He Wanted to Make Money, So He Built a $10M/Year Business

Started at 320k a month and when I ended Client Ascension I barely got over 900k. I had 77 people at the very peak paying 5k a month.

If my mind is blown, the audience watching is also going to be off their seat at this point. What is going on guys? Andre Hickel Jr. Here and I'm here with Matthew Larson. What's going on brother?

Good. How are you?

Good, good, good, good. Just start by telling the audience who you are and what you're currently working on.

When I joined Client Ascension I was working on a landing page and serial agency for E Commerce. Exited that agency, it got acquired in July.

You're probably the only person that's gone through the program and exited their business. One of the things that's super interesting, how did cold email add to like your enterprise value and pump the numbers on an exit?

I got very lucky when I first started the agency and had a bunch of friends and people referring to me and that's really how I got started. So I've always been very good at ads and landing pages and creating offers. Almost a hundred percent of my customer acquisition outside of referrals I was getting was from my paid ad funnel. So that was the way I was getting a lot of customers. I did landing pages and CRO for E commerce brands. My paid ad funnel was lead magnet based paid ad funnel which is centered around a free landing page masterclass which was like 12 videos and then I had another one that was actually a paid one. Kind of like your cold email scripts but it was landing page templates. I had one landing page template for 49, five for 79 or 15 for 99. As long as you can get a sale for less than $99, you're getting leads for free. I got up to 7k a day and spend with losing money on the front end and then they just kind of eventually convert and that was the main way I got customers. I was on Twitter as well posting a little bit. I didn't have many followers but I good leads from Twitter too. But I'd always see cold email wizard Daniel posting about Client Ascension. Klein Ascension taught me how to get the leads, set up the domains, set up the software and then I attended a couple of the classes on how to write a good cold email. The feedback just kind of worked right away.

You said you got it up to 7,000 a day in ad spend without losing money. Like basically you're self liquidating.

Yeah, through the landing page template sales plus co registration stuff. Cold email is amazing. Personal brands. Amazing. But if you can get a funnel like that, that's the promise.

Game changer. And then what is the conversion on the 7K like say it's 500 customers. How many of those customers usually convert to a higher ticket offer and then how high ticket is the next offer?

My offers at my landing page agency were one landing page for 2,500 or three for 5,000. But I also sold sitewide conversion rate optimization. I started at 8,000amonth for that service when they eight A B tests a month and then I got quite a few clients and raised the prices and ended up at about 15k a month before I sold. About 3% of all subscribers of the info product would probably become customers or they're usually a landing page in most cases. And then about 8% of people who became a landing page customer at any point went into CRO and I never got one CRO client without them first being a landing page client.

I mean that whole funnel makes so much sense. We talked about it before too. Like some of the fastest growing companies like Click Funnels for Apple. It's just a massively successful self liquidating offer. It's why they're able to scale so infinitely essentially. But talk a little bit more about cold email. How did that add value?

I bought 480 domains the first way I started cold emailing Shopify stores. I used Apollo to scrape built with Shopify. I was doing about 150 to 200 landing pages the last couple months before I sold and about half of those were from cold email. That is like 1666 each if they get 3 or 2,500. So that's like 160 60k ish a month at the minimum from cold email that I learned inclined ascension at that time. But it really changed when I read something in Taylor Welch's book about partnerships and white label. So I started never cold emailing e commerce brands ever again after that and started only emailing paid ad agencies that serve e commerce. I was asking for referrals when I first started but then someone asked me if like I white label my services. We settled on you can get 5k a month for unlimited landing pages with a maximum of three being constructed at a time. So it's essentially six to nine. I had 77 people at the very peak paying 5k a month. There's no customer acquisition cost. A lot of the landing Pages are template based. 70% at least. Profit after all is said and done, it built up to that. I'm not saying I did that for like three years or anything. But cold email channel was very good. Paid ad channel was very good for the enterprise value because they can get customers. The cold email to brands is another that added so much enterprise value. And the partnerships one with the cold.

Email, it was a massive operation. How many team at one time?

I had 10 people that were either in Canada or the United States and then I had 66 overseas people. I tried a couple of salespeople, but it was kind of out of control with the growth. I figured If I'm closing 70% and they're closing 25%. Losing a lot of money here. It was a lot. Wasn't uncommon to be 10 sales calls a little bit more sometimes a day. I really didn't mind at the time. Yeah.

And like the thing is you spent a lot of time on sales calls and doing sales, but it was in a short time frame that got you an exit that had changed the way you live the rest of your life, I guess. What was the next thing? Did you go into a new business business? Did you just start investing in different places?

