10 Key Lessons from 8 figure boardroom (Scotland)

Number one, it would be ads versus organic content. I think a lot of people get hung up when they consider digital marketing around organic content and how important that is and how, I mean, to be honest, it is important. When you're trying to develop and grow a brand, organic content is really important. But the thing people don't understand is that conversions don't necessarily come from organic content and ads are where conversions come from. And the best way to understand this is to almost think in your own shoes. Have you ever necessarily bought from seeing an organic video? No, you've been educated on the brand or the business. you've bought from seeing an ad. So I think understanding the difference between the two and making a clear decision on what you want as a business and a business owner when you come into working with an agency or whether it comes to running ads yourself is really, really important. Number 2, people get really hung up around building a personal brand. They think that it's like the be-all and end-all and that if they don't build a personal brand, that's the number one reason why they can't scale their business. Having a social following and having a personal brand is not the reason you can't scale your business. And if you are in a position where you think that's the case, then you need to come to an event like this to understand that that's not the case. Like, a personal brand and having a following online is not the number one reason on how you're going to scale your business in 2026. I think, I think people are getting very caught up and hung up around AI and how AI is going to replace teams. In fact, we've seen companies, uh, like Stripe, uh, get rid of some of their employees from, from implementing AI. But I think the number one lesson that came from AI in this weekend's talk is actually how the AI should be used to open up the potential capacity your team can handle. So you shouldn't be using AI to remove your team. You should instead be going, okay, instead of hiring the 10th person in this particular department, what I should be doing is how can we remove friction and automate some of the day-to-day operations we have within this department so that that particular department can now take on a much larger workload?

Yeah.

And what you end up doing there is opening your margins to a whole new level that you didn't know was possible.

Yeah, I like that. But these flies are fucking killing me. You guys probably can't see it, but there's like a lot of shit ton of flies out here. So my 5 key takeaways from this mastermind was one, SDRs, if you don't know, like people who of course pick up the phone and start dialing all of the leads, super important role with any company, especially if you're running ads, is how to track their specific metrics. Now, if you don't have this position, this might not be super relevant, but if you do, this will be relevant, is you don't necessarily just track their, okay, the call didn't show up or just call showed up and then show up. Like those 2 are just not necessarily, just don't take them at face value. And if a call didn't attend, why did not attend? Was it like, did they want to reschedule? Did they want to cancel? Or did they just want to, what's it called? Or they just ghost the call in general. And all of those 3 things need to be attributed and fixed separately. So if a call just wants to reschedule, that's a fairly easy fix because all they're basically doing, the setters, like all you have to train them on is on the last 5 minutes of a call, just make sure we're being super tactical on how we close out that call and transition for them to actually pick a time that works best for them. So one of the examples that we received was this lady was busy at 2:30 or at 2 p.m., and then the setter basically gave her times of like, okay, yeah, we have 2:45, 3 p.m., 3:30, 4 p.m., and then they just decided on 2:45 for some reason. Now, logically, if she's busy at 2 p.m. because she has a hair appointment, she's not making it to that call at 2:45. It's just not going to happen. And then another example he gave was if, let's say, if someone's, you know, working a job 9 to 5 and somebody pretty much agrees to a 5 p.m. time, you need to push back on that a little bit. You need to have that kind of like conversation. I'm like, okay, cool, 5. Um, is that when you get off work? Yeah, um, yeah, I get off work at that time. Okay, cool. Do you have a drive or do you pretty much work from home? Oh yeah, I have a little bit of a drive. Okay, got it. And how's pretty much the drive time with traffic? Around 30 to 40 minutes. I'm like, okay, does it just make sense to do 6 PM then? I'm like, yeah, let's do 6. So that instant, like, that just kind of like small communication instantly increases your show rate more on the setting side of things. So like, those are where the key nuggets that I got from the scheduling side of things. That's kind of like one point.

