How We Jumped from $90K to $500K + MONTHS with ONE Funnel Shift ⚙️💰

What's going on? What's going on, everybody who's actually tuning into this podcast? First of all, guys, welcome back to another episode of The Nikhil Sai Show, which is hosted by me, The Nikhil Sai. And guess what's going on today? I'm back with another amazing guest. This time, the guest who's jumping on is such a fun person, and we became good friends once we met at Funnel Hacking Live. He's one of the part of Russell Brunson's Inner Circle member, and, uh, we geeked out on so many other projects and talked about numbers and looking at other people's businesses and analyzing how everybody's doing. One thing really popped out when I was having a conversation with this person is how much depth he has in scaling a business, in building systems that can take businesses to $100,000, $300,000, $500,000 a month cash as a coaching consulting business. And this is no joke. Scaling an info offer or a consulting offer is pretty easy because there's not really so much in fulfillment. You can run a bunch of ads. And get it to $10K, $20K, $30K, but it kind of stalls there. Like, you know, like breaking past $100K a month consistently is a big accomplishment. And that's one of the reasons the guest who is jumping on today is going to break down the strategies and systems and processes he has used from a marketing and fulfillment standpoint to even get to $500,000 a month in cash. And this is going to be an incredible journey. So if you want to build a scalable info product coaching, consulting, service-based business, this podcast will be a game changer. So make sure to stick around. They've done well over $5.5 million in the last 28 months, and this guy has played a crucial role in making that happen. Let's not waste any time, and actually, let's welcome one of my friends, Daniel Tapia. Hey Daniel, what's up my man?

I'm excited. Thank you so much, man. Appreciate you.

Yeah, so stoked to have you on. I mean, it was so fun hanging out with you in FHL. I just should definitely mention that after parties before breakfast meetings, we just ran into everybody. And you're one of those very few connections which I really believe are long-term, meaning you're not just shaking hands, but you're there for long-term. So I'm excited for you. Now, I would love to geek with you like we did about marketing systems and playbooks and ads. Before that, give us some context, Daniel. You've had very unique career. You had so many transitions in your life. So let's dive deep. Let's understand who are you as a person and how did you end up here?

Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about my backstory real quick. And I won't spend too much time on that 'cause I wanna get into, you know, nuts and bolts of the meat and potatoes of these things. Just a quick little backstory on me going through life on my kind of hero's journey, if you will. Went to college, went to high school trying to become a physical therapist. And that was kind of my trajectory of life. And then, you know, life kind of took a different trajectory for me. I had a son when I was 20, about 21 years old. And I was like, oh, I don't want to be, I don't want to be in school while my son in the most development, like the time where he needs to be developed the most. I don't want to be in school during that time. And, you know, there was really two options for me in the town that I lived in is like, go work in the oil fields and go make money for your family or, you know, continue to work at like a, you know, just a normal job to see, you know, just to pay the bills. And so that was kind of the journey. And I was like, I don't know if I want to do that. And at the time I was in really good shape. So now I'm not as in good shape, but I was in really, really good shape. And I started doing these things where I was like, I would go to the— I was in college and I would do these like exercise things. And one of them being like, I became like one of the— well, there was an award called the Fittest Man on Campus and I won that award. And then people started asking me like, how do you, how do you do that? Like, how are you so fit? How are you? All this stuff. And so I found the journey of like, a personal trainer. I'm like, I didn't even know that was a thing. And so I started doing that, like working early morning, late nights, and trying to become a personal trainer and all that stuff. Um, what I realized at that time was like, oh my gosh, I'm burning the candle on both ends. I'm working a lot of time, which I'm still at the same point where I thought I was gonna not be if I had gone to a different place and, you know, gone out in the world or whatever. I was still working really early and really, really late at night because you know, nobody that uses a personal trainer comes during the day. Everyone is like before work or after work. And so no matter what I did, I wasn't going to be able to see my, my family. And so that kind of sucked. And that's what brought me to the, what you call like the online world. And I remember one day just on, on Google at the time, I was like, how to make money online, as probably all of your audience and yourself. Once upon a time everyone did. And I actually listened to a podcast I didn't even know what a podcast was at the time. I mean, think about it. This was about 2013, 2014. So that was like the— like there wasn't even podcasts that much really. And I remember listening to a guy, his name was Jeff Cavaliere with ATHLEAN-X and another guy named AJ Meraz, Online Super Coach. And I remember he, he was talking about— he was talking with this guy like a podcast similar to this one. And he says he makes an offer at the end. He goes, hey, if you want to learn how to grow an online personal training business, join my free webinar. And I didn't know what that was at the time. I was like, what the heck is a webinar? Like, what's all this thing? I just remember putting my information, showing up, and I remember him doing this webinar. And at the end of it, he's like, book a call. And I'm like, cool, whatever. So I book a call. I didn't know anything was happening. Like, I knew nothing. I was so green to this stuff. And then at the end of this call, he's like, $5,000. That's how much it is. And I remember my like, my heart like sunk down to my stomach and I'm like, 5 grand? I don't even make 5 grand a year. And so it was scary, dude. It was totally scary, but I did it anyways. And that's when I realized for the first time about mentors. That was like my first introduction to like a paid mentor. I always thought you had to just do things like, I was just like, I'll just get it for free. I'll barter, whatever. I'll, you know, I'll do whatever I have to. But that was like my first introduction to getting like paying someone to get ahead. And I never understood that concept until he asked me to buy. And I remember, you know, giving him the credit card and I didn't have anything. So I had to call my bank and like, I didn't even have a limit for $5,000. That's how crazy it was. I had a limit for $1,000 on my credit card. That was all. And I had $0 in my bank account. So I do this thing and I call my bank and I'm like, hey, I was all wired up. I'm like, hey, I need this thing that $5,000. And they're like, you can't do that. The max we can give you is $3,000. So then I go to PayPal and I go get this credit line for PayPal and I'm like, "Okay, I'm just going to splinter it all together, AJ." He's like, "Yeah, whatever. Do whatever you got to do." Meanwhile, he has like 15 other people. I thought I was the only person he was going to work with. I didn't know that there was people behind. And so long story short, I paid the guy. And what's interesting is that as soon as I paid him, buyer's remorse set in. And I don't know if you've ever felt this, but I remember calling him and crying. Not crying, but like with shakiness in my voice, I said, dude, I need my money back. And if you don't give me my money back, I'm gonna, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm gonna do something. I'm gonna do something bad, right? And I don't know like if it's gonna be bad to me or bad to you, but I started doing all this like weird things that people do when they don't have money, right? And he goes, Dan, Dan, Dan, hold on, hold on. I'm gonna give you a lesson right here. And I go, no, I want my money back. I don't want a lesson. He goes, listen to this. If I give you your money back now, you're going to quit every time things get hard in your life. So he goes, it doesn't matter about the money for me. I make $200,000 a month, but it can change your life if you actually apply yourself. And this is all you have. So you're going to apply yourself more than anybody else. And I remember, I remember just hanging up on him. Like, let me call someone else. Right. But that That one message right there, man, I have used that same story to break through for other clients that have come to us and do that thing. And I remember him giving that lesson to me and I was like, dang, looking back, I'm like, thank God I didn't get the refund. Yeah. Because if I did, I wouldn't be on the journey I am today, which, you know, like we do roughly about $450,000 a month on average cash collected now. But it wasn't, it wasn't, that wasn't the journey where we started. And so the journey kept going and in the next 15 days or so, I made an additional $15,000. I was like, Oh shit. I was like, oh, this works, right? I hadn't made $5,000 a year. After I gave him $5,000, I found money. But it wasn't like found money, I just got committed. And what happened was when I got committed, I got creative. The alternative is not true. You don't get creative then committed. You get committed first then creative, right? Because I never knew that my clients could pay me more in advance But until I paid him, then I had the leverage in my mind. I was like, I remember going to my first client. I'm like, hey, so I've been training you. And this was my first introduction to offers too, Nick. I said, hey, I've been training you. You pay me $328 a month, Dottie. I remember her, she was my 62-year-old client. And I remember talking to her and she, I was just like, hey Dottie, so everything's gonna change. It's gonna be great. It's gonna be amazing. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go online. And she's like, so what then? What does that mean for me? I go, okay, well, you know, you're paying $328 a month. Well, if you prepay 6 months, I'll give you the additional 12 months at no cost. She's like, okay. And boom, first injection of cash. I'm like, wait a minute, let me do it for my next clients. And I did it again and again and again. And that's how I made my first like $15,000. And then I'm like, oh, no way. That's crazy. And so the journey keeps going. That's when I'm, you know, started getting into like, okay, I just tapped out my client current audience. I have nobody else. How do I get get more people. And that's when I realized, you know, Facebook ads was like a thing. And I got into, uh, Dan Henry's course at the time. I was introduced to him by a colleague of mine. And, um, so Dan Henry at the time— I don't know if your audience knows who that is— but he was running a Facebook ads for entrepreneurs thing. I was like one of the first 7 people he brought on and taught this Facebook ads thing.

Crazy.

And he gave me a script, and I just remember like going outside and doing exactly what he said. He just said, go outside, do a video, and say, come to my gym. And so I did, and I was still doing a personal training thing and I made, I spent $28 and I made like $1,500 and I was like, oh my gosh, it works. And so it just kept compounding. I kept doing this over and over and over until I met another person through a mastermind and that being David, who I work with now, who I partnered with now. And he had a tax franchise and he wanted to, you know, kind of get into this online world or marketing. He wanted to learn this process because business was doing good, but it wasn't doing great. And so we came in and I came in and kind of consulted him the first year. We did over— I think in the first year we did $2.5 million in additional sales from the things that we, you know, had taught him to do. Me taught him to do, right? And then he goes, then I, you know, we kind of worked together for a little project and then I did— I split off and kind of did my own thing. And that was when, you know, right around the time like 2018, 2019, appointment setters started to be like the thing, you know? Appointment setters, everybody wanted appointment setters. Yeah, yeah, that was the hot chick at the time. And so then I was like, cool, let me sell that. And so I partnered with another guy and we started placing appointment setters into companies. And we did this by getting appointment setters to set appointments for people that want appointment setters. So it's like inception, right? It was like, so anyways, on that process, I figured out how to onboard and train people very quickly because we onboarded about 28 appointment setters within 3 to 7 days.

Jeez.

And that's a lot of volume.

