The Question That Actually Fixes Your Business | Ep 930

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 ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  You'd have this small amount of time to get a very high leverage answer. And so I wanted to make sure that every single person who asks their question asks the right question. And I'll tell you a story that might illustrate the point. I think like probably six months back, there was a guy who came here. He was one of the gentlemen in the back. Came up and said, hey, can you talk to me more about the closure framework? And I said, well, before I do, you know, what's your closure rate? And he said forty percent. I was like, okay. So you got excited. You've all these tickets. You reserve the date. You wait for it to happen. Got a plane, flew out here, got a motel, got everything ready, left your business behind, went through the first day. And then you have this opportunity to ask your question. I was like, and the answer to this question will do nothing to change your business. It's nothing to change the business.

• 0:46Alex Hormozi?

  Can you just like same stuff? And so when we hear like Alex talking about same stuff. And what's interesting is that the vast majority of the time, the things that we do the most are rarely the thing that's holding you back. And so that's why like so much entrepreneurship is like eating glass. It's just so painful because as soon as you get good enough at something that is so overly constrained. It's like, great, I just feel like I started to get a hold of this. And now I have to get kicked in the genitals. There you go, it's both sides.

• 1:15Alex Hormozi?

  Over here, this thing that I don't know anything about. And so that's why we organize it that way. So that hopefully, because you probably have a lot of notes from today. So of course, it is like, yes, okay, cool, we'll get it.

• 1:30Alex Hormozi?

  And notes are very valuable, but they're only valuable insofar as they translate into whatever you're going to do when you get home. And so all of you guys at some point are going to get into a plane or in a car and open up a like tablet page. Or if you're old school, actually writing things down. And you're going to the blank page and you're looking at your eight pages of notes, whatever it is and say like, okay. What the hell am I actually going to do? And you're going to write like three or four things on that next page. And my entire objective, objective of this little portion is to make sure that the three or four things that you write on the page are the correct ones. Because you can, I'll say this, I've grown and worked with a lot of businesses. You can get a lot of stuff wrong. If you just get like the one or two things that you're really going to dedicate your resources to.

• 2:15Alex Hormozi?

  You really can't get one or two things right and get just about everything else wrong. If you get the right things right. And so I, and when you're talking about constraints, who here was at the implementation workshop? The online one? Okay, so this will be largely due to a lot of you. So I have the distinct pleasure of doing lots of Q's and A's for businesses. And when I thought through, what is the actual decision tree that I walk through when I'm talking to somebody? I'm trying to figure out where the business is stuck. And so I call this six M framework, the Mosey Six, where we were caught. And they just happened to all have M's, which is convenient for me and for anyone else to remember things. So the first and obvious question that I've always asked everyone, and well, I'll let it point as we're going through this.

• 2:59Alex Hormozi?

  So you can see this is real for me more. But the first question is like, why can't we do more than we're currently doing? If you can't do more than what you're currently doing, then great, you now have permission. Go do more than what you're currently doing and great, and we have, we have no scale. Now, when I asked that question, it was like, I can't. And it's like, okay, why not? So the first one is metrics. I can't do more than what we're currently doing because I don't even know what I'm doing right now. Because I have no numbers to do, to have a predictable anything process because we don't know what we're doing. Okay, fine. So you don't have enough metrics. So each of these become off-ramps. The idea is as soon as you find it, great, then since you attacked, then you can eventually go do more. So the route of all of this is always back to as soon as you, you knock out this other stuff underneath, you go back to, we keep doing more.

• 3:45Alex Hormozi?

  The next issue that comes up is model, which is I don't want to do more because I'm not sure if I'm in the right book. I'm not sure if I'm choosing the right vehicle. I'm not sure if this is even worth it or if it's going to be accomplish my goals. And that becomes kind of a larger question like, am I getting out of this what I want? And I would say my, my one tidbit on model is that a lot of times when someone's stuck on a model issue, I would say like 75% of the time when I talk to them, it's just that they need to remind it that it's going to be difficult. And that they have this big goal and then the reason that you get pin ten or a hundred million dollars from an exit is because it's fucking planets. And that most people don't have the intestinal fortitude to go through it. And a lot of it comes down to being able to manage uncertainty.

• 4:31Alex Hormozi?

  Like fundamentally, a lot of the pain of entrepreneurship is walking into a dark room, you can't see anything and racing for how are they getting it? And then just continuing to walk in at once and while you're like, oh, ice cream. And you're like, oh, oh, dog shit again. Yeah. And that's a lot of what the entrepreneurial process is for just many years at a time. And then you're like, I think there's light at the end. And then it's actually a flashlight, so he's gonna be sure of the heaven there. And so you have these moments, these glitters of hope that only get crushed. Back to this. So, but I'm gonna ask the question, why can't we do more? We don't know our metrics, right? Get our metrics, then we can do more. I don't know if this option is right for me. And this is the feature not bug. Like, this might just be a feature of your business. Rather than something, this is not a problem to solve.

