Alex Hormozi walks through his journey from managing six gym locations at 26 to building Gym Launch into a $25M/year licensing business with 65% EBITDA margins. He breaks down his offer strategy, sales philosophy, and why he now invests in niche B2B service businesses through Acquisition.com. The conversation covers the mechanics of irresistible offers, the danger of starting a second business too early, and why passive income is overrated compared to optionality.
Speakers: Alex Hormozi (guest, founder of Gym Launch and Acquisition.com), Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road)
Introduction: Alex Hormozi on Working and Identity [00:00:00]
Alex: I have come to accept that I love working, and I don’t need to judge myself for that — or take in other people’s judgment on how much I should “do.” This is my life and this is what I like doing.
The Gym Licensing Origin Story [00:00:30]
Sam: I never heard of you before, and I was like, hey, this guy is popping up all over my YouTube all of a sudden — what the hell is going on? And he’s saying this gym… I don’t know, I call it a course, which actually is incorrect.
Alex: If there’s one thing I could clarify for the audience’s sake: we were much closer to what a franchise would be. And overall, in the very beginning, that was the big decision — am I going to go the franchise route? Because I had six working locations. I was 26 years old, they worked, and that’s when a mentor said, “You should stop owning all these gyms. You need to license the model out.” So that was when I kind of transitioned from B2C to B2B.
What you might not know is that for two years I actually — because I wasn’t confident — I was like, I know it works in my six markets, but does it work in all of these markets? So my wife and I did 32 gym turnarounds in the next two years. We’d fly out in person, fix their pricing, change how they did their layout, change their sales — just like a management consultant.
Sam: It’s exactly that.
Alex: And then from there we figured it out, we cleaned it up, and completely dialed it in. I would love to say with some stroke of brilliance I decided to start licensing — that was not what happened.
We ended up doing these launches, and the flaw of the business model was that I didn’t control the fulfillment. We would go in, charge nothing — it was pure performance. We’d fly in and I would charge 100% of the upfront cash collected while we were there. We averaged about $100,000 in cash collected in 21 days, per gym. So if I were launching eight gyms in one month, we would make $800,000.
Sam: Got it. And this was before Gym Launch, when you were doing the gym rescue model?
Alex: Exactly. And what ended up happening was it started scaling really quick. I was like, this is the game, this is what I need to be doing — and they didn’t have to spend money on ads. They literally did nothing — they gave me a place to go market and sell.
But what would happen is we’d dip out, and then all these customers we’d sold would be fulfilled by a facility that was struggling — because that’s why they called us. They typically had pretty poor product. And I didn’t have the bandwidth to stay there for six weeks to retrain trainers and show them how to set things up.
So we’d fly out, and then in an unfortunate percentage of cases, the gym owner would tell clients: “Hey, you signed up and paid this guy $500. I’ll give you the same thing for $200. Refund with him and just sign up with me directly.” Within a matter of months I had about $150,000 in refunds between like three facilities because they talked to each other.
Sam: Yeah.
Alex: And I’d already incurred the cost of the marketing, the flight, the sales guy, the hotel, the rental car — everything.
Sam: What was the name of this gym franchise?
Alex: The original concept was Gym Rescue — like Bar Rescue. That was the idea.
Sam: But gyms didn’t want to be rescued.
Alex: Bingo. So who doesn’t want to get launched though, right? So it’s Gym Launch — even though you’re already open. It’s a nice branding switch.
Anyway, we were like, okay, this is not the model. I was basically having to sell more every month just to cover the refunds from the month before. Very stressful.
The Pivot: Weight Loss Programs and the $6,000 Phone Call [00:06:00]
Alex: My wife had a little side training business she’d kept going — she was doing like $3,000–$4,000 a month. And I was like, you know what? Screw the gym thing. We know how to sell weight loss direct to consumer. Why don’t you become the face, I’ll run the acquisition side, and we’ll sell 16-week transformations just over the phone. And so we started doing that.
Sam: That doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Alex: I know, I know. But it started working. 14 days in, we’re doing $1,000 a day.
Sam: Why did it work? I thought it was so crowded.
Alex: We were good at it. We understood that space very well. So I said, all right, I’ll bring in eight sales guys, we can do $8,000 a day selling these transformation programs.
So I called up the eight gyms I was supposed to launch the next month and said, hey, we’re not doing the thing we were doing — you didn’t pay anything, so best of luck.
The first guy was like, “Dude, I just refinanced my house, I maxed out my credit cards, I need this. My buddy filled his gym up with you. I know your thing works. Please help me.”
So he hedged and begged and finally I was like, all right man, I’ll show you what to do — but I’m not flying out there to save your ass if you can’t close. He said, that’s fine. Then he asked, well how much?
And just to show you where I was at the time: I picked the highest number I could think of with the intention of getting him to say no, because I didn’t want to do it. And I said $6,000.
He said, “Done.”
