I sold my company for $46,200,000 at age 32…7 LESSONS I learned..

Summary

• We're always one decision away from massively changing our lives, and the quality of our decisions distinguishes our outcomes.
• Deciding to sell the majority stake of my three companies was not instant; it took 18 months of deliberation.
• I considered seven key variables before selling: story (external/internal), money and finances, energy and headspace, team resources, future and vision for myself, what's best for the business, and the ultimate decision and the why behind it.
• The selling process is complex and takes mental bandwidth, as it's a burden you can't often share publicly.
• Focusing on selling rather than building can lead to strategic errors that hurt the business, such as lowering prices unnecessarily.
• The decision to sell should be influenced by the potential for life-changing wealth but also requires confronting fears and ensuring it doesn't distract from the bigger picture.
• When considering selling, it's critical to evaluate if the potential short-term financial gain outweighs the long-term growth and satisfaction from keeping and scaling the business.
• It's essential to balance the desire for a "big exit" with the realization that being "legit" doesn't stem from an exit event. Openness to diversity within your business portfolio is central to growth.
• The fear that accompanies deciding to sell – the fear of being a "one-hit wonder" – is real but should not hold you back from potentially greater opportunities.
• Selling a majority stake can result in short-term wealth but may lead to regret and loss of momentum if the money does not lead to further success.
• 85-year-old self-test: Picture yourself at 85 and decide which option you'll regret less; this can provide clarity on present decisions.
• Decision to sell was driven by the desire to unlock the future and because unmade decisions are the heaviest burden. It's sometimes necessary to let go of the sure thing for greater, albeit unknown, opportunities.
• Part two of this discussion will cover the negotiation process, and additional videos will share lessons from the entire sales experience.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with something simple but powerful: decision-making. Remember that one choice can change everything. So, make sure every decision you take from now builds towards the future you want.

A good way of doing this is reviewing these seven variables often. Ask yourself about your business's story, your finances, your energy, and if your team has what they need. Think about your vision for the future and what's best for the business. Finally, always know why you're making decisions.

Focusing on the business instead of just thinking about selling or expanding is key. Don't lose sight of building something solid. If you ever think about selling, consider how it matches your personal and business goals.

If you’re unsure, think about the 85-year-old self-test. Picture yourself older and ask which decision you'll regret less. This can give you a clear direction.

And remember, unmade decisions are heavy. Don’t let fear of the unknown stop you from opportunities that could be great. Sometimes you need to let go of the good to grab the great. Align your actions with the kind of person you want to become, and this will pave the way to your success.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"We're all one decision away from massively changing the direction of our lives"

– Alex Hormozi

"The only real thing that distinguishes these people is the quality of their decisions"

– Alex Hormozi

"What we don't do are the things that we regret rather than the things that we do and then fail at"

– Alex Hormozi

"The hardest decisions in life are giving up the one that's in your hand for the two that are in the bush"

– Alex Hormozi

"The heaviest thing in the world is not iron or gold, but an unmade decision"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

