Der Bauplan hinter dem 100 Millionen Dollar Unternehmen

0:00this is the BiggerPockets podcast show 798. really the philosophy behind it is if we can build a place where we don't just achieve success of becoming you know a firm that does 10 billion by you know turning people out by paying them so much money that they feel like they can't leave um but by actually fostering an environment where people are constantly learning and developing and we're encouraging them [Music] [Music] what's up everyone this is David Green your host of the BiggerPockets real estate podcast the biggest the best and the baddest real estate podcast in the world I'm joined today by my partner in crime Rob abasolo with an incredible episode for everyone today Rob and I are going to be joined by Alex and Layla hormosi as we talk about business real estate people relationships success investors frustrations investing butterflies making money a lot a lot oh we we really did Cover a lot Alex and Layla were kind enough to share a good chunk of time with us and open up about both their relationship their business and their future in fact they hired an executive for one of their companies while we were doing them these are some hard-working folks that are dedicated to the cause that took some time to help our listeners what were some of your favorite parts of today's show oh pretty much all of it you know the hormones are like my favorite people these are really not just my favorite content creators but my favorite entrepreneurs because they really tackle business problems and and really the foundations of business in a way that I've never heard it before and really it was super cool because you always hear them give these masterful insights on building a business and scaling to a million or scaling to 100 million the thing is you always hear them do it separately yeah but you never really get them in a room together so this is the first time I'm really seeing these magic we did it's so much more Mosey magic so uh I think I did pretty good for being for being you kept your inner fan girl together pretty well they couldn't tell until you told them how excited did you get when Alex recognized your post on his thread I was pretty excited yeah it was pretty you remembered it that's right very nice you know when I hear Jocko willing talk in the times that I've met him he's got this Vibe about him that you don't see in other human beings Jocko has been through things in life that have made him very different than everyone else in a really good way I get the same thing from Alex and Layla The Experience they have with building scaling and exiting businesses and then managing them I don't know how many other people on the planet have the perspective that they have specifically on there do you notice that oh absolutely like it's just the way they explained like building out your team and the operations which is very applicable in the world of real estate especially if you're trying to scale that's exactly what you need to do and you need to do it well it just seems so simple coming from them and that's how you know that they're Masters at this because they explain an incredibly difficult Concept in a way that just makes perfect sense instantly when you hear it so they gave me free Consulting uh many people would pay tens and tens of thousands of dollars for that kind of thing and I feel like a lot of people at home are going to really they're going to be like this is what I needed to hear yeah so I opened up about struggles and I'm having a business areas that I'm weak in they gave me some advice I kind of laid it all out there we talked about investing in fears that hold a lot of people back things that are tripping people up and most importantly the fundamentals that lead to success in real estate investing in starting a business and in wealth overall and my my two cents is that with the market getting tougher more and more people are going to need to move into building or buying a business this is a very crucial wealth building block as real estate investing is getting tougher and tougher and you still need to be able to make money today's episode is I mean it's probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for somebody who's gonna go do something with it so you guys are in for a treat now you may be noticing that our background looks a little different that's because Rob and I are here in downtown Los Angeles at the Spotify Studios recording for your viewing pleasure before we get to Alex and Layla today's quick tip is consider making your money and investing in the thing you enjoy doing Alex talks about how we can all get shiny object syndrome and he refers to a conversation between Dave Ramsey and Graham Stefan where they actually get into the fact that Graham should be investing in the thing he's passionate about and Alex realized that's which is why they double down on acquisition.com and scaled it to be incredibly successful rather than starting a bunch of different business ventures and as a second quick tip Alex actually mentioned how before he met his wife he had nine different businesses and none of them were profitable and she really helped bring Clarity into his life and his business environment and the two of them exploded when they met each other so keep an eye out for who your partner might be or potentially your spouse as we get into that as well all right well we hope you enjoy the studio we hope you enjoy the show and get ready because several Bigger Pockets episodes were all going to be released from this same location and they're all fantastic with some of the best guests in the business speaking of that let's bring in Alex and Layla and be sure to keep an eye out for episode 800. we ask a lot of people here at the Spotify Studios some pretty amazing entrepreneurial questions that will come out for episode 800 so get excited Alex and Layla welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast thanks for being here thanks for having us on honor to be here so welcome back Alex um you know funny quick little anecdote I think uh when we interviewed you about eight months ago I said I had hired one of my sales guys to to become my CEO and then you're like well I don't know if I would have done that uh and then he listened to it he's like man I don't really think what do you think about that and I was like you're doing great he's doing great oh good it's a small update just a small upgrade um and Layla really happy to have you here happy birthday thank you so much for being here and I wanted to say you know I actually I subscribe to your YouTube channel first um it was a video you did about a year ago called how to go from zero to a million dollars and it was a longer piece of content and I was like okay well you know like I do I like I'll watch a minute or two I don't watch the whole thing and I was like wow this is really good and you had like a PowerPoint it was the whole thing and I was like this is great and then a couple days later I get served up one of your uh videos Alex and I'm like I'm pretty sure her name was horror Mosey but like what are the chances there's another YouTuber named horror Mosey this is all crazy so um you two are the the only YouTubers that I will watch an hour-long video for them I just watched your hour-long video last week and I was like well every minute thank you so good good content from start to finish excited to talk about some of those principles he's not lying man I'm glad you guys are here because this is all Rob has talked about for the last three days okay Alex can you believe that Leila's coming on her birthday we can't mess this up It's gotta be perfect really can't mess it up I've been rehearsing in the mirror but it's all good well I'm glad you guys are here thank you especially on your birthday that's very very sweet of you so we appreciate it our audience does as well absolutely tell us about acquisition.com why are you guys passionate about this project oh fine okay is that the signal sneak attack just like you need to still second base is that what she's doing well no we uh yeah so because if we ever go together she she always jokes that I will be like you should go and then I like have time to think about what happens that's what we're doing the trick is you're supposed to say that's a good question to buy yourself some time and then you get well I do that all the time too I do with you you don't realize it yeah all the time I make you talk first and then I sum up what you said better than you said it and add maybe a little piece on the end right right um no I mean the reason for acquisition.com you know interestingly most of our businesses have come out of personal need and so like I I got into you know I I got in shape and then people started asking me how I got in shape and then I started helping people get into shape and then I started growing a business of helping people get in shape and then people who help people get in shape ask me how I got the business of people getting in shape and then uh people who had businesses that helped other you know small businesses uh started asking me how my businesses go you know what I mean so it just continued to work out that way um and so Leila and I uh still had at the time when we started what would then become acquisition.com uh we owned gym launch Prestige labs and Allen Allen so our software company Prestige officer our supplement company and Jim launch was our gym licensing business and so we had um I think at the time just about four thousand uh people had gone through our licensing program and um and we had the same amount of people who were selling our supplements to that same distribution base and uh covet happened and So that obviously impact in the software was actually how to get is a martech solution so how to get uh leads in the door for Brick and Mortar businesses of any kind it was supposed to be for gyms original and then other people who were like hey man I have a bunch of plumbers I have a bunch of whatever's does it work for them and it turned out it did so it actually had a much bigger Market than we thought it did originally and so middle of covid things are tough for gyms I'm almost like I