Yeah, I invested almost all of my money right when I got another thing about this. A lot of people think that when you sell, if you sell for 10 million, you think you just get 10 million cash. Especially in agencies, it doesn't really happen like that. They'll say it's a $10 million purchase, but they'll pay you like 1 million up front and then like 9 million maybe uncertain conditions someday. I got 83.3% cash for mine and then the other 16.66%. If you have a lot of leverage, you don't need to sell. Right. You can tell them like you contacted me when you're in a sal a lot of the time in my experience, because I have sold a couple of different companies before, I wasn't really the main person in those. I was more of like the Apprentice. They try to drag it on, frustrate you with legal shit until you're like, just take it for I just want to get over with. I was like sending 480 domains of cold emails and 7 kids like every day. I emailed them like the price is going up. They told me I didn't have to be like that. They're going to buy it anyway. Two, three months goes by and you've grown 25, 50%. So instead of them doing that to you, you're basically doing that to them. They got to get it over with now.

But it' sounds like the ultimate leverage in this deal. It's having all these different channels, like the diversification of channels to generate leads that don't have to do with your face or your personal brand.

Personal brand is great, but a lot of people I don't think understand how all of these work together. You have your paid ads, you have your outreach which is cold email. You have your content which is like your personal brand. You have partnerships. When you stack each of them, they make the other one more effective.

If you're starting an agency again, what's your biggest piece of advice?

First thing I would do, I would only do a productized offer. A landing page. Page 2500. You get one landing page. That's a productized offer. I would stay away from like the whole full stack agency. Unless you're just huge where that makes sense. Because you're gonna have to hire a lot of people to do SEO, web design. Email, that's a big operation which is gonna destroy your margins. You're also gonna having to compete with people who only do one thing. Number two, I would definitely do start cold emailing almost right away. I try to find a way to make a good offer and I would get those four clients for whatever price. In my opinion. When you're first starting even it's for a hundred dollars. You got to prov yourself or anything that you can do this. And then after those four, I would do the same thing but raise the prices. All you really want is to make like 20, 30k a month. As a freelancer you can do that just off cold email. I don't want to be like one of those guys and say it's easy but it's not super difficult if you try it for a year. The next thing I do is invest that cold email money into a video editor and then maybe a graphic designer. Let's start my personal brand. And then your cold emails become more effective. In addition to cold email. I always still believe in an hour of just the manual prospecting per day. You just literally go on Twitter or whatever your dominant platform is and just search and make a list of people and just try and talk to them. If it was me, knowing what I know now, I would go 90% of my day just to learn how to make good short form videos that attract people. Whether it's personal brand stuff, B2B. But if I'm doing to someone who just starting out, I would not do paid ads until you have a significant amount of clients. Case studies, knowledge. I would say when you start ads, when you have 10 recurring clients, maybe you have A decent personal brand and then they click on your ad, they're more likely to see your content in the algorithm and then if they see your content, they're more likely to see your retargeting ads on your productized service. Let's say it's a one time. I would have an upsell that's pretty high value mrr that's related to your first one. So you could be like a, an offer funnel instead of just going to the top. I had landing pages for 2,500 and then 0 for 8,000. The same customer avatar needs both. I was closing at least 70% of landing pages. Once you have some client results, some confidence, most importantly, you can start reaching out to the partners and you can be extremely creative with who you you're going to partner with. You never really know. I say 66% of your cold emails go to clients and then 33% to partners and then the partners break down. Most of them would go to referrals or white label partners which are essentially the same thing. A small percentage should go to media partners where you can get on podcasts or YouTube channels or guest posts and blogs or newsletters. It's a very good way to leverage other people's audience, especially if you don't have your own. And if you do have your own, you can get them to do it on yours and it makes it easier. I don't have.

Or it'll just be easier for them to feature you on theirs because like, oh, I could feature this big name brand and it just helped yours grow more.

Yeah, exactly. A lot of the big people have only been doing it consistently for like two years, four years. It's not as hard as like the normies think it is and the haters think it is, but it's not as easy as like the gurus say it is either. I joined Client ascension, started at 320k a month and when I ended Client Ascension I barely got over 900k. I remember reading Alex Hermosi first book and saying he made 1.7 million a month. I was just like, that doesn't sound possible, right? And then I realized if you do that. But plus the sale like I basically made mostly in the previous 12 months that I did my agency the last.

Thing because people are now going to be like, who the hell is this guy? How do I find them? How do I get in touch and see what you're up to and maybe become a client?

I have a little consulting company called A thousand x leads. Calm Matt Larson 1000x just DM me there.

If you guys go on there and just look at the landing page, you'll understand, like, where Matt is coming from with just all of his success and the numbers he's saying here. Excited to keep up with everything you do from here.

Yeah. Take care. Nice to talk to.