we're all one decision away from massively changing the direction of our lives we can take one drink and get into our car we can sleep with someone that we shouldn't have and destroy marriage um or we can quit a job or we can sell a company and so one of the things that's always been interesting to me is that billionaires millionaires hundred thousand heirs people who are have zero dollars people who are in massive debt the only real thing that distinguishes these people is the quality of their decisions and so what i wanted to do in this video is walk you through the decision process that i went through in selling the majority stakes of three companies for 50 million dollars last year um and my name is alex mosey and so i i make this stuff because i want to document the journey mentally for me because i think i'm going to forget the details of these things as i age and like kind of what i was thinking and and the different pieces of it and so i made this little presentation based on notes uh because i actually took really extensive notes throughout this entire process of what i was thinking through you know different variables i was considering because this is not a an instant decision the the whole process for me actually took almost 18 months um and a lot of deliberation a lot of back and forth all right and so that's what i'm going to kind of focus on in this video so uh to sell or not to sell so there were seven variables that i looked at one was kind of the story externally and internally the second was money and finances you know for me uh personally third was kind of energy and headspace the fourth was team resources in terms of like what am i going to lose am i going to gain number five is the future and the vision for myself number six was what was the best decision for the business and then number seven i'll loop around and tell you what i ultimately ended up doing and why probably more importantly why all right so my name is dr mosey my wife and i are business investors and we in safe portfolio companies here's your youtube proof because i know there's a lot of people out there so you can just google apg gym launch and you can see all the top results are you know public disclosures of them purchasing making a big investment in the company out of 46 those two were at a 46.2 million evaluation the third sale i can't disclose the number the company did 12 million the year before i'll just tell you that okay so quick backstory i actually ended up writing out the backstory for this in in more detail so this will get you 100 up to speed to the same context as i had so i spent the better part of two and a half years obsessing about a single decision whether or not to sell my business and i'm thankful to tell you that two and a half years later i made that decision so what i want to walk you through is how i made it and hopefully help someone skip the two and half years of mental charging that it took me to get here so let's start with why did i want to sell so let me take you back into a moment that i decided to sell and then bring you forward to this moment so leila and i were on a walk in march of 2019 and we had just done 4.4 million dollars in revenue that month and taking out 1.7 million in owner dividends that month she stopped and she looked at me and she said let's shut it down i don't feel like doing this anymore we don't need the money let's just shut it down and move on and being the motivated money motivated entrepreneur that i was at the time i was like hey now let's at least see if we can sell this all right maybe we can get like a small payday before moving on to our next thing and so i went up and hit my network up and asked anyone if they knew anyone who could help me you know value my business and let me know what somebody might pay for it and that's when a good friend of mine rick mayo introduced me to investment banking friend of his who specialized in our space which was the fitness base at the time um and so within a day or two i was on the phone with a guy named mike okumian and he was a banker in the fitness base and he transacted a handful of high profile deals and after a few introductions i shared our dilemma and asked if there was you know he thought the company could be worth anything and what he told me next really changed my life and so i'm loosely paraphrasing but he said dude you grew from zero to 17 million dollars in profit in two years and you're now on pace to grow fifty percent again this year and i was like yeah i know we're really tired of it though and michael was like uh if you continue this growth at the end of the year he's like i could sell this for 150 million easily and i was like really and he was like yeah and and if you can disassociate your brand uh from your face and maybe get another acquisition channel going probably even more and so my job just about hit the floor right i was used to small business ownership where when you stop wanting to do business you bake someone to buy from you and you're trying to recoup your costs as much as you can get but this was something entirely different right 150 million that's not even rich the generational wealth right and as a reminder i was 28 all right and so my wife and i probably had maybe 20 million bucks saved up at the time but this was an order of magnitude changing wealth for us and so after getting off the phone with michael my head was spinning and i felt like my world perspective had shifted forever and it had from that moment onwards the next two and a half years all i thought about was how do i sell this business for 150 million dollars and interestingly from that moment onwards my business plateaued more or less right i mean we grew but not to the same degree that we were going before and it could have been because i was already burned out which is possible um it could have been because of macroeconomic forces uh because there was a little flu that went around that affected gyms or could have been because i wanted to i shifted from wanting to build something