Little surprise video on Thursday, will be doing more of these in-depth breakdowns on content and founder brand, even installed some new tools to make them more tactical and hopefully useful to you guys.
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Summary / TLDR:
He changed from doing solo videos of just him teaching business owners how to scale their company (by sharing a tip, strategy, story, lesson) → to bringing on a real business owner, having them present their business (revenue, growth, where they’re stuck) and then basically doing a 1:1 consulting session where Alex gives them very tactical advice on how to scale their company.
His main offer: a $5k in-person group workshop, which his company Acquisition.com hosts once a week with 70-100 business owners, where he upsells about 30% attendees into a $36k/year advisory program.
The math: 70 x $5k = $350k per event for just the workshop tickets, which is $1.4M per month, given that they do it every week. Upsells: 20 x $36k = roughly $700k per event from the upsells, which is $2.8M per month, so $4.2M per month or roughly $50M per year in total for just the advisory business, not including their PE portfolio etc.
His new style of video is hyper optimized to drive workshop ticket sales. Gotta watch the above video why. But a few notes:
It’s just good content because it’s hyper tactical, which is what most business owners want
It’s gamified, because they structure it like a game show, so you get emotionally involved and are more likely to watch the next video because there is continuity
It not only shows that Alex knows how to scale businesses using his own businesses as examples, but that he ALSO knows how to coach other business owner into scaling THEIRS, which is exactly what you want to know before hiring someone as your advisor
The winner of the “game show” is a perfect match for becoming a portfolio company of their PE arm, so all of it combined is also deal flow and filtering for them
This post is sponsored by Thormeier.co
Thormeier.co is my LinkedIn & Founder Brand advisory where I’ve worked with 30+ SaaS and AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more pipeline from it.
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Full Transcript:
[0:00] Alex Hormozi recently changed his content strategy, and I think it’s brilliant, but I think most people will miss it or not really notice how smart this actually is. So I wanted to break it down a little bit.
So most of his videos were just like this. It was like a 15-minute, sometimes much longer, video of just him teaching stuff. And then recently they started doing this, basically like a game show. They call it Scale or Fail. The first round of it was basically these videos where he would sit down with a business owner, and they would present their business and what they’re struggling with: revenue, growth, et cetera. And then they would have basically a one-on-one consulting session with Alex, where he would give them very specific technical advice for their business. So there were different kinds of businesses, like a theme park. I think this is a dentist or something. This is a service business, a roofer. And he would basically coach them.
[0:58] That was basically phase one. And then the best people moved on to this most recent show that they did a couple of days ago, where they basically all presented how they implemented the advice that he gave them and how much they grew. And then the people who grew the most advanced to the next stage, and from there it would progress.
[1:20] I don’t think people realize how much money he’s printing with this content. But if you look at some of the psychology, I think it’s super, super smart. So let me share some things.
[1:38] The way that Alex Hormozi makes money: obviously he owns a company called ACQ, and they have a couple of different offers. The first one is an in-person workshop that they sell for 5K. That’s a workshop. Two days. And it’s in person, at their office. That’s kind of the entry offer, right?
[2:01] Then from there, the upsell is they sell a 36K, which is basically their advisory, per year. So you pay this upfront for the full year. And this is basically a way you get access to Alex’s team, and you can ask them any question at any point. There’s a community. Alex does, I think, monthly Q&As where you can ask him questions.
[2:26] And then, I believe the main thing, and this is how he mainly started, was basically a PE firm, where they would own... I don’t know if this is disclosed. I believe it’s somewhere between 10 to 50% of companies that they own, and that’s the profit share that they get. So for the best, biggest, most profitable, fastest growing companies, they basically act like a PE firm. They get a stake in it, and from that they get a profit share.
[2:55] And so this is what he wants to sell, and then from there there’s the upsell, and then from there this basically funnels the absolute best companies, who want to get real one-on-one ongoing access to Alex, right?
