The $100M Mindset That Alex Hormozi Stress-Tested

0:00Here's the deal. Neil and I have been traveling and we're slightly behind on the podcast right now. So we are going to share with you some of the greatest hits. You're going to like these and they're going to be very helpful to you. And I would encourage you to listen to them all the way through. And these are our top podcasts or some of our top interviews. So check them out. Dude, so what happened with the Crocs? Yeah, so you introduced us to whatever, some guy at Crocs. Yes, Dan. Yeah. And he, you know, then sent us all these cool designs for some acquisition.com Crocs, which would have been dope.

0:33And I would have totally repped him. And it was like, yeah, we'll do some sort of collab thing. And like right when we were ready to move forward, I was like, cool, like send me whatever link I can promote. And like, let's do this. Like I didn't even really like care about like money splits or anything. I just like thought it'd be dope if everybody had some. Yeah. And then he was like, well, just tell us how many you want. And here's the bill. And I was like, huh? And it wasn't even that they were priced at normal Crocs. They were priced at twice with the normal. It was like 80 bucks to us. Yeah.

1:05have the crocs and i was like there's some massive misunderstanding i was like i was like so many people if there was like an acquisition not com croc would would rep these like for sure i like tens of thousands of people who like did the thing like i'd get this one or whatever and so um because i was a prima donna i was like no i'm not wearing crocs again um and so after that i stopped wearing crocs we're not done here i'm gonna help sort this out so the story here is um so so at my at my thing last year at my event, you were in Crocs and you were just like, dude, I'm ready to take it to the next level.

1:37I'm super motivated to promote. I was like, dude, I happen to know their VP of digital there. And no, we are going to rectify this. And I just want to see it happen. It's not like he's going to pay me or anything. So that's a good place to start. And it's interesting enough, Dan, he actually has a holding company. And what I wanted to bring up was this, I was at an investor conference a couple of months ago called Capital Conference. And And every year there's like rage. I think the year before, it's like all about the hedge funds. This year it's about hold co's, right? Everyone's hold co. Interesting.

2:08As if it's really easy to start a holding company, right? And then it's like, no, there's a lot that goes into it. And you, I mean, you have a portfolio of businesses, right? And maybe we can spend some time talking about how difficult it actually is to not only be creating content, which we'll talk about in a second, but running a holding company. It's not just, oh, I'm going to hire an operator and that's it, right? It's much easier said than done. Yeah. Well, to dial in on the Holdco side, I mean, we have, it's tough if we try to pull apart media from the actual people. But I think we have just under 30 people who work at Holdco, which is a lot of people for a holding company.

2:50But we're really hands-on in terms of how we add value to companies. So I think there's kind of two models, at least that I'm aware of, or at least that we considered. One is the completely decentralized model, the Berkshire Hathaway model. I know you know this stuff. I'm saying this for the audience. Which is the whole delegation to the point of abdication. Just like, don't call me unless everything's burning. And then still don't call me. And that's one model. Uh, but part of the reason that we have basically the complete opposite model is that the deal flow that we have usually wants our help to grow.

3:24So we're definitely growth partners more than we are. Let's buy at a good price and hold it and just try and, you know, arbitrage the value that we can get from the business and then reallocate capital at the holding company. So for us, we're looking at, is this company in our deal box? Do we really like the founders? Because a lot of times, if you're buying a company, you kick the founders out. And then you put it in an operator that you trust, etc. So we have a lot of, which actually makes it harder for us to do deals because there's so many reasons that we won't do a deal. We don't like the founders.

3:54They don't have a big enough vision. We don't think the product's good enough long term, which means we won't redo product market fit. That's one of our big, that's why 3 million, if anyone's curious, why 3 million. in top line is kind of the minimum. And it's 3 million-ish, but at least a million in EBITDA. Because unless you're there, like usually you're still figuring stuff out. Like we wanna have at least a basic product market fit. Like you've done something. Yeah, there's something that's here, right? And so we won't redo that. And then we want it to be in a couple areas. For us, it's usually consumer services or business services, which is either brick and mortar chains or national services like mortgage sales or something.

