https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_gcqwupsza8

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 we're all one decision away from
massively changing the direction of our lives we can take one drink and
get into our car we can sleep with someone that we shouldn't have and
destroy marriage um or we can quit a job or we can sell a company and so
one of the things that's always been interesting to me is that
billionaires millionaires hundred thousand heirs people who are have
zero dollars people who are in massive debt the only real thing that
distinguishes these people is the quality of their decisions and so what
i wanted to do in this video is walk you through the decision process
that i went through in selling the majority stakes of three companies
for 50 million dollars last year um and my name is alex mosey and so i i
make this stuff because i want to document the journey mentally for me
because i think i'm going to forget the details of these things as i age
and like kind of what i was thinking and and the different pieces of it
and so i made this little presentation based on notes uh because i
actually took really extensive notes throughout this entire process of
what i was thinking through you know different variables i was
considering because this is not a an instant decision the the whole
process for me actually took almost 18 months um

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 and a lot of deliberation a lot of back
and forth all right and so that's what i'm going to kind of focus on in
this video so uh to sell or not to sell so there were seven variables
that i looked at one was kind of the story externally and internally the
second was money and finances you know for me uh personally third was
kind of energy and headspace the fourth was team resources in terms of
like what am i going to lose am i going to gain number five is the
future and the vision for myself number six was what was the best
decision for the business and then number seven i'll loop around and
tell you what i ultimately ended up doing and why probably more
importantly why all right so my name is dr mosey my wife and i are
business investors and we and safe portfolio companies do 85 million a
year and i have nothing to sell you and if you're you know here's your
youtube proof because i know there's a lot of people out there so you
can just google apg gym launch and you can see all the top results are
you know public disclosures of them purchasing making a big investment
company out of 46 those two were at a 46.2 million valuation the third
sale i can't disclose the number the company did 12 million the year
before i'll just tell you that okay so quick backstory i actually ended
up writing out the backstory for this

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 in in more detail so this will get you
100 up to speed to the same context as i had so i spent the better part
of two and a half years obsessing about a single decision whether or not
to sell my business and i'm thankful to tell you that two and a half
years later i made that decision so what i want to walk you through is
how i made it and hopefully help someone skip the two and half years of
mental trudging that it took me to get here so let's start with why did
i want to sell so let me take you back into a moment that i decided to
sell and then bring you forward to this moment so leila and i were on a
walk in march of 2019 and we had just done 4.4 million dollars in
revenue that month and taking out 1.7 million in owner dividends that
month she stopped and she looked at me and she said let's shut it down i
don't feel like doing this anymore we don't need the money let's just
shut it down and move on and being the motivated money motivated
entrepreneur that i was at the time i was like hey now let's at least
see if we can sell this all right maybe we can get like a small payday
before moving on to our next thing and so i went up and hit my network
up and asked anyone if they knew anyone who could help me you know value
my business uh and let me know what somebody might pay for it and that's
when a good friend of mine rick mayo introduced me to investment banking
friend of his who specialized in our space which is the

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 fitness base at the time and so within
a day or two i was on the phone with a guy named mike okumian and he was
a banker in the fitness base and he transacted a handful of uh high
profile deals and after a few introductions i shared our dilemma and
asked if there was you know he thought the company could be worth
anything and what he told me next really changed my life and so i'm
loosely paraphrasing but he said dude you grew from zero to 17 million
dollars in profit in two years and you're now on pace to grow 50 again
this year and i was like yeah i know we're really tired of it though and
michael's like uh if you continue this growth at the end of theories
like i could sell this for 150 million easily and i was like really and
he was like yeah and if you can disassociate your brand uh from your
face and maybe get another acquisition channel going probably even more
and so my job just about hit the floor right i was used to small
business ownership where when you stop wanting to do business you bake
someone to buy from you and you're trying to recoup your costs as much
as you can get but this was something entirely different right 150
million that's not even rich the generational wealth right and as a
reminder i was 28 all right and so my

