Five guys behind $100M online: An honest conversation

Sales Bro Pod episode 41 or something, maybe 42. Got the boys here, we're at the crib in Tampa, Florida. Um, some money printers on this one. I think this is the second in person. We've got a squad here, so let's, let's run some intros real quick. So to my left here is Cole. We recorded on episode 6. We run the agency together. Certified money printer. Actually, all these guys are certified money printers. We've got Ace, runs an ad agency that we've scaled a bunch of teams up with. Tony, new videographer of Serial Sales Creative Director, maybe, perhaps. And so we're gonna level up the YouTube level up stuff. And then Hadi, Hadi Hottie finds offers, finds banger offers, and he's like, yo boys, let's run this one. Um, so together we've run up a good amount of business in 2024, and we've been scheming this weekend, and I figured we should just scheme a little bit on camera, talk, talk about, uh, what we're seeing out there and joke around a little bit. But I guess I'll open it up and I'll pass it to whoever wants to run with it. But, um, I think we're really good because we run a lot of stuff to like paid, like cold traffic, paid ads kind of stuff. And like we're really good at finding and building like good offers so we can convert. But like when you guys are looking for good offers, what are you looking for?

What— a few things really. One, think about what you would price something like that at and like what people would pay for it. The industry it's in, usually like the make money stuff, the ROI stuff, the printing, and then like how to formulate the proper guarantee, to be honest. Because nowadays, bro, like without a guarantee, you're not really competitive at all, in my opinion. Yeah, like having some sort just helps.

Some people are really against guarantees, but if you're going into cold traffic, bro, like it has to be— you have to make it as like Easy to say yes as possible.

Exactly. You don't do yourself any disservice by not having it guaranteed.

Yeah, it's just, yeah, I know you gotta have your fulfillment dialed in with guarantees. What about you, Ace? What do you agree?

I think 2 things is like one is a big market. So if you want to go cold, you need like a big market to run traffic to. And then number 2 is like Something that's leveraging a trend.

Yeah.

Usually like when you run something that there's a trend behind, like that shows that there's interest and demand already for the product. And so like you don't need to like create demand, you just gotta put it in front of them. So like finding trends is a really easy way to scale stuff really fast.

How do you know like when the offer's cooked? Because like there's, you know, right now there's certain offers that are just kind of hot, like they're trending, but then There's certain ones that would rip 2 years ago and then now we wouldn't touch them. But how do y'all know when it's dead or dying?

Just like the ads stop working. The way I look at ads is it kind of quantifies how attractive your offer is. So if all your costs are really cheap, your CPM is cheap, cost per click is cheap, then that means that the market is receptive to your offer. But then if everything was super expensive and you're not getting calls and stuff's really expensive, then it probably means that nobody really wants your offer. They're not fucking with it.

But if it's for like, if you're looking at an offer like you're talking about before you're running ads for it, or if you're looking to pick it up, bro, usually if the industry has been like kind of saturated or just kind of blown out of proportion, now it's like not converting as well, you've probably heard of it. Kind of like e-com automation, like you just Yeah. You're like, it's not the best time to get in anymore, but we've heard of it for years, so that's why.

Yeah.

Also, so like, so you guys know a little bit more, Ace has done like over $50 mil in ad, like basically sales off the back of his ads. And then Cole and I, for the agency, the sales agency stuff, we've done like probably over $30 mil together and then within the agency. And then how I mean, I know you've done crazy stuff, but like, what's your flex stat?

It's like, dude, probably— I think I'm wondering, I think probably like $20 mil, right?

Yeah, over $7 mil just this year across our offers.

Yeah, as we're recording this, uh, one of the teams that we run with Ace had a $40K day just about cash collected. So it was good. We were in Tampa swimming in the hot tub and grabbing some Grabbing some food and squats getting pissed. Yeah, big day.

Deals running.

Squats getting paid. Had a late night, late morning, but still making it happen.

Gotcha, man.

But what do y'all want to chat on?

Cole got to start chiming in.

I want to know like on the sales piece though, like because I've worked with a bunch of sales teams and some of them are straight cheeks. Like, what do you think that you guys do so differently that, like, is better than all these other sales teams?

