Wie Alex und Leila Hormozi ihre Firmen führen

0:00on today's podcast i had alex and layla hormozy on they are the owners of acquisition.com portfolio of companies doing over 100 million dollars a year in revenue and we talked about how they go about running their businesses um if you don't know who they are they are social media superstars and entrepreneurs alex wrote a best-selling book on amazon's got almost 5 000 reviews they sold their company for almost 47 million dollars they're just doing a ton of crazy stuff and in fact they are literally the only people i watch on social media because so much of what they say is applicable to me whereas you know most content you see is very generic and you know i guess lower level and so to hear the tactical things they're doing in their businesses and for their portfolio of companies is really crazy and really interesting so i think you're getting a ton of value out of this episode now let's jump into it welcome to the ryan pineda show where our mission is to invest i only expect to make money and things that i understand innovative it's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past can inspire i am much more likely to hit my goal just due to putting it out there you're now rocking with the best what's going on everybody welcome to another episode of the ryan pineda show today i actually have our most requested guest ever alex is pointing at layla i have none other than i'll just say the hormozys what's up what's up thanks for having us yeah it's good to see you yeah it's good to see you guys um you know you literally have been the most requested guest and um it's funny because i don't really watch much content or youtube and i came across alex's channel when he first really started getting it going i think around like 20 000 subs and i was like dude this guy is super smart like how does nobody like know about him yet and i was like i told a bunch of people i was like go watch this guy's sales training i've given it to my sales team and everything and you know sure enough started just rolling and growing and then i found out we shared um a similar guy with our tick tocks and i was like oh dude like link me up with this guy because it's great and then you started producing content too and it was just like now i don't even know six nine months later you guys have exploded yeah people find my stuff and then they find layla stuff and then they stop consuming my stuff it's definitely different stages in the journey in avatars yeah i would say bigger companies in general probably consume more of layla stuff uh because i'd say like more of my stuff is uh tends to be more promotional in nature and like monetization pricing strategy etc with probably some elements of viewpoints and perspectives that are probably unique we were talking about earlier but like layla's is so like this is how you scale a company and it's a lot of the stuff that people don't know which is like how do you hire how do you recruit how do you build culture how do you incentivize how do you build constructors how do you you don't mean like all these other things that are actually necessary to build a company that people have no idea exist and usually it's those bigger companies that that are attracted to that type of thing yeah when i watch alex's um i think you talk very tactical and you know everything's really great but you also go a lot into philosophical things right yeah and whereas layla's like boom this is how you do it like what are you doing like this is very much to the point here's how it goes yeah i think alex speaks a lot more to entrepreneurs specifically i think his content is like for someone who's an up-and-coming entrepreneur or someone who's aspiring to be an entrepreneur i think like your content just like really speaks to them mine is not that way and that's because that's not the nature of my role in the company so i think i'm a lot more like the ancillary roles around somebody like alex yeah so for those people who don't know you guys you want to give a quick rundown of who you guys are yeah uh so we are married we own acquisition.com before that six years ago we started a company called gym launch which was where we would fly around and do gym turn around so kind of like gym rescue like bar rescue we did that for a year and a half we did 32 gym turnarounds in that period of time and we realized it was a very difficult business to scale and so then we flipped from doing an in-person turnaround business to licensing and that was when the business really went from you know a few hundred thousand dollars a month to a few million dollars a month uh in a very short period of time and so um that business took off in 2018.

4:18um in 2019 we started our supplement company prestige labs which sold through that distribution base so we ended up growing to over 4 500 locations that licensed our materials for basically it was a white label franchise that was kind of the idea so how can we give franchise level support but allow them to keep their autonomy in their brand for like a micro gym owner and so that was jim launch prestige labs was the supplement company that was the physical products arm behind that so they could all stock their stuff and you know we solved a lot of problems that specifically gym owners were struggling with which is what prestigious lodge was was great for and give really really competitive affiliate commissions and so that was an entirely affiliate-based company and that company did really well or still still does and then the third company we started was allen which was a software company that solved the problem of working leads and so most brick and mortar gym owners get leads from marketing or running ads whatever and they don't work the leads and so it was like this huge issue for acquisition for them and so we saw where kind of chat was going we saw where machine learning was going we figured we could bridge that gap for them and we ended up being able to double the amount of leads that would show up on average to a gym and then if we found out that we actually used it on any brick and mortar business and so that ended up doing really well and so we exited all three of those last year so we exited the software company in june of 2021 and then we exited prestige labs and gym launch in december of 2021 so we sold uh two-thirds stake of gym launch and prestige labs to apg which is a private equity firm for 46.2 million and then um and then we started doing acquisition.com kind of at the same time because that's what we kind of wanted to do next so we started that i think the first company we took on was in 2020 june of 2020 or may of 2020.

6:04yeah you know it was let's take on one or two which we know we could deliver we could do really well with without distracting ourselves from the sale yeah but we didn't want to actually full-on start another company because our whole goal was that we knew that we had split focus you know we had started multiple companies and we do really well with the two of us on one company and so the goal was to divest our majority interest in those companies and then just full-on focus on the new thing and there's so many things that can happen when you sell a company that we were like dude we're not gonna full on start it until we know that we've sold the other ones yeah and i can attest to this because i actually had your coo now ceo um reach out to me it was pretty much like after we had first talked maybe like what was that six months ago or so and um he was like hey you know i was a baseball guy too you know i know you're a baseball guy yeah kale and i was like oh tight he's like yeah you know i'm the ceo at gym launch and i was like oh dude i just talked to alex for the first time like you know let's link up and so we we got on a zoom um and i had him get on a zoom with my ceo for my education company i'm like how are you guys getting customers at gymlodge tell me how you're doing your sales team and like he kind of explained everything to us like he sat there for an hour and like i was like wow there's so many things we don't currently do that we can do so much better at especially like on the outbound side yeah that sounds great any outbound at all oh that's super cool i didn't know that you they linked up that's fine i didn't know either he's a savage yeah kill's a machine yeah he is a machine well he's a baseball guy of course yeah he's just like you know it's funny because people like oh you sold the company congratulations you guys are amazing and i'm like dude it was like we couldn't have done it without maggie and kale yeah and so you know because obviously anyone that's buying if they want to see two founders exit that have like the faces of the company you have to have people who are really strong to take their place and so they're great yeah why um what was the reason for selling two-thirds like why not sell the whole thing or keep the majority so we believed that gym launch was i mean we still do that jim lunch is going to be a lot worth a lot more in the future than it is today um and so we wanted to have as much so the i think if you if you zoom out the question is what problem are we solving and so for us the problem that we're solving was not liquidity because you know we've probably taken 45 million dollars in distributions up to that point from those two you know those three companies up to that point so like we had like we didn't need the money um but it was much more we needed the headspace and so we needed to not be responsible for all of that stuff um and that might have just been a story that we're telling ourselves but at least we because it was so inextricably linked with our faces leading into it i still kind of had an identity that was attached to it um and i probably could have done like more pondering and things like that to try and work on it but like the shortcut was we'll sell two thirds we'll still have a big chunk of the business um and we'll be able to do the thing that we kind of wanted to do next which was acquisition.com and if we if the if the first two