to wanting to sell it and i have no idea all i can say is that i stopped going i stopped growing after that conversation and so i can truthfully tell you that 50 or more of my mental bandwidth for the last two and a half years was dedicated to the idea of selling and what's more difficult about that is i can't really talk about it publicly right and so it's this kind of like this burden that you keep in the back your head that just eats up a lot of your thoughts that you can't talk about right and so what happened was all my decisions changed from what is going to provide me the most long-term goodwill with our customers to what would a potential acquire think of the decision and would it make the company more or less valuable and i think this ultimately hurt my business the heart behind the business had shifted from the process to the outcome and over the next year our revenue went up but our profit dropped because i thought an acquirer would want to see lower churn which is true but i made a terrible mistake and lowered my prices in an attempt to do so and it ended up cutting about five million dollars in profit in the process so i went from 17 million in profit on 26 million top line to the next year i think we did 37 million top line 13.4 million bottom line which is still obviously not a bad you know outcome but it it should have gone the other way should have gone like 19 million on 37. like i said although we grew by 40 top line my bottom line by 25 and so you know we also thought we needed to show we were legit and hired a lot more people to sit around and do nothing while the core team was still hustling to get the work done either way we had we splunked up to like 135 employees i think at our peak for that those two entities and so either way over the course of 2019 uh we pulled me out somewhat from the fulfillment of product divisions so that was somewhat of a win and then in 2020 we committed to selling the company right so that's kind of like speeding up to 2020 and we knew we could tell the story of the infrastructure cost being something that ate up margin and that we were still growing and we were on pace to you know keep it for a year and show some growth and then sell it concept so we went to market in february of 2020 and right as you guessed it there was this flu that went around kind of affected our business a little bit and we had the option of pulling back but layla and i were honestly you know just like even-handed about being the gym business right we wanted to not have that be the only thing in our lives the bankers ended up adjusting our expectations and said you know i think uh and mind you this was actually we weren't we were no longer working with uh the guy that was uh referenced earlier he actually was just a council like we ended up using a a different firm i think i think we can definitely help you grow yeah and get 45 for this business right and at this point we were fine with that we just wanted out and not really out just more like we wanted our focus back and so over the next three quarters our revenue and profit continued to decline as the fluid raged on and once the second shutdown hit the business really hit rock bottom in q4 so we had gone from like three to four million dollars a quarter in profit to like 500 grand in profit in q4 of 2020 right and so the bankers suggested that we stop the sales process and try you know try again once the flu had gone away right but lately the guy laila and i were kind of yet again really determined to be out of pain and so we told them to just you know keep going with the process and so they hit up all the private equity firms again and lo and behold we got a few replies and some firms were interested in buying our company at rock bottom what a surprise right and those replies after a lot of phone calls and meet and greets and information requests turned out to be two offers for the company and then you know for context i can't show the actual numbers of the trailing uh 12 that they came up to this for 2021 but i can tell you that they just consistently straight line went up um so basically q4 q1 was kind of like the bottom of it like december of q4 of 2020 was like the absolute bottom and that's really because because there was almost no hope you know i mean like it had the second round of shutdowns a lot of gyms had shut down it was just kind of looking bleak no one decided etc and so i'll bring you up to speed kind of internally we realized that we would have to build this business to run on its own because we didn't know if we were going to be able to sell it and we knew we weren't gonna like want to shut it down or something like that there's too many families that relied on us too many employees too many customers like it just it didn't make sense and so beyond that uh tactically we started an outbound call center um so that we can have a second channel so we started to take the steps that we knew we should do and from the feedback that we had from the first round which was like you need a second channel it needs to be less branded to you etc this is important to understand over the next 12 months i stopped attending all product meetings all client-facing calls all client-facing events so i didn't show up to my events like there was nothing we built an outbound call team that did 50 of our sales volume and we promoted a team of generous become the face of the consulting brand overall and so all that remained for me was a weekly 101 with the ceo uh a weekly executive call team that was 90 minutes and quarterly meetups internally so i was no longer public facing at all it was only uh internal that i was kind of facing and so now let's get back to where it was interesting so we signed and accepted an loi and at this point you know the profits had gone up significantly from from kind of the q4 bottom and i have to skip the actual uh numbers of what was around there i can just tell you the the overarching number which was which ended up being 46.2 and so here was the decision-making