In this episode of the GTM podcast, host Charles Cormier interviews agency growth specialist Trevor Longino. The conversation centers on three core systems needed to scale an agency: repeatable execution, systematized sales, and customer retention. Trevor explains his unique "go‑to‑market with a guarantee" offering, describing how the guarantee works, the pricing keystone ($3 M valuation increase) and why he believes it isn’t a scam. They discuss how to train a team to execute without the founder’s oversight, and how to replace founder‑driven sales with a scripted, repeatable sales process. Trevor shares his "crowd tamers" sales script, the steps for qualifying prospects, and the importance of a pricing keystone to frame value. Charles then presents a draft pitch deck for an affiliate‑focused service that leverages a "podcast flywheel" – 75 podcast interviews per week, 10 k interviews per year – as a lead‑generation engine. They walk through the tech stack (multiple email accounts, light‑signature plug, AR function, AI tools) and the cold‑email campaign workflow, and Trevor provides candid feedback on narrative repetition, visual design, and the need for clearer ROI metrics. Personal anecdotes pepper the discussion: jokes about Charles running an agency from "jail," their supplement sponsorship, sleep habits, intense workout routines, and recent health setbacks. Trevor shares his agency’s recent financial trajectory (declining months, a July $60 k rebound, August illness, September $45‑60 k run rate) and how his team has stayed intact despite challenges. They also touch on team dynamics, the difficulty of caring for clients versus solving problems, and a brief side‑conversation about autism and mastermind groups. The episode ends with plans to rename the podcast and a light‑hearted sign‑off. Key takeaways: (1) Scale agencies by systematizing execution, sales, and retention; (2) A guarantee can be a differentiator if backed by a clear valuation‑based pricing keystone; (3) A high‑volume podcast can fuel a cold‑email flywheel, but the pitch deck needs tighter storytelling and ROI proof; (4) Team stability and transparent financial reporting are crucial during downturns; (5) Personal health and lifestyle choices impact founder performance.
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Welcome to another GTM pod with friend Trevor Longino. And I am Charles Cormier. Trev, quick intro and get into the juice right there.
Sure. I build million dollar marketing engines. I've done it 15 times, taken a start from zero to more than 3 million annual recurring revenue. Now I run crowd tamers and we've launched several dozens. Trev's million dollar marketing engine. I'm the only agency in the world I know of that offers go to market with a guarantee. So that's me.
And that. That's a scam, would say Benny, that's.
Ah man, why you gotta say that? Not a scam. I've yet to ever have to give my money back. Not that I refuse to do it. I've yet to have someone ask for it. So anyhow, it's a sequence safe guarantee when nobody exercises it. So what I want to talk to you about here, Charles, is. Is you. You run agency. I run agency. A bunch of people you talk to own and run.
I run mine from jail.
You ready? Yours from what looks like a jail cell today. Hey, look, my bookshelf. That's been fake for years.
That also looks like a jail by the way.
It does a bit. It does a bit. I've got. I've got one 2x4 up. I've begun construction.
All right. The point. Sorry to interrupt.
No worries, no worries. So I've been identifying what it was I needed to systematize and operationalize. Those are both terrible words to make it more of a business and less of. I have a job that owns me. So the first one is your agency work needs to be small enough and repeatable enough that you can train people to do the work without you watching over it. One thing that's important to remember when you are building a team to do your work in an agency is 80% as good as you, but you didn't have to do it is 100% better than if you had to do it yourself. So I think everybody in my team, they're all very good at what they do. Of course I have an ego. I imagine I'd be better than them at their work. Even though odds are by now probably I'm not. But regardless, I recently said to my team like a couple weeks ago, look, don't pass stuff to me for approval anymore. Just send to the client. Because what I'm doing is making stylistic changes that the client may not care about. Right. Let the client see if the client thinks it's good, cool. If the client bounces it back because we were just completely wrong. Then loop me in. I'll see if I can offer clarity. But if it's just, you know, here's some revisions and stuff, don't even, don't involve me, just do it. So almost all of the execution now in my team, because we do, we really do one thing, we build million dollar engines and we do it. I mean I've got 11 clients right now. We're doing it for. Right. That's what everyone wakes up in the morning, sits down and does. And each person has their role. My writer, my designer, my, my developer. Like they all tackle their piece of this. My media buyer, all these people so they don't have to wonder how do I