Yeah.

Yeah. And they were producing within 72 hours because I was like, okay, this is what you need to do. But here's a script. Boom. And then I had them set up on a CRM and I just had to figure all that stuff out. In fact, that gauntlet right there, I still remember to this day, it got me sick, almost deathly sick because 'Cause I was just under so much pressure so fast. And within 5 months we scaled that company to $100,000 a month cash collected organically just through appointment setters, DM appointment setters.

Crazy.

And then David became one of our clients there and he made like $79,000 in cash collected in 19 days. And then he goes, hey Dan, like you're really good at this stuff. You want to come and like partner? We'll do this with other tax people. And I was like, well, I guess you're okay. I mean, at the time that business was kind of fizzling out because we knew how to market and sell.

Yeah.

But the biggest key, and I'll share that how we got to $500,000+ a month is fulfillment and delivery. We did not know how to keep customers staying and paying. So they paid one time and then we didn't fulfill our end of the bargain. And so we were at our peak, we were selling and refunding almost at the same time. Like we would sell a new one and then refund the next one. And man, it was scary. So then that's when I made the shift with Hip, with David, and then roughly about 2022, 2023, then our first inaugural year, if you will, in this pro— in this business, this new business, we did $900,000 of cash collected. The second year we did $3 million. This year we're on track to do $6 to $8 million.

There you go.

So that kind of got us here. I got to see you, man.

Such a journey, brother. Such a journey. I mean, yeah, I can't even imagine you working in oil fields, like, after knowing what you've done. And I'm glad that day, you know, you took that courageous decision to go all in, right? I mean, it is so true, like, the deprivation you have once you pay somebody creates a motivation for you. So you don't have any more excuses. You're just like, I'm zoned in, like, because now I have so much less than what I used to have. It makes you uncomfortable. And I think that's the tip everybody needs to hear, which is They are slightly comfortable and they're going smoothly and they want to keep it like that. You know, tough boats are built to sail in a strong ocean. So that's a great story. Now let's talk about this, right? Like marketing is this, this is a big, it's a very generic word. Like it's a very commonly used word. And many business owners kind of are scared about trying to figure out their own marketing. And that's why they outsource it to agencies or hire freelancers who they don't know much about or even try to hire internal people, but they can't really gauge because they don't understand it, right? If you have to share, what was the fundamental view for you to actually market something? How are you able to consistently go in and sell in your fitness offer or appointment service offer? And now with David, the tax consulting offer, like, I'm curious, what's, what's been the playbook for you to actually market a business?

Um, so it usually starts with like, uh, who do I want to— who do I want to help? So even before what do I want to sell, it's like, who do I want to serve? Right. And that's the first key pillar. Like it's always been who, who, who, not what, what, what. Because I've led with offers and there was some part of my journey I didn't tell you, but I led with— I was trying e-commerce, I was trying selling t-shirts, I was trying to sell like fitness t-shirts and I tried everything. I tried affiliates, I tried everything. I tried to sell for a quick buck. And some of you guys have probably done that, right? Like just I tried everything to try to figure it out. But what I came back to was like, if I'm not— if I don't want to help these people, it doesn't matter matter the money because at the end of the day, I don't see the impact, right? And so I always start with who do I want to help? And then secondly, I'm like, okay, if I want to help them, can they, are they qualified to pay me?

Right?

Because some people miss that. They're like, I see it a lot. They're like, I want to help, you know, I want to help nonprofits. I'm like, there's a reason why they're nonprofit, bro. Like you can help them, but they're not going to pay you. Like there's the missing link there, right? Or I want to help single moms who are unemployed get a job. I'm like, But you don't understand, like they are, they don't have money so you can employ them, but you're not going to, they're not going to pay you. So just understand that going into it. And so what I realized with, you know, every time I did something, I was like, okay, well, who do I want to help? And so it always came back to who, then the what, and then, you know, obviously the how, right? It always came through that process of, you know, conceptualizing ideas and creating offers because the what is kind of easy to sell once you know the who. That you want to sell it to.

Yeah, right.

Because then you just ask them. And usually every time I start an offer, I always ask people, I just go to the person, I say, hey, I want to help these people, but before I help them, help me help you at no cost. And I usually ask 3 questions. Number 1, what's your biggest challenge when it comes to X, right? What's your biggest challenge when it comes to marketing? If I want to sell marketing or whatever I want to sell to these people, hey, tax advisors, what's your biggest challenge when it comes to marketing? Right? So I'm trying to sell marketing in this case. What have you tried when it comes to X? What did you hate? What did you love? What kind of results have you received? Right? And so those are the really kind of key pillars. What would make this outcome a big success? And so if I just get them for free and I get those questions answered, now I've created a baseline for me. And so usually that's what I start with because one, I hate going in blind to things and just like, I consider myself more of a sniper than a shotgun approach.

Yeah.

So I like to have concise data, not necessarily concise data, but I like to have something before I go out and do something. And so usually that's how I'll start. I'll start with the survey to the audience that I want to serve, then I'll help some people for free, then I'll ask them to pay me if it helps them, and then in exchange for a referral, right? Or in exchange for a case study. And so everything has been built off of a case study. Everything really is like the key pillar. The key pillar is like Everything wraps around a case study, right? For me.

