If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to build a billion-dollar company day by day, Leila Hormozi — CEO and founder of Acquisition.com — just showed you. In an unfiltered week-in-the-life vlog, Leila walks through her 4am wake-ups, five-hour meeting blocks, executive quarterlies, team communication breakdowns, and the mindset that keeps her moving through all of it. Spoiler: it's not glamorous. But it works.
What Does Leila Hormozi's Daily Routine Actually Look Like?
Leila's days start early — often before 4am when she can't sleep — and she treats that extra time as an asset, not a problem. She heads to the treadmill, gets in a walk, grabs coffee, and mentally prepares before the calendar takes over. Most days include five or more hours of back-to-back meetings, and she keeps shoes under her office desk specifically so she can swap into something comfortable and walk between obligations.
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Leila starting her 4am morning before the rest of the world is awake
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She's unapologetic about working while exercising. She takes calls on the treadmill. She checks her phone between sets at the gym. She's clear that this isn't a lifestyle she's prescribing to anyone else — it's just what works for her. "I recognized a long time ago that I'm not for everybody. How I live my life isn't for everybody. But it works for me."
She also carves out space for what actually restores her. After long event days, she goes home, takes off her makeup, and bakes. Lately, the more general system stress she feels from running the company, the more she finds herself in the kitchen. It's her version of decompression — quiet, tactile, and entirely her own.
How Do You Communicate Better as a Leader?
One of the most actionable things Leila shares is her approach to adapting communication style based on who's in the room. She doesn't speak to her portfolio team the same way she speaks to her media team. She doesn't deliver feedback the same way to someone who is struggling as she does to someone who is thriving.
"The more skilled you are as a leader, the more you fluctuate your communication style based on the person in front of you." She describes it as speaking someone's language — meeting people where they are rather than forcing every room to adapt to you.
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Full team Zoom meeting where Leila addresses communication growing pains
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Her approach to feedback follows the same logic. When a mistake is made, she's not interested in dwelling on it. She asks: is there one thing that, if addressed, covers 80% of what went wrong? Then she redirects the conversation toward what to do next time. This keeps people solution-focused instead of shame-focused — and it mirrors how she wants to be led herself.
Why Does Communication Break Down When Your Team Grows?
Acquisition.com added 17 people in a single quarter. And with that growth came exactly what you'd expect: people not being looped in, information falling through the cracks, and the informal communication that worked for a small team suddenly failing at scale.
Leila's response wasn't panic. It was perspective. She brought it up in a full team meeting not to alarm anyone, but to normalize it. Her analogy is memorable: when a kid falls and scrapes their knee, the parent who screams and rushes to the hospital creates a traumatized kid. The parent who says "does it hurt? okay, let's bandage it and get back to school" creates a resilient one. She sees herself as the latter parent.
"Communication is never going to be better than it was now. It's going to get harder from here." She said it plainly and without drama. The goal wasn't to fix everything immediately — it was to help the team understand that friction during growth is normal, expected, and manageable. Recognizing a problem without catastrophizing it is itself a leadership skill.
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Leila answering a founder's question about hiring an executive assistant
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How Do You Build Core Values That Stick Across Your Whole Team?
When an attendee at one of Acquisition.com's workshops asked how Leila's three core values seem to genuinely permeate the entire organization, she broke down the process clearly.
It started with anchoring to the vision — what kind of company did she want to build? From there, she asked what kind of person she needed to become, and what kind of people she needed to hire to make that vision real. Then came the values themselves: distilled from what she and her team genuinely admired in people they looked up to, filtered down to only three.
The test she applied: if I only used these three filters when hiring, would I bring in the right people? When the answer was yes, they deployed it. They hired their first few employees using that rubric and it held up. The values weren't a wall poster — they were a hiring filter, a behavioral standard, and a daily practice rolled into one.
She also models Excellence personally in small, specific ways: sending a message she didn't have to send, acknowledging something she overheard that someone didn't expect her to notice. "Excellence is in the details. It's the people who, when nobody's looking, refill the coffee machine."
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Workshop Q&A where Leila breaks down how she built Acquisition.com's core values
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Why Transparency Makes Your Team Perform Better
Leila is deliberately, intentionally transparent — and she argues that this is one of the highest-leverage things a CEO can do for team performance. When people don't know how you're feeling, what's going on, or where things stand, they fill that vacuum with anxiety. You don't have to yell at people to create a stressed team. You just have to go quiet on them.
Her framework: she shares so much that when she occasionally can't share something, her team trusts her. There's no accumulated suspicion. Because they've seen her be honest about the good, the bad, and the uncertain, a moment of discretion doesn't read as hiding — it reads as leadership.
"When people feel safe, they do their best work. They're not in fear. They like their jobs more. They want to be at work more. And they get to actually grow." She traces this back to the best bosses she's ever had — people who showed their good days and bad days, who weren't performing perfection, and who she respected more for it.
How Does Leila Hormozi Handle Online Hate and Criticism?
Leila is refreshingly direct about this: she's genuinely unbothered. Not performatively unbothered. Actually unbothered. And she explains exactly why.
Her view is that criticism is painful only when you have unrealistic expectations — of the world, of others, of yourself. The moment you accept that putting yourself on the internet means people can say whatever they want, the sting disappears. There are no rules governing what strangers can or can't say about you. Expecting otherwise is the source of the pain, not the comments themselves.
She also talks about shame specifically. She's spoken publicly about being arrested, being overweight, and making serious mistakes in past companies. Her reasoning: "Shame only exists in the dark." When you've already told your own story, there's nothing for a critic to weaponize. The antidote to fear of judgment isn't thicker skin — it's living a life you're proud of and being the first one to talk about your own failures.
How Does Leila Hormozi Balance Work and Personal Life?
She doesn't pretend there's a perfect balance. She admits she skips deadlifts on days with big meetings because the physical fatigue isn't worth the performance cost at work. She prioritizes being present with her husband Alex in the morning over getting in a longer workout. She bakes at night to decompress. She takes off her makeup the second she gets home.
The throughline is intentionality. She's not optimizing for the appearance of balance — she's optimizing for what actually matters to her. And she's explicit about her hierarchy: doing right by her team, being a good wife, staying close with friends and family. Getting her eyeshadow perfect doesn't make the list.
"I care more about my team and being a good wife and a good friend than whether I did my eye shadow perfectly today." For Leila, the goal isn't to be everything to everyone — it's to be the right things to the people who actually matter, and to build something that outlasts any single day's to-do list.