do my part of the big task. It's all broken out. They all know what it is. They've all been doing it for more than a year. It just goes right. Excellent. The second loop you have to have is sales must happen without you. And one way that this must happen for any agency owner. I've been making this transition. My sales always used to be very consultative. It would be. Let's look at your messaging, let's look at your website, let's look at your ads. Let me see what you're doing. This is how I would tackle changing it. This is why you'd want to bring me in. This is the approach I would bring to it. Maybe you would find that valuable and it works pretty well. But it requires you've been doing marketing for more than a decade to be able to sell it and that you're fast enough on your feet to see a problem, identify a fix, explain it clearly enough for somebody who's not a marketer to understand and then convince them to buy. That's not very trainable. The way I'm selling more and more now is. And this probably won't be a like a revelation to you, Charles, I think you're better at sales than I am. But the crowd tamers grow to market system is a series of steps. The series of step works. The series of steps has worked dozens of times. You talk to somebody and you identify. Look, here's the. The three common areas a startup struggles to bring in business. Which one is you? Awesome. Crowd tamer solves those. Here's the process. We solve them by not looking at your website, not talking about what you're doing. Just here. Is our engine right? Would you find this engine valuable in your business? Yes, I would. Do you know what this engine is worth for your business? Oh, I don't know. What is it Worth? Well, if I'm building a million dollar engine, it's worth $3 million, right? That's the company valuation increase of a million dollars in ARR. I've just set a keystone of $3 million for the value of working with crowd tamers. Now any price I mentioned that's less than that sounds like a bargain. You're just gonna straight up drug out in the middle of a call. Cool, dude, I'm waiting to see you crush the pills.
And this episode has been sponsored by magnesium complex.
Did you just dry swallow that?
No. With coffee.
Okay.
Yeah, at least I. I did an ultra hit of. I want your comments on that for the point number three. 2100 jump squats, 1100 push ups and 600 jack knives. I told you that yesterday. But you see how my brain is. It doesn't even remember is like.
Yeah. After that kind of exertion. Yeah, your brain's just dumping everything. It sounds horrible. That's my thoughts on this in one sentence.
Yeah. Okay.
I did the 21k that you bought for me right back in April or May. Whenever I did that, that was fine. Like I was sore for a day or two afterwards. Whatever. That's a whole different level of wtf, mate.
You need like major magnesium to recover from that. I'm surprised though, because I think I already did a version of it and I wasn't that destroyed. But I'm sleeping way less nowadays. Shout out to you for the. The tips on that.
I just had a conversation two weeks ago with somebody who's like, trevor, if you're sleeping less than seven hours a night, you're killing yourself. And I'm like, well, on a good night, I average five. He's like, you're killing yourself. You're gonna die. Like, I've been this way for a decade anyway.
Your physiognomy, I guess, you know, and what you got your brain used to. And some people also need to calculate in there that awake hours might be fun for someone. You know, it's living more time and quality of life might be better than not, you know, and sleeping. If your life sucks. Yeah, spend it sleeping. If it doesn't, well, spend it away.
Hey, if your life sucks, sleep more. There, there's a. There's a pro tip. You're just skipping forward through the cutscene. Okay, so anyway, three systems, right? So first one is work is done. The second one is sales gets done. You have to systematize the sales. The sales needs to be packaged up where I'm still validating that my Script works, right? I'm trying to be very disciplined about using this script, explaining the process, setting the keystone, and then naming the actual price and that. I mean, I had a new client on board yesterday on that package. Very easy sell. Right. When I find the right client, they go, yes, this makes sense. And away we go. Once I've sold, you know, eight or ten packages like this and the script is very solid, that's when I can say, great, I'm going to find somebody who's 25 in an economy that's more affordable than Canada and say, hey, how many calls can I book with this person with the qualified lead every week? And if they don't close, but half of the calls that I would have closed, but I 5x their volume, I'm still way up. Right. So that has to be systematized. And the last part is customer retention has to be systematized. And so my agency, right now, my team is doing the work, I'm doing the sales. No one's paying attention to customer retention. My customer retention numbers are awful. My average client life cycle right now is maybe six months. Right. That's. That's just terrible for an agency.
I mean, that's better than 90% of agencies out there.