I think one thing I learned from this weekend is it's really important to utilize Instagram Stories more. I think everyone focuses so much on Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels and in-feed content like posts and carousels. But the one thing people don't utilize is Instagram Stories. And it's not necessarily an Instagram Story to try and convert someone, but it's an Instagram Story to show personality. Now, if someone is coming across your profile and they're making the decision on whether or not they should follow you, which is ultimately what you want them to do, if you don't have anything visible about your personality on your profile, why should they follow you? They don't have any trust or connection with you. And Instagram Stories are a great way to showcase in real time some of your personality. Now, if you're going out for a coffee with a friend, post it on your Instagram Story. Now, as cringy as that might sound, if someone comes across your profile and they see that, they go, okay, this, this person's a cool person. They're out having a latte on a Monday morning, sat on the road. They're a lawyer. Like, I'm now going to give them a follow because I have an interest in their life. I have an interest in what they're doing. And by showcasing that content, you actually will grow your social following.

Another one of the insights I had was on the client success side of things. So of course on internet, on Twitter, every single where you go, it's always about top line revenue, record month, all of this left, right, and center. But I think one of the things that is not the most talked about, and this is something like we've known internally already and we've paid a lot of attention to this anyways, is kind of like the client fulfillment and the success side of things. Meaning one of the main things that this speaker talked about, which I think you can just see his name on, of course, the screen, apologies, I forgot, was if you can get your client result within the first 14, 30, the days, Like the amount of days doesn't matter, but the fastest humanly possible you can get your client results for, they're going to stay infinitely longer. Because if you delay that process longer, then they're just going to lose interest within the program. And then you also have to add in consequences if they don't necessarily use the program more. So for example, if they signed up and then within second month they're going to go, so within the first month they're going to go. So you have to add in consequences of what happens if they don't necessarily use the program. But I think just the client experience, the delivery, and just the satisfaction rate, like those things are so untalked about that I feel like if you just improve those metrics, your backend revenue is going to carry you anyways. And then another thing you mentioned was like, would you rather have guaranteed money coming every single month or do you want to sign new clients consistently and just hope everything works out? Because if you have kind of like a proper engine running on the backend side of things, upselling becomes a lot more simpler too. So I think that was—

And renewing as well. It's like from an ads point of view, you pay to acquire a lead in ad spend. So if you're able to deliver them a result in the first 14 days, the chance of them renewing is so much higher And now you don't have to pay for that renewal because you've already paid for the acquisition. So then now the margins on that renewal just have increased to like near 100%, you know, like you don't have to pay to acquire them.

So yeah, 100%. And one of the questions he asked was, what would you pay for your client to not lose them or for them to not churn? So for example, like if you run ads, we already have kind of like a cost to acquire a customer. This is the amount you have to spend to acquire that customer. Now he was like, would you spend that amount just to not lose that customer? Does that mean a free month? Does that mean kind of like a steep discount? Does that mean you send them something like whatever that is. So that was pretty profound as well because it's just one of those things where people would be like, yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily mind losing this person. Like you should like always look into a sense where like what would I do to kind of like re-sign this person and like how much money is it worth for me kind of like re-signing this person anyways? So if that's kind of like plus minus whatever your numbers are, like I would just look into that as well. So if you can just spend that amount and just keep that person as a client, theoretically you're just gaining a client anyways if you think about it, because if you're losing him, you go negative 1, but if you keep him, you're going to stay at 0. But if you sign new clients, you're always going to get positive. So, because if you lose one and you gain one, then you're at zero. Might as well stay at zero and gain more, if that makes sense. So that was pretty cool.

I think that comes back to trust as well. It's like what you've asked from that client to work with you is quite a lot in terms of trust for the amount of money they're paying for a service. You know, you've asked for their trust. So if a client is in a position of financial difficulty where for whatever reason, it might be a personal reason, they're unable to like renew or continue, or they might feel that the experience they had wasn't necessarily satisfactory, then I think it's almost time for the business to put trust and faith into them. If they've been a good client to you, then why not give them a free month to try and help them get back on their feet? The chances are that they will receive that free month as like incredibly, like with incredible gratitude, that the likelihood of them then staying on for another 6 months is just massively increased.

