WEBVTT

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.040
Getting into a head-on collision in a DUI and having basically no money to my name to, you know,

2
00:00:05.040 --> 00:00:09.040
12 months later, uh, having $3 million in profits, not knowing what to do with it.

3
00:00:10.400 --> 00:00:13.280
Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more

4
00:00:13.280 --> 00:00:16.480
pro-customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned

5
00:00:16.480 --> 00:00:18.400
along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

6
00:00:20.400 --> 00:00:23.680
Hi, my name is Alex Ramuzzi, and I own acquisition.com, and our portfolio

7
00:00:23.680 --> 00:00:27.120
companies will do $85 million this year, and I have absolutely nothing to sell you.

8
00:00:27.120 --> 00:00:32.720
What I want to talk about today is one of the pivotal moments of my life that took me from,

9
00:00:33.840 --> 00:00:39.520
really just getting into a head-on collision in a DUI and having basically no money to my name to,

10
00:00:39.520 --> 00:00:44.080
you know, 12 months later, having $3 million in profits, not knowing what to do with it.

11
00:00:44.080 --> 00:00:48.720
There was a series of decisions that happened in that period of time that radically

12
00:00:48.720 --> 00:00:52.480
transformed my life, and so I want to talk to you about one of the more significant ones today.

13
00:00:53.200 --> 00:01:00.160
And so, kind of like I just alluded to, leading into my DUI head-on collision, I had six gyms,

14
00:01:00.160 --> 00:01:08.240
two with one partner. I had three with another partner, and then I had one on my own.

15
00:01:08.240 --> 00:01:11.360
So I had all these kind of weird arrangements that were going on in my life at that time.

16
00:01:12.400 --> 00:01:19.840
I also had a partner that I was doing a 50-50 split for a dental agency work, and another,

17
00:01:19.840 --> 00:01:24.160
and the same partner, we also had an agency together for car practice agency work.

18
00:01:24.160 --> 00:01:30.640
I'm also doing in-person gym launches, so that means that I was flying out in-person

19
00:01:30.640 --> 00:01:37.360
and doing gym turn-rounds and trying to launch gyms. And at the time, I was so stressed that I was

20
00:01:37.360 --> 00:01:42.560
drinking, I mean, probably half a bottle every night just to, honestly, not to get drunk, but just

21
00:01:42.560 --> 00:01:47.920
to not be stressed. It took me a really long time to just even like function, you know what I mean

22
00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:53.680
in the morning, because I was so spread thin mentally. And what I want to kind of talk you through

23
00:01:53.680 --> 00:01:57.120
is some of the decisions and how I thought through them, because I don't know where you're at right

24
00:01:57.120 --> 00:02:01.040
now, and it doesn't really matter what the scale is of what the decisions are, because I've made

25
00:02:01.040 --> 00:02:04.720
decisions like this at multiple times in my life. I ended up going to an attention coach,

26
00:02:04.720 --> 00:02:08.720
I know that sounds ridiculous, but I went to a coach to help me manage my attention.

27
00:02:08.720 --> 00:02:12.400
And so, one of the things that I think us as entrepreneurs we think about all the time is like,

28
00:02:12.400 --> 00:02:16.240
you know, we're managing our time, we're trying to be productive, and I worked every hour of the day

29
00:02:16.240 --> 00:02:20.640
that I was awake. And yet, I still didn't have that much money at the time, everything was tied up,

30
00:02:20.640 --> 00:02:24.240
and you know, the gyms and all that kind of stuff, and cash flow for employees and all that kind of

31
00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:29.520
jazz. And this coach had kept telling me he's like, you need to, you know, you need to aggregate

32
00:02:29.520 --> 00:02:33.600
your attention, you need to focus, he's like, your spread all over the place. I pretty much just like

33
00:02:33.600 --> 00:02:39.120
would not along and listen, and I tried to do some of the stuff they told me to do, but I wasn't making,