[3:07] And so his YouTube channel obviously funnels people there. If you look at any of his videos, and this is more like the old style, “What type of content should you make that makes the most money”, him sitting down, sharing some advice, “How to become rich with social media”, the call to action is always to their lead magnet. So it’s basically a lead magnet. You get your free personalized roadmap, you put in your information, and you get it sent to your email.
[3:41] From there, once you get that lead magnet, the next pitch is basically: hey, if you like this resource and you want to scale your company, here you can sign up for the workshop. And their landing page is basically... if you go to acquisition.com right now, it’s the workshop landing page, with a little VSL here, “I’m ready to scale”, some testimonials, what you actually get at the workshop, more testimonials, and then a call booking form to attend the workshop. And they’re also explicit here that it’s 5K per seat. I actually attended one of these. So this is their entry monetized offer, right?
[4:27] Also, sometimes, I believe, if you look at his podcast, they directly lead you to the workshop landing page as the main CTA. This is the roadmap, roadmap, roadmap, roadmap. Here, you can see for this podcast, instead of it being the free lead magnet, the roadmap, the call to action is directly “book your spot at the two-day interactive scaling workshop”. So they’re experimenting with that.
[4:57] And I think what people are also not realizing is how much money they’re printing with this. Because it’s 5K per ticket. It’s a group workshop, right? They have about a hundred business owners there, 100 attendees at each of these workshops, in person. I would say not all of them are paid, because when you’re part of the community of the upsell, you get two of these every year for free. So let’s say 70 of these actually paid. So that is 70 times 5K, they’re making 350K per event. And they do them once per week, which means they make 1.4 million per month from just these workshops.
[5:55] But now it gets even better. So they have the 1.4 million per month from the workshops. But then at the workshop they do the upsell to the 36K advisory. And I know that they upsell roughly a third of people, so 25 to 33% of people do the upsell. So of the 70 people, let’s say, who are not yet part of the program and who actually paid at the event, a third of them buy the upsell. So let’s be conservative here and say 20 buy the upsell. 20 times 36K, what is that? That’s [720K]? That is another 700K per event. Again, they do four events every month, one per week. So this times four is, they’re making another 2.8 million per month in upsells.
[7:02] So that together is, they’re making 4.2 million per month from the workshop plus upsells, which is what? 48, like roughly 50 million. Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, none of these numbers are confirmed. This is just me doing the math from other numbers that I know and inferring. Maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less, but this is, I think, a good ballpark number of what they’re making just from this.
[7:27] And then obviously here, the upsell is that once someone does the yearly advisory, and the company is doing really, really well, and they’re growing fast, and they’re very profitable, and they want more access to Alex, and they want Alex to sit on their board or get weekly one-on-one calls with Alex, then from there they become part of the portfolio. And then from there they get a profit share, right? And when I was at the workshop two months ago, I think the biggest company that was at the workshop was doing 40 million in revenue. So these are not just tiny, tiny companies.
[8:10] So it’s printing money. But back to the content strategy, right? What he’s optimizing for with this YouTube and podcast (they’re very overlapping, he repurposes a lot of content between those two) is how to get more people to buy the 5K workshop, ‘cause that’s the main offer that they sell. And he needs to fill anywhere between 70 to 100 slots every week, which is, let’s say, 400 slots per month he needs to sell. And so that’s what his content strategy is laid out for.
[8:50] So if we go back to his YouTube channel, here it is. If you think about the psychology of the videos that he’s putting out: the workshop is essentially a scaling workshop, right? That’s how it’s positioned. Like, hey, you’re a business owner, you’re stuck somewhere, you want to double your revenue. Come and attend the workshop, work with my team, and we’ll help you get unstuck and figure out where your bottleneck is and how you can scale your company more.
[9:17] All of his content always, even previously, these sit-down videos with just him, they’re aimed at business owners. And they’re always aimed at helping them grow their company in some way, by sharing some framework, some tips, some roadmaps, some lesson that he learned: how to sell better, how to build better offers, how to do marketing better, how to run better ads. All of that is to serve their goal of growing their company. And so you get a business owner to watch the video, and then at the end the call to action is basically: hey, you now learned some small way of how to grow your company. If you want to grow your company even more, and, you know, trust me, because you watched the video and you saw that I have smart things to say, go and attend a workshop with us, right?
