Warum die meisten Unternehmer nicht mehr Geld verdienen

0:01[Music] you can make a few million dollars 10 million dollars being really good at Marketing sales you could become a multimulator doing that it's just you're not going to build like the massive massive Fortune unless the thing you sell is good that's Alex hermosi best song author and the founder of acquisition.com it's like the real big obvious answer of why people don't make more money is they're just not that good I'm Michael Mogul founder and CEO of crisp the nation's number one Law Firm Growth Company I've built my business through practice not Theory crisp started which is 500 to my name and has grown to over eight figures in Revenue over the last few years earning a spot on the Inc 500 lists of the fastest growing private companies in America our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed Law Firm owners do the same for theirs in each episode of this podcast I sit down with Innovative Market leaders from the legal industry and Beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity challenge the status quo and Define what it means to be a true Game Changer I sat down with Alex hermosi to discuss why ego is the enemy of progress how desirable traits are actually learnable skills and the power of humility in achieving success and so if you want to be smarter the key is to change your behavior faster and so I think in that way it operationalizes knowledge and probably a lot of lawyers are big readers and they love you know the mental masturbation of like consuming stuff but if your behavior does not change after you go to a workshop or a seminar you listen to this podcast if your behavior doesn't change you learned nothing which means you are not that smart that's coming up on the game changing attorney podcast before we begin today's episode I want to remind you that we aren't beholden to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast this allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered I'm not going to push any made to order meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance that being said I have one small request if you receive any value from this podcast please give it a five star review pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free Alex hermosi is a game changer in the world of business as the founder and managing partner of acquisition.com he's helped countless entrepreneurs achieve success through his Innovative approach to marketing and sales in a world where ego often Reigns Supreme Alex is a refreshing voice of reason urging his fellow entrepreneurs to confront reality and embrace the truth about what it takes to win I began our conversation by asking Alex about his journey towards building his personal brand and how it has impacted his success the only platform that I was really consistent on was uh I'm not even consistent on the only one I used was uh podcast so my first podcast is June of 17 and then I think in September of 20 I did my first YouTube videos uh and then I did that first and then I think probably one or two quarters later we started with the short video stuff um on Tick Tock and Instagram reels I picked up Twitter I think in like June uh of like the next year of 21.

3:17um and then that's been more or less the the entire strategy uh when I say strategy me like we just post on those platforms so so from my understanding you kind of had an evolution of just the your mindset towards building brand and building personal brand you know what led to that uh being wrong my eighth episode of my podcast uh in in 17 was uh stop random eighth episode I probably have the exact opposite perspective now um and I'm wealthier now so hopefully I'm writing maybe maybe in 10 years I'll change my mind again but I don't think I will fundamentally brand is one of the ways that you can differentiate anything it's really just the Goodwill that you have in the audience and your ability to price above a commoditized version of whatever you offer like that discrepancy between what a commodity sells at and what your sells at like that is the pricing power that brand affords you and so with price being the single strongest lever on profits in any kind of business having a brand becomes incredibly important if it is the strongest influencer on your ability to price that just fundamentally shifted how I saw it because before then it was just direct response uh in terms of cold reach outs like cold calls code emails Etc and Drug response ads in order to get customers and so I was just a big advocate of like just do cold calls and run ads and you will get customers but the Long Long play is building a brand that is worth something and then that can get transferred into any Arena so like if I were to start a mosination credit card or I would start mosination apparel both of them would be successful even though they're completely independent because of the brand that's been built not that I'm going to do either of those things but I'm saying like that that's kind of the idea well and I mean so obviously your Ventures have evolved over the years I heard you mentioned on a podcast that the businesses that most entrepreneurs start are often drastically different from the ones that they eventually find themselves in and you mentioned like Andy priscella and your and yourself uh if you could briefly share just just kind of your entrepreneurial journey and your Evolution yeah I'll do it by businesses so that'll probably be easier so first thing I did was I started an online training a charity business uh so people would pay but then I would donate the money now it's just kind of like get my feet wet with people giving me money even though I didn't take it personally um then I quit my job and asked the same people who are paying the charity if they would pay me instead so that I could like eat I was like I'm the charity now and they were all good with it uh from there I started my first gym from that gym opened up uh five more uh from there I had a mentor say that this you know he was like you're really good at running gyms you shouldn't be owning more gyms you should uh kind of teach other people to run chips and so uh from there we did uh turnarounds for two years so we'd fly out to Brick and Mortar gyms to kind of put all of our systems in place and turn it around in 30 days that was kind of the the offer and then from there that became really legit painful and you've got eight sales guys going out to eight different locations across the nation every single month you know away on the road 21 to 24 days a month uh which is tough for families Etc by A Stroke of Luck uh there's there's a million very sad stories in between here but uh but I struggle Vlog uh I was supposed to launch six or eight gyms the next month and we had decided to Pivot to go direct to consume we're selling weight loss because we were we were familiar with that um and I told the gym owners that we were supposed to launch that I wasn't going to do it and one of the guys was like hey could you just show me what you're doing rather than flying out here and I was like sure how much you know uh and I just picked a really high number and he said yes and I was like holy cow that was pretty cool and so then I told all the other guys the same thing and they were like how much and I just kept increasing the number and they all said it was fine and then I called all the gyms I did the turnarounds for and said remember that thing I did can I just license the model to you and they're like yeah that's fine and so um that's when we got into license that was 2017.

