How I Scaled Multiple Companies to Seven Figures (Everything You Need to Know)

The most common question I've gotten so far today is if I'm going to be running for president. And so I thought that was a fitting entrance song. I don't know what it is, maybe the lapel pin or just the outfit. But yeah, I'm not running for president, America. Not yet. Looking at my girlfriend, she's not happy. But anyways, thank you guys so much for already making this day in this weekend so fulfilling for me. And just to see your guys's reactions to some of the presentations so far is really why I do what I do. And so I got a presentation planned for you guys. Where I actually want to start is by going around the room and hearing from a few of you guys who are here at last year's event. So the rest of you guys who are here for the first time or who were here last time and didn't get the results you might have wanted to have by the time you're here today can just see that it is real. And so if someone can run a mic. Do we have a mic guy? Someone running a mic? Elias. Perfect. Thank you so much. If we could swing that mic over to Max to start. Max, if you could just share a little bit more about your story and where you were at at last year's event and where you're at now. Appreciate you.

Thank you.

Lies.

Hello. Hello. Okay.

My bad. That was all me. What's up? I'm Max. I run an E comm, email and SMS marketing agency. So for e comm clients. So last year at this event, so I came into Client Ascension of April of 2023. Is that what that would have been? Came in at like 5k a month or so. Just like freelancing. Was in CA for a while and then I'm still in college. So I was a junior last year and I studied abroad in Prague and so I went to Prague. I was in Prague in like September and the event that's like when I went, went off. And so I was traveling and I came back to the event here in October while still being in Prague, living the college life and whatnot. And so I came in, I had gotten like through CA. I got up to like 30k. 30k was my first 30k month was last October at this event last year. And that was super dope. That was when I was like starting to build out the team. I was still just like super involved on like client fulfillment and you know, some of the stuff that like Taylor went through and then like Andre and then like talking with a lot of the guys, like at the VIP event, it really helped me build the system and the strategy for how I was going to scale and how I was going to bring somebody to take on like a lot of my ops and management, which is now this guy next to me. And so. And that just like kind of built everything. And since that point. So we had the event last year, I did like 30k, stayed, stayed in college, finished out like junior year. And so every single month after that month was. I have not had a down month in terms of like every single month since then. And it's just been building the team and continuing to rip content. Like all the principles from last year's event, which was super cool. And then, yeah, so my biggest, the biggest, the bottleneck has completely stopped from like being generating leads and whatnot. It's just completely on like team and operation. So I'm excited for like this presentation specifically. But yeah, E comm, email and SMS. And then so it was at 30k at the last. At the last event and like now like after like a year later, we're at like 150k.

Wow. Give it up for Max.

Wow.

Who's next?

What? Who's next?

Oh, Zach.

What up, bro?

Let's pass it to Zach.

All right.

All right. What's up, guys? I also run an E comm, email and SMS agency. Been in client ascension for right around a year. This time last year I was not in CA and through a lot of trials and tribulations over the past year, literally like 10x where I was last year, all because of CA. So it's been awesome. It's been a great experience learning like from people like Max that are crushing it as well as Andre, Operations, the rest of the team. So yeah, overall just kind of started out really not knowing what I was doing with the business and now I just feel every single aspect, finances, operations, marketing, sales, way more dialed in. So overall it's been a great experience.

That's awesome. And I always got to remind these guys because I heard you say again and you always tell me this, it's all because of ca, but that's just so not true, dude. It's because of the work that you put in and so give it up for Zach. Great results, brother. Let's swing it over to Stephen right there.

Yo, I'm Stephen. This is my business partner Omar. We run an organic content agency and last year, similar situation to Zach, we both run free tickets and that kind of started the whole thing. So went to the event, had a great time, met A lot of great people. And after the event, I decided to join, pull the trigger just because of the community. Everyone else was so helpful. We joined CA around 2k a month. It's been less than a year, but since then we've 20x'd our business. So that's really great. And I think a big key to that is because we're really open to learning. We're not stubborn. There's no guessing game. We like to learn from people ahead of us, you know, and because of that, we've scaled, you know, we stacked our skills in terms of sales, marketing, content offers, operations, so on, so forth. And yeah, we're just going to continue scaling and then, you know, hit that 100k a month. By this time next year, you'll see me again.

Great work, bro. Great work. Stephen. Let's swing it to Dylan and Alex. Where are these guys? Dylan and Alex? Not in the. Oh, right here. Alex, what's up, brother?

Thank you, thank you. I'm Alex. Where's my co founder? Where's Dylan?

He's fired.

Oh, he's actually on a sales call.

Oh, never mind.

