I went to the Acquisition.com Scaling Workshop

Here's what I learned from 2 days with Alex Hormozi, Leila Hormozi, and the Acquisition.com Team

December 27, 2023. I remember it like it was yesterday.

Becca and I were walking through Pearson International Airport, heading to the Air Canada Lounge to kill some time before our flight to London. As part of my airport routine, I like to make a stop to check out the books and magazines. On the shelf, staring back at me, was $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi.

A few weeks prior, I came across Alex on social media. I dismissed him immediately. I saw this muscular dude in a tank top talking about sales and marketing and my mental model instantly put him in the bucket with all the other bro-sales influencers. I generally despise this type of content and these types of influencers. They sell some “RA-RA!” sales spirit but nothing of substance. All talk, nothing tactical. They get you hyped up and then sell you some bullshit courses. That’s what I thought Alex was doing.

As I stared at the bright blue cover of $100M Leads I noticed the subtitle of the book read: “How To Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff”. That’s interesting. At that very moment I was in the weeds working on our sales and marketing strategy for 2024, so it struck a chord. I decided to pick it up and flip through the pages, which led to these thoughts:

• “This guy is giving away his lead gen playbook for $20?!”

• “These are the same techniques he used to scale four companies to $120M+ in under 4 years without taking on outside capital?!”

• “Alex and Leila now own a portfolio of companies that generate $200,000,000 per year in aggregate?!”

• “This is the 2nd book this guy wrote?!”

• “He’s either a genius, or this is another bro-sales scam…”

Here’s what happened next:

I grabbed $100M Leads. Read it cover-to-cover in a day, and then re-read specific sections over the course of the trip. Was still sort of skeptical, so I grabbed Alex’s first book, $100M Offers. Read that. Less skeptical. Got home from an amazing New Years trip with Becca. Built our 2024 sales and marketing strategy around “The Core Four” principles. Ended 2024 with a pipeline north of $100M in total annual contract value (ACV). Booked a ticket to the Acquistion.com Scaling Workshop.

I’m going to repeat this for emphasis:

I read Alex’s books, which essentially say ‘do these things and you can build a $100M company’, and within 12 months we built a $100M+ pipeline. I should also highlight that our sales team is just one person.

To be clear, we did not close $100M in new revenue in 2024, nor are we at $100M in revenue presently. Of the $100M+ pipeline we built in 2024, we closed high single digit millions in new revenue.

So a couple weeks ago I walked into the Acquistion.com offices in Las Vegas, sat in the 2nd row, and strapped in for 2 days of sales, marketing, strategy, recruiting, personal branding and growth hacking sessions from the team that leads Acquisition.com.

My honest review of the Acquisition.com Scaling Workshop:

I’m going to rate everything about the 2 day experience. From location, format, speakers, food, etc. I’ll give every item a rating out of 10, and then at the end I’ll tell you if it’s worth the money, and if I would do it again knowing what I know now.

Cost

The Scaling Workshop is $5,000 USD.

My initial reaction to the price was: this seems expensive. I think that’s mostly because I’ve never paid that much for an education workshop so I didn’t have anything to compare against. Also $5,000 USD is $7,200 CAD. Even more expensive. If you plan on bringing your business partner or a colleague, it’s the same price. No discounts.

As the event approached I wasn’t thinking much about the price, and after the event I generally didn’t feel one way or another about it. It seems like the right price. If it was a few grand more I’m not sure I would’ve ended up going through with it. More on the value for money later.

Rating: 7/10

Location

Las Vegas is one of my favourite cities. It’s the best city for business events. The Workshop takes place on the ground floor of the Aquisition.com office, which is a 5-10 minute drive from most hotels on the strip. If you’ve ever been to an industry training session, that’s what it feels like. It’s set up like a conference room with breakout areas. It’s comfortable.

Rating: 9/10

Objective

The general premise of the workshop is to help owners overcome constraints in their business and increase the enterprise value of their companies. The main focus is centred on Alex’s ‘Theory of Constraints’. For those who don’t know what that is, you can find clips on YouTube.

You get a workbook that includes a scorecard as well as the high level notes from each presentation. On Day 1 you work through the scorecard with the speakers to determine your current enterprise value.

