This episode unpacks Hormozi’s operational frameworks for culture-building, team scaling, and sales timing. Hormozi defines culture as behaviors (spoken and unspoken) that get reinforced, where values are simply “chunked up rules”—with unspoken modeling mattering more than posted policies. He emphasizes the “scale to zero” paradigm requiring 3-6 months of business growth without founder involvement before expansion, and reveals that selling at the point of greatest deprivation (hunger before the meal) converts infinitely better than selling after value delivery (dessert menu after satiation).
Key Takeaways:
- Unspoken Rules Trump Everything Written on Walls Culture emerges from which behaviors actually get reinforced (leaders showing up on time) versus what gets posted in Slack—if no consequences exist for violations, the unspoken message is that value doesn’t matter.
- Hire Leaders Who Can Teach You When building C-suite or department heads, deliberately hire mentors who know more about their domain than you do—ego-free leadership accelerates company-wide learning and removes operational bottlenecks.
- Scale to Zero Before Expanding Anything Operations must run for 3-6 months without founder involvement and ideally improve during absence before launching new locations, product lines, or businesses—most failures stem from premature expansion before solidifying existing operations.
- Sell at Greatest Deprivation, Not After Value Delivery Conversion maximizes when customers are hungry (menu before eating) not satiated (dessert after the meal)—solve one problem while revealing the next deprivation point to maintain buying momentum.
- Speed Outsells Superior Products Consistently If you can only improve one business element, make it reaction speed to inbound/outbound—Amazon rewired consumer brains for instant gratification, making fast response the ultimate competitive advantage across industries.
Listen to understand why most culture initiatives fail (talking versus modeling), when expansion becomes suicide, and how timing the sales moment matters more than offer quality.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious. Let’s do another, review session from that, live Hormozi event. went to, approaching a couple months ago. still, again, so much, content that is just worth, perusing and mining deeper into. and, if you want to check out some of the previous, Hormozi content, you can find that, the number of podcasts on that written about it.
times in the newsletter as well too. Get serious or no. Podcasts get serious. Serious news is the newsletter. If you haven’t signed up for that, it’s free. Weekly goes out on Mondays. So again, the Hermosy event was for the affiliates from his latest book launch. hundred of us there. Fireside chat set up and some audience Q &A. So just been going over the various takeaways here.
So jumping right back into it, know, Hormozi will talk a lot about just culture building, but how do you actually do that? And again, I think I’ve remarked a couple of times and he’ll point out in a lot of his content of just trying to boil down what are actual behaviors behind certain words. Like, what does it mean to have integrity? What does it mean to be honest?
dishonest, for instance, like what does that actually mean from an action taking perspective? The first principles of defining those terms. And so, you know, when it comes to culture, remarks that, you know, inherently has certain values that the group and community abides by. really talking about a business context primarily here, but it could serve from a lot of…
uh, different standpoints and you know, values are chunked up rules. Um, so I find that value valuable to, uh, um, yeah, values are valuable, right? Um, to, kind of keep in mind here, cause again, it starts to boil down. Okay. What is everybody doing, um, in their actual behaviors in relation to these inherent values? Um, and so
you know, to break that down further, it’s like, okay, what behaviors spoken or unspoken are reinforced when it comes to culture. So for instance, like, you know, something that, you know, could be unspoken is like, do people actually show up on time for meetings? You know, is that…
reinforced in any way, like are there penalties for not showing up or the leaders showing up on time? And so, you know, regardless of, you know, you could have the rules plastered all around your AI projects or on walls, if you have an office or, you know, Slack memos, whatever, then yeah, we have to be on, you know, it’s expected folks are on time for meetings. But if that’s not actually reinforced in a spoken or
on unspoken standpoint, know, spoken would be, you know, Hey, a team member or leader is mentioning, everybody needs to be on time. And if you get called out, if you aren’t on time, unspoken would be, well, you know, I’m look at here, here I am live on the podcast, trying to break this down even further and define it for myself here. So,
you can start seeing the process of like, okay, yeah, what does it actually mean for these various words here? So then unspoken.
would imply that…
You know, if, if, if somebody, if somebody is, you know, not routinely showing up on time, or maybe it’s a whole team thing and there’s no, reinforcement either way of people needing to show up on time, then it’s actually like unspoken that, this value doesn’t actually matter here. so that can kind of be the flip side.
of that and I know a number of times you want to model behavior versus speaking self to me, like the unspoken rules would generally be more powerful. I learned a lot of that from parenting. We think it’s easier, right? Do as I say, not as I do. Plenty of times, so.
