On this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez sits down with Alexander Ford, CEO of Measurable Genius, for an eye-opening conversation that reframes the way event leaders think about enrollment, marketing, and leadership. With a background in behavioral psychology and a mission to assist entrepreneurs to build lives and businesses they actually want to run, Alexander brings a powerful lens to the event industry—one focused on alignment, not just tactics.

Alexander is known for assisting high-level entrepreneurs translate their visions into operational structure while staying true to their core values. As the creator of The Choice, a transformative live experience, he guides leaders through a journey of self-awareness, leadership development, and business redesign. His genius lies in his ability to simplify complex behavioral concepts and apply them practically to sales, team building, and event design. Throughout the episode, it becomes clear that his approach isn’t just about growing your business—it’s about growing yourself while you do it.

The first major topic Alexander explores is The Psychology of Enrollment: Understanding Why People Attend Events. He challenges the surface-level focus on ads and marketing tactics and instead urges event leaders to ask: what do attendees truly value? What is already top-of-mind for them? He emphasizes that effective enrollment comes from connecting your event to your audience’s existing internal priorities—not trying to manufacture interest or “push” people to attend.

Next, the conversation dives into Redefining Sales, Marketing, and Leadership through Behavioral Alignment. Alexander reveals that many entrepreneurs resist sales or leadership tasks not because they lack discipline, but because they’ve associated those tasks with approaches that feel unnatural or unfulfilling. The solution, he explains, is to reframe those roles in a way that aligns with your strengths and values. When marketing and sales feel good, they become sustainable—and effective.

Finally, Rudy and Alexander unpack Building a Business (and Event) You Actually Want to Run. Instead of grinding toward a future definition of success, Alexander makes a compelling case for building a business that feels fulfilling right now. He shares why living out of alignment leads to burnout, and how redefining success around your personal nature can lead to greater joy, energy, and long-term profitability. It’s an inspiring conversation that gives every event leader permission to ditch the hustle and lead from a place of clarity, creativity, and authenticity.

Want to connect with Alexander?

Website: https://measurablegenius.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderwford/?originalSubdomain=ca

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexander.ford.12907/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexanderwford/?hl=en

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexanderFord

Hello, and welcome to today's episode. We have a special guest with us, Mr. Alexander Ford from Calgary, Canada. Welcome, sir. For our audience who perhaps are learning your name for the first time, I want to share a little bit about your background here. You are the CEO of Measurable Genius, and you've been in the business of sales and marketing and events for over 10 years now. You are a behavioral psychology expert and you've really done a tremendous amount of study and work in the area of human psychology and human behavior and really figuring out what makes people tick, what makes people want to do the things that you want them to do, what makes people want to come to your events. People want to show up, want to do the work, want to buy your next program and you've been applying your human behavioral methodologies through your marketing agency, helping dozens of coaches and experts over the last decade grow their own business. You also have your own production studio where you run virtual events and you have an upcoming event as well called The Choice. So super excited to get to dive deep into the interview today and learn more about the human behavioral background of how to have people attend your events and do the things you want them to do.

Yeah, it's an exciting topic because it touches everything. Human behavior underlies just about all of the things that we care about. So if it's into sales, if it's into marketing, if it's into coaching, if it's into speaking, consulting, teaching and my mentor, I don't know, 10 years ago, said, if you want to make a lot of money, you need to find a problem that impacts a lot of people or is very expensive to solve and what I have discovered is that one of the most important problems is, how do I get someone to do what I want them to do? And that shows up in all of these topics.

Absolutely and one quick point I missed on the bio background, I mean, it's not like you've just done a little small agency. You have like 30 full-time employees and human behavior is critical when it comes to leading and managing your own company, as well as working with customers and consumers. So you've definitely been around the block and you have a lot to share from experience on today's episode, which I'm really excited about.

