Q&A. From Sales God to Scale God | Ep 989

Summary

The Game with Alex Hormozi

Episode 989: Q&A. From Sales God to Scale God

Release Date: January 8, 2026

Host: Alex Hormozi

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Episode Overview

This Q&A-heavy episode dives into pivotal business growth topics from scaling a sales-driven company to building sticky recurring revenue models and leveraging brand authority. Alex Hormozi provides tactical and philosophical insights as he fields live questions from entrepreneurs navigating multi-million dollar revenue goals, market-specific challenges (like hiring in the UAE), and building globally influential brands. The conversation is fast-paced, candid, and brimming with practical advice for listeners eager to grow beyond personal salesmanship into true organizational scale.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Breaking the Founder Bottleneck: Scaling Beyond Personal Sales (00:00–07:31)

• Situation: A business owner in the UAE is generating $6M revenue, wants to hit $24M, but is personally responsible for $4M of sales despite a seven-rep team.
• Challenges Identified:
  • Market constraints (e.g., local hiring regulations and office space requirements).
  • Overreliance on founder’s own sales production.
  • Underinvestment in hiring and agent training.
• Alex's Analysis & Advice:
  • Don't sweat small operational setbacks: Office negotiations and their costs are relatively inconsequential compared to the upside of scaling.
    • “If it takes you a month extra to try and nickel down...who cares? You make 500,000 a month right now. That's two and a half days of work is generated.” (03:44)
  • Role Evolution Is Mandatory: “At some point, your identity will have to shift from sales God to sales training God...it's about not how good I am at closing, but how good I can make anyone at closing.” (04:31)
  • Codify and Transfer Success: Winners often don't know why they win—Document every winning behavior to make sales success repeatable through training.
  • Invest in People, Not Just Personal Output: "If you hard block for reinvesting in the team, you will get disproportionate returns. You will make more than a million dollars back getting each of those other guys an extra one deal a year. Yeah.” (05:46)
  • Play the Long Game: "No one cares what you make. They're going to care that you built an infrastructure that has 80 guys or 100 guys. It's knocking 30 million a year..." (05:08)
• Memorable Moment: Alex gives permission—and a nudge—to “lose” a million a year deliberately to build the training system needed for scale.

Important Segment: Founder’s Sales Bottleneck and Transition — 04:31–07:31

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2. Building an Organization for Agent Growth & Brand Attraction (07:31–08:27)

• From Zero-to-Hero to Superhero: “Long term, the business you want...is going to be one where agents that are already good...are attracted to a brand because it’s big enough that you can start feeding them leads...You don’t have to start taking these people from zero to hero. You can just take heroes and make them superheroes.” (07:34)
• Reinvest in Brand: As you grow agent numbers and revenue, allocate profit to “consistently reinforcing your brand,” making your firm the obvious choice for top producers.

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3. Recurring Revenue Realities: Making Memberships “Consumable” (08:27–14:37)

• Question from Max (Money School / Chinese Entrepreneur Focus):
  • Goal: Build a $1M/month membership model from content and community.
  • Current status: 75 founder members, $75k total, $1k lifetime access charge.
• Alex's Deep Dive on Recurring Models:
  • Education Doesn't Stick: “The day before you know how to advertise, advertising is unbelievably valuable. The day after you know: why would I pay for something I already know how to do?” (10:15)
  • Service must be "consumable":
    • E.g., Weekly 3D-printing blueprints, new vetted real estate deals, constantly updated ad creatives for gyms—something members need to return for over and over.
  • Membership Value Needs Weekly/Monthly Renewal: “Last week's news is no longer valuable. This week's news is.” (11:20)
  • Differentiate One-Time Value & Recurring Value:
    • High upfront charge for transformational knowledge, lower monthly for new, incremental, “consumable” value.
    • “If you charge $10,000 up front and then $500 a month...As long as the ongoing value surpasses the $5, usually by 3 or 4x, then you’re good to go.” (13:20)
  • Network Effects & Niching: “Ideally, in what way can I make it so that each additional member...actually adds value?” (14:10)
• Actionable Takeaway: Recurring business models must offer something that’s continually needed and consumed, not just “knowledge transfer.”