you know, especially as kids get older, like they’re just constantly observing. It’s just like, okay, if my parents aren’t doing something, then it’s not actually being reinforced to follow, like follow within this culture, this particular behavior, regardless of what’s being spoken. So to me, I would tier the unspoken higher than the spoken, but ideally they’re matched up and reinforced with.
real consequences, both positive reinforcement, that’s generally better, people react better to that, but then also negative reinforcement as well too. remarked in this last week’s newsletter that our culture could really be summed up as underwriting over everything, and this is probably worth a podcast in and of itself, but…
I like how clear cut it is and that you can boil it down to one sentence because it just indicates yes for anybody on the team, anybody that has anything to do with our business. Nothing else matters compared to the underwriting. If we don’t get that right, everything else falls apart. So you have to be contributing towards due diligence and careful evaluation of.
you know, any asset that we may consider, but you see how that could also branch off to other parts of the business. It’s like, okay, we’re going to have a keen attention to detail to our sales processes, our marketing processes, et cetera. Because you could, for the most part, kind of branch out that inherent understanding of underwriting to other parts of the business.
because it really means like, following a detail oriented process and utilizing curiosity and a seeking of truth to get to the right answer. So that kind of defines what we do as a company. And it’s basically a chunked up rule, right? So I like how we were defining that even internally here and kind of.
Uh, following what, uh, Hormozy has set up for his own companies and acquisition. and he was mentioning to, you know, along the line of team building is just, you know, when it comes to leaders within your company, if you’re, uh, uh, hiring for C-suite or, um, you know, VP, whatever, like it depends on what your org chart might look like, um, is to hire your mentors. Uh, and so this is something where.
You know, again, you have to kind of put your ego aside, especially as you continue to grow as a company here and that, you know, if you’re expecting to have a department or particular area of the company really excel without your constant attention associated with it and needing to go through your own approval process, like you should be hiring somebody who knows more about that particular area than you. Sometimes it’s like a really stark.
difference like within land price or, you know, CTO who just, yeah, knew far more about engineering and software development than I did. Like I learned so much because of that. It’s more of like a project manager type role within the company. So, you know, that’s an easier one to mention, but, you know, other areas where, yeah, you might be more of a sales person, but okay, is.
you your chops when it comes to operations of company, just like not as much up to snuff or when it comes to actual HR hiring, like knowing the KPIs to follow there. Yeah, hire somebody who can teach you and, you know, up level your entire company as a result of the knowledge and wisdom that they’re bringing. So something to keep in mind there.
And then, you know, this has just been so critical. He was mentioning it, especially in relation to brick and mortar companies, because it’s more of a concrete example, concrete brick and mortar, is using this scale zero paradigm, where, you know, especially for franchises or, you know, looking to expand locations.
Make sure that your time as the core operator that your time needed at that first location Or whatever location is being worked on is is down to zero and ideally like have a You know six month test. It probably minimum three months, but you know three to six months where I You know baseline if you step away from
that location that the company isn’t burning down or getting worse. Ideally, it is doing even better than the time that you left it alone. And then and only then is it appropriate to launch another location. Because if you don’t have the operations all set up at one, you’re just going to create a situation where you’re to be balancing fires going on from
one area compared to the other and like it’s just it’s hard to catch those things up. I mean you can easily extend that to digital companies or you know non brick and mortar oriented companies where you know don’t necessarily just have like different product lines or you’re trying to do different businesses run them at the same time if you haven’t really set up their operations to work well without you for a matter of months and ideally excel without your participation.
Then it’s kind of a fool’s errand to start something else. So that is something that I’ve learned the hard way more than once and probably will continue to learn the rest of my life. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, this is maybe the key struggle. So something else to keep in mind there just because like the, there’s so many businesses that just go kaput because they just over expand like that is a
key key risk factor that you know very few folks can actually manage properly. They don’t understand how tenuous things are until you’ve really locked in a particular business or location. Few other points here is
that when it comes to the point of selling, you kind of have to match that up with the customer journey. so, Hermosy would really say is like, you want to sell at the point of greatest deprivation, not value. Because, know, and his example that he’ll utilize a lot, it’s like…
You know, you put a, when somebody walks into a restaurant, for instance, you put the menu in front of them, they want the steak. Great. like you’re, selling to them at that point of greatest deprivation. They’re hungry, but you know, they already eat, have the full steak. And then you put it another menu in front of like, okay, what state do you want after? Like they already received the value of the meal. And it’s just like, not nearly as appealing anymore, right? Like they’re satiated. So, you know, trying to sell your service after your customer has already received.