4:35Right. And those are places where if we can see like an easy, like five X or something like that, that's usually what we will want to pick up. So if there's like a bunch of like, it's kind of funny, like the double edged sword of you want a good business, but my head of biz dev said, he's like, we want you to be very specifically incompetent as in like incompetent in all the ways that we are excellent. okay and so it's like if someone's like oh yeah our sales process is horrible or like man we can't get enough demand gen but we have like a huge LTV and we're really sticking on the back and like those are companies that would come in and just murder yeah I mean we just we just bought a 32 location teeth whitening chain um and I was so excited about this and then we went to the facility and the experience was fine in terms of the product but the sales process that I went through was like, I was like giddy.

5:26I was like, Oh my God, there's so many things that we can do to improve this. And so we just rolled out our first level and we five X LTV in one rollout. And so this is 32 locations. And I was like, great. Like we just created$50 million in enterprise value. Like let's just roll this out over the next 12 months to all 32. And I was like, and that will be a W for the year. Agency owners. If you want to grow faster, my partner, Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day.

5:59You're going to learn how to recruit the right people, and you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you on the other side. One of the hardest parts about what we have is that you have this desire to have activity, right? It's like we have all, because right now we get 3 ,000 companies a month that apply. So it's continued to grow. But we don't necessarily make more money by doing more deals. And so it's way more about fine. And like the hard part is sticking with the plan and not getting like eyes bigger than your stomach.

6:30And so anyways, that's been the biggest challenge for us is like just being very selective about the deals that we know are the best deals for us, not necessarily just good deals. And you talk about the deal box, which is Warren Buffett's like you wait to swing, right? So what do you think it is for your deal box? You kind of mentioned a couple of things yeah so right now and i think that over time we'll probably expand it as we bring in other like um like ex-operators somebody you know if someone's scaled and exited business for like 100 million plus in like software or something then i'd be like well dude just come into my deal flow and we'll make a deal that makes sense for both of us you don't have to spend three years building out this massive deal machine i'll just partner with you on it and then we'll you know kick off a different pod but for right now our stuff has been focused on services just because that's the world we just know really well.

7:12Got it. And that kind of starts to go into content a little bit because you've been very prolific in the last two years with leveling up your content. Did that teeth whitening company, did that come through your content or where did it come from? Content. So walk me through how that worked because actually I was having lunch and my friend has a pet holding company. He's like, I want to ask, because he does produce content, right? He's like, how much does that content actually help with deal flow? So what happened with that story? All of our deal flow comes from content. So yes, it does help. Yeah, I mean, it's like someone will watch a number of pieces.

7:46They'll listen to a bunch of podcasts. They'll buy the book. They'll read the book. They'll go through the course. And they'll have spent 100 hours with me virtually before they decide to take the first action, which I like because then a lot of times they'll fix a lot of the low-hanging fruit, which is kind of nice because then you don't have to have a thing that has all these issues. And so they'll apply our head of business. Well, there's multiple screenings. So we have an automated screening that weeds out like probably like 90 % just because they're not big enough or they're in a space or they're international, etc.

8:13And then once that we have somebody who immediately reaches out to just qualify that this data is accurate, which again, that's like another wave. And then from the qualifying stage, we have somebody who then does a way more in-depth business case and basically writes up a full like one page write up per business. And then the ones that that person thinks are big enough and in our deal box, then get passed on to our managing director of business development. And so then he takes the deal from that point until close, which is usually like several more conversations, which he usually weeds out most of them.

8:48And then we'll try and do, we target, not that, we usually do about two LOIs a month is what that results in for us. I think just for those people listening, it's hard once you're in it, like you understand how hard it is, right? But when you look at your team, it actually is a team of badasses. It's like a SWAT team, right? Yeah. And so you have people that have actually been there, done that. You've talked about your CFO before. You said it's 30 people. Yeah. Who else are kind of the key players on that hold code team? Because I don't want people to think this is easy. Oh, yeah. Everything's easy if you don't do a good job.

9:23um so it's like uh so for us we look at it by function so it's like we have somebody who's an it so we call them smee so subject matter experts so subject matter expert for it for finance for um hr and recruiting uh for we have two different marketing smees one that's more on like the tech side like martech um and like media buying and like funnel optimization stuff cro and then the other one is more like truly like the art side of like the words the copy via like video sales letters, ads, that kind of side. And then we have a director of sales and we have a director of customer success. And so each of those people has years of experience building and scaling multiple teams to bigger than most of the companies that are coming to us and now have, you know, experience doing their function and scaling it within each of our portfolio companies.

