How Chandler Hit $3,500,000 With His SMB Inside Client Ascension (B2B Lead Gen + Client Acquisition)

Yo, what's up everybody? I got Chandler here. Chandler is a good friend now and obviously is inside Client Ascension and he's coming on here today to share with you his experience. We're gonna just talk business. So Chandler, my friend, welcome. Could you, could you just give everybody a rundown of like the business you run and kind of maybe the stuff we showed you how to do in Client Ascension and what that, what that, what that resulted in for your business?

Yeah, 100. So starting off the business I run is a green energy contractor for commercial real estate. So what that really is, we do any kind of energy efficiency project. So LED lighting, low flow plumbing, EV charging stations and solar energy installs. And what is really cool about our business versus we don't have any in house labor I guess if you will. So we pretty much are just a project management and service sales platform. We sub out all of our labor. So that allowed us to do projects in Washington state proper. Last year we just closed out two on just outside of New York City, on Long island and pretty much everywhere in between we get business done. So what I really was excited about joining Client Ascension was kind of, I had this old school kind of real world business mousetrap. Right. But the scalability of that really boded well with some of the tips, tricks and you know, lessons that you can learn inside Client Ascension kind of, you know, the Internet money scaling, if you will, voted pretty well for my, my mousetrap that I had set back up so before I joined Client Ascension. So I believe I joined early 2022. My business did about 900k in revenue in 2021 and as of I just got the year end financials for 2022. We finished out at just shot just shy of three and a half million bucks. So pretty big jump there. And you know, a lot of that was directly attributed to the stuff I learned inside Client Ascension primarily some of the lead gen tips and tricks. So I know like a lot of people use that and then turn it into an agency that create on their own. But I basically was developing an agency, as you know, the biz dev platform within my business and is the good thing about this too is I know a lot of people talk about the saturation, you know, people hitting up chiropractors and other econ people like hey, can I get you five extra clients? It's like well take that to a super unsaturated market. Really old school like in commercial real estate, especially the vendor space that we're in. Their idea of business development is setting up, you know, paying 25k for a trade show booth at some dumb trade show in the middle of nowhere, they're going to stick you by the bathroom and fingers crossed, someone walks by. Whereas I can go scrape emails for my target client in my target industry and my target locations, hit them on some email campaigns that, you know, Christian and the rest of the guys with Inclined Ascension helping me out through, get them on a call with Connor and who walked me through the kind of sales script stuff and just getting my closing way better than what it was before I joined Client Ascension just turning into a fricking machine. And we're hoping to double that again in 2023, again doubling down on these same principles that I learned at Client Ascension. So.

Pretty good. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's kind of interesting because most people in there, they run just like a digitally based business and you're like you said you're, you're a hands on like hands dirty, like SMB. And if people don't know what SMB means, it means small to medium business. And it's, it's kind of in that realm where you do like, you'll get like physical stuff gets produced and created. And it's very interesting because you use terms like business development, which is like, yes, that's literally what like cold emailing is. You're developing business. That's what business development means. So it's, it's really interesting to see the intersection between companies like yours and then more so like 100% based digital companies and like taking kind of like a SMB and like translating their stuff to be more digital and then like taking the full digital guys and translating that into like no, no, this is like a little more sophisticated than you would otherwise think and like merging them into one like robotic baby type thing, you know what I mean?

Hybrid.

So yeah, I like your model a lot where it's, it's literally is it. It kind of could be considered like just solely digital in a way because you're like contracting it out. It's just like the classic example of arbitraging. But what you're doing is you're arbitraging labor.

Exactly. Yeah. So it's like 100% like we have an office. I'm sitting here now. This is our version of the startup garage, if you will. It's nothing fancy, but we get shit done here. And yeah, that's kind of that intersection that you're talking about is where I'm trying to live and where I think I'll be Spending the majority of the next decade is taking these old outdated businesses. I mean, dude, you'd be blown away. But you know, businesses doing 5, 10 million bucks in revenue and all their books are on paper, all their files, they have no, they don't even know what Google Drive is or they can barely use your emails. And then you go buy a business, which the business I am running right now I purchased in 2021 in May. So buying these, you know, the mousetrap is there. It's just then you start layering on these kind of new age tech techniques, if you want to call it that, and you can just superpower these things. So it's exciting stuff.

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's really cool because I mean you, you, a couple, a little bit ago you made like a pretty detailed breakdown of like exact Legion system that's kind of employed in your company. It was super interesting because when you, when you're really looking, you just, if you just look at it, it's so simple where you're like, you just do this over and over and over again. And it's just a biz dev process that you just constantly move over and over and over again. And the beauty of it is that it can be trained to somebody else. So like if there's someone like an SMB like you or they run like a larger company, it's literally just creating a biz dev system that is easily replicatable to just like SDRs or just business development reps. And you can just employ this, you can stack these people and do the same thing over and over and over again. It's like, and you, you, you've probably got to this point now where there's a certain point where you're so efficient and you're so good at acquiring the business that the only bottleneck is the actual fulfillment of the thing.