Maybe, but I'd argue it's not better than the ones that stick around for more than three years. Right. Like, most agencies fail pretty fast.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to take eight minutes of this call to give you a presentation and you give me feedback on it. It's very early, so it'll be perfect for. For you to give me feedback and it also will show you, like, what I'm on to nowadays. So this is a presentation that I give for an affiliate group yesterday, by the way, this is not my niche, so I modified my actual product to affiliate. So I Go podcast flywheel 75 pod interviews per week. You can comment on the aesthetics as well. It's. It's really crappy. It's bare bones. Still, I did a good job yesterday, mostly because of my words True called email. Right. And that's what your calendar would look like. My podcast get 100k CEO views per month. CEO salary is 426kvs. $426 for TikTok users on a yearly basis. My goal, I'm known as a guy that wants to interview 10,000 cos a year, and I interview 15 cos a day. I was inspired to do that by Peter roas that did 5,000 posts in a couple years and hit the 10k mark. I think interviewed him on my podcast. CEO and founder of Engadget Gizmodo and now product manager at Facebook messenger insta dms@mea. So that's like authority I guess. About my podcast, I interviewed more than thousand CEOs including John Lee Dumas, Andrew Warner. This is what your calendar could look like. This is my tech stack. Then I get into like what each do. This is what a campaign looks like. Final product, you know with the open rate and the reply rate. This is the setup. Super Easy Light Signature Plug 5 mailbox per account and I have 5 per ball accounts. I have a bunch basically I have 50 and unsubscribe link. The copywriting looks like this. It is super simple. People over complicate things and I started using the AR function. More on that later. It's about product market fit. So having a great product offering, having a great niche and then you get product market fit and again it looks like this and it looks like that and then you add a backend to this whole thing with community newsletter, LinkedIn post remarketing. Then I included affiliate because it was an affiliate conference. Looks like this. Some of my posts, my newsletter, my new annoying newsletter, the views that I get on LinkedIn, the numbers of followers and yeah, their titles. Then I go with a couple of AI tools, talk about AI affiliate stuff, affiliate specific stuff. Tell them about my service, tell them I'm overbooked and unsubscribed. Tell them that I get these every now and then. And that's a real answer. That's a real one. I got like last Thursday actually. But I rather get one offs for 10 solid meetings and look like subscribe.
That's the cold email game.
Yeah. What do you think about this?
All right. It's a bit repetitive. I, I think.
Well that's on, that's on purpose by the way. This slide here. Just saying it's like coming back constantly to something I want them to remember. The only caveat to this is that some people might give them anxiety and not like that.
Honestly to me that's a huge turn off. But that's, that's fine. I'm not your customer for this. Right. I would never want like I, I fight now to try and keep two days with maybe one meeting at most so that I can do work during those days. Right?
Yeah.
And I'm also deliberately like my Mondays now I try and have pretty light on work just so I can have a, a day to get my head together and be a little more intense about the rest of the week. So, like, what you're talking about to me sounds like if I were to do a line of cocaine every morning and then start my day, like, let's freaking go, maybe that would appeal to me. But that's not my lifestyle. Right. So that's fine for your brain.
Your brain. Yeah.
That's not my brain. That's fine. I'm not your ideal customer for this. I don't have to be. I do think the story. I do very much like the idea that my podcast system fills your calendar like this. Boom. Right now, there are two things I would modify here. One is I would 100% be fine with getting a very personable human in my company who is able to pick four topics that I think really matter to the company, talk about them, and then fill up their calendar with this much discussion and this kind of reach. Right. Like, if that's a possible thing to do, I might be game to do that. But I think most CEOs you talk to, almost all these meetings you're showing here are they're interviews. Right?
They're.
They're not.
No. 50. 50. Yeah.
Okay.
Well, regardless, five to ten leads. Leads per day. Real ones, you know, like, not. Yeah, but I think it's not fair to say that. That they would be second tier because I get folks that are. Yeah. Like, big buyers that I would never get to speak to, ever.
Yes. That's the power of that podcast, is they'll come on your podcast when they wouldn't do a cold pitch. I completely get that. The problem is most CEOs want to spend even half of a day doing this sort of interview thing. Right. So I think you need to find an answer to that. The other thing I do like is when you show your tech stack slide, there's a bunch of moving parts here, and you don't even have to show me how all this works. I look at this and I go, I'm never going to learn all these things. Right? Like, I mean, I know that Namecheap and cPanel are all like a web host, and then Calendly and Google Calendar are very similar, sort of. And then Set grid and Apollo IUIO. Like, I see how this all dovetailed together. I know enough. But I would still go like, I'm never going to build this. Right. So I like that you say, look how complex it is to make it as simple as your calendar is full of folks who want to interview you. I get that. But I would still want to see, you know, the comparison. Right. This is the tech stack. It Puts together. But this is what you see when you work with us, which might just be like, here's your email inbox. Right. Something. Show me the flip side. Other than that, I mean, yeah, design could use some work. This is all impact font, black and white. The narrative reiterates a bunch of times. I think you can smooth that story out. I would start with, you know me well enough, I begin with a outrageous claim. Something like, if I booked you five top quality CEO interviews a week, your business would make $2 million more next year. Like something like that begins with. Very few people are going to turn down $2 million more next year. Right.
