Wanna scale your business? Click here.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition Mentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap
Chapter 1: What is the key to standing out in business?
Being believable is more persuasive than being persuasive. If you demonstrate and speak forth your biases prior to making a claim or making some sort of teaching thing, more people will believe you. And I would encourage you that if you want to stand out in this marketplace, the thing that you can do above all else to stand out is to actually tell the truth. I have exciting news for you today.
And that exciting news is that it's Monday. And for those of you who are brand new, welcome. Now, before we get going, I actually wanted to set the tone with something that I shared on Le Twitter, which is French for Twitter, actually French for the platform formerly known as Twitter. So Le X, maybe just Lex. I don't know. We'll go with it. All right.
And I think this was a really exceptional read and I think probably applies to many of you today. All right. So I will begin and then we'll get into the fun and shenanigans. All right. So differentiation is survival and the universe wants you to be typical. This is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon. This is by Jeff Bezos, by the way.
And I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians can take it to heart. Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins' extraordinary book, The Blind Watchmaker. It's about a basic fact of biology. Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at.
Left to itself, and that is what it is when it dies, the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantities, such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content, or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure and its surroundings.
Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than the surroundings, and in cold climates, they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die, the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up at the same temperature as our surroundings.
Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells. They work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail, they die.
More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die. While the passage is not as tended as a metaphor, it's nevertheless a fantastic one and very relevant to Amazon.
I would argue that it's relevant to all companies and institutions and to each of our individual lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness, to keep alive the thing or things that make you special? I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship.
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Chapter 2: Why is telling the truth important in marketing?
Customers will shout at you for not being good enough. And you may shout at yourself when you aren't making the amount of sales that you want, or you're not getting the amount of advertising, or your ads aren't working, or people aren't saying yes on the phone, or at the end of the month after spending all your money, there's nothing left.
That stark contrast of reality is what makes entrepreneurship, in my opinion, a driver of change and ideally improvement. And so I see this letter. It's really great. You can find it on my ex. It's one of the pages of the shareholder website. And you can scroll down a second too, look. Ah, little Jeffy B action. That was kind of cool. I actually forgot.
I honestly was just really moved by the thing, but I did forget that. Kind of dope, right? Anyways, no big deal. Me and my compatriots, we exchange tweets sometimes. Me and Jeff, we go back and forth. Jeffy is what he likes to be called behind the scenes. No, but anyways, very, very cool.
I thought it was really distinctive and it caught my eye and I figured I would share it with you because it's definitely like the energy that I have right now. is that it takes a tremendous amount of effort to be you. And I know we're going to do a breakdown, I think, but I want to talk about something that's super top of mind for me right now.
Being believable is more persuasive than being persuasive. Said differently, if you demonstrate and speak forth your biases prior to making a claim or making some sort of teaching thing, more people will believe you And so many people in the info world rely on unsubstantiated claims and sometimes outright lies.
And I would encourage you that if you want to stand out in this marketplace, the thing that you can do above all else to stand out is to actually tell the truth. And the people that tell the most true thing will stand out the most. And so imagine a world where you got on a phone call and someone said, if I buy your thing, will I learn how to paint? If I buy your thing, will I learn how to code?
If I buy your thing, will I learn how to make $5,000 a month extra? And then to that, you would say, I think that would be amazing. But to be clear, I promise you no guarantees and no outcomes because I cannot control what you do. And would it be reasonable for me to promise something or guarantee something that I have no control over?
With that being said, what I can help you do is state the facts and tell the truth. I will give you access to the materials that are the best breakdowns of how to paint, how to X, how to Y. And there are people like Sally who says that this was amazing, but her results might not be typical. There are other people who haven't been satisfied. How different of a frame
Would it be on your sales call to state the facts and tell the truth? How different of a frame would it be on your webinar to start that way? How different of a frame would it be in the ads to say that? And so this has been something that's been very top of mind for me, which is like, to what degree? Because truth, like, obviously there's objective truth. One plus one equals two, right?
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Chapter 3: How does differentiation relate to survival?
I have learned so many of the skills I have from what many would consider under the pejorative term of guru, of info marketer. But I've learned a lot of what I've learned, some of my most valuable skills from other people who have been in this space. Now, that being said, my results are not typical. I am not typical. And so me saying that doesn't guarantee that you will have those results either.
