[00:00:00] Brian: I spent an entire day with the man himself, Alex Hormozi, a couple of weeks ago. It was me, nine other business owners. We spent an entire eight, nine hour day at his offices. And it's big boardroom in Vegas in his acquisition.

[00:00:12] Brian: com offices or headquarters.

[00:00:14] Brian: This was something I paid money for a lot of money for her.lot of people ask me if I won the school games or something. If you're familiar with Alex's stuff, you know what that is. If you don't, it's fine.

[00:00:22] Brian: This was a fun experience because I was by far the smallest business in the room. Most guys in the room were between 5 million a year and 10 million a year businesses, which are like real businesses. There were multiple people that were between 10 and 20 million dollars a year.

[00:00:35] Brian: The guy sitting to my left was at 40 million dollars a year. The guy sitting to my right was at 250 million dollars plus a year. That's Alex Hormozi himself. And so we got to spend an entire day locked in a room with Alex to basically have him destroy our businesses, just beat us down, tell us what's wrong, fix it make us feel bad about ourselves.

[00:00:54] Brian: And I wanted to take this episode to talk through what I learned in this room full of multi multi millionaires, with Alex Hormozi [00:01:00] himself. And if you don't know who Alex is, this is probably not going to be the most interesting episode for you. At least for me.You won't care about it as much, but Alex is the author of a hundred million dollar offers, a hundred million dollar leads.

[00:01:08] Brian: He's got millions of followers on social media because he makes great content. he backs it all up because he's built and sold multiple businesses. And his current business does over a quarter billion dollars a year in revenue,

[00:01:17] Brian: So after being locked in a room in a small intimate setting with this many successful entrepreneurs, by far the most successful entrepreneurs I've ever shown myself with, especially in this small setting like this,

[00:01:27] Brian: I figured I have to have an episode that details some of the things I took away from this. Now, before I get into that quick life update, if you're a fan of this podcast, you've noticed this, I'm sure. It has been over two months since I've recorded an episode. We've been on just like replay mode here for the last two months.

[00:01:41] Brian: And it's surprising because I still get DMS and people hitting me up about like the episode they heard last week and how much they loved it. dude, that was a replay. I'm sorry. some of you may have noticed, some of you may have not even noticed that this has been like replay centralfor the last couple of months.

[00:01:53] Brian: in July, I was, out of the country with my mom and my sister and my wife. It was my mom's retirement trip. She'd never been out of the country before. We had a [00:02:00] wonderful time. we went to, Versailles. We spent a few days inParis. We went to Venice.

[00:02:04] Brian: We went to Florence, Italy. We went to Barcelona. And so my mom got to see all these things and all these places. She's never been before. As a retired lady. So awesome. Congrats to my mom for retiring. Then my wife and I went over to Portugal for a couple of weeks where I actually got to spend some time with my team.

[00:02:18] Brian: to my full time guys live in Europe. One is in Portugal. one is in Romania. So we all got together and hung out in Porto, Portugal, which is a beautiful city worked on a lot of stuff with the business.

[00:02:27] Brian: And then in August, my wife and I came back home and we just had a lot of catching up to do. So I couldn't necessarily devote time to the podcast, doing catch up mode. Then I went to Vegas for this Hermozi event. Then I went to a wedding in Colorado last week.

[00:02:39] Brian: So it's out of the office for my podcast days for those weeks. So here we are. Thank you for being patient. If you've been like Brian, where have you been? The podcast is not dead. It is not dying. I am coming back strong. I just had a my first one I'd consider summer off and it was awesome.

[00:02:51] Brian: So let's come back to this. Spend a day with Hormozy. This is really interesting because this room again, full of very successful entrepreneurs, there's a saying, I don't remember what the saying [00:03:00] is, but something like, millionaires. wear suits, billionaires wear like sweatpants, something like that.

[00:03:05] Brian: And this was like a really good example of that. So in this room, everyone in the room is like dressed up, they've got their Rolexes on their 50, 60, 000 Rolexes on. They've got their custom fitted suits on, minus me. I just have like a button up shirt, something you've seen me wear on this podcast.

[00:03:19] Brian: I had literally this hat on, Nothing nice, because I know how Hormozy's style is. Hormozy rocks in the room, no nose strip, surprisingly. He had his jorts. His tank top

[00:03:30] Brian: no hat actually, usually as a hat, but he had his man bun going on. He was rocking the man bun this day, but it's just fun to see like the guy who's the most successful in the room. Just not really caring physical appearance and everyone else in the room, like trying to look so big and so successful.

[00:03:43] Brian: There's maybe a lesson in that. I don't know the lesson, but either way, it's just be, you do what you want. If you want to dress up and that is truly you, there's nothing wrong with that. But I resonate more with the side of I'm not going to like super dress up for anything other than a wedding, which I went to last week and a suit for that.

[00:03:55] Brian: So I've got bunch of takeaways. So they gave us these if you've ever used a remarkable, remarkable is like [00:04:00] this little like note taking device where you write notes and you can just have a bunch of pages and it syncs with your laptops or desktop computers or your phones on their app. And you can take handwritten notes.

[00:04:09] Brian: Thanks guys. So they gave us all remarkable twos with the like pen and the eraser on it's really cool device. I hate handwriting notes, but that's all they gave us and they wouldn't let us use laptops, cause they don't want people recording in the room for obvious reasons. Cause it's a bunch of successful entrepreneurs, people that you may have seen before.