10:13And we've just, it's just a very long process of step-by-step codifying every play in the playbook. And I think that it's kind of like the Bruce Lee of like in the beginning, in the beginning, everything's simple. And then you have like a zillion, you know, punches and kicks. And then it comes back to just like, don't get hit. And I think that right now we're, we're getting better and better at like, okay, we crushed this playbook really well. We crushed this playbook really well. And so right now we've got like a three playbook that it's like we can 10 X like services companies. And so I'm just trying to see like, okay, there's 20 other things that we do really well but like what are those like easy just massive levers that we can crank on and then i think that's where i want to just like i might even say let's get even more efficient at just do it pulling these four levers immediately 10x in the business and then saying like okay so do we want to exit or do we want to like double down again or do a dividend recap or something like that and then reinvest for another time i think when we're hanging out like a like a year ago it was service plus other businesses and i think now you guys are honing it even more and like that's what business is right you just hone in more and more and more you get because then you get even more efficiencies at holdco and then you can get more and then it's even easier at the holding company to deliver value uh or really not deliver value create value within the the portfolio companies because they're doing the same like if you're switching from shit like let's say uh uh an e commerce like the pet thing right so like let's say i had one of his companies which would not be my deal box and i'm we're optimizing a shopify page for chewing toys for dogs and then like The next call is about the brick and mortar teeth whitening chain.

11:47It's such a jarring switch of perspectives that you don't get a lot of accretive benefit between both of those calls. Whereas if you have brick and mortar teeth whitening and the next call is brick and mortar photography and then the next call is brick and mortar gym chain and all of them are selling sessions and appointments, it's like, okay, run this play. Yeah. So you had a talk recently, and I want to go into this a little more because back in the day, at least for me, it was like I had this senior living business. There's this education thing. There's this SaaS thing. There's this. There's this.

12:18There's this, right? And for you, you had like nine different businesses or whatever, right? I mean, just how bad was it when that was actually happening? Because I don't think people really understand how important focus is until they get punched in the gut. But it's like, how do you prevent that? So I think the big difference is because people are like, Alex, you talk about focus now, but you have 13 portfolio companies. But like I have one holding company. And if you were to reframe it as like I own a marketing agency and I have 13 clients, it feels that way, except I own them. You know what I mean?

12:49But there's a full CEO and leadership team that run each of the companies. And we have our leadership team that runs that. And so like I own the holding company and that's my work. You know what I mean? but where I've made the huge mistake when I was earlier on is like I have one company that makes money I'll start another and so then you end up becoming CEO of three companies and it's a nightmare and so that's the part like it's weird because I feel like I only I mean I don't want to speak this over myself but like I was only really able to understand how to do multiple things once I sold Gym Launch because then I think it was the first time I was really above the business and then at that point i was like okay so the the above the business is the one thing the portfolio is the one thing and then that's when you're like your value prop as a as a hold co it is a bit like the holding company is a business in and of itself and i think that's the big like epiphany that i had is like it is a business and then you get really specific you niche down just like you do in any other business on what specific type of quote customers even though they're not customers you serve and you talk about working so there's above the business in the business yeah on the business, right?

13:56What's the difference with above? Just for the audience. Yeah. So in the businesses, like I'm taking sales calls, I think on the businesses, like I'm in leadership positions, I'm managing, I'm leading, I'm casting the vision, I'm inspiring the team. And then above the businesses, you look at many businesses, and they are all almost like product lines or clients, as I was saying earlier, that you don't sit anywhere on the org chart for these businesses. And that's probably the easiest litmus test is like, do you have a direct report from the company? And I have zero from any other companies. It's funny.