If you’re a larger business, or if you've done M&A before, none of it will be new to you. It’s a fun exercise that gets everyone in the room speaking the same language. It also gets the wheels turning in your mind as to which levers to prioritize when you get back to work.

Also, if you’ve watched or read any of Alex’s content you know that customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime gross profit (LTV), and the relation between the two (CAC to LTV), are two metrics he lives by. If you’re going to attend I would highly recommend you know these numbers for your business. It’s helpful for two reasons:

• The speakers talk about it a lot

• Figuring them out will give you a few “aha! moments”

Part of the “pre-work” they ask you to do is provide a few metrics on your business. CAC:LTV is one of them. That’s when I discovered our CAC:LTV. Our numbers looked good, but I didn’t fully appreciate them until the workshop. That’s when I found out our ratio is actually quite strong for a company of our size.

If you don’t know your CAC:LTV today, don’t stress. My company spends 6-figures on marketing a year and before this event I didn’t know our CAC or LTV. In hindsight, it seems irresponsible that I’ve never tracked CAC:LTV. But we live and we learn.

If you attend this event I highly recommend doing the pre-work. It will ensure you hit the ground running on Day 1 and better understand what the speakers are talking about. It will also help you view your business from their lens, which is that of an investor.

Rating: 9/10

Format

The Workshop is made up of 100 people, from roughly 50-70 companies. It’s two full 8+ hour days of speakers, Q&A, breakouts, and networking. It felt like the right amount of people. Small enough to be intimate and approachable, large enough to get a decent representation of companies of varying sizes and industries.

The room is very diverse and you get people from all over the world, from a wide variety of industries. There were 4 Canadian’s sitting next to me, and a couple Greek’s behind me. Also, a real estate influencer who I recognized from my Instagram feed.

Day 1 consists of talks and presentations from all the Acquisition.com leaders. The day ends with a key note from Alex, followed by a “VIP Happy Hour” with Alex and his team.

Day 2 is round table breakouts with those same leaders plus a few other specialists. The day ends with another presentation from Alex, followed by a Q&A with Alex, and then closing with a Q&A with Leila.

The format makes sense and they highlight why it’s laid out the way it is. They want to ensure they give maximum context on Day 1 so that when you move into smaller roundtables and the Q&A on Day 2, you can ask pointed questions that can help you solve constraints within your business and unlock growth.

Going into this event, I was most excited to hear from Alex, and least excited about the round tables. I was skeptical that their team of specialists would provide the value and advice I was looking for. That assumption was wrong. I thought the round tables were great. I asked each specialist at least one question and got value from every answer. The roundtables exceeded my expectations.

A few negatives:

• The event is roughly 18 hours total. Alex participates for about 3 hours. I can appreciate that he has businesses to run, and his time is valuable. It would be nice to have more time with him, especially for the Q&A.

• Leila only participates for 1 hour at the end of the Day 2 for Q&A. If you’re going because you’re a fan of hers, you may not get what you’re looking for.

• The Q&A for Alex and Leila is limited to 8 questions for each of them. In a room of 100 people, only 16 get to ask them a question. I did not get to ask my question. Disappointing.

• Most companies in the room are sub $5M in revenue with a good majority being under $2M in ARR. I was the 2nd largest company in the room by revenue. A lot of the questions are asked by these smaller companies. If you’re doing over $15MM in ARR, the Q&A may not provide a lot of value to you.

• At no point are Alex and Leila available for 1:1 questions, photos, etc.

• Alex attends the VIP Happy Hour, but you can only attend if you sign up for their Scaling Workshop Level 2. Which is $45,000 USD, but they “discounted” it to $35,000. So it’ll cost you $35K to have a drink and some 1:1 time with him. More on L2 below…

Overall the format is good. It makes sense. But the way each day ends, with upsells, it feels more like they set the format so they can guide you up the ascension path. Something Alex talks about a lot in his content and at the workshop. You’re basically watching them work their marketing methods on you live. It’s fine and it clearly works because a lot of people sign up for the L2 Workshop. But overall it makes you question if the structure is really designed to give you the most value, or them.

