The Full Story of Alex Hormozi

An Entrepreneur that went from broke at 26 to worth $100,000,000 at 32

Alex Hormozi is only in his thirties but he is already worth over $100 million dollars. That’s WAY more than most people his age, or any age let’s be honest.

He became so rich thanks to four businesses. A licensing business that helps gym owners make tons of money, a supplement company for these gyms, a software company that schedules sales meetings for these gyms, and now Aquisition.com which invests in all kinds of companies and help them grow to over 10 million dollars a year.

If that was not enough, he has a bestselling book about making offers so good people feel stupid saying no. He also has a growing YouTube channel, a top level podcast, and a great social media presence in general.

It’s easy to think that Alex was born lucky and had everything going from him. But in reality, there was a lot of pain and struggle. He had to deal with everything from being rejected by his family to sleeping on the floor because he had no money to being scammed and lose everything he had worked for five years to almost filing for bankruptcy.

So how did he go from such a horrible start, to now him being ultra-wealthy? It’s a fascinating story with many ups and downs. No matter where you are in your life right now, you will learn from what he has gone through.

Chapter 1: Early years and depression

On August 18 1989, Alex Hormozi was born in the US. His father had fled from Iran, built his own medical practice, and wanted his son to follow his footsteps.

Alex loved his father and wanted to prove everything he had to him. But there was always this problem. No matter what good he achieved, his dad did not praise him but always wanted more from him.

Despite Alex feeling that he was never good enough, he did very well in school and university. He was able to graduate one year early, and got a job in consulting. He had done and achieved everything his dad wanted. And yet Alex did not like where he was. He hated his job so much that he did not want to live anymore.

Despite that, he was super-afraid to make a change, because his father was so happy for him. But after many months, Alex realized that he either had to die to his father, or die to him.

So after two years, he decided to disobey his father and quit his laid out consulting path to go to business. But little did Alex know at the time, how much challenge and pain he was going to face very soon:

Chapter 2: Starting a gym

Luckily for Alex, he had an existing passion. He could easily grow muscle thanks to his genetics and even had a six pack when he was in high school. He was so passionate about going to the gym that his friends told him that he better would start his own.

He had also learned that the fastest way to learn something is to study those who were successful at it. So he emailed 40 gym owners that he knew, and asked them if he could come and work for free so he can learn as much as possible.

Of those 40 gym owners, one of them welcomed him. His name was “7 figure Sam” and it was time to act.

He sold his nice home, quit his job and drove all the way from Baltimore to Los Angeles where 7 figure Sam lived. Alex did not tell his dad about it until he was in Ohio, halfway into his journey. His father did not like Alex’s decision at all. So much so that both of them did not talk for the next few years.

But finally, Alex arrived and knocked on Sam’s door. Despite Sam being surprised, Alex could stay.

In the next 3 months, they worked together every day, from 4 am to 4 pm. During that time, Alex learned a ton about gyms, sales, marketing and business in general.

In the same year Alex felt ready to start his own gym. But after getting the gym, he could not afford a home on his own. Thus he decided to sleep on the gym floor, alone in the dark.

But Alex refused to give up. He could not imagine a life where he would go back to his family again. He would rather die instead.

Fortunately for Alex, he had learned how to advertise on Facebook. Because it was 2013, it was very easy to get people to click. Thus he managed to get 191 people signed up. Better yet, these people lost weight and became stronger. With all the extra demand, Alex could open many more gyms, and the way he did this was genius!:

Compared to normal gyms, Alex was expensive. But the customer could get all their money back if they did not lose weight for the first 6 weeks. That extra boost in motivation actually made these customers lose weight. Once they succeeded, almost everyone agreed to continue their memberships at the gym.

If that wasn’t enough, Alex could earn more in 30 days than how much it cost to get two new customers. He could then use one credit card to get one customer. Then pay back the credit card within the 30 days without any extra costs. Now he had enough money for two more customers which he could spend again to get more customers. All without spending any money himself.

With these powers, Alex wanted to dominate the US with all his gyms. He presented his plans to a famous entrepreneur called Russell Brunson. But what Alex heard from Russell shocked him to the core. Russell told him that Alex had a “level 10 skillset in a level 2 opportunity”. Instead of opening up new gyms, he should teach other gym owners everything that Alex knew to make a gym super-profitable.

