Pod Insights The Game with Alex Hormozi The Fastest Way to Grow Is Simpler Than You Think | Ep 858 About this episode In this Q&A episode of The Game, Alex (@AlexHormozi) gives real-time, high-stakes coaching to entrepreneurs trying to double their businesses, revealing how a single hire, smarter partnerships, or one clear offer can unlock explosive growth.
Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast, you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
Wanna scale your business? Click here.
Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:
LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition
Mentioned in this episode:
Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Alex Hormozi? Everything that you spend your time on that is not interviewing to get this setter and get them trained up are things that are not going to double the business.
0:16 Alex Hormozi? Let's do A's and Q's. Hello?
0:19 Speaker 01 Hey, my name is Joe Reed. I own Genesis Family Healthcare. I have been in primary care for the last 20 years, 16 in my own business. The last two years, I've changed to a direct primary care model, which is basically a membership model, much like a gym membership model. So my revenue was $2 million last year, 15% profits. I do kind of live through my business too, so that kind of helps out. So the thing that I would really like to know is what is the marketing strategy or the marketing model that you would advise me to grow my business?
0:52 Alex Hormozi? You want to double because I overheard you earlier. What, what's sales velocity right now? How many customers are you selling per week, per month?
1:02 Speaker 01 I have around 2,000 per year.
1:04 Alex Hormozi? Per year? Okay, so, so 40 a week roughly. Okay, so 40 new patients a week are coming in. What's the way that you're getting customers right now?
1:14 Speaker 01 No, it's, it's, it's not the new patients that are coming in. I have 2,000 patients, 300 patients.
1:19 Alex Hormozi? What's sales velocity? So what's new?
1:20 Speaker 01 Sales velocity is probably around seven, eight a month.
1:25 Alex Hormozi? Seven, eight a month. Okay, got it. So you have really good patient stick, obviously, if you're at 2,000 and you can, that's great. Okay, so the seven to eight a month that are coming in, is that just word of mouth?
1:34 Speaker 01 We did, we did a pretty good marketing turn in the fall, spent a lot of money on some things. I think we put the cart before the horse a little bit, as far as just going on online and really marketing Google ads.
1:45 Alex Hormozi? What did you, so it was PVC?
1:47 Speaker 01 Yes, I mean, and, and then Facebook and Instagram.
1:51 Alex Hormozi? Did you hire an agency?
1:52 Speaker 01 We did.
1:52 Alex Hormozi? Okay, how did that work?
1:55 Speaker 01 Uh, got a lot of people at the top of the funnel and we did not close.
2:00 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
2:01 Speaker 01 So we know what our issue was at that time. So.
2:03 Alex Hormozi? So what was the issue?
2:05 Speaker 01 I, I think follow up as much as anything.
2:07 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
2:08 Speaker 01 Because most people in our town kind of knows our, they know our brand.
2:11 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
2:12 Speaker 01 So, or they know who I am.
2:13 Alex Hormozi? Sure.
2:14 Speaker 01 So, so.
2:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's close as much as anything.
2:18 Alex Hormozi? Yeah. So what stops you from doing that again? And now working the leads this time?
2:24 Speaker 01 People.
2:25 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
2:25 Speaker 01 Getting the right people.
2:26 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
2:27 Speaker 01 You know, a lot of answers, a lot of questions have been answered since being here on.
2:31 Alex Hormozi? No, you're good. I mean, that's, I mean, that's the hope.
2:34 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:35 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
2:35 Speaker 01 So it, it really is, I think, the people and the script and the, and, and the execution.
2:41 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
2:41 Speaker 01 Of those things. So.
2:42 Alex Hormozi? So in all likelihood, you running ads in a local market to get more patients feels pretty sound to me. The offer that you were running, what was, what, what offer were you running to get people in the dark?
2:55 Speaker 01 As far as just direct.
2:57 Alex Hormozi? You ran your ads. Yeah.
2:58 Speaker 01 It's a monthly membership.
2:59 Alex Hormozi? No, no, no. But like, the ad wouldn't be like, want to buy a direct monthly membership.
3:03 Speaker 01 Right.
3:04 Alex Hormozi? No, right. So what was the offer that people saw that caused them to take action?
3:09 Speaker 01 The genesis difference was, was a big part because we're, we're more of a, a difference in we're, we're more of a functional type medicine.
3:17 Alex Hormozi? Sure.
3:18 Speaker 01 And, you know, I hate to use functional holistic and all those things. It kind of sounds like them.
3:21 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
3:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I'm more of a realopath. So I'm realistic.
3:25 Alex Hormozi? I'm a realopath myself.
3:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah. So, and we did shut the gym down during COVID, sure. And I told certain things about this. I was a rebel during COVID.
3:35 Alex Hormozi? I got you.
3:35 Speaker 01 A lot of things that, that has really been a, a flagship with me.
3:39 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
3:39 Speaker 01 Because I was, I was, well, we, as a practice, we've got six providers at my practice.
3:43 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
3:43 Speaker 01 And we all kind of stuck at things to the establishment.
3:46 Alex Hormozi? So what we need to do is basically have an offer that we can run on the front end. It would typically be some sort of. I'd say nineteen to ninety nine dollar offer. And I want to be clear, I'm not trying to undervalue your services. It's gonna be a front end thing. So you get them to opt in, thank you page, they can buy it. Some of them will, some of them won't, doesn't really matter. So the ones that do buy and self schedule, those will be easy. Because you won't have to work them, they'll probably just show up because they paid. For all the rest of the leads, you call them up, you collect the card over the phone. And then you obviously bill them the nineteen or ninety nine dollar thing. For whatever the, call it a functional movement screening, or like some sort of pain assessment, or if that's. Basically, you want to figure out what the most common pain that your ideal avatar is suffering from. And then make the offer related to that.
