New Distractions Kill Keynote Speech at Future Flipper (Pt. 2) Ep 462

Alex Hormozi emphasizes the critical importance of focus and leveraging one's existing business to achieve exponential growth. He argues against the enticement of starting multiple ventures, which often results in a lack of progress and financial success. By recounting personal anecdotes and experiences, Hormozi illustrates that true leverage comes from improving what you already have – "better is better than new." He stresses that the mundane, repetitive tasks that refine your business are the key to unlocking leverage and, ultimately, more income. Hormozi's mantra, "one thing all in," serves as the cornerstone of his message, advocating for entrepreneurs to concentrate their efforts on a single venture to become unbeatable in their field. Through his company, acquisition.com, he aims to guide business owners in scaling their operations by focusing on betterment over novelty.

• Self-coaching can lead to more successful outcomes.
• It's common to not follow one's own advice, which can be counterproductive.
• Applying one's own advice can lead to increased earnings.

"So if you were coaching you right now, what would you tell you to do? And what's crazy about this is that half the fucking time, it's not what I'm doing. Take your own advice. If you do that, I promise you'll make more money."

The quote highlights the discrepancy between knowing what to do and actually doing it, and suggests that following one's own advice can be financially beneficial.

• The speaker wishes successful entrepreneurs had documented their journeys.
• The speaker is documenting their own journey to build a billion-dollar business for others to learn from.

"I always wish Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us."

The quote expresses a desire for transparency in the entrepreneurial process by successful figures and a commitment to provide that insight through personal documentation.

• Owning multiple businesses doesn't guarantee success, especially if they're not profitable.
• The speaker's friend mistook having multiple ventures for being a successful entrepreneur.
• It's a fallacy to wait for one business to take off before committing fully.

"He had a zillion businesses. Like a zillion. I get a spreadsheet for how many businesses he had, and they were all bullshit businesses. They didn't actually make any money."

This quote illustrates the misconception that quantity of businesses equates to success, emphasizing that many of the friend's businesses were unprofitable.

• Success requires focus and the ability to pick one business to grow.
• The act of choosing is more critical than the choice itself.
• Being able to say 'no' is essential for growth.

"The picking is the thing that grows it. The ability to say no is the thing that grows it, not the thing you pick."

This quote emphasizes that the growth of a business is more dependent on the entrepreneur's focus and decision-making rather than the business itself.

• Entrepreneurs must learn to decline opportunities to maintain focus.
• Saying no to distractions allows for more effective competition.
• Focus is visualized as dedicating all efforts to one venture.

"One thing all in."

This succinct quote encapsulates the concept of focus by advising to commit entirely to a single business or project.

• The speaker uses a hypothetical scenario to challenge a friend to focus on one business.
• The friend acknowledges that focusing on one business would make growth much easier.
• The real challenge lies in overcoming the difficult decisions that come with focusing.

"If you ended everything else...how easy would it be to grow that thing? He just looked at me. He was like, really fucking easy."

This quote reveals the friend's realization that focusing on one business would simplify the path to growth.

• Difficult conversations are necessary for success.
• Many people avoid these conversations and fail to achieve wealth.
• The willingness to face challenging decisions can lead to prosperity.

"All the riches you want are on the other side of a few hard conversations. And most people spend the rest of their lives not having them and being poor and wondering why."

The quote underscores the importance of facing tough decisions and conversations in order to achieve financial success.

• The Woman in the Red Dress represents attractive distractions.
• Entrepreneurs must learn to say no to increasingly tempting opportunities as they succeed.
• The speaker shares a personal experience of not saying no to a big opportunity, which was a strategic mistake.

"The Woman in the red dress becomes more seductive, more attractive. The better you get. The more status you get, the hotter the Girl you attract."

This quote uses the metaphor of the Woman in the Red Dress to describe the allure of new opportunities that can distract from the main goal.

• Opportunities can distract and spread resources thin.
• Entrepreneurs must maintain focus to avoid being overwhelmed by new ventures.
• The metaphor of quicksand is used to describe the feeling of being spread too thin.

"Because this is what the Woman in the red dress really looks like, just ready to smash your shit and distract you and spread you thin so that you can't keep your eye on the ball."

The quote likens distractions to the Woman in the Red Dress, emphasizing the destructive potential of losing focus on the core business.

• Talent reallocation can cause instability in other areas of an organization.
• Cutting back and refocusing is essential when an organization is spread too thin.
• The importance of managing ego and accepting temporary revenue loss for long-term stability.
• The speaker emphasizes the need for someone in the audience to take this advice to heart.

"You take the best person from over here to fix that problem, then this thing goes to shit."

The quote highlights the risks of reallocating key personnel without considering the impact on the areas they leave behind.

"Got to cut shit, got to eat your ego. You got to watch your revenue go down so that you can refocus, reconsolidate, bring the troops in."

