Don’t Start a Business Until You Watch This…

Summary

• In 2020, I experienced a significant shift in perspective, reducing my anxiety and increasing my understanding of why many people fail.
• Early success in my career, jumping to millions in profit, created an unhealthy benchmark and a toxic viewpoint.
• Emulating investors and billionaires, I've now embraced a longer time horizon for success, which has lessened the pressure of immediate results.
• Instead of rapid gains, I focus on actions that ensure inevitable success when repeated over time.
• By extending my time horizon, time has transformed from a liability into an asset, leveraging the power of compounding in my favor.
• I've shifted from skepticism of SEO and inbound marketing to recognizing the value of building consistent inbound interest over years.
• Diversifying strategies with a long-term focus, like building reliable and sustainable channels, is part of my plan for future growth.
• Shifting from a CEO to an investor mindset helps in focusing on enduring success rather than immediate comparison with competitors.
• I recommend investing in projects that might not deliver immediate returns but are likely to yield disproportionate benefits in five years.
• Discipline in consistent action is crucial. For example, I postponed evaluating the ROI of a new initiative until next year to improve execution quality.
• A recent insight is focusing on metrics—like increasing qualified applications—that are likelier to drive sales growth over time than merely fixating on short-term sales numbers.
• I target measurable, predictive metrics, such as the number of sales-accepted leads, to guide my growth strategy.
• Small, consistent activities, like enhancing outbound efforts or creating more content, contribute to gradually escalating inbound applications.
• Now I prioritize reliable inflows, such as initiatives expected to generate a steady number of new clients monthly, embracing the time it takes to see results.
• My reduced stress levels are linked to my detachment from short-term business fluctuations and lesser impact on my ego.
• The COVID-19 pandemic halved our profits, but I remain undisturbed, viewing it as a temporary setback, with confidence in future recovery and growth.
• Seeing time as an ally, an inevitable force, aligns me with natural processes that facilitate growth, even without direct intervention.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with shifting your perspective on time. Instead of seeing time as a threat, view it as an ally. This means extending your vision from quick wins to long-term growth. Focus on setting goals for five years instead of just tomorrow, this week, or this month.

An important step is to choose actions that, when done consistently over time, lead to inevitable success. This could be developing your skills, creating valuable content, or building out reliable marketing channels.

Embrace the investor mindset. Invest in projects that may not have immediate returns but promise significant benefits down the line. This patience will pay off with compounded growth. Don't get caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations of your business or comparisons with others.

Identify key metrics that are predictive of sales growth. For example, increasing the number of qualified applications is a strong indicator of future sales. Choose one metric and work on improving it with small, consistent efforts.

Let go of the pressure to see immediate results from new initiatives. Give your plans time to mature and evaluate them on their long-term contributions, not just the initial output.

Lastly, allow yourself to detach from short-term business performance. Trust in your strategy and believe in the recovery and growth of your investment over time. This will lead to reduced stress levels and a healthier relationship with your business.

Remember, embracing the power of compounding and giving your strategies time to come to fruition is key to lasting success.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"I've tried to shift my perspective to wanting to do tasks and actions on a repeated basis that I know that if I repeat them over a long enough time horizon will lead me to inevitably accomplishing my goal"

– Alex Hormozi

"Seeing time as an asset is working for me and how things compound over time now works to assist me rather than hinder me"

– Alex Hormozi

"If I can extend my time horizon, then time stops being a liability and a threat and becomes an asset"

– Alex Hormozi

"Building a machine that consistently month over month creates more and more inbound interest is just wildly compelling to me"

– Alex Hormozi

"Using that discipline to invest in things that are going to create disproportionate returns is a good use of time"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

