Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / She bootstrapped an empire that generated $100M in revenue, all before turning 28. This is Leila Hormozi’s story on building Gym Launch, Prestige Labs, ALAN & Acquisition.com

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She bootstrapped an empire that generated $100M in revenue, all before turning 28. This is Leila Hormozi’s story on building Gym Launch, Prestige Labs, ALAN & Acquisition.com · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Leila Homozi for Female Startup Club.
• 0:12
  Everyone, Dune here, your host and hype girl. In today's episode, we're learning from Leila Hormozy. Her businesses have collectively done $100 million in revenue, all before turning 28. We're talking about her story to get to this point, the magic to scaling these businesses, and some really key tactical advice for founders.
• 0:35
  Layla is an American entrepreneur, investor, speaker, and consultant. She is the co-CEO of Gym Launch, Prestige Labs, Allen, and Acquisition.com. Layla met her now husband, Alex, in 2016 when both were head down working to build their own businesses. They quickly realized that they were not just great partners in their personal lives, but also in business.
• 0:59
  Layla has become known for her skills in leadership and management and is frequently called upon by other business owners for her wisdom. If you love this episode and you get something out of it, please do shout about it from the rooftops. I really love it when you do that. And feel free to slide into my Instagram DMs anytime to chat. I always love to meet you and know what you're up to. This is Layla Hormozy for Female Startup Club.
• 1:26
  Leila, welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. I'm excited to have you here. I'm excited to be on. I'm looking forward to it. I felt really honored when your PR team dropped into my inbox saying that they had this brilliant female founder, nine-figure business owner ready to speak on the show. There's only a few women who have spoken on the show in that ballpark, so I'm excited to learn from you.
• 1:51
  Well, I hope I live up to the standard or the expectation. Pressure's on. No, I'm just kidding. We're going to have so much fun. I always love to start by getting the elevator pitch. And I know that you have a couple of businesses. You have a couple of businesses that are nine figures. Is that nine figures a year, by the way, or nine figures? Like, how does that break down? Yeah, yeah. Right now, all of our businesses together do about 85 a year.
• 2:16
  And so the 100 million came when we crossed it. And then people kind of like extrapolate because we won the award for it. I think what a lot of people don't know is you win those awards for lifetime. Right. And then but now we do do almost 100 million. So about 85. Hopefully next year it's 100. So I can just be like, there's no discrepancy. Holy shit. That's like a lot of money in a year.
• 2:38
  You're like really successful. That's cool. It's been crazy, honestly. And this all happened before 28, right? For you? Yeah. Holy moly. Mind is blown. Can you give us the, like, the elevator pitch on what these businesses are and who you are? You know, it's funny. It's like, I'm like, I'm a 28 year old girl from Portage, Michigan. And I just have been most of my life just obsessed with wanting to
• 3:07
  I think, you know, a lot of people like talk about the purpose of life. I think it's like to realize your potential. And so I think that business is a great way to express that. And so for me, it's like how my expression of myself and a fast way to facilitate my own personal growth is always through business and through a lot of other things, too. I think relationships are obviously a huge one, but in business, it's primarily relationships. I think it's the fastest way to do so. Our businesses started, kicked off with Gym Launch. Gym Launch was a service company that essentially was kind of like a non-franchise model for gyms.
• 3:37
  So it's like you've got the fee, you've got the business models, but there's not a name associated with it. And so we were kind of behind the scenes. And we happened to launch that business at a time when social media was extremely cheap. And so we were able to capitalize on all of this unexplored opportunity that nobody else had captured. And so it kind of just skyrocketed. You know, we went from zero to 28 million in just 20 months. And it was crazy.
• 4:02
  absolutely insane because I'd never run a business before. I'd never managed people before. I'd never done any of it before. I didn't even know how to do billing. I used to pay people. I like nothing. I knew absolutely nothing. Um, but I just knew I didn't, that this, we had to figure out how to capitalize on that opportunity. Do you mean by like paid ads, like Facebook ads and Instagram ads? Is that what you mean when you say that? Yeah, it was primarily paid. Uh, and that opportunity has since become much less appealing. Um,
• 4:26
  And it's switched to different platforms and different ways of monetizing. But that was when we kind of hit the market and built our reputation, our brand off of that. Since then, we started Prestige Labs, which was our supplement line. And the reason we saw the need for that was, you know, me and my husband were the ones who actually went and launched gyms for 11 months. So we just flew across the country, would go into someone's gym, sell a ton of people. Like the most I sold was 240 people in a month and do a gym. And then I'd sell all of them supplements.
• 4:53
  The thing was, I was telling them supplements that they could find on Amazon. So they'd be like, they'd pull up Amazon on the sale call and be like, just buy it here. And I was like, oh, this is so embarrassing. And we were like, well, we want to make sure that doesn't happen for our gym owners. So we start our own line. And that birthed Prestige Labs. And then from Prestige Labs, because we didn't have enough complexity in our lives, we decided to start a software company called Allen, which worked the leads for all of the gyms to ensure that they could get people into the facilities.
• 5:18
  And so we started those three on our own. And then we started essentially a holding company that we now take on. We take equity positions in other businesses and kind of put them into our portfolio. So right now we have seven. And those are all companies that we either own outright or own a large chunk of.