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 wife and i probably had maybe 20
million bucks saved up at the time but this was an order of magnitude
changing wealth for us and so after you get off the phone with michael
my head was spinning and i felt like my world perspective had shifted
forever and it had from that moment onwards the next two and a half
years all i thought about was how do i solve this business for 150
million dollars and interestingly from that moment onwards my business
plateaued more or less right i mean we grew but not to the same degree
that we were going before and it could have been because i was already
burned out which is possible um it could have been because of
macroeconomic forces because there was a little flu that went around
that affected gyms or could have been because i wanted to i shifted from
wanting to build something to wanting to sell it and i have no idea all
i can say is that i stopped going i stopped growing after that
conversation and so i can truthfully tell you that 50 or more of my
mental bandwidth for the last two and a half years was dedicated to the
idea of selling and what's more difficult about that is i can't really
talk about it publicly right and so it's this kind of like this burden
that you keep in the back your head that just eats up a lot of your
thoughts that you can't talk about right and so what happened was all my
decisions changed from what is going to provide me the most

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 long-term goodwill with our customers
to what would a potential acquire think of the decision and would it
make the company more or less valuable and i think this ultimately hurt
my business uh the heart behind the business had shifted from the
process to the outcome and over the next year our revenue went up but
our profit dropped because i thought an acquirer would want to see lower
churn which is true but i made a terrible mistake and lowered my prices
in an attempt to do so and it ended up cutting about five million
dollars in profit in the process so i went from 17 million uh in profit
on 26 million top line to the next year i think we did 37 million top
line 13.4 million bottom line which is still obviously not a bad you
know outcome but it it should have gone the other way should have gone
like 19 million on 37. like i said although we grew by 40 top line my
bottom line by 25 and so you know we also thought we needed to show we
were legit and hired a lot more people to sit around and do nothing
while the core team was still hustling to get the work done either way
we had we ballooned up to like 135 employees i think at our peak for
that those two entities and so either way over the course of 2019 uh we
pulled me out somewhat from the fulfillment of product divisions so that
was somewhat of a win and then in 2020 we committed

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 to selling the company right so that's
kind of like speeding up to 2020 and we knew we could tell the story of
the infrastructure cost being something that ate up margin and that we
were still growing and we were on pace to you know keep it for a year
and show some growth and then sell it concept so we went to market in
february of 2020 and right as you guessed it there was this flu that
went around kind of affected our business a little bit and we had the
option of pulling back but laila and i were honestly you know uh just
like even-handed about being the gym business right we wanted to not
have that be the only thing in our lives the bankers ended up adjusting
our expectations and said you know i think uh and mind you this was
actually we weren't we were no longer working with uh the guy that was
uh referenced earlier he actually was just a council i we ended up using
a different firm i think i think we can definitely uh help you grow yeah
and get 45 for this business right and at this point we were fine with
that we just wanted out and not really out just more like we wanted our
focus back and so over the next three quarters our revenue and profit
continued to decline as the fluid raged on and once the second shutdown
hit the business really hit rock bottom in q4 so we had gone from like
three to four million dollars a quarter in profit to like 500 grand in

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 profit in q4 of 2020 right uh and so
the bankers suggested that we stop the sales process and try you know
try again once the flu had gone away right but lately the guy layla and
i were kind of yet again really determined to be out of pain and so we
told them to just you know keep going with the process and so they hit
up all the private equity firms again and lo and behold we got a few
replies and some firms were interested in buying our company at rock
bottom what a surprise right and those replies after a lot of phone
calls and meet and greets and information requests turned out to be two
offers uh for the company and then you know for context i i can't show
the actual numbers of the trailing uh 12 that they came up to this for
2021 but i can tell you that they just consistently straight line went
up um so basically q4 q1 was kind of like the bottom of it like december
of of q4 of 2020 was like the absolute bottom and that's really because
because there was almost no hope either i mean like it had the second
round of shutdowns a lot of gyms had shut down it was just kind of
looking bleak no one decided et cetera and so i'll bring you up to speed
kind of internally we realized that we would have to build this business
to run on its own because we didn't know if we