what's going on everyone uh happy sunday this is uh coming from downtown austin uh wanted to talk to you about one of the most profound belief and perspective shifts that i've had over the last few years um and i think 2020 was that year for me uh where i made one of the most profound internal shifts and the shift has yielded me unbelievable amounts of decreases in anxiety for me and honestly just increases my increase my level of certainty and i can understand why so many people fail to a much higher degree and i think one of the biggest curses that i had earlier on in my career is that um you know within months i went from it's just everything kind of aligned for me um mind you after five years of eating uh but nonetheless things did align for me um and very rapidly went to from making not a lot of money to millions of dollars a year in profit um to my second year uh doing almost 20 million dollars in profit uh and that that that fundamentally i think ruined me in a lot of ways earlier on because i saw that as my my benchmark you know what i mean i saw that as like if it's if a business is not doing this then it's failing we're doing something wrong and i think that it was a really poisonous viewpoint for me or toxic viewpoint and uh i want to share with you what what what i've shifted to and what has been such a dramatic improvement in my life and i think my business so when i look at investors and people who make a lot more money than me and people have much bigger businesses than me uh i see this common thread of looking at it from an investor's time horizon and so i feel like in entrepreneurship everything is about tomorrow everything's about this week everything's about this month and making payroll and all you know you have all the day-to-day things but you get so much you get so caught in the monthly goals and weekly goals that you forget to make the long-term investments that are important and not urgent and when i look at the billionaires of the world and all of them are trying to build you know escape paths to mars to me i see that i'm sure there's the cool factor but the fact that they're all kind of thinking about the stuff just leads me to think that they're thinking on such a larger time horizon than the rest of humanity which is probably one of the reasons that they're more successful and one of the things to think about this is kind of fast versus inevitable and i have tried to shift my perspective to wanting to do tasks and actions on a repeated basis that i know that if i repeat them over a long enough time horizon will lead me to inevitably accomplishing my goal and so what it does by shifting that way is i look at tasks i look at projects i look at initiatives in a very different light i also am i mean i wasn't super affected by competition in general mentally because of other things but i think this has been probably the last nail on the coffin for me in terms of like well so and so is making more or whatever right the things that we do to compare ourselves if you remove the time horizon and think of uh not next year but maybe next decade right um i've been using five years because that is a timeline that i feel like i can wrap my head around in israel for me um i had a mental reach out to me and he was like and you know this guy sold his thing for three 3.4 billion uh and he's like bro you need a hundred year timeline and um i i i took that in i accept that uh but i it was it's not real for me yet and so five years is something that is real for me that i can believe in and so uh what that does is if you think about time as an inevitable force that's going to move forward one way or another think about for a second how and this is for me do i see time as a threat do i see time as a liability something that i'm always saying is is working against me or is time and asset that is working for me and i think this has been the single greatest shift in perspective for me is now seeing if i extend my time horizon then time stops being a liability and a threat and becomes an asset and how things compound over time now works to assist me rather than hinder me and so i'll give you a simple example so uh i have never believed in seo right or really even inbound marketing and i have had a major shift in perspective on this uh probably in the last 12 months and the reason for that is because you know if you your first 12 months of of doing you know seo and i'm saying that as a general as a catch all time really just any inbound marketing and that is not paid advertising that results in people because that's technically kind of still outbound right you're you're putting ads out there and then getting people to respond rather than basically pool-based marketing where you're putting you're creating a water hole for people to come towards right and so i've i've never really invested much thought into inbound stuff at all i mean the only example of that is really this kind of vlog podcast which i never did for uh for really any business purposes it's just more for me to document my journey um but nonetheless uh thinking about this in terms of that perspective of and i've been talking to people who are like oh yeah we have this you know it's taken us five years to build this asset but now this asset creates 3000 applications a month for our for our software or for our whatever right and i think to myself i'm like man just building a machine that just consistently month over month creates more and more and more inbound interest is just wildly compelling to me and so i think to myself okay sure we're going to have our outbound things uh both outbound in terms of manual outbound with people cold call call email etc you know cooldm but also we have our outbound with paid advertising across platforms but the kind of the third piece of this is what can we quote invest in that if i did it over five years i believe it would be unreasonable for me to not have built another channel that is reliable and sustainable and enduring and so you'll probably see some more things for me in the next 12 months along that line because i think it's really awesome and i want to use compound growth to my advantage rather than as a hindrance rather than it's something that i compare myself to and feel always inadequate and so what i think that the shift from the ceo to investor mindset has helped me with is the stress that i put on myself uh for like quarterly goals and looking at someone else who might have started at the same time as me and is doing better than me because then i get to think to myself okay but we're not comparing ourselves now we're comparing ourselves to what's going to happen in 20 years right will their company still be here and i'm trying to build something that endures that lasts that maybe even can be passed on to a future generation and i don't think those were ever thoughts of mine when i was starting my entrepreneurial career and i wish they had been and so i don't know where you're at right now but maybe if you can if you can take that perspective and think to yourself what could i create that and what tasks did i do what projects could i invest in that even if they don't pay off this quarter or next quarter even the next 12 months i think that it would be inevitable that i would have a disproportionate payoff five years from now and obviously that begets the obvious you know the the single greatest constraint that most people have which is they can't do anything consistently but i believe i can do things consistently and i think that many of the people listening to this can do things consistently and so if you have that character trailer already you've developed that discipline i feel like using that discipline to invest in things that are going to create disproportionate returns is a good use of uh time right for us and so i'll give you a real example around this