I just remember looking at the phone like, holy shit. Six thousand dollars. So I hung up and called the next guy I was supposed to cancel. Same spiel. He asked how much. I said $8,000.
Sam: What were you even giving these guys? Like a playbook to sell in their market?
Alex: So we already had the entire front-end process super dialed in. Here are the ads, here are the pages, here’s how you place them, here’s the targeting. Once they come in, here are the five texts you send, here’s how the reminder sequence works, once they walk in the door here’s how you set up your lobby, here’s where you need to sit — all of that.
Sam: So it’s not a course, and it’s also not like an EOS back-end operations thing. It’s more like a marketing machine.
Alex: Exactly. I was licensing the acquisition system. The ads I ran were ads I’d written, going to pages I’d built. But on their URL. You were basically a services business.
Sam: 100%.
Alex: And the training component was already made — I’d put my own guys through it during the gym rescue days. I literally just added in how to run the ads and the whole product was there.
The average gym collected $30,000 in additional cash in the first 30 days just from implementing it. Not as good as us, but still $30,000. And the price for the system was $16,000. So they were stoked.
Then we signed three-year licensing agreements for $42,000 a year. And what would happen is their gym would go from 100 members to 250 in two months and they’d be like, how do I hire trainers, how do I scale a sales team? And we already had done all of this from my six gyms. So we just did the whole thing.
How Russell Brunson Changed Alex’s Trajectory [00:14:30]
Sam: So zoom out for a second. For those who don’t know the story: you open a gym, get to six locations, you’re sleeping on the gym floor for nine months, you build them off cash flow — no investors — and somehow you end up at a Russell Brunson event. How did you get there?
Alex: For full context: I had two partners after my first successful gym — one was the ex-CEO of Broadcom, a $10 billion company, and the other guy had 22 tanning salons. The Broadcom guy brought in the tanning salon guy and said, let’s scale this. Long story short, the partnership didn’t work out. So I ended up opening the next three on my own.
But your question was how did I end up at Russell’s thing. Two years before that mastermind, I went to Traffic and Conversion Summit because I knew I needed to learn more about marketing. I’m a gym owner — I’m not an internet marketer. So I go, and one of the side rooms is Russell. He does his entire sales presentation for ClickFunnels and then literally stops right before the buy button because they weren’t allowed to sell there.
And I was like, I want whatever that was. But because I couldn’t buy, I went back to my life for two years.
Then when I was having some sort of existential crisis — I was 26 or 27, the gyms were making money, I texted one of my managers and he was like, I think we’re good, I just need some ink. I ordered ink from Amazon and then I was done for the day. I was trying to be useful but there was nothing for me to do.
So I googled Russell’s name out of the blue, and the first link was something like “Are you one of my dream clients?” — which went directly to his mastermind. I applied, got sold into it. It’s like $30,000. And honestly I should never have been sold into it — it’s for internet marketers. I was the only brick-and-mortar business owner there.
I show up, everyone’s showing their funnels, and I’m like, yeah, I own a bunch of gyms, I’m trying to get to ten, I’ve got six. And I walked through my acquisition process — we were getting 30-to-1 on the front end. Thirty dollars out in cash in the first month for every dollar spent.
Shaan: That’s insane.
Alex: For a lot of brands, one-to-three over a year would be considered all right. This was insane. It cost us $3 to get a lead, and one out of five leads would give us $500.
So anyway, Russell saw these numbers and said the sentence that changed my life: “Alex, you shouldn’t be running gyms. You should be showing gym owners exactly what you showed me. Right now you’re in a level two opportunity with a level ten skill set.”
Those were his exact words. And honestly it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had this vision — United Fitness, we’re going to be America’s next gym, we’re going to make people healthy. But he made more money than me at the time, and I thought: if I don’t listen to someone’s advice, why am I paying for it?
Shaan: You met someone more successful and that shattered the glass on your whole business plan.
Alex: Yeah, 100%. I didn’t even know what an “opportunity vehicle” was.
Sam: Same — I remember when I didn’t know what that meant either.
Alex: I define it now as: the number of potential units to be sold times the gross margin per unit. Then there’s a third multiplier — supply and demand dynamics within the space. So like, if I tried to get into telecom — amazing TAM, amazing potential gross profit per unit, terrible supply-demand dynamics for me to enter. So how do I measure the opportunity vehicle? Those are the three I use.
In this case, what Russell saw was that the amount of potential gross margin per unit was enormous. And for context: our second year in the licensing business we did $25.9 million top line and $17 million in EBITDA.
Sam: Wait, say those numbers again.
Alex: $25.9 million in top line and $17 million in EBITDA. Year one was $6.8 million with $3 million EBITDA — that was the hybrid year when I was transitioning from gym rescue to the licensing model. About halfway through year one we flipped it, and then we shot out like a gun. The first month we did $120K, then $200-something, then $360K, then $480K, then $780K, then a million, then $1.2M, $1.5M — that was literally the next six months. That crossed us into year two, and that year we did $25.9M.
