What would you do with $100 million a year? Today, we unpack Joe’s insightful conversation with business mogul Alex Hormozi, who breaks down the steps to massively increasing your income. Spoiler alert: It’s not about clipping coupons—it’s about thinking bigger, stacking the right skills, and taking strategic risks.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or rocking it in a 9-to-5, Alex shares:
- How to identify high-leverage opportunities to grow your income.
- The art of negotiating for more value, no matter your role.
- Why maximizing your life is more impactful than endlessly optimizing it.
- The importance of “10x thinking” and making transformative decisions.
- How stacking skills can set you apart and skyrocket your earning potential.
Get ready to shake up your 2025 game plan and rethink how you approach earning, saving, and living larger. Don’t just settle for incremental improvements—this episode is your guide to big moves.
It’s time to build a bigger stack and unlock your potential!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
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Today’s Mentor: Alex Hormozi
Big thanks to Alex Hormozi for joining us today. Grab yourself a copy of the book $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No. Learn more about Alex by visiting Acquisition.com
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Tune in on Friday for the second half of Alex Hormozi’s interview! You won’t want to miss it!
Written by: Kevin Bailey
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Episode transcript
[00:00:00] bit: My old acquaintance, [00:00:07] I don’t know the rest of. [00:00:17] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. [00:00:31] I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, dog, and buckle up buttercup because today we’re gonna teach you how to make a hundred million dollars a year with a guy who makes millions and helps others make millions. Alex Hormozi. Joe recently flew to Las Vegas to meet with the famous business building expert, and today we’re breaking down that interview for you, so that 2025 is your best income producing year. [00:00:58] And now two guys who have the notepads ready and their game face is on for this money earning extravaganza. It’s Joe and oh, [00:01:15] Joe: happy New Year stackers and welcome. Let me be the first to welcome you to 2025. I am Joe Saul-Sehy. I’m super happy you’re here In January, we usually kick things off by helping you get out of debt by helping you set up new goals. This year we are starting with income. We’re going to hopefully OG increase stackers income. [00:01:38] A bunch. If you wanna have a brighter year of far more Benjamins in 2025, this is your show. [00:01:45] OG: Amen. And you said, get your notepads ready. OGs going digital this year. So I’ve got my remarkable tablet. Look at ready to rock roll. Look at you. [00:01:52] Joe: Remarkable. You finally got one of those. How do you like it? [00:01:55] OG: I am, uh, I’m in the a hundred day free trial period. [00:01:58] I will, I will report back. [00:02:01] Doug: Was that a, uh, Christmas gift from our caller Nick? [00:02:05] OG: No, it was, uh, it was, it was a Christmas gift from our, from our friend OG to himself. OGs, like, back away. Nick, I have all these notebooks, right? Like these little journal books, they’re always with me so that I just have contemporaneous, like whatever I’m thinking about. [00:02:20] So it’s a big change to go to here, but I’m gonna do it. I’m committed to doing it for the first quarter, just to see how it goes for 99 more days. Yeah. But who’s counting? No better way to kick it off than this, uh, fantastic interview, which I’ve been waiting to hear since I knew that you, uh, went to Las Vegas without me to do it. [00:02:36] Joe: Yeah. Let’s talk about how this is gonna go down because we Did you hear him slip that in there? Yeah, just he puts the aggressive and passive aggressive. Doug, [00:02:44] OG: I thought I could get a pump on with him. That’s what I was thinking. I was like, I like to work out. Alex likes to work out. I’m sorry. What? We can get a little jack together. [00:02:52] I mean, if he’s way more jacked than me, but [00:02:54] Joe: for stackers that have never seen Alex Hormozi, you need to, uh, just look this guy up. He’s wall suns out. Guns out. Yes. Yeah. And it’s funny because I was, I was teasing saying that when I went out there that I was just gonna reach across and just bump on because he likes to, uh, likes to show off those guns. [00:03:15] Now he, he had on a long sleeve shirt when, oh, I went out to visit him. But let’s set this up for everybody because we are not doing our normal variety show day. Here we are digging into one interview. I’m gonna play the interview, but a lot of what Alex Hormozi does is speaks to entrepreneurs and a lot of our stackers are not necessarily entrepreneurs. [00:03:35] You might work for somebody else here, what we call an intrapreneur. You may think if OG and I didn’t stop this interview and talk about what does this mean to you? You may think that this doesn’t apply to you. There are so many nuggets in what you’re about to hear that are going to apply to far more of you than you think. [00:03:53] This is going to be fantastic, and while sure you might not make a hundred million dollars, we’re gonna get you on the path to making a lot more money and I’m super excited. So I flew out there. I spent about 45 minutes talking to him. We’re just gonna dive into that interview. OG and I are gonna stop it from time to time. [00:04:10] We’re gonna dig in and we’re gonna make sure that you get the nuggets that you need to make more money. Before we get there, we have some sponsors that make sure that this is free for you. How about that? We’re gonna help you make more money and we’re gonna keep the product free. We’re gonna hear from a couple of them, and then we’re gonna jump into my interview with a guy who knows how to make money. [00:04:32] Mr. Alex Hormozi. [00:04:40] Hey, welcome to 2025 Stackers. And you know what? I know this feels weird, but Mom, let me outta the basement. I’m actually in Las Vegas where I’ve got Mr. Alex Hormozi with us. Happy New Year, my friend. [00:04:53] Alex: It’s great to be here in 2025, another day. Similar. It’s actually completely different than 2024. I’m amazed at how different the world is, uh, compared to yesterday. [00:05:02] It’s like the light was turned on. [00:05:03] Joe: Isn’t that wild how things change overnight? All of a sudden things [00:05:06] Alex: change. Yeah, [00:05:07] Joe: but lemme ask you this. Let’s say it’s January 1st. You’re 22 years old. You can talk to the old Alex who was 22 years old. What would you tell Alex? 22 on New Year’s Day? [00:05:18] Alex: Same thing I would tell him every other day, do more than you probably are. [00:05:22] I think a lot of it is just honestly be, keep doing what you’re doing. In the earlier days, it’s like you have to act a lot on faith. You have to act like, I think this will work. And, um, one of the problems with successful actions is that especially if you have a longer term viewpoint, long-term sounds good in theory until it takes a long time. [00:05:39] And so I think just reminding myself that like, you are on the right path. If you’ve lost five pounds and you’re not down the a hundred pounds that you set the goal on, it’s like you still need you to calor deficit. You still need to work. You mean [00:05:47] Joe: by January 4th? Yeah. Right, right. By you, by January. [00:05:50] Exactly in trouble. [00:05:51] Alex: But yeah, a lot of times it’s like the success has to get tied to the actions that we have to take. In the meantime, [00:05:56] Joe: man, already two seconds in og. There’s a ton there. First of all, his very first answer, do more, and we’re gonna hear this from Alex quite a bit over the next hour. The thing that I’ve seen with very successful people is they just try more stuff. [00:06:14] Their failure rate in the beginning especially, is much like everybody else’s failure rate. They just do it on a quicker basis. I remember, uh, Tony Robbins hearing Tony Robbins talk about this in the past. Mm-hmm. If you just increase the velocity at which you make mistakes, you will gain the lessons from those mistakes much more quickly, which means then you can move on down the path toward bigger successes. [00:06:36] This idea of do more, his flippant answer, I think was huge. [00:06:41] OG: Well, and I heard two things there. One I heard was do more, and I thought about it in the context of incrementally more. He talked about losing weight. If you’re working out three times a week, is there a chance that you can work out three times a week plus an extra 10 minutes? [00:06:57] Can you do just that incrementally more stuff. The other thing that I heard him say was, focus on the thing that you’re doing, not necessarily the result that you’re having from the thing that you’re doing, because it’s the thing that you’re doing is gonna produce the result. And, and, and he said it right at the very end. [00:07:14] There was, success comes from doing the thing, not from the result of the thing. And we learn about this in Strategic Coach, you’re gonna do a lot more in the next 10 years or in the next 25 years than you even thought possible. But it’s because the compounding effect of all of the little changes that you make in your life over that 25 year period versus going, it’s January 1st talking, I didn’t lose any weight yet. [00:07:38] You know, it’s January 3rd, I should be down some pounds. It’s like, you’re not gonna see all those results right now. It’s gonna take a while, but you’re, if you do the activity, I. You will see the results faster than you think you will, just not as fast as