[00:04:22] Brian: knew a couple of guys in the room from their businesses, so that was really interesting to see. took a bunch of notes and my notes were kind of organized in a few different things. One was, things that Hermosi specifically had for me and my business. things that I just picked up from him talking to other business owners.

[00:04:36] Brian: There were just like these random quotes that Hermosa would say, and then maybe we talk more about it. Maybe we wouldn't, but it was just like, an unlock for me, because you just pay more attention to somebody when you're in a room with them for like the entire day. And so these are in no major particular order and some of these are gonna be shorter and some are gonna be longer.

[00:04:50] Brian: But I just want to talk through some of the things that took away from this.

[00:04:53] Brian: So my first takeaway and honestly one of the recurring themes that I saw again and again and again and again and again and againthroughout the entire day [00:05:00] as he talked to all of us. is that we need to simplify our businesses if we want to grow them And Hormozy calls it nail it and scale it.

[00:05:06] Brian: That's his little pithy term for it And that basically just means if your business is not where you want it to be at any level It's probably because you're trying to do too much. his entire Point for most of us throughout the entire day. It was Do less. Don't do more Every single person in the room was at some sort of bottleneck in their business We had hit some growing point where we have plateaued or we couldn't break through it or we're on the cusp of breaking through and couldn't quite do it or people in The room were on like annual declines like there was one guy in the room went from 17 million a year to 12 million 9 million he's down to 5 million like That's a really bad trajectory.

[00:05:39] Brian: So every single one in the room had different levels of problems, I'll say, and every single person, no matter where they were, whether they were growing steadily and they're trying to have a much bigger growth spurt, or they were shrinking like that person, or they were at a plateau. It doesn't matter.

[00:05:50] Brian: Every single person was trying to do more and more and more and more and more. They had all these ideas and all these things I wanted to try all these things I wanted to do, and Hormozy basically [00:06:00] shot down each and everything that we had on our list of things to do. All in an effort to just focus on one big thing.

[00:06:05] Brian: So while everyone's trying to add things, Hormozy just says, take them away. And he gave us a really good story to illustrate this Of course, it's a fitness example, but I'll tie this back to all freelancers that listen to this podcast because, maybe you can't relate to a fitness example, but you should be able to, if you have, a brain.

[00:06:19] Brian: there's fitness company called. Alloy fitness. I'd actually never heard of it, but it's a really big small group training fitness facility. And when they first started out, they were offering like five different services that have 5, 000 square foot facility,

[00:06:31] Brian: which is like just under 500 square meters if you are somewhere, not in America, but it's a relatively large space in large spaces. If you're in like a place, it's like a good location for a gem. You're going to have like a really high rent or high cost lease.

[00:06:43] Brian: And so they were offering small group training, large group training, private fitness training, weight loss bootcamps, one or two other things on top of that.

[00:06:51] Brian: And they were unsurprisingly struggling to grow that's what a lot of gyms do. It's Oh, we need to offer all these things because that's what all the people want. And if we offer all these things, we make a little bit [00:07:00] of money in each of all these things. Now we're going to have a big, profitable business.

[00:07:03] Brian: and it was actually the exact opposite of that. It was not add more. It is just simply take away

[00:07:07] Brian: because More services offered means more square footage needed, which means bigger team needed because you have to lead all these trainings and all these groups. And you have to have people to manage these people. So they had a bigger team at each location and then they had more square footage, each location, lower profits, more operational complexity, more things that can mess up.

[00:07:24] Brian: And so the owner, smartly asked himself, how can we make this as simple as humanly possible?

[00:07:29] Brian: So they went from five, six, seven different services, 5, 000 square feet, many, many people on staff to run all of this very low profit margins. And they simplified it as simple as you can go one service, small group training, small group training doesn't require a big facility.

[00:07:43] Brian: So they went from 5, 000 square feet down to 1200 square feet, which is like a hundred square meters, Now, instead of a bunch of employees, each location only needs three employees because there's not much to do. You have one service you're offering. One potential thing to mess up one thing to get right. In other words, [00:08:00] one thing to make actually excellent so instead of offering a pretty decent small group training a pretty decent large group training a pretty decent private fitness training pretty decent weight loss boot camps all these things being pretty decent they can just make one excellent service and that's small group training

[00:08:12] Brian: Because of this focus and taking away all these things now every location for alloy fitness does between least a half a million, up to a million plus per location and revenue, 50 percent margins, and they're run off three employees. And now alloy as a full company has over a thousand locations from what I could find on the internet is worth between one and 2 billion.

[00:08:32] Brian: They raised like a hundred million dollars at a 1. 4 billion valuation in like 2021. I would imagine they're only bigger now because 2021 was a weird time to raise funds for a fitness facility. so they're probably worth two billion or more right now,

[00:08:44] Brian: So let's talk about how this relates to freelancers. It should be pretty obvious by now, but most freelancers, and you're probably guilty of this, tend to want to offer a massive list of services. I've seen some egregious. Freelancers out there offering 10, 15, 20 services on their website.

[00:08:59] Brian: We do [00:09:00] literally everything humanly possible, every single thing. We will do whatever you want. Problem with this is you're probably not very good at all of those. You may not even be very good at any of them because you probably don't spend much time doing any one of those things long enough to get good at them.

