How can you create an unshakeable business? My name is Leila Hormozi and I crossed $100M by the age of 28. Now I’m growing acquisition.com into a billion-dollar portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I’ve learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up, Let's BUILD. New Episodes Every Monday & Wednesday!
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Customer service department, I said we will get back to you in 5 minutes or less because I saw that our first response was always within 90 seconds. So if it's always within 90 seconds, I'm pretty sure 5 minutes is reasonable. And people were very impressed because they were like, wow. You guys are so fast. And they were always like, holy crap. It said it was gonna be 5 minutes and it's like 2 minutes. And so I would never have set that target if the average was, like, even 4 minutes because I'm like, oh, man. If something happens, somebody had to go to the bathroom, like, in 1 minute off. So you always have to really undershoot with that. So the next piece of the pyramid that we have are departmental expectations. So this is essentially how you take the core values and how you take the brand promise, and you flow them down and disseminate them down into the departments you have of your company. So here's a common scenario. Right? So say you're a restaurant and a customer comes in at 11:15 and they want eggs, but you stopped serving breakfast at 11 AM, how does your employee know that it's okay to serve eggs or not? Do you expect them to always delight the customer or hold the agreed upon service hours? So a mom and pop shop that has might say, we always like the customer, and that is like our promise of our staff in the kitchen. Versus McDonald's, you get fired if you serve eggs at 11 15th. So let me give you a real example of how this floods down. So at Gym Launch, we had a core value speed is king, which then turned into a brand promise of your questions answered in 5 minutes or less, which then turned into all client inquiries were responded to in less than a 120 seconds. So then what ends up happening is we create a KPI in that department to measure that. So the KPI for the department is what number of inquiries are answered in less than 2 minutes versus how many are answered in more than 2 minutes. Because again, I'm not gonna make the metric 5 minutes because that's what people are expecting. I need to make it 2 minutes so I know that we're completely overshooting. And so the customer service department
To fit in the system that they created for Alex. And so now what we did is we said there's 2 different systems, and we have to create one for Layla. And I think it was just because of this feeling consistently week over week, like, that I'm failing. And I didn't think that that was going to be productive because the way I see content is it's not something I'm doing for, like, a season. I see content as something that I will do infinitely. Like, I don't know why I would ever stop doing it. Just like I don't know why I would ever stop doing business. Like, it's just That's what I wanna do. And so I also know that in order to continue doing something in the long haul, you have to readjust your strategy. And if content is going to take Yeah. You know, 20 hours a week, I will never be able to keep up with it. Like, I will end up quitting. I won't do it because it doesn't make sense with what I do. And honestly, I don't know if it would make good content because I think my content's good because I'm I'm actually doing it and I have a lot of experience. And I don't know if I'll be able to even create the best content if I'm not doing those things. So that's where the decision came from. And I think that putting it out there was, like, almost like a relief for me because I just didn't wanna make a change in strategy and then people be like, what's going on? You know, like, why is the content not as good? All these things, etcetera. Yeah. But the irony of it is that actually my content has, substantially increased since then, which I find so funny. And I like Yeah. I was wondering. Yeah. It's actually really found like a I don't know if, like, hit a vein, but I think because Something that I really didn't like about my strategy before is it feels like everything was very heavily produced. Like, it's like, how inorganic is it for me to, like, sit in front of the camera with, like, 4 dudes in a room and then, like, rehearse a script that I wrote, like, 3 days ago. It's, like, is that Layla, or is that just like a talking head delivering, like, very plain, like, unpalatable information? And so every time I would watch my videos, I was just like Yeah. Oh, like, that's not me. That's not my personality. That's not how I talk. That's not how I teach my team.
