What I’m thinking about: The most counterintuitive business lessons from 11 hours with Alex Hormozi…strategies that feel wrong but unlock the next level of growth.
Quick context: I’m continuing my breakdown of the $100M Money Models affiliate live event. (Catch Part 1 here on the Mozi 6 framework,“Why can’t you do MORE?”, if you missed it.)
The Growth Paradox
Alex hammered this point across multiple fireside chats: The only way to grow past your current level is to implement counterintuitive strategies.
Think about it…the intuitive strategies are what you’re ALREADY doing. Those are table stakes.
Recall, every business has 3 fundamental necessities. Marketing, sales, and delivery. If you check the box for each one, you have a business (let’s take staying financially solvent for granted…easier said than done of course.)
For a typical land flipping business, marketing (mail/call/text/PPC/SEO/on-market listings), sales (closing acquisitions and dispo), and delivery (transferring title from one entity to another, with potential value-add in between) is the baseline.
Many viable businesses have been built from this framework, and several that have become consistent profit engines.
Intuitively, when it comes to growing a land business, most folks will focus on marketing and/or sales constraints, because they’re the easiest to understand and measure.
Recall, marketing is a leads problem, sales is a conversion problem, and delivery is a LTV (lifetime value) problem.
As discussed previously, bumping LTV is the most surefire way to grow the value of a company.
In land, typically the LTV is the profit earned from the sale of a property.
Most land businesses barely, if ever, focus on LTV as a KPI because of the lack of continuity within the industry.
Your LTV is generally relegated to a one-off sale, from a unique product that has it’s own particular price point.
No upsells. No downsells. No continuity.
I can hear the arguments forming, so let me head them off:
- Yes, an upsell could be considered value-add to land, like a septic/MH install, though that’s generally still all handled as one purchase, which I would consider a core offer.
- Owner financing could qualify as continuity, though each parcel of land is still unique, with it’s own price and set of terms, and there’s an eventual end to payments
- Repeat buyers could bump average LTV, but most land businesses are not set up this way (e.g. focused on selling to builders/dev’s in a particular area)
- Accounting-wise, it makes more sense to calculate LTV from dispo, but technically you could attribute the metric to acquisitions, so if you have a repeat seller or have wholesalers/realtors birddog for you, LTV could get bumped. Not typical for most land businesses.
So, since most land businesses will focus on increasing leads and/or conversions, growth eventually plateaus.
Of course, you can build a solid 7-figure, perhaps 8-figure business this way. Nothing to sneeze at.
(As an aside, only ~5% of US private businesses reach $1M+ of annual top line revenue. That’s already rare air if you’re at that mark. Then it’s about 1 in 250 above the $10M mark, and about 1 in 3000 above the $100M revenue mark. I love the symmetry that in order to grow 10X in size, it’s about 10X more scarce in the stats. It’s all a numbers game…how big you get is directly correlated with how good, and focused, you are.)
But a 9-figure, or a billion dollar land flipping business? I’ve never heard of one, though forgive my ignorance if there is.
In order to reach those heights, dramatically increasing LTV is the only route.
Which inevitably, and counterintuitively, requires…fewer customers.
This is exactly what we’ve been doing at Serious Land Capital over time, and particularly over the previous ~5 months.
We steadily raised our minimum purchase price per deal from $10K to $20K and now to a $50K minimum. Every time we raised it, we priced out a chunk of potential funding deals.
Psychologically, this was a hard pill to swallow. We could still fund those $20K and $30K properties. The 2X margins often exist at that level, and we had done very well with them.
But here’s what changed: One ~$300K deal can deliver the same backend profit as six or seven $50K deals (or ~30-50 desert square deals), often requiring similar due diligence effort per transaction.
The counterintuitive move was intentionally reducing volume to increase deal size (and LTV)…even though volume felt like proof we were “winning.”
(And yes, this hurt short-term as we adjusted operations. That’s the trade-off. Long-term bets are required in business, and generally the person with the longest time horizon wins.)