Somebody, he texted an opt in and they called him back and he left to go make that call. So hopefully we'll make some more Money in about 10 minutes. So we are the owners of stacks. We are fractional CFOs. We do accounting for a lot of digitally based businesses. Our scope is pretty wide. We can facilitate many different types of businesses. There's my guy. Progress. So Dylan and I actually met for the first time at the event last year and we were getting to know each other on Slack before the event. He would send out questions to me, I'd send out questions to him, he would refer work to me and we kind of realized we were in a very similar space. And there's definitely a lot of nuance to accounting and finance and to where both of us realized, hey, why don't we just team up and put 100% into the same thing together? And we've, you know, we've 3x since that. This is actually we haven't met in person since last year's event, which is kind of funny, but we talk more than we do to our girlfriends, so.

And his now wife.

His now wife, yes. Congratulations to him.

I don't know if that's a congratulations for not talking to his wife.

I think that one of the biggest unlocks for us was actually around our operations because there was a lot of moving pieces. We placed, I think more of a focus on removing ourselves from fulfillment versus just trying to scale to the moon, revenue wise, right off the bat, we're now a team of nine. And that's been an incredibly amazing process pouring into our employees. And we're looking at this company as a 5 year, 10 year longer term horizon to where we are consciously willing to sacrifice more money now. And quite frankly, we paid our lead cpa, who's our cfo. We were paying him more than we were paying ourselves for quite a while. And that was our conscious decision because I know that there's going to be some escape velocity to that very quickly where if we have the right teams in place, we have enough of a roadmap to facilitate 30 more clients, the money will come. So for us, I think that was a big unlock, was really getting the team right, getting the operations right and just like trying to pour more into our clients and just improving our results. So it's been an amazing process and I think now I've been here for.

Almost two and a half years, something like that.

So, yeah, amazing event.

Hey, thank you for being here. And so that's all for now. I'm sure if you go around the room later after the presentations and on the boat, you'll hear more and more success stories. And that's what I encourage you guys to do is just go learn everyone's story. Because the more you hear results like what Alex and Steven and Max and Zach shared, the more it builds the belief that this can be possible for you too. And that's where it all starts. But it wouldn't be right to start this presentation that's all about team building without shouting out, my team, the Client Ascension team, can you guys please stand up if you're on the Client Ascension team? And let's give these guys a round of applause. These are the guys that make it all possible. These guys are what make this event possible and what make this community possible. And so I have the rest of my life to pour into these guys and to thank these guys for the work that they do for the company and for you guys in the community. And so thank you guys so, so, so much. And so my presentation today is just on how we run multiple seven figure businesses simultaneously without burning out. And I also thought of an alternative title to this presentation which is, Whoops, too fast there. How to step into the role of a CEO who actually runs shit. And I promised my mom I'd only swear that one time during this presentation. And so it ends there. But I just had to do it to drive the point home. And so before we jump into the presentation, I see this all the time when people are sharing slides that people like to, like, take pictures of every slide. I don't know if you ever actually go back and look at those slides, but. But that's between you and yourself. But anyways, I want to give you the slides before we get into the presentation. And so just scan that QR code for me and let me know if it's coming up for you. Is it working? Is it working? Where is it sending you? Okay. So anyways, that's actually my girlfriend's e commerce brand. And so I had to do a quick plug. And I also promised her that all of you email marketing, e commerce agencies will not go up in picture at any point during this event. So please don't. But here's the actual QR code for the slides. I promise this time I told her, you guys, I'll make a lot of money. So she is expecting purchases reached its limit.

All right.

You'll get the slides at some point. It's not the point I was just trying to make. We'll put up another QR code after. Thank you. Lucas has got it handled. Thank you, guys. But anyways, the title of the presentation, running two seven figure businesses simultaneously. It's really so simple, which is what Daniel always likes to say. It's really so, so, so simple. And I'm gonna break it down in three steps. So it's a zen, it's a coffee, and it's an auromet, and it's really just a lot of stimulants. But anyways, again, I'm all about comedic relief because I don't really do this whole public speaking thing. And so if I can get you guys laughing early on, I can actually dive into the value now. So are you guys ready for some value?

All right, let's dive in.

