The Hard Truth About Growth Most Founders Avoid. Hormozi Hotline feat. Leila Hormozi | Ep 918

Guys, I have a special, special treat for you. This is, uh, this has only happened one other time in human history. This is historic. So you guys, you guys are gonna get this, and it's come from downtown Vegas. My lovely wife, Lady Layla herself, Queen Lay, has come to join us and spit some fire on Hormozy Hotline, and we're going to be taking the calls together.

First of all, thank you for this opportunity.

Thank you.

So yeah, my name is Joshua. I run a performance-based marketing agency called Asnitzos for kitchen and bathroom remodels and outdoor living companies. Currently at $8K per month, profit is $7K. We work on a pay-per-show model and position them for high-end projects, so not like discounts, etc., without retainers or ad spend on their ads. So we take the risk there. Right now it costs me around, yeah, right now it costs me around $250 to acquire a customer on the last stats where I ran the ads. I have a $1,000 setup fee and I charge $500 to $600 per qualified appointment show.

Great.

To get them one appointment show. Yeah, to get them one appointment show, it costs at the worst time, like I'm aiming for $210. Uh, if I don't get them at least 10 appointments in the first month, I refund them the setup fee. Now, currently, to let you know, I do have 2 clients on this, but I have 3 other clients still in Tree Service, which I kept for cash flow because that's what I ran before. And my question is, from just what I told you guys now, and from your experience, what do you see which I currently don't see? So what would you do in my position to absolutely like scale this or maybe do differently.

Um, are you keeping the customers?

Oh no.

Um, until I'm basically— I wanted to keep them until I'm at $10K sufficiently in the modeling and then completely ditch.

So the question was, I mean, I don't think you should cut your cash flow. You have— you only have like 4 customers, right?

Currently at 5.

Okay.

So you have 5 customers and that means that if you're doing $8,000 a month, you said $8,000 top line, $7,000 bottom line, but you said your cost of getting a show is $210 on $500. Those margins don't make sense. What am I missing?

So for the $8K, I'm not basically counting in the $200, which is lost. It's just counting the $300.

Okay.

Got it.

The one guy I'm currently, the one guy I'm currently onboarding. So I only have one guy currently. On it. Uh, yeah, the other guys currently on onboarding.

And when you say guys on onboarding, you mean a client?

Uh, yeah, the one company I'm currently onboarding to get them into the $500 thing. I got his $1,000 setup fee basically, but he's not actively—

and you have—

yes, currently I'm looking to scale this now.

But yeah, I mean, go for it. I know you're going to So what you're going to say?

Well, I was just thinking that we have to run some more water through the well.

So I need to get more data.

You need to, yeah, you need to get more data. I mean, at that point, that sample size is so small. I think we need to focus on getting a bigger sample size.

Mm-hmm.

And then we can go from there.

I, I understand.

Okay.

Well, what is, what would you say, what is just your opinion about the model they offer? I'm, you know, I'm running this because all other agencies are basically running this. Paper appointment and yeah, they, you know, and they pay for the ads, but like the trust is really low in that market. So I was thinking about doing that.

Dude, I think everything's fine. I think everything's fine. The, I would say one risk that I see that's relatively significant is your cost per show relative to the revenue per show is kind of low. I would say the guys who I see like really murder it are at like 20%. So you're at like 60%. Uh, I'm sorry, 40%. So I want to see if we could drive that down because my fear of the business is that when you take this to scale, you'll be less efficient and your margins are going to compress. That's like, I would say like, that's kind of like my biggest red flag. Overall, the model of lead cost and arbitrage, there's nothing wrong with it. I've seen some massive, um, agencies that run that model. The next issue that you're going to run into is the types of businesses that you're serving. So you're going to want to go upmarket for people who can spend $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 a month in ads. That's, that's what you're going to want to go after because the volatility of your business is going to be predicated on the volatility of their business. So when you go after, and this is super common for small business owners, for everyone who's listening is like, you go after, if you go, most people who are poor, I'm not saying you're poor, but like most people are starting out in business, go after other people who are also smarting at starting out in business because that's where your confidence level is. But their business, they don't know anything either. Right? So it's the blind leading the blind and you're like, what's wrong with my business? All these people are churning and they're churning because they don't know what the hell they're doing in their business either. And so you're going to want to earn the right to go upmarket as fast as you can. Um, and if you have 5 clients that pay you what they're paying now versus having 5 clients and each one pays $100,000 a month, you could run the same ops and have 100 times the revenue.

I was going to say, the next, the next thing that you're going to want to realize is that, like, we've done the pay-per-show model, and we also had a software that used to enable the pay-per-show model. There's 2 things that you want to watch out for, which is one, when you're doing pay-per-show, a lot of times the businesses are gonna think, well, if they show but they don't close, why the fuck am I paying you? And so then you're gonna be really tempted to be like, ah, can I just help them sell these people? I'm just gonna also, maybe I should start a sales agency and close these motherfuckers. That's the next thing that's gonna happen. The second piece to it, and by the way, don't do that, go upmarket instead, 'cause people that are upmarket have their own sales team and they understand that concept that even though you get somebody to show, it doesn't mean that they're guaranteed to close. You still need to have trained salespeople. So do not give in to the temptation. Don't try and serve an avatar that isn't best for you more. That's the biggest mistake people make, which is like you're serving an avatar that isn't your best avatar and you try to go above and beyond for it. You just don't want to do that. The second thing is that— okay, that's like— I feel like that's like 2010.

That was good.

That's fire. The second piece is that with the paper show model, here's the place where it goes wrong. Which I saw firsthand, which is why agencies had churn with it, which is that customers want to be able to predict how much money they're going to spend with you. So if you look at churn and you look at customer retention, the customers who retain the most are the customers who understand how much they're going to pay. And so one thing that you can do is you can give people a range estimate, or you can give them a heads up different times through the month as to how much you're going to be billing them. Now it seems contrary because you think, okay, well, if I tell them how much they're going to be paying, they'll be like, oh my God, that's so much. But the reality is actually if they get a bill that's unexpected, that is like it looks and it's like once you get one unexpected bill from a company, it's like by the second one there's a 50% likelihood that they're going to churn. So think about how you can communicate with those customers. Maybe it's every other week, maybe it's every week to show them what their tab looks like. By increment of revenue. Yeah. Or by increment. That's a great one too.

Yeah. Just like every $5,000 or whatever, every $1,000 and then $5,000. $5,000 they spend, you just let it— you just automatic, just letting them know that this is happening. We can turn it off whenever you want.

So I think another piece that you could also ask is when you're getting the sale, when you're onboarding them, ask them what their budget is. I know it seems contrary, but it's like, if you want to get them to spend more money with you, you also need to show them that you're okay spending as much as they're comfortable to start. Does that make sense? And you can coach them up from there once you get buy-in.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I currently, what I currently do is I built like this lovable thing where I put in the numbers. So close rate, average contract value, et cetera. And, um, basically I do that on the sales call though. So that's a big nugget. That's great. Uh, because then I can always like weekly tell them like, hey, this is how much you should spend and that's what you should expect in the long term to get a return. So thank you for that. Um, I mean, if you were me here. How would like you think about going from like 8K per month right now to like 50K in this exact model as fast as possible and also as sustainably?

Dude, this is, we, we answered it. So I wanna ask you, what do you think we, what do you think we just said?

Just, I wanna make sure you retain that I, that I, that I need to get more data, that I need to get more data and like it's just sell more problem.

And, and.

And that I should not switch my business model and get them to basically convince me to get them to sell and also make sure that they know how much they get charged.

And go upmarket.