What Made the Offer Work — the Gym Launch Mechanics [00:22:00]
Sam: What made you getting 30-to-1 so good? Just good copywriting? Were you a good phone salesperson?
Alex: First off, Facebook was way cheaper in 2013. The cost per lead was insane, the conversion rates on landing pages were higher — everything was more responsive. But the core thing we were doing was an irresistible offer.
We offered a free six-week challenge. When people came in, we’d walk them through the program, and the hook was: if you lose 20 pounds in six weeks, we give you the entire amount back. That’s what made it so compelling. We had 70–80% success rates — insane for a weight loss program — because people were basically wagering money.
I didn’t even know that wagers were regulated by lotteries at the time. It was like: put $500 down, lose the weight, get it back. And the reason it worked so well is someone comes in motivated.
Let me walk through the math. At this point I’m probably paying $10 CPM. I’m getting maybe 4–5% CTRs because it was early Facebook, so I’m getting 50 clicks for $10. My landing page is converting half. In some markets we were getting $0.25 leads. The highest markets back then were like $5.
So you’ve got an average cost per lead of like $2 — which is their name, phone number, email. From there we’d schedule 50–70% of those for an appointment, half would show, and then we’d close them. Depending on the skill of the salesperson, the average gym closes 35%. Our team averaged about 50%. When Layla and I sold ourselves, we averaged 80%.
We’d collect $500 cash upfront. Then 24 hours later they’d come in for a complimentary nutrition consultation, and we’d average $200 a ticket in supplements — creatine, pre-workout, whatever. Three weeks later we’d say, “Hey Sandy, you’ve lost 12 pounds — is that your ultimate goal?” She’d say well, no, I want to get in amazing shape. And we’d say, “Great. You understand it’s not about the six weeks, it’s about six years from now.” She’d say yes. Then we’d say, “Congratulations, you won the challenge. Because you won and I’m aligned with your long-term goal, instead of taking that $500 back, let’s spread it over the next year so you get a discount and we can align with you long-term.”
She says sure. Three weeks after that, she gets billed for her first EFT — even though she “won” the challenge. Then six weeks later we’d say, “Wouldn’t you like a little more attention? Instead of the large group, we can put you in a one-on-four scenario.” And so on.
Sam: And then this parlayed into the actual product you really crushed it on — Gym Launch proper, the $25M year.
Packaging the Service: What Gym Launch Actually Sold [00:28:00]
Sam: I want to get nerdy on the packaging. That’s a challenge — packaging a service. What did that look like, and what other industries would you do it for?
Alex: That’s basically what Acquisition.com is now. If someone knows how to help a lawyer make more money with their law firm, or a bookkeeper with their bookkeeping business, or a hair salon — that’s what I’m looking for. Niche e-learning service companies we can invest in.
Sam: Our friend Jack Butcher has a phrase: build once, sell twice. That’s basically what you were doing. People who were selling one-to-one had to sell and then do. You were like, no, we’re going to build once and sell a bunch of times.
Alex: Yeah. And I’d love to say it was a master plan, but you realize why something worked well after the fact. I had zero incremental cost. I was selling cars over the phone with no cost of goods. Insane.
So we would onboard people. We had a concierge service. We had calls every single day — I would hop on a group call with every new customer every day. I was always available. We had a 35-person tech support team to help them with the pixels and landing pages, because that’s where they got stuck. They understood the sales, they understood the nutrition — the tech is where they struggled. So we really ramped up our implementation support.
On the strategy side, I took 400 calls in the first year.
Sam: But it was also a set of videos, a folder?
Alex: Yeah, it was a set of videos. Like, here’s why you set up the lobby this way. Here’s what they need to see when they walk in. Have them sit down here. Give them this iPad with this download — the swipe file of the presentation they should be leafing through before they come into your office. When you’re ready, say these things, make this joke. When you come inside, sit on the corner — don’t sit across from them because it seems confrontational. Have them step on the scale. Make sure they look at the weight. Then she cries. Then you sit down and say, okay, we’re here to help you, let’s figure this out — what have you done before?
So it’s: here’s the video explaining it, here’s the script, and here are six examples of guys in different gyms with different styles of selling.
That was one of the things we learned early on: people have different styles of selling and they’re all effective. Some are more analytical, some are emotion-driven, some are off the cuff. So we showed different styles within the same framework. And we went from a scripted process to a question-based framework, which is what we’ve pretty much stuck with since then.
What Industries Would You Apply This Model To? [00:33:00]
Sam: If somebody wants to get good at selling, what would you recommend?
Alex: I have relatively strong beliefs about this. A lot of people read books before they start selling, and I don’t think that’s the right path — because you don’t know what they’re talking about. You only understand what building rapport means once you’ve had a conversation without rapport and gone, oh, okay, now I get it. You need to confront the reality before the knowledge becomes actionable.