That was wild. But anyways, why should you listen to me? So I actually have a bunch of slides on, like, here's our revenue, here's our growth. But none of this matters. And what you guys helped me to realize, especially Jeremy and Mario, is that the true success and meaning behind everything that I do is not about the numbers or not about the growth, but what's actually here in this room today. Like just your guys presence, just your guys community, your guys willingness to fly out and be here for an event like this. That's why you should listen to me because I had something to do with that. We also have businesses that at the same time are very successful. That graph shows How Liskit is in the top 10% of SaaS companies compared to even companies that are VC backed. And so I had the revenue numbers prepared, but honestly, I'm just gonna fly right through them because just like you guys, I'm also here to learn. And so I'm applying my learnings in real time. And you guys can see how that works. But I want to propose a question for you guys, and that's not coming up on the slides, but it's on my slide. Okay, so question, how is it that we, my team at Client Ascension and Liskit, have enough time to keep 2000 active paying SaaS users, 300 active high ticket coaching students, and 150 new agency clients happy every single month, while there are business owners in this room who struggle to keep just three clients happy? A lot of stimulants. Exactly. Someone's already got it and can go home. You got the lesson. That's all you're gonna learn today. But how is it, how is it that that's possible? That's exactly what I'm gonna break down for you today in this presentation. But the question I want you guys to ask yourself is, why not me? Because when you see those numbers and when you see those results, the first thoughts that at least came into my mind when I started to see other people that were successful and were crushing it online is like, oh, that's not real. That's a scam. He's lying. That's not true. That's not possible. But if you could simply change your mindset around it and just ask yourself, why not me? You'll watch your life change and you'll watch the results in your business change with it. And so if I can do what I did in terms of having a couple of clients and a couple of SaaS users, it might sound impressive to a room like this where you guys are earlier on into your entrepreneurial journey. But how about someone like Elon Musk, in one week's time, this guy landed a rocket back into place, revealed autonomous taxis without a pedal and without a steering wheel, revealed a robot that can do your dishes and practically everything else that your wife does, for the most part. While also.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. While also.

Stay with me here. While also going to Trump rallies and playing video games and tweeting out memes all day long. How is it that someone like Elon Musk can do that? Stimulants. Exactly. Exactly. Zyn, coffee. Neuromints. And Christian, you have some neuromints. Maybe just give these Guys, a little feeling of what that's like right there, or how is it that someone like Mr. Jeremy Newsom. Let's give it up for Jeremy one more time because, man, what a presentation, dude. The first time I heard Jeremy talk, it's exactly what you guys experienced here this morning. And it was just earth shattering. And so it's again, really my success comes from being able to share that with the rest of you guys. And so thank you, Jeremy, for being you. But how is it that someone like Jeremy can speak on the biggest stages, be as wealthy as they come, have the most beautiful wife and family, while also doing all these things? He's a best selling author. And some of these things just don't even make sense. He ran 12 miles every 12 hours for 12 days. He did a marathon every day for three days straight in Tahoe. You did what? Everest five times. You were telling us one of the only nine people in the world who climbed Everest five times. Like Psycho, right? But, man, how is it that these guys do so much with the same amount of time and resources that all of us have as well? And so again, that's what we're gonna get into. Are you guys ready to get into that?

Okay, let's do it then.

All right, so.

All right.

Who's doing the ehaw?

All right.

Is it my mom? No.

Okay.

I didn't think so. Okay, so let's dive into the success formula I've decoded for my success and learning from these legends. And so the first step, this is just gonna be super practical. We're gonna get straight into it. So number one, set your objectives. The framework that we teach in Client Ascension. If you guys are not in the program, this might be super useful to you. But it's really simple. You set a wildly important goal. And this goes back to the question that both Mario and Jeremy asked you guys earlier on is like, why do you do what you do if you can't answer that question, you're directionless. And so you're just not going to achieve the results that you truly do want. And what you see others have, you. You're just doing it because someone else is doing it. So what is your wildly important goal? And then your lag measures and your lead measures, which are the outputs and the inputs. And so it's a really simple success formula that I learned a while ago, and I'll show you proof of that and what that actually looks like that just helps you to decode exactly what Mario and Jeremy taught you into practical business templates, which I know you all love and are here for. And so that's the bha. That's the business health audit template that we use in Client Ascension. But the most important thing, even for the guys that have been using this for years, is to stop and ask yourself, is your wig your wildly important goal, actually wildly important? And then ask yourself, why? Because so many of you set a wildly important goal that that's only important to you because you see other people that have it, and that's your reason, and that's not wildly important enough. And that's why you're not achieving your wildly important goal. It's really that simple. And so stop and ask yourself, what is your wildly important goal? And check yourself, is it actually wildly important? This is one of the most important steps in all of business.

And.

And so many people skip this because they want to get right into doing the actual work, but then you're directionless. And so, again, ask yourself, is your goal actually wildly important?

Like, stop and think, is it? Is it? Nope. Okay, we all got work to do then.

