Acquisition.com Workshop Review: 15 Takeaways To Scale Your Business

I paid Alex & Leila Hormozi $5,000 for 2 days of learning (and then another $35,000 to keep learning). So, here's what I've learned so far.

Dear Reader,

To kick-off 2025, I spent $5,000 (and my co-founder, Dickie, also spent $5,000) to attend a 2-day business workshop at the Acquisition.com headquarters in Vegas.

And if you’re wondering, “Vegas? Did you hit the casinos before the event?”

• Yes… I did gamble.

• Yes… I did lose all the cash I brought ($3,000) at the roulette table.

• Yes, it all started with a tequila espresso martini around noon, and it ended with several Classe Azul Reposados on-ice and me betting it all on red (it was black).

• And yes, before the trip, I had one of my friends connect me to a guy whose entire business is to book dinner reservations at impossible-to-get restaurants, who yes… successfully got me and my wife and her parents a table at Delilah. (If you know you know.)

That was the first two days.

The latter two days was spent main-lining business information from 8:30am to 6pm.

And if you’re also wondering, “But Cole… $5,000? Was it worth it?”

The answer is Yes. Very much so.

And you’ll understand why by the end of this post.

Acquisition.com Workshop Review

Some quick context:

• The workshop is 2 days long (from 8am to 6pm).

• The workshop costs $5,000 per head. (I went with Dickie so each of us paid $5k.)

• The room held approximately 100 people, give or take, with a mix of solo founders/business owners & co-founders (like us) going together.

• 60% of the workshop was listening to different topic-specific presentations by each of the subject matter experts on their team—who also run different divisions inside Acquisition.com, which manages a portfolio of businesses. (So for example, we heard from their Head of Recruiting, Head of Business Strategy, Head of Marketing, etc.)

• Each presentation was helpful in its own way, and the only thing that made one presentation “more helpful” than another would be the relevance of that topic to your specific business. (For example, the Hiring presentation we didn’t find as “helpful” because that isn’t our core problem right now. But I guarantee everyone else in the room who has “hiring” as their core problem found it very relevant/helpful.)

• 20% of the workshop was then sitting in small groups with these subject matter experts and getting to ask them questions. (This was probably the most valuable part of the workshop for us.)

• The other 20% of the workshop was then presentations and/or Q&As with Alex and Leila.

Some tangential "things-to-know”:

• The event is catered (breakfast & lunch).

• They did an amazing job having gluten/dairy-free options (usually “the” reason why I hate going to events, because most people don’t do this and, since I have food allergies, I basically don’t get to eat the entire day). I was extremely grateful for this, and also appreciated their attention to detail here.

• The team was all warm and welcoming. Nobody made you feel like you didn’t belong there, no matter how big or small your business was.

• The Acquisition.com headquarters isn’t far from the Vegas strip, so it’s convenient to get to from both the airport and whatever hotel you stay at.

And just, in general, I really appreciated their attention to detail.

The event was extremely well-run.

Who Is The Acquisition.com Workshop For?

There were some businesses in the room doing $250,000 per year in revenue, and others doing $12,000,000 in revenue.

In my opinion though, you will get the most out of this workshop if you are at-or-above $1,000,000 per year in revenue, regardless of what your business is, does, or who it serves. Reason being, so many of the things you need to hear, learn, or do below $1M/year in revenue are already in the free content & resources Alex and Leila share online.

Now, is there benefit hearing it again in-person? Sure.

But you’ll get more juice out of it if your business is at a lightly more mature place.

For context, last year our business did $6,000,000 in revenue, so we were almost exactly in the “middle” of the room as far as low & highs go.

And we walked away with way more than $5,000 worth of value (the price of the ticket).

Acquisition.com Workshop Upsell: Value Acceleration Method

Now, like any good info business, at the end of the workshop they pitch you on “more” help & access to their portfolio team.

Here was the offer:

• $45,000 (or $35,000 if you sign up before the event is over).

• You come back for 2 smaller workshops with their team later in the year (you can pick the dates that work best for you).

• Before you come back, their portfolio team does a massive audit of your business and then when you come to the workshop they basically tell you, “If we were to invest in your business and treat you like a portfolio company, here’s what we would tell you to go do.”