4:32 Alex Hormozi? And it would probably be some sort of screen slash assessment slash, you know, X-ray or whatever. That then reveals the problem and then you do a prescriptive close on the solution. And so this is a very tried and true method. And it sounds like the biggest issue that physicians offices typically deal with is that secretaries don't know how to work leads.
4:50 Speaker 02 Right.
4:51 Alex Hormozi? Right. And so you really need a sales role. And so it feels uncomfortable, sales medicine, but it's also reality. And so that's pretty much it, which is that's the offer. And then you would hook it up to a scheduler and then you would call the leads.
5:08 Alex Hormozi? That's, I mean, that's, that's really it. And so it means you just need one person to call the leads and you can do this thing.
5:12 Speaker 02 Okay.
5:13 Alex Hormozi? So then everything that prevents you, so I'm gonna say it super directly. Everything that you spend your time on, that is not interviewing, to get this setter and get them trained up. Are things that are not going to double the business.
5:31 Speaker 02 Thank you.
5:32 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, hundred percent. Thank you. That help? Okay, good.
5:37 Speaker 03 My name is Frank. I sell luxury watches to other watch dealers.
5:43 Alex Hormozi? Oh, B two B.
5:44 Speaker 03 B two B, yes.
5:45 Alex Hormozi? Got it.
5:45 Speaker 03 Our revenue last year was eighty eight million and our margin is three percent. So I would like to, it's, it's a.
5:53 Alex Hormozi? Jewelry, I get it.
5:54 Speaker 03 It's the type of the business. So I would like to double our revenue. And obviously you just need to sell double the inventories, double of the watches. And right now we are capped because I'm actually, I'm actually the person who get good leads. Because in order to make money, you need to buy cheap and sell either high or okay.
6:15 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
6:15 Speaker 03 So I'm not able to give up my proprietary deal flow.
6:22 Speaker 03 Because somebody can just take it and do themselves because in this industry pricing is price is most of the competitive advantage. Branding is not that much, so.
6:35 Alex Hormozi? Well, the watches are the ones that are carrying the price, but your specific price.
6:38 Speaker 03 Right, right. So I'm able to get
6:42 Speaker 03 good price.
6:43 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
6:43 Speaker 03 Sell reasonably, but right now my time is pretty capped and we are trying to double it. I'm trying to figure out what's the best way to do it.
6:49 Alex Hormozi? So I think, is there a way that we can chop it into pieces?
6:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:53 Alex Hormozi? Meaning you have your proprietary lead flow, right?
6:57 Speaker 03 Right.
6:57 Alex Hormozi? You cannot share where the leads are coming from and then share the leads with someone.
7:02 Alex Hormozi? And have someone else work the leads.
7:03 Speaker 03 That's what I, that's what being trying to do.
7:06 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
7:06 Speaker 03 I'll, my time will be capped of these proprietary leads because I want, I want to double my proprietary leads.
7:12 Alex Hormozi? So you want to double your lead flow?
7:14 Speaker 03 Right.
7:14 Alex Hormozi? Right?
7:15 Speaker 03 Right.
7:15 Alex Hormozi? And I'm guessing this has to do some sort of outbound method that you're doing.
7:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:19 Alex Hormozi? Okay. So I would probably look at like VAs in like offshore that don't know anything about the space. So I think it's, so if you look at the keys to the kingdom, it's like what you don't want to have is somebody who understands how to get the deals, gets the cash to buy it and then find sellers, right? You have all three of those, which is why you have a money flow, right? And so if we got, let's say, somebody who is a VA who could work some of the outbound stuff.
7:40 Speaker 03 Right.
7:41 Alex Hormozi? And do more of that work for you, they don't know any of the buyers. And they probably don't have the cash to buy something like that.
7:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:47 Alex Hormozi? And so I think you could pretty easily get someone to duplicate the effort that you're doing on the outbound lead generation side, doing that and just keep it controlled there.
7:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:53 Alex Hormozi? Does that make sense?
7:54 Speaker 03 Yeah. Another business model we've been doing, we've been trying for the last year is we partner with other people who get leads, but they don't have money and we just partner on deals.
8:03 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
8:03 Speaker 03 These are doing pretty well, but the caveat is that they will over declare their cost or if they will under declare their price.
8:12 Alex Hormozi? Sure.
8:12 Speaker 03 So they will, they will undercut you, they will give you a fair
8:14 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
8:15 Speaker 03 cut, but they won't review everything.
8:17 Alex Hormozi? Uh huh.
8:17 Speaker 03 Is, is this just the, the, the feature or it's a book?
8:22 Alex Hormozi? It's a feature.
8:23 Speaker 03 It's a feature.
8:24 Alex Hormozi? So I'll say something that it, Leila taught me this one in the, early on in our relationship.
8:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:29 Alex Hormozi? She said, never count the other guy's money.
8:32 Alex Hormozi? If the deal works for you, the deal works for you.
8:35 Speaker 03 Okay.
8:35 Alex Hormozi? The deal doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. If the other guy makes more money, he'll do more deals with you.
8:40 Speaker 03 Got it. So right now I have two options, right? One is partnership, one is VA. There's, if I have to prioritize one, what would I do with?
8:49 Alex Hormozi? Which one do you like better? Which one scales faster, given your skill set?
8:52 Speaker 03 Partnership?
8:52 Alex Hormozi? Then do partners. I don't think there's any issue with that.
8:55 Speaker 03 Got it.
8:55 Alex Hormozi? Though the big, I mean, if you think about it from the value of a business perspective, I, I personally do like the partnership thing.
9:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:00 Alex Hormozi? If you have a reliable way of getting, of getting them kind of in.
9:03 Speaker 03 Okay.