So, anyways, this was back in 2021, an email that I got after meeting with my business coach at the time, Brandon, and he had taught me this business formula back in 2021. At the time, I was at $9,000 a month with my agency, and I had a wildly important goal to increase that to $30,000 a month. The reason that was wildly important to me is because if I didn't figure out this whole business thing, my mom would have made me get a job. And to me, that was the scariest thing. And so it was actually wildly important for me to hit $30,000, or at least so I thought it was. And so I did. And that's exactly what happened. I hit that goal, along with my business partners at the time, Dan and Christian, shout out to these guys, love you guys. And we hit that goal. And as Mario and Jeremy had already told you guys, we moved the goalpost and we set it further. But this stuff works. And it's also a perspective shift for a lot of you guys, because back in 2021, the businesses were at $9,000 a month, MRR. And we're standing here today being at $800,000 a month, MRR, in just a few short years. And again, it's not about the numbers, but it's about the belief around what's possible. And just for you guys to see what's possible, not just by me, but by all the rest of the guys that you heard sharing before this presentation I think that helps more than anything else to start to build the belief. So you will. This isn't like you can or you might. It's like you will achieve similar growth just by staying consistent over a long period of time. That's it. It's really that simple. I've stayed consistent. Dan has stayed consistent, Christian stayed consistent. Working every single day on the business, working on ourselves at the same time, working with Mario, going to Jeremy Newsom events, hosting our own events, coaching Incline Ascension. We've been doing this every single day for the last four or five years and that's why we're here today. And I believe, again, if you do something long enough, for a long enough period of time, you'll be successful. The other method that we use in all of our businesses that I absolutely love is the CEO Dashboard. So I told you guys, we're going to go more into the weeds, more into the practical for a second here. And so the CEO Dashboard is a concept by Ryan Deiss, and it essentially breaks the business down into the three departments. What drives a business. There's marketing, sales and fulfillment. That's really the simplicity of business at the end of the day. And so the basics before we get into the CEO dashboard, and I have a template for this too, so if you want the template, just let me know. But the basics are to one, set weekly meetings on Fridays to update your CEO Dashboard and hold yourself accountable to schedule monthly meetings to review last month's progress and set new objectives in each department. And then you're gonna wanna track three to four metrics in each department. So this is kind of an exercise for you guys over the next couple of slides, pick out metrics that you wanna track or that you're already tracking in both in marketing and sales and fulfillment. And so things that you should be tracking in marketing are cold email metrics. How many emails did you send? How many replies did those emails generate? How many positive replies did those emails generate? How many calls were booked? Same for manual outreach. Dream 100 DM sent replies, positive replies, calls, content creation, how many videos did you post, what you actually do? Because if we go back to the success formula, it's inputs equal outputs. It's not outputs first. And then you do the work. It's you have to do the inputs. And so these are the inputs. And this is how you keep yourself accountable to doing the inputs, sending emails, sending DMs, doing Dream 100 outreach, posting YouTube videos, spending on ads. And then it brings us to the North Star, which of course, for Marketing for at least most of the types of businesses that you guys are running in this room is how many calls did you book?

Right.

And so that's it for marketing for sales. There's a couple here. My favorite is the first one, which is not a result most of you guys track or even know about, which is sales call reviews. How many of you guys are consistently reviewing your sales calls or your team sales calls? Maybe a tenth of the room. And the guys that raise their hands, I mean, Dan's doing pretty well with sales, Max is doing pretty well with sales, as we've heard. And so there's something to be said about doing sales call reviews.

Right? Right.

It's not just straight to how many deals did you close or what's your close rate? Like, there's things that go into this. And so then you have outbound sales activities, you have follow up activities, you have show rate, you have offer rate, close rate, upfront cash collected. And again, the North Star is how many deals did you close and how much cash did you collect? And so these are the metrics you want to be tracking in the sales department and then in fulfillment to tie it all together, or as I call it, customer success. How many case studies, online reviews and testimonials did you generate that's going to represent the work that you're doing for your clients? How many referrals did you generate, how many upsells did you generate? What are your fulfillment deliverables, coaching calls, onboarding calls and NPS loom video audits, weekly campaign updates, etc. These should all be tracked to keep yourself and soon you're going to hear about it, your team accountable. So there's a reason why we're breaking down department by department, all the things that not only should you be doing, but you should also be tracking on a weekly basis. And the North Star when it comes to customer success is really just the churn rate, the monthly churn rate. And as you guys heard Daniel talk about in his presentation, you can do ads, marketing, sales, all that completely. Right. And better than anyone else, just as good as Daniel does it. But if the churn is too high, you're capped. It doesn't work. It only gets you so far. And so all three departments have to be working together at the highest level. And to ask any one human being to do that is an impossible ask. To ask Elon Musk to land a rocket back in place, or to build an autonomous taxi, or to build a robot, or any of the things that you've seen Client ascension and liskit do is impossible for just one person. And so that's where we get into building a team. And what does that look like?

So, okay, we're good.

By setting clear objectives in each department, you just outlined exactly what you need to hire people to help you to do. This is the biggest blocker I've found with entrepreneurs that come to my coaching calls. Specifically, it's like, who do I hire? And it's like, well, what do you need to hire for? I don't know. Okay, well, now you know. Are you doing all these things right? Customer success, sales, marketing. These are all things you should be doing in your business to achieve your wildly important goal. And so now you know who you need to hire for. Is this making sense so far?