process and that's what i want to get into which is like okay so what did you guys end up doing and why all right because during this process the business kind of almost shot out of a gun 2021 and kind of had a really strong rebound um that's obviously why there was way more people who were interested first there was two and then there's two more i interested parties and so we had a handful of private equity firms that saw that okay they saw the bottom they saw the the fast rising back and they're like wait we could buy a company that just did you know 15 million in ebitda a year ago or two years ago and we they can bank on the fact that it'll probably do that again let's dive in all right so that's the back story so these are the considerations the story slash milestones that i was telling myself the money energy headspace team resources future vision best decisions for the business and ultimately why i decided what i decided to do i wish i could have given you more visuals for this but but i did this this already took me a lot of time to transcribe all my notes into one presentation and so there was there was two kind of composers i and and it was really kind of having this like devil's advocate in my head conversation that was going back and forth and i even just put these directional arrows to like what i said first and then what i responded with mentally i'm sharing these thoughts with you because i i want to show that like i don't think these thoughts ever go away you know what i mean like i i said and this is like i mean i was like i need a sale to be legit you know as an entrepreneur and then a friend of mine was like dude you already have seven successful exits and a handful for multiple millions right and i was like well yeah he's like you do seven million a month right now like you're legit i was like huh okay uh he's like this is not a reason to sell a business i was like okay that's fair um i was like but a big exit is an entrepreneurial rite of passage right and he's like so jeff bezos stuck elon they're not legit because they didn't exit their businesses i was like that is also a good point i was like well there's kind of like the four-minute mile component like there's no e-learning companies that really sell for you know or personality-driven brands that that are selling for these types of numbers not many at least and so i could prove that you know these types of models are sellable i was like well can i just prove that i have a higher net worth and keep it i was like that's also not a good idea or not good reason to sell it you know another story was like you can't have more than one thing and so that's why you should sell but you know in terms of keeping it's like well you just need to level up your skill set like there are it is not physically impossible there are other entrepreneurs who do this and so you just need to be better and this is just a great growth opportunity so that's not a good reason to sell i'm like all right fair i was like ah it's a big nice few to everybody who doubted and you know spoke out against me over the years and then it's just like you're better than that that's also not a good reason to sell so i'm showing this stuff very candidly you can reinforce uh the lesson of selling my gyms and so the big lesson there and this is one that i've spoken about a lot is that you know sometimes you have to give up what you have in order to give up uh to get the bigger thing that is unknown so you have to you have to let go of something that you do know that is good in front of you for something that you don't know that could potentially be great and it kind of hinges on the idea that what we don't do are the things that we regret rather than the things that we do and then fail at that was that's kind of the story uh there and the keeping argument that is like well that might be the wrong lesson to learn like maybe you needed to exit those things but it doesn't mean you need to exit everything it's making sure that we apply the correct lesson to the story and that might not be the right lesson from that story i was like okay that's fair and then you know finally doing a sale early selling the the majority uh portion of the business would unbrand me somewhat from the fitness industry because it's it's still something that drives me a little nuts it might also be because of how i look so that's possible just being real like i still see comments are like hey man i still find your content valuable even though i'm not a gym owner and i'm like i haven't made a gym piece of content in three years i'm glad like it's just funny and i consciously made that decision in 2019 when i rebranded my podcast from gym launch secrets uh and i hadn't spoken about your stuff in a while but i consciously rebranded it to the game which you can check out if you want and so my keeping story around that is like people have already moved out from that dude like a handful of comments is not like what everyone thinks about right you're not just like some gym dude you already have the majority of your money is made outside of gyms now i was like well yeah but people don't know that and so anyways these are the stories i was telling myself at this time right and so next is kind of like what are the what are the money money things that i was telling i was like okay well selling cash would be nice but the keeping argument is uh well after it you'll have a tax event so you'll actually be you'll have to give a portion of that to the government it'll actually net decrease your net worth because you already have that value and equity and because of the amount of money you already have so my wife and i at this point are probably taking from those two businesses about 45-ish million in dividends it's not really going to materially change your your living um which is true other thing though is that from a selling perspective it's like i can i can take that cash and then i can reinvest it and then all i have to do is just make the delta right so it's like i can take you know