you think you should, if that makes sense. [00:07:55] Joe: I love that phrase that he said. [00:07:57] Long-term sounds good. Until you realize [00:07:59] OG: term. It’s until, until you really realize what long-term is, except for the inverse of long-term. And what I mean by that is how many times have you thought about something? And, and I, I don’t know, Joe. I was, um, I walk a lot. I, you know, I make phone calls and stuff. [00:08:13] Doug’s a recipient of those walks and phone calls. Sometimes he doesn’t wanna be. But I was thinking about your series of time when you, when you ran a mile a day, you ran a mile a day for some insane amount of days. I don’t remember what it was, a thousand days or something stupid. Wow. I mean, not stupid, but like crazy. [00:08:31] Like insane. Something stupid hard. [00:08:33] Joe: Yeah. It was close to five years. [00:08:34] OG: Yeah. You know, when you think about something and say, I, I mentioned the remarkable tablet for 90 days, right? It’s hard to commit to doing something for 90 days until you look back over the previous 90 days and then you go. That was just October. [00:08:49] Oh my God. Yeah. I could have done that. I mean, it was just October, but now you look, it’s January 1st and you go, can I, could I really walk 10,000 steps every day for the next 90 days? Oh my gosh. It would be crazy. It’s, I can’t necessarily commit to doing that so hard. And then you get to March 31st and you go, well, I mean, that was just yesterday. [00:09:10] I mean, I can’t do it in the future, but I could have done in the past, you know? Yeah. We’re [00:09:13] Joe: gonna hear this a lot in this interview. Some of the stuff that isn’t said that’s in the cracks, taking all the stuff that we just said, what did Alex really just say? We evaluate too much and we do too little. [00:09:25] Mm-hmm. We don’t take action enough and we evaluate every single little action instead of just continuing to get out there and do it, and do it, and do it, and do it. Let’s jump back in. Talked in the past, and the reason we wanted to kick off 2025 with you is because stackers, it’s our a hundred million dollar year. [00:09:44] In fact, I brought some of, Ooh, look at these, huh? Yeah. So if in 2025 we’re gonna get some of these, I think we’ve gotta talk about the type of stuff that you do, because a lot of our stackers, Alex, they don’t think that they’re in sales. I firmly believe that we’re all in sales. Whether you’re the CFO of a $5 million company, you’re like, Nope, the sales thing is down the hall, or you’re the stay at home dad who’s helping his family, you know, get dinner on the table. [00:10:09] You’re always in sales. [00:10:10] Alex: Yeah, I agree. I mean, fundamentally, if you think about the highest leverage skill that you can have, it’s to get other people to do stuff for you. And so if you only had that one skill, then you could use that one skill to get everything else life. [00:10:21] Joe: You have said this publicly by year number two. [00:10:25] Your top line revenue is $26 million from zero for Jim. [00:10:29] Alex: Yeah. For gym launch [00:10:30] Joe: to 26 million for gym launch. Now we’re, we’re looking at nine figures. How has that changed your life? [00:10:36] Alex: I mean, Layla buys more expensive stuff. I think honestly, though, it’s like the things that we could afford at that point. [00:10:42] There’s nothing that we buy now that we couldn’t afford. Then. I think honestly, to some degree, you, you have to grow accustomed to wealth, and then also, you probably heard this saying like over $70,000 a year, there’s no increase in, in subjective wellbeing. But I think that there’s a, a problem with that study, and it was that it requires more skill to know how to spend, spend $10 million a year and enjoy it. [00:11:06] Joe: Almost like the old, uh, Brewster’s millions movie. [00:11:08] Alex: Mm-hmm. Movie. Absolutely. If you have no skill above $70,000, then you won’t spend the money. Well, but if you know how to spend money, then you can continue to make more and get incremental returns in terms of increases in subject to wellbeing by making more. [00:11:22] And so I would say that my life is certainly better. From that perspective, I do know that I have significantly, I mean, I don’t really have any anxiety around money. Some people I hear that they’re like, man, I always feel like I could lose it all tomorrow. Like, I don’t have that. I really, I really don’t. [00:11:34] I’m like, has that always [00:11:35] Joe: been the case? I mean, was that confidence with you even when we’ll talk? No, a lot of our audience hasn’t heard your story. They don’t know that you’ve been broke what, twice? [00:11:42] Alex: That’s my third run. [00:11:43] Joe: Yeah. I think Walt Disney’s like at five. So yeah, [00:11:46] Alex: I think it’s unlikely that I go back to zero again. [00:11:48] But what’s interesting is that like when I was at zero, I was also still pretty okay. You know, the downside is being pretty okay. I think that that has helped me take bigger shots. [00:11:56] Joe: What I love about this for uh, I’ll get back to what we love about that. By the way, I was showing him when I said, look at these. [00:12:02] I had a stack of, uh, fake a hundred dollars bills that we had found in their offices. [00:12:07] Doug: Wow. And we’re [00:12:07] Joe: showing the, I knew it [00:12:08] Doug: wasn’t your biceps. [00:12:10] Joe: Look at these, Alex, these cannons, look at these. There’s a lot to unpack there also. Oh, gee. Let’s talk about this idea of knowing how to spend money. Well, because like most of his points, he makes these points very quickly, and then he is onto the next thing. [00:12:26] But this is a huge point. If you know how to spend money, well, you can deploy that money, still enjoy that money, and also that money is bringing in more money. That’s, that’s a big aha. Like knowing how to spend money. Well, we’ve talked a lot about how it’s about the income side of the equation versus the expense side of the equation. [00:12:48] Sometimes that expense can also lead to bigger and more revenue. [00:12:54] OG: I, I guess I would think about it as being an investment then. Right. And maybe that’s what it means about spending money is how to wisely. Allocate it maybe is a good way to think about it. That’s how I internalized it. I was having a conversation a couple of weeks ago with somebody and I said that I can simultaneously hold these two thoughts in my head, which are, first that money doesn’t solve problems, but you can arrive at them in a limo so you, you know, so you can arrive at your problems in a limo. [00:13:22] Okay. I get that side of it. And then I also appreciate the side of, if you have the money, then you don’t have any real problems where you can pay your way out of whatever problem it is. And obviously there’s some circumstances there where that’s not true health perhaps or something. But I know this story of there’s not incremental happiness over 70,000 and things like that. [00:13:41] And maybe that number’s been adjusted now. And I think there’s a very real scenario around the stress, around money, and I appreciate what he said very quickly at the end where he doesn’t like worry about money anymore. I would wonder how many people or at what level people have to be at to literally have no worry. [00:14:00] About money, because I think in my experience there’s different stages that people go through in terms of thinking about it. Anything under 70, $80,000. I think that most people budget the heck outta their money. Right? You know where every dollar goes. I think that as you go from 80 to 150, you start loosening the purse strings a little bit. [00:14:20] And as you get to one 50, maybe you don’t have as much around a food budget, you know? And, and food is one of those, obviously a staple that you have to have in your, in your life. But maybe you’re not shopping always at the discount grocery store, or you’re not paying attention to the price of eggs. You know, you’re just like, Hey, I need a dozen eggs for the refrigerator and you buy them. [00:14:38] And I feel like that happens in my experiences around that one 50 range. And then I think as you get closer to 300,000 of income, I think people start not caring a lot about spending on some luxury things, whether it’s travel or whatever. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not worried about it. I think it takes a special faith in the future. [00:14:59] In your brain to not have any. Worry about, you know, what the future might bring, especially if you’re an entrepreneur. And that’s what struck [00:15:06] Joe: me was the confidence. Just the fact that he’s been bankrupt twice. This is his third go at it. And even when he was at those low points, he didn’t lose faith in his ability. [00:15:20] To make it happen. And I think this is a core thing when it comes to money. It isn’t about the money. He said, he also said, we don’t buy anything now that we couldn’t buy back then when I was broke. So a, he’s not a big spender. Mm-hmm. He doesn’t, we’re gonna talk to our frugal friends, Jill and Jen from the Frugal Friends podcast on Monday about frugality. [00:15:42] And frugality is not about cheapening your life, it’s about establishing these values about what you’re really interested in. Right. I get this strong feeling that he very much has those values. The huge 26 million for Jim launch by the end of his first year, $26 million at the end of a year. But before that, he’d been broke twice and he still was able to grow this thing. [00:16:05] I think that no matter where you’re at on the spectrum, this self-talk that we have, that I can’t do it. I’m not in the space. I, I, I just, this is for other people making money’s for somebody else. I think to some degree that’s between our ears. It’s not always completely a hundred percent between our ears, but I think there is a lot of self-talk that’s negative. [00:16:26] Where Alex, when he was broke, was like, Nope, it is me. It is my time. 2025 is gonna be my year. I can make it happen. I like it. Let’s get into, uh, what I loved. So I started this sentence with, what I love is, what I love about this for our stackers is that it’s this confidence that you can do it again. And it’s not, there’s not this exterior thing going on. [00:16:48] It’s all inside of you. [00:16:49] Alex: Yeah. So back to my 22-year-old self, my piter thing that I would tell him besides you are on the right path continue, would be to continue to invest in the SME 500 rather than the s. There’s a lot of what I do with. [00:17:07] The first a hundred thousand dollars that I would have, I would reinvest all of that into skill acquisition. And that seems like a really amorphous thing, like skill acquisition, like what is that? And so that’s going to courses, seminars, tutoring, mentorship, whatever it is that you can to get more skills. [00:17:22] Like I’m very much a product of the alternative education system. [00:17:25] Joe: You’re not, yeah, you’re not talking about, uh, traditional four year college degree. No. [00:17:28] Alex: Yeah. I course run eight. So opportunities exist. Very simple example, which is. And the numbers may change, but just go with the concept. So like a friend of mine has a daughter, she turned 17, something like that. [00:17:43] She started working in a bowling alley, like the front desk or whatever, right? Yeah. And so, and he’s a multimillionaire, but he’s like, okay, it’s a job, whatever. She’s, she’s worked, she’s outta the house. But he’s like, you know, if you take a week or two and just do the phlebotomy certification, you can make 25 an hour, at least in the city that they were at. [00:17:58] Like that. Yeah. And the cost of that, I think, again, rough estimates, 500 bucks, something like that. And so for $500, she could triple her earning capacity in a matter of weeks. And so if you think about that, that’s where, like, that is the, a microcosmic example of what investing in skill acquisition does is that it just simply increases your ability to time, trade time for money. [00:18:18] And I think there’s a lot of pushback on the idea of trading time for money, especially in the finance space. Sure. But I fundamentally reject that concept mostly because all of us spend time for money. It’s just that we are not exchanging based on that unit. And so it’s like, and I could prove it, which is just you live every second of the day and money comes in over seconds of the day, therefore you make you trade money for time. [00:18:41] It’s just that, let’s say I make an investment, it’s like this thing makes me money. It’s like, so you don’t count the time, the other 20 investments that you looked at and then decided not to do, and then the time it took you to vest this investment and then make it’s higher leverage. Absolutely, and that’s the point. [00:18:54] It’s a higher leveraged investment and you got more for the time you put in, but you still absolutely traded time. [00:18:59] Joe: He, he, he, the, the time and money thing obviously rubs him the wrong way. I wanna focus though on this idea early on and he again, seems to be talking more about an entrepreneurial spirit, og, that she gets a job at a bowling alley. [00:19:14] It’s guy’s daughter, if she just went and spent $500, she could make that back up in a hurry. Just getting a, a quick certification. Now she’s got a job. Has a skill trading more money per hour than she was trading before. Still trading time for money, but trading on a much higher number. You know, he talks about TikTok ads because again, he talks to entrepreneurs, [00:19:38] OG: right? [00:19:38] Joe: But when you look at designing yourself a curriculum, no matter what your job is, I think his bigger point is look around at the skillset you have now and how much money would it take to invest in the next area on this career ladder that you’re on, even if you’re working for somebody else. And you’re gonna find that there are ways to multiply whatever current number you’re at today. [00:20:05] OG: Well, it’s kind of, you know, he said the s and p versus the S and me. I think about investing in the context of like capital market assumptions. And we’ve talked about this on the show before around if you invest your money in the s and p, you know you’re gonna get a 10% return. If you don’t touch it for a hundred years, you know, if you’re gonna invest in the smallest companies in the world, you’re gonna get a 12 to 13% of return. [00:20:25] If you don’t touch it, a lot more volatility. And if you’re gonna invest in a small business, if your brother-in-law says, Hey, let me sell you shares of my ice cream shop, he better be modeling out a 20% return. So it’s way riskier to have that little, little teeny tiny business than to give your money to the best investment managers of the best corporate managers in the world. [00:20:44] I allow the s and p 500, [00:20:46] Joe: but at 22 [00:20:47] OG: years [00:20:47] Joe: old. [00:20:48] OG: That’s what I’m saying. So, yeah. But the return on yourself. If you think about it in terms of capital market assumptions is a hundred x or 10 x or two x, it’s not 10%. It’s not 0.1 x. You know what I mean? If you look at your company, even if you’re working for, you, say, well this is great if I’m an entrepreneur and yeah, I can go learn how to do TikTok ads, that’s great. [00:21:08] Sell my business. No, no. Find what your company sucks at. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who runs a business and he was talking about sales in particular around business development, and we were talking about the industry he’s in and I said, is there any concern that you have around, you know, the industry over our lifetime, like disappearing, like kinda, you know, whatever. [00:21:29] And he said, well, maybe. But if you can sell, you will always have, if you can develop business, it doesn’t matter whether you’re, you could do that with washing machines or computers or TikTok ads or whatever. Like if you can, I. Alex said, get people to do stuff for you. That was his definition of it. Uh, you’ll always have a place, so look at your organization and see what they suck at and see how you can be useful to that organization. [00:21:56] If the marketing process sucks at your firm, and you can go, well, wait a second. I, I’m pretty good at this TikTok thing. I bet I can like, put it together, run the proposal by the boss, go, Hey, let me run this for a while. Pay me on the results. Like, tell me if this works for you. I need your okay to do this because it’s your company, or I need your, you know, or your department. [00:22:17] I need your okay to run this program, but let me try it and see if I’m successful. And to your point earlier, Joe, about try things, experiment, fail, try again, whatever. If you’re constantly providing value to the people around you, you’re gonna get exponential returns on that because other people aren’t gonna take the thousand dollars course to run TikTok ads. [00:22:37] You know what I mean? And you go, well, that’s a thousand bucks. It’s like, yeah, but that might get you a hundred thousand dollars pay raise. That’s a hundred x return because you’re the only one in the company that knows how to do the stupid marketing program because nobody else wants to focus on business development or whatever. [00:22:51] And you don’t have to be an entrepreneur to be able to do that. You can, you can do that in, in your own organiz, or we had another example of, I mean, this was more of a return on life. We had another example where somebody in our kids’ school, it’s a private school, they just sucked at brand awareness. [00:23:08] There was like, there’s no social proof around our kids’ school and the, you know, and obviously if you’re a private school, you have to have enrollment to have resources, to have more enrollment, to have more resources, right? It’s like this self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the people in our friend group ran marketing for a big Fortune 500 company. [00:23:26] She goes, well, I mean, I can do that for you guys if you want. It’s, she’s going, this is a no-brainer. This is like the easiest thing in the universe. Why aren’t we doing X, Y, and Z? The whole rest of the world on that side of the equation was like, yeah, it’s too complicated. We wouldn’t know what to do. And here’s this woman going, I, it’s like, take me two minutes a day. [00:23:44] I can, you know, so she took it over, doesn’t get paid for it, but got an ROI for the organization because now there’s brand awareness and people are enrolling in the school, which higher tuition, higher, you know what I mean? Like all these programs are now Waterfall. But if it [00:23:59] Joe: were a for-profit concern Yeah. [00:24:01] And it was in an organization like she, she would’ve found the opportunity and then she could have charged for that. [00:24:07] OG: Yeah, absolutely. A ton. Absolutely. My point is, is that it doesn’t have to always be about money. It can be Right. ROI in terms of experience or in terms of something that bene, it benefits us to have this woman running this program, even though financially she’s not getting anything out of it, nor are we, because more enrollment equals more opportunities for my kids, if that makes sense. [00:24:26] Yeah. He, he thought, I [00:24:26] Joe: could tell at the time that he thought he was gonna get some pushback from me, you know? ’cause he sees this as a financial show. And when I didn’t, I’m like, yes, 22 years old. Build that curriculum. Heck it does. 45 