Okay, cool.

And so that's the first step. You have to know where you're going and what's important to track within the business to get there. The second step is you have to hire people to actually execute on that for you. You have to hire not just people, but as I call them, a players. You have to hire people that are as good as you, or as Taylor likes to say, something I learned from Taylor Welch, who's back there, who you're going to hear from pretty soon is hire people that are smarter than you and are better than you. And it's like the limiting beliefs start flying around. Why would someone like that want to work for me? Who am I to hire someone like this? I don't have enough money. They're expensive. Someone said this in the breakout session yesterday. It's like, oh, man, it's, I want to hire someone. I know I need to, but it's expensive. I'm like, it's expensive. It's expensive not to hire someone. If you don't hire, you're going nowhere. You're stuck. And I know we talked about is stuck a real place? Maybe, maybe not. But you are stuck if you don't hire someone soon, clearly.

Right?

And so it's expensive not to hire. It's not expensive to hire. And so you have to break these limiting beliefs and actually be able to get there. So just a real quick look at our org chart for client ascension. Taylor's probably gonna tell me I gotta go and fire a bunch of people after seeing this, which is probably true. And I'll just wait till after the weekend. Let me just enjoy my weekend and then we'll get into some of that. And some of these guys are in this room, man. So let's, let's just Take it easy. But that's the org chart for Client Ascension. Andy, you're fine. Trust me. It's going to be okay. Is he good? Yeah, you're good, bro. Don't worry. So that's your chart for Client Ascension. That's the org chart for list kit. We did this presentation back in April, and we don't even know what the dev team looks like. So I just put like, a big Death Star kind of deal because that's just kind of like the vibes I get with the developer team is like they're just doing some really discreet operations somewhere in space, and I don't know how it works and I don't need to.

Cool.

And so that's what both org charts look like. Just to give you an idea of, like, wow. Like, Andre and Daniel and Christian and Dan, like, they're doing all these amazing things. They're putting on these events. They're crushing it with revenue. And it makes you start to think, like, why am I not able to do that? And it's because we aren't even doing it in the first place. It's the team behind it. And so there are so many people on both the Client Ascension team and on the Liskit team that are making these results possible. And I think that's so important for you guys to actually see in the Visualize the amount of people involved in making what you see possible. Oh, the flag is Lebanon. Yeah. I like to point out our Lebanese team members because we hire a lot of our team from Lebanon, which is also the flag here. And my dad is from Lebanon. So shout out to my dad back there, so. And pray for Lebanon. Yeah, this is sad. What's going on there. And shout out to Cynthia, our community manager, who's in Lebanon. That would actually be awesome. Can we get a quick video shouting out Cynthia and we can send it to her on slack? Relax, Nick. She's okay. All right, we're good. All right. What's up, Cynthia? We're at the Client Ascension event. We're sad you can't make it here, and we just want to give you a shout out and say how much we love you and appreciate all you do for the community. And so here's the community. Awesome. We love you. We're praying for you, and we're praying for all of Lebanon and we wish you were here.

Awesome.

Thank you, Andy. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thank you, guys.

That was totally unplanned. That's pretty cool.

That's what happens when you go off script. I got it. Now but anyways, just to give you a quick checklist on again, going back into the practical. So how do you hire a team? Well, it starts with the team itself. So what does every team need? And if you come from the background of playing sports or watching sports, some of these things might be obvious to you. But let's break it down into a business. And so every single team needs a team leader. Every single team needs at least two to three key monthly objectives tracked in what we just talked about, the CEO dashboard. Every team, I believe needs a project management board or CRM if they're a sales team. Every team, I believe needs a dedicated team channel in Slack to talk. Every team, I believe needs a weekly team meeting hosted by the team leader. And every team, I believe needs monthly team training sessions focused on key monthly objectives they might be falling behind on. Is this making sense? And so if you have a team, you can just go down the list and check off the boxes, do I have a team leader? Do I have objectives for that team? Do I have a project management board? Do I have a dedicated Slack channel? Do I have weekly team meetings that the team leader is hosting? And do we do team training sessions? The team training sessions have been the most valuable thing I've implemented. And shout out again to Taylor Welch for this because we signed up for his Mastermind Chamber, which I highly recommend. And we used to do team calls with the SSCs, Andy over here, who manages a team of SSCs. And we would watch Taylor Wells training sessions talking about how to improve client success, how to improve or decrease your churn rate. And that's probably against the terms of service of your program by sharing this stuff on Zoom Calls. But um, anyways, figured I'd at least mention it. So team training sessions are so important. Um, your team is not a team of robots. They're humans at the end of the day. And so if you have the expectation that they're going to automatically hit every key monthly objective you set, you're delusional. Or at least I believe so you have to be a team leader or you need your team leader to be able to step in and train them on where they're falling short. And that's exactly what we do with all of the teams at Client Ascension Liskit, which helps us to stay on track most of the time. And so that's what every team needs. And to break it down even further, this is what I believe every team member needs. They need one, an assigned team. They need a scorecard that clearly defines their responsibilities and KPIs, they need performance based incentives. A lot of you guys are just throwing base pays at people and wondering why they're not performing or hitting the KPIs that you set for them. They need an end of day and an end of week type form, especially if you're remote. This is so important. An end of day and an end of week type form to ensure you never have to micromanage. And they need weekly one on one meetings with their team leader. Is this all making sense? Super simple to implement, but who's doing all of these things again, look at the room. Who's raising their hand? Where are those guys with their business? It's all starting to make sense. And so that's the checklist for team and team members. And I want to expand a little bit more on.

