I Paid to Work With Alex Hormozi's Team For 1 Year - Here's What I've Learned

Mike DeHaan: [0:00] Here's what it's like to work with Alex Remozzi and his company acquisition.com to scale your business. First off, let me clarify. I have not received any investment from Alex Remozzi and his acquisition.com company, but I am currently a part of their whole workshop program they're doing where they work with businesses that are hoping to potentially become portfolio companies of theirs in the future. If you haven't heard of Alex Shmoze yet, he's probably the biggest business influencer out there. Him and his wife, Leila, they own a company called acquisition.com. It's a private equity company that buys kinda like smaller companies and helps them scale, and then they try to sell them again to larger private equity firms. And he has gotten a lot of fame over the past couple of years. He produces some of the best business company you can find out there for, like, smaller businesses. And he has this really great way of taking stuff that's, like, kinda complicated and actually putting it into bite sized pieces that are easy for people to understand. It's got different books. He has a YouTube channel. He has a podcast. If you're a small business owner, it's definitely worth checking out because he does produce a lot of great knowledge. And for the longest time, really, the only way to work with him directly was to get invested in by his company, but that is a hard thing to do. Obviously, you need to be of a certain size.

Mike DeHaan: [1:10] You had to kind of hit, like, their investment criteria, and then they had to choose to wanna invest with you, which being a private equity company is very, very few of the deals that come through. But at the beginning of this year, they started this whole workshop group that they now run through their headquarters down in Las Vegas. If you've consumed any of this content, probably heard about it. But, basically, what they do is they offer a two day workshop where you can fly down there. And that's, like, their level one workshop they call it. I did that a few months ago. And what that consists of is basically two full days. There's, like, 80 to a 100 people there. They have talks around different topics. They have, like, some small group sessions they do. Alex and Layla are very present for people that, like, wanna kinda fanboy about them. Right? And the whole point of it is to give you some business education that's very general. It's not necessarily folks in your business, but it was still very, very impactful. I got a ton away from it. And then a big part of what they do there is they upsell you to a more expensive thing, which was $15,000 a year for me to be a part of, which is their level two. And with that level two, basically, what you do is you hire them for a year to work with you and help you grow your company, and they kind of advise you on how to grow your company on a, you know, limited basis in a way that they would do if you were a portfolio company of theirs. And so you actually work with, like, the whole team, and they do a really big deep dive. And as a part of that, you get two workshops that you go to in Las Vegas where it's much smaller. It's like the one that I went to a couple weeks ago is I think it was, like, 15 people, maybe 20 people.

Mike DeHaan: [2:42] And it's two super intensive days where you are working, like, very close knit with their team, very specifically on your business. And so the first one is like a $5,000 one time fee to go to that workshop. And it's super general, new to entrepreneurship, or if you're a scaling entrepreneur, tons of great info. And then if you are really wanting to dive in, the $15,000 a year one is the one we get to work for them and essentially hire them as like a consultant. Right? And if you get value from the first one, and you kind of like the message that he teaches, honestly, upselling to level two is a no brainer. And so even though it was pretty expensive, $15 for us, we didn't think twice about it. We signed up right on the spot. And so, anyways, it was really interesting going into it with a real estate company because a lot of people who consume Alex from Mosie's content, the things that he goes into around customer acquisition and kind of building a business, it feels like it's hard to relate to a real estate investment company. But I guess going into, like, this level two where, you know, they are going to be looking specifically at my company, I was actually surprised at how much of the different content around team building and marketing and the customer journey and everything else actually really applies to a real estate company.

