Stop Being Broke. Get Busy.

Summary

• Scaling the unscalable can make you a ton of money.
• Many are leaving money on the table by not leveraging their competitive advantage.
• Just because something seems impossible to scale doesn't make it unscalable.
• People often think they can't scale personal, hands-on efforts like handwritten cards or one-on-one calls, but with time and systems, you can.
• I learned sales by doing 4,101 closes in my gym business, not through formal training.
• Your first aim should be to get busy—don't be broke and not busy.
• When starting out, doing the hard work, including low-ticket sales calls, teaches you more than it earns you.
• Engage with your customers directly to understand their pain points and what features they value most.
• By starting with the most expensive, personalized service, you can later scale down to more automated, do-it-yourself options.
• Successful scaling involves first solving the most difficult customer needs and then systematizing these solutions for more mass-market approaches.
• Small businesses have an advantage by being able to do what's "unscalable" for large corporations.
• Pursue the hardest solutions first because they'll teach you the most and establish a strong market position.
• Use direct feedback from customers to refine your product and messaging continually.
• Take the time to do personal, unscalable efforts initially to build loyalty and gather critical insights.
• Once you find what works, create systems and frameworks to scale your business efficiently.
• Always use what you have as your first rule of entrepreneurship; don't waste your current advantages.
• Move from one-on-one to group interactions as you grow to maintain high levels of engagement while scaling your output.
• Be prepared for hard work and management debt until you can afford to hire the right people.
• Look at scaling as a gradual process where you continuously learn, adapt, and implement better systems.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing the following strategies to grow your business and personal development effectively.

1. Get Busy With Hands-On Work:
   Start by engaging directly with your clients or customers. If you’re offering a service, don’t hesitate to do the unscalable things like personalized messages or one-on-one calls.

   • For example, make 1-on-1 calls or send handwritten thank-you notes to learn about their needs and preferences.

2. Learn Through Doing:
   Practice makes perfect. Dive into sales or customer service yourself to learn and understand what works and what doesn’t.

   • Like I did in my gym business, close a lot of sales personally to get good at it.

3. Ask Your Customers the Right Questions:

Use direct feedback to refine your product or service offerings.

• Ask them what single feature they value most and which one they wouldn’t miss if it went away.

4. Start With High-Touch, High-Value Services:
   Start by offering the most personalized, hands-on version of your service. This will help you understand the intricacies of your business.

   • Once you perfect it, you can streamline and create more automated, scalable versions.

5. Create Systems After Learning:
   After you understand what works, start building systems to replicate and scale those actions.

   • For example, if you start with personalized onboarding calls, move to group onboarding sessions when feasible.

6. Utilize Your Competitive Advantage:

As a small business, your ability to offer personalized, high-touch services is your edge over larger companies.

• Utilize this to build customer loyalty and gather valuable insights.

7. Incremental Scaling:
   Don’t worry about scaling right off the bat. Focus on delivering exceptional service first and scaling step by step.

   • Move from one-on-one to group interactions and then to fully automated systems gradually.

8. Use What You Have:
   Always leverage your current resources and advantages effectively before looking for new ones.

   • If you have time, invest it; if you have money, look for the best ways to use it to buy more time or skill.

By following these steps, you'll gather valuable customer insights, build stronger relationships, and gradually create systems that allow you to scale effectively.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi> #### "Just because in the beginning you can't see how it's going to scale doesn’t mean it's impossible to scale"

– Alex Hormozi

"Welcome to business baby"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you're broke get busy and do some of the unscalable stuff"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you’re the small fish then that’s the advantage you play"