14:33So Neil sometimes will call me in the middle of the day and he'll be like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm working on stuff. He's like, I'm bored. Yeah. It's just like, right? But it's not like that, but he works really hard. but i think the other good comparison here is the the difference between like a parallel entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur because a serial entrepreneur actually waits to the next level yeah a parallel starts multiple things yeah but to your point how are you supposed to compete yeah i mean the focus the one person who's going all in on one thing is always in my opinion going to make the most money and if you look at the wealthiest 50 people in the world they all went all in on one thing yeah and you know and there's a couple private equity investors who are at that top now but i would make the argument that they're they were they got into the business of private equity and that was their one thing even though they bought and sold companies it functioned the same way as having a marketing agency except the unit size was bigger with more zeros yeah do you think when you had the nine different companies was it nine yeah okay when you had the nine a it felt frantic right but did you feel like you were really close to losing it all every day yeah it was horrible it was like it was so stressful because i mean i had i had nine companies worth of employees i didn't i just didn't understand how operate i didn't understand how leadership worked i didn't understand management i didn't have one-on-ones i'd have a communication cadence and i was the rainmaker for all the businesses like it made it was so ridiculous when i think about it now like it's so obviously stupid but you just don't know when you're ignorant before we move on from here what do you say to all the people now that want to start a whole they're just like i'm going to go buy businesses because that's what cool people do yeah and i'm going to go hire an operator you have any words for those people well right now buying businesses is like in vogue i don't really know why it got in vogue but my best guess is that we have so many people retiring right now that there's just a huge supply spike and then a lot of people who'd never made their money buying businesses selling courses on how to buy businesses um because the thing is is and this is kind of for the audience is like if you if you make your money buying businesses and you're really good at it you don't need to sell a course like the best people at buying businesses buy businesses and hold them and invest like i think neval said like the best investors don't sell courses on investing you know what i mean because like if you're really good at it you don't need to um and i just i like i kind of stick by that um and so it is kind of shitty and there's a lot of marketing dollars that are going behind that a lot of content being made because it's like sexy.

17:03And the idea of buying a business for no money down that makes 500 ,000 a year, which is absolutely possible. You totally can do that. But the thing that they miss is that, I'm going to say this, I'm going to try and make sure I say this the right way. I can buy a business for$0 down that makes 500 or a million dollars a year and know how to run it. If you've never run a business, and even if you do somehow magically pull off that deal, you're still screwed because you have no idea how to run a business and so it's like you still lack the skills even though you can close the sale like i could sell i could sell that i could build a skyscraper and if i somehow managed to bs my way through the negotiations and close the contract i still have to build a skyscraper and if you've never built a building before or even a house very tough and the likelihood that you then lose your ass on because like you're not you'll get the business that does a million dollars in profit per year for zero dollars down but not for zero dollars.

17:57And that's the piece that I think a lot of people, it's like, it's not free. Like you have a liability or you have a debt if you do some sort of seller financing, creative financing, whatever. It's like, but now you owe this person. Yeah. And that's the marketing piece, right? I think we get the, it's the headlines at the end of the day. Do we have any water? Thanks. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes.

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20:09Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school go to shopify.com slash marketing school shopify.com slash marketing school um so i want to talk about the the content piece so i was hanging out i was speaking a real estate mastermind a couple weeks ago and this is one guy based in arizona he owns like about 1.5 billion in real estate and he was um he was crushing oh you're good okay thanks art so basically this guy owns 1.5 billion in real estate in Arizona and then in the middle of the pandemic he's like I'm just going to do YouTube for fun because he couldn't go anywhere so he grew to like 400k or so but his content is like top notch because he actually does it this guy's deep you can tell tax advantages whatever who is it?

21:00Ken McElroy you should definitely talk super smart but then you look at other people who are getting millions and millions of views a month on YouTube and they're talking about all these different businesses, but then they know the YouTube game, but they don't have depth when it comes to business, right? So I see it as a trade-off at the end of the day, but you're actually able to play both, right? And so they were talking to me, they're just like, okay, what's the point of even creating content? I'll just go buy more business. Actually, this was last week. One of my friends went to me and was like, Eric, I don't need to create content.

21:31I'll just go buy their businesses. And then I posted that to Twitter X the next day. yeah and uh layla was like um so layla was like oh no but you create leverage is where we get our deal flow from and you said all your deal flow comes from that right so um i guess sure we have the same as you know we have a network and things like that come through but yeah i don't i can't i don't think we've done a deal that's not come through our deal flow and of the 3 000 that come through each month what percent actually make it oh tiny right we do two lois a month and that's not to dissuade people it's mostly because we just have a lot of people who don't have qualified businesses just to be clear like if you have a qualified business hit me up but we just have a tremendous amount that are doing less than a million in profit and they're like i'll give you five percent alex oh man so tempting so okay if for example the i mean let's just use a fake example someone has a bunch of locations they're doing one million ebda um well let me just rewind for a minimum is a million just to be clear so like art like ideally for me like i love that like three-ish four-ish you know what i mean like that's where like you're right about to hit that so we can just like boom 20 and then it's like and you're aligning with them it's like hey if we want to hold forever you're like hey like if i like you maybe yeah right yeah i'm good on either way because like we don't we don't need the liquidity yeah i'm happy to let it compound tax free so like i'm good either side either way and i'll just rephrase over here because i think when we hung out a year ago it's you talked about how you're maybe moving more towards instead of minority investments into majority how are you thinking about it now yeah we're 100 in that in that camp are um it's you know it's almost like uh it's almost like finding your price when you're selling a service except in the deal world and this is one thing that like if you really want to get into this world like it is such a long game because if you think about like product market fit you have the same concept that happens at like a holding company when you're investing.