Mike DeHaan: [3:52] It's just not necessarily in the way that a lot of us think about it. And some of the biggest challenges, I guess, that I was faced with as I was going into that was they would regularly be pushing me on the fact that I was I kind of already knew what was working. I just wasn't doing enough of it. And so a very common journey with real estate investors, especially wholesalers and flippers, is they kinda go in, they make a little bit of money, they find out, you know, something that starts to work. And then as soon as they find resistance, they go and try to do the next thing. And so as an example, you know, what's very common is somebody starts up a direct to seller marketing company, they start doing direct mail. As soon as the direct mail starts to kinda, like, fall off a little bit in terms of its efficiency or you get a month where it doesn't work quite as well for generating leads, then they'll go and they'll stand up a cold calling team. Right? Or they'll go and they'll do some online marketing. And then what ends up happening is you end up having, like, a little bit going in all these different ways, and none of them are nearly as effective as they could be. And that's kinda like a very general level of something that's really common. The next sort of phase of that, and this is one of the reasons that you see a lot of people out there that have communities, podcasts, myself and this included, right, is because what happens, you get to a point in a real estate company where you sort of reach a level where it's very, very hard to keep growing, gets more expensive, and you start to get your eyes on these other businesses, it seems like they'll run very parallel to the real estate business that will make more money. And so this is why, like, almost every single established real estate investor has some kind of group, becomes a guru, does things like that. It's not because their business isn't working. It's because, you know, we get our investing business to a certain level.

Mike DeHaan: [5:31] We're getting past that feels harder than simply going and teaching people to do the same thing and making more money. And then once you get into that and that starts to be successful, what ultimately happens, and again, I'm guilty of this as well, is they start to provide services based businesses. So they start to stand up things like marketing companies for their community. They start to have different kinds of trainings, different workshops, different kind of, like, affiliate networks, things like that to monetize the community network that they're building. And then what happens is that becomes a whole other business with more problems. The investment business starts to suffer. If they switch over to the investment business again, the community starts to suffer. If they focus too much on that, all the other businesses that they start to support the community start to suffer. And ultimately, what happens is this, you have this big back and forth where all your businesses aren't really doing awesome. They're also not really doing poorly, but they're kinda just surviving. And you're making a little bit of money here and there, but you're not making nearly as much as you could. And this is exactly where I'm at right now. This is something that so many guests that I've had on collecting keys have sort of been down the same rabbit hole. And going into this conversation with Alex Shramozi's team, the biggest thing they opened up with was, like, why are you doing this? Right?

Mike DeHaan: [6:47] And something that they really challenged me on was, you know, instead of trying to do more of these, like, new things, trying to do these new things all the time, make a little bit more money, what if instead you just dialed things back and you focused on making your investment company better since that has been the most profitable thing that you've done that I've done over the past couple of years. Right? And the interesting thing was is, obviously, I thought about that. I'm not an idiot. And so I would kinda push back and say, like, well, these are the ceilings I hit. These are the challenges that we faced. And their retort back to me was always like, well, you just feel that way because you don't know what it looks like at the next phase yet. And what you need to do is basically take a step back, review these different things, and, like, here are examples that we have seen about how we can make this how you can sort of get past this going into the future. Here's how you would kind of identify those constraints and get things moving forward. And one of the things that I really appreciated was all of the stuff that we worked through. And let me say that, like, before I went to this first level two session, there was a ton of preworks I did with their team. So they were very familiar with us. They're very familiar with our financials. They're very familiar with our process, with our team, and everything else. And so going into it, it wasn't like I was sitting down with their team, and they're like, tell us what you have going on.