I think that it's we have a really good eye for talent and we do a good job of building the right teams around the specific offer types that we're working with, just because we've been in a lot of different offers and seen what scale looks like and know what it takes to kind of get there, especially from a sales standpoint. And then also just keeping a super, like, competitive and fun culture within your sales teams because You know, nobody wants to work with people they don't enjoy working with at the end of the day. And then also they want to feel like they're compensated well but also motivated to do more. And then we're just, we're ethical in our sales practices and we make sure we do things the right way, which I think is a big thing in the industry because it's not really the case across the board with different sales agencies. But yeah, that's a couple things.

You gotta start throwing steak dinners, man. So I said on one of our teams, like, the next closer with a hat trick, 3 deals in 1 day, We're gonna buy like a steak dinner. And I think yesterday—

David did it this week.

Yeah, so we gotta lob him a steak dinner. But I think a lot of it's the offers too, bro, because like I know a lot of these sales agencies and sales teams, like they're super pushy, super aggressive. Like our guys really aren't like having to hard close people, and that's on like cold traffic, 5-figure price point. So it's like the offer, marketing, the offer, Just having someone competent on the back of it, like sales-wise, I mean, it just kind of happens.

Yeah, and when you've sold a ton of stuff and you know how to build those sales practices for what you're selling, which just comes from time in the game and experience, all we really need to do is identify talent and potential and someone that represents themselves well and speaks well and, you know, has at least shown some experience in the past that's impressive or in a somewhat potentially somewhat relative field. And we know we can train them up to become, you know, what we need them to do on the sales front.

Yeah, how, um, how do you know? Because like with us it's kind of hard because like we could, we could have the best sales team, the best setup, all this stuff, but like if marketing blows, like we don't even get the, the chance to like know if our stuff is working or not. Um, but how is that working with y'all? Like there's people like downstream that you have to rely on versus us, it's kind of like upstream, you know, like what is that like?

Yeah, it's frustrating. It's like you have to have both sides that are clicking. You know, we've been on the other side of that where we've worked with teams like, for example, one of these automation offers, we booked like 1,800 calls in a single month and they closed like less than 1%. So it's like super frustrating because at 1,800 calls it's not It's not a lead quality problem, like there's enough volume there to close more than one per se, you know.

Imagine taking 1,800 calls.

But also like putting, because like me, I put people like a sales team and like a media buying team together, kind of like y'all too, right? So like it's about finding like when the sales side and the marketing side, they don't kind of align or they don't click. The offer never goes. So like I've had different media buyers and different sales teams, like at least 3 of each. And like there was always that issue of like either communication or they just don't vibe well or always pointing fingers. And like I think that like fluidity is very important between marketing and sales instead of just their own skills individually, which you all do really well. Which is why every offer kind of blows.

That's why it's cool to work with your boys, man. Yeah, we run up a lot of offers with our boys and I just have fun with it, make money. And there's no ego involved, you know, we respect what they do, they respect what we do, so it works well.

It's good too because like the other day when we were on our call with Ace and like we could just be like super upfront because we're like cool with each other and we're looking at like 2 new offers, the landing pages, and like one of them Ace has like brought us into and then the other we brought Ace into and like it's 2 different landing pages and we're like, bro, like why is ours like Like cheeks, like a lot of shit because I've seen him put together some saucy landing pages.

So you can't be giving me mid after I've seen what you got, man.

Uh, so yeah, yeah, that's, that's super important because like, bro, it's just about communication. Like we can, we can like— it's cool because we, um, I see at like your company and like Hadi, if he vets offers and, you know, they make it through to exist, um, it's just like, I know that, all right, these guys, like, if it's possible, like, if this offer can rip, like, Ace will make it happen because he's done it before, right? Or like, if this can be sold at scale, uh, mass market, like, Hadi's gonna figure out how to figure out the, like, offer structure because that's literally what he does. And same with us, even in sales. Um, So it's like, right, I'm literally at the point I'm pretty convinced where like if we can't make an offer work, like it's gonna be very hard for someone else.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, make it work for sure.