This quote explains the tough decisions leaders must make to stabilize their organizations, including cost-cutting and managing their own egos.

• Character traits are defined by actions, not feelings.
• The speaker shares a personal story to illustrate the importance of behavior over emotions.
• Patience, courage, and loyalty are exemplified by actions taken in spite of contrary feelings.
• The speaker believes that consistent behavior can eventually change one's feelings.

"Patience is about the behaviors we do, not how we feel about behaviors."

This quote conveys that patience is demonstrated through actions, regardless of internal feelings of impatience.

"Loyalty is not necessarily about the fact that your eye doesn't get caught every once in a while... It's about whether you act on it."

The quote emphasizes that loyalty is measured by one's actions in the face of temptation, rather than the absence of temptation itself.

• Leverage is key to increasing returns on input.
• The speaker argues against constantly creating new things and instead focuses on improving existing ones.
• Betterment of current processes and offerings is a form of leverage.
• The speaker provides a strategy for growth used with portfolio companies, emphasizing improvement over novelty.

"Better is better than new. Better is leverage."

This quote encapsulates the speaker's philosophy that improving existing elements of a business is more beneficial than constantly seeking new ventures.

"If you do it better, you get more for what you put in. That is leverage."

The quote defines leverage as the increased output gained from enhancing current business practices.

• Entrepreneurial behavior is often driven by emotional needs and positive reinforcement from risk-taking.
• The speaker warns that the habit of jumping into new ventures can be detrimental to achieving significant success.
• Lessons that help entrepreneurs at one stage may need to be unlearned at another.
• The speaker encourages focusing on tedious but necessary tasks to improve business performance.

"The problem is that the thing that forced you or gave you that emotional, that decreased your action threshold, thus that you would jump into the next thing is the very thing that will make you jump out of the opportunity that could become your billion-dollar thing."

This quote warns that the initial entrepreneurial impulse to seek change can hinder long-term success if not managed properly.

"Better comes from boring. It is not exciting to run your 30 eigth split test on a landing page. It does make you more money."

The speaker suggests that mundane tasks, though unexciting, are critical for business improvement and profitability.

• The speaker stresses the importance of executing known but neglected tasks within a business.
• Acknowledging and confronting the less stimulating aspects of business is crucial for growth.
• The speaker challenges the audience to focus on a single business to ensure proper management and scaling.
• Prompt follow-up with leads is given as an example of a simple but effective practice to significantly increase sales.

"The reason that stuff is so important is because you already know what you need to do."

This quote implies that business owners often already possess the knowledge of what needs to be done but fail to act on it.

"Who here calls other leads within five minutes? Okay, like two hands, you will triple your sales. Triple."

The speaker provides a specific actionable step that can have a dramatic impact on sales, emphasizing the potential benefits of diligent execution.

• CRM systems are essential for managing leads and customer interactions.
• Effective call prioritization within a sales team can significantly increase revenue.
• The most successful businesses are those that have their processes fine-tuned.

"CRM. Got to get round robin set up, leads got to come in. You got to figure out how call prioritization works between the team. That's boring. Makes you a shitload of money. That's how it works."

This quote emphasizes the importance of setting up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and call prioritization to manage leads effectively, which, although may seem mundane, is crucial for generating significant revenue.

• Pretending to be someone capable of achieving your goals can help you become that person.
• Acting as your own coach can be beneficial since you have the most information about yourself.
• Self-coaching involves asking what you would advise yourself to do, often leading to better decisions than your current actions.

"And you continue to ignore the new things that sound really exciting and you become the person who's able to do that by pretending to be the person who's able to do that because you already know what to do."

This quote suggests that by ignoring distractions and focusing on what you know needs to be done, you can develop into the successful person you aim to be by emulating that persona.

"So if you were coaching you right now, what would you tell you to do? And what's crazy about this is that half the fucking time it's not what I'm doing."

The speaker highlights the discrepancy between what we know we should do and what we actually do, implying that self-coaching can lead to better decision-making and outcomes.

• Diversification can be a distraction that hinders financial success.
• Concentrating on a single, profitable aspect of a business can lead to rapid growth.
• Focus allows for mastery and makes failure increasingly unlikely.

"It's so much easier to stack the deck in your favor if you just do one thing, because when you focus on one thing, you make it unreasonable to fail."

This quote illustrates the advantage of focusing on one business aspect, which increases the likelihood of success by reducing the chance of failure.

• Achieving excellence in any field requires extensive practice and repetition.
• The more effort you put into a specific skill or task, the better you become.
• Being the best often means outworking the competition in terms of volume and persistence.

"I took 4000 fucking sales calls. That's how I did it. I didn't even go through a sales training. I had 4000 fucking conversations."