So I’m a proponent of: do first, identify the deficiencies, then go find the information that matches the real-life scenarios you’ve encountered.
Sam: Which specific books or moments made things click for you?
Alex: There’s one moment that made things click, which I actually wrote about — make people an offer so good they’d feel stupid saying no. That’s the secret of selling. If you just make it so good that they won’t say no, your job gets a hundred times easier.
Sam: I get that, but my problem as a former copywriter is: if people want to refund, it’s going to be a pain. In order to make an offer irresistible you can go different routes, but one is just doing lots of stuff, and when I think about that route I’m like, that’s going to be a lot of work.
Give me an example of where you see a substandard offer and how you’d switch it to be more irresistible.
Alex: A simple one we did within the agency space and a software company we started: we helped them transition from a retainer model to a pay-per-performance model. We said, listen, pay us one time upfront — which for most of them was basically their LTV anyway, since most of them sucked at retention. If you’re charging $1,500 a month, we’d say charge $5,000 upfront and say you’ll never charge them again unless someone walks in the door. Cover the ad spend after that, and you only get a percentage when the person shows up.
We ran a pricing survey internally where I asked: if we worked your leads for you, what would you be willing to pay as a flat rate? And there was a big pricing curve — 75% were willing to pay $300–$400 per month. Then later in the same survey I asked: same result, same everything, but what if we said pay per show — what would you pay for somebody who walks in the door? They were willing to pay four times as much.
So I said, why don’t we price it that way? And that’s what we did. It also makes it way easier to sell. You can cash-flow the acquisition because you’re making what your LTV would normally be, upfront on day one. Then in the first 30 days you’re still getting cash you can use to finance further acquisition.
From a chiropractor’s perspective: you pay us once just to get everything set up, and from this point going forward, only when someone shows up do you pay. People understand that.
The Year-by-Year Numbers and the Big Mistake [00:38:00]
Sam: So I know you had like three or four or five businesses. Walk me through the revenues.
Alex: Year one was $6.8 million — that was the hybrid between me doing gym rescue and transitioning the licensing model, so about halfway through we flipped it. The first month after the flip we did $120K, the next month about $200-something, then $360K, $480K, $780K, a million, $1.2M, $1.5M — that was literally the next six months.
Year two we did $25.9M top line, $17M EBITDA.
Year three we did $37M top line, $13.4M EBITDA.
Sam: Wait — year three you had much higher revenue but much lower EBITDA margin?
Alex: Yes. And this is why I’m a big advocate of — maybe it’s just my own deficiency — we had heard I could sell the company for around $100M so I was like, let’s do the full three-year run. And then a little flu went around and people lost their minds, but it didn’t affect the gym space at all. I’m joking.
What actually happened was two big mistakes. Number one: I started a second active company when I already had one at scale. In December 2018 I started Prestige Labs, the supplement company.
Sam: And you’re basically selling supplements to your clients?
Alex: Through the clients. They never purchased from us directly. We created a drop-shipping model — I sent out retail kits with display bottles and a kiosk with an Amazon Fire tablet pre-loaded with their affiliate link. So a client could make the purchase right there in the gym. And the gym would make 80 bucks a month in pure profit per subscriber, because there’s no operational drag — they just make the one sale and it auto-ships after that.
Interestingly, a lot of gyms made more money selling the supplements than they did on their service — because service has low margins but the product was almost all margin for them. We paid 40% commissions because they were paying for the cost of acquisition.
In the first month we did $1.7 million. That year we did about $37M but my licensing business came down to around $20M and the supplement company was about $17M.
Sam: And the second mistake?
Alex: Second mistake was that I lowered pricing because I thought potential acquirers would want lower churn — which is true. So I cut the top-line price by 25% and saw absolutely no change in churn. Just lost the revenue.
Sam: What did you reduce it to?
Alex: It went from $800 a week on the licensing continuity to $600 a week.
Sam: What’s $800 a week times 52?
Alex: Forty-two grand a year. So to be part of what we called Legacy — the continuity program — it was $42,000 a year.
Sam: And what was the noun you used to describe the members?
Alex: The program was called Legacy, the people were called Gym Lords.
We’d sell Gym Launch as the front-end program, then they’d go into Legacy as continuity. And I copied the exact same model as the gym itself — the front end was a high-price launch to liquidate the cost of acquisition, and then I’d down-sell the continuity. $16,000 for 16 weeks is $1,000 a week. I’d say: now you’re going to get more for less — $800 a week, you get everything you had before plus more. They’d think, what a deal.
At the gym level I’d say, hey, it’s $600 in credits and if you stay we’ll drop you from $250 a month to $200 a month. So we’d front-end the upsell, then down-sell the continuity — it’s classic internet marketing stuff that a lot of tech startups don’t do, and they’re fools for it.