Let'S see. Nope. 1, 2, 4.

More on performance based incentives. And so performance based incentives are my favorite way to pay team members and for most of my team members also the way that they want to be paid. Especially if you're hiring more entrepreneurial typed team members, which I believe are some of the best hires you can make. A lot of people are scared to hire entrepreneurial team members because they think, oh no, they might go and start their own business. But that's a great thing. Rewire the way you think about that. That's a great thing. You're part of that journey for them. And so you want to align with, you want to align the performance based pay with the KPIs in your CEO dashboard. And so for sales roles, this is easy. This is the way all of you guys do this. For the most part, it's 100% performance based. It's you close a deal, you get a commission. You don't close a deal, you don't get a commission. And it's really simple. And that's an agreement between you and your sales team and nobody's offended and no one's surprised. And so what is your sales team naturally incentivized to do? Close deals, collect cash, increase their close rate, go to more sales call reviews. And so you don't have to sit there and micromanage and babysit your team members. Because they are naturally incentivized to do exactly what you hired them to do. If you were to just pay a salesperson a base payment, chances are they're not going to hit KPI and it's really just because they don't care to. They're getting their base and they're happy. And so this works with Every other role within your company, not just salespeople. We do this with our onboarding specialists and our entire customer success team. And I truly believe it's the best thing we do. And it's why we run a team that is consistently performing. And when they're not performing, it's okay because the business is not suffering. The business is only paying for as much value as every team member in the company is bringing and delivering at any given time. This making sense.

Cool.

Is anyone doing performance based pay for people outside of sales roles?

A couple of you guys. Smart, smart dude. Smart dude.

And so an example of this is Louis. Where's Lewis? Shout out to Louis. Lewis is the. Is the man. Lewis and I have been working together for probably three years now. I originally hired. Lewis is like a leads list builder. Everyone's like, you could hire one of these guys from Pakistan. And I'm like, well, I have a bigger vision for Lewis, which we're now fulfilling with the list kit setup offer, which is really cool to see. But Louis is not paid a base salary, which he might not be too big of a fan of. Right, Louis, you probably prefer a base salary, but then you probably wouldn't have been with us as long as you have. Right. Makes sense. And so Louis is the head of Customer Success Atlas Kit.

And.

And one of the metrics we track in that customer success department in our CEO dashboard is churn rate, referrals, case studies, upsells. And so if we do all of these things and we do more of these things, Louis gets paid more. And so what do you think Luis is going to do? Do more of those things or align all the time he spends when he's working on this kit to accomplish those things. It's really simple. It's common sense. It's so simple. It's just stimulants at the end of the day. Stimulants. That's all it is. That's all it is. And another thing I like to do with the teams as well is to implement monthly team competitions to hit the most important KPI in the CEO dashboard or to help force the issue on a KPI you're falling behind on. And so for example, on the list kit customer success team say we're falling behind on upsells. And side note, for like customer success and how important some of these metrics are, Daniel brought up the. The idea of if you have a high turn rate, you can only grow so far. But one thing that wasn't factored in is upsells. If you Upsell the same percentage of your customer base as you churn, you actually just keep growing. There's no limit to that. And so if you set the KPI for your upsell rate to be as high as your churn rate, you can grow as far as you want. It's just math, right?

It's so simple.

It's just stimulants, right? And so that's kind of the point I'm trying to drive home right now is figure out the KPIs in the CEO dashboard and let those fall into each of the categories that you see here when it comes to hiring a team and managing a team and team members as well. And so I have some rapid fire bonuses as well because just from this weekend alone, since yesterday and this morning, I've gotten so many questions about hiring that I wanted to at least cover in this presentation so I don't have to go back home and make a bunch of individualized loom videos for you guys in client ascension. And so I'm just going to spit off some rapid fire bonuses.

And I have a slide here as well. Pew, pew, pew.

