wife, like we end up making it work in the end anyways, right? And then we'll go into um, I think you, I think you might be asking for permission instead of support. Deep psychology. Get started to be a marriage counselor. Is it—it's time you stood up for yourself, you know, like—well, cuz then you play it out. You say, listen, because if you, if you don't do this and you don't do it because of your wife or whatever, cuz let's say you go home and she says no, okay, fine. Well, play this forward 5 years. Your business isn't in the place you want it to be, you're not the weight you want to be, you have this back pain, you—whatever the thing that you sell around is—it's like 5 years from now, who are you going to blame? You going to blame her? You going to blame you? I don't think it's fair to either of you because at the end of the day it's your life, and you got to be able to make these decisions. Now again, I just think—and this is where you go into like—I think you're asking for permission when you really just need support. By the way, Amazon do a brilliant job of taking most of these off, but just saying, we'll give you a refund, you can send it back, and it won't cost you anything. So my wife gets a package a day and she's like, don't worry, if I don't like it, I can send it back. So like I don't object. And it's like, okay, fine, you know, I don't see much going back, but the point is you can just get rid of it. Money-back guarantee or giving people some comfort. Oh, 100%, yeah, or delay. Or you can do a delay pay with the payment term. You say, hey, just say yes now, sign the contract, I'll delay the payment till Friday. And between now and then, if you go home and your husband says, no, sweetie, I want you to live 10, 10 years less long, I want you to be fat, I want you to have generational unhel—Die Young. Yeah, exactly. If he says that, you call me up first. I'll talk to him. Exactly. And so I make some jokes about it.

And then the final one here is, let's assume you explain away their concerns, they're like, yeah, I want to do it. Um, and I added this one later, which is you reinforce the decision. And so one of the the major things that happens, and I, I had to add this in because I wanted my sales guys to make sure that they completed the transition or the handoff to customer success in onboarding, and until I had this it was just like, explain their concerns, close the deal, and then it was like, I'm done. And so it was like, no, we have to bridge this; we have to reinforce that they made a great call. So say, hey, right now I'm going to transfer you to Sarah. Sarah's going to get you started. Hey, Sarah, this is John. John's trying to retire his wife. John's trying to get in shape for a wedding, whatever it is. Um, Sarah's going to help you take the next steps now. Then Sarah is going to start the onboarding conversation of how do I relate the actions that this person has to take with their goal and say, hey, we're going to help you retire. We're going to help you get look good for that wedding, but these are the first three steps anyway. So that's, so that's how you get people to give you money. In England, there's a new gym that's opened up called Third Space, and one of the things they've done is they've also limited supply. So they basically—I went there, it's a P gym, it's like $1,000 a month for it, and they're like, we don't have his space right now. Yeah, but put you on the waiting list, and then, and then a few days later they ring you up, say someone's just left, but do you want it now? Yeah. And that's actually a brilliant—I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll do. So limiting supply is another element. Great. I hope you're enjoying the podcast of Alex. I've just written a book, guys. It's taken me 35 years to get all this knowledge, and I put it all in here. It will help you remove any subconscious bias you have for stopping you from starting your dream. The key in this book that I want you to learn is, if you want your dream to happen, you've got to make other people's dreams happen first. The link is down in the description. It would mean a lot to me if you bought it. All the proceeds from this book I'm giving away to fund dreams, so please buy if you can. Now let's get back to the episode of Alex. All right, next, cuz that was awesome. So how many times they buy? So um, now we want to get them to obviously buy again because um, I think Dan Kennedy said this, and I just love this quote, he says, you don't, you don't get customers to make sales, you make sales to get customers. And so the idea is that once you have a customer, then you want to get them to buy as many times as seemingly possible. And so at this point, there's so many things that you can do um, to make a business make more money. Right. And so you've got—get this out the way again. Yeah. Yeah. So one is that you can increase the price of whatever you have. I'm just talking about eight different ways that you can make more money um, to get them just basically make more money from any customer. So one is that you can just charge more. The second is that you decrease the cost of whatever you sell. So so if you have a service, you can either pay people less—that's usually not the right idea—but you can improve the service ratio of how many customers to every rep. You can add tech in order to make their jobs easier. Um, you can go offshore things like that. The next one is you ask them to buy again. So you just do this times two. You say, hey, um, you have that thing, do you want to buy more of that thing you just bought? Uh, one of my favorite, one of my favorite upsells ever. Uh, the next one is that you can get continuity, which is you say buying—which I see this as a quantity. This one as uh, you're, they're buying once, and then there's a delay, and then a day. So this is a quantity. Then you've got quality, which is do you want to buy a better version of the thing that you have? Then we have uh, downsell. So it's like, hey, and this one it's like, wait, how is this going to make me more money? So downsells make you more money in that if you, you turn a no into a yes. And so, okay, you don't want to buy the, the, the normal Burger, do you want to buy a junior Burger? Do you want to buy a smaller one? Do you want to just buy the burger, not the other stuff? Okay. Then we've got cross-sells where you sell something different. So I'll go through this whole example real quick uh, but with, with a burger store because everyone can understand it. So I can take my burger and make it more expensive. I can lower the cost of each burger for myself. I can get them to buy two burgers. I can get them to come back again to buy another burger or put them on a burger subscription. So this would be through like—follow—good idea for a business idea. Burger subscription business. In-N-Out should do that. What they—yeah. Did you, did you eat there today? It's great. Not today. We have to—there's no—sure. Yeah, I don't know what's in it, but it's not sugar. Don't—it's me either. But anyway, you can have uh, you can, you can increase the quality of the meat. You—oh, this is mystery meat Burger. You can have Sirloin, you know, Burger. That's ground-up mystery meat. Yeah. We can go uh, lower quantity. So this is uh, making it smaller. Oops, sorry, that's—you know what is quantity? There you go. And then you can lower the quality. All right, now I don't like saying lower quality, but it's a more economical—this is an HP strategy for all their printers. They start off as really good printers that never break, don't need an ink cartridge, and they reduce the quality so you need ink cartridges, and you need the faster one, not the slower one. They make it slower so you want to buy the faster one. And so uh, you, you get the smaller Burger, so you have less uh, or you go from regular meat to just completely questionable, like what is this thing? Uh, or you say, okay, what are the cross-sells? Well, do you want uh, fries with your burger? Do you want a drink with your burger? And so those are basically the eight ways that you can get a customer to buy more stuff. And so the whole process though, especially if you're selling, doing a cross-sell, which is very common in terms of what people are thinking about selling next, is that there's a problem-solution cycle that exists in business, which is that if you actually solve a problem with whatever you do, you also create another problem. So all problems, all solutions create more problems. All problems create solutions. And so if you do accurately solve it, so let's say I um, like let's say someone has the burgers and all that stuff, well, once someone's full, then I created a uh, a dessert problem. Right. Right, which I can solve, you know, with uh, with my milkshake or my ice cream cones or whatever. Right. Just to use the very simple example. But if I solve the traffic to someone's site, then the next thing they're going to need help with is sales. The next thing they're going to need help with is delivery. There's always going to be something else that's going to happen. You know, if you, if you help someone lose 20 lbs, the next thing they're going to want is they're going to want to tone up, or they're going to want new clothes. There's there's a ton of things that happen as a result. But there's um, another piece that I'll bring up here, which is something that I've learned over and over again, which is that people enter hyper-buying cycles. And so let's say that I sign up for a marathon. Right? If I decide I'm going to start a marathon, and then I go to the, the shoe store, the running shoe store, and I say, hey, I want some, I want some running shoes, if that business owner—it's like, well, well, they just bought the running shoes, I don't want to, I don't want, I don't want to scare them away, I don't want to seem too salesy. Well, what are they going to do? They're like, well, I still need the iPod thing for my, for my shoulder, so that when I'm running, I need new tank tops, I need running shorts. Um, I got to have uh, you know, the, the app that tracks my progress, whatever it is. Right. And so—and I've got to have those gels that I—whatever marathon runners eat. But the thing is is that if you don't sell it, they're going to buy it, just not from you, and all of this is going to happen in a very short time cycle. They're going to make the decision, I'm now a marathon runner, and so I need to get all the stuff associated with that. You buy a pet, there's a zillion things you buy. You go to a wedding, there's a zillion things you buy. Like whenever someone makes a decision to enter it, like basically they have a new identity that then associates with whatever purchases they're going to, to make. They enter this cycle where they just buy lots of stuff, and you want to be there right at that moment to make that.

