Moment 120: The ONE Skill, We Can All Learn, That 95% of Millionaires Have!: Alex Hormozi

00:03Caleb in the corner who works for you, he's your creative director. If Caleb said to me, you know, Caleb said to you, he said, Alex, I want to be a millionaire. Yeah. What would you say to him? What advice would you give to him? He says, listen, I've heard you doing all these podcasts, you're running around, I've been filming the camera, but I've been filming, I've been listening. Yeah. And this millionaire stuff, this sounds amazing. Yeah. So what advice, how old are you, Caleb?

00:3129 what advice would you give to 29 year old caleb if he said to you alex how do what how do you knowing me how do you think i become a millionaire so there's a lot of ways to do it it just depends on which way you want to go so say first off you can stay at acquisitions not come that'll probably happen on a long enough time horizon just because we're gonna get really big we're already pretty big and we're just getting started um so like i i genuinely believe that and that's 100 my goal that every single person that we have becomes very, very wealthy.

00:59Because I'm going to die and it's not going to matter anyways. And if everybody else can make some too, great. So that is a path. Another path is he peels off and goes on his own and starts a business of some sort. And so it depends on whether he wants to make the business itself what his core skill is, which would be like media and maybe services around media, or using the skill that he has of media in an opportunity and he gets two or three other people to maybe co-found it with who have other complementary skills. And then he just runs that division or portion of the business within the larger context.

01:31And that's like a classic question of like, I'm really good at making wallets. Like, what do I do? It's like, well, you can continue to make them. And then when you can't make as many as you have demand because you're so good at it, you can either raise the price and just continue to keep raising the prices until eventually become Versace of wallets. And you make tons of profit, but you don't have tons of units and that's okay and you're a luxury brand or you put on the put on the business owner hat and you say okay how do i mechanize the wallet building process and i become more businessy and so i think it's like do i want to be the artist or do i want to be the entrepreneur both of them are fine it depends which one you feel like you're more naturally inclined to or have a higher likelihood of success doing i like the game of business i've played lots of different games in terms of industries like i like the game overall i don't feel like i have a particular art I don't think I'm really good at any aspect of business. I feel like I've been decent enough to not make one of them the constraint. I'm not a great copywriter, but I'm good enough that that's not going to be the limiter. I'm good enough at hiring that I can make sure that that's not the

02:34limiting factor. And so that's kind of how I think about it in terms of business growth overall. And so it'd be the same thing with Caleb is like, we have to identify what the constraint of the system is and then deconstrain it. When you say talent stacking, I've heard you say that a few times. What do you mean by that? So this is one of my favorite topics. Um, many skills like one plus one equals five when you put them together. So let's say you have somebody who's really good at math in the beginning that as a skill, not super monetizable, right? Okay. Well then you learn bookkeeping. Okay. Well now you had a proclivity for math, but you learned something that has value in the business world. Okay. Then you learn to, you know, get your CPA and I become an accountant. Okay, more valuable. Then you start studying around tax law and insurance. And you're like, oh, significantly more valuable. And then you learn how capital markets work and how debt markets work, right? And you understand how mergers and acquisitions work. And all of a sudden, you're a CFO. And then you learn how to sell and promote a little bit. And all of a sudden, now you're a rainmaker. And so you still needed to be good at math. But when you stack these other

03:39skills on top of it, the original math skill becomes significantly more valuable when you have these skills on top. But each one kind of requires the one before, which is why one of the things I hate about kind of the entrepreneur world a little bit is like, they'll learn something new and then poo-poo the thing before. It's like, I'm not upset at the teacher who taught me arithmetic because I learned algebra. One was necessary for the next. And so as entrepreneurs, a lot of times it takes I think the self-awareness to say like where am I at on my skill stacking adventure right and each skill every skill you add to your skill tool belt makes the rest of your skills more valuable which is why I think it's so cool which is why I'm such a big advocate for education overall and that's I mean mission of acquisition not going to make business successful to everyone that's why we put all this free stuff out there is like if we can give people enough skills they'll be able to stack them on their own and then just achieve whatever they want in a totally different way if you'll allow me to go there. It's like you look at Jay-Z, right? Maybe he was somebody who naturally had rhythm, right? And so then all of a sudden he learned how to rap. Okay.

04:42Took his rhythm, put in a rap. Okay. And then he made his first CD. Okay. And then he learned how to promote. Ooh, significantly more valuable. And then he learned how to make a label. And then he learned how to recruit other artists. And so he still needed to learn how to know how to promote the other artists. If he didn't know how to promote at all, he wouldn't be able to do it. but once he had the label he got significantly more leverage on the skill of promotion and he could recognize people because of his skill in rapping and rhythm and so like each of these skill stacks on top and then eventually he he pinnacled into beyonce as his as his top skill i'm just kidding um like where is he going um but no but like that's the idea so like it and that's why i'm just like learn the skill find the next skill and and the nice thing is that it doesn't even matter how disparate the skills are. Like if Jay-Z is really good at math and understands capital markets and understands the label, those combine to do another cool melange, right? A little French word, like mix of skills that's like unique to Jay-Z. And the longer you play the game, the more skills you get and the more unique your mix of skills is. And that to

05:46me is like the coolest part about business and just like education in general. I stumbled across a bit of a similar but maybe adjacent idea in my career where when I learned when my company went public on a stock exchange in Europe I then learned from an investment bank when we're having the meetings with the banks we went on this roadshow met 20 different investment banks we're considering an IPO in another country they told me that our business would be worth four times more if it was just on a different stock market?

06:21If you move it to the NASDAQ, the exact same business would be worth four times more, which meant that my net worth would be forexed just by taking the exact same business and moving it to a different stock exchange. And I thought about that a couple of years later when I was thinking about the skillset that I had acquired over my career, which was this skillset of marketing and social media and entrepreneurship. And I was thinking, you have to not just have the skill, but know what market to apply it to.

06:48and what ended up happening i've never told this story before but um i looked i looked for an industry where my skill set was in least supply but highest demand and return the greatest and it turned out that industry in terms of social media marketing and storytelling i felt was most in demand and would return the greatest value for companies that were about to ipo because essentially when you're going to IPO, if you have a good story, it can swing your valuation by hundreds of millions. Or in the case of the first company I worked with, when their IPO listed at 3 billion, billions. And so my skillset of social media and marketing, I could do what with it? I could go help a local gym and get paid a thousand bucks, or I could go help a company that was in the lead up to an IPO that was, you know, where I can potentially add hundreds of millions in value and take 7 million as part of an equity deal.

07:44So upon leaving my first company, the equity arrangement that I had was valued somewhere between four, I'm going to say between, it depends because the share price fluctuated. But I think on the day of the IPO, the equity that I got for the 9 to 12 months work that I'd done was worth in the region of 7 to 8 million dollars. Nine months work. Basically freelance. yeah you know same skill stack but applied to an industry that would would pay me more for the same skills um and so i thought a lot about that and that's ultimately why we started our company which is now called flight story we have a um probably the time of airing this about 100 people we started the company about about a year and a half ago oh crazy that's basically that's applying the skill set we have to industries where that need it and we started out in the ipo market did a little bit of work in this biotech market um and now we've kind of broadened out but people don't think about that a lot you like my skill set where is it in highest demand and can pay the most