gotta take my take my mind off this stuff and I get a sales call because we're rolling out software I read all the books it's like Founders should take the first sales call so you can get to know the customers and so I still had like a just tinyish brand you know what I mean like I had a tiny fan base that's tough yeah and so I was right on the cusp where it would it was still okay for me to take those calls um where it wouldn't be weird people just like hop on to have no interest in actually the product um and so anyways this particular call guy got on and was like I don't want anything to do with your software he's like but I've read everything that you've ever put out I've applied all of it and I like tripled my business and I want you to partner with me to scale it and I was like uh this isn't really the right time but whatever anyways he I he still he sold me on it and I really liked him and he owned a photography business that's called enchanted fairies and at the time he had one Studio on his journaling were doing really well and he had an agency business on the side that helped photographer like he marketed photographers the same way he had it for his own studio um and after finding out about that uh I was like you know what if we just stopped this agency thing and just like scale the hell out of this chain and so um we invested in the business and uh that was three years ago in that business now went from you know one single location to doing you know two and a half million a month um over with their over 30 locations that we just own all of them and we just continue to scale that and so that was like the first deal we did and then and you own all of those as in like they're not franchised out or anything anymore wow okay cool and so then we uh we did a uh it was like oh that went well maybe we should do this again so we did another deal um and then that business went from like 16 and a half million in Top Line to 50 million in Top Line the next year and I was like okay that worked well um and then we did another deal another deal and so by the end of that that year we had done I think three or four I can't remember what it was three or four deals three Deals and I was like you know I think and we were going back and forth on selling gym launch because it was covered it wasn't like the ideal time to sell a gym company um but the flip side was like interest rates were zero uh and so there was tons of money in the market so it's like okay this is a great macro time to sell but a really bad micro time for the business to sell and but Leland I committed a few years earlier that we would sell the business if we felt like we no longer loved the business anymore and we'd both been in Fitness for 10 years and we were ready to just I didn't want to be the gym guy anymore and so and the fact that these other deals had gone well like I wonder how different like life would be if like those first deal or two didn't work out we probably wouldn't have sold but they did work out and so uh the day after we sold which was December 24th of 2021.

11:26um we started acquisition.com the next day and so uh then we had because we had you know we're probably taking 40 million in distributions up to that point and then we also had our sale money which was 46. um and uh we started our family office which is acquisition.com and so we uh buy and scale businesses that's really cool so Leila I know you're the CEO of acquisition.com what exactly is the type of workplace that you're trying to build there I'm trying to and it's really we you know because we're a small business I think um but you know technically the team reports to me but I mean we work on everything together uh really what we want to build is in terms of the type of place you know like you look at like traditional private Equity it's a very punishing environment um I think like it's run by fear they're pretty much like it's the golden handcuffs which is like all right I'm gonna get my two years at I won't say their names but like these top firms and then I'm out right because it's so unsustainable and so you know when we looked at doing what we were going to do I was like you know the only thing is like I just don't want to build a place that actually treats people like that you know I want to build a place where we don't just build companies we also build people because you know really behind the philosophy of acquisition.com there's really there's strategy and there's all the strategy that we deploy into the businesses in terms of how are we going to grow these things but who grows those is the people that are in their businesses and who directs the people on how to grow those function and the businesses overall is our team and so you know really the philosophy behind it is if we can build a place where we don't just achieve success of becoming you know a firm that does 10 billion by you know turning people out by paying them so much money that they feel like they can't leave um but by actually fostering an environment where people are constantly learning and developing and we're encouraging them and I think that there's a lot of talk against this in any time that it's like kind of risen in the management philosophies um it's so hard to apply and to understand that people just reject it and so my goal is to just build acquisition to 10 billion and then have people ask how we did it and then tell them that we did it this way and you don't have to be mean to people and pay people exorbitant amounts of money because it's such a terrible job you can engineer an environment where people like the business wins the people win and our partners win and that's really what it is I think that um the founder of Whole Foods he talks about that all the time uh John Mackey uh I think that's how you say his last time I always say it wrong um but he talks about creating a win-win-win and not even a win-win-win but like a win-win-win-win-win it's like a win for the community a win for the environment a win for the employees a win for the business a win for the you know business financials I went for the customers and we just take that Approach at acquisition.com it's like if it's not going to make a win for every single person that it touches then we can't do it just keep working and so the business itself exists to be an example of a win-win-win uh you know when for our portfolio companies a win for acquisition.com a win for our employees and you know it just makes it more enjoyable too because I think like I I can't imagine going and being the CEO of a company where I felt like people didn't want to be there like that just sounds awful to me I wouldn't want to be there so you know I think what we want to create is a place where people actually like working um and I think we're doing it yeah yeah so I mean it seems like acquisition.com when you're working with these companies you're effectively helping them scale you're helping them build out their systems their teams is your company set up from an operational standpoint the same way you set up the companies like do you have operators or is every employee at acquisition.com meant to be like a super sniper operator that can be inserted inserted into any business it's a good question so we essentially have a setup where um you know there's the executive team at acquisition.com which Services you know the internal things that we need to have done at acquisition.com um and then we have what we call like pods and so there's one portfolio operator with a team of what we call subject matter experts say uh you know uh managing director of people managing director of customer success managing director of sales managing director of marketing and they as a pod can service a certain amount of businesses they can do the value creation for those businesses in our portfolio and then you duplicate that and you know as of right now we're focused on like a you know more like Professional Services and a brick and mortar chains uh that's probably the two uh niches that we're focused on if we decide to Branch out into SAS then we would build that same structure but with people who have background and SAS so that's how acquisition.com is structured and then we bring in outside expertise and Consultants as needed for like special projects and the way that we've um built this is that a company comes in and you know if let's say a company's doing 10 million Top Line and 3 million bottom line so probably like 30 or so employees somewhere in there what we would then do is we will identify what department usually needs to go from zero to one it's usually just non-existent um and then we will go and actively head hunt and recruit some of the best people from businesses that are maybe you know two or three times the size of that business and put them into the business and then our subject matter expert will deploy our playbooks with that person so that way we can create the most Enterprise Value at the Port Co at the portfolio company level not at the holdco level and for us it's like each of these you know smes that we call them subject matter experts you know if they were sitting on the balance sheet of any of the portfolio companies it would definitely you know hurt the the P L but because we can fractionalize that and a lot of high-skilled Labor doesn't require tons of time it just requires defect it takes 10 years to learn you know where to hit the machine to that whole thing and so it's like we can we can consolidate that cost at hold cost so the actual profit is I want to say inflated but um just way better yeah yeah exactly because we can we can consolidate all this brain power and then copy and paste things the way we already know it's working and we can take learnings across the portfolio and so we're like hey uh you know this this sale setup is working really well in these three companies we just got a new portfolio company and let's let's deploy that here right we're like hey this New Media platform is doing really really well unless to play that Playbook and the rest of them so we just we can learn way faster and to play way faster a lot of companies a lot of personalities mixing right so when you're looking at some of the companies that