How He Built a $132k/mo Content Agency inside Client Ascension (Ayman Arab Interview)

In September 2023 I did 6 a 62k month. And then we coasted from September all the way to December at around 60 55K. And then February 2024 I did 93 5K in a month. And then we pretty much coasted like the whole year in between like 70 and 80k a month with the agency all the way up until December of 2024. So two months ago or a month ago we did 132k a month. So that was the whole timeline. So overall it took me about 2 years to get to 130k.

Dope. So walk me through. Like when you had first joined in December 2022, you're at like 2k a month and you got up to 15k a month. And what, what was it you said? Like three months. What did you, what did you do to get up to 15k a month from 2k a month originally?

How'd that happen? Yeah, so for that initial three month push to get to 15k a month, I primarily focused on cold outreach combined with content. Those are my two avenues. There's three ways to get clients. There's ads, cold outreach and content. But I didn't do ads. Cause that's more for later when you make more money. Actually we scaled to this point with pretty much no ads, but I'll touch more on that later. But basically cold outreach, My strategy was G100. So I was sending free work, five messages per day with free work upfront. So originally we were more focused on short form content. So actually I was sending free short form clips. What I would do is, cause I was still in college, I would stay up until 4am, send five free short form videos and I would sleep and wake up at 6 or 7am, go to school and. And I continuously did that. And then over time I slowly transitioned to sending scripts rather than short form videos just because I was. I didn't want to edit anymore or pay the editors to do the videos. It was just more efficient. And then for every 100 people we'd reach out to, typically we could close one to two. Even though I had like no social proof when I started. So that was the cold outreach side. And then on the content side I was mainly focused on Twitter and YouTube. Those were my two platforms I was focusing on. And we started getting a good amount of clients through Twitter about after two to three months of posting on there because it does take some time to kick in. But I was doing like one auto DM per week, or I guess you could say two per month on average. And then every auto DM, I would turn it into a YouTube video. So I had this whole content ecosystem going on and then I was in the DMs following up with people. So those were the main inputs. So just to recap real quick, you want to. I was trying to do one YouTube video a week, five messages a day, and then about two tweets per day, 10 Twitter replies per day, and one auto DM a week as well.

Sweet. Good stuff. For every 100 pieces of, like, the free work that you give out, you'd sign anywhere from one to two clients. So how many of those did you do in total, would you estimate?

Yeah, we. We kind of lost count because I use trello to track them and there's no like, number counter. But I don't know if I want to say a thousand, but probably between seven hundred and a thousand, maybe, Maybe more. I'm not too sure, to be honest. Yeah, yeah.

I think there's a huge misconception with a lot of people who, they want to, they want to execute a strategy like this.

Okay, do free.

We're going to do like 10 and then they stop.

You know what I mean?

It's just like not even remotely close to what's sufficient to actually make anything happen. So, yeah, so really, really useful insight there for people who want to reach an initial 15k a month. What. But what happened after that? So, so you, you get to 15k a month and then like, and then throughout the rest of that year you get up to like 60.

Like, what happened there?

Like, what's the difference between being at 15 day a month and getting to like 60.

Yeah. So funny enough, it was just continuing to do the exact same things, but then on top of that, just focusing on producing case studies because I got my first good case study right up around when I hit 15k a month. And it was like, oh, I scaled my first client from 30k a month to 75k month in four months. We're doing short form and YouTube frame at the same time. So I used that case study to pivot more into YouTube. And then I just kept pushing out that case study, kept up with the outreach, kept up with the content over time. As time went on, like, I slowly dropped from doing like five messages a day, a day to maybe three. And then like, some days I would miss out just because content is just much higher leverage. So I would like post content and, you know, my brand was bigger so I would get more clients from inbound. But I started from zero on content like everyone else. You know, a huge misconception is maybe people will look at your account with like a hundred k followers and be like, oh, of course you made money on Twitter. You have a hundred k followers. Or me now I have nine k. It's like I started with like a hundred followers, no profile pic. So to answer your question, it's just more of the same plus producing case studies on top of it to get to 62K. And then actually one more thing I did was to get to that 62k. I had to get a bit creative because I was doing a competition with my friends and we had a goal like, oh, who's going to hit 50k first? And I was short. Like I wasn't going to hit 50k in September 2023. So I had to come up with a new offer. It was like, oh, we'll script your VSL and make it for you. It was like those gamma VSLs, similar to the ones we make for yourself. So we would create the Gamma doc and then edit it. And I sold them for like 2k or I don't know what I was charging. And we sold like a ton of those. So that's what pushed me up. And then what I realized on that month was like, okay, I shouldn't focus purely on like retainer projects. You know, one off projects are super profitable and easy to fulfill on too. So nowadays like, you know, all of our money isn't even MRR. Like we have maybe 20% of our revenue every month is one offs and then the rest is recurring projects. Nice.