Yeah, that's true.

That's nice because like, you know, you, you kind of realize like the litmus test for finding like good partners is that you don't have to do your job and theirs. I feel like when I'll be working with shitty sales teams, like we're doing our job and then we're also trying to fix like pre-call stuff and like get to the sales side. You guys probably do some similar stuff for bad marketing teams. So like when you just do your job and they do theirs and everything clicks, it's like super easy and you can just scale. Like it's, it was easier working with these guys. Like we worked less probably and made more money working with you guys than other sales teams in the past. It's like we just do our stuff and you guys do your stuff and it works.

We need a clip of that.

Yeah, we're gonna put that on the landing page. But no, it is good when you work with the same people on multiple stuff because it's like we We know, like when we spin up a new offer and new like tech stack and all this stuff, it's like we already know what exactly you need from us and then, you know, vice versa. So it's just really easy.

But also with that dynamic, it's a lot like you kind of like, bro, I know if an offer is going to like hit, like obviously not at the specific scale, but like I know if I'm gonna lose money on this offer or not. When I'm working with you guys, so I know that like if we launch like that offer we're about to launch next week, I'm not really scared to just go crazy on the ad spend from the beginning. Which usually like it could take like 2 months to ramp an offer with the ad spend if you do it responsibly.

Yeah.

You're like kind of seeing, okay, the closers are coming in, the numbers are looking good, KPIs look good, let's turn the ads up now. We don't really have to do all that. Yeah.

With Hottie, we, uh, where we go from 2 closers, 1 setter to 5 closers and 2 or 3 setters within what, a month?

30 days.

Okay. Went from zero to $560K.

Ripping ads, bro.

$560K cash collected, second month just shy of a mil.

Let's just start $700K in like a couple weeks.

Let's, uh, like call our shot with this new offer that we're about to run. So if we do like hit it out of the park, we could pull the game tape and be like, literally said we're gonna do that.

Yeah.

So what are we— what's the, the push before end of year? Okay, so it's October 25th. How many weeks are left? Like 2 months.

2 months. 9.

Yeah, so as we're filming this, we're like standing up this new offer. So Hottie found an offer, brought us in. We have our team working on the setup. Ace's team is working on it. We'll probably launch like next week. And what's the— what's the revenue target we're looking at?

Do not ask me, bro. I'm gonna inflate the numbers.

It's like we gotta be able to do at least $400K cash flow in the first month. $400K or $500K.

I think it's realistic because I think we're gonna launch like right as November starts.

Yeah, so this guy has a current like 4x ROAS doing $80K a month, which is not bad, but we're about to blow it up.

I think he's gonna turn his ads off until we hit 150 in that very period.

150 first, like, this also comes back to what you just asked the question earlier of how do you identify hot offers. Well, this offer has a competitor in the market that's doing what, $4 mil a month?

Something like that.

So we know the potential is there, and even the offer that's doing those numbers, we think that their marketing and their sales process could be done a lot better than what it is now. So it just shows the potential opportunity that exists with this offer.

Yeah, that's gonna be great.

December? Clear amount in December or what?

I mean, we, we did that.

That's what we did.

Yeah, we did it before. Um, so yeah, I mean, I'm hyped about it because like we have a lot of work in one particular niche right now, but kind of branching out to something that is also like super scalable and like kind of a More— not more blue ocean, but like there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of market share to grab, I think.

Um, yeah, I also think this is an offer you could branch out like internationally, which is how you get those bigger numbers. You're right.

And it's like, uh, what, what the guy was saying, it's like the offer that— what the offer is on, like it's so new to so many people, like, and it could be huge. I mean, it has to do with like financial, um You know, type stuff. Um, obviously it's like, those are the offers for who— I think Heidi said it, like the offers that rip the most are like, you put this much money in, you should get this out.

Yeah.

So it should rip, dude, and it should be long-term as well. So I'll call a shot, uh, within the next 2 months we'll do $400 month 1 at least, and then Probably let's just let's just call it like 1.2, 1.3.

1.2 by the end of the year.

Yeah, solid. I think we got that.