Makes a lot of sense.

And that's kind of how I've done, spun up every offer is like I'll ask 'em, I'll do the work, kind of, how do you say, make like steps to how I got the result and then I'll come back to another person and sell that strategy.

That's such a good point because people miss it. They just think about that, you just have an incredible offer with some insane guarantee and it would sell. Yeah, it might for one or two person, but then you would go through the same issues of fulfillment and refunds and all that good stuff. But if you solve a problem and you build a case study and you sell a journey, people are buying the journey and they're not buying the outcome. They're trying to buy the vehicle that can deliver the outcome. So the expectations are on point and, you know, they're going to stick to the product and have much, much better stick rate. So love that. Now, uh, If you have suggestions, right, like on traffic sources, and I know you're big on Facebook ads, and if you have to break down, because Meta has been changing a lot, especially in the last few years. Maybe like the first ad you launched, the interface of Facebook ads compared to what's right now, it's like game over, like completely changed. And I've heard Mark Zuckerberg's interview where he was talking that if a business owner just opts in and he just mentions about his product, like Meta would be able to run ads in the next few years, like few GenTech features are going to come up. So I'm curious, You have to give like a Facebook ads playbook because I'm assuming when you're doing $500K cash, you're pushing it through ads primarily. Like you are definitely going all in in Meta. So give us like a Meta marketing playbook on what's working for you.

Yeah, so when it comes, I mean, a good majority comes from paid ads and a lot of it comes from Meta. And what we've realized, you know, we spend north of $150,000 a month on ads. And so, You know, one of the things that I've realized is that targeting is almost nonexistent anymore. It's more about the creative and the offer. So that's what I've seen, at least, you know, moving into the new, like what we've been trying, we've been trying, I mean, we throw, when it comes to that, I'm a sniper, but sometimes we have to be shotgun guys, especially when it comes to like ads, just freaking throw crazy things against the wall, see what touches, see what hits, see what CTR, see what CPMs, all that stuff is, looking like. And, um, yeah, man, sometimes it's the Wild West in there. But what we find after, you know, doing this over and over and over is that if the creative and the copy and the offer are good, then the audience will find that. We don't need to be like sticklers for— like, because I've seen media— I mean, we've had— we've hired media buyers that do all this crazy stuff in our platform. And I look at it, I'm like, dude, there's no way someone's gonna go through this and do this. I would never be able to teach this to someone else. And time and time again, I find that some, most of my ads win, not because I'm so good, but just because it's simple. I'm just put one campaign, one ad set, and then throw some hooks and an offer at it. And then I just iterate on that process right there and I'll just find the winners based on like whatever metric we're trying to shoot for. And then I'll just do it again.

Hmm, makes sense. It's all about creative testing. It's like, okay, and to sell this, consulting, high-ticket consulting, right? There has been a big industry shift, right? Like, people used to buy high tickets so easily, especially when the Fed rates were lower, the credit was much easy, the cash flow with businesses was much easier, especially in 2020, 2021, that like everybody started a high-ticket program and they were just having a blast, right? Like they were just having party. Now the dynamic is changing. The customer trust from high-ticket— for high-ticket programs has changed a little bit. What have you done to keep your sales still going like at top, like building that trust and creating that effectiveness in converting leads into actual customers?

What we found is creating a culture and a community around the clients buying and stuff. And so we don't do what most people's like typical call funnel thing is. And we see that trust be really low when it comes to call funnels. And what I mean by that is like, You used to just put up an ad and say, I guarantee you get this, or Y happens, or whatever, and you'd call them, you close them. But now there's sophisticated buyers out there in the market, and especially if you're a sophisticated buyer, you're not going to sit there and just wait for someone to call you right away and then you're going to make a decision on the instant. No, it sounds like there's going to be— that could be the case, but more often than not, they have to hear you, they have to see you. I think that was a study done by Google that there's like a 7-hour rule or something like that where they have to like see you like 7 hours, hear you or something like that.

Yeah.

And so we really took that to heart. And so what we do is we do events, right? Online virtual events. And so that way we can compress the time to trust, right? In very short timeframes. And so our funnel kind of looked like this webinar to a $997 sale, which is a kind of a just like an entry point. It's nothing like too expensive. I mean, if you're B2C, that's kind of expensive. But if in a B2B world like we are in, $997 or $1,000 is, you know, nothing. Yeah. Yeah, it's really nothing. Yeah. And to clarify, we don't do like make like it's not a biz op, so it's not like a business opportunity that you can like, hey, I'm doing— I'm an engineer. Can I do this? Yeah, that's kind of B2C. What we do is more of a business development. Kind of process. So it's more B2B. And so the metrics change a little bit. It's a little bit more expensive, but also, and I might be going too far for some of your listeners, but the LTV or the lifetime value of that customer is a little bit higher, right? So the upfront cash might be lower, but the long-term effect of them staying and paying is a little bit higher for B2B versus B2C as far as what we've seen. There's some variables in there, of course, but So what we do is we do an event. So basically it would go from a webinar to a $1,000 sale and then from a $1,000 sale to a 2-day. We used to do it in person, so it was only in person for all of 2023.

Yeah, that's crazy.