[9:55] Now, this new format is, I think, that on steroids. He’s basically sitting down with a business owner and advising him or her one-on-one on exactly how they grow their company. And I think it’s so good for multiple reasons.
[10:14] The first reason is that it’s just good content. If you’re a business owner, you actually want hyper tactical stuff. I think tactical especially, the better and bigger you get as a company. You don’t need this kind of generic, like, “oh, cold email is dead, you need to do organic content”, or here’s some philosophical take on how you need to approach your company. You want hyper tactical insights on the exact little things that you need to adjust in your business. So it’s super, super tactical, and it’s essentially a game show.
[10:56] So not only is it super interesting and relevant content for exactly his audience that he’s looking to attract, but you have this kind of gamification in there. Because instead of just hearing Alex Hormozi speak and share his advice, there’s also this element of, you know, you get involved a little bit. Some of these episodes are quite emotional. Like, if I go to some of these, like this guy here, he runs a theme park [clip from the episode plays], he gave up his 401k and poured it into the business to try to save it. You know, he gets emotional here. So with some of these business owners, you get really emotionally involved.
[11:44] But this is also the game show aspect. So you have emotional involvement. But then you also start rooting for people. You have your kind of favorites who you want to advance in the game, who you want to get to the next round, and who you maybe want to not get to the next round because you don’t like them. And so you have this kind of involvement, and you also have an ongoing series, which helps with retention, right? Because instead of just having a good video, that was good, and so you subscribe to the channel because you want to get more good videos, there’s an element of, like, oh, I want to see what happens next, because I want to follow along the journey of whether this person progresses or not, and who gets eliminated in the next show, et cetera, right?
[12:27] So it’s just good content. That’s number one, and that’s the good reason why it’s just working. But I think it’s better for more reasons than that, because I think this is the kind of relatively obvious stuff.
[12:42] If you think about the psychology of the thing that he’s selling, which is the workshop and then the advisory, which is essentially a coach, right? If you’re gonna hire an advisor or coach, you wanna know two things. Number one, they know their stuff. But number two, you wanna know that they’re a good coach. Because if you’re going to play football, of course it’s going to help if the person who’s training you, and who you go to for advice, was a good football player who played in a big league and who had success, right? That builds credibility, and you’re like, oh, I want to learn from that person. But not every single football player who is a good football player is also a good coach, right? That’s a separate skill, to be able to teach people and pinpoint their exact weaknesses, et cetera.
[13:36] And so his previous videos were basically just him demonstrating that he knows how to scale businesses, right? Because he talks about his lessons, his advice, his insights, what he’s done before, stories from his past. So you’re like, okay, this guy actually knows business and has done good things. But if you’re gonna hire his firm and his company and him to advise you, you also wanna know: is he actually able to help me specifically, and sit down with me and figure out my specifics for my specific business, and then give me technical advice that I can use, and not just do this for his own companies, right? And so this new format demonstrates this very, very clearly. So I think it drives even more interest for the specific offer that they run, which is a workshop slash advisory.
[14:22] Because he essentially does that in the video, right? What you’re watching is a one-on-one advisory coaching session that he does with a business owner, and that’s the exact thing that you would want to buy. So it’s the best possible thing to advertise the thing that you’re selling. So, again, I don’t have access to any of the backend numbers, but I’m very confident that the conversion rate of views to workshop bookings is much higher, because it’s a much more natural conversion path, right? You have a business owner, which is your audience. You have a video that is super relevant and interesting to them, which is tactical advice for another business owner on how to scale their company. It’s also gamified, so you’re more engaged and more likely to come back. But then what you sell is advisory and basically coaching. So it’s a direct conversion path.