Next offer again and again and again. Offers are only bad if you present it at the wrong time or it's not a need. And so that's why we don't try and sell them; we make the offer, we present it. If they're not into it, no big deal. And so that's at least how I think through, um, upselling and getting more out of every night.

Stores do this so well. You know, they put the socks on the out-to-checkout right? They put the and all that stuff. Brand, brand plays such an important role in this because once you've got trusted, then people want to buy from you, cuz they know your shoes are good quality; well, your tops are probably good quality, your socks are probably good quality, your armband's going to be good. Put my iPhone in. So who helps you? Isn't that next?

Yeah, yeah. Who helps you? That's it. Who helps, by the way? Um, we have a platform that helps people. It's the hardest thing we've noticed for people to actually ask for help. Love giving help; that's the shocking thing, but people don't ask for. But, but what's your take on it? So who helps you? So the, the way I think about this is you have you have four ways you can let other people know about stuff, right? So you've got you got one-on-one, uh, and then you got one to many. It's people who know you and people who don't. And so one one to people who know you is warm outreach. So you just text your friends, you DM people, you email, you call, whatever. You've got one to many to people you know, which is posting content; that you make a post to your Facebook page and you say, hey, this is what's going on in my life. One to one to people who don't know you is cold outreach. So that's cold calling, cold emailing, cold whatever. And then you've got one to many, uh, to people who don't know you, which is paid ads. And so these are the only four things that any one person can do to let other people know about their stuff. You can talk at events, the similar things.

Put oh yeah, totally. And so once we know this, this is how we advertise to anything, um, to get customers, then it's like, okay, well we do the exact same process to get employees. And so you need a team that's going to help you. And so in the beginning, a lot of times you start by reaching out to people you know and saying, hey, friends, family, do you want to help me with my business? Um, and then you probably make a post and say, hey, I'm hiring, you know, anybody who knows anybody, please like make the introduction. Um, and then you start running ads on job boards and saying, hey, uh, I've got this great thing, please apply; it's great. And then when you get more advanced, you start head hunting, uh, and you start looking for people who are really good at that thing. And these are typically, in my experience, these are the highest value, uh, and the hardest, but it's just like it's just like the sales that you made with Apple; it's like these people, sometimes it takes two, three years to get that one killer on your team, but that person can just build an entire division or an entire department and just continue to scale. And so it's basically taking the same concept that you have with advertising at customers and applying it to employees.

