Leila Hormozi, Co-Founder and President of Gym Launch, shares her passion for helping other entrepreneurs in growing their business and changing the world. She’s the Hercules in Gym Launch, scaling companies with 30% growth month over month. Leila met her husband, Alex, through a dating site and talked about business for five hours on their first date. They may not have hit it off romantically right away, but they were fascinated with each other intellectually and from a business standpoint. Leila shares how she and Alex started Gym Launch, their mentorship programs, and where they are in the business right now.
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Gym Launch Co-Founder and President Leila Hormozi
Leila Hormozi, the Cofounder and CEO for Gym Launch is with us. Leila, I’m excited to talk to you. You’ve been specializing in high ticket lead generation and sales for boot camps, cross cuts and small group training studios. Gyms using Gym Launch to go from zero to capacity in 30 days. You’re also an entrepreneur with a passion for helping other entrepreneurs grow their businesses and change the world. You’re one of those people who can help make a decision to grow and do it instantaneously. You can also use these superpowers to elicit loyalty and extreme performance and ownership from the team you coach. Wherever there’s a growth curve like the one at Gym Launch, everyone looks to the sales and marketing but the smart ones look to the operations. Scaling a company like yours with 30% month-over-month growth is a Herculean effort. If you look for Hercules in Gym Launch, you found it. Welcome, Leila.
Thank you.
How are you?
I am doing well. How about you, Cameron?
I’m well. How did you start Gym Launch? Give us the helicopter tour of what the business does.
My husband and I met on Bumble, which is a dating website a couple of years ago. When we first met, we didn’t necessarily like each other from a romantic standpoint, but we were super fascinated with each other intellectually and from a business standpoint. In a nontraditional way, we met on our first date and we ended up naturally talking about business for about five hours. He, at that point, had six gyms and I had transitioned into taking my clients. I had been doing personal training into a private facility and I was also venturing into an online business. Upon meeting, I was in a trance with him. If you talk to him for more than a few minutes, it’s obvious that he has a high IQ and you could say a genius, especially around sales and marketing.
I had gotten into the industry thinking, “I’m still passionate about helping people. I, myself, had lost 100 pounds. I want to help other people do the same.” You quickly learn that’s not how it works. You have to know sales and marketing and he had some awesome ideas around it. He understood what he had skill-wise to scale his gyms on the sales and marketing side, which was cool to learn. Within a matter of a few weeks, I left everything I was doing and he had proposed a concept of Gym Launch and that was what he did. Called it from day one and he said, “Help me build this.” We made a little handshake deal regardless if we like each other, date or not, we were going to do this thing together.
That’s a strong relationship right from the get-go. What does Gym Launch do?
My husband and I, dating at the time, we would fly out to someone’s gym. We would turn on our marketing that my husband was doing and then he or I would go in and do the sales for a facility. We would say, “We’re going to do all the sales for you, but you get to keep the members and we’ll teach you how to retain them on the backend.” We did that for a few months of Gym Launch until we transitioned to what we do now. What we do now is we teach the gym owners how to fish rather than fishing for them. Instead of saying, “Use me for my marketing agency. I’ll coach you through X, Y and Z,” we say, “Here’s all the stuff we used to do in other facilities and now you’re going to do it.” We give them that autonomy by teaching them how to fish.
You’ve created a mastermind group or a group of gym owners are part of your tribe or is it a coaching community?
We like to call it a mentorship program. Our first level is our product, Gym Launch, which is literally generating the leads, selling the leads, retaining the leads and reselling the leads which are now customers. Our second tier is Gym Legacy and that’s what a lot of our marketing and branding out there is. Gym Lords is what they call themselves. We have 427 people in that one and that is our mentorship program. Everyone wants leads and marketing help, but what they need is the help on the backend. How are you going to retain these people? How are you going to give them amazing service? How are you going to develop a great product? How are you going to keep your team together while you do all this? That is what that level is and it is a phenomenal group of people. They are some of the hardest working entrepreneurs I’ve ever met in my life.
Are these all owner-operators mostly?
Correct. They come to us as owner-operators and our goal is to get them out of doing that and transition them into the owner.
How do you charge? What are your fees like?