whatever cash i've received there i can invest it and then i can build something else and what i'd have to do is make up the net difference between what i do on my own what my cash grows into versus what that 66 would be worth in five years right and so that's the that's the net delta difference and i was like i feel like that would be still a pretty strong argument for uh doing the sale the flip side is what am i going to buy that's going to make me the same amount of money that i could from this company that's clearly going to you know triple and then you know triple in value and go back to what it was worth um you know pre-flu fair argument on the on the other side it's like well you're super super concentrated you know diversification is not a bad diversification's not a bad idea and then i quoted warren is a hedge against ignorance do you feel like you're in this space do you feel like you don't like that the the companies that you have you don't know anything about um well no i actually feel like i know more about the stuff that i'm doing okay well then you don't need to have diversification just go all in on the things that you know and then they will grow disproportionately which candidly my life is an example of that so it's hard to argue against that point you know rich people sell wealthy people never sell another argument for keeping it yeah uh i could also take out debt and still continue to own the whole thing kind of refinance the business and still keep 100 ownership if i did that but the problem for me from that perspective is i knew that i would never do that because i was already very tired at that point in running an entire another process from scratch was something that i just knew i wasn't going to be willing to do at least not on any short time horizon i was like okay well you can still do debt to fuel like m a and start doing acquisitions and just use that as the umbrella brand and i was like um well a couple things one i didn't have the debt relationships too i didn't know m at that level buying majority of 30 40 million you know 10 on the low side 30 40 on the high side size companies i was like i don't i don't that's those are mistakes that could potentially like undo everything i've done and i'm just not willing to uh to quote a friend of mine i bet the empire for a pot of gold that was kind of the argument against uh just using debt to fuel m a the the final you know keeping argument for for money was like after tax you're almost gonna get the same money as if you just take out debt on the company tax-free and that is true in theory uh but it's unknown based on promises from bankers that's not 100 because a lot of times they may inflate things uh just fyi side note bankers will inflate things for you because they want you to sign on the dotted line to work with them big picture consolidated from this is that like the money wasn't going to change my life in either direction whether i sold her i kept it which brought me to the next one which is energy and have space on one level it's like the story is you can't have more than one thing which i'm a very big proponent of the the counter to that is while riches people own lots of things okay well that's also true too but i think the main difference and i'll i'll hit on this later is that i think you can only have one active thing split split attention is one of the most dangerous things in entrepreneurship and i can tell you that when i did split my attention when i started another company and then a third company my revenue pretty much just continued to flatline so doing more things just does not like you have to focus and i think that you can have multi lots of things that are going on but you can only have one active thing so like if i own a building i'm not active in that i could invest in apple and i'm not active in that and so you can't own lots of things it's just to make sure that what you're owning is not owning you the next point here is that selling is a story it's not reality so it's like the idea that i'm just gonna like walk away magically and not care about the company or the employees or the or the customers it's just that's a story i'm telling myself in my head there's still 100 going to be things that i'm sleeping you know going to bed and thinking about the team and the company all that stuff and so it's like you you're not going to get what you think you're going to get from from selling i was like yeah but i could treat it like other portfolio companies because i'm just it's it's kind of redistributing my net worth you know accordingly across more more enterprises and then i can care about them more evenly whereas here it's disproportionate in terms of like lopsided for my net worth um so i was like okay that's fair another strong argument for keeping is like you'll grow faster never selling just never sell and uh let it compound tax free the counter you know for that is like i just have to outpace that delta what the cash can make me from investing plus what i'm going to make on my own uh versus what that two-thirds share uh would grow into right that's what i have to make up if i can make that up then it would make sense and then this one was actually from my closest friend he said what's the objective what problem are you solving you said i feel like you just chose the nuclear option of like okay you know i i want to get headspace back and so therefore i must uh you know sell sell two-thirds you know sell some majority of my company he said why don't you just match the conditions right like what is what do you imagine life to be like when you have sold majority uh and then look at what those conditions look like and then match them in your current condition and then you can keep the company and still have the effective sale that happens in your mind and i was like that is a fair point but you know my counter is that like i don't think i can do that i feel like i'm still i would imagine it's like having kids where even if you're spending zero time you know taking care