How Andrej Makes $25,000 a Month With His Paid Ads Agency

What's going on, guys? Andre Hagel Jr. Here from client Ascension, here with another student spotlight interview featuring Andre. You got a great name by the way, bro. I have to say it for sure.

Thank you. Thank you. You too. You too.

Yeah, bro. Well, dude, thank you for being here. You've been in the program. We were just talking about it off camera for almost a year now and so longer than the average student and you're crushing it. Just coming off a record month. And so real quick, just for the audience, can you just let them know who you are and what you're currently working on? Like what does your agency sell?

Yeah, definitely. So I'm Andre, based in Germany and I run a growth agency for e commerce brands. So we basically help e commerce businesses scale, get more sales mostly by managing their paid ads. So Google Ads and meta ads, but we also help them with other parts of the business like increasing the website for conversion, the conversion rate on the website, and also helping them with increasing their average order value, their customer lifetime value, and just basically allowing them to scale as profitably as possible.

That's awesome, bro. Yeah. One thing I love to ask is like that's your offer today. That's great. But like a year ago when you joined Client Ascension, how has your offer changed? How is it different today? Maybe it's the same same, maybe it's better. Like what does it look like before and after?

Yeah, great question. So when I originally joined the program, I was still more of a freelancer and just doing a lot of different stuff for a lot of different businesses. So I still worked with like service based businesses, but mostly was already focusing on e commerce brands and working with those and just managing their paid ads. Then when I joined first I wanted to focus only on Google Ads. So my first offer was increasing the revenue by 50k per month using Google Ads for e commerce businesses. And I did that for I'd say three or four months and it worked very good and I got a couple of good clients. But then I wanted to expand my offer again because I just love other aspects of scaling businesses. So also doing like meta ads. And I noticed that with a lot of brands it's not enough if you just manage their ads. They also need help with their website and with their business overall. And you can have the best ads in the world if you send them to a landing page that is not optimized. They will not convert, they will not generate results. So I basically transitioned more into a growth partner approach or more like the holistic growth approach to really make sure that I can get the best results for the clients as possible and really get them to the goals that they want.

Yeah, yeah, I love that, bro. It's so important because, like, people will come into a program like Client Ascension, or maybe they're not in a program, they just have success early on with an offer and they think that offer is just going to stay the same and it never has to change, it never has to improve, it never has to pivot or evolve. But like, offers have a life cycle to them and they always have to just become increasingly more valuable, especially as the marketplace gets more and more competitive. Right. Like there's other people out there that do E commerce growth and E commerce services. And so how do you stand out and how do you do a better job than your competitors? You just make it more valuable. And I think being in a program like Client Ascension is helpful to see that because you also, funny enough, like, went through those same things, right? So like, your clients, they, they figure out how to do ads and then all of a sudden their website's not converting, so they need to focus on the website. So maybe for you, you figured out how to do Legion, but your offer is not converting or your VSL wasn't converting. So like going through the program of Client Ascension or some of those things you figured out early on that you struggled with or had roadblocks or bottlenecks with early on, like lead gen, sales, fulfillment, what was it for you?

Yeah, I'd say everything was a roadblock at like the specific stages of the business. So when I joined I had like a website, but I didn't have a VSL at all and never, never had a vsl. So that was also very difficult for me in the beginning. It took me a very long time. I think it took me two months to have like the first VSL ready just because I was like overthinking it and procrastinating and doing like other stuff because I just didn't know like how to do it and wasn't feeling comfortable with. That was the biggest roadblock in the beginning. Also with the landing page, I had like landing pages before, so that wasn't that big of an issue. It was more the VSL side and then just with cold emails, the same thing. I've tried cold emailing in the past, but on a completely different level. Just like in the beginning a couple years ago I was like manually cold emailing businesses in my area and like local businesses. That's how I got my first client. I think four, four Years ago then I tried like some automation, some automated cold emails, but also like without any personalization, I didn't have a clear structure when it comes to the copy, how to find the lead. So after I had my vsl, I basically focused on the cold email aspect, really joined like all the calls for that, asked the coaches for feedback and dialed in the cold email stuff. And then the next bottleneck was the sales side. So again like obviously watched all the content on the sales stuff, joined all the sales coaching calls, did like mock calls with other students and client ascension and still doing that. I mean I'm definitely like way better at sales than I was like 10 months ago. But I think it's a never ending journey and there's like you can always just become better. So I joined the sales calls like every week do sales, mock calls. Every week record all my calls, review those and yeah. And now basically the next step and next bottleneck is definitely operations and leadership. So now I'm starting to build out a team. I hired my girlfriend in January as the first full time position. Now I'm hiring a full time media buyer and other than that I was just working with like one or two freelancers and now really have to work on like leadership skills and managing the operations and completely new challenge.