And go upmarket. Yes.

Upmarket, the one thing I want to ask, what do you think about the avatar? 1 million above because I was thinking about it.

Just go up.

You guys have an opinion on this?

Just go up. Just, just like in your ads or your outreach, look for people who are doing 10 times those numbers.

Number go up good.

Yeah. Big number good.

Okay.

Okay.

Cool. Like, you literally have the same size company you have in terms of headcount. Literally just add a zero to what the people that you're trying to attract are and you will make significantly more money and love your life more. Mm-hmm.

Cool.

Yeah.

Thank you. All right. Rock and roll.

Should I increase that?

Okay.

No, I don't think yet, dude. It's 5 people.

Yeah.

You got to get more water through the well. Also, there's a— like, for everybody listening, like, it's like, okay, increase your prices, but like, you haven't even gotten to the threshold of delivery. So until you get to a point where delivery is stressed and you can see how your team and how your company operates when you are stretched when it comes to your client load, do not increase your prices. You increase your prices when you know that your product and your delivery is rock solid. So we got to get more water through the pipes first.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate you.

Next caller.

Next caller.

Hello?

Hi.

Yeah, super nervous right now, but thank you for the call.

You should be terrified.

What if I'm nervous? Yeah.

My name is Jazz. I run Winnipeg Digest. It's a local newsletter slash media company.

Okay.

With an audience of 110,000 people in Winnipeg.

Sweet.

So that's about 70,000 on socials, 40,000 newsletter list in the last 18 months.

That's awesome.

We right now do— Yeah, thank you. We do about $10,000 in revenue right now, $6,000 profit through local advertising.

Okay.

Is that per month or per year?

That's per month. Yeah.

Okay.

And then, and then 6, we currently have 6 annual advertisers, mostly paying about $1,000 per month with 2 paying $2,000 per month. And then the rest of the revenue comes from single one-off ads. My question is a little two-part. So the first one is, how do I scale to a million without running out of local advertisers in the future, which I'm afraid of, or running into a supply constraint because we only send out 12 newsletters per month. So basically we have 12 primary— no, we send out 12 newsletters per month, so it's 3 per week.

Okay, got it.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

And these are digital, right?

Yeah, these are, these are digital emails.

Yeah. Got it. Okay.

Yeah.

And are you—

so that's my question.

Yeah. So I would not be worried about running out of advertisers. There's 110,000 people in the city.

There's—

you can for sure get enough advertisers. That's not an issue. So put that one away. You running out of ad space is more, more possible. So you have how many people on your list?

Yeah, so we have 40,000 on the list. The city is a million people. Oh, see, 110,000. Yeah, so the city is a million people. The 110,000 is what our audience size is. So it's 70,000 on social media.

Oh, you have so much room. You have so much room. So much room.

Yeah, so that's kind of— so, okay, so if I have room, then kind of from a growing perspective, then I'm afraid that we'll run out of ad space. So we'll run into a supply—

No, you're not going to run out of ad space. You're going to have to make sure that you're pricing your CPMs appropriately. So said differently, if you have, you know, 250,000 of the people out of the million in the city on your newsletter, you could charge a trip— I mean, every ad would be, you'd be, you know, $100,000. Like, it would be a lot. You know what I'm saying? So Yeah. So the space itself, obviously you have limited, you don't have, you don't wanna send your entire newsletter. It's just all ads, right? That's not gonna work. The way that media scales is via impressions and, and quality of impressions. And so you can charge more for the same space. That's what, that's what you have to do. So it's like, how do I scale this business? You get more eyeballs.

But it's like, there's not that, or like with, I don't know if there's enough businesses that can pay me $200,000, like $100,000 per ad.

Yeah.

You know, for sure businesses— well, again, you're, you're selling 12 ads a month. You're— $1,000 a month in, in advertising is not like many businesses can do that. Many businesses can do 5 or 10.

Mm-hmm.

Dude, like my dad used to run— my dad, local business owner, right? He used to spend $10,000, $15,000 to be in like Baltimore Digest or something, or Baltimore's whatever, like one, one magazine per month went out. He would spend $15,000 to be in that thing for like a half page.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

So, okay.

Yeah. So that kind of, that kind of semi, I guess that kind of answers my second question too, which was like, it was either, okay, should I expand to new cities, stay in the current one, but niche down? So let's say go start another one, but say Winnipeg Real Estate Digest or something, right? Or just keep—

I want you to keep scaling this one. I do not think it's worth you splitting. Splitting your attention right now. I think you have way more, way more impressions to capture. The other piece that you wanna consider here though is like you're sending a newsletter. It's like, are there other places you can, like, you have 70K on social. It's like we can charge for posts, we can charge for stories, we can charge for YouTube video integrations. We can charge for news. Like I would rather you do all that stuff first before even considering the Gmail for now.

Okay.

But what you would say the next step would be to niche down after like a certain scale?

No, I don't even want you to think about niching down. I want you to just do more. You need way more. Okay. Okay. And then, okay.

And from an acquisition standpoint of subscribers, we are currently running Facebook ads and acquiring subscribers at like $1.40.

Okay.

So that's kind of, so my question then is, do we continue to pay scale Facebook ads? Cause right now it takes about like 3 months to break even on a subscriber.

Okay.

So you already know that. Yeah. I mean, that's fine. Yeah.

Okay.

And so keep feeling Facebook ads and social.

Yeah.

You can also sell people longer, you know, periods of time on the front end. And is there, and is there like a front end offer?

Like, cause I know a lot of people in the space try and, try and achieve like negative costs for acquiring a subscriber. Right. So. Having some sort of a front-end offer, would you say I should still continue to just push B2B advertising or—

You can push B2B advertising as you do your Facebook ads so people opt in for the newsletter. Just have something called an SLO, which is self-liquidating offer on the thank you page. Okay. Do you have anything on the thank you page that you sell them?

No, nothing right now.

I'm about to change your life. I'm about to change your life. You ready?

Yeah.

I want you to offer a 10-pack of Guide to Winnipeg's Best Restaurants, Guide to Winnipeg's Best New Spots, Guide to Winnipeg's Best Ski—

Dessert.

Best Dessert. Like literally just put a, put 10 different kind of like magazines, do it once. Make that 10-pack like $37, put it on the thank you page. If you can get 1 out of 37 people to buy it, your cost to acquisition is to 0, and then you can scale the thing with a fucking move. So those would be physical, like physical things, or digital guy? You can make it digital, it's fine.

Okay. I was literally about to offer that for free in our welcome sequence.

So there we go.

Okay. And yeah.

Okay.

No, I think that kind of answers the question.

I feel like that was pretty good. Yeah.

I mean, no, that was pretty easy.

Thank you.

No, like, I mean, I've been, I've been like going back and forth with like, oh, should I start a Christmas holiday lights company on top of this?

No, dude.

No, no.

What?

That sounds fucking awful.

No, it sounds horrible. Do more of this. All you had to do is add a self-liquidating offer on the front end. You'll be able to grow the hell out of your media. You can charge more, you can get more advertisers in, done and done. You could also, to your concern, you could also parse your lists. Right. So let's say you triple your list size. If for some reason you can't find advertisers, you can pay more, which I wholeheartedly reject. But just to show you that you can still be creative here, you can say, I'm going to send 12 emails to these people, 12 emails to these people, and 12 emails to these people. List A, B, and C, because you made the list 3 times as big and you can charge that many more times. Okay. Got it.

That answers, I think, all my questions.

Thank you. All right. Rock and roll, man. Appreciate you.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

You should take this one.

What are the questions that we're prompting people with?