years old. Part of your budget should be on. Yeah. And this goes back to spending money. [00:24:42] How do I spend money? So it returns me more. I invest in the yes. In me. Yeah. Let’s go back to Alex. [00:24:48] Alex: Looking at dollars per hour is actually a wonderful way to continually measure what your intrinsic value is in the marketplace. And so it’s like, look at what you made last year, divided by 2000, assuming a 40 hour work week. [00:24:59] And that’s gonna give you a rough estimate of what you make, of what you make per hour. And I think that’s actually really valuable because in some instances it’s very humbling. If you divide it by 8,000, you get the all hours of the day. And that’s super humbling. Yeah. Right. But with that, it’s like, wow, I could make this number go way up. [00:25:13] Joe: I think it’s a great way to think about it. If no matter what her says, no matter whether you say you’re not, or, or, or you are, you are trading hours of your life for money coming in the front door. Even if you’re just evaluating investments, one investment versus another. How much time did you take? Yeah, if you divide the amount of money coming in the front door by the number of hours in the day, you are like, oh my goodness. [00:25:33] OG: Wasn’t there a movie about that where you had to trade time? I, I never watched the movie, but I’ve seen it on YouTube where you’d go to the coffee shop and it would be like, well, that’ll be 11 minutes. And they had little timers built into their arm and they had to scan their time. Wow. [00:25:46] Doug: I vaguely remember that. [00:25:47] They had to [00:25:47] OG: lose time. [00:25:49] Doug: Yeah. [00:25:49] OG: That was the medium of exchange, not dollars. [00:25:52] Joe: Wasn’t that part of that, uh uh What was the new show? That was, and, and by new, I mean it was like the Twilight Zone, but a newer kind of incarnation of it. It was called, yeah. Oh, black Mirror. Black Mirror. Wasn’t that a Black Mirror episode where you had to trade time? [00:26:07] Doug: It would fit. I don’t remember that as a Black Mirror episode, but it would fit with that whole meal. You, yeah. I [00:26:11] Joe: mean, [00:26:12] OG: that’s what you’re doing, [00:26:12] Joe: right? Tracking that though. Immediately, OG gets your subconscious mind going, oh, how do I make this better? [00:26:19] OG: How do I eliminate the things that are below that, [00:26:21] Joe: right? [00:26:22] OG: Yes, absolutely. A hundred percent. Yeah. [00:26:24] Doug: And so many of us are locked into thinking our work week is 40 hours when I’m done at six o’clock, then the rest of this is me time. And you don’t really realize me. Time takes on a lot of different forms, not just television and couch. I love that, [00:26:41] Joe: Doug, because think about him. [00:26:42] Think about him challenging all these assumptions. Yeah. A dollars per every hour that I exist, investing in myself versus waiting for my boss to design a curriculum. I’m not gonna wait for my boss to design a curriculum. This is my life. I’m gonna figure out where the opportunity is and I’m gonna go make more money. [00:26:58] I’m not gonna take the job at the bowling alley. I’m gonna take the $500 course so I can now get $25 an hour versus 10. [00:27:03] Doug: The first thing that I thought of when you said, you know, wait for my boss to design a curriculum, one of the things that would get my dander up so much when I was leading teams dander was people who would say, what’s my career path? [00:27:16] When they would look for some defined, documented career path for the role that they were in to say, where are steps, you’re next steps gonna tell them where are next steps? And that, that, yeah, either me or the company was gonna document to say, here’s the board game that we’re, we’ve predefined for you. [00:27:32] If you roll the dice right, you’ll get to move to this next step. Oh my God. Why would you limit yourself that much? Why would you expect anybody else on top of limiting yourself to a career path within your existing role and within that company? Why would you do that to yourself? And then to make it worse, why would you want somebody else to define that for you? [00:27:51] Joe: As part of our January extravaganza, we’re gonna talk to Anthony O’Neill about that specific thing. Doug, he’s a guy that used to be with the Ramsey organization. He talks about getting your seat at the table, and if you’re not working on your own priorities, you’re by default working on somebody else’s priorities. [00:28:06] If you’re asking your boss to define your career path, your boss will define it according to whatever the hell is their their dream, right? Yeah. Oh, here’s what I’d love for you to do for me. Why do you wanna not work on what lights you up? [00:28:19] OG: Didn’t uh, Arnold Schwarzenegger just write a book called Be Useful? [00:28:23] I thought, I thought that was the name of it. Arnold [00:28:25] Doug: Schwarzenegger can write. [00:28:26] OG: I. He’s a pretty, I was gonna say pretty, pretty well known guy there, Dougie. I know, I know. Yes. Take it out. It’s called Be useful. Yeah, I mean basically what you’re saying, Doug, is just find a way to be successful, be useful in the organization, to find your own path [00:28:40] Joe: and [00:28:41] OG: don’t limit it to, to what they want for you. [00:28:43] Let’s go back out to Vegas. [00:28:45] Joe: I can’t figure out why so many of us think that we can’t design our own curriculum [00:28:49] Alex: if, I mean, if you think about how can I increase my earning capacity? So it was funny, right before we started this, I was like, it’ll be kind of interesting to be on here because I know just about nothing about Roth IRAs and 4 0 1 Ks. [00:29:02] And I said, [00:29:02] Joe: that’s two of us. I have no idea. Yeah. [00:29:04] Alex: I’ve spent all of my effort on try to make more, rather than try to optimize everything that I have because optimizing typically gets you incremental returns, not order of magnitude returns. And so I’ll give you like a a business example. So if I’m gonna optimize a webpage, like you know, I might be able to get 20% lifts here, change the headline, changing the opt-in, whatever, but I’m not gonna get a hundred times more. [00:29:27] I can get a hundred times more if I crank marketing and I know how to make content or I know how to run ads or I know how to scale a, an outbound sales team. Like those things, if I increase inputs by a hundred x, I can get a hundred times more throughput. And I think a lot of people spend way too much time on the, how do I optimize the 10 or 20% rather than like, how do I 10 x, how much I make? [00:29:45] I think about things in order of magnitude. So when I started acquisition.com, I spent about a year thinking like, if I could only do one thing and I only accomplish that one thing, what one thing would make the remainder of my goals or problems irrelevant? And so at the time it was, okay, so we wanna start this family office. [00:30:02] So for those who don’t know, we, we’d taken probably 40 million to distributions from Gym Launch was the company we were just. And then we sold for 46.2 million in a cash deal. And so we had some money at that point, and I had made a few investments that had worked out really well. And so I said, okay, this is what I’m gonna do full time. [00:30:16] And if that is gonna be the plan, I could become the best investor I could, you know, have best access to finance. I could, like, there’s all these things I could do, but the one thing that I came back to is like, if I just simply had more deal flow than everyone else on Earth, then I could be an idiot and have no access to capital. [00:30:33] But I would still have the best deals coming to me on the best terms, wanting to do deals only with me. And if I only did that, nothing else would matter. And so that was kind of the pretext to making, you know, to building the brand and making the content. Yeah. So I mean, the [00:30:45] Joe: question, this is, I’m gonna stop right there because man, he just, he just said a lot right there, og, but I think the key point there is why are we spending our days, our hours at X amount per hour and we’re optimizing to squeeze out another 20 cents? [00:31:06] We’re clipping coupons. We’re asking for cost of living raises, we’re doing backdoor Roth IRAs, and there’s nothing wrong with any of these things, but he is like, I could do that, or I could use that same time to think about, and I’d love this phrase, if I do this one thing, it makes all the other problems go away. [00:31:31] That’s astounding. Thinking about how carefully he’s monitoring his use of time. [00:31:36] OG: Yeah, I, and, and kind of taking this to the financial planning space or to your personal investing space, this is the conversation of, well, how much allocation should I be at 8% or 11% small cap value in my portfolio? It’s like, I don’t know. [00:31:52] Or, you know, should I do pre-tax 401k contributions or Roth contributions? You’re asking a question that’s unknowable about tax rates 25 years from now, you’re 40 in the future. Yeah. You don’t know what they’re gonna be in a quarter century. So instead of obsessing about that, why not figure out how do I save and, and by the way, generally speaking, the person who’s worried about the pretext versus Roth is doing 3% in their 401k or 5% not throwing shade. [00:32:17] I’m just saying that’s where they think the the leverage comes from. But the reality is, is the leverage in this whole operation comes from not saving 5% in your 401k, which is five grand a year, but figuring out a way to save 24,000 a year in your 401k, that’s the order of magnitude savings. Then all the other stuff doesn’t matter if you have $10 million in your IRA and no money in your brokerage