• 5:38
  What kind of businesses? So we do have one currently in the fitness space, but it's kind of a complementary business to Gym Launch. So it's easy to transfer our skill set and our knowledge there. We have one that is in the photography niche, and then we have one that is in the audiobook niche, and then just also a general mass market business opportunity. So we typically look at education and training businesses, as well as businesses that
• 6:01
  are going towards almost like a franchise or licensing model in brick and mortar. Because we understand brick and mortar extremely well, so we can help someone franchise or expand their licensing business in person, which that's kind of geared towards the entrepreneur who wants more of an exit, and they want enterprise value, versus there's also the education and training. We help a lot of those people learn how to take their education training business and turn it into an enterprise where it actually does have value so someone would want to buy it. Because that is what's becoming more popular nowadays, so there are a lot of firms who want to buy those kinds of businesses.
• 6:31
  And there's also just, you know, we take the stake in the companies, but some of them don't want to sell. They just want to learn how to have financial freedom for themselves. And that's something that we've been able to do for ourselves. And so now it's like, we want to be able to help other people do it. It's pretty cool.
• 6:42
  Yeah. You've got like the ultimate blueprint that you can essentially transfer across to different industries. Right. What's interesting to you when a business comes knocking on your door for your help? Like, what are you looking for when it comes to the founder or the team or the size of the business or the revenue or the profit or, you know, all those things? What are you looking at? You know, we've taken on different sizes. So the smallest that we'll take on is 8 million a year. And the largest that we have right now is doing almost 50. And the revenue's
• 7:12
  important to have over a baseline because let me put it to you like this. Like I can come in and I can help someone build out all their initial systems, but I'm not, I don't desire to do that. Um, it's almost like creating something out of nothing takes a lot more time and energy rather than fixing the broken things that already exist. So a lot of times what I like to do is to come into a business, especially if it's, I like around 10 million.
• 7:35
  Because I see all the things that are broken that are the reason they can't get to 30 or 50 million. And so that's where I feel like I get the most – that they get the most outsized returns from the relationship. And then in terms of a niche, we're typically looking at an unexplored opportunity. We know how to help someone. We see people who are – and it's all day, right? There's people who have these unexplored opportunities that nobody else is capitalizing on.
• 7:58
  that are, we just know, we're like, it's the makings of what we had in our three companies, which is just like, it's going to boom and explode. And the thing is, is that most of the times that they don't have someone helping them say like, here's how you catch all that attention, then they can't capitalize on it. It's the difference between why somebody, you know, has a couple million dollars per your business and then a 50. It's just knowing how to capitalize on the opportunity that's at hand and also understanding, is that truly a unique opportunity or is it an improvement opportunity? Right. And so I think it's kind of a traditional red ocean,
• 8:29
  And when you're saying that, is there like a clear example you can give us of like someone who was doing a few million and how they captured this opportunity that you speak of to get to, say, the 10 or the 50 or the 20 or whatever? Yeah. I don't want to expose our companies that we have staken, but I can tell you the one I own outright, which is Gym Launch, right? Yeah. When we came into that opportunity...
• 8:50
  You know, we were like, nobody is teaching gyms how to run their own ads and capitalize on this. They're not teaching them how you can put a dollar in and get $10 out right now. And instead, what they were trying to do is keep all their secrets to themselves. They were trying to do it for them. They were trying to teach them ways around it. But we all knew that we're in the inside circle, what was really making the most money. And so we said, well, what if we empowered everybody and taught everybody ourselves? There's nobody doing that right now. And so we saw the opportunity. We said, we're gonna go take it.
• 9:19
  And then the big piece, though, is that you can go fast enough to take it and not let everyone catch up with you. And I think that that's what a lot of people mistake is that they go and they take the opportunity. They don't move fast. They don't build the team. They don't build the infrastructure or they don't have the emotional capacity to deal with all the crap that comes along with it, that they can't grow so big so fast. You know, there's a reason why most companies want conservative growth is because it's much more sustainable. And in order to.
• 9:43
  capitalize on opportunity like the ones we're seeing now that the internet is a thing and businesses go up and down much faster, you have to be a different, like the structure has to be different. The infrastructure has to be different. How you do things is completely different than a traditional business. And I think a lot of people take traditional business infrastructure ideas and how they run things and how they do things from like what was taught, say, 5, 10, 15 years ago, and try to apply them to the age we have now. But it doesn't make any sense. We have the internet, it's completely different. And so, you know, I think a lot of those, the businesses that thrive
• 10:13
  If that makes sense. Yeah, totally. And I'm trying to understand like for gym launch specifically, like when the, the Facebook ads and you know, this kind of thing, it stopped being like the main thing to grow your business. How did you then grow? Was it like affiliates or was it just like word of mouth? Like what was that next growth phase for you? It's turning it into a completely different business, honestly, is what we did. Um, and it was probably a process of like two years
• 10:43
  less fast, easy money, because that was what it was. The industry has changed, right? The industry was very appealing. It was like you could make fast cash, you could get really rich off having a gym. Now you can still, but it requires much more work
• 10:57
  an effort on the owner's part. It doesn't mean you put a dollar and you get 10 out. It means you put a dollar and you might get $2 out, right? And then you have to know how to run your team efficiently, how to understand operations, how to understand financials. And so because the opportunity now requires the knowledge of all of those different realms, we have to then accommodate by
• 11:15
  teaching them all those different realms and making sure that they're well-rounded business owners. Because it used to be that somebody that just understood marketing could capitalize on these opportunities. They didn't even have to be that good at retention and they could make a ton of money. And now we have to say, we have to train them to be true business owners because this industry is not, it's being disrupted, right? And it's not as appealing as it was a lot of years ago because that was when it was at its peak.
