How I picked my mentors…

Summary

• Build a team of experts in law, accounting, and investment when constructing wealth; they're crucial to your business trajectory.
• Find mentors and advisors based on integrity and skill; without these, I wouldn't be where I am today.
• Integral people and advisors must have your best interests at heart and the necessary abilities to advise properly.
• Interview multiple advisors to gain perspective and discern integrity.
• Ensure advisors' incentives align with your interests, such as paying realtors more for achieving higher sale prices.
• Gain enough knowledge (e.g., read books) to reasonably assess an advisor's skill set.
• Bring knowledgeable individuals to meetings or talk to various experts to compare competence.
• Interview multiple professionals to prevent lazy decision-making; these choices greatly affect net worth.
• Trust and skill in advisors are both essential; better to choose someone you trust with good (8/10) skills rather than a perfect (10/10) skill set but uncertain intentions.
• Define successful relationships by the extent to which someone would help you at personal risk; apply this to choose trustworthy business partners.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing a step-by-step approach to build wealth with integrity and skill. Here's how to do it:

First, build a team with experts like lawyers, accountants, and investment professionals. This is key for a business trajectory. When you're looking for these experts, find mentors and advisors who really care about your success. They should be honest and good at what they do.

To ensure you're choosing the right people, you should interview many advisors to compare their advice. Also, read books to learn more about their field, so you can understand and test their knowledge.

For example, if you’re hiring a realtor, structure the payment so they earn more if they get a higher sale price for your home. This makes sure they work hard for you because their goals match your goals.

Next, to find out if advisors are trustworthy, think about whether they would help you even if it was risky for them. Pick people you think would stand by you no matter what.

Remember, it's better to work with someone you trust with good skills, rather than someone perfect at their job but who you can't be sure about. That trust is worth a lot.

Follow these steps, and you'll build a strong team that'll help you with your money smartly and honestly.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Selecting the right people can make or break your life and the trajectory of your business"

– Alex Hormozi

"One of the hardest things is trying to figure out who you're going to trust"

– Alex Hormozi

"You need someone who you can trust and has your best interest at mind"

– Alex Hormozi

"The idea is to find someone who has both your best interests at heart and has the ability to deliver on what you want"

– Alex Hormozi

"These types of decisions can make the biggest impact on your net worth and your financial future"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

