I Invested $45,000 In Alex Hormozi's Workshop—Here's Everything I Learned For Free

Was it a complete waste of money, or the best money I've ever spent?

I spent $45k for a full business audit from the Acqusition.com team.

And in today’s post I’m going to distill every single golden nugget & framework I learned while I was there so you can get all the lessons for free without leaving your desk. And at the end, I’ll tell you if it was worth it.

Let’s get into it.

---

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 and Apple Podcasts)

---

What we’re going to cover:

• A very short overview of the VAM event and where it fits in their Advisory model

• Marketing Frameworks

• Sales Frameworks

• General Business Frameworks

Rapid-Fire Overview Of The VAM Event

• Why did we go?

  • We were looking for direct insight into our business from someone who has scaled this exact type of business before

• Where was it?

  • At their HQ in Vegas

• How much does it cost?

  • $35,000 per business with an additional $10,000 to bring a business partner

    • “That’s a waste of money!”

      • Yes it’s expensive to someone who doesn’t have a business

      • But to us there are extremely few places where you can get this level of tactical insight, so the investment was a no-brainer

• What’s included?

  • 2 full-day events with their team spread out during the year

  • A full business bottleneck analysis and Critical Task playbook on what they would do if they invested in your business today

• How is the event structured?

  • 2 months before the event we submitted a full report on all of our business metrics

  • Then that information is sent to their team who analyzes the main constraint based on the numbers presented

  • Then you are sorted into a group with various Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who specialize in your individual constraint

  • That SME joins you for a 30-minute call to break down what they see in your business and potential frameworks they could share during the VAM day to make it a home run for you

    • We ended up having two calls with our SME who saw so many opportunities for us to make it to the next level that it deserved additional brainstorming—great problem to have!

  • Once you get there for the VAM day, you receive a 30-minute presentation breaking down some of the frameworks that they recommend running with to break through your constraint

    • The best part about this was you are with a table with 5-6 other businesses with different constraints, which lets you see tons of other frameworks that are not directly solving your bottleneck, but could be useful in the future

  • And then they send you the deck with any additional frameworks you’ve requested before setting the next date for you to fly out there later in the year

With that overview, here is a full breakdown of all the frameworks I’m taking from the event to apply to my business over the next 6 months:

Marketing Frameworks

Here’s some quick background dog the work that was done together with our Subject Matter Expert: Lewis

• Based on the numbers I submitted, we had plenty of traffic and a great sales process

  • These numbers were well within KPI (and most of the time better than KPI) relative to the other businesses they consult with

• We identified the constraint was mostly around the process of turning clicks into calls -> the middle of funnel marketing conversion rate

  • Luckily, this is more of an “ideal scene” type of improvement where we just simply needed to see what a system looked like to improve each individual page, then run that system for a long period of time

• Given this was a pretty straightforward process, we also discussed other “ideal scenes” we lacked that would help us improve our marketing efforts everywhere

  • The first was how to structure a media department that would help us leverage our written content to grow on YouTube and Instagram

  • The second was how to build a process for rapid creative testing & validation with our paid ad strategy

• With all that in mind, here are the main marketing frameworks we emerged with

“Conversion Rate Issues Are Hidden Problems”

• This was my biggest takeaway of the entire event.

• For the last ~12-18 months, we have chipped away at higher revenue levels but it’s been volatile.

  • Outlier months have been followed by regression to the mean, rather than strung together month after month after month.

• And given how we generate traffic for the business, it makes sense.

  • We have posted the same number of times per day across every platform, all driving to the same landing page, opt in, application, and call funnel.

  • The outlier months have occurred when a video has led to a surge in traffic that led to an equal surge in throughput.

• All the while, we have been looking at ways to increase traffic and attention.

  • Turns out, this is actually quite difficult to do, especially as an organic business.

  • You can only grow a brand so quickly, you can only get so many impressions, you can only post so many times per day.

    • But during this process of publishing content and trying to grow our traffic, we have made very, very few tweaks to the funnel.