6:49uh that was like May April May of 2017 and then uh then I took off like a rocket and so then uh you know five thousand location translator that's the original just today we started a Subway company in between there to sell through that distribution base so that was e-commerce um and then we started Allen which is a software company that worked leads for brickmore businesses that was the next year after that um all selling that same audience uh and then in 2021 in December we sold two of those companies so gym launch and Prestige labs to American Pacific group which private Equity Group out of San Francisco and uh we sold that for 46.2 and then we sold the software company for an undisclosed amount uh just Retreat buyers we sold 75 of that uh in an all stock deal and so uh from there we started our family office which is acquisition.com which we started the day after we sold and uh now we have I think 11 portfolio companies and it's it's fascinating to me because I mean looking back at that journey I know you mentioned that there's several moments and I mean I've heard you describe some of them some like the Rock Bottom moments of the people that either did not operate with Integrity the people you would partner with uh you know it was running out of money even even the way you start you know uh 100 million dollar offers your book just talking about that scenario I mean if you could speak to some of that just in the story of of adversity right that was an unrelatable uh recanting of events there were probably I mean there were many Rock Bottom moments but you know that I would say the two most famous of them if they're if stories can become famous um was when we switched out of the brick and mortar gyms and got in the turnaround business um you know the reason I I made that move was because I was supposed to be opening more and more locations with a new partner so I sold five and I opened a sixth with this kind of new model that was going to be like a launch and go model and so uh the guy that I partnered with was like Hey I'm really good at operating you should instead of doing these turnarounds just open it fill it and then I'll just come behind you and then every month you can open up one to two locations in order and I was like that sounds great he said you know but I have some Financial you know issues and uh my credit's not good so of course you you know of course you'll personally guarantee the lease and front all the money and I was like of course and I'll do the work too of course I mean that's any nice guy would do that and so you know everyone already knows where this goes six weeks later you know I'd crushed the launch of this new gym and then I look at the bank account bank account's empty and I put all the money from selling my gyms into that bank account too because I was young and I didn't understand how this worked all the money that I'd had from the five years or four years of building my own gyms was gone and so I just had this gym and I was like dude without and uh he said I know you've been skimming from the top of this business and so that was just my share it hadn't I never occurred to anything like that had ever occurred to me and so I went to a mentor and he's like just go one by line with him through the financials like maybe he's concerned or whatever and so anyways I went to him with all the financials highlighted line by line just like to show whatever one of the expenses was and then we brushed it off the table before we could even look at it I was like oh okay I just got completely scammed here and so uh yeah I lost everything and so that was the first time I lost everything and then uh that was when my 2B wife at the time uh took me to her parents house which I got to meet her parents for the first time uh hey here's this guy from the internet that I just left everything for um he's a real winner he has nothing to his name and uh we're gonna start the business together and so uh she said hey we should keep doing this turnarounds even though that this one didn't work out the model is good and so uh she got all of her friends to quit quit their jobs uh to do this with us um and so we were supposed to start on the 26th of December which was 2016.

10:14and uh on the 24th of December I had done this big launch to kind of recoup money because that was how I knew how to make money so I did a big launch and made like a hundred thousand dollars that was supposed to come to us and then uh before whatever reason the money wasn't coming like we're processing the credit cards and it just wasn't getting deposited and it's been almost like three weeks I was like what's going on so Christmas Eve I get on the phone with the payment processor and uh I was like I'm not getting off the phone until you guys send me the money and uh long story short they said uh Hey because of that gym that you uh opened up and you had you know because I shut the gym down that was with that guy and I was doing launches in other locations so I was running everything through a Southern California brick and mortar processor account which I didn't know how this works I just figured like hey just process money through the the POS since I was making up memberships that didn't exist for Jim's that I wasn't at and they were like this is a regular we're just going to hold on to this money for six months um and that was all of the money um that I needed and two days later all of her friends were supposed to quit their job and start this new launch business with me and so um that was going to cost me 3 300 a day in advertising hotels airfare rental cars per diems for food uh for this new launch and go model I had a credit card from when I had my gyms that still hadn't been canceled uh by MX for a hundred thousand dollar limit on it and uh that's when I told Layla I was like hey I think this could go really really terribly wrong and I think you would be justified in leaving me at this time I'm like sitting in her parents basement or you know like I'm like you really should leave me right now I don't think this is going well for me and she said I would sleep with you on the bridge if it came to that and so you know when she said that to me it give me whatever confidence you know every guy could use and I started you know I spent thirty three hundred dollars a day on a credit card that and meanwhile I still didn't have a way to process money so we're spending 3 000 plus a day you know selling 20 to 60 you know packages of Fitness per day with all these sales guys and I couldn't process the money and so in the last day of the month I finally got some processor to give me a 50 000 limit if you're doing the math here at 3 300 a day does not add up to 50K but the good news was I could process 50k a month which meant that on the last day of January process 50 on the first day of February I processed 50. I got two more running and so the 1550 covered my hundred thousand dollars from the month before and then I was still back at zero again and so the next month it I made like 20 or 30 000 in profit after costs and so that kind of concluded the first rock bottom and then fast forward three months all these gyms that we're doing these launches for started telling the customers to refund and um go through them instead at half the price after we would leave the location because they had the relationship with them but we owned the processing risk which ended up being a recurring thing so I lost everything again the the little nut that I had saved up and uh that was when I called the gym orders to say hey we're going to sell direct to Consumer I think maybe I'll tell Layla I was like I think maybe I'm I'm out on this gym thing like something's not working and I just need to switch gears um but when I called the first guy up and I said I'm not doing it he said I put my life savings into this gym and and I refinance my house and I maxed out all my cards like I need your help and so push came to shove and I said fine I'll say I'll show you how I feel gems up and how my whole system works I was like but I'm