– Alex Hormozi

"Stop being broke and not busy and get busy and you won't be broke for long"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

what I'm going to talk about in this video is not fun but it's going to make you a ton of money and I'm going to explain why so many of you are leaving massive amounts of money on the table right now and not using your single largest competitive advantage and these lessons have come hard-earned from years in business I've founded and exited nine businesses my last one at 46.2 million bucks our current portfolio is over $200 million a year and I make these videos so that you can make money and the big concept I want to talk to you about is scaling the unscalable and I'm going to give you some big tactics at the end of this video after I explain why it's so important why everyone gets it wrong and so just because in the beginning you can't see how it's going to scale doesn't mean it's impossible to scale I had this girl come up to me at an event ages ago and she was in the Fitness World obviously because that's where I was and she said I do outbound for my my business and we do $30,000 a month um but I want to have a more scalable acquisition system and I was like why can't you scale outbound and she was like well I mean it requires people and I was like welcome to business baby like how how do you think you're going to scale the deliverable if you had Fitness coaching I was like people is Fitness coaching unscalable no you hire and train people welcome to the service business which is culture and training that's service that's how it works and the fact that you don't know how to do it is what makes it unscalable not that physics disproves the ability to scale onboard boing or scale handwritten cards like unless you can prove physically that it's impossible that gravity exists differently in your world then it's not unscalable you have a skill deficiency it's unskill that's what it is it's not unscalable you are unskilled enough to scale it I remember when I was in weight loss I would have a lady who would walk in and uh and she would say something like hey uh I don't want to lose too much weight right or I'd have a guy and this is probably the more common one they'd say well I don't want to get I want to look like you like and I'm like don't worry you never will but the point is is they would look at me and say I don't want to get bulky like you you have too much muscle I don't think that looks good and I'm like you know you're not going to wake up tomorrow and just be jacked as and have trained for 20 years right it's not going to happen there's going to be a million days in between and at any point you can say I'm just going to stop here I'm going to try and maintain but the thing is is that people try and say that they don't want the extreme version of a solution so they're not willing to do take a step in that direction and so the same thing happens from a deliverability perspective they say hey you know what if I do it this way I'm not going to be able to hit $100 million a year this isn't scalable but the thing is is that you're not even making money right now and you're talking about scale you're talking about how you're not going to be able to fit in your clothes and you haven't even lost weight you're talking about how you're don't want to look too bulky but no one even knows you work out right now because of how you look and so the same thing in business is that like sure you think and here's the here's the real real is that when you start you don't have context and you don't have resources so with your current set of resources the unscalable thing looks unscalable because you have no help and you have no money and you have no leverage but good friend of mine Andy forella he has first form they do hundreds of millions of dollars a year in Revenue when he started the business he started writing handwritten cards to every single person who bought their products now in the beginning you'd be like you're the owner how could you write handwritten cards to every single person that buys the product that's not scalable Alex but guess what he still does it today and they get a zillion orders a minute at this point but what did he do well in the beginning he was writing the handwritten cards and over time he just signed the handwritten cards and then finally other people were writing the handwritten cards and the gesture still held and so the thing is there's a there's a 2.0 3.0 version that can still check 80% of the boxes that you learn from the unscalable solution I got on the phone this last week with a recent founder who exited exited a fintech company for $2.5 billion some of you guys who saw my story um I've been trying to talk to people in that space so if you don't do know somebody in Neo banking uh payer processing uh who had a big exit uh please hit me up I'm trying to learn some stuff uh for one of our portfolio companies but anyways he was saying hey it's all about the unscalable and he and I had this great chule about this that so many business owners are unwilling to do the heavy hard work the one1 calls the talking to customers in the beginning because they say it's not scalable but there's always a version that presents itself two three steps down the road because you have the money and the skill to be able to say hey what are the key components of this of this thing that can make it scalable and so I would encourage you if you're starting the business and let's say you're selling because I'm obviously in the school Community right and so I see people who are trying to sell a a $20 a month community and they're like well I don't want to hop on the phone for a $20 month sale also first off guess what genius I was in the the large Fitness World brick and mortar what do you think gym memberships sell at do you think they have a person selling it at the front desk sure as they do guess who it isn't the owner and they can still scale that process and so again the idea that things aren't scalable is ridiculous now sure you're not going to be able to take 20 calls a day in the be you know at scale but you're currently making zero so what the are you doing all day you can't be busy and broke