• 11:37
  Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Totally. I've got it. And when you say like, you know, you wanted to grow really fast and businesses need to grow really fast to kind of capitalize on this kind of thing, you guys didn't take on investment, right? You bootstrapped the business. How did you or what kind of investment did you need to put in in the beginning? And how were you financing as you were growing when it came to gym launch? Yeah, we've always run all of our businesses off of client
• 12:07
  There's different ways to position businesses. Some people are at the low end of the market. They're the McDonald's. They're the cheap ones, right?
• 12:13
  then there's people at the high end of the market, right? Which is like a, you know, steakhouse or something like that. I prefer, and the strategy that we typically prefer is to be the steakhouse because what it means is that if I can charge you a lot more money for the experience, the knowledge, the atmosphere, you know, a lot more than just the product you're getting, the experience around the product, then I have all that extra money to put into building my team, to put into better customer service, to put into going above and beyond for the customer. And so I don't,
• 12:41
  We don't work with many businesses that are on the low end of the market because it's just really hard to bootstrap that. It's much easier, in my opinion, to build. I mean, it's probably more stress for people if they don't have a high stress tolerance, but to build something that costs more money, but then you have more money to put into innovation and R&D and all those things, you can make a better product. So it's worth more money. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
• 13:06
  And so what year are we talking about when you started Prestige Labs? And can we switch kind of trains of thought here and go into Prestige Labs and talk about how you grew that in the beginning and what the kind of strategies were to get that off the ground and what made it work and what picked up the momentum? Yeah. So I'll tell you what worked to start it and versus sustain it, right? To start it, we took our base of gyms and we made it
• 13:30
  perfectly catered to them. And that was our launch strategy is, you know, we have all these clients who trust us and want more from us. And so we're going to launch it to them. Then to continue growing it, we have to launch it to people that aren't our audience, right? And so we have to find franchises and licensing companies and other gyms, pools of buckets of gyms and personal trainers that want to sell those products. And so our strategy from there to grow, it was to find, you know, partners that we could partner with and they could send traffic our way.
• 13:56
  And then the third piece to that is that if you really want to take, you know, a commerce brand even bigger, there's you could go into stores and to physical locations or you could take it online and sell direct to consumer. But you have to be very careful to make sure that you don't, you know, screw your affiliates. And so we actually then started taking it direct to consumer because we didn't want to do the in-store route. I personally just hear nightmares all day of it. So I just didn't want to try it. I know more about direct to consumer online anyways.
• 14:24
  And so that's the route that we took. So it's a phase, right? First phase, launch to existing audience. Second phase, duplicate that by finding other people's audiences, launching to them. Then third phase, creating another level of customer, right? Which is instead of going through affiliates, we just go direct to consumer. Those things, though, have been spaced out over, you know, three and a half years. And it takes different kinds of teammates to run each one, right? So it's like the team has to expand to also accommodate.
• 14:52
  Right. You make it sound really easy, but I'm sure it's not. I think most things are actually pretty simple. It's just that we overcomplicate them in our minds because they seem all scary. For that, because, you know, I know that in the beginning you said with gym launch, it was like Facebook ads and that kind of thing in the very beginning before you moved into those next phases. Was it the same story with Prestige Labs, like outside of the community that you'd already built and you already launched to? Was it an ads play or was there something else kind of strategy wise?
• 15:20
  No, it's not an ad's play. You know, I would say that the unique thing about our company is that we use, I don't even know how many people say this. Most of them, it's just BS. We truly have the best products in the world. We have our friend who's a biochemist who graduated when he was 20. He put together these products. He brought two more scientists in from other countries. They put them together. And then because of that, we charge a lot of money because they are not cheap to manufacture at all.
• 15:45
  Okay. But then because we charge a lot of money, because they're expensive to manufacture, because they're quality products, we can pay large commission on those. And so we've actually paid out more in commission to our affiliates than we probably have taken out ourselves as profit to the business. And that's because if you want an affiliate strategy, then you have to ultimately serve the affiliate first, right? Which is like, well, then let's just pay them more than what everybody else pays them, right? Like let's have the best product. Let's have the best margins. Let's have the best payouts.
• 16:11
  And for affiliates, what is a good split? Is it like a 50-50 split or is it like they actually get more? No, on a product like that, if we were to give them more than 50%, we would be in the negative. So they get about 40%. Okay. And most supplement companies do about 10% to 20%. On a good day, they'll get 30%. And so we just priced it as high as we could at 40%.
• 16:35
  And the thing is, is that we also drive traffic to them. You know, we're doing follow-up email campaigns on their behalf that they get 40% of and other things like that. And so we just believe the more money we make them, the more money the company ultimately will make, the happier the customers will be. And how many like affiliates and for anyone listening, who's trying to build out an affiliate strategy, I'm just trying to understand like the blueprint that is easy for someone, not easy, but someone else can replicate kind of thing.