Exactly, bro. That's the thing that people don't realize. So I talk about it on these interviews, but I'll have people come through the program and after six months they get the results. Then they're like, I'm good now. And it's like, well you figured out how to do the work, but now you need to figure out how to manage people to do the work. And there's just. In business I've learned because I've been in business for years now and I have multiple companies, the coaching program, the sas, the agency, and we've been successful with them. But like even today, sitting here today like I'm not done, I'm not even anywhere close. Like I still have so many problems in bottlenecks and roadblocks that I have to figure out and solve. And so like when someone comes in and after 6 months they hit like 10k a month or their first wildly important goal and they think that they have it all figured out now I'm just like, dude, like no, but, but it's just cool to hear your mindset on it. It's like there's always new challenges and always new things to to work on and solve. I think it's awesome you hired your girlfriend. I think it's awesome that you're now focused on like team management and becoming a better leader because that's what it is, right? You go from doing all the work yourself to now passing that off to someone else and having to manage them to do the work, hopefully as good as you could do the work. It's so different, bro. So let's go way back for a second to when you first joined the program. Like, how did you even hear about Client Ascension and what were you doing before? Like, did you have an agency? Were you guys generating some revenue? Did you have clients? And why did you make the decision to join?

Great question. Yeah, so I started my business or I started like freelancing, I'd say around four years ago. So everything started with an internship where I had to learn paid advertising for a business and yeah, learned everything like in a month or two. Then immediately started freelancing while I was still studying, still in college, and basically just reached out to local businesses in my area and asked them whether I can run their ads for free for two weeks and if they're happy with the results, then we continue working together. And that's how I got my first couple of clients. And then I've been just doing that and kind of freelancing on the side while still studying, finishing college and all of those things. And I always wanted to transition more into an agency, but I never really managed to get to that point. I was always at around 5k ish per month in revenue and never really able to do more than that. Then around two years ago I think I finished studying and started doing it full time and definitely wanted to have an agency. But yeah, didn't really know what to do, what the next step is to get more revenue and then be able to start build out the team and make it more of a business rather than just freelancing job. And I'm not even sure how I originally found Client Ascension. It was probably through one of the Twitter posts or something. Even though I was not a lot on Twitter, I was like a bit on it. And like the Client Ascension community is very big on there. So even if you spend a little bit of time on Twitter or money Twitter, then you find them. And then I somehow landed on the email list on Daniel's email list and just one of the newsletters or the emails resonated with me and I jumped on the call. Originally I didn't think I would join. I just wanted to get on the call to get some more information and figure out what the offer is about. But yeah, on the call everything made sense. And I saw that if I do everything that is in the program and get on all the calls, watch all the content, implement all of those steps, that it would be unreasonable for me not to get to 10k or 15k per month in a couple of months. Yeah. So it was basically no brainer for me to join.

That's awesome, bro. Yeah, I think like it's, it's similar to the story a lot of people have coming into the program is like they're really operating as a freelancer. They're doing work like agency services, but they're doing all the legion, all the sales, all the fulfillment. And it's like it's not the most fun time in the business as compared to like building a team. And the cool thing with building a team, bro, and you've probably felt this especially like with being able to provide an opportunity for your girlfriend. It's like you can provide opportunities to people like that are life changing. Like the team members that we have at Client Ascension, bro, they love their job. They show up to work every single day so excited. They get paid super well. They get different perks, like being able to attend our in person events. Like they. And they have meaningful work that they can show up and do every day. And it's like that is a result of something that we created. Like that's just the coolest feeling ever. And being able to share like the passion that you have for your business with other people on your team and then like again with your girlfriend, like that's got to be the coolest thing. Like what's that been like now? Having people on your team that like work with you and are as passionate about the work you do as you were this whole time.