Yeah, I feel like I smashed that one.

I'm not going to answer a marketing question, so tell us what the next caller is.

Hopefully it's a people question. They'd be like, people, they're alive.

Anything but marketing. Yeah, anything but marketing. I can help answer. I'm not going to—

What's up, guys?

What's up? Hey, tell me about the biz.

Yeah, so I, uh, run a company where I essentially help remote high-ticket sales coaches, uh, with their fulfillment by providing job opportunities and then coaching for their students/client on best application processes, interview, uh, support, and and prep and things like that.

Um, which part of the delivery do you— can you hear me? What part of the delivery do you do?

So I like post the job opportunities inside of their community, um, and then I do group coaching calls once a week with some of the clients, and then DM support, answering people's questions, reviewing their application videos and things like that.

Okay, what do they do? They're responsible for sales?

Yes, so they're sales coaches, so they're teaching people the sales side of things. And most of them, before I come into the business, are doing part of the, you know, helping them land jobs, um, but often are struggling with having enough job opportunities. And the coaching part of actually teaching people what to do properly to get hired.

Got it. So they're really good at getting the clients, they're not good at getting the clients the opportunities. So you bring them the opportunities, you're responsible for the second funnel.

Exactly.

Okay, great.

Um, so I guess like the bottleneck that I have is we currently have 45, um, communities that we work with.

Wow.

Um, we work on our retainer model. Uh, we don't charge the businesses anything for the recruitment services. Not really recruitment services, it's just like posting their opportunities in the community. Um, and so the sales coaches pay us a retainer. Anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 a month. And I run the entire business and fulfillment. And so I guess my bottleneck is that the business is not a business, it's me.

Are you charging for placements when you get them opportunities?

No, so it's just like a flat retainer model.

No, no, no.

Providing the job opportunity.

You're providing, let me say it differently. These guys get jobs at businesses that need salespeople, correct?

Yes.

So who— those businesses, you just give them people for free?

Exactly. So I don't charge the business anything, um, so that that doesn't become a bottleneck, so that I can have as many job opportunities as exist in the world.

So it'd be like I would come to you and say, I need remote salespeople, and you would be like, I'll give you some for free?

Yes. So let me know anytime you need sales reps.

I mean, I wouldn't do it because I wouldn't believe that you were any good.

Yeah, there's that.

Well, we have anywhere from 500 to 600 job opportunities that we post a month. So we've got a lot of people who do trust us.

I—

you get what I'm saying? Okay, so what's the problem in the business?

Well, just that I guess I'm bottlenecked by I have no team. And we have 45 clients. And so, uh, I'm not sure where to find the right talent, how to incentivize the right talent for, um, the fulfillment side, like coaching, finding the right opportunities. I, I guess I, I just don't know what direction to go in to scale beyond where we're at currently.

So let me ask you, in the business right now, where do you spend most of your time? Is it on sales? Is it on fulfillment? Like, which piece?

Um, it's—

yeah, I don't really spend very much time at all on sales. It's, it's pretty much all on fulfillment. So, uh, I guess like liaising with businesses who are looking to hire sales reps. Yeah. Um, and answering questions and getting on group coaching calls with the students of my clients.

How many group coaching calls a week are you getting on?

Uh, currently around 20 per week. So a little less than half of the total clients we work with have that as part of the services I provide.

Gosh, okay. And then of that time, the rest of the time you're spending DMing people, essentially like answering questions in the group?

Exactly, yeah.

Okay. And then what would you do if you weren't— if your time wasn't being taken by doing either one of those things?

Um, I think it would just mostly be, be acquisition, um, finding more clients and making bigger, better connections with, with businesses and people that hiring sales reps consistently?

Yeah, I think the first thing that you should try and get off your plate is the questions, because if you can bring somebody on and you can train them on answering the questions in the group, that's like a— it's almost like they're onboarding to then take over calls from you. My question is, when you're on the calls, what is the— like, if you were to tell me the top 3 things that you're teaching them on the calls, what would those 3 things be?

Uh, I mean, I think the, like, the application videos would be the number one thing, but the majority of those calls and answering people's questions is all, like, personalized. So it's based on their situation and their past experience because I work with some people that have a ton of sales experience and some people that, you know, this is going to be their first ever, you know, go at sales. Um, and so it's mostly personalized, like, how can we frame the experience they do have or the lack of experience in the right way to be able to help them land a better job than they have currently or their first job.

Yeah. So it's essentially a lot of career coaching to a degree, just in like a less traditional sense.

Yeah.

Okay. So you're looking for somebody that can essentially be a career coach for the sales, remote sales opportunity peeps.

Yeah, pretty much. And I think that struggle is I don't know who has the understanding of the industry and, and I guess enough expertise. And obviously I can coach that, but, um, to, to have authority in those conversations that isn't a great sales rep who could make a lot more money selling than, uh, helping people get jobs.

So there's two different models that you can think of when you think of a coaching business like this, and I think this goes for like any coaching business in existence. So we've talked to so many, and I've helped structure multiple teams like this. Like, there's really two models that work and there's tradeoffs in each one, meaning like you kind of just want to pick your problems. And so I'm going to describe each one and you can tell me which one you think you would rather have the shit that comes with it. The first one is that you hire people that are going to be full-time. The downside of this is it's going to be harder to find those people because they're competing with these other opportunities. So just like what you said, it's like they could go make more money somewhere else, which means the type of people you're going to find are people who directly want to learn from you, and they see this as a learning opportunity, not an earning opportunity. And they one day want to open up a business similar to yours. So there's two downsides here.

Yeah.

Which is one, they're going to be competing in terms of cost. And so they're looking at these other opportunities. They're not going to come in for super cheap, even though they're trying to learn, because the anchor is just very high. So what they can earn elsewhere. The second side to it is that there's going to be a finite timeline on this because they're coming in to learn. And so once they feel like they've learned enough that they can go off on their own or go do something somewhere else and learn more, they're going to do that. However, the benefit is that it's less management for you because if you bring these people in, you probably only need a couple of them literally to take care of all the clients that you have and you get a ton of discretionary effort from them because they're full-time employees with you and they're trying to learn. So they want to go above and beyond because they're trying to acquire the skills. That makes sense. That's the first model. The second model.

Absolutely.

Is easy to find and also hard to manage, which is find people that essentially are doing what you just described. They're already those coaches making a lot of money, but they want to make more money and they want to have influence. They like the status, they like the teaching. And so as a side opportunity, they can do this for 10 or 15 hours a week, maybe even less. And so then what you would do is you would get more of those people, say you need, based on, you know, 20 calls a week plus whatever, say it's 40 hours, maybe need 4 or 5 of them to cover you. You pay them a lot less, you get them fractionally in part-time. The downside to it is that it's going to be more management from you because you have to build out a schedule. You're going to have to make sure that they're all, you know, clock in, clock out, whatever, all the compliance. And so I would say that if you have a hard time finding the people, then maybe go with the model where you have the part-time coaches coming in. I would say the other upside to doing the part-time is that if you lose one, it's not a big deal. You can replace them fairly easily. There's a lot of key man risk in the first model. And so if you don't feel like you're like going to really be great at retaining them, I typically tell people steer away from that model.

Let me— yeah, I'm going to piggyback on that. So the nice thing with the partial model that Layla just outlined is that one, you're placing all these salespeople right now and you already have a history of placing a lot of salespeople already, right? And they already went through your training and whatnot. And so I would say take your most successful alumni and say, hey, want to make an extra $5,000 a month and give back to the community that you came from? Many of those guys would probably say, sure, I'd happily do it because, you know, $5,000— because a lot of, you know, salespeople do get tired of selling all the time. And so this gives them a little bit of a break and feel like they're giving back. Yeah, exactly. So I actually really like that model. And given the fact that you recruit all these salespeople, I don't think it'd be that hard. Second, because it would kill me and eat me up inside to not at least say it. You can double your revenue really easily. Can I tell you how?