• 17:01
  How many affiliates should you be aiming for to bring on to the program? Or is it just like unlimited? If you look at like the average stats from an MLM, it's about one in 20 people that you bring on become a high producer or a consistent producer. And so that's the stats that we've gone off of and we have found to be true, which is just there you're going to have outsized returns from a very small amount of people. So the top 20% produce 80% of your revenue. It just is.
• 17:26
  And so you have to be able to funnel 20 people in knowing that one is going to come out, you know, a really top seller. And then catering to that top seller is how we structure a lot of our programs. Now, we obviously always try to make everyone successful, make sure we have the right onboarding and training and all that. But the stats say about the same. And that's the numbers that a lot of the really large commerce brands understand when they're pushing affiliates is that it's just going to be one in 20.
• 17:54
  So I would say do the math based on what is reasonable based on your price point. If you have an audience of 500 people, then it's reasonable to say that 50 could become top producers. What is a top producer for the, you know, and for us, we know, okay, if a gym drives in 100 clients, they're going to on average sell 70 of those clients supplements if they're a high performing gym. So then if we have 50 of them, you just do the math.
• 18:21
  And do you have affiliates outside of the gym owners that you go out and seek? And I have no idea what they could be, but like, say like YouTubers, for example, who are your affiliate partners who are pushing the product and that kind of thing? Or is it strictly the gym owners? We've done gym owners and personal trainers, and then we've expanded into online influencers. And so that's an interesting one, because I would say, again, it's like out of the ones we pick and we try to, you know, be tactful in who we decide on.
• 18:51
  become a consistent producer again. And that's because if you look at the age of influencers, an influencer typically wants to just post and not do any, they don't want to build a funnel. They don't want to have a landing page. They just want to post and like have the brand out there and give a discount code. Now, if somebody were to have a funnel and build a landing page, they would have, I mean, I, in the beginning, that's what I wanted our influencers to do. And I had to talk to many agencies and many people that work with influence. They were like, listen, most of them don't want to do that. They don't want to build a funnel or landing page. They just want to put the price out there.
• 19:19
  the percentage discount and do that. And I just understand cause I'm like, wouldn't you want to make more money? But like they don't because it's kind of scary to have a landing page and what if it doesn't work and I put all this time and I have to learn funnels and that's very complicated seeming. And so again, it's, you have to find a lot of people and kind of funnel them through. It's almost like if you're hiring salespeople, like if you hire salespeople, it's probably one in every 15 to 20 are going to stick. Um,
• 19:45
  And so it's kind of the same concept. It's like you put a bunch of people in the funnel and you kind of see who comes out the bottom after the process. And so for Gym Launch and Prestige Labs, it's kind of like if you were to just tell people, you know, what you should do is basically build out your affiliate network, like focus on that, build up your list of people and build your business that way. Or is there something that you would focus on first?
• 20:10
  I don't have a formula for it. I know that would be ideal, but I think you have to play to your strengths. That's what it is. We are good at doing that. I know lots of people who are terrible at it. Some people are much better at direct-to-consumer. Some people are much better at affiliate strategy. So I would say if you're looking, what's the difference, right? Well, direct-to-consumer, it's primarily just customer support.
• 20:33
  It's product, having a fantastic product, and customer support, having great customer support that people don't complain about. If you look at an affiliate strategy, it's having an economical product that can pay the affiliates and be a comparable price for the end user, as well as having a lot of training. So you have to have multiple levels of training for affiliates. You have to be able to train and onboard affiliates. You also have to be able to support and onboard the people that they sell.
• 21:01
  It is much more complex in my opinion. Right. Because I've done it in our supplement line and with our software, we went through the affiliate route. It's harder in my opinion, in terms of you have to be a really effective communicator because you have to know how to communicate to the affiliates as well as people below them and not piss off either one by the communication you give to each one. Versus if you just go straight to end user, it's harder because you're competing in a bigger pool typically, but you don't have to have as effective of communication strategies.
• 21:29
  So it's like pros and cons to either. It's kind of like pick your problem. Do you want your problem to be communication with affiliates or do you want your problem to be that you're competing against an ocean of other companies that are marketing a similar product? Yeah, that's so true. And I just wanted to ask you another question before I move on. When it comes to, we said that the split for Prestige Labs is probably like a 40% split. When it comes to the software or gym launch, is the split higher because it's a digital product?
• 21:57
  With the software, it was an affiliate model, but it was also more of a resale model, right? Which is we charge the affiliate a flat rate and then that affiliate can go around and sell it for whatever they want amongst some constraints, which is you cannot sell our product for lower than X, but they could sell it for as much as they want above X. So that was how we did it with the software, which is more of a reseller slash affiliate. And then with Gym Launch, we don't do an affiliate strategy at all. It's just we, you know,
• 22:25
  have our own sales team that sells to gym owners and those gym owners, you know, decide if they want to work with us or not. Got it. If that makes sense. Yep. Yep. Totally got it. When you think back in hindsight to like your life before these businesses, did you envision this is where you would build a business too? Like was your goal to get to this level or what was your goals as a younger woman?