Sam: You did the exact opposite of what software companies do. They say, make the cost of trying as low as possible — free trial, no credit card. You said, I’m going to ask for a huge number upfront and then over time offer more value for less cost. Why does that work?
Alex: A couple of things. One: I didn’t have funding. This was Alex’s bank account. I could not afford to have a burn rate.
From a psychological standpoint, it always made sense to me to sell someone when they’re the most excited — which is day one, before they’ve gone to their first workout. Because once you get your first workout you’re like, this is going to be work. Sell them when they’re excited about the bikini, not about the TSA line to Maui.
And the reason we decreased cost over time is my belief that information decreases in value the longer someone has it. So we tried to accommodate that with pricing. And since our gross margins were basically 100%, it still made sense economically.
Passive Income Is Overrated — The Case for Optionality [00:49:00]
Sam: I want to do a little rapid-fire. I’m going to quote you and I want you to riff on it. Ready?
“Passive income is overrated. We seek freedom, but what we really want is options for engaging activities.” What does that mean and how did you come to that realization?
Alex: In 2021 we sold three companies — Allen, Prestige Labs, and Gym Watch, my three majority holdings. And my CFO was really engaged in activities and I pretty much took a passive seat because I didn’t want to start hardcore on scaling Acquisition.com until those exits were done.
I thought this was what I was always optimizing toward — quote, freedom. You outsource all your activities, you buy back your time, and then you have all your time back… and you have nothing to do. And I was like, this sucks.
I looked back on the times when I was building those companies with a lot of nostalgia. That was some of the happiest times of my life. And now I’m bored out of my mind.
So I’m getting back into the game. Right now we’re two days a week just doing interviews to build out the core team for Acquisition.com. And honestly, I’m happy as hell doing this. The difference between this time and last time is that I have the option to do it — I’m choosing it. Rather than: I have to do this or I won’t be able to pay rent.
Sam: So the shift was from freedom to optionality.
Alex: Exactly. First you do what you have to do to pay for life. Then you take that money and buy back your time. But then you need to spend that time on the thing you actually want. That’s the thing.
Acquisition.com: The Investment Thesis [00:53:00]
Sam: And Acquisition.com — you’re buying businesses and deploying your model?
Alex: Yeah, we buy a majority interest and deploy the model. We’re looking for someone who’s doing for legal, or hair salons, or photographers, what I did for gyms. I’ve done it, I know what it’s going to take to go national, let me take a minority seat and help you grow.
Sam: What niches interest you?
Alex: It’s silly because everyone is really hot on software and the valuations and everything, but I might just be a simpleton — I really like high cash-flow businesses. Service businesses are super malleable. I can chase price points, change the product, change client experience without a ton of dev work or UX. I feel like they’re simple businesses and it’s very easy to get high margins if you know how to deliver value.
Right now the four targets are: e-learning businesses in a niche; brick-and-mortar chains that already have multiple successful locations and are wondering do I go national and own them all; software-as-a-service or tech-enabled services — more tech-enabled, with a software component but not as the main thing; and a fourth one I’m forgetting because I’m on a podcast.
The Photography Business — A Hidden Gem [00:56:00]
Sam: You said the photography business might be the best of all of them. What is it?
Alex: It’s children’s photography. The founders are super mission-driven — their daughter got told to shut up at school because she was stupid or something, and she stopped talking for nine months. They’re photographers, so they started taking pictures and building them into a story experience. They’d read her a story where she was the hero, she got her voice back in the story, and their daughter actually started to talk again.
So that’s the mission behind it. But the actual business model is really, really good. It’s a magical storybook experience — sort of like taking Disney and putting it in other locations. You can walk out with a book with you in it, among other products.
I don’t teach photographers how to do it — we own all the locations. When the founder came to me, he had one location and about 100 B2B clients doing some sort of agency/coaching hybrid thing that I really hated. I asked how much a photography studio makes — I’m not going to share the numbers but it was a lot. I asked what he was charging: $5,000. I said, all right, we’re never doing that again.
So how much does it cost to open a photography studio? A lot less than it makes. So I said, why don’t we just front all that and build them all? And that’s what we did. I think we have 13 locations now, started with one a year ago. I think that business is going to be worth more than all the businesses I’ve put together.
Transparency About Money and Net Worth [01:00:00]
Shaan: Alex did this thing — he had a call with Grant Cardone, paid $30K for an hour, recorded and posted it on YouTube. On the call he basically asked all the questions you ask your rich uncle — what do I do now that I’ve sold these companies, how much should I have by now, is my net worth enough. He was completely transparent in a way that was almost uncomfortable. He said things like, “I’ve got $21 million in the bank, after this deal I should have $54 million after taxes.” All of this on YouTube.
Sam: Why are you so open about that?