not flying out there to save grass if you can't sell and he said no it's fine and so he said well how much and I said six thousand dollars which at the time was the most money I could possibly imagine someone paying me and he said yes in like five seconds and I was like holy [ __ ] and I just I was dumbfounded and so then I just grabbed a piece of cardboard I was like oh yeah what car do you want to use and then I you know wrote it down and process six thousand dollars one transaction and had seven more calls that day and ended up doing sixty thousand dollars in a single day and uh Layla came back in from doing weight loss sales because that was gonna be the new business and I was like hey I think we're still in the gym business I think we were just doing it wrong and uh she was like wait so we're back in jibs it's like yeah we're back in gyms and so from there I called all the old gyms that we've done the launches for said hey remember that thing I just ripped a hundred thousand dollars out of your location for want me to show you how I did it and they said sure and then I sold them the thing so that's the slightly longer story of uh that with with many many sadnesses taken out of that during that period of time I also going to head on to Collision into DUI my mother was in the hospital like there's a lot of other things that were going on too but it was uh it was a tough time for me it's it's like the ultimate pitch for uh entrepreneurship you know just just now and I mean I gotta say right the ultimately for entrepreneurship like beware yeah it's like the frustrations lead to breakthroughs and it seems like I mean every every entrepreneur kind of has their own story but it's it's very rare if ever that I hear anybody having a story where everything always went went up and you know and to the right it was always if screwed over there was always some rock bottom moment there was something that was a catalyst I mean when you're when you're taking these hits I mean obviously you're human as well I mean it's it's easy to get discouraged what what keeps you going I mean for me at the time it was very away driven you know I mean I didn't have like a lot of times people were very driven by like their mission or their purpose or their big vision and I had none of those things I mean my vision was a don't be broke b don't let my dad be right really be more than I but a was the facilitator of big and so yeah just the idea of going back as a failure to Baltimore was just like I would rather have died than done that and so as much pain as I was going through at the time it was better than the alternative admitting defeat and so for me that was the thing that that get me got me through it and I think I think for a lot of entrepreneurs one of the if there's if I you know there's a couple of key themes in the messages that I want to get put out is that like there's a lot of there's a lot of positive jargon that's put out by you know it's social media and influencers Etc like Follow Your Passion but the thing is just like when you're starting out everything sucks like everything sucks and I was talking to a friend of mine and you sadness comes from not knowing what to do right it's a feeling of hopelessness like you don't know what steps to take which really just means it comes from from ignorance and when you're new you don't know anything so of course of course you don't know what to do which leads to like very deep depression for a lot of entrepreneurs at different times in their careers most guys who are starting out are are thinking there's something wrong with them because they're not passionate but my probably singular message is pain because most entrepreneurs don't need to look very far to find the pain in their lives anger shame fear resentment whatever it is anxiety like we have different things that have fueled us in our lives and I would rather have people just use what they have because I think that is in essence what entrepreneurship is about as being resourceful not really necessarily about having resources and if we consider passion or resource as a requirement to be successful I just don't think it's true I think you need fuel and you should use whatever fuel you have I think over time if you get your head above water you'll be able to find a different fuel but I think that uh away from fuel is more powerful than towards fuel it's not necessarily a sustainable but in the beginning you should need to move and so a lot of ways that can get you to move yeah how much do you believe I mean just and you mentioned this earlier but just how much do you believe in luck plays a role in success or does it play a role in success I mean for example you meeting layla it's hard to tell the story of Alex without also the story of Layla but at the same time if you've never met I guess you'd eventually get there but you know with the path of probably pretty different I think luck is huge I think there are things you can do to increase the surface area of luck so I think luck is a massive Factor I mean I was born in America I was born as a male I was born to a doctor so I mean like from that perspective I already won uh so like yeah do I think if I was born in Bangladesh as a girl that I would have been as successful as I am now probably less likely a big part of who I am now is the upbringing I had if I live someone else's life I might be exactly the same way they are and so in that way I think it's very much luck driven I wonder like when when Leo stood by and uh you know she said you sleep under a bridge I I have a similar relationship because my wife you know I've joked we kind of have like a southpaw story when she met me I'm a penny stock I'm just starting the company she's successful she knows what she's doing and we've kind of grown the business together and I've asked her a few times like hey you know what what did you see in me then but I'm curious what do you think uh why do you think she stuck by you I think Layla is an exceptional judge of people I think if there's like one skill that Layla is world class at is that she just she just sees through people Layla has never been wrong about a hire about a partnership ever um it's pretty impressive and so I think she's off or she's I'm giving I'm giving her words here but I mean she saw a potential in me and she felt like if I had if I was able to shed some of these bad Partnerships and beliefs and relationships and things like that that were weighing me down that there was something underneath that was good in a lot of ways that was kind of how both of us I think saw our relationship at the time was like we're not good yet but I think that we could be good together and I mean our relationship in the first two three years was not was not like a Hollywood movie you know what I mean like we were mostly business partners and we got married 11 months in but like we didn't have a wedding we didn't have a marriage we had a marriage um but like we didn't have a party we didn't have a honeymoon we worked the day of our of our eloping and then we work the next day you know I mean it just nothing happened and we just worked straight through but I think it was about three years in where we started like really recognize one another and really find our groove kind of even romantically so we have definitely like an atypical story uh from that perspective but it has worked out yeah yeah and I heard you mentioned on uh on a podcast the importance of respect within a relationship sometimes respect being even more important than affection I mean it's good to have both but just be able to respect one another yeah I think there's if you look at um gosh I wish I could quote this better but there's like the Four Horsemen of divorce uh they did you know sure for this like Hallmark study they like they have couples bring up some subject that they argue about and they study how they argued and they could predict with like a 91 success rate who was going to be divorced in 10 years and there's four horsemen of like divorce and the one that was the highest predictor