Absolutely.

Because now there's that personal connection of I trust you and you trust me.

Absolutely. Also depends on why they're leaving. But if it's just one of those things where if things are not necessarily working out, but you guys still have a good relationship, I think just offering that as an extended arm kind of like goes a long way. And then it also pretty much puts the ball in your court in a sense where you're basically putting your money on the line because if things don't necessarily work out within that month, they're not going to renew. So yeah, it's a win-win for everybody.

If anything, I think it's really important that if you're a business owner and you're looking to work with an agency that you actually understand what your offer is because an offer and a business model are two very, very different things. If you have a business model, you're simply saying to me. I work in X industry targeting X consumer, and this is the service I deliver. Great, that's good for you. However, what is your offer? And to understand what your offer is, you need to seriously think about the desired outcome the potential customer you're going to work with is getting as a result of working from you. And what that means is, from an organic content point of view and also from a paid ads point of view, an agency is now able to deliver you much higher results because they're able to sell that offer to potential cold leads. Understanding the difference between a business model and an offer are incredibly important.

Another thing that kind of stood out to me, and Cole said this, was like with Claude Code and Claude and all these madness tools, like we use them a lot, think we're working, it gives us the illusion of working, but are we really tackling the problem at hand or are we just pretending to work?

100%.

So for example, if the bottleneck in your business is sales or marketing or fulfillment, if you're not necessarily directly working towards those and if you've given this illusion to yourself that you're in this Claude Code screen or you're in this Claude GPT and you're just kind of like working, you're white coding, you're just pretty much building something which you're never going to use, then that is pretty much you wasting time, if that makes sense. Because if your attention is required as a founder or as a sales manager, manager, whatever it is, towards a certain problem that's going to help scale the company or just get better client results, whatever it is, like you need to tackle that problem immediately. You need to stop being lazy and just do that specific thing. Because what he did effectively was he just hired kind of like a developer.

Hmm.

He just hired a developer and that developer was basically cracked at just like, you know, also just AI usage. And he was building like 4 tools a day, like a sales call review agent. I think what he said was he basically profited off of this guy's investment, meaning like he's full-time of course, but he basically made his money back in a sense because of all the money he saved the company. Because their Zapier bill, I believe, was like $36,000, something like that.

Something like that, yeah.

Yeah, and he basically turned that down to zero.

Yeah.

Because every single thing he built was in-house. So like just hiring a developer in-house is also kind of like a cool way to off— what's it called— delegate vibe coding, if anything. So that kind of stood out to me too because I do that. I was like, I'm just sitting here, I have one screen of like cloud over here, I mean, you know, this is a cloud code over here, and then it's like Slack, and then trying to work on something.

I know like I should be reviewing calls doing something more tactical for my team.

So that was something I was like, okay, yeah, you know what, this stands out. I do have made some cool shit though, by the way. I'm just putting it out there.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. But I think that vibe coding anything, whether it's using AI to complete a task, whether it is vibe coding like an internal software or software for yourself, it's like you do have to think about this is— you think to yourself that this is such a high ROI task, like high ROI in terms of like my time I'm putting in. But if you actually break it down and you go, okay, to build this software, it's actually taken me across the last 2 weeks about 4 hours a day, how much do you value your hourly rate? Like, do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like, you are probably actually better off bringing in a developer. And a developer and an AI expert are 2 very different things, right? An AI expert is someone who spends a lot of time on Instagram Reels and knows what Claude code is. A developer is someone who actually understands the backend to the, the software that you're, you're vibe coding, you know, you're using AI for. So hire a developer to do it instead so As a founder or as a business owner, you can now focus your time on operations or marketing. I think that's way more important.

Yeah, I think I want to talk about is partnerships. So this was another good point that was brought in this presentation was like partnerships in the start sound good. And of course, like to be clear, there have been a lot of successful partnerships and a lot of people in business right now have a lot of successful partnerships. This isn't like don't do a partnership. What his point— I mean, this is Spencer Vat— like his point was if you're going to go into a partnership, Don't necessarily just look into the now, look into what the goals are. Because I think Spencer, in his example, as kind of like a 19, 20-year-old, he just wanted to scale ballistically. And his partner, who was this kind of like real estate person, I don't know, but he was kind of like an older gentleman, and his goal was to work as less as possible and have more stability for his family. Nothing wrong with either one of those goals, but they're very misaligned.