companies that we took on weren't as successful as they have been i don't know if we would have sold but the you know the first two companies and uh well you know all the companies don't run very well but the first one first two that we've had the longest have just really really done well and so we're like all right this is uh this is what we really want to do and then you know we built acquisition.com and so now that does about 13 million a month between the portfolio companies so explain to everyone like what acquisition.com is yeah so we work with internet businesses typically i'd say the majority of our businesses are e-learning and training companies um as a whole it's probably 80 and then 20 are just i would say generic service service-based businesses um and that's at least the split that hasn't been purposeful but that's been um what it's been up to this point and uh you know we know those spaces really well and so minimum size is 3 million i think the biggest company we have does you know about 6 million a month and so there's a big range there uh in terms of size so you know on the small side it's 250 a month and it's on the high side it's 200 000 a day right so it's a little bit different um but you know we just we've done that you know 3 million to 30 million jump uh six times now and so we just really know what that looks like and so we look for businesses that are right at that range that have a good uh leadership team that have really deep expertise within some sort of thing that they're teaching because that's a big lever like how good you are at the thing matters a lot now we know the businessing around that to really optimize and and scale it and drive profitability and add acquisition channels increase lifetime value decrease turn all that kind of stuff but um taking companies from 3 to 30 that are internet-based founder-led businesses is kind of the bread and butter and so that's what we do at acquisition so you know your target is to get a you know business currently doing three million maybe minimum minimum right and you know obviously you get the biggest return taking them from 3 million to 30 million plus right so selfishly i have a couple of companies like that in the um internet space so what are the biggest bottlenecks you see to go from three to thirty yeah yeah um you know if i were uh looking at i think to go from three to thirty first off as they're typically missing they don't even have the completed first layer of leadership and then in order to get you need that in order to get to usually 10 to 15 and then you're gonna need that second layer of leadership in order to get to 30. and so it's typically building out you know to get to 10 you usually need like one high level executive and then you need to fill out that like manager level leadership team and then in order to get to 30 you need to have really both of those levels so that's the first thing in terms of people in terms of like the other pieces of the business their product packaging and pricing is usually not optimized at all so typically we have to redo the whole structure so all their offer structure all the product all the pricing all the packaging it's just not optimized they don't typically they don't they're under charging or they're not charging for the right things they don't know what's actually valuable to the customer and so we help them figure out what's the thing that's actually valuable to the customer and then who is your freaking customer right because you can say who it is but like who's actually buying and who's actually like in your facebook group or in your crm is a different story um and then i would say that the other two pieces to our data so getting the data in place it's really really tough to scale without that and so getting them into a system that actually can that their team one wants to use because it's one to get you on a system but the second thing is you have to get them on a system their team can actually use easily and it has usually a good interface um so that's the third one and then i would say that the last piece of that is just scaling the talent at the top which is the culture which is the soft stuff that we go over with them and honestly i think helping that ceo and integrator typically a duo that we work with um just raise up in terms of their level of leadership and the kind of culture that they have because i don't think that in the beginning they realize how important it is and so we reinforce that on day one from working with them and so we really hammer home like dialing what the culture is so that as we scale we don't lose that right so it seems to me and i mean it seems obvious just like talking about it but like people like most people just they don't have enough manpower yet and what do you see as like the biggest needs for hiring like is it on the marketing side is it on the sales side depends wildly on the company yeah like if you have a product driven entrepreneur they probably have you know really good product and innovation r d things like that um maybe decent customer success probably the tracking is usually not in place and they usually don't have a very clear customer journey they're not you know measuring time to value they're not you know actively measuring nps or creating customer health scores things like that that we can have predictive metrics around how we're going to drive you know lifetime value but they'll usually be better there than they are on like the sales and marketing front and so it's really just like where do we feel like the constraint of the system is and then just ruthlessly prioritizing and attacking that and so on the flip side if we have a very promotion driven entrepreneur then it's usually the back of the house that needs to clean up and so you know for us because we deal with the whole of the company um we attack at end end right yeah it's funny i before this podcast i had um this guy's name's kiala and you know we're talking about internet marketers right and most internet marketers are great marketers great promoters they suck at ops fulfillment and then you know you get guys who are really passionate about what they do and they just don't want to talk about it right we were talking about my you know my buddy graham stefan who we partnered with you know he's not the greatest promoter you know but great product right his product is his content and what he's doing so i think it's cool to see that so what would you say at least on the marketing side right because you got your book 100 million dollar offers right which is all about marketing which was a fantastic book for anyone who has not read it yet go get it it's 99 cents on amazon like you can't you'd be dumb not to buy it right so you know quick plug there but uh you know in that marketing book something that really hit home was all these ways to market that i currently don't market right like you know i learned to market on the house whipping side by going direct to seller right we would run tv commercials direct mail cold call all that stuff but when i went to the internet based businesses i was like oh social media this will carry me and it has to this point and then i've pretty much abandoned you know affiliates uh outbound anything like that like what what do you see with all these companies you guys evaluate and look at as like i guess the bread and butter with internet companies like further marketing strategies is there consistency or a theme i would say i mean predominantly most of them run paid ads and have some sort of strong organic or both that's i would say like that's the majority of the companies that that come to us not to say that that's what we need them to do or what we end up building with them but that's that's where they're at usually when they they meet with us yeah i mean i would say that there's the companies we take on versus the companies that inquire most the companies that inquire have figured out paid ads their product is usually not honestly like to the point yet where they figured out a really strong organic stream we have some companies that we take when we find those ones those are usually some of the best because they have a great product um but a lot of the ones that inquire and are at that level usually don't have the organic because the product just isn't quite good enough yet and so the granite ganec really works against them and then most of them just don't have the operational fortitude to do outbound and so they might say like outbound like oh i run ads and then they dm me and messenger like that's not that's not out and it takes you know eight months to get outbound working so they tip it's typically just something paid and it's usually not on brand it's not aligned with their culture you know there's a lot of things it's not calling out the right person so there's a lot of room for optimization yeah we get a lot of gains just from just filling in holes like the first year we mostly just fill in holes and almost like by accident will triple the profit of the company without even like really putting the big stuff in place yet yeah because it's interesting we like you know we say between three and ten because the thing is is that when you take on a business and we have that are bigger it's very different it's fixing and fixing yeah is taking something having you're basically negative so it's like when you take on someone between three and ten they're at zero and you just have to take them to ten when you take on someone that's at 20 or 30 and they're stuck you are starting from like a negative eight and you're gonna take them to negative four negative two zero and so it's just it's a lot easier to start fresh they've to give more more words around it they have incurred debt usually multiple types of debt they've incurred cultural debt they've incurred management debt they've incurred technical debt in terms of their their systems uh that they're operating on and so we have to basically pay down that debt before we can grow again so like one of the companies we had um we pretty much almost like maintained for the