Alex: It feels like the right thing to do. Usually the things I’m most afraid of are the things I should do. I know that when I say those numbers, people can judge me in one direction or the other. But in my mind, all the people I want to talk to think that’s a relatively small number. So I feel insecure saying them. But I believe shame only exists in the darkness. If I can shed light on it, I can hopefully quell some of the insecurities I have.
Sam: But the Panda Express guy wasn’t doing that when he was 32. What are the numbers? Yeah — he didn’t say those things. You’re saying you think it’s small?
Alex: Age and liquidity are huge multiples to net worth. The fact that you had that at 30, in cash — that’s way different than owning ten restaurants.
Shaan: It also seems like, for your model with Acquisition.com, the more you go out there as the entrepreneur’s friend and provide value through free content, the more you create your own deal flow. People think, “God, what do I do with this business? I’ve learned so much from this guy — maybe Acquisition.com would be a great partner as the next phase.” That’s the model, right?
Alex: That’s the why. My mission through Acquisition.com — and really through my life — is to document and share the best practices of building wonderful businesses. I will die and the stuff I accumulate is irrelevant. It’s a travesty to me that Elon and Bezos and Buffett — they didn’t write any books. That’s the point.
The businesses are just there to lend credence to the books, the topics, the lessons — and to discover new lessons as I go. I’m horrified at the things I said five years ago that I thought were true. But the only alternative to putting your thinking out there is to say nothing, and I consider that option every day. This is as strong as I can think about it currently, and maybe I’ll think about it less wrong in the future.
Fitness, Grinding, and Working With Your Spouse [01:05:00]
Sam: You seem like a grinder when you were building these businesses. And you’re huge — you look like a bodybuilder. How did you balance being fit with getting married and building companies?
Alex: My wife works in the business with me. We’re true 50/50 partners — it’s very rare, and I recognize how rare it is. She’s 100% matched with me and should just as much be on this call. She runs the other half. From a work standpoint she has more output than I do. She’s the operator — builds the infrastructure, does the recruiting, sets the HR stuff, manages the culture. I just occasionally come up with a good idea and try to stick with it long enough to see it come true.
In terms of grinding: this is what we like. I love business. There’s nothing that stimulates me like this. So I do as much of it as I can. We’re single — no kids — so we work from about 5AM to 4PM. In the middle of the day we usually go to the gym for an hour or two, then come back and keep working. Go out to dinner at night. That’s our lives.
Sam: You seem a little neurotic — not manic, but neurotic. Compelled by something deep-rooted. If that’s true, what’s it rooted in?
Alex: Originally the drive came from just crippling insecurity and needing approval. Then from a behavioral conditioning standpoint, I got positive feedback from doing things, and I was conditioned to continue. Now I continue those actions without the original catalyst.
I don’t think I suffer from those insecurities as much as I used to. I’d say I’m about 30% better than I was at the beginning. It might just be because I have this massive pile of money I can use as an emotional crutch to tell myself I’m not a piece of shit. If it all disappeared, I’d find out how much actual growth I’ve had versus just compensating by circumstance.
Sam: What did you do this last year when you took time off?
Alex: We went out to dinner every single night to a five-star restaurant for seven straight months. We moved to Vegas temporarily. Traveled a lot — Cabo, Scottsdale, Sedona, Flagstaff. Felt honestly pretty empty. You can only eat so many times. There’s just not a lot to do.
It felt good having that rest for a while. The first six months after selling — I needed to decompress. But then I hit the phase I’m in now where I’m like, all right, I’m ready for war again.
Sam: You said something on one of your videos — one of the only other people I’ve heard say this phrase — you talked about “seasons.” “I had a season where I was focused on X.” That’s been a game-changer for me. My trainer uses it all the time. It makes every decision less heavy because you’re like, it’s okay, there are beginnings and ends.
Alex: Maybe it’s a fitness thing. In terms of entrepreneurial seasons, for me it’s been about five-year chunks. This is going to be my fourth season. They’ve been roughly the same length — it takes me about three years to see something through, and then two years to figure out how I’m going to transition. Kind of like a PE cycle.
The Handlebar Mustache and Physical Presence [01:12:00]
Sam: How much of your look do you think accounts for your success? Because your face is on a lot of ads and YouTube videos. You look jacked, you’ve got the badass handlebar mustache.
Alex: Persian.
Sam: There it is. You drive a G-Wagon but there’s an axe in the back.
Alex: I read a book by Dan Kennedy five years ago that said people with noticeable facial features are more easily recognized and remembered. So I read that and grew a handlebar mustache.
I actually sold the likeness of the mustache with the company — it was a core part of the branding. At the events everyone would have mustaches. It was like, “cash money stash” or whatever, different hashtags.
Sam: You had to stop with the handlebar mustache after selling?
Alex: No, they were allowed to use it. I just got tired of having it after five years.
Sam: What do you weigh? How tall are you?
Alex: 5’11”, 220.