you're acquiring if a company is coming in with like a sour work culture can that be fixed or is that something that might cause you to like walk away from a deal I think that the given the size companies that we're investing in you know these companies are typically like right just a little too small for private equity and so you know when they're coming in they have a sour work culture not because of bad practices but because of no practices they just truly don't have any standards in place any systems in place to ensure that they can have a good culture so it's like we're starting from Ground Zero now I think what's harder is when businesses get bigger and they have systems in place that promote a bad culture right I think that when they're small it's just kind of like you're just accidentally creating a culture because you have nothing in place when you get bigger you have put things in place and still have a bad culture because of the wrong things that's harder to turn around that's called a turnaround we don't we don't necessarily do that I think we've done it with one business and it's honestly a lot harder and it requires a different kind of skill to put the systems in place to promote a good culture because they kind of just have like whatever naturally occurs right yeah it's like a hodgepodge um you know that's that's something that we're good at doing but it does take time it does not happen overnight the culture is the piece that takes the longest and honestly it's like still what I'm trying to crack because you can change all the people around the founder but the founder themselves if they do not change like it's just really hard to change that yeah David I mean you you have a big team of like at the David Green Team is there a lot that you have to do to insert like what you see the the culture being or is that really something that you put more like on the operator level at your company no I haven't been able to get an operator to do that very well that's like why I'm stuck so that's really where I failed over the last four years over and over and over was taking myself out putting a person in they understand the organizational chart they understand the processes they understand what's happening as long as the money the revenue the deals flow in they can keep the whole thing going there's a change in the economy interest rates go up something changes the flow that was nice and they they don't know how to go and like lead the people into a new realm and then I will have to step back in but now it's like I'm out of shape because I've been in the gym in six months so it takes me a long time to like reacclimate myself to what's happening figure out who are the pieces that are working who are the pieces that have been slacking when no one was looking you get the whole thing running again and then that business over there is having the same problem and like I've just been bouncing around for the last several years because of exactly what you guys are describing it's that leader the one that can Inspire the culture and that's really what makes the business work is when people come to the one Brokers or the David Green Team because they hear me talk on the podcast and they're like I want his standards I want that guy's work ethic I want that guys eyes on my deal I want to feel the way he makes me feel when he talks about real estate and then when you put a person in your org chart to do a job but they don't Inspire that same level of confidence in the customer the conversions become a whole lot harder so it's what they're describing like is building the culture of leaders that all kind of adhere to the same standard the subject matter experts are really the ones holding that line it sounds like you're saying that are keeping everyone operating or is that not the role that they're playing um they hold the standard of what good looks like in each function yes I think that the portfolio operators who's like the leader of those subject matter experts is the one that more so is distilling that cultural piece um and so I think we're very I I've definitely developed a philosophy around that which is you know you know hiring people who are either have our values or are so open-minded that they can you know flux into our values that's what's been missing to your question exactly what you're saying just personal opinion um there's always like I always look at it like either we're going to be really good at hiring this person or like what we did at gym launch was like really good at building because like if you are used to investing in people then it's like maybe just bring someone in to be your successor and over a span of two years they watch you they're there with you and everything and you just keep them by your side and then two years in somebody with like very little experience can do it that is what I've tried I just picked the wrong person so they got a little taste of what it's like to be David Green's guy and their ego be insane right or they got a little taste of all this money and they're like oh great I don't have to work 70 hours a week to make it work anymore now I can cut back to 30 and enjoy my life and they're taking their foot off the accelerator before you've hit like escape velocity would be the way to look at it and I can admit that's I think when we actually did the first interview with you this is the hardest part for me is to be the guy who is like I was a police officer before this I'm very familiar with enforcing a standard or a law then you step into the podcast space and you're not a you're like a magnet of like hey you guys can do this and I have not done well bouncing between those two roles a lot of the people that will find come to me from the podcast and now I'm like crushing their soul when I'm like you have to step it up and I or if I if they're not from the podcast they don't understand the ethos that people have from the Bigger Pockets realm you guys are nodding like you understand the struggle I'm having here but I can admit I'm not good at it it's a skill in itself yes so between the both of you is there a difference between the way y'all wake up like is one of you really focusing on the internal uh operation of the company versus the external side of it yeah I mean it did everything that Layla talked about earlier in terms of like getting a win for acquisition.com getting one for our internal team and getting a win for the portfolio companies is what I would consider kind of like the internal mission of acquisition.com the external mission is very much the stuff that we put out there which is like to make real business knowledge accessible to everyone and so it is like if we can make the entire Marketplace better then we are net positive to the marketplace we can hopefully teach skills that then allow people to work at companies and you know quit the jobs they don't like to you know take jobs they do like and maybe even take jobs at acquisition.com or our portfolio companies um but yes Layla is absolutely internal facing I am external facing our days are almost Polar Opposites in terms of how we how we work what we work on how they're structured uh the hold code is small is not because it's a holding company it's not like we have a gazillion people there we probably have 20 something it's not big um and so it still functions like a small business in that way in that Layla and I will you know talk about big strategic decisions but for the most part we try not to change the strategy that much but you got to give time time sure well in episode 649 we spoke with you about scaling from zero to hundred thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars to three million and three million to Thirty million and so I want to sort of talk about setting up some of the operational Frameworks when you're in those phases um I started a company recently it's called Str cosseg and I feel like the partners and I we are all Visionaries and so we're at this point now where you know from a funnel marketing standpoint we've got the leads we've got a very warm set of emails uh we've had a lot of good conversions we've actually done really really great for the two months that we've been operating but for me I'm trying to understand who do I hire next what is the ROI of that person because it seems like I need someone that is somewhat of an operator but I also feel like I need someone to actually run the marketing and the follow-up to actually convert some of those leads you know I think we probably have similar ways of looking at this which is in the beginning the first thing is that when your business is small is that the reality is you need everything right yeah you don't have a head of marketing you don't have a head of sales you don't have to have a head of Cs it's like it's all just like open wound but the question is like which artery if clogged uh prevents the most blood loss that's the way I look at it right and so it's like okay where do we get the highest Roi if we put a person there and I think that often what a lot of people want to do is they want to get out of pain themselves and so in the beginning you do see a lot of people who have a skill in terms of say it's sales or say it's client acquisition and then they think well gosh this is taking up all my time I need to hire somebody however the question is can the business bear you stepping back bring someone in who's going to be 30 less effective at first right say that sales person you're closing at 80 they come in and they close at 50 it's like well can the business actually even support that and in the beginning the answer is usually no so the question is where are we going to get the highest Roi if we bring somebody in which is like what is the biggest constraint right now not saying it feels bad to me right because I think like often we're so often in pain that we're like I want someone to come in and take the sample my plate but like what's the biggest constraint on the business and so I would look at it from that perspective in terms of like what is not happening that if it were happening the business would be 10x better or what is happening that needs to stop happening to make the business 10 times better that