I would love to know.

So I hear where you're coming from with the, hey, I want to have as many opportunities possible so I can find as many placements as possible. So making it free is a way to do that. I hear you there. But you probably know of all the candidates you have that there's probably 10% of them that are killers and are going to do well, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. Have a tier that's $2,500 or $5,000 per head. That you say, hey, all these people are free. I personally screen these ones and give them a blue checkmark from me. And these ones are $2,500 or $5,000 a pop. So if you get 600 placements a month is what you're doing. If 60 of them are paid at $2,500 or $5K, that adds $150,000 to $300,000 a month to the business.

That makes a lot of sense.

Boom roasted.

Okay.

You're like, I gotta get that one out.

Yeah, I definitely need to implement.

And call that a money model.

Call that a money model right there.

Right there.

You should write a book.

I should write a book about that.

Does that help?

So that, Layla solved your, your deliver model and that solved your money model. Rock and roll.

Yeah.

That's awesome. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

That was a fun one. That was good. That was nice.

A little spice.

I had a little spice of life. That was fantastic. All right, let's do next caller. Let's rock and roll.

Who else we got?

Hey, I'm Brian.

Hey, Alex.

Hey, Leila.

Hey.

What's up?

What's going on? So I run an online coding bootcamp for adults called Tarsity.io, and I'm in a pretty frustrating position where we've basically plateaued at around 30 to 40 people per year. We have pretty good reviews. People seem to like us. I do pretty much only organic through a podcast and around 30,000 followers on LinkedIn. And I'm just wondering, how do I hit this magical 100 people per year target?

What do you charge?

$9,200.

So $9,200 is what you charge and you've got 30 to 40 people a year who are buying? Yep.

How long have you been doing it?

This business has been around for about 5 years, and I've been running it for the last 2.

Did you buy the company?

Yes, I did. Like, a seller-financed purchase. Yeah.

Okay. Understood. And last year, was it also at the same number?

Basically, yeah. Like, it had a pandemic, you know, plateau. It went up to like 50 or 60 people during the pandemic when it was the software developer market was really hot and now it's kind of gone to like 30 or 40. We're priced under most other coding bootcamps and we're much more personalized, but it just feels like, yeah, it just feels a little stuck at this point. And I feel like we had good experience with ads. Almost all through a podcast I do that has about 10,000 listeners per month, but it just feels like it's frustrating. I'm like, that's a lot of people, but it's like no one's actually—

No, dude, 10,000— 10,000 uniques or there's 10,000 downloads?

10,000 downloads.

Right. And how many podcasts do you make a month?

Yeah. Uh, 2 per week.

Yeah.

8 per month.

Yeah. So call it, you know, it's 1,200 per episode downloads and not all downloads are listens.

That's right. Yeah.

Right. So you might only have 1,000 people, right? You might only have 1,000 or 500 or 600 people. And yes, we read the chat, by the way. Um, and there's only 500 or 600 people who are actually listening. So the fact that you're getting 30 or 40, that actually sounds like good. You're getting— yeah, you're getting 5% of your podcast to convert.

Okay.

Hello guys.

Has your podcast grown in the last year?

Yeah, it did, but I think that was like from doubling the amount of episodes. So I think it was like I was looking at it like, oh great, I'm getting more people. Yeah, I think that was the issue. And so I've been trying to like explore LinkedIn. I'm like, okay, I have like 30,000 people on LinkedIn and then trying to write daily. Like, not as many as I think. Most of the people come from the podcast and we ask people, hey, how'd you find out about it? It's almost always through the podcast. There's, there's like, I'd say, let's say 25% come, come through LinkedIn and that's about it.

All right. So you have a marketing issue. No one knows you exist. And it's, it's great that you have a podcast. Podcasts are very, very difficult to grow because there's very low suggestibility. So you would want to take— so I see podcasts and like email lists, for example, as very middle and bottom of funnel. Yeah. And so you need more top of funnel awareness type stuff. So LinkedIn works, that's fine. But I would also be looking at— I mean, I know it's just you, but I think you just need to make way more— like instead of making more podcasts, I think you need to make more LinkedIn content for sure, because that's where a lot of people— like, I think that's a good place. I think X is also a pretty good platform for people who are trying to like buy, you know, coding stuff. Also repurposing that content, super easy between LinkedIn and X, 'cause it's almost all words. But beyond that, if you take the words and then you make videos of those words, shorts or longs, combine the best 3, 4, 5 LinkedIn posts you make and then make those into longs for YouTube. If you combine all those things together, you'll get significantly more traction. Beyond that, I'm assuming, what's the, what's, how are people actually buying from you? So I see a LinkedIn post or you're good. I see a LinkedIn post or podcast. What do I, what's my, what, what gets me to take action?

Oh, okay. Like at the end of each episode, I'm like, hey, you know, go, go to plugd.io and fill out this application.

Yeah. Okay. So thing one is we need a better lead magnet. So it'd be like, I would say you have your course thing. I would say give the first module away for free. And say, hey, like, learn how to do this in under 60 minutes. The first, like, the one thing that's really valuable, like, oh my God, this is amazing. And then all you do is all those people get that thing for free. You'll get way more leads. You can call them up and then sell them. Because a direct ask of like, go apply is tough.

Yeah, for sure.

Right. Super bottom of funnel. Like you have a very bottom of funnel business. And so that's why it's not growing because everything is about just conversion.

Yeah, I was also thinking like we've had a lot of companies that we've worked with that are in this space and the ones that I've seen that have had the highest revenue, they actually, they make YouTube videos. So the reason I think it works well for that is because like it's a very, um, like a lot of people that get into coding, like they like watching a lot of videos on coding. So it's like listening to it is very different than like watching it. I almost feel like you could take your podcasts and literally just turn them into YouTube videos. I think that you'd get a lot more buy-in. There'd be a lot more trust. And then you probably honestly get way more lead flow that way cuz it's a, a platform that's easy to grow on compared to podcasts. So it's like I wouldn't stop doing the podcast.

I think—

yeah, yeah.

In conjunction with what Alex said, I think the thing I'm thinking, it's just like you're putting a lot of effort into a channel that's not gonna give you a lot of return.

Yeah.

Like my podcast and Alex's podcast, like that is like the, it's the one thing that probably comes from like, I would say like if we wanna do it the right way, it would take a ton of effort and be difficult to distribute across other channels optimized for those channels. Whereas YouTube, if you made YouTube videos, you could take that and put that across Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn. Like it's, it's such a better source piece of content that when you're ready to scale again, you can scale that across so many different platforms versus the podcast is always just audio.

Video turns into audio much easier than audio turns into video.

Correct.

Yeah.

So yeah.

TL;DR.

And that's probably keeping it going. Good.

Totally.

TL;DR, 2 things you need to do. Thing 1, get a better lead magnet. Thing 2, you need to advertise way more, which means you put out higher volume of content across all platforms, especially ones that have high deliver, uh, high discoverability. Yeah, no, that tracks.

And, and so you probably wouldn't do ads at this point, right?

No, I think you can, I think you just, I think you can post. No, I think you can, you, you have so much meat on the bone with organic right now. I would do, I would just double, I would, I wouldn't double down. I'd, I'd 5x down.

Okay. I appreciate that.

