Work with me: https://thormeier.co/ I help SaaS / AI founders grow faster on LinkedIn, build a stronger founder brand, and drive more revenue from it. Track record / why I have the audacity to teach this stuff: 1. Grew my LinkedIn to 43,000 followers 2. Which to date has generated about $3.2m in revenue for myself 3. Built a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency (Project 33) to 7 people and $100k/month, where we worked with over 80 B2B tech companies 4. Closed the agency to advise founders and make the same amount of money with no employees. I advised now over 30 founders on how to grow on LinkedIn, including the CEO of a publicly-traded cybersecurity company 5. I run the biggest podcast and newsletter in this space (founderbrand.org) 6. I've interviewed over 150 of the biggest founder brands about their approach, including Jason Fried, DHH, Henry Schuck, Dave Gerhardt, Guillaume Moubeche, Adam Robinson 7. Spoke on stages about this stuff, eg. at Nathan Latka's SaaSOpen Will be doing more of these in-depth breakdowns on content and founder brand, even installed some new tools to make them more tactical and hopefully useful to you guys. Summary / TLDR: * He changed from doing solo videos of just him teaching business owners how to scale their company (by sharing a tip, strategy, story, lesson) → to bringing on a real business owner, having them present their business (revenue, growth, where they’re stuck) and then basically doing a 1:1 consulting session where Alex gives them very tactical advice on how to scale their company. * His main offer: a $5k in-person group workshop, which his company Acquisition.com hosts once a week with 70-100 business owners, where he upsells about 30% attendees into a $36k/year advisory program. * The math: 70 x $5k = $350k per event for just the workshop tickets, which is $1.4M per month, given that they do it every week. Upsells: 20 x $36k = roughly $700k per event from the upsells, which is $2.8M per month, so $4.2M per month or roughly $50M per year in total for just the advisory business, not including their PE portfolio etc. * His new style of video is hyper optimized to drive workshop ticket sales. Gotta watch the above video why. But a few notes: * It’s just good content because it’s hyper tactical, which is what most business owners want * It’s gamified, because they structure it like a game show, so you get emotionally involved and are more likely to watch the next video because there is continuity * It not only shows that Alex knows how to scale businesses using his own businesses as examples, but that he ALSO knows how to coach other business owner into scaling THEIRS, which is exactly what you want to know before hiring someone as your advisor * The winner of the “game show” is a perfect match for becoming a portfolio company of their PE arm, so all of it combined is also deal flow and filtering for them Full Transcript: [0:00] Alex Hormozi recently changed his content strategy, and I think it’s brilliant, but I think most people will miss it or not really notice how smart this actually is. So I wanted to break it down a little bit. So most of his videos were just like this. It was like a 15-minute, sometimes much longer, video of just him teaching stuff. And then recently they started doing this, basically like a game show. They call it Scale or Fail. The first round of it was basically these videos where he would sit down with a business owner, and they would present their business and what they’re struggling with: revenue, growth, et cetera. And then they would have basically a one-on-one consulting session with Alex, where he would give them very specific technical advice for their business. So there were different kinds of businesses, like a theme park. I think this is a dentist or something. This is a service business, a roofer. And he would basically coach them. [0:58] That was basically phase one. And then the best people moved on to this most recent show that they did a couple of days ago, where they basically all presented how they implemented the advice that he gave them and how much they grew. And then the people who grew the most advanced to the next stage, and from there it would progress. [1:20] I don’t think people realize how much money he’s printing with this content. But if you look at some of the psychology, I think it’s super, super smart. So let me share some things. [1:38] The way that Alex Hormozi makes money: obviously he owns a company called ACQ, and they have a couple of different offers. The first one is an in-person workshop that they sell for 5K. That’s a workshop. Two days. And it’s in person, at their office. That’s kind of the entry offer, right? [2:01] Then from there, the upsell is they sell a 36K, which is basically their advisory, per year. So you pay this upfront for the full year. And this is basically a way you get access to Alex’s team, and you can ask them any question at any point. There’s