Exactly. And that's where, and that's where it kind of can get a little tricky in kind of the real world businesses because then you start dealing with stuff like supply chain and price increases and labor shortages and shit. So that's where the nuances and obviously you know, the margins where Internet business, you know, you're clicking buttons and printing money, which is so sweet, but still it's a great, it's a great world to live in. I love it.

You probably have a similar philosophy on this as I do because you sell like your stuff is like in the five figures, like probably mid five figures. When you sell something, maybe, maybe like six figures as well, sometimes it's so much easier to make money when what you're selling is just B2B, very expensive, 100%. It's so like, I mean, we get some guys coming in sometimes. They're like, yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to scale up to $100,000 a month with my $300 per month service or my $46 course. And it's like, bro, that's so hard.

I'd rather just sell, I'd just rather just sell one thing for $100,000 a month and that be done with it, bro. Versus, you know, selling that three or the $300 product.

Yeah. So you're, you're, you're literally acquiring like six figure contracts with cold email and like a very simple process of doing it, which is just the most hilarious thing of all time. Because you could probably go to some other like SMB owner and they might be like, chandler, how'd you go from 900k a year to 3.5 million a year in one year? They're like, oh, I just send cold emails and they're like, whoa. Yeah, like, it's got to be this crazy complex system. It's like, nah, pretty simple.

Exactly. Yeah. Because most of the people in the space, like I was saying, like, their idea of business development and just sales is incredibly antiquated, but the mousetrap that they're selling is fricking sweet and it works really well and it solves a lot of problems for people. But you know, just layering those two worlds together can just create a beast. Yeah.

So you're kind of at that, that, that, that point now where you can like, I know like you, you just came up with a golf video with Dylan. You guys just like go out and golf and then like, like we're friends now. Like we hang out. Like we. Oh yeah, we'll, we'll like go out places and whatnot. It's like super fun when you just have like a, you just own this entity that produces cash flow and it's like semi automated. And a lot of people say, I want to make an automated business. But yeah, it doesn't really work.

It's never.

Yeah, yeah, but it's, it's pretty nice when you get to that like 3 million a year mark. Because I feel like that's like a turning point for people when you hit around like 3 million year and maybe even if your, your margin is like 50 or something like that, it's like, that's like really, really good. Like. Yeah, you're chilling. But I was. You, you, you've probably seen this before. I was, I was reading something on Twitter and it wasn't even a thread, it was just a conversation on like SMB Twitter. I follow some of them and I like to see what they're talking about. And what they were saying is they're, they're calling it the black hole of business and they're saying it's, it's somewhere between like 2 and 3 million a year where you're starting to get sufficiently large to where you need to start hiring executives and like full time managers.

Yeah, I saw that tweet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, that's so true. It's, it happens right there. And it's like you're either going to get stuck right there or you're going to take the cash flow and plow it into that kind of stuff and go beyond it. So like, what is your plan to do? Like, which direction do you want to go?

Yeah, yeah, no. So for me, it's like I'm trying to blow this thing up as, as big as possible. Like right now. We just made our first kind of key hire on the sales side under me, and that just gave me back like freaking 20 hours of my week. So it's huge. So I'm finally. Because I was truly the business we bought was in this industry, it's called a turnaround, if you will. So a lot of hair on the deal I was wearing. People joke about, you know, buying a job in the space when you buy kind of an SMB like this because a lot of times the owners are very involved in the day to day. And I kind of bought like seven jobs, if you will. So I'm like, hey, I knew what I was getting into, but this is my first rodeo. So I'm like, I want to get my hands dirty. I need to learn everything. I need to do every single draw within this company and learn because on the back end now it's like I know the exact person I need to hire who can solve these exact problems that I've been facing and take that off my plate. So now I can start working on my business rather than working inside the business. So yeah, so our plan is to just keep blowing it up as big as possible. My, my philosophy with business is grow demand to the point where it starts breaking operations and then repair operations to be able to sustain that demand. And then it's back on the sales team to go break operations again. So we've got to that point now where we kind of had broke operations. And then we just hired another sales rep, More of a kind of inside sales. Just free me up to go focus on bringing in new clients. And so we're trying to break ops again. And then we'll just keep repeating that process until, you know, I guess we top out.

That's. That's the same way we do it. It's like oscillations. You break this, then you break that, then you break that, then you break that. You just keep going back and forth.

Exactly. That's a good thing too. Like, some people are like, oh, I don't want to break anything. I'm like, well, you're never going to grow. Like, it's. It comes with a territory of growth. So.