of the kids even when they go to college you're still thinking about them right they're still taking up shower time they're still taking walk time they're still taking up morning coffee chat time right and so those are kind of some of the head space considerations i had team resources the big line here is that you know when you sell sell a company you you lose the resources right i'm so used to being on top and having a lot of leverage in my decisions it's way more just deciding at this point like i'm not doing a ton of doing um within any of the portfolio companies and so giving up that kind of all those resources like hey if i'm like hey i want to recruit somebody i just go to the recruiter and say hey can you recruit this person right if i want to like go build a site or i want to go put a book on amazon i just say hey can you go put this book on amazon and then it just gets done right so i would lose that and that might actually be a big asset for what i wanted to do next and actually allow me to move faster right so that is a is a strong argument for keeping it right so these were these are the four thoughts that i had written down during the process was like okay well i could lose the team and uh but like i could coach them to become like the type of people that could work you know at acquisition.com it's like well different needs require a different team that's not a really good shortcut like there's different different skills different backgrounds different experiences etc that's not really good to try and retrofit a team that was not designed for this right you know obviously i love the team they've been with you since the beginning this is me arguing to myself yeah but i need to give them room to grow and if i'm still there kind of on top of it they're not going to be able to like blossom into what i think they can they can really truly grow into you could make your employees wealthier you know if you kept it you could you know do some sort of esop program there which is an employee stock ownership program i was like yeah but they can also become wealthy um through the stock ownership plan that the new you know owners would put in it's like okay that's kind of moot richest guys all said that they regret selling their teams that's something i talk to people who are wealthier than me and they're like they all regretted doing it the counter to that is but they're all really wealthy doing their next thing so you know i get i and i can understand the i can understand both sides of it future and vision uh in terms of like what i want my my my life to be like this could be the cash cow to build the the conglomerate you know that funds all of these new acquisitions that i built into my conglomeration i was like yeah but i could use the cash from the cell to do the same okay fair um the version of me that i want to be can own multiple companies without running them yes um but you still need to give you know like like that's not reality for you right now and then you know finally here you'll still care about uh the team the same and or still care about the company the same uh but you'll just have given up the upside it's like so you're still gonna do the same mental work and mental decisions and strategic planning the way you always are but you'll just give up the upside and the counter to that is like yeah but i'll still have four companies rather than one and that's gonna really distract me from what i want to do ultimately which is acquisition.com and so um that was kind of like the future and vision component of it all right and so uh the last thing before i'll tell you why i made the decision that i did is the business component you know on one side i was like okay do you want to do what is required to get to 200 million i could just do the playbook that the private equity is going to do because i know what their playbook is and so i could just do that so that's an argument right you know businesses always go up in value over time right unless they don't in which case to become sellable so it's like if you keep it and it goes up then like you would still own the thing and it would be making more money in the future so the value goes up and you get dividends the whole time which is why business ownership is very lucrative but in case it doesn't in which case you don't make any money and the thing that you have has no value right um you know they don't have a magic pill they're not going to do anything you don't know how to do it's like yes but they're going to put all their focus on it and i am not because i'm doing other things that i want to do you know imagine what you're going to learn watching them do m a if we sell it um yeah but you don't need to learn you know learn from them to do that so that's a different you know perspective on it um if you want to do uh what they do just buy it from yourself you know and have it have your your new self buy it from your old self still go through the transaction mentally uh install the same incentives run the same playbook as them but just own the whole thing right um but i really thought about that i was like i feel like that's it's fear that's driving that decision fear of losing what i have and it's like hey you need to have the skill uh of being passive well i already have that it's just not i just don't feel like i have that about a company that i founded myself and then um you can always just use the transition plan that i already designed during diligence that i presented to them and just execute it yourself and it's like yeah i can do that in theory but i don't know if it's going to be that clean and so you know the one line summary for for this is like do i think selling or keeping it is the best decision for the business i think that if i keep the company i will increase my net worth more do i think the company will realize its potential if i keep it maybe maybe not i think that the people who were going to potentially buy it had a very good skill set in growing companies of this size they're more experienced