9:03 Alex Hormozi? I would say the only, you know, problem with that particular angle is that if they make enough money doing the deals with you, they eventually just stop doing.
9:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a, it's a short-term relationship.
9:12 Alex Hormozi? Right, so.
9:13 Speaker 03 Keep them poor.
9:14 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, shoot. Sell them a watch. So, or tell them to move to the US, get text. Anyways, boy, Bing. I think long-term, the VA thing is nice because of the issue that we were just talking about. Uh, because if you only get eight deals done with somebody before they make enough money to buy their own, you know.
9:31 Alex Hormozi? I was trying to think of an auto, AP, there you go.
9:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:34 Alex Hormozi? That's, I can show you my luxury watch collection, then. I just don't think the VA thing's gonna be that hard for you to do.
9:41 Speaker 03 Can you elaborate more? Or can you, can you?
9:43 Alex Hormozi? So you, you document, demonstrate, duplicate. So what do you do? What's your process? You find somebody, like, a VA is gonna have a very hard time making the amount of money to do one deal.
9:51 Speaker 03 Right.
9:51 Alex Hormozi? You're gonna pay them five to $10 an hour.
9:53 Speaker 03 Okay.
9:53 Alex Hormozi? It's not gonna be a lot.
9:54 Speaker 03 Right.
9:54 Alex Hormozi? And so it's gonna take a lot of hours for them to buy an $80,000 or $240,000 watch. Right?
9:59 Speaker 03 So they are basically just talking to other wholesalers and bringing deals?
10:02 Alex Hormozi? Yeah. They're just gonna do what you do.
10:05 Speaker 03 Okay, but then I'm still the person who is evaluating the deals, right? At the end of the day, my time was.
10:10 Alex Hormozi? Realistically, you just have a rubric.
10:13 Alex Hormozi? Like, you know all the brands of all the watches. I know that you probably in your head have an idea of what's hot right now and what price is you willing to buy at. So you just have a decision tree that's in your head that you run every time. You just need to document it so that you can say, hey, if you find anything that's like this or they have any of these products, let me know.
10:28 Speaker 03 Okay, the tricky part is that the price fluctuate day by day.
10:32 Alex Hormozi? Mm-hmm.
10:32 Speaker 03 And somebody has to be in the business to understand what's the, what's the reasonable price to buy.
10:38 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
10:38 Speaker 03 So.
10:39 Alex Hormozi? Feature.
10:40 Speaker 03 Feature.
10:41 Alex Hormozi? You're, I mean, you're, you're in the commodities business.
10:43 Speaker 03 Right.
10:43 Alex Hormozi? Price is the game. So you having real time metrics on pricing is what allows you to scale. And go from being a one man shop to somebody who can get more to build, to building of this. Fundamentally, you build a business around buying and selling, so price is the, is the exchange. And so that's probably just gonna, every morning you update the pricing sheet and then they can go out and hunt.
11:02 Speaker 03 Hmm, I see.
11:04 Alex Hormozi? Does that make sense though?
11:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, thank you.
11:06 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, hundred percent. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, there we go. There we go. Yeah.
11:13 Speaker 02 Hey, Alex Hutter here from Canada. I bought the boring fire and safety company, but I've changed my mindset to say boring, but I love it. I, I, I sell fire and safety and commercial cleaning to mainly like restaurant owners when you bought it two hundred plus.
11:27 Alex Hormozi? Yeah. And probably. Manage you have three in the Wales. Yeah, I got you.
11:30 Speaker 02 Thank you. I told my wife about that. She's like, why do you need Alex? Just watch his videos.
11:35 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
11:35 Speaker 03 Yes.
11:37 Speaker 02 Anyway, that's a different.
11:37 Alex Hormozi? I love your wife, Mill Friday.
11:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, she's German, so she's very methodical.
11:41 Alex Hormozi? Very good.
11:41 Speaker 02 I would like to get at least double the revenue, but because of your workshop, I want to get to ten million one day. But I don't, I think let's double it first. What's stopping me is that when we introduced the fire suppression for the restaurant avatar, and we discussed this yesterday. A big key piece we were missing was, for example, you have this tag here. It's a national fire protection code, basically.
12:03 Alex Hormozi? Good to know.
12:03 Speaker 02 Then the one that's ninety six needs to clean the hood cleaning in restaurants. So we trying to introduce that. But we had zero sales process for over two decades. The husband and wife team that sold it to me didn't believe in that. The phone rings, we pick up in two rings. That's literally the process. Uh, we went down to twenty percent.
12:22 Alex Hormozi? Sorry. It's a complex.
12:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:24 Alex Hormozi? Just kidding. Yeah.
12:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. We went, we went down twenty percent the first time because we tried to launch that division last summer. I'm in that boat right now. And I've gone down another twenty percent again because I tried to launch it again the last ago. Uh. So that's what's stopping me.
12:40 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
12:40 Speaker 02 The second thing is zero sales, as we talked about.
12:42 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
12:43 Speaker 02 The third thing is I had did some fancy roles in finance that I was telling you about and some government, you know, I'm on some boards and so on and so forth. Haven't posted on LinkedIn. I've got fifteen thousand followers on LinkedIn.
12:53 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
12:53 Speaker 02 People have been asking me, hey, man, what are you up to? And I'm a little bit shy to tell them that I'm in fire safety. I've tested it out with a few folks here. I say to them, hey, I went from finance to fire safety. The first question is like, why the hell did you do that? Well, you know, it's like a shocker. So.
13:07 Alex Hormozi? Crazy.
13:07 Speaker 02 So, yeah, so just wanted to know.
13:09 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
13:09 Speaker 02 What?
13:10 Alex Hormozi? What do you do?
13:11 Speaker 02 A few thumbs up?
