Stop Trying to Fix the Thing That's Working | Ep 978

**Alex Hormozi** (0:00)
I want to talk about a business myth that needs to die. It's something that so many business owners believe. And someone is playing what it is, how it's applied to thousands of businesses that have come to our headquarters here at acquisition.com in Vegas, and how it's likely holding you back. And it's one of the most insidious beliefs, and I think it might be the one that ends the most businesses, and the crazy part is it has nothing to do with the business and everything to do about how you treat it. It's not that your business isn't scalable, it's that you want scaling to be easier, and that's the issue. Your business isn't broken. You don't need to change the business. You need to deal with the fact that solutions take time, and that this might just be a feature of the business you're in. Now, part of you might think, well, if this is a feature of the business that I'm in, I don't want to have this business. Okay, well, let's walk through that. So hypothetically, if you were very good at solving that problem, would that be a problem that you'd be more okay with dealing with?
Maybe. And if you're considering an alternative path, you should also consider the alternative problems.
You're like, well, I want to do something else. Okay, tell me all the things that suck about that path, because I promise there are things that suck about that path. And then the final question of that is, are you better equipped to solve those problems? Now, in the hypothetical world, you always think you're better equipped to solve those problems. But oftentimes, you've never even solved them before. And maybe the problems you think that are there are not actually the real problems. The real problems are much deeper and more nefarious than the ones you're currently dealing with. And so I think that there's something so deep about the saying, the devil you know, right? Is that like, the business is the devil you know, you've maybe been doing this for a year, two years, or five years, or 10 years, however long you've been in your industry, 20 years. The thing is, is the longer you've been in industry, the more you've mapped the system, right? The more you've mapped the terrain. You understand the good and you understand the bad, and you understand what to do about the bad. And so fundamentally, problems will not end. And I think this is like, it's almost like a human problem that exists with entrepreneurs is that they want problems to stop and they will never stop. They will never stop. You're wishing for something that does not exist and in so doing, you are consistently changing things about the business that is working. It's probably the same thing for people who hop from relationship to relationship. Is they want to think, I want to find a relationship that has no problems. It's not going to happen. You're not going to find it. But the biggest problem of all is that you think that there shouldn't be problems. You have a problem with your problems, and that problem is solvable. You decide that there isn't a problem with having problems. You accept that having problems is a fact of life. It's a fact of business. It's a fact of wherever you're trying to go. Like, find me $100 million, $10 million, $1 million, $1 billion, entrepreneur, who says, I got here and there were no problems. In fact, today, I have actually solved all of my problems. It doesn't happen. And so we have this demand, we have this wish, and that wish is the actual biggest problem in your business because it's the thing that's causing you to break the thing that's working. And this is where you need to give time time. You need to give solutions time to breathe, and you need to give solutions time to work. And as always, once the solution actually happens, play it out. Let's say that we've got, we finally fixed our accounting, our accounting recruiting problems. We now have lots of accountants. We created a whole school for accounting. We made 20 partnerships with different accounting schools. And now we have this, we have guys banging down the door being like, man, I would love to work for you. What's your problem now? Well, you know what? Now that I've got all these accountants, I've got all these guys with empty calendars. I have so much more capacity. I'm overpaying in payroll because I got all these guys, but I need to get more customers. And so what do you do? You start marketing more, but now the customers are coming because you're trying to fill slots, you're lowering your bar. You're taking worse quality customers. Now your churn becomes an issue, right? And your margins start going down because you can't charge these people as much, and you've already taken on more fixed costs because you started hiring all these people. Huh? Is this sounding familiar? These are sounding like business problems because wouldn't it be convenient if that accountant would say, hey, I will wait here patiently until you have acquired 20 accounts of appropriate size, and then and only then will I choose to come on board. And at that moment, you can collect their revenue, and all of these customers will say, you know what?