Yeah. To be honest, it's still unbelievable for me. And it's still like recently I just like thought about it for, I think for the first time that basically just me deciding to play a little bit of business and to do like something online now really impacts a lot of people and a lot of other lives. So I mean for the clients obviously we were able to scale like a couple of brands to like seven and eight figures in revenue and get them a bunch of sales. And for them, even in the past they have already been able to expand their team and hire way more people, which definitely had a big impact. And now also in my agency. So my girlfriend started her first full time job early January after finishing college. She hated it from the first day she called me like after an hour or two that she hates it and that it's unbearable for her and she can't imagine like going to work every day there. And yeah, I basically immediately just told her like, why don't you work for me? Because I know that she can provide a lot of value in the business for me. She studied business law which is not that that related to what she's doing now, but she's managing everything in terms of operations, site reporting, cold emails and all of those things. Also with hiring and manages a lot of things in the business now. And she just tells me probably every week or even more often than that that she just loves her job now and she's able to work from anywhere at like have her own hours and just do what she loves and what she enjoys doing. And yeah, that's just great feeling.

I love that bro. So like what are some things you did? So obviously you joined Client Ascension and in the program we obviously have coaching on like lead gen to get the cold email campaigns going. We have a VSL coach that you talked about working on your VSL and getting that to a point where it was like really where it needed to be. And then obviously with like hiring like figuring out the systems you need in place to hire the right way and to manage people. Like so what is it like going through a coaching program like what do you do on a day to day basis in Client Ascension since you joined to like extract as much value and learning out of it.

So in the beginning I definitely watched through all of the Kajabi content first through all of the videos except for probably the last two just because they weren't relevant for me yet. So in the beginning I watched all of the other content and just started to implement as much as possible as quickly as possible. In the beginning I also joined pretty much every coaching call I could just to make sure to extract as much value as I can. But then after a couple of weeks I dialed back a little bit and made sure to join the calls that are most relevant for me at the stage where I'm at or where I have like specific questions, specific problems. But for the first I'd say three to six months, I was still joining like five to 10 coaching calls per week. So at least one, usually two per day just to make sure that I get the help that I need and have all the questions answered that I have and also insights from other students and from the coaches just to get as much help as possible. And now I dialed back even more. Currently I'm joining, I'd say about three to four coaching calls per week usually. And really looking at there are like two, three coaching calls which are not non negotiables for me where I jump on like every week. The sales sales call, then the seven figure agency coaching call with Connor and the mindset call with Mario. So those are the three non negotiables for me and I join pretty much every week those three calls and for the other calls I try to like when I have a problem or a specific issue I'm facing or I need help with a specific aspect of my business, then I try to join that call specifically and then ask that question.

Love that. Yeah, just like week by week. That's the cool thing about the schedule and how we have client ascension set up. It's like if you need help with cold email lead gen, there's a call for every week. If you need help with sales, there's a call for every week. If you need help with appointment setting, there's a call for every week. If you need help with response handling to your cold email replies, there's a call for. And there's also a channel in Slack that's always active every single day with expert coaches that do this stuff at the highest level. So it's cool to hear like how you as a student have like set a schedule if these are the non negotiables and all these other calls. Like when I'm feeling I need help like probably with hiring and onboarding. I've seen you on some of my calls in the past and it's like you get the help and the support you need in that moment to like overcome that next roadblock you're facing. So it's just really cool. And one of the other things I'm interested in and hearing more about is like what has it been like working with your student success coach? Right. Because like something that I am super like blessed and privileged to have are a bunch of business partners that like every day if I'm not doing what I need to be doing, they're you know, texting me and calling me and being like where is this? And I just feel like a lot of people are solopreneurs or they just don't have a business partner or founder yet. And it makes it really hard to like be self accountable to like make sure you're doing things when someone's not right behind your back checking to make sure that you're doing those things. So like what is it like working with Andy who's just like constantly checking in with you every single week? To make sure you're staying on track. How does that help?

A ton. Yeah. I love Andy and he's great, and he definitely contributed a lot to the success because I had courses before and coaching programs and all of those things. And obviously there is unlimited information online on YouTube and all of those things. But the problem is really a lot with the implementation and having the accountability to make sure that you implement all of the things that you learn and stick to the things that you said you were doing. And she's really great with that. I mean, with the business health audit calls, every month we outline, like, the specific goals for the month, what kind of tasks we need to get done for that, and then basically next month we review what did I manage to get done, what I didn't get done. Also all the agency metrics. So, like how many, for example, cold emails I've sent, DMs I've sent, content created and in how many sales calls that resulted, how many clients I've closed in the month. And using all of that data and making sure that we can just make sure that I'm accountable and that I implement the tasks. And he also just checks in with me, I'd say every two days probably at least he sends me an email, a message on Slack, where he asks me how I'm doing, how the tasks are looking, what the TO dos for the week are, or what I am currently struggling with all of those things. Recently, like last week, I had some personal issues going on and he immediately reached out and offered to get on a call to just talk things through and.