[00:09:12] Brian: It's also very difficult to offer tons of services because now you have different processes. It's hard to quote prices. It's hard to understand the workload that goes into something. It's hard to become known for something. I made some really gross sketches. If you're watching on YouTube right now, this should be showing, but this is the classic freelancer right here. Your bandwidth is this circle. If you can't see this, I'll just explain it to you. It's a big circle that represents your bandwidth. Little short, tiny arrows, probably a dozen of them, or maybe six to ten of them coming off of this little circle.

[00:09:39] Brian: They're really short, stubby arrows because you only have so much bandwidth. And every little thing that's pulling you away from any sort of focus means that you are capped out on how much effort, energy, bandwidth you can put into any one thing. So when you're offering too many services and you're pulled too many different directions, you're going to feel like you're always behind.

[00:09:58] Brian: You're going to struggle to gain any [00:10:00] traction and the result is you're gonna plateau. whether you plateau at 20, 000 a year, 50, 000 a year, 100, 000 a year, a quarter million a year, a million a year, 10 million a year, 40 million a year, 250 million a year, every single entrepreneur has a different level they're going to cap out at.

[00:10:14] Brian: And all of us have different amounts of bandwidth. There's no one entrepreneur that has the same amount of bandwidth than the other. you see some people that just have the ability To work past this, they work harder than anyone else. They work smarter than anyone else. They work longer than anyone else.

[00:10:28] Brian: And so their bandwidth pool is much, much bigger. So you see them and you're like, Oh, they can offer 15 services. I can do that too. But realistically, you don'thave the bandwidth. You don't have the energy, you don't have the time, you don't have the skill set of that person.

[00:10:41] Brian: So your lack of focus, you end up looking like this, tiny little short arrows coming off of your bandwidth circle here. Should come up with a better name than that.

[00:10:49] Brian: Let's counter that

[00:10:50] Brian: with the Hyperfocus Freelancer, the Hyperfocus Business Owner. This is the same amount of bandwidth put into one thing, you get one long arrow. I saw this probably a decade ago. But [00:11:00] I've always come back to this and I always try to find the image online.

[00:11:02] Brian: Never could find it. So this is my ugly, gross handwriting. I made this with my little remarkable too, but this image says it all. You're hyper focused on one thing. You can just get more done.

[00:11:12] Brian: it's so fascinating. See Hormozy just swat us down he'll tell you, and I will tell you any one thing can work. And that's the problem with freelancers as they come to me. coach freelancers. they have like five different things they could do. any one thing of them could work.

[00:11:26] Brian: This is beyond services, by the way. This could be five different services you're trying to offer. This could be five side hustles you're trying to do at the same time. This could be, five different client acquisition methods you're trying to do at the same time. This could be any number of things. result is the same.

[00:11:40] Brian: The more you try to do, the less likely you are to be successful at any one thing. Because any one of those things could work, but none of them will work if you don't focus on that. And that was Hermosi's message to us again and again and again and again throughout the day. The entrepreneur comes to Hermozi.

[00:11:52] Brian: They pay a lot of money to be there. They have this grand plan. They're walking through with Hermozi and Hermozi just looks at them because he's done it three, four other times that [00:12:00] day. And he just says, you don't have the bandwidth to do this. That's all he'll say. And you know what he means.

[00:12:04] Brian: And then the entrepreneur will try to argue with him as if they know better, because when you're in a room full of successful business owners, there's a lot of ego in that room, a lot of pride in that room,

[00:12:13] Brian: but they always give in because they know he is right. Any one thing can work. Literally, none of them will work if you can't just focus on one thing. So that's Hormozy's nail it and scale it framework. So that's the first thing.

[00:12:24] Brian: Simplify if you want to grow Hormozy is one of my biggest influences as an entrepreneur myself. he pops into my head more than anyone else because every single situation I find myself in, there's some memory that comes up because I've listened to just about every one of his podcasts, many of them multiple times.

[00:12:36] Brian: And he says, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. You've heard me say that before. I'm sure if you listen to this podcast for a while, and this is one of the things we need to be constantly reminded of. if I really sat down and looked at it, there's probably still things in my business today that I.

[00:12:49] Brian: I'm doing too much of, I'm doing too many things at the same time. And I don't have any focus in one area in that specific area of my business. So you can look at this at a big macro level where we're looking at, just your entire [00:13:00] business. And then you're trying to do other side hustles that are distracting you from it.

[00:13:03] Brian: It could be at a smaller level where we are talking about different initiatives that you're trying to focus on within your business. You can put it even at a micro level where we're talking about different services different marketing initiatives different, softwares you're trying to use, this goes everywhere.

[00:13:16] Brian: So if you haven't already go to YouTube, look at the image that I created. go to six figure creative. com slash three, two, eight. And there'll be the video embedded on that page for the show nuts page.Cause I want you to see the image. So it gets stuck in your head if you're listening right now.

[00:13:28] Brian: All right, next. The thing I took away from this is Alex has a big idea list. And this kind of goes hand in hand with what I said earlier where focus is the name of the game. Alex is just like all of us in some ways where we have all these big ideas. We have all these things we could do, all these things we want to do, these wonderful like visionary things that are like so cool or so fun or would be so awesome.