So yeah, so we would only do 2, we would only do an event every quarter and we would sell tickets all month or all, 2 or 3 months, we would sell tickets to that one event in person 4 times a year. And that's how we got to our first million, right? And it worked, but it was really expensive, really heavy on, you know, a lot of the things. And then in January 2024, we switched the model over to, uh, virtual. So we did the same event that we would do in person, but we did it online now. And then that's when we went from like making like $50,000 a month on average, maybe a little bit higher, like $100,000 a month in the first year. So then we were going to $150,000 on average. $100,000, you know, so that was a big difference. But our costs went down too.

You don't have to host.

Yeah, you didn't have to host it. Everything was just like Zoom and whatnot. And we did that all of 2024 and it was once a month. And so you think about it, we went from 4 events to 12 events. So we literally 3x'd our ability to collect cash.

Volume, yeah.

Which if you look at the number, it's directly correlated like to the revenue. We went from 9 million. Yeah, we went from 900 to, you know, 2 million.

So that's 2.5. Yeah.

Yeah. So from 900,000 to 3 million in cash, that's literally a, what, a 3x change.

Yep.

Right. And so the only change there was the frequency. You know what I mean? So funny. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's so funny, right?

Yeah. Yeah. This is deep. I think this is a big takeaway for anybody who's listening. If your constraint of the business is maybe you are not selling enough, that's the big thing. Just sell more times, sell multiple times, make offers. That's how you make money. So yeah, please going down.

Yeah. And so that was kind of our journey for 2024, 2025, you know, how we would— So then at the end of 2024, I'll tell you the journey of how we're getting to $500K months and kind of reverse engineering it. So what we were doing was webinar, virtual event. And then what we started to add at the end of, 2024 was we took them back to in-person because we love the leverage from in-person conversions. But we also like the front-end, you know, margins for virtual sales.

Yeah.

And if they come in after a virtual ticket sale where we're selling $15,000 programs and they come to an in-person thing, number one, we're going to build a stronger community. Number two, they're more likely to buy our second thing, or number 3, they're more likely to stay and pay longer. So that's where our next play started to happen where we started doing quarterly events again, but in person. But we flipped the model from leading with the in-person to now leading with the virtual and then bringing them back in for in-person.

And so they charge the same, the same $1,000 ticket for the, physical event or?

So the way that it will work, the way it works now is $1,000 to get to the virtual. So instead of $1,000, it was like $2,000 to come in person, but then it was $1,000 for virtual for $15,000 package that we would sell. And then of the people that would buy the $15,000 package, they came to the event for free. So it was kind of like a lead magnet. That $15,000 thing is a lead magnet to come in person. Does that make sense?

Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

And then from there, we had a percentage of those people that would show up, they would either renew with us and they're like, okay, well, you're paying for 6 months, do you want to just continue for 12 and we'll just reset your contract now? Or they can buy, you know, we have a different tier now where it's called MDC, where they can pay an additional amount, come closer to me and David, right? And so there was a percentage of people start to upsell.

Wow.

Wow.

And how much is that package? The highest?

It's $60,000 a year. Or so it's either $60,000 a year or we even have a higher one, which is $120,000 a year, $10,000 a month.

Dude, love that. I mean, this is what, like, when you pay that kind of money to be in a room, you will automatically start creating offers with that audacity. And I'm glad, you know, you went into rooms like that and you started creating those offers. That's incredible. Now, I'm assuming you've tested a bunch of different vehicles to sell the same thing, right? Like you're running ads to get people to the webinar, and I'm assuming this is a free webinar unless you're selling it at low ticket, but then you are doing like an event, 2-day event, virtual or physical, and then you're selling high ticket. Have you tried any other vehicles instead of webinars? And how did that translate in terms of results, like challenges or multiple-day events in the front end, directly sell the high ticket? And we kind of had these ideas. When we were back in FHL. So I'm curious.

Yeah, so I got this idea from Big Daddy Bill to do an event after seeing his numbers. And I'm like, okay, so let me give you some context on the Inner Circle. The only reason why we joined the Inner Circle with Russell was because one day he did a story and his story said this guy's showing us how he's spending $150,000 a day on ads. And I was like, that's a monthly budget. That's a— yeah, that's what we're making a month, not a budget.

That's how much we're making a month.

That's crazy. Yeah. And so I talked to David and David's like, well, he's the granddaddy of them all. Like Russell's who created everybody. Like Russell created everyone in the, in the education field, if you will. I mean, aside from Dean and Tony, but Russell's the guy, like he's the guy that made everybody. And so we were like, we had some like people that we were thinking about joining their mastermind and then we're just like, let's just go to Russell because Russell knows, you know, Russell is the key for everybody. Right? He's like the gateway drug, you know what I mean? And so we show up to this, we signed up for the Inner Circle. And the reason why we signed up, because I saw that and I'm like, I'm an obsessed kind of person. Like I'm obsessed. Like once I have my like a radar on something, I'm like, like nothing else matters. And you could, I mean, you saw me in FHA. I was like on his hip. I was like, where's this guy? Where is he?

Where is he? He was almost like, Nick, can you keep Daniel? Like, can you take him from him a little bit?

Yeah, you were like.

You were giving passes like, Nick, ask this question. I still remember at the table, I was like, yep, asking that. We were grilling him, bro. Yeah, it was fun.