Like you got you got to dole out the value too, but you also want to make them want more right so understanding where they are in in that Customer journey standpoint is critical in order to get the most possible conversion So I mean there’s a million examples you can pull from and knowing like okay You have to demonstrate a lot of value just to bring people in
And start to trust your service, but like how do you still leave them wanting more? Or you know, potentially it could be like, okay kind of free information, but you know paid execution that that’s that’s a way to to handle things for instance and so he was mentioning, know, if you do sell at the point of Value you can kind of only overlap that with the point
you know, graze deprivation if you’re showing, okay, what is that next point of deprivation that is going to come up? So that this is kind of like a lead magnet thing too. Or it’s like, okay, you might solve one problem, but you you open up another can of worms for a larger problem now that this initial smaller problem might’ve been solved for the customer. And now it’s like, oh, well, I’m going to have to take care of this as well too. So.
That’s kind of like, you know, the gym model where it’s like, yeah, you’re going to get their diet plan set up. But then it’s like, okay, you need supplements in order to, properly maintain the level of nutrients that, you want to be getting with, with, with your new plan here. So that would be like the upsell. you’re, you know, providing value, but then also, opening up that next point of deprivation that you also want them to get, to get, them to buy into. So, that is.
Yeah, let me convey this in a real estate thing and go off the cuff here.
you know, it’s harder to do for land, right? Maybe you know it
You could do it maybe like an example would come up for like hunting or recreational land sometimes like, okay, yeah, you can get this nice piece of land. That’s kind of your base purchase, right? But if you want to be hunting 10 point stags or whatever, it’s a little outside of my typical vernacular to speak about, but it’s like, okay, we do have this extra package here that
you know, for a few thousand extra dollars, you know, we’ll set you up with trail cams here. We even have a guy who can come in and cut some trails for you. We can get some food plots set up like you’re interested in its extra service here. So they might not even have been thinking about it. I mean, probably they would have. mean, it’s real estate. You’re probably going to get very specific buyers for that, but they might not have really appreciated the nuances of it or could have gotten like a city boy like myself, like, oh yeah, it seems.
nice piece of land here. I didn’t fully understand the hunting potential and what goes into it. So yeah, you guys offer another service. I’m feeling deprived for this next step here that I’m just going to be willing to open my wallet up as I’ve gotten value just buying the land. But now I see the next steps that I need to take in order to get the maximum value possible for this journey that I’m on as a customer.
That’s something you could utilize there. And really what Hormozzi hammers in just again and again and again is that, and I try to utilize this within our own business so many times, like speed will outsell anything else. Like if you can only focus on one thing to get better at within your business, like can you just react faster?
to anything inbound or get your outbound out faster and then react better to those that come back to you. Because you can just, the bar is so low with so many businesses out there. I mean, some industries are gonna be harder than others. But when you can show your potential clients and customers that you are on top of things and you’re paying attention to them and that you’re gonna be fast providing service, again, in the economy like this, they…
Society like this where just everybody wants things instantly. This is the Amazon model, right? Like they’ve just changed our brains to Understand how quickly things should be fulfilled even from a physical product standpoint and that you know when you do deliver speed you have to make sure that you’re giving Immediate value as well too because that that’s gonna increase your close rates
a lot more oftentimes as well too. It’s like what, even if it’s not like the full delivery of a particular service, like can you solve something in that instant that a seller is ready to buy here? So like lot of like internet marketing type things, like okay, if you put your credit card down right now, boom, you get instant access to whatever course you’re gonna be looking at.
like that is immediate value here where you’re not having to wait to get something delivered or if something costs more for somebody to get value delivered in 10 minutes versus three days from now, like a lot of folks will pay that extra bit.
of cash or really if there isn’t any difference in one company just does it way faster than the other like they’re going to go for the faster one. Again, the Amazon model you might not always get the best price on certain things and kind of feeding a larger corporation but Amazon Prime is just so worth it for most of the US, most of the world to just get things.
so much faster than having to wait for chipping from other wholesalers or suppliers. So that’s just something to keep in mind is like what else in your business can you deliver faster and also deliver instant value for. So just something to keep in mind here. Again, these are just
podcasts and write-ups in and of themselves, but hopefully this unlocks some key changes that you can make within your own company as well. SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, 50k minimum purchase price, a whole bunch of leads. We’ve had very significant deal flow recently. Excited to see more. I’m trying to get to them as quickly as possible. Speed matters here.
Land Daily Diligence Facebook group looking forward to next time subscribe and share everybody take care now. Bye