Now I have a, a little another framework, if you're good with it. Yeah. Um, so you've got lead gen, how you get, uh, how you get customers, right? And then you've got nurture, you've got sales, and you've got onboarding, and then you've got, uh, retention, SL, oops, SL, ascension. All right, so they you retain them and you upsell them. Okay, cool. Everyone, a lot of people, at least in business, understand this pipeline, but they don't know that they already have all the skills, just like all the things that you do to currently cut customers, you already have the skills to advertise to get people to help you out. And so then all this is is just application generation, which you use the same core four that we just went through. Nurture is the same as that you should be nurturing. So fun facts, SOA might have shared it yesterday, but like a candidate's take on average eight days to find a job, and B candidates and below take 30 days plus. And so if your process of getting someone from the first, uh, engagement to getting higher takes longer than that, then you're by definition getting B players and below. Now I'll say my only exception to that is if you're hiring C-Level and up; it just takes a very long time, but you want to make sure that the communication still rapid between those things; they probably make a decision quite quickly; they might have a notice period that's longer, but they might still make a quick decision. And so the application nurture here is that like a lot of smaller businesses like they should they should be honored to work for me; they should they should be calling me. I'm going to put a 100 steps of friction; it's like, well, okay, you're just going to get fewer applicants. Well, like you say, a A won't get A players; you get players; they just want to deal with it. And so sales, this is the interview. And so a lot of people are like, well, tell me why you should work for me. That really only works for low-level individual people. At a certain level, you're selling them just as much on why they should work for you as they are on on them, and that's that comes with talent because the higher the level of the talent, the more options they have. They don't, I'm not, I know you know, but I'm just saying it's so it's it's so this thing I don't I don't want people to miss it because a lot of people don't understand when they're recruiting they're selling, and and I work personally so hard to get good people; like it's the hardest job. People don't apply sales process to it; the they sit back and say, well, tell me where you're going to be in five years or while you're good for my company, and people just don't give a [ __ ] Good people be like, well, you why why should I be here?