Rating: 6/10

Food

They clearly care about peoples experience, and comfort. They provided breakfast, lunch, and snacks, on both days. The food is really good! It’s buffet style and they have a variety of themed dishes. They even asked for dietary restrictions prior to the event, and had gluten free options in the buffet. They have a fully stocked beverage fridge that you can grab from at any time. They also have drip coffee all day, plus a full service coffee bar with a barista making espresso based drinks.

Rating: 10/10

Speakers

The speakers were pretty good. I’ll address them individually.

Ed Turney

Ed is the Operating Partner and was essentially the host of the workshop. His job, as he put it, is to ensure the workshops are amazing and always improving. He’s known Alex and Leila for years, having worked with them in the Gym Launch days. A great speaker and presenter. Speaks with good pacing and confidence, and mixes in humour and some sarcasm at the right spots. When he wasn’t speaking he was floating around the rooms and was always approachable for a question.

He kicked off our roundtable on Day 2 and his focus was on building personal brands. He provided some great data points and perspectives on how to improve content and ads. I found his opinions and perspectives very insightful. I had no idea who he was before this workshop. He deserves a lot of credit for the quality of the workshop. If it wasn’t for him setting the tone, my view of the event may have been lower.

Jacob Hopkins

Jacob is the Director of Sales at Acqusititon.com and helps portfolio partners optimize their sales process across multiple markets. As a teenager he had a car washing business and one-day offered to wash his neighbour’s car, who happened to be Alex. Seems like Alex took him under his wing and now he’s leading the sales team. Nothing really stood out to me during his presentation that is unique or can’t be found in any of Alex’s content. He spoke on the topic of “Value Attractors”, which is how a business owner can increase the enterprise value and thus the EBITDA multiple of their company.

Justin Jacobson

He is the Director, Investment & Strategy and presented on the topic of “Value Detractors”, which is the opposite of the above. Basically, how can we eliminate things that lower the value/multiple of our business. He stressed the importance of knowing and tracking your metrics and finances. His message was simple: “if you don’t track it, you don’t care”. Essentially, the old Peter Drucker adage, “only what gets measured, gets managed.”

I asked Justin a few questions, mostly around the investment thesis and deal flow process of Acquisition.com. I was mostly curious about how many companies they’ve invested in from these Scaling Workshops. His answer surprised me: Zero. They’ve invested in zero companies from the Scaling Workshop.

I don’t know exactly how many workshops a year they host, but based on the two month schedule I saw from January and February, there were approximately 7. Let’s conservatively say 30 workshops per year, with 70 companies in the room at a time. 2,100 companies per year. That’s a lot of potential targets coming and going with no investment from the Hormozi’s.

He did say they’re very selective and only make about 3-5 investments each year, but the fact that none have come from that event is surprising, and tells you a little bit about their views on the companies that attend.

Sami Lei

She recently worked at a $1B ARR E-Comm company. She didn’t mention who, but that’s her background. Sami is the Director, Strategy & Operations for Acquisition.com. Her talk was focused on the strategy side. To be honest I don’t recall the entire presentation because it didn’t really resonate with me. She’s a good speaker and is very direct.

Frank Lofaro

This was one of my favourite presentations. Frank is the Director of Recruiting and he had some great tactics and insights. When you move from a small to a medium and a medium to a large business, the people you have around you play a crucial role in how easy and smooth it is to break through those new plateaus.

Alex also highlights this in a lot of his content, and at a couple points during his talks at the workshop. Hearing how they recruit and attract top talent, from the guy who spends his days doing it for Alex and Leila, was very impactful.

During the roundtables on Day 2, I got to go deeper on a few topics with Frank and he provided some great context and tactics that we’re adding to our recruitment playbook.

Tim Kim

Director of Sales & Ops. His background is scaling and selling his SaaS ads agency for a higher multiple than most agency’s can command. His focus is on how to scale sales excellence. Basically, how do we unpack every process and choke point to ensure every person and team are firing on all cylinders. His perspectives gave me some ideas on how to better systematize sales and account management. Good speaker.