But I think that if all of us collectively, everyone on school, If we were to advertise in a way that was more truthful than anybody else, we would collectively raise the conversion of this platform. And here's the fucked up shit. The first people to do it will stick out the most. You will get first mover advantage.
Because the thing is, is that so many people, many of you who are listening to this right now, are afraid. You're afraid of telling the truth. But when you think about it from a customer's perspective, you would always be more inclined to believe somebody who told the truth and disclaimed up front, gave damaging admissions. It's one of the most fundamental ways of persuasion. I teach this.
Say all the things that are bad and then say the things that are good so that when you say the good things, they're more likely to be believed. It's to your benefit. to disclaim the things that are not true or could potentially not be true. And what I mean by that is saying the reality is not 100% of the people who join your community are going to lose weight.
Not 100% of the people who are joining your community are going to get a six pack. They're not going to learn how to paint like Van Gogh. They're not going to even learn how to paint like you. Why is that? Because their backgrounds, their effort, their experience will differ. Their results will vary. So say it and you will become significantly more compelling.
The people who state their biases up front are more trusted by people despite the fact that they have disclaimed their biases. So if someone says, hey, Alex, do you think Layla is a good CEO? I would say I am biased because she is my wife. And so that will weigh in my decision. That being said, I care a lot about making money.
If I didn't think she was the best CEO, then I would probably make moves to not have her as CEO. And so if you deem me an intelligent individual who's motivated by external goals and trying to achieve things, then you might reason that I would have maybe even a higher bar potentially for my spouse because it's a reflection of me.
But by me saying that, and by beginning with my bias, it makes what I say afterwards more believable. it also happens to be true. And so what I want you to think about here, okay? What I want you to think about here is there's a few situations where you can correct these things, all right? So the first is in the advertisements, all right? Number one is how people find out about your stuff.
That's in the outbound messages, that's in your YouTube videos, that's in your paid ads, right? Or whatever, your Instagram, your TikTok, whatever. That's place one. And by the way, you telling your story despite it being true, is also still a claim. You are testimonial number one.
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Chapter 4: What does it take to maintain distinctiveness?
If you can do all four of these things, you can. But let's just pretend you can. So number one is that you get permission from the person. That sounds about fair. You're like, okay, that feels okay. That feels legit. That feels right. The second is that you disclose the context under which this has occurred. Now, this is all the stuff I'm talking about. What are the unique situations?
What are the circumstances? How is the data collected? What kind of experience did they get? Was it different than everyone else's? Okay, that's the disclosures. The third piece is substantiation. Now, you might think, well, I have a screenshot. That is actually not sufficient substantiation. Even if they gave you a screenshot of their Stripe account, not sufficient substantiation.
you would actually have to show three things in the substantiation. Number one is you'd have to show their bank account or actual downloads from their Stripe, actual PDFs from their processing or their whatever, right? That's thing one, before your intervention. Second, You'd have to show the PDFs and actual downloads from the bank account or their processor after the intervention.
And number three, a causal relationship between the two gaps that shows that what you did is the reason that it went up. That's number three. But wait, there's more. Number four is that, is it typical? And if the answer is no, and if you're like, well, how would I show typicality?
you would have to substantiate those claims for everyone, which means that you would have to track that for every customer you have. Now, one of the advantages that school has is that we are a platform. And so we can substantiate the claims because we own the processing. Very unique for us.
But if you're trying to... So essentially what I'm trying to say here is that earnings claims, likely the way you're making them, are probably not legal. Okay. Now, there's obviously... Some of you right now are like, you're hyperventilating. I won't say more about that. I'll just leave that there. Now, you might be asking, well, then how can I show proof that my stuff is good?
Great follow-up question. How? The way that you do that is that you show satisfaction. And so the way you do this from a persuasion perspective is that you say, you might want to know ROI. But I don't want to talk about that. What I want to really talk about is the question behind your question. This is an intention close, by the way.
Someone asks for an answer to something that you can't answer, either for legal reasons or for whatever reasons. And so rather than saying no, you say, I'm guessing the reason you're asking that question is because you want to know intention. Because you want to know, will you be happy after you made this purchase? And if that's what you want to know, let's talk about that. Here's Sarah.