• You go execute. You see how much you grow/they see how well you can execute, and then you come back for the 2nd workshop and do it again. (At least, that’s my understanding.)

Well, we have never made an investment in ourselves we didn’t make ROI-positive.

So we walked up to one of the sales guys after the pitch and said, “Do us a favor and take our money.”

We got a ton of value out of the first workshop. But we’re flying back out to Vegas in a few months to be part of this smaller group and get their portfolio team’s take on what else can be improved in our business.

And I guarantee you it will yield more than $35,000 in revenue for us.

“Is The Acquisition.com Workshop A Scam?”

During this pitch process, I overheard two entrepreneurs in the corner talking about how they “don’t like to get pitched” and how “it’s probably a scam.”

Let’s unpack that.

• Are there scams in the world? Yes.

• But are most “scams” actually scams? No.

People who call something a “scam” are really just low-information buyers who lack the appropriate context or information to make an educated decision for themselves.

And do you want to know the root of that problem?

Usually it’s some sort of faulty belief… like thinking, “If someone charges me money, they must be out to get me.”

Not much you can do to help these people. Their entire life is anchored in a constant state of suffering, and they are hell-bent on finding proof that their point-of-view (“I’m right!”) is correct.

Sadface.

My Answer:

So, is the Acquisition.com Workshop a scam?

Or are Alex & Leila “scammers?”

No. They are two of the most impressive entrepreneurs I’ve ever met (and I’ve ghostwritten for hundreds upon hundreds of Silicon Valley founders, venture capitalists, C-level executives of publicly traded companies, billionaires, etc.). And the way they have built these workshops is nothing short of amazing.

I was taking notes the entire time—not just on the content, but their attention to detail and how they ran the event itself.

15 Takeaways To Scale Your Business

Now, with all of that out of the way, here are all the “nuggets” I wrote down (in no particular order) during the two productive days I had in Vegas.

(I’m going to exclude my takeaways from my two unproductive days in Vegas… like “Don’t bet on red when it’s obviously going to be black.”)

Takeaway #1: Take out as much cash as you need from your business to feel “secure” personally… so that you can take more risk inside your business.

This is something I ROYALLY fucked up building my first company—my ghostwriting agency back in 2017.

I grew that agency from $0/mo to $180,000/mo in revenue in about 18 months. The mistake I made though was never taking any money OUT of the business to make my personal life feel more secure. In fact, the entire time we scaled that business, I had $5,000 - $10,000 in my savings account and that was it. (Meanwhile, our monthly payroll of 20+ employees was north of $100,000.)

As your business grows, you will inherently need to reinvest profits back into the business to keep it growing (we’re at this stage again right now). But that’s high risk. Which means, before you take that risk, make sure you’ve had a few months (or years) taking money out of the business so that you feel more comfortable/financially secure in your personal life… SO THAT you feel good taking that risk inside your business.

Takeaway #2: Above $5M/year in revenue, you don’t bootstrap departments. You hire subject matter experts who build the department.

This might have been my biggest “golden nugget” from the event, and thinking about the ROI of this simple concept relative to the fact I paid $5,000 to “learn this” is hilarious. $5k to learn something, at the moment I needed to learn it, that will make us millions more dollars in the future. (Not a bad ROI!)

This was also one of those “what-got-you-here-won’t-get-you-there” lightbulb moments.

I am a bootstrapper. Always have been. Whenever I have an idea, the first thing I do is go tinker and figure out how to duct-tape together something myself. And before you hit $1M or $2M or even $3M in revenue, that makes sense. That’s usually what’s required.

But this past year, our business grew a lot. And so did our team. We went from 13 employees to 28.

And the mistake I have been making (for months) is thinking, “Geez… I barely have any available time to bootstrap our next department!”

And it wasn’t until we attended this workshop that I realized (aka: someone said to me) that’s not how it works from here. Above $5M/year in revenue, you don’t bootstrap departments anymore. You take your cash, you go find someone who has already built the department you want to build, and you go buy their subject matter expertise and empower them to build it.

Completely different way of thinking about & solving the problem.

Takeaway #3: Before you change anything in your business, test it.