Yeah, and the three core pillars that we cover in The Choice, the event that I'm running, are effectively the three domains of behavior that I think are most relevant to business owners. So the first is my own behavior. Like, how do I wake up each day and make sure that I'm aligned in my behavior with my purpose for those who are interested in like a spiritual context or in alignment with creating the life that I want or that I say that I want, or like making sure that I am moving towards a meaningful and fulfilling life, which is why I think most of us set out to be entrepreneurs to begin with. The second being the behavior of our clients. How do we enroll people? How do we help them step into transformation? How do we help them move through their objections or their resistance? How do we help them be the person who wants to buy? Because we all want our customers to want to buy. No one wants to feel like they're manipulating. No one wants to feel like they're convincing. The third is how do we lead a team? How do we scale? How do we operationalize? How do we enroll a community around our purpose or around the reason for our business existing such that they want to show up and do their jobs? Because as entrepreneurs, we really want our employees to want to do their job. No one wants to try to convince an employee to do work they don't want to do. We want them to want to do their work. So yeah, behavior shows up in all those places.

Awesome. Yes, yes. I know we're gonna talk quite a bit more about The Choice and the different behavioral opportunities that modifications or transformations that are possible when attending the choice event. Our audience, one of the top of mind challenges that people have when it comes to running events, which I'm sure you can relate to right now, is, hey, how do I get more people to my event? How do I fill my event? And there's the tactical side of it. There's like the Facebook ads, the YouTube, the organic, the emailing, the webinars, the affiliate partners, the paying for sponsor stages, and all of these things are viable options that that can work when done properly. But one of the cool things that you and I talked about in the green room was, yes, there's the tactics and you personally are doing several of those tactics right now filling your next event. But more importantly, what is the behavior behind it? Like, how do you address the behavior of how to get people to want to come attend your event? So I think that'd be a great area of focus here as we jump into this interview to not just the tactics of an event, but what are the psychological behavior components that you have to focus on from a messaging and marketing and communication perspective to have people want to come?

So we are going to just dive off the diving board directly into the existential. The reason that someone would want to come to any event is the same reason why they would want to buy your product or service. It's the same reason why they would want to work with you at all and it's because this problem appears to them as if it touches on something extremely important. So inside each of us, we have a reasonably unique hierarchy of decision making criteria against which we measure all of the different places we could put our time, our energy, our money, our attention, our focus. We're doing this minute by minute, second by second, day by day. We are triaging. I could put my attention here on this podcast with you. I could put my attention on a need that is appearing in my team. I could put my attention on a sales call. I could put my attention on my girlfriend or my boyfriend or my husband or my wife or my spouse or whatever. I could put my attention on my kids. Each of us is making those triage decisions against a reasonably solid hierarchy of what we consider to be important. Now, most of us don't have a very tangible sense of that hierarchy because the human nature is sort of of two minds. We've got like the mind that is conscious and like thinking and feeling and it really feels important. It thinks it's deciding things. It's like, I'm going to sit at my desk and I'm going to journal and then I'm going to decide to lose 40 pounds.

Then I'm going to wake up tomorrow surprised with ice cream in my hands wondering what fugue state I was in and how I ended up here and we're often sort of like, what in the hell am I doing? I'm a little bit confused about my own behavior and then there's the part of us which is largely unconscious and it's governed by all kinds of psychological, chemical, and biological systems, which is to some degree governing the information available to the conscious mind. So like we're moving through the world, information comes in, something's happening, and then our consciousness has information revealed to it and the mechanics of that are important because stored in that unconscious set of systems is this hierarchy. In that way, it's solid and if we discover it, what we can realize is that we can work with it. It's actually like one of the most important skills we can develop is working with this system because if we understand it and we respect it, what we can then do is apply that to our customer and we can understand that my customer who says they want to lose weight but isn't is lying. Our customer who says they want to grow their business but isn't is lying in exactly the same way we set a goal that we think is important without a connection to what's underneath in the operating system of the mind. We become surprised that what we thought we wanted, we don't want. That one distinction makes this game both more complicated and more simple because now what we understand is that the goal is not to convince the very important conscious mind who thinks it's in charge but actually isn't.