And so here's how to onboard new employees. So here's the first one I'll hit you with. So if you're onboarding a new employee, I just start with daily one on one calls and then I'd brain dump a ton of basic trainings and company info. Because just like a salesperson, it's not just a sales skill set that's required, it's also knowledge and an understanding and confidence behind the actual offer that they're selling. So that's super important. And then introduce them to every other team member in the same role and coordinate one on one intro calls. This is the biggest hack I've found. If you're strapped for time, you already have a pretty sizable team that's super demanding is when you hire a new team member, put them on another call with another team member. Trust your team. As some of these speakers before me were saying, trust your team more. This is so important. If you don't trust your team, you're never going to escape playing the solopreneur game and hitting ceilings in your business. And so additionally, if I were to hire, I'll give you an example. Is anyone hiring a CSM or CS role anytime soon or planning on it or feels the need to. Okay, perfect. This is exactly how I do it. Ready? So once you find the person, which I can help with that as well, I'd give them access to all my training and if you don't have training, it's okay because I'm pretty sure most of you are in Client Ascension. Give them the training I gave you.

Simple.

Then I'd intro them to all the other CSMs and have them share their trainings. And again, if you don't have any other CSMs on your team, ask someone next to you, do they have a csm? Would they care to connect your CSM with their CSM so that they can share learnings? All right, talk to people. That's the second step. The third step is I'd have them shadow CSM calls. If you're the one doing the CSM calls, invite them to the call with you. And don't do anything different other than have them on the call there with you. Ever go to, like, the doctor? This is actually scary when they do it at the doctor, but they're like, oh, this person's just shadowing me for the day. Everything's going to be okay. And you're kind of just like, wait a second, like, this is a bigger deal than getting onboarded to a $79 Liz Kit plan. I hope everything goes okay. But it's the same concept. It applies to this as well. And so shadow them on the CSM calls. Do reviews of CSM call recordings. So if you're not recording your CSM calls the same way you're recording your sales calls, you're missing out. And you're eventually going to need to do this anyways. And then have them start taking their own calls with an experienced CSM or yourself, shadowing them and taking feedback notes and giving those to the person and discussing them in a call after. And then let them host their own calls eventually. And just do call reviews the same way you do with a salesperson. This makes sense. Is this clear enough? Easy to follow.

Cool.

Here's a fun one. How to never have to micromanage. Cormozi talks about this all the time. People need to be reminded more than they need to be taught. And this doesn't just come down to knowledge and training on how to run the company, but it also comes down to what are the goals of the company in the first place? How many of your guys as team members can spit back to you their objectives, not just for their department, but for the overall business? How many of your guys, team members, can do that? If I call them up right now.

None of them.

And so how do you feel when you don't have a direction into where you're going or why you're doing what you're doing, is that a good place to operate out of? As we learned again from Jeremy and from Mario, no. And so why treat your team members any differently? And to make it really easy rather than having to wake up every single day and send a slack message reminder, here's why we're doing what we're doing. Put it into their end of day type forms. At the very beginning, before they get into telling me about how their day was, I remind them, here's the objectives for 2024, or for this month or for this quarter and I list them. This is for the CS team customer success. Fulfill setup clients within 21 days. Produce one testimonial for every three setup clients, have a less than 1% refund rate, have a less than 10% churn rate, and generate referrals and upsells from at least 10% of active clients. Click. I understand the mission. What do you think this does every single day? When your team members, before they get into filling out an end of day type form, go through the process of reading back the objectives and click a button. As simple as I understand the mission. How are they going to show up tomorrow when they go into work? Are they going to be clueless and lost on what they should focus on or work on? Or are they going to be abundantly clear on what the objectives are and where they should focus their time for the day? To me, again, this is common sense and so it's very exciting to be able to share it with some of you guys and see your faces like, whoa, that's so simple. Why did I not think about it? Another one. Again, this is a lesson from Taylor Welch and so it's really cool to have Taylor here, but he told me this and it really hit home and stop wasting time on unproductive meetings. So many of you guys are doing that feel productive and I get it, but like are your meetings actually productive? And I'm not one of the guys that says, you know, totally remove meetings from your calendar, but how can you make them more productive? So if we know that most meetings are a total waste of time and go for too long, how can we prevent that from happening? Well, you do 90% of the work before the meeting even starts. And so how do you do that? Well, same way you have an end of day type form filled out. I have a pre meeting type form that my team fills out. It's as simple as what were your wins, what were critical issues you experienced this week, what ideas you have to improve, and what are your Top three objectives for the week. Those are probably the four most common questions I ask and most other people ask on their team meetings. And you spend the entire call talking just about those things, rather than being able to pick on just one thing and actually workshop it and actually train them through it. Okay, is this making sense?

Okay, cool.

