I've had a massive shift in how I view business and it has fundamentally transformed everything that I'm doing. Hi, my name is Alexi. Um, I own a portfolio of companies that does $85 million a year in revenue. And this is purely because I just want to help more people not be broke. So, that's the goal. All right. So, one of the things I'm going to tell you, two stories that significantly changed my uh career. All right. Hopefully, you'll be able to take the the message from the story because I think they're really good. So, when I was just starting out in my gym launch business, I had a gym owner who said, "Hey, let's partner on this. Like, you keep filling these gyms up at full capacity. Why don't you just fill them and I'll come behind you and operate them? " And I had a gym that was doing $4. 2 million a year. Um, this is what he was telling me. And um, I really know how to operate the business. You know, all the acquisition stuff, so let's just partner up on this. And I said, "Sure, sounds fair enough. " It ended up being a horrible partnership, but that's not the point of the video. The point is what I learned. All right. And so we had two locations and the newest location uh had a whole new staff and they were just lacadasical, right? They weren't they weren't caring. They weren't really doing a good job. And he said, you know, we need to we need to, you know, have a meeting. And I was like, okay. And so he said, we'll have a meeting at the first location, call everyone there, tell them to show up at 4:00. And the first location was probably like 45 minutes away from the second location, right? And at 4:00, so everyone's everyone's coming in, everyone's sitting down. It's kind of awkward. It's silent. there's clearly like some tension, right? And so at four o'clock, he looks at his assistant and he says, "Hey, go down to the front. Um, lock the door, right, of the gym. " And she was like, "Okay. " So she goes and locks the door. Mind you, some people hadn't shown up to the meeting yet, right? They were a couple minutes late, whatever. And so all of a sudden, as they lock the door, like 30 seconds later, someone's like banging on the door and it's like, "Hey, open the door. " And he's like, "Ignore them. " And they were like like, "Why aren't you letting me in? " Cuz obviously there's a meeting going on, right? And then another person comes, knocks on the door, and now there's like three or four people, and they're like, "What the hell? " Like, "Why aren't you opening the door? " Whatever. Right? And so he tells uh his assistant, he says, "Go outside and tell them they're all fired. " And he says this before he starts the meeting. And so I'm sitting there, right? And everyone in the room is like, "Oh shit. " Right? He just set the tone. All right? And he reset the bar. And I remember witnessing this and being like, "Wow. " So what he did was he reset the bar of this is how we perform. When we say we're going to be somewhere, somewhere at that time. If we say we're going to clean up after the session, session. If we say we're going to follow up with leads, we follow up with leads. And what I have figured, and I'm going to tell you one more story, and then the moral of both of them. All right? So, pause on that for a second. Now, when I had my first job, I was a uh actually I think it was my first, it was my first job. I was a blender tender at Smoothie King. All right? And so, um, I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do when I was this business. And it was a small business owner. I think he had two locations, three locations at the time. His name was Dave. Really nice guy. What's up, Dave? And I was trained personally by Dave. So, Dave trained me. And I was, you know, enterprising young man. I wanted to do a good job. And so, I showed up on my first day at work um, at one of his newer locations. You know, after, you know, between people walking in, you were supposed to like mop the floor, clean the counters, like just clean it, just make it look good, restock the shelves. And so, I started doing that when someone walked out the door. It's my first shift, right? And the manager was like, "What are you doing? " And I was like, "I thought like I was worried I was in trouble. " So I was like, "I thought I was supposed to am I not supposed to restock the shelves? Like I thought I was supposed to do that right now because like there's no one here. " And he was like, "Oh, yeah. You don't need to worry about that. " He's like, "We don't do any of that stuff. " And I was like, "Oh, okay. " Boom. New cultural norm. All right. So what I was supposed to do and what the owner had trained me to do and then was always complaining about how no one ever did what we was supposed to do. The manager was telling me that I didn't need to do that stuff. what I learned from this, right? And I'll just call that manager John, right? Actually, I'll call that manager Vince. Vince is the name I'll use. So, I said, "So, do you in your business have a Vince? Are you the Vince in your business? Do you have someone in your business that's the Vince that's secretly destroying your business? " All right. So, let's rewind to the original story about the first Jim I was talking about. So, think about the difference between both of those styles of management. I'm not saying the first is right or the second is wrong, whatever. The second one's definitely wrong, right? But when you look at that, what it was setting the tone. And the reason that my views on business have dramatically shifted is that I have always had a tendency to lean towards strategy, acquisition, monetization, pricing structures, and all of that stuff is important, but I think within a business, there are two components to it. You've got the smarts, and you've got the hearts. And you have to have both. And I think that most people overestimate the importance of smarts, myself included. And I think that there's a lot to do with the hearts because business strategy overarchingly is not that complex. Like you really think about it, right? It's like you got to find something that's good that people want and you sell it for a lot more than it costs you to do it and you do as much of that as you possibly can. Like that's kind of the idea, right? And the thing is it gets lost in the execution. It get lost in the doing