The biggest operators in land…the ones doing hundreds of millions or billions…work on fewer projects with larger check sizes.
And as I mentioned last week, we’d rather have the capacity to take on a greater number of larger projects, even if it means sitting on liquidity until a better opportunity arises.
This industry changes by the year, so we reserve the right to change our mind as new evidence arises, but I’m laying my cards on the table right now.
(There probably is a route for a land biz to do disgusting amounts of volume to achieve the same size, but like Hormozi told us at the live event, while there are no rules in business, and plenty of folks have found success by following a route of lesser probability…why not play the odds and take the more likely route, business is hard enough already.)
For the sake of article length, I’m going to quickly summarize other key lessons (there’s more to come!), and you can tune into these (one, two, three, and four) Get Serious podcast episodes for greater depth.
You’re Always Incurring Debt
Every business incurs debt daily.
You’re incurring debt on:
- Manpower (burning out your team to hit growth targets)
- Ignorance (pursuing new strategies that might not work)
- Operations (sacrificing quality/reputation to maintain velocity)
- Monetary (self-explanatory)
Alex’s framework: Always take out the debt in your business that you can pay back the fastest (e.g. burning the team hard for 6 weeks to complete a major AI buildout that creates leverage for years.)
The mistake is not acknowledging which debt you’re taking on…and whether you can actually pay it back before it compounds into a crisis.
The Real Reason Your Team Doesn’t Execute (And It’s Probably Not What You Think)
Alex breaks down the 5 real reasons employees don’t complete work:
1. They didn’t know you wanted THAT done. Communication failure. The task wasn’t clearly conveyed or got lost in translation.
2. They didn’t know HOW to do it. No training, no documentation, no access to the process.
3. They didn’t know WHEN it was due. Timeline confusion creates misaligned priorities.
4. They’re BLOCKED. Technical issues, dependencies on others.
5. They don’t WANT to do it. Burnout, lack of clarity on why it matters, or overwhelmed by competing priorities.
Most execution problems live in constraints 1-4. Fix those first before assuming it’s a motivation issue (most employees want to be of value and contribute.)
This is also how you prompt AI effectively. The best AI prompting (credit to Callan and the UnCommon Business team) requires solving all five of these constraints (including motivating LLM models)…which means the best way to communicate with AI is also the best way to communicate with humans.
The Other Lessons Worth Noting:
The ~$1-3M Revenue Swamp: Most businesses get stuck here because they’ve proven they can operate and owners plateau psychologically…but they haven’t solved for the next constraint (and can’t afford star talent without sacrificing most of the business profits). You need to focus 80%+ of your time on your main constraint and let other fires burn (and potentially give up major short-term profits). What got you to $1M won’t get you to $10M.
The SPCL Content Framework: Content either primarily entertains or educates. The best performing educational content needs to demonstrate Status, Power, Credibility, and Likeness. Power (giving directions that produce positive results for your audience) matters most…which is why this newsletter focuses relentlessly on tactical value you can implement in your life and business. You wouldn’t be reading otherwise, right? 🙂
Focus on internal deliveries over external metrics. Stop obsessing over hitting $2M or $5M (or $10M or $1B) revenue targets. Instead: “Can I make 100 cold calls every day this month?” or “Can I review 10 on market deals today?” The inputs you control lead to outputs you can’t force.
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Most of the above items come back to one uncomfortable truth: Growth requires doing things that feel wrong in the short-term.
Every time I pick up a weight at the gym, my brain immediately demands that I put it down. Every time. And I’ve been training for 20+ years. Growth never comes easy. Get uncomfortable, maximize intent.
The operators who break through are the ones willing to implement counterintuitive strategies while their competitors stay comfortable with what’s working “well enough,” (…until it doesn’t.)
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Looking for funding from operators who’ve implemented these frameworks at scale? Serious Land Capital’s 41% net margins didn’t come from remaining complacent in today’s challenging market, they came from counterintuitive strategic decisions like raising our minimum purchase price to $50K. We focus exclusively on 2X+ margin deals.