makes sense yeah because the company is very profitable for for where we are we can certainly sustain hiring somebody and from a marketing standpoint I think the the stubborn thing for me that I always feel like is I'm good at marketing my stuff and it's very hard for me to relinquish that control so it almost feels like perhaps I can't walk away from that business quite yet but maybe if I put more of a project manager someone that's kind of pushing the daily agenda in line that would sort of complement my skill set a little bit can I throw this out there um is there a reason that you want to step away from the marketing not particularly just time and you know I have other businesses that I'm also I'm marketing a lot right you know I have four or five different companies that I market so that that's the tough part for me because you probably don't think you're not gonna stop marketing right so it's like I feel like a lot of times um like just as business owners entrepreneurs in general we do a lot of things based on like shoulds that someone else has told us at some point in our career and there's like could have been a whisper could have been at lunch at you know five years ago and you're just like oh this is fact and you like operate the rest of time until someone's like hey I don't know if that's true um but like you look at Dave Ramsey uh you know they're doing 300 million a year he still does his podcast every day um and so I think it's just like unless the goal is to exit the company if you enjoy doing the thing then it's like okay well then how can we get the most of you doing the thing because that is the highest leverage you know time for you and then it's like how do we clear everything else off of your calendar so that you can do the most of that anyways that's just like if we're looking at okay we're a big leverage points you know in the business and it's just it's just kind of funny because a lot of times we're like man I got to get out of sales and you're like well so you're an amazing sales manager and right now you're doing I don't know 600 000 a month uh maybe that's not that might not be the time right now like we might need to think about what are the other things on your time and take everything else off and then keep that and then we'll have even more resources because we'll be twice as big to then go get a killer who we can hire who has an amazing track record at a company that's twice as big who you know who knows this type of sale et cetera et cetera that makes sense for me I mean I feel like because yeah I just I would like to just show up in Market yeah and so because I'm doing a little bit of the operational side back and forth I feel like I can't really ever do the marketing side good and I can't do the operational side good and so yeah it's just always very painful to to hire is it always painful to hire well one thing I would say is also I just I I think that um at different levels in the business I think like a project manager is like that's everyone's go-to when they're not really sure what role so that's actually one that I think like vague roles like a project manager is actually where I see like usually what it means is that we're missing a roll over here a roll over here and then somebody right here is weak and we fill it in with like a project manager the drone's okay yeah drunk drawer um so I would just be be weary um in terms of hiring is a skill in itself so it's just like like dude I'm awful at real estate sorry um like for now yeah for now yes um yeah terrible awful like as good as business that that's how bad I am in real estate the opposite um but it's because I've never I've never applied my skill set it's not like I think I'm dumb and can't learn it it's that I've never taken the time and I think that you know I was forced to learn how to hire well because in gym launch we grew so quickly and I had to hire so many people so quickly I learned all these lessons that I think take honestly a lot of people decades to learn yeah yeah you know I've hired thousands of people at this point and that's just not something most people of my age have done and I think that it was in a compressed period of time which then I think even cemented the learning even more and so it is a skill you know I think that if somebody's not good at hiring sometimes it is best that you defer to a recruiting firm and watch what they do learn from them because I think a lot of times we we think we know what good looks like and we think that hiring is just like a thing you do to get people but it is a complete we have there are complete hiring departments there are multiple different roles that help people hire I mean it's an entire process of its own so just like there is client acquisition there is Talent acquisition and I think that Alex is very good at client acquisition and I am very Talent acquisition and they're honestly it's just flipping client acquisition all the things you do for that you do to acquire Talent it's just that most businesses in fact eighty percent of businesses do not match their external strategy with an internal strategy and so that's why Talent acquisition doesn't exist in most businesses and most people say well my business is too small for that and I'm like well how do you think your business gets big like by having that and so I think that it if it's treated as a skill of its own and one that is imperative to the growth of the business then I think people would see and and I guess that's what I strive to do is like to show people the importance of it um there's a lot of stats to back the importance of the people that we bring on how we bring them on the culture that we have as a team um but it's still I think it's starting to become more relevant when I even when I started making content I think you know two and a half years ago I felt like I was like speaking something that nobody talked about you know what I mean yeah yeah it's discusses it's almost like uh oh yeah you have to be able to hire people it's an afterthought yes it's something super interesting is that for every strategy for every three strategies that a company commits to saying like this is our strategy that we're gonna do for this year one here's your two here's your three two-thirds of strategies fail not because the strategy is wrong but due to execution and when they say well what makes the difference in companies that are able to actually execute these because that means that only 33 of strategies that we say we're going to do actually happen well there are some companies that are able to execute 78 of strategies what makes up the Delta is what people and I guess McKinsey defines this as the soft stuff which is Talent acquisition culture and people and so it's like you know I feel like I'm like I'm saying all stuff people like Layla is about the fluff I'm like oh my gosh this is not the fluff this will make you so much more money you will grow your business so much bigger yeah there's people that analyze the economy what the government's doing and they figure out what the overall environment looks like there's people that analyze an individual real estate investment and look at what's the income stream what are the expenses there's people that analyze businesses uh there's people that analyze stock opportunities there it's all some form of risk allocation like how do we know where this is going to work we've talked to so many people today and the biggest hurdle in all of their growth was hiring and yet you don't put that same effort into the analysis of humans which are the one thing you can't scale without once you get to that limit like where I kind of am if you were to think about it like you're really good at marketing and you probably have sales teams you've probably taken a lot of sales calls in your life and you take a thousand sales calls or 2 000 sales calls and then you think about that from the context of hiring it's like a lot of entrepreneurs have had like 30 interviews that they've actually tried to make a judgment be like man I suck at this it's like well it's reasonable that you suck out you've only done it 30 times yeah you know what I mean I tell people all the time if they're like you know Layla I don't think I need a sales manager and I'm like do me a favor I just want you to interview 10. and then tell me if you need one because they don't even know what a sales manager for their business should be doing yeah one of the other issues in the beginning is uh it's just ignorance not stupidity it's just that a lot of entrepreneurs really on don't know what good looks like and so like kind of like the operator it's like I just don't like you probably know what a good salesperson looks like you like like you've probably hired enough of them I mean just from what it sounds like in your business it's like well how many good operators have you ever hired and so it's just it's kind of like such a good point right so you have there's no there's no ideal scene to like look at you're like bring someone roll the dice again right like that I remember when I was trying to hire agents that could close my clients I would just I tried I failed I tried I failed they couldn't close it I hired one Johnny and he could do it and I was like that's what it looks like and then they all came after right like there's something about mentorship maybe where you're following someone else and you see what they're doing that you get this pattern in your mind of what that's a great point that you just made and I haven't hired I called a leader but it's an operator like what you're saying the person that can run and we've placed operators in what two-thirds of the portfolio more almost all of them except for like so you have a pattern in your mind of what that looks like all of them yeah so oh yeah I get basically I guess it is all of them we've taken an operator um and put them in because usually the entrepreneur is the one who starts who gets the fire going and gets to a certain point and they don't they don't like a lot of these things and what I'd say probably one of the bigger mistakes and this is one that we have made um earlier on was hiring hiring the project manager and calling them coo or