Case Study: How Raphael Hit $50,000/mo with his Content Agency inside Client Ascension

What's up everybody? Got my boy Raphael here and he's in Client Ascension. Good. Sir, thank you for coming on. Could you let everybody know in the audience, what do you sell and how much money did you make before you joined Client Ascension?

Hey guys. What's up? Daniel, Appreciate you having me on. So I run a content agency. I help B2B businesses and info products basically scale up. Their YouTube and their Instagram make around 30k a month. However, our actual MRR is fifth is around 50k, which we'll get into later. Before joining Client Ascension, I think the most amount of money I ever made was just 5k. And ever since I've joined, it's just been up from there.

Nice. Good stuff. So what are the actual deliverables of your offer? Like, because obviously you're a content agency, you help clients make content. But what are the functions of that? Like, what do you do?

We do everything front to back. The only real thing the client has to do is just record. So we'll do the market research. Obviously for content is performing well in their niche, we'll look at sub niches. From there, we'll come up with the strategy. Strategy. We'll get, you know, our really good priority video ideas, then we'll script it out for the clients. We help the clients record too. We send them SOPs if they're very nervous on camera, we like jump on a call just like this with them to guide them through recording. And then once the video is recorded, we edit it, we make the thumbnail, we post it, we do the SEO, we monitor performance, we look at, okay, what's converting, what's doing well, what isn't, what do we need to double down on, what do we need to fix? And it's just really that continuous process throughout the time of them working with us.

Yeah, who's buying it? Like, who are the clients?

So to be businesses like cold email, Legion agencies, E Com, email marketing, however, like a bulk of our clientele, honestly nowadays is just like info product sellers. So guys selling biz ops like how to make money with drop shipping, how to make money with copywriting, growth, operating, whatever. So really just info product sellers.

Dope. So how is your core offer evolved over time? Like when you were at 5k a month or some bullshit like that, like was it kind of just like, hey, I'll do some like little video editing packages now for you? Or what I'm trying to get at is like when you sell personally to cold traffic, like, what is your offer? Are like promising a specific result or like, like, how is that going right now compared to what you were doing before when you were just getting started?

Yeah, but I'll be honest. Before I joined Client Ascension, I did not have an offer. I didn't even have a landing page. It was literally just, oh, you need a video negotiate on price. Really, really unorganized. Not like a business, just like a bullshit freelancer. And then as soon as I came into Client Ascension, I think you helped me with my first offer. Actually, that was the. The million views in 90 days that absolutely cooked. And then that really helped us scale to our first 15k a month. We went from like, after joining Client Ascension K a month to 15k a month within 3 weeks just through selling that offer and not even to cold traffic. We literally messaged all of our leads who had bought from us before if they would be interested in getting a million views in 90 days and just rip that to 15k a month. We don't run that anymore just because we've seen, like, a lot of our ICP don't care about views. They care about making money. So we switched it to a YouTube offer where it's 10 to 30 qualified sales calls from YouTube in 90 days. Or we work for free until you get it. But that first, like, million views offer that absolutely ripped and then the YouTube offers ripping right now.

Yeah. So just as I imagine, imagine, like, you start to sell progressively higher ticket packages to progressively more qualified clients, and they start to be way more concerned with the actual quantifiable result of making money. You said you're working with some info product people, with some agency guys. Do you find yourself helping them with like, building out their funnels or whatnot or like, ads at all as well in addition to the content? Like, does it ever kind of like overlap a little bit over there?

Funnels? No, that is something I've looked into definitely for future, because you can make a lot more money with that. But ads, yes, I've scripted out some ads for clients. I've edited some ads for clients. Those have done really well, added something and we can also charge way more for. So, yeah, that's also something we do.

So of your clients who get the best results versus your clients who get the worst results, is there, like a commonality between them where you could determine, like, this client's going to get very good results or like, this client is missing these key pieces and like, what are those key pieces?