Mhm.

So to the point where I think they scaled their company to like $8 million something a year, and Spencer is doing most of the workload, I believe, um, to the point where just the only outcome for this was to end, which it did. So I think choosing your partner, if you are going to go with this partner, is, um, A, if you're going to be doing all the work, it can't be 50/50. Like, you need to pretty much put that on a piece of paper first. And then B, the visions need to be aligned. Like, the outcome of why you're doing this needs to be pretty much aligned, because as soon as it kind of like goes astray, that's where most of the partnerships fail. So super important, that one. Any other key takeaways?

I think the number one key takeaway from coming to one of these masterminds is actually how much business goes on behind closed doors. If you are a business owner and you're like, I can't acquire new customers, there's no market for my product, you're actually better off coming to one of these masterminds and speaking to people about the business and, and how it's going so far and what you should change. We saw firsthand a guy that completely— like Ali Adel, right? He completely transformed his business from having one conversation with someone he'd never met before. Like, his entire offer in his business completely changed. That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't come to an event like this. And I'm not saying necessarily like come to an event like this, but if you are someone who has got an established business or offer, the amount of business that happens behind closed doors as well and hands that get shaken, it's almost— you can almost walk out of an event and be in profit.

Yeah. I mean, the value you get from people like this, because a lot of people think their problems are unique because it's their baby. Yeah, it's kind of like their special made thing. But no problem is unique. And that's something I realized a while ago as well, because I used to think the same way as well. I was like, yeah, this problem is probably like, you know, super unique. How is this person going to help me? And then I was just seeing Cole on one of his YouTube videos. He was just kind of like, yeah, when you're at this stage, from this stage, you probably face this, this, this. You have to do this. Just do this, this, this, and you'll be fine. I was like, he just labeled it out like it was nothing.

Yeah.

You know, he was like, yeah, if you're at this stage. I was like, yes. He's like, you probably have this problem. I was like, yeah. You just do this, this, this, this. I was like, yes, but I need to learn more. You know what I mean? So I was like, yeah, no problem is too unique. You just need to speak to the right people because there's like any problem you think is unsolvable, I promise you, has been solved like 500,000+ times. You just haven't looked hard enough for the solution. Or you're just trying to look at, like, look for the solution yourself. This is one of those things where if you're in, I don't know, Texas, and you want to go to New York, do you want to walk there? Do you want to take a flight? You obviously want to take a flight. So in a business context, you obviously want to speak to somebody who can get you there faster. You can theoretically just walk to New York, it's just going to take you way longer. So that's the best example.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Yeah, very true. Another one I can give you is by Spencer again, was Data Truck.

Yeah, but what specifically around it though?

I mean, anything. So for example, he specifically told the entire room, and this room, like, you know, like average person was making like $200K a month. Like, this was the room. He's like, raise your hands if you track your P&L. And around 80% of the room said, yeah, I track my P&L on a monthly basis. Then he said, like, who does a quality check on this P&L from what their accountant said? It's like less than 10% of the room kind of like raised their hands. And he was like, holy fuck. Like, you guys need to know what's going on in your P&L. Like, if you're just paying somebody $500 a month and you're not even like Q-checking the actual statements or just the P&L, like whatever he's providing, Google Sheets or something, like chances are there's some stuff you're missing, some stuff you don't know. And then you literally said like without data you're uncoachable. Like that stood out to me too. It's like if you don't have the data, like how am I supposed to coach you?

So true. That's actually so true.

