Alex Hormozi VAM Workshop Review: 5 Golden Nuggets From Acquisition.com's Portfolio Team

Things I learned from the same portfolio team scaling $100M+ companies.

Dear Reader,

Back in January, 2025, I flew to Las Vegas to attend Alex & Leila Hormozi’s Acquisition.com Workshop Event.

I wrote up a full review of the workshop event here. (Nutshell: It was awesome.)

At the end of the event, we decided to double-down and buy their upsell: two advanced small-group workshop events with their portfolio team later in the year. This is the same team of people responsible for scaling the various departments of all the portfolio companies they invest in—several of which have crossed the $100M mark. It was $35,000 (at the time… I hear they’ve since raised the price, as they should), and included a full deep-dive analysis of your business.

Well, it’s now March, 2025, and I’m writing this in the lobby of the Wynn Hotel the day after we attended our first small-group event with their portfolio team.

First, I’m going to do a quick recap and review of the event.

And then I’ll get into crystallizing my messy notepad of takeaways here for you.

Acquisition.com VAM Workshop Review

I am a big believer in investing in yourself.

So much so, that over the past few years I have invested north of $300,000 in education programs, workshops, and masterminds to help accelerate the growth of our writing businesses. That probably sounds ludicrous to most people—and if you don’t have a business vehicle into which you can pour said knowledge, you would be right.

But here’s what I know:

1. All of my mentors do the same thing. Many of them still, even after building $100M and $1B+ companies, continue to spend $250,000 - $500,000 per YEAR in continued education and keeping their finger on the pulse.

2. You can make every investment ROI positive. Oftentimes, you aren’t just buying information that will help grow your business. You’re also buying access to serendipitous knowledge “you didn’t know you didn’t know.” You’re buying validation that what you think is the right next decision is the right next decision. You’re buying confidence in your ideas. You’re buying a sounding board to stress-test your ideas. Etc.

3. I’ve invested $300,000+ but made millions. We just crossed $15M in lifetime sales in just the past 4 years. (To be honest, it’s actually closer to ~$18M because we also accept payments in other payment processing systems, but this Stripe screenshot below is nice and clean so we’ll go with that.) If you gave me the option to save that $300k and still generate the same end outcome, but it would take 5 more years… I’d trade the $300k every time.

Now, do you NEED to do this? Do you NEED to invest this much in yourself?

Of course not. The Internet is free, as are most AI tools.

And if you’re just starting out, don’t have a business, and don’t have any (or very much) revenue, then spending $35,000 for an advanced workshop is probably unnecessary.

But as you get going, I think it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself and your business.

Some napkin math:

• $35,000 for this event

• Our business currently does approximately ~$6M/year in top-line revenue.

• That’s 0.5% of our revenue.

Do I think I’ll learn at least 1 thing that will grow our business by more than 0.5%?

If so, then it’s an ROI-positive trade.

VAM Offer Stack

“VAM” stands for Value Acceleration Method.

This is Acquisition.com team’s process for growing companies in their portfolio. The “pitch” to businesses who attend the entry-level workshop is: “This is exactly what we would tell you to do if we invested in your company.” Pretty compelling pitch, especially for businesses (like ours) who love learning from Alex & Leila Hormozi and their team.

I’m probably missing a bunch of things here, but here’s the high-level offer stack of the VAM Workshop:

• 2 events per year

• You choose the dates—but goal is to space them out by 3-6 months so you can make progress, come back and ask more questions, make progress again, etc.

• You work individually with the best person on their portfolio team who can help you solve your specific constraint in your business (marketing director, sales director, hiring director, etc.).

• That portfolio team member also puts together a full analysis of your business + in-depth slide deck on all the upgrades / changes they would recommend to remove the core constraint in your business so it continues to grow.

• We paid $35,000 but I know they’ve raised the price since, and will probably continue to raise the price because they have so much demand (as they should).

For example, right now our core constraint is on the CRO side.

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization.

In a nutshell: we have plenty of traffic, but we are “leaking” a good amount of quality leads all throughout our funnel. Which means how we grow the business by 50% or even 100%+ from here isn’t some “big” strategy or game-changing idea. It’s just months of really, really boring work tweaking every single tiny variable in our funnel:

• How can we increase the opt-in rate of our landing page by 5%?

• How can we increase the number of leads who fill out an application for our Premium Ghostwriting Academy by 5%?

• How can we increase the number of leads who fill out an app but haven’t booked a call by 5%?

• Etc.

This is the process of going from $5M to $10M.