pick one right you're either busy and you're making money because you're doing the right stuff or you're broke but you got plenty of time like you can't have both problems and so if you're broke get busy and do some of the unscalable stuff and that means hopping on the calls with customers that are below your ticket price but guess what that happens is that you're learning more from them then you are earning from them and that's okay because you're going to learn the pain points they're suffering from you're going to learn the the hooks in the messaging that matter most to them you're going to learn how to alter your product and your offer in a way that makes it convert at a higher percentage you're going to learn The Things They Don't Care by the way you want have two magic questions here's some Pro tips for you the first thing you ask a customer is you say hey if I were to eliminate all of the things that I have in my feature set except for one what would it be and they'll tell you and if you ask 100 people you'll get by far a power ranking for what matters most in terms of value for the core deliverables you have now you can also ask the second the inverted version of that question which is hey if I were to eliminate one thing from my entire feature set and it changed nothing about your life which one would it be and you also get the least valuable thing and between both those elements and if you do this on a regular basis you continue to cut and trim and distill down the value they provide to the most amount of people by simply asking them and so I think Paul Graham said this and I believe this and I keep repeating it because I think it's so important is that you can solve every question and every problem in business by talking to your customer more you have a marketing problem talk to your customer you have a product problem talk to your customer like they know what they want and they will tell you how to address them and how to advertise to them and so getting on the phone and doing the quote unscalable writing the handwritten card onboarding every customer even though it's $10 a month that they're paying guess what happens when you on board those customers I'll bet you they're going to stay longer I'll bet you they refer more people and you're going to be able to make the product better and the marketing better and so even if you do that now let's say okay Alex oh my God I followed your advice and now I'm taking 20 calls a day well guess what now you're making money and I don't give a but if you're still like hey I want to make more money fine I'll give you the next step so when you go from 101 you go to semi-private you do one on six right you can still deliver a close to that experience but you 6X your output so instead of talking to 20 people a day you talk to 120 people a day now if you're like wow 20 people a day that sounds like a lot guess how Alex learned sales I did 4,101 closes not consults closes over a multi-year period for my gyms why because I had appointments back to back to back to back to back and I had two to three people that were scheduled for every 30 minutes and so that accounted for show rate so that no matter what I always had one to three people who were showing up every 30 minutes that I pitched the exact same thing to and guess what happened I got pretty good at sales the amount of people who asked me hey what sales training did you go to I didn't I went through the unscalable sales training of actually just selling a lot of people and so the idea is that you are going to learn more then you are going to earn in the beginning and that is okay because as long as you see entrepreneurship as a continual journey of educating educating yourself on your customer the problems that you're trying to solve for them why would you not want to FastTrack that and jam as much of that as you possibly could from the best possible teacher that is in the marketplace which is the market itself and so I get passionate about this because I see so many poor people trying to think that they're thinking like rich people when they're really thinking like poor people CU they're trying to be broke and not busy so get busy talk to the customers even if they pay you 10 bucks a month you'll learn more and then guess what happens after you do one on six you do group onboarding you do one on 20 you do one on 30 and guess what you can do from there we have a company right now that still does that did group onboarding and scale to 100 million plus a year all right and we still did it because we knew the onboarding was such an important Pro part of the process for sitting expectations telling them what was going to happen next keep setting promises and keeping promises over and over and over again and so if you have one on 30 fine guess what you can still do six those do 180 people a day with just one person and if you train somebody and what happens like let's really think through this in the beginning you do the one-on ones okay now in the beginning you're just answering questions over time you say Okay most people have these same six questions and so then I'm going to create a little presentation around these six questions and so then you start using the presentation in the one ones and you're like you know what I think I can do this a little bit faster and so you get the one-on six there and you have the presentation and you're still seeing the same output with the one on6 as you were with the one-on-one fantastic now what do you do you see can I get to 30 and you do 30 and then you 5x again your 6X output and again now you're like huh I wonder if I can teach somebody else to go through the same deck as me and you know what you do and just like that you scaled the unscalable real quick if you're tired of being broke and would rather be busy join me at the school game so school.com games I take a call every every weekend there I'll help you build your business step by step we we have once a month a mastermind that I drop in there of all the people who fly out from the top 10 communities that are making money online right now and we break down all the tax that they're doing right now so that you can use them too and so the reason that you have