Piggy-backing on the above…

Another “bootstrapper” habit is to move fast and break things.

And when you’re small, this is correct. Perfection is the enemy of progress, so just do something and get moving.

The problem is, as you grow, the riskiest thing you can do is change something inside your business. Even if you’re convinced it’ll improve it. Even if you think, “There’s no way this won’t be ROI-positive.” When you have something that’s working, ANY change = some percentage of risk.

So a big piece of advice they hammered home to us was: don’t make company-wide changes.

If you have an idea, or are trying to solve a problem, don’t roll out a solution to the entire business, or the entire product, or the entire sales funnel, etc.

Instead, find a way to test your theory inside a contained environment:

• Have 1 closer try a different pitch, first.

• Have 1 coach try a different method with a student, first.

• Send a different offer to 10% of your email list (instead of 100%).

• Etc.

Takeaway #4: When you change something, expect a 20% decline in the short term.

Piggy-backing on the above again… when you change something, there will always be a period (in the short term) where metrics go down.

This is usually because, especially in a more mature business, when you change one thing that one change ends up affecting 5 or 10 other things, which inherently “change” as a result of the original change you made.

…which causes short-term inefficiencies.

…or causes short-term declining profitability.

…or causes some other metric to go down.

This isn’t a problem. It’s just something to expect (so you don’t see a metric go down in the short term and freak out).

Takeaway #5: There’s a difference between “continuity” and “back-end upsell.”

This was a really interesting clarification for us, and just goes to show how there’s always more to learn. (We’ve been in the digital education space for 4+ years now, and I had never heard anyone articulate this to me, this way, before.)

• Continuity means a customer keeps paying for access to the thing you already sold them.

• Back-End Upsell means a customer pays you (one-time or on a recurring basis) for access to “more” of what they already bought from you.

So let me give you an example.

Our core business is our Premium Ghostwriting Academy. And our core offer is we help turn burned-out freelance writers into Premium Ghostwriters by putting them through a 12-week curriculum, with 1:1 coaching, as well as group calls with me. And it’s a one-time payment.

• A Continuity Offer would mean at the end of the 12 weeks, we say, “Great, you went through the program. Now, if you’d like continued access to the curriculum, that continued access costs $99/mo.” (Or whatever price point you decide.) It’s payment to keep access to the thing you already bought.

• A Back-End Upsell would mean selling more coaching, more accountability, and maybe even a new roadmap or curriculum to help them accomplish their next goal.

Hearing this delineation was extremely helpful as we think about the best ways to scale our Back-End Upsell Offer after people complete the PGA program.

Takeaway #6: "Strategy is how you choose to allocate your limited resources against unlimited options.”

This is something I’ve heard Alex Hormozi say probably 50 times at this point. But for some reason, hearing him say it in-person made it click for me in a different way.

The entire game of entrepreneurship is a game of who can make the best decisions. Because we all have the same 24 hours in the day.

And how you identify “the best decisions” is by thinking deeply about how to allocate the few resources you have (time, energy, attention, money) against the unlimited options in front of you.

And in the context of growing your business, the way to make this decision (according to Alex) is to ask:

• “How does this get me more customers?”

• “And/or how does this make our current customers worth more?”

Anything on your list that doesn’t accomplish one of the above is probably the wrong thing to focus on (right now).

Takeaway #7: More/Better/New

This is one of my favorite Hormozi frameworks.

The path to improving anything goes like this:

• More: Until volume is the constraint, do more.

• Better: Once volume is the constraint, focus on increasing the quality of your volume by doing better.

• New: Once quality volume is the constraint, and you can’t do any more, and you can’t do what you’re doing any better, consider doing something new or different.

I love the simplicity of this.

But here’s a different way of interpreting the above framework (which Alex also articulated in a nice and sticky way):

• Doing “More” is the least risky thing you can do. If something is already working, there’s almost no risk to doing more of that thing.

• Doing “Better” has some risk, but also has some incremental reward. “Better” fundamentally means “change,” and as I already noted above, change inherently injects risk. But, some risk, some reward. Which is why “Better” leads to improvement.

• Doing “New” has the most risk. You’re choosing to do something you haven’t done before with the hypothesis this thing will in some way be more powerful than whatever you were doing before. High risk, high reward.