Alex never thought it was possible at first but decided to give it a try. He started a new company called Gym Launch where he traveled to gyms and sold as many customers as the gym could handle. The gym owners had nothing to lose since they did not need to pay anything. They got the clients in return, while Alex got the money from the first sign ups. If you already see what can go wrong with this, it will come true later on.

During that time, Alex met a girl called Leila. Compared to all other women Alex engaged with, Leila was different. She was the top salesperson at a local gym and was also passionate about business. Both of them clicked and Alex wanted her to work with him, which she eventually did.

But Alex was suffering from extreme stress. He had somehow become a CEO of a chiropractor agency, a dental agency, 6 gyms and now Gym Launch. He felt like all these businesses depended on him to survive, and he also resented his family.

It was so bad that he had to hire a coach only to manage his attention. Because of this, a lot of trouble would soon come for both Alex and his girlfriend.

Chapter 3: The crisis

In late 2016, Alex’s mother got into a severe accident, so bad that the hospital put her to 24 hour supervision. When Alex heard that, he could not take it anymore. On one night, he had drunk so much, and foolish as he was, decided to drive. He then got into a car crash.

When he got out of jail, his girlfriend had enough. She wanted Alex to either quit every business he had except for Gym Launch, or she would break up with him. But because he was so in love with her, he made the difficult conversations and sold the businesses. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of what was going to come.

In the same year, Alex met a guy that wanted to help him operate the gyms he filled up. The guy had previously been indicted for fraud, but Alex believed he was still a good person. Thus both of them became equal partners and split everything in half.

But that partnership did not last long. One day, Alex checked their shared bank account where he had put all the money that he had got from selling his gyms. All that money was gone. The partner had taken the money and wrongly blamed Alex for this.

To put this into perspective, imagine everything YOU have achieved in your last five years. Now imagine all of it disappear and your very best friend betraying you. This was the horrible reality for Alex. He now had to make the upcoming gym launches ultra-successful to get money to begin with. And sure, the launches were successful with over 100,000 + dollars in sales. But, Alex did not get the money because his payment processor did some extra checking. He had to wait.

But then came Christmas Eve and Alex called the processor up again. To his stark terror and anger, he got the message that the payment processor had seen some irregular activity. That processor was only intended for a single gym location and now Alex had made transactions across the country. Distracted as Alex was, he did not take notice first. Because of that oversight, the processor would now hold onto all these money for 6 months.

Finally, when Alex and Leila were alone in the dark, Alex told her what was going on. At this point, he felt that everything was going to collapse and he wanted Leila to do what was best for her and break up with him. But she pulled his chin towards her and said “I would sleep you under a bridge if it came to that”. If it was a normal night, Alex would have cried out of joy but he was so emotionally exhausted that he did not do anything.

With both of them strong together, Alex and Leila decided to take a gamble. Lots of credit card debt, and a payment processor designed for risky businesses.

Luckily, they crushed the recent launches. Everything was going amazing, and thanks to them being able to process money, it seemed to work. They had a chance of getting off this bottomless pit of quicksand.

But. If life wasn’t cruel enough, the couple got other bad news that ruined everything. Suddenly the gym owners that the couple helped told the new clients to refund the money that Alex got and sign up to their own gyms for half the price.

This was the fatal flaw of the entire business model. Keep in mind, Alex and Leila were only 26 and 23 years old so they did not have much loyalty from more seasoned gym owners. And now the couple were trying to fill a leaking bucket.

In that darkness and quicksand, another unexpected event was going to happen which would change their lives forever.

Chapter 4: The insane business success

In early 2017 as the refunds were happening, Alex noticed that Leila was doing something on her computer. Apparently she had her side-business of online personal training where she only spent 4 hours per week. But she earned 4000 dollars per month from it, enough to pay for rent and food.

Because it was all online, it could be scalable and they did not need to spend money on flights and hotel stays. Alex saw that her side business, if only they got more clients, could save the couple from this bottomless pit. After a weekend of preparation, they started to get more clients and signups.

Thanks to this, Alex felt free to cancel all the booked launches for the upcoming months. He had gotten tired from the gym community, since they seemed to take advantage of him all the time. So he did not feel sorry when one of the gym owners begged Alex on the phone to come over.

But that gym owner was persistent. And all of a sudden, he asked if Alex could just show him digitally how to do it, without him coming over. Alex was so tired that he just picked the highest price he could think of for this: 6000 dollars. The gym owner accepted it without any question. Alex was so stunned that his jaw was figuratively on the floor.