Okay, this next one. Who hit the slide? Did I hit that? That just completely changed. Anyways, does anyone understand the meaning of this slide yet, or do I have to explain it? You guys get it? So this is one of my favorite games growing up. It's Slack a Mole. Anyone ever play it? We play this every day within our businesses. Don't lie to yourselves. And so don't get caught playing Sock a Mole. Right. What this looks like is you have messages coming through from team members and from clients in Slack, and you answer one, and then you see another one pop up, and then that one pops up and the one you just finished pop back up. And all day long, all you're doing is responding to people in Slack. And at the end of the day, don't get me wrong, you'll probably feel exhausted and you'll probably feel like you worked a lot, which you did, but in reality, you got nothing done. None of your objectives, none of your broader goals, none of it was moved forward. This is not the way to run a business. This is not the way to step into the role of being a CEO. And when you do log into Slack to clear messages and to catch up on things, the first place you should be going to is your team. So many of you guys hire your team members and then forget about them. You don't nurture them. You don't spend time with them. You don't pour into them, which is why you hired them in the first place. And this is actually something that Jeremy taught me at his event in Nashville almost a year and a half ago, or two years ago at this point. And I was struggling with this. And it's really a struggle of just letting go of responsibility and control. And Jeremy told me, if you could just learn how to pour into your team the same way you know how to pour into your clients, everything will change. And I did that. I audited my calendar. I audited the way I set up my Slack channel, and I started prioritizing my team before my clients, because why did I hire the team in the first place? To take care of the clients.

Exactly.

And so how does it make sense to take care of the clients when there's a team in place to do that?

It Doesn't.

And so that was one of the biggest breakthroughs, one of the most life changing pieces of advice ever. And it just hit so close to home, Jeremy. And so thank you for that life changing. Okay, is this all making sense before we move into step three? First two steps, really simple, set clear objectives. Second step, hire a team of A players. And now the third step and the most important step, which now that I say it out loud, I'm standing here on stage, it doesn't make sense to end with the most important step. Probably should have started with it, but anyways, the third step, but really the first step is to lead. You have the objectives, you have the team, but now it's back to you to step into the role of leadership. And so this is supposed to be Trump pointing at all of you guys. Okay? So it all starts with you. If you want to hire an A player, you have to be an A player.

Right?

Did that hit that hit, right? If you want to hire an A player, you have to be an A player. Same thing as. I'll break it down, even simpler. If you want to, if you want your team to arrive to work early and leave work late, you must be doing exactly that yourself. That's the role of a leader.

Okay?

And if you're not going to listen to me tell you that, listen to this fine gentleman point right at you and look right in your eyes and.

Tell you that.

We got to get a Nick Verge Trump impersonation real quick.

Anything.

Wait, into the mic. Wait, go again, go again.

You want your time team to arrive to work early. I mean, frankly, if you want them to leave work late, I mean, I personally feel you must be doing exactly that yourself. Excuse me, Excuse me.

Thank you, Nick, or thank you, Donald. But this goes into how to attract a players, okay. And get them to drop everything to work for you. Wouldn't that be nice? Like, is that something that you guys would like to have a players dropping everything to come and work for you and for your dreams and for your vision. Yes or yes. Stole that one from Jeremy. I love that. And so the first thing you need to do is cast an umbrella dream. I learned this one from Patrick Bet David and he said you have to share a vision big enough that a players and high level people that you want to hire onto your team, their visions and their dreams can fit inside of yours. This is called alignment.

Okay?

And this is something that Elon Musk, to come back to this example, does so incredibly well. He hires the smartest people. He doesn't Just hire them. He attracts them.

How?

Picture yourself as an engineer, top of your class, graduating an Ivy League school, and you're just about to graduate and you're looking for jobs and you care about this world and making it a better place and applying your skill set to do that. Are you more interested in building an algorithm for Google to prioritize search results more than you're attracted by the idea of building robots, landing rockets back into place, and building cars without steering wheels and pedals? What's more exciting? Spaceships. Absolutely, spaceships. At least that's my perspective on it. Maybe you guys feel differently, but spaceships are much more exciting than a search algorithm or than a social media algorithm or whatever other jobs exist out there. And this is what I believe Elon Musk does better than anyone else is he cast the largest vision where the smartest people on the planet in that line of work can align themselves and see their vision within Elon's bigger vision.

Okay.

The second step in this process on how to attract a players and get them to drop everything to work for you is to work for your team. So many of you think your team is there to work for you, and it's just the wrong way to think about it. You are there to work for your team, and you do this in a couple of ways. One, you do it by setting the example. Like we talked about before, if you want to hire A players, you have to be an A player. If you want your team to show up early and leave late, you have to do exactly that. And so set the example. And another Taylor Welsh quote. This is even my presentation anymore. This is just like a bunch of stuff from other presentations I've seen. But another one from Taylor is never ask your team or actually.