Sam: Before internet marketing, you were already jacked when you started the gym business. I saw a photo.
Alex: I’ll tell you because I’m on TRT now —
Shaan: Me too.
Alex: — but what you saw was 100% natural. And in the comments no one believes that, but it’s true.
That training methodology is pretty much what I’ve done since then. I had a roommate named Greg Knuckles —
Sam: Amazing name.
Alex: Real name. He’s one of the two smartest people I’ve ever met from a pure processing-power standpoint. When I met him in our 20s he was pulling 800 pounds, natural. He said, “I read this research paper — what if we had you lift six times a day but for just ten minutes each time?” I lived at the gym, so I said sure. I set a timer and every 45 minutes I’d go do one set on three exercises, then go back to work.
Side note: that’s actually an amazing productivity hack. You get this nice boost from your nervous system every 45 minutes to wake back up.
He also had research on a pure carbohydrate diet with no fat. The logic being: the efficiency of fat conversion to stored fat is almost 100%. The efficiency of carbohydrate conversion to stored fat is lower. So if you have a calorie surplus, you want 100% of that surplus to be from carbohydrates to minimize what gets stored as fat. So I had about 200 grams of protein and 800 grams of carbs and basically zero fat.
Sam: I saw what you were eating — it looked like it would be awesome for a day and horrible after.
Alex: Horrible. But the big caveat: my closest friend is a biochemist and national strongman. He’s like, “You have potato chip genetics. You shouldn’t give advice to people. You could drink Coca-Cola and work out and have a six-pack.”
So I had that plus I was doing everything maxed out. Not sustainable — my knees were shot, my elbows felt terrible, I was bordering on overtraining. But I put on a ton of weight and strength across all my main lifts.
Sam: I was reading that article while listening to your videos and I was like, oh man — this guy carries this over to everything. Super precise, very systematic. What’s interesting about you is you’ve overcome a self-limiting belief that a lot of people have: you’re like, of course this is going to work. Here’s the plan, here’s what’s going to be hard, here’s the outcome. And you took that same process to business.
Alex: Thank you.
Sales Masterclass: Conviction, Trust, and Childlike Curiosity [01:21:00]
Sam: Let me give people something practical. Most people listening have spent zero time trying to improve their sales. I want to do a little role-play — give us the default way people do something, then the reframe that has better results.
Alex: And just to complete the loop from 40 minutes ago on what books or training clicked: if you look at Belfort, Bradley, Grant Cardone — most of the big sales trainers have the same story: “I started selling and was the best guy on the team by a mile, then I tried to figure out what I was doing.” I think some people, based on their childhood and upbringings, just have a higher natural proclivity for selling. Gift of gab and empathy.
And that carries into how you recruit for sales teams. I have a very short window for allowing people to fail. I’ve never had a killer salesperson who didn’t do pretty well the first week. As a result, the team is just killers — and they know it.
I love this Grant Cardone quote: “My sales team is a dangerous place to work.”
Sam: I love that.
Alex: So in terms of sales: people are really freaked out about the idea of selling. The first reframe is: you’re not selling — you’re helping someone make a decision that’s going to help themselves.
And the front part of that is: I believe the number one predictor of good sales is conviction. You have one person who should believe in something and another person who doesn’t believe it yet. Trust is the thing that transfers that conviction.
Most salespeople don’t have 100% conviction. And conviction isn’t binary — it’s not I believe it or I don’t, it’s to what extent do I believe it?
That’s why, with my sales teams, the thing that really juices performance is hearing testimonials from people they sold last week — what they’re doing today, how their lives have changed. When we were in person and I’d do weigh-out day — when everyone finished their six-week challenge and was crying and so excited — I’d try to stack as many sales appointments as possible during that time. We closed like 100% because people were like, how can you not think this works? It’s right there.
You can either trick yourself into the right tone or train yourself into it. But it’s much easier to just genuinely believe, because if you truly believe in the product you will talk about it differently.
Sam: Got it. So conviction and trust. What else?
Alex: Overarchingly, to help someone sell, we just have to ask the right questions to get someone to come to a conclusion on their own.
Most sales conversations follow the same framework if you know what you’re doing. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times. They’ve had it once. We should know how this conversation is supposed to go.
The big front-end pieces: Why are they there? What’s the problem? What have they done so far? Where have they failed? Why is our product different from the things they failed at? Ask for permission to explain the product. Explain the product — not based on features, only based on the experiences they will have as a result. Use analogies to explain those experiences. Then have a close at the end.
The TikTok I think you’re referencing is the “no-based close.” A lot of natural salespeople do this anyway. If I want something, I might say, “Hey, would you mind?” and they say “No, I don’t mind.” It’s natural communication that people who naturally know how to influence do on their own. This is just retroactively looking at it and saying: what did I do differently?
Sam: What about when someone throws an objection, like, “My husband’s not going to approve it”?