He then called other gym owners and sure enough, he could charge way more than 6000 for just showing the ads. At the end, Alex priced it at 16 000 dollars per gym owner, but the average gym that signed up gained over 30 000 dollars just in the first month alone. In other words, WAY more than they bought thanks to Alex’s proven model and experience. He also called back the gym owners he helped last time and they too wanted to buy from him.

During the following months, Alex and Leila saw the most insane growth ever. They grew from 300 000 per month to 400 000 per month, to 780 000, to 1M to 1.2M to 1.5M to 2M to 2,2M to 2.4. During that year, they made over 26 million in total, of which Alex and Leila took home over 17 million.

And yes, they were able to cover the refunds and escape the quicksand.

This crazy ride taught a valuable lesson for Alex. Although he lost the money the year before, he still had his skills and knowledge from over 5 years of experience. There is no wonder why he values learning skills above everything else.

But Alex and Leila did not slow down and Gym launch grew even bigger and bigger. They started the supplement company Prestige Labs and also founded the software company Alan. That software using AI, automated the scheduling for new clients, and got more people to sign up in the end.

In the midst of all that growth, two things happened on the personal side for Alex. First, he and Leila decided to marry each other. Leila had saved him from collapse and grew the businesses to staggering heights.

Second, Alex got a call from his dad, which he resented before. What he heard caught him once again by surprise. His dad apologized to him for not believing in him.

So Alex had made it, both in business and love. Things were looking great during 2017, 2018, 2019, and in the beginning of 2020. But if you were alive that time, you remember what happens next:

Chapter 5: Covid-19 and another depression

You can imagine that working out in gyms was life-threatening at that time. Thus everything that Alex and Leila had accomplished was in great danger once again.

Fortunately, thanks to their strong position, they survived. It was a tough time for sure but with all the commitment from the team, it worked.

It was also during that time that Alex wanted something different. He had been in the gym space for over 7 years and did not want to be “the gym guy” anymore. So both Alex and his now wife Leila decided to sell two thirds of Gym Launch and Prestige Labs for 46.2 million dollars. They also sold their software company ALAN.

During the entire selling process, Alex was not allowed to do anything in business. He had to retire for a short period of time, and live the dream that tons of people around the world want: lots of passive income every month. But Alex did not enjoy it at all. He learned that the moments where he was most happy was when he did hard work, just for the sake of doing hard work and nothing else.

That might seem very counter intuitive. But think back to your own life and all the challenges you overcame. If all the moments of pain and negative emotions weren’t there, the successes you had would not mean as much. When I apply that mindset for myself when I work, it’s much easier to get into flow, and thus enjoy every second.

But Alex still wanted to give what he had to as many people as possible. And so he did.

Chapter 6: Acquisition.com and Alex today

Aside from business and fitness, Alex always loved to write. In 2019 he released his first book “Gym Launch Secrets”. It contains everything Gym Launch did to make gyms successful. Everything from marketing to sales, to client fulfillment and keeping employees happy. After reading this book myself, I recommend it to every new entrepreneur I know.

But in 2021, he released his second book $100M Offers. It only cost 99 cents and he promoted it using only one post on Instagram.

Despite that, it has now over 10 000 5 star reviews and continues to sell even more copies every month. The most popular idea from the book is the value equation, where you can measure how much something is valuable only by looking at 4 things. The dream outcome times how likely you will get that outcome, divided by how short time it takes and how little effort and sacrifice you need to do.

This book is the cornerstone to his new company Acquisition.com. With that company he buys parts of other companies and helps them grow to over 10 million dollars a year. But Alex and his wife Leila both want to make real business education available for everyone. Now he has over a million YouTube-subscribers and several 100,000s across other platforms. He also has his podcast The Game which is one of the top podcasts in entrepreneurship.

And last but not least, he has a third book coming out as of this recording called 100M Leads.

As I’ve consumed everything he has put out, he is my personal hero. Every day I get new knowledge from him. Either his books several times. podcast episodes every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. New video on his YouTube-channel every Wednesday and shorts all day long. He is the best gift to me, and to all of us.

With that said, if you have found any value from this, make sure to click this link. If it is before August 19, you will be redirected to where you can sign up for the launch event of 100M leads. If it’s after, you will be redirected to the released book for 99 cents.