first almost nine months and then it tripled in the next six months and it was just like orgstrucker move people around get these people out restructure this team fix the compensation over here you know what i mean just like all the all the stuff that no one wants to talk about but like that's what builds sellable businesses that have true 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deals so when you guys are looking at acquiring these companies are you only looking for ones that people want to sell no go for it no we we align ourselves with whatever the founder wants and so like the way that we get you know make money off of you know our investments we align to make sure that whether they sell or not that's one of the things that we didn't why we're not like traditional pes traditional pe is usually incentivized to get someone to sell to a specific buyer within a certain amount of time against whatever the founder wants usually they force them to and they usually have like a drag along right which means that they can force them to sell we just never want to do that because we're entrepreneur first and so it's really aligning ourselves with whatever that that person wants which we make sure that we figure out within the first two weeks of working together right right so what does a typical structure look like right you know somebody comes in they're like hey you know take a look at my business and you guys do your due diligence on it like all right this looks interesting you know you have a call like these deals being struck i've heard you say in the past you know you only want minority stakes right because you want them to you know lead the charge yeah so is a lot of this just you guys buying into the company or you just giving you equity for your expertise like how's all that playing out it's a combination it you know it's a case-by-case basis we have some companies that we have put cash in we have companies that we haven't put cash in um the big thing is like what problem are we solving and so i'd say the vast majority of the companies that we are working with are internet-based companies they are growing they are profitable they have cash flow and so usually the founders like they wouldn't if we were to appropriately value the company it's usually not actually valuable because no one would really buy it because the founder could never actually step away so it's really just them with a thousand hands you know what i mean and so the valuation would be really low and for most of them they don't need the cash they need the expertise and so for the majority of the situations it ends up just being cool we'll take a meaningful enough stake that that we care but not so much so that you stop caring yeah yeah you know i mean so it's really trying to strike that balance and then um you know we have incentives for us to try and like triple the company within five years and that's like our big you know goal that we drive towards but because we're minority partners um it's basically like everything kicks in after we triple um and so that's kind of like what we drive towards uh with those companies so we get a percentage of cash flow and we have you know some profits interests are like equity-like um arrangements from the company so that if they you know if they choose to sell in that period of time you know we're incentivized there but because of the combination of cash flow and um profit interests which is just a fancy word for equity-like stuff for anyone who's listening um we are we are balanced in our incentive between holding and selling whereas if we were like just equity then we would be over indexed on just trying to sell basically as fast as we can and get a big multiple on it yeah but most the founders that we're dealing with that are approaching us are like i really want to take this thing the next level they're 100 motivated to do it um and they just want more help to get there faster make fewer mistakes got it so what do you guys think about just the different options for you know having this um exit event you know it seems like you know you guys obviously sold um why not go public or something like that for acquisition.com or for those companies for say gym launch like why why not take gym launch public when you guys were doing it i think again it's it's what problem you're solving for taking it public would have again would have been the one taking right like and we just knew you know for a lot of people they're building something and it's the right foundation to build more upon like i think you're doing that right it's like you built the one company that's now building other companies right when we looked at gym launch we said could this build what we want to build within acquisition.com and the answer was not eloquently like it would actually be complicated because everything was geared towards fitness and so we could build a fitness version of acquisition.com within gym launch and we could you know take companies public and do all those things there but we were like do we want to be you know isolated to fitness and the answer was no we already weren't isolated to fitness in the companies that we were working with we didn't want to continue to go further into that niche because we have other businesses that we have expertise in and so we didn't want to isolate ourselves to that yeah and so ultimately it was like we could take it public we could do all these things we just felt like we were going further down a path that wasn't the path we want to go down right that makes sense so i mean obviously while you guys were building gym launch acquisition.com came up as this idea and vision so like what gave you guys the motivation to want to go about that route well we had one guy who somehow like found his way on my calendar is it's kind of funny um and uh you know in the first five seconds he was like okay i'm really sorry i lied to get on your calendar and normally i'd be like all right that's not you know good um but he's like i promise it'll be worth your time like all right and so um he gave me his pitch and he he had done he had taken uh you know a brick-and-mortar facility uh from you know a few hundred thousand a year like 1.6 million a year just using like all the free content that we had put out just for the gym space so he'd been like super following stuff for a long time and he'd been doing that for a few years and uh he's like i really want to take this thing and do what you did with jim launch in my niche and it just ended up working out so well um with that particular founder and his wife that it was like i loved doing it so much and i really enjoyed being able to just like solve so many problems ahead of time that we had you know struggled to figure out and so the line of growth on that company is faster bigger more profitable than jim launch was you know what i mean and so i was like man let's do like and that's where i think the the fire kind of lit within both of us were like this is what i really want to do um and we you know we've been in fitness for 10 years and so we just we knew we could build a fitness conglomerate um and just do m a and start you know buying franchises and buying chains of gyms and buying marketing agencies and things like that within that space buying fitness coaching companies whatever um but it's just and that would have 100 been a great path to wealth or more wealth it just wasn't the path that we felt like doing and you know i think i talk about this from my world views a lot but like you know the marginal utility of money beyond a certain point you know decreases and so um we wanted to do different things yeah no that makes 100 sense so you know you guys plan to do acquisition.com for a long time is there any plans to sell it at one point or no we um you know obviously any good business could be sold at any point in time is kind of the way we look at it but right we set it from day one we don't want to sell acquisition.com we want it to be the foundation that we can build other things upon so what we're doing right now with it you know like we're talking about the types of businesses that we're taking on right now that's for the first pod of you know say i don't know anywhere between 15 to 25 businesses and we'll cap it and then we might say that we're going to open a pod that's for sas or e-commerce or you know what i'm saying and so there's variety there there's different routes that we can take in terms of maybe we decide to buy companies outright one day i mean there's a lot of different stuff we can do and it feels like it would be a shame to then get rid of the machine that builds the machine right which is really what we wanted to build so i could see us spinning up other things under acquisition.com and selling those off for sure i just don't think that we want to sell acquisition.com yeah so we don't want to sell the goose we want to sell the eggs if we're ever you know going to do the exit path but no for us it's you know there was there were a number of assumptions that had to be true for us to kind of hit what we wanted to do and so i was like we have to be more popular in the future than we are today we have to invest in businesses where the marketplace is growing faster than the s p 500 we have to believe that we can meaningfully drive value to those particular companies and we have to uh do business with people that uh that we think are exemplary and that's both internal and external to the company so if those four things are true then we will be able to you know realize this vision and so that's more or less been kind of the assumptions that that everything acquisition.com was built off of yeah so i the way i look at it is like you guys are creating kind of like a blackstone where you're gonna have all these companies that you guys own so do you plan to maybe take acquisition.com public to get the funding needed to buy all these companies like down the road did you scale or what's the plan for that there's i mean we've we've uh we've had plenty of discussions about it i mean yeah i like there's there's things that