Yeah, and I was just like, I had to, when I get caught on something like that, and I think that's just my obsessive personality, and that's probably why I've done good in business and every venture that I've done.

Yeah, 100%.

And so I went over there and I, well, the whole intention was like, I need to talk to Bill. I need to know what he's doing. I need to know his numbers. Like I was, I'm one of those people like once I see it and hear it, it's game on. And so that's when he started, he started talking about his numbers and what he was doing. And I'm like, I look at my numbers and I look at his numbers and I'm like, dude, they're the same. But his are like, he's obviously he's doing it like $600,000 a day versus making $600,000 a day versus us. We're making like I don't know, like $10,000 or $20,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 a day or something like that. And I did the math. I'm like, oh, I get it now. Like, I understand why his numbers are so much bigger and faster than what we are. But I wouldn't have understood that had I not been there and heard him say it. And I had to grill him. I'm like, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. Anyway, so that led us into trying different vehicles at the time of this, you know, right now we tried a 2-day virtual event without a webinar, and it did okay. It did okay, I'll be honest with you. And, you know, it helped us cross past the $500,000 mark a month, um, in new business. Um, it brought us 22 additional sales for the $15K program, which helped us out on the front end. Um, but then all of a sudden, like, ads just took a dump because we went straight to we were going from free webinar registrants to now we're transitioning the, and this is something that like tactically for like Facebook people, we had to reshift a pixel. So we did like we trained a pixel.

Same pixel for—

Yeah. We used the same pixel. That was an issue that we didn't know we needed to fix. So we used the same pixel that we had used for an entire year to get free leads. And then we use that same pixel to try to learn for paid leads.

Yeah, that's a big no.

Just, yeah, it just went like, like everything went to garbage.

Yeah.

And so then we consulted with some guys, we changed the pixel thing and we're like, man, you know, we're sending 10,000 page hits a day to this thing and it's just like, we're not getting a lot of people. We're missing all these leads. And so we said, okay, instead of paying the $97 to attend this event, Why don't we just do a free challenge and do a VIP upsell and then just do a lower ticket of the $15,000 program? And here's the ninja thing. Here's the ninja thing we're going to do. So we're in that process right now. So we spent about $10 grand. We got about 330 people registered. We have about 150 showing up. We have a lot. We have pretty good. We have about 137 people show up.

That's good show for the $10 grand.

Yeah. Pretty good, pretty good. I mean, that was a combination of emails, text messages, ads. So it's a little mix, right? So it's not completely cold just yet. However, the front-end results of this 5-day challenge, we're able to do kind of like the combo loco of having the webinar, the webinar process plus the 2-day event without having to do freaking 8 to 10 hours a day. It's literally an hour a day and people are getting faster results.

Yeah.

You know? And so it's like a, almost like mind-melting. Like it's just like, what in the world? How are we supposed, how are we able to give big fast value in such a short timeframe? And it's almost like you can see it evolving into what could be. And so now here's the hypothesis to get us past, you know, $500,000 to $1 million a month or so. And so the idea here is that we sell them to the $2,500. Now we're going to sell a $2,500 to a $5,000 thing. 'Cause one thing I learned from Bill is that we were selling a $1,000 thing. He was selling a $5,000 thing.

5 times expensive. Yeah. 5 times more ad spend. Yeah.

Correct. And he was liquidating. For those of you guys that don't understand this, what I learned from Bill who was making $600,000 a day, he had something 5 times more expensive and it was taking us 45 days to bring back the same initial dollars.

Crazy.

We put the $1,000 in.

That's why it was so slow. Yeah, you get it.

So it was taking us 45 days to get that same dollar back and then multiplied. Him, he does it every 7 days.

Yeah, it's crazy.

So if you do that, if you do the math, right, just, just, just on math, not getting emotional about anything. And this is where my nerds with math, if you understand math, then you can win this game of business.

100%.

So if all I did was $660, which was about, let's just say 45. So 45 days, on average to get our money back multiplied, right? It took us about 45 days, and we divide that by 7, which is his time to get his money back. That's about 6 times faster. So he makes his money 6 times faster. And watch this, remember what I told you before? His number was 5 times greater than ours.

Yeah.

So now you do 5 times 6. He's moving at a rate of 30 times bigger than us. So if you think about— yeah, if you think about a car, he has a tire that's 5 times bigger than ours, and it revolves 6 times faster than ours. So the distance—

Of course he's gonna beat us.

Yeah. Right? And so the distance he's going is 30 times more for the same timeframes. If you guys get this, I'm telling you, ah, you guys listening to this, I don't, it took me a long time to hear this and really think about it. But Nick, if your people hear this, there's gonna be someone that's like, got it. You know what I mean? 'Cause that was me. I was like, got it. And so now we're doing the 5-day challenge and the hypothesis is, Okay, we went from selling a $997. Well, now we can liquidate if we do a $2,500 thing. Well, now we have 2 times bigger than we were before and we did in 5 days, which now we can compress both timeframes.

Hmm.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, totally does.

And so this is still a hypothesis. We're gonna test it, but that's our theory to get past a million a month. And then obviously now with the $2,500 ticket, we already know that our 2-day virtual event crushes, cranks out purchasers at $15,000. So guess what they're gonna get? The people that pay the $2,500 thing, they get a ticket to the virtual 2-day event.