• Turns out, this is where a lot of the juice is for us.

  • We have been generating the same amount of traffic for month and months, with little time spent on the small tweaks that convert more of the traffic.

• Why didn’t we do this? Because it’s a hidden problem.

  • The entire time, the business has been printing money. It’s awesome.

  • And when that is working, you are less likely to tweak the pipes that are generating all of that attention.

    • However, the business was printing money not because of everything we set up, but despite it.

• Had we spent the last 18 months making tiny, 2-5% improvements in conversion week after week after the week,

  • we could be sitting at a much higher revenue level.

  • But alas, sometimes you have to feel the pain of a mistake before you can act to change it.

• So how do we fix it?

  • The first step is to track data on every single page that receives clicks in the entire funnel.

    • Luckily we have been doing this already - we just haven’t acted on it

  • The second step is to compare those numbers to the industry benchmarks supplied to us by the Hormozi team

    • This is the benefit of working with them - they see a significant number of businesses similar to ours and have developed pattern recognition of what “good” looks like

  • The third step is to then deploy weekly tests on whichever stage in the funnel could see a 50% improvement

    • This doesn’t mean going from 50% to 100% on a page.

    • It could be finding a step that is at 8% and getting it to 12% or a step at 30% and getting it to 45%.

  • Then you just repeat this process basically every week until you die

• Now, identifying CRO as our bottleneck was my most important realization.

  • The second most important realization is learning that there are CRO agencies who specialize in deploying these tests on your behalf on a monthly retainer.

  • And working with them to do all of this for us is actually our next step.

• And this builds on one of the big lessons I had from our first workshop.

  • At our current revenue level, it’s better to invest time in finding an expert who has the ideal scene already laid out and have them do it, rather than us bootstrap something we do not have any real clue how to do.

  • And so I’ve started sourcing a handful of recommended agencies with interviews setup first thing Monday morning.

• So - the next 12-18 months are going to be very exciting for us.

  • If we do NOTHING but maintain the same level of traffic we have now, we could see upwards of 30-40% growth just by running weekly CRO tests throughout the funnel.

  • Pair that with the explosion in impression we anticipate when we start to take Instagram and YouTube to the next level—PHEW.

The Hormozi Ad Assembly Process

In the fall, we took our first crack at running consistent cold traffic advertising—and it was a humbling experience. (I wrote more about that here)

9 Lessons I Learned Failing To Scale My Business To $1M Per Month

Looking back, because we lacked the ideal scene, we were doing several things dramatically wrong:

• Spending upwards of $20k/week but hardly making new ads

• Using Facebook’s recommendations on which ads to run (rather than forcing spend behind each variation)

• Letting “decent” ads linger for far too long (rather than allocate that spend to a new ad)

Since then, we’ve pivoted our strategy for advertising mostly to semi-warm audiences that have engaged with us in some way. And rather than send them direct to an application page, we are giving away lead magnets via DM conversation and having setters take it from there. Results are promising so far, but those came with far too little creative output than is necessary to really scale our advertising. And that’s where this framework steps in.

The high-level summary of the framework looks like this:

• Your initial testing will have 6 “angles” that will make up the meat of the ad

• You will then “bolt on” 5 different hooks to each angle, which gives you 30 different ads to run

• And for extra bonus points, you can have multiple film each ad, which would double the number of ads to 60

Then, you run each of those ads in their own ad set to force the Meta algorithm to spend money on each of them.

The amount to spend on each ad set will vary depending on your budget / margin / etc., but the more money you spend, the faster you will get results (either a verified winner or a dud).

After enough spend to validate each ad, you will rank them top to bottom on performance from 1 to 30.

You then take the BEST 2 ADS and follow the “70/20/10” process.

The following week, 70% of your ad tests (and budget) will be “slight variations” of the best 2 ads you ran last week.

• Different clothing

• Different color filter

• Flip the ad horizontally

20% of your ads will be “decent variations” of the best 2 ads you ran last week

• Different hook

• Different person speaking

• Different setting entirely

And then 10% will be completely new ads that forces constant creative retesting.