was contempt which can seem be seen visually with an eye roll which is both a lack of respect um for the other person and also thinking you're better than them and so that like combination is deadly for relationships and I think that if you were to reverse that and think that like the other person is better than you are I'd have ultimate respect for them then you might have something that could Safeguard a marriage or a relationship you know I know that the two of you've worked together I joke my wife and I say like you know we've been together but it's like dog years right because you know we you know we wake up together we go to the office and then we come home so it's just like multiplied by seven but like what what advice do you have for other couples whether they're considering working together if they're already working together how to you know how to keep that going I have to put my disclaimer that like we've only been together seven years and I think in in decades so you know when I went across our first decade I'll let everyone know but you know the only encouraging thing I can say is that from a time spent together the average marriage uh people spend two hours a day together uh and 45 minutes of that is high quality in the other hour and 15 minutes is watching television uh or eating and doing like household activities and so the amount of time we split together compared to the average relationship is we've had like a 45 or 50 year marriage uh comparatively in terms of hours spent that being said uh with that large caveat I think that the biggest thing that has worked for us is just acceptance which is that Layla has never tried to change me and I've never really tried to change her and I think I get a lot of messages which is like how do I find my Layla or more specifically how do I make my wife into Layla which is a weird message to get because it means that you don't accept your partner who they are and so people like how do I get my wife into business I was like if she's not already in a business she's not into business like you're not going to make her into business it should be like a woman saying like how can I make my man taller it's not going to happen so I think um and this is going to probably be relatively controversial but I think a lot of people losing the draft a lot of people think about like how do you how do you coach a championship team I think a lot of teams lose in the draft they don't have the talent and so again that's probably a little bit contrarian to like all marriages are savable which maybe they are the question is are they ideal or the optimal for both Partners in terms of achieving their their potential and I think a lot of them are because I think a lot of people mature over time and probably wouldn't make the same decisions as they did you know 20 years ago which is one of the hardest parts about a lifelong decision in general and so I think that making sure that you're picking somebody who has the same long-term goal as you has the same values as you and I think the single greatest one is that they that if you want to grow that they want to grow because growth is also another word for change which means that if you have two people who are changing for a long period of time you just better hope they'd be changing the same direction yeah yeah and it's obviously a choice of spouse or life partner or whatever obviously probably one of the most important decisions we make in our lives it's number one so okay so on that note then what would you say is like two and three well I I say that from uh measuring from subjective well-being so it has a 0.7 more correlation to yours projected well-being it's a strengthy relationship with your significant other so there's nothing else that comes close to that so I would say from that perspective it is a it is the the most important one and pretty much if you think about this everything else is impermanent the business you start is impermanent you can change businesses you can change you can change markets you can change where you live you can teach who you work with like all these things are changeable but if you are married and you believe in trying to stay with that commitment then like you're making a permanent either detractor or addition to your life and that person's gonna interact with you probably more than anyone else and not probably you will be interacting with that person probably more than anyone else especially if you work together and so like pick wisely yeah but two and three where you live like the actual Market that you're in uh that's being less and less important but I think just the circles you run in are important I think from a business perspective the industries that you choose to get into uh have a huge influence on you know if you're getting into steel mills uh as they're going out or you're getting into newspapers 10 years ago probably wasn't the best call so it doesn't matter how good you were you probably aren't going to win so those are kind of like some of the bigger marker or macro influencers on on how successful you'll be but that's a little bit more of a business change yeah and I know you've worked with many many different Founders I mean in all sorts of different businesses services-based businesses software I mean the full gamut like are there any particular traits that you've seen in the in the most successful Founders that kind of separate the most successful from the least successful yeah they're humble if you have humility you can do a lot because if somebody's humble then they can accept feedback and they can accept feedback then they can change I mean it's very difficult basically if someone does have humility then it means that whoever they are they one has to be the person that they need to be a day one thousand because if they can't admit a deficit then they can't improve and so humility is by far the biggest one you know beyond that it's they have to have Drive they have to have some reason that they're going to do it whether it's you know away from fuel or towards fuel like they have to have some sort of Drive there's a big study on this so that I've been quoted a lot for even though it's not my study um but it's you know the three most common traits that they've seen you know it's not the early wake-up time it's not it's not a lot of you know it's not the healthy eating it's not the cold plunges or the affirmations but the the three common traits were that they had a superiority complex so they believe that they can do big things they want to chase after big goals the second is that they have crippling insecurity and that they feel they'll never be enough and that they have impulse control and so if you have a big goal and you have big Fuel and you don't stray the path and you do it for a very long period of time you'll probably win yeah yeah it's almost like I think there's a book it's called like the manic Edge you know to a degree it's like you almost have to be crazy in a sense I mean you think about entrepreneur the idea of starting a business the risk that you take on I mean obviously I mean I think Shark Tank maybe has popularized this to an extent but when you look at the reality of it it's uh not always a great proposition I mean I I think now with a lot of like social media culture it's this idea of you know working remotely from your laptop everybody's making 40 Grand a month I don't know why people get stuck on this number but it's just I don't know that it really depicts an accurate uh portrayal of of what this journey is yeah well I think the average I mean I I think the average small business owner takes something like fifty thousand dollars a year I mean the average small business owner makes the same as the median household income so you know from that sense it's one person versus a household so I guess in that sense they have to make a little bit more money they also take out significantly more risk personally in order to do that so I agree with you I think that the I think right now it's in Vogue it's cool I mean it is the way