12 Takeaways From Alex Hormozi's Scaling Workshop
That I'm using to double my businesses in 2025
Buenos dias from Mexico City 🇲🇽
I just released a new video breaking down my 12 takeaways from a recent $5,000 Alex Hormozi workshop event.
In the 31-minute video, I cover several different topics, including:
High-performance operations
Crafting a mission & core values
How to scale content across platforms
The art & science of “bottleneck analysis”
Looking at your business like an investor
How to hire “builder” employees versus “manager” employees
…and much more, all through the lens of doubling my portfolio of writing business in 2025.
This type of business content is a bit different than the other types of newsletters & videos I've released.
But that's because, at any time, I am writing & creating about whatever is most top of mind for me.
Over the past few years, that was mostly writing and personal development topics. I still enjoy talking about that stuff, but I've said a lot of what I have to say about it.
Right now, all of my "new" creative thinking is going toward business growth, so that's what I'm going to talk about for the next few months.
If that's irrelevant to you, no hard feelings, feel free to unsubscribe for now.
But for those of you still here interested in starting or scaling your digital business, let’s dive into the lessons.
For those of you who learn best via video, here’s the link:
And for those of you who learn best via audio, here’s the podcast link (Spotify & Apple Podcasts)
And for those of you who like to read, here’s the text version. Keep in mind, this was an off-the-cuff outline for the video, so I go far more in-depth over there.
12 Takeaways From Alex Hormozi's Scaling Workshop
The fastest-moving entrepreneurs are obsessive resource allocators. Similar to investors, they seek the best risk-adjusted returns with the resources they have. The main resources of the business are time (of the team), attention (of the team), and capital (of the business). So resource allocation is 1) aligning attention on the most important thing 2) properly allocating everyone’s time to achieve that thing the fastest and 3) strategically investing capital to accelerate the outcome or increase its likelihood of achievement.
$3m to $10m in EBITDA is where the majority of the value in a business is created. $3m in EBITDA likely gets a 1x multiple, so $3m of enterprise value. The process of going to $10m (when done well), not only 3.3x’s the EBITDA, but can take the multiple from 1 to 4 -> which is a 13.2x return. The EV goes from $3m to $40m, and that is the stage we are in right now as a business.
LTV:CAC are two metrics you must have staring at you and constantly audited. LTV = lifetime value of the customer. CAC is customer acquisition cost. The scope of calculating those is beyond this write-up, but basically you want this metric to be ~8:1 or higher when aggressively scaling a service-based business. On top of that, these are the only two metrics that you can “improve” in your business → either making customers worth more or reducing the cost to acquire them. You should be able to tie every project on your list directly to the improvement of one of these metrics.
We need a single dashboard with the most important metrics in the business. The quality of the dashboard is 1) how many people use it on a daily basis and 2) how clearly they can connect their performance to the performance of the main numbers on the dashboard. We have data thrown about across Airtable, Google Sheets, and various Slack channels. Now, it’s time to unite them such that we can make even better decisions as a team.
Leveling up in business is transitioning from selling to people to selling to employees. In the beginning, you are the one creating all of the value. Over time, you will replace yourself out of certain functions that are customer-facing (if you are approaching business correctly). However, your job then becomes selling to your employees to spark their highest performance and retain them.
Brand is the best way to improve LTV and reduce CAC at the same time. It makes it cheaper to acquire customers since you have fixed media expenses (just labor) but unlimited upside in the number of eyeballs you can reach. It increases LTV because the continued content you create makes customers likely to keep purchasing because they associate the good content with the purchase they made, whether it’s free content or not.
Every single thing in your business is trainable, you just lack the skill of training. Seeing their presentations, their handshakes, the way they repeat the question back to the audience, it was so clear that Alex & Leila did this first, then obsessively role-played and drilled each person on their performance until it was indistinguishable from theirs.
The people doing it at the highest level of an obsessive, intentional standard. It was so evident the way these employees conducted themselves that they 1) loved working there 2) loved the culture of high performance and 3) had been trained with extreme repetition and attention to detail.
Past $3-5m in revenue, anything “new” starts with “who” not “how.” I made the mistake this year of trying to “bootstrap” our cold ads initiative (while continuing to run the rest of the business & sales team). I spent roughly ~200 hours on this throughout the year, which took time away from both my content and the management of the sales team. But for whatever reason, I thought I “had” to be the one who got it off the ground, then handed it off to a new hire or media buyer. But I had the sequence flipped. I should have spent the first 50 hours finding a world-class director of paid marketing, someone with far more experience than me building out a cold traffic acquisition system. Heck, I could have even spent 200 hours on it and ended up with a far greater return than I ended up with.
Excellence is a remarkably high number of extremely small details done well. Throughout the workshop, I paid close attention to the event operations, taking notes on how to run a great in-person event in case we wanted to do so in the future. Several things stood out that were clearly “iterations” from prior events, all based around eliminating the small, annoying parts of attending any kind of seminar. Clear bathroom signs, high-quality food, a barista for fresh coffee, WiFi signs posted everywhere, constant 15-minute breaks every 90 minutes, greeters at the door, the list goes on and on.
Any change you make in a business you should expect a 20% “decrease” in performance to start. That makes the hurdle rate to doing “new” at least 20% for it to be worth it, and arguably 40%. This happens because the switching cost leads to an immediate drop just from having to retrain the team. Change a meeting cadence, change a sales script, change an onboarding flow, all of these are going to come with a switching cost the team must overcome. Therefore, the highest risk-adjusted return is always to just do more or better or whatever you’re already doing, rather than add something new.
The ultimate size of the business is the sum of the intelligence of its people. Alex laid out this golden nugget during one of his talks and I found it interesting for a few reasons. First, because of his definition of intelligence = speed of learning, that means the ultimate size of the company is how quickly everyone can learn things. And so said another way, the ultimate size of the company is correlated to the speed of its iterations. The second reason I found this interesting is because you can create a culture of iteration through constant, rapid feedback on every behavior. And when I say constant, I mean constant. You could tell they’ve built this culture by the way their presenters all presented the exact same way as Alex and Leila.
Aaaaand that’s it!
Lots of takeaways there and the 2-day workshop was well worth it. For a further deep dive into what my co-founder and I learned, you can read his Substack Post that covers different lessons than I had.
That’s all for this week. As always, thanks for reading and watching.
See you next Sunday!
-Dickie Bush
PS… If you missed last week’s edition, I summarized everything that happened in my life in 2024 + my gameplan to dominate 2025. You can check out that full breakdown here:
PPS… Here are the tunes that powered all of my working sessions this week. Highly recommend two espressos minimum before turning this one on. Jump to 1:44:00 for the best 10-minute section of the mix.
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Thanks for putting this together. Super insightful! Some great points on here!
That last piece is crazy deep about everything being trainable
In the higher level NLP world. This is everything they do: it’s called modeling.
Modeling requires you to break down every a aspect and step of someone’s process down to the breathing patterns and belief patterns
It gets really heady
I imagine Hormozi’s team got into that
Thanks for this post bro. Good one.