a community. Alex does, I think, monthly Q&As where you can ask him questions. [2:26] And then, I believe the main thing, and this is how he mainly started, was basically a PE firm, where they would own... I don’t know if this is disclosed. I believe it’s somewhere between 10 to 50% of companies that they own, and that’s the profit share that they get. So for the best, biggest, most profitable, fastest growing companies, they basically act like a PE firm. They get a stake in it, and from that they get a profit share. [2:55] And so this is what he wants to sell, and then from there there’s the upsell, and then from there this basically funnels the absolute best companies, who want to get real one-on-one ongoing access to Alex, right? [3:07] And so his YouTube channel obviously funnels people there. If you look at any of his videos, and this is more like the old style, “What type of content should you make that makes the most money”, him sitting down, sharing some advice, “How to become rich with social media”, the call to action is always to their lead magnet. So it’s basically a lead magnet. You get your free personalized roadmap, you put in your information, and you get it sent to your email. [3:41] From there, once you get that lead magnet, the next pitch is basically: hey, if you like this resource and you want to scale your company, here you can sign up for the workshop. And their landing page is basically... if you go to acquisition.com right now, it’s the workshop landing page, with a little VSL here, “I’m ready to scale”, some testimonials, what you actually get at the workshop, more testimonials, and then a call booking form to attend the workshop. And they’re also explicit here that it’s 5K per seat. I actually attended one of these. So this is their entry monetized offer, right? [4:27] Also, sometimes, I believe, if you look at his podcast, they directly lead you to the workshop landing page as the main CTA. This is the roadmap, roadmap, roadmap, roadmap. Here, you can see for this podcast, instead of it being the free lead magnet, the roadmap, the call to action is directly “book your spot at the two-day interactive scaling workshop”. So they’re experimenting with that. [4:57] And I think what people are also not realizing is how much money they’re printing with this. Because it’s 5K per ticket. It’s a group workshop, right? They have about a hundred business owners there, 100 attendees at each of these workshops, in person. I would say not all of them are paid, because when you’re part of the community of the upsell, you get two of these every year for free. So let’s say 70 of these actually paid. So that is 70 times 5K, they’re making 350K per event. And they do them once per week, which means they make 1.4 million per month from just these workshops. [5:55] But now it gets even better. So they have the 1.4 million per month from the workshops. But then at the workshop they do the upsell to the 36K advisory. And I know that they upsell roughly a third of people, so 25 to 33% of people do the upsell. So of the 70 people, let’s say, who are not yet part of the program and who actually paid at the event, a third of them buy the upsell. So let’s be conservative here and say 20 buy the upsell. 20 times 36K, what is that? That’s [720K]? That is another 700K per event. Again, they do four events every month, one per week. So this times four is, they’re making another 2.8 million per month in upsells. [7:02] So that together is, they’re making 4.2 million per month from the workshop plus upsells, which is what? 48, like roughly 50 million. Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, none of these numbers are confirmed. This is just me doing the math from other numbers that I know and inferring. Maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less, but this is, I think, a good ballpark number of what they’re making just from this. [7:27] And then obviously here, the upsell is that once someone does the yearly advisory, and the company is doing really, really well, and they’re growing fast, and they’re very profitable, and they want more access to Alex, and they want Alex to sit on their board or get weekly one-on-one calls with Alex, then from there they become part of the portfolio. And then from there they get a profit share, right? And when I was at the workshop two months ago, I think the biggest company that was at the workshop was doing 40 million in revenue. So these are not just tiny, tiny companies. [8:10] So it’s printing money. But back to the content strategy, right? What he’s optimizing for with this YouTube and podcast (they’re very overlapping, he repurposes a lot of content between those two) is how to get more people to buy the 5K workshop, ‘cause that’s the main offer that they sell. And he needs to fill anywhere between 70 to 100 slots every week, which is, let’s say, 400 slots per month he needs to sell. And so that’s what his content strat