to make the most money it's also the way to lose the most money uh it is you know at definition the the highest risk highest reward game but you know it's quote Warren Buffett I think the reason business is so risky is because people don't know what they're doing and that's kind of the nature of it is when you start you're ignorant biggest debt you pay is the tax of not knowing right you're not knowing what you do he also says that it's it's only risky if you don't know what you're doing and so once you do know what you're doing then there's not nearly as much risk in business but the only way to know what you're doing is to get in the game which means you have to incur lots of risk to get in and then the more you play the better you get and less risky it is and the higher rewarded yeah yeah it's like in many cases it's like the other the solutions making good decisions how do you make good decisions experience how do you gain experience bad decisions and you know and the cycle repeats something you've shared before that I thought was very interesting is just the differences between how the most successful people viewed time and their approach to time Horizon if you could elaborate on that you can pretty easily tell how successful an entrepreneur is by looking at two elements of time one is the increments of time they speak in so if they talk in decades they talk in multiple decades they talk in lifetimes they talk in Generations I can almost guarantee it's going to be significantly more successful entrepreneur than the one who talks about next week next month even next score and it's such a small thing but it's it's pervasive like you can hear it in conversation you can immediately know oh this guy's only doing this much because the only way to do really big things is to think on a much longer time Rising the second component is how they manage the micro which is if you look at someone's calendar and how they allocate their most scarce resource which is time you can see where they're going to be in 6 or 12 months so if you look at the calendar as the balance sheet of someone's time asset and how they allocate their their time budget then you will see where they're going to get their returns and so if we look at a founder and we look at their calendar we can tell how the company is going we can usually see how we need to fix it because fundamentally most entrepreneurs work all the hours of the day most most of them do right and so if they're not making the amount of money that they want to make it's because they're doing the wrong stuff and that's usually the biggest issue and they think they need to work harder but they've already maxed out their hours which means fundamentally they're wrong they're seeing a distorted reality they think this is going to work and it is not are there particular things that that you see I mean just even looking at an entrepreneur's calendar where you're like okay well that you can tell right away okay this is not optimized or the focus isn't in the right place like what types of things stick out well the single commentary that every entrepreneur has to get over over time is relinquishing control so entrepreneurship is a continual giving up of control at all levels and so whatever they're doing is usually the thing that they need to be able to give up and transfer to somebody else in order to get further and further above the business and get more leverage and so in the beginning you have to give up delivery or you have to give up selling where you have to give up promoting you have to give up something or administrative tasks and you look at your calendar and you say which of these things is most easy to replace in the marketplace and is the cheapest one that I can replace and you replace the first one that gives you the most time for the least amount of money then you're like great now I should fill my time up with the thing that makes me more money and fundamentally that is the game is you just continue to trade up the time until you have bought all of your time back and then you can just do all the highest level leverage activities and leverage this being defined as getting more for what you put in yeah now this is a concept that I think when people hear it they probably will not along and yet you and I both know this I think so many entrepreneurs struggle with it and struggle with that relinquishment of control no one can do it as well as they can no one can do it you know quite the way they do what's the answer there like how do you get somebody to the point where they actually start doing it call it Foundation this is why you're poor like we can I mean you can keep doing what you're doing it's just you're going to keep getting what you're getting and so the question is whether you want to keep getting what you're getting or you're willing to change something I mean it's the same as somebody's trying to lose weight saying I want to keep eating the same diet but if I look the same you're like yeah so you have a diet of time that you continue to eat or let something else eat your time every single day and you expect the outcome to look different and it's just not true and so I think just a very logical breakdown where someone just you have to confront it you have to confront reality and a lot of entrepreneurs are delusional sometimes in a good way you know you have to be optimistically delusional in some in the certain capacity to be an entrepreneur but a lot of times that delusion takes control and they believe the false statements that you just said right which is like no one can do it like I can do it I'm irreplaceable etc etc but like every single human on planet Earth is replaced in 100 years yeah and the likelihood is that if you were doing it and you're also doing other things then somebody doing full-time what you're doing will be better than you are and I can virtually guarantee that 100 people doing full-time what you're doing are going to be better than you are so let's a little side the side quest here a lot of entrepreneurs learn the wrong lessons from experiences so we talked about having experiences earlier right and you make the lesson Etc but the thing is that most people are on the wrong lessons so I'll give you an example a small business owner hires the first sales person they're like I'm going to give up control of sales I'm gonna give to this person they're gonna start selling and of course the person takes okay because they also don't know at a higher bandage recruit train sales people because they don't have that skill set yet either but they bring this person on the person fails right there's lots of lessons you can get from that but one lesson that's common is that sales people don't work right or no sales person can tell like I can't right and so then as soon as they have that belief Forever Until That belief has changed they will not make more money and the thing is there's a lot of those salesman beliefs at every single level of Entrepreneurship but the correct lesson is phrasing the thing that didn't work as deficiency personally which is okay this salesman didn't work I do not know how to and then insert the problem recruit hire train manage A salesperson great that's all let's go solve that and then that is the process all the way up but you have to admit it it's like AAA right you got to make your prompt and until they do and that's where she really comes in into play and that's what that's what plateaus many entrepreneurs so they cannot admit that anyone else could do about it and most people do better do and I think it's much better belief like everyone can do everything about it it's great I'm not needed and that's the point you want to own the business not have the business own you it's a it's interesting it's like so many entrepreneurs I meet I don't know if this is direct correlation exists but it seems like the more successful they are I mean when you really start getting up there eight figures nine figures ten figures Beyond it's like you start to see greater levels of humility and I wonder if to an extent