That'd be crazy.

Um, all right. What do y'all think of Tampa?

Tampa's pretty cool.

Tampa's.

That's crazy.

And there's just a hurricane here too, so everything's all messy, but well.

Ace is from Canada, man.

They need you down here. We, uh, we were scheming on a warehouse spot. So in Austin, we're trying to get Cole to move there. Tony's moving there, uh, next week. Trying to get Ace from Canada. And we're thinking like, dude, we do so much business together, uh, it would be so cool to have like a warehouse where like half is like sales and You know, we have desks and stuff over there, and then he has UGC creators filming TikToks in the other one. And we get, uh, you know, get some— a TV, some couches, pool table, like just make it a chill, chill spot, host some events, all that. That'd be super cool. Um, so we'll see if we can Austin Pill. Yeah, yeah, I think we closed Cole on it.

I don't know, we'll see.

We're gonna have to close him again.

And then Hottie Snacks.

I'll just pull up whenever y'all are done.

Yeah, yeah. Um, all right, what else? What else is new? Tell me what's new with you. Tell us about the movies we're about to produce. So moving back to Austin, we're gonna hit some cinematic shit. Got a new, uh, new toy coming in next week.

Oh yeah.

So we're going to be announcing that, have fun with that. Obviously pushing more content, doing YouTube. Once we get a warehouse, things are going to get real crazy.

Oh yeah. For sure.

That's going to be nice.

Um, but yeah, looking forward to all of it. It's going to get crazy. Um, I want to get you some local Austin clients, literally just by like running up the channel. And then people were like, yo, who do you use? It's like, oh, this guy.

My boy.

Get that boy paid. Start doing some traveling stuff.

Yeah.

Start doing cool events and stuff like that.

We'll just do this but more often.

Yeah.

Go travel places, go work for the weekend.

So maybe keep the degen on the—

yeah, keep the degen on the low until, uh, we're locked in till nighttime.

Yeah.

Your progress on the—

Pizza's waiting, bro. Yeah, yeah, that pizza's gonna be cold for sure back there. Um, all right, we can talk about like one or two more things. So like, how did you all guys like meet each other and like start working together and like all that kind of thing?

That's a good question.

Uh, me and Dylan started— met through Twitter. When was that? When we first like I mean, I don't know when we followed each other, but we had DM'd and then we hopped on a call at some point.

Mm-hmm.

Nothing really came from it. We were just cool dudes, stayed in contact. And then we got on a couple other calls because we were going to potentially work together on someone's offer and kind of do what we're doing now, but preliminary, like before we actually formalized the agency. And then we decided to partner on an offer in like November of last year. And then since then, just kind of taken off from there. And I knew Ace because I used to close on a team that he was the media buyer. And so I would see his company name all the time on our ads back at LinkBack, and then he would see my name closing deals all the time. So we got connected with him afterwards when we were planning to run up some offers and needed a media buyer. And then he knew Hadi from the past, and then Hadi needed a sales agency, so Ace intro'd me to Hadi, and here we are. Awesome.

Form the Avengers.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because bro, you know, when I got on the call with y'all, I didn't know you guys managed teams. I thought you just do the recruitment and stuff because that's what, that's what Ace told me, because I think that's what the twins were doing. Yeah. And then, uh, so I thought like y'all charge like a retainer and then you do like a build-out. So that's actually what I hopped on the call for. And then I, I think I mentioned, uh, one, one offer that y'all were already running And then, uh, yo, we managed it. I was like, oh, y'all manage offers? And then that's kind of where it started.

Yeah, it's crazy what we've done since. I remember that like it was yesterday. Yeah, it was Friday night, I'm having some sushi.

Oh yeah, like 10 PM and we like closed.

It was like a 20-minute call and we just like, all right, let's run it up.

Yeah, I gotta get my door— my, uh, Uber Eats. But, um, can you talk about when we, when we started on the first offer and the ones that we're still running? Uh, Hottie was involved and then He had to like focus on other stuff for different reasons, so we still run the teams. But can you talk about like starting that up and how fast we were able to like see success? Like we're having like $30K days like in the first week.