than m a than me and so i think that the business would benefit from that all right so what decision did i ultimately make i'll give you my quick one-line summary of kind of selling and keeping after giving you all those different variables for selling anything that distracts from my berkshire hathaway will be a net loss so get into a better boat and this is just the classic example of like everybody told me that i was crazy when i was when i sold my gyms to start the licensing company uh gym launch but this is because like what they saw in front of them was six gyms that were making money and i was 26 or something and they were you know like why would you give something up that you worked so hard for and it's obviously making money and it's because like in some way it's like i have to believe in me more than they do because in their minds maybe that's what they think i'm limited to capacity wise and i think that i can do more uh and so that's the you know the argument for selling the argument for keeping which is also very compelling is you know become the person who can grow a cash compounding conglomerate without ever selling ever you know warren buffett never sells wholly owned companies he also says get into the best boat so he has two pieces of advice that contradict themselves and uh they're both very good and very very fair so what decision did i ultimately make right so everyone has a plan until there's a check in front of them to walk away from 46.2 so um it's one thing to say no in theory it's another thing to say no when you're one email away from that you know money right and so uh these are kind of the soft decision frameworks that i applied so the first one is that i had to acknowledge that there was no wrong answer right so i knew that if i did either of those directions ultimately i was still always going to be very wealthy and none of it was going to make any material difference in my life and whatever decision i tried to go to winners win and i would have probably executed either way and it probably wouldn't matter i knew also from a happiness perspective that i'll probably be happy in either direction and you know rationalize whatever decision i made either way that was like first and foremost none of this matters the second one is like okay well you know is it i could still make a better decision versus a worse decision even though they both might be quote or right decision um which has just reminded me of this the story of the boy and the horse you know father buys a a boy a horse everyone in the town says that's amazing the wise man says time will tell um then the kid falls off the horse and breaks his leg and then everyone's like oh that's terrible you bought the kid the horse and then the wise man says time will tell and then army comes around and recruits all the young guys to go to the military and then you know half them die and then everyone's like oh my god that horse was a blessing and then the watchman says time will tell and so ultimately you kind of get where this is going right is that you don't really know whether something was good or bad until the day you die and once you die it won't matter food for thought noting that the three hardest decisions in my life quitting my job to start my gym selling the gyms to start gym launch and then potentially selling gym launch prestige and allen to start acquisition.com and go all in on that each of those are the three hardest decisions of my life and it's because i had to give up something that i knew that gave me status that people gave me praise for that most people considered big material successes for something that was potentially bigger but completely unknown so some the bird in the hand versus the two in the bush and the thing is is that the hardest decisions i think in life are giving up the one that's in your hand for the two that are in the bush um and so it's like you have to take big risks sometimes to take the next kind of like quantum leap you know take the next uh jump in order of magnitude so these are the three hardest decisions i've ever made in my life and i would say that in order they were most difficult quitting my job second most difficult uh selling my gyms third most difficult uh selling these companies are my majority interest in those companies so i i i give this for context because i think that a lot of people who are listening to this like you're probably in one of these decisions where you have one in your hand and there's two in the bush like i think the hardest decision of entrepreneurship or really life in general is when do you give that up when do you not take the rational move and take take the upside one and so for me i just knew that regret would be more guaranteed from paths not taken rather than failed execution this is a question that i get from layla and it was uh one of the things that we both thought about a lot which is what am i most afraid of like which of these decisions makes me the most afraid keeping it or selling it and for me selling it was the thing i was most afraid of because i was like what if i can't recreate what i've done what if it's you know what it's a flash in the pan what if i'm a one-hit wonder which was silly anyways because we already have seven other businesses we've sold but i'm just telling you these are the thoughts you have right and so yeah like what am i most afraid of that was what i was most afraid of and so finally or second to last i had my 85 year old self test which i have i've talked a lot about and i'll talk more about which is i run and i'm doing this almost like without knowing now because it's been so ingrained because it's been probably the most effective distance framework i've had in my life and so i'm just going to keep using it which is like what does 85 year old me think about this decision and the honest truth is that 85 ruled me in this decision was useless because he was like it's not going to matter anyways uh do the thing that excites you and you know it's like what are you and like i'm