Yeah, the key pieces, honestly, with like, content is I know someone's going to succeed if they're in it for the long term because it's something that 100% compounds over time. But if it's just the case of they're like, oh, you know, I just want to try this out for the first month or the first three months, see how it goes, I know they're not going to succeed because one, their full effort isn't into it and two, they're just not going to be consistent enough to the point where eventually it does compound. And, you know, those calls start booking it start coming in and everything starts coming in on top of that too. I think I was going to make a tweet about this, but our best clients are the ones who are sort of like partnered with us. Like, they don't see it as a case of, oh, you're just my editor, you edit this, blah, blah, blah. But it's a case where we actually work one to one together. I've had a client who's been with us now for over a year and we scaled just through Content is info product from about, I think it was 10k a month. Now he does like 50 with his biz op and that's like multi six figures already. But the differentiator with him is that, you know, he's always open to feedback. Whenever we tell him to film something, he films it absolutely immediately. We hop on weekly calls with him. Literally every single week we go over the content, we go really in depth, we switch our style a lot, we always adapt and he's really just, you know, open for feedback and he understands that this is always going to compound. We just need to be consistent. And even like months where, you know, it didn't go as well or performance was bad, it didn't matter because we knew it was going to turn around. Just looked at what was going, not working and we fixed it. Instead of just saying, oh, you know, content doesn't work, I'm going to give up or I'm going to find someone else, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. So what's your main acquisition channel for clients? How are you getting them all? Like, is it cold email or ads or content yourself?

It's a mix. It's a mix. DMs actually the Dream 100 method I learned from Evan in CA. That is absolutely amazing. It cooks. I haven't been as consistent with it recently. I'm getting back on it. But if someone ever like, they're down for the free video, 9 times out of 10, I will sign them and if I don't, they'll come back eventually, like Dream 100 was a big game changer. That always works. You just need to innovate on top of it. You need to go the extra mile. You don't do any like switch and bait, like, oh, I recorded you a loom. Want me to send it over? Like, not send it up front. That's what I do. And then just like inbound. So like Twitter inbound. That works pretty well. My own content also works pretty well. Instagram, I don't post on Instagram, but I do like, just like Instagram stories posting. The work we do, I follow like a lot of just like people in the online space and then they'll see that and then they'll just like convert. That's kind of the main client acquisition channels. We are looking at running ads though, probably within the next month through two, just to really scale up.

Nice. Everybody in the audience know because they may not understand what dream 100 is. Could you just explain that process real quick for them?

Yeah, so what dream 100 is basically how you sign whale clients. You make a list of a hundred people you really want to work with, and then each day you send to that list 3 to 5 dms with a highly personalized deliverable that they can go and like implement. Now it's basically giving free value upfront. So in my case, what we do, at first I sent them like a free YouTube script. Be like, yo, you know, if you record this, we'll edit it, do the SEO, post it for you for free, no strings attached. And then eventually that evolved into like a full content strategy that, that they can actually use for the next three months with obviously like the video script, the ideas, everything. And then the entire idea with that is, you know, you get them to use the free deliverable, whatever it may be, and then, you know, they see just how well this works and then they come on as a client.

Yeah. What kind of response rates do you get when you were sending your dream 100 because you're doing the video up front. Right. How many people do respond? Like what percent of them that you outreach to actually end up getting back to you?

Out of every single 100, I'd sign 13 as a client, which is actually really, really insane.

That's actually really good because there's obviously the free deliverable and the cost to produce the free deliverable. Let's say it's just some video or video script and editing or bullshit. Let's say that you've hired someone out, do it for you, or you've automated a lot of the process. With AI, there's some cost associated with the production. With the free deliverable, it might be like $10 or something like that. If you do a hundred of them, it's really not that much money to acquire a customer. So like that's actually like an insanely good rate. So that's awesome. Speaking of that though, how much do you charge? Like what is your pricing model? I think a lot of people who I find personally is that when they're just getting started, they think that you have to have like some exact level of pricing and this is what I charge no matter what. How do you go about that? Because obviously I teach inside of client essential. Like no, just let it be dynamic and like, like sling deals, you know what I mean? Like sell what you can get.

I'm saying how much do you deals, bro? I like that from you, bro. Literally, I'm never going to say no to money. And I've signed some pretty big clients just by saying deals. Now ideally we do want retainers, but we've actually seen if we sling deals that gets our foot in the door. Like maybe someone might just need a VSL. Edited right? That's fin. We can charge them like 500, 750 bucks just for the VSL. But then they see the good work and then on top of that I'd send them a dream 100, whatever like YouTube script while we're doing the VSL and then eventually they'll come on retainer. So it varies. It's very dynamic. For most of our like main clients it is a month to month retainer. Anywhere between like the 1500-3K range. We do have some clients on higher retainer. Those are also just like the deals we've sung too. So it's very dynamic.