Our up-front program, Gym Launch, is $16,000 over sixteen weeks. It’s like we say, with our tools and our system, we guarantee you that you can pay for it with the money that you’re making from the system. We don’t guarantee it because that’s not legal. Our success rate is still about 94% on that one and then our upper-level program is $799 a week for three years. It’s about $120,000 over the three years.
This is not inexpensive at all.
No, it’s not.
You sign them up for a three-year program.
If you leave, you cannot come back.
You’ve got 427. How long have you been doing this?
We launched this model last April 2018.
Why did you get out of the lead generation side of the business?
Gym Launch: Everyone wants leads and marketing help, but what they really need is the help on the backend.
We still help them create new ads and generate leads. We’re always making sure we help them with that part. We felt when a business relies on someone else for making it rain, it takes power away from the business owner. My husband and I, he dove into lead gen and learning that himself. That was what freed us to start a business and feel that freedom. We don’t want to be that thing that kept somebody. We see many franchises and organizations that don’t do that and they tie them in because they’re afraid they’re going to leave and we didn’t want to be like that.
You also already understood how to run the backend of the operation. If you could figure out the frontend in sales and marketing, you intuitively or through experience knew how to run your businesses, but you decided to train people on doing it.
We knew how to run small businesses but running what we have now is definitely a journey.
How many people are in your organization? It’s so our readers can get a scope for what the organization looks like.
As of now, we have 46.
What do they do?
We have departments. We have IT, HR, sales, marketing, customer service and our largest sections are customer service and sales. Customer service is bigger than sales but I would say that they account for probably under 50% of the company.
It’s not many. What are they working on day-to-day?
Our biggest thing is that because it’s such a high-ticket price, we want to make sure our gym owners get answers as quickly as possible. Customer service ranges from they handle intercom, onboarding calls with the gym owners, escalations if somebody’s Facebook ad shuts down. They’ll get on a Zoom call and help them. We have customer concierge that calls customers each week and follows up with them to make sure they are sticking to the program, that they are using the program. If they’re not, what can they do to help them? It ranges all the way basically from little text messages to hour-long phone calls.
You’re actively running this like a real best-of-breed franchise company without franchising. Your gyms are not all operating under the same brand. They all operate as independents.
A lot of them are franchises.
Are they franchises of other chains?
Most of them are.
Have you ever approached any of the major franchise companies to see if you could do anything on their behalf or do you even need to?
We have relationships with four affiliate agreements. We agree to help with X, Y and Z with their franchisors and then they sign for all of their franchises. There are two ways of doing it. One is where they take ownership and say, “If you’re signing on with our franchise, you must use Gym Legacy as a vendor.” The other route is, “I highly recommend that you use Gym Legacy. If you do so, you get a discount because we’re an approved vendor,” etc.
It’s almost for the franchise or they’re outsourcing their operations. It sounds like if you guys have specialized in it, they don’t even need to worry about it.
It comes down to what they are trying to do with the client. What we always want to make sure of is that their goal for their client is in line with our goals for our clients, which is total autonomy and freedom for those people and over-delivering. We have a couple of franchisors that have said, “Don’t use Gym Launch. Don’t use Gym Legacy,” because I’ve not worked with them. That’s unfortunate, but for the most part, they’re great relationships.
Do you have any businesses that are outside of the gym space at all?
We do not. We solely stick to the micro gyms and we’re aggressive about pushing away those that are not our niche.
Talk to me about that. That was a big belief we had when we built 1-800-GOT-JUNK? that we would only operate in markets. If we didn’t have a franchise-specific in a market, we would turn down work, even if it was literally across the street and it was a zip code that wasn’t owned yet. We would turn down the work and be working literally a block away. How do you keep your team and yourselves focused on your need? Avoid the opportunities because I’m sure they drop in your lap all the time.
My husband is the opportunity seer. He has many talents and he looks at this opportunity and he’s like, “Look at what more we could do and all these things we could venture to.” There are me and a couple of our executives that are always like, “We have to focus on what we’re doing.” When we first started Gym Launch, we were much broader. We were like, “We could probably work with most studios regardless of their shape, size and color.” It wasn’t until we zeroed in and hyper-focused on what that avatar looked like of whom we wanted to serve that we took off. That was definitely a key factor and we never wanted to take on a client that we can’t say with absolute certainty will be successful with our program. Reputation is going to succeed the short-term cash we could get from it. It’s a matter of, “If we want everyone to have an amazing experience, what person has to commit?”
