Scott Millard built Video Spark from a $2k/month freelance video business to $20-30k/month by moving online, packaging his offers, and hiring a closer. He found Client Ascension through Twitter and restructured everything around recurring revenue instead of one-off projects.
Questions this video answers
January 16, 2023.
About 7 years.
Around $2,000 per month.
Consistently $20,000–$30,000 per month; he mentioned a possible $40,000 month.
Roughly 9–10 months (he alternately says nine months, ten months).
Chapters
What's going on, guys? Andre Hagel Jr. Back here with another student spotlight interview with one of, I would say, like, poster childs of Client Ascension, Scott Millard. So what's up, Scott? Me and Scott are boys. We're about to move in together, even at this point, and just we make a bunch of content together. He does specialize in. Yeah, dude, I remember when I saw some of your first videos on Twitter and I think I told you, like, these give me, like, an Apple vibe, like an Apple trailer commercial vibe, which is so dope. So, yeah, the video quality that you put out is unbelievable. So if you haven't seen it, I recommend you go and check it out. But tell us a little bit more about, like, how you heard about Client Ascension, because I feel like that part of your story is also really interesting and there is some funny aspects to it as well.
So I don't even know if I've told you this. I've told Daniel this, but long story short, probably 10. 10 months ago or something like that, I was in, literally in my mom's basement in my bedroom. I had just left, like, the second startup or something. Yeah, second or third startup I'd worked at. We ran out of money. I was basically like, didn't know what to do. I had just joined Twitter probably like a month prior to that, on the recommendation of some. Some friends. Shout out to Jean Luc jl and I was on Twitter just like, kind of looking like, what to do. I was going to get a normal job at that point, and I caught on a Twitter space that Daniel and David were on, and Daniel's talking about, like, setting up domains and all this stuff, and I'm like, what is he talking about? This makes no sense. I had never even heard of this. So right place, right time. I basically heard that. Entered the funnel and booked a call with Jay, and Jay closed me, thank God, after two calls. And, yeah, so, I mean, I just heard about it through Twitter and then funny enough, that's how I've grown my business, basically 100 of it has been through organic Twitter. So, uh, it's been pretty fun to. To. To be on there for the last year and kind of experiment with it.
Yeah, man, it's been truly incredible to like, watch your growth from, like, when you first joined the community. It was actually right around when I was in Minneapolis for Vcon, and I was just like, who is like, this new student? Like, I was almost like, scared to, like, meet new people in, like, a city that I've never been to. And Then we ended up meeting up later in Tampa and here we are today. So it's a really cool story and it happened really, really fast along with some other milestones and wins that you've achieved. So why don't you go into talking about like the actual business that you run and how that's kind of changed since joining the program. Like yeah. Any wins or milestones that you can recall over the past couple of months?
Yeah. So to preface, I have like 7 years of video experience. So before client ascension ever happened I was running on purely a freelance basis. Um, and most of it was in person. So if you think about it like in Minnesota I would maybe get a chance to have like 2k in business maybe per month of just like random stuff, had no form, didn't know how to do Legion, barely knew how to do sales, didn't I kind of knew about marketing but all the online stuff I was like didn't really know how to do. I just knew how to make videos. And what client extension that we were talking about the other day did for me is in like I said, I think I've been in there for like nine months or something. Ten months. I basically went from only knowing how to do stuff like in person, one off basis freelance model to now being able to build a small team, be completely online, do the lead gen sales marketing as like an operator and outsource some of that how to do it. Well graduated from not knowing how to do sales to trying to close some deals to like I hired a closer just the other day so that's been like a big achievement. But all in all client ascension really got me to basically bring my income 100 online. And not only that but I've at least 10x my income. So like I said, I was making maybe 2k a month doing freelance stuff. I'm now consistently at 20 to 30 kind of bounces around there. We might do actually like 40 this month. Just fingers crossed. But yeah, so that's, it's, it's been crazy.
Yeah dude. And one of the things that I remember we, we were talking about early on in the business was like having to constantly chase new business because it was a one time service, right. And a lot of agency owners and more specifically like you kind of identified as, as a freelancer, struggle with this because it's not really a business, it's a one off service. And in recently you've made this really cool pivot to more recur like a recurring model. So maybe talk a little bit about the pivot that you recently made in your business. And before we hit the record, you were talking even about like how you want to be like the bespoke video marketing agency in the, in the industry and just have like really unique services to offer. So maybe touch on that a little bit so that people watching can almost get an idea for what you're, where you're going with this.
Yeah. So I guess so we've been struggling to. Well, before I even started this, I didn't realize that building recurring revenue was like really healthy thing I guess for a business to do. I don't know why I didn't think of that. But it's like one of the main things obviously when it comes to like making an exit and stuff like that. We're still kind of working on making it recurring. But what I will say is from client extension directly what happened is I was selling one off videos and they went from like 500. Then I increased the price, then I increased the price to now they're like 2K 3K. Right. But I was still struggling to get past like 15k a month doing that because you have to sell video after video. What we ended up doing is putting together what client ascension ended up doing, not me, is putting together a specialized offer for me that was a package deal that was able to literally overnight immediately increase my, I guess you'll say average order value by at least double. So we went from like a higher ticket, one off video offer, which actually isn't that high ticket if you compare it to agencies that charge like 20k for an explainer video, to being able to package those and do the messaging in a way that's more than just, hey, you'll get two videos. It's like, no, you'll get this component with these videos and we'll do this for you and it will, you know, increase your revenue because of this and we'll charge you this price, which is now 3 to 4x what we were charging for the normal videos. So what that allowed us to do is have the same amount of inbound leads as we had before, but basically triple our revenue, our top line revenue. So that was a game changer. And I've only been running that now for like a few weeks and we've booked more calls. My revenue is going up. I guess the prospects are honestly more excited because they're getting, they feel like they're getting more, which they kind of are. So that's been, that's been really great and not something I would have probably thought of myself without being in the program.
Yeah. So awesome. And so many benefits can stem from price increases, right? Like now you're able to go out and confidently hire a closer and hire a team to do fulfillment without having to stress too much about margins. And so that's really cool. Lots to look forward to in 2023. So just to end this real quick, where can people watching find you, follow you, and also look into what it might look like to work with you?
Yeah, so Twitter is Scott C. Millard. Everything is basically linked to my Twitter. If you look up Scott Mellard on LinkedIn, I'm there. Same thing with YouTube. I basically just tweet about everywhere else you can find me, so. And in terms of working with us, it's the company's called Video Spark and the links are plastered all over my Twitter, so you'll have no problem finding it if people are interested in that.
Awesome, man. Well, I'm super proud of you, bro. Keep up the good work. If you're watching this, be sure to follow Scott. Follow everything that he's doing. He obviously is crushing it in the space and is, again, a poster child of this program. So appreciate all your hard work and looking forward to seeing what you do from here on out.