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 were going to be able to sell it and we
knew we weren't going to like want to shut it down or something like
that there's too many families that relied on us too many employees too
many customers like it just it didn't make sense and so beyond that uh
tactically we started an outbound call center so that we can have a
second channel so we started to take the steps that we knew we should do
and from the feedback that we'd had from the first round which was like
you need a second channel it needs to be less branded to you etc this is
important to understand uh over the next 12 months i stopped attending
all product meetings all client-facing calls all client-facing events so
i didn't show up to my events like there was nothing uh we built an
outbound call team that did 50 of our sales volume and we promoted a
team of generous become the face of the consulting brand overall and so
the all that remained for me was a weekly 101 with the ceo a weekly
executive call team that was 90 minutes and quarterly meetups internally
so i was no longer public facing at all it was only internal that i was
kind of facing and so now let's get back to where it was interesting so
we signed and accepted an loi and at this point you know the profits had
gone up

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 significantly from from kind of the q4
bottom and i have to skip the actual uh numbers of what was around there
i can just tell you the the overarching number which was which ended up
being uh 46.2 and so here was the decision-making process and that's
what i want to get into which is like okay so what did you guys end up
doing and why all right because during this process the business kind of
almost shot out of a gun 2021 and kind of had a really strong rebound
and that's obviously why there was way more people who were interested
first there was two and then there's two more interested parties and so
we had a handful of private equity firms that saw that okay they saw the
bottom they saw the the fast rising back and they're like wait we could
buy a company that just did you know 15 million in ebitda a year ago or
two years ago and we they can bank on the fact that it'll probably do
that again let's dive in all right so that's the back story so these are
the considerations the story slash milestones that i was telling myself
the money energy head space team resources future vision best decisions
for the business and ultimately why i decided what i decided to do i
wish i could have given you more visuals for this but i but i did this
this already took me a lot of time to transcribe all my notes

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 into one presentation and so there was
there was two kind of commodities i and and it was really kind of having
this like devil's advocate in my head conversation that was going back
and forth and i even just put these directional arrows to like what i
said first and then what i responded with mentally i'm sharing these
thoughts with you because i i want to show that like i don't think these
thoughts ever go away you know what i mean like i i said and this is
like i mean i was like i need a sale to be legit you know as an
entrepreneur and then a friend of mine was like dude you already have
seven successful exits and a handful for multiple millions right and i
was like well yeah he's like you do seven million a month right now like
you're legit i was like huh okay uh he's like this is not a reason to
sell business i was like okay that's fair um i was like but a big exit
is an entrepreneurial rite of passage right and he's like so jeff bezos
suck elon they're not legit because they didn't exit their businesses i
was like that is also a good point i was like well there's kind of like
the four-minute mile component like there's no e-learning companies that
really sell for you know or personality-driven brands that that are
selling for these types of numbers not many at least and so i could
prove that

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 you know these types of models are
soluble i was like well can i just prove that i have a higher net worth
and keep it i was like that's also not a good idea or not good reason to
sell it you know another story was like you can't have more than one
thing and so that's why you should sell but you know in terms of keeping
it it's like well you just need to level up your skill set like there
are it is not physically impossible there are other entrepreneurs who do
this and so you just need to be better and this is just a great growth
opportunity so that's not a good reason to sell i'm like all right fair
i was like ah it's a big nice few to everybody who doubted and you know
spoke out against me over the years and then it's just like you're
better than that that's also not a good reason to sell so i'm showing
this stuff very candidly you can reinforce uh the lesson of selling my
gyms and so the big lesson there and this is one that i've spoken about
a lot is that you know sometimes you have to give up what you have in
order to give up to get the bigger thing that is unknown so you have to
you have to let go of something that you do know that is good in front
of you for something that you don't know that could potentially be great
and it kind of hinges on the idea that what we don't do are the things
that we regret rather than the things that we do and then fail out that
was that's kind of the story uh there and

