How the Ops Kings Scaled From $0 to $95K/mo With Their Development Agency

And there's some people that had seen some of the automation stuff I'd posted in the Client Essential community, but they just had no like way of practically applying it to their business. And so I think the two together. So we formed Opskings which is now it's a US based C Corp. We have like fast forward today, $95,000 in revenue last month and 17 to. We're bringing it. We're probably by the end of this week we'll have close to 20 employees.

So what's going on? Client Ascension, this is Andre Hagel Jr. 1 your coaches and I'm back with a Student Spotlight interview with my old friends Ryan and Tony. What's going on guys?

Hey, what's up?

Good to see you. So this is a big case study. I have to put this out there. This is one of the biggest case studies, if not the biggest case study we've ever done for Client Ascension. The results being you guys joined the program. The business wasn't even started at that point because you guys had joined separately and then eventually partnered after the London event that we had last summer. And so you guys essentially went from zero to now $95,000 a month with. How would you guys categorize it? Like a development agency or a low.

Yeah, I mean consulting and operations and automation. So we basically go in, a business comes in, they're like, hey, we can't take on more clients because like, you know, we've got a bunch of spreadsheets or ClickUp or whatever and it's like it's breaking now. And it gets to the point where the founder knows, like, it's just not smart for me to be distracted by trying to figure this out myself. We get a lot of referrals and Client Ascension was part of that, which we can, we can dive into. But yeah, we go in and unlock capacity so that they can keep on adding more customers.

I love that. Yeah. And so going back to when you guys first joined the program. So I think Ryan or maybe so I think I specifically remember Tony joining the program because when Tony joined it was like Tony was already established and had a brand on Twitter at the time and people knew who he was. And I remember a couple of guys in the program were saying, hey, we gotta get this Tony guy in. And I'll never forget when Tony joined, it was like the worst thing ever for me because I had like 10 students saying, where's my referral fee? And I'm like, we can only give one student a referral. Who, whose actually is It. And I'm like, dude, this guy paid us however much for the program. I'm gonna have to pay out that and more in referral fees because we can't figure this thing out. But, man, I knew we had a gem of a new student once Tony joined, because, yeah, the community, they all just knew who Tony was immediately, which is awesome. And so, Tony, maybe talk about your experience before joining the program and what you're doing and why you made the decision to join, and then we'll. We'll jump over to the partnership.

Yeah, for sure. So when I first joined on, I pretty much, you know, established a Twitter profile, started working with a couple of people for free while I had my kind of 9 to 5 job. I was the director of operations and one other agency. And I knew I wanted to get into consulting and, and doing ops consulting individually. So I kind of reached out. I think I reached out to Eamon first. It was literally like the first cold DM on Twitter. And I basically said, yo, I do this for a living. I can help you out for free. And then, you know, if it's worthwhile for you, you can refer me to someone else or leave me a testimonial or something like that. And that's how I started. So then I think, you know, Amer referred me to some other people, to Matt Lucero, Lucero referred me some other people. And fairly quickly, I went from, like, zero to, you know, having 10, 15 clients fairly quickly. And then everyone's saying, well, you got to join Client Essential. You got to join Client Ascension. There's, you know, hundreds of us just like, just like us that all need this help. And, you know, then they kind of peer pressured me into joining Client Essential. And I did. And then once I did, I think I texted you guys within like 24 hours. I think I closed like four or five clients right off the bat. And I'm like, you guys are good for the guarantee because I pretty much got the revenue right away in like, less than 24 hours.

That's so awesome. Yeah, I mean, back then we were running a guarantee. I forget exactly what it was. But yeah, I remember that DM you sent. You're like, yeah, you guys are covered. You don't even have to worry about the guarantee. And it was for, I think, a six or 12 month program at the time.

Yep.

But you did what? What I see a lot of successful students do when they join a program like Client Ascension is they just capitalize on the community and bring value to the community. And I saw you do that right away, which is I think why you had early on success. And so let's fast forward a little bit then to the London event because again, when you guys joined, Tony and Ryan, you guys joined separately, which we love because we got basically two students in one. And we hosted an event in London last summer and you guys both were out at the event. And I don't know if that was the first time that you guys had met, but after that essentially a partner was established. And so how did that all happen?

