https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRMG_HpOAN4

13 Years of No BS Business Advice: The 20-Point Framework (Expanded Guide)

This comprehensive guide expands on Alex Hormozi's 20 core pieces of business advice, providing detail, context, and actionable takeaways for each point.

1. Anchoring and Pricing

• 1. Have something extremely expensive to sell that you never even plan on selling.
  • The Anchoring Tactic: This is a psychological strategy. Place an offer 10 times or even 100 times more expensive than your core product on your menu. Simply having it there shifts the customer's perception. Your main product, in comparison, suddenly looks like an incredible deal, effectively anchoring the perceived value high.
  • The Whales: Approximately 10% of customers are 'whales'—they prefer to buy the most expensive, exclusive item regardless of price. By not having a premium tier, you leave significant profit on the table. The only thing worse than making a low offer to a high-budget client is making an underpriced offer to someone who was ready to spend much more.
• 7. Raising prices almost always makes you more money but you hear no more often.
  • Profit Leverage: Pricing is often more inelastic than you think. If your margins are 50% (e.g., selling a $1,000 product with $500 costs), doubling the price to $2,000 means your profit jumps from $500 to $1,500. Even if your sales volume drops by a third (e.g., a 35% conversion reduction), your absolute profit still dramatically increases.
  • Inflation Threat: Inflation is a compounding cost. If you are not making price increases of at least 3-6% annually, you are actively losing profit margin year over year. Raising prices is a mandatory defensive move to maintain the health of your business.
  • Old Customers: The easiest way to handle existing customers is to implement the new price for all new purchases. For recurring services, draft a price increase letter that justifies the change (investment, inflation) and Grandfather current customers in for a delayed period to honor their loyalty.
• 12. The 'Look Back Window': Bill less frequently.
  • Customer Perception & Churn: A customer judges the quality of their purchase based on the last billing cycle. If you bill monthly, and one month has a dip in perceived value, they are likely to churn.
  • Extending the Window: By billing annually or for longer periods (e.g., 3-6 months upfront), you give your business more time to average out the value delivery and overcome short-term volatility. The customer only has one chance per year (or period) to churn.
  • Cash Flow Advantage: Offering a prepaid annual option (even with a discount to boost uptake) can double your cash flow instantly. This upfront cash is essential because it offsets the costs of customer acquisition (ads, commissions), allowing you to reinvest and scale faster.

2. Customer Acquisition & Focus

• 2. No one knows you exist: advertise more.
  • Repetition is Key: Entrepreneurs stop advertising because they get tired of the message, but customers haven't even registered it yet. You need to be reminded more than you need to be taught.
  • The Core Four Acquisition: As a founder, you must commit four hours a day to the only four ways a person can let others know about their stuff:
    1. 1-on-1 (warm outreach).
    2. 1-on-1 (cold outreach).
    3. 1-to-many (content creation).
    4. 1-to-many (running ads).
  • Rule of 100 Baseline: To ensure you're doing enough, use the daily baseline of: 100 minutes of content, OR 100 outreaches, OR $100/day in advertising spend.
• 3. Until you're at $100,000 a month, advertising is all of your focus.
  • Phase 1: Filling the Bucket: Up to $100k/month, the priority is acquisition. You need enough customer volume (reps) to generate feedback and iterate on your product to make sure it's good.
  • Phase 2: Fixing the Leaky Bucket: Once you hit $100k/month, shift your focus to delivery and fulfillment. Plug the holes in the bucket (churn, bad service, low referrals) before increasing ad spend. If you scale advertising without fixing delivery, your reputation will tank, and you will plateau faster.
• 4. Under a million dollars a year, it's one channel, one avatar, one product.
  • Laser Focus: You must say 'no' to everyone who isn't your specific target customer (One Avatar). You must only serve One Problem with One Product. This focus gives you enough reps to iterate the product and get reliably good at delivery.
  • One Channel Rule: Dedicate all acquisition resources to a single, reliable channel (e.g., YouTube ads, cold email). Only move to a second channel when the first one is running without your direct daily involvement and is generating consistent cash flow to fund the inevitable cost and time required to get the second channel working (which can take 6-12 months).

3. Proof, Sales, and Customer Conversation

• 5. Always start for free, always.
  • Build Conviction: If you're starting, you should not charge money for something you don't even know is good yet. Working for free helps you build the conviction and confidence needed to charge premium prices later.
  • Monetize Proof: The initial free work generates three things that make you money later: 1. Testimonials (Proof). 2. Referrals (Word of Mouth). 3. Paying Customers (who convert after the free period ends because they don't want the value to stop).
• 6. Proof over promise.
  • Compelling Proof: Proof is always more compelling than any promise or guarantee because promises are just approximations of the likelihood of success.
  • Four Elements of Proof:
    1. Recent Proof is better than delayed proof.
    2. Be as Visual as possible (video is better than pictures, which are better than text).
    3. Capture High Volume (screenshot every review across all platforms and display them).
    4. Capture Pain first. Content that begins with the customer describing their pain or struggle converts significantly higher because it builds immediate relatability.
  • Timing: Make the sale at the moment of greatest pain/deprivation. Collect the proof (testimonial) at the moment of greatest satisfaction.
• 8. Talk to customers to solve all your problems.
  • The Rocky Cut Scene: You must take hundreds of sales calls, even for low-priced items, not for the revenue, but for the learning. You must learn the exact words, objections, and desires of your customers.
  • Identifying Selling Points: You might think you know the selling points, but only talking to customers reveals which words cause their eyes to light up and actually drive the purchase decision.
  • Interview Churners: Talk to everyone who canceled or requested a refund. The goal isn't necessarily to save the sale, but to understand what went wrong and identify friction points in your product or service. Don't minimize their anger; join it.
• 9. What to say to prospects on the phone (The CLOSER framework).
  • This is a 6-step sales script designed to be simple and duplicatable.
  • C - Clarify: Why did you hop on this call?
  • L - Label: Re-state their problem and desired outcome to ensure alignment and increase their buy-in.
  • O - Overview: Review their past experiences (the Pain Cycle). Temporarily increase their deprivation around the desired outcome to motivate action.
  • S - Sell the Vacation: Focus on the destination (the emotional, positive outcome) and not the plane flight (the features, process, or steps).
  • E - Explain Away Concerns: Address the five main objections: Time, Money, Decision-Maker, Specifics of the program, and Fear of Making a Mistake.
  • R - Reinforce: The work begins after the sale. Wow the customer with a world-class post-purchase experience in the first 24 hours to reinforce their decision.

4. Founder Leadership and Scaling

• 10. Before you even think about doing something new, do 10 times more of what's already working.
  • Constraint Analysis: When asking why you can't 10x what is currently successful, the answer reveals the single biggest constraint in the business (e.g., lack of leads, poor creative). Solving that constraint is the only thing the founder should be focusing on.
  • Avoid the Uninformed Optimism Cycle: Entrepreneurs often switch tactics repeatedly, going from Uninformed Optimism -> Informed Pessimism -> Valley of Despair -> and then starting over. They miss the final stages of Informed Optimism and Achievement. Everything is hard, and the grass is rarely greener.
• 11. Stress is a fact of business life.
  • Perspective: Accept that stress is inherent in business. Growth is stressful, stagnation is stressful, and decline is stressful. The belief that a different business model or state will eliminate stress is a misconception.
  • Increased Tolerance: As you grow, your problems become objectively larger, but your tolerance level for stress increases, meaning you stop categorizing recurring issues as problems. The choice to categorize the issue as a problem is often a greater source of stress than the problem itself.