34
00:02:39.120 --> 00:02:46.160
I mean, I was making some progress, but it wasn't until I drank so much that I ended up getting

35
00:02:46.160 --> 00:02:52.160
into a head-on collision, about 60 miles an hour on the highway, and I actually walked away

36
00:02:53.040 --> 00:02:57.040
from that, and it wasn't, I didn't hit anyone, I was actually getting pulled over, and there was a

37
00:02:57.040 --> 00:03:02.800
car that was in the side, the shoulder, that was turned off, it was dark. And so, I was looking

38
00:03:02.800 --> 00:03:07.040
over my shoulder, and just kind of going from lane to lane as I was, you know, getting into the

39
00:03:07.040 --> 00:03:11.360
shoulder as I was getting pulled over. As I was getting pulled over by the cop in the shoulder,

40
00:03:11.360 --> 00:03:16.080
there's a black car, and I just, I nailed it. And so anyways, they say that because I was drunk,

41
00:03:16.080 --> 00:03:20.880
I was really relaxed, and that's why I didn't get any injuries. Who knows? But anyways, I stepped

42
00:03:20.880 --> 00:03:26.560
out of the car, you know, I'm getting whatever they do, you know, signed, you know, signed paperwork,

43
00:03:26.560 --> 00:03:34.800
whatever. And the next day, after Layla picked me up from jail as my girlfriend, not my wife at

44
00:03:34.800 --> 00:03:40.720
the time, she was like, this guy's a real winner. Anyways, and so she picks me up, and the next day,

45
00:03:41.680 --> 00:03:47.120
I have a conversation with him obviously, and he's like, he's like, your lack of making decisions

46
00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:53.120
is going to kill you. And I remember him saying that to me, and he was like, the reason you're stressed

47
00:03:53.120 --> 00:03:56.320
is because you have all these decisions that you know you should make, and you're not making them.

48
00:03:57.200 --> 00:04:02.560
I wanted to make this because I wanted to talk about probably the second hardest decision I

49
00:04:02.560 --> 00:04:06.160
made in my life. The hardest decision was quitting my job. Probably the second hardest decision was,

50
00:04:06.160 --> 00:04:09.840
was the decisions that I had, it was a multitude of decisions that I had to make that I knew I was

51
00:04:09.840 --> 00:04:13.600
supposed to make, and I just didn't know how to confront them. And it seems like it's a common theme

52
00:04:13.600 --> 00:04:18.080
in my life that when I only make decisions when I'm literally confronted with my own mortality. And

53
00:04:18.080 --> 00:04:21.760
so if you notice that as a common theme among my stuff, it's because for some reason I can't get

54
00:04:21.760 --> 00:04:26.560
myself to decide to do things unless I literally think I'm going to die. And so I saw this, and it

55
00:04:26.560 --> 00:04:32.960
became the catalyst for me making a number of changes in my life. And so what I did over the next,

56
00:04:32.960 --> 00:04:38.720
you know, really the next 48 hours was a rapid series of decisions that consolidated all my attention

57
00:04:39.440 --> 00:04:44.320
into one thing. And so that's what I want to talk to you about. So the first thing I did,

58
00:04:44.320 --> 00:04:49.680
I called up the partner that I had the two agencies with and I said, hey, I can't do this. I'm doing

59
00:04:49.680 --> 00:04:54.400
gym agency work where I'm flying out and doing turn-around, I'm doing dental agency work,

60
00:04:54.560 --> 00:04:58.800
we're doing chiropractor agency work. I was like, I can't do any of it. So I'm just, I'm out.

61
00:04:58.800 --> 00:05:04.640
I just was like, I'm out. You can have everything I'm done. It was like, okay. And that was a horrible

62
00:05:04.640 --> 00:05:08.160
conversation to have because I felt like I was letting a partner down. And then I called up

63
00:05:09.360 --> 00:05:18.000
the partner that I had in the multitude of gyms, more of the gyms. And I said, hey, you know,

64
00:05:18.960 --> 00:05:23.680
how can we figure out a way for us to walk away? I want to do this gym launch stuff.