calling them director of operations right and what it really is is somebody who you're like oh they're really deterrented they love Asana and they love like checking boxes and it's like that's actually not what an operator looks like well I think that's why I said project manager because it feels like going straight to operator or coo is too big of a role for where we're at I'm probably not but you know funny story uh my CEO that I was telling you about we're thinking about hiring his wife as a project manager so if he listens to this he's gonna be hurt again but a different a different way of describing it maybe would just be and this is I guess I'm I'm describing this as me watching what Layla all the companies because like I'm pretty good at acquisition and that's kind of been my hat for a long time um but when I'm at Layla I think I was doing two-ish million bucks a year um and just total revenue not making really any profit um but when she came in my life she had a totally different perspective on how to just treat people and how to actually run a business and it was not all the detail stuff in the Excel sheets and things like that that I thought it was going to be yeah it was just leadership it was like your Catalyst it was leadership and that was the thing it's just like when we're looking at operators we're like is this a leader like um does this person inspire me do I do I admire them well other people in the team admire them well like will they be you talk about setting standards it's like well if everyone on the team doesn't admire the character of this person and then emulate it then exactly and so that's where you get like more and more nuanced on oh we can you know we can pick this and it's been really cool because our director of people um like it's funny we probably have all these marketing stats and acquisition stats you're like you know your your CPL or CPA like all these different stats but the same level of rigor can be applied to Talent so it's like if I said hey what's your time to fill a lot of people would be like it's like what's your average time to fail and they're like I have no idea it's like okay what's your employees here and they're like I have no idea uh what What's the two-sided fit and it's like what is that right like two-sided fit is 90 days later the manager and the employee rate rate themselves on a scale from one to ten and say how how much of how how much of a perfect fit is this right if one person says zero and one person says 10 then you're a zero right and if both people say zero then it's a negative 10 and if both people say 10 then it's a 10. and so like right now our two-sided fit is 8.7 so that means that on average both people are saying 8.7 um on both sides of that equation 90 days later not just like you probably hired someone like it's the first week they're killing it they're awesome and then you know I I have this conversation over and over again like hey how's that marketing person they're like oh they suck anyway it's like I thought like two weeks ago yeah right so it's like you got to give it time to breathe yes um but having the archetype and then understanding the process and truly looking at it as acquisition like Talent acquisition where it's like I'm gonna draw a parallel so you've got lead gen on the customer side and then you've got application generation and they've got lead nurture on the on the customer side and then you've got application nurture right and then you've got sales on the customer side and you've got interviewing right and then you've got you know whatever the the offer is you also have the offer that you're gonna give them and then on the then you have onboarding for a customer you have onboarding for employees and then you have retention and Ascension for customers and you have retention and Ascension for employees and so the entire customer life cycle is actually mirror images we use different words for it yes but if we don't have patterns the same because it's people yeah right but you got me thinking very few people learn sales because they start off as a W-2 work or someone someone brings a house cat it's tuna it doesn't learn how to hunt right a handful of people can figure out how to hunt if they're hungry enough right but then of the sales people how many of them actually make it to the tier like you're saying of being able to fill who could actually replace me like that's kind of that's usually where I try to take off and then I fail and I come back down and I've been bouncing up and down it's just rare to have a human that can get that skill set because they don't stick with it like you guys did so if you could just clone yourself and make a whole bunch more laylas like the business world would be that'd be nice yes find your Layla two uh entrepreneurs yeah that's it um so okay so you have your you have husbands and wives you've got work husbands and work wise for you all it actually ends up being the same um Dave is my work husband as much as he doesn't want to admit it and uh I'm curious you know like I am actually at a point my wife does not work at the moment she really does want to work doesn't necessarily she's not super passionate about real estate but she wants to be a part of the business right what are your thoughts on you know involving your spouse and your work I mean I feel like y'all can probably speak to this nose goes oh got him um I think it was different for us because when we met we both were incredibly like voraciously focused on our careers slash businesses um and it just so happened that they were in the same industry and we had similar views on what that looked like and like what we want our futures to look like I I have a lot of people that come to me and say like how can I get my wife like interested in in the business and I don't really have an answer because it's like I it wasn't like that it was like you know what I mean um you liked it right I liked it on my own and then I met Alex does it sound like he's saying how do I get this employee that doesn't really want to be in this role to like the role is that the same yeah it's like you know if she herself has voiced interest then I think that you make it easy for her to acquire knowledge about it but I think that people have to autonomously like if someone's really actually interested then they'll be like can I come to work with you can I Shadow your calls can I do all this start taking things from you they start I can do that I can do that I can insert themselves yeah and so just like anybody else would I don't look at it like oh it's your wife I look at it like it's a person if they have interest then they'll find those ways to do it and they'll be very eager um I think that a lot of people have a great marriage and then say well could we also do this together I don't know you know um I think that there's so many things that we learned in the beginning and that you know our natural skills that fit together uh eliminated a lot of friction but there was still friction you know I think in the beginning of working together even though we had similar Mission values uh complementary skill sets like still learning to work together was a skill of its own uh it's an ongoing thing that we have to continue to learn and get better at and I feel like I feel like every year I'm like gosh we've gotten so much better um because it just continues to like it's it's not you're never finished right and so I think you know we had a very a different kind of scenario I think that there's a lot of people who want to enter that but I mean like it's kind of like I said earlier like you you pay the toll like there's a toll that's paid which is a learning curve and I think it's not a matter of like weeks or months it's it's years of learning how to work with your spouse you know I was just going to say that I think we actually fell in business love before we fell into like romantic love and I've said this publicly before but like I think Layla and I both loved each other the day we got married but I feel like I like felt more in love with her the more we did business together um because business was like our first date was only about business and it was four hours long I didn't even ask her about anything else because she was like oh I'm like oh you see this stuff he's like oh yeah I heard about these Facebook ads this is years ago right and I was like oh yeah I'm running those she's like what you know I mean like that was the whole like that was four hours right um and at the end of the date I pitched your own working for me I was like hey this might not work out but you should totally work for me did you still have the hangover it's like the first time I drank in like two years uh no I felt okay that day and and at this at this time she had a book of business already so like she knew how to hunt she knew how to kill she had a full client roster as a personal trainer and I was a gym owner just a few steps you know like a few career steps ahead I was also older than her um and so it seems divinely inspired that you guys got married I'm sitting here listening to talk thinking like you couldn't have created in a lab better partner for each other I yeah I I think that it was it's very much like when people say like how do you win the game it's like you win in the draft so what I had two questions one is do you feel like you fell for her as a business partner before a romantic partner because your love language is business making money success you've mentioned that before right which led me to the next question I was thinking is we typically do it the other way where we want romantic Sparks we want butterflies and we're like I'll make all the Practical stuff work but I really want to be attracted you took the opposite approach and from what we see now it looks like the romantic stuff happened still like you didn't have to just wander through life until you found that person that exploded with passion do you think that's good advice for people in general that are trying to figure out who to marry I will say that it has worked exceedingly well for us and so I think Layla and I talk about this just on our own time a lot we're like all the relationships that we had