23:28You have like deal fit. And so it's like, what's my offer? But not to a customer, but to an entrepreneur, to a founder, to somebody who's trying to go to their business. And so it takes way longer to have enough qualified candidates to even make the offer. And then it takes 90 days to even see if you can close the offer. And then from closing the offer, it takes another year or two to see if it was actually like worked out. So like your feedback cycles are so long that it's very painful as somebody who is an ex on whatever you want to call me, who's used to being able to like, hey, let's try this out.

24:00And in 30 days, have it both spun up, tested and have data. Like in 30 days, we might be able to like talk to a couple of entrepreneurs that we think are interesting. And so anywho, we have moved towards bigger and bigger chunks of companies. Right now we target 49 % with most of the deals. We just did a majority deal two months ago. And so we're now doing both minority and majority and our minority slugs are bigger because it's the same thing where it's like it's the same work for us at 20 as it is at 51 and in some cases weirdly enough it's almost less work at majority because um i have fewer emotions to manage on the founder side because it's like listen i'm the one who's taking all the risk on now and so this is what we're going to do rather than saying hey man i think this is what we should do what do you think and so i have way my speed of implementation on majority companies is so much faster.

24:56And like what I would like to do in the next, and this is why it takes years to do this, but like over the next two or three years, I'd love to show the difference between our minority holdings and our majority holdings of how much more profitable and how much faster we grew them to then make an even more compelling case of like, I don't necessarily want to fully exit founders. That's not my intention. It's more like we have done this before. Like, please, like, let me love you. Like, let me, let me just do what we already know how to do many times. And that, like, I remember I had a conversation with one of our founders.

25:23This is one of the companies we actually ended up buying with majority of um we had like six phone calls uh to talk about a price change that i wanted to implement and we implemented the price change and we doubled profit and it was big company already we doubled profit in 30 days and and like we increased the price and increased close rates like we call that a wonderful wonderful thing because they were mispriced like we did a bunch of research we saw the competitors the marketplace were we were like we're not even going high i was like we're just going up to market yeah which is i mean i love those opportunities they're not always there but like but it if it had been a majority holding it would have just been an email and be like this is what it needs to change to let the team know here's here the you know bullet points to talk to the sales director and he would just let him go yeah do you think before so when you had the 20 or so like i think we're talking about this already it's like they weren't not that they weren't taking you seriously i mean maybe you just didn't have it was more of a consultative relationship and to be fair like it's not like we wield authority like i've i'm not really an authoritative person from that perspective like it's always soft influence we've never taken a vote in any company ever like what because it's funny because during the deal process we're like well how many who gets i'm like dude we will literally never look at this contract again like i pride myself on the fact we've never taken a contract out after a deal um but it still feels a little different like no matter what anyone says like if you if you buy majority it just feels different it's like here's the plan let me know if you have questions about it or like what do you think and i want feedback more i want feedback i don't want to sell someone on it you know what i mean and i think that's the you're looking to collaborate yeah exactly yeah and so now we rewind back to the content again so yeah how how do you think your content strategy has changed in the last 12 months because i i can from afar i can see some of the adjustments yeah caleb's not here today right yeah yeah i know the team's bigger now i mean um how big is the media team now nine nine yeah it's nine and then we have some vendors so probably if you included their teams probably like 15 or 16 somewhere in there okay um i mean i think the big thing is just like we try and focus on content that only we can make that's the that's the big single throughput line if someone else can make this piece of content i don't want to make it and so that's why we try and we, you know, we call them, you know, one of zero stories, which is like something no one else can do.