[00:13:46] Brian: the reason he's more successful than anyone else in the room, including myself. It's because he has the discipline to instead of say, Oh, that sounds awesome. That's a wonderful shiny object. He calls it the woman in the red dress you're with your woman, the woman the red dress walks behind you or walks by you.

[00:13:59] Brian: And all of [00:14:00] a sudden you're turning around looking at the lady in the red dress, despite having a perfectly good woman in your arms.

[00:14:04] Brian: So for all those. Ladies in the red dress, put them on the list for later on if it makes sense.

[00:14:10] Brian: Anytime Alex has that big, bright idea, he just adds it to the list Alex's big idealist, and then he goes back to focusing on the one core thing that will actually push his business forward. And this goes back to Alex believes wholeheartedly as, something called the theory of constraints.

[00:14:22] Brian: And that is the business will grow to the size of the constraint, the bottleneck in other words, and it cannot grow past that.

[00:14:28] Brian: And many times the big ideas that we have in no way affected that one bottleneck. any second of the day that you, spend time on those things that aren't fixing the bottleneck, you are just allowing your business to stagnate. And I've fallen into this again and again and again, where I will let other things pull me away from fixing the bottleneck and then I'll fix it.

[00:14:44] Brian: So my business over the years. Has not been some crazy, steady upward growth. It has always been growth, plateau, growth, plateau, growth, plateau. Because I fall into this trap again and again and again, where I fix the bottleneck. We hit the next [00:15:00] bottleneck. I spend way too long not fixing the bottleneck again.

[00:15:02] Brian: And so we plateau for a while and then I fix the bottleneck and then we grow again. And that has been God, my entire life, basically. A lot of it's because of this big ideas list. There's always something that's pulling my attention away. It can be another big idea, some piece of content I want to do, some cool fun thing over here, some funnel, some, just anything.

[00:15:20] Brian: And Alex is very disciplined about this. He does not allow himself to focus on or work on or play with the idea of or toy with or do anything on the side in his free time. It just goes on the list. He's not allowed to touch it or use it or do anything with it until he's maximized The thing he's working on the one core thing right now until he's maximized that until he's gotten it out of the bottleneck way

[00:15:41] Brian: And then his incentive his many incentives on finishing the thing that he's focused on right now is knowing that when he's done He can't go back to the big idealist now The caveat of that is the big idealist really is useless if the big idealist does not contain the fix to the next bottleneck because when you fix one bottleneck, there will be another [00:16:00] bottleneck to fix That comes up and the easy example of this is

[00:16:02] Brian: many freelancers suck at lead generation. So when you start generating leads, all of a sudden that bottleneck is fixed and then you realize you actually suck at sales. So when you start having conversation with people who don't fully know like, and trust you yet, these are colder, cooler leads. You realize that you're not really great at sales.

[00:16:19] Brian: You're not great at fully understanding the needs of the person. You're not great at fully understanding how your solution is the bridge that gets them from where they are now and where they want to be. And so you have to start fixing that bottleneck now. So now you went from all your focus in lead generation to now all your focus in sales and fixing that, bottleneck.

[00:16:35] Brian: And when you fix that, you realize, Oh my gosh, I'm actually horrible onboarding my clients. It's a whole clusterfuck

[00:16:40] Brian: everyone's backed up and we're losing things. And I'm forgetting things and clients are unhappy, so I've got to fix that before I can start worrying about bringing a bunch of new clients on, otherwise I'm dumping a bunch of clients into a horrible onboarding process. and you repeat the process. So that is in a nutshell the big idealist, the theory of constraints. And one of the things that we discussed again and again with, people in that meeting, [00:17:00] and I wanted to share that with you. So if you don't have a big idea list, create one.

[00:17:03] Brian: And that way, when you have these wonderful ideas in the shower or just walking one day, you're just struck with inspiration, or you see something online, if that's really cool, add it to the list, And then close it. And then come back to it later on when you're like, what should I do right now?

[00:17:14] Brian: All right. Next on the list is a quote. This is a random quote he said, and then I had him explain this, He said, the faster you get to quantity, the faster you get to quality. And in this contexthe's talking about making content. So he realized when he was making content on YouTube earlier, in order to get to quality content, which is what's required to actually grow a following, which he's grown, several million people following on, YouTube and social media.

[00:17:36] Brian: He realized that it's not about just trying to create quality in a vacuum. It's about creating quantity and that leads to quality. So for him, he just focused on how can I make as much Content as possible very quickly and just put tons and tons and tons and tons of content out I want to say right now They're doing like hundreds of pieces of content a week Because they have a whole team and they can clip things and make little Stories for Instagram and short YouTube shorts.

[00:17:58] Brian: Their content [00:18:00] production team is insane. If you'd ever heard him talk about it they have full time video editors, just for YouTube shorts, full time video editors, just for tech talkInstagram. Just for YouTube long form, just for the podcast.

[00:18:13] Brian: They have multiple videographers full time on staff. They have multiple content teams. It's insane, but going back to his point, quantity leads to quality until he did a lot of content and learned what actually worked and didn't work, he was not able to create quality content.

[00:18:28] Brian: his explanation was he created a lot of content. Probably pretty mediocre content in the beginning when he was trying to take content seriously. And then every month they look at the top 10 percent and they try to figure out and reverse engineer what is it about this top 10 percent of videos that is getting people to watch longer, share, to leave comments, engage with things.