Segment 2 (05:00 - 09:00)
right? As soon as you hire your first employees, you're like, "No, employees can't do what I can do. " It's like, "Well, that's a horrible belief. You should probably change that before we try and move forward. " That's a limiting belief, right? If you want to have a big business. And so when I think about this from a cultural standpoint, and this is what has shifted for me, is that it's become so much more about the soft skills. It's coaching and developing the leaders of the company. It's so much more about addressing behavioral dynamics of someone that are limiting them more so than it is about tinkering. And I can't help but think that so many entrepreneurs, myself included, I spent so much time tinkering and and tweaking things. What if we change this in our sales process? on this page? What if we change the offer like this? What if we change this on the pricing? What if the payment terms? Blah blah. All these different things, right? And think about this for a second for yourself. How many things have you tinkered with in your business over the last however many years, how many months, and your business hasn't changed at all. Right? Because the real problem is not the strategy. The smarts, right? The problem is the heart, right? The people are not doing what you want them to do because they don't understand why they need to do it and why it's important, right? And that's the soft stuff. and you've got, you know, people who don't want to talk to each other because they don't like each other because one guy's really annoying. And so it's like it would be it would better serve you to fix that problem than to try and come up with some new strategy, right? Realizing that has been one of the biggest breakthroughs that I've had in my career. Those two stories should illustrate the difference between um having a championship mentality um and having a loser mentality and what might be going on in your business. And I'll leave you with one more story really quickly. So if any of you has ever been on a championship team, right? If you've ever played in a sports uh arena or whatever and you've been on a winning team, losing team, right? And you've probably event, had a lot of good players, but you guys were not connected, you weren't concerted, you weren't aligned, right? On the flip side, you had a winning team and it was like everyone showed up to practice, everyone, you know, tried their hardest. It was the effort and the consistency and the alignment of the team that accomplished the goal. The rules are the same. Everyone was trying to do the exact same thing. And so when you think about the entire business landscape, right, your competitors have access more or less to the same talent pool that you do. They can see what your strategy is overall and most people are not that dumb, right? And so as long as you have a relatively sound strategy, like you're not selling things at a loss, right? Then the difference between the two is going to be your ability to execute and have people execute on your behalf. And so that's going to become like for us as CEOs, we do shift towards becoming championship team coaches. Which is why John Wooden, if he had run a business, would have had a championship business because he focused on the fundamentals. And one of my favorite sayings of all time is advanced people never don't do the basics. I would go to these stages and I would watch guys get on stage and they'd say, you know, we follow up with all of our leads, you know, within five minutes. You know, when we get on sales calls, we always ask them why they're there. We label them a problem. you know, we overview some of the past things they've done and then they follow a clear framework. Then as soon as someone buys, we you know, we have a good onboarding process and nothing they say is revolutionary. It's just that they actually do it and the people are actually on their behalf. They're not the Vince or don't have a manager like Vince who's telling them they don't that they shouldn't have to do that work, right? Who's sabotaging the business what they did is they set the tone and then they carry the bar. And so their job is to be intolerant of anything but excellence and to reinforce that in the culture so that it's consistently executed across the company because that between two companies with the same strategy will make the difference between somebody who yields disproportionate returns on advertising, crazy profits, good growth, great retention on employees, low turnover from a company that doesn't have that right even though they both have the same strategy or even if the smaller company has the better strategy, this guy will win. And this has been one of the most profound shifts that I've had as a CEO and now owner of companies is what I'm looking for is I'm looking for just as much soft if not more soft skills, interpersonal dynamics, self-awareness than I look for skill um in particular, you know, like this guy's really good at finance, this person's really good at product, marketing sales. Like I'm looking way more for character traits now. And now that I think about it, when if you're thinking about yourself, right, then I would look in the mirror and say like am I really are we always doing the basics? Because if we always do the basics, we will be advanced because that is what advanced people do is they never don't do them and they have a culture that reinforces that standard. So, hope you enjoyed the first story. Vince story. Make sure you don't have any Vinces in your business. Uh, my name's Alex Ramoszi. I own a portfolio company, like I said earlier, that does 85 million in revenue. Lots of broke people on this channel to make sure that you are not one of them. Keeping awesome. Click subscribe and I'll see you next video. Bye.