i do like about the going public part which is just you know all of a sudden your equity is is liquid and you can you can issue shares and you can you know have access to debt markets and things like that which i think are cool but there's also a lot of headaches associated with being public and so uh i think we lean more towards just keeping it private this whole time um and if we want to do something we can in the future but like because of the audience size that we have you know if you look at like we were talking about graham stefan and grant cardone earlier um if we were to do something i'd rather just raise funds from the audience and allow them to participate in the in the stuff that we do because i feel like that would be like way cooler yeah something more what we would like to do is like you know eventually with say not maybe not the companies we have right now but a specified pod we say we're gonna grow this pod with the intention that uh one day we can say all right we have now five years of returns that we can say this is our return for the last five years and they're fantastic now i feel like ethically i could take someone else's money and say hey what if we bought the other x percent of all these companies in this pod which we've already grown from day one so like what's the likelihood that we're going to continue to succeed with these companies so it's like stacking the in the deck you know the stacking the deck in our favor so you know from a diligence perspective it's not like okay we've got this company it looks really interesting we already know right it's like we've been doing this for five years we've already you know 5x the profit of this business and we know what the next you know 5x looks like and so yeah so we might take this piece and then the fun takes this piece and then we still have majority now in the company so we can you know drive the direction even more yeah no i freaking i love that idea that's super smart so let's talk about how you even get these businesses to come to you so you know social media has been something that's drastically changed um you know the world period and business owners as a whole right like it's like dude if you're not on social media you know it's like does anyone know about your business right like that's just what it seems like and you both recently came on the scene like you know going full force what was the catalyst behind that yeah so i figured with this company you know in contrast to some of the other companies we've had in the past it had to be something that was inbound and so like true inbound like i would like i would say paid ads is like in between you know inbound and outbound um but like i didn't want to build a company where we're soliciting people saying hey we're going to help you grow your business you don't know who we are um and by the way you know we're going to you know buy in for a manure it's just like you know there wouldn't be trust there's just a lot of things that would be missing so i figured that this company would make the most sense to build off of an organic inbound you know following and i didn't have one and so i was like okay well you know looking at grant and what he did with uh with his fund and whatnot i was like all right well real estate's not my game um but you know i feel pretty confident that you know high cash flow digital businesses are our game and so if if that's what we're going to do in 10 years then uh start today you know that was kind of the thought process a year and a half ago yeah and honestly looking at like because we both you know we're ideating about this business the how you bring in customers affects the entire business and so even like looking at the kind of talent that you can acquire when you have like a very volatile acquisition strategy you're not going to acquire the same kind of talent you can if you have a very stable reliable acquisition strategy and so we know that if we can build this moat which maybe it takes a lot longer to build that's okay it's still worth building because of the kind of business that we can build underneath that yeah and i agree like most of my customers have been all organic inbound and so like even when things aren't necessarily going well like if you know they don't get the service that they were hoping for or something happens they're not immediately like oh you know bad review scams are like hey like i get it you know they're much just more easy going than somebody that you had to do a hard sell on to buy your product yeah and i think by the nature of what we do you know it's investing and partnering with people it's not even like i mean we talk to the founders of the company every day pretty much all of them um and so i think it's it's just a very different it sets the relationship up for success this way rather than if it were paid or outbound i just don't think that we'd be set up for success and i don't think we'd be able to have as much influence in those companies as we do now and so i think it would be disadvantageous for them and us and it's a and because our relationship is a minority's sake it's much more based on trust and influence because like we don't we don't have majority so like we can't force someone to do something and so we have to have people who share our values and like trust us and if we're like hey we really think you should make this move and it might seem scary but they're like all right i trust these people i'm going to do it.

33:22and that happens honestly all the time yeah because of just all of the content and value you've put out there it's like yeah if you tell me to do this i already believe you you don't need to sell me on doing it yeah yeah trust is a um a lubricant for doing business things happen a lot faster yeah there you go so i mean obviously you guys are putting out amazing content like how much of your time do you think you spend on the content side versus like the me or the business side it's different between both of us so you can answer for yourself first i would say um i mean the vast majority of our time is on the business and the businesses that we have in the portfolio um we've been pretty good you know caleb's here behind the camera um we've been pretty good about capturing uh way more of the stuff we've been doing and so i think that's dramatically cut down we were talking about this earlier on the actual amount of like direct to camera type stuff um but like for me the youtube channel i make you know two to three videos a week which ends up being me usually like one day every two weeks i'll just knock out you know four to six videos and um beyond that i use twitter a lot and that's kind of like where i test my short it's really just like stream of consciousness and then that based on what people you know find interesting there that's usually what what seeds the short form video content and uh we can i you know we knock those out pretty quickly um because those are i don't know those are easy for me to do because i made ads for so long they have similar like pace you know to like an advertisement and so um we enjoy doing that but besides that it's really just we have the long-form videos with the short form videos and we've got tweets and that's um that's the majority of what we do and you know tweets get repurposed as um as instagram posts as well and that's i mean that's the that's that's it you know i mean that's that's everything sounds so simple what about you yeah i mean same stuff but i think i know what you know with acquisition.com being new it's not it would be irresponsible for me to prioritize making content over getting the infrastructure in place like we're heavily investing in talent and hiring and getting the you know structure in place to scale and so that because that's my role in the company like i i actually realized today i was like oh [ __ ] like i haven't made a youtube video in like three weeks and so and i told our youtube guys then beginning he's like you're gonna do it alex does he does three times a week and i was like i'm done doing three things i was like i'll do like maybe one week and then he'll be like dude we don't have one this week i'm like yeah i don't care because it's irresponsible you know what i mean because yeah i'm just always gonna be more internal facing and so actually that's when you know when i said i really do want to make the content because i think it'll help the companies and help them be more well-rounded if they both of our perspectives but i was like i cannot do direct to camera it's not scalable and so i was listening gary vee and he had this one line where he just said dude i'm an operator he's like you don't get it i spent 99 my time on my businesses and i was like i'm an operator and i was like i need someone to capture rather than me creating and that was when we really had the conversations of like because i kind of came to i was like dude i can't how are you doing this seems like i don't think i can either anymore so we were like i've come to that conclusion too you know yeah for the last two years i've been like all right i'm focused on building this media business and you know it is a business right so like making this content and everything and now i've come to the conclusion i'm like yep you know what i'm just filming like me doing business and that's the content now that's just way easier like you don't have to like dedicate time to go film it's really live videos yeah and it's realer you know people people like i really wish i knew what like your day looks like it's like well this is what it looks like now yeah so we're putting more and more of that kind of stuff out there which is cool it's like either you're telling them what you just did or you're just doing it in front of a camera so so what's your advice to these founders like who want to get better at organic right you were talking about how most of them already got paid media figured out and they're like oh we want to get organic and they're like that's why they're coming to you because they're like you know you guys you know came out of nowhere and