13 00:12:00.000 --\> 00:13:00.000 the keeping argument that is like well
that might be the wrong lesson to learn like maybe you needed to exit
those things but it doesn't mean you need to exit everything it's making
sure that we apply the correct lesson to the story and that might not be
the right lesson from that story i was like okay that's fair and then
you know finally doing a sale early selling the the majority portion of
the business would unbrand me somewhat from the fitness industry because
it's it's still something that drives me a little nuts uh it might also
be because of how i look so that's possible just being real like i still
see comments are like hey man i still find your content valuable even
though i'm not a gym owner and i'm like i haven't made a gym piece of
content in three years i'm glad like it's just funny and i consciously
made that decision in 2019 when i rebranded my podcast uh from jim mulch
secrets uh and i hadn't spoken about your stuff in a while but i
consciously rebranded it to the game which you can check out if you want
and so my keeping story around that is like people have already moved on
from that dude like a handful of comments is not like what everyone
thinks about right you're not just like some gym dude you already have
the majority of your money is made outside of gyms now i was like well
yeah but people don't know that and so anyways these are the stories i
was

14 00:13:00.000 --\> 00:14:00.000 telling myself at this time right and
so next is kind of like what are the what are the money money things
that i was telling i was like okay well selling cash would be nice but
the keeping argument is uh well after it you'll have a tax event so
you'll actually be you'll have to give a portion of that to the
government it'll actually net decrease your net worth because you
already have that value in equity and because of the amount of money you
already have so my wife and i at this point are probably taking from
those two businesses about 45-ish million in dividends it's not really
going to materially change your your living which is true other thing
though is that from a selling perspective it's like i can i can take
that cash and then i can reinvest it and then all i have to do is just
make the delta right so it's like i can take you know whatever cash i've
received there i can invest it and then i can build something else and
what i'd have to do is make up the net difference between what i do on
my own what my cash grows into versus what that 66 would be worth in
five years right and so that's the that the net delta difference and i
was like i feel like that would be still a pretty

15 00:14:00.000 --\> 00:15:00.000 strong argument for uh doing the sale
the flip side is what am i going to buy that's going to make me the same
amount of money that i could from this company that's clearly going to
you know triple and then you know triple in value and go back to what it
was worth um you know pre-flu fair argument on the on the other side
it's like well you're super super concentrated you know diversification
is not a bad diversification's not a bad idea and then i quoted warren
is a hedge against ignorance do you feel like you're in this space do
you feel like you don't like that the companies that you have you don't
know anything about um well no i actually feel like i know more about
the stuff that i'm doing okay well then you don't need to have
diversification just go all in on the things that you know and then they
will grow disproportionately which candidly my life is an example of
that so it's hard to argue against that point you know rich people sell
wealthy people never sell another argument for keeping it yeah uh i
could also take out debt and still continue to own the whole thing kind
of refinance the business and still keep 100 ownership if i did that but
the problem for me from that perspective is i knew that i would never do
that because i was already very tired at that point in running an entire
another process from scratch was something that i just knew i wasn't
going to be willing

16 00:15:00.000 --\> 00:16:00.000 to do at least on any short time
horizon i was like okay well you can still do debt to fuel like m a and
start doing acquisitions and just use that as the umbrella brand and i
was like um well a couple things one i didn't have the debt
relationships too i didn't know m a at that level buying majority of 30
40 million you know 10 on the low side 30 40 on the high side size
companies i was like i don't i don't that's those are mistakes that
could potentially like undo everything i've done and i'm just not
willing to uh to quote a friend of mine i bet the empire for a pot of
gold that was kind of the argument against uh just using debt to fuel m
a the the final you know keeping argument for for money was like after
tax you're almost gonna get the same money as if you just take out debt
on the company tax-free and that is true in theory uh but it's unknown
based on promises from bankers that's not 100 because a lot of times
they may inflate things uh just fyi side note bankers will inflate
things for you because they want you to sign on the dotted line to work
with them big picture consolidated from this is that like the money
wasn't going to change my