Yeah.

Which is the next offer for the $15,000 thing. See what I mean? And so it's just building that, sticking that funnel together where it's like $2,500, then $15,000, then bring them in-house and sell them the next thing. And so then it becomes that linchpin is like $15,000, boom. And now it's a numbers game all throughout the throughput.

100%. Yeah. I mean, Love that. I'm so glad we talked about like the absolute meat. For some people who don't have a business, it might be going over the head. But for some people who are actually running ads, I'm sure they're taking notes. They're like saying that, ah, gotcha moments, right? So that's pretty incredible. Thank you so much. Now we kind of talked about the offer, the marketing piece, and like marketing systems, and also like a little bit of pixel tracking and how important it is. Can you talk a little bit more about, because I see this, everybody preaches about the marketing side, like go sell and everything will be fixed type of situation. But I believe, like I've seen hundreds of them, actually thousands of them. The number one reason most businesses fail is not because they have shitty marketing, but more likely they have a terrible, terrible fulfillment. Like most businesses I see fall off, they go up 3 months, 6 months, and then, you know, they kind of pace out and now they're like not doing it anymore or changed and came to a different offer. But you have been scaling this offer consistently in the last few years, and especially David himself, he's been in the game for so long. So can you give us a little playbook on like creating strong fulfillment systems, creating the culture you're creating where the community doesn't feel like they're being sold on? Like we were in FHL and you look at the inner circle community, like people are excited to pay Russell Brunson like $250 grand, like $50 grand or $100 grand to be in his programs. And that, that kind of vibe is not built, it's curated, like it's perfectly curated and it's executed well. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Okay. So This is something that I actually learned on accident, but because not because I didn't want to learn it, but I never had a reason to learn it until recently. Because, you know, as you scale up marketing, you're naturally, you're just going to spend more to acquire customers, just natural. And so the next layer of it is you have to what they call increase your LTV or your lifetime value. And this is where I was playing the game and I didn't understand the game I was playing. Until I was in it. And one thing that I realized I went to is there's a term called churn or client leaving ratio. And what I didn't realize was like, I was like, what the heck does that even mean? I didn't know anything about those things. I didn't know like, because I was a marketer, right? So I was just like more clients, more clients, more clients. But then at some point it just gets so expensive that now you have to get those same clients to go to the next level with you. Or stay in pain forever, right? And so then I went on this journey and the first thing that I did, you know, to help us was figuring out what our client leaving ratio was. And the very simple formula for this is figure out how many clients started with you. Let's say hypothetically this month I get 10 clients, okay? Of those 10 clients, in 3 months, how many of those same 10 clients are still with you? Okay, this is an easy math to figure this out. And if 3 out of the 10 left, that means that your churn is 30%. Okay, that means 30% of your clients will leave every 3 months, right?

Every quarter. Yeah, it's crazy.

If you just divide it, then you can figure out your monthly churn, right? And you can just— because the churn is always a moving number. It's never going to be stagnant. But it's always gonna be like a moving number that's always changing because you're always gonna be changing.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's a moving target. It's not like a set in stone thing. It's just a timeframe that you're gonna evaluate your numbers at. And I would just keep it. If you're gonna use a 3-month static or you're gonna use a 6-month static, just keep using that process because you're gonna find trend lines and that's how you're gonna be able to grow it. And so what I looked at and I identified that our monthly churn was about 7%. So meaning out of 100 clients we would get a year, we'd lose about, if we get 100 clients, we'd lose about 7% per month, right? So let's say 100 times, yeah, we lose about 40, what is that? 7 times 12?

No, a lot more than that.

Like, no, yeah, we lose 80% of our people.

More than that. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah, 84%. So we'd have to literally like, double our lead gen— like we'd have to double our sales just to stay with demand at that rate. And then, so I, so what I did is I implemented two things. Number one, I didn't know anything about a client success manager and I hired my first client success manager and I was the first client success manager to be fair. Then I hired the first person or we hired the first person and I had to train her. I didn't know how to train a team at that time. I didn't know how to train team because again, I was just, I knew how to make money. I just didn't know how, how to train others how to do what I did. So I had to train her, then our revenue retention, meaning our client leaving ratio, started to go down because she started to meet with their clients and help them out and all that stuff. And then right around early 2024, we hired our second CSM who, she had came from a background of CSM. She understood this. She understood this. And I didn't understand it. The person I was training didn't understand it as well. And so she came in and kind of just like told us like, this is what needs to happen, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And so we started tracking it and, you know, she started increasing, helping us with churn and actually client ascension and retention. Like meaning just her alone, she produced over $300,000 in, oh no, actually $373,000 at the time, you know, in the last 9 months by herself in new revenue.

Insane, dude. That's crazy.

It's insane. Like, You know, she came in and kind of just changed the game as far as like we were just selling one thing and then she was getting these people to resell and rebuy. And I'm like, what the heck? And to the tune of like, it's an additional, in the last 9 months, she added an additional $750,000 in new revenue from our current clients.

That is insane. Imagine how much amount of advertising spend needs to go into ads or some crazy marketing to get similar revenue added. It's crazy. 100%.