13:11 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, exactly.
13:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:12 Alex Hormozi? Thanks. So. So, so you have a pretty classic issue and so this will affect more than one per, more than just you. So I'll fill in some of what he was explaining. So he's got restaurants as an avatar, right? Which, and he also has property managers, right? And they've got like a hundred units at a time, right? So think of this as these are whales.
13:33 Alex Hormozi? And you've got your minnows over here.
13:37 Alex Hormozi? And the issue is that he only has three of these and these came super, you know, sporadically. There's no process around it. The restaurants also come sporadically, but there's more of them, right? And the main hook that he has now is that he also didn't tell you that he bought a cleaning business.
13:52 Speaker 02 That's right. We did a roll up play too.
13:55 Alex Hormozi? Right. So he bought a cleaning business and then he uses the cleaning as a way to get into the restaurant. Right?
13:59 Speaker 02 That's right. Yeah.
14:00 Alex Hormozi? Okay. So. Do you remember what I told you last night?
14:05 Speaker 02 Yes.
14:06 Alex Hormozi? Okay. So what did I say?
14:08 Speaker 02 You said focus on the, the property management persona to build on the fire and safety stuff. And then after one year of me doing the sales, she said, I need to be in the business because I found a fire myself and I talked to you. You said, no.
14:20 Alex Hormozi? I'm going to be out of the business in three months. And I was like, well, that's not.
14:23 Speaker 02 That's right. That's right.
14:24 Alex Hormozi? Yeah. So I bought this business and I want to be out of the business and.
14:26 Speaker 02 So I quit my other stuff. Exactly. I have to quit teaching. I've quit everything else. And I'm a property manager firms nail the fire and safety first. And then after a year, then slowly nice them into cleaning.
14:37 Alex Hormozi? So the key here is that, so I'll put a nuance into what I said so that you can, because I said other, it's a lot to take in when we were talking. So there's, I did say that, but the other part that what we're solving for is it's not that that's the solution. It's that I want to solve for the greatest discrepancy between LTV to CAC on customers that are We have to acquire, right? Yeah. And so what I want to figure out is, is it easier and more profitable to get restaurants? Because even if these guys are minnows, there's tons of businesses that can make a killing with minnows. There's nothing wrong with minnows. We just have to look at LTV to CAC. And so like, maybe it costs you, you know, a hundred dollars to get a restaurant and a restaurant's worth, you know, $2,000 over the next five years. 20 to one, good business, right? Now, these guys might be worth, you know, that's supposed to be a dollar sign backwards.
15:22 Alex Hormozi? There we go. Let's say these guys are worth, you know, $20,000 a year. I know they're not, but whatever. Let's just say they're worth $20,000 a year and it costs you $4,000 to acquire them. Now, in your mind, you're like, man, this is so much more money, but the LTV to CAC ratio is actually much smaller. Right? And so what I want to just figure out is what the LTV to CAC is between these two things. And I do think that you owning it is an intelligent decision. If you have an inkling as to which one of these is more profitable in terms of what it costs versus how much you make, then I would start there, but I would focus only on one of them. Because you just have to get your hands dirty and learn the actual sales process. Now, I'll bet because you have this cleaning thing, if that gets the door open for these restaurants as a pretty easy like foot in the door, quite literally. It does.
16:06 Alex Hormozi? Okay. Well, then it's great. Well, then this one's like property managers are going to be harder to get. And so if you're like cash looking trained, which I'm guessing you are, given the stress I can feel, right? I would probably go cleaning because you can get your foot in the door and get your reps much faster. Yeah. And I think you'll learn the sales motion that might also apply to the property managers later. So it's not like you're excluding that, but for right now, and this is what I hope to have happen, is that you figure out the sales motion for, for restaurants with this offer. And you might just be like, we're making a lot of money. Let's just keep doing this. And then you can just transfer that because I'll also bet kind of like the selling, you know, flipping watches. Selling property managers is going to be harder. Yeah. Than selling restaurants.
16:48 Alex Hormozi? And so if you do eventually want to get out of the business, it'll be easier to get out of the business if you make that the customer. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Leila and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow.
17:33 Alex Hormozi? It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap. R O A D map, roadmap.
17:49 Speaker 02 Got it. One last question to follow up on that is we also sell like a third department that does safety compliance. That's like only two or three people that do that. So for example, that fire sign that you have, the exit sign. So that needs to be there, otherwise the fire department can shut you down.
18:02 Alex Hormozi? Sure.
18:03 Speaker 02 I haven't even touched that department because the, the feedback I get from the team is don't sell more stuff because you can't keep up with the current customers. So don't bring more. Any, any insights on that one?
18:14 Alex Hormozi? Is it profitable? The other?
18:16 Speaker 02 It is, that one is a subscription model. So yeah, I mean.
18:19 Alex Hormozi? Super profitable.
18:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's 20K a month in revenue, for example.
18:24 Alex Hormozi? Okay, cool.
18:24 Speaker 02 And 20 clients that pay well and you know.
18:27 Alex Hormozi? Okay. Okay.
18:29 Speaker 02 All in gap companies and things like that.
18:31 Alex Hormozi? Yeah. So, all right. We have this, you said departments, $20,000 a month. So departments, one person?
18:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, it was one person, it was a previous owner, but she, we hired three more people. So it's, yeah.
18:46 Alex Hormozi? But it was the owner and now you have three people there.
18:48 Speaker 02 Correct, because that was like the key, key person risk. So all the information was in her head. Remember, there's no processes here, right? The phone just rings.