Where are you as a couple? Where are you investing your cash? The business is starting to throw off some good cash for you and you run the numbers in my head. Where are you investing? Is it investing in the growth of the business? Are you pulling some of that money aside and putting it elsewhere? Where are you as a business?
Gym Launch: You have to continuously deliver to your clients.
Our number one is we’re always going to reinvest it back into the business. We host a couple of events per year. I like to not worry much about cash during those because it’s customer fulfillment as well as the infrastructure. We are looking at what we can do to make it a better culture within our company, company meetups, events, things like that. I would say a lot of the cash is going into our research into what we can do to build even more of an ecosystem for these gyms. We spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on the research for them and the research of the different child companies that could open up within Gym Launch to better serve them. What we’re moving toward are supplements. This has been something we’ve been working on since we began. It wasn’t until we had the funding from Gym Launch that we could even look at doing such a cash-heavy business.
Talk to me about the events you’re running. Give us the rest of the model. What have you decided to kill off over the years? Things you’ve tried that maybe worked in the earlier days that you’ve decided to kill off now or things you thought were great ideas that you learned maybe by trying that weren’t.
It feels like it’s still new. In the last several months, it’s like a whirlwind. The biggest learning experience for us was you have to give away all your secrets as a business. You have to continuously deliver to your clients. The biggest realization we had was we never wanted it to get into the coaching business. My husband was like, “Coaching is a commodity. It’s this and that. You might as well have a business.” When we started teaching people how to do this for themselves, we saw how much it helped them and people are coming to you crying saying, “You saved my life and my kids. You got me out of $50,000 debt.” Maybe we were doing it wrong before. Maybe we haven’t had the best experience with the coaching groups we’ve been in because we felt it was always about the network not about what the coach was delivering to the people. We never wanted to be a network community.
My husband made a commitment to the group and to the business that has probably been one of the cornerstones to our success. He would, every month, deliver and release at least one to two new things for the upper-level clients. Whether that is a new method of lead generation, a new portal for them to reflect, to use, to leverage for their operations or a new system like we have now. Automated follow-up he created not that long ago for them, whatever it may be. He’s always innovating and that shifted our view from being like, “Once you get them in, you’re good,” to “We are constantly reselling them on our product and looking at it like continuity is a continuous sale.” It’s not, “Once you get them, they’re good and you can remain stagnant.” You have to be progressively and almost ferociously pursuing what it could be even better in the company.
Where are you two learning? Where do you continue to work on your skills? You’ve mentioned parts of your masterminds in the past. Where have you guys gone? Where are you continuing to learn?
Two of the most influential groups that we began with for this were Russell Brunson and Alex Charfen. They were two people that helped us a lot in the beginning especially. Russell is lead generation, sales, getting businesses off the ground. He’s good with the startup. Alex Charfen is good at helping you assemble that first team. Besides them, I would say my husband probably referenced Dan Kennedy for most of the marketing and sales experience. I would reference honestly reading about some of the people that are the greats like Peter Drucker, Seth Godin, Simon Sinek and studying their lives. Rather than consuming their material, I like to study the lives of people and how they’re acting.
How about the dividing of roles? You keep mentioning your husband in the business. If you were to give us a visual of your org chart, where do his roles fall on the org chart and where do your roles?
What it would look like is you would see two at the top which is him and I. He has a small team of three people that surround him on a daily basis. My husband’s like Willy Wonka in the Wonka factory. He’s in there and he’s creating either content or researching the next thing we’re going to release to the group. His team is tight-knit. It’s close and not quite as organized or rigorous as we run the operation side. You would see me and then you would see the rest of our operations team which is 40 people. You would see all of our executives and our directors. At this point, three levels of management: executives, directors and managers.