and this doesn't apply to everyone but it's always striking to me how someone can still have ego if if they have built a business from nothing and just just The Humbling process of even building an organization the lessons you have to learn how you know just the challenge that you experience the pain you know in in many cases that to come out of that with ego but yet the ones that know all the answers have it all figured out no I'm good I already read that book I already you know I already heard that like they're they're the ones that seem to be struggling the most I agree I also think that you can have situational ego so uh because there are definitely some very wealthy people who are very successful who do have egos who are soft mate like I can attest to that there are um there are also many many many who are very humble in general but I think it's also domain specific you know if you can be humble humble in business and and Arrogant with women you can be Arrogant with your physique but humble you know I mean so I think I think it's much it's a little bit more nuanced overall that being said there's totally people who are arrogant in everything they do uh but I do think that it's more domain specific and even within the business somebody might have an ego around how good they are at marketing but not it can go around how good they are at HR right and so really comes down to How do they associate their self-worth with something however close the action is to the association they have with their identity and their worth the harder it is to peel away from their grip like a lot of entrepreneurs who are promotional or product driven entrepreneurs don't have any problem Outsourcing Finance like it's not like they don't have a huge thing with that right but they have a huge problem if someone wants to take over product or take over promotion or whatever for the business and so it's because they just derive their self-worth from that and so that's that's why a lot of the entrepreneurship is a head game yeah and I'm curious I mean now uh with acquisition.com and by the way just at the time you were launching that company and starting it how much was the domain by the way like was this is this like a big big investment just to get the domain or was it just it's 370 000. okay okay obviously at this point it's been worth it but what was your vision uh for acquisition.com I wanted to be the family office for you know Layla and I to invest our Capital into businesses that we believed in with Founders that we thought were awesome and uh products that we believe you know we're gonna help people and so that's more or less what we've done and the whole idea was I wonder if we can build a personal brand where people would listen to our content and say Hey I want to work with these guys and so what happens is that the goal was that it would create a somewhat of a pre-filtering process for values because if you can get values alignment it's a lot it's kind of like the marriage thing like if we have similar missions similar values it's a lot easier to get along that was a theory I didn't know if it was going to work uh but it it certainly has we get a lot of companies every day that reach out to us that you know we're looking for investors to either buy you know a minority or a majority stake in the company to help them scale which is very much what we do so we are we are active in our portfolios or that's I mean that's where we make our money um is actively growing the companies themselves and recruiting in great people to help scale the businesses and it seems like this is kind of like a forever Venture for you and in many ways I mean obviously you love building businesses but this gives you a way to scratch that itch in in so many different Industries and verticals and so the best businesses have a compounding vehicle built into them and most businesses don't which is why most businesses are not the best businesses right and so you can have a compounding vehicle in terms of capital as in like there's an allocation of capital that could that exists within the business like every time we open up a new facility we get 50 on our money and so the question is how many times can we open up new facilities like that would be an example if we uh have customers let's say if it's a national thing rather than you know brick and mortar locations if every time a customer comes to us they bring another you know 1.3 customers then we know that over time no matter how big we get as long as we retain the quality of our of our deliverable we will get more and more people who will continue to come to us the other way to do that would be you have people who always keep selling for you so even if you're let's say uh let's say you sell solar right it's transactional people aren't really going to get a second roof but if you as the business owner know that every salesperson brings you two rooms a month then your compounding is on the actual sales people themselves and so you go from having two people who get you two ribs a month to eight people two and every every month you keep bringing them on and then they become a consistent uh production but the number of sales people compounds and so those are the only ways to build forever businesses those are the types of businesses that we're interested in is in 30 years will this thing be massive and if that's true then all we have to do is wait how and and it seems you're especially passionate about great products products that you know do a great job it's almost they do the marketing for you and then ultimately scaling through through customers customers referring other customers it's easier I mean so it's selfish it's just it's a it's the Lazy Man's way of doing it it's long-term lazy it's short-term effort but it's long-term lazy because think about this way I could spend two years perfecting a book right and making it amazing and really putting pouring my heart and soul to it and then after that two years release it and then for the rest of time have people who buy the book tell other people about the book and so I spent two years but then from that point going forward customers Market everything for me and everything that comes in off of the book is profit right the flip side is that I spend two months writing a book that's decent but not great and then I have to spend the rest of my life promoting it and then in so doing I also get lots of people to find out that I have a mediocre book it just makes less sense but the thing is is it just takes so much more time to front load that effort to make an exceptional product or service that most people aren't willing to do it and so most people's products like the real big obvious answer of why people don't make more money is they're just not that good and specifically from an ego perspective they're just not as good as they think they are so so how do you I mean is there a balance or how do you know when something is ready like essentially if you're trying to make something perfect that can you can run into procrastination I'm seeing this right now I'm working on a second book I didn't you know I didn't know anyone read the first book it turns out a few people read the first book so now I'm trying to make the second one you know even better because now like okay people are going to read this thing I know you're working on on your next book as well at what point do you know okay this this is ready oh and for me there was nothing left to do like anything else that I would add or subtract to it would make it worse now that's not always the case you know I mean with a pro like a book is a very defined literally has bookends right there's beginning internet but if you have a software product for example I sure there's more from a conceptual perspective uh as an ideal but like the idea is to have a consistent Cadence where you're approving the product on an ongoing basis right and so but the thing is just front loading that because until you have the product Market Fit until you have a certain percentage of people who are or