So that was the first key pillar. Well, actually before that, okay, I had to, I had to about take about 3 to 6 months to actually make the product good. Meaning before we brought on a CSM, all the product was me and David. So it was just like calls with me and him, always, always just calls, calls, calls all the time. And it was just me and him delivery, delivery, delivery. And so what we had to do is we had to systematize delivery. So meaning the delivery had to be the same every time because if I brought these people on and there was always me, the bottleneck, or me that has to be the thing, then it would never grow past me 'cause it would always go from her to me, from them to me, or from them to David, from them to, right? And so what we did was we created a course, a module, and so everyone followed the same frameworks. So it's the same core curriculum and the same process every single time, independent of who they are. Okay, that was step number 1. Step number 2 was bring on the CSM have them have some core KPIs, right? Retention being one, which is like get them to stay and pay. Engagement being two, which is like make sure you talk to them so that they can stay and pay. And then what we did was probably about 4 months ago, 5 months ago, I realized there's another concept called activation points. I didn't know that, right? And an activation point, think about it like this. So when you're, and I was a personal trainer. So this is something that always caught my attention. So when I was working out for the first time in my life, the first benchmark that I wanted for bench press was 135 pounds. That was like the, oh, you know, for like someone like the moment for you. Yeah, exactly. You have that big round plate that you put on both sides. That's where your first round is. And then your second round is, can I put a big plate and 25 plate on each side? That's your 185. Boom, you got that sucker out there. And then the next one is, can you put 2 plates on each side? And boom, that's your next big achievement. And then you put 2 plates and 2 25s on each side, now it's 275. And boom, now you can knock that out. And then your last one, right before you get to that next level where everybody's like the peak of the peak, is the 3 plates on each side, 315, right? And every pillar, it's a milestone, or otherwise known as activation point. Like everything up to that So like in business, everybody wants to hit their first $10K a month. That's their first pillar. Then their first $100K a month, then their first $500,000 a year, then their first million. Then the people that are doing a million wanna do 5, and then people that are doing 5 wanna do 10, right? And then people that do 10 wanna go to 100, right? And so that's kind of like the natural ascension of like people's thought patterns. And so I realized that. And so what we found was that everyone that started to win with us meaning they made $1 million in their first year with us, they had the same core things that they did. And we realized, we were like, oh shoot. So here's what we do. So we used to have onboarding a certain way, but now we pulled an activation point from like maybe 6, maybe like 45 days, right? It was 45 days to get their first value from us because we need all the setup and all that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we were like, okay, so we pulled what it took it 45 days and we said, let's do it within 7 days. And so we took that 45 days and we said, okay, instead of them getting a customer in 45 days after all the setup, doesn't matter about all the setup, all the scripts, all the CRMs, none of that matters. If all we did was get them to send this one email within 3 days, they will get their first customer.

Yep.

For $2,500. And then they will believe us to do all the other stuff.

Ascension can go, yeah, through high.

And now they believe. And that's all we needed them to believe, that this thing could work for them too. And so now that's the core thing that they do as soon as they sign up. Boom, you have to send this email. If you don't send this email, we can't honor our agreement. See what I mean? And now I have an agreement that outlines this is the core thing you need to do. Then we have them do ads within, you know, about a 14-day window or maybe closer to like 45 days depending on how fast they can send stuff. But that helped us right there. I'll tell you this, Nick, we were struggling to get past 100 active clients. We're at 137 right now. And in this year we onboarded 71 new clients at $15K and we've only lost one.

Geez, that's incredible. Incredible. Like very big, big jump in the, you know, improvement on churn. That's pretty cool.

So I'll tell you what that number looks like. It's less than 1% monthly.

That's like SaaS. Now you're talking like a software company from a consulting company.

Even lower than SaaS 'cause average SaaS is like 3 to 5%. monthly.

Correct. Yeah.

And for us, at least for now, it's less than 1% per month, which means—

It's looking good.

Money stays in the account for us, which means we have more spending power for marketing.

Yep. You don't care if the ads get doubly expensive because now your lifetime value goes quadruple because your clients are staying longer. Wow. That's something to really think about. Daniel, that was so—

That part's hard mentally to understand because nobody, If you're a marketer, it doesn't make sense to you.

Just spend more.

It doesn't really make sense. Yeah, exactly.

Just spend more and fix things, but that's not how it works overall. Appreciate you sharing that. Do you have a scheduling conflict or can we go like 15 minutes over? I have a bunch of more questions.

Yeah, I think we're good.

Okay.

Oh, actually, hold on. I think I have a scheduling conflict at 2:30. Yeah, I do have a call right now in 1 minute.

Yeah, I do have a scheduling conflict. Okay, no worries. Let's wrap it up. So once again, guys, hopefully you enjoyed the podcast today. And Daniel, thank you so much for jumping on and sharing the meats and bones and potatoes of what it actually takes to build a multi, multi-million dollar business. And thank you for sharing behind the scenes numbers and giving us literally a clear playbook on building a multi-zone for your business. Appreciate you jumping on. And guys, thank you so much for jumping in. Share this with any other info friend, coaching friend, any person who sells business to business, ideally through paid ads. This is going to be a game-changing note-taking session for them. And I'll be back with Daniel or any other amazing guests just him on this show once again. And thank you so much for tuning in to The Nikhil Sai. Bye for now.

See ya. Yep.