• 22:49
  It wasn't as clear of like what level to get to. But like I remember from a very young age, like in high school and then in college, like, you know, I went to school for exercise science. And the moment that someone told me that as a physical therapist, I could make $80,000 a year. I was like, oh, F this. God, that sounds terrible.
• 23:07
  You know, they're like, yeah, you only work 40 hours, make 80 grand a year within like three years. And I was like, ew, what? That sounds terrible. Why is this something that you're celebrating? Like, there's so many limitations around this. And that was when I was like, oh, gosh, I'm going to have to start my own business because I can't do that. That just sounds terrible. And as soon as I kind of knew that, I was like, okay, well, I'm going to make my own route. I don't know what I'm going to do. But I moved out to California. I didn't know anybody. I didn't have a job. I didn't have much money. And yeah.
• 23:34
  I went to like every gym I could find and try to get a job and got into basically selling memberships and then went from selling memberships to selling personal training and then also doing personal training. And then I was like, I think I need to start a gym. That's the next level. And then I'll learn how to run a gym. And then from there I can learn how to do a bigger company. And that was how my mind worked. And then when I met my now husband, I got to skip a lot of those steps because we just actually ended up starting gym launch. And I didn't,
• 23:59
  predict it would happen as fast as it did, but I didn't have any limiting beliefs. Like I was like, I think if my belief has always just been, if one person in the world can achieve something, then there's absolutely no reason I cannot. We are literally made of the same material. Like that, why wouldn't I be able to be? I think the only reason that we're not, or that we would think anything else is that we put these limitations on ourselves and we almost, it's like gravity is a fact, right? Like gravity affects all of us. There's no arguing it.
• 24:28
  But a lot of us have our own forms of gravity in our minds that are limiting beliefs. And we're like, I just can't because of X. And I just feel like I don't have that. I don't have much of that. And when I do find it, I can go in and rip it out because I don't want it. Totally. I love that. And I think the limiting beliefs and the negative self-talk can be such a deal breaker if you're trying to go out and do big things in the world and, you know.
• 24:54
  achieve things that you want to achieve. That's really cool. I love that for you. I want to talk a little bit about your team because I am always interested to know, like, who are the early hires? Like, who do you bring on in the beginning to help you grow these kinds of businesses? My personal opinion, because I've tried different ways, because we've had a few times to try, is always hire for the, what is taking the most time from
• 25:24
  When Jim Launcher started, what took the most time that cost the least amount of money to hire was customer support and tech support. The second was billing and finance. And so I didn't think to myself, what do I hate doing? That's not the question. It's the wrong way to look at it, right? It's what takes the most of my time that I can get with the biggest arbitrage, right? Like I can get a big return on my time by hiring this person.
• 25:49
  because they cost this much compared to if I were to say, well, let me outsource and hire a marketer right away. It's like, well, no, or a sales manager right away. Well, no, you know, both myself and my husband partner have those skills and it takes less time from us. And so it's just looking at continuously saying what takes the most of my time is the least amount of money to hire for until it just continues to go up. I don't believe in hiring ahead of demand. That's one thing that I see a lot of people do is they say, well,
• 26:18
  you know, in six months. And a lot of people coach this way. I don't know how the F they make it work. Because one, bringing someone on who doesn't have enough work sucks. And two, a lot of people make this mistake. They think that they're going to have a big increase. They're projecting that they will, but you have no control over that. You only have control over the things you're doing, but you don't have control over the outcome.
• 26:38
  And so I think it's kind of, it's like this invincible mentality when people do that, they overhire. And I did that once and I regret it very much so because it was, I had to lay off like half a team because we hired in anticipation of a launch we were going to do. And that launch didn't go nearly as well as we anticipated. And so what I've learned now is that it's much healthier for the team that you stretch people a little bit for a short amount of time to see if that hire is really,
• 27:04
  an actual hire that you need. So I hope those two pieces make sense. That's interesting. Yeah. And I liked the first point as well. I think as, you know, for me, I always think about what can you delegate in terms of just those daily repetitive tasks that someone else could be doing that, like you say, it could be like a VA or could be an assistant or something like that. And,
• 27:23
  I was listening to a show recently and this guy was talking about he's built a really successful business and he was talking about for every two new hires that he brings into the company, they onboard one VA to assist those two people. And the VAs are tasked with just taking off all of the repetitive things that those two hires are doing, which are obviously kind of key hires, to make sure that they're not being stuck in those situations.
• 27:46
  daily tasks and they're able to keep thinking big and keep doing the big moves in the business, which I thought was really interesting. And yeah, I thought that was cool. I hadn't heard that before. Well, it's interesting. Where do I want to take this now? I wanted to know more about your team in terms of like, how big are you now? What's the company look like? Or what do all the companies kind of look like today? And do you guys all work together in one office or is it spread out? What's the setup?
• 28:10
  So we're completely remote. We've been remote since the beginning. As a leadership team, we get together once a quarter in person for anywhere from three to four days. And so that facilitates a lot of the in-person interaction. But we don't have an office or a central location. I think that's kind of cool now. But back when we did it, people were like, why do you not have an office? You're crazy. You'd be so much more effective. And then COVID hit and everyone was like, I should not have an office. I'm so glad. You're so lucky. And I was like, yeah, now I look smart.