Yeah, so Tony, I think DM me on Slack, like in the Clint Ascension Slack community. And he's like, hey, like we're both in the same space, we should connect in London. At the time I was based in the country of Georgia, so he was in Croatia and we met there, had some drinks in London and then decided, I think afterwards, I think we chatted on Zoom and decided to try to figure out some kind of joint offer. So we had a case where Tony was doing operations and he would fix a bunch of operational problems, but then would be left with problems that were clearly technological to solve. And I had the opposite problem, whereas I was doing automation. And you know, when I joined ca, it was almost like the opposite story to Tony. I had no website, no offer, but also no customers. Like I had a friend of mine that I'd been just doing free work for, he then got me into like a rev share kind of thing, right? Like he was like insistent on paying me, but I had none of that stuff. So we met in London. I had no, you know, no customers, no offer, no whatever. But we connected in Slack. We approached you, Andre, and we're like, hey, we're gonna, we wanna just try some kind of like test offer. No idea what it's gonna look like, but this was like, I think July or August of like last year. And then about a month after that, maybe less than a month after that, we landed like actual clients from Twitter and a bunch of referrals and we kind of just, I think like the early momentum from the CA community really helped because we had people that Tony had worked with who were like, oh, sick, I get to do some automation stuff too. Like that's amazing. And there's some people that had seen some of the automation stuff I'd posted in the client essential community, but they just had no like way of practically applying it to their business. And so I think the two together. So we formed Ops Kings, which is now, it's a US based C Corp. We have like fast forward today $95,000 in revenue last month and 17 to. We're bringing it. We're probably by the end of this week we'll have close to 20 employees. So it happened really fast. And I. A lot of the, I think a lot of the benefit of the CA community is like very much understated. If you do it right, if you do good work and you connect with people in the community, I think you can like legitimately launch. Launch your business.

Yeah, it's so cool to see like some of the partnerships that were not formed until guys joined Client Ascension and then made it out to an event. Like you guys are a prime example of that obviously. But then you have like guys like Cam and Presley that run. Yeah. Curator and they're the biggest concept content agency on. On social.

Stacks, guys.

You have stacks.

Yes.

And Alex, I mean there's countless examples of these partnerships that have been established as part of the program. Ryan, one thing I'll recall for you as well, I don't know if this was when you partnered with Tony or before or during, but one strategy that worked incredibly well for you because you said you came into the program essentially with nothing. You were kind of just doing.

Yeah.

Pretty quickly became like an influencer on Twitter through these DM giveaways. And so maybe talk about your explosive growth on X and how that contributed your guys business growth.

Well, I mean, for probably the first year of our business, most of our leads would come through Twitter. We got a lead through Twitter yesterday. We had a sales call a couple hours ago. $4 million a year company. So yeah, I went from zero on Twitter before Client Ascension. I actually was like very skeptical that Twitter would be like any kind of serious business platform at all. And then I remember some of the coaching stuff, like specifically Dakota's stuff around the content strategy and how you write well was super helpful. And then the other thing that was massively helpful is Daniel's direction around how to use content to test out offers and use signals from the marketplace. So yeah, I went from. I mean the headline there is I went from like basically zero people on Twitter before I joined CA to now I've got 17, just over 17,000 people on Twitter. And it's like you get real customers through there. You get very, very big businesses that have become like a foundation for our client base. We also get talent from there. I know I've talked to you about how you can use a personal brand to get people that want to work with you. And I think you get a discount. You get this level of Talent for this cost because they see your work and they're like, I just want to work with you. So we got early people that volunteered to work for us for free. We get a lot of our core team members today through, through Twitter as well. Just inbound, one of our business analysts saw a video we made in at the Tampa event. So Tony and I did like a lunch for some of our clients at Tampa and hired Scott to do the video for it. We put up a video and he saw that and he's like, oh, sick. Like these guys are not just some random business. Like they, they really go and meet people and they seem like nice, nice dudes. So he reached out and applied for us and he's one of our key team members today. So I, I think without, without content and without, you know, Twitter specifically, I don't like, we wouldn't have the key team members we have or clients we have today for sure. It was a huge, it was huge.