before this kind of were those you know crazy chemistry all that stuff and in the beginning of really nice relationship like literally on a second day she was like I just feel like you're like a friend type of guy oh friends yeah second date and uh he hadn't kissed me and I was like what the hell yeah was that your way of trying to tell him you needed to do something different yeah I love it okay um and then I just gave like the most sickening Belly Laugh of all time yeah and then it's never first time my entire life I'd ever been like my entire life that any girl had been like you seem like a friend classic I have you've never been friends like I I actually respect you yeah and that was what it was you know I was like I just like I was like I enjoy talking to you yeah and I was like I don't feel like I have to like pretend to wait for you to stop talking so that I can try and talk about something that I find more interesting and so it's not like okay your turn now to talk about your day I was like I just want nothing to do with that like it just killed me inside and so I just liked hanging and um I think we hung out every day after the first date uh and we didn't go on any dates for like a month and until finally was like you have not taking me anywhere but we spent all day I was like I'm gonna be working in here if you want to meet me there and then she would just work next to me and that was what we did after like the first date and then I was like I'm gonna start this thing called gym launch and she was like okay I was like she quit you should quit your job do my thing you know and uh still like she didn't and then I did the thing and came back and I was like look it worked and then she was like I've heard me mentioned the moment that you were like that's a girl for me I don't remember the details of the story but I had something to do with her going overseas or out of town to go crush a gym that you had just started and you hammered the getting the sign ups you basically filled it with lifeblood so that it could exist and that was when like it clicked for you yeah like there was something different did the Romantic part change at that point do you remember it didn't it didn't change at that point like this it made too much I have too much sense is the right word but it was like I she had basically like eternally earned my respect at that point like I already respected her but like when she had gotten into that really tough spot or I was in that really tough spot and basically you know at any other point I would have expect it would have been reasonable for any other person just like walk away because we split up and she went and so she had quit her job to join me do this thing six months later I'm like I don't know if I can do this I'm so overwhelmed I've got nine businesses none of them making money you know I've got some of you stole from all the stuff that's going wrong I just had a DUI my mother's in the hospital I'm just like I have nothing left and so she was like well I'm gonna go do the launch that we're supposed to do and then she broke every record she still has the all-time record for the biggest launch and it was like she stood tall yes um when was tough and I think that's where I was like well wherever I want to go I'm going to need someone like that I think that's where all my best friends came from those moments when you don't feel strong you feel vulnerable you know you need somebody and they show up for you like it creates a bond that is deeper than just an attraction that can come and can go she made 100 Grand in 24 days at a time when you needed it every night at any other time right every dollar of it do you ever go to bed at night and just think like how awesome you are at that moment this is because you like it was like yeah you have a mirror on the ceiling you know two strikes ninth inning bottom of the ninth and you hit the home run that led to the New York Yankees becoming the biggest brand but to to I was just gonna full circle it which is just like a lot of people are going through the the dating side of this or they're in the marriage that there's two different seasons on this like if you were on the dating side I do not give advice because I think so much of like there's so much individual variation that goes into relationships and whatnot we can only comment on the fact that like this was a very different Dynamic for both of us and it just so happened to have worked out and all I can share is that like if you think about something all day long every day then it is very helpful to have someone else who also thinks about the exact that's your love language like right like not many people could have figured out how to how to hit your love language there yeah just talk to me about business all day what about from your side like what advice would you give to guys that are trying to figure out how do I get a girl in my life they can also work with me how do I figure out if we're partners I think the first piece of advice that I would give is like what I'm so grateful for with our relationship is that we've never compared it to anyone else's and I think that even people comparing their relationship to ours you're going to lose no because you can't be Alex and Layla and I think what we've never subscribed to is like any traditional relationship Norms rules is this okay is that okay is is this bad is this good one day per week we literally will say we're like put in the counter we don't care if it's good or bad we like it and it works for us and so I think everyone has to find that in their relationship and I wish everyone can could just release Judgment of their relationship and if you like it and it works for both of you then keep doing it I don't care what that looks like I don't think anyone else does but I think that we're so busy comparing ourselves and looking at you know people only see us on social media and I I do think that we're pretty transparent but at the same time it's like you know no one relationship looks the same and so it's just hard to you just have to stop judging yourself for whatever you do have if it's working for you yeah maybe it works better in other places that ours doesn't you know what I mean you're just seeing one side you're like hear us on this podcast you're like man wouldn't that be nice but maybe maybe if something else that we don't have you know what I mean like we just don't know it doesn't exist yeah and we're good with that yeah it works for us though um before we wrap up today I did want to ask you know you mentioned Dave Ramsey a little bit earlier did you recently have like a light bulb moment in how you invest your money well I saw a podcast that he did with graham Stefan how I remember when it was but Graham had him look at uh his Investment Portfolio and he was asking Dave to just analyze it yeah and before Dave looked at it he was like well what I can tell you is having talked to all the billionaires that I know um they all tend to do one thing that they like and they're good at and they just do a lot of it and so he asked the follow-up question to Graham he said okay if this if this pie chart this circle where your total knowledge and experience and resources and connections what percentage of it would be like Stocker Market stuff what percentage of it would be real estate what percentage would be business Etc and he's like well shoot I probably say 85 of my knowledge is about real estate and when he looked at the Circle 85 of his assets were real estate and he's like well then I think this is a perfect distribution for you yeah and that one bit was what ultimately gave me it felt like gave me permission to do what we kind of wanted to do but didn't feel like it was right because to the point about we're talking about relationships you know I had spoken to all the guys that I knew who had you know who were at 500 a billion and and up who were ahead of me and I was like what should I do with this money like how should I invest it like all this stuff in literally every single person had an entirely different strategy right and so I was like maybe I should get hard money lending maybe I should get into you know like Fix and Flip stuff maybe I should just buy apartment buildings maybe maybe we should do business invest but wait are we doing business what won't we just start another business you know like I was going through all this stuff and I just didn't know what to do um but when I thought about that I was like we like business and we're good at business and so let's just if I were to draw that Circle it would be a hundred percent business yeah and so our circle of assets though high risk from the outside when you're buying companies that are doing two to five million in profit a year which is usually around the the size that we come in um those are from an investor class asset considered risky uh you know risky risky Investments um but you know to quote Warren Buffett it's only risk if you don't know what you're doing right and a lot of times I'm sure there's real I mean to be fair there's always there's always bodies you know what I mean but if at least if you know which closets are going to have the bodies then you're like oh I know there's gonna be bodies there yeah and you don't get I mean sure we still get surprised every once in a while but you have fewer surprises and the Damage that you suffer from the surprises continues to go down and down and so you can get outsized returns because you have an information Advantage yes and so that's that was the the piece that Dave gave us and then that's why acquisition we're like well what are we really good at we're really good at scaling brick and mortar really good at scaling Services both consumer service Professional Services it's like that's what we're gonna buy man I I watch you do that I'm just looking at this white board in front of me that you actually have the market very missed opportunity I should have to illustrate it that's great advice though because everybody else is looking for what they're doing wrong what's the secret oh I'm do I'm making money this way but it could be better if it was over here and they're bouncing around no one asked the question you said