bringing their own friends to try your thing it's still not right and so what ends up happening is that especially if you have a promotion driven entrepreneur so somebody really understands how to Market and sell this is where I always say it gets dangerous it's just that you can make a few million dollars 10 million dollars being really good at marketing and sales and so you could become a multimulator doing that it's just you're not going to build like the massive massive Fortune unless the thing you sell is good and so what happens is most entrepreneurs are promotional promote too soon and then they have to fight this uphill battle for the rest of their existence and the thing is it gets reinforced because they get better and better at marketing and so they Market more and more and more and more at some point especially if it's like d2c so like you know directing instant work products you go into colder and colder audiences who are less and less likely to buy your thing and so your cost to acquire continues to rise over time because also advertising costs only go one way which is up just the cost variable and so you've got multiple forces that are going against you that are decreasing your profitability and unless you have a concurrent force or something that's going in parallel with that growth which is your customers bring you other customers to decrease that cost of acquisition you eventually hit a plateau where you can do lots of Revenue and not a lot of profit and you can't grow from there and that's where sometimes you have to have hard conversations with an entrepreneur be like this thing just isn't good enough and we need to maybe dial back a little bit and so like the original idea idea of getting your first acquisition Channel going whatever it is is not to then scale that the idea is that you get enough customers in that you can get feedback continue to improve the product and then once you get enough people referring and bringing friends which is my litmus test for it is good enough then you scale it now you still consistently want to make it better and better and better absolutely but litmus test is am I getting referrals once you have that then all of your marketing efforts from there on out are going to be enhanced and then that's what's going to allow you to outcompete your competition who wasn't so long-sided and always just wanted to make the next Buck yeah speaking of competition how do you view competition I mean is I remember you mentioned the story The of the gentleman that kind of screwed you over early on although at this point you know I almost feel sorry for them right because if they kind of hung in and things have probably gone much better for them just just seeing your rise but it seemed like you never were vengeful about it you know you always just got to move forward and I imagine just in your different businesses you've had your dealings with various competitors some say you know the steeper the climb the you know the sharper the knives like what what is what's your thought on competition so you know one I I love this quota I think the first time I heard it was from Rick Moore as a pastor he said uh anger is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies and so it's just like it doesn't serve you so many times I think many of us have had these experiences where you're just obsessed about being angry at someone and how could they how dare they and most of anger comes from ego go back to the humility thing which is like I just you formed and fundamentally think you deserve better right if you don't think you deserve anything then a lot of times it can diffuse a lot of the situations because you're like well in 500 million years this probably won't matter and if you scale out wide enough the Earth doesn't look like anything but a speck of dust or even you can't even see it and so it just gives a little bit of perspective on like how much does this really matter from a competition perspective there's an obsession with small business owners around competition and I would say that like most small business owners look at other small business owners and see them as competition but like they are not competition usually both people just have shitty products which is why they have small businesses and so I would say obsess over your customers not your competition the competition takes care of itself and as an aside it's interesting because again this is kind of a more of a small business owner perspective but like the private equity in the in the investment world if they see three companies that serve a similar Avatar they just buy all three and combine them and so like as much as you might have a blood Feud with this person like the person who's a level up from you just sees it as three different cultures that serve the same Avatar with slightly you know slight differences and then they merge them into a much bigger company that has you know obviously doesn't always go that way there's cultural differences blah blah Etc but I think just seeing it like that I've seen so many competitors who like you know wanted to kill each other and even even in the in the gym watch World there was a guy who was uh he considered himself to be a competitor of ours and I reached out to him and he thought that uh I had some like ill intent and like now we're we're decent friends and he's like I always hated you it was like yeah I didn't think about it well it's these one-way you know like obsessing over things that are happening only in the entrepreneur's mind and I think that that is the biggest cost of competition is the obsession of what everyone else is doing rather than taking that same Obsession and applying it to your customers and that would make you more money yeah I've heard you say like I know a lot of this is a mental game people thinking about well what's somebody going to think of me what are they going to think of my decisions my choices if I do this if I go left if I go right and I think you said something along the lines of you know one day you're gonna pass it's you know it's gonna be your funeral and then you know there's gonna be people who don't make it just because something came up that day yeah the way people want to eat people who uh are arguing over who gets what most the people that you met your entire life aren't going to make it and so like and I mean it's kind of like I mean I I made this tweet and it went really viral but you know the Queen of England died I think like eight or nine months ago now you know shoot your amassed more wealth than 99.99 of the population she was a monarch for 70 years which has to be at close to a record she did it as a female which is even more amazing from the times that she came in to power and whatnot and whoever's listening to this probably hasn't thought about the Queen of England and she was you know one of the all-time goats of just like success if you wanted to find it that way we're so self-centered that we assume that everyone's gonna cry when we die but most of us won't even be remembered for six months and so I think we have all this irrational fear around taking bigger swings doing the things that we want to do making whatever dreams we have real or at least giving it a shot we play these these videotapes in our minds of these future scenarios where people who aren't thinking about us are saying things that they're not having thinking because they don't care about you and they think about themselves and so it's like no one's thinking about you and I think getting over yourself is a really good way to be able to have more personal freedom in the choices we make and take on big risks yeah and I want to get your take on on AI I know I know you've posted a bit about this I want to get your perspective now I think when you posted one time about a chat gpt3 and now we're GPT four or maybe you know we'll be on to the next one soon enough like how do you think I mean if a lot of people listening to this podcast they're they're running a law firm Professional Service based business like how do you think