Jacob Morales

He’s the Sales Manager. I would guess he reports to Jacob Hopkins but I’m not sure. He was alright. He only joined us during the round tables. I got to ask him some questions around building a sales team, specifically if it makes sense to start with AE’s or SDR’s and how to compensate them. His answers were helpful.

Lewis Mudrich

Director of Marketing (Workshops). He was co-founders with Tim Kim at the SaaS ad agency. We met with him on Day 2 and his focus was on how to improve websites, ads, and affiliate programs. Based on my lack of notes, don’t think I had many actionable takeaways.

Alex Hormozi

The man himself. Pretty cool to see him present in person. Stating the obvious: he’s an excellent presenter and speaker. Clear, concise, and direct. He spoke 3 times in total. At the end of Day 1 he gave a presentation on the “Value Acceleration Method”. VAM is essentially their playbook/process on how they go from A to Z and unlock constraints within a business to maximize the value.

The Day 1 talk ended with him using his ascension methodology to sell people into a higher ticket event. That higher ticket was the VAM, which is their Level 2 Workshop. The L2 (VAM) Workshop is priced at $35,000. In a nutshell, that $35,000 gets you two more days at the Acquisition.com HQ, in a smaller group with many of the speakers listed above, and they help you overcome the constraints on your business to unlock more value. The L2 workshop also does not include any 1:1 time with either Alex or Leila. More thoughts on this in the section below.

Day 2 he gave two talks. First he does a Q&A, but it’s limited to 8 questions, and all of them were small businesses. Not only did this not provide any value to me, but the fact that only 8 out of 100 could ask a question kinda sucked. My read is the majority of the room was there to see/meet/ask Alex, and most didn’t get the opportunity.

His second talk is a presentation similar to Day 1, where he focused more on sales tactics. I got some good nuggets from this portion. Part of the way through I realized he was doing the same thing as Day 1, but being a bit more explicit about it. He was upselling, but this time with data points. The best part: the data points were actually related to the satisfaction and success of participants of the VAM L2 Workshop. Felt sort of meta. Fascinating to watch.

I can dislike the upselling all I want but it clearly works. By the end of his 3 talking sessions, I would guess he got at least ¼ of the room to sign up for the L2 Workshops. $35,000 by 25 = $875,000. From 3 hours of speaking. Impressive stuff!

Leila Hormozi

Leila closed things out with a Q&A at the end of Day 2. By then my brain was overloaded with info and I was pretty drained from two 8+ hour days sitting and drinking from a fire hose.

Again, only 8 people could ask questions. Bummer. The questions again revolved around small business problems so I didn’t get any value from them.

Honestly, I wasn’t impressed with her answers or her presentation style. Even though I’m mostly a fan of Alex’s content, I do think Leila has some great perspectives. But her responses felt short and shallow. I think her session only lasted 40 minutes or so.

It seemed like the room skewed more Alex fans, but there was surely a bunch of Leila fans. You could see a lot of people perk up when she came in, and the people asking questions seemed nervous and excited to talk to her. Those people probably have a different view on her talk, I just wasn’t impressed. Not taking anything away from how successful she is, I just had higher expectations.

Rating: 8/10

Some other thoughts…

While I generally enjoyed the entire experience, there were a couple things that left a bad taste in my mouth.

The only way you get to interact with Alex, is if you sign up for the L2 Workshop. At the end of his Day 1 presentation, he pitches the room on the L2 Workshop and says “anyone who signs up now can come over to the private VIP Area for happy hour with me and my team.” and then he leaves the room. So, if you want to spend time with him, you have to spend an additional $35,000. That’s wild. I get it. He’s busy. His time is extremely valuable. He’s also exceptional at making money so he’s going to leverage the valuable assets he has to make more money. But, I’m sure I’m not the only person who attended a Scaling Workshop who thought they would get a minute or two of his time as part of the event.

Being a larger company in “an industry that they really like”, and by all accounts operating a growing and healthy family service business, the Acquisition.com Team told me they were interested in the possibility of investing in my business. They gave me a “personal” letter at the end of Day 1 asking if I was open to the idea of a potential investment in my business from Acquistion.com.

This does not mean they actually want to invest. They make that clear in the letter. They’re simply asking “hey are you open to a conversation or is it completely off the table?”. I don’t usually entertain these conversations, because we’re not taking outside capital, but occasionally a firm/investor will pique my interest so I’ll hear them out.