All right, man. Rock and roll. Appreciate you. Cool.

Hey, thank you.

All right. Later, brother. Simon, appreciate the shout for the book. I'm glad you like it. He's referencing Money Models. It's also free on my podcast for those of you who are broke. It's also a free course on my site for those of you who are also broke. It's also there. You don't even have to opt in. You can just watch it. But we're here now, so let's do this. Next caller is Renwitha. Nick caller. Okay, let's body slam. What's going on, guys? Can you hear me? Yes, sir. Going on. My name is Josh. I own a brick-and-mortar pest control company that focuses mainly on recurring service plans.

Cool. Residential clients.

Yep. So currently my constraint is optimize my offer. I feel like there's room for improvement. Optimizer what? So Um, my constraint is optimizing my offer. Offer. Okay. For improvement. Okay. Yep. So, um, I've been bundling basically all the services into like a mother of all bundles type of deal. Yeah. Um, I basically can't upsell with that since I'm bundling everything and margins get tighter, but my close rate does increase. Um, but when we don't bundle, the opposite happens. Close rate margins do increase. Along with upsell potential. So my question is, which of the two would you deploy to scale the quickest?

I'm currently at $1 million, started the business a year ago, looking to get to $5 million next year.

My question is, you said close rate decreases when you take away the bundles, right?

Uh, yeah.

So basically, yeah, with the, uh, that bundle, um, I basically just cancel.

Yeah.

Pretty much.

I'm curious, do the customers, do you sell less of a specific type of customer? Like in terms of like income range or type of house or something like that?

It's all upscale, like, uh, yeah, basically upper, upper middle to higher class.

Is that, is that what you're asking me?

Yeah, I was just trying to understand if like there's a specific type of customer that's more attractive that you're not getting when you switch. That you lose with the Switch, but that the ones that you're getting are gonna have a, uh, a greater LTV. So it's like kind of worth the trade-off, but I was trying to understand if there's a difference in customer.

Yeah, it's, uh, so the, the customer, um, basically, yeah, I, it's like, so the customers are pretty much the same.

It's really not gonna change. Okay.

So I pretty much, I'm focusing on like hired customer here that's willing to. Yeah, let me push back real quick. So you said your constraint is your offer. I would say, how do you know that? Well, so, well, because of the— I'll tell you really honestly, it's like that close rate drops when we, when we don't bundle and when we do bundle, it goes up. I mean, the business is rocking and rolling. It's doing great. Honestly, I don't— I'm just wondering if that is the constraint. It doesn't sound like the constraint. Like, what's that like?

Why is the business not doubling revenue?

Like, yeah, what's stopping you right now? I mean, you said your close rate's fine when you have the bundle, so sell the bundle. Okay. Unless there's some other major problem. So the only thing is that the upsell potential drops, so the LTV does drop. Well, then why don't you raise the price on the bundle?

Yeah, I guess I could just raise the price on the bundle.

I mean, it's like, love this for us. I will raise the price on the bundle. This is great. I'm glad we, I'm glad we had this chat. Okay. And you'll, we have this thing that everyone wants to buy, but it has lower margins. It's like, well, but you, if you're especially going upscale, they don't know the difference. So, you know, tack on $20 and then probably like double your margins. They won't even know. Yeah, you're right. I love it. This was fun. Appreciate it. I'm going to be seeing you guys in December. All right. Fun. We'll rock and roll, man. We'll see you out here.

Tell us how much more money you make in the meantime. Yeah, that'd be lovely.

A whole lot of money. Thank you guys. You bet. Have a good one. We have a next caller.

Okay. Yeah, let's do next caller.

Who's on? Who's, who's on first?

Hey, this is Paul. So I run a marketing agency. For martial arts schools. Oh, thank you. Generation. And yeah, I offer lead generation and appointment setting services. I currently am at $420K in revenue, $100K in profit. And yeah, I guess the problem right now is that I kind of started this just doing freelancing, kind of stumbled into martial arts on a whim after having success with the clients. I figured out like a repeatable system to get them results, get people showing up, get people coming up to the first class. And that's kind of where I'm at today. I guess my problem right now is, you know, I'm selling 3-month contracts and churn's pretty high still. And I kind of just didn't really fix the churn issue. I kind of just started selling a lot and getting clients and I have a good relationship with all of them. But I've been kind of stuck at this range. It's $35,000 per month for a while now. And, uh, clients just leave for a lot of reasons out of my control. Either A, I do a great job and they can't handle the one coming in, or B, they don't have the patience to kind of keep going with it. And, uh, I think—

Do you want to take this one?

I don't, I don't, uh, run a martial arts school myself. So sometimes I have issues with sales and, um, I can't really run it myself. So I kind of just grew the agency on a whim.

What do you want to have happen before I answer the question?

What do you want to have happen?

What's your goal? Yeah.

That's the question I like to start with.

Yeah, I think right now I'm trying to figure out if I should keep pushing on this or if I should pivot. And then like, I didn't really set out to start an agency.

What do you want to have happen? What's the goal? It depends whether you should push or pivot.

You try and make a certain amount of money, you try to sell a business. Do you want a lifestyle business? Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, what do you want to end up?

I think right now, I think I want to learn how to make a lot of money and exit and— Well, this business, you will not exit. That's for sure. Yeah.

We, we can tell you that. Yeah.

Yeah. That you will not exit this business.

So the question is, can you learn something from this business and make money at the same time, or is there a better opportunity?

Yeah.

I thought about potentially selling my book of Bidneth and then opening up and pivoting to some sort of brick-and-mortar kids education business. I mean, I've kind of fleshed out the scripts on how to get parents and getting them invested into martial arts program and the whole nurture sequence behind it. So I thought about investing the money because I've saved about $100,000 in this business and I was thinking of kind of leveraging that into maybe investing in an actual brick-and-mortar and learning how to scale that. But I guess I'm just trying to figure out, do I, you know, I'm in a good spot. Should I push the agency, grow it? You know, I'm curious what Leila's going to say.

And we'll probably have two different pieces, like we'll probably come at this from two different angles. So you'll get a double trouble on this one. Sure. But I'll say this. Congratulations on learning how to generate leads in a market and work them and get them in. You've, you've learned acquisition, super valuable, and you've learned it for a specific avatar, right? You get that. The next step This business, like, I can tell you where this is going to go. You would have to, you'd have to basically change this entire business in order to make it a bigger sellable business, which is essentially the same as starting over. Uh, if, and that's all based on your goal, because the reason that you have the churn you have is because martial arts studios in general tend to have significant, you know, they have high churn. They're typically not very good business owners. Uh, not very good, but just they're small, right? They're very volatile. And so that volatility is reflected in your business. And volatility in their business and your business therefore creates a business that is not valuable. Right. And so that's going to be based on them. The only way that you can get those types of customers, um, who are volatile inherently to be sticky is to look at the things that those people already buy that they don't turn out of. So what are the things that they buy that they don't turn out of? If you were to stick with this, and I'm just using this as a mental construct, and then I'll get into more specific examples of what I think you should do next, but big picture, right? You could, their, their payment processor, they don't turn out of. Right. The CRM, they don't turn out of their insurance, you know, I mean, like, like there's, there's things that they don't turn out in marketing stuff. They will turn out of left and right and center. Right. So I think that you have this whole kids education thing. If it were me, I would prefer you go and find an industry. If you want to do brick and mortar, which is fine, if you want to go brick and mortar, I would find an industry that already has a product or service that people don't churn out of. Then I would apply your skill of learning acquisition to that business, and then you'll be able to, like, you can go and start acquiring businesses, um, and then filling them up because you know how to acquire. And those businesses, um, will already have the stick in place, and so you'll have the full stack.