It’s not some big change. It’s just a million tiny tweaks that slowly but surely allow for more throughput in your funnel—grinding the business up to the 8-figure mark.

So, for $35,000 here’s essentially what we bought:

1. We bought someone smart telling us that. Which, to be honest, we didn’t know.

2. We bought someone smart telling us WHY we should do that. Also very important, because there are currently 8,754 other shiny objects trying to distract us right now, so having clarity that “this” is the only thing that matters to really grow the business is monumentally helpful.

3. And we bought someone smart telling us HOW we should do it. We bought the ideal scene, teleporting us into the future. Now we know what to do, why it’s important, and how to immediately start making these changes.

I would be shocked if we don’t hit 8 figures in revenue this year.

Again, laughable ROI on the 5-figure investment we made.

To Recap:

• Workshop was amazing.

• If you’re below $1M in revenue, I’d recommend the entry-level workshop.

• And if you’re above $2M in revenue, I’d recommend investing in this more advanced, small-group workshop.

We’ll be back in Las Vegas in September for our second event—and hopefully, we’ve made all these improvements by then (we will) and we can get to work on removing the next constraint in our business, taking us into multi-8-figure territory.

For what it’s worth: years of being a ghostwriter has allowed me to talk to a LOT of very smart people in business. Founders of billion-dollar companies. Insanely successful Venture Capitalists. C-level executives at some of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. You name it.

And truthfully, I think Alex & Leila are the best at creating business frameworks.

A lot of people are good at the game of business. But not very many can articulate how to replicate that success in a reliable way.

Can’t recommend entering their ecosystem enough.

5 VAM Workshop Golden Nuggets

So, with all that in mind, what are some of the biggest things I learned?

Honestly, a lot of it was stuff I know I know, I just needed to hear again. And that’s OK. Sometimes you need to hear the same thing 10 times, in 10 different ways, from 10 different people in order for it to finally “click.” This is what so many people don’t understand about education, and the art of learning: just because you “heard” it doesn’t mean you learned it.

You’ve only “learned” once the learning successfully changes your behavior.

So until then, find more ways to hear it again.

1. The 4 Levels of Growth ($0 to $100M)

I found the distinctions between these levels really interesting & pretty spot-on to what we’ve personally experienced:

• (Level 1) $0 to $1M: Validating the core product/service. If you can’t cross $1M/year with the core product/service, something about it isn’t working. Could be the marketing, but it also could be the offer or the business model. Something is broken.

• (Level 2) $1M to $3M: Don’t get distracted. We experienced this so much at this level. Once you cross $1M you think “I can do everything!” And you can’t. You can do ANYTHING, but you can’t do EVERYTHING. Sequence matters. And the reason most people get stuck here is because they allow themselves to get distracted—instead of just taking the core product/service that is clearly working and pumping as much marketing volume into it as possible.

• (Level 3) $3M to $10M: People. Above $3-5M/year, chances are, your team has grown to a point where you are FAR more reliant upon other people. Long gone are the days where you (the founder/creator) could just grind for a weekend and have a meaningful impact on the business. Now, it’s about empowering other people to build with you—and trusting them to get things done on their own, the right way. (This is where we are right now.)

• (Level 4) $10M to $100M: Hiring subject matter experts who know way more than you do about a specific vertical in the business. Prior to $10M, a lot of times the founder/creator will play a role within the business, learn it, figure out how they want it done, and then hire someone else to “manage” it. But more and more, I’m seeing how/why that doesn’t make sense the bigger the business gets. Above $10M, you don’t build new departments yourself. You don’t know how! And you now have the cash flow to go hire someone who has already spent 10-20+ years doing the exact thing you want to go build. Go hire & empower that person for each vertical within the business.

“You just need to hire great people” is one of those things you hear successful people in business say over and over again, but it’s hard to really grasp what that means until you experience it yourself.

2. Employee Retention Framework

This is something I’ve always know intuitively, but it was really helpful to hear someone articulate this in a way that was tangible.

Employees need to be constantly re-sold on the vision of the business, and their individual vision inside the business.

3 ways you can incentivize team members longer:

• Mentorship: Give people the opportunity to learn things above and beyond their specific role.

• Identity: Give people ways to crystallize their own individual identity within the team, and can see the direct impact of their contributions to the larger whole.

• Leadership: Give people opportunities to experience leadership moments, even if it’s small—like leading a call, or being part of a presentation.

As our team grows, and we need to think more and more about “people,” I found this framework really helpful for creating systems that constantly reinforce each person’s role on the team (and how much we appreciate each individual person!).