That's true with our clients too. Yeah, some of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's so true because like if you are thinking about speaking to someone, whether it's a coach or or just go into an event, it's like unless you have data, it's near impossible for the person you're speaking to to understand the position you're in. Whereas if you have data, they can visualize the position you're in and then give you feedback on what should be made to change it. I think, yeah, that coming back to tracking, I've got one client that I look after ads for that I actually— maybe 2— that I actually keep track of their spend and their revenue and therefore their profit it in a Google Sheets doc. They don't even ask for that Google Sheets doc. They've never once said to me, what is my ad spend? And as a business owner, that actually shocks me. Like, like, that they've never asked for how much have I spent today specifically on ads and what my revenue is. But I keep track of it anyway because I know that probably at one point their accountant is going to ask, and then it's going to end up coming to me and I'm going to have to provide them something. So that's why I do that. But it does shock me that, you know, there are business owners out there that are quite literally spending thousands.

Yeah, I had a case too. This was— I don't even know when this was, but we were running ads for this local business and we were running it for kind of like quite some time because the conversations that happen, and this is why like sometimes like this is, it's important. It's not even something like you should know this, like you should know what ad metrics mean and what you're asking for. Because sometimes let's say if somebody wants to stay within a certain budget and then they agree to certain things which force you to increase the budget, if that makes sense. But they don't necessarily know that.

Yeah.

So that there's like, I took accountability on that too. I was like, I just need to do kind of like a better job on telling them this means this, not necessarily just assume that they'll know. So that's something we fixed internally. But basically what happened was they wanted to stay within a set budget, but they wanted more leads. And I told them like, okay, if we need more leads, we just have to increase. I mean, for me it was pretty logical. We just need to increase the spend per day because if X number is getting us X leads, then this number needs to go up for us to get more leads. So they agreed to that. So we just increased it. And then 6 months down the line, they're like, we've spent way too much over the last— like we've over-budgeted. I was like, what do you mean? I showed them the Fathom recordings and everything. I was like, look, like you guys literally agreed to it. They're like, no, Areeb, like, no, no, no. I don't know, like, because towards the end of the year is when they decided to check their books.

Yeah.

I was like, bro, 6 months?

Like, I was shocked.

I was like, what do you mean? Like, it's been 6 months. Like, we've been spending this amount. And bear in mind, like, they've still been closing deals, still, you know, acquiring a lot of leads. But we actually ended up refunding for 2 months just so they can recoup some funds. We literally just kind of like ended the relationship there. But to me, it was shocking. I was like, bro, like, most people just don't even track the data properly. Like, even me, I was looking into like, okay, this could be better, this could be better, this could be better, like specifics. So even for us, like, another takeaway was like the scorecards. Like, we need like much more detailed scorecard so we can check like every single, every single, what's it called, position and departments, like KPIs and much more depth. Yeah, like that's the kind of shit and detail you need to go into to kind of like even increase stuff in the first place, because if you don't know where you're at currently, you don't even know where you're going.

And do you know what the great use of scorecards is? The great use of scorecards is you can then— that's just another way to utilize AI further, because we've, we've given each individual employee, or like every single role in the business, a scorecard. what you're essentially doing is having a one-page document on exactly how well that employee has performed for that particular month. And you can then input that into AI and get a full understanding on exactly like how each department is doing. Like, chances are if you've got a, you know, 100 employees, you don't necessarily have time to look through 100 scorecards every month.

Correct.

You want a condensed version of that that's going to give you a score overall for the department, any individual scores that, you know, stick out as like anomalies to say either they're really good or they need to be, you know, get rid of. So That the scorecard is really important because it allows you as a business owner to check on each individual employee without actually having to necessarily speak to each individual employee.