account and no money in a Roth, I think you’re doing pretty good. [00:32:46] I think you can figure out a way to make that work. You know what I mean? Now, there’d be plenty of people that are like, well, but technically if you had 6 million in pretax and 2 million of Roth, and it would be the same dollar. Well, yeah, if you can predict the future tax rates, sure. But nobody can. My argument to you is put your foot on the gas, keep your foot on the gas, and Alex says it way better than I can in terms of order of magnitude returns versus incremental returns. [00:33:13] Getting an extra 10% ain’t gonna hurt anybody’s feelings. Right. That’s totally great. That’s awesome. He said very flippantly. [00:33:19] Joe: Yeah. We sold it for $46 million cash deal. So we had some money. Yeah, I had 40 million and [00:33:24] OG: then 46 I had some money. I had 86 million. I had, I had some money. I had some money. [00:33:27] Joe: He’s looking at $46 million and somebody else is going, okay, uh, I’ve got 120,000. [00:33:33] If I make that $124,000, like I, and don’t get me wrong, we gotta start somewhere, right? Yeah, yeah. But he’s thinking on a whole different scale, and I believe it’s just the nature of his thinking that’s changing the game for him. I’m not gonna worry about a 4% safe withdrawal rate. I’m not gonna spend the, you know what I’m gonna do? [00:33:52] I’m gonna make my numbers so ridiculously big that I can withdraw whatever the hell I wanna spend. A, because I’m not focused on. Consumption and spending. He said that earlier. But number two, because I’m gonna be working on these ridiculous numbers that, that are gonna make it irrelevant. And the key is also, you know, there’s this thing, the time box that we talk about. [00:34:16] A lot of people think expanding the time. In fact, Doug even said earlier, you know, what are you doing with that extra time? We think about our nine to five and certainly at the beginning of your career, expanding the time box makes sense. But if we take that away and we just make different decisions inside the time box that we have that are more impactful, what’s the one thing I could do that gets rid of these other five things that I need to do? [00:34:38] How do I make sure I don’t gotta do five, I just gotta do one. Wow. What a, what a phenomenal [00:34:42] OG: place to do. This is what I love about the 10 x is easier than two X book. Going back to Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy’s, I don’t know, second book, maybe third book something. [00:34:51] Joe: Yeah. [00:34:51] OG: The whole idea of that 10 x is easier than two x concept is once you start thinking in 10 x numbers instead of two X numbers, you have to change the game. [00:35:01] You cannot do incremental returns to 10 x. And that’s what Alex is talking about here as well. It’s like you have to think a thousand times differently to have 10 X multiples in your life, whatever that looks like. You know, if you’re looking at your health and you’re going, I weigh two 20, I need to cut some weight. [00:35:17] I’d like to be two 15. You know, you can do that in a week. If you just don’t eat, you go on a starvation time. You know what I mean? Like that doesn’t change anything. But if you’re like, how do I look like Mr. Olympia, that’s 10 x thinking, it changes everything. And you go, well, I have to have this food plan and I have to, you know what I mean? [00:35:37] Like you start exploring all these different things. Your brain is so super powerful to solve problems when you ask really good questions and changing the question from like, how do I make this incremental change to how do I, what’s this one thing to do so I don’t have to have any problems? Like your brain goes, whoa, uh. [00:35:57] Okay. One thing that’s a whole new game. Yeah. Well, I mean, you could do a whole bunch of little things, but you didn’t say that. You said you wanna do one thing. You know, it’s, uh, it’s exponential thinking is, is, uh, a fun experience. [00:36:10] Joe: First question then is how do I make the deals come my way? Yeah. Versus going to somebody down the street? [00:36:14] Yeah. [00:36:15] Alex: So to circle back down like, okay, that’s clouds. How do we go back to dirt? It’s thinking what’s the highest leverage thing that you have that you can put your time into or effort into that will get you the highest return. And so if you’re in a, in a selling situation, then fundamentally the salesman who sells the thing with the most zeros makes the most money. [00:36:31] That’s it. Like if you look at like law of sales and making money, the more expensive the thing you sell, the more money you make. If you’re selling gym memberships, you’re not gonna make a ton. You could crush it and make a hundred grand a year. If you sell cars more zeros on it, you can crush it and sell, you know, make 400,000 a year if you sell luxury. [00:36:45] So maybe sometimes high end or higher volume, you can get maybe a million. And that’s if you’re total savage. But that’s kind of where you’re at. You sell companies, you can make. 10, 20, $50 million a year. The limit does not exist from that perspective. So that’s on the sales side. On the, on the other side, you have the promotion side, which is letting more people know about your stuff. [00:37:02] If you’re in business, that’s kinda like the front end thing. So we can optimize lots, but like, wouldn’t it be cooler to just have a hundred times more people who are knocking at your door? Correct. Because I think that if there’s only one law, so acquisition dot com’s logo actually has some thought behind it. [00:37:15] But there’s two things that I care about in business. One is supply and demand, which is these two curves. I think it’s the fundamental law of all things. And then this triangle here is basically a fulcrum leverage. And so it’s how do I get as much as possible for the effort that I put in and how can I shift supply demand in my favor? [00:37:33] And so back to the value creation thing, if I am, I’m employed, right? And I wanna make more money, then I see the amount of money that you make as the amount of value you create. As in financial, how much money do you bring in and correlated to that? How closely tied to that, how directly do you impact that? [00:37:50] And is it clear? Number two is your ability to negotiate. So it’s like, okay, value is the size of the pie. Negotiation is the slice of the pie. And then the third piece that influences that negotiation is supply demand in terms of your replaceability, well, you’re a sales guy, you do 10 million in sales for your company. [00:38:05] You’re like, they should be paying me more. And if you have a great negotiating skill, maybe you could get that. Except if there’s a hundred guys who are just as good as you who are willing to do it for less, then you’re a commodity. And so trying to shift supply and demand in your favor does have elements of just, how do I become unique? [00:38:17] How do I become a market of one? How do I have a how skill stack that makes me different? And where you get outsized. Adding skills together, that’s what creates unicorns. Like if you had, at the most basic level you understand how to do math, it’s like, okay, that’s a skill hard to really trade for money, but it’s it’s a skill kind of. [00:38:34] Yeah. And then you learn bookkeeping and you’re like, okay, that’s something else that I can do. And I [00:38:38] Joe: go from math teacher to, yeah, I can do books for 50, whatever. Yeah, different people. So you [00:38:43] Alex: learn bookkeeping and then from there you get, you know, a master’s in accountancy and you’re like, okay, now I can become a, you know, director of finance. [00:38:48] Like, there’s things like that. And then all of a sudden you learn about tax strategy and you learn about insurance. So maybe you become a VP of finance and then you learn about, uh, mergers and acquisitions, and you learn how to raise funding, and you learn how to do diligence and financial diligence. [00:39:01] Then all of a sudden you’re a CFO or an M and a C, FO, and now you’re making millions of dollars. But fundamentally, each of those is a skill that if you only knew taxes, that’s it. You have to know math. And so oftentimes when we’re starting out, we feel like the skills that we’re learning aren’t as valuable. [00:39:16] And they’re not. But they open the doors to the next level. And that’s why college classes have requisites. You have to do algebra one before you can do algebra two. And I think a lot of people look at, you know, calculus seven and they’re like, well that guy’s making a ton. It’s like, yeah, well you gotta start it out. [00:39:28] You know, arithmetic or algebra. And I think that basically carries through in business. And if you have that CFO and all of a sudden he also knows how to like advertise. Whoa. And they know how to negotiate well. And so each one of them actually gets an order of magnitude improvement on the remaining skills. [00:39:42] And so the more skills that you have, the more of a weapon you become. And so I think fundamentally my wealth plan has been to learn as much as I possibly could about all the skills that are required to make money. [00:39:55] Joe: I’m gonna stop him right there for a moment. I think the idea of skill Stacking, you did a good job there. [00:40:00] I don’t think we have to rehash that og, but I think what he’s talking about here. That’s really important is going back to the beginning, there’s two pieces. Number one, the size of the pie. What size market are you working in? Unfortunately, there are some people that are working in a market where your ability to make a ton of money, and I’ve had this personally before, where your ability to make a ton of money, you realize