what are you good at what are you happy doing you make money in that and like it's going to be a much lighter lift when when that's what you're doing and if I can tack onto that like let's say you've been doing something for like three years and you're making some money at it right in my opinion the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs will make at that point is that they then look at the greener grass on the other side of the fence and say man wholesaling is actually the thing I shouldn't be doing flipping I should be doing wholesaling and so what they do is that and that's actually even a little bit too close they you know they say crypto trading or whatever right something a little bit more outside of the loop and then what they think is they see they have uninformed optimism right so they go into it being like this is going to be amazing and then right after that they get you know six months in and they're like I now have informed pessimism about this opportunity and then they go into the valley of Despair and that's usually where they're at your three-ish right but the thing is is like the next part of that Loop is informed optimism is it like okay I remember the things that I used that that got me into this and those things are true but there are these other other things that you also have to account for and then you get to the fifth step which is just like Mastery achievement of the goal whatever it is and so most people just do step one two three over and over again uninformed optimism inform pessimism value of Despair switch on an uninformed optimism inform pessimism value of Despair switch and so like the thing is is that when you're at your three the gains that you get from your three to your four are greater in terms of uh absolute return than the gains that you get from year zero to year one now you'll learn more in the first year than you do in every any other year but the time that you get the outsized return is you're 10 to 11 is your 14 to 15 and that's where like when you're if you're thinking about like business value it's way easier to take a business that's doing 20 million a year and take it to 25 million a year then take company from zero to five million but in terms of absolute of like which one of these is going to make you wealthier the 20 to 25 is boring as it might be is going to make you way wealthier than going from zero to five and so like a lot of people start over when they really just need to push further yeah I love that so yeah you're always going to be asking if the grass is greener there's always on the other side you always want to know what does tasty wheat taste like a callback is from The Matrix yeah I know yeah you don't have to explain your idea I think I was like you don't know if I get your The Matrix I've been sitting on that one for 50 minutes there will be an opportunity for tasty wheat uh well awesome well before we wrap up can you tell us a little bit about your new book coming out yeah a little preview yeah yeah for sure so uh the first book 100 million dollar offers has sold just under 500 000 copies with no advertising thank you uh pretty pumped about that just Word of Mouth which has been cool um and that book answered the question what do I sell right it's like what do I sell to anyone right and that's usually when someone gets into the entrepreneur Journey that's what they're trying to figure out the next thing is like okay I know what I'm gonna sell but who do I sell it to you need leads right and so that was the reason I put offers before I put leads even though the I I wrote all of these like this book and that book actually at the same time but I was like I have to put offers out first and so leads um shows how to get I'm gonna I'm gonna rewind if I said hey what is a lead right people are like oh I know delete is we talk about leads all the time but I had a friend of mine who's not at all in business and very smart be like what's a lead and I was like uh you know like uh like some like a name and uh and a phone number and he was like so is an Instagram follower a lead and I was like well I I get I mean yeah I guess that that is also a lead he's like what about a YouTube subscriber and I was like well that I guess that's not that's not really a lead he's like why not and that discussion became like the the the pillar that leads was built off of which is Elite is a person you can contact period that's what it is but then when you realize that that's the definition of a lead you realize you don't actually want leads you want to engage leads you want someone who's shown interest in the stuff you sell who you can also contact and getting someone from a lead to an Engaged lead you create something to make them make take that switch and then from there it's like okay if I know how to get people to engage uh what do I do to do that it's like well you have to advertise and so there's there's four ways that any one person can advertise and there's four ways you can get other people to advertise on your behalf so there's only eight ways you can get other people to know about your stuff and so uh fortunately um we've actually built we've we've done over eight figures in sales in each of these eight types obviously in some of them more than that but uh and so I feel really confident that I know how to build referral systems that generate real amounts of traction now how to build affiliate systems that build real amounts of traction how to run paid ads know how to make content I know how to do cold outbound right like uh I know how to run an agency to do these things on behalf know how to get employees to do these actions on our behalf and so these are all the different ways that you can get other people to know about your stuff and if you just know one of them you can make good money if you know how to do a couple of them you can pretty much just write your own check and that for me Bridges the gap for especially the newer entrepreneurs who are coming in or the more experienced entrepreneurs are like okay I'm at a million a month 10 million a month like what does that look like and so the book starts chronologically with like you have nothing and then the end of the book basically Paints the pictures of how do I have 100 million dollar plus lead machine and just step by step how to build it and so it took two years two thousand hours um of writing time so six hours a day for two years wow it was the first six hours of my day every day to write the book I'm incredibly proud of it and I do think it'll be bigger than offers awesome offers which is also a staple in the business Community this is Daniels not mine but I look forward to pre-ordering that where can people get it when does it come out give us some of those details acquisition.com forward slash leads leads um is where the event I'm going to be doing a live launch so it's going to be a big thing August 19th yeah you said it's going to be like the like a huge thing yeah we've got 263 000 people who've registered so far wow um so it's um we'll see what happens I was like I just hope the tech Works nothing breaks the whole vibe is like that but no one will that just happened to on Twitter didn't someone just there's like so many instances is it Tucker Elon Musk somebody was like announcing no DeSantis was announcing he's running for president oh really and Twitter's servers couldn't handle it it was like a huge thing in the news you've clearly been writing so much that you didn't catch it you've been hiring rock stars so you don't know what's going on we've put we've put a million bucks into this event just into the event um and we're we've got another project I've been working on for four years that I've not told a soul about that will be releasing live to everybody there and a little preview what is it just for the podcast absolutely so all I can say is that it's uh it's more than a gift card and it's less than a Tesla and every single person who's there will get one our team doesn't even know I think it's like a series did you hire Oprah to hand it out whatever it is it will be it will be if if that Oprah episode met entrepreneur ownership that's what it would be like I'm stoked but it will only be for people with their life so it's going to be it's gonna be fun yeah awesome well if people want to learn more about you where can they learn about your socials YouTube Instagram all that kind of stuff I'm pretty sure if you just search hor MOSI yeah Alex and myself will pop up on all platforms yeah anywhere any actually I think we're on almost except for Snapchat we're on every platform so yeah LinkedIn Twitter Instagram threads uh that's right yeah YouTube and the threads man yeah yeah I was I was yeah because I'm a Twitter guy he's a writer I think the first thread you you posted I was like yeah can you just do these so we know who to copy yeah that's funny oh but yeah that's that's where we're at in acquisition.com is uh if you've got a you know company doing two to five million in profit or even a year we'd love to see if we can open or if you want a job because we have rolled out what's called MOSI Talent so people who are looking for work uh basically if they subscribe to MOSI Talent then they get pers first dibs at any of the jobs in our portfolio companies or at acquisition.com cool my last question for you guys we've been asking everybody this today my social media handle is davidgiving24. I've been getting roasted by all these marketers that say boom boring and nobody likes it your guys's professional opinions how terrible is it and can I just keep it we're wondering if he should drop the 24 uh someone suggested earlier maybe he had the seven so it's David Green 24 7.

