His Business Almost Failed, Now He Makes $35,000/Month

Almost a year through in the program and this month going to be back around 32 to 35, I think.

Welcome back to another version of the Client Ascension Student Spotlight interviews. My name is Andre and I'm here with Noah from the Client Ascension community. What's going on, brother?

Hey, Andre. Doing well. How are you?

I get to learn more about you and all the success you've been having recently. So telling the audience a little bit about who you are and what you're currently working on.

Yeah, sure. So I run an SEO agency. Been doing that for about two and a half years. We primarily focus and work with E Comm brands and direct to consumer brands. We'd handle services end to end. So basically we do all the content creation, backlink building and on page and technical optimization. And I'm also working on a newer offer that I've had a few people that are currently going through right now where we're also doing some training with either doing in house SEO or teaching your team how to create in house content that helps with SEO. Mainly because I see a lot of brands who are on the fence about hiring an agency to do all the work, but they have a content team that's not producing good blog posts and things like that because they don't know what to do. Right. So that's another offer currently working on too.

Got it. So it's helping their current team kind of bridge that knowledge gap on content that feeds SEO.

Yeah, pretty much. Number one thing I see with a lot of brands is like they'll have a content writer on staff that's producing content, making blog posts, but it's actually not helping at all. Content's not ranking, it's not helping support like collection and product pages. So it's actually a kind of a waste of resources. So it's kind of a way not to happen.

They're just checking the box, they post it on each of the platforms. They're good for the day. Right? Yeah, we've all seen that story. So an SEO is competitive space, right? I mean, it's one of the marketing services has been around for quite a while now and it sounds like this new offer is one of the ways that you're able to stand out. How else do you feel you've been able to separate yourself amongst the other SEO agencies in the marketplace?

I mean, obviously getting results is helpful. Right. So I'm able to get my clients results, get them a positive ROI on working with me. I also have like, within the E Comm space, one area that I really like working in, and I kind of specialize in is working with higher ticket products. Right. So I have a handful of clients that sell something that's anywhere from 2 to like 10 grand. Plus these are people who are going to a Shopify site and running their card without talking to anybody on like buying a boat or something for like 10 grand or 15 grand. I have experience doing that and I like working with those types of brands. It's just fun to work with cool products that are more interesting than, you know, a $10 pair of headphones or something like that.

Yeah, the high ticket definitely makes it easier. They really reap the rewards of the work that you do for them over time. I'm sure it makes a lot more sense. So where does Client Ascension come into the picture? How'd you hear about Client Ascension initially? Where'd you hear about it?

My business journey has been pretty interesting. I've been doing my agency for two and a half now, but the first 18 months I like effortlessly was scaling to the point where I was actually anxiety producing, where I was like so terrified for the first client to leave. You know, every month everyone was just staying around. I didn't lose a client for the first 18 months. Then the economy shifted a bit. It was just like dominoes just started falling. A few clients, they fired this person that was in charge of whatever I was with. And then so like relationship ended. Happened over a span of like six weeks or so. Just lost a lot of revenue, Was still doing fine, but just not where I was at that point. Sort of recognized that while I had scaled things up really well over the first 18 months, my pipeline was dry, my sales skills were not great. I didn't have my marketing locked in or anything like that. And so I just really like had been relying on the fact that word of mouth referrals, et cetera were kind of keeping me afloat and I wasn't prepared for this sort of turbulence. So I'd seen other people join Client Ascension. I've been following you and Daniel, a lot of the guys for a while on Twitter. I just knew I needed help anytime I invested in myself and in the business. Like, it usually worked out well for me. Just kept seeing you guys posts all the great work and help you were helping people with. Knew I needed some help, otherwise it was going to be looking rough for myself. So pulled the trigger on that.