Yeah. Yeah.

So that's where we're at.

I. I had a question. It just kind of. It's kind of flew past my. My mind. But. But where do you feel like you could. Would. Would selling this company be something that you'd be interested in? Because I'd imagine you could probably get like, like maybe like a 2x revenue on it. And if it's like you really, like, got the sales team dialed in, like possibly like a three or four. I don't know, you. You're more aware of multiples and SMB space.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I wish there was freaking revenue multiples in this business. It typically trades off, like either EBITDA or if the business is kind of really small, something called sde, which is basically like all the money that the owner has to like, pay himself or all of his fringe benefits. A lot of times these small businesses, like, especially you look at one and during due diligence on acquiring it, you see he's got his. His Buccaneer season tickets running through the business and like all this other stuff. So you kind of back all of that stuff out called like adjustments to get to kind of like a baseline. Like, hey, if owner, this is what owner A is doing. If acquirer B comes and buys it, what kind of money does he have to play around with effectively? So those trade off, like, I guess call it depending on the size of the business, anywhere from like 3 to 5x of that kind of like, call it profit, if you will. So depending on the margins of the business, that could be maybe like a 1x revenue, if you will. So, yeah, so my goal is eventually blow this thing up to the point. And there's a lot of being in the green energy ESG sustainability space. It's kind of the hottest girl at the bar right now. If you will. So there's a lot of active private equity transactions going on. So I'm hoping to get this up to a space where someone. It's attractive enough for someone to take it out and then figure out what I want to do next.

I've always kind of been under the impression that people, dude, why don't you sell that company? But then you get to the point where it's like, well, well, I'm going to. Okay, say I sell the company. You get like 6 million or 7 million. So now you just have to redeploy the 6 or 7 million to something else that also provides cash flow. So like, what is even the point of selling the company exactly?

If it's like.

Sufficiently staffed and like, I mean automated to a degree where maybe it requires like 20 hours of work for you, like, what would even be the point of selling the company? What are you going to do with the money specifically? And even then it's like you're, what are you, 28? 29?

Yeah, 27. I'm turning 28 later this year.

It's like, what the, what is 6 million gonna get you at 27? You know what I mean? It's like you still gotta like, you want to live like a, like, yeah, kind of a lavish life for the rest of your life. It's like it's gonna be a little more than 6 million.

Yeah. You still got work to do. You got your work cut out for you.

Yeah.

And it's like even if, oh God.

Even if you put in like dividend stocks or something, return on. It's like, bro, that's money. Like it just isn't 100%.

Yeah. So I guess there's kind of like two schools of thought, right? Or three schools of thought, I guess, if you will. So one, a hundred percent. It's like, you know the age old adage, like if it's not broke, like don't fix it. Like just keep riding the, riding the horse. So if you want to do that, there's like two kind of avenues, I guess, or so if I were to sell one, probably roll it up into a bigger business and just rinse, wash and repeat that. So that's kind of the playbook within, kind of like real estate, private equity. It's like a lot of guys, you know, they start off buying single family homes or duplexes, triplexes, quad plexes, whatever. They go buy it, improve it, fix it up, rent it out for more, go sell it. And then they're on the 10 unit buildings. And then they go do the same process and then they're on the 50 unit buildings. So eventually, I mean, you know, the business I acquired was relatively small in this world, but obviously I've been able to grow it. So I guess kind of next would be go buy another business that's even bigger, grow that one again. And then Instead of a six million dollar exit, we're talking 15 to 20 million dollar exit on the next one. And then there's also a space saying if I like this space a lot, you could also do roll up. So it's like, hey, you're buying kind of like similar businesses in the same niche and just like it's like a big snowball. So you're buying like some onesie twosies and just rolling this giant snowball up. And I think probably honestly the richest guy I know in Tampa did that. He started the commercial cleaning business and just started scooping up ones all across the country. And I think he ended up cashing out for like somewhere in the tune of like 250 million bucks when all said and done. And then the best part is he has all this knowledge of how to do this right. And then when you sell a business, you know there's some sort of like non compete. Typically it's anywhere from like two to five years. And he was able to negotiate his non compete to like, I think it was like maybe a year, year and a half. And then he started and he's doing the other thing. He's doing the same shit again right now. So it's a good.

What I kind of think of is like I watched some Hormozi video one time and they were, they were talking about, he was explaining some philosophy from some like mega rich dude. He was like, there's no reason to sell unless you think the party is over. Yeah, I'm like that's kinda so true.

Yeah.