to do the unscalable stuff is that there's a swamp in business where you don't have enough money to pay somebody else but you still have to do your day job and the next job and so you just have to work overtime and that means you work today's job and tomorrow's job so that you can get ahead and so the thing is is that every single business hear me out every single business incurs debt so the question is what type of debt do you want to incur so a venture back company incurs financial debt so that they can H lots of talent upfront they can get really smart people and pay them where they should be paid at Market rates now if you don't have that money to pay all those good people guess what kind of debt you incur management debt because you don't have the right people because you can't afford to pay them and when you have management debt what does that mean it means that you have to work the job of two three four people and that's what makes it quote unscalable but you have to go through that swamp in order to get to the other side and one of the big problems is that people look 10 steps ahead and then project that back to the present it's the same thing as saying Hey I want to uh get rich so I'm going to go start flying private it's like Warren Buffett wasn't flying private to get rich he has done that as a result of being rich it's not the path that got him there it is the outcome of being there and this is actually one of the big issues I see at large with a lot of the uh information that gets put out there is that what happens is people grind and they sacrifice a T and then they get rich and then they have a different Demand on their time and then they extrapolate and they give advice of their current setting to people who are not in their current context which is try why I try to spend a lot of time with people who are making their first 10K first 100K first million dollar a month so I can I can remember what it's like to be at each of those levels so that can make sure that what I'm saying is contextual to the current constraint of the business that you're in and I'll give you a super tactical example of this in companies that we still to this day who do tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue is that I know just just like you do if I get a green textt that clearly is from a you know a chat interface for a sales rep or an automation I'm way less likely to respond if I get an iMessage I'm an Apple user and so I know that this is a real person on the other side and so what do you think I have our sales teams do do we use the interface or do we do the unscalable yes guess what we send a personalized voice note we send a personalized video we send it via iMessage from a personal phone now does it mean that they have to have a personal phone no I don't need use their phone I can buy them an iPhone again there's leverage there's leverage in the beginning you're like what am I going to do buy everyone an iPhone well eventually yes but in the beginning you don't have money and that's okay but you think that something isn't scalable because you don't have the context from which to scale it but if you had unlimited money and unlimited Talent you absolutely could scale it and so just don't use that as the excuse to not do the thing that you know would work better because you have to be more efficient per lead per opportunity when you're small and so you have to pull out all the stops Gary Halper has this amazing story about this he says whenever I want to write a sales letter I imagine that I can only write one letter for my life or I'm going to die and so he says if I he starts with that hypothetical Max saying if that's what I had to do what would I do he's like well first I would have a handwritten envelope that I'd handr write the name on it I'd have a stamp that I would lick and put on it on the inside would be a handwritten letter from me and then the words themselves would be all these things and I'd have some lumpy thing in there and he starts at the hypothetical extreme because if you only have enough money to send a 100 letters then handr write all of them right now over time you're like okay this worked how do I scale it but guess what now you've got the sales from you writing a 100 letters and guess what you have the skill of writing a 100 of those letters and all of a sudden you start develop a system for how you write those letters and you expand your capacity to 500 letters and you 5x your income and you're like okay now what are the elements that of my unscalable solution that had the highest effect or impact on the throughput well 80% of the stuff uh didn't have as much of the impact this 20 % did I can use cash from my earlier less scalable thing to create more leverage in the more scalable thing and get 80% of the effect and 10 times the output so it still makes sense and so you always are going to lose efficiency at scale but the question is in the beginning start with the absolute most efficient process and this is fundamentally the opportunity for all starting or smaller businesses when I say small business I'm saying 10 million and under all right so don't get your get your ego all up like I'm a seven figure ENT I don't give a the point is is that you're not you're not Apple you're not A3 trillion company you're not Microsoft right so you can do things that they can't that is the advantage of the small business and that is why there will always be small businesses because they can do things that big businesses can't because they don't scale but the fact that they don't scale 100% is 100% your opportunity to beat them if you're not doing this it's like getting dealt pocket aces and then choosing to fold because you're saying I can't have pocket aces on every single turn because my next turn I might not get it and so I have to not use them now you have them in this chapter so use them use what you've got the first rule of Entrepreneurship use what you have and if you have an advantage if you're the small fish then that's the advantage you play now become a midf fish then you have other advantages you have resources you have a little bit of reputation and you use those resources to leverage up so now that I've talked