Mm. What was your experience prior to this business?

Uh, well, I worked for a marketing company and I learned lead generation there, and then I kind of just, um, the company ended up getting sold, so I ended up, you know, trying to do the job with freelancing. And I learned, yeah, I took, I got my own client, and then after I did that for about 2 years, and here I am with a bunch of clients and I don't really know what the next step is. So, okay, that's great to know that you came back.

Background.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I, I thought about getting into the, uh, kids education space because, you know, I did martial arts because, um, I came from a sports background teaching kids like different sports, specifically Frisbee, which was cool. Um, and I guess I thought about, you know, buying some sort of like tutoring business or kids education and taking my marketing skills there and growing that. Um, but, uh, Yeah, because if my goal is to learn how to sell and, and, and tell a company is, I'm not sure if the agency space is there too. That's from my head that it has to be paid.

Just find something that has high revenue retention, high stick.

I was going to say, you want to find something easy to market. Like, I think it's really impressive that you've done what you've done for martial arts studios because we've worked with thousands and it's tough. So I can say that objectively. Uh, it's like you have a, you know, like a level 8 skill that you're using on like a level 3 opportunity. And the opportunities that you're kind of presenting, they're not really that much better. It's like maybe a level 4.

They're just different. Yeah.

I'm like, can you get a level 8 opportunity to match your level 8 skill? And what, what did that do, guys?

It's something that has revenue retention. I'm just telling you right now, it's something with revenue retention. Revenue retention. Yeah. If you just solve for that, cuz once you have revenue retention, if you know how to acquire customers, you just grow a business every year, just gets bigger. That's— I mean, the hardest thing is revenue retention.

I, I just want to like open up your mind. You're looking at opportunities that are linear. I want you to look at opportunities that are exponentially different than what you're doing right now. And I think the reason you're thinking linearly is because, you know, without noticing, we have these beliefs, right, that we keep ourselves in these boxes thinking like, this is what I'm good at. The fact that you're very good at marketing You need to find a great product that retains customers easily to market. What that is, maybe it does scare you or makes you nervous. You're like, I know nothing about that. That's okay. You can figure it out. And the thing that I tell people a lot is it is just as hard to build a small business as it is to build a big business. Both of them are going to be painful. You're going to suffer. There's going to be late nights. It's also just as hard to build a, I would say, like a more advanced business as it is a small business. I can tell you that from personal experience, like building a gym up to what it needs to be is as hard emotionally as building a large company like acquisition.com. And they are hard in different ways and they're also easy in different ways. So you're gonna have 50% shit and 50% good no matter what opportunity you pursue. I would love to see you pursue an opportunity that is at least worth the 50% shit you're gonna go through. That's something me and Alex talk about a lot, which is like pick an opportunity that's worth the the pain because it's going to be pain no matter what. This goes for everybody on the call. It's going to be hard no matter what. So pick one. Even if you're like, I don't believe that I could do it, you will figure out a way. And everybody does. Even when we started Acquisition.com, you know, we didn't know anything about investing or buying companies or doing any of those things. And we learned along the way. It's just that you have to have the belief in yourself to just start. Like, you're not going to feel ready for any opportunity that's exponentially different than what you're doing right now. You get ready by starting. Got it.

Just got to find a level 8 opportunity. No, I literally— I would go on—

I would literally go on ChatGPT and I'd be like, tell me what an opportunity is that has great revenue retention. Here's all the industries I've worked in. Here's all the skills. Where is something where I can get insane revenue retention that is 5 times more likely to sell and be worth something and make me, you know, maybe it's $50 million. Compared to these businesses I'm in right now? Just like, look at the list and then think like, okay, well, like, where do I have a 30 to 50% shot of success? I mean, like, I don't know how to explain this. Like, I have never felt ready before I tried something. I'm always like, I have no fucking idea if this is going to work. I could totally fail. This could totally be terrible. And like, that's going to happen no matter what. It's just like you're picking things that are small. And here's the thing that's even worse. You said you want to sell a business. Well, then that means you have to stay in the game, which means you have to be challenged, right? If you pick something that you know you're going to win, this is like where high performers just die. And I can tell that you're a high performer, is that you pick something that's too easy and then you get disengaged, and then you're like, I can already play this out, know where this is going to end up, and I don't want to go there. And then you don't even want to see it out to sell the thing because you already know where it's going to go. It's not interesting.

Do you have anything you would add? No, you're right. Yeah. I was just gonna add a— yeah, yeah. No, last year I, I remember I was at the 10K rate and I, I watched a bunch of Alex's videos and he just said double ad spin and keep the course. And here I am a year later, double ad spin, kept the course, and I'm now, I guess just gotta find a, you know, high leverage activity.

So also I would just say this, you're gonna learn more trying something then you are going to learn thinking about it. We don't learn while we stay in our heads, right? We learn when we get out into the world and we do stuff. So like, think about a way, like, how could I test these opportunities? Can I be an affiliate of a company like this? Could I be an affiliate to an insurance company? Could I just come in and be a contractor to help build up this X company? Like, you could literally just find one big client, be like, I will do your in-house marketing just so you can learn the business.

Yep.

Dang, I would love to do that.

And use the cash that you have as you're saving so that you can be aggressive with your learning. Right. As in like that's your best day, so you don't have to worry about living.

Yeah, I've been, I've been doing the whole like Chipotle thing, frugal thing. I saved up my first cent of cake. Good. First cent of cake because of you guys. I appreciate you guys. No, I appreciate it. Appreciate you, man. Awesome. No, I'll do the thing. I appreciate you, dude. Yeah.

We have another caller. Oh, a caller.

We have a ringer is at the door.

Someone has a ring. You're right. Who do we have on the line?

Devin. Devin. What up, Devin? So I've got a small YouTube channel, like really small, and I, I just don't know where to go other than just make more content.

What do you sell?

I've watched y'all stuff. I don't have anything to sell. What do you make YouTube about? Should I have a product? What was that?

What do you, what's the YouTube about?

It's a hunting, fishing, outdoors.

I'm an outdoorsman.

Okay. Oh, that's cool. And how many, uh, subscribers do you have or views do you get a month?

So I've got 2,000 subscribers.

Okay.

And last, in the last 28 days, I've gotten almost a quarter of a million views, mostly from shorts. I haven't posted many longs yet. Okay.

All right. I post—

what do you do to make money?

Yeah, how do you live?

I have a job. I work 40 hours a week.

What do you like?

What do you do though? I make lawnmower parts.

Okay, I think you're early. So I do think that you should start making some longs because longs, that's what's going to deepen your kind of influence with the audience. You want to demonstrate more expertise around hunting. And if you're like, I don't know how to do that, just take 3 or 4 long concepts, sorry, short concepts that were good and just loop them together. Not, not literally loop them together. Just, you know, make a video that covers each of those, each of those concepts, you know, in tandem and work your way to a 5 or 8 or 10 minute video. And I would start doing that. I just think you're, I think you're early, dude.

Okay.

So just basically just do more. Yeah.

And, and do better too. You know what I mean? Like, I think you just, you gotta learn a little bit more about the content game.

I would say like what right now are you spending all of your time making content for YouTube outside of work?

Just about. Yeah.

Yeah. And how long have you been doing it?

Every minute I keep spare I do. Yeah. No, you're good.

How long have you been doing it?

Well, I started the channel several years ago and kind of got very, very inconsistent. And then, uh, about 2 months ago I decided to really get after it.