65
00:05:24.720 --> 00:05:28.960
And so we ended up working it out. And I basically gave away the gyms

66
00:05:30.880 --> 00:05:37.600
at fire sales numbers, more or less. I was able to sell two of them successfully for a

67
00:05:37.600 --> 00:05:42.240
better number, but the rest of them I pretty much just gave away. And then the partner that I had

68
00:05:42.240 --> 00:05:48.560
that I was in the new gym with, I said, hey, I don't want to do this anymore. I need to focus

69
00:05:48.880 --> 00:05:54.480
on gym launch. Obviously, all those conversations did not go, you know, super well. They weren't super

70
00:05:54.480 --> 00:06:00.000
well received. But I think I just was only able to have the courage to do it because I had almost

71
00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:04.400
died the night before. And so it just gave me this massive perspective where I was like, am I,

72
00:06:04.400 --> 00:06:10.240
I'm so afraid of letting these people down that I that I might die. And so I ended up making that

73
00:06:10.240 --> 00:06:13.360
all those decisions just in a matter of like a day or two.

74
00:06:13.360 --> 00:06:20.400
Hey guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon called 100 million

75
00:06:20.400 --> 00:06:24.400
dollar offers that over 8,000 five star reviews and it has almost a perfect score. You can get it

76
00:06:24.400 --> 00:06:28.560
for 99 cents on Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing

77
00:06:28.560 --> 00:06:33.360
that book. And it's my biggest gift to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to

78
00:06:33.360 --> 00:06:38.320
get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars to that later on in your business career.

79
00:06:38.880 --> 00:06:43.040
So that's my gift. Go check it out. Amazon and back to the show.

80
00:06:44.800 --> 00:06:52.240
And having those conversations. And so I think the the the lesson for me that I've taken with me

81
00:06:52.240 --> 00:06:58.000
that's been the most valuable thing of this is one, you won't die when you make those those calls.

82
00:06:58.000 --> 00:07:02.960
But second, a lot of times I feel like when I was a newer entrepreneur and even as I feel it as I

83
00:07:02.960 --> 00:07:10.320
accumulate un-unmade decisions, right, I think we accumulate these unmade decisions or un-un confronted

84
00:07:10.320 --> 00:07:14.960
conversations. And what happens is there's like a portion of my brain in my decision-making, my

85
00:07:14.960 --> 00:07:20.160
thinking power that just gets allocated to this chunk, this this decision, right, that needs to be

86
00:07:20.160 --> 00:07:24.400
made that is unmade, that I know I should make and I probably know what the right call is, but it's

87
00:07:24.400 --> 00:07:29.200
just sitting there unmade. And so it's like as we start accumulating these things, it's like my

88
00:07:29.440 --> 00:07:33.680
actual amount of of thinking power continues to decrease until it gets to the point where you're

89
00:07:33.680 --> 00:07:38.560
so reactive because you have no brain power. And as a small like correlated to that, I don't know if

90
00:07:38.560 --> 00:07:42.400
you've ever like if you remember when you were a kid and you had like homework or something like that.

91
00:07:42.400 --> 00:07:47.520
And you were like staring at a math problem and you couldn't figure it out. And you know you're

92
00:07:47.520 --> 00:07:50.480
staying up late into the night and you're like, whatever, I'm going to go to sleep and see if I can

93
00:07:50.480 --> 00:07:55.520
think about the morning. And then you wake up the next day and you feel refreshed and you look at

94
00:07:55.520 --> 00:07:59.120
the problem and it seems obvious. You're like, oh, duh, here it is and then it's done, right?