Alex: People are afraid of confrontation. But you can sell without ever having confrontation — and you do it with what I call childlike curiosity.
If someone says my husband’s not going to approve it, I’m like, “Why wouldn’t he? Huh, that’s so interesting — tell me more about that.” Rather than going into battle mode. In arguments, no one wins.
So: “Why would he think that? I’d think he wants what’s best for you, right? Does he know you’re struggling with this right now? He wants the best for you, he knows you’re struggling — so why do you think he’d be opposed to solving something you’re currently struggling with? Would he be happier if you continued to struggle? No. So would you be opposed to moving forward today?”
And then you close it.
Childlike curiosity is the mindset you have to train because people get defensive. Fighters talk about breathing in the ring — beginners hyperventilate. Veterans slow down their breathing when things get intense. Sales is the same way. Your adrenaline kicks in, you start breathing faster, fight-or-flight kicks in. You’ve got to slow it down and be like, “Huh, that’s crazy — I wouldn’t have thought that. Tell me more about that.” Now you’re genuinely interested and they don’t feel like you’re combating them. Which is what you should actually be.
Wrap-Up: The Takeaways and Alex’s Content Philosophy [01:30:00]
Sam: Dude, you are full of interesting insights. It’s almost exhausting listening — like reading a really good history book where every sentence is packed with a fact. I’ve been rationing a book of yours — I’m only on page 30 because I can only get my mind blown so many times per minute.
Shaan: I think what’s interesting is you can hear it in your voice when you talk about business and fitness — you don’t have a self-limiting belief that a lot of people have. You’re like, of course this is going to work. Here’s what’s going to be hard, here’s the outcome, here’s the plan, attack.
Alex: Thank you. Let’s do something — I think most people have probably seen some of these sales clips and shorts but let me give people a chance to hear it without having to go find a random TikTok.
Sam: Actually I want to give people something to take away. We went from: sleeping on the gym floor to realizing I’m hustling at level 10 in a level 2 opportunity. Then we got that formula — number of units times gross profit per unit times supply-demand dynamics. One nugget, put down the podcast and go reassess your life. Then: charge $500 upfront, then offer more for less over time to maximize LTV. Nugget two, go rethink your sales and pricing strategy. You’re probably doing it backwards.
Shaan: That’s the thing — this guy carries that precision over to everything.
Sam: Well, I bet your non-entrepreneurial friends are like, “Alex, chill, let’s just make a fart joke.”
Alex: I don’t have many non-entrepreneurial friends, honestly.
Sam: One thing I want to share — Connor McGregor has this quote: “Some people will look at my success and get bitter. Most will get bitter, and a few will get inspired. That says more about you than it does about me.” And you had something similar in one of your talks. You said: some people get envious, some get angry, some are skeptical, some are confused, and some get inspired — and I’m here to talk to that group. That last bit, whoever you are in this room of a hundred people — the four people here to get inspired — that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.
And I think that’s a great question to ask yourself when you hear stories about Elon or whoever and you have some kind of reaction. I had it visiting someone’s house in Vegas — someone with a really similar story to you, in the gym business, 60 gyms, transitioned to real estate. Unbelievable house. And I felt envious. Then my trainer reframed it — he goes, “Oh man, that’s so cool. You get to sample what you like and dislike, so when you make your money, you’ll know what you want to spend it on.”
Switching from envy to excitement. I’m getting to play with all these toys to figure out what I like. I could think about it or look at Google Images, but this is way better — I actually get to drive the car.
Alex: I think that’s a good thing to leave people with. Study your reactions. And if you’re sharing information, speak to those who are going to take the positive — and don’t get caught up in all the people who are having the other types of reactions.
Final Words and the Setup Roast [01:36:00]
Sam: Even without the hair I still got the guru vibes. I gotta ask you one last question: you’re a business guy who’s killing it on YouTube — why is your setup so bad? I can hear the echo, you don’t have a microphone, you’re on a laptop…
Alex: I don’t do it for a living. That’s the first answer. I spent like $80K on a studio in my Vegas house, started in Austin and couldn’t get the damn thing to work half the time. So I’d just get immediately annoyed and stop making stuff because I was annoyed at having to fix it. Then I realized: is it better that I just make the stuff and that’s it? If I can figure out how to not have it be a pain in the ass, I will. But until then, I’m just going to make things.
And honestly, at Gym Launch when we started, we didn’t have a website until after our second year. We’d already done $40 million in sales before we ever had a website. I didn’t send my first email until we crossed $70–$80 million collected. We kind of just do things our own way. If people are down with it, they’re down with it.
Sam: That’s badass. Thanks for coming on.
Alex: Thanks for having me. Sean, this was fun.
Shaan: Thanks for coming on, dude. I think people are going to really like this.
Alex: I’m honored you guys decided to have me on. I know you don’t take your audience’s attention lightly, so thank you for thinking that whatever I had was worthy of their ears.