Important Segment: Recurring Revenue & Consumable Value — 10:00–14:37

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4. Authority and Proof: The Power of the Messenger (14:37–16:58)

• Question from Max: How to become Alex’s global Chinese partner and spread his message to 15M entrepreneurs?
• Alex’s Candid Response:
  • Proof Is Everything: “If I were to partner with someone, I would want them to be bulletproof from a proof perspective...Anyone can repeat the words. The idea that why does my content outperform yours? It's because the messenger is 80 or 90% of the context within which the message is received.” (15:04)
  • Authority Decreases Risk: “Authority is compelling because it actually decreases risk. And so we listen to an authority because we don't have to spend nearly the mental effort to deduce whether this is true.” (15:33)
  • Quote: “Elon can tweet, I'm shitting on a toilet right now. And it'll get 200 million views because Elon's the richest man in the world...the backdrop is so embedded in the message that they're inextricable.” (15:12)
  • Be the “Lucky General”: Substance and track record trump everything.
• Key Lesson: To carry and grow someone else’s brand/mission, you must first have irrefutable proof yourself.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Limiting Beliefs in Scaling:

  • “At some point, your identity will have to shift from sales God to sales training God.” — Alex Hormozi (04:31)

• On Not Over-Optimizing Small Costs:

  • “If it takes you a month extra to try and nickel down, who cares? You make $500,000 a month right now...” — Alex Hormozi (03:44)

• A Membership’s Weak Point:

  • “The day after you know how to advertise, why would I pay for something I already know how to do?” — Alex Hormozi (10:15)

• On Authority:

  • “It's actually a more efficient way to consume information, to follow authoritative sources, because it takes less cognitive load.” — Alex Hormozi (15:36)

• On Building Brand for Talent Magnetism:

  • “The long term, your big brand should attract talent and reinforce high status so that people would rather be with you and get mentorship and help from you for their careers.” — Alex Hormozi (08:12)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Founder Bottleneck & Team Building Reality Check: 00:00–07:31
• Brand as Recruitment Magnet & Growing Beyond the Founder: 07:31–08:27
• Building Sticky Recurring Revenue (Consumable Model): 10:00–14:37
• Authority, Proof, and Messenger vs. Message: 14:37–16:58

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Final Takeaways

• Scaling from “sales god” to “scale god” demands an intentional identity shift, reinvestment in people, and codifying what actually works.
• Recurring revenue in educational businesses hinges on delivering value that must be consumed repeatedly, not just once.
• The credibility and proof-point of the messenger make or break influence and expansion, especially in global partnerships.

This episode is rich in both tactical and mindset-level shifts for ambitious entrepreneurs focused on multiplying their impact (and income) beyond their personal efforts, with Hormozi’s direct, no-ego advice throughout.

Transcript

[Alex]

I have now the distinct pleasure of doing lots of Q's and A's for businesses selling to rich investors and entrepreneurs who are trying to avoid taxes. You do $6 million in revenue. You'd like to be $24 million in revenue. And what's stopping you is that you're 68% of your revenue, despite the fact that you have seven agents.

[Business Owner]

Yes, seven plus me. And I'm 4 million of not to brag.

[Alex]

I don't know if you notice. Okay, cool. So why can't we do more? So each agent, you have 70 agents that now do 2 billion in aggregate. Are they unskilled?

[Business Owner]

No, I'd say the industry average. Two of them are quite young and good for their age. So they've done a few hundred thousand dollars each month. 21 one's 23. So for their age, they're 10. And then to be honest.

[Alex]

Okay, so let's just skip here and say that you have enough human beings in your market who could do this. You have metrics for their funnel process.

[Business Owner]

To be honest, I've just been designing the system.

[Alex]

So you're good with your model? Yeah. Right. Can you afford to do good margins in your 6 million so we can skip money?

[Business Owner]

Yeah, we have about 4 million there.

[Alex]

Fantastic. And that's tax free, by the way. Manicar is the issue.

[Business Owner]

There's one unique issue in my market.

[Alex]

Which was my talk. So it's manpurization. Why can't we do more? Yeah. So what's the unique thing about your market?

[Business Owner]

Yeah, so in the uae you need Spanish.

[Alex]

Yeah, it's cool.

[Business Owner]

You need the office before you can hire the person. She can't hold this because everyone needs a visa. So you actually have to make a big leap. Take the office for 40 people and sign a four year contract because the government will come inspect.

[Alex]

How much does that cost the office.