95
00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:06.160
I feel like that is the that is an expression of having far more attention, far more decision-making

96
00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:11.600
power, far more thinking power because you can concentrate on this one thing and all of a sudden

97
00:08:11.600 --> 00:08:15.040
it seems easy. And I think that business and life are a lot like that, at least they have been

98
00:08:15.040 --> 00:08:21.120
for me where it's like if I feel like I like simple decisions are take an inordinate amount of

99
00:08:21.120 --> 00:08:25.200
efforts because I am too distracted, I have too many things, too many unmade decisions, too many

100
00:08:25.200 --> 00:08:29.920
unconfronted conversations that I need to have. And those can be life conversations with a spouse,

101
00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:32.640
they can be conversations with parents, they can be conversations with siblings, they can be

102
00:08:32.640 --> 00:08:36.240
conversations with business partners, they can be conversations with employees, they can be decisions

103
00:08:36.240 --> 00:08:41.040
that must be made. And I think one of the most powerful things that I've tried to remember is like

104
00:08:41.040 --> 00:08:45.520
I'm only one decision away from changing my life. Just one decision, I'm one decision away from

105
00:08:45.520 --> 00:08:48.960
from changing my life. I can quit my job that is one decision, right? I can start a business that

106
00:08:48.960 --> 00:08:52.400
is one decision. These are decisions that we have to make at some point in our life and these

107
00:08:52.400 --> 00:08:56.560
are like the crossroads. There's two kind of major, major themes that I have. One is that most

108
00:08:56.560 --> 00:08:59.600
people don't regret doing things, they regret not doing things. And so I know that when I die,

109
00:08:59.600 --> 00:09:03.120
I don't want to regret not having done things. I'd rather do things than fail so that I do not

110
00:09:03.120 --> 00:09:07.520
have the regret and I'll have the experience. And having that kind of thought process has been

111
00:09:07.520 --> 00:09:14.720
extremely helpful for me to draw back to the point of this, this whole thing. When I made these

112
00:09:14.720 --> 00:09:19.840
decisions, and Layla was with me because she basically said as well, after I got off the phone

113
00:09:19.840 --> 00:09:24.080
call with the coach, she was like, if you don't change things, she's like, I'm not like this,

114
00:09:24.080 --> 00:09:27.440
this has got to change. Like I'm not going to be around. She kind of indicated that she didn't

115
00:09:27.440 --> 00:09:31.360
say it directly, but I think I understood. I could read between the lines. And I valued my

116
00:09:31.360 --> 00:09:36.080
relationship with her more than a lot of the other things that were going on on in my life.

117
00:09:36.080 --> 00:09:40.640
And I could tell that she was a little bit outside of the storm that was Alex Hermozia at the time,

118
00:09:40.720 --> 00:09:47.440
the storm of chaos. And so she was like, you have to make these calls. And so I made these calls

119
00:09:47.440 --> 00:09:53.280
physically like phone calls and also these decisions. And what resulted next was really the,

120
00:09:53.280 --> 00:09:57.840
you know, I had to suffer the pain of the consequence of those decisions, which was very hard for me.

121
00:09:58.880 --> 00:10:03.600
But I felt determined that I had made those decisions. I felt confident and I felt like I had more

122
00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:07.760
attention and more bandwidth in my disposal because I had made the tough calls. And I started

123
00:10:07.760 --> 00:10:11.120
believing in myself more because I was like, man, if I can make these calls, then I can do this

124
00:10:11.120 --> 00:10:15.920
next thing. And so that was kind of, I would say, the explosion that created the beginning momentum

125
00:10:15.920 --> 00:10:20.960
of like, I can do this. After I basically shut down as many different side processes I could,

126
00:10:22.720 --> 00:10:27.200
that's when I went all in on gym lunch. And so gym lunch actually was started in 2016,

127
00:10:27.200 --> 00:10:33.440
which was probably 2016 into the first half of 2017 was like the worst 18 months of my entire life.

128
00:10:33.440 --> 00:10:38.400
And that was also when I coincidentally met Laila my wife. So she saw me at the absolute worst.