The business is the biggest thing each of you has either run. The most entrepreneurial story is that you wake up in the morning and the business is now the biggest thing you’ve ever done in your life and tomorrow it’s bigger again. We read a lot on social media about the whole impostor syndrome. I don’t think so much of impostor syndrome. I don’t feel like we’re out there faking it, but I feel like we’re out there waking going, “What am I supposed to do?” How do you control your mind and the chatter that entrepreneurs have to deal with our own skill sets, our insecurities and our worries? How do you keep that under check or in check?
A lot of it came from when I was going through weight loss a few years ago of affirming yourself of things. If you put in that work in the beginning, then it doesn’t come later on. I haven’t had those questioning thoughts anytime even though I’m constantly uncomfortable. Every day when I was walking or reading or whatever, I would have time where I would say my affirmations. I would say some cheesy stuff like, “I am a badass. I am the COO of this $10 million company.” For me, doing that and then taking action, continuously learning and reading about operating a business and expanding my skillset is what puts me at ease. If I know I’m better than who I was yesterday, it’s a lot easier to avoid that feeling of inadequacy because I’m doing something about it.
I love that you do the affirmations. I co-authored the book, The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs, with Austin guy Hal Elrod. We launched that book and the A in the morning SAVERS is your Affirmations. It sounds cheesy but it works. What is Leila focusing on in terms of your day-to-day?
My day-to-day has been mostly scaling leadership. It’s turned into much more of a strategic role, especially since we brought my sister in who is ascended up the ladder and is our highest executive over everyone. She has been in operations for several years. Until I got into this, I didn’t understand how good she was at what she did. She handles a lot more of the day-to-day operations when I can focus on strategy. I’m looking at forecasting what the teams have to look like in the next quarter. I would say for this quarter specifically, I’m wrapping up developing our leadership training. As people ascended to management and executive roles, they have a module or a portal where they can log in and see how Gym Launch expects its leaders to lead and manage. From there, it’s building out the team for our next venture which is supplements. I’m focused on what is phase one, two, three of the roll-out going to look like. What’s the infrastructure going to look like? What are the roles we’re going to have to hire for? Building out that plan and then beginning with hiring that first person who is going to be a director.
I was talking to a client I coached about a 700-person company. I’ve been coaching them from 60 people up to 700 employees. We’re talking about what the next phase of growth is going to be like. They’ve raised $255 million from Warburg Pincus. They’ve got a huge amount of cash to fuel the rest of their growth. We are talking about forecasting the team and we talked about doing an org chart for what the company would look like a few years from now, a couple of years from now and several months from now. Reverse engineering that org chart into almost a monthly staffing plan, you could then hire ahead of the curve.
If you’re only hiring the people you need, you’re missing the point. What you want to be doing is hiring the people that you’ll need in several months and tell them to roll up their sleeves and get in here early because they’re going to be building the business for you. It sounds like you’re approaching it the right way. Talk to me about leadership training. I’ve always believed that a leader’s job is to grow people. It sounds like you guys are taking that philosophy on. What skills are you working on growing the leadership side of your team?
I honestly feel most people that come into the company that ends up as leaders are growth-oriented, but they have been taught to sit back. Not giving as much feedback, not voice their opinions as much, and take a lot of the responsibility that should probably be delegated. It’s how the workforce has been for the last however many years. My goal was always to get them to understand I’m coming from a place of, “I want to grow you as a person and I want you to shatter the beliefs you came in here with. Understand that to grow in this company, you have to give feedback. You have to challenge me at times. You have to voice your opinions.” The biggest thing a lot of directors face at first is they have a hard time delegating down a lot of decision-making and they try to take a lot on their back. They assume that as they rise up, they’re going to have more responsibilities day-to-day rather than decisions they oversee.
Ideally you want to delegate all of that. I almost flipped the org charts upside down. I have the CEO at the bottom supporting the VPs that are above them, supporting the managers, supporting the customers. Our role is to help them make decisions, remove obstacles and grow them as people but not to tell them what to do. As long as we keep the vivid vision above everybody that all of the employees, customers and suppliers can see that same vision the CEO can see for what the company is going to look like in a few years. Everybody can figure out how to do it, but when the org chart is autocratic, the typical top-down, everyone is waiting for it to come to them versus, “It’s your decision. I’m here to help you and support you.” On the leadership side, are you building into your interview and recruiting process that you’re hiring and recruiting people that already have those behavioral traits? That they are strong leaders? Will they make decisions? Will they speak up?