uh we're looking at doing an initiative uh on the gym launch in our dremels company uh related to just generating more you know inbound applications and whatnot and i was talking to our gm about it and i was saying listen let's let's not think about that for like this quarter uh i mean we can start now but let's not measure the roi until you know next year and i don't think i would ever have said something like that a year or two ago i don't even think it would even be a thought um but it's it's been wildly freeing because there's so much less pressure around initiatives and i think it actually improves the quality of the initiative and the execution of the team because they're not immediately being like oh it's been a week and it's not working so we're failing right and so um let me give you another really good nugget that i've had recently around this which is um rather than looking at week over week month-over-month sales growth instead i asked myself the question what one thing if i tripled it in our company what non-sales related you know what not in revenue related thing that if i were to triple it it would be unreasonable to believe that my company would not triple as well and for me that was inbound qualified or i'm saying about but just number of qualified applications generated that was a metric that i was like okay sometimes when you're increasing the number of applications that are coming in uh you have a new sales person a new sales team and their their close rate is low it happens right it's part of scaling a business but over a long enough time horizon it would be unreasonable for me to believe that if i were to triple my number of applications uh i would not see a you know a proportional increase in sales and so what's interesting to me is that if i can i've never actually thought about a leading indicator because i have leading indicators on churn which is like customer activation and i talk about that in other stuff but i've never actually had a leading indicator on growth which is fascinating to me that i've never had this which is like hilarious but actually measuring the number of sales accepted leads and that is that's defined as a lead that the sales team accepts because they showed and are qualified right they are the type of person uh who who we can serve uh you know they have the size business that we work with you know and they showed up and they have interest right so that would be a sales qualified lead and so trying to say i want to increase sales by five percent a month is a fine goal the thing is is that there are so many other variables that can affect it in a short time horizon like that whereas saying i want to increase our number of inbound applications by five percent per month is far more consistent and reasonable to do and so if you thought about like a line right if i increa i know that i can increase through consistent activity the number of inbound uh applications either through adding more people to outreach uh creating more channels for content um and then you know obviously there's the paid side which is you can add another platform etc right and so if i if i draw that line that is something i can consistently do and so when i'm thinking about growing my business and hitting a goal like tripling it right in the next five years and i think okay well then let's take let's take our sales qual sales qualified leads right and let's draw that as our line and that's going to be our baseline right that's what we're going to focus all our attention on the day-to-day activities around that those are going to be like the stock market right they're going to be up and down up and down up and down and i think most of us are looking at such small time horizons it looks crazy but if you look at it from an investor's perspective in terms of years or decades then you can really see the truth and the reason that a stock will go up over a decade is simply because of the true economic value that a company is providing right and so for me a leading indicator of growth would be the number of interested inquiries that we get and so that is actually going to be my primary predictive metric that i will be driving because i know that of course we're going to change processes sure we might change crms you know we might change our funnel or our sales like all these things are small things but if i can simply increase the number of qualified applications of people who want to for example grow their gym uh by 3x in the next five years then i can reasonably believe that i would be able to achieve it and thinking that way it's just been amazing and so uh that is what i'm dedicated to doing and some of these smaller projects which for me were like well this thing isn't going to double our lead gen so i don't want to do it i've really shifted my perspective on that and so i'm now looking at uh reliable inflows it's like okay well i think this one thing can generate us 20 new clients a month that's not huge for us but it's it's it's noticeable and so okay well then how you know how much does it take to to invest in that how long do it you know and and and let's start it let's start the let's start the snowball right and so that's one of the that's what i was talking my gm about and so we're actually going to do this initiative that i think will results in about 20 new clients a month and it's going to take us time to get there but i but i think it's it's going to be really really uh valuable for us right over the long haul especially and so let me just take a quick look at my notes real quick because i wanted to make sure i'm not missing anything for you um do to do [Music] yeah i think that's i think that's um that's my biggest thing right that's that's pretty much my message for for what my biggest perspective shift has been is thinking about a five-year time horizon shifting from ceo to shareholder uh shifting from ceo to to board member or advisor and thinking about it over those time horizons and i feel like if you can just make that change i wish i could explain to you how much less stress i have because if you know the company goes up by a little bit or down by a little bit one month over another month it just it just doesn't affect me like it doesn't affect my life in any way and i feel like i had my ego so and this is actually the last point that i had in my notes which is my ego is just so much less impacted by the fluctuations of the business that it's just it's just phenomenally increased my standard of living like i'm just i'm just really not that stressed about things you know it i just can't even express it to you and so anyways this has been probably the biggest lesson of 2020 for me um and obviously 2020 for us was uh um we our profit was cut in half we did i think 13.4 in profit last year and we did i think six six this year we're getting our final books but around that this year in profit which was technically my lowest year of profit in a while and um but i can truthfully tell you it just really doesn't affect me because i know it's a momentary business disruption because of a pandemic that disproportionately affected my clients than many you know than many other industries um and i don't think it would be unreasonable for me to believe that over the next three years right that we would we would not only recover but grow past where we were before and so in thinking about that um anyways i just it's been it's just viewing time as an ally and not an ally or an asset not a threat or a liability and once you can when i can hitch my cart to something that is inevitable like the past and the passing of time um then i feel like you're aligned with forces that will grow you without your permission and so anyways i'll leave you with that i hope you have an amazing day and keep being awesome catch you on the flip side [Music] [Music] [Applause] you