27:48And so like, no one can talk about like how they bought a teeth whitening chain and then like implemented a new sales process. And then five X it. No one can say that. Cause that's such like, no one did that. I did that. And so someone might be like, here's how Coca-Cola, here's a breakdown of Coca-Cola's business model. But like, I'm not going to do that. Cause someone else can do that. But this is the stuff that I can do. So it's more, it's gonna be more capturing out what we're literally doing because i think the more people saw what we actually do in companies one it would get even better deal flow for us um but also it's more unique than i think what most people do so that's kind of like us trying to play more to our strengths which is like our day-to-day is our strength um and we almost diverted from our strength to create content to just like learn this game but as our infrastructure gets bigger and better we're leaning more and more so we we um we just bought a big headquarters here in vegas um and so we're going to be centralizing the whole media team that'll be our big media headquarters and so got the gym in there too right yeah we have a whole floor um and so there's gonna be a ton of new content we're gonna be pushing out because it's funny because like right now people will probably be like it's so crazy even say this they're like you've made it you're at like the pinnacle of content i'm like dude we literally haven't even started like the amount of stuff that we're planning on doing for like 2024 is bananas i can't wait oh it's gonna be it's gonna like we will be pushing out a lot of content and it will be really good.

29:10Because you said one thing earlier, but I love this statement, but it's like the second throughput would be like too good to fail. Because that buddy of yours, Ken, it's like you don't have to know the algorithm, in my opinion. Like if the piece is good enough, you don't have to nail the thumb, you don't have to nail the headline. If people start watching it and they're like, this is so good, they will share it, they will keep watching it, and they will come back and watch the next time. Because what happens is like if you think about the human behavior side of it. If you just watch, if you over deliver like crazy on one video, the next time you post a video, that person will click it.

29:42And they don't even look at the thumb. They don't look at the headline. They're just like, oh, Alex or Eric made another video. It must be good because all the other videos are good. And I think it's more important to have more good stuff. Sorry, fewer good pieces than more mediocre pieces. Dude, so here's where I'm coming from. Looking at Ken's, during the pandemic, he had videos that would get a couple hundred thousand and that's when you know you're doing pretty well with each video neil same deal he had a couple hundred thousand some videos would get a million views or so and then same deal for me a couple hundred this is like four or five years ago and my thesis here is that you have to be in the good graces of youtube and you have to be you cannot stop right and because those guys neil stopped ken stopped i stopped we're in this box right now where i look at neil's youtube i'm like dude your views are the same shit from the last couple years ago but you're only getting like 5 10k views right so there's i think there's this like this this penalty box almost i think it's it's um so in my opinion all social media has switched to the tick tock tick tockification of social media um i you know i actually think it's good because what it does is it like subscribers mean nothing followers on instagram mean nothing they're literally just a vanity metric now and so the only thing that matters is click retain reward that's it like that like and it doesn't matter what the platform is they're all the same is like did you get them to click did you get them to watch and you get them to come back yeah that's it and so the algorithm like it also by doing that though it makes it there's never been a better time to start because in the earlier days when it was subscriber based it was basically an email list like you build a subscriber base and then they push out your stuff subscribers but they don't do that anymore at all and now it's just like they do look like audiences based on what they predict someone will like your thing or not and so you could be a brand new account and have your first video do 10 million on the first upload ever which i think in some ways is like a great equalizer and it makes the content king yeah and so actually going to the shorts for a second your team of 16 people yeah what percent of your work with you and your team goes that you think into shorts versus the long form stuff i mean my shorts for me is like almost no work um that's that's all the team okay that's all them so they're cutting up your long form stuff yeah that's almost the majority but we did direct to camera stuff early to kind of like kickstart things but it is i haven't i can't remember the last direct to camera shoot we did um because direct camera versus it's it's a very it's a different setup so like you're no more no more direct to camera not that i'm not against it it's just that they've got enough other stuff and i prefer the other stuff because i think it's more like organic yeah um but the director camera stuff my the the usability per minute of footage is highest whereas if like we do a vlog day they're going to get three or four shorts from a full day but they got to go through like eight hours of content whereas if i do like two hours of direct camera yeah we have like a hundred shorts yeah it's a lot yeah yeah and so what about from this this you pull like what like 20 15 shorts you would know yeah i would say it's like 10 10 20 shorts okay yeah really 10-ish go for two hours or something like that okay got it um and your spend a year ago was like i think like 120 grand a month like what do you think that looks like now it's probably double okay so 240 yeah and are you getting paid on on adsense any of this yeah okay i mean not enough to make it back it doesn't equal it out okay it doesn't go it out but it's okay the deal flow is good yeah yeah no yeah like media is just like a loss leader if you want to consider from that perspective we lose money on media which is funny because people are like he makes money on his two dollar book which by the way amazon takes you get paid like 30 cents on a book that's two dollars but anyways uh that just goes to fund the loot the the money losing media team and i say that with absolute love um you know what i mean but but that's but that's i mean all marketing loses money until it makes you money like you know it's a long game yeah and rewinding back to the deal stuff for a second so of the 24 lois that you do that comes from content by the way so it does make money um how many of those that actually go through about half okay Okay, got it.