That is what I look for out the gate. I’m always looking for those who take the opportunities presented to them on the teams, people in the front line and looking at how we can get them to fast-tracking leadership. For some positions, I would say most of them. I feel you can train a lot of those characteristics if you yourself are constantly working on them and aware of your behaviors and how you’re treating them on the team. I do think there are some positions that the skill level, someone does need to come in with experience such as finance. I can’t teach someone to understand finance to the level they’ll need to in our company.
You can’t teach the skill of finance but you can hire for people who already have the leadership ability. When they were twelve years old, they were the leaders or when they were fourteen years old, they were speaking up in the classroom. If you can look for behavioral traits early, you almost hire for attitude and the skillset. Whereas in the old days, they used to say hire for attitude, train for skill. You have to hire for both.
I’ve hired one. In the beginning, I remember hiring for the attitude. I thought it was amazing but then this person didn’t put in the work on the skill side and they end up bringing the team down. That was my fault because I didn’t know at that time. They needed to have at least some skill.
You’re starting to realize the leadership skills are part of what to be recruiting for as well. What skills have you brought in outside trainers to train your management or your leadership team on or even your employees on? Do you bring in people from the outside to train at all?
We don’t. The reason is that we have so much access to many people good at many different skills. Primarily, when it comes to sales and marketing, my husband finds the people to go to and then spreads the information through the company. When it comes to operations, I find the people to go to and I spread that information to the company.
You’re spreading it through but making sure you are still growing them in a focused way. A lot of companies miss out on that part that they’re focused on the day-to-day of selling their product and service, they miss on the focus of growing their teams.
Gym Launch: You can train a lot of those characteristics if you yourself are constantly working on them and you’re aware of your behaviors and how you’re treating the team.
I’m lucky I’m at the point where I can focus on what they need to grow as people.
Tell me about bringing your sister into the company. Many companies are against nepotism. I don’t even call it nepotism. I think it’s hiring great culture fit people who have already got the skill sets and it sounds like you knew she was a good culture fit. She’s your sister and she’s obviously got the skills. She had several years of operational experience. How was it bringing her into the organization in the earlier few months? How has it been since then? What have you learned during that?
My sister and I were not super close growing up. We were the opposite. What I didn’t realize was that what made us opposite in our personal lives would make us work well together in the workplace. We were both super nervous at first but she was looking for a new job. She wasn’t happy where she was. I could see how smart and hardworking she was and I needed help from the operations and it was a perfect fit. When I first brought her on, how we did it was we both led side-by-side together. Over time, I would let the team know, “I’m going to let Mimi take this over on this and I’m letting you guys know because I told you we were going to lead side-by-side first and now this is hers. She owns it. You guys know that. She knows more than me now.”
I would say within about four months, she had taken on everything I hadn’t been doing at that time which then allowed me to go and like the business again. How it is now is amazing. It has forced us to learn how to communicate better with each other and to work toward one goal together. It brought us closer together because we have a new found respect for each other’s strengths because it’s utilized in our relationship. She’s protective of me and my time and I am constantly reaching my hand out to ask where I could help and support her. It’s honestly been easier than I would’ve ever expected.
Are there any hard feelings from any of the people on the team as she’s risen in her role?
I had a couple of people at first say, “I was a little upset because she went over me and I was in operations.” I said, “I’m logical first off,” and they all know I don’t make emotional, irrational decisions. I said, “Look at her experience and look at yours. You’re not taking my coaching. Our business is growing fast that we don’t have the luxury of waiting years for someone to take it and I have to bring someone in.” I already trust her and she already fits the culture. I’m transparent with the team about it and they’ve told me before if anything’s ever come upset, “Does it make you feel like I’m favoring her or X, Y and Z?” They’ll tell me how they feel about certain things and I try to be as upfront as possible about it.
How about firing people? Have you guys had to fire people yet?
Yes, I think we’re lucky. We’ve had to fire nine people and we have 46. It’s low over the span of time. It feels high because four of them were a couple of months ago, but we have had to fire people.
Lessons from that on your end, were they hiring mistakes?