How can we engineer an environment where work makes our lives better, not worse? That's the goal. I don't think the goal should be to minimize work. It should be to, how can we make work make the rest of our lives better? How do you create an unshakable business? I crossed a $100,000,000 in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a $1,000,000,000 portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build. Seems like no one wants to work anymore. Like, we've got, like, hump day. We're talking about taco Tuesday. We're talking about Sunday mimosas. We're talking about every which way that we can avoid work rather than do it. I would say that a lot of people feel this way and say these things because there's this narrative that work is bad and that work has to be punishing and that work's something we want less of. And what I wanna talk about is why that is wrong. It is not true. It is only true in certain situations. And I wanna talk about how you can engineer your life so that you get to avoid those situations and be in ones where work is actually good and you want more of it. So what I wanna talk about today is why so many people think they hate their work and are constantly trying to minimize and escape it. I was actually on LinkedIn the other day and I was looking at all these posts that were popping up, and a lot of them were basically people who, I don't know, they sell you on, like, having a business that takes you x amount of hours a week, a business that, you know, supports the life you love and all these things. And And I actually just felt really sad because I think there was a time for me when I thought that work was bad and work sucked, and I wanted to minimize time spent working. And I see that there's a lot of people now playing up this narrative that work is bad and work means punishment. And work, If you work for a company, you're never gonna be happy. You've gotta be happy as an entrepreneur. And then when you're an entrepreneur, you can only work
I I don't think ethically I could make business content without talking about how hard it still is for me. Mhmm. I think it's a fallacy. I also think that that's not good for people to think that they're gonna get to some point where business is easy. It's just not true. And I would feel really badly if people watch my content and thought that was what was gonna happen. How do you create an unshakable business? I crossed a $100,000,000 in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a $1,000,000,000 portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build. You have a goal of getting from a $100,000,000 net worth to a 1,000,000,000. You're documenting the journey. Now, how do you feel like you're doing right now? Like, are you on track to that goal, or what's kind of the current bottleneck in your universe? Yeah. It's an interesting question. I tend to have long time horizons. Yeah. So in the projections that I laid out for acquisition.com, you know, it's funny. A lot of people were like, if you guys aren't at a1000000000 in through 2, 3 years, what are you doing? You know? And I was like, I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that because you've succeeded in the past, it's going to be easier this time. And I think it's easier in that you know what to expect, but I think it's harder in in the way that you expect it to be easier. And I really prepared myself for, like, building businesses is a key strength of ours, but we are not investors. And so I think there's gonna be a learning curve. Mhmm. So I I factored in grace time for myself in the first couple of years of, like, we're probably gonna have to dial in our investment thesis. And so that's definitely happened. It's changed a lot over the last 2 years. And I feel now much more confident in, you know, I would say, like, an investment thesis is equivalent to, like, product market fit Yep. Than I did 2 years ago when we started. And it's professional.
They had drop off after 48 hours and after 2 weeks. And so I was like, okay. It's a little bit of both in this instance. At least that's what I'm thinking. And so we gave them a a decent amount of feedback. And then finally, after about 2 months of not seeing a significant increase and their churn spiked to 10%, which is high, I decide to secret shop them. So here's what happened when I secret shop them. What it means to secret shop, and you guys, if you don't do this in your business, it's a great thing to do to understand what it's like to be a customer, is I essentially went through the customer journey, which is like I pretended to be somebody who wanted to buy their service. So I got an ad from them. I opt in for the ad. I booked a call with the salesperson. I went through the sales process. I got blasted with all their emails. I got blasted with text messages. I got, like, hit up left and right. Essentially, I felt, like, inundated with information. Like, they were constantly coming at me. So I was like, well, this is good. They have great follow through. They have great follow-up. The salesperson was super upbeat. I felt like I knew exactly what was happening. The salesperson actually didn't even just wait for an auto response to hit me up and, like, remind me of my call. He literally left me a personalized voice memo. And it was like, hey. I just wanna remind you of your call tomorrow. Super excited to speak. I was like, this is fantastic. So go through this entire process. And I was like, this is very well done. And then get all the way to the end of the sales call and go through it. He signs me up. He's like, next, you're gonna get an email, and that email is gonna have me linking you to Joy. And Joy is gonna be the point of contact from here on forward, and she's gonna make sure you get your onboarding call in the next 48 hours. And hence, I'm like, great. This all sounds amazing, and this is gonna go really well. And so I bought the product and then waited. I wait a little more. And then, like, a hour and then 2 hours. And I'm like, hello? And then a day. So I email support and I say, hey. I just bought the product. They said I would get an email immediately introducing me to my new point of contact. Nothing. Crickets. Imagine what it would feel like if you had all this hype around getting you to buy a product. Someone had been talking to you left and
