This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Leila Hormozi doesn’t talk about her past to shock people. She talks about it because she thinks it’s the point.

The co-founder of Acquisition.com has been open about the six arrests, the addiction, and the moment she stood in front of a mirror and decided she didn’t want to be that person anymore. Not as a cautionary tale, but as proof that the same capacity for excess that nearly destroyed her is exactly what built a portfolio doing over $250 million in annual revenue by the time she was 30.

Foundr CEO Nathan Chan sat down with Hormozi to hear how a personal trainer with $5,000 in her bank account became one of the most respected operators in online business, and what she’s learned about leadership, execution, and telling people the truth even when it costs you.

Q&A with Leila Hormozi

Nathan Chan: You were arrested six times in eighteen months. What finally made something click?

“It wasn’t discipline. It was complete pain.”

NC: You moved across the country, became a personal trainer, started from scratch. How did that phase build the operator you are today?

LH: I became a personal trainer. I walked to every gym that was within walking distance from where I lived. I got a job at the closest gym so I didn’t have to spend any money on gas. I had $5,000 in my bank and my rent was $1,500 a month. I just needed to make it work.

That period of selling, building client rosters from zero, and managing survival-level finances became the foundation for everything that followed.

LH: I am such a fanatic about leadership, starting with self-leadership, because you cannot lead others unless you can lead yourself. And that’s what kicked me off on that journey. Starting a business is just a vehicle for how I can help other people better their lives.

“You cannot lead others unless you can lead yourself.”

NC: You and Alex met on Bumble, and he pitched you on Gym Launch on the first date. What made you say yes?

LH: I said, the worst case scenario is I end up right back where I am now, needing to build up my client rosters again. I can accept that. And when else in my life can I do this with very little consequences?

The early days of Gym Launch were marked by one disaster after another: a fraudulent business partner who drained their bank account, a merchant processor that locked their funds on Christmas Eve, and friends who had quit their jobs to work for a company that suddenly had no money.

LH: I had burner phones with different accounts on them because that worked at the time. We scrounged everything possible.

NC: You scaled Gym Launch from zero to $50 million in twenty months. But Glassdoor told a different story. What happened?

LH: We had a 4.9 Glassdoor up until I learned a very hard lesson, which is that you cannot let inexperienced managers make hiring projections. We hired 35 people. We only needed five. I had all of the same desire that I do now. I just want to make an amazing place for people to work. I had the desire. I didn’t have the skill.

The day before she was supposed to lay people off, her director of HR texted one person and told her she was going to get fired. That person told the whole team.

LH: My Glassdoor went from a 4.9 to a 2.2.

NC: You’ve talked about struggling with wanting to be liked, and how that actually failed the people around you. How did you work through it?

LH: I desperately wanted to be liked and I didn’t know it. I came from the side of being incredibly empathetic, incredibly understanding. I had to go through going from there to probably swinging too far on the other side, then finding my middle ground.

I realized it’s really not better to be nice in that way, because the two personalities have the same effect on people long term. Whether I’m yelling at my team, or I’m being so nice I don’t tell them the truth, the same result occurs. That person doesn’t know what they need to do better.

The shift came when Hormozi had to let go of a close friend she had hired, someone she had failed to give honest feedback to until it was too late.

LH: I remember in the firing I said: if I could fire myself, I would, but I own the company. I hadn’t given them the feedback they deserved. And because of that, they lost respect from the teams.

I started following John Wooden’s stuff about seven years ago. I said, I’m the coach. What’s the coach’s job? The coach’s job is to tell you: you’re at a six. I need you at a ten. Here’s how to get there. And that changed everything for me.

“I was being deceptive to spare my own feelings of being uncomfortable.”

NC: There is a through line across everything you touch: Gym Launch, Alan, your SaaS company. Rapid, outsized growth is always the result. What drives that?

LH: There are two things you have to have. You have to be building what the customer wants: the offer, the money model, understanding the market. And on the other side, you have to say: how are we gonna make that happen? Most people put a lot of resources on the first side and completely underestimate how many they’ll need on the second.

When I think about business capacity, I think about financial capacity, personnel capacity, systems capacity, and thinking capacity. How many people wake up every morning thinking about this thing? You need all four in excess before you launch.

LH: Most businesses don’t fail because of a bad strategy. They fail because they have poor execution, and they have nobody to tell them what good execution looks like. Out of all the portfolio companies we’ve looked at, probably two of them were capped because of strategy. The other fifty, it was execution.

NC: You are obsessive about talent. What do most founders get wrong about building a team?

LH: A great environment can take a mediocre person and make them great. But if you are just starting your business and you don’t have that culture yet, guess who makes the culture? You are the culture. The CEO, the founder is the heartbeat of the business.

It was not until I realized that every single thing I did was heard through a megaphone and seen through a microscope by my team. They modeled all of my behavior. I’m thinking everywhere: they’re watching, and I’m teaching through my actions, not my words.

NC: How do you attract great people without a big brand or huge compensation packages?

LH: You have to know what your offer is to the marketplace as a small business owner. For me, I don’t want it to be money. I want it to be growth. In a fast growth company, if people don’t want to grow, they see every point of change as a threat rather than a challenge. I want people who see those inflection points as challenges.

I have a big people team: six people, looking to hire four more. A lot of companies would be triple my size before they had a team that big. But I believe in the employee experience the same way I believe in the customer experience.

Despite having no Ivy League pedigree and starting out at community college, Hormozi has built a team of former founders, seasoned executives, and high-growth operators drawn not by compensation but by culture.

LH: I just started these companies after I graduated from community college. But they come because of the offer we present: we are a place for people to grow, and we leave everyone better than they came in.

NC: Last question. What do you want people to take away from your story?

LH: Do you think we would have had the massive success without the massive failures? No. The same muscle that allows you to succeed at that level and take those risks also means you’re gonna fall on your face. It’s a rite of passage.

LH: I became obsessed with how to build an amazing team: a team that can get us not just to 50 million, but to 50 billion. And it all starts with understanding your team as much or better than you understand your customer.

From arrest warrants on kitchen tables to leading one of the most respected operator-founder duos in online business, Leila Hormozi’s story is ultimately about one thing: the moment the pain of staying the same outweighs the fear of change.

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