At the end of Day 2 I sat down with a member of their “Investments Team”. It’s in quotes because I quickly learned this kid was not an investor. Just minutes into the conversation it was apparent that this kid was trying to sell me into their Level 3 Workshop. I didn’t even know there was a Level 3!

Long story short, I had a 19 year old trying to pitch me on the value of “investing” in the L3 because at that level you get actual face time with Alex and he really helps you unlock constraints to get to $100M+. He also pointed out that by being in the L3 you’re more likely to be a portfolio company, because the Acquistion.com team has worked with you and seen you grow.

What made this meeting even worse, was his almost smug salesbro body language. Leaning back in his chair trying to act cool and in control, while answering my questions with more questions, was comical.

I respect the hustle. Alex is a savvy entrepreneur. He clearly has this workshop upsell game figured out. His people all seem to be pretty good at sales and marketing. No surprise. But if you’re trying to convince me that I’m “important” and a “potential target for investment,” then maybe bring one of the big dawgs out to meet me, not a kid who just finished highschool and hasn’t built a business before. I found this to be a bit insulting.

But that’s not even the worst part of the L3 upsell experience…

Even before considering attending the Scaling Workshop, I was made aware that Acquisition.com only invests in US-based companies. So that precludes me from being an actual investment target for them. And just to be sure, at the end of my meeting with the 19-year-old I asked if this was true. He confirmed that at present they only invest in US business. Yet, he spent the previous 15 minutes trying to convince me the L3 Workshop was a good “investment” for me because it makes it more likely Acquisition.com would consider investing in my business. This is extremely misleading, and in my opinion, bad business.

The L3 Workshop is $130,000 USD.

I have a lot of respect for Alex. I’m sure he’s helped a lot of companies and provided a ton of value at the L2 and L3 workshops. Based on what he says publicly he seems to be big on ethics and integrity. Leveraging your star power to lure people in and then repeatedly upselling with misleading offers feels contradictory to the messaging he puts out. I won’t hold it against him, but it felt like a brosales bait-and-switch. Not a fan of this play.

I don’t think it ruins the whole experience, it's just a disappointing feeling.

So would I do it again, knowing what I know now?

As a big fan of Alex’s work, story, perspectives, and tactics, I had high hopes going in. Besides the Q&A’s, all the sessions I was looking forward to lived up to my expectations. As I mentioned, I actually had low expectations for a few things, like the round tables, and those exceeded my expectations.

Do I now view Alex and his team in the “RA-RA” sales-bro bucket? A little bit.

Do I think less of Alex, based on my experience and my dislike of the heavy upsell approach? No.

Would it have been nice to get a second of his time to ask 1 question? Absolutely.

Hindsight is 20/20. Knowing what I know now it makes sense why the workshop is designed the way it is. If I took the time to think about it from the lens of an Education Event, I probably would have had different expectations that would’ve been inline with how it played out.

I went in thinking this is a deal flow event for Acquisition.com. I thought “wow what a model! Acquisition.com has all these companies paying them $5K to meet with them! Imagine paying a VC $5K for an intro meeting!?” This was a mistake on my part. Acquisition.com is a portfolio of $250M+ in EV. These guys aren’t cutting 6-figure checks for small regional service businesses, they’re hunting for well-oiled cash cows where they can supercharge the companies sales and marketing to increase EV.

So would I do it again? Yes. Knowing what I know now, I would still attend the workshop.

Rating: 49/60 (82%)

I love all things Vegas. I’m a huge fan of Alex’s work and perspectives. I hope to one day build a family office like Acquisition.com. I also learned some new things. Even though a lot of what they talk about is available in the books, and online for free, I took a lot of notes and I’ve already implemented quite a few tactics into our businesses. Also, seeing a pro executing live in-person fires me up.

If your company is doing less than $15M in revenue, I think you would get a lot of value from attending the Scaling Workshop. If you’re over that number, you’ll still get value, just don’t get your hopes too high.

If you have any questions feel free to comment below or shoot me a DM. Happy to provide any more context where I can.