[00:18:46] Brian: And they would look at that top 10 percent make adjustments the next month for that month's content. And they do a lot of content and so on and so forth. And then eventually they realized when we spend twice as much time on a video, it will do. Five times better. So they started doing [00:19:00] less content at a higher level and had another step function and growth.

[00:19:04] Brian: And then they realized if we spend five times more time on something and effort on something, it gets 20 times the results. And they just kept doing this over and over again

[00:19:12] Brian: on top of learning. What works and what doesn't work just putting the reps in over and over and over and over again with tons of quantity Allows you to get good at something This is the reason when we talked earlier about focusing on one service as a freelancer When you do that one service over and over again You're doing quantity on something and that quantity over and over and over again leads to quality And when you can actually offer a better service or better quality than someone else because you're doing more reps That leads to a better reputation for yourself happier clients More referrals, more testimonials, more repeat clients,

[00:19:44] Brian: but this quote, the faster you get to quantity, the faster you get to quality. This quote works in a lot of different areas. It works in sales doing tons of terrible sales calls.

[00:19:52] Brian: If you're bad at it, just getting the reps and getting practice in, it would be unreasonable for you to expect to be good at something that you have not done a bunch of [00:20:00] times. And so many people, they mistakenly think they're good at something because they've never really done it at a high level or been challenged on it.

[00:20:07] Brian: And as soon as they're challenged with something, they realize they're bad at it and they don't want to do it anymore. Or they just avoid the thing overall because they're not good at it because they've never done it. And so they will never get good at it because they've never done it and they'll never do it.

[00:20:17] Brian: This is another quote I love. This is by a old friend of mine, Seth Mosley, who's been on this podcast, a Grammy winning music producer, with like probably 30 number one singles at this point. The quote he has for him and his team is just dare to suck.

[00:20:30] Brian: If you can't dare to suck and put the reps in to actually get good, you will never be good at something.

[00:20:35] Brian: another quote that Hermosa used, this week and you've probably heard it before, but it's the quote of, I don't fear the man who's practiced 10, 000 kicks one time, I fear the man who's practiced one kick 10, 000 times.

[00:20:46] Brian: Many freelancers are that 10, 000 kicks one time type of freelancer. You have 10, 000 services you're offering. You do them all one time a year. You have no quality because you have no quantity. width, but no depth. [00:21:00] And the freelancer that practices the one kick 10, 000 times, AKA the one service they do 10, 000 times a year, that person has it dialed in.

[00:21:06] Brian: They have everything dialed in. They know how to

[00:21:09] Brian: sell the service because it's the only service they sell. They know how to onboard because they have all the systems dialed in. Every project looks relatively the same.

[00:21:15] Brian: There's no big surprises. They know how to price it and give quotes out. They know how to, account for any or changes. Cause I've seen all the variations that could be possible. know how to make the client happy. They know how to deliver great results from the service they offer. And Love it or hate it. That is a lot of times what separates the most successful freelancers from those who are wannabes. They want to be successful. They want to be talented. They want to be good. But they don't have the discipline and focus to just do the one thing 10, 000 times.

[00:21:42] Brian: All right, I got a few more here, but these are gonna be a lot more tactical, not big picture. There's gonna be a little faster pace here, but these are just things that I took away as we talk through some things in my business, some people in other people's businesses. I'm not getting into the specifics, by the way, of my business because the things that I'm focused on and working on, to take me where I'm trying to go are things [00:22:00] that are no way things you need to worry about yet.

[00:22:01] Brian: So I'm going to skip. The very specific things that Hermosi has me doing right now.

[00:22:05] Brian: Maybe I'll take a couple of them and, break them down in future episodes.

[00:22:08] Brian: But this is a super tactical one. if you don't know how Alex Hermosi's business is set up, they own acquisition. com. they have a portfolio of companies that they have invested in that they own minority and majority stakes in, and those companies combined do over a quarter billion dollars of revenue per year.

[00:22:23] Brian: And when you have a whole portfolio of companies that do that much revenue, you've seen a lot of different permutations of what works and what doesn't work.

[00:22:30] Brian: And so in this case, this is athing that Alex was talking about. He says pain based hooks work the best. And B2C and B2B. break this down. Pain based hooks. work best in B2B. So that's business to business and B2C business to consumer.

[00:22:43] Brian: Many freelancers listen to this podcast. Many of you are B2B business to business. You work with other business owners, you offer services that have a direct ROI or help the business save time, or do something that creates value in a very, Understandable way.

[00:22:54] Brian: There's also a lot of creatives that listen to show that offer services that don't have a direct ROI, either business to consumer [00:23:00] B2C, where my background is that where you're offering music production services to artists who will never make a buck off of it. It's very much all feelings based, family photography, very much a feelings based ROI. Some of you help people reach goals. Some of you help people self actualize. but no matter which one you do, pain based hooks work the best. So here's how he came up with this. first of all, Alex has created thousands of ads in all his businesses throughout his life.

[00:23:24] Brian: Thousands of them. He looked at every one of those. And all the ones that have been used in his portfolio companies that he has access to, which is probably thousands more. And he looked at just the top five, 10 percent of those, the best performing ads and looked at the similarities between those.

[00:23:38] Brian: So he has lots and lots of data to look at over millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend throughout his lifetime.