[Business Owner]

That we're negotiating at the moment in dollars? Like 350,000 plus for them.

[Alex]

Per year? Yeah, per year.

[Business Owner]

Okay, so yeah, we're negotiating 4 million.

[Alex]

Profit, but you can make 3.6 and then have all the scaling opportunity.

[Business Owner]

You know, we negotiate in the office now.

[Alex]

Yeah, 10% of your profit reinvestment and grow the business. Okay, so what's the issue?

[Business Owner]

Higher end of talent, I guess, because I'm.

[Alex]

So that's not the problem anymore. So we nicked that site.

[Business Owner]

It's lower risk.

[Alex]

Thanks for being a support, by the way.

[Business Owner]

I've had a good year.

[Alex]

Well, not that good. You gotta scale. Okay. So your market's obviously not an issue.

[Business Owner]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Okay, so let's take out your four.

[Business Owner]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Two million is what it is. And so seven people equals $2 million. So say $300,000 per person, just using rough math. So if you want to get to 24 million, you need 80 reps. Yeah. Okay, cool. So you need whatever, 73 more reps than you currently do. What are you doing right now to acquire agents?

[Business Owner]

Yeah, not much. Like nothing, to be honest. Yeah, nothing.

[Alex]

Well, yeah, that explains the.

[Business Owner]

We've only got four desk space left.

[Alex]

So we're in this like, dude, I'm so past this. So I'll give you this, clarify. There are some negotiations that I have made in my life that were so dumb in retrospect. Put it differently. If you were going to get office space, for sure, if you want your goal, right, the difference in cost of office space between this space and a better negotiated space for the same space or this space and yet another Office A at a good price or office A at a mediocre price versus Office B, whatever the dump to there is, you negotiate to $300,000 a year. So you save 50 pounds. Who gives a shit, right? Sell a house, whatever. The point is that, let's say it takes you extra time. It's like you make 500,000amonth right now.

[Business Owner]

Yeah.

[Alex]

So what's that? That's two and a half days of work is generated. Right. You can generate the difference in two and a half days if it takes you a month extra to try and nickel down. Who cares? You have the one you're doing right now.

[Business Owner]

We had to submit a plan application. Basically waiting on that. And then we're done. Price is negotiated.

[Alex]

It is negotiated.

[Business Owner]

I mean, we trying to get approval from the government for change it into this space.

[Alex]

So you're going to do this space. You have four desks open right now?

[Business Owner]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Okay, so that's like 50% growth. So why not more?

[Business Owner]

I guess I don't take the time to train people as much as I should. So I need to hide that out because obviously I'm earning a lot and it's low risk for me and better for me to keep billing what I'm billing. So I need to hire the person that does the hiring.

[Alex]

I'll softly push back. I'm not against it. This is more just figuring this out. At some point, your identity will have to shift from sales God to sales training God. And it'll be about not how good I am at closing, but how good I can make anyone at closing. And so fundamentally, you do behaviors you Do a big laundry list of behaviors that you do and you being really clear about what those are. This is what's tough with winners in general is that a lot of people don't know why they win. Michael Jordan, way better player than coach. But there are things that you do that if we codify those things, we can get somebody else to do those things. And if we do that, then they'll sell more and make you money. Right now you can outburn anyone. You will not be able to in the business you want to build out, burn everyone. And so the sooner you can bridge that gap, the sooner you'll start building the business you ultimately want. Now, I'm sure on some level your ego is tied to how much money you made. But like big game, right? No one cares what you make. They're going to care that you built an infrastructure that has 80 guys or 100 guys. It's knocking 30 million a year on and you're four. Right. And I'll say this, I think you keeping your chops, being the aspirational person, I think there's elements of that, especially in the space you're in. Makes sense. I think that if you were to say right now 25% of your time, so you lose a million dollars a year, I'm saying roughly you hard block for reinvesting in the team. You will get disproportionate returns. You will make more than a million dollars back getting each of those other guys an extra one deal a year. Yeah.

[Business Owner]

It's also like I do all the content, so all of my leads are organic. So like. Yeah, certain time is.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Business Owner]

So it's also.

[Alex]

Okay, so back to this. What do you have to do to get. Or you should fill those like tomorrow. Right. You have four desks. Why not use it?

[Max]

Yeah.