18:56 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
18:59 Alex Hormozi? So I, I, okay, we have to take these one thing at a time. So first things first, we're going to ignore this. Cool. We're ignoring that. Yeah. Second thing is you're going to get the sales cycle for doing this offer the front end because that seems to be working for you. So I would get you better at closing these deals and doing. And that's a 20 year history as well. Great. So that's good. In terms of the cross-sell, which is basically what that is, I would say table it for now. Not, I mean, I do think the reasoning of we're too busy, but we're also not making as much as we want is tough. But the, the steps of what we're going to do here is this is going to be number one. And then the second thing that you're going to tack on is the cross-sell.
19:39 Alex Hormozi? Actually, it'll be 1.5 is fix compliance department.
19:48 Alex Hormozi? So that they can actually handle the customers. And then so it's restaurants is number one. Fix the compliance department and then you'll start cross-selling the compliance services. But this will probably take six to nine months to get to here, just to be clear. It'll probably take six months to learn this, maybe three months to turn the department and figure out like you hired three people to replace one. I'll bet you two of them aren't doing anything, especially if they're like, we're too busy. It's one person is doing this. There's three of you. Now you're saying you're too busy. Something doesn't add up here. And so you pro, like right now, your business need has four fires. You just have to take one fire at a time. Okay. And this is the most important fire, which is getting new business. So let's solve that one first. Okay. Thanks so much, y'all. Appreciate that. Yeah, a hundred percent.
20:30 Speaker 04 So my name is Michaela. We have a sales agency that sells photographic art and albums to consumers on behalf of photographers. Right. This past year, we did just under 2 million and I need to be at five at the end of this year.
20:44 Alex Hormozi? You must be.
20:45 Speaker 04 I must be.
20:45 Alex Hormozi? Or else.
20:46 Speaker 04 Or else. And what's stopping me is definitely just advertising and marketing. We haven't done anything up until this point. Our business evolved from selling courses, so it's selling courses. And then people didn't want to implement or do the sales appointments themselves. So I built an agency to do it for them. Yesterday, you mentioned the plumber situation, right? So my question is, right now, we, so I have my course that basically teaches photographers how to run a print-driven business, business and do what we do. But it was also like a really great final strategy for this business. So I'm not sure whether to use that as a down sell or if they don't qualify for our partnership program to put them in the course first
21:31 Speaker 04 or to pull it from behind the paywall and turn it into just free content to be top of funnel.
21:37 Alex Hormozi? What percentage of the revenue is coming from the education?
21:40 Speaker 04 Like less than 10,000 a year. It's not something that-
21:43 Alex Hormozi? Well, then yeah, make it free for sure. No question. Yeah. And I would make it free in a couple ways. So one is I'd put it out as content, put it on YouTube channel, let it be stream free. You can still have people opt in for it if you're running ads and just give them all the links to the YouTube videos. And so that would both get you leads from the platforms and also from you running ads to them. And it basically functions as like a great and like just put an easy call to action upfront. And then also follow up with the leads, like you have a sales team. So follow up with the leads who opt in and just put a thank you page scheduler. That's hey, by the way, if you want us to implement this stuff because you don't want to do it, we're happy to show you how we execute this stuff. And just put a sorting question on the opt-in form. So you can see what revenue level is at.
22:24 Alex Hormozi? And so if they're, let's say minnows or not big enough to do what you want to do, then don't have it thank you page over to the scheduler. And then only have the pixel on the thank you page that has qualified leads. And then that way you'll, the algorithm will target more qualified leads on a continuous basis. Does that make sense?
22:41 Speaker 04 Yes, thank you.
22:42 Alex Hormozi? Great. This was good.
22:48 Speaker 05 Hi, Alex. My name is Rajan Mukherjee and I run a cybersecurity company. We sell cybersecurity analytics, specifically we catch hackers in a large organizations.
22:59 Alex Hormozi? Right.
23:00 Speaker 05 Primarily sell to the Fortune 1000, Global 2000. Specific focus on financial services, nation states and retail. We do, last year we did 304 million dollars of top line.
23:11 Alex Hormozi? Awesome.
23:12 Speaker 05 And our gross margins are about, gee, about 88%.
23:15 Alex Hormozi? Right.
23:15 Speaker 05 Our net operating margins are lower primarily because we have significant costs in terms of sales and marketing and what have you. There's a lot of infrastructure on the backend there.
23:24 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
23:24 Speaker 05 Even though the delivery costs are low, the sales and marketing efficiency is not there. We'd like to get to about $500 million of revenue in about a year and a half from where we are, and that's recurring. What's stopping us is that we're sort of addicted to those large deals. Take a look at our average deal size, we're talking about about 536K for average deal size today. And what that really causes is it causes a significant amount of lumpiness in the business. Moreover, there's a lot of platformizations in terms of what we have in terms of the technology. And what I mean by that is we've, we tried to do a land and expand sales model. We sold, we sold smaller amounts, if you will, we tried to transact those and try to upsell. But ultimately, we have elephant hunters on our enterprise sales team who just go and sell the entire fleet of products in one shot, nine months,
24:08 Speaker 05 it's nine months or bust. Really, what's happened over here, though, is that this is a fundamental risk to the business. It's very, very lumpy. And sometimes, a quarter will be, we'll either make the quarter or lose the quarter based on a particular, on one deal. And this is particularly frustrating right now because we are PE, and we've sold the company, we've sold the company twice. We sold it from VC to PE, and then from another PE to another PE. And now we're looking at the third exit pick in the next year and a half, which is why we have the $500 million ARR target. Any suggestions as to how to take an established model where we have various covenants and add a minnow, or basically a land expand motion, without disrupting the existing enterprise sales motion?
24:52 Alex Hormozi? Did you found the business?
24:53 Speaker 05 Yes.
24:54 Alex Hormozi? Congratulations.
24:55 Speaker 05 Thank you.
24:56 Alex Hormozi? How long has it been?