Yeah. So story as well, I think, you know, like how why did I decided to start that one note that I've taken listening to you here is that, you know, this may seem like work, but this is cash right there. You can imagine that every name has, you know, one 5k dollar tag too. And the 10% conversion rate. Well, the.
Yeah. The other thing I would want to see here then is like, give me a second slide of this and just highlight every single name on that calendar that closed. If you show me, boom, these calls, boom, this many closed, boom. This much revenue. Like, then I get it. Okay. This is a numbers game. And show me how I make money with this calendar.
Bank account, I'll call it. Yeah, this is like a bank account to me.
Yeah. So like something there. And I think you've got like this pitch works. It wouldn't work for me. I don't want to talk to people that much. I'm not that friendly. But some people love talking to people and this would be their perfect day. Particularly folks who are running. Like many sales and marketing agency owners, they're way more people focused than I am working with my sales coach. Recently we really unearthed the fact that I don't give a shit about my clients. I care about the problems that they have. Right. I want to fix their marketing. That's what makes me interested in their business. Them as people I don't care about. And my sales coach is like, you need to pretend, Trevor. You need to pretend you care about them. And I'm like, but I don't. They would just shut up. We can get to fixing the problem, which is why they're talking to me anyway. He's like, no, Trevor, they. You got to make the connection. I'm like, the connection.
So autistic. We're just a bunch of artists except Johnny and Talal on this mastermind.
I don't know if you heard Johnny's like, I'm getting out of the agency business.
Huh?
Johnny's getting out of running an agency, so the only non autistic person in the bunch. And he's like, hey, I'm just gonna do software sales. It makes more money.
Is not. Well, yeah, it's a bit out there too, but he's calm.
He's like, yeah, I'd say out of all of us, Talal's the one tall. And Johnny, you look at, you go, oh, these are normal humans.
Oh, my God, this is funny. Maybe I should call it the autistic Mastermind and be and get canceled.
No, no, you would get so canceled.
Yeah, well, I mean, I could get canceled from these comments today, but I. I am studying autism, and this is the brain behaving in an odd way. The difference, though, in our case, I. Well, I'm not sure. I was always somewhat weird, but I have recently taught myself to be even weirder lately.
Oh, good. Yes. Foster the insanity.
Yes. What about your agency? Like, are you still afloat? Are you still a happy pirate hunting for more pirates? Or are you being hunted down?
So I think I've talked about this before. A bunch of places, maybe not with you. From October to June, October last year, June of this year, every month, I earned less month than the month before.
Yeah, yeah, he told me that.
And July, I turned it around. July, I did about 60k. That's not bad.
Yeah.
August, I had a strep infection in my knee, which I didn't know you could have that, but. So I was sick. I was basically sleeping, like.
And you didn't buy my Total Defense supplement, which I rebought yesterday and asked my parents to ship once they come to my wedding here in two weeks.
Oh, master club. I didn't know you were getting married.
Yeah, thanks. But buy that supplement. It's serious. I'm not saying it will prevent streps, but it will definitely strengthen your immune system, but yeah, okay,
because August was. I was sick all of August. I made about 12K in August. In September here, I'm already at, like, 45, right. And today's the 20th, so I might well break 60 before the end of the month. So, like, turned around. The offer I'm doing is working and
back on track, man.
Yeah. And credit to my team because they were like, I share all our numbers and everything. So they've been watching the. The company slowly all go into the ground, and I. No one's quit. Everyone's still there. They've all been with me the whole time, like, I have.
I just watching cos praise their humans just to boost them their own esteem and their esteem up while knowing this is leading to an abyss sooner or later.
I mean, I don't. I was honest with them. Look, things are looking grim and I'm like, I'm hoping we'll make it through.
Oh, but I mean that humans are not scalable and I'm pretty. You know that. You know, like. But I mean you're. You're short term convincing yourself of the other way around. But I know that at least you're not hiring more like. Yeah,
yeah, stop. Stop the, the bleeding there. I am not yet hiring again. If this sales engine I'm building works reliably, I will have to because they'll end up building up more business.
Let's call this podcast that the Cancel Agency Pod or something like that. That'd be. That'd be a better title. Anyway, let's run. Yeah, let's. Let's run, man. Charles Cormier. Charlescoming.com Toplis Agency, podbuyer.com and
yeah, and crowdtamers.com find me. As I said, I build million dollar marketing engines guaranteed. Go to crowdtamers. Com. Click the big green let's chat button. Don't talk to me.