You know, another key takeaway— this wasn't even a takeaway from one of the speeches. This was just one of those exercises which seemed bullshit in a lot of events. But in this one, just because of the size of the room and the level of people, this exercise was actually so good. And the feedback and of course people's ideas were just like amazing. It was like writing down every single one of them. So this is just kind of like one benefit, and I'll of course go through some of them, but this is kind of like the benefit you get by just being around these type of people in the first place. So there was this exercise where, because the room was divided into tables, like every table had around like, I don't know, 6 to 7 people. And then every single table needed to come up with an idea, not an idea, like something that's working well for them and then present it to the room. And then whoever had the best idea that's going to work for everybody pretty much wins a one-on-one time with this Cole Gordon or gets kind of like a prize as well and gets a prize as well. So like the idea, of course, our table came up with was just basically something related to SDRs and the type of interview questions we need to ask. And it was just kind of like a more detailed recruitment funnel. Like you should run ads for recruitment and then you should basically kind of like have a quiz as soon as you're about to recruit somebody with the courses. So you can pretty much kind of like see the quality of the applicants. So that's kind of like was our table's takeaway because I wanted to go recruitment focused. But just to kind of like name a few, and there was like, I think, 11 of them. But one of them was literally saying something like you could look up keywords on Google and then find kind of like the top 5 websites that pull up. And some of them, you'll be surprised, are kind of like expired domains as well. They don't even lead somewhere. Yeah, you can literally just buy those expired websites and forward it to your own website. So this is literally just free leads. Well, as soon as somebody types in that specific keyword in that area, like your stuff is just going to pop up now. Just because you bought that previously held expired domains because I don't know, like who knows what happened to their business. So that was kind of a key takeaway because you can literally spend like $2,000 to $4,000 and literally get like infinite quality leads.

Yeah.

If you just do that because you're buying domains that are already ranking at the top on Google. So that was kind of like a profound idea. Another one of them was by Cameron. He said donkey leads where like you have a shit ton of leads, everyone does in their CRM. You can literally do a reactivation campaign, like send all of them an email of kind of like a free training or something. And then put them into like an affiliate of anything that's relevant to your business. Or chances are just do kind of like a webinar with all of those other leads, bring them into a call and just kind of like sell them on an offer. So you can make pretty much instant money right there too. Yeah. So those were kind of like just a few of them. There was like a bunch of them, guys, that I could name here.

Fun fact, actually, there was a guy who realized that the Google domain had expired and so he bought it for about $15.

Who's this?

A guy somewhere in— some guy in the US. I don't know, early 2000s. Google domain had expired. He bought it for about $15. And then he started getting loads of emails from Google Search Console about all of this stuff that was going wrong because he was like now actually the owner of google.com. And then what ended up happening was less than about a minute later, Google emailed him and refunded him and bought the domain off him. And as a reward for him finding it, they gave him $7,000, like as a reward. So he bought a domain for $15 and made $7,000 from it.

Yeah. I mean, he had no choice though. Like they just literally just refunded him.

Basically just refunded him.

There was no option. Forcefully. But I mean, good on them for sending something.

Like, I think actually what also happened is they realized that when he said that he was going to donate that $7,000 to charity, they doubled it.

Really?

Yeah. So, Google is a good company.

I personally wouldn't have donated.

No, neither.

I don't think he did. He just kept the double.

I think a really important strategy that, for anyone who is running ads or even doing email campaigns as well, to be honest, is a format called, like, Hammer Them. And I sometimes do it for some high-ticket offers within the ads market.

Jeremy Haynes, right? Yeah.

I sometimes do it for some ads during the high-ticket offer, but essentially this applies to ads and emails, and we can call them hammer them ads. And hammer them ads are essentially, let's say someone comes through your funnel, they book a call with you, um, and they have a call with you in 3 days' time. Okay, cool. Now what you're going to do is set up another campaign with ads that are very, very like bottom of funnel. So the ads are very much around you as an individual, you as an offer, you and like your sales team, and what people are going to expect from the sales call and from your business and from your service and you put all the ads into that campaign and the audience is anyone who has booked a call with you. So now what that means is that someone signs up, they book a call with you, they then go on Instagram and all they're going to see because the audience is going to be so small is your ads and that's then going to be a format to increase your show-up rate for your sales calls. And you can also then duplicate that over to emails as well. Sometimes you may have signed up for a webinar or for a sales call yourself and not even realizing and then you suddenly receive within the space of 2 days like 12 emails and that is another format to increase your no-show rate. and have more people show up to calls.

Nice. Oh, I think that's open.