now your organic is so strong what do you give them as advice yeah i would say first nobody comes to us and says we want to do organic like you guys and they actually all know that's not typically a priority for where they're at in business it's really not for most of them um so that's the first thing i'll say and the second thing that i will say or that she will say that i will say after her um is that a lot of things is sequence in the business and so usually zero to three million ish you know is product market fit so the whole objective of that phase in the business is just do people want to buy what you are selling right um and so it's like okay you have made some sales and the mistake that most people make is they think okay well marketing got me here i should market more and that's usually not the case usually now it's like okay we've proven product market fit but we are not getting any referrals we're not getting a lot of word of mouth and unless we clean up all the back end and increase customer lifetime value put put all the infrastructure in place so that we can get more ascensions build it back you know all the other things that are required to really create an exceptional customer experience you become a only marketing company and then it becomes very difficult to scale past maybe 10-ish million because you have so many people falling out the back that you just like every month you have to sell twice as many as you did the month before just to stay the same and so you know for us it's like okay zero to three you got your product market fit you know three to ten we have to clean up the back end and usually just by cleaning up the back and without even increasing the uh sales velocity or number of units sold per month we can still triple the business just by massively increasing how much each customer is worth to us and how many customers those customers bring to us and then at that point now that we've expanded ltv expanded gross profit margins etc and the infrastructure to scale then we have these new metrics we can go and attack new acquisition channels and be inefficient at scale because we have so much margin that we can work with right so talking about churn you know in a lot of e-learning many people buy say a mastermind right or something and they they go into it knowing that like oh you know what i'll do it for a year and then i'll try a different mastermind after that right like typical somebody's attitude if they want to go learn something how do you keep that from happening you mean leave yeah stop them from leaving so it depends on because there's you know levels there's you know courses there's coaching programs there's masterminds things like that um we have to separate out the consumables from the one-time purchase so like education for example is a one-time purchase and information decreases in value precipitously over time the day before you learn something it's much more valuable than day after you learn it right and so that's where having information only becomes very difficult from a continuity perspective the things that are consumable that people can use month in without are accountability they can use tech support they can use a community so those are all things that people can consume on a consistent basis from a from from increasing the stick you know if we increase the quality of the community overall and if we can up appropriately adjust the price to match the value or be less than the value that they're receiving over time so it's not uncommon to see a year one price be higher than a year two price because the value diminishes once you have access to the network and then the new value that's being consistently delivered is the new people who enter the network and the new information that comes you know that gets put into the programs and the trainings and things like that and so but that might be less than the learning of the initial skill and so it's really finding that sweet spot where we can keep the customers and make sure that we're pricing based on the consumable not on the one time thing yeah that's exactly what i figured out what future flipper was you know at first people would do it for a year they'd be like okay i learned what i wanted to learn and like that was good but then we realized like man people stay for the community like you said the network the accountability you know the camaraderie of just coming to an event every quarter and they love it and you know to make it even sweeter i did exactly what you said was i i cut the second year price in half and i just said hey you know it's half the price and you know it'll be that price as long as you want to stay and like our retention skyrocketed just from doing all of those things yeah yeah if you think about it really like when people are if you look at like anything customer success they always put like basically it's results and experience and so it's just like understanding that most i think in this space typically like e-learning masterminds they have the results there which like you're getting the network you're getting the information you're getting all this but they actually forget about the experience which is like did you set expectations properly with the person of what they're going to get even because some people join for network for some join for the education and then did you onboard them well and then what's you how often are you talking to them are you proactive with your communication and so a lot of people actually look at jim launch and they say oh it's a digital you know uh information business i'm like dude we had a 40-person support team you know because we were so focused on the experience like every time someone had a baby a wedding a birthday a holiday like their first trip they made a certain amount of money it's like we're constantly pouring into them and i think that's the intangible stuff that people don't believe because they have relationships and so i think the relationships and the feeling that you give those people is longer lasting than the education all in all because people are loyal to a person not necessarily to a thing right and one of the points that layla made there i'll just zoom in on real quick which is um asking people why they're joining sounds really simple and obvious but people are solving different problems when they're buying the same thing and so having a personalized experience for how they're going to consume the product in the service at the onset giving kind of like a unique roadmap is one of those things that will dramatically enhance the value that they're receiving from the program because usually most people deliver way more stuff than someone can consume and so it's like okay how can i give you the shortest path to getting the value that you want the way you want to receive it and so like that's a huge part and then you know some of the other cool things is using that network effect that you have a for the network but also for group purchasing power so if you let's say let's say just for math sake let's say your first year was twelve thousand dollars in your second year six thousand dollars if you have a group of 200 entrepreneurs or 500 entrepreneurs who are in this network we have a huge amount of buying power and so there's normally services and products and things like that that everybody probably frequents that may or may not be yours you know that you own and so you can bundle in the savings from the group purchasing power to be in excess of the absolute cost of the mastermind and then it becomes a savings to be a part of the association or whatever and so there's like ways that you can stack the value that makes it just so irresistible and such a no-brainer for people to stay that they're like well [ __ ] yeah i mean it makes i'd feel stupid to say no right and then that's the idea as the world starts to go more digital you need to be aware which businesses are going to thrive in the future one of the obvious ones is e-commerce in fact last year e-commerce sales did over 4 trillion dollars globally and it's continuing to grow now if you're like most people you probably don't have time to learn a whole new industry and start a new business but there is another way you can partner with us at 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want to start living the wealthy way today go to wealthyway.com there you can get all the free resources like the course planner and discord community so go to wealthyway.com yeah so speaking of you know you referenced your book subtitle there you know offers what what's the subtitle offers how to make offers yeah how to make authors so good people feel stupid saying no yeah so you know we talked about the book earlier and just like all the different ways to market and i know you're coming out with a whole series of books and everything else and the next one's about um generating is the leads and you know you've talked about how it's it's taking a while with all the revisions and everything else and it's been a beast it's been a headache and i remember i actually asked you man this was maybe like four or five i go hey you know how are you publishing them and you're like just on amazon kindle i was like really i was like who's writing them he's like i am i was like what about her you're like i'm just doing it i'm like holy crap dude to do all of that like i wrote i wrote my one book right over there and that was like four years ago i was like i don't think i could ever do that again that was so difficult to like write it on my own yeah yeah it's tough but alice didn't write his first book even thinking he was going to publish it like i don't think people realize that like he was literally writing and he's like i don't know if i'm going to do anything with this like i just don't i think i'm just writing it for myself he's like we could actually use it with the companies it'll be like a manual that's exactly what he was interested in today and so then fine it was like one day he woke up in the morning and he had said like oh if if i'm gonna pull i'll do it you know if i'm gonna