That's awesome, man. You've been in the community for a while now and you've been posting wins pretty consistently, which is really awesome. And it's interesting, right? Because you've been in the agency space, you've been in other coaching programs, and really, it sounds like you joined Client Ascension at a time where your business almost was, like, going up, and then it started to come down a bit. And so you use Client Ascension and maybe use it as a backboard to bounce back off of, which is really unique because I talked to a lot of guys where they just had no experience in business, and that's why they joined Client Essential. Like, you just had a downhill trend that was happening in the agency. Maybe it wasn't permanent. Right. But you just needed to change something or switch it up. The reason why you're successful is, like, you're not afraid to bet on yourself. From what I've seen, that pays off for you and obviously also for your clients because they're benefiting from you educating yourself and becoming better at what you do. So the biggest problem you're trying to solve, you covered that, I guess. How did Client Ascension help solve some of these problems?

It definitely has. So, first of all, there are some lessons in business that you can hear people talk about, but you don't really learn to go through them. But one of the big ones that helped me through is, like, level of output you need for, like, marketing activ and whatever. Right. Is always way more than you think. You need the goals you want. That has been very evident. And really, just being in a community of people where there are wins happening and you're connected to, like, just stuff going on, there's insights into what's working, what's not working. Anytime I've had a problem, I can go to the community, either hop on a call with a coach or go into the educational materials, and, like, there's something there to help move things along. I'd say probably the biggest area that I've had growth with is probably with my sales. My sales approach and, like, confidence is just so much better than it was prior to joining, Way better than I was previously. I don't know. I was definitely, like, real stressed for a while with how things were going. Now I have clarity. I'm like, all right, well, things aren't going well because I'm not doing this or doing that. I know what levers to pull a lot more than I used to. And one of the things I'm working on right now is building out a better team because I'm kind of like, where I was when things kind of fell off a bit last year when I signed up for Client Ascension. Almost back to that Point pretty much now things fall off. I joined, I'm back there now, that zone, which is cool. But now I'm getting like a second run through where like previously I did not build out the team I need to break through that sort of ceiling I was hitting and now I'm working on that. So it's kind of like I have all the tools I need to get to that next level of my business, whereas a year ago I did not have any of those things.

Yeah, the way Cole Gordon always described it to me, like we went through his coaching program and he always says as soon as you solve a problem in business, it creates the next problem for you to solve. So like it's the constant problem solving. You're never there. You've never officially finished business. What I love to hear is you touched on the marketing, you touched on sales, you touched on team building, fulfillment. You're really working in all the different areas of the business to keep those moving along. That's really cool to hear. What are results like for an SEO agency if you can share some insights as to growth you're seeing with your agency.

So when I joined, I just come off like back to back 35k ish months and then things pretty much almost cut in half when things like hit the fan. I was starting from like around 20, a little below 20 because I didn't have things in place with marketing and like my sales was kind of crap. It took a few months to get the ball rolling and then I was running into this thing of like I was taking one step forward, one step back because like then onboarding process wasn't going as well as it should be. Like all these things kept coming through. So I really kind of viewed first like nine months in the program. I was learning a lot of lessons that I didn't learn that first ramp up and I had to go back through and like fix all these problems today. I'm glad that those things have happened.

Absolutely.

Now almost a year through being in the program and this month going to be back around 32 to 35. I think once everything's collected back where I was a year ago and like with the foundation now to push to 40k, 50k a month and higher.

That's awesome, bro. You'll always see some guys, they rapidly scale from nothing to 30k, but they can't sustain it because the foundation is not in place. So they have one good month, one 30k month, and all of a sudden they think they're a $300,000 a month agency. But it doesn't shape out that way.

Right.

So I'm always impressed by guys that can keep 30k a month consistently for a year is a lot more impressive than just hitting 30k once and then falling back to the media. That's just what it's like, right? Yeah. You're in client ascension. You could probably relate to the process working in longer time horizons. You mentioned a year, right? To get back to where were before. That's pretty similar to the expectations you might set with your clients when you do SEO for them. Because SEO is not like this overnight thing. It doesn't happen in the first week or the first month. It takes a couple of months. And not everyone, and you've probably experienced this with clients, not everyone is willing to stick it out and wait it out. So how is seeing that on the client side helps? Maybe with you as a business owner as well.