Yeah, yeah, right. Why should I spend my next five years here? Totally. And onboarding is the same; you onboard employees the same way. After someone takes the job, they accept the offer, they sign the paperwork; it's like, great, now we have the onboarding; here's all the passwords; this is what it's going to look like. And typically people do, I think people do this backwards, which is they basically bring people on and say, good luck, uh, whereas the basically the more work you do up front, the less work is required over time in order to get someone to be proficient at whatever their work is. You do a big onboarding; we're super big on onboarding. Anything particularly on onboarding you think really useful? Honestly, it's just a lot of touch bases. I mean, the first two weeks they're probably like managers usually meet twice a day, you know, with, with, with new hires, just to say like, okay, what are you going to do today? At the end of the day, it's like, how'd it go? Tell me about the conversations you had. And usually, especially it depends on what level of, you know, person's coming in; anybody who's maybe director leveling up, they're going to they're going to talk to all the directors across the departments; they kind of shadow a lot of people. CU we want them to get a very good idea of a holistic understanding of the business so they can understand where where and why their work makes a big impact. And then finally, you have the exact same thing, which is retention and ascension, which is how do I keep good talent? And then what's my career path, um, for them so they can see their vision of what it's going to look like in five years? It's like, listen, we're bringing you in a director, but long-term we'd love to have you as a CRO or a VP of this whole division or something like that. And this is these are the requirements; this is what you would have to do in order to move up there. And again, we try to we try and define things by behaviors, so if you're doing all of these activities, then you will by definition be this role. And so our way of promoting, at least at acac.com, is we want people to just start doing the role, and then the title feels obvious rather than, hey, I want that title; okay, here's the plan. I'd rather you just go do the next role, and then everyone's like, well, yeah, he he deserves the title, like so everybody else is already bought in cuz you're already doing the job anyways. And I think it's the one of the the biggest hacks, at least for those of you who are who are employees at a company; one of the best ways to move up; they said yesterday, which I absolutely love, was growth. Yeah, give people a chance to grow, cuz that will keep them. Everybody I've ever lost in past companies has been because I didn't have a thing they could do next. Yeah, so this is brilliant framework. Okay, keep your advantage. All right, how would you keep the advantage? Well, I mean, I I I think for people is always a key part, right? It depends on the business; if it's a service business, you like if it's a creative agency business, the people literally keep the client; if if so that's that's one way. So you have to keep recruiting; probably never-ending; most CEOs are permanently recruiting; that that's the main job, right? To keep advantage. I I personally think these days it's like, well, if you're not building a personal brand, you're going to lose. Yeah, I actually think the brand piece is actually this; I think the keeping your advantage is the brand. And so if we think about the brand as a virtuous cycle, right? And so I kind of think about it like this, which is if we have different levels of communication, so this is you about you, so you say we're great, and people some people might believe you, some people might not. So let's just say you go and watch, you know, Godzilla the movie or you know you see an ad for Godzilla; you say, okay, you know, it looks decent; maybe I'll go see it, whatever. Then it's your friends. So your your friend John sees it and he says, oh, it was a great movie, or oh, it was a terrible movie; this is going to weigh way more than whatever they said about themselves. And then finally, it's just you say. So you go see the movie and you have a good experience or a bad experience. And so what happens is that this person then becomes the friend for other people and either perpetuates the cycle of advertising, uh, for the business, and this is what reinforces brand. And so at the end of the day, we can make whatever, you know, we can we can have the most brilliant advertising campaign of all time, the best associations, the best celebrity endorsements, but if as soon as people try the food or they try the product, they wear the shoes, if it's not good, it doesn't matter; it like it doesn't matter how good all of that stuff is is that you have to keep the edge, and I think that's where the the connection between the brand. So it's like the brand makes a promise that remains the same, more or less, but the way to keep the promise changes. And so it's like we want to be the. So if Apple says we're going to have elegant, you know, products that are well-designed, blah blah blah, okay, that promise has remained the same for many years, but the way they execute on that promise has to change, right? Because technology changes; there's new advancements in foam, so the shoes become lighter; they become better fitting. And so, um, from an R&D perspective, what we did, uh, was that we we actually had a r& R&D department at, at gym launch, the the company that we sold, um, and what we did was I said, okay, here's here's your budget, and I want you to spend this money no matter what every month, and I just want you to spend it on solving our customers' biggest problem. So every month you're going to give me a list of all the problems that they that they're saying they have, and I want you to try and wait them; is how big is the problem and how many of them are suffering from the problem? And so we use a little format, which is you might have seen this one before, which is, um, let's see, you've got impact, got the expense, you've got the the number of times I can't remember what the R is, and then you've got confidence; this is reach, there reach, and then you've got confidence. And so basically with the product, it's like how many people are suffering from this thing, how much are they suffering? How likely is this solution, uh, going to to solve the problem? And then how much does it cost us to do it? And so with that, we can basically create a power ranking of, okay, this thing is impacting a lot of these people, so this is a high, high, high-priority issue, but we don't have any solutions that we're actually really confident about. We've got a solution that we're really confident about, but it's really expensive, right? And so this is where you basically factor all four of these things in into your innovation cycle, so you say, okay, this is how we strategically prioritize, uh, our resources to get the best returns. And so if we think about what strategy is, strategy, okay, so a lot of people use this word, and no one really defines what it means. And so I'm going to define two words for the audience that I think will will make a lot of sense. So strategy is just prioritization of resources. So when people are like, man, I really need a strategy, it's like, dude, it just means what are my priorities; that's all it is. And so if we think about the universe as having unlimited things that we could do, but we have limited resources, time, money, energy, effort, then the people who get the furthest in life are the ones who are the best at allocating those resources to get the most bang for the buck. And fundamentally, that's what the best strategists are; it's just this big amorphous word that people define in all sorts of ways, but that's all it is. And so then it's like, okay, well if I'm going to prioritize my resources, I want to prioritize my resources in a way that that provides the most value. And so for customers, um, I see value as this value equation, which I taught in the, um, $100 million offers book, which is I see there's four variables to value: you've got the dream outcome; like is the thing the thing they want, the need thing that you're referencing earlier; we've got perceived likelihood of achievement, which is if I buy this thing, how likely is it that I'm actually going to get what I want? And this is actually the the last one that I added to this because I was like there was another thing that felt like it was missing; you've got time delay, which is how long is it going to take between when I buy and when I get? And then I've got sacrifice and effort. So, uh, they're two sides of the same coin; effort is what are the things that I have to start doing as a result of this purchase that I don't want to do, and what are the sacrifices; what are the things I'm going to have to stop doing that I wish I could keep doing? And so fundamentally, the goal here is you want to increase the the dream outcome as much as humanly possible and increase their perceived likelihood, and you want to decrease the time delay and decrease the effort in sacrifice. And so in a perfect world, you'd have something that they click a button, they get their dream outcome absolutely guaranteed immediately by doing nothing. And if you had that, you'd have an infinitely valuable product. If you think about like, hey, uh, buy a six-pack; if someone could just simply click a button and then all of a sudden they could pull their shirt up and they would have a press that button right now; of course, so many people would. And so think and then because of that, we'd be able to charge a tremendous amount of money. And so by thinking through this these these things, in my opinion, will never change; people will always want things to be faster; people always want to do less for them; they will always want to have less risk or a higher perceived like of achievement, and they want to make sure the thing is actually what they want. And so, um, I obvious, you know, I use fitness examples a lot because a lot of people understand it, but it's like, okay, let's say that someone wants to, uh, lose weight; okay, that's the dream outcome. Well, then why is it that, uh, a PDF is $5 about how to lose weight and lipo section is 50 grand? Well, the other three variables. So if I think about the PDF, if I if I buy a $5 PDF, when I make the purchase, do I really believe that I'm immediately going to lose weight? Probably not. And so there's a huge discount that I'm going to put on the value of the PDF because I don't think I'm really going to do anything with it, whereas lipo section, if I pay it, they're going to put me to sleep; they're going to rip this fat out; like so the perceived lik of achievement significantly higher on the liposuction. For time delay, it's like, okay, this one I might have to work out for a year in order to see the results; the liposuction, I go to sleep, I wake up, I'm thin; much faster. And then effort and sacrifice, well, I'm going to have to sacrifice, uh, you know, taco Tuesdays, nights out with the girls, uh, I'm going I'm going to have to sacrifice sleeping in; I can't do that anymore; sacrifice my weekends, uh, and the effort is I now have to wake up early; I have to eat food that I don't like; I'm going to have to be sore; I'm going to have to feel stupid because I don't know how to exercise; it's like there's a lot of cost with that compared to you just wake up and you didn't do anything. And so for that reason, one thing's $5, the other thing's 50 grand. And so if we think through that, like there's many different things that solve losing weight, making more money, you know, getting more leads; there's a ton of different things, but if you want to make sure that your thing's more valuable, you want to decrease the risk, which is increase perceived likelihood; you want to make it faster, decrease the time, and you to make it easier. This framework works so well; a case study like Blockbusters, you know, it didn't keep their advantage because because people wanted it quicker; they could going to Netflix; originally it was getting posted to them; Blockbusters didn't think people wanted posted; they thought it was more convenient for people to go to a store and buy it. And so there was a less time delay; there's no less sacrifice; just press a button at home; they people don't keep their advantage; they die like BL Blockbusters do. So you've got to keep thinking about how you can make this this is a brilliant equation, by the way; I'm glad you went a bit deep on it because I think a lot of people just just talk about this top line, as you say; they don't think about the time delay, and they don't think about the sacrifice element. It's so funny you say that because the first the first half of my career, all I thought about was was this; all I would do to me was this was promise and this is proof. Mhm. So all I did was I had bigger promises, more proof; bigger promises, more proof. But if I look at the the biggest companies in the world, all they focus on is this; Amazon's like, how do I make it easier? How do I make it faster? How do I make it how do I make it less effort for the person? And this part is usually where all of the operational effort goes; in this is all the marketing and sales.