I would say the first mistake is hiring someone for the role that it is required of them now rather than the role that is going to be in a few months. I didn’t know that at first. I would hire someone who works now but our business is changing rapidly. A month from then, their role would require more. I remember one girl was petrified of the change. The second thing I would say is ignoring red flags. Ignoring things that are obvious like, “Everything else is great about a person. There’s one red flag during the interview and then we hire them anyway because they have a great skill set, a great culture fit.” That red flag comes up and bites you in the butt later. We had someone who would steal from the company.
I was talking to a CEO and they were saying that it takes a few months after you hire someone to know if they’re the right hire truly. I said, “No, that’s not true. If you have the right interviewing and selection process, you know everything about them before you present the offer.” The reality is most companies get sloppy and lazy in the hiring process and they do end up ignoring the red flags or they do end up hiring too quickly or hiring somebody for the job they have to do now. Even when we were growing 1-800-GOT-JUNK? we went through six consecutive years of 100% revenue growth. Year-over-year, 100% six times in a row, you had to hire ahead of the curve for that. That’s where you guys are growing as well.
The reasons many people would say it takes a few months is they’re not aware enough during the interview to catch themselves lying to themselves almost.
What’s the single biggest thing you think if you look back on your extremely fast growth in the last several months? What’s helped you scale that quickly? If you could say there’s one thing, what would the one thing be?
I would say for myself, complete clarity on my autonomy in the business away from my husband’s. For him to say, “Leila, I want you to run the business, do all the operations and do all the people stuff and I am going to market and develop a product.” I don’t want to make those decisions. When he said that, I realized who I had to become to build this business that would fulfill his insane visions and that was the moment everything took off for us.
That’s what I call the Navy SEAL mentality. If you’ve got a group of Navy SEALs and they’re all going into a room, the door’s closed and they know on the other side of the door there are a bunch of people that want to kill them. One person’s job is only to look to the right. One person’s job is only to look to the left. One person’s job is only to look straight ahead. They know if they do anything but their exact role, somebody might get killed. If the guy who is always supposed to look to the left looks to the right a little bit, somebody from the left might kill somebody. When there is that pure role, clarity and then also the confidence that the individuals have the confidence to do their job and run with it, stuff starts to scale. Are you taking that idea or that confidence that you have? How are you trickling that now through the organization? Have you started to do that with everybody who reports to you?
That’s my 100% focus with them. I would say it’s giving them the freedom to fail with the executives. It’s allowing them to fail and telling them and reassuring them over and over again that I’m okay if they mess up. They are giving them a clear outcome for their department. They’re the ones making the calls on what are the goals for your department based on the goals of the company and then them having that clarity of where their ownership is and clear swim lanes. Clear swim lanes with backing that and padding it with the support and the confidence from me and from everyone else. I would say those are the two things they need, clarity and trust.
I go back to Michael Gerber who wrote The E-Myth when he says that people don’t fail, systems fail. If somebody makes a mistake or drops the ball or something goes wrong, it’s not their fault. It’s that there’s a system that’s broken or missing. The fact people make a mistake shows us we need to systemize something so it doesn’t happen again. It gives people a lot of comfort where they realize no one’s going to get blamed for something going wrong. We’re going to then create a system around it so it doesn’t happen again. Let’s go faster. You’re working with many business owners. What’s the single biggest mistake you see businesses making or your clients making?
At this point they’re at in their entrepreneurship, it’s resistance to building and growing a team 100%. Our frontend product, it’s resistance to scaling. When they get into our second tier, it’s resistance to accepting some of their own flaws and then resistance to the delegation. In a sense, that is what I see most of them struggle with. Holding on too tight, and what a lot of it is when you’re that small, it’s my business but it’s the business. To say it’s our business with your team, I try to speak that way because I have to remember. I should not be the one the business relies on solely.
It was one of the reasons why I tried to get leaders and business owners to take many vacation days is I want them to be forced to delegate and forced to have other people running the company for them. The more time you take off on vacation, the faster you’ll scale your company.
We will have our first out-of-country vacation.
How long are you going for?
Fourteen days.
Gym Launch: You should not be the only one the business relies on solely.