• This would likely be 1 new angle with 3 different hooks

So in Week 2, your 30 ads would look like:

• 21 ads that are extremely slight variations of the 2 winning ads you had from the first week

• 6 ads that are significant variations of the best ads from last week

• 3 ads that are completely new tests

And on and on you repeat this process. This guarantees you have a:

• Data-driven way to keep your best ads receiving significant amounts of spend

• Constant new creative angles getting tested each week

• Enough creative for your media buyer to constantly test new ads, scale winners, and shut down losers, ON A DAILY BASIS

And this is the process we are going to start this week.

How they structure their media team

Over the past few years we have spent the majority of our time writing on platforms like X, LinkedIn, Threads, and Substack Notes. We are a writing-based business and the similarities between those platforms allowed us to be “everywhere” with only marginally more editing / formatting work.

But for the last 6-12 months, we’ve started to invest more into YouTube and Instagram after Alex said over 80% of their opt-ins came from Instagram & YouTube. Growth there has been pretty good, but we finally feel we’re at a place in the business that we can go all in on turning these platforms into significant revenue drivers.

So part of what we wanted out of this event was a “behind the scenes” of how they structure their media team. This is the type of information that you simply cannot find in a course, with ChatGPT, or anywhere online. You can only pay to borrow the experience from someone who has likely iterated on the structure hundreds of times. And that structure is what we emerged from the event with.

Now - this is the only part of the event that I am keeping fully behind the kimono. We were the only business there that requested it and they had never shared it publicly, so I don’t want to overstep and share something before Alex and Leila themselves even shared it. I’m sure they will at some point after clarifying the structure for us, but I’ll wait until they do so to talk any further about it.

I will however share a golden nugget that I’ve only heard them talk about once or twice publicly: incentivize editors on “outlier” video performance.

• In practice this looks like a $250 bonus whenever someone posts a video that goes viral

• This incentivizes the team to look extra hard for clips with viral potential

• It also incentivizes them to put in the additional 10% discretionary effort that differentiates average videos from viral bangers

Ideal page structure for landing pages

Part of our deck was a “best practices” for structuring high-converting opt in pages.

Our opt-in rates are pretty solid — roughly 35% on our main email course landing page. However, the big realization here is that if we could boost that to 50%, our business would grow by a whopping 42%! And so this is the highest leverage place in the funnel for us to ship weekly improvements.

Summarizing the golden nuggets of the page structure:

• 80% of the optimization should happen above the fold

  • Both on desktop and mobile, both must be optimized to get a user to 1) see the value and 2) take action without scrolling

• Use the “incomplete information” bias to get more opt ins

  • Either by blurring the asset they can unlock on the other side, “locking” a video that they can click play on but that won’t unlock unless they opt in, etc.

• Headline -> video or image asset -> testimonials

  • THAT’S IT! And then you test one thing on that page every week basically until you die

So here is the page we currently have:

And the initial test we are going to run will be:

• No email opt in “on the page” but instead just “download the free guide” button CTA

• From there we will test the headline obsessively looking for jumps in opt in rate

Speed page load time is costing you significant amounts of money

Part of what you pay for with consultation like this is for someone to point out glaringly obvious things to you that you’re too “in the weeds” to ever notice.

For us, that was how slow it took our landing page & application page to load: 9 whole seconds!

(Pro tip for anyone out there: the speed at which your page loads on your personal phone or desktop is like 80% faster than it actually loads to a new user because your browser has the page “cached” with most information preloaded. This was news to us!)

Lewis showed us a study that Google ran that suggests a 7% drop in revenue for just 1 second or more of page load delay. Now imagine that extrapolated out (likely exponentially) for a 9 second delay. No bueno!

So the first step was learning that was a problem. The second step was learning you can hire either 1) a CRO agency or 2) just a solo developer on Fiverr who can run a page speed load audit on your entire website for not very much money. This is one of the first action items we are going to implement this week - OPERATION WARP SPEED.