Okay, well, okay, I think then we can both tell you this, which is like YouTube is a game of consistency. Like that's just, that's how the platform works. So I think the biggest thing that you can do right now is just be consistent. Because if you look at like how to go from just like okay or mediocre to just like good solid, it's consistency. And then if you wanna get to like great, it's like continued improvement while being consistent. So I guess the question is how many shorts and how many longs do you commit to making per week?

So I was, at one point I was doing one a day and I was, it was great, but I'm kind of back down to like 3 a week, 3 to 4 a week.

You mean for the shorts, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. I think, I mean, you do have to do more and you have to do it consistently. And I would just tell you that like right now you're not multi, like just for your own self, do not consider yourself having done this for years. You've been doing it for 8 weeks. Yeah. So you're super early, man. Yeah. You're super early. Okay. So I just like, I wouldn't even think about monetizing it right now. Like you just want to take 5 AM to 9 AM and 5 PM to 9 PM. You're 5 to 9, beginning of day, end of day. And I put all of that into making sure no matter what I got out, I get out one short a day. And then on my weekends, I'm going to make sure that I get at least one long out.

Okay. What's your goal? One more question. What's my goal?

Yeah. Do you want to quit your job? Do you want to build a company?

Yes. I believe if I can just replace my income from my job with this, then I could scale it up. And I guess my number would be about $10,000 a month. Okay.

Would be like ideal money. Mm-hmm. What stops you from making one video a day like you were? Like, what, what behavior?

Um, mostly just life gets in the way, or I get to talking and there's somebody, and then sun goes down and now I'm out of daylight.

So if you, if you want to ask yourself how to be consistent, the question is, how do you stop the things from occurring that make you inconsistent. Mm-hmm. So it's like, do you have the right people surrounding you? Do you have yourself in the right environment? Like, those are the things that I think you wanna be thinking about right now, because I know like for myself or for Alex, when we were first starting out and like making, just trying to get into business, I had to put myself in an environment where it made it easy to achieve my goals, not hard, which also meant surrounding myself with people and a routine that made it easy.

Okay, do you know how I define commitment? How? The elimination of alternatives. You have to get rid of your other options. And I don't mean like you need to quit your job. I mean everything else that is not you make. If this is what you want, and it's like you could only know that, but if this is really what you want, then it means that you have to say no to everything else in order to truly say yes to this. Because every time you say yes to something else, it's saying no to this thing that you want. And almost always the things that we want to say yes to now are short-term, long-term. We say yes in the moment because it gives us a short-term, short-term good thing, but it prevents us from the long-term, long-term great thing.

Okay, so I was also thinking, should I post on Instagram, Facebook as well?

I want you to be consistent with YouTube first, man. All right. Give me 12 weeks of consistency. You make 1 long and you make 7 shorts, 12 weeks in a row. You do that and you're like, you know what, I got more. The thing is, is right now you have to do that volume so you can become more efficient. Like you have to feel the pain of the inefficiency of being like, man, this is a lot of work. Because when you do that, all of a sudden you'll start getting faster. You start getting better and your work output and capacity will go up. and then you'll free up the bandwidth because you got more skills, you got more efficient that you can start looking at, you know what, I'm gonna repurpose this on Instagram or repurpose this on TikTok or whatever.

Okay.

It's also like, I'm just like really thinking about this. In order to build a business to replace your income, like you wanna build that confidence and confidence is an output, not an input. The input to confidence is becoming incredibly consistent with something so you get the experience, which makes you competent, and then it leads to confidence. And I think like in general, if you can't stick with a commitment that you make to yourself, then you, you degrade the trust you have with yourself every day. And so like anything you do, it's not going to come out as good as it could be. It's always going to be harder, it's going to take longer if you don't repair that trust with yourself. So I think like right now, if you're just consistent with the posting, like that is going to make you not just better at business and content, but just better person for yourself. A better, I would say like partner to yourself in doing this.

Mm-hmm. That, that's kind of funny because I was watching one of Alex's videos where he was talking about consistency and how it, how you get better by doing the thing over and over again. So I started doing that and I've already noticed that trend.

It's a, I think right now it's good to steer a little bit, like I get obsessive over doing things consistently. Alex knows this. Um, but I think you can steer a little bit in the obsessive, uh, direction right now. I think it'd be good for you. And then you can course correct that later.

And expect the fact, like, expect people who are normal and around you to not understand, expect them to think it's weird, expect it to not look cool. Like everyone goes through a cringe period. Like you're, it's going to be lonely because you're trying to do something that's very different. And I make that content where I say like, in order to be exceptional, you have to become the exception. You're going to probably be surrounded by the majority of people in your life who don't want this, aren't interested in it, think it's dumb, think it's stupid, think it's you trying to be famous, you thinking more of yourself than you really are, all of that stuff. And you just have to just put that on the shelf and get back to work. Because like, either they'll be right or you will, and you've got a long time to be right.

That's kind of what I was—

all right, thank you. Yeah, they'll be right for now and you'll be right for good.

Yes, sir.

So just keep, keep on, keep on, keep on, baby. Keep on.

Thank you very much. You guys are awesome.

You bet. I appreciate you, man. How do I go about hiring the right person? That is a very short question. That's a very long answer. Um, be the right person. Yeah. Well, there you go. There's a short, there's your short answer. Wow. Wow. Must be nice. Uh, I run an agency for churches. They have all cameras and equipment, but no editors. Basically a clear marker for for taking for backend media optimization, how should I market to ministries? Honestly, I think they're pretty easy to market to. I think I would start with outreach first. Get some— I get my first 10 testimonials so I can— and then ask them for referrals. And then once I have that, once your capacity gets taxed, you can ask them to start paying you because you can't keep doing it. And they're going to start getting hooked to the fact that they had good media. After they have good media, you'll convert some of them. Some of them you'll have to drop with the excess capacity. Then you can start doing outreach using the testimonials from the 10 people that you did it for free for. And in that process, you'll learn how to do the game.

I feel like in fitness content, it's not impossible to post daily, but I keep running out of ideas to keep up with 7 days a week. Here's my favorite way to make content. Look at all the content on fitness that you fucking hate and then ask yourself, why do I hate this so much? There's your piece of content. I do this all the time. People will send me like, you should make this piece of content. Like, dude, it's disgusting. and then I'm like, why am I so disgusted by this piece of content? And I'm like, it's so cringe. Why? And then that is a piece of content in itself. So like, look at what you see that why you're like, why is this so bad? And then that becomes the content that you can make. It's like the best hack I've had.

And I'll piggyback on what Lila said. When she's saying that, she's not saying dunk on people. She's not saying make reaction videos where you shit on other people. You probably like me, anybody who's followed our stuff, like Lila and I, we do not like, that's just, we don't operate that way. I think there's no— I think there's enough hate in the world. I don't think I want to add to that. So I just like, you know, tall poppy, right? You can drag everyone else down or you can lift yourself up. We are very much on the like, just make better shit. And if you keep making better stuff, you will be known. I don't think there's any point in shitting on others, but it is good for, for inspiration. Yeah. Thinking about it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cool. I have an event company and has only been established for 2 months. But our competitors have been here 15 years. How do I get clients to trust me since they're comparing us to our competitors? You're going to have to— okay, so I'll give you the classic, um, small dog frame. All right, so if you were to enter the gym space, you would have to compete against Jim Launch. And as a reminder, when I entered the gym space, I was the small dog, not the 800-pound gorilla. The small ones, the small, the teeniest of dogs, the itty bitty bit.

Everyone compared us to everybody else. It was like every call I got on, it was like, well, what about this person?