1:00:06thoughts you won't hurt my feelings oh no I think it's just on brand yeah I think if if you've been writing it this long it's funny yes that might be just be part of the brand yeah we're laughing with you bro yeah I don't know if you can get your handle at this point because like trust me I try to get mine they're like yeah you know for 300 Grand yeah I'm like yeah someone told me hostage my URL for 20 grand and I was like no no I have I have the UR I have the website but if I switch it now I gotta go like try to get the all the new stuff right and I am kind of a straight shooter I'm not really known for being this big marketing scheme so it's so you guys are saying David not a because I think it's kind of quirky if you keep the 24. okay that's a good thing it's all right okay yeah I suggested thy David Green that's been shot down in every room we're in so bye David given right now well then there's also like the real David green but I said you should do the realist or the real real I'll just give a funny anecdote on this so I I used to I used to poo poo everything brand related and was like it's just Quan right it's just conversion and all that stuff and so our supplement company I called Prestige labs and I did it out of jokingness out of Prestige Worldwide which was right and it was because my whole point was that like the name doesn't matter Xerox is made up you know I mean like we ascribe meaning to it after the fact and so you know I I don't think that's one bit Acme supplements yeah I don't think it matters one star restaurant from Michelin tires yeah that's true yeah awesome if you want to find David on the socials David Green 24 or possibly Thai David Green we'll see we'll see whether we land with that you can find me at Raw built over on threads uh Instagram YouTube oh wow I'm tired now unfortunately well thank you guys thank you guys for having us thanks for coming out awesome interview and thanks for sharing so much of your personal lives as well I mean obviously people like to hear the business stuff but I think there are a lot of human beings that are hearing this and thinking oh I'm not crazy I don't have to do what other people are doing I can look for a partner that fits into my life from a practical element before we run off and try to get into a honeymoon and I don't have swipe 7 000 people on Tinder to find the one that hopefully ends up working out there's a better Bud [Laughter] chase that beautiful butterfly and that was our interview with Alex and Layla or Mosey Rob I know you're on cloud nine right now what was your favorite part of that interview well you know I think they really stressed the importance of hiring and hiring intentionally you know I kind of brought the question of hiring a project manager and bringing them on to my team and uh it's really funny because this is a role that I'm also needing to hire on the real estate side but it seemed like what they were saying is you know uh project managers effectively are the junk drawer position because most people think of it incorrectly like a project manager is there to keep timelines and set deliverables and all that type of thing and all those types of things but what they were saying was people just sort of backfill every role position and call it a project manager and I am 100 guilty of doing that I was like I need a project manager on the real estate side and I need a project manager for my coseg company but really it sounds like they want me to drill down and hire specific roles that I I actually need to feel like an Acquisitions manager a dispositions manager an underwriting manager all that type of stuff and I was definitely just thinking of it as one grand position so pretty eye-opening for me uh it'll definitely have some pretty big implications on The Hires that I make here in the next like week or two what about you what I thought about with that project manager was when you hire someone and they're not doing their own job they're not making sure the Project's getting completed they're just giving you excuses for why it's not we think we need to hire a project manager but what that really means is we need to hire a babysitter for the other person I'm already paying so now you've created a salary to pay someone to make sure that other people that you're paying are doing their jobs and now if the project manager is not making sure that the first person is doing their job you now have two salaries to get nothing done and I could just see how quickly companies can run out of money when you start throwing money at problems rather than hiring people that are held accountable to getting a result so that that jumped out at me especially with real estate sales really any kind mission-based job it's very easy for employees to say well I'm doing my best but they're really not there's doing as much as they're willing to do and now you're hiring a project manager which is just a Band-Aid for the fact you made the wrong hire I think that's what they were saying is if you have to hire a project manager you might have the wrong person in that job because someone who's taking responsibility for the outcome that you want doesn't need to be babysat they don't need someone to make sure they're doing it I thought that was fantastic especially when it comes to real estate how many times have we hired a contractor whose job is to oversee the subs then you got to hire a project manager to oversee the contractor to make sure that the subs are doing their job you're just throwing money at these problems that aren't getting fixed that actually just happened to me on on a flip that I'm doing right now I brought in I was trying to bring in a project manager and we're trying to write out like their roles and responsibilities and we were just like I mean what do they really do I guess they're going to manage the project and when I told my contractor about this I was like hey yeah you know they're going to help manage the uh the project he was like I mean I can do it man he's like all the stuff you're saying that you're gonna hire them to do that's my job and I was just like oh and I wasn't used to having a contractor that was actually good at their own project management so it was a pretty interesting uh follow-up I mean this just happened to me after this conversation with the hormozis so it's kind of nice to to see all the the dots connecting in the world of real estate yeah and you can tell how Alex isn't necessarily a real estate investor but business is business and real estate investing is a business owning a property is like owning a business and owning 10 properties which is a portfolio is like having a portfolio of businesses and it's business principles that determine if we're good at what we do or not he talked about lead follow-up as one of the key things that business owners miss out on when it comes to lead generation he even wrote the book about it in my real estate business lead follow-up is crucial in Deal finding when I'm when I'm in buying mode I'm always following up with offers that I wrote and seeing if they change their mind and I frequently will get good deals in fact when we bought our Scottsdale house we use that Technique we wrote the offer they said no and we're like all right let's let's let them wait this is what I want you to say call in three days and say this call two days after that and say this and then if they say that that's when we're nowhere in a good place lead follow-up is crucial and these principles apply no matter what you're doing uh the the whole idea of win-win-win and why culture matters I thought was really good also that you need to make sure everyone wins that's a mistake I made in business many times where I put myself in a position where the employee was winning but I wasn't so they were getting paid regardless of how they performed so win for them they get a paycheck but it's not a win for me well then you don't stay in business or I've had times where I'm winning with the structure of the uh business but they feel like they're not motivated enough so they don't think they're winning they're not going to work you really do have to tweak with this thing over and over and over until you get a win-win-win is that something you noticed in your business life as well yeah this whole episode just made me realize how lazy I've been about weren't workplace culture because my teams are small you know I've got several different companies but within every single company I mean my team can be anywhere from like one person to three people I think my biggest team is like 10. and so in my mind running these businesses I'm like well we're not really that big of a company to where culture is all that important and I think talking to them sort of made me realize that I should really be fundamentally trying to create that from the beginning because it only gets tougher to fix and adjust the bigger the company gets yeah the same thing is true with your portfolio like you just gotta remember that a company and a real estate portfolio are different versions of the exact same thing and the principles that work in real estate work in business and vice versa I thought it was funny that when we asked Layla about real estate investing she kind of made a joke and she's like oh no I'm terrible at it but it's just a flame favor of business that they don't have as much experience with they understand gyms they understand like some of the other structures that they're comfortable with I'm sure they'd be good at real estate investing if they really gosh yeah they'd be better than us but why would they right if they're able to scale with businesses instead of needing because you know how it is real estate is all about delayed gratification is is a get rich slow scheme for sure and they've got a system figured out that I think is much more complicated and much more risk intensive and not not passive income is active but it works for them so that's why they're doing what they do and we were very lucky to have them come in I don't know that they've ever done an interview together like that first time I've seen it but yeah anything I've seen online right where you get you got both sides going deep into deeper things not giving service level questions so this was awesome yeah well I'm excited I'm gonna go start a business now you implementing everything they talked about yeah just don't name it acquisition.com I don't know why Alex picked a word that no one knows how to spell so many vowels in that thing you got to pick something easier jobs.com I'm sure that I'm sure that URL is taken I'll go daddy in a second you're probably right all right this is David Green for Rob the GoDaddy Abba solo signing up [Music] thank you …