How Adam went from $10k/mo to $45k/mo in less than 1 year with his email marketing agency

When I joined back in January, I think we only had, like, four or five clients at the time. We were doing, like, 10k a month. And it was like, a really inconsistent. Like, I had gotten up to, like, 15. It would drop back down to, like, eight. It was really inconsistent. Now we're at, I believe, 18 active recurring clients, and we're doing about 45,000 per month.

What's going on, guys? Andre Hagel Jr. Here from client Ascension, back with another student Spotlight interview here with my boy Adam Rem. What's going on, brother?

Sup, Andre? How are we doing?

Good, good, good, man. I appreciate you jumping on to share your story. I think we first met back in April at the first, like, smaller event that we did, like, that Mastermind event we did in Tampa. And then obviously you're at the most recent Tampa event, and you've been in the program for a while. And just you being local to Tampa makes it a lot easier to connect. And I know you played basketball with Christian and Dan as well, so it's just cool being able to, like, connect in person outside of just the community, because we can't do that with everyone having students, you know, all across the world.

Yeah.

So we'll dive into that. But I want to go through the. The basics real quick on why you're here. Like, what results did you generate that garner you being able to. To be on this interview? So let's just go through the line of questioning, like, how long have you been inclined Ascension, or how long ago did you join?

So I joined right in the middle of January of this year.

Okay, so almost a year ago. And then just take us through. Like, what was your revenue when you joined? How many clients did you have when you joined? And then fast forward to now. Like, what's your revenue now? How many clients do you have now? And what's the growth look like? Like, how many calls are you. You booking? Like, sales calls? Are you booking every month?

Yeah. So when I joined back in January, I think we only had, like, four or five clients at the time. We were doing, like, 10k a month. And it was like, a really inconsistent, like, I had gotten up to, like, 15. It would drop back down to, like, 8. It was really inconsistent. Now we're at, I believe, 18 active recurring clients, and we're doing about 45,000 per month. And in terms of calls booked, it kind of varies right now because we have a lot of different, like, projects going on. But on the high end, we'll book, like, 40 calls in a month on the Low end, we'll book like somewhere around 10 to 20, depending on like, the quality. Like recently we've been optimizing for higher quality people, so it's been lower.

Yeah, but you're working with e commerce brands, so you're talking about just working with higher quality brands, higher revenue brands, brands that have like, more established products and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's awesome, bro. And first off, congrats on the growth, especially in that short of a time frame. And from what I remember, it's just you, right? You're the only business owner. You don't have a co founder or partner or anything like that?

Yeah, yeah, it's just me. No partner.

That's awesome, dude. You're crushing it. And you're young, bro. You're in your 20s.

Yeah, I just turned 21, like two months ago.

It's wild, dude. It's wild. You're making like a doctor's salary as a year old, but wild, dude, that's super exciting. So let's go back to like the origins. Right, so you're crushing it now, but, like, when you first joined the program, like, why did you join? Was there a specific problem that you were hoping to solve? Was there a specific goal in mind that you had? Like, how did you find the program? Why'd you join?

Yeah, so I had actually been in like the Client Ascension funnel for a long time and I was always just like, watching Daniel's YouTube videos a lot. And the biggest problem I had was that everything just felt so, like, insecure because like I said earlier, we had like four or five clients and they were paying us, but it like, nothing was coming in consistently in terms of leads or sales calls. And I was just always unsure if we were doing everything right. So because of that, I saw everything that you guys talked about with like, cold email and everything. So I joined and instantly got that stuff set up. And that immediately gave me, like a sense of relief that I knew I was like, I was always gonna have leads out there that we could bring on to like, our existing client base.

Love that. So you were running like a business that didn't really feel like a business. It wasn't a repeatable process. There weren't things or activities or systems or that sort of stuff happening on a daily basis. It was kind of like figured out as you go. And when you saw Client Ascension and started listening to Daniel's YouTube content, you felt like, yeah, like he's the guy that can help me put some real systems behind, you know? Like what's in my head essentially.

Yeah, like our lead gen system, completely inconsistent. Like every month it was a new thing that was happening. Let me see, there was zero sales process whatsoever then to now is literally night and day in terms of like lead gen and sales process. Then even on the ops and fulfillment side it was just, it was a lot more messy and like there was no structure to it. But I got a ton of help from you specifically with that stuff, so that helps.

Yeah, I remember when we first met, at least in April. I love students like you who come to me with very legitimate operations and hiring and management questions. Because a lot of times people join the program and they're asking questions about how do you onboard a client or how do you fulfill for this or how do I outsource this? And they don't have any clients because they don't have marketing and sales figured out yet. So you did marketing and sales first and then when I first interacted with you, you had already figured out marketing and sales like you're saying, and had real like applicable operations questions that I was able to help with. And I think we first spoke maybe leading up to that event, but really in that event in April in Tampa, we did a lot of workshopping on like building out a team pods and managers. Especially on the email marketing business model you need like email designers, email copywriters, people to manage them. There's a lot of different roles that you have to hire out for and then put management structures into place for. So yeah, it sounds like you've pretty much leveled up in every single aspect of business. Legion, sales and fulfillment. And so that's gotta be a pretty good feeling.