I would challenge you and this is an old one that we used to do years ago. You get your assistants to change your passwords on your laptops and your email so that you have zero access for the fourteen days. You force yourself to let it go. The reality is that even if the old adage of like, “Only call me if the business is burning. Don’t call me. If the business is burning, call the fire department. I can’t do anything. I’m in Italy.” If you can set your team up with that, it gets powerful quickly. The other one is no business books, no business periodicals, no blogs, no business writing, thinking nothing. Read a novel. Go read a book about something that’s passionate for you and disconnect. We missed that part. Often, the more business learning we’re doing is adding stress on top of our already busy lives. It’s adding a lot of random ideas. Good for you to take the two weeks off but go take it. If we were to think about technology and how technology is changing our businesses, how have you guys as a company leveraged technology? What are your favorite apps, hacks or tech tools you use?
We don’t have a ton of those. Facebook is the main one in creating a community. We have three Facebook groups. One is a group for prospects, one is a group for our front level or our 16K product, and the other is a group for our top level. We basically are constantly adding value into all those groups, but we’re also encouraging our clients to sell for us using those groups because we give them status. We post a video boosting up our top-level group. We post it into our 16K group and talk about how often they are and showing testimonials with them. They’re commenting on that saying, “You changed my life in this program. Anyone who doesn’t join hates money,” things like that. It promotes for us. The groups have become a self-sufficient marketing tool. We don’t have to do much. They do their thing.
It’s a solid tool. I’ve watched how Elrod with his Miracle Morning Community and it’s incredible what he’s done in that whole community. Good for you to leverage a tool that sits in front of us for free. The last question I’ve got is related to one of the books that I launched. I came out with a book called Meetings Suck and I was frustrated with people complaining about meetings. I wanted to teach employees how even to show up, attend and participate in meetings not only how to run them. How do you leverage meetings being either over video, face-to-face, in person or over the phone? What systems do you have that make meetings work for you?
The biggest thing for me has been if you’re meeting suck it’s because you suck. If I’m bored with the meeting or I feel people are bored with the meeting, there’s always something I can do about it. I don’t know if there are any hacks. We do Zoom and I ensure everyone is sitting down and paying attention, phones are out of sight and their video is on that they’re properly engaged. I do a lot of employee surveys. The biggest piece I got was we want to be more involved in the meetings. I’ll send out a lesson plan for the executives so they have a part of the meeting they own. There’s always space for Q and. A. There’s always space for people in the front line to drop in, some shout outs. I try to make it that it’s not my meeting but I move towards getting my information I need to across the team but then letting everyone participate.
That’s the key. If they’re going to be at the meeting, they should be involved otherwise why invite them in the first place? They’ve got better things to do if they’re not going to be involved. You skipped over something and we checked our phones. Phones aren’t in the way. That’s a huge system I’ve been encouraging companies all over the world to do now is you check your cell phone at the door. If you can’t be in that meeting for a half-hour or an hour, whatever it’s booked for without your phone, it means you’re too busy to be in the meetings. That’s okay. Don’t come to the meeting. That is for the CEO all the way down to the frontline staff who is in the meeting. It’s like a swimmer. You’re not going to be in a swim race and check your email while you’re racing.
Do one thing at a time and do it well and then let’s book the meetings for a shorter period of time. Leila, you and your husband met on Bumble. One of the upcoming interviews we have for the show is the second-in-command for Bumble. She and I met at the TED Conference. I go to the main TED Conference every year and we bumped into each other at lunch and Peter Diamandis was hosting there. It will be interesting to hear what her growth stories are, but you guys are certainly buzzing. It’s fun to watch your growth. I’m happy you’re able to share with us. Thanks very much for everything.
I appreciate you having me.
Important Links:
- Gym Launch
- 1-800-GOT-JUNK?
- Russell Brunson
- Alex Charfen
- Dan Kennedy
- The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs
- The E-Myth
- Meetings Suck
About Leila Hormozi
Gym Launch has grown from 0 to 75 employees in 21 months 100% virtually while simultaneously going from 0 to a 40 million dollar company in less than 2 years.
Our mission at Gym Launch is to teach micro gym owners how to fish (rather than fish for them) so they can experience the independence and freedom they sought out in the beginning of their journey while helping the population lose weight.