• 28:37
  But we've done that since I can remember. We have people all over. We have people in Russia. We have people in India. We have people in all sorts of countries, primarily US, I would say, but I would say maybe 25, 30% offshore in other countries. Amongst our companies, the ones that we own completely outright, we have about, I want to say, it fluctuates because we have a large sales team that hire a lot of people on that kind of funnel strategy. So it can fluctuate anywhere between
• 29:04
  you know, 70 and 85 full-time employees at any time. And then amongst the other companies that we have, you know, stake in probably another 85 to 90. Wow. And with the remote, like working, what's the impact of that if you were to sell one of these businesses and you have, you know, people all over the world? Is that something you have to consider? Is that something people care about? Yeah.
• 29:31
  It is. It's, you know, it depends on what kind of business and why they're buying the business. So if somebody is buying your business because they consider it to be an asset sale, meaning you have, say, a product or a software that they find valuable, they might not want to buy the team. They might have their own team. In fact, a lot of people do, right? However,
• 29:54
  I do think this puts people at disadvantage because the team has all the tribal knowledge and they're usually great. I think all our teams are great, for example. If that company is in person, what it might mean is that for those people in the sale to retain their job, they would have to move to that state and work that office to maintain their job. Because a lot of people expanding to basically reconfiguring your HR strategy to include people out of state for things like benefits and payroll is actually much more complex than it would seem.
• 30:24
  And so they have to say, hey, you guys have to fly in and live here now. And so that might say, if you're a virtual business and you want to sell it, it might be like, hey, now my team would have to go move to wherever they are and not be virtual. So it is a big culture shift. And I think that that's the reason most a lot of acquisitions are bumpy is because it's so much of a shift of how you work every day and the culture that you're working in.
• 30:47
  Hmm. That's so interesting. I hadn't actually thought about that. And like the HR side of things and what the regulations and I don't even know what the language is around it, but around that kind of part of the business. It's just a lot more like benefits, for example, if you've got them in one state to have benefits that can work in all states, there's different regulations in every state. And so then it's much more complex. It costs a lot more money and it's more drag on the business. And so a lot of people don't like to do that. Yeah.
• 31:13
  But I like the fact that we can. For me, it's like a competitive advantage that I can hire from literally anywhere. I would rather do that. Absolutely. Totally. I mean, I totally see that. That's so cool. I was reading in your husband's bio, Alex's bio, he's documenting your journey on his podcast from 100 million to a billion. Is the strategy for you guys to get there to sell your businesses or to continually acquire and add valuation that way?
• 31:42
  I don't think the strategy for most people to get there is to sell. So I guess it's like, how do you define a billion? Is it like a billion dollars in the bank or is it a billion in equity? It's typically people that are billionaires' equity or assets. So for us, if we look at it, we look at assets and equity. We don't look at cash in the bank because I don't even know what you would do with a billion dollars in cash in the bank.
• 32:05
  And so we look at like value of our portfolio. So like our portfolio company, which is acquisition.com, getting that to be a billion dollar company, it would have to acquire a certain amount of businesses that are doing a certain amount of money. And then it could become worth a billion dollars. And if you look at most people that are worth anything, and there's lots of exceptions nowadays in terms of, I think that the easiest ways to do it are either through acquisitions, which is having a portfolio of companies or a hedge fund or a fund.
• 32:33
  through code, meaning technology. So it's almost infinite. You see that with like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all that. Or through leveraged media. If you look like Kim Kardashian or Kylie or any of them, right? Leveraged media. I think those are the three ways that are probably the easiest to get there. And we're not attached to the goal of a billion by any means. Like I will not be upset. I'm very happy with my life and where with, you know, if we get to half a billion or even if we just stayed here for forever, like I, you know, I wouldn't be upset.
• 33:01
  But it would be really cool to show that it's possible to do it. Yeah. And we need more women billionaires, self-made billionaires. That's the coolest thing ever. If you become a billionaire, you've got to promise me you'll be the first billionaire on my show. You've got to promise me you'll come back. That's funny. I promise. By the way, acquisition.com, obviously really cool URL. How much does that cost? How much does a URL like acquisition.com cost?
• 33:29
  No pressure. It's like significant. It's probably like close to half. It's around the range of a half million.
• 33:37
  Okay. And did it take you a while to get it? Like, was it as in, was the person who owned it already happy to sell or did it take a while? They were just a land grabber. So they just grabbed it to the, at some point they knew it could sell in the future. It was either this or marketing.com, but we didn't feel like that made sense with what we wanted to do. I think Alex just liked that marketing.com was for sale and was like, well, marketing.com. I was like, well, that's not all we're doing. Acquisition.com is really cool. I love it. I like it too.
• 34:06
  What is your key piece of advice for women who are on that entrepreneurial journey, but earlier on than you are? I would say a couple of things. I would say one is don't define yourself by labels. Don't get into the habit of doing that. I think I see a lot of women do that in many ways. It's like wife, girlfriend, you know, woman entrepreneur. And like, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you
• 34:31
  constantly identify with the label, you inherently limit yourself. I would say it's like, yes, I'm a female entrepreneur, but I'm also just an entrepreneur. I'm also just a person, you know? And so I think it's, especially early on, not identifying with labels and not limiting yourself based on those labels that you've decided to choose for any reason, one or the other. I think a lot of times we put them on ourselves early on. And especially with women, I think we have so many
• 34:58
  It's like, oh, well, I have to be this kind of wife or girlfriend. I have to be this kind of mom. I have to be this kind of daughter. And we are such people pleasers that I think that gets in the way of what you really want for yourself, right? I think a lot of times women outsource what they want to other people and expect others to give it to them. And if they provide for others, they will get it from others. And I think that women find the most satisfaction in life when they finally say, I outsource this to myself.