about scaling the unscalable hopefully you're sold on that concept there's two Frameworks that I introduce you one is the sales to delivery Continuum and understanding the dynamic between both polls and secondly the done for you done with you do it yourself pyramid so the first thing is is understanding something that I called in uh the offers book the sales to fulfillment Continuum and basically the sales to fulfillment Continuum states that the easier something is to sell the harder it is to fulfill in general now the only main exception of this is technology but when it comes to Services uh it's usually if it's really easy to sell it means hey I'll do everything for you no matter what very easy to sell very easy to make that promise very hard to deliver on that promise now the other side of that is that if I said hey you have to do it all yourself then that's something that's very hard to sell uh but very easy to deliver on and so what I find interesting is that the vast majority of people who are starting businesses try to start on the thing that's the hardest to sell and I think they have it wrong I think they have it backwards and in my career I've had basically the the exact opposite uh perspective or approach to starting a business or starting a new product line and so if you're a business owner I would think about this when you're thinking about selling a new product or starting a new level of service and if you're someone who's new then this is going to be starting from zero to selling the first thing now the second framework around this the first is the sales to fulfillment Continuum the second is the order in which you attack it and so the way that I recommend doing this is following what I call you know like the Tesla Model which is you start at the top of the pyramid with the most expensive thing first this is typically done for you so this is very easy to sell very hard to fulfill and that's okay because in the beginning you don't have that many customers you don't have that much lead flow and so you want to maximize the revenue per customer now in addition to that it also sets you up to go Downstream later because you will get the highest percentage of people the best results with done for you the difficulty is that it's more difficult to scale comma and that's okay because again we're starting out and when you do this you develop the Sops you develop the products underneath of that larger product that allow you to productize the service that you're ultimately going to deliver later and so imagine you take on I'll use an agency as a simple example here if I took on uh agency clients and I did everything turned Key Well I'm going to start developing Sops for lead maget developing Sops for ads I'm going start developing Sops for landing pages and upsell pages and email followup all of these things are things that I'm going to have to develop Sops for now once I have all of these systems in place guess what happens next you go from the top of the pyramid to the second layer of the pyramid which goes from done for you to done with you now done with you you can typically charge a fraction of or less than what you charge for done for you sometimes a third of the price a fifth of the price but by doing that you've productized a great degree of the service and then you switch from a service provider to a Consulting relationship where you're helping someone do it themselves but you're still there to assist and so that's kind of in between the total not even handholding it's hand doing to hand holding to No Hands touching right which is do it yourself at the end and the thing is is imagine the opposite version of this a branding perspective you've positioned yourself you've price anchored the most expensive version of your service that has the highest results with the best customers and so you already have this strong Association at the top of the pyramid which then allows you to go and say Hey listen I have you know 10 private clients they all you know pay me $10,000 a month to do whatever it is and I have a lot of you guys who are asking me but you don't necessarily qualify for my Private Client Service and so I decided to take all the stuff that I have for my Private Client Service and make it available to you and I'll help you walk through the process that I walk through with them but instead of me doing it you could do it for yourself but I will be there every step of the way and by offering that you are able to sell 10 times the amount of people because the amount of handholding in terms of support that you have to offer is on10th of you literally doing it now from there again you say hey there's a lot of people who know my private clients they can't necessarily afford that and they can't afford this thing but they have they're enterprising and they want to take things on their own and so I take all the Sops and stuff and I will give them to you so you can just follow along and do it on your own and that's one10 or you know oneir of the price of my done with you and so I prefer the top down approach to the bottom up approach cuz let's play it the other way hey I've got this really cheap thing right that I've been selling to everybody and I have you know everyone in their in their and their mother takes it now I'm going to start helping you through it now to be fair I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that it's just that if I had a preference between which one I would prefer to build I'm going to have the least operational uh drag at the top because I have the fewest number of customers and then I have more customers and then I have the most customers and as I move my way down the pyramid it gets harder and harder to sell but my skill in sales improves right because I'll know the customers I'll talk to them I'll spend time with them and so my messaging can improve and get better and better all right that's what I had that's my money message of the day is that scale the unscalable start there stop being stop being brok and not busy and uh get busy and you won't be broke for long and if you like this then I have a whole video that breaks down all my business lessons from 13 years in business which you can watch next