Totally. Plus this promise; if you make it too big, you damage your brand; this is why this all links together cuz if if you're not careful, you you want to get the big sale and you sell something you haven't actually got, and then you're in real trouble, right? Next, stick with it; stick with it; right; this is a good one; most of the best things in life happen, um, so we have this we have this little orientation that we take our sales guys through, and so, um, we show this line and we say

Okay, so this is you today, and this is you, uh, you know, later. And so this is your skill as a salesperson. And so this might be, you know, two weeks in, and this might be, you know, two months in, and this might be, you know, six months in. And so you're like, "Six months, I'm almost, I'm almost at the top." It's like, yeah, well, let's let's move this up a little bit. My my drawing's a little broken. And let's say this is three years. So you're like, "I'm only going to make this tiny bit of tiny bit of improvement between six months and three years." Yeah.

And the thing is, though, is that your income is going to look like this, yeah. And so it's going to basically not change much at all, and then at the very end is where you're going to get because this little difference—the difference between number two in the world and number one practically for running is a tenth of a second—but the difference between number one in the world and number two is everything. And so all of the best gains come at the very end of the compounding. It comes from the very deep knowledge that only comes from repeating many failures in a very narrow field. And so that's actually one of my favorite definitions for an expert: someone who's, uh, who's made more mistakes than anyone else in a very narrow field.

So how do people stick with it, though? Because I mean, social media is a great example. First three years I did social media, I made no money, and it probably cost me a million pounds. Yeah. So it's only in the last year and a half I've actually started to be able to make money and be able to pay the team and all the rest of it. So I I I look at it as a purpose thing, right? I'm trying to fix the education system; it's broken. It should be teaching the skills that you and I are trying to get people for free. How do people stick with it? What do you think is the formula there?

So I'm going to I'm going to go back to something that I said at the very beginning: so if motivation is equal to deprivation, you need to feel deprived of of something. And so in the examples I gave, so you know, if you're starving, you're hungry; if you're sleepy, you if you're if you're if you're exhausted, you're motivated to sleep. But money doesn't work the same way because if you take that that logical extreme, you say, okay, well, then all poor people should be more motivated to make money than anything, and the reality is they're not. So why is that? So because all the ones that I first at are all physiological needs; the other one is completely made up. Money is only a new—I mean, in terms of humanity, it's a very new thing, right?—and so it's a psychological construct. And so the idea is that the deprivation actually is completely made in our own minds. And so, um, you know, Harvard at least did this did this study, which is they talk about your reference group, which is the biggest predictor of people's long-term, um, financial wellbeing is their reference group, which is—and this is important—is that it's the five people you compare yourself to, not the five people you spend the most time with. And I think that's a huge a huge difference.

And so, um, I had this little this little tweet that kind of went like viral or whatever, but you want to take advice not from the people who are closest to you, but the people who are closest to your goals. Take advice from them. And people are like, "Oh yeah, I'll take advice from them," but when you're about to make a big life-changing decision, who do you talk to? If you're talking to the people closest to you, none of them have relevant experience, and if you don't want their lives, then definitely don't listen to what they say, right? And it's very hard because that's what makes it feel so lonely, I think, in the beginning because you have no one to talk to. And so that's why I'm such a big believer in heroes, uh, heroes and mentors. So mentors are people who actually interact with you, but heroes are just like, "What would Warren Buffett do?" You know, some people are religious; "What would Jesus do?" Whatever your thing is, right? Like, who's that who's that ideal? And sometimes, you know, one of my friends is like, "What would the ideal version of me do? What's the person I want to become do?" And all of it is again around doing because if I do those things—like, I might not be a patient person, but if I were to be patient for five years, people start calling me patient; I might actually be patient because all I did was patient things, even though I don't feel patient, right? And so it's like we can change basically how we feel, and what we do don't need to be connected at all. So you can feel horrible and still do things and be kind, and people like you can feel like a very nasty person because of the things that you think and the things that you want to do, but as long as you don't do them, then the only thing the world will ever judge you on—at least the only thing that I would ever judge you on—is what you do. And so it's like, okay, a deprivation. So back to this.