Our goal is to understand the true hierarchy underneath the conscious mind in our customer's world and align our event with what is actually at the top of the list stored in that operating system to the degree we're successful in helping our customers see that our event is connected to what is already at the top of that list. Eugene Schwartz says demand is not created. It's only leveraged. It's only followed. We can't change a market. We can only ride the wave of it. He's talking about this system. We can't change our customer. We can simply connect to that thing that's most important. So the number one most important thing is not how do I invent an event that I can make my customer want, which is how most people are trying to play the game. How do I create an event that speaks to that intrinsic and most important priority that my customer has, and how do I help them see it, which is a very different context. So then when we go into the marketing, how do I help my customer understand how my event is the most important thing they could possibly be doing? We change how we're doing our webinars. We change how we speak from stage. We change how we interact with the audience, and we tap into that fundamental desire.

Yeah. I like the point you made from referencing Eugene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising, I think is the name of one of his more well-known books, this idea that you can't create demand. You have to discover it and ride the wave, as you said, and taking the time to figure out what that is and being able to align with that. I definitely found that to be true with some of the events that I've run, is taking time to interview. They actually interview the clients and the customers to understand what their current demand is and align with that versus trying to force them to do what I want them to do.

Right, exactly, which you don't want to do. I mean, there's a version of us at times where we're like, man, if I could just force my customer to do this, it would be so much better. But if we're being honest, if we're being honest in just about all contexts, we don't want our customer forced. We want them to want to come. We don't want our wife or our husband to be forced. We want them to want to be intimate. We want them to want to spend time with us. We don't want to convince anybody. We want to be loved. We want to be appreciated. We want them to be attracted. That's the name of the game. So how do you tap into having a person want to be attracted to the thing that you want to sell them?

Yeah, therein lies the mystery of life.

Yeah, and hopefully I'm being a little bit enrolling like, hey, guys, like there's a problem. There's a problem out there that no one's talked to you about. There's a problem out there that's been covered up with 10 years of an online marketing industry that has forgotten its roots. The next $7 checklist doesn't talk to you about the nature of the human condition and how to align your communication with intrinsic inspiration and desire. But the semantic distinction changes the game. If you ask a different question, if you ask a higher quality question, you get higher quality answers. You don't need to actually like go learn human behavior like I have for 15 years to figure this out. I'm giving questions to the audience and to the listeners right now. Instead of asking, how do I fill my event? The question is, how do I help the customer who I want to serve see how my event is the highest priority thing that they could be investing their precious resources into, because it's going to create the transformation they want? That's a very different question. If you rest in the question mark, if you sit in that question, and you think about that when you're writing your copy, and you're framing your webinar script, and you're speaking from stage, you're going to automatically because you're a powerful creator, you're going to come up with different answers and this is one of the things that I teach my clients. It's not my job as a coach to give you answers. My job as a coach is to ask a question because you're capable of creating your own answers to these questions. They will emerge. So how do I help them see how my event is the highest priority thing they could be doing to solve the most important problem in their life, such that they will want to come?

And speaking of the most important problems in their lives, of your audience's life, specifically that you're talking about for your upcoming event, The Choice, in the room, I asked you, how does that, how do some of these problems show up as symptoms in their lives? And I thought that was a great point of conversation, which I'd love to highlight right now. So if someone's listening to this, and they're hearing you, they're feeling like, I don't want to do marketing for my event, or I don't want to do sales calls for my event, or I don't want to sell something at my event, because I feel like selling is manipulating people, or I don't want to hire people to help me with my event, whether it be employees, or maybe even volunteers. I want to do it all myself because I'm not good at managing others. I have a client just talking to yesterday who is struggling with his management and it's interesting, because those are the ways that this shows up. Like, I'm doing something that I don't want to be doing in my business, with my event, and or either I'm avoiding it completely, or I'm doing it under duress, like I'm doing it, and I don't want to be doing.

Yeah, it's really common.

So those are some of the symptoms that someone listening to this episode may be experiencing when it comes to their events, or the events that they're supporting, thinking of these things that they don't want to be doing, but they have to do it to get the paycheck or to run the event. So let's talk about that a little bit, because I think that's a good entry kind of portal into talking a little bit more about your upcoming event and what people could expect to get out of it if they choose to come.

Yeah. So first and foremost, I'm going to say something very explicitly. My goal here is not to enroll you into doing something you don't want to do. So out of the gate, if you've got the story, I don't want to do sales, marketing feels gross, hiring people sucks. My response is not do it anyway. It's absolutely not. In fact, that's the response my industry gives you. That's the response service providers give you. That's the response coaches and like content creators on Youtube are telling you. That is not, it's a completely inappropriate response. Telling a human being that the way to get what they want in life is by doing something they don't want to do is a fundamental social problem that we have created that I am taking a stand against. There's two types of suffering. The suffering that is associated with doing what you want. We call it meaning. We call it fulfilling. We call it a challenge that we enjoy. We call it something that's hard but fun. And then there's the suffering associated with doing stuff we don't want to do because we think we have to do it to get something we want or we think we have to do it to please an authority figure like our father or our teachers or our preachers or the people that we grew up having perceptions that we're dependent on them and if we don't keep them happy then we're not going to survive. There's all this programming. I want to like reveal a portion of the behavioral science that I teach my clients, which is when you attempt to act in a way that includes doing something you don't want to do, being someone you don't want to be, or having something you don't want to have, it's not just painful.

It's consequentially damaging biologically. The brain literally demyelinates. You shift from your prefrontal cortex into the amygdala. Your fight or flight and fawn responses turn on. You become dumber. You lose creativity. You lack strategic focus. You lose command. You become reactive and impulsive. You then basically look to be saved because you create a narrative of pain and any narrative of pain without meaning requires that you look for an offsetting pleasure and that's when you wake up in a fugue state with ice cream in your hands wondering why you have to cope with a shitty week or a terrible month with sex, salt, sugars, fats. Pleasure. This is the animal nature and it's a part of us and it plays a function but it is not how we become successful entrepreneurs. So you've been taught to deploy a blunt instrument in achieving your goals and it's not working. I just want to say that it's not working. So if you're a listener and you're feeling like there's times in your day you're pushing through, you're struggling, you're doing something you don't want to do because there's no one else around to do it or someone's got to do it and I'm willing to eat glass to be successful so I'll do it. I just want to put a pause or a moment between these ideas and now shift to the second half of the answer to this question which is we have the capability to move our minds consciously into our powerful medial prefrontal cortex and become creators of intrinsic and inspired ideas.

We have the ability to move into the portions of what's important to us contentually, meaning the things that are highest on our list of values. When we do that, our brain lights up and our body lights up and our chemistry lights up in a way that we no longer label things painful. Pain and pleasure are transcended in the mind and we move more into inspiration, enthusiasm, gratitude, love, and presence which are transcendent synthesized emotional states which are not the same as the polarized pleasure and pain animal states. This is important because to the degree we do that, we grow. To the degree we do that, we expand our self-worth. To the degree we do that, we create the potentiality for increased influence.

Increased influence, increased power, and increased energy. We become unlimited. We also have a tendency to take care of ourselves and take care of the people we love. We make good decisions because our brain is fully active and we're likely to move more towards what we want. We begin to create narratives that we're getting more and more of what we want. The name of the game in entrepreneurship or any form of growth is the following. If I have a story that when I fill my day with what's important to me, I end up with more of what I want. I create a feedback loop that says I can depend on myself to fill my day with what's important to me and therefore get more and more of what I want. But if I fill my day with what I don't want because my story is that to the degree I push through what I don't want, I might get what I want. The problem is we're collecting evidence that what I can trust myself to do is fill my day with what I don't want. So why would I grow my business into ever greater degrees of likelihood that I am going to decide to fill my day with what I don't want? We undermine trust in ourselves unconsciously while wearing a mask that these are good decisions because it's going to ultimately get me what I want but those days will never come because what I want is always on the other side of the decisions I'm making today to do what I don't want. So step number one is if I'm doing that, if I'm filling my day with what I don't want, acknowledge I don't know what I want.

I actually might be asking questions that sounds like what converts best? What day of the week do people open emails more? What's going to make me more money? What's going to be fastest? And then we optimize around these apparently logical ideas. Well, if it was fastest and it makes me the most money, of course, that's what I want. The problem is most of that leads us to answers that aren't what we want. The only question to be asked is what do I want to do today to get what it is that I want? Now back to the original content. I think I don't like sales. I call sales painful and I've got a story I don't want to do sales. Actually what's happening is you've created a definition for sales that sounds like things I don't want to do because everything in my life has mostly been things I don't want to do. So now I'm not in resistance to sales. I'm in resistance to doing s*** I don't want to do. I'm not in resistance to marketing. I've defined marketing as something I don't want to do. So I'm not in resistance to marketing. I'm in resistance to doing what I don't want to do. I've decided that employing people includes a list of things I don't want to do. So therefore, I'm not in resistance to employing people. I'm in resistance to employing people if it means I'm going to end up doing a bunch of stuff I don't want to do because the only thing I can trust myself to do is fill my day with a bunch of stuff I don't want to do and these are all the different ways it has shown up for me in the past. So I said at the beginning I wasn't going to try to enroll you into doing things you don't want to do and hopefully it's clear why that's the case because it's like from a behavioral perspective, the number one problem in your life, if you don't have the money you want or the influence you want or the team support you want or the relationship you want, all of that is on the other side of these core principles.

You don't know how to work with your own behavior, which is why you need to come to the choice and that needs to be reframed. The first way to reframe it is, ask a different question. How would I love to sell my event in such a way that intrinsically to the activity, I enjoy the process? So instead of I'm going to do sales in a way I don't want to get something that I do want, what is a form of sales that is congruent with my values? What is a form of sales that I would enjoy? What is a form of sales, like let's be creative, that is actually something I might love, like, want to do? So that when I'm doing it, I'm filling my life with something I want to do. What is a form of marketing that I would genuinely like? Let's redefine it. So when I do it, I have the story that it's something I want to do and to the degree we practice this psychological feedback loop, which we can do, and this is real personal development, you don't need therapy to fix this, we collect and provide ourselves with evidence that we can depend on ourselves to make decisions in such a way that what I do with my time, my energy, my money, is what I want to be doing with my time and my energy and money, and therefore there's nowhere for me to go. I don't need to be saved. I don't need to be relieved of pain. The thing I'm choosing to do right now, I want to do, so now there's no hurry.

There's no need for millions of dollars to rescue me from my own bad decisions. All of these compulsions and impulses of the animal mind to get me out of the moment and into the future where my actual life is falls apart and we realize that in this moment we are fulfilled and this is the life that we've been looking for. This is why we started being an entrepreneur to begin with, but we skipped right over the core skill and we jumped into building funnels. The core skill of how do I live a fulfilling life today, not tomorrow, today?

I think that's a microphone drop moment right there. How do I live a fulfilled life right now, today, not someday, tomorrow, and not having to eat glass in order to do it?

Yeah.

I think this has been like a little mini masterclass on the subject. It's actually been pretty awesome. For our audience here listening, I couldn't agree more with the principles that Alex is explaining here. I've been on a similar study and journey as Alex in my most recent times around understanding why I do what I do and how to align my highest values with the highest and most important work and also how to surround myself with people who have the desire to want to do the things that either I'm not good at or I don't want to do. So at the service level, it may sound like a great conversation, but I tell you an application is probably the one of the most important things I've learned and studied in the last several years. So that's what you're sharing is gold and I think someone listening to this and who's struggling with doing any part of their business that they don't want to be doing, especially when it comes to their event and promoting and filling their event, and they're struggling with it. I encourage you to come go to Alex's upcoming event. Alex, can you just share briefly about your upcoming event here so our audience knows as we kind of bring this interview to a close?

Yeah, this event is something I'm creating to step more and more fully into what I want. I've spent a lifetime doing things I don't want for clients I didn't want to help telling this story. Even as a human behaviorist, there's a reason I studied human behavior for 10 years because I'm the worst problem for myself. Like, I was my own worst enemy in this and I constantly had this story like these parts of me, like, they can show up later. The part of me that loves human behavior and it loves personal development. The part of me that loves business planning and strategy and scale. Like, we can do all that later once we've solved the marketing problem. That's the story that I had for 10 years. So I became a really great marketer. I became really great at creating results in marketing with my team and with my agency. But I was deeply unfulfilled because I kept doing stuff every day I didn't want to do inside the story that if I just got this done, this project finished, this next employee hired, this next responsibility delegated, if I just made enough money, if I created enough margin, if I had, like, a big enough business, if I had enough partners, all this stuff, then finally I'll give myself permission to do what I love. So it's meta because, like, the choice is an event that I truly love because it's full of what I love and those things are, one, the science of fulfillment, the science of making great decisions around what's meaningful and important to me. How do I wake up every day and moment by moment, decision by decision, act according not to my authority of the conscious mind that is like trying to do all of its decision making stuff, but act congruent with my nature?

See, like, I kind of, this is a theory I'm fleshing out in real time as I begin to have this conversation with people more honestly. I perceive most entrepreneurs are looking for a solid foundation around which to make good decisions. How do I know I'm making a good decision in my life? Do I optimize around money? Do I optimize around my health? Do I optimize around fitness? Like, how do I know if I'm making a good decision? How do I know if this opportunity is good? How do I know? And where I'm at is the only solid foundation for decision making is my innate, intrinsic quality. For better or for worse, and I'm not saying this is fate, Alexander sprouted out of the universe with a nature. I have a nature to me. My conscious mind is like, no, I'm important. I can be anyone I want to be. Okay? And I have a nature. So do you. You have a nature. There's a chemistry here. There's a quality and a texture to it. Like, the way a fish is a fish, and a bear is a bear, and a tree is a tree, and Alexander isn't Alexander. So my nature is the quality around which I make my best decisions and that nature can be revealed to me if I choose to be curious, and I choose to be loving, and I choose to be honest, and I choose to tell the truth about that nature. I choose to test and measure against my nature and so therefore, in that regard, I'm my most important split test.

So running split tests against my nature is day number one. Like, how do I really make good decisions every day against my nature so I can create my most fulfilling and inspired life? Life, because life comes before business. Day two, how do we understand our clients' nature? How do we understand their intrinsic values, by definition? How do I capture what's important to them, and align what I want to help them with, and align my narrative, my communication, my marketing with that nature, such that they light up and they go, I want that. I'm not even sure why I might want it, but I can see that that's important, and I'm going to go get it. That's marketing. That's day two and then day three, how do we change these stories around scale and leadership in a business? Because entrepreneurs get stuck thinking, you know, I don't want to hire people because hiring people isn't something I want to do. Okay, how do we transform that story so you can be helped in a way you want to be helped? Okay? Because, like, hiring people is too narrow a definition. How do I be helped in a way I want to be helped? How do I help my wife help me? How do I help my family help me? How do I help my friends help me? How do I help my team help me? How do I build a great sales pipeline in a way that I love having a sales pipeline? How do I build a marketing machine in a way I love having a marketing machine? Instead of, someone please come save me from having to do marketing. Someone please come save me from having to do sales. Someone could, like, let's transform that story so we can be great leaders.

And let's be curious about what our business, the business we want to build, that we want to lead in a way we want to live our life, works. If you want to work three days a week and spend a bunch of time with your family and travel, how do I build a business that gives me that? If you want to work seven days a week like Alex Formosy, 14 hours a day, great. How do we build a business that looks like that? I don't care. But what I do care is that we step out of the definitions given to us by others. Running a good business looks like this. It doesn't. It can look like anything you want. So day three is all about that.

Awesome, my friend. Thank you for the overview for your upcoming event again for the audience. Listening to this, we're going to include links to Alexander's website and resources and his upcoming event here somewhere near the interview series or the interview. So go ahead and go down, click the link, check out his next event. If you feel called to make the choice to register for his virtual event, the choice upcoming very soon, I'm sure, when you listen to this, and if it's already past that event, I know there'll be a link there that'll probably update you to his next event. Alexander, it's been a pleasure having you here on the podcast. With us. Thank you so much for being a wonderful guest with us today.

Thank you for having me, Rudy, really appreciate you.