Nice, good stuff. Do you ever do any kind of like performance based on top of a retainer? Like if someone's like going to do like a launch of a new product or something like that, you're like, hey, I'll build out all this and this and this and this and this and you give me like a part of the revenue it generates in the launch.

No, we actually haven't. That is something we do need to do. It's something we do need to like look into. Because if, yeah, if they're doing a launch, we do all the content. We could do the vsl, probably figure out how to do the landing page. Yeah, that's something we should look into. But at the moment. No, no, yeah, I mean that's like.

Your Next evolution, because you're at 50k a month and like, okay, well, how do we start getting to, like, 100 to 200k a month? The answer is, like, you start kind of like piecing off into other tangential to sell to these people. Because, like, you kind of morph from being a content agency to more so just being like, you just do all sorts of marketing where it's like, all.

Right, you're gonna do.

You're just a opera. Like, even you were just saying, like, the best kind of clients are the ones we become partners with. And like, that's just an extension of that. Like, you just sell them other. Like, I'll give you, for instance, as like, even just straight up, if you started selling ad creatives, like, you script out ad creatives and you edit ad creatives, and then maybe even you build the funnels for the clients and you run the ads for them. That's the kind of thing that takes your average client LTV from like, I don't know, $8,000 to like 30,000 DOL going to say you just make an absurdly higher amount more money.

That's a really good idea. Yeah, we should talk about that privately, because that's definitely the next step. 100%.

It's like, you have the client base at this point do that too. Just like when you first started and you did the million views guaranteed just hit up all the people you currently work for. You could do that shit like, fucking instantly, bro. You could be like, hey, I'll make you a webinar funnel. Or like, I'll launch you a VSL funnel. You know what I'm saying? You could just like, fucking RAM that shit. What does a sales process look like? So say you did like, a dream 100. Maybe you just have, like, rough numbers for it. I don't expect to have the exact calculations for everything. So you've done a shit ton of Dream 100. You've delivered somebody like, a free work deliverable, like, gave them a script. You'll tell them to court it. You'll edit it for them. Like, of the people who actually end up posting the script, like, how many sales calls does it take to actually end up converting these people? And how long is it the average conversion window you deliver this, and they're like, how long does it take for them to be a client? Because a lot of people fucked it up and don't understand how long it actually takes.

Yeah, it really does vary. What I try to do is, like, as soon as they say yes to the Deliverable. I tie in a call some way. Like even if it's just to help them set up their recording, I'll do that. That just helps build the goodwill. And always after, like when the video is done, we'll book in a call, we'll go over it together and then I kind of just like pitch them. So that's kind of like a week, a week and a half process. And then if they don't bite after that, like if they don't sign, then it's just like continuously following up. I've had people who like we've done the free video but it didn't really perform well. And then they didn't really want to come on. But then I just keep following up, keep sending more value and then eventually they would come on. But that's like a one to three month process. You just need to keep following up. If that answers your question, 100%.

So what does fulfillment look like? How does the team work? How many of you are there? Like how much are you working? Like what's kind of your day to day look like in terms of the fulfillment of a client?

Now we have a huge team. I'm really grateful for my team. We have, they're all in house. We have an office actually there in Pakistan. So they come in, it's like a 9 to 5, they clock in. They only work for us. We have like now 12 full time editors, we have two project managers, we have like three quality checkers. So like a team of 17. We're pretty big. So they are over there editing like nine to five. They're grinding, spending. And then my job each day is honestly just to make more money, like wake up, do the dms, work on content, work on Twitter, obviously run my follow ups. And then just like management on the client side. I haven't stepped away from fulfillment completely. I still run like calls with most of my clients, help them with scripting, help them with ideas, all of that stuff. That's kind of what the day to day looks like.

Are you mostly doing and producing short form content or long form content nowadays?

Good question. Honestly it's like 60, 40 split. 60% long form, 40% short form. @ the beginning of this year it was like 80% long form. Then I feel like shortform kind of made a bit of a comeback. So now it's, it's almost like a 50, 50 split.

Yeah. Is that because like short form became actually longer form or like it used to be 60 seconds, now you can make like fucking three minute videos or something. Or do you think it was just like, some random.

That's a good reason to. But I think it was just like a random thing because then everyone. Everyone went to YouTube and then there was a gap with short form. So we also went to that gap, but we stayed with YouTube. So now it's. It's kind of like how it is right now.