24:57 Speaker 05 Eighteen years. Feels like eighteen.
25:00 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
25:04 Alex Hormozi? That might be my quote of the day. Okay.
25:08 Alex Hormozi? So I think that, so, I mean, margins have to be razor thin if a $500,000 deal is going to make or break the quarter. So what part of my misunderstanding there?
25:15 Speaker 05 It's not, so it's not so much, so basically, we reinvest a significant amount in growth. So, for example, we have 204 salespeople in, in the company today. And what we generally have been trying to do is rather than optimize on the operating margin, we've been reinvesting into the business. So we have sales capacity for the next year.
25:30 Alex Hormozi? Do you trade on EBITDA?
25:31 Speaker 05 Uh, we have now, we've recently moved from covenant, basically our leverage covenant moved from, moved from ARR to EBITDA, as it's actually, it's moving next end of this year. So we're preparing for that right now.
25:43 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, because you'd have to dramatically increase EBITDA if you're.
25:46 Speaker 05 That's right. So we've moved, we've actually moved from negative EBITDA to $37.6 million of EBITDA this year.
25:52 Alex Hormozi? All right. So I'll, I'll tell you what I might start by what I wouldn't do, which is I probably wouldn't allocate existing resources or people and try and to take people from one to the other because it's, it's such a different sales motion, kind of going after minnows. And so I think you'll probably need somebody who's kind of entrepreneurial. It might be a real, because given the size that you have, it might make sense to acquire somebody who already had, that's if I'm in your shoes, because you need to have such a significant amount of scale in order to make a, you know, make a dent in this. It's, I'd be looking at somebody who has inferior product to yours, but has a really good marketing and sales function for minnows and just say, listen, your backend's trash. We'll plug it into ours, but we just want like this. There was a deal that I was looking at for gym launch,
26:35 Alex Hormozi? obviously smaller, but where there was a marketing agency that was selling like 50 gyms a month and they would keep them for three months and they'd churn out. And I was like, man, I could just buy this company and just say, keep everything the same. Just sell our thing. We ended up doing the deal for a different reason, but I think that would probably be like the fastest way of getting into the minnow market. Start building that from scratch, given the fact that no one in the business sells to minnows now.
27:00 Alex Hormozi? Given the timeline, I don't think I would, I don't think I'd try an organic growth strategy for minnows to get from, you know, 340 or right around where you said to, to 500 in 18 months. I don't think, I don't think, I just, I think it'd be really, really tough.
27:15 Speaker 05 I think that that's, that's our sense as well. We were looking at doing an inorganic, rather an inorganic acquisition there. The catch is also one of maintaining the culture of that acquisition. That's going to be such a distraction.
27:28 Alex Hormozi? I mean, I think either way, it's going to be a distraction. I wonder if, I know you said that the lumpiness is an existential threat to the business. What is sales velocity?
27:38 Speaker 05 So, so as I mentioned, the sales are, I'm not happy with that sales cycle either. It was about nine months.
27:44 Alex Hormozi? But how many deals a year do you do?
27:46 Speaker 05 So in general, so right now we have about 40 customers with, with ARR's over, over a million. Total customer count is approximately a thousand today.
27:54 Alex Hormozi? Got it.
27:54 Speaker 05 And so we'll, we'll add a net new this, this year of about 150 customers.
27:58 Alex Hormozi? You have a thousand customers, 340 million roughly. So annual revenue is like 340 ish per customer and then top 40 are disproportionately higher.
28:08 Speaker 05 That's right. So, so we have a long tail. So we raised prices recently. Now we're looking for larger deals. The, the average deal size has increased as, as we've grown the company.
28:16 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, yeah.
28:19 Alex Hormozi? So if we were looking at the more better new, I know as as rude venture it is, I still think that way. If I had to make a bet, I would probably bet on the better button for the existing sales function with. You have two hundred and four or forty, two hundred and four.
28:34 Speaker 05 I just. Two and four people.
28:35 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, two hundred and four salespeople. I would probably be thinking like, okay, I've I'm dissatisfied with this. I'm probably not going to introduce a new variable into the business when I know that if I if we just, I guess, thinking like twelve months in the future. If we just nailed one thing, we would have the highest likelihood impact on us getting to five hundred. We'll probably take in the existing infrastructure, existing deal model and just say like, how can we tune this thing up? Would probably be, and that's just going to be a lot of rolling sleeves up. But I think realistically that that's probably, and there's probably a lot of bloat right now. And I'll bet you that from a cultural perspective, I know you want to maintain the culture, but I'll bet you the culture that team is probably not as good as you want it to be. It's probably a lot, I mean, especially in like tech sales, it's like literally the butt end of jokes for lack of work ethic, right?
29:20 Speaker 05 That's right.
29:20 Alex Hormozi? So probably putting in almost like a Welchian, Jack Welch perspective of every quarter, bottom ten percent gets cut.
29:26 Speaker 05 Right.
29:26 Alex Hormozi? I think we probably dramatically signal to them that like we need to produce. And usually laying off the top bottom ten percent in a business of that size. Well, it'll you will make more money. And so actually, I know I do, we we had to derive that, be of a bigger business. That's probably what my next move would be. And then I would be looking at, so if we're, it's kind of funny because this is really what we're doing. One more.
29:51 Alex Hormozi? So this is like a perfect case study here, which is we need to get more customers. Are we doing more, are we doing better? Or are we doing new? So new would have been, we're going to go after minnows or we're going to do an acquisition. That's new. So we talked through that, it was like, I don't know, especially on the timeline. Is he going to create one hundred and fifty million in sales? Probably not. It'd be really tough unless you just did, you acquired one that was already doing that.
30:11 Speaker 05 That's right.