podcasting. [00:40:25] Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. We’re in it right now. There’s gonna be difficulty making money because there’s nobody in this business making money, and even if you’re a unicorn, you’re gonna be the person that maybe makes mediocre money versus big money. So if we’re talking about making a hundred million dollars, which is the title of this show, this episode. [00:40:43] You can’t be in a market where nobody even has a shot at doing that. [00:40:46] OG: Well, I think about this in, in the context of the time trade of, of money for time in addition to the market and the pie and all that sort of stuff. You know, it’s just you, you know, if you’re, if in using his selling example, if you’re selling things that everybody has, everybody can do, everybody can get, and they’re all a dollar a piece, you’re gonna run out of time before you get to the spot where you’ve made enough money because it’s such a low outcome per per sale or whatever you wanna call it. [00:41:16] The widget is so inexpensive and there’s no, he used zeros, but there’s just no zeros on it and you only have so much time in a day. It’s like you can only trade so many of those widgets for time. And since each widget is relatively low cost or low value, there’s not enough hours in the day to trade that many widgets away. [00:41:36] Contrasted to and is example of, you know, if you’re the best company seller in the world. Those are all, have tons of zeros attached to ’em, and there’s not very many of those deals on a daily basis. So you can put a lot of energy into it and get all the zeros basically. [00:41:55] Doug: There’s two things that I don’t know if I wanna disagree with or refute, but there were two notions that just came up in that last segment that I didn’t love, one of which is the use of the word pie, because it implies that there’s a fixed amount. [00:42:09] And I don’t like that notion because it’s self-limiting. If you were going to say, there’s no money in this. I can stack all these skills in this industry, but there’s no way to make money in podcasting. I disagree. We haven’t figured it out yet. But somebody will, somebody who knows how to stack the right combination of skills and have a vision for where there is some willingness to invest in this new way of either subject matter or delivery mechanism or something around media transmission. [00:42:42] In this case, podcasting. Somebody’s gonna figure it out. So I don’t look at his, but hold on, Doug. [00:42:46] Joe: Look at his, look at his attention to tracking and to numbers, right? And to, okay, the data. If he looks at the amount of money the average podcaster make versus the average, he used car sales, right? Versus the average car sales person, just the average person in that arena. [00:43:02] I. It’s very easy to figure out that one of them has a higher number on it than another one has. Like for the average person, they are making a different number. Somebody who’s selling companies versus somebody who’s podcasting. Take the number of people divide by the average income, or you know the income they make, find the average income. [00:43:22] You’re gonna find that selling companies there is a bigger pie than there is in the podcasting world. [00:43:30] Doug: Of course there is, but what I’m getting at is you can use that information to inform yourself, uh, to be redundant there, to inform your decision on where you apply your time. Yeah. You don’t have to, if you are super, super passionate and you have a skillset that says, I think I can crack that nut, don’t let that average. [00:43:53] Average pool of money. Don’t let that dissuade you. If that is your passion and you think you have a way to solve that puzzle, don’t say there’s no money in that pie. There absolutely is. Somebody else just hasn’t figured it out yet. So that’s my first thought. If, I mean, just. Don’t let the averageness of what are most people making in this space? [00:44:15] Don’t let that slam a door shut if you don’t want it to. The second thing is about skill Stacking. I think you have to add something to that, which may have been mentioned, but I just wanna really call it out. So maybe this isn’t an, an absolute me refuting something, but you can stack all the skills you want. [00:44:30] I had somebody working for me once who had seven master’s degrees from Ivy League institutions, and they were working for an idiot like me, which should tell you something. They weren’t selling those skills the right way. You can stack all of the skills you want until you figure out how to sell them a hundred percent. [00:44:49] Then they’re, that’s not gonna do you any good. Yeah. His uh, so be careful about just taking classes, taking classes, taking [00:44:55] Joe: classes, yeah. Well, and how did he couch it? He couched it. And that’s why I love these breakdown sessions because he couched it under negotiation. He didn’t couch it under, uh, just learning more skills. [00:45:05] He said, second, your ability to negotiate for more of the pie. And to do that, you have to stack more skills. One of those skills is gonna have to be negotiation, which was the first thing he said. [00:45:14] Doug: Yeah. And that, that’s why I said maybe I’m not flat out refuting something. Yeah. I just really wanted to call it out. [00:45:19] No, but that and highlight it. It’s fantastic. How many [00:45:21] Joe: times have you seen that person that you’re talking about? Oh, you see it all the time. So many times. I’m just gonna go back and get another degree. [00:45:26] OG: Oh, before I can get started, I need to read the Wall Street Journal. [00:45:29] Joe: Yeah. [00:45:30] OG: That was our industry, Joe. [00:45:31] Joe: Right. And how many people that were, uh, that were broke. I remember John Hans, the leader of our area of, uh, Detroit, when I was with American Express, John Hans said one day the secretary accidentally left everybody’s paychecks on the copier. When I went to make a copy, he goes, so I got to see. I didn’t really wanna see, but I got to see what everybody was making and obviously when you have that information, you’re not gonna not look at it how much everybody in the office is making. [00:46:01] He goes, and then I realized the guy two offices down from me with stacks of books all over his office, who I went to about every question, right? I was making like three times the amount that guy was making and that’s when I realized that knowledge didn’t pay knowledge, didn’t pay, hustle paid. And knowing where the knowledge, where I can find the knowledge paid that knowledge [00:46:23] OG: transfer. [00:46:24] Yeah. [00:46:24] Joe: Yeah. If I know how to find that knowledge from this guy and then give it to the client in a timely manner that pays, but having the knowledge, this dude’s not getting paid a thing. Yeah. Great point. Doug. Coming up next, har Mo’s knowledge bomb train. I hate that phrase, but it true, but it is true here continues. [00:46:47] Can’t wait to hear what, uh, Alex says next. [00:46:52] bit: Hey, this is Jen Pilcher, Navy spouse of 23 years, and when I’m not helping military spouses connect in our digital community, I’m Stacking Benjamins. [00:47:03] Joe: Alex Armey now dives into, well, another fun topic, [00:47:09] Alex: the more you learn about it, the more different ways you see to make money, and then all that exists around you are just unlimited opportunities. [00:47:16] But when you have few skills, there are few opportunities. And so if you’re like, man, how do I, how do I get that big bet? How do I back the truck up and like really go all in on something? Well, if you can’t see opportunities because you have no skills, [00:47:26] Joe: you’ve got a bunch of brilliant individuals in this office today, as I walk through, you’ve got all these entrepreneurs here talking, collaborating, learning from your team as they’re learning. [00:47:37] I’m wondering how you help these, these entrepreneurs. And much like you said, even if I’m an employee working for somebody else, I still need to know how to negotiate. I still need to know how to sell myself. Do you start with them on what they’re best at, and then that’s the next skill that I go to. So you’re talking about, Hey, I’m good at math. [00:47:54] So then next is bookkeeping, or do you say, well, to make more money, I gotta know X, Y, Z, like the curriculum, is it predefined? Yeah. Or is it defined on what your strengths are? [00:48:03] Alex: Kind of neither. Actually, I operate everything off of the theory of constraints, which is that every system will grow until it’s constrained and then it will grow no further. [00:48:11] And so adding other things to a system that’s not the constraints. So if you think about this visually, like a highway, right? So you’ve got like a two lane highway. Let’s say that there’s a bridge and then there’s two lanes on the other side, right? So if there’s a one lane bridge, that’s gonna be the constraint. [00:48:22] Doesn’t matter how many cars you put on one side, you’re still gonna slow down to the rate of one car crossing the bridge. [00:48:27] Joe: This is the classic book. The goal, yeah. [00:48:29] Alex: You’re talking about, I’ve actually never read the book, but Oh, I think you’d love it. Just based on this so far and so adds on the other side of the bridge. [00:48:37] It would add potential to the system, but not throughput. Right? And so a lot of people spend a lot of their time adding potential to the system, but not throughput. Being able to identify what is the actual constraint of the system, and the system can, if you’re an employee, can be you. You’re the system, you are the, you have inputs, and the inputs is gonna be the time that you, that you allocate towards whatever endeavors you have. [00:48:56] Joe: Where is my biggest