Yeah, every time. So you have to, you have to— comparison only works in the vague, not in the specific. Meaning they're comparing your company to their company. You need to reframe the comparison as comparing you to employee number 86 at that events company. So it's like, listen, they've been here, like you wanna lean into it. You wanna be like, listen, they've been here longer. They've got way more, you know, track record experience. I was like, but you're just gonna be a number to them. And if there's a problem, you're gonna go to account rep number 6 and you're like, and they're not really gonna care. And so it's not, is my company better than their company? The question you have to ask yourself is whether I'm better and more motivated to help you have an amazing event and experience as a new business owner who will do everything to succeed compared to their hourly or salaried employee who clocks in and clocks out and doesn't care. That's who you need to compare against. And if that's the bet, I'll win 10 times out of 10. That's the reframe when you're starting out. All right. Could you please explain how to decide between a monthly— oh shit, you know, monthly subscription and what was it?

I missed it.

And a one-time payment. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. Um, it's actually just a math thing. So it's gonna ladder up to something called EPCs, which is earnings per click. All right. And so you get your earnings per click by saying you have two lines on an Excel sheet. So this is pure math, 100 clicks to offer one, 100 clicks to offer two. And so if offer one gets 100 clicks and let's say you convert 2% of those clicks. All right. I'll just do the math in front of you.

We love when you do math. Yeah. All right.

Right. I'll be fast with it. All right. So we get 100 clicks on both of these. We've got A, which is our subscription, and we've got B, which is our lifetime. Okay. So let's say our conversion rate on this is 2% here. And let's say our conversion rate on our lifetime offer is 3% on the page, whatever. All right. Now our price for our subscription is going to be, let's say, $10 per month. And let's say that our lifetime offer is $50 one time. All right. That's it. Now, our churn. All right. Our churn here, let's say that our churn on this is 10%. Okay. That means our LTV is going to be $100. So if we have 2 clicks, 2%, 2 clicks, and we have 100 LTV, then we're gonna make $200 in total on 100 clicks, which means our EPC is $2. If we're going through this one, our churn doesn't matter cuz it's lifetime. Lifetime value is gonna be $50. And so we got 3 clicks, which means we got $150. So our EPC here is going to be 100 divided, uh, 150 divided by 100, which is, I don't know, 1.5, I think. So this would be our winner. All right, now the big caveat here is that it will take you 10 months to break even on that first offer versus getting 5 times the cash up front. So there's going to be a cash conversion cycle issue, um, that you're going to have to deal with. Now these numbers actually don't make sense because realistically you might have higher conversion at a $10 price point than $50. Then again, people don't like monthly recurring compared to a one-time payment. It could be, it could go either way. And so if you're like, how do I pick which one? You test both. You look at your earnings per click. The one that has earnings per click, um, that's higher is gonna be the one that will make you the more money over time. And as long as you have the cash flow to sustain that, that's the one you do. If you don't have the cash flow to sustain it, then you have to start retriggering the money model. Read the Green Book. That's what it was all about.

Boom. Snapshot that.

That's right. Uh, Chormosi hotline. Caller number 27.

Next caller, please.

Did they hung up? They were like, too hot. They were like, it's too hot, getting out of the kitchen.

Did you almost hang up? You almost hang up?

You almost ghost us like Patrick Swayze? Can you hear us? Hello? Yeah, what's up, man? Tell us about the business. What's going on? What's the— what is the problem that you want to solve today?

How's it going, guys? You still alive? You've been killing it.

All right, tell me, man. What's your name?

So, uh, so I run, uh, my name is Dan. I run a center for seniors and the disabled, a day program. Okay. And, um, most of our members, um, are basically insurance-based. Yep.

So Pick them up, you take care of them all day, you drop them off and you pay day rates, right? Correct. Yeah. Give them a meal. And the biggest issue that you have is that sometimes people don't want to come with you. Is that the problem?

Basically, biggest issue is growth. And in our area, we have a lot of kind of bad actors who are offering kickbacks and payments to join the service. Even though it's completely illegal. Yeah, we are a federally funded program.

Yeah, yeah, super familiar. So you're struggling with growth because you have illegal actors?

That's not the—

that's just an easy excuse to, to say, you know. Um, but kind of the, the difficulty is focusing on— we kind of have 3 primary people to sell to. It's the actual person that will join the program. Yeah. A caregiver, either a mom or kid. Yeah. Family needs this. Yeah. Or referral sources like doctors, social workers. So it's basically these three archetypes of people that we need to sell to.

Which one do you succeed the most with?

It's a good question. The referral sources always seemed, seemed great because they have access to a ton of people. Um, I do in-person lunches with them and do the whole song and dance, but to get a referral, it's very difficult, uh, because once again, people are also paying for referrals.

So, but that's an excuse which we said earlier, right? Correct. Okay, so let's just then just cast it out of your vocabulary for now. You're going to not do illegal things, right?

No, absolutely not. We've been in business for 20 years, so we're not playing.

We too have competitors that do illegal things.

So like, like, it's like, it's a, it's a, it's like, it's just something that's taking up room in your mind because you brought it up twice already.

Absolutely right.

Okay, so you're saying that you have these song and dance conversations and you're saying it's hard for you to convert from from them saying yes, you can come to our facility with a bus and pick up people and knock on doors?

The pickups are from their house. That's when they've already become a member.

Are you doing— are you doing multifamily though?

Uh, no, usually each location is a particular person. It's not like, uh, we're not picking up from like one place like hundreds of people. Each stop is one person.

Yeah. And you've owned the business for 20 years?

Yeah, well, I joined about 8 years ago as a partner. Okay.

So can you take more customers than you currently have?

Absolutely. We're— we could take about double, if not triple.

Okay, so you're demand constrained right now? Yes. Yeah. Okay. The main trade right now, so people don't know you exist, so we have to do more advertising in some way. So you said you have these 3 avatars. Do you know what one of these avatars is worth compared to the others?

Uh, in a number sense, no. But let's say if you advertise to one caregiver, that's one member, and potentially a doctor's office is like 200 potential members.

That sounds like pretty simple math to me. So what stops you from going to the physicians?

Nothing.

I go to them, but to get consistent referrals is— surprisingly, we get referrals from people that I've never spoken to. Like, we're in the local community, we're very well known. Yeah, but like, they know us, they know our name. Yeah, but in terms of actually getting, getting a signature and getting a person to join, right, uh, very— so I don't have, uh, confidence in that. You're good.

In the Leads book, which hopefully you've read, right? The chapter that I want you to learn like the back of your head is the affiliates chapter, because that's exactly what this is. So these physicians are your affiliates and you are going to need— like them just saying, yeah, sure, we'll refer people to you is not going to do anything, right? Which you've already experienced. Yeah. So I prefer a launch then integrate strategy. Which is great. Why don't we send an email to all those people? Or if you want, I can hang out at your office and after you meet with a patient, I'll meet with them after you.

Hmm. That's interesting.

Great.

That's what we call a fam-fam. Yeah.

So you want to launch, which is like if you can get them to one-to-many, tell their audience, you know, about you. And I say audience, it is obviously their patient base, but like That would be thing one. That's the easy thing. Integration is what you want to have with an affiliate, which is how can you work in their existing flow so they have minimal change in business, but it ends up promoting you. So that's what— let me send somebody to your office so that they can take this for you. Right. You could also say like you're worried about kickbacks. You can rent space if you wanted to and say, hey, I'll pay you $1,000 a month to put up a little, a little kiosk here. And that would be different than a kickback because it's not based on performance.

Interesting, interesting. I love it.

Wonderful.

You should, uh, you should go into business coaching.

I wonder if you could do this professionally.