publish it maybe i'll do it in like a few months and then i kept telling him i was like well if the thing is good enough which i've read it like probably six times by this point i'm like it is fantastic like it's going to blow up like you don't need to do anything and he was like and then one day you woke up and you were like i put it on i put it on instagram and it's amazon instagram he was like yeah i was like what the [ __ ] i was like i don't even know where to log in to like you know make sure the shit's going well and stuff and so there's a little bit of [ __ ] show but it you know he made one post and no marketing no other posts about it nothing just it just literally went viral off word of mouth i mean it was insane people don't believe us they're like you had to pump something i'm like he didn't pump [ __ ] but people just aren't used to actually like the how much time he puts into writing like i am not somebody that gets bothered by how much somebody works but like when he gets in the writing mode where it's like weeks on weeks of like right i'm like hello are you hungry are you thirsty like are you are you shriveling raisin in there you know he's in this closet yeah go in your closet and just yeah turn off the light he's so dedicated to it and it's because he genuinely loves writing yeah and i like the books like books are very special to me because like i've learned a lot from you know reading and um like if you think about like when people die the only thing that's left is like books like the only thing that has like stayed for two thousand five thousand years is like written word and so i think there's something magical about that and so um that's what i you know i spend a lot of time trying to make it really really good and i think there's a big difference between like publishing a book and publishing a great book and there's just a mountain more of work with like you know i mean like there's probably 20 of the work is publishing a book compared to you know publishing a book that the product the value that people get is so far in excess of what they pay that they tell their friends about it and so like if you can if you can achieve that ratio then then the product takes off and then it continues like it becomes its own marketing yeah and so that was that was the goal for the book and you know when i told layla that i was like i don't know if i want to promote it because either it's good enough that it will promote itself right why would i promote it because if people aren't telling their friends that it's good then why would i want anyone else to read it right 100 and i think the thing you did that was genius was you made it a dollar like you know like the virality of that you haven't seen many people do that right because like they spent so much time and money to get a book out there and to do the launch and you know if they paid a ghostwriter and all this stuff and it's like to sell it for that you know it's like well what do i have to lose like i might as well read it and then like it just it's kind of like it made me realize too that a book is pretty much just like content and you know we make content for free we we don't charge people to watch our youtube videos and stuff and i was like yeah that makes it like why not try it as a book and so watching what you did with that and obviously even if it was a dollar and it sucked nobody would watch it or nobody would share it right so it was just like you got nothing to lose by buying this and just reading it other than your time and um dude it's just it's crazy like how viral it's going because i read it when it maybe had a couple hundred reviews and then i was looking at it before i was like this thing's got like 5 000 reviews now what's going on here yeah it's crazy yeah it's been pretty cool i'm very excited about it yeah it comes up on one year in july yeah so you know hopefully we can get fifty five hundred maybe six thousand the first year which would be crazy because there's anything about like you know what does it look like you know 20 years from now are there gonna be like 120 000 reviews right which would be pretty cool uh so but like you know to your point about the pricing thing it's like i priced it there because like what was the objective of the book the objective of the book is that it gets shared and that many people consume it the objective is not like for me to make an extra you know twenty thousand dollars a month two bucks a book yeah like i just you know and amazon takes 66 of the of the 99 like it really like yeah in the book yeah we we said we want to be able to basically you know anything we put out there that's education or information we just like decided like our brand like it's just what we want all of it to be for free so we don't want to make people pay for anything we don't want to ever sell anything it's just not that's not how we want to make our money yeah we i mean we just make our money doing the stuff you know what i mean and so we wanted to just teach as many like the business model was simple it's just okay we really do do this stuff and why don't we just help as many people as humanly possible knowing that 99.9 will never work with us and never give us a dollar and that's fine and then of the people who are super executors because they can take the stuff without hand holding and get themselves to 3 million 5 million you know 8 million 10 million a year and then they're like dude i used all the stuff i got past this level now like i trust you because i used your stuff and it worked so now i know the next thing's gonna work and then it just makes it for such a better process of finding alignment getting the right partners and so it's just big picture i don't want to sell more like 10 000 things you know i want to i want to just find partners that were in it for 10 years and build something really cool do you ever see yourself starting i know you're not going to charge for education but do you ever see yourself starting like a mastermind for high-level entrepreneurs no no that was actually i'm sorry no i mean i feel strongly against that yeah but even if you didn't charge like just i don't know as a networking type deal i think we thought about doing like an event yeah you know like a mosey nation event or doing a community on like discord or something like that so like we're trying to think of different ways did he tell you to do discord yeah yeah yeah yeah and putting it together as we speak i uh i have two discords right now okay oh yeah so they have about 15 000 in them all right and uh discord is interesting because it's like 24 7. yeah and it's just like non-stop people are just always talking always coming it's it's different than a facebook group where it's like you gotta make a post and somebody might comment somebody might it's like a 24 7 chat room yeah yeah that's crazy i mean yeah i could see us doing something like that um it's just what's the objective you know i mean like for us the objective is to i mean the mission of the company is to document and share the best practices of building world-class companies and so we do that by building world-class companies and documenting it and then we share it and the key point of sharing is like we share it so that everybody can have it and i just in my bones believe that the only thing that makes the world better is entrepreneurial businesses and so the more business owners we can equip with the skills and lessons that you know were very difficult and painful for us to learn then the more good businesses will be out there and even if none of them ever work with us like we'll die and it won't matter and it's okay and we're happy to just help people out and that's we're good with that 100 so how is it you know working together i mean you guys seem like you're just yin and yang like you know it just works so well just watching it from here does work well it does work pretty well honestly yeah i mean it's a tough one because we met and we started working together so quickly and it's not for i would say like 99.9 of couples and i think also a lot of couples aren't going to work as well together as we do because i think that we just naturally you know like i've always been kind of in this position with anyone that i've worked with like the integrator to a visionary um and alex is naturally a visionary and so i think we met and we both had we had complimentary skill sets and it was the right timing and we started doing it from day one and we're both really coachable and we both take ownership over our [ __ ] and don't blame each other and so i think just who we were we're lucky that we found each other and it worked so well um but working together is great we love it do you guys ever like how do you split like between business and your relationship or is it all just flowing together all the time it flows together i mean i would i mean there are there are moments where you're like hey husband hat or hey wife hat you know like and you need to like clearly delineate but most of the times like the things that we enjoy talking about are the things that we're building together you know what i mean so in a lot of ways we're talking earlier like the businesses that we build are a lot like our kids they're the things that we're bringing into this world and we're raising them and you know fostering them and whatnot and so like that's that's what we enjoy and we've always kind of decried the black and white you know you have to have one date night you cannot talk about business you have to you should you must blah blah um i think you can do whatever you want and this is like this is the life that we like and this is the marriage that we do marriage the way we in the way we envision marriage and it works within our dynamic and that's all we know and so you know for people who have similar mission values and you know lifestyles then i think those are the three things that for us have to be in alignment for any kind of long-term partnership it's like you got to want to do the same epic thing you have to want to get there the same way and then the