So in my opinion, I've always struggled with this question the most because it's never been an issue for me, and I think and that's and that's why it's one of the hardest things that I have to translate to somebody else. So everything that I have is more around how do I translate how I see it more than this was the series of steps I followed to become motivated. I was so afraid of failing and being this deprived, right? I was so deprived of respect, or at least how I perceived it. Not continuing was just never a choice. And I always used to think when when I was like the earliest days of the gym was really tough for me; I was sleeping on the floor all the whole the whole the whole story, right? And and it sounds it sounds cool in retrospect, but when it's like you're sleeping on the floor of a gym because you can't afford two places, and you know you've got kids the same age as you who are partying on the rooftop of your gym because I it was below a parking garage is where my gym was, so a parking garage; people with like these cars would drive over the top like and it was it was concrete and metal, so it just it sounded like a gunshot, and it would happen all night long, so I couldn't sleep, but I'd have to wake up at 4:00 to teach the 4:30 class, and I taught all the classes, so I taught eight classes a day, but then I also ran the whole business; I had zero employees, so I did all the billing, I cleaned it, I fixed the equipment, I marketed and got leads, I did everything. I didn't know that employees were a thing; that's why I have it as one of the steps; I had no idea.

And so the thing is is that whenever it would be really hard for me, um, I would I would always think to myself, "As long as I don't quit, I win," mhm. And so like if I just keep going, I just have to survive. And so just kind of approaching it from that perspective because the the more painful thing was the idea of going home a failure, and I just couldn't do it. I was like, "I would rather die." And I think thinking through like past human experiences, which is okay, across all the globe, slavery has happened everywhere, and slaves for their entire lives for thousands of years had to work all day every day, and they had no opportunity; they just had to work all day every day, but there was no upside; they just had to work all day every day or they die or get killed or whatever. And so I was like, "If they can do it with no upside, I can absolutely do it with the chance, uh, that I can win." And I think seeing business as an infinite game is what was a huge perspective shift for me, which was the there is no number one in business. And this was something that was like really like—it's for anybody who's listening to this, I think it's powerful to understand—is if I were to say, "Hey, who was who is the richest man in the world 30 years ago?" There are a couple of Japanese guys because the Japanese economy was booming at that time. Now no one even knows who they are, and that was just 30 years; forget 500 years. And so the thing is is the number one guy in the world at business—if you want to measure it by net worth, which whatever—but even if you did, it's like that guy just touches the top for a decade, and then someone else touches the top, mhm. And so when we say, "I want to I want to be successful," success is about sticking with it. And so the only way that you become a failure in business is by stopping, mhm. And so all the infinite games—like all the games worth playing in life, in my opinion—are all infinite. So it's not about it's not about getting married; it's about staying married. It's not about getting in shape; it's about staying in shape. It's not about starting a business; it's about staying in business. And the only thing that gets you out of business is you choosing to stop. And I think that's a very powerful frame because it puts it 100% in your control. And so as long as you keep trying, you're still in business. And I think a lot of people give up so much; they they give up just on the idea of a negative comment or some snide remark from a friend of theirs or, you know, their their dad or their brother, you know, makes them trying to feel stupid for for taking a risk that they were unwilling to take. And I think that's [ __ ]

Anyways, motivation comes from deprivation. And so, at least my number one rule for entrepreneurship is use what you've got. And so a lot of times there's there's a lot of social media stuff; I don't think there's anything wrong with it that talks about like, "Find your passion, find your purpose, find the thing that you love," and I think that's great, but when if I were to go back in time, I can say that now from this lovely, you know, position that I have, but when I started, you know, my first business, I wasn't doing it because it was something I was passionate about; it was not it was not this like sunshine and rainbows; it was miserable, and I had a lot of shame and had a lot of anger. And so I didn't feel any of the butterflies, but that's what I had. And so it's like I think you just use what you got, and if you need shame to get you going, if you need if you need anger to get you going, then you can that fuel can change over time, but wishing you had a different fuel, I think, is what gets people in trouble. I think that's what that's what stops a lot of people. Like, "I should feel—" It's like you should nothing; like should just just shouldn't exist. It's just what do you have, and what are you going to do?

And I'll say the last piece is there are trade-offs, and I think being able to name the price of the things that you want is super valuable, yeah, which is like, you know, the the cost of of of fame, for example, is privacy; you don't get that anymore. And the cost of you starting a business is—for, you know, for me it was like—I stopped being able to follow the the football team that I used to follow; I stopped being in fantasy leagues with my friends; I stopped being able to go out to, you know, the bar and drink and things like that. So there was a cost. And so the thing was just like, "Am I willing to pay that or trade that for this thing that I want most?" And I think for some people, maybe you don't want that, mhm. And I think the thing is is like—and that's okay—but I think the problem is where you you want you want to have your cake and eat it too, yeah. I want to have the six-pack, but I also want to have cake. I want to, you know, I want to I want to you have to, and you got to learn how to play the game, uh, but it's it's that it's it's people aren't willing to make the trade. And I think that just comes down to the very bottom of everything. Like when I wanted to—there was a period where I wanted to get into Harvard's business school when I had I'd done two years of consulting, and that was what I thought was going to be my path, but I'm always very grateful for them because on one of the application questions they had was, "How are Harvard MBA help your short and long-term goals?" And I thought about it for like three days, and I realized that, well, I wanted to start a business, and so me starting doing another two years of school, I could just start a business; like that was this the goal. And so I'm grateful that they asked me that question, but before I ended up getting to the application, I spent four months taking—um, I basically did 10 phone books of problems because I read this research study on, uh, on standardized testing, which said the the score that you get—so for anybody who has standardized testing that they have to do, maybe you're a tradesman and you need a certification or something—it goes like this, which is, uh, score—so this is like score—number of problems. So basically, it was just a direct correlation between the number of problems that you did before taking the test was directly correlated with your score. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, "Oh, I'll just do all of the problems." And so I did 16—like it was it was it was huge; it was like I it was standing on the floor—books of problems—like the really thin Bible paper—like really thin paper. And so I did four hours a day of problems for four months; it's all I did; I just did problems. And so I got above Harvard's mid-score. And so for me, it was like, "This is the only thing that I have to do, and this is what I care about most." And so people like, "How do you stay motivated?" I was like, "I don't know; I just didn't have any other choice because the alternative is just was something I wasn't willing to do." And I think a lot of people aren't willing to cut things.