The speaker credits his sales expertise to the sheer number of sales calls he took, demonstrating that practical experience can be more effective than formal training.

• Rapid growth without a solid foundation can lead to failure.
• Shortcuts and neglecting product quality can be detrimental to business success.
• Word of mouth is a powerful force that can work for or against a business.

"Everyone fails because they want to move fast. Like this is the number one issue. So they don't have a solid foundation."

This quote warns against the temptation to prioritize speed over stability, which can result in a weak business foundation and ultimately lead to failure.

• Negative customer experiences can lead to a decline in business growth.
• An increase in advertising costs disproportionate to market rates may indicate negative word of mouth.
• Businesses should focus on product quality to foster positive word of mouth and referrals.

"If you run ads and it has become more expensive for you, disproportionate to the increase in cpms, just cost per impression or eyeballs in that period of time that you've been in business, then it means that you have negative word of mouth."

The speaker points out that rising advertising costs relative to market benchmarks suggest that negative word of mouth is affecting the business, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a positive reputation to avoid costly marketing expenses.

• Short-term tactics lead to negative referrals and increased customer acquisition costs.
• The invisible hand of the market punishes businesses that don't focus on product quality.
• Shortcuts result in a cycle of promotion and decline without establishing a solid foundation.

When you shortcut it, promote, promote, promote, promote. And then flatline. And then dissolve.

This quote illustrates the cycle of aggressive promotion followed by a rapid decline when businesses take shortcuts instead of focusing on product quality.

• Taking time to perfect a product pays off in the long run.
• Many businesses rush products without proper development, resulting in inferior offerings.
• A well-developed product simplifies business operations and provides leverage.

They don't get the product right. They put two pieces of bologna, of sandwiches together with a bologna slice in the middle, and they call it a product.

This quote criticizes businesses that rush to market with poorly developed products, likening them to a subpar sandwich.

• Better quality products and services provide more leverage.
• Small and big businesses can have similar levels of activity, but alignment and direction differentiate them.
• Proper alignment means the same input yields more output.

Better is leverage. Better gets you more for what you put in.

The speaker emphasizes that improving quality (better) increases leverage, meaning businesses get more return on their efforts.

• Continuous improvement, such as split testing and role-playing, is key to success.
• Regularly refining marketing strategies and customer service can boost profits.
• The process may be tedious, but it leads to significant financial gains.

What boring, but better. Looks like it means split testing, landing pages not once, but weekly.

The speaker highlights the importance of consistent, albeit mundane, tasks like split testing that contribute to better performance.

• Meticulous hiring processes can yield employees that provide significant leverage.
• Role-playing with sales and customer success teams improves their skills.
• Investing more time in hiring and training can prevent future losses.

Taking ten more interviews for the same role. Sucks. Sucks to talk to ten more people for no reason. But there is a reason...

This quote explains that while conducting numerous interviews is tedious, it serves the purpose of finding an employee who will greatly contribute to the company's success.

• Commitment to daily activities, regardless of immediate outcomes, is crucial.
• Personal satisfaction should come from the commitment to the activity, not just the outcomes.
• Repetitive action is what forges character and leads to success.

You need to become the person who isn't satisfied with whatever that outcome was, but only by the commitment that you made to yourself about the activity that you were going to do.

The speaker advises that commitment to activities, rather than being swayed by outcomes, is essential for personal growth and business success.

• There is a disproportionate relationship between the effort put into a product and its sales success.
• Investing significantly more effort can yield exponentially greater returns.
• This principle of leverage is often overlooked because it requires hard work.

About 20 times the work. Realistically, who here knows the difference in sales between a seven and a half book and a nine and a half book? About a thousand times the sales.

The speaker points out the exponential benefits of putting in extra effort into improving a product, leading to vastly higher sales.

• Understanding leverage in making money.
• The downside of constantly creating new, low-quality products.
• How focusing on better quality is a form of leverage.
• Consistent improvement and alignment lead to success.
• The significance of hiring and team development.
• The importance of commitment over immediate outcomes.
• The exponential rewards of putting in extensive effort.

So I said I was going to cover three things. I want to make sure I filled my promise.

This quote summarizes the speaker's intention to cover the three main topics promised at the beginning of the talk, which are about leverage, the pitfalls of new but poor products, and how better quality provides leverage.

• Focusing on a single outcome for a long time without distraction is key to scaling a business.
• Aligning all actions towards a single goal leads to seemingly effortless success.
• Acquisition.com helps companies grow through leverage by providing the who, what, and how to scale.

Through leverage, most entrepreneurs lack the who, the what, and the how to scale@acquisition.com. We recruit the who, we give them the what, and we show them the how.

The speaker describes how Acquisition.com assists entrepreneurs in scaling their businesses by providing essential resources and guidance, emphasizing the concept of leverage.