33:44So 12 go through. Okay, pretty high conversion rate, but it's also good qualification. Yeah, but I think we've just continued to get narrow and narrow. And I wouldn't be surprised. Well, our deal flow keeps going up. So if we might actually have the same number of deals done on five times the amount of deal flow, because we're just getting better and better at picking. Yeah. Well, one more thing before we go back to content. What is the craziest thing someone has offered you? Because here's the thing, right? I do believe there is the brand equity that you have gets you good deal terms. like there'll be agencies that come to me oh yeah we do four or five million a year we'll give you 20 it's like what like great um so like what is the craziest thing someone's off you like their newborn like anything like that like um i well i mean you have honestly the people who who who make the craziest offers usually don't have anything of value to offer you know what i mean but um i would say almost all the all the deals that we do have favorable terms you know what i in terms of both price and just like just terms in general like we keep we try to keep our contracts as simple as humanly possible i put this big emphasis on the legal team to make it plain english contracts and like my lawyer like had a heart attack when i was like i want a fifth grader to be able to read this contract because the biggest issue that that happens in the deal process for anyone who's ever done a deal is that their lawyer starts talking to your lawyer and then they just keep having these conversations and translating back and forth and then you have all these miscommunications and then it's like keep going yeah and the only person who wins there is the lawyer and so we've we've taken a little bit of a different approach of like let's keep our conversation as primary and then we together tell the attorneys what we want them to to do and that way like any any negotiating happens between us and that way because like i remember there was um a deal we were working on and their you know attorney who it wasn't even an m &a attorney by the way if you are going to sell your company or have somebody invest like have an m &a attorney anyways um it's like no he's a family friend i'm like doesn't mean he knows anything so he was like we need this non-compete to be you know 24 months and a 50 mile radius around the brick and mortar locations they asked for this yeah and i was like so the lawyers are talking for like two weeks about this and i finally i called the founder up and i was like are you planning on starting another chain i was like you still own majority of this business do you plan on competing with your own business he was like no and i was like cool then as long as you own majority of the business you don't compete with your business and he was like yeah that's fine it's like great glad we had this talk you know what i mean but like that was probably like ten thousand dollars in lawyer fees that went back and forth that was settled by two entrepreneurs in two minutes yep just obvious stuff you know what i mean but like that kind of thing is the stuff that like hang nails you know what i mean like on deals yeah dude that's good see that's a good short over there um so now we rewind back to content sorry for jumping all over the place yeah um d so when you're thinking about the ideation piece right so is that like are you separating that into another day is that like on the same day and then how are you thinking about like the hooks the stories all that type of stuff um the team brings everything okay so the team brings everything from like because they'll watch this podcast and then they'll be like dude that story was interesting can we do a thing on that and that because like they basically the team is inherently curious people who like my content and so like to use some gary terms like they fuck with my content and so the stuff that they want to know more about we we go into more depth on yeah and so um i haven't been asked to come up with topics in a really long time um but i'll tell you how i would come up with topics because this is how i was doing it when it was just me starting out is that i just like to use time as my as my like anchor for this so i go far past which is like what are the what are the life-changing experiences or conversations that i've had that have shaped the way my worldview and so those are stories that i will tell because i think they're impactful and people get value from them um then i have recent past which is like let me look at my calendar uh over the last week and just look at all the meetings i had and i just like i would have my phone up and be like okay so uh i was talking to one of our profile companies who's trying to make a change on pricing and so this is what we were considering you know i mean i'm just i just literally go through what my life was.

37:53Um, I have present, which is whenever something comes up in the moment, I always have a way to like brain dump it. And so for me, Twitter or X, um, is kind of my brain dump whenever I threads. Yeah. Or well, they, they repost stuff. Um, but Twitter is my, is my home home base for that. And so they'll also come with the tweets that they thought were like interesting to make more content about. Um, and then you've got like manufactured, which is stuff that doesn't exist at all. What's an example? Like I lived on$100 for 30 days. Like here's what happened. Like as an example. That wouldn't be one that I would make, but like, because somebody else could make that.