What do you think about coaching programs? Because obviously not everyone who joins a coaching program gets results. But you join when you go from 2k a month to 132k a month. Why do you get results and why do other people not get results?

Yeah, so just because you join a coaching program doesn't mean you automatically get results because other people do. Like you said, there's a difference, right? Some people get results like me, some people don't. So the difference is when I joined Client Ascension, I was like hopping into coaching calls. I was asking questions. I was also making an effort to connect with other people. I made some really great friends there and just kind of keep in touch, you know, they know. Maybe one like Matt Lucille for example, shout out to him. He has a cold email agency. I'm like super tight with him. He I just made a ton of other friends and surrounded myself with people pushing outreach and getting clients every day. So now I'm rambling a bit. But to come back to the main point, number one, I would show up every day like not only for, into the program, like doing calls and stuff, but also like the outreach content, et cetera. I would track my inputs and connect with people and ask good questions and then go execute on the questions and then come back and then show the coaches, hey, I did what you told me. If worked, it didn't work. What should I do now? And then the. They tend to give you more advice or, or more attention if you actually execute on what they're telling you. So that's what I have to say on that.

So imagine, imagine you're back at like that, that, like that 2k a month and trying to get to like 15k a month or 30 or 60 or whatever and you're trying to hit that initial leg up. Where do you, what advice would you give to yourself in that position? And kind of like other people you see, they get stuck around there. What kind of advice would you give to them?

The advice I would give is like, it's the cliche sentence of nothing happens for a while and then everything happens all at once. So you like when you do dream 100 for example, like you probably won't close your first client for anywhere from like sometimes it's three weeks, sometimes it's five weeks because there's also sales cycles. So like maybe you reach out to someone on February 1, but they're not going to close till February 20 or something. So you have to keep doing these inputs and make sure you're doing things that snowball and compound over time. So like don't expect results on day one. Everyone's timeline is different. Like you should compare yourself to other people like myself, but at the same time just know, you know, everybody's results may vary timeline wise. So just what I would tell myself is stick to the outreach like religiously. Like you gotta do this every day, no excuses and then just post the content and then just let God do its thing and it'll work out.

What do you, what are your thoughts on offers? Because I mean like originally I remember you, you came in, it was just.

Very simple, like oh, we'll do short form video for you.

And it's like it doesn't work like that. How is your, how's your thought process and kind of just understanding of offers evolved? Like do you have a take on it?

Yeah. So actually to. We didn't have like a basic short form offer when we hopped in. We did, we created the we'll make you 60 shorts using two hours of your time and then that just freaking ripped. But to answer your question, my thoughts on offers now I think like nobody really cares about offers as much as people think. Like people put too much of a focus on it. It's really just like, okay, what will you do for me? Okay, we'll make you YouTube videos. What am I going to get as a result? I'm going to get qualified calls, I'm going to get clients, I'm going to shorten sales cycles. Okay, cool. Do you have social proof? Yes. Okay, then I don't care about the guarantee. Oh, you have no social proof. Do you have a guarantee to make up for it? And I'm like, yep, yeah.

So because I know you, you, you coach some people particularly like content type people and you probably get exposed to this a lot where guys come in and they're trying to sell something. Just like, look it just see like literally no one is buying it. Absolutely zero people are showing interest. What is the kind of advice that you give to these people? Say they're running a content agency like yours, bro. Just like no one's responding, no one's interested. Like, what, what, what have you typically found around that?

Yeah. So after coaching like tons of content agencies, what I realized is like, there actually is certain offers where like it works way less than other stuff. So for example, there was a point in time where maybe the million views in 90 days thing like kind of worked. But a couple students tested it and it just doesn't work as well as the other stuff because people don't really care about views, they care about making money. So you have to make sure your offer is selling something that people want. And the other thing I've noticed to tackle that second point, you said of like someone, maybe they're like, hey, I've been reaching out and it's not working. Number one, we make sure like okay, they're doing their follow ups because the money is in the follow up. Are they can, are they tracking everything in a Trello CRM? But then also, but we've noticed is like the people that have outreach, that works like they're also posting content. Right. There's a big, big difference between the people who just do outreach, no content. And especially if you're a content agency and you're not doing, you're not practicing what you preach, it's very bad. So as long as they're doing your outreach, doing the follow ups to making content, it ends up working. And the same advice applies to other people. For example, if you have a Twitter and LinkedIn ghostwriting agency, but you're not tweeting and you're not making LinkedIn posts, way, way, way less people will buy from you. It'll be way more harder to sell. Now like when I'm on a sales call, I just pitch someone like some short, like a package for like eight grand a month. Right before this I just screen share my Instagram. I talk about, hey, you know, I got 27k views on this reel. Here's how much money I made. Hey, look at my YouTube channel. And then I always say I'm one of the rare content agencies that practices what I preach. And then it just makes such a big difference.