Like I've been—I'd say one of the things that's been, you know, blessed with, if you want to say that, is um, I'm very willing to cut people and things out of my life very quickly. I think it's healthy to do that. And so this is my this is my North Star question that I would encourage people to ask themselves: "Does having X in my life increase the chance I hit my goal?" That's my North Star question. This could look like—like it—off Twitter, but I get it; it's it's it, you know, uh, first of all, I feel a little bit emotional hearing you talk about that; I don't know why that's triggering something in me, um, do you know what is? Cuz I I have the same problem trying to help people have a better life; they kind of got to help themselves. What do you think of this like, you know, I think it's Pablo's cave where people get brought a fish in the cave every day, and it's easier, right? They don't ever leave the cave because that's what a salary kind of is; the food comes to you every day, and people have forgotten how [ __ ] amazing it is to go out in the rain with your mates and hunt, yeah, or or go together and make the food. Men and women made food; men and women went out hunting in the old days, you know, like there was no fridge; there was no get up and eat [ __ ]; get up and go out and make [ __ ] happen. And you know what what it is? I think that—and it's absolutely fine with people don't want to do it—but I don't want people to say they can't be an entrepreneur or they can't sell; I want them to be honest; they can't be bothered, yeah. Cuz and I think the key is—and you you describe your story; I have a similar story—I love the hunger I have from the deprivation that I had. The Vikings used to land places and burn the boats that got them there, yeah; then they got no [ __ ] choice. And I think that's what people need to do; if they really want to do it, they need to burn the boats; that got—they can't go back to the cushy job, the middle-class life, that's it; you're in or you're out, yeah. And then like you say, you got to like figure out what you're going to cut out isn't going to give you the goal you want. So especially in the beginning, you have limited resources, right? You have limited time because you have no leverage; you have no one helping you, and you probably don't have that much money. And so time is the only thing that you have that you really have to be, uh, really careful with. And so that's—it's what are the what are the activities—does this activity, you know, like drinking, for example, is this like—does this does this increase the likelihood that hit my goals? That's it. Does it increase the lik my goal? Does does does having these friends in my life increase the lik that hit my goals? And the answer is usually pretty obvious; it it doesn't. And then the thing is is that most people are again just cowards, Y? Is that they're not willing to just make the make the cut. But I'm pretty sure you live the same framework that you did when you were younger; I act like I've got no money; like I don't I don't put—I don't—this is Gucci, right? Sure, me know, like I I think people get comfortable as they grow, as but I think people the motivation thing really gets to me, cuz sticking with it, which is the theme around this, is all to down to perhaps limiting your choices, not increasing them. Some people have too many choices, yeah, you know, like die on the hill, you know, like go for it, and people don't do it.

So okay, getting better—this is the one step before we get a million dollars—so um, I'm looking forward to the U million dollar in cash, yeah. All right, getting better, cuz I I've done all these things, so I hopefully a big suitcase of money is coming my way. Get better. So I'll um I'll describe a process that, uh, that I I do, and it's all based on action. So I define work, right, as volume times leverage, which is how much you do and how much you get for each time you do it, because that equals output, which if you're looking at this transitive property, work equals output. So it's not about how hard you try; it's about what you get done. And if you have more leverage, you get more done. Now if you do a lot of work—so I'll give you a simple example—so if you if you if we're learning sales, right? So if I start cold calling and I do 100 calls a day and I have low skill, then I will have low leverage; I'm going to get fewer appointments than somebody who makes the same amount of calls as me and has high skill; they'll book five times the appointments as I will. So did they work more? In my world, yes; they had higher output. And so a lot of times it's like you have to learn how to work, but the thing is is that how did that guy who is good get good? He did volume; he did a lot. And so then it's like, okay, if this is our equation for output, in terms of getting better, and the getting better part is going to be leverage—this this is a constant; you have to do work; you have to do volume—okay, so we start with the doing, which is the volume, cool. So we have that first. And so whatever it is—so let's say it's I want to start making, uh, you know, Instagram Reels—fine. I want to get good at Instagram, so it's like, great, so I'm going to make 100 Instagram Reels. And this is the part that people—well, people people don't even do this—but let's assume that you did this. Okay, so you do the 100 Instagram Reels. People then say, "Well, I did 100..."

And nothing happened. It's like, okay, so then what we do is we look at our 100—let's say this is, you know, the the the 100 reals that we did—we say, what's different about these, about these top ones? These top ones did better. And what's different about these singers? Do this all the time, don't they? They put music out all the time. 60% of Adele's songs never went in the top 10 or something, right? You know, so yeah, this is that they also do it. And so then once we figure out—and this is where you have to, this is where you have to uh, be as detailed as possible—and a lot of times you'll start having almost superstitions. It's like, okay, I coughed at the beginning of this call. Well, that was different. Well, did all of your top 10 calls, did you cough? Well, no. Okay, then disregard that. So you run something called a common factors analysis, which is just saying, what do all these ones have in common? What do, so like, what do these ones all have in common with each other, but that's different than all of these ones? And so once we do that, we say, okay, so my next 100 that I do, I want to look like this. And then all of a sudden it's like, huh, I got 30% better on my total views by just doing more of the stuff that worked. Yep.