So when trying to figure out what to do, I encourage you to not just use the More/Better/New framework, but also consider the different risk levels associated with each decision.

Takeaway #8: CEOs think more like investors and less like managers.

This was a brain-breaking moment for me.

(And it wasn’t even Alex or Leila who said it. It was their Head of Strategy during her presentation, which was badass.)

I’ve been a Founder/CEO-type for 8 years now. I started my first company in 2017, and we just started 2025. And for the past 8 years, I always felt like my responsibility was “manage” people. And while that’s true, I see now how that frame causes your thinking to get sent in the wrong direction.

The way great CEOs build companies is they don’t think of themselves as managers. And their job isn’t actually to manage people. Their job is to find subject matter experts, who can run departments, who they can trust, who can successfully manage people.

A great CEO is an orchestrator (or in this metaphor, an investor).

Something for me to work on.

Takeaway #9: How you achieve the goal is irrelevant.

Something we’ve been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out these past few months has been paid ads to grow our business.

From September 2024 to January 2025 we probably spent north of $250,000 on paid ads for our business.

And we lit most of it on fire (didn’t do much).

Another sadface.

Then, at the workshop, we talked to Alex a bit after the end of the first day during cocktail hour, and we told him our metrics and how we have been trying to get more customers using this new method (paid ads), and he basically said, “Why? You’re already crushing it on organic. Do more of what’s working.”

Quarter-million-dollar mistake we made.

Whoopsie.

The takeaway here is… how you achieve the goal is irrelevant. We kept thinking we needed paid ads because “that’s what everyone does.” But if you can achieve the same goal (more new customers) doing whatever you’re already doing, more, and then better, just do that. How you get there doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you do.

Takeaway #10: Don’t underestimate the value of a “better” team member.

Another thing Alex said to us that really hit was:

“A $500,000 team member is VERY different than a $50,000 team member. Get comfortable spending more.”

And meeting his and Leila’s team, I could see it. I have no idea how much they pay their portfolio team/subject matter experts, but they’re all rockstars. And it completely reset the bar for me of the sort of talent you can bring into your business.

This is absolutely a faulty belief/skill deficiency I’ll need to let go of to grow to the next level.

I need to get comfortable with the idea that the next department head we hire might be 2x or 3x more than any person I’ve ever hired in the past.

Takeaway #11: “The theoretical max of a business is the sum of the knowledge on the team.”

Building on the above… I thought this was brilliant.

If you’re the founder, and you’re the “smartest” person on the team (aka: you tell other people what to do and how to do it), then the theoretical max of the business is literally your own knowledge.

• The business will grow to the extent of your own experience/pattern recognition.

• And the business will stay stuck at the level where your experience/pattern recognition runs out.

I thought that was a fascinating way of looking at a business.

The takeaway here is: if you want to expand the theoretical max of your business, buy more knowledge.

For example: when you hire someone, you aren’t just filling a role. In an idea world, what you’re really buying is that person’s entire life experience. All the problems they’ve already figured out how to solve that you don’t. All the shortcuts they’ve learned about that aren’t even on your radar.

You expand the capacity of the business by adding more people who know more than you do.

Takeaway #12: Show team members “the gap.”

This was a gem from Leila.

When a team member in one role wants to move up to a different role, and they aren’t ready or qualified, don’t just say “No.”

Instead, show them the gap.

How she does this is by taking the job responsibilities list of the different or elevated role and highlighting all the things in red this team member currently isn’t doing or doesn’t have experience doing—so they can “see” the gap.

• Here’s where you are right now.

• Here’s what you aren’t doing.

• Here’s what I would need you to do (or be able to do) in order to consider you for this role.

I really liked this exercise because it shows people, if you want more growth potential, here are the exact skills you need to build and demonstrate proficiency in.

Takeaway #13: Checklists are more valuable than SOPs.

All roads lead back to making-things-actionable.

Takeaway #14: “What do you see that I believe about the world that isn’t true?”

This is a question Alex asks other smart people, specifically his mentors.

Takeaway #15: Anything can be a $100M business.

There’s no such thing as too niche.

People just give up too early.