talking 85 year old selfies like what are you afraid of and it's like that i'm not going to be successful if i do the next thing it's like well that's not a very good reason not to do it and so i was like okay i guess that's fair does who you want to become you know i was like well i really want to be a rational investor i want to be somebody who makes rational decisions he's like yeah but you know the ups like you're limited on your upside in this and so like if you believe that your life can be bigger than this then you're guaranteed to not get it if you don't take the big jumps i was like okay that's fair and so that was kind of like the main shifts that i got from my 85 year old stuff this was ultimately the one thing that mattered most and then i'll tell you finally why i decided to do what i did the next thing that i do will be 10x or 100 times as big and if anything takes my intent from that it will be a net loss i would hate to look back and think i was holding on too hard to what i had and didn't have enough faith or i could have if i took the leap and believed before sing and so at every level the fog is bigger but so too is the reward and so like as you you know climb the mountain right if you fall there's further to hit the ground um in terms of your perceived failures but like you still have to take jumps to hit the next mountaintops and so i think that was ultimately um the biggest reason for why we decided to do what we did um and i'll tell you one interesting thing which is that like i felt the loss of the business but i didn't feel the gain of the money the money really i didn't feel it at all um and so that was kind of interesting i felt like the loss of resources i did feel some level of relief for about three days and then it was back to normal which was nice and then now that we are back in this in this in this season of building i can tell you 100 that this was 100 the right decision um i you know obviously i'm going to rationalize whatever decision i make but after really thinking through all of the different angles this was the right call because i can already see and feel the momentum it's so nice to be back in the trenches again i love building things um i'm a builder and so it's great to build not only my own business but to build all the portfolio companies and so i'm just i'm learning so much more i'm being exposed to a lot more things which allows me to make more lessons and you know the mission of acquisition.com is to document and share the best practices of building world-class businesses and so you're like why does alex make these videos part of it is because of that like i wish that elon and i wish that that jeff and i wish that you know warren you know wrote books and made youtube channels right of like what they were thinking about at every given you know part of their journey because i hope that 30 40 50 years from now like we were like man if you look at alex in his 30s what he was deciding what he was thinking about and looking in his 40s when he was deciding what he was thinking about i want i wanted these videos to be kind of like proof of that um so that they could hopefully help others retrace the path but i am very very confident that the decision that we made was the right one i just can't tell you the amount of like creative energy it was like the moment we actually made the decision it was like my future unlocked again like i couldn't see past making the decision to sell it was like it was like i had to make this decision before the rest of the opportunities in my life opened up and so um i think i made a tweet that was shared a zillion times which is like the heaviest thing in the world is an iron or gold but it's an unmade decision and so i think um and i made that during the time when i was when i was making this decision to sell or not and so i think that for a lot of us there's these unmade decisions that weigh us down and like they eat up so much of our mental capacity that we just need to free ourselves up and and do it uh and pull the trigger those are the soft decision farmers that i allowed myself to to think through uh a 99 cent book if you want to give 66 cents of that to to amazon uh it's got three thousand five star reviews it's the first of ten books that i'm making kind of detailing the process of of scaling a business i have a course that goes with that that's for free you don't even have to opt in for it so it's not like an email collection it's just i think that the highest leverage thing that most people can do is is improve their offer that's the first place that i start with all the businesses that we take on that we invest in and so if you're curious like what we actually do we we invest in companies that are doing between 1 and ten million in profit uh typically within uh the e-learning or service space so uh you know chains of of brick-and-mortar service businesses that want to license or want to franchise or people who already have a niche uh that they have to find out that they do business services too so it's like oh i'm i'm good at you know bookkeeping i'm good at helping lawyers improve their practices whatever stuff like that are the types of niche licensing businesses that we go after because that's our playbook and so we work with those businesses to scale into you know 30 50 million plus and i make these videos for everyone else to hopefully get there um so that we can have the opportunity to um you know invest in your business and help you help you go to the next level so anyways this is part one uh this was just like the thoughts behind the decision i will do another video or two in terms of what i learned about the negotiation process i'll learn to explain what i learned about the sales process overall uh in other videos this one i wanted to walk through kind of what i was thinking about uh for myself and everyone for why we decided to to do that and then ultimately sell the two-thirds stick hope you found value in this and if you did watch another video and i'll see in the next ones