129
00:10:39.120 --> 00:10:43.600
And for some reason decided to stay with me because she believed, which is why I still always have my

130
00:10:43.600 --> 00:10:51.040
my eternal gratitude. We made this call. I ended three partnerships. I sold, sold or let go of

131
00:10:51.040 --> 00:10:56.000
fire sold, you know, at the time, I guess if you were to try and number those, I'd like 11,

132
00:10:56.000 --> 00:10:59.200
just nine businesses or something that was going on. And so this is one of those things where

133
00:10:59.200 --> 00:11:04.000
people were like, man, I have, I have, I have so many businesses, you know, et cetera. And it's

134
00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:08.320
like you have to do them in the right sequence. Like I didn't even, I wasn't barely making any money

135
00:11:08.320 --> 00:11:12.240
and I had all these businesses so I could feel good about my status when in reality I knew

136
00:11:12.240 --> 00:11:17.360
that I wasn't that successful. And so it was only when Laila was like, this gym lunch thing is

137
00:11:17.360 --> 00:11:22.160
working. Like all we have to do is just give it our full attention and it will work. At that point,

138
00:11:22.160 --> 00:11:27.200
I felt so, I want to say defeated, but I also felt like my, my, my slate was clean, right? I had

139
00:11:27.200 --> 00:11:33.600
clean the slate and like I pushed everything off the side in the face of my, of my mortality that

140
00:11:33.600 --> 00:11:38.880
the stress of not making these decisions was going to kill me. And so that's when I just focused

141
00:11:38.880 --> 00:11:43.840
full in on, on, on, on gym lunch and, and things kind of took off. And I think in another video,

142
00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:47.840
I'll tell you that story of how, how things actually started there because I think it's valuable

143
00:11:47.840 --> 00:11:51.920
for a lot of people who are going through it right now. But I guess I wanted to make this video

144
00:11:51.920 --> 00:11:56.160
because the, the takeaway that I had from that is that I'm always one decision away from changing

145
00:11:56.160 --> 00:12:03.040
my life. And I'm often one conversation away from getting my attention back. I'm one decision

146
00:12:03.040 --> 00:12:07.360
away from getting all my attention back from where I'm feeling distracted. So I don't know where

147
00:12:07.360 --> 00:12:10.320
you're at right now, but the most valuable thing that we have as entrepreneurs is not our time,

148
00:12:10.320 --> 00:12:15.280
but our attention. If we have all of the time, but we have a million things going on, we are useless

149
00:12:15.280 --> 00:12:18.960
because we have no decision making power. We have no thinking power because little pieces of our

150
00:12:18.960 --> 00:12:24.800
brain are being allocated, these un, unformed, un-finalized decisions that maybe can cost you

151
00:12:24.960 --> 00:12:28.560
your life. And I don't know. I mean, it did almost for me, which is why I've been so ruthless with

152
00:12:28.560 --> 00:12:35.440
my attention since then. And so, and, and had to, and by, by consequence, so disciplined with my

153
00:12:35.440 --> 00:12:39.840
focus, it's not because I'm naturally that way. So hopefully this story will illustrate that to you,

154
00:12:39.840 --> 00:12:43.360
that this was not something that naturally came to me, but was a decision that I had to make

155
00:12:43.360 --> 00:12:47.760
to save myself. And so, don't know where you're at right now. My name's Alex from Rosy. We own

156
00:12:47.760 --> 00:12:52.800
acquisition.com. Our portfolio companies now do about $85 million a year. I have nothing to sell

157
00:12:52.800 --> 00:12:56.720
you. I made this channel because a lot of people are broke and I don't want you to be one of them.

158
00:12:56.720 --> 00:13:01.280
And I think that everyone has 100% within their control to become the top 1% of the United States,

159
00:13:01.280 --> 00:13:05.760
which is already top whatever percent of the world. So anyways, lots of everyone. If you did like

160
00:13:05.760 --> 00:13:18.640
this, hit the subscribe button. If you didn't love you either way, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye!