If I Wanted to Make My First $100K in 2026, I’d Do This

$42 million in distributions, a $46.2 million exit, $106 million in a weekend. Most people hear those numbers and think, oh, that's probably when he felt the richest. That's actually not the truth. The moment that I felt the wealthiest in my entire life was when I had $100,000 in my bank account. That was the first big unlock for me as a person. And the reason is before that, I was sleeping on a gym floor and doing math on whether I could afford groceries. right and once i had a hundred thousand dollars that was when i stopped having to worry about tomorrow right about paying rent about paying dues about paying my cell phone bill or paying my car insurance you can't think about your long-term vision if you're trying to pay rent right that's just real and so in this video i want to give you a six-step roadmap as clear as humanly possible to making and banking your first hundred thousand dollars if you're a big baller business owner then you can skip this one but if you don't have that yet then this is just a pure give on my part of trying to help you get there the first step is that we have to cut all costs so that we can take more risk when i say all costs i mean all costs that means you don't eat out anymore for anything and if you're hungry you deal with it and if it's not from a discount grocery store you don't buy it clothing like what you have right now on your back is everything you need for the next two years period no exceptions just keep reusing it trade or go to goodwill you go to work you go home and home is ideally with your family or worst case with another family also trying to make it and save and it's got to be as cheap as you possibly can and i say this as somebody who lived through this when i was beginning my journey i was splitting a bedroom in a six-bedroom house with one guy just in that bedroom as in like every night we'd stare at each other and i'd be like good night john and be like good night alex then i blow out my candle Everything about that was true minus the candle. And pro tip, if you sleep with a fan on your face, you can't hear anything. So, you know, if you have to deal with it, that's one way to do it. But I had roommates that I was paying like $300 or $400 a month for a very long time while I was beginning my business and started to actually make real money. And I still stayed there. Now, the next thing is going to be your car. So if you think about expenses, ideally a paid off clunker is the best way to go. If you can't, you want it to be... as cheap as humanly possible but ideally just pay off your car so you don't have to think about it again all right so that comes your food your car your shelter and the reason that this is so important for us to basically stack up this cash flow because you're working and making money but right now you're probably spending all of it so it's like we need to make this we need to decrease it from the downside so we have this cash flow this fluff that we can start spending and reinvesting in getting more skills which i'll talk about in a second all right real quick if you are on this path to your first 100k I want to make it faster and easier for you. So these books, I had 3.6 million of these books that were donated by other entrepreneurs. These books, I'm personally donating. And so if you are on the path, you can get all three of these books for nothing, basically, for just covering the shipping. So I think it's 16 or 17 bucks all in for all three hardbacks shipped to you. plus a 30-day trial of school to actually use this stuff and have the tools to apply it in. All right, so it's like, it's the best thing. We call it the business backpack. It's literally everything you need to get started online. I'm not promising you're gonna be a zillionaire. I'm not promising you're gonna make $100,000. I'm just saying it's a great way to start and it's the best. It's one of the most valuable things I could possibly give you. And again, special thank you to all the entrepreneurs who donated the books because we're doing our best to give them out. Now we have to cut all of our time costs. Step two is save time. And so if you work, a nine to five job this is kind of just the reality of it your nine to five job is not killing your dreams all right so just stop subscribing to that you're wasting the two four-hour chunks of the day that you do have available to you which is your five to nine in the morning and your five to nine at night so what you want to be doing is instead of just like mindlessly doom scrolling through life right instead you're like i have four hours before i have to go to work Right now, if you work remotely, even better because you'd be more efficient with it. If you're not remote, then it might be three and a half hours or you just wake up earlier. And I also say this to someone who did this, right? The reason that this whole, like, I wake up early in the morning became a thing for me was because that was the only time I could get ahead. And so I very much believe in Kobe Bryant's perspective on this. It's like if everyone else is, you know, going to practice, he's like, well, if I do two extra practices a day, I'm going to move forward three times faster. And so one is we got our money back. Two, we got our time back. Now that we have our time back, we need to minimize the distractions in that time period because focus is achieved not through addition, but subtraction. When you remove everything else that doesn't matter, focus is what's left. Now, if you happen to be just, if you're on your path right now, so like, let's say that you have You're not at job, so you started a business, but it's not making as much as you want, and you don't have the $100K in savings. Let me just give you the simplest formula that I had. It's kind of like the 2.0 version, which is a 4-4-4 split. So if you're at 9-5, then you've got 5-9 and 5-9. If you don't have a 9-5 during the day that you've got to go to, then I like to do four hours of promotion. First thing I do when I get up is let people know about my stuff, because if nobody knows about your stuff, they can't give you money. The second four-hour chunk is delivery. So you give the people that give you money what you promised them. The third four-hour chunk is building. So this is building the future, figuring out what to do next and how to do it. This is a combination of two things. It's going to be the curation of opportunities, like what are all the things that are out there? I have to see them, find them. And then the second is the prioritization of those. Okay, there's 10 things I could do. This one thing is going to give me the highest return. This is what I'm going to prioritize my time and money towards. So big picture, you promote, you deliver, and you build. That's what you do with your time now regardless of what job or business you have. If you want to save time, you need to understand this concept, which is understanding whether you are a maker or a manager. A maker is when you're in the build mode. This is when you're completely locked in. You're like, no distractions. I have to go learn stuff. I have to go write copy. I have to go edit videos. I have to go make content. I have to go build this template that I'm going to sell to my customers. Whatever. Manager is when you're interacting with other people. Now, that could be client calls. That could be team calls. It could be vendor calls. Any kind of conversations that you have to have. Slack messages, whatever. The thing is, is that managers, their perfectly productive day is no blank time, right? It's five minute chunks, and you're just trying to have as many touch points and decisions as possible. A maker, a perfectly productive day, is a completely empty calendar. So I don't know if you're anything like me, when I look at my calendar, I truly have nothing on it. I feel one, this immense sense of relief, and two, this huge amount of energy of possibility, like what? big thing can I get done today? And that's when I really moved the ball forward. And I'm telling you, the life hack of all hacks, a single habit that has changed my output was having my first four to six hours of my day to myself. So when you're in that maker-manager decision mode, I like to block at the micro level, my day is maker time, manager time, and then keep them separated because the biggest killer of productivity is task switching. So if you're trying to make and then you're slacking and then you're making and then you're texting, you're screwed. Right? So instead you just have to put the blinders onto your maker period. And then when you're in the manager period, it's like, go for it. Just be distracted and know that that's like the rest of your day is screwed. And I accept that. Like for me, Mondays are my day that I'm a manager and the rest of the week, I try to do my absolute best to be a maker. Now that we have the money saved up and we're still, we got some cash. We drove down our living expenses. We drove down our time expenses. So we have free time and we're organizing it well. And we're focused and productive during that time period. What do we do with the time? Three, which is research a skill that people already pay money for. And this is a key part. What you want to do, especially if you're like, I need to make more than I am right now, go find what people are already paying for, right? So on a B2C side, it just looks, you look at all the things that a business does, right? So a business gets advertised. So they make content, they do outreach. There's the funnel building process that's associated with that. All of those things, each of those are skills that on their own, you could go build yourself a million-dollar-plus business off of. Just one of those. And so that's just on a B2B side as an example. On the B2C side, here's a very easy hack. Just print out your credit card statement or your bank statement and look at what you actually spend money on. So just think when you're selling to consumers, I'm going to give them time back that they otherwise wouldn't have. And for business owners, you're giving them money that they otherwise wouldn't have. But don't get overwhelmed with a zillion things that you can learn there. Pick one. And so I have a 1-1-1 rule, which is you want to sell one product or service to one avatar on one channel until you make $1 million. That's it. So we saved our money, we saved our time, and then we researched the skill that people are already paying for today. That leads us to number four. Spend time learning. All right, so first of all, it's important that you understand what learning is if we're going to say what it means. So I say this because a lot of people spend their time trying to learn or sitting in front of a computer or listening to podcasts or whatever, but it doesn't actually change behavior, which ding, ding, ding, that is the definition of learning, which is same condition, new behavior. If you're in the same condition, meaning you're in the same bedroom, you're looking at the same computer, and what you're doing every day is not changing, you are not learning. So use that as a simplest litmus test for understanding whether the content that you were consuming is valuable. If you cannot translate it or the person who's teaching you, whoever it is, me or anyone, into what do I do now? So there's this big thing, Malcolm Gladwell talked about 10,000 hours is this common theme, which is it's not 10,000 hours, but 10,000 iterations. And the reason I like that framing is because it assumes that you will fail and it assumes that you will get better as you learn, right? It is that 10,000 iterations is a proxy for feedback loops, which means that if you do something, you get no feedback, it's virtually impossible to learn. So when we were doing stuff in the real world, a lot of times the real world will give you a feedback loop, but you post these content, nothing happens. That is still feedback. It's that it sucked, right? But you can still get better. The fastest way to learn skills is to find somebody who's really good and hire them 101. Fastest way to learn skills. I still did this in my early days, even when I barely could afford it. So when I say I learned with first party data, I give you a handful of examples, but this is a do this instruction list. So number one, you have to do a lot of volume. in order to learn, right? I can't just have one sales call recording. I have just one comment that I try and learn from. I have to have lots of comments that I have to aggregate and put them together. Number two is that I analyze the top 10%. So what are the top 10% of sales calls? What are the top 10% of content? What are the top 10 customer service resolution person? What are these top 10% outcomes? What do they have in common that the other 90% don't have? And you can apply this to any subject matter that you're trying to learn. So that is step three. You analyze the difference. step four is you figure out the most important details like the eyes like the feet like the whatever and this is this is where a lot of people struggle is that they they don't know which part is important and that's part of learning is that you're like there's six differences i don't know which one was the reason so you start trying them one at a time it just is what it is and so the final step is avoid the mistakes that the 90% is making that are keeping them at the bottom and do more of the stuff at the top 10%. And you just continue to do another hundred repetitions, look at the top 10, try and make the next hundred look like those 10 and do it over and over again until people are like, man, you're so good at this. You must be a natural. And that is fundamentally how you learn any skill. We saved our money so we could get aggressive. We saved our time so we'd have time to actually do the work. We researched which skills to learn. Then We spent our time actually learning, and we walked through exactly what those 10,000 iterations look like. So what do we do now? Step five is you spend the money in the right places. So I think of this in three bigger buckets. You've got tools, you've got implementation help, and then you've got trial attempts. So think about that as like, where am I going to spend this time and money? Because you actually have to do this in order to get out. Like if you're just like, okay, I'm saving my time, saving money, you're not going to get to 100K, right? Like you have to do stuff too. For tools, that might mean that you might buy a software tool, right? That might mean like a CRM or a landing page thing or school. It's nine bucks a month. Like chill. All right. To get started, right? Because for you, like the alternative is you could try to rebuild the entire thing. Yeah. Or you could just like go to grab a tool that's already there. Save yourself some time. So that's what kind of tools looks like. Implementation. This is where you can buy courses. You can buy communities on school if you're looking to learn anything. You can get tutoring, which I'm a huge advocate of. And for some reason, this is like falling out of vogue. But if you can get someone to just give you one-on-one help, my God, it's so valuable. The next is trial attempts. So that means like, okay, I want to start running ads. Okay, great. Well, you got to spend money on ads. Or like, hey, I want to start, you know, making content. You're going to have to spend money on maybe some of the editing software that goes with that. Like, of course, there are free things and be as cheap as possible. But accept that some of these things are kind of... minor investments that will give you huge leverage on your time. So the last step and the whole point of all this is to just increase your active income. People look at the billionaires and they're like, oh, they live on passive income. What people miss is that most billionaires who are self-made made their money from making money, meaning they had active income. They had monster active income that they could deploy. Like you get rewarded for the risk you take on. You cannot take any risk on if you have no time and no money. So you need to go find that risk. create something that you can put at risk so that you can get rewarded for it and we do that through increasing our skill sets and our active income and so you're like okay well those are the five steps what's the last step number six do not increase your lifestyle all right i i know guys who are making forty thousand dollars a month and made it for years great sales guys and spent every single dollar i've got multiple friends who didn't start saving money until their 40s and they were like oh my god i can't believe i i just like lived that way right you want to be rich not look rich right? This is about 100K in the bank, not 100K in revenue. Everything minus food and shelter is your profit. I say this as once things started working out for my gym, my first gym, I was making about $20,000 a month in income, personal. I was still splitting the room, paying $400 a month in rent. Because I was like, well, dude, I need to say like, my goal was not to stop at $20,000 a month. I was like, I want to go big and I'm going to need all this cash to open a new location, to learn more stuff, to attend more conferences, all of this stuff, because I wanted to learn. And so basically the day that you stop spending money on learning is the day you decide that you do not want to make more. And so zooming all the way out, the six steps to getting your first $100,000, you got to stop spending money. So you have money to spend on the right stuff. You got to stop wasting time so that you have time to invest. in the right stuff what stuff do you invest in number three is you have to research you got to pick you got to look and the best way to look is not to risk it on something that you don't know but find stuff people already spending money on the fourth is now that we know the thing that we're going to focus on we're going to eliminate all the other distraction and we're going to spend all our time learning number five the money that you do have you want to spend on tools implementation help and attempts trying it and failing and then finally once things actually start working you'd never get to the 100k in a bank account just by increasing your income You also got to not let your lifestyle take back over so you can finally bank it. And the reason this is so kind of near and dear to my heart is that when I had the first 100K was the first time that, I mean, I remember looking at Layla and I was like, we did it. I said, we could do nothing and fuck off for three and a half years. And it was crazy because I think about that now, right? Two people, $100,000 in savings, three years. And I wasn't thinking about it in terms of investments or anything like that. I just knew that I didn't have to worry about rent. I didn't have to worry about food. And that was when I was able to really start thinking long-term. And so I want as many people as possible to get that point because many of you have bigger dreams than that. But you can't get there until you pass this checkpoint. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Until you're not thinking about food and shelter, it's amazing to want to change the world. But if you've got to pay rent tomorrow, you've got to pay rent tomorrow. right and so this is the plan to help you do that

