“Do stuff with people you like, and do more of it.”
In 2015, Leila Hormozi moved to Orange County, California, to start a career in fitness as a personal trainer after earning a degree in Exercise Science. Within one year, she became the top-selling personal trainer in the region. In 2016, she met Alex Hormozi on a dating app and accompanied him on his 4th gym turnaround. During this time, she ran a successful personal training business online, making $4,000 per month that helped support the couple while their other business, Gym Launch, took off.
It was Leila who convinced Alex to go all-in on Gym Launch. During her time in business, she has founded and scaled three other companies to $120M+ in cumulative sales across software, service, e-commerce, and brick-and-mortar, without taking outside capital. She has ascended to board positions in each of her companies and co-founded Acquisition.com, which acts as the holding company for all of her business ventures, which do $85,000,000 in yearly revenue across a variety of industries.
She is known for developing management systems that create good places to work. This article offers her advice on mastering business, based on her interview on The Futur™ channel.
Become unstoppable at selling
Part of Leila’s success comes from her strength in sales. When asked how she became so good at it, she answered, “I learned by necessity.”
Here’s her full response from the interview:
“I moved out to Orange County, and I had a degree in Exercise Science, and I said I think I can get a job as a personal trainer anywhere, which was true. I applied at six gyms and got offers at all six, but I had a couple thousand dollars in my bank account, and my rent was a thousand dollars a month, and I had to pay for gas, food, all of that… so I was like, I need to make money. I had jobs before, but never commission-based or anything like that. The thing about the job you could make money the fastest as was that you had to sell. Before, I was so averse to anything sales I just thought salespeople were gross, but I quickly learned that every business does sales – and if I actually wanted to do what I set out to do, which was helping people lose weight because I had been about 100 pounds overweight and then I had lost it all and started doing bikini competitions. So, I wanted to help other people do the same, and I realized that just because I was good at something didn’t mean that people were just going to throw themselves at me and want what I had to offer.
So when I got the job (as a personal trainer), there were twenty of us who got hired at the same time, and by the end of month one, there were three of us left because it was hard. There are a lot of preconceived notions about what sales is, which deters people from even trying to get good at it. The second piece to it is that it requires a high capacity to receive rejection. I think I just have the capacity for that, and I developed that early in life, and that allowed me to be okay with failing at so much so quickly and saying, this doesn’t mean I’m a failure it just means I need to work and get better at what I’m doing and acquire skills.
*I used this as an opportunity because I didn’t want to have to move back home because I couldn’t afford my rent. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, that I didn’t need anybody, didn’t need my parents or another person to depend on. I remember reading four different books on sales and the common thread between them that I ***felt was that I should be good at sales because I actually believed in what I wanted them to buy. I was learning sales not to make money (although that’s the consequence of it) but because I actually wanted to help people lose weight, and I actually wanted their lives to change.
If you pull back the curtain behind the tactics of sales, everyone is trying to manufacture conviction… and I had conviction, so why did I need to use any tactics? Once I realized that, I just shared my story with everybody. I was like; this is why I came out here (to Orange County); this is why I literally moved as a 21-year-old female alone to California, packed up my stuff in my car with almost no money, because this is what I want to do for people. And I realized in sharing that with people, that was what got people to be like, “I’m onboard.”
Obviously, you can make a lot of money in sales, but I got really good at sales because it was something I wanted to sell. I really believed in it, and I knew I could help people, and I had conviction. The same is true for today. *I’m sure I’m good at sales, but it’s because I would never sell something that was shtty.”**
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