Yeah, dude.

That talent pipeline that comes from building a personal brand is game changer. Game changer. Like exactly. Like you pointed out, like the, the best visual is like you get this level of talent for like this cost. And it's not to say like you don't pay well. It's just to say that like people don't put pay above everything else when they have an opportunity to work for someone they look up to and admire and actually are on board with the vision that you guys are setting out to accomplish. And that's the coolest thing, man. And it's not just the level of talent and the cost, but it's also like the buy in and the culture and like the enjoyability of working with these guys in general. And so I've seen some of your posts on X. I've followed everything you guys are doing and it just seems like you guys have a great culture. I mean, you had one of your guys our most recent Tampa event a couple weeks back and he was awesome. And just hearing his experience working with you guys, I mean, you guys have built a great culture and I think a lot of that just stems from like you put out content that's on brand to who you are and the right people find it and want to work with you. And so yeah, man, that's great. Anything to add to that, Tony?

I think for me a big component of not only just doing content. I would say one of the biggest kind of mindset shift for us was very early on we prioritized on how can we optimize for getting as Much social proof as possible from the client work that we're doing and then just sharing that to the market. So like a number that we religiously track is like how many video testimonial interviews do we have and what is the ratio of clients that we onboard versus the clients that we listen to? Video testimonial and if you remember, in London I had kind of the idea for like automating, you know, based on different triggers and doing stuff like that. We took that and ran with it in our business. And now I would say a big, big, big portion of that, I think. And it was a great mindset shift we got from you guys at Client Ascension is the importance of social proof. And we just ran with it. Now we have I think almost like 30 video interviews in a year, which is like insane when you think about it. It's like one video testimonial every like two weeks or something For a service based business, dude, it's freaking bonkers.

Yeah. No one can keep up with that level of social proof. And I think at a certain point, like you think, okay, now it's enough, like there's 30 people that just said they got results by working with us. But what I've started to find, because this for me is probably I'm in the hundreds at this point. Like we've done over a hundred client ascension case study or student spotlight type interviews. I've done a couple over at Liskit as well. And what I've found is it's not about just the quantity. It's not just if you have a hundred you're good, or if you have 200, you're good. It's like every story is unique and when prospects are looking at different solutions, they're trying to identify where they're currently at with where one of your customers was at. And, and they might hear something about you guys like meeting at an event and someone might be listening now as someone that can relate to Ryan and be like, hey, I don't really have much going on right now, but I want to find someone like Tony and partner and go to events like what they're talking about in London and in Tampa. So like there's unique elements to everyone's story and the types of businesses that they run and the unique problems that you're solving for them. So the more case studies you do, the better. Like we're three years into this business with Client Ascension and I'm still looking for case studies every single day. And it's something that we teach in Client Ascension as well. I have my entire framework for how to get a case study, record a case study and leverage a case study right there in the program for the students to learn from. So that's awesome, man. And I've seen it too with you guys. It even works on me and I've seen case studies of myself on your guys channel, which at this point we probably got to do a refresh on because you guys helped us a bunch as well with the client attention program. Just as we started to scale, we had different CSMs and account managers in place and it just got real difficult when new students joined to figure out like who do we assign them to based on capacity and based on availability, hours and whatnot. And you guys helped us build an amazing, completely automated process for that, which is just cool. It's cool when you can exchange business essentially, right? It's like you guys join the program, you get value and now it's like you've built something so great that I can't help but also be a part of that business as a customer. So I love reinvesting in the businesses in client. Ascension is typically where we go when we hire an agency for anything is it's like, hey, is there anyone inclined ascension for this before we look elsewhere? So yeah man, it's real cool. So you guys are at I would say a different level of scale obviously as you were when you were first in the program being, you know, very closely approaching that 100k a month figure. What are some of the contributions to how you've been able to break out of like the 10k a month mindset and really just get towards running like an actual seven figure company? Have you had to expand different Legion channels? Have you had to hire and build out a sales team? Have you had to make any changes on the product side or on the pricing side? Like what has that been looking like for you guys?

