Case Study: Building a 400k/mo Content Agency

All right, what's up everybody? I got a Reeve here who is in Client Ascension and like Olympia now, right? And he just hit $400,000 in a single month. So I got him on here, we're gonna talk about how we reached there because he's been with us for a while. So he's gonna talk about like the whole journey and like everything, how exactly he's making $400,000 a month. Now, just as a quick disclaimer, if you work with me, I'm not promising you're gonna make $400,000 in a single month. Like, the probability you get any results at all is extremely low because most people don't get any results doing anything in life at all. To get magnificent results, you need to be a particularly magnificent person. Just throwing that as a disclaimer. However, Areeb here was in fact able to, and he's going to talk about exactly how. So Areeb, thank you for coming on, bro.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So I joined Client Ascension originally in 2024, and at that point I was already doing $28K to $30K. And how I got there was just by brute force, man, because we own a content agency. I have like 2 physical location studios, like one in Houston, one in Dallas. And it was just straight up a grind, like 16, 18 hours a day saying yes to every single deal. That's how I got to $30K. And I didn't see myself going past that $30K point because I was like, bro, how the fuck do I do that? I don't have any hours left. That's where I pretty much joined Client Ascension. Of course, watched some of your videos. I think I found you on a podcast specifically at first. I just liked the energy. I was like, okay, this guy is cool. Let me kind of like just apply for his program, see how it goes from there. The main thing that kind of like stuck out to me right away was how organized the program was. So of course you have kind of like weekly calls, you have like a sales call specifically, and by competent people, these aren't just like, you know, some Fiverr idiots. These are like $100K coaches. Every single person is just pretty much competent in their field. You have Andre for operations, you had like Jacob for sales. There was a lot of other coaches you can pretty much tap into at any time you want. So from from the $30K mark to let's say even $70K mark, it was just streamlining a lot of things. Like I had to bring myself out of fulfillment because at that point I had a lot of trust issues. So Andre from operations was pretty much, you know, able to give me that confidence like, hey, go out, hire people, train them properly, and then bring yourself out of fulfillment so you can of course put yourself more on the marketing and sales side of things. And of course on the marketing side of things, this is where of course Daniel, you helped a lot too. Pretty much kind of like streamline the offer because my offer was very vague. I didn't like using a guarantee. I was very scared still. You were like, Arif, just don't worry about that. Just use a specific offer, do this shit because it works. And I just kind of like trusted you that. That's how we pretty much originally got to that $70K mark. Nice.

Good stuff. And walk us through how exactly you're getting clients on all of these levels when you were first starting out and then you hit the $70K mark and then from like $70K to $400K a month. Like, what was the client acquisition methods along the whole way?

Yeah, so I've been doing ads pretty much forever and that's kind of like one of the reasons, main reasons I joined Olympia as well, because especially within the Houston market, I've been running ads for so long, I'm still kind of like known, like I still get recognized a lot of times too. So I'm like, okay, there's definitely something I'm doing incorrectly here because I could be making a lot more money. So at First I did like Instagram profile visit ads. And then I was still lucking out on those too because like, you know, there was just a lot of people following. I would just DM everybody, get them onto a book call and just kind of like try to close them from there. So that's why I had kind of like rapid success on Olympia because I already knew kind of like how the call went, how the sales process went. 'Cause I'm very used to pretty much speaking to people who have never heard of me before.

Mm-hmm.

So that's pretty much what I did. It was just like ads all the time, just investing a lot of money. I mean, even the business in general, man, like I started this business with like $1,200 in my bank account and I put all that, every single penny into ads and I converted that into more money. So that's how pretty much like my business started.

Ads all the way through the entire way. What are the numbers that you see in that? What is your CAC?

So CAC right now, so we have 3 different markets that we offer to, and this is something of course we'll speak about too. So one of them, of course, is the Houston local market, Dallas local market, and the US local market. So we have 3 different CACs pretty much across all different markets. Overall, the average is around $2,500. So US one is a little higher, it's like $3,000 plus. The Dallas one is around $2,500 and the Houston was like $1,500. So we're now focusing more on the local markets because the CAC is way lower there. So the profit is just much higher.

Could you explain explain the offer stack of like how this works. So like how is the Dallas offer different from the Houston offer, different from the national?

Yeah, it's the same offer, but just the local element helps a lot too. Because of course with the marketing services, there's just a shit ton of competitions. There's just like every person just getting born every single day with a marketing agency. So of course when it comes to the entire US market, people are just speaking to 20 different agencies and the competition is much higher. The sales cycle is just logically much higher. It is definitely more scalable, but in the Houston and Dallas market, since we already have physical locations, people can just walk up to us, shake some hands, you know, just come to a video and they can actually meet people. So the closing became a lot more simpler. And then of course we could charge more for it too. And then on top of that, the LTV was much higher because it is local. And the LTV part was like, okay, so this just makes sense. Because if an average customer is staying with us for like 8 months in Houston and Dallas, we just have to kind of like keep scaling this. So the offer across the board, to answer your question, is pretty much the same. It's just done-for-you content services, 1 million views in 90 days. That's what we pretty much started with.

In terms of the deliverables that are different for the national market, like someone in Tampa, Florida buys the done-for-you content offer. So they have to film themselves or like, how does that work?

So we do kind of like a Riverside setup for what we're doing right now, but we have like directors who would pretty much log in with them. We'll have the scripts. We can literally put in this software, you can literally put scripts in front of you and all they have to do is just perform the scripts. And then the Riverside automatically uploads that content into the cloud. The editor gets that footage, we edit it, publish it. So we pretty much help them set the entire thing up as well. So we literally tell them like, hey, anywhere you are in the world, all you need is pretty much an iPhone to create the content, have a tripod, have a ring light ready, and we pretty much take care of the rest.

Is it just you Are you closing right now or do you have a team of closers?

It's me still. I'm a psycho, I just like sales. That's why I'm still on the calendar. And I have 3 other closers, so it's 4 people in total.

Was it Dan inside of Olympia who was helping you build that sales team or like the construction, like the sales process of all that? Like how did that work out in terms of like getting your first closers and like how was that built?

When I joined Olympia at the $70K mark, that's when everything kind of like took a step further because I desperately of course needed help with sales 'cause I have no idea how to build a sales team. Of course closing a deal yourself and actually building a sales team is completely different. So remember of course coming to the events, you know, seeing Dan's presentations, doing multiple one-on-ones with Dan as well, which is something you get in Olympia, which is extremely valuable, where we can just walk through specifically for my specific offer, how to build a sales team and what exactly to do to pretty much kind of like ramp this up. So Dan helped me pretty much kind of like build the initial sales team and gave me advice on what to do and what not to do. Because at first I hired some sales guy who, yes, he was able to pretty much build the systems and actually have some closers ready. But Dan was like, "Yeah, Reeve, you have to do this in-house." And I pretty much listened to that advice and it saved me a lot of dollars and of course a lot of time as well. So Dan pretty which helped me step by step building that sales team, which is making us more money now by definition.

Yeah, good stuff. How were we able to help you on the funnels and ad side?

Yeah, so on the funnels and ad side, I think the immediate effect that we saw was we just need to double down on the VSL call funnel. In our one-on-ones and of course the calls that we do, you were like, Areeb, just this is what we're testing with Liskit. We're testing opt-in, we're testing just book a call, application, book a call, and then of course just do the actual call. So we just started doing the same thing too. Like I don't necessarily like asking questions on stuff I'm not necessarily super educated in. I'm going to do it first, I'm going to test it out. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, then I'm going to test something else out. So I properly tested the opt-in stuff first and it worked pretty well. We were getting a lot of leads. I also hired setters because going back to Dan, he said, "Hey, you need to have setters as well to maximize every single lead." So we just followed the process from A to Z and that's where we pretty much saw the growth. And then of course on top of that, of course we had one-on-ones as well. You saw the funnel, you saw how the offer was, you saw the numbers. One call, of course, I think I remember which was extremely valuable. I don't even know if you remember this. I was spending around $100 a day at that point and I was tracking every single thing on a Google Sheet. And then I got on a call and you were just like, "Areeb, what the fuck are you doing? Just get high rolls. Like, you're making money, just get high rolls." And I was like, "I don't know, $200, $300." And then after that call, I just got high rolls and I just hit some—

He said he just don't have to do any of that anymore.

Yeah, you were just annoyed. You're like, "Why are you doing this?" I can't tell you anything. We're looking at these numbers.

So how did Andre help you build the ops and fulfillment side of this business? Because I mean, making $400,000 a month, it's a pretty significant amount of clients to be concurrently working with. So like, how is that all working out for you?