roadblock? [00:48:57] Alex: Yeah. What’s the thing that’s limiting me? Now, in that instance, it’s like, okay, well if I did just need to learn tax and I could double my income, then that’s the constraint. Now, this is where it’s like 2 0 1 version of this, which is if we think about strategy as prioritization of resources, ideally limited resources against unlimited opportunities, that’s all strategy is. [00:49:15] It’s like, I’ve got this much stuff and I’ve got all these things I could do. How do I allocate that stuff to get the best returns? Sometimes the best strategic move is something that’s not on your to-do list. That’s where the order of magnitude increases happen in people’s lives. That’s when somebody walks into your life and says, Hey, I don’t think you should be, you know, A CFP. [00:49:32] You should consider making a podcast and doing this whole other thing. It’s an order of magnitude change in terms of the opportunity. Now there’s also a huge stack of skills that you have to learn along the way in order to do it and unlock that. And so yeah, those are [00:49:43] Joe: almost always Alex. During my 56 years on this earth, the times when there were huge breakthrough in my life, it was never on my list. [00:49:50] It always, from Seth, I talking last night about this, about, and it’s always right in front of me. Yeah. And I didn’t see, [00:49:57] Alex: and so one of my favorite. Sales closes that I heard at an event years ago is this guy wrote a million dollars on the whiteboard. Uh, he looked out in the crowd and he pointed to ladies like, how much do you make? [00:50:07] And she said, 50,000 a year. And so he wrote 50,000 underneath the million. And then he drew a line and he subtracted 50,000 from a million. And he said, $950,000 per year is what you pay in ignorance, not knowing how to make a million dollars a year. Wow. And I, [00:50:25] Joe: that’s a slap across the face. That’s a little harsh what you pay in ignorance, not knowing how. But the difference is, and I thought it was harsh too, Doug, but the key is she wanted to make a million dollars a year. If she didn’t wanna make a million dollars a year, and she didn’t care. It isn’t harsh. If she didn’t care about making a million dollars a year, that’s super harsh. [00:50:47] But the fact that she cares about it OG and she doesn’t know, I think that’s, that’s really what he’s getting at in the most Gordon Ramsey way possible. A quarter, Ramsey, you stupid. [00:50:59] OG: This [00:51:00] Joe: is not how you cook [00:51:01] OG: an egg. It’s like, I’m sorry. It’s just an [00:51:02] Joe: because it is ignorance. There’s a way to get there, she just doesn’t know what it is. [00:51:07] Yeah, so if you think about it, it’s a cost and what did he say earlier? Leverage. And in this case, you’re trying to leverage yourself that the knowledge is out there. Somebody’s already doing this. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, is the other assumption here. Somebody’s already doing it and I’m paying this cost of ignorance because I don’t know what it is. [00:51:25] I gotta figure out what it is. Going back to again, setting up your own curriculum. [00:51:30] OG: Well, I think it’s, to piggyback a little bit off of what Doug said earlier, if it’s already existing in your space, right? If you’re selling cars or you’re selling houses, or you’re a tech manager or whatever the case may be, the highest paid fit person in your world exists. [00:51:48] If that person is an aspirational thing, right? If you look at people who are realtors, there are plenty of realtors. My, one of my good friends is a realtor and he has all these stats kind of off the top of his head. But, you know, some insane proportion of realtors who start being realtors don’t actually finish being realtors and, you know, close one or two deals a year and barely kind of keep their lips above water. [00:52:09] But then you see the television shows of the person who sells the a hundred million dollars houses in Beverly Hills, and they’re, you know, driving Ferraris and flying in private jets, and you go. Well, is that person that much more talented or skilled or whatever the case may be? I don’t know. But it exists. [00:52:26] And the, the model for being successful in that space is very easy to find. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to do, but it’s easy to find and learning how to do that, or copying the recipe card or whatever the, however you wanna think about it, as exists in that space. Now, there might be an industry that you’re in that doesn’t have that, and you’re like, I, I would love to make a million dollars a year and I bag groceries at Walmart. [00:52:52] But there are no grocery baggers at Walmart who make a million dollars a year. There’s not a path for that. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do what you’re doing, but there’s just not that thing that’s out there to model after or to do. So in some respect, kinda saying what Doug was saying earlier, it’s like you, you know, you’re your own limiting belief there. [00:53:12] However, you have to kinda look at the total available market. The other thing I love is this concept of constraint management. And so many people in so many things say the answer is do I mean, he even said it earlier, do more. It’s like, well, you gotta do more of the right stuff. ’cause if all you do is shove, you know, if you’re in sales and all you do is shove more leads in the funnel without having the ability to process that or without having the, the system behind that to run that through the funnel, so to speak. [00:53:42] You’re only as fast as that one lane highway. It doesn’t matter how many cars you pack up behind that, you’re still only gonna go one car off per bridge, you know? So, um, if you haven’t read the book, the Goal, that is a great holiday read. Well, I guess we’re past the holidays. It’s a great, it’s a fun [00:53:57] Joe: story. [00:53:58] It actually is just a fun story. It’s a story I love [00:54:01] OG: parable books. For whatever reason, I can play along with the story. Like you said, just kind of, I’m reading it like I’m watching a movie. Versus a book that they’re, they’re just shoving data in your face or something like that. I love, I love Herbie Herbie’s, my boy. [00:54:14] You’re my boy, Herbie. [00:54:15] Doug: The other great thing about that book is it’s a walk back in time. ’cause it was written like 40 years ago. And when they talk about the guy’s drinking in his office and they’ve got these new things called fax machines. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like reading the Mad Men. [00:54:31] Joe: Yeah. [00:54:32] Doug: But as a business book, and it still all applies. [00:54:34] I went back and read [00:54:35] Joe: it with my son. It all applies, uh, two years ago, uh, Nick and I read it together and we loved it. Yeah, it all applies. Yeah. This, it was a great time. Read the goal. All right, we’re gonna go back, uh, here in, uh, episode one of two. We’re gonna go back to Alex here for just a minute longer before we say goodbye. [00:54:50] Alex: Fundamentally, you can make a billion dollars a year. How do I know? Because there are people who make a billion dollars a year. So it’s physically possible. It is doable. You can do it. The discrepancy between my earning and that is two things. Skill and time. If you have a clear path to like, how will I get to a billion? [00:55:05] Then it’s time. If you don’t know the path, it’s skill. [00:55:09] Joe: It’s funny because we opened this by you talking though, it’s gotta be skill for most of us because on a day-to-day basis, even you said you’re working in fog. [00:55:16] Alex: Yeah. [00:55:17] Joe: You gotta get comfortable with the fog. [00:55:18] Alex: Oh yeah. We’re talking earlier about the kinda like the value of like, okay, we create this value. [00:55:23] That’s the pie negotiation’s, the slice of the pie and then how replaceable. You’re right. And I said there was one other caveat I was gonna make, which is perfect timing here, which is risk. The one thing that trumps all of that is risk. You can make outsized returns without having been the one who made the value without having, you know, tremendous. [00:55:39] I mean, you have to have some ability to negotiate if you’re gonna take on risk. But the reason Eduardo Savrin is worth 15 billion or whatever he is worth now, so if you don’t know who he was, he was the, he was the guy that put $30,000 into a checking account for an LLC called Facebook and never heard of it. [00:55:52] What’s that? Right, right. And so he ended up doing, from what I understand, almost nothing with the growth of Facebook, but he was the one who took the risk. And so because of that, he was compensated. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur not that long ago who was taking home probably like two or $3 million a year personally, and he wanted to join us here@acquisition.com. [00:56:13] He’s like, well, this is kinda what I make now, so I kind of have to make that as my baseline, although I can afford that, that’s fine. The issue was he wanted to make the same income he was making, taking a hundred percent risk taking none. And have upside. That’s where it doesn’t work. And so if you want to make more within a business, you need to take on more risk. [00:56:34] The people who are most highly compensated in any business are the ones who incur more risk. Sales guys incur risk. They have commissions. Some people are only commissioned. You take on more risk. Like you know, if you’re an insurance sales guy, you work within an organization, but you’re very much an independent, you know, like you’re a mini entrepreneur if you will. [00:56:49] And so you can pretty much look at compensation based on all the variables I said earlier, comma, with a massive caveat on risk. And risk is kind of the force multiplier across all of that. You can have all the other ones almost irrelevant, but if you’re willing to take on risk, you will get disproportionately rewarded. [00:57:02] And I think me personally, where you get the real outsize returns is where it looks sort of like risk to other people, but to you, you understand it and then it’s not risky and then you just get the outsize returns without the risk, [00:57:14] OG: it looks like risk to other people and seen mic drop. Yes. I mean, this is the thing about being an entrepreneur, that people who are not entrepreneurs don’t get. [00:57:25] It was interesting what he said about the person who wanted to join him, who wanted to get the same amount of money for taking no risk versus taking the risk. And these are conversations that come up in our business with our clients and their, you know, how do I design comp plans and things like that. I talk about it with my friends who are financial planning firm owners like me, and just the range of expectations that people have based on their level of exposure. [00:57:52] And Joe, you were in this business, and I know you remember that. It’s really the only business I can speak to, but I know that you remember periods of time where your staff got paid and you didn’t. I mean, that’s happened in the podcast business with us, right? There’s been times where the teams got paid, and you and I don’t necessarily, because that’s the risk we take. [00:58:12] And I had an interesting observation about this a couple weeks ago. I was having a conversation with one of our team members and I said, out of curiosity, would you rather have above average guaranteed income? Or median income with above average, significantly above average upside potential. Like IE do you want the guarantee that’s really good, or do you want the potential, not guarantee, but the potential of amazing, right? [00:58:39] Whatever those numbers mean to you. And uh, and she had an interesting perspective on this. What she said was, I know what the answer is, what it’s supposed to be, but I can tell you where I am today. And I think there’s one piece of this that Alex is kind of glossing over, which is, it’s easy to say, I can take a lot of risk when you’ve got 40 million in the bank. [00:59:02] It’s easy to go, I’ll just be all, all risk, you know? But when you’re 22 and you know, rent’s due and your car payment, you got student loans, you have to temper that risk with some sort of, you know, non variability too. And as time goes on, the, the more that then maybe this goes to spending and kind of the whole a story arc of this whole thing. [00:59:22] The more that you can keep your guarantees low and continue to work on the upside of being variable or continue to have the upside be the risk part of it, the higher that that goes, the faster that that goes. Right? If you’re, if you have lifestyle inflation, you make a hundred grand a year and then you make one 50 and then you make 200 and you’re, and, and that’s your lifestyle number that keeps on growing, and then you go to a new job, you’re gonna say to your boss, I need to make 200. [00:59:48] But if you can keep your lifestyle at 70 and your income goes to a hundred and your income goes to 1 25 and your income goes to one 50, you can go, hold on, time out. Can I keep my salary at 1 25? Can I get more RSUs instead? How does that work? How can I be rewarded for the growth of this organization because I want a piece of that as opposed to you just paying me another 3% cost of living raise. [01:00:11] Maybe this all kind of ties together with all that. [01:00:13] Joe: Absolutely. No, it a hundred percent ties together. Yeah. And you could see just the difference in his thinking versus the average optimization thinking that we’ll see all the time in the personal finance community. I wanted to also draw back to this idea of risk. [01:00:28] Like how do you mitigate that risk when he says something that seems risky to everybody else, but it’s not. I think that’s where we get back to his skill acquisition. The more you make yourself a unicorn, the less risky it is for you. It is for everybody else. ’cause they don’t understand the skillset that you have. [01:00:42] Mm-hmm. They totally don’t get it. To them, it looks like magic. I mean, I’m sitting here with him in Las Vegas. Well, some of [01:00:48] OG: its personality, right? I mean, like to me it seems risky to have a W2 job That’s just in my soul. I don’t know where that came from. That’s also [01:00:57] Joe: your perspective because you’ve been there since you were born. [01:01:00] You know? I mean, that’s what I mean. You’ve been an entrepreneur. Since then. So for you, you’re like, oh, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that. There’s a ton of people listen to this. It would be risky to [01:01:07] OG: take a guaranteed outcome. [01:01:08] Joe: Yeah. There’s a ton of people listening to this though, that are completely, their whole life existence has been working in some other capacity for somebody else. [01:01:16] So for them, what you do seems like magic. [01:01:19] OG: Yeah. Or risky. And I think it’s not, [01:01:21] Doug: it’s easy to forget about the risk that that W2 job can go away immediately without any cause. So many states are at will, employment states, and you don’t think about that risk because of the, the lull that you get into with that check showing up. [01:01:39] That’s true every two weeks until one day you’re like, what the FI just lost my job and I was doing everything right. You don’t think about that risk until it happens where you live with a sense of you, OG and, and Joe, you guys live with a sense of risk every day. Because you’re entrepreneurs, that becomes your state of normalcy. [01:02:00] And so that’s normal to you. And it’s terrifying for a W2 employee because they don’t want that sense of risk hanging over their, that feeling of risk hanging over their heads every day. ’cause that’s not the environment that they’ve put themselves in. But they’re both risk. It’s just choose your risk. [01:02:16] They choose your risk. [01:02:18] Joe: Yeah. I remember there was a real estate guy, Doug, uh, Robert Allen, who very famously said that there’s two doors in life. One is opportunity. The other one who says security. Yeah. The person who chooses the security door gets neither. Yeah. Limiting your opportunity and your boss can get rid of you whenever you want. [01:02:36] Doug: Yeah. I mean, it’s not for everybody. Look, I was, I tried being an entrepreneur a couple of times. It wasn’t for me, but I was fully aware of the security door that I picked when I spent most of my career in more of a W2 environment. But I knew what I was getting into. I didn’t bitch about it. [01:02:50] Joe: One thing I saw though from you, Doug, over a long period of time, was what Alex said about increasing that skillset every time you, you, you truly were an intrapreneur because you went from a job with this company to a job with this company for more money to a job with this company for more money to a job with this company for more money, leveraging your unique unicorn talent. [01:03:11] You don’t have to be an entrepreneur for any of this to work. And that’s, I think, actually probably a good place to leave this. Is that if you’ve made it through this episode and you think this is just for entrepreneurs, you’re crazy. Mm-hmm. Because this is all about just taking your career path and even if it’s gonna be working for four other people and designing that career path so that you can do what I saw you do, Doug, during your, your career. [01:03:33] Uh, how can we do that? How can we do it better, faster, stronger? [01:03:36] Doug: Most of that was through my skill that I developed for selling to convince people that I was not as irritating as I come off negotiation. Negoti. [01:03:44] Joe: Yes. Yeah. Negotiation and selling. And then the reason he lost that job was it turned out he was, he totally was. [01:03:50] Everybody is irritating as people thought. Okay, we’ve got the groundwork. Everybody in the first half here on Friday. We are now going to take that groundwork and we are going to see harm. Take it and now build the machine. And it’s gonna be super fun. Uh, but most fun is how do we make a hundred million dollars part two, Doug la to unpack there, what should we, what should we have learned from today’s? [01:04:17] I hope you were [01:04:17] OG: taking notes. I’ve got two pages on the tablet, so that’s where I am. [01:04:21] Joe: There’s so much. My head hurts in the best way possible. Doug, what should we have learned? [01:04:26] Doug: Uh uh. I don’t have that much. It’s pretty simple today, Joe. Wanna be more profitable in 2025? Build that skillset. Learn from our mentors right here all year long, and we’ll fight fear, kick self sabotage to the curb and begin Stacking those Benjamins. [01:04:45] Do we even need two more? No, I don’t think so. Special thanks to Alex Hormozi and his Las Vegas based team for helping make our 2025 kickoff possible, especially the amazing Seth Silvers. You’ll find more on alex@acquisition.com. This show is the property of SB podcasts LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Saul Sea High. [01:05:12] Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah. And before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. [01:05:34] This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show. [01:05:50] Steve, um, I would like you to just grab that little audio clip of Joe saying Great point, Doug, and play the outta that whenever you can in the future. [01:05:59] Joe: Great point, Doug. Great point, Doug. Great point, Doug.
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