There's definitely an aspect of trust and faith. Just confidence is going to work out. You know what I mean? So I think for anyone interested in going into the program, right, it's like you're investing in yourself. You got to take that seriously, be real with yourself, yourself along that journey. So like either you get tested at times, are you actually committed or you're not committed, like you said, that translates well for me with my SEO clients, like the ones who aren't that committed SEO, like they don't get the benefits, they don't get the results, and the ones that stick with it do.

I appreciate you sharing that. I've always found SEO is like a great comparison to just business in general. It's like the ones that are willing to wait it out, you're either going to be six months down the road and you're not going to be happy with your progress, or you're going to be happy that you waited it out and were patient. But it's going to be six months from now, six months from now, regardless. Which is kind of the methodology I always like to go by. One of my favorite questions to ask to guys like you who invest in themselves, especially in coaching programs. Let's just talk about clients ascension specifically. Just like any other program, most of the people that go through it do not get the results that they want that they expected. There's always a select few like you. I would say client ascension has a pretty high success rate compared to other programs. For the guys that do see the results like yourself, what's maybe one piece of advice you'd have to give to someone that's trying to figure it out. They're just not seeing a return and they just can't figure out why.

I kind of touched on this earlier where it's like the amount you think you need to do, it's always more, right? That's like a lesson for me that's been like, very real.

Not the answer they wanted to hear.

It is kind of like work harder, you know, also mixed with working smarter. Right. There's levels to realizing you're not either doing the right type of thing or enough of it to get where you want to go. Right? It can seem like effortless for somebody else externally, but in reality they're probably doing a ton of stuff that you're not doing. A lot of it holds other people back, in my opinion, because I know this is real for me. I just wasn't fully investing myself as much as I needed to. You have to be reflective of that. You have to be able to look in the mirror and be like, am I actually going all in here or am I not? And a lot of people, I think, can sign up for coaching and they think it's going to be like this magic pill or whatever, right? And like, really, at the end of the day, it's still up to you to get the results, which is kind of true for anything in life, right? It's like you can go to college and mess around, get the degree, but really for you to have a positive experience off of that, you still have to invest yourself and push yourself. For anyone who wants to achieve results, take it seriously, keep pushing, and if you're not seeing results, just push even harder.

Being in a community of other people that are pushing the limits will help you to push your own limits. If you're in a community and you're sending emails from 10 email accounts and the rest of the guys are sending from 100, chances are you're probably going to push that up. Whereas if the rest of the guys in the community are falling way behind, you're going to fall to the average most of the time. And then the second thing you mentioned in the interview is knowing which levers to pull. A lot of what holds us back from taking massive action is not having confidence in this is the right thing to do. By being in a program like Client Ascension and just by being in business in general and putting a lot of volume out into the world, it'll return back results so you know where to focus. So if you know where to focus, you'll have the confidence and you'll know, like, if I do this thing, I'm very likely to get this result, which I really do want. I just think a lot of holdback for most people is they just don't think it's going to work. So knowing the levers of pool and seeing other people around you getting results with higher volume I feel like are essential as well to just be surrounded by that every day. So last question for you Noah is where can our audience find you? Follow you, Learn more about your agency because you guys provide killer services on Twitter.

You can find me at Noah's 4 cents, the number four there. Work with Noah.com is our website so you can check us out there as well. I'm also on LinkedIn Noah Kane, you can find me there.

Awesome bro. Last question, like what is the rest of 2023 look like for you in the agency?

So right now just brought on an executive assist, a junior SEO as well to help out with some things. Putting the team in place right now to take some things off my plate so I can continue to push things. Just kind of getting primed for an awesome 2024 where hopefully we start hitting those 50k months pretty consistently and absolutely bro.

Appreciate you spending the time with us. Appreciate everything you do for the community, incline ascension and just how active and contributing you are to the community. Keep crushing it bro. This is awesome.