Sarah's in a similar situation to you, and she's very satisfied with this purchase. This was the best decision of my entire life. It totally changed how I saw painting. I see it as an artist now. My painting skills have completely transformed my life. Phenomenal. No earnings claims, no specific outcomes, entirely subjective. Who can argue? Alex is the best painting teacher on the planet.
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Chapter 5: How can you build trust with your audience?
If you didn't have, you know, you didn't have these materials, now you have access to the materials. These are plus plus, right? Minus minus is less bad stuff. What is, and if we're thinking through this, what is this, what is some of the bad stuff? overwhelmed, confusion, not knowing where to start. Less of that now. So if you're suffering from those issues, we might be able to help remove those.
Okay? Again, we make no promises, blah, blah, blah. Okay. What is the plus minus and minus plus part? How does that work in? That's what I call selling against the don't, right? Which is the path not taken. And so a lot of marketers, a lot of salespeople, they get lost because they spend too much of their time only on the decision in front of them rather than looking at all the alternative paths.
So if you get off the phone today, plus minus, you might have more overwhelm. You might have more confusion. You might have more delay between where you are and where you want to go. That might be a riskier path. And then minus plus is if you decide not to move forward, you might not get these outcomes that you wanted.
And so when I'm thinking about writing copy, I use that as basically framework one. And then in the book, I talk about who, what, when as framework two. And when I layer those two things on top of each other, that gives me endless variety of things that I can bring up that can be persuasive. And if you're like, what book am I talking about? This is the Leeds book in the... I'll find the section.
I think it's in the paid ad section. I think it's section one for paid ads. And in there, I talk about writing copy. And it's the who, what, when framework. So what we're looking at right now is looking at page 140, this framework. 140 in the leads boat. All right, what, who, when? And so what I just went over was the what side. That's my plus minus box, right?
Now I've got my who side, which is, okay, well, we talked about how this could affect you, but how does it affect your family? How does not doing this affect your friends? How does not doing this affect your colleagues or your rivals, your frenemies? How are they affected by this decision to do or not do? And then third is when.
is, okay, well, we're talking about present, but let's talk about the future. Let's talk about the past. What will your wife think about you under these new conditions? Would that be valuable? And so, all of that being said, if you're like, well, what do I do if I don't promise everything else in persuasion? And so hopefully that gave you guys a little bit of context.
This has been top of mind for me because I'm, I don't know, I feel really, really passionate about this because I think that, I mean, I'm a gym owner, guys. Like I came up as a, I went online training and then I started a gym. Like it's not like I went through some branding school or some marketing school to figure any of this stuff out.
Like I found this out by reading books and buying courses and attending conferences and going to masterminds and doing all sorts of stuff that right now gets shit on. And frankly, probably rightfully so because of the things that I just described, because there's a lot of people who promise high and deliver low. They do the opposite. And some of you guys are listening to this right now.
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Chapter 7: How should you handle earnings claims in advertising?
It's where we do these big breakdowns of businesses. It's a lot of fun. Anyways, so there's a guy who's going to come on and he's a restaurant owner. And he's like, you know, I don't really want to share my numbers because I think my employees will leave if they know how much money I'm making. And I'm like, okay, so big picture, your goal long-term is to keep opening more locations.
Do you think when you have 10 locations that they haven't figured out that you are making money? And taken to the natural extreme, has this limited businesses in the past? Well, every publicly traded company is literally forced to be transparent about all of their metrics and yet people still work there. And so there's a lot of these limiting beliefs that exist.
One of them is that if I share my financials, everyone will leave and maybe some people will leave. And guess what? Maybe they shouldn't be there because eventually if you do succeed, they will find out that you make money. And guess what? So what? Find somebody who's happy about you making money instead of angry about it. That's probably a great first place to start for people on your team.
But second to that, if the eventuality is that everyone's going to find out anyways, and you're going to have to work this way, and that's what the biggest people in the world do, why not start now? I see that as a measure of success. And so I promise you, you can absolutely advertise and sell in a way that is compliant and truthful, and it will improve your business.
And it will make you stand out in a marketplace full of scum and sewage. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business.
So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages.
Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap.
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