And so this process, you just do for like 10 years, um, and you just keep doing it over and over again. I mean, like the first, the first YouTube, you know, video that I did, I think probably has like, you know, 100 views or whatever it was. And any for anybody who's listening to this, like Simon had a had had a big business, but I'm assuming that when you started, you had zero subscrib—when you started your account, and so did I, across all platforms. And so people have this idea that like everyone starts at zero. And I'll also give you this other kind of word of encouragement, which is there's this, there's a huge media narrative around the idea that like millionaires and billionaires are evil. I don't know why, but there is. And so what's interesting about that, if you look at least in the US statistics, are that it's over the overwhelming majority of millionaires and billionaires are self-made, not inherited. And so it's like, okay, wait, if the majority of them are self-made, then that means they all started at zero. Mhm. And so they had the same thing. So let's say they didn't have a lot of money. Actually, think having zero, starting at zero is a competitive advantage.

Oh yeah, we have nothing to lose. Yeah, exactly. Anyone with zero, you think you don't realize that you've got an advantage. So you have no money, and all you have is time. Mhm. And that means that you're in the exact same position as every self-made millionaire and billionaire when they started. And the only difference is that right now you're a self-made poor person. Mhm. It's just that no one likes to claim it. By the way, self-made doesn't exist because everyone had help. Oh, for sure. No, no, but con—in terms of, in terms of starting here, yeah, we with no—no, you can have nothing and still make it. I do you know what's really interesting about this for people listening as well, like I, I've invested in 78 companies. I know you've invested in a lot of businesses as well, sometimes too much money can destroy a business. Like I've seen people like WeWork, for example, their biggest problem was they never thought about actually making money, just kept their business was raising money. Yeah, right. So I think that that's another thing people don't really quite grasp. But getting better, I mean, do you think there's a a mental framework to help people get better? 'Cause I, I mean even myself, right, I'm I'm pretty good at business. I've had to get better to compete. Yeah, but is is there a framework for getting better as a as a human, like do you think as a human being, not as a business person? I think they're linked, but what—

Well, I mean, I I really 100% live on that common factors analysis thing. So if I look at—so I'll tell you how I live my my whole life. So like when—um—so I really did this, which was uh, the whole the thing that started this was I was 21, 21 or 22, and this is my first job out of college. And I remember I had a really good weekend, and um, I was just like in a good mood, came in on on Monday, and my boss was like, hey, uh, you know what's what's going on? I was like, just you know, just had a good weekend. And she said to me this line that I I just it kind of like hit me. Um, she said, I'm pretty sure stringing is many many days in a row like that as you can is the secret to living. And what what it did though is it took this whole this amorphous idea of like joy, contentment, purpose, and just made it really tactical. Was like, okay, how do I live as many days in a row as I can of days that I like? So I looked back at like last year and I said, okay, what were the days that I like the most? What were my top 10% days? Well, the things that I had in common as I worked out. Okay, cool, I did that. Um, I ate with people, I like ate with friends, and then I worked until I had nothing left. That's exactly my framework. And so if I do these three things, then if I do that on all my days, then more of my days will look like that. And so the majority of my days now feel like what used to be top 10% days. And so obviously these are different for other—it might be playing music, it might be whatever, you know, whatever your thing is, but that common factors analysis and it's like, okay, what are the top 10, you know, we've, you know, Leland have gone on 100 dates. Okay, the top 10 dates, what do they have in common? Okay, well, Al—I think all of it. Yeah, how to make dates better. It's brilliant. I got flowers, right? He got flowers, he had a gift. Is this coming from her side? She told—pre-planned? No, he had pre-planned, he had pre-planned something, right? She's told you her her list. I wrote some sort of note, right? Um, and so, and we dress up. And so those are the things, they're like, this is my, this is my recipe for for making good dates. And so it's like a lot of a lot of times it's like no one just takes the the look back and says, okay, what—but it's because they don't start with the—I did stuff. That's the first step. Like you got to do the 100 reps, you got to do make the 100 posts, you got to make the 100, you got to make the 100 C calls, you got to make the the 100 sales, and you got to record them. And that's the other piece, like you have to be able to record it, whatever, whatever to the greatest degree possible, you have to recall what were the details. And so then you look, you see the common factors. It's like, all right, well, I'm going to only do those five next time. And by by by randomness, because life happens, in there's variables that are out of our control, again there's going to be another top 10% in the next 100 dates, and we're like, okay, so in those dayses, not only did I do these five things, but I uh, we had a driver, uh, was a was a big difference, and there was a surprise uh, element for some of these. And at a certain point, the thing is the the the improvement is going to go like this, right, just like that, just like that sales thing, you know, the first time you do this your your dates are going to get way better, right? And then after that though, the dates are going to get incrementally better. But all that happens is like, man, people are going to be like, how do you have such a healthy relationship? You're like, you know, all I did was I just looked at the stuff that worked, and I just stopped doing the stuff that didn't, and I just did it over and over and over again. Amazing, Alex. Honestly, you're an amazing human being. I love this. I hope you guys enjoyed it. We're off to have some chicken now. We'll see you later.