A secondary framework I really liked here is changing how you reward team members with variability:

• Quickly: The moment someone on your team performs an action/behavior you want to reinforce, how can you quickly validate that action/behavior with validation, approval, or some sort of reward?

• Randomly: How can you reward team members with variability, so that rewards or validation don’t become “expected” and lose their value? *(Hedonic adaptation is real, and we tend to appreciate things that are “unexpected” more than things that are expected and eventually become boring.)

• Publicly: How can you celebrate different team members beyond just 1:1 interactions (on team calls, during department meetings, etc.) so their efforts are recognized by the larger whole?

3. How To Charge More

This is a framework I actively teach inside our Premium Ghostwriting Academy, but I heard an additional tactic here I really loved—which I’m going to steal :)

Whenever you are thinking about how to charge more for your product or service (but especially services), here are 3 ways to go about it:

• First: Set a date for when the new pricing will take effect, over-communicate, and raise prices. Go to all your clients and just tell them, “My business has been growing a lot. I’ve decided to raise prices to better reflect the value we provide. We’ll be adjusting our pricing on {Specific Date}. I’ve really loved working with you, so if you’d like to keep things rocking & rolling we can bump you up to our new pricing tier. And if this is out of budget, just let me know and we’ll work on a transition plan.”

• Second: A clever little tactic you can use to make your “new price” even more digestible is price anchor to something even higher and then downsell to the “real, new price.” For example, let’s say you want to raise your prices from $3,000 per month to $5,000 per month. Well, how do you make that seem like a steal? You say, “We’ve decided to raise our prices to $7,000 per month, but I’ve really loved working with you, so I’d be happy to meet you in the middle, give you a discount, and only increase your retainer to $5,000 per month.” You end up in the same place, but now it feels like a discount.

• Third: For long-term customers/people you genuinely like working with, down-sell them to keep the old price IF they pre-pay. This is the new tactic I hadn’t thought of, and really like. Let’s say you’re increasing your retainer from $3k/mo to $5k/mo. You can say to the client, “We’ve decided to increase our prices to $5k per month, but I’ve really loved working with you so I’d be happy to honor your original pricing if you pre-pay for the next 6 months.” This allows you to pull a ton of cash forward, AND takes the risk of them churning down to zero.

4. Ads 70/20/10 Framework

This is something I’ve heard Alex Hormozi talk about probably 10-20 times in his own content, but again… sometimes you just need to hear it again, in a different way, from a different person, for it to click.

As we look to scale our retargeting & cold traffic ads throughout the year, here’s the testing framework their portfolio team uses:

• 70% of ads = “more.” So just take the ads that are sort-of-working and create more, slightly different variations. This means tiny tweaks like: same ad, different filter; same ad, different background music; same ad, different person reading the script, etc.

• 20% of ads = “adjacent.” Take your best-performing ads and re-launch with a more meaningful change. The meaningful changes are usually “new hook” (first 3-5 seconds), “new CTA” (last 5-7 seconds), or “new/change social proof” (hook or throughout).

• 10% of ads = “new.” Only a small number of your new ads should be completely new. This is your experimental bucket. Just try things. And if something works, do “more” small variations. And then when you find a winning variation, do “more adjacent” variations.

A lot of boring work, but this is how you figure out which ads can scale to the moon.

5. Operationalizing Behavior Framework

This is one of my favorite Alex Hormozi-isms: unbundling words & operationalizing behavior.

Something they do internally, especially with sales training, is they give salespeople (in their own company, but also their portfolio companies) a massive checklist of all the “behaviors” they need to execute in order to have a successful sales call.

And they get super granular.

Literally things like:

• “Did you greet the prospect at the beginning of the call addressing them by name with excitement in your voice?”

• “Did you nod your head when the other person was talking?”

• “Did you show understanding by repeating the last thing they just said to you back to them?”

• Etc.

This might sound ridiculous, but it’s not. This is the level of detail beginners need.

Otherwise, what happens is you just say, “You need to be more confident…” and nobody knows what that means. “Confident” is a bundled term. And you need to UNBUNDLE it into actions in order for it to be understood and, more importantly, implemented—causing a change in behavior.

I’m going to look to create this internally for our own Sales & Success teams, but also create this for our ghostwriting students who are brand new to holding sales calls.

In Conclusion

Super fun event.

Excited to see how much we implement/grow over the next 6 months.

Pumped to be back here in September for the second small-group workshop event.

And onwards to $10M+ we go…!