Sales Frameworks

Although at this exact moment marketing & CRO are our main bottlenecks, fixing those will create a “bottleneck ping pong” back and forth between sales & marketing.

• When we make a big CRO upgrade, we will see a surge in call volume

  • Then we need to go hire more closers / setters to handle that new volume

• Once you hire those additional closers, the bottleneck ping pongs back to marketing to make sure they stay at 100% capacity

  • And that requires more CRO tweaks, or more ads, or more content, something that increases calls on the calendar

• And once we make that upgrade, it again shifts back to sales

  • And after that, it likely ping pongs over to success to make sure we have enough capacity to take on more clients

• And on and on and on until you decide to stop scaling

And therefore I also went into the event hungry for sales team frameworks that would allow us to burst through sales bottlenecks each time marketing took another leap forward.

Here’s a handful I emerged with:

There is a direct correlation between sales performance and the frequency of competition

Over the last few months, we’ve rolled out monthly bonus incentives for our closers based on the most important sales metric: up front cash collected.

This has been a nice upgrade, as it’s led to a surge in intensity at the end of every month as closers get close to their next bonus level and lay out significant amounts of discretionary effort.

But the golden nugget from the Hormozi team was to do that on a weekly basis, rather than monthly.

A few reasons this works so well:

• This dangles a constant carrot on the end of the stick for them to work hard every week, not just at the end of the month

• Since the competition ends on Saturday night, it incentivizes competition into the weekend, as there is 100% a chance you will make more money if you open your calendar for Saturday

• Resets the clock every week, such that if you have an off week you can bounce back and have a great one the week after and be immediately reinforced for it

So going forward, we are going to structure weekly competitions like this:

• Tiered cash bonuses based on performance each week, with each tier of up front cash collected unlocking a higher bonus amount

• Random rewards each week for the closer with the highest amount of cash collected that are not cash prizes (swag, steaks, trips somewhere, etc.)

On top of that, we will have random rewards / competitions for metrics aside from cash collected that we want to focus on improving:

• Randomly rewarding closers who have 100% up to date pipelines & CRMs

• Random “single day” competitions for those who close the most deals from the calls they have that day to encourage holding prospects accountable rather than setting follow-ups

• Random “QCs” for those that are doing the small, nitty gritty activities like sending morning voice notes or bumping up their entire pipeline

The high-level takeaway here is that for a sales team that is incentivized purely on performance, constant competition and prizes will go a long way in keeping things “fresh” and unlocking a ton of discretionary effort as a result.

3 ways to increase the reinforcement level when training someone

This was a golden nugget from their sales director.

Reinforcement/operant conditioning are the main training framework used by the Hormozi team. And these are the 3 ways they shared you can “increase” the level of reinforcement a reward provides

1. Randomly. When you reward someone on a consistent basis, the novelty of the reward wears off and therefore its reinforcement is weakened. However, if you randomly give rewards (like a slot machine) then the reward has much stronger reinforcement when it finally does show up

2. Quickly. The faster you can pair a reward with a behavior, the stronger the level of reinforcement

3. Publicly. If you reward someone in public, the reinforcement is stronger due to the baked in status increase that comes with it

Reinforce every sale with as many people as possible

One of the best stories & frameworks I learned came from Ed, the Operating Partner for their workshops division.

Early on when he started working at the Acqusition.com HQ, he was reluctant to wear suits. He had worked for years in the gym & supplement industry, so he was used to a hoodie and sweats. One day, Leila had a tailor come in to custom fit some suits for him, an offer he couldn’t refuse. The next day when he came in, Leila sent a company-wide memo (excluding him) to hype Ed up on how nice his new suit looked. One by one throughout the day, every person who saw Ed gave him a compliment on his new digs. The janitor, the front desk attendant, the security detail, every single one of his colleagues reinforced his new behavior.

And the best part? He knew exactly what was going on—and it still worked! The next day, he looked forward to wearing a suit to the office, and he’s been doing so ever since.