Mike DeHaan: [8:02] But they were fully prepared for all the objections that they knew I was going to have. And so when we're having this conversation about, you know, where I'm convinced that I can't grow my real estate company anymore for x y z reason, They're backed by data, by math, by financial models, by all the things that a mature business owner looks at as a company about why I need to reconsider kind of the direction that I'm going and instead need to probably just, like, refocus on the thing that's actually gonna make money. And it would have been very easy for them to just sort of be like, because this is what we say so, we're more experienced entrepreneurs. But the fact that they had done so much homework and come very prepared to, you know, have an educated conversation, I thought was really unique. Because we've hired business coaches in the past. I've talked to a lot of friends to mentor things like that. And everything's always theoretical, or they're always kind of going off of, like, their base experience. Whereas, like, the whole acquisition.com team that we worked with, they had actual hard proven evidence and research that they had done that sort of, like, reinforced what they thought was going to be best for growing the business. And so at the end of everything, with every single person that we met with, you kinda met with, like, all of the subject matter experts that work there, and they all kinda give us different stuff. Every single one gave me, like, critical tasks on things that I needed to do before the second session in the spring that I'm gonna be going to out there, which is super helpful because now it wasn't just like they shot me down to figure it out, but they were like, here's what we suggest that you do sort of get past the things that we discussed.

Mike DeHaan: [9:37] And so I have all this list of critical tasks. And that way when I got back to my office and was able to sort get back to work, I knew exactly where to focus to get things moving forward. And the big things that they basically left me with were to wind down the marketing businesses that we had been sort of building. The ultimate thing was like, why are you doing this business that you've never actually scaled before when instead you could spend your time and resources growing the business that you already know how to do? They said with the community, the community that we run, they liked that business actually. They said that they think there's a ton of value in having, like, a paid networking business like that. And they said as long as it's not detracting from our resources and it actually runs alongside our real estate business, it makes sense. And they had a lot of good views around how to structure it. So one of the things that we're doing is we're having a course that you can get now instead of it being kind of like a higher ticket community only. We're having a something that for people that aren't ready for that commitment yet. Click and keys.com/academy if you wanna check that out. It's our off market investor academy with a Facebook page, as well as a bimonthly coaching call on that. And then people that go through that and are happy, they can move up to our scale community, which is three times per week coaching as when a more comprehensive community with more serious investors. So we're reformatting that a little bit so that it's actually like building a larger network for us and for the people that are involved. And ultimately, the goal with that is to help reinforce the growth of our wholesale and investment company, which is a networking company at the end of the day.

Mike DeHaan: [11:08] Right? Like, if you go into off market real estate or risk real estate in general, so I'll let you know. And one of the best way to have good people or good people in your network or good investment deals with is by training them to be good, Right? To be better investors. And so by us for having scale, it has the monetary entry into that community because that's how you know people are serious. Things are free. People don't take things seriously at all. We very hands on coach them to make them better investors and grow their businesses. And then as a result, when we want our business to grow, we have more seasoned people that already have proven track records that we can work with. Okay? And as a result, we can lean into our investment business more heavily. We can optimize our marketing. We can optimize our sales. We can systematize that more, and we can focus on not getting distracted by too many other shiny objects. And then as we go forward, they had a whole bunch of financial models about what that growth could look like. They built a very compelling argument about why we should focus on that. And ultimately, was kind of a no brainer when I got back that we need to be shutting down the marketing businesses and moving towards that. And so it was an interesting experience. Like, it was very, very I would say, like, honestly disheartening, but it was eye opening, I guess, the way that they were able to look at things from such a data driven perspective and provide a lot of value in a way that I wasn't expecting. Also, too, I would say that I appreciated the fact that they were willing to have hard conversations with everybody there, and they weren't worried about, like, hurting people's feelings or things like that.

Mike DeHaan: [12:40] But, you know, as they put it, there's no point in BS ing people that are paying money to, you know, try and make their businesses as large and successful as possible. So if you're an Aux Mosey fan looking to grow your business, I highly recommend you look at their workshops. Both the level one and the level two one, I've gotten a tremendous amount of value from so far, And it's definitely going to contribute to a ton of growth that we have over the next twelve months. And I'm excited to go back for my second session for the level two here in the spring. So if you guys have any questions about that, I'm happy to chat one on one about it too. You can hit me up on Instagram at Mike underscore invest, and I would love to hear your thoughts if you've been to the workshops or answer any questions you consider going. So appreciate you guys listening, and I'll see you next time.