• 5:16Alex Hormozi?

  This is a deck, how are we gonna be managed? This is just wanting to be part of the ship that you go with in the business that you're in. I mean, you shoot polar examples. If you're in the cleaning business, finding business is really not that hard. Many people want you to clean this. It's just not a hard business to get to admit. Finding people who want to clean other people's stuff, much harder. That is the, that is the feature of that business. On the fitness and weight box side.

• 5:41Alex Hormozi?

  Warning people, uh, wanting people to, uh, come and train at a facility and talk about fitness stuff. Tons of super fitness geeks who do it for free all the time. Really hard to find people who are overweight, who want to lose weight, who wants to sign up for a gym. Really difficult. It's always gonna be a demand for a true business because people, in and of themselves, lose motivation. And so, these are two completely different industries. And they have dynamics that are embedded within human psychology, human behavior, that are inherent to those businesses. And so if you were like, hey, you know, the cleaning business is tough, it's just really hard to find good people. No shit? That's the problem that you get to solve in exchange for money. Right? And then on this side, it's like, hey, you know, I've got this beautiful gym, I've got all these people that I wanna train.

• 6:24Alex Hormozi?

  Like, no one actually wants to like stick to the diet and workout. It's like, oh shit. Uh, welcome to the gym business, right? And so it's just like, these are inherent to a lot of the businesses that we're in. And sometimes you see it here, like, yeah, that sucks too.

• 6:38Alex Hormozi?

  Do you want to start over? No, well, at least you have five years of experience. And now you're at five year, I don't know if something's starting up today. Right? Okay. So we've got more metrics model. And the next issue that comes up is money. Okay. Which is, I can't do more because I can't afford to. Okay. So if I were to leave this, we're like, all right. Can we not afford to because leads cost too much? Can we not afford to because we close too few of our sales? We're closing too few as a conversion rate issue. Is the problem that we have our lifetime gross profit is too low? We make too little on it, right? Are these the, these are the kind of like sub offshoots of money?

• 7:24Alex Hormozi?

  So maybe we have to, like, if isolate each of these, because all of these can sometimes seem similar. So we can't afford to because it's too expensive. Well, are our leads too much? Or do we not make enough money? Or are leads the right price? We don't know how to close. And so this is where having industry averages, which is the only time in my life where I'm okay with looking at industry averages. Every other time, just toss it out because it might just wouldn't be average. But it is decent to at least understand like, okay. If I'm closing off of a webinar and we're closing 0.5% of leads, we're off, right? Now, what's our lead cost for this personal development thing? Well, if we're at $20, that's too high because that's just not what the CP is that industry dictates.

• 8:07Alex Hormozi?

  That's where a lot of pattern recognition, that's where a lot of marketing can help a lot on the diagnosis of this stuff. The last step here is manpower.

• 8:17Alex Hormozi?

  So simply put, so these are sub. All right, so who's like, A, B. So, sorry. So you got one, two, three, four, five. And there are six and I'm forgetting one of them. I wrote it, so I should know what they are, but maybe one of my guys can tell me.

• 8:35Alex Hormozi?

  The last one is manpower. Which is like, I would do more, but I just don't have more salespeople. I don't have enough agents. Right? I have the metrics. I'm fine with the model that I have. We can afford to do it. I just don't have enough people. Which here's the cool part about this model. It goes back to the top. What do we do to get manpower? Why can't we do more? We can't do more because I don't have metrics around how I attract account. Okay, let's get our metrics and then we can do more of the traction account. So it's a it's a cyclical, so it always repeats itself. And so this actually took me like, you know, only 10,000 fucking calls to figure out. But yeah, that's how it works. And so maybe. What's my sixth one? Anybody?

• 9:19Alex Hormozi?

  I'd say like free lunch if anybody figures it out, but here I am. So, all right, with that being said, we said helpful. Market. Market, thank you, thank you. It's I I forget it because it's such a bullshit one. All right. My market is too small. Okay. Sure it is. All right. So my market is too small. There's there's only like, it's so rare that your market is actually too small. Like if you are in Bumfuck, Kentucky, you might actually have a market that's too small. That's fair. And that actually works all the way through. I can't find a super AI technologist in Bumfuck, Kentucky.

• 10:01Alex Hormozi?

  So I can't do more reach outs because I've tested everyone in my market because I know them all. And they're in my cellphone and none of them are AI whatevers. Okay, that's fair. It's just that the vast majority of businesses are not in that situation. Even if you're a local, if you're in a market that's, you know, 50,000 and up, you can pretty much, you're pretty much good. And then obviously the follow up question is like, is it a version? So we do hybrid or two. This is my remote, like, you know, some of those conversations. But yeah, so these are the these are the reasons that people get stuck. And that is the model. Like this is the digital trading model. Like this is what we want to do. And then obviously for each of these levels, it's like, okay, well, what do I do instead? Thank you guys so much.