I feel like Andre such an unutilized person within the program. But operations, especially at $400 grand, like is extremely important because you can get customers, but keeping customers and of course making sure that, you know, you're getting the most out of that customer is also extremely important. But you can't do that if your operations is messed up. So I think two of the things that come to the top of my head where he immediately pretty much suggested was one, the pod structure we were previously running at like $150K-ish was just set up incorrectly because we had like one person managing like a team of like 25 different individuals and we were running pods completely inefficiently, meaning like every single pod needed to have its own videographer, needed to have its own client success person, need to have kind of like their own set of account managers, editors. So I remember on my one-on-one call with Dan, with Andre, he basically said, "Areeb, this is too many people for one person to manage." We just kind of like broke down by bits. So instead of having one pod with one client success person, one videographer, we made teams of departments. So client success has its own team, videographers have its own team because everyone has different capacities. So let's say one pod's capacity is like 75 clients, but one client success person could take 90 clients, but we're just limiting ourselves and just spending more money on this person. So just stretching the pods and making sure people have proper capacity so they can perform to its max was super helpful. Another thing he recently helped us with, which is increasing our quality of the staff more, is we were hiring an account manager for every 5 to 6 accounts. And then he was basically like, "Areeb, at your scale that you want to go to, you're basically going to be signing like 10 account managers every single month." So he was like, "Figure out how they can do more work and then give them at least 10 accounts per account manager so you can hire less and focus more on the quality of the account manager." And that's exactly what we did. And then it was just a game changer. Clients are more happy, everything's just kind running more smoothly as well.

If you had to take maybe like 2 or 3 kind of like core ideas or implementations that you learned working with us that got you to more than 10x your company, what would you say those 2 or 3 things are? If you could just think of something off the top of your head, like everything just started working so much better when I just did this.

I don't think I've ever been in a position where I'm like, I was just such an idiot of not doing this earlier because the entire premise of, let's say, just being in CA for like as long as I've been in Olympia is I want to know what the people who have already achieved done and how can I just follow the footsteps steps they've taken, the input lag was always pretty low. For example, the latest call, you were like, hey, Arif, I'm trying out Manas's website. And then I was like, okay, how did you build it? You were like, I did XYZ. I just went in the next day, made like 3 versions of it and just started testing those out. So I think the main thing is like just taking action like as fast as humanly possible and then actually spending some money. These 2 are kind of like the most important part because on the ad side of things, if I was still scared, if I didn't necessarily spend the money I needed to spend on advertising, I can't necessarily get the numbers I need to see what works at scale. And if I didn't sign up a lot of clients and break my operations, I don't know what's wrong with the company, so I can't necessarily fix it. So I think just getting the speed to information on like, okay, something's wrong, how do I fix it? And just having access to those expert coaches to kind of like solve that issue, that was extremely valuable. And number 2 was just actually doing the work yourself as well. Those are kind of the most important things.

A lot of people have an issue with just they're too slow to do anything. They just keep doing what they've already been doing. It is 100% of the time just more efficient to copy what somebody who is already getting results is actively doing and just do that. And it's really not more complicated than that.

When I came here at $30K a month, like I'm not going to question somebody making like $500K a month. So I'm not going to be like, no, why should I do that? I'm like, just do it, bro. Like, it's just, you're making $30K a month.

If you had to give a piece of advice to somebody who's kind of just starting out, maybe they're running a $30K a month agency like you were, is there any like core piece of advice that you would give to somebody who's trying to reach $400,000 a month like you?

Number one is like, if you start making some money, don't go to Bali and fuck off. Like, that's just not a good thing. To get to $400K a month, and of course we're still trying to get to bigger numbers, you keep having to find unlocks, I think. So at $30K a month, I thought that $100K $100K a month mark was kind of like the end-all be-all. But then as soon as I got to the $100K a month, I was like, okay, this is just kind of like the starting point. Like $100K a month is actually brokey numbers. Like it's nothing because at $100K point you have to then invest a shit ton of more money into getting the staff you want that can get you to the next level. And of course advertising spend needs to be equally as important to get more clients in the door. So if someone's at the $30K a month mark and want to get to $100K, is first, if you're watching this video, just join Olympia because you're going to get one-on-one support with these guys, which is kind of like the main thing you want to do. Number 2 is whatever is laid out for you by the coaches, follow that step by step. Don't question it, like, because these people have already done it. So you just have to kind of like follow it step by step, ABC, however it's laid out. And then from there, you just need to be kind of like diligent enough to understand where your business needs to improve and actually do strategy sessions yourself on a piece of paper on which departments to improve and kind of like get help on those specific departments. Because that's what I did. Because it's not necessarily always sales and marketing, because I knew operations and sales needed help as well. So I just had everything written down on a piece of paper, went to Andre, went to Dan, get specific help and improve those simultaneously.

And just knowing what the actual bottleneck is. Like, this is my problem. This is the problem I need to solve and not like dilly-dallying and screwing around with other irrelevant shit all the time, which is what people do. Do I have a problem with my offer? Do I need to change my offer? It's literally nothing to do with the offer at all.

Yeah.

All right, bro. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you. For everybody watching this, I'm going to leave links to Areeb's stuff in the description. You can connect with him. And if you want to join Olympia or Client Sentience/AI Assistant Agency, that'll also be in the description. Thanks for coming, bro.

Appreciate it. Absolutely. You take care, man.