it'll impact those types of businesses it will it will impact those businesses I'll just say my two cents which is the people who will win I mean this isn't even my quote but like you're not going to get replaced by AI you'll get replaced by somebody who knows how to use your AI better than you and that's like the the short to medium term I mean ai's scary man I think it's a big black box I think humans are exceptionally bad at predicting outcomes um I mean even if you had asked two years ago which jobs AI is going to take first people would have said blue collar would have been you know drivers laborers Etc and it actually went all the way to top to the most creative jobs it went to you know video and images and design and text and so I think we're really bad at predicting what's going to happen from a risk-adjusted basis you know the investment feels not worth it and I know that that's really contrary and I'll say it this way it's like AI has the possibility it's a really amazingly improve humanity and we know that technology does not change our subjective well-being one bit so we were just as happy and unhappy as we were if anything we're a little bit less happy with more technology and on the downside risk is all humans are gone and so the upside is we're just about as happy as we are now and the downside is we're all not here and so for me if I were just to look at it from a risk adjusted basis I probably wouldn't make that bet that being said the cat is out of the bag and now we have to play the cards without and so I think for everybody who is listening it would behoove you to spend your weekends learning how to prompt engineer or staying up to date with the new plugins and overlays and auto GPT and AV AGI and all these things that are coming out because if you want your competitors are and the thing is the scale and speed of these is so robust it will be able to compress progress that used to take years into weeks and so if someone has a little bit of an edge it might be a lot of an edge really quick so don't sleep on it yeah yeah I think it's it's the rate of improvement that's that's in and almost like the unchecked rate of improvement that's either the the most exciting or in in some cases the scariest aspect of it and yet like you said I mean the cat's out of the bag at this point it's you know it's here and just learn and leverage it what about uh any other skills that you you believe like just are valuable for people to develop I think having the mindset that character traits that are desirable are not actually traits their skills because if you were to say like somebody who is honest or someone who is persistent or someone who's loyal you're like what does that mean what means to somebody who acts in this way and under these circumstances and so if you can act in this way under these circumstances that means you can expose yourself to these circumstances to act a certain way and that means you can learn it and so traits are learnable you're not born with them you learn them you reinforce them over time and then you become different I use quotes here because you behave differently and so I think uh I'll leave with this intelligence is a rate of learning it's a speed how quickly do you learn and then you have to Define learning learning is same condition new Behavior so if I say hey when I show you this red thing I'm going to slap you and I show it and then I slap somebody and then I show it then I slap them and the third time I show it to them and they Duck Right same condition new Behavior they've learned somebody who's smarter I show it once and on the second time I go to slap them and they duck so they have more intelligence and so if you want to be smarter the key is to change your behavior faster and so I think in that way it operationalizes knowledge probably a lot of lawyers are big readers and they love you know the mental masturbation of like consuming stuff but if your behavior does not change after you go to a workshop or seminar you listen to this podcast if your behavior doesn't change you learned nothing which means you are not that smart I love it I love it what's a day in the life like right now for you I mean I really you don't have any hobbies you don't golf like what what are you up to just business stuff for the most part I mean you know today I was talking to a buddy of mine who um works for public CEOs and I was bouncing some ideas off him in terms of like our investment thesis and kind of our portfolio strategy and then I had a meeting a portfolio Auto so it's just like looking at the some of the companies that we have and some of the issues that are coming up and kind of how we're going to resolve them and allocate resources around those at a meeting with my book manager for the next book launch that's coming out just making sure that our order quantities are right and that we have the right mix you know between you know paperback hardback you know is the is the shipping guy ready in terms of like what's expected volumes you know from there I have this podcast and so it's a mixed bag for me for me mostly my mornings are working on one big thing for a very long period of time so the book was my first six hours of your day for the last two years that's done now so uh now it's just getting into the kind of the promotional cycle for that book and making sure it gets printed and shipped and all that kind of stuff One Step book launches I'll probably be allocating all of my first six hours of the day to some other very big project but that's really I work on the very few things for a long time yeah and and it seems at this point like it your motivations perhaps have changed I don't know if you're running away from anything at this point I don't know you're trying to prove anybody wrong like what's what keeps the fire burning what keeps you excited what keeps you energized I mean it seems like it's not the money you already have that so what what keeps you going I like it I think that's it I just like it it's what I look forward to doing I write books about business I draw pictures about business I make videos about business I do business all day I enjoy it it's what I enjoy doing and I just happen to be fortunate in the thing that I like happens to be you know valuable to a Marketplace that exchanges money if I liked gardening I would be I would have a super duper Garden I know I don't know if I'd make as much money but I would um but that that's pretty much it I'll leave with this I had a mental really early on in my life and I had a really good weekend right and I just everything was like perfect that weekend I was telling her how how my weekend had been and she was like I'm pretty sure the key to life is stringing as many of those days in a row as you can and it just kind of stuck with me because it operationalized improving subjective well-being which is like if I do the things that I like with the people that I like as many days in a row as I can I'll probably end up okay and that's pretty much what I've tried to look by and and as we come to a close you know we ask everybody this uh this being the game changing attorney podcast what this being a game changer mean to you well that you would introduce new variables that would force the rules to change I'm going to give a huge thank you to Alex hermosi for taking the time to speak with us today and I want to thank you yes you for listening to this podcast and for your commitment to growing as a leader if you found this episode valuable here are three free ways that I can help you grow your Law Firm number one download the first chapter of my book absolutely free at gamechangingattorney.com number two you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691 and I'll answer any question that you've got for me and finally number three if you can leave this podcast a five star review it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their Lessons Learned here to you for more information on our interview with Alex hermosi see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com [Music]