lifestyle is like how you do it in the meantime yeah and i think you know what people i'll say this which is what people see in terms of like us in the business setting and working together and doing all that like we actually do i have always intentionally like tried not to because i actually it was a pattern when we had gym launch which is i don't want to show like husband and wife alex and layla in front of our team because i don't want them to that to detract or distract from business and so like how we are in private when we're not in front of other people is very different than how we are in front of people too and that like so we're super playful okay super funny playful tons of humor we drove around a lot light-hearted you know very touchy you know like that's one thing that like i actually when we had the company i was like oh like i just because you go just touch your spouse but in front of the team to like be hugging and doing all that while you're leading it quarterly yeah like that's a little weird i try we we've kind of trained ourselves not to do that front of other people and if anything he's like no like unified front it's just like i mean she's like i would imagine it's just like parenting right i mean i don't have kids but i would imagine it's just like parenting unified front like we don't disagree publicly if there's ever anything like if there is anything we're like hey after the meeting yeah like i thought we were not doing that yeah where did that come from oh i thought you were talking about this like ooh my bad i'll let them know in slack no big deal you know what i mean yeah just being sensitive to other people in the room you know i think especially like so many people are hesitant to work for a husband and wife duo because they're worried like about the stability of the relationship and how you disagree and how you solve arguments all that stuff and the last thing we ever want to do is bring any any sort of personal element in like in front of our team besides i would say our intermediate team which is like you know caleb who does video he's going to see us together like in our own element and same with our eas but besides that nobody really sees got it got it so with all these businesses you're buying how do you factor in like the economy because i've heard you talk about this on on your videos talking about like the vehicle at which you know you're in right like if you're you got a ship that's got a lot of wind behind it it's way easier to go with that right and so we see the economy doing whatever it's going to do how do you guys navigate this so i will take this um so one is what's the marketplace we're going after so the marketplace that we're going after is e-learning which as a category is is set to two and a half x over the next five years now compared to like any anything else that's great growth so from uh like the wind behind the sales perspective we've got that um and you know i think a big part of that is because uh formal education is being disrupted i think because a lot of people are looking or seeking out alternative education sources to make money right because and this is not me decrying or saying college is bad it's just that a lot of people can't afford to spend four years and a hundred thousand dollars and not make money for that period of time to then make the same amount of money that they could just not doing that experience and so like the opportunity cost is massive and so if we could and so i'll say it differently is that the demand for income producing skills has not gone away the supply of formal the formal supply of it has and so they are seeking out alternatives and so that is why that market is growing so number one is that number two is that in a you know bad uh economy future especially an inflationary environment businesses that have uh low capital expenses and uh high cash flow um tend to be businesses that fare better because there's easier pricing power and because you don't have to you know put capital back into the business to expand it it's easier to those businesses are more flexible and so the types of businesses that we work with are by nature low capital expense businesses high cash flow and um and so for those reasons we feel really well equipped for you know an inflationary period that might come in the future um you know everybody you know everybody has a plan until you get in the face but uh we feel as far as as far as we can see we feel pretty good because things have to go on and so it's like okay well if we can mitigate these risks at least then we can trudge forward and deal with things as they come yeah i mean it it comes down to their very flexible businesses and so if you have a flexible infrastructure and you have a flexible model and these aren't businesses with huge capital expenditures and giant buildings and real estate all over the freaking world it's not going to be that hard to pivot and honestly like during covid we had to pivot all three of our businesses was it easy no it was a pain in the ass but did we do it yes and it was something that made the companies better off and so we factor that in when we're looking at the entrepreneur and are they the kind of person that could you know do well in economic downturn and then the company as well and most people in an economic downturn like the demand again for income producing skills does not go away right the demand for you know other things that are like nice things uh might decrease but like when there is no money the demand for money is just as high if not higher and so i don't and many of the businesses that we have teach kind of niched income producing skills so it might be you know how to fix a hair salon how to be a plumber how to whatever um and so those are those are i think always going to be in demand yeah second to that is we do try to pick people that we believe are market leaders or could be market leaders yeah that's a big one so we're not looking at people that are distressed or that we don't think have the potential to take over their specific niche and so typically in an economic downturn the market leader survives and so we we felt confident that those people could do that right when you guys look at these different businesses you know you're talking about market leaders and um you know as far as in the space and generating revenue and everything but you know like a lot of businesses probably like jim launch early on are very dependent on you know the founder right they're the face they're driving all the traffic even today in many of my businesses like dude if ryan stops making content you know where the lead's coming from right yeah um what do you guys do to address that if any you mean so that we could like potentially exit them in the future kind of thing yeah it's always honestly with all of them that is part of the plan yeah so yeah that's something that takes i want to say if you're starting you're like i want to sell my business and i want it to be like rock solid maybe it's 18 to 24 months um i would say if you want to do it right and like really rock solid three years so most of these companies our three year to five year plan involves that so it's how are we going to basically like you know diversify our risk of the founder you know because at some point if they want to exit i think most of them want the freedom to choose right like they don't necessarily want to exit but they would like the freedom or the opportunity to decide at that point in time and so we're always setting them up for that and so it's it's you know i think that it's more complicated when you are the founder than when you're somebody like myself looking at it because i look at like you just have to put other people you pro for every alex i need like 10 people right and that's all it is it's just the 10 people that fill the skill set gaps and then the 10 people that can you know essentially act as characters to fill in for one face right so can 10 people fill the gap of one alex yes is there more operational complexity yes but it's a more sturdy business and so often times like a personality brand it's basically diversifying and adding going from like one personality to like you know you to disneyland it's not just mickey mouse it's all the characters you've got yeah alice in wonderland and snow white and like all these people it's like how do we create that within each of the businesses and so you know a lot of those businesses they have people that you know are niche experts teaching their you know customers because they're coaching businesses and those people typically you know you kind of make subject matter experts that can take over a different subject matter um and then the other one is taking you know their leadership team and kind of like raising them up to be more forward-facing kind of taking the internal and making it external so there's a few different ways you can do it but it's just a process and if you if you do it over time it's honestly not that hard yeah you you pretty much described what i've been thinking because like i don't want to sell but you know i'd like the to have the option one day right and so we started thinking about this at like the one i'm most prevalent at which is the real estate education business right and so i said you know what we're really good at making content why don't we just produce it for other people in the community right and so we took like our best students who i thought were great on camera we took our coaches everyone else and so we created a whole separate youtube channel instagram everything else and they're growing really quick just because our post-production team makes them the exact same like it's just send us the videos and we'll make the thumbnails and everything else that we know works and so that's actually helped out a lot and like we're launching a new podcast i am not the host you know and just trying to diversify i think the more that you edify those people so it's like the more that one you associate with them like you're seen with them before they're on their own and then you edify