Yeah. In terms of clients getting results and actually getting calls booked and making sales, Is it more so that long form gets all the actual results in terms of client sign?

Yeah, long form gets more of the actual results, like actual, like, ROI that you can track and revenue. But short form with, like, I'd say it's much easier to get views and get attention with short form 100. But yeah, long form kind of makes some money. Right.

So do you just use it for, like, awareness? Pretty much. And then long form is like, does the actual converting.

Yeah, yeah, we use it for awareness, and then we just. We send them over to the YouTube. That's actually how I upsell, like, most of my clients who just come on for short form. I'm like, yo, you're getting all of this attention now. We need to nurture it and convert it to stop selling the YouTube and then send them over there.

Yeah, yeah, dude, you got to start selling at least. Least, like, retargeting ads to these clients, bro. And, like, just run the retargeting ads for them. At least. Like, that would just fucking cook with all those views would be insane.

Yeah, 100%.

All right, cool. So what are the biggest bottlenecks do you have inside your business today? Is it Legion sales or fulfillment? So basically what I'm asking is, what is stopping you? What precisely is stopping you from getting to, like, 200k a month right now? What aspect of it do you think it is?

That's a really good question. I think it's a mix of Legion and Fulfillment. We definitely need to start running ads asap, because, like, inbound and whatchamacall referrals cook. It's not really predictable. You can't really. Because it also gets to a point with a content agency where you're signing more clients, but you also might be losing an equal amount. And the only way to beat that is just with ads. So definitely need to start running ads asap. And then on the fulfillment side, I think we have, like, our editing dialed. That's really good. But I do want to look to hire, like, more talent on the strategy side so that, you know, I just have, like, people who know the ins and out. Of YouTube who can do like the creative strategy better, the ideas, the scripting, all of that, and then just get our clients like absolutely in insane fucking results.

Yeah. Nice. How do you do the project management for the clients? Like what kind of software do you use for that?

We use Notion Slack for communication. I have a business partner who's really good with all the back end stuff. I hate it. I don't want to be doing all that. So he just manages all of that?

Yeah. How do you keep your clients happy and basically just reduce churn? You got any strategies behind that?

You guys have found honestly, just like really good communication. Really? Really. I Learned this in CA2. Just we talk to our clients daily. I trained our project managers to give our clients like daily updates and end of day updates. Like, we make it like I this in onboarding. Like, look, it's going to take time to get results, but eventually when it comes time to where we've done enough content to where it compounds, we're going to get insane results. So just setting that expectation and then just keeping them in the loop, like showing them like, hey, we're on track to our goals or if we're not on track, this is what we're going to fix. This is what we're going to go. This is how we're going to get back on track. It's really just really good communication with our clients that have churn most of the time. It's not even a case of they're not happy with the service. It's just like, unfortunately there was a mishap with communication on our end or they just weren't like a good fit. Yeah, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So what's your plan to get to, let's say 100k a month? Is that the goal? How fast are you trying to do that? Like, what's the war map, the plan to actually accomplish that?

100K months, definitely the goal. I want to get there by the end of the year. It will be a sprint, but I think we can do it. We basically just need to run ads asap, hire new talents on the back end for more of like the result stuff like the scripting, the strategy and then honestly just keep that going. All right, bet.

So last question. If you were starting a content agency today, 0, you lost all your team, lost all your connections, you have like no past customers, nothing at all. You have to start from complete, absolute zero. How would you do that?

It's a good question. I get on Twitter asap. I still think that's the best place to get clients. Just run like a Dream 100 offer. This is what I did when I started to be like I'll do when I first started like a freelancer. The offer I ran was I'll give you two weeks of short form content for free in exchange for a testimonial. I'd spam that, get as many like case studies testimonials as possible. And then also those people that I did the free work for, they're happy with it. They'll also turn into paying customers. So I probably should have my first few clients by then. I'd have a few case studies and then I'd keep that going. I keep running that offer and then just join Client Ascension and scale.

What would you use for editing? Just like Cap Cut or something?

Just Cap Cut Premiere Pro. Honestly, what I would do is I wouldn't even edit myself. I'd focus on the marketing. And then as soon as I sign my first paid client, I just. Just hire someone.

All right, brother. Thanks so much for coming on, everybody who's watching this. All Raphael's links will be in the description. And if you want to join Client Ascension, the link that will also be in the description. Thank you for watching. Share it, whatever, subscribe, do all that good stuff, please.