[15:11] But I think where it gets even more brilliant is... and this already is the less obvious part that I think many people don’t think about when they create their content, which is that you don’t just need content that is relevant to your audience, right? If you create content, you have your ICP, and obviously your content needs to be relevant and interesting to your ICP, because otherwise you’re not going to attract your ICP. And how are you going to sell anything if the people who watch your content are not the same people who buy your product or service, right? So this needs to align, and you do that by talking about their problems, goals, desires. And that’s how you attract them, which is what Alex does, right? His ICP is business owners. What do they care about? They want to scale their business. What are their desires? They want to make a ton of money. They want to double their revenue. They don’t know what ads to run or how to scale a sales team. So all of his content addresses all of these things, and that’s how he attracts people.
[16:19] Beyond that, what you need to do is that the problems and goals and desires that you speak to need to also be the ones that your product actually solves, right? Which seems obvious, but so many people don’t do that. Let’s say, again, my ICP is SaaS founders. So if I want to attract them with my content, I need to talk about their goals, problems, desires. But what are SaaS founders’ goals, problems and desires? There’s a ton of stuff, right? Fundraising: how do I raise my next round? There’s sales: how do I hire a sales team, how do I train my sales team, how do I do outbound? There’s marketing: how do I get awareness, or grow pipeline, or get more leads? There’s obviously HR and hiring: how do I hire and find great people and retain them? There’s operations, which is: how do I reduce my costs and improve margins, how do I build better processes, how do I leverage AI? There’s a ton of stuff. So I could speak to any of these, and it would help me attract these people with my content. But I only do one thing, which is LinkedIn and founder brand advisory. That’s the only thing I do.
[17:41] And so if I create a piece of content around “how do you leverage AI to optimize your processes and improve margins”, that might be interesting to them, but then there is no natural path to be like, “and by the way, I help people with LinkedIn and their founder brand”, because it’s not what they signed up for, it’s not what they watch me for. But where it does help is marketing, right? So if they’re struggling with how to get awareness, or how to get leads, or how to drive more pipeline with enterprise buyers, this is directly what this impacts. And so if I create content that speaks to this problem, and then presents it in a way that has to do with founder brand or LinkedIn or both, then that’s a much more natural path to then be like: “and by the way, if you found this piece of content interesting and the solution makes sense for you, then you might wanna check out what I do, because I can help you do it better and faster.”
[18:31] Which is probably what this video is, right? I speak to founders, I talk about the marketing aspect, and it’s very connected to founder brand, because it’s Alex, it’s him running it as a founder. It’s definitely not LinkedIn, this is mainly YouTube, but it’s very much organic content related. So there’s a much more natural path for me to say in this video: hey, and if this resonated with you and you want to figure out how to apply all of this to your business and your founder brand and your content, go reach out to me so I can help you.
[18:59] But I think there’s more. Because, yes, he’s creating good content that is relevant to his audience, and it’s super tactical, and there’s this game show aspect. But as I started thinking about it [a few words unclear]. There’s another super brilliant aspect of this, because they run it as a game show, right? So they now have eight of these contestants who he did the advisory session with first, and now they basically show off what they implemented and how much they grew. At some point they actually go over how much revenue they added in the 90 days after they had their one-on-one session with Alex, right? This person added 920,000 in top-line revenue. This person added 500K. This person added 1.6 million in top-line revenue in the 90 days since the advisory session.
[19:54] And so this is a prediction, because this is their most recent video, from five days ago. But my prediction is that at the end of this thing they’re obviously going to have a winner of the show, of the Scale or Fail show, which is why it’s a game show. That’s part of it, that’s why you start rooting for people. And that winner wins a golden ticket, they say, to work with Alex’s firm, which seems like a perk to the viewers, right? It’s like a promise: if you win, then you get to work with me. I’m pretty sure that whoever’s the winner, the golden ticket means you become a portfolio company, where they probably invest some amount of money into you, and then Acquisition.com and Alex get a profit share.