Yeah, and that's actually another good point because when I first came in, I was also just looking to learn because it's like I, I know that to increase my earning and then obviously like grow our team and everything, I just needed to increase my skill sets in all these different areas. And the way you guys marketed client ascension was like, it's just like we're going to teach you everything you need to know, you know, from lead gen to sales to ops to every, you know, all the little stuff. So that was a really big reason as well why I jumped in.

Yeah, and that's really what it is. It's the big vision for it, at least in the beginning was like, we want to be the alternative to college. Like we want to be the college for entrepreneurship and business, but more specifically teaching on concepts that we're actually implementing in our own businesses that allowed us to grow. Right. So like we run Client Ascension, we run another business called List Kit. We're on pace to do over a million dollars in revenue just this month. And so the cool thing about Client Ascension is we can teach our community based on what we're learning on a daily basis from scaling these companies ourselves. And last year that wasn't the case. Right. We weren't scaling the million dollars a month, but we were scaling to maybe 300 or 400,000amonth and can share those learnings. And next year maybe we'll scale to 2 or 3 or 5 million a month and can share those new learnings. So we're able to like pass back these learnings from our own experiences, which is really cool because there's never not going to be something new to learn. And that's what I love about the program. It's not just super focused on just learning cold email. It's like learn everything, Legion sales, fulfillment, leadership, mindset. And then we love to bring in the in person events as well.

Yeah, actually the in person events are one of, I'd say honestly one of the biggest, like good things I would say about my experience so far because I've just met so many people at those events, the two that I've been to and I mean, I don't know if I'd say life changing, but definitely like a big, like it changes my perspective the way I think a lot.

Yeah, yeah. Like that first event was a smaller event and that group, I mean that group was so far like one of the most successful events we've done in terms of the people that were in the room and, and where they're all at now. And then obviously the October event is our annual event that's to a much bigger scale. There's over a hundred people there. It's much more overwhelming, but also there's a lot more opportunities in the room. And I know you've connected with some other guys locally, like I mentioned, even my business partners, but even guys like Evan Siege, who is a mutual connection, who's helped us both quite a bit with our content and our ads and all that sort of stuff, and Matt Lucero, who's a cold email coach in the program. So that's one of the, the other great parts about this program is the community is really strong and a lot of them are based in Florida and more specifically Tampa, which is a nice advantage for you being right there in Tampa.

Yeah, I came here kind of like on a whim, so it was a really good setup. Happy? I did.

That's awesome, bro. So, like, what are your goals from here? You're at. You said like 40, 45K with the agency with eight clients, which is awesome. It just sounds like you're getting higher quality clients paying you higher ticket retainers or maybe you're just earning even more performance fees from each of them. Is that the goal is just to continue to find really high value clients and scale that thing up slowly through that route? Do you want to set up like low ticket products? You want to do a setup offer? Like, what's kind of your plan going into 2025 as we're sitting here in December 2024?

Yeah, it's funny, I mean, I think you said eight. We have 18 right now.

Yeah, that's awesome.

But, but yeah, like you said, that's actually the big thing I'm focusing on now is finding those really good opportunity brands that we can work with and just pour our full attention into even more so than we already do. And yeah, be kind of incentivized to keep them growing as a brand. And then in the future, I definitely want to add on more services to what we do right now just to further service those big brands with big opportunities. That's a really big focus of mine right now.

Yeah. And there's a lot of that. Like, have you done some of the Dream 100 outreach that we teach in the program or are you kind of still in that exploration phase of like, does cold email work the best to find these brands? Is it Dream 100? Is it ads? What are some of your early findings?

So I dove pretty deeply into paid ads after that April event. It actually took like two or three months for me to actually start doing it, like, seriously. But paid ads has been the biggest thing lately. And then just recently I'm starting to dive into like the Dream 100 style approach as well. Yeah. And that's gonna be my main, like, mechanism to get those big, like big opportunity brands in the door. At least that's what I'm hoping for.

Yeah. Because you got guys like Evan. Evan Sich was able to sign Jim Launch. He did some work with David and his company. He works with Jason Wojo, he works with Client Ascension and Liskit. Now he was able to sign some pretty whale clients through those Dream 100 mechanisms that we teach in the program. That he teaches in the program, which is really cool. So, yeah, I'm interested to see that's newly rolled out. And anytime we roll out something like that in client ascension, there's always A couple of students that really take it and run with it and make it even better. And so I'm excited to see just in 2025 overall, like, the types of companies our students are able to go out and start working with. And especially a guy like yourself, like, you go out there and sign some pretty massive E commerce brands. That'll be cool.

Yeah, absolutely. It's also just like, it's a lot more meaningful when you hit a brand up personally, you know what I mean? Because nowadays everything's so automated and that stuff works. So it's great. But it's just so nice, really connecting with an owner saying, yeah, we can partner on this and really scale you guys up. I find a lot of, like, fulfillment out of that.

Yeah, a hundred percent, like, the personalization is key, especially if you're like a fan of the brand. Right?

Exactly.

There's specific brands that I'm a big fan of that I'd love to work with. And I remember I'm on the cold email side. Right. So that was my agency back then, and we worked with email marketing agencies. And I'll never forget, for one of them, we got a response from yes Theory or their clothing brand called Seek Discomfort. And that was like my number one clothing brand. I love their YouTube channel. And I remember getting like, low key jealous of my client. I'm like, I kind of want to work with these guys. Like, I want them as a client because they sign them to do their email marketing. And I just thought that was really cool as I could, you know, bridge that connection. But I low key was like, dang, I want to work with these guys. So I can only imagine there's probably like an actual Dream 100 list that you have of brands you just love to work with.

Yeah, that's actually a crazy story because I've heard of those guys.

Yeah, they're awesome, dude. I love their YouTube channel and they have cool merch as well. But anyways, Adam, what would you say to like, a younger version of yourself, but more so just like agency owners that are just getting started? Like, what's one thing you thought of an agency owner should know or have or skill set or thing to learn that you quickly realized was not really the case? Like, what's something you know now about running an agency that you didn't know back then or that you thought back then that's different now? Just trying to shed some light on your one year of learning since joining the program and all the growth you've experienced in each of those departments. There's gotta be something that comes to mind.

Yeah, actually, I've thought about this. I think my biggest thing would be like, that I would tell my past self is to do like, get a lot of reps in, in the outreach, like as like a dream 100 style thing. That way you get a lot better at the actual service that you're fulfilling because you're just starting, you know, like you're probably not that good when you're, when you're just starting out. So you get those reps in and then you use those reps as a form of outreach as well. Like I've personally, if I would have started doing that, I think I would have progressed way faster, like back two years ago when I first started.

Well, no one wants to do it because it's a lot of work, right? It's like you're doing the work before you get paid and that's a big block.

Yeah, exactly.

But for the people that are willing to do it and implement a proper strategy so they're not just wasting their time doing a bunch of free work with nothing to show for it, the results are pretty amazing. Like we've highlighted from what Evan's been able to do. So, yeah, I love that because Dream 100 Outreach, it's marketing, but it's also sales. Right. Because you have to sell the people on why they should work with you. But in itself as well, it's fulfillment because you're giving them a delivered product or service or deliverable rather than just trying to sell them on the potential of what that might look like. So you're actually doing all three things by doing Dream 100 Outreach, which I love that answer. It's like if you're going to focus on one thing as a new agency owner, do Dream 100 outreach because you learn marketing or lead gen sales and fulfillment all in one. As you do that. And that's, that's like I said, we just rolled out an entire course in client attention on how to do Dream 100 outreach properly. I think there's like 14 modules that go through it specifically from Evan, who's closed. Like I mentioned, the notable clients like Jim Launch, Hormozi, Patrick Pet, David Jason, Mojo, Client Ascension, List Kit and has just worked with, with the top guys in our space, which is really cool. So yeah, dude, that, that's great. That's great advice. And even now, as, as you're, you know, at this next milestone, you can continue to use that form of outreach to sharpen your skillset and pick up new clients.

Yeah, yeah. And the bar just goes higher. So, like, now I'm not doing that just to find, like, my first client. I'm doing that to the big dogs, trying to get, like, a big opportunity that could genuinely completely change the trajectory of the agency if we were to land one of those.

Love that. And you can play the long game because now you have a solid foundation with 18 clients. Not 18 clients. Really good revenue and just more experience under your belt, kind of knowing what to expect going forward. So, yeah, dude, I'm excited for you. And we'll have more events in Tampa next year. That's going to be a big part of our business model going forward, is having more events. So we got one on February 1st. We'll have another one probably in April or May, another one sometime in the summer. And then we're already locked in on October 25th for our big annual event again. So we're gonna have a lot of events, and I'm sure we'll see you around. And honestly, I'm just excited for that day where you post in the WINS channel or reach out to us directly saying you signed one of those Dream 100 clients, because I know it's just. It's just a matter of time, so.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I'll be there. I'm looking forward to it.

Well, Adam, let us know. Let the audience know where they can find you and follow you online. I always say, if you're watching this and you're already in client ascension, just shoot Adam a DM on Slack. That's typically the best way to connect with other students in the program. And if you're not inclined, Ascension, definitely check it out. Like I said, we just rolled out Dream 100 outreach content and so much more. We got a bunch of events planned for next year in Tampa and some other locations as well. We haven't announced, but you can just go to clientessension.com and go through the funnel to find out more. But, Adam, where can we find you online as well?

Yeah, so I'm on Twitter. I believe it's just amrame. So that's R E H M. I'm on Instagram @Adamrame copy and then on YouTube as well as Adam Rame. So you can check me out. Those are my main three.

Perfect, bro. Well, thank you for. For being here. Thanks for being in the program. Thanks for implementing what we teach, improving that. Yes, this stuff does work, and I'm just excited for your future, bro.

So appreciate you. Andre.

Talk soon. All right, thanks for listening. Guys, peace.