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If you’re new to my channel, my name is Alex Hormozi. I’m the founder and managing partner of Acquisition.com. It’s a family office, which is just a formal way of saying we invest our own money into companies. Our 10 portfolio companies bring in over $250,000,000+ per year. Our ownership stake varies between 20% and 100% of them. Given this is a YT channel, and anyone can claim anything, I’ll give you some stuff you can google to verify below.

How I got here…

21: Graduated Vanderbilt in 3 years Magna Cum Laude, and took a fancy consulting job.
23 yrs old: Left my fancy consulting job to start a business (a gym).
24 yrs old: Opened 5 gym locations.
26 yrs old: Closed down 6th gym. Lost everything. 
26 yrs old: Got back to launching gyms (launched 33). Then, lost everything for a 2nd time. 
26 yrs old: In desperation, started licensing model as a hail mary. It worked. 
27 yrs old: "Gym Launch" does $3M profit the next 6 months. Then $17M profit next 12 months.
28 yrs old: Started Prestige Labs. $20M the first year.  
29 yrs old: Launched ALAN, a software company for agencies to work leads for customers. Scaled to $1.7mmo within 6 months. 
31 yrs old: Sold 75% of UseAlan to a strategic buyer in an all stock deal. 
31 yrs old: Sold 66% of Gym Launch & Prestige Labs at $46.2M valuation in all-cash deal to American Pacific Group. (you can google it)
31 yrs old: Started our family office Acquisition.com. We invest and scale companies using the $42M in distributions we had taken + the cash from the $46.2M exit.
32 yrs old: Started making free content showing how we grow companies to make real business education accessible to everyone (and) to attract business owners to invest or scale their businesses. 
34 yrs old: I became co-owner of https://Skool.com, which is a platform for people to build communities online, making a living doing what they love, with people like them.
36 yrs old: I did a $106M book launch selling 3.6M copies of my $100M Money Models book, in 72 hours, breaking the Guinness world record for the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time.

Today: Our portfolio now does $200M/yr between 10 companies. The largest doing $100M/yr the smallest doing $5M per year. Our ownership varies between 20% and 100% ownership of the companies. Many of them we invested in early and helped grow (which is how we make our money - not youtube videos).

To all the gladiators in the arena, we’re all in the middle of writing our own stories. The worse the monsters, the more epic the story.

You either get an epic outcome or an epic story. Both mean you win. 

Keep crushing. May your desires be greater than your obstacles. 

Never quit,

Alex

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