Yeah, I can expand on this, Ryan. Then you can add on. I think the couple of big lessons for us was once we found a model that worked, we just stuck to that model. We had clients ask us to do project work. We had clients ask us to do different things. Hey, can you guys do sales ops? Can you guys do marketing automation? Can you guys do all this other stuff? And we just kind of stuck to what we were good at and religiously follow that one single thing that we're doing and we knock on wood. Never had a problem with Legion because we would just get so much referrals, get so much people that would just talk about the service organically and we would just continuously grow. The biggest problem for us, and I think the biggest breakthrough we, we got into the business when we really started growing crazy is once we started hiring the first employees and letting people actually take care of the clients in our name and fully own that client relationship, like having business analysts, CSMs on our end who are handling the entire client relationship, having developers who are handling the entire client relationship. That was really the biggest factor that allowed us to, oh, let's just double down on this, let's start marketing more, sharing more of our story, and then we can just continuously add on clients to the system. And then what the best thing was is we got so much better once we plugged people into the system because, you know, we're fairly good at ops and system, as you can imagine. But adding on additional team members who, you know, can add on and have their own perspectives and teaching people frameworks and how we think about things and something that kind of seems obvious to us, it doesn't seem obvious to someone else, and that forces you to kind of teach principles and frameworks that really exploded our service. And I think that was the kind of biggest, biggest unlock for us. Ryan, I think you would, you would agree with us.

Yeah. So, like very, I mean, I'll walk people through, like very high level for. Tony's hired way more people than I have in his previous experience and things like that. For me, I was really worried about not even like, if I fire somebody to do the dev for me or if I hire developers, will they be better than me? That's not because I always wanted to like, learn new stuff anyways. But I think what I was really worried about was if I hire somebody else to be one of the developers and add developers, I have to then figure out how to add value somehow. So it was almost like, am I going to be good enough at the next thing to be able to fill up my entire day? Because it's kind of a dick move to hire someone to sit around, do nothing. So I have to figure out that that was a big blocker. The interesting thing that happened, I think that was one of the most powerful things we did, was put other people in place and try to figure out how to train them to be as good as possible and really focus on the systems that they could think like Tony and I. So our service now is dramatically better than it was even six months ago because of the fact that Tony and I are freed up to then think about the process and go like, okay, well, we can Add this dashboard for our CSM so that their job is a little bit easier. So the more of their mental bandwidth can go to this strategy. Right. We can build this AI bot to then do quality assurance or assistant quality assurance.

Exactly. What you start to realize is, like, you just hire people that are smarter than you as well. Like, once you. Once you create, like, the clear pathway for them to be in that role, it's like they start.

One of our. One of our business analysts, one of our CSMs at this point has more testimonials than all of our competitors. One of our. Whatever, business analyst, I think he has like 12 or 15 or whatever it is, like video interviews that directly relate to him, that people reference. You know, working with this person was insane. It was great. And he puts that on Twitter. He posts about that and just. It's a. It's a great. You know, for us, that's like the best. Best way. It's like we sell a client and the next time we talk to them is on a testimonial call. It's like the best thing ever.

I love that, man. Well, I know you guys got a hard stop in a minute or two here, and so I just wanted to say thank you again for jumping on and sharing your success story with us and just being a part of the program and trusting the program, especially both of you guys separately. Right. Like, you guys joined the program as two entirely separate businesses and then eventually came together to create the Ops Kings, which is absolutely crushing and dominating, and it's just so cool to see, man. So where can the audience find both of you guys? Online, on the socials and also the company as well. Yeah.

So opskings.com is. Is our whole. Is our whole company. And then Tony's on Twitter. The Ops King is Tony's Twitter. And then mine is super hard to spell. So it's at RM Hildebrandt with a DT at the end. Whatever you can. You can ask.

So just reach out. Reach out to me and I'll forward you.

Just reach out to Tony. And he, like, yeah, he's. He's used to sending people my way, so I love that.

Well, thank you guys so much. Again, congrats on all the success, and I just can't wait to see you continue to run it up.

Appreciate, Andre. Thanks.

Appreciate it, Andrew.