30:12 Alex Hormozi? So then it's okay, do we hire more sales guys or better? Well, we have a lot of bloat on the team right now. I'll bet you we could do it better. Cool. Okay, so who's in charge of that team right now? And why are they not winning?
30:25 Speaker 05 Does that?
30:26 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
30:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, so, yeah, we have, we have a CRO on that team. Like, again, he's the incentive on, again, is completely revenue based.
30:33 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
30:33 Speaker 05 So really.
30:37 Speaker 05 My concern more than anything else is, and I keep on hearing this, and this is a topic that we have fairly frequently. It ain't broke, so don't, so don't try to fix it.
30:45 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
30:45 Speaker 05 At the same time, I'm.
30:46 Alex Hormozi? Is it broke, though?
30:48 Speaker 05 I look at it, I'm not happy with the way, I mean, when we started this company, the goal was, it was less, it was less about revenue and more about ubiquity. We said, okay, we have the solution that can get everywhere.
30:57 Alex Hormozi? Yeah.
30:58 Speaker 05 And as we sort of learned, got wedded to the teat of the big deal, it's been hard to, to break that habit.
31:03 Alex Hormozi? Yeah. Heard. So I'll say this, and you may not need to hear this from me, but I think that spanners, founders have a special privilege, which is that you know how the company was founded. You know how it was made, you know how to break it, you know how to bend the rules. And so if you started this, the first few sentences you said was this is an existential threat to the business. And so if the private equity firm is not recognizing it as an existential threat, it's because they don't have the same information that you do, because they couldn't. They haven't been around the business for eighteen years, but you do. And so whatever pulse you have, I would probably trust your gut and say, no, this is a threat. So like, when you say it ain't broke, don't fix it, I see it is broken and we do need to fix it because we will not hit the five hundred million dollar goal if we continue with status quo.
31:47 Alex Hormozi? And if we, if we don't hit that goal, then all of a sudden, you know, one of the private equity guys that I know, he says, all businesses increase in value over time, unless they don't, in which case they are worth nothing. And so you were, you, from that perspective, that's kind of where you're at right now. And so I think it would make sense for either you to parachute in and you might need somebody who's a little bit more entrepreneurial, a little bit more renegaty to go in and kind of rattle some cages and say, we need to, we need to do better. And I think that's probably going to be what will be required. And it'll, and I focus, obviously, we think, I talk a lot about behavior, but what are the behaviors that we're going to change? And how can we?
32:28 Alex Hormozi? I mean, we solve sales problems in every organization by more role playing, like role playing to your eyes blade. That's how we do it. And that's fundamentally how we fix sales functions, because we can just give rapid feedback. And so it's, I think you need people who, it's not like getting all the sales team to attend a rah rah event and having some sales speakers speak for eight hours. It's not going to do anything, right? I think it's, you need to have probably almost like a SWAT team of people going in and then retraining and quickly red, red, yellow, greening the team as is and be like, this guy sucks, he's out. This guy has potential, but still needs to learn. This guy's great. Let him do his thing. And I mean, that might take 12 months, but at least at the end of that 12 months, like your sales velocity will increase, the deal cycle will probably shorten, the deal value will go up. And those are the things that I think would have the highest
33:13 Alex Hormozi? likelihood of getting to the 500. It's for my advantage.
33:17 Speaker 05 I appreciate it. Thank you very much.
33:18 Alex Hormozi? Thank you. No, 100%. Thank you.
33:24 Speaker 06 Alex.
33:24 Alex Hormozi? Hello.
33:25 Speaker 06 Cool workshop. More of these.
33:27 Alex Hormozi? What's that?
33:27 Speaker 06 You should do more of these.
33:28 Alex Hormozi? Oh, yeah.
33:30 Speaker 06 Uh, my name is Antonio. I, well, we built the Duolingo for learning how to draw.
33:34 Alex Hormozi? Sweet.
33:34 Speaker 06 We basically sell guided personalized learning.
33:38 Alex Hormozi? Okay.
33:38 Speaker 06 To aspiring artists.
33:39 Alex Hormozi? Cool.
33:40 Speaker 06 We currently do 60K in MRR.
33:43 Alex Hormozi? Right.
33:45 Speaker 06 The long-term goal is I would like to exit to a company like Duolingo.
33:48 Alex Hormozi? Right.
33:49 Speaker 06 Like Joy Tunes. Uh, right now, the more short-term thing is getting to a quadruple.
33:54 Alex Hormozi? Get bigger.
33:55 Speaker 06 Oh, get to a quadruple revenue. Oh, or like valuation essentially in 18 months. Yeah. What's stopping us right now is traffic primarily. We have two acquisitions channels, which is organic word of mouth and then social media. I have around 600,000 followers across three channels. Your team eloquently told me do more. I just wanted to know at what point would you say, okay, now we need to do better instead of only more?
34:23 Alex Hormozi? Uh, you need to do way more.
34:24 Speaker 06 Uh, for sure. And then, and then at what point would, is just for the Forex, that would just be do more?
34:30 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, I mean, for sure.
34:32 Speaker 06 And that's it?
34:33 Alex Hormozi? Yeah. You're, you're so, again, this is not a slight, but like 60,000 dollars a month, like yours, you're tiny.
34:38 Speaker 06 Yeah.
34:39 Alex Hormozi? So we have to, you gotta do so much more. So you said you get some from organic. What was the other source?
34:46 Speaker 06 Social social media, so YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
34:49 Alex Hormozi? So all traffic is from organic?
34:52 Speaker 06 No, basically, yeah.
34:53 Alex Hormozi? Okay, do you run ads?
34:54 Speaker 06 No.
34:55 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, so I think it's unlikely that you're gonna quadruple this year off organic unless you just get really good at it really fast, which you could. And so I would say
35:05 Alex Hormozi? it would probably like if you really, if you have to hit four or more, it would be either an ad funnel. Or if you look at what Duolingo did, they did a lot of influencer campaigns.