• 35:26
  And it's up to me to give myself all of these things. And I don't expect anything from anyone else for them to fill this need that I have or this hole that I have or to satisfy any of my desires in life. And I think that that's just human nature of women is that we want to provide for others. And then from that receive, say, love, recognition, et cetera. But if we're able to say, how about I just love and recognize myself and I don't expect anything of anyone else, I think you just become fucking powerful.
• 35:55
  Agreed. Hard to do though. Hard to change that shift, I think, for some people. If you think it's hard, it's harder. Agreed. Agreed. Any pitfalls that we can avoid as entrepreneurs early in the journey? Any pitfalls that you had that maybe you could save others from? Yeah. I think the biggest thing that I see with people that are just starting out is that everything is an immediate fire. And I acted this way too.
• 36:24
  which was anytime there's a problem, our expectations are so high of what business should be like and all we see is all the glory. I just tell people, my day is 50% shit, 50% awesome. I have a friend that says the same thing. It's like, it was 50% shit before and 50% awesome before. It's still 50% shit and 50% awesome. That's how your brains work.
• 36:42
  But what happens is that you have this dream that once you have the right kind of business for you and your business is working well, that that 50% of shit goes away. And the reality is it never does. But what we do is we spend all this time in the beginning trying to fix the 50% of the shit. And we waste so much of that time that we could have been focused on just growing as is and accepting that businesses have holes and problems. And so I think that it's, I would say, challenging.
• 37:07
  Make tiny tweaks, don't make drastic changes. Once you get product market fit, you don't need drastic changes for probably a couple of years. You just need tiny tweaks. And I think a lot of us in the beginning are so emotionally reactive that we're like, oh, I need to change my whole product. Oh, I need to fire my whole team. Oh, I need to completely change my marketing strategy. I need a completely new funnel. I need new marketing.
• 37:27
  And it's like, in reality, it might be like, yeah, you probably should refresh that ad. Or like, you might need one more salesperson, you know? Or like, I think you just need to change the copy on the product, not the product. And we're so like in that reactive state when things are small and it's just gaining traction that we usually just want to 360 everything. Because what worked for us to start the business and gain the initial traction was to do this giant leap. And so then we assume we just need giant leaps. And it's like, don't need giant leaps all the time.
• 37:56
  Yeah, I love that. I actually so resonate with that. And I feel it goes into that, the 1% compound effect of just like taking small, tiny steps to build your business. You do that day after day after day. It's the same thing. If something's not working, you don't need to make huge changes. You need to just incrementally shift a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and see what works and what needs to move. Totally. Yeah, I love that. And it's much more sustainable. The change will probably stay
• 38:22
  if we just do it in tiny increments rather than if we swap the whole thing. Yeah, I really needed to hear that. That was a good one. Thanks.
• 38:30
  Love that for me. Love that for everyone listening. I've said it to myself enough times. It's funny. I've never actually thought of it that way because I'm one of those people who can have that reactive like, holy shit, like I need to change direction. Like I'm not doing the right thing. But I'm also someone who really believes in the 1% like compound effect of just those small, tiny actions. And if I just keep going and keep doing like small things every single day, like things will start to snowball. But I hadn't seen it that other way. That's really cool. Love it.
• 38:55
  At the end of every episode, I ask a series of quick questions. Some of them we might have covered already, but I ask them all the same. So question number one is, what's your why? Why are you doing what you're doing? I believe that my purpose I have tied to why I am here on this earth is to just reach my potential, whether it be selfish or not. I think if I do that, I don't think it's bad for myself or for anyone else. I think if anything, it would probably be good. And so to see what I'm capable of doing, like what am I capable of becoming?
• 39:24
  is probably why I do anything. Yeah, that's so cool. I love that. Question number two is, what do you think has been the number one marketing moment that made any of your businesses pop? Gym watch was the free six-week challenge that we offered. So my husband and I record each other on our iPhones doing cartwheels and backflips in front of gyms. And we said, come in for our free six-week challenge. And it was humiliating, but it worked. And...
• 39:54
  our gyms replicated that. And that's how they were able to get such a high return is just these crazy outlandish ads that we made, you know, sometimes dressing up like a dinosaur, sometimes like just ridiculous marketing, anything you can think of. And then I would say for our gym launch itself, I think before our first event, we were nervous. And Alex was in the bathroom and he's
• 40:17
  going to shave his beard. And then he leaves on a mustache and it was this crazy big mustache. And he was like, do you think I should leave it? And I was like, it's pretty funny. And he was like, I feel like it would lighten my mood. Like, I'll just like, remember not to take myself too seriously. And I was like, for sure. So he did that for our first event. And I noticed how many people wanted mustaches after. So then I went and bought like, we'll stick on mustaches for everyone. And we had, uh, our next event had about 750 gym owners and every single person wore a little fake mustache.