Can you walk us through a typical day now versus when you kind of didn't really have any direction or like know what to do? Like what, what, what is running a 132k a month business hood like for.

You, like on a daily. So now since I've moved to Dub Canada, I went from eastern time to plus nine hours ahead. So right now it's like 7pm for me in eastern it's like 10am so this has made it. So I usually do calls from like 5pm to 11pm that's the current window I have open. I do all the sales calls myself. I've messed around with like two closes before, but it always just ends up coming back to me. So typical day is in the morning calls. That's where I'm doing the needle moving activities such as creating my own content, looking at the CRM and doing the doing follow ups as well. Just making sure the stuff that needs to get done gets done. And then later on in the day the team logs in, I check in with the team, make sure all the clients are attended to and then that later part of the day from 5pm to 11pm, I'm on calls. Not the whole way through, a couple breaks in between. But we do get a lot of calls from Twitter, YouTube, et cetera. And then finally after 11pm, so this is like 2pm to 5pm Eastern time. I'm checking in with the team again, making sure everything is good, potentially doing like a slack huddle with my ops manager, making sure things are clear. And nowadays a huge focus has been on like hiring because we had such a big influx of clients over the past two months. So really just getting video editors in and then simultaneously making editing trainings as well. So that's, that's the answer to the.

Question if you had to give it like a synopsis of what you learned specifically in client ascension that helped you grow your business to where it is now? What would be like, maybe the two or three most integral things that you learned that contributed to towards your success?

Yeah, the first thing that I learned was it's getting successful is a blueprint. It's like, you do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, and it'll work. It might take three months, might take two months, but it'll work. So I learned like, okay, there's three ways to get clients ads, cool outreach content. Because, you know, it sounds basic, but it's good to just have all the information just like there. You know, I'm a 2k a month noob. I was like 17 years old, and then I just learned everything. So the first thing is, okay, there's three ways to get content. Pick like two and. But it'll work. So I learned like, okay, there's three ways to get clients ads, cool outreach content. Because, you know, it sounds basic, but it's good to just have all the information just like there. You know, I'm a 2k a month noob. I was like 17 years old, and then I just learned everything. So the first thing is, okay, there's three ways to get content. Pick like two and then just rip it day in and day out. Track your inputs. That was like another really big thing. Like, there was the sprint back in the day. I don't know if you guys still do those, but we had a spreadsheet. We're tracking how many tweets, we're doing all this stuff. And then it was cool to see how many tweets I made versus clients I signed. And outreaches, 10. The next thing I learned was overall, like, sales, because I had never sold really anything before. I mean, I sold some. Some varsity jackets. Like, I had a closing brand for a bit, but I learned like, okay, this is how a sales call is structured. This is how you handle these objections, et cetera. And I also learned how to position my offer in a way where it's like, I'm not giving you videos. You know, you're gonna make money off of these videos. That was one huge thing that propelled us to the next level and I guess overall with offers as well. Like when I added a guarantee to my offer, that's when we went from like 15k to 30k a month. And I think, like, two months or something, it just made a big difference. And funny enough, like, nobody even actually cares about the guarantee. Like, it doesn't come up on the sales calls. Or anything, but it just gets more people on the phone. So that's really, really good change. And a couple other things I learned was, like, social media, specifically Twitter. Like, I didn't really know too much about Twitter before joining. And then I learned, like, okay, this is the type of content that gets clients, you know, hey, you should do these Twitter replies and all this type of stuff. So overall, how to run a business as well. Because we got Andre, the operations go too. So, like, you know, I'll ask him questions, and he says, okay, you need to think of the business like a conveyor belt, and you need to do this, this, and that. Of course, a lot of the things I've learned from client ascension, I've, like, morphed into different learnings and added my own experience on top of it and developed those things. But a lot of my. My base comes from ca. Yeah. Nice.

How long did it take you to make your investment back in client attention? Oh.

I made the investment back, like, months, I guess. 30 days. 30 or 45 days later. Yeah.

Nice.

Did you.

Do you have any, like, hesitations or doubts before joining? Because I know you also do coaching for some other people, and you. You're probably able to identify the same exact thought processes that people have. What is that? Because sometimes people will see, like, a. Here's a group of people teaching people exactly like me how to get results. Here's a bunch of evidence that they've already done it for a bunch of other people. But, no, I'm not gonna do it. Like, why do you. Why do you think that is?

What is that thought process? I think it's more the fact of, like, they recognize that the program itself works, but they. They're not confident in themselves to make it work. Like, they're scared they're gonna join the program and then be overwhelmed, and it's a lot of money I'm losing, and they look at the price tag.