[00:23:44] Brian: And just for the record, Alex's lifetime return on ad spend is for every dollar he puts in, he gets 36 back. So if he spends. 100, 000. He gets 3. 6 million back. I think is the math.

[00:23:56] Brian: Yeah. that math does math.

[00:23:57] Brian: He found that 80 percent of the [00:24:00] ads that were the most successful, were pain based hooks and particularly pain based hooks that came from their clients own words. So I'm gonna break this down for freelancers out there. Any freelancer in the world that I can think of fixes some pain of some sort.

[00:24:14] Brian: And that pain could be, I want to make more money as a business owner. And I'm not making more money, I have a pain associated with that and you're going to help me as a freelancer make more money in some way, shape, or form. It could be a small level of that, it could be a big level of that, and for other people it can be,

[00:24:28] Brian: I'll use an example easy understand, family photographers. What pain do you solve as a family photographer? Well it's like, I missed. One of the most precious stages of my child's life, that's a pain, but the key of this is don't just come up with off the top of your head what pain you think you saw for your clients.

[00:24:44] Brian: They use the actual words from their clients and it can range. It can be videos of the client talking about the pain. It can be quotes, transcripts of the videos from the clients talking about the pain. It can be. In your onboarding questionnaire, if you've [00:25:00] phrased things correctly, you've asked the right questions, taking direct quotes from your client's onboarding questionnaires, where they talk through the pain that you're helping them solve or why they chose you or whatever.

[00:25:08] Brian: There's multiple ways to get your client's exact words, but pain based hooks work the best, and you can use this in a number of ways. Particularly, by the way, this is when you can sell your services directly. And it's starting with pain based hooks. Hooks are the most important part of any content you create.

[00:25:23] Brian: If you don't know this, for every dollar you spend on ads. 95 cents of that goes to the hook because 90 to 95 percent of people do not make it past the first 15 seconds of the video, which is generally the hook of a video ad.So if you're spending 90 to 95 percent of your ad budget on the hook, you could say that's pretty important. Also, many people, if they're scrolling through social media reels, Most people will not make it past the first few seconds to five seconds of a video on an algorithmic driven feed like Instagram stories or tick tock.The hook is what draws you in. The hook is what gets people to stop the scroll. If they're scrolling through things, the hook gets people to pay [00:26:00] attention to something. If it's a post, it's the first few lines, the first few words. And when you start it with a pain, that the client can resonate with, that they're directly experiencing themselves.

[00:26:09] Brian: So whether you're making social media stories like Instagram stories, reels, captions, posts, you're doing video ads, anywhere you're trying to get people. To stop a scroll and pay attention to something where you're advertising or promoting your services or yourself as a freelancer or trying to generate leads pain based hooks work best historically I've, thought about and taught and done myself, hooks that are about reaching a goal.

[00:26:30] Brian: So going towards pleasure or away from pains of pain based hooks. And I've actually not done the analysis before talking to Alex of which one works better, but lo and behold, away from pain works better for myself as well. So if you are trying to make this easier on yourself, just do pain based hooks for anything you're doing to promote your services.

[00:26:48] Brian: Next thing I learned is financial objections. This is from Alex Hormozi. another surprising one for me is it is his opinion. that true financial objections almost always be overcome. If it's a true financial objection. So many [00:27:00] freelancers, you're working people, they don't have the funds to hire you.

[00:27:02] Brian: So it's a financial objection in Alex. We'll just tell you, Oh, that's easy. This is one of many examples of Alex just saying, Oh that's, easy. Just do this. And I stare at him blankly and I'm like, that's all I have to do. And he's like, yeah, just do this. where I'm thinking I have to do all these other things where I just have to accept this is reality.

[00:27:18] Brian: This is the norm. And Alex just says no, no, no, that's not how it actually is. This is how you do it. I feel like you have to be there to understand like the confidence he has and the assurance he has when he's explaining something to someone whose mindset needs to be shifted.

[00:27:30] Brian: Like mine in certain areas, but this is a good example. So true financial objections can usually be overcome. he has an order of operations when he's selling something to someone and they don't have the funds. So just steal this, use it yourself. he's done 3000 sales calls himself in fitness and his other things that he's done in gym launch that he had.

[00:27:45] Brian: And then he also has a portfolio of companies that have over like 400 sales reps combined. full time people on the phone all day, taking five to eight calls a day to selling things. This is what they do. So take this and implement it yourself as a solo freelancer. And thank [00:28:00] me later.

[00:28:00] Brian: Thank Alex. Actually, it's very simple. It sounds too simple, but it's not. First is when it comes time to talk money and collect payments. This is why phone sales are so important when you're selling your services, because you can actually go through this order of operations and not try to do it through email versus collect the full payment or the full deposit or the full amount, whatever the full thing is for you.

[00:28:17] Brian: It might be just an onboarding fee. They don't have it. Ask if they have a credit card. , Alex says, it's surprising how often people just say, oh yeah, I was put on the credit card. They just don't think about it. They don't have the funds, but they have a credit card.

[00:28:27] Brian: The third thing is offer buy now. Pay later. Affirm, Klarna after pay. Those are the three big ones. All of those have ranges from like zero to at least $5,000. Some of 'em go up to 10 to $15,000, which is more than enough for a lot of freelancers here, especially just for the onboarding fees. offer, buy now, pay later, see if you can get them to qualify for that.

[00:28:45] Brian: They can pay it off in 12 months, no interest. And finally, he just says offer layaway. He says it is surprising how many people fail to even offer layaway. If you don't know what layaway is, this is very common in, poor communities that just are bad at saving money. you're at Walmart.

[00:28:59] Brian: You want to buy a [00:29:00] bike for Christmas for your kid. You don't have the funds for that 500 bike. I don't know how much bikes are cause I haven't bought one, but just say it's a 500 bike. You don't have 500 bucks. So you put it on layaway. Walmart puts it in a layaway department. They hold onto it for you.

[00:29:11] Brian: They don't sell it. And every month, maybe you put a hundred bucks towards it. That's all you can afford. It's basically a forced savings plan. It's you saying, I am not responsible enough with my money. To trust myself to save the 500 before Christmas. So I will let Walmart hold onto the product. I will give Walmart a hundred dollars every month.

[00:29:29] Brian: And in five months, when I've paid the bike off, I can take it home. And many freelancers fail to understand that they are able to do this with their own services. You can't afford the 4, So that means we can put it on a four month payment plan. We'll pay off a thousand dollars a month. And on that fourth payment, we will start our services together.

[00:29:45] Brian: If someone has a true financial objection, that's the only thing holding them back. They want what you offer. They want to do it with you. All of the things are like a hundred percent green light check mark. I'm ready to go. If the only thing holding back is money, they will take you up on the layaway plan because if [00:30:00] they truly want to do it and they're going to save money for it later, they might as well save it through you through a layaway plan.

[00:30:04] Brian: Instead of them who are proven that they can't save up enough money work with somebody, instead of them trying to save funds, they just put a thousand or a hundred or 500, whatever it needs to be each month. Towards your service so that when it's paid off you start Walmart does not give the bike away and hope you paid off That's a debt collector layaway is different layaway as you get the thing after you pay for it That's an important thing here.

[00:30:23] Brian: If they still won't bite after offering layaway, then it's not a true financial objection There's a two other things it could be that there's competition Offering a better value so they could offer the same or better quality at a cheaper price So they're gonna go with the competition Or they just don't trust that you are the right fit for them for whatever reason

[00:30:38] Brian: it's a lack of certainty So if you were having people and you're offering this to them and they're still balking They're still going away. They don't want to do this. It's because there's a lack of certainty You haven't overcome and that's a skill that you can gain And there's certain other things you can do to have more certainty in the sales conversation and the pre sales conversation.

[00:30:54] Brian: but that is it. True financial objections can usually be overcome. And Alex has to say, yeah, that's how you do [00:31:00] it. I got two more. This is another tactical one for freelancers who do, phone calls for sales, keep yourselves calendar as wide open as possible. His quote is this.

[00:31:07] Brian: you sell seven days a week, you make more money. actually tie it back to just freelancers right now. If you are doing phone sales as a freelancer, it means you are having discovery calls with your clients on the phone or on zoom, which you should be.

[00:31:18] Brian: It can be really tempting for freelancers to block out certain amounts of time. So let's just say just afternoons or just a couple days a week or whatever. on your calendar where you're allowing calls in and that way someone doesn't book you in the middle of a session or middle of a project or whatever or, you want to have your mornings as your, creative time and afternoons as you're like meeting time or whatever.

[00:31:34] Brian: And I understand that and there's nothing wrong with that. Unless you need money. So if you were broke or you were making less money than you want to make, then just keep your calendar as wide open as you possibly can set your calendar to 15 or 30 minute increments. So somebody can select the exact time that they want to talk to you on the exact day that they want to talk with you.

[00:31:51] Brian: That'll increase show rates as well.

[00:31:52] Brian: And then just be okay with any call being booked at any time. If you need the money, that should be okay with you. You don't get to pick and choose when someone wants to [00:32:00] have a conversation for your service. And by having not enough availability on your, calendar, you are making it a difficult for that person to give you money.

[00:32:07] Brian: So if you need money, make it as easy as humanly possible to accept their money. And that means having a wide open calendar. Go do it right now. It's an easy thing to do in five minutes on any calendar, Calendly, easy funnels, whatever you're using right now. Just change your calendar 15 to 30 minute increments.

[00:32:21] Brian: So they can book every 30 minutes or book every 15 minutes. 7 days a week, from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, all those open. And you may be surprised that you're getting more book calls, which is good. You're going to make more money if you do that. that is a quick and easy one.

[00:32:33] Brian: Keep yourselves counter as wide open as possible. again, quote from Alex sell seven days a week to make more money. And last but not least here there is no real end to leveling up your problem solving skills. something I saw time and time again is I would give Alex my biggest problem.

[00:32:48] Brian: Something that's been keeping me up at night. Something I've been struggling with for months. And Alex would just like shrug his shoulders. Oh, you just do this. And he would just look at me and I would just be like, wait, that's all I need to do. And he's like, yeah, just, do this. And I'm fibergasted because [00:33:00] this is, something that has kept me up at night and something I didn't think I had the skill to do.

[00:33:03] Brian: And it's just quick and easy thing.

[00:33:05] Brian: And if I look back at problems that plagued me a decade ago, things that maybe kept me up at night a decade ago, I would be the same thing. To my old self, I would say, Oh, that'sdude. That's so easy. That's so easy. You're an idiot. Just do this. Just listen to me and just do this. And I think there is some power to having someone like Alex that I've looked up to for years that I trust wholeheartedly.

[00:33:22] Brian: Who's multiple books at three books of his that I've read, some of the multiple times someone who's listened to hundreds of podcast episodes from. So I trust wholeheartedly and what he tells me because I know, I know he knows what he's talking about. I trust what he says. So when he looks at me and gives me advice, I just listen to it.

[00:33:37] Brian: I just throw the ego away and I say, this man makes way more money than I do. I will just listen and do whatever he says. And a lot of times, we either don't have that trust in the person we're talking to, nor should you in some cases, especially friends, family, people that don't make as much money as you or don't make way more money than you.

[00:33:51] Brian: but other times it's our own egos that hold us back from listening to people that we should listen to, either way, as entrepreneurs, we will be endlessly solving problems and our [00:34:00] businesses will only grow to the levels of problems that we're able to solve.

[00:34:03] Brian: So the reason Alex Mosey is able to grow his businesses to over 250 million per year in revenue.They make a lot of money. I'll say what their actual,net margins are, very high still,

[00:34:13] Brian: but the reason he's able to grow a business that large is because he has the skillset to solve the problems that a 250 million a year and more business needs to solve. I don't have that skillset. If you put me in his seat at acquisition.

[00:34:23] Brian: com, the business would probably shrink down to the level of my business over enough time because I don't have that skillset. So there's a skillset involved. There's other skills than just problem solving. But at the end of the day, every skill you lack right now is just another problem you have to solve.

[00:34:35] Brian: I don't have this skill. I need to acquire it. That's a problem that I have. I will solve that problem. It all comes back to problem solving skills. So this is a skill you need to constantly level up. If you can't look back at problems you had a few years agoThree, four or five years ago and just laugh at those problems because they're so easy for you now You can just sleep and breathe that problem every day And just it's easy for you. Then that means you're likely not leveling up your problem solving skill

[00:34:56] Brian: now, I think one big issue when people hear episodes like this is that they [00:35:00] have absolutely no way of getting around people like that. And nor should you. Like I think there's a level where you are around two bigger businesses and that might have been close to two bigger businesses for me because some of them were talking about things that are way above my level where you're like, Oh, you've got to start hiring C suite executives and leadership team and you're hiring people like half a million dollar a year salaries.

[00:35:19] Brian: I'm not there yet. So you don't want to get too high of a level, just a couple of steps ahead of you. People that, have been through what you've been through, people that understand you and what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:35:29] Brian: I encourage anyone to find that circle, that group of people. We've talked about this on the podcast before, masterminds are a good thing to have. Barring that something like our coaching program could be super helpful for some of you where you have people like me and my team looking directly at your business, similar to homosy.

[00:35:43] Brian: We're not solving 250 million a year business problems. We're solving, a hundred thousand dollar a year business problems, but having that second opinion at whatever the cost, I spent more money on this than I've spent on any education, consulting, coaching, whatever you want to say, thing before.

[00:35:56] Brian: But any amount of money is worth it because I know that the things that I implement from what [00:36:00] Alex hadon my business specifically talking through my challenges specifically and the things that I need to fix specifically just one of the six things that I'm working on from what he gave me is worth 25, 000 a month just one thing I'm not going to tell how much I spent on this because it's largely irrelevant here, many people would hear what I spent to spend a day with Hermosi and nine other business owners.

[00:36:20] Brian: And what does it mean to me and Hermosi alone? It was a lot of money just for me and nine other people, they hear what I spend on something like that and think it's crazy and they would never spend that much money. But you're essentially saying I will not invest X dollars to get X times 10 back.

[00:36:34] Brian: So whether it's books, courses, coaching. Mentorships, masterminds, whatever you need to do to get around people that can help you solve the problem, the bottleneck that's in your business right now. I highly encourage it. If that might be us at clients by design, if that's your bottleneck is getting more clients, then go to six figure creative.

[00:36:51] Brian: com slash coaching, watch the video there. See if it's a fit for you. we'll design an entire client acquisition strategy for you in the next 14 days. If you [00:37:00] don't love it, you pay us nothing. So it's really easy to get involved. You get to see what we're going to do together before we actually Start together and I have high confidence because I know that 97 percent of people that see what we create for them, for that client acquisition plan, approve it.

[00:37:12] Brian: They have a 97 percent approval rate.

[00:37:14] Brian: Many people will not do that much work, and take on the risk like that. So anyways, that's all I've got for you this week. Hopefully it's helpful. Hopefully it's enlightening. Hopefully there's at least one or two things from this episode take away and can implement in your business. There were some other things I wanted to share, but I think we're just too high level.

[00:37:27] Brian: For the typical freelancer because like I said, there's a hundred thousand dollars a year problems. There's a million dollar a year problems. There's $10 million a year problems, and there's a hundred million dollar a year problems. No one here needs to hear the a hundred million dollar a year, probably not even the $10 million a year problem solving stuff.

[00:37:39] Brian: So I'll keep those for myself or for my other friends. that's all I got for this week. Glad to be back. Glad to have, my 2024 September voice in your ears and not my old Brian self voice in your ears. But if you didn't notice that those were. replays, then no problem.

[00:37:53] Brian: If you didn't know those were replays, then again, you need to be reminded more, you need to be taught. Peace. See you next week.

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