[Alex]

But your entire marketing, you are in the hiring and training business. Ironically, that's the business you're in. He's our president here at bcq. He was the former president of Real brokerage. Yeah. Super familiar with the space. But all this time doing hiring, training, all recruiting, all he did was recruit agents. And so he knew that they had a system. If you work through our system and you have our resources, you're going to sell X houses per year people, period. So once you know that input, output, it's just like how many people can we put through this black box? Right now you don't have the black box because it's up here.

[Business Owner]

So as we go through the process now. But you get to document successful sales in each Step and then trying to get it.

[Alex]

When you walk into a house, where do you sit? Has he even walked you through the process of selling a house before? No. Okay. This is called the game plan. Let's walk you whatever. You have to script all this stuff out. Yeah. Anything someone says to a customer should be scripted. Okay. I think you actually can get to $24 million a year. You could totally do it in 24 months if you shift your perspective from sales guide to sales training. God for sales recruiting. God. Yeah. Right.

[Business Owner]

To take that leap when the new office is done, you start trying to take it now.

[Alex]

Yeah. And I think that long term, the business that you want to ultimately build is going to be one where agents that are already good, that are already doing 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, are attracted to a brand because it's big enough that you can start feeding them leads. And then you don't have to start taking these people from zero to hero. You can just take heroes and make them superheroes. Yeah. That's where you want to be. Of course we have to build a brand, but going from seven to call it 20 or 30, and then this firm going to call it, you know, that'd be like 12ish, maybe 15 million a year that you'd be doing. They're doing a million a month plus. Right. You can actually reinvest a portion of those profits into consistently reinforcing your brand. The long term, your big brand should attract talent and reinforce high status so that people would rather be with you and get mentorship and help from you for their careers. Thank you. Thanks you guys. Make your girl feel nice.

[Max]

You know, Alex, you probably didn't know this, but I'm your long lost Chinese cousin from Australia.

[Alex]

I believe you.

[Max]

My name is Max. I take your mission very seriously. Within 24 hours of your book launch a month ago, I was so excited. Had 8 shots of coffee and I saw the light that morning. My study is a school community called the Money School. Inspired by you, I do what you do. But for the Chinese entrepreneur nurse, I had 75 members join within the first.

[Alex]

Week, charging a thousand dollars each lifetime monthly.

[Max]

One time I'm doing a family member stage. So it's one sub for life and then thousand dollars.

[Alex]

Okay, yeah, got it.

[Max]

I got two questions. The first one is I really want to hit the 1 million monthly rev target on school as soon as I can. What do I need to do?

[Alex]

Right now you're at 75k total. Yes. Okay, so what did you do to get your first set of customers I.

[Max]

Have a book, I have about 20,000 subscribers and I summarized your three books in Chinese.

[Alex]

What am I doing? If you're like, write another book, I'll send you some money. What is the consistent value that you provide the people in the community?

[Max]

So I've done this for many years and I've made. I'm not summarizing a book.

[Alex]

Okay. It's like I take your content.

[Max]

I've been a small time kol in Australia for the Chinese community. K opinion leaders.

[Alex]

Okay, guys on YouTube.

[Max]

Okay, so I have a group of audience based on.

[Alex]

Who's the audience?

[Max]

Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs who are starting are making some money.

[Alex]

