Leila Hormozi, CEO of Acquisition.com, Shares Her Journey to Success

Article presented by George Nellist

It is every entrepreneur’s dream to be prosperous. However, you cannot become successful overnight. This is a journey that requires certain qualities to achieve your personal and professional dreams. These include setting clear goals, never taking no for an answer, evaluating your strengths and weaknesses, and always watching for opportunities. It would also be best to network, evaluate your actions and priorities daily, take your time to build a team, and don’t be afraid to leap. Ultimately, keep learning, seek new experiences, enjoy helping others, and step outside your comfort zone.

Leila Hormozi, CEO of Acquisition.com, lives by those principles. A first-generation Iranian American entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist from Kalamazoo, Michigan, she moved to Orange County, California, in 2015 to start a fitness career. The same year, she became a top-selling personal trainer in the area, a status she maintained throughout her tenure. She met her husband, Alex a year later when she accompanied him on his 4th gym turnaround and got to know him better in successive turnarounds. They became inseparable, and created a process packaged into a licensing model that scaled to over 4000 locations in 4 years. Leila Hormozi  also scaled three other companies to over $120M in cumulative sales across four different industries, i.e., software, service, e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, etc., without using outside capital.

Later, Hormozi stepped down from her roles and took board positions in each company, allowing her the time to establish her company, Acquisition.com, in partnership with her husband, Alex Hormozi. Acquisition.com is now the holding company for all her business ventures, which earn $200M+ in yearly revenue across various industries. Hormozi also uses the company as a platform to invest both her monetary and intellectual capital into other businesses.

The collection is based on Hormozi’s investment thesis focusing primarily on asset-light, high cash flow, and sales-focused digital products companies: software and e-learning. Hormozi was quick to reveal that it was not easy to quit her regular job and start a business with only $1K in the bank. However, she took the plunge and overcame initial challenges by taking a business model that was losing money and adopting an innovative approach that generated nearly $7M in the first year. It was also challenging to run a gym and supplements business during the Covid pandemic when there were supply shortages.

Hormozi explains, “We overcame this by being extremely transparent with our team and customers. We did our best to stay up to date with changing regulations in the gym industry and come up with creative solutions for every kind of customer. We also buckled down and went hard on reinforcing our internal team culture. In ‘wartime’, your internal team has no room for error.” Leila added that creating relationships with backup suppliers and adjusting their marketing to push products they were confident in delivering helped the duo overcome supply chain challenges. “We never wanted to make promises we couldn’t keep,” adds Hormozi

When asked about their plans, Hormozi said, “I see myself running Acquisition.com with 100+ companies in the portfolio. Our goal is that within five years, the portfolio will reach $1B in revenue, and we are known as the leader in the market for low to mid-market companies that want to propel their growth without having to sell a majority interest to a firm.”