Because if you really look at like, I mean you can go out and you could just like, if you're ever just in a room of like wealthy guys, it's always like they just, it's not that they like sold something, it's they just own everything. Yeah, like it's, they just own everything. And this is kind of very interesting where compounding effects apply to every aspect of everything in life. And what I mean by that is your competencies are going to compound. Like you're going to know how to, how to build significantly massive business. Like four years, five years lapse from now. It's like maybe your thing is not 3.5 million anymore, it might be like 50 million now. You're the person capable of running a 50 million dollar year business. You know how to like functionally and logistically grow it to that point so your competency compounded and then it's like you've acquired all the cash flow from that. So you started acquiring like little ones. Right. And then those had their own compounding effect over time and they like feed into the larger one and everything just snowballs over an extremely long period of time. And it's even the case with cold email. And you probably see this all the time. You make like, I don't know, you're gonna send like maybe 5, 6 follow ups to someone and like they're spaced out really long. And then like you've contacted so many people and then people start responding to your emails that you sent them like five months ago and it, it starts compounding. Like it's, everything compounds. It's really, really weird. So I understand like where he comes from, where it's like if you don't sell once, you think the party is over. Cause it's like yeah, you just kind of like sold it. You just cut off the compound.

Yeah, you got to go reinvent the wheel. Exactly. Yeah. So no, I love that too. I mean that's like the, I guess kind of. Cause my background before I got in this was in the commercial real estate investment world. So it's like instead of selling, instead of selling, you know, your apartment or your industrial complex, whatever the hell you owned, you can refinance it. And so when you refi, that's a non taxable event. And so it's like the revenue and the rents, they all grow here. Your loan's about to expire. Maybe it was a 10 year term loan, something like that. Instead of selling it, you just refinance it. And all of a sudden you get this giant chunk of cash, tax free money in the bank and you still own that asset. That's still appreciating. So there's some very direct parallels in.

That I would imagine if your company is sufficiently large, I don't think that they really be cool with doing this unless you're at like 10, 20 mil a year, maybe you own some physical assets, but it's just taking a line of credit against the company. Yeah, like if you wanted to go buy some giant house or something like that and then like it's just against the company but they're, people will hear that, they'll be at like 500k a year or something and they think, yeah, that's not happening.

And yeah, especially too. Once you get enough, if. Once you get that size, obviously, you're probably gonna have a sizable amount of cash in the bank with whoever your banking lender is. Especially if, you know, like, a local guy like us. All of our money is within the bank of Tampa, and we were able to negotiate, you know, a good rate with them. One of my partners has, like, a sizable real estate portfolio with them. So it's like, all right, yeah, it's all about who you know in that world. But yeah, to your point, the same thing with, like, the refinancing, because a lot of these small businesses are. Are acquired using SBA financing, which is like the government's, like, program for small businesses. And those terms are typically 10 years. So, you know, you get that loan, you size that loan through your business on year one. And obviously, if you can grow it, like, hopefully that's the plan, right? Grow it to that year 10. When you pay off the loan, you can go get another loan against it. And again, that's just a tax free fricking windfall. So that's. That's the playbook for the wealthy people.

Yeah, I know, dude. Or like, putting all your stuff in a personal trust that owns, like, 90 of the assets. There's some crazy stuff that happens when you get to, like, the 10 mil a year mark and some, like, weird stuff that people employ. We're kind of getting to that point now where I'm, like, getting entrenched and stuff like that. And I'm like, yeah, go. You do that. Like, what is going on?

Yeah, yeah, I know.

And then like, hanging out with like, like, wealthy people in Tampa and whatnot, it's like, what are you talking about? Exactly. I know.

It's fun. It's so. It's so exciting, dude. And if anything, it's just like, you know what? You can look at it the side of like, oh, damn, I don't have that yet. Like, what the. I'm just gonna give up. But you know, the real killers, and I know you look at it this way, it's like, damn, that's just inspiration and some motivation to get there myself.

So it's just. Yeah. Like, it's inevitable. What's like, I'll be there one day. I'll join you soon.

Don't worry. Yeah. Or what's a. What's a dude who does a utopia? The marketing thing. Yeah. I don't know, but I just saw he had a tweet one time. It's like, it's. It's already happened. Like, we're just waiting for time to catch up or some like that. And I'm like, all right. I fuck with that. That's cool.

Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty dope. All right, brother. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you very much. 900k to 3.5 mil, which is. Which is absolutely dope. Just make sure you do, like, 6 mil next year, 7 mil next year.

That's what. That's what we're forecasting, so we're gonna keep on. Those are rookie numbers.

You gotta.

Gotta put those numbers up.

I'm gonna. I'm gonna leave links to all of Chandler's stuff in the description, so you can go hit him up on. On Twitter. You can go follow him. He posts interesting stuff. He's a g. Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate it.

Yeah. Enjoying client ascension too. If. If I couldn't convince you, you're. You're dumb if the shit works.

So.

Appreciate you, bro. Yeah, of course, Daniel.