Okay, got it. So the thing with membership, who here is a recurring revenue business? Well then this will. I'm going to go a little deeper on this because it's probably valuable for him, for you, in order to make a recurring revenue business actually recurring. One of the big mistakes in the education business, which is the way you're in right now, is that people will take something that is inherently valuable and try to bill for it like it's consumable. So education has super high one time value, right? The day before you know how to advertise, Advertising is unbelievably valuable. The day after you know how to advertise. Why would I pay for something I already know how to do? It goes from huge to zero. That is the problem with education in general. Everybody who has an education business wants to build continuity. Continuity is very hard to build. If you purely have education as the primary value proposition in a school community or any kind of recurring revenue business, you need to create or at least demonstrate consumable value. I'll give you a couple examples of this. So there is a super low churn community that does 3D printing in school. What they do is they find the hottest trending items and then they create the 3D blueprint. I don't know how this stuff works, but like what are the 3D blueprints? And then every week they upload those blueprints to their community. And so because it's trending, it's new, it's consumable. You consume this week's things and next week's. The trends are different. Right? News in and of itself is consumable. Last week's news is no longer valuable. This week's news is. Which is why new subscriptions do work. Right. Different example, there's a real estate business that did wholesale. They would find all the hot deals in an area, pre vet them, do their calculation and say These are all the hot list. And so every week at every local market, people in their community would see the building. If they liked it, they already knew, pre vetted. So that creates this consistent thing that gets consumed. And then next week there'll be new deals and some of those deals are gone. Like Gym Launch, we made new ads that we tested every single month that we would then give to the gym owners. So rather than spending money, wasting money on production and testing ads that don't work, we would pre film test and hand them only the winners. It would just take winning ads and run them. But what do you need next month? More winning ads. And so that's what gave Gym Launch the super high margins that it had and kept it sticky because it was media functionally rather than education. And so we sold the box which is like this is the gym launch system. This is how you run the gym. This is the price point, the sales process. Once you know the sales process, you know the scripting of the bundles, you have the white label stuff, you got it. It's zero value now. So what we do is we want to set like if you have inputs, you've got black box and then you've got output being money, right? This is your one time thing that's very valuable. You can only charge for it once. This is much smaller. You charge for it on a recurring basis. You sell the inputs to the machine. So with your business you'll probably have to niche down which is why niching is so valuable because you can actually create the machine and then sell the inputs. Like I couldn't make ads for 100 different businesses because they're all different. I can't test 100 different businesses. If you have a super new or beginner network, you teach them one, two or three different business models that would work and then you sell the inputs. Same way if you have medium and larger business owners, it has to be about something different, which is probably going to be network, it's going to be access group negotiated discounts that you can do on behalf of everyone. And that is going to be valued much less than something that's one time that's going to immediately make them more. Sometimes I think this is where a lot of entrepreneurs make mistakes is that there needs to be a very big discrepancy between what you charge that one time versus the true willingness to pay for the small recurring revenue component of the business. That's okay, provided it's sticky, right? Because if you charge $10,000 up front and then $500 a month after that, it probably would be relatively sticky if someone's willing to pay 10 and it's $500 a month. As long as the $500 a month was still like 10,000 buys you some time. But as long as the ongoing value surpasses the 5, usually by 3 or 4x, then you're good to go. So I would really just back into, how can I provide value to all these people? And ideally, in what way can I make it so that each additional member does not detract or dilute the value the community, but actually adds value functionally? That sort of network effect. Is that help?

[Max]

Second question. What would it take me to become your global Chinese partner to help share your message with 15 million overseas Chinese entrepreneurs?

[Alex]

You'd have to have credibility. Real talk. The reason that I think the content that I have has been able to perform really well is because I had the backdrop of the proof. The Alex Ramosi brand was built off of $100 million net worth. Prior to this. It wasn't like coaches coaching coaches about would have or, I've already done this and that's my proof. I don't need to do this. I do this because I like it. And I have other missions in my life. But that proof is the backdrop that everything stands on. If I were to partner with someone, I would want them to be bulletproof from a proof perspective in terms of what they had done to prove that they were. Because anyone can repeat the words. I mean, shoot, literally anyone can repeat the words. The idea that why does my content outperform yours? It's because the messenger is 80 or 90% of the context within which the message is received. Elon can tweet, I'm shitting on a toilet right now. And it'll get 200 million views because Elon's the richest man in the world. That backdrop is so embedded in the message that they're inextricable. And so obviously there's core components of value. But the why should I believe you? Is always the big blaring Vegas lights above everyone's head. Why should I? Because if you think about why is authority compelling, Right? Authority is compelling because it actually decreases risk. And so we listen to an authority because we don't have to spend nearly the mental effort to deduce whether this is true or not or to what degree. I think this is risky to follow. If Warren Buffett gives some sort of investing advice, most people would just say, Warren Buffett's one of the richest men in the world. He's arguably the best investor of our generation. Therefore, I will just listen to him. It's actually a more efficient way to consume information, to follow authoritative sources, because it takes less cognitive load. That being said, being high agency, as a person, you should separate those things. People aren't in general, but if you are a high agency person, you should be able to separate messenger from message. No one does though. And so for me, let's use Napoleon's quote, I'd rather have lucky generals if I were to do something like that. I would rather somebody have a big proof point that they can sit on. Then all of the content makes sense within that context.

[Max]

Thank you.

[Alex]

Thank you.