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The Christmas Eve That Changed Everything

On Christmas Eve 2016, Alex Hormozi sat on a child-sized plastic chair in his fiancée's parents' playroom, laptop balanced on his knees, and watched a payment processor freeze a hundred and twenty thousand dollars of his money for the next six months. He had no permanent address. He had just wired twenty-two thousand dollars in commission to his salesman — whose wife was pregnant — out of his last twenty-three thousand and thirty-six. The screenshot he took of his thousand-and-thirty-six-dollar balance still exists. Leila, the woman who would later become his wife, checked his pulse at the movie theater that night. One hundred beats per minute, resting, for a fit twenty-seven-year-old.

Thirty days before that, he had woken up to find a different number in his account: minus forty-five thousand, seven hundred dollars. A business partner had taken all the seed money for a new venture called Gym Launch. In the same window, his mother nearly died in an accident. He totaled his car in a head-on collision at sixty miles per hour. He picked up a DUI. He was, by any reasonable measure, finished.

Two days after Christmas, he launched six gyms simultaneously, with thirty-three hundred dollars a day in expenses — airfare, hotels, rental cars, gas, ad spend across six markets — all charged to a hundred-thousand-dollar credit card. Four hundred and twelve dollars per working hour going into debt. January 2017 revenue: a hundred thousand, one hundred seventeen dollars. Just enough to cover the card. Twelve months later, monthly revenue passed a million and a half. Twenty-four months later, four point four million a month. Two years after the playroom chair, he had crossed a hundred and twenty million dollars in total sales.