[20:50] And why is this so brilliant? Because it’s basically deal flow that they’re generating here, right? It’s a funnel. They get applications from people who want to participate in this game, who are all business owners, and they want to scale their business, and they look up to Alex Hormozi and they wanna learn from him. That’s why they apply. Then they pick the best ones of them, do the YouTube video with them, which creates this incredible content. And then, as people go through this process, they see how well they execute, how coachable they are, and they get an inside look into the company metrics, right? Because part of this is them sharing how much revenue they’re making, and how much profit they’re making, and how quickly they’re growing.
[21:50] And so whoever wins at the end is the winner of the show, but they’re also the most perfect fit for the portfolio. They want to learn from Alex. They’ve demonstrated that they can execute well, that they’re coachable, and they’ve demonstrated that the company is doing super well, that they’ve been able to grow it super fast, that it’s super profitable. And so this is what they want for a portfolio company, right? And so it’s a win-win at the end for both: the business owner gets even more access to Alex and gets this continuous coaching and advice, and they found a perfect portfolio company here, that is growing fast, with a founder that listens to advice and implements it quickly and is demonstrably growing revenue by a lot through it.
[22:39] Just think about what that would mean for your company, right? That would mean that you invite your ICPs. Let’s say you sell to enterprise VPs of engineering. Imagine you would be able to invite VPs of engineering who are not yet your customers, and create content with them that they find valuable, that other enterprise VPs of engineering find interesting. So it’s great content that helps you with your awareness and top of funnel, that generates leads for your company that sells to VPs of engineering. But through the process of creating this content with them, you end up with people who become direct buyers of your product by winning the show.
[23:24] And I don’t think this is random, right? I think this is an evolution of how they arrived at that. And if I had to guess how they arrived at this strategy, because it’s a lot of planning and production and getting this right, you can see gradually how they learned that this is the best format for them right now, right? They were doing these just-Alex sit-down videos, what he teaches. And then at some point they did a lot of these videos, I think it’s on this other channel, where basically they would do these Q&A clips of people who attended the workshop. Right, this is at the workshop. This is Alex at the workshop, and then this is a person who is attending the workshop, and they do a Q&A, and they would just record the Q&A and put up that video. And that content did really well.
[24:24] And then they said, okay, how can we do this better and scale it? Increase the production. So they started experimenting with this format seven months ago. You can see this is the same format. This is another video like that, eight months ago, where they had the same format: business owners come, present their business, and get a one-on-one advisory session with Alex. But it was just one-off things. And I’m pretty sure they learned that, oh my God, this... And so they’re like, first of all, how can we do this way more, instead of once a month sporadically, and make it an actual thing that we do? And then they figured out this kind of gamification, to not just do a one-off advisory session with a business owner and then peace out and never see them again, but rather make this like a progression, like a game show, where the best people progress into the next round. Here’s another one: progress into the next round. And then the winner wins the golden ticket to become a portfolio company.
[25:19] Lots of good things here. I think if I try to summarize the lessons here: you need to create content for your ICP (this is obvious) that you can tie directly to what you sell. Meaning your product or service should be a natural progression from the piece of content. So if Alex talks to a business owner about how to scale their company, it’s a natural progression to say: and if you want to scale your company more and even better, and work with us directly, attend the workshop. So you want to tie it directly to what you sell.
[26:04] I mean, if you can somehow gamify it, obviously that is amazing, and have a kind of game show continuity in there, like a progression. And they basically engineered it so that the winner of the game show is also the best-match enterprise deal. Because a portfolio company is basically like an enterprise deal for them. It’s a super long process, it’s a super low probability that someone is a fit, but if someone is a fit, it’s a very high upside.
[26:50] And so I think it’s just brilliant, and there’s a lot to learn from it, and from the constant iteration and progression that you can see in this content. Hope it was useful. If it was, you know, unsurprisingly, as I said, I do this sort of stuff. For SaaS and AI founders, I have an advisory. It’s mostly LinkedIn stuff, and how I help people do similar stuff, but on their LinkedIn: how to create better content and how to drive more revenue from it. So if that’s relevant, book a call with me. If not, I hope this piece of content was valuable.
