Some Lessons From $7 Million in Sales This Year

Sup lads? I'm gonna do some lessons from about $7 million in sales this year. This is a rant video. I'm not gonna edit this, but just a couple things I want to, I guess, like a year and recap things. I've realized things that would potentially be useful for you if you don't know me. My name is Daniel Fazio, the co founder of Client center and List Kit. As I just said, we did about 7 million this year. I think we're probably going to do close to a million dollars this month in December, which would be profound. So I hope I hit that really soon because that's a substantially massive milestone I'm very excited to reach that I could start flexing on, which would be great. So I think the first thing I want to talk about is the fact that some things can scale so much farther than you think they otherwise would. We're running this offer right now and like we're running cold traffic ads to it. And I'm the one on the ads and the VSL and the funnels and like writing the, writing the email and like all the copy for it and kind of like just the structure of the offer. I'm not, I'm not the one fulfilling that. Andre is the one handling the fulfillment and the. Dan's the one handling the sales team. And then also Christian is helping me write and film ads for it. But dude, like I'm filming this on a Thursday and on Monday we closed 17 people in a single day. Like, I know people who will go an entire year and not sign. 17 clients in total. We did that in a single day. It's like, dude, sometimes we'll, we'll literally close like 30 people a week. Like, it's. It's like, it's so insane. Just like the, the amount of scale and volume that you can throw through something. And like, I think I've just really truly realized this and it's probably only been the past couple months that, bro, we can go even more. Like, I think we could sign like 30, 40 people a day and just like, just get disgustingly profound amounts of traffic through this. Like, I, I really think that's, that's completely possible. And to, to hear that number, like 17 clients in a day, a lot of people like the equivalent of that for some of you guys might be like three clients a day. And like, you gotta understand, like, this is so totally feasible and possible for you to do. Like, and I think the main, the main reason why people aren't able to do this is for two reasons. One is hiring people and persistence and risk, which are like the remaining topics that I'll talk about in this video. But let's go through like hiring people first. I think the sales team has seven people on it right now, seven full time closers. They can handle five calls a day. So that's a lot of calls, right? 35. So we can do 35 qualified sales calls a day. The reason why you can't. And even the fulfillment team, like I don't know how many people are on the. I think it's, I think it's like 10 people on the fulfillment team. Just like handling all this, all these clients, dude, you need to replicate yourself. Like it's the only way. And this, this is like, this is, this is the reason why people get stuck at like 20 or 30k a month is that like they fail to replicate themselves, which is like the next final boss.

You know what I mean?

Like, I think like the final boss of getting from 10k to 20 or 30k a month is, is just getting more traffic and like is kind of like committing to making more content, doing outreach and like spending on ads and whatnot. And the final boss of getting past 30k a month is replicating yourself. And it's like that final boss takes you all the way to like a million a month. Like it actually does. I think the problem though is like a lot of dudes, they just like, they're not, they're not good managers. I'm not going to call myself a good manager because it's Andre handling all that. But I know for a fact that if I need, if I go hire someone, like I'm going to be, I'm going to be testing for competence and I'm going to pay them pretty well, you know what I mean? Because like I'll make sure that they're the kind of person who's intelligent in the first place. And I feel like what a lot of people do when they're trying to hire somebody and replicate themselves is you're just trying to find any body, any human body at all who will do any amount of button clicking for the least amount of money possible. You're not testing for any form of sentience, intelligence or, or ability to think whatsoever at all. And then once you get them on, you don't want to talk to them, you don't want to do any training with them. And I've definitely done this mistake before. You don't want to hold them accountable. You don't even want to think of the KPIs that need to be created. You don't want to sit here and have to manually track these KPIs. You don't want to call them out when they're doing something bad. You don't want to have to get on zoom calls with them and train that. Like, you don't want to do anything at all to make sure that they can do the, the maximum amount of efficient work and be as good as possible. You just don't want to do that. That's why they fail. You say people suck. It actually isn't the people. It's you being a bad leader and a bad manager. That's true. It is true. I promise you it is. Second is persistence and risk. Now, the way I want to kind of have you think about this is the best way to visualize this is ad spend. So like we launched a new offer, it's called Olympia. And we're just helping people with ads and scale their business with ads. But you have to imagine when you start spending money on ads, you're not closing people day one. So you're going into the negative. So the best way to visualize this is, I have two hands here. So one is ad spend and one is revenue, right? So you start spending money and the spread, this is a negative spread because your ad spend right here is farther away from your revenue.