• 40:44
  And then the stash became like a hallmark of all of our companies. That is so funny and so bizarre. I love that. What a cool story. Yeah. How interesting. Question number three, and I feel like you're going to have some really good ones in this one. Where do you hang out to get smarter? What are the resources that you're reading or subscribing to or people that you're following? You know what's funny is my friend Trevor talks about this. He's on the Formulator Supplements and he's extremely wise.
• 41:13
  Go to the source is what he always says, right? Like, look at the, anything that you read now in terms of psychology, team building, et cetera, was most likely taught by somebody who was a philosopher tens of thousands of years ago, like, you know, Seneca and Epictetus or whatever you say his name and all of those guys, they're the ones who came up with most of the stuff that we use now. People just repackage it, put a bow on it.
• 41:37
  And so I think researching any of the old philosophy, it's like, it's like humans have been on this earth for a long time. And the problems that every single person listening to this has, everybody has had for thousands of years and they have solved it. And so might as well go to the source. So I do that a lot, studying a lot of the older stuff. And then a second to that, I would say, I don't, you know, a lot of the great leaders, like I would say Howard Schultz, you know, he was the CEO of Starbucks, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.
• 42:07
  really large businesses when I study because like they've been my size and bigger. So why, why would I want to cap it? You know, I want to go to the very top and look at that and study and see what they're doing. I love that. That's cool. Thanks. Question number four is how do you win the day? What are your AM or PM habits that keep you feeling successful and motivated and happy? I think one is always identifying the
• 42:32
  If I have any sort of anxiousness or fear or anything, I write it down and then ask myself what I can do about it. What is within my control versus what is not within my control. It's just something I have to accept. And so then I always make sure I get that done through the day, right? Like I fit it in somewhere. It's usually just a conversation with somebody. That's typically where it'll manifest or doing something I've been putting off. I usually do that night before the day. And then in terms of my day, I walk a lot and I always make sure I spend time with my husband and my
• 43:02
  friends. Like I integrate everything into my day. So I like to, you know, I work for maybe six hours and then I'll see friends and go on exercise or work out with a friend for an hour and a half and then, you know, go to dinner with my husband. And so I think a lot of being able to stay in the game and being able to endure, it's not so much endurance, it's energy management and being able to not, I think it's very easy to build a business and be miserable.
• 43:29
  I think what is hard is to build a business and also maintain your life and be happy. It requires a lot more discipline and it makes you a better entrepreneur. And it also means that you're probably going to have more durability than someone else because you're not miserable. So it's like misery is easy to start something, but it's not easy if you want to maintain the thing that you've started. And so I think that just, I observe and I say what brings me joy and happiness. And I try to put that into my days as well as making sure that I'm doing work that I find meaningful.
• 43:58
  which doesn't mean I always like it, but I find it meaningful because it aligns with the values of how I want to live. Yeah, that's so true. I think if you're not like enjoying the journey, then you've kind of missed the point, missed the point of life. Right. We have no control over the outcome, only the journey, which is, that's the only piece. Totally. Question number five, if you were given a thousand dollars of no strings attached money, where would you spend that in the business?
• 44:28
  I know that's not a lot of money for you. No, I would spend it on probably employee recognition. Great. Nice. Because I think that you could say customer recognition, but I think if you recognize your employees, they will recognize your customers. For sure. And last question, question number six is how do you deal with failure? What's your mindset and approach when things do not go to plan? Yeah.
• 44:56
  I think I probably expect failure more than success. And so my question to myself before I try anything is if I try to do this and I fail, will it still have been worth it? So then if I fail, I'm still very happy I made the decision, if that makes sense. Yeah. So when I do fail, I'm like, well, I learned so much. I acquired so much knowledge. I have so much experience or I grew as a person.
• 45:21
  I don't consider it a failure. You know, it's like the outcome. The failure is basically just the outcome did not meet my expectation. And most people are wildly off on their expectations because our brains don't know how to do that. Right. We have so many distortions. And so most of the times people fail. And so it's just like, well, is it worth doing even if I fail? Then I wouldn't even consider it a failure. So true. But I think it's also like it's OK to say I'm disappointed. I'm sad. I don't get mad at myself for feeling bad. Like someone will be like, how are you feeling? I'm like, shitty.
• 45:52
  They're like, really? I'm like, well, I feel shitty. That doesn't mean I'm going to act shitty. And it also doesn't mean I didn't learn a ton. You know, I think it's like there, you can be disappointed in yourself and be sad. You didn't get the outcome you wanted and be happy. You learn things and you're growing as a person. So I think it's like you have both 50% good and 50% bad in any situation. And it's being able to not get stuck on one 50%. Because if you get stuck on the negative 50%, you become...
• 46:18
  in a spiral where you think everything is bad. If you get stuck on the positive 50%, you think you're invincible and nothing can touch you. So I think it's having like a healthy balance of the two. For sure. Thank you so much. I have absolutely loved this. This was so cool. And I'm excited to see all the stuff that comes under acquisition.com. I'm excited to see the growth of your businesses. I'm going to be cheering you on from the sidelines. So thank you so much for joining us.
• 46:45
  Thanks for having me. It was great. And you ask great questions, which is always enjoyable. Thank you.
• 46:55
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 47:19
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 47:42
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.
• 47:59
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 48:23
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 48:46
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show, and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.