as you build your wealth there are people who you will need to help you and have in your arsenal that means lawyers accountants investment professionals uh people who you uh invest with so those are different things people you do deals with people you do business with people you might get mentorship from and selecting the right people can make or break your life and the trajectory of your business i can tell you that firsthand i would not be where i am today if i didn't have the mentors and advisors and counsel that i've received over the years and over time one of the hardest things is trying to figure out who you're going to trust and what's the process that you have to go through in order to find those people and so having done this for a you know a while and we've you know moved a lot of money uh in our businesses and for those who don't know me my name is alex for mozzie i own a portfolio of companies that does about 85 million a year the whole goal for this channel is to document our journey from uh 85 million a year to a billion dollars a year in revenue in our portfolio and just share the lessons that we've learned along the way and so i've boiled this down to two things two traits uh that you can look for so i try to make this as simple as possible and i don't just do this review i do it for me because i think you know we're kind of in this together and this crazy thing we call life anyway so the two things that i look for and then i'll show you the tests that i think through for each of them so the first is integrity and i know that might sound silly but when you like think about it you need someone who you can trust like if you're giving someone your money like or you're trying to take someone's advice or counsel you need to trust their intentions all right and so it's not just whether they have integrity it's whether they have your best interest in mind all right so i'm gonna get to how i solve for that in a second but that is the first character trait of you need that you need of a council of somebody of any kind of council really whether it's investment law et cetera the second is efficacy or their skill set right so let's think of both let's think of just different scenarios here so let's say you might trust your mom implicitly but she doesn't have the skill of knowing much about you know how to structure insurance policies or trusts or you know investments in tech startups right she might not have that skill but you might trust her intention right for you specifically on the reverse of that you might see that there's this person who's got lots of skill is prodigious in this but it also means that they know exactly how to screw you if they want to right which is one of the double-sided things of being really good at something right you know all the details you know how to write the agreement structure the deals in order to make sure that you you know get the best outcome right and so the idea is to find someone who has both your best interests at heart and has the ability to deliver on what you want right and so it's both of these things since you're like well yeah maybe that seems obvious for me just even boiling it down to that was very helpful for me because when i look and i look through advisors look for people i want to get counsel from i have to look at these two things all right so here's how i test for the integrity piece and here's how you can kind of like you can control for risk here right one is i always try and interview as many advisors as humanly possible all right and i do that because i'm going to get as much information from each of the council during this process that will give me perspective from which to make a judgment right one of the biggest problems with this like if you think about julie who's trying to lose weight right she goes in the gym and then she talks to 10 personal trainers one personal trainer says it's all about high fat low carb another guy says hey don't worry about that keto stuff it's all about high carb low fat and then another guy says no you really just need a balanced thing and another guy says it's only about calories it's only about counting your macros and so you get this huge perspective so that hopefully you can make a judgment call otherwise when you talk to the first guy and he says it's all about keto then you're like well i guess this is it right i guess these guys all have opinions when in reality there is a truth you just don't have the perspective in which to make a judgment yet and so the first step in this is that i interview as many as as i possibly can from reputable sources so this is where i reach out to my network i make posts et cetera to try and get as many referrals as i can all right so that's step one step two for the integrity piece is that i try and have a line incentives now a lot of times they're incentive systems that appear aligned but not are not in reality so let me give you an example so in the real estate market if you're a realtor for example you may think oh this realtor has my best interest at heart right because they have an incentive to sell the house and so that is why they're going to get compensated so they want to sell it for as much as possible ah but they aren't incentivized to sell it for as much as possible they're incentivized to sell as fast as possible and get a deal closed right and so think about this for you selling a house for five hundred thousand dollars that's worth five hundred thousand dollars is a normal you know that like that's normal that's the market price right but for you to make an extra let's say twenty five thousand or fifty thousand dollars would be really material that would be a huge extra outcome for you you would probably push a lot harder to get the extra 25 or 50 000 now let's say that um you could probably sell it in a day at 450 000 because it's below the market value of the house right now here's what's crazy is that if a a selling realtor you know like total might be seven percent two percent goes to the buyer and five percent goes to the seller if five percent is going to your realtor five percent of five hundred thousand dollars right is 25 grand okay and so for them the the 50 000 decrease to drop you from 500 to 450 means that they're going to give up 2500 so they're going to make 22 500 so let me ask you a question now the reverse if they sell for 525 they're going to get 27 500 right and so it's a 5 000 swing off of a you know 25 000 nut for them and one of them might take them three months and one of them might take them a day so what is their incentive their incentive is to get is to make as much money as possible per unit of time and so they're incentivized to sell as fast as possible and so this is one of those things where you have to put your thinking cap on and say are our incentives truly aligned and so when we're looking at this when i say there's two aspects that i look for counselor or somebody who's going to help me do something financially legally insurance wise whatever it is so first is that integrity piece and are there incentives aligned the incentives being aligned and you could restructure that deal and say hey you know what you're going to get zero percent on anything below 400 000 i'll give you three percent on anything between 400 and 450 and then from 450 and up i'll give you 20 right or 15 or whatever right and so now they're highly incentivized to push and now your incentives are aligned because each increment for you is worth almost as much it is to them and that is how you would align incentives all right now how do you test for the second thing which is their skill set this one's hard all right especially if you don't have the perspective from which to make a judgment which when i answer new things when i'm trying to learn about trust and i'm trying to learn about investment things and different vehicles i'm learning about storage units more about multi like you're like man there's so much stuff there's so much nuance that you have to have right and so the first thing is i like to usually read two to three books on the topic all right and i read two to three books just so i don't appear like an idiot um and so i can at least understand what they're saying and they're going to respect you to they will it's kind of like defense if you bring your if you bring at least some level of knowledge they don't feel like they're going to take advantage of you so this is this is the first thing that i do and this is because i don't like feeling exposed in these types of conversations the second thing you can do is if you have someone that you can trust you can bring them in alongside you and the third thing that you can do which is probably the the most and highest recommended is repeating the same action i said in the first hand which is try talking to as many of them as possible and then you will gather the insights and you'll see the people who demonstrate the most expertise and what you can do is take what one person says and say well what about this and see what they reply with right and as you gain more and more knowledge and this is how you so in the consulting world this is qualitative research right this is where you're literally doing interviews essentially to gather information so that you can make an informed decision right and so when you do these interviews and this is what this is the lazy part this is what most people don't do is they won't do this work right they won't take the time to interview 20 people or 10 people when in reality these one decisions the guy who you decide to you know invest in in their fund or if you decide to buy this building or invest in a fund that that buys x y z right or you or you have somebody who who manages your portfolio whatever it is right that one decision can be one of the most if not the biggest influence on your total net worth over a long period of time and people take more time to figure out what they want to where they want to go on vacation than where they're going to put their money right and so my ask to you is that if you if you put these put these lenses on think about both of these lenses lens one do i think this person is integris do i think this person has my best interest at heart and then two do they have the skill to deliver on that promise because i don't want my mom doing my investments i know she has my best at heart but she has no idea what she's doing and then i don't want somebody who absolutely knows what they're doing and does not have my best interests at heart right which honestly unfortunately is a lot more of the cases that you'll come up with and candidly you know a lot of times they're literally incentivized against you you know uh in in the insurance industry they're they're kind of incentivized to rip you off it's it's it's pretty terrible and there's a lot of industries like that mortgage brokers are incentivized to rip you off and so you really have to look at it from both lenses and these types of decisions can make the biggest impact on your net worth in your financial future simply based on who you decide to work with and so that is the framework that i think through when i'm looking at looking for council looking for trusted advisors final note that i'll leave you with i was watching a video of warren buffett and he talked about how uh his life in most people's life is more or less the same he's like i eat at the same fast food restaurants i get the same desserts of dairy queen i wear the same suits as you do except you know he's like at least they look cheap on me he said but one thing that he he realized that was different about him is that um he defines a successful life based on the number of people who truly love you when you die and he gave a definition of that that i thought was really powerful and so one of his friends i can't remember the name he said survived auschwitz and he said that her judge of character of who was a true friend and who truly loved her was would this person hide me if the nazis were coming and that's been such a powerful frame for me to think through which is it's not just you know will this person trying to help me lots of people try and help other people but how many people help other people when their own lives are at risk just for helping because it's doing the right thing and so i think when when i think about that type of frame the number of people i have in my life that meet that characteristic are far and few between and i think that if you can if you can trust the people that you do business with to that degree you will be best served and if i have to choose between the two i would rather have somebody who i trust their intention and i have eight an eight out of ten on the efficacy than somebody who whose intentions i am unsure of and they have a ten on ten of the efficacy so anyways lots of love hope you enjoyed this uh click subscribe if you did uh and i'll see you guys next video keep being awesome bye