You see what I mean?

So you're going negative. Literally every minute the negative spread is getting higher until you close someone, right? And if you're running a call funnel or like a B2B offer, you're going to be able to book a call and then there's a conversion cycle for them to even book a call in the first place. And then they finally get in the call and then there's not a 100% show up rate. And the people who do show up, they have a sales cycle, it might be like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 weeks.

You see what I mean?

So it's like a considerable amount of time you have to sit in the negative.

You see what I mean?

So people get super uncomfortable in there and then they turn off and then they like, they never even give themselves the opportunity for the revenue to catch up because a sales cycle needs to speed up and catch it.

You see what I mean?

So the way it works is like the spread gets higher and then you close someone. Boom. And now you're like close. You're, you're. They get close again, right? Okay, cool. So now you keep spending, keep saying boom. Sign another one. Now You're a little bit in profit. Okay, cool. But then you keep spending, keep spending, keep spending, keep spending. Boom, it happens again. You see what I mean now? Now the positive spread is higher. But the problem with that don't, that people don't realize is that the amount of time it takes for these spreads to reverse and for you to be in the positive is super fucking long. Like, it's a long fucking time at scale. Like, people don't just close in a one call close. That doesn't happen. So it's like it might be like two months until like this spread is super positive. And now here's the next thing that's different about scale than people might not realize. So what you have to imagine is say, say you've been running ads like $200 a day or something like that. So, and then you have a good positive spread, and then you bump that shit up to like 400 a day. Congratulations, that spread will start to catch up and maybe hang a break even or negative again. So you're not even making money. You're not even making profit.

You see what I mean?

And then, and okay, cool, you get a spread and then you bump it to 600. They Boom, you're back in like negative or break even.

You see what I mean?

That, that increase, every, every, every incremental increase will also have to go through this period of, of catching the spread.

You see what I mean?

So when you're scaling something, it fucking keeps going negative. It keeps going down and down and down and down. This, this spread is being stressed. The profit spread is being straight. You're, oh, you're literally a mat. Just imagine it's like you have spend revenue and it's, your revenue is always trying to catch up to this, to the spread. It's, it's always right on the cusp of being negative. Always. It's always right there. It's, it's a, it's. And it sits there like looms over you like this darkness. Or it's like, oh, fuck, this can, this can like blow up at any time. This could be like so catastrophic. It's, it's always there.

You see what I mean?

And that it works the same because now you're signing all these people and you need to keep hiring salespeople, right? Because you need to keep hiring salespeople in anticipation of calls that you have not even gotten yet.

You see what I mean?

So it's like, you have to, you have to like, you have to like, have the testicular fortitude to have the belief in yourself that you can get them the calls. When you hire a new salesperson, like, I'll definitely get you calls, right? You don't. You're not 100% sure you can, but you have to get the salesperson to do so. And it works the same for fulfillment. You have to hire new people for fulfillment in anticipation of business that you have not acquired yet. So you get that. You hire the person for fulfillment. You start fucking paying them and go through all the time of hiring them and training them just to put them into a system that you can't even fill their capacity up yet because you have to go back to the ad spend to fill up and like be negative, to like give them shit to.

Do you see what I mean?

So it's like not only is the ad spend always on the cusp of negative, so is hiring salespeople and so is hiring fulfillment. It's like, it's like you have to understand, it's like, it's like, it's the looming darkness over you. Like you, you could die at any time. Like, it's like, it's like the hanging, the analogy of the hanging sword or. It's like if, if one thing fucks up, just dead.

You see what I mean?

That's what this is like. You're always on the fucking edge of unprofitable. You're always on the edge of death in this and that. That it's, it's risk.

You see what I mean?

Like this, this is how you scale something. You just always are on the fucking edge. This is why you'll see, like if there's like a startup company, like a startup tech company, they raise funding.

You see what I mean?

Because the spread will get too negative because they're going too fast.

You see what I mean?

They're, they're hiring hella, hella, hella, hella people. And the spread is getting huge negative.

You see what I mean?

But you, if you're running a bootstrap business, it's like you got to keep these like super aligned and really close together. So everybody in everything you do has to be hyper efficient. And you need to get the maximum output from every input. Like you need super efficient. Because these cannot spread too negative, right? It ha. It has, it has to stay right here. But at the same time, you have to balance this with your ability and your mental fortitude to just be okay with the looming darkness and be able to look into it and be completely okay at the possibility of imminent death.

You see?

That's what scale is? It's just those numbers. And then the last thing I've realized is there's been two separate occasions. Like, I'm posting a lot on YouTube right now. Obviously, I'm posting this video on YouTube right now. What I have found. And I wrote an email on this yesterday. And you should all go subscribe to my email list because I write like, I write like fucking essays to my email. They're not like too long. It's like, I get the point across, but it's like super useful stuff. But yesterday I wrote an email. It was about like, customer journeys and how, like, if you things together, if you do something persistently, it doesn't. The results of that thing does not increase linearly. It increases geometrically. So, like, if I post. If you put like just YouTube as an example, if I post one YouTube video per week, and then I go to two YouTube videos per week and say, let's say, let's say I do, we have two separate instances for three months, I do one YouTube video per week, and then for another three months, I do two YouTube videos per week. The second instance is two times more YouTube videos. The results from two YouTube videos a week is not twice as much as one YouTube video per week. It's like six times better. And then if I do two YouTube videos per week for like six months, it's not six times better, it's like 12 times better. The effectiveness of things expand geometrically upon more volume and persistence.

You see what I mean?

So, like, why are we, why, why were we able to sign 17 clients in a month? It's because. It's because simultaneously, not only are we spending like $7,000 a day on ads, there's the thousands of people who we've. Who have already opted into our ads where we have their email and their phone number, and then they're getting retargeting ads and emails and our setters are calling them to set appointments. And then all past customers, maybe they came in and they churn and we could sell them and reactivate them to something else. It's a giant swirling of shit that has occurred over just thousands of different actions in the past as a result of past persistence.

You see what I mean?

So, like, we're being rewarded for things we've done six months ago.

You see what I mean?

And I can't even fathom exactly how ridiculous of a scale that this could be at if we just keep doing this for like three more years. Like, really, how far can this shit reasonably go? And going to the first point in this video, I think something could go, like, way fucking farther than you would otherwise believe is reasonable at all. I really, I really think that it can just be stupidly, profoundly massive. That's what I think. And I think a lot of you guys, you. You just like, what you want to do is you want to make. Like, I want to make 10k a month so I just don't have to work a job and whatever. And I was the same exact way. I remember. I said that I want. I just want to be able to make 10k a profit. I don't have to work a job. I can, like, live a nice life. I can save money. Inflation's probably made that 15 or 20 now, but I remember saying that. And then you reach it. And then the difference between somebody who's going to really scale and achieve greatness is like, how much of a psychopath are you? It's. I feel like I got there and it was just like, I need more. I need more. I need more. The number must go up. Number has to go up.

You see what I mean?

Like, I just, like, I, I like. It's so fun. It's so fun when you're, when you're winning, dude. It's like, oh, my God. It's like anyone who's played any sports at all, Like, I. I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe you, like, played. You played basketball with your friends or something on the weekends when you were a kid and whatnot. It was like. And then you were, you were doing really good at basketball, and it's like, oh, like, I want to keep playing basketball. Like, this is so fun. You know what I mean? Like, you just keep. And you're like, fuck, I have to keep playing because you're. Or like a video game. Like, fuck, I'm so. I'm so good at Call of Duty. I'm so fucking good at multiplayer. You know what I mean? I just want to keep playing. It's the same fucking thing with making money. It's the same thing, and you are completely capable of doing this. Like, if you could do that with the sport or you could do that with the video game, you could do this with making money in a business. It's the same exact energy. It's the same thing. Anyone who's ever been good at any video game at all can do this. Anybody who's ever been good at any sport at all can do this. It's the same energy you channel, the same thing. It's like you're in the arena. You're going against other people.

You see what I mean?

And you just go so much farther than them and try so much harder than them that it's like you're so orders of magnitude better than everybody else and you get so much more money. This is so important. Like, channel that shit you can. Like. It is completely reasonable and possible for you to do this. And those are my lessons. Leave a comment if you got any. I love you.

Peace.