35:14 Speaker 06 Yeah.
35:15 Alex Hormozi? Of all these guys who teach languages or speak different languages and say, hey, you know, go sign up for Duolingo.
35:20 Speaker 06 Yeah.
35:20 Alex Hormozi? And that might be a really good strategy, given there are so many artists on YouTube and Instagram, and they typically are horrendous at monetizing.
35:30 Speaker 06 Yes.
35:30 Alex Hormozi? Right.
35:31 Speaker 06 But it's a double edged sword because they're usually incentivized to sell their own courses.
35:35 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, there's also a bunch that just don't.
35:39 Alex Hormozi? And so, but big picture, I just don't think you're going like, I don't think you're gonna quadruple your following or like your organic views. I mean, maybe you could.
35:46 Speaker 06 Right.
35:46 Alex Hormozi? But what's the funnel that you have right now in terms of how you get customers?
35:51 Speaker 06 It's affiliate links on the on the social media channels that we can track.
35:55 Alex Hormozi? It's a link and a good, what's the price point?
35:58 Speaker 06 Sorry?
35:58 Alex Hormozi? What's the price?
35:59 Speaker 06 We have three prices. We have nine, twenty nine and ninety nine.
36:03 Alex Hormozi? Uh huh.
36:03 Speaker 06 And the obviously the twenty nine is the most popular. Seventy percent of people are on the annual subscription.
36:08 Alex Hormozi? Okay, that's good.
36:09 Speaker 06 Yeah.
36:10 Alex Hormozi? So good on annual. And then what, what's LTV for the customers?
36:14 Speaker 06 Around two hundred dollars.
36:15 Alex Hormozi? Got it.
36:16 Speaker 06 And virtually no tax. It's like twelve dollars.
36:19 Alex Hormozi? Well, it's, you mean twelve dollars is if you take your organic costs, basically your content. Okay. How many pieces of content are you putting out?
36:27 Speaker 06 Across all channels, we'd say about ten to twelve.
36:31 Alex Hormozi? Per?
36:31 Speaker 06 Per week.
36:32 Alex Hormozi? Okay, cool. So, yeah, let's go more, for sure. Let's do more. Yeah, I, I, I revert back to my original statement. To put this in context, we put out four hundred and fifty a week. So like you definitely have room.
36:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
36:47 Alex Hormozi? Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, you wanna, you wanna, you wanna build this thing. So, I mean, you know, ten, ten a week is like one and a half a day.
36:53 Speaker 06 Yeah.
36:54 Alex Hormozi? So, yeah.
36:55 Speaker 06 So just do that till you hit the constraint of people, operations, basically. And then, and then at some point, do you look at if you had to pinpoint anything that could be better in, in terms of to raise engagement, all of that?
37:08 Alex Hormozi? Well, I'd have to look at all the content and I have to look at the funnel because I'm sure there's things we can find on the funnel to increase in conversion. So if you're at like 1.5 and it's I think we get this to three, it's like there's a double. Great. So now we only have to double our impressions. Well, if we double our number of posts, we have a double there on the front end. We have a double in conversion. So those are four X. But if we, you know, I like to say like, how do we leave no doubt with this goal? So it's okay. Well, if we, if we 10x the amount of volume of content we're putting out and we double our conversion and we increase our follow up on the backend and we look at our pricing strategy and see if there's maybe some holes that we can find there. Then it's well, there's a 40x. And so if we just suck by one tenth of that, we'll still hit the four. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's, that's how I tend to look at those types of goals. I want to, I don't want
37:52 Alex Hormozi? to hit a quadruple. I'll shoot for 40 and if we miss it, we'll hit 20.
37:56 Speaker 06 Right. Yeah, it makes sense.
37:57 Alex Hormozi? Rather than solve for four.
37:58 Speaker 06 Okay. And the last question, maybe like you have, well, maybe you still have like the, the key man issue of like you're the face of, right? This, I have that. But at what point would you say, okay, I'm, I'm the key man? What's the first sort of talent I would bring on the team? If we scale in terms of content and everything and we hit like a wall of, okay, I can't produce anymore. And I guess I'm only in front of the camera 24.
38:24 Alex Hormozi? I don't even want to answer the question because it's so far from where you're at right now.
38:29 Speaker 06 Right.
38:29 Alex Hormozi? Doesn't matter.
38:30 Speaker 06 Right.
38:31 Alex Hormozi? It just doesn't matter.
38:32 Speaker 06 Right.
38:34 Alex Hormozi? Cause you'll have, my answer will also be irrelevant because by the time you do have that problem, you have different resources, different teammates, more cash, and you'll have a different solution that will then make sense than what me trying to predict, but that's going to look like 12 months from now is going to be. But really, the, the, the scaling that it will look like in the short term is how do we get more out of you? And it's going to be basically you getting as much assist as you can so that you can reduce more. And so you're like, well, what I'm going to be on camera 24 hours a day. I'm not on camera 24 hours a day. We put out 450. So like, we're, you know, we're doing, I don't know what the math is there, but more. Uh, right. I guess we're doing what 40, 40 times more content than you are. And I'm, I'm not on camera 24 hours a day.
39:19 Speaker 06 Thanks.
39:19 Alex Hormozi? Cool.
39:20 Speaker 06 Awesome.
39:20 Alex Hormozi? All right.
39:20 Speaker 06 Yeah.
39:21 Alex Hormozi? Easy.
39:24 Speaker 06 Wow.
Previous How to Turn One Restaurant into a National Brand | Ep 857 Next How to Survive Creator Burnout and Still Scale (Karat Reshare) | Ep 859 Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated