Broke and almost dead to $100,000,000…how I did it..

Summary

• I own acquisition.com, and our portfolio companies are projected to earn $85 million this year.
• There was a time when I was stressing myself thin, managing six gyms under different partnership arrangements, running a dental agency and a chiropractic agency, and also doing in-person gym launches.
• My excessive drinking due to stress led to a DUI and a head-on collision, which was a pivotal wake-up call for me.
• After the collision, I realized I needed to make some serious changes, and I had a heart-to-heart with my attention coach, who emphasized the importance of focusing my attention.
• I decided to consolidate my activities and made the tough decision to exit from all business activities except for gym launch, despite the difficulty of these conversations with partners.
• I learned that making these hard decisions actually increased my mental bandwidth and decision-making power.
• The process of divesting and consolidating allowed me to narrow my focus, which was instrumental in the eventual success of Gym Launch, bringing in $3 million in profits in just 12 months.
• I found that we often accumulate unmade decisions that reduce our thinking power, and making those decisions can reclaim our mental capacity.
• There's a powerful realization in knowing that one decision can change your life and that many of us are just one decision away from significant change.
• It’s essential to recognize that as entrepreneurs, our most valuable asset is not our time but our attention.
• I encourage you to make the tough decisions and have the challenging conversations to regain your focus and drive your life towards where you want it to be.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest taking the time to evaluate where you're spreading yourself too thin. Look at all your projects and commitments, then figure out which ones are not aligning with your ultimate goals. You might have to make some hard choices, but remember, clearing your plate for the most important things will help you succeed.

Start by listing everything you’re involved in. Then, ask yourself: "Does this activity help me move towards my main goal?" If the answer is no, have those tough conversations to step away from it. This could mean leaving partnerships or stopping side projects that don't contribute to your main focus.

Next, think about all the decisions you've been putting off. You know, the ones that keep nagging at your mind and make you feel stressed. Decide on them—one by one. Taking these decisions off your mind will help you reclaim your mental power. You'll be surprised how much this can free up your capacity to think and concentrate.

Remember, your attention is more valuable than your time. Protect it. Don't get caught up in a bunch of tasks that scatter your attention. Zero in on what matters most, and you'll find that you have more energy and clarity to tackle the things that will truly make a difference.

Lastly, believe that you're just one decision away from a significant change. This can be intimidating, but also empowering. Choose the path that leads you closer to where you want to be, even if it's challenging. It's those hard decisions that will ultimately set you on the path to success.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"You're one decision away from changing your life"

– Alex Hormozi

"I'm always one decision away from changing my life"

– Alex Hormozi

"Most people don't regret doing things; they regret not doing things"

– Alex Hormozi

"I'm often one conversation away from getting my attention back"

– Alex Hormozi

"The most valuable thing that we have as entrepreneurs is not our time but our attention"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

hi my name is alex ramosey and i own acquisition.com and our portfolio companies will do 85 million this year what i want to talk about today is one of the the pivotal moments of my life that that took me from uh really just getting into a head-on collision in a dui and having basically no money to my name to you know 12 months later having three million dollars in profits not knowing what to do with it there was a series of decisions that happened in that period of time that radically transformed my life and so i want to talk to you about one of the more significant ones today and so uh kind of like i just alluded to leading into my dui head-on collision i had six gyms two with one partner i had uh four three with another partner and then i had one on my own so i had all these kind of weird arrangements that were going on in my life at that time um i also had a partner that i was doing a 50 50 split for dental agency work and another and the same partner we also had an agency together for chiropractic agency work i'm also doing in-person gym launches so that means that i'm i was flying out in person and doing gym turnarounds and trying to launch gyms and at the time i was so stressed that i was drinking i mean probably half a bottle every night just to honestly not to get drunk but just to not be stressed it took me a really long time to just even like function you know what i mean in the morning because i was so spread thin mentally and what i want to kind of talk you through is some of the decisions and how i thought through them because i don't know where you're at right now and it doesn't really matter what the scale is of what the decisions are because i've made decisions like this at multiple times my life i ended up going to an attention coach i know that sounds ridiculous but i went to a coach to help me manage my attention and so one of the things that i think us as entrepreneurs we think about all the time is like you know we're managing our time we're trying to be productive and i worked every hour of the day that i was awake and yet i still didn't have that much money at the time everything was tied up and you know the gyms and all that kind of stuff and cash flow for employees and all that kind of jazz and this uh this coach had kept telling me he's like you need to you know you need to aggregate your attention you need to focus he's like you're spread all over the place i pretty much just like would nod along and and listen and i tried to do some of the stuff they told me to do but um i wasn't making i mean i was making some progress uh but it wasn't until uh i uh drank so much that i ended up uh getting into a head-on collision about 60 miles an hour on the highway uh and i actually walked away um from that and uh it wasn't i didn't hit anyone i was actually getting pulled over and there was a car that was in this in the side the shoulder that was turned off it was dark and so i was looking over my shoulder um and just kind of going from lane to lane as i was you know getting into the shoulder as i was getting pulled over as i was getting pulled over by the cop in the shoulder there's a black car and i just i nailed it and so anyways uh they say that because i was drunk i was really relaxed and that's why i didn't get any injuries who knows but anyways i stepped out of the car you know i'm i'm getting whatever they do you know sign you know sign paperwork whatever and um the next day uh after layla picked me up from jail as my girlfriend not um not my wife at the time she was like this guy's a real winner anyways and so she picks me up and uh the next day i have a conversation with him obviously and he's like he's like your lack of making decisions is going to kill you and i remember him saying that to me and he was like the reason you're stressed is because you have all these decisions that you know you should make and you're not making them i wanted to make this because uh i wanted to talk about probably the the the second hardest decision i made in my life the hardest decision was quitting my job probably the second hardest decision was was the decisions that i had it was a multitude of decisions that i had to make that i knew i was supposed to make and i just didn't know how to confront them and it seems like it's a common theme in my life that when i only make decisions when i'm literally confronted with my own mortality and so if you notice that as a common theme among my stuff it's because for some reason i can't get myself to decide to do things unless i literally think i'm going to die and so i saw this and it became the the catalyst for me making a number of changes in my life and so what i did over the next you know really the next 48 hours was a rapid series of decisions that consolidated all my attention into one thing and so that's what i want to talk to you about so the first thing i did i called up the partner that i had the two agencies with and i said hey i can't do this i'm doing gym agency work where i'm flying out and doing turnarounds i'm doing dental agency work and we're doing chiropractor agents where i was like i can't do any of it so i'm i'm just i'm out i just was like i'm out you can have everything i'm done it was like okay um and that was a horrible conversation to have because i felt like i was letting a partner down and then i called up um the partner that i had in uh in in in the the multitude of gyms more of the gyms um and i said hey you know how can we figure out a way for us to you know walk away i want to do this gym launch stuff um and so you know we ended up working it out and i basically gave away the gyms at fire sale numbers more or less i was able to sell uh two of them successfully in a for a better number but the rest of them i pretty much just gave away and then uh the partner that i had that i was in the new gym with i said you know hey i'm i'm i don't i don't want to do this anymore i need to focus on on gym launch obviously all those conversations did not go you know super well they weren't super well received but i think i just was only able to have the courage to do it because i had almost died the night before and so it just gave me this massive perspective where i was like am i i'm so afraid of letting these people down that i that i might die and so i um i ended up making that all those decisions just in a matter of like a day or two and having those conversations and so i think the the the lesson for me um that i've taken with me that's been the most valuable thing of this is one you won't die when you make those those calls but second a lot of times i feel like when i was a newer entrepreneur and even as i feel that as i accumulate unmade decisions right i think we accumulate these unmade decisions or unma un unconfronted conversations and what happens is there's like a portion of my brain in my decision making my thinking power that just gets allocated to this chunk this this decision right that needs to be made that is unmade that i know i should make and i probably know what the right call is but it's just sitting there unmade and so it's like as we start accumulating these things it's like my my actual amount of of thinking power continues to decrease until you get to the point where you're so reactive because you have no brain power and there's a small like corollary to that i don't know if you've ever like if you remember when you were a kid and you had like homework or something like that and you were like staring at a math problem you can figure it out and um and you know you you're staying up late into the night and you're like whatever i'm going to go to sleep and see if i can think about the morning and then you wake up the next day and you feel refreshed and and you look at the problem and it seems obvious you're like oh it does here it is and then it's done right um i feel like that is the that is an expression of having far more attention far more decision making power far more thinking power um because you can concentrate on this one thing and all of a sudden it seems easy and i think that business and life are a lot like that at least they have been for me where it's like if i feel like like simple decisions are are take an inordinate amount of effort it's because i'm too distracted i have too many things too many unmade decisions too many unconfronted conversations that i need to have and um those can be life conversations with a spouse it can be conversation with parents they can be conversations with siblings they can be conversations with business partners they make conversations with employees they can be decisions that must be made and i think one of the power most powerful things that that i've tried to remember is like i'm only one decision away from changing my life just one decision i'm one decision away from from changing my life i can quit my job that is one decision right i can start a business that is one decision these are decisions that we have to make at some point in our life and these are like the crossroads there's two kind of major major themes that i have one is that most people don't regret doing things they regret not doing things and so i know that when i die i don't want to regret not having done things i'd rather do things than fail so that i do not have the regret and i'll have the experience and having that kind of thought process has been extremely helpful for me to draw back to the point of this this whole thing when i made these decisions and layla was with me because she basically said as well after i got off the phone call with the coach she was like if you don't change things she's like i'm not like this this has got to change like i'm not going to be around she kind of indicated that she didn't say it directly but i think i understood i could read between the lines and i valued my relationship with her uh more than a lot of the other things that were going on in my life and i could tell that she was a little bit outside of the storm that was alex hermosie at the time the storm of chaos and so she was like you have to make these calls and so i made these calls physically like phone calls and also these decisions and what resulted next was really the you know i had to suffer the pain of the consequence of those decisions which was very hard for me um but i felt determined that i had made those decisions i felt confident and i felt like i had more attention and more bandwidth at my disposal because i had made the tough calls and i started believing in myself more because i was like man if i can make these calls then i can do this next thing and so that was kind of i would say the explosion that created the beginning momentum of like i can do this after i basically shut down as many different side projects as i could um that's when i went all in on gym launch and so gym launch actually was started in 2016 which was probably 2016 into the first half of 2017 was like the worst 18 months of my entire life and that was also when i coincidentally met layla my wife so she saw me at the absolute worst and for some reason decided to stay with me because she believed which is why she'll always have my my eternal gratitude we made this call i i ended three partnerships um i sold sold or let go of fire sold you know at the time i guess if you if you were just trying to number those like eleven nine businesses or something that was going on and so this is one of those things where people are like man i have i have i have so many businesses uh you know etc and it's like you have to do them in the right sequence like i didn't even i wasn't barely making any money and i had all these businesses so i could feel good about my status when in reality i knew that i wasn't that successful and so um it was only when layla was like this gym launch thing is working like all we have to do is just give it our full attention and it will work at that point i felt so i want to stay defeated but i also felt like my my slate was clean right i had cleaned the slate and like i pushed everything off the side um in the face of my of my mortality um that the stress of not making these decisions was going to kill me and so um that's when i just focused full in on on on gym lunch and um and things kind of took off and i think in another video i'll tell you that story of how how things actually started there because i think it's valuable for a lot of people who are going through it right now but i guess i wanted to make this video because the the takeaway that i had from that is that i'm always one decision away from changing my life and um i'm often one conversation away um from getting my attention back i'm one decision away from getting all my attention back from where i'm feeling distracted so i don't know where you're at right now but the most valuable thing that we have as entrepreneurs is not our time but our attention if we have all of the time but we have a million things going on we are useless because we have no decision making power we have no thinking power because little pieces of our brain are being allocated these unformed unfinalized decisions um that maybe can cost your life and i don't know i mean it did almost for me which is why i've been so ruthless with my attention since then um and so and had to by by consequence so disciplined with my focus it's not because i'm naturally that way so hopefully this story will illustrate that to you that this was not something that naturally came to me but was a decision that i had to make to save myself and so um don't know where you're at right now my name's alex from rosie we own acquisition.com uh our portfolio companies now do about 85 million a year um i made this channel because a lot of people are broke and i don't want you to be one of them and i think that everyone has 100 within their control to become the top one percent of the united states uh which is already the top whatever percent in the world so anyways what's up everyone um if you did like this hit the subscribe button if you didn't love you either way and i'll see you next video bye