them when they are on their own and you consistently do that over and over and over again and just like as an added point because this is the subject of the next book um lots to say on this um but like typically if it's a founder face you know face forward thing then it's gonna be through paid ads organic for the most part right and there are so many other ways to get customers and so it's like okay well how do we get an affiliate channel set up how do we get a referral you know a really strong referral program in place how do we get a big manual outbound team set up uh how do we um how do we do huge blasts uh you know to different lists that we can that we can hit and so there's there's these different things that we can set up and we can do that and by building an employee team we can build customer teams we can build affiliate networks all of those things we can do that are not founder-facing at all and i can tell you that when we when we when gym launch uh the sales past 50 of total sales came from the outbound team i can't explain the amount of like peace of mind to just know that every day we're doing 5 000 dials and that's going to turn into 100 100 or whatever you know what i mean and so we just know that if i die tomorrow all these people have jobs all these families are secure mortgages are paid like everything's gonna be okay and that like and that's why you know a private equity or whatever feels comfortable coming in to purchase a business like that because they're like oh they're not only diversified across um channels but they're diversified across methods of acquisition right it's not just social media right exactly that's just like one right like we could cold call we could cold email we could call dm like there's so many different ways that we could do this we could build we could do paid ads to get affiliates and then build a thousand person affiliate like so prestige labs was 100 affiliates it was all affiliates yeah 3 000 affiliates um allen was 100 affiliates we actually had super affiliates we had a two level affiliate set up um in in allen because for the same reason i was like i don't want to be the face of this and so there's so many ways you can do it and even like even in the paid ads you can put the mascots but you can also put your customers more right have the have the customers and the results and the experiences and the workshops and things like that be far more prevalent because the end of the day like they don't really care about us they care about what they see in us they care about what they relate to and so if we can if we can draw that line or just kind of like lean into that more we can kind of like step off camera and it's like oh wow this person is just like me and this business helped that person succeed whatever yeah no i love that so you mentioned that if you're going to replace the founder it might take 10 people to replace alex right what are you guys doing to recruit top tier talent for ourselves in general for you and you know helping the founders you know hire better um i think that you know we're at a point now where it's actually we're attracting a lot of top talent which is something that i haven't had for the last six years unfair it's honestly it's really like an unfair advantage it's not and that's what i've experienced too yeah i tell people i'm just like i make a post and we get so many like hot applicants and it's great but like that's not the reality for most people yeah so for most people i mean like when we had gym launch like to get top level top tier talent is an investment you know i think that there's two ways that you can get it which is one you can go through your network and you can try and literally like pull whatever favor you can to get your first top level person and if you can get one that edifies you to every other person that you're ever going to talk to that it's not a crazy idea to do in your company right so like for gym launch like we got our cfo um and i'll go with the second way which is using a recruiter or paying somebody to go recruit if you don't have that in-house because the thing is a lot of people don't have recruiters in-house they also don't have the time to dedicate to really finding the right kind of person so i mean we forked out a lot of money on a couple positions and i'm glad because once you have one or two people that are top tier talent that you did pay a lot of money for it then those people have networks and then those people also edify you so you start to look more legit so try to legitimize your company and so then you do attract talent more naturally whereas in the beginning you just don't have that advantage so you don't have anything to leverage besides your money and so it's you know either your time you can try and dm and you know on linkedin and crap yourself i guess as a founder which i mean i've done it um or you could pay a recruiter to do it for you to find that talent um i really just think like we basically gotten in i'll tell you how we found our cfo we got an in with one of our friends who said i can get you with this recruiting company but they typically only take companies above 100 million at that point we weren't there and he was like but i'll tell them like how fast you're growing and all this stuff and so because of that we got to use them and because their name their brand of recruiting right so when they reached out to somebody they're like oh [ __ ] they're like they were literally number one in the nation so they're like i'm gonna answer to them because they're the number one firm and so i think you have to associate with somebody else's brand if you don't have a strong enough one and so for our companies like acquisition when we're trying to fill roles for them you know like we do leverage ours to find people for them because we have so much inbound like hey do you have do you need an operator for a company a sales manager so we can just yeah throw that back into that it's a big competitor you know that's a big thing that we can help with the portfolio companies because also like to her point about like the legitimacy if they're like oh your portfolio is doing you know 150 million a year they're like okay but yeah i feel much better that you guys are all on board on this and you guys are an investment firm that's really like see something here too so then they feel way more at ease and so we will you know we'll screen and vet some of the final candidates especially like leadership and up and so like we can attract them we can vet them and then we can place them and then it also gives us from an operating perspective we get multiple lines inside of the business so we know what's going on because it's you know sometimes the founder doesn't communicate all the time because they're busy whatever and so we have other people who are in the in the company that know and like and trust us too and so it gives us so much more intel to how the business is doing so we can keep a much better pulse on what we can do to help them so so you're telling me acquisition.com is a recruiting company now that's i mean i mean that's actually yeah yeah um because when we were deciding what we wanted to build you know alex was saying this is what i want and i was saying this is what i want and then we kind of put something together it's always like a mesh of the two um and so like what i really love doing is finding talent for people like i love doing it for my own teams and so i was like i i think i'm good at it and i think i'm really good at helping people with it and so that's why we decided like the most hands-on piece that we are with the businesses is recruiting so it's recruiting their leadership and that was the number one thing you said from the beginning you were like people yeah that's what they all need yeah and it makes sense like that's the thing you're helping probably the most with it's the it's the phase of growth that they're in so part of it might just be that that tends to be the problem that most of them are at and so we have morphed ourselves into becoming like the best solution for that thing i don't know if it's the chicken or the egg but just the more high quality people we place into enterprises where there's a deficit the faster the growth is and so we just like everyone's one higher away from the business of their dreams yeah no i 100 agree and i mean for acquisition.com it gives you guys so much of a competitive advantage not only just like yeah we're going to potentially give you money you're obviously going to get our expertise but by the way you're getting our network too yeah it's like shark tank 100 yeah that's super cool well i really do i can talk all day to you guys because there's just so much you know you guys have going on and your knowledge and everything but you know i appreciate you guys coming on the show it's been a lot of fun and uh i know the audience got a lot of value out of it so yeah i mean we appreciate you having us on you know every 15 minute drive yeah that's true no and i appreciate the questions because it was uh you know we don't get to talk about like as much higher level business stuff or what we do every day that often um yeah never uh so uh this was actually really fun for us because we almost exclusively we talk about this stuff every day this is all we talk about but nobody asks us about it yeah i have no one to talk to about it yeah they were all just selfish questions that i've been wondering it was good we like talking about so yeah well cool um guys if you like this episode definitely go check them out on social media we'll link to all their links below if you've got a business that's got 3 million or more in revenue go hit up acquisition.com to help you out as obviously and uh you know if you like this podcast leave a five star review share with a friend catch you on the next one peace thanks for watching the ryan pineda show if you want to work with me head over to ryanpineda.com you can find my courses coaching programs and upcoming events we also have free resources you can download so head over to ryanpineda.com …