I tell that story because it shows the power of team-wide praise and reward. And how we’re going to implement that in our business is have as many people from our team hype up the closer or CSM who brings in every single new sale. The goal will be for everyone to have notifications on for this channel to deliver swift and public praise for the single most important action in our business.

The best way to incentivize speed to lead is a free for all setting process

We’ve been circling around various ways to come up with systems that best incentivize speed to lead for our applications who do not book a call.

Their team repeated time and time again that the single most important factor in outreach is speed to lead. If you can call every single lead who does not take the desired action in under 60 seconds, you can expect significant throughput increases as a result.

Now this is not something we’ve ever done, and it’s become a bottleneck as too many qualified leads are slipping through the cracks as our setting team has their hands in so many different places throughout the day.

The fix will be for the warmest leads out there - the leads who fill out an application but do not book a call - to call them within 60 seconds to try and get them locked in on the calendar.

Often times, these leads do not book simply because there was not a time available to them that worked. And if they leave that page / their computer without booking a call, their likelihood they do falls from 70% to roughly 20% -> no bueno!

So to improve this, we are going to implement the following “free for all” system:

• When a lead applies but does not book a call, they become “open” for whoever claims them first by sending them a double dial + text message

  • This could happen at any time of the day, which therefore prompts setters to be more locked in on opportunity any time they could be coming through

• That lead will remain on their lead list for 7 days, as long as they are contacted daily

  • If they are not contacted, the lead becomes open again for another setter to claim

  • This part is less important, because if someone makes it to 7 days without booking their likelihood again drops significantly

• Since the main reason they do not book is availability, we will set up a “dummy” calendar that only our setting team has access to that allows us to book them in further out than the public calendar allows

So rather than having a “round robin” that automatically routes leads to setters, this “free for all” process rewards those who are the most proactive in reaching out to leads (which is the single most important factor for increasing throughput).

Ideal scene for scaling a team of Closers and Setters

Our current team structure is 4 closers and 3 setters. Over the next few months, I see that getting to 6 closers and 6 setters - which is a lot for one sales manager to handle.

The natural progression at that size is to elevate one closer and one setter to be “Closer Lead” and “Setter Lead” to become “player coaches” that share in some of the management responsibility.

This frees up time for the Sales Manager to focus on high-level team training that applies to everyone, recruiting the best reps, and working on sales process improvements, while also QCing the feedback given by the team leads.

So the team structure would look likely look like:

• Closer Lead has 3+ Closers in his “pod” that they manages while also closing full-time

  • The breakdown is an 80/20 split where they spend 80% of their week taking calls and 20% of their week giving feedback and training reps

  • Importantly, this is not a daily breakdown, like taking sales calls in the morning and managing at night. That requires too much context switch that would hurt performance

  • Instead, it looks like 4 days of sales calls and 1 day of management, or 3 days of sales calls and 2 days where the morning is management and the afternoon is sales calls, something like that

• Same structure applies to the Setter Lead - 80% of their week is spent in the field setting, 20% is spent giving feedback and managing the other setters

• For each of these structures, the additional compensation is given as a percentage of their “pod’s” overall performance

  • This aligns incentives for them to get the most out of the team they are managing, while still making their main source of income how they perform as sales reps

This will take additional work on the ideal scene here but creating that kind of career trajectory in the business is something we ultimately want to build.

What does it mean to be a good listener

One of the big themes within the Acqusition.com HQ is “operationalizing” terms that most people throw around without ever defining.

• What does “patience” mean?

• What does “consistency” mean?

• What does “resilience” mean?

And one that I loved hearing broken down was how they define being a “good listener.”

1. Nodding your head when people speak

2. Adding in proper “ahhs” or “oohs” when someone speaks

3. Reciting back to them what they just said in fewer words

If you do all 3 of those things, you are a good listener. And so part of their closer onboarding training is modeling & roleplaying this behavior.

It sounds silly, but you can see everyone on their team do this exact behavior whether they’re speaking directly with you or taking a question from someone on the stage.

