How to Recover From Huge Mistakes in Business | Ep 704

**Alex Hormozi** (0:00)
Everybody messes up, it's part of business. Your employees are gonna mess up, you're gonna mess up as a boss, your customers are gonna think you messed up even when you didn't mess up. Messing up happens. And so, if you act every time like you have never had a mess up before, then you are going to mess up even worse. And so, in this podcast, I'm gonna talk to you about three different stories about big mess ups that I have done and been an experiencer of, and some tactical things that you can do that have made our businesses so much better and turned one-star reviews into five-star reviews and the step-by-step process thinking through that.
Enjoy. What do you do when you mess up? Right? Because you're gonna mess up in business, you're gonna mess up with a customer, you're gonna bill someone the wrong amount, you're gonna give someone the wrong date, you're gonna forget to onboard someone, you're gonna have a package that doesn't get delivered, it gets delivered to the wrong address. You're gonna onboard someone and put the wrong company's logo on it. And every one of those examples that I just said is something that we have done at some point in my career. And so, I wanna tell you two stories, and then I wanna drive home a couple of principles that have served us well.
Use them if you want, but they have worked pretty well for us. And so, I'll tell you two kind of polar extremes. So, I buy a lot of gym equipment, even though I'm not even in the gym industry technically anymore.
I have a massive gym that is in our headquarters. That's really sweet, I'll just put it that way. We've got like 85 unique pieces in the gym, and it's just for me and the team. And so, all the pieces are bought from individual people. I kind of put the pieces together that I like.
And so, it's not just one distributor. And so, I had a piece of equipment that I bought, and I was really excited about it, because I was like, oh man, I love this piece. It's gonna be awesome. And when it showed up, it was bent, like the frame was bent, and the weight stack was kind of off. And so, one of the main poles was bent, so then it was like this whole ordeal. And we called the company up. He was like, well, I mean, you accepted the shipment. I was like, yeah, because the truck guy was like, what do you want me to do this? I was like, all right, we'll drop it off. He was like, well, as soon as you accept the shipment, it's your liability. And I don't know if it happened before or after that. And I was like, well, I'm telling you, it happened before. And I just wanted to help the guy out, who was the truck driver, complete the runs that he had for the day. And he was like, sorry, dude.
And I was like, all right, well, I mean, can we get the pieces or something? Like a new frame that you can ship out just that piece. And he's like, well, that's gonna be extra. And I'm like, dude, I bought this thing.
It arrived not the way that I bought it. And now I'm incurring additional costs in terms of financial costs. But I also have the additional cost of, now I'm talking to you, when I'd rather be using the piece of equipment. And so the TLDR of that is, I basically just threw the piece out, and I hate the person who I did business with. And I will tell anybody who ever considers buying from them that they suck.
Now, let's take the alternative example.
So, last year, I went to Orlando for GymCon, and we stayed at The Ritz.
And when I went to The Ritz, we'd had our team with us, and so we went out, they have a Michelin star restaurant there. Which by the way, I found out, was actually named after Michelin tires. Totally random. I saw like the Michelin tire man at the front of the restaurant. I was like, this feels weird. But it's actually what it is. Anyways. And so we go in there, and it's this really nice restaurant or whatever. But it took three and a half hours to eat our entire meal. We didn't get drinks for like 45 minutes. We didn't get the appetizers until minute 90 And I was like, dude, this is absurd. I was like, I honestly just want to go get Chick-fil-A. Like I don't even care, right? And so anyways, we finished the whole dining experience, if you want to call it that. And the manager of the hotel, our team was like, hey, just letting you know, like this was pretty tough.