17 00:16:00.000 --\> 00:17:00.000 life in either direction whether i
sold or i kept it which brought me to the next one which is energy and
heb space on one level it's like the story is you can't have more than
one thing which i'm a very big proponent of the the counter to that is
while riches people own lots of things okay well that's also true too
but i think the main difference and i'll i'll hit on this later is that
i think you can only have one active thing split split attention is one
of the most dangerous things in entrepreneurship and i can tell you that
when i did split my attention when i started another company um and then
a third company my revenue pretty much just continued to flatline so
doing more things just does not like you have to focus and i think that
you can have multi lots of things that are going on but you can only
have one active thing so like if i own a building i'm not active in that
i could invest in apple and i'm not active in that and so you can't own
lots of things it's just to make sure that what you're owning is not
owning you the next point here is that selling is a story it's not
reality so it's like the idea that i'm just gonna like walk away
magically and not care about the company or the employees or the or the
customers it's just that's

18 00:17:00.000 --\> 00:18:00.000 a story i'm telling myself in my head
there's still 100 going to be things that i'm sleeping and you know
going to bed and thinking about the team and the company and all that
stuff and so it's like you you're not gonna get what you think you're
gonna get from from selling i was like yeah but i could treat it like
other portfolio companies because i'm just it's it's kind of
redistributing my net worth you know accordingly across more more
enterprises and then i could care about them more evenly whereas here
it's disproportionate in terms of like lopsided for my net worth um so i
was like okay that's fair another strong argument for keeping is like
you'll grow faster never selling just never sell and let it compound tax
free the counter you know for that is like i just have to outpace that
delta what the cash can make me from investing plus what i'm going to
make on my own uh versus what that two-thirds share uh would grow into
right that's what i have to make up if i can make that up then it would
make sense and then this one was actually from my closest friend he said
what's the objective what problem are you solving you said i feel like
you just chose the nuclear option of like okay you know i i want to get
headspace back and so therefore i must uh you know

19 00:18:00.000 --\> 00:19:00.000 sell sell two-thirds you know sell
some majority of my company he said why don't you just match the
conditions right like what is what do you imagine life to be like when
you have sold majority uh and then look at what those conditions look
like and then match them in your current condition and then you can keep
the company and still have the effective sale that happens in your mind
and uh i was like that is a fair point but you know my counter is that
like i don't think i can do that i feel like i'm still i would imagine
it's like having kids where even if you're spending zero time you know
taking care of the kids even when they go to college you're still
thinking about them right they're still taking up shower time they're
still taking walk time they're still taking up morning coffee chat time
right and so those are kind of some of the head space considerations i
had team resources the big line here is that uh you know when you sell
sell a company you you lose the resources right i'm so used to being on
top and having a lot of leverage in my decisions it's way more just
deciding at this point like i'm not doing a ton of doing um within any
of the portfolio companies and so giving up that kind of all those
resources like hey if i'm like hey i want to go recruit somebody i just
go to the recruiter and say hey can you

20 00:19:00.000 --\> 00:20:00.000 recruit this person right if i want to
like go build a site or i want to go put a book on amazon i just say hey
can you go put this book on amazon and then it just gets done right so i
would lose that and that might actually be a big asset for what i wanted
to do next and actually allow me to move faster right so that is a is a
strong argument for keeping it right so these were these are the four
thoughts that i had written down during the process was like okay well i
could lose the team and but like i could coach them to become like the
type of people that could work you know at acquisition.com it's like
well different needs require a different team that's not a really good
shortcut like there's different different skills different backgrounds
different experiences etc that's not really good to try and retrofit a
team that was not designed for this right you know obviously i love the
team they've been with you since the beginning this is me arguing to
myself yeah but i need to give them room to grow and if i'm still there
kind of on top of it they're not going to be able to like blossom into
what i think they can they can really truly grow into you could make
your employees wealthier you know if you kept it you could you know do
some sort of esop program there which is an employee stock ownership
program i was like yeah but they can also become

21 00:20:00.000 --\> 00:21:00.000 wealthy um through the stock ownership
plan that the new you know owners would put in it's like okay that's
kind of move richest guys all said that they regret selling their teams
that's something i talk to people who are wealthier than me and they're
like they all regretted doing it the counter to that is but they're all
really wealthy doing their next thing so you know i get i and i can
understand the i can understand both sides of it future and vision uh in
terms of like what i want my my my life to be like this could be the
cash cow to build the the conglomerate you know that funds all of these
new acquisitions that i built into my conglomeration i was like yeah but
i could use the cash from the sale to do the same okay fair um the
version of me that i want to be can own multiple companies without
running them yes um but you still need to give you know like like that's
not reality for you right now and then you know finally here you'll
still care about uh the team the same and or still care about the
company the same but you'll just have given up the upside it's like so
you're still gonna do the same mental work and mental decisions and
strategic playing the way you always are but you'll just give up the
upside on the counter that i was like yeah but i'll still have four

22 00:21:00.000 --\> 00:22:00.000 companies rather than one and that's
going to really distract me from what i want to do ultimately which is
acquisition.com and so um that was kind of like the future and vision
component of it all right and so the last thing before i'll tell you why
i made the decision that i did is the business component you know on one
side i was like okay do you want to do what is required to get to 200
million i could just do the playbook that the private equity is going to
do because i know what their playbook is and so i could just do that so
that's an argument right you know businesses always go up in value over
time right unless they don't in which case they become sellable so it's
like if you keep it and it goes up then like you would still own the
thing and it would be making more money in the future so the value goes
up and you get dividends the whole time which is why business ownership
is very lucrative but in case it doesn't in which case you don't make
any money and the thing that you have has no value right um you know
they don't have a magic pill they're not gonna do anything you don't
know how to do it's like yes but they're gonna put all their focus on it
and i am not because i'm doing other things that i want to do you know
imagine what you're going to learn watching them do m a if we sell it

23 00:22:00.000 --\> 00:23:00.000 yeah but you don't need to learn you
know learn from them to do that so that's a different you know
perspective on it if you want to do what they do just buy it from
yourself you know and have it have your your new self buy it from your
old self still go through the transaction mentally uh install the same
incentives run the same playbook as them but just own the whole thing
right um but i really thought about that i was like i feel like that's
it's fear that's driving that decision fear of losing what i have and uh
it's like hey you need to have the skill uh of being passive well i
already have that it's just not i just don't feel like i have that about
a company that i founded myself and then um you can always just use the
transition plan that i already designed during diligence that i
presented to them and just execute it yourself and it's like yeah i can
do that in theory but i don't know if it's going to be that clean and so
you know the one line summary for for this is like do i think selling or
keeping it is the best decision for the business i think that if i uh
keep the company i will increase my net worth more do i think the
company will realize

24 00:23:00.000 --\> 00:24:00.000 its potential if i keep it maybe maybe
not um i think that the people who were going to potentially buy it had
a very good skill set in growing companies of this size they're more
experienced in m a than me and so i think that the business would
benefit from that all right so what decision did i ultimately make i'll
give you my quick one-line summary of kind of selling and keeping after
giving you all those different variables uh for selling anything that
distracts from my berkshire hathaway will be a net loss so get into a
better boat and this is just the classic example of like everybody told
me that i was crazy when i was when i sold my gyms to start the
licensing company uh gym launch but it was because like what they saw in
front of them was six gyms that were making money and i was 26 or
something and they were you know like why would you give something up
that you worked so hard for and it's obviously making money and it's
because like in some way it's like i have to believe in me more than
they do because in their minds maybe that's what they think i'm limited
to capacity wise and i think that i can do

25 00:24:00.000 --\> 00:25:00.000 more uh and so that's the you know the
argument for selling the argument for keeping which is also very
compelling is you know become the person who can grow a cash compounding
conglomerate without ever selling ever you know warren buffett never
sells wholly owned companies he also says get into the best boat so he
has two pieces of advice that contradict themselves and uh they're both
very good and very very fair so what decision did i ultimately make
right so everyone has a plan until there's a check in front of them to
walk away for 46.2 so um it's one thing to say no in theory and it's
another thing to say no and you're one email away from that you know
money right and so uh these are kind of the soft decision frameworks
that i applied so the first one is that i had to acknowledge that there
was no wrong answer right so i knew that if i did either of those
directions ultimately i was still always going to be very wealthy and
none of it was going to make any material difference in my life and
whatever decision i tried to go to winners win and i would have probably
executed them either way and it probably wouldn't matter i knew also
from a happiness perspective that i'll probably be happy in either
direction and you know rationalize

26 00:25:00.000 --\> 00:26:00.000 whatever decision i made either way
that was like first and foremost none of this matters the second one is
like okay well you know is it i could still make a better decision
versus a worse decision even though they both might be quote or right
decision um which has just reminded me of this the story of the boy and
the horse you know father buys a a boy a horse everyone in the town says
that's amazing the wise man says time will tell um then the kid falls
off the horse and breaks his leg and then everyone's like oh that's
terrible you bought the kid the horse and then the wiseman says time
will tell and then army comes around and recruits all the young guys to
go to the military and then you know half them die and then everyone's
like oh my god that horse was a blessing and then the watchman says time
will tell and so ultimately you kind of get where this is going right
that you don't really know whether something was good or bad until the
day you die and once you die it won't matter food for thought noting
that the three hardest decisions in my life uh quitting my job to start
my gym selling the gyms to start gym launch and then potentially selling
gym launch prestige and allen to start acquisition.com and go all in on
that uh each of those are the three hardest decisions of my life and
it's because i had to give up something that

27 00:26:00.000 --\> 00:27:00.000 i knew that gave me status that people
uh give me praise for um that most people considered big material
successes for something that was potentially bigger but completely
unknown so some the bird in the hand versus the two in the bush and the
thing is is that the hardest decisions i think in life are giving up the
one that's in your hand for the two that are in the bush um and so it's
like you have to take big risks sometimes to take the next kind of like
quantum leap you know take the next uh jump in order of magnitude so
these are the three hardest decisions i've ever made in my life and i
would say that in order they were most difficult quitting my job second
most difficult selling my gyms third most difficult uh selling these
companies are my majority interest in those companies so i i i give this
for context because i think that a lot of people who are listening to
this like you're probably in one of these decisions where you have one
in your hand and there's two in the bush like i think the hardest
decision of entrepreneurship or really life in general is when do you
give that up when do you not take the rational move and take take the
upside one and so for me i just knew that regret would be more

28 00:27:00.000 --\> 00:28:00.000 guaranteed from paths not taken rather
than failed execution this is a question that i get from layla and it
was uh one of the things that we both thought about a lot which is what
am i most afraid of like which of these decisions makes me the most
afraid keeping it or selling it and for me selling it was the thing i
was most afraid of because i was like what if i can't recreate what i've
done what if it's you know what it's a flash in the pan what if i'm a
one-hit wonder which was silly anyways because we already have seven
other businesses we've sold but i'm just telling you these are the
thoughts you have right and so yeah like what am i most afraid of that
was what i was most afraid of and so finally our second to last i had my
85 year old self test which i have i've talked a lot about and i'll talk
more about which is uh i run and i'm doing this almost like without
knowing now because it's been so ingrained because probably the most
effective distance framework i've had in my life and so i'm just going
to keep using it which is like what does 85 year old me think about this
decision and the honest truth is that 85 ruled me in this decision was
useless because he was like it's not going to matter anyways

29 00:28:00.000 --\> 00:29:00.000 do the thing that it texts you and you
know it's like what are you and like i'm talking 85 year old selfies
like what are you afraid of and it's like that i'm not going to be
successful if i do the next thing it's like well that's not a very good
reason not to do it and so i was like okay i guess that's fair does who
you want to become you know i was like well i really want to be a
rational investor i want to be somebody who makes rational decisions
he's like yeah but you know the ups like you're limited on your upside
in this and so like if you believe that your life can be bigger than
this then you're guaranteed to not get it if you don't take the big
jumps i was like okay that's fair and so that was kind of like the main
shifts that i got from my 85 year old self this was ultimately the one
thing that mattered most and i'll tell you finally why i decided to do
what i did the next thing that i do will be 10x or 100 times as big and
if anything takes my intent from that it will be a net loss i would hate
to look back and think i was holding on too hard to what i had and
didn't have enough faith or i could have if i took the leap and believed
before sing and so at every level the fog is bigger but so too is the
reward and so like as you you

30 00:29:00.000 --\> 00:30:00.000 know climb the mountain right if you
fall there's further to hit the ground um in terms of your perceived
failures but like you still have to take jumps to hit the next
mountaintops and so i think that was ultimately the biggest reason for
why we decided to do what we did and i'll tell you one interesting thing
which is that like i felt the loss of the business but i didn't feel the
gain of the money the money really i didn't feel it at all um and so
that was kind of interesting so i felt like the loss of resources i did
feel some level of relief for about three days and then it was back to
normal which was nice and then now that we are back in this in this in
this season of building i can tell you 100 that this was 100 the right
decision um i you know obviously i'm going to rationalize whatever
decision i make but after really thinking through all of the different
angles this was the the right call uh because i can already see and feel
the momentum it's so nice to be back in the trenches again i love
building things um i am a builder

31 00:30:00.000 --\> 00:31:00.000 and so uh it's great to build not only
my own business but to build all the portfolio companies and so i'm just
i'm learning so much more i'm being exposed to a lot more things which
allows me to make more lessons and you know the the mission of
acquisition.com is to document and share the best practices of building
world-class businesses and so you're like why does alex make these
videos part of it is because of that like i wish that elon and i wish
that that jeff and i wish that you know warren you know wrote books and
made youtube channels right of like what they were thinking about at
every given you know part of their journey because i hope that 30 40 50
years from now like we were like man if you look at alex in his 30s what
he was deciding what he was thinking about and looking in his 40s what
he was deciding what he was thinking about i want i wanted these videos
to be kind of like proof of that so that they could hopefully help
others retrace the path but i am very very confident that the decision
that we made was the right one i just can't tell you the amount of like
creative energy it was like the moment we actually made the decision it
was like my future unlocked again like i couldn't see past

32 00:31:00.000 --\> 00:32:00.000 making the decision to sell it was
like it was like i had to make this decision before the rest of the
opportunities uh in my life opened up and so um i think i made a tweet
that was shared a zillion times which is like the heaviest thing in the
world is an iron or gold but it's an unmade decision and so i think and
i made that during the time when i was when i was making this decision
to sell or not and so i think that for a lot of us there's these unmade
decisions that weigh us down and like they eat up so much of our mental
capacity that we just need to free ourselves up and and do it uh and
pull the trigger those are the soft decision farmers that i allowed
myself to to think through um and if you didn't catch in the beginning i
have nothing to sell you i have no masterminds then coaching programs or
mentorships for sale i do have a 99 cent book if you want to give 66
cents of that to to amazon uh it's got three thousand five star reviews
it's the first of ten books that i'm making kind of detailing the
process of of scaling a business i have a course that goes with that
that's for free you don't even have to opt in for it so it's not like an
email collection it's just i think that the highest leverage thing that
most people can do is is improve their offer

33 00:32:00.000 --\> 00:33:00.000 that's the first place that i start
with all the businesses that we take on that we invest in and so if
you're curious like what we actually do we we invest in companies that
are doing between one and ten million in profit uh typically within uh
the e-learning or service space so uh you know chains of of brick and
mortar service businesses that want to license or want to franchise or
people who already have a niche uh that they have to find out that they
do business services too so it's like oh i'm i'm good at you know
bookkeeping i'm good at helping lawyers improve their practices whatever
stuff like that are the types of niche licensing businesses that we go
after because that's our playbook and so we work with those businesses
to scale them to you know 30 50 million plus and i make these videos for
everyone else to hopefully get there so that we can have the opportunity
to um you know invest in your business and help you help you go to the
next level so anyways this is part one uh this was just like the
thoughts behind the decision i will do another video or two in terms of
what i learned about the negotiation process i learned about explaining
what i learned about the sales process overall in other videos this one
i wanted to

34 00:33:00.000 --\> 00:34:00.000 walk through kind of what i was
thinking about for myself and everyone for why we decided to to do that
and then ultimately sell the two-thirds stick hope you found value in
this and if you did watch another video and i'll see in the next ones