I’m looking forward to running more thought experiments like this internally as we define the highest standard of behavior.

Create a “Closer Rubric” for them to diagnose their own calls

One of the bottlenecks for Closers to do call reviews for themselves or for others is figuring out which parts to give feedback on.

• Intro?

• Discovery?

• Pitch?

• Objections?

• Closing?

It can quickly become overwhelming to find the point of highest leverage.

The Hormozi team solved by this by creating an objective “Closer Rubric” that has 31 rows for them to grade extremely specific parts of the call with a “not quite”, “good” and “great” score.

The first pass at the call review is to grade each of those 31 parts with the proper score. Then, they look they look at which part of the call they scored the lowest percentage on and give feedback on only that part.

And this also creates a process where you can have a 3rd party do the grading, like a Sales QC VA whose sole job is to grade and review sales calls to streamline the feedback process for the manager & team leads.

They also have one of these for “off the call” that allows a closer to grade how they are taking care of their body, mind, and the small details that lead to consistent sales performance like reaching out to their pipeline and keeping their CRM up to date.

Just more examples here of operationalizing as much of the business as possible into checklists.

General Business Lessons & Realizations

Aside from sales & marketing, I also emerged with a handful of general business frameworks based on how Leila & Alex structured the event, plus conversations with other business owners.

To remove yourself from sales & fufilment, you must edify your team

We paid $35,000 for an event and Alex + Leila were not even there—but I was not disappointed.

First off, they have an extremely qualified team. And as a someone who runs a group coaching business where I am not involved in the fulfillment, I understand the requirements of creating an offer that allow you to remove yourself from them while still keeping clients happy.

But a quality team alone is not enough—you have to make their accolades known to those they are working with to get them to fully buy in to their coaching & consulting.

This is something we could do better with our Success team - finding ways to have in-depth backgrounds & credibility bestowed upon them when they begin working with our students.

Two ways to learn anything: modeling and role play

This golden nugget came from the CEO coach that Leila has started working with (who also coached Sam Altman).

Behavior change comes in 2 main ways:

• Watching someone else do something (Modeling)

• Doing something yourself with a guide (Roleplay)

This sounds simple, but you can use that to change any behavior in the fastest & most effective way possible.

For example, someone learning sales, they should:

• Watch the best closer (Modeling)

• Role play with the best closer (Roleplay)

For someone learning to write emails, they should:

• Read all of our best emails (Modeling)

• Write an email with immediate feedback from our head copywriter (Roleplay)

This is true for just about any habit or skill as well.

If you want to stop eating late at night, you should:

• Talk to people who don’t do that behavior / have overcome it and ask how they do it (Modeling)

• Practice doing it before you’re put in that situation by roleplaying:

  • Your response when tempted with a late night snack

  • The question you’ll pose to yourself when placed in that situation

  • The replacement behavior you’ll turn to instead of eating, etc. etc.

You can also use this framework to consolidate your efforts when you’re learning something. If it not modeling real-world behavior or practicing that behavior with a trusted expert, it is likely a waste of time.

To keep people from leaving a community, give them status

This was a 1-off golden nugget that I overhead in a conversation around community retention. And we are going to immediately implement it in all of our communities.

People don’t want to leave something where they have built up status in the community. There are few places that someone can gain status, and it’s hard to give it up once you have it.

There are several ways you can do this:

• Give them titles based on how long they’ve been a part of the community

• Give them virtual or physical swag that marks their status for others to easily see

• Give them access to things that only happen after they’ve accomplished something important

Any combination of these can work, but the single most important part is to have always have a clear roadmap for them unlock the next status level. That way, they know their actions are getting them closer to the next one.

Most young talent is better compensated with life coaching than with money

This one came from the Operating Partner of their Workshops division: Ed—who happened to be one of the oldest guys on the team at just 38 years old.

He told a few stories of how many young employees he’s been able to get below market rate because of how he invests in them during their 1:1s. He undercompensates them financially but overcompensates them in attention & guidance.

On his 1:1s (which he holds weekly with any employee he is mentoring), he rarely talks about the business they are currently in. Instead, he either talks about:

• Things they are working on outside of work (their personal development)

  • This could be personal finance, productivity, health & fitness, habits, relationships, anything they need help with

• Where they eventually want to go (the business they one day want to start)

  • This usually boils down to unpacking the skills they will need to get there and how they can start building those skills in their current role

Now, some people do not want to invest so much into the people on their team, and that’s okay. They should just expect less loyalty and to have to pay above average salaries as a result.

He went on to say that young people really do not care about the marginal money changes if they love the role they’re in, they feel supported in every area of life, and they feel like they’re growing.

And I need to keep this in mind as I manage more and more younger employees.

They are not going to respond in a big way to additional compensation - but they will respond in a big way if they feel your discretionary effort in helping them become better human beings.

Referral incentives must be big enough to change behavior

I found this nugget scribbled (barely readable) in the corner of one of the journal pages I took notes on during on the event—and damn I’m glad I found it.

Everyone offers 20% for referrals - and basically no one does anything with that. I’m a part of like 20 affiliate programs that offer kickbacks, but they get precisely zero discretionary effort from me.

And so the framework they use for this is the reward must be big enough that the person invests their free time or diverts their main time into unlocking that reward.

We have two main referral / affiliate programs: externally for our PGA students to help bring their friends, and internally with employees to bring people they’re excited to work with. And so the thought experiment I’m running is what if we tripled the size of the bonus we gave?

• What if you had a $5k bonus for someone bringing their friend to work there?

• What if you had a 75% affiliate commission for someone once they’ve hit 10 referrals?

If we had those, would we see more effort in both groups telling their friends? More than likely.

First moment and last moment in any event is the most important

To finish, here is a meta takeaway that I will apply to this video & post.

The two most important parts of any video, presentation, in-person event, conversation, course, anything—are the first and last parts.

And the Acquisition.com team put this into practice with their event structure.

• Both times we’ve been there, we were greeted outside with a warm welcome and hyper-specific compliment from their sales team (who doubles as the welcome committee)

  • This put us in a good state and shaped the lens we would take into the full-day event

• And both times when we left, they revealed some unexpected bonus that we were not expecting and gave us a goodie bag for us to take home

People will forget what happens the middle often but you can frame them for the event itself with the first few minutes and for how they feel about it after in the last few minutes. And it’s those moments that are worth investing in.

And that’s it! There’s the full breakdown of everything I learned from the first of two events that are included in the $35,000 investment. Several of these golden nuggets on their own would have made the experience worth it, but combining all of them makes it an absolute home run.

Would this event be worth it for every business owner?

Absolutely not. But at our level, there are only so many places we can get access to hyper tactical information & ways of thinking that are going to let us get to the next level. And that’s exactly what this event provided for us.

---

Aaaaand that’s it. That’s the full breakdown — hope you found that helpful!

If you have any follow-up questions on any of the softwares I listed, please leave a comment or hit reply to this email and I’ll get back to you as best as I can.

See you next week!

Dickie

---

PS… If you missed last week’s edition, I shared a full breakdown of my $8,512 monthly software bill. I talk about every piece tool, what it does, why we use, how much it costs, and whether it’s essential as a beginner. You can read the full reflection here:

This Week’s Beats 🎧

I’m working on my first house mix, which will be filled with songs from Trilucid. Here’s a good mix that shows you what they sound like:

My Businesses & Social Media Links

Looking to start writing online? Here are a few places to start:

• Ship 30 for 30 — Publish 30 pieces of content in 30 days

• Premium Ghostwriting Academy — Become a ghostwriter for business owners

• Typeshare — All-in-one software to publish ideas on the internet

• Write With AI — Turn ChatGPT into your personal writing intern

Follow me across platforms:

• X/Twitter (@dickiebush)

• Instagram (@dickiebush)

• YouTube (@dickiebush77)

• LinkedIn (@dickiebush)

• Threads (@dickiebush)