Yeah, yeah, dude, it was so quick because I remember we just spun up the offer and I was like, I needed a sales agency at the time. And so when they agreed to run it, which, you know, at first I didn't think they did. I was like, okay, you know what, let me just test them out. Ace Dodge for them, let's just run it up. And that was also the first offer in that industry, so I didn't really know how it was gonna do. And then we launched, and like right after we launched, I had to go somewhere and visit family in like New York. So I was like kind of just like waiting for that initial weeks like following up to launching an offer where it's like, it's like the ramp.

Mm-hmm.

So I wasn't really expecting much. So I'm there, Like I'm staying in like my uncle's basement, and I just see like twenty K coming, thirty K coming. I'm like, dude, what's going on? We just launched. And I'm like, Cole's just like, yo, peff, peff, peff. I'm like, dude, it was insane. Yeah. And that's kind of when we knew that like the system worked between like us, and then it was just replicating. Yeah. That was insane. And also like we we asked the founder to modify the offer a bit like midway because. We knew there was something that everyone was asking for that we weren't providing. We did that and like immediately, bro, like doubled the revenue.

Yeah, it was crazy.

What is, uh, with what we do, like we're really front-end heavy. Like we can just come in and if they have a good offer, like we could take it to the market, blow it up, build them a team, all that stuff. But like when it comes to the fulfillment side, like making sure their client success is dialed in because like If you put like our engine on the front of like a shitty offer that's not dialed in, like that can be really bad for clients, the company. Like how do you vet to know that someone can like handle the volume that we can send them?

So I mean, usually I would first see where they're at and then I would let them tell me. Like I wouldn't give them any expectations I have for them. I would let them tell me like Like, I would just be like, how many clients do you have? How long have you been running this? And I kind of just make it seem like no matter what they say, I'm gonna work with them. So they're incentivized to just tell me the truth. And then based on what they tell me, like, you know, if they told me they had like 200 clients, then I would not, you know, be opposed to asking them to show me, like, you know, if it's like if they're running e-com, like, okay, show me 20 stores, you know what I mean? Like, show me something that could kind of match to the volume that you said you've done, and then also just proving that you've been in the space for that long. If they have a community, like, let me look into the community, let me see if people are like, you know, angry or like upset or like having issues. Kind of see their— talk about their onboarding process, because when someone pays, like, the first 48 hours is most important. So like trying to see like how that looks, and then, and then just ask them like, you know, how do you feel about like this kind of scale? Because at the same time, usually they're doing a fraction of what we'll take them to, but they're also juggling 3 aspects of marketing, sales, fulfillment. Sometimes like if, you know, they haven't done those numbers before, but they could if we take over those, you know, 2 components. But honestly, even after all that, you can never be too sure. So it's kind of just taking the risk because the offer is good.

Trial by fire.

Yeah, the best is finding product-specific people who literally just love making a badass product and have no interest in actually doing the sales aspect of their business or the marketing aspect of their business, and they can just focus on, you know, producing results on the back end, and we can do what we do best.

Yeah, it's like looking at the types of companies are important too. Obviously with something like e-com automation, it's, you know, it's like very fulfilled, like there's a lot of moving parts and stuff like that. But if it's software, like even a media company, a deliverable can scale because there's no— like, if the cost to replicate it is like zero.

Yeah, there's a rate of scalability like that you could actually kind of measure pretty much for every offer. Like if you're running something in the trading space, there's like that whole talk about AUM, like how much money can something handle, like, you know, can a strategy handle. So it's like Kind of like that.

Yeah, dude, I wanna— I kind of want to talk about this because I think, um, it's just kind of crazy. I think we're a little bit like desensitized to it, uh, and we've all kind of like moved on. But all of us together, um, was running up some offers, but we had one that didn't really work out very well, um, where we have like a very, very large outstanding invoice that none of us have been paid on. Over half a million dollars, and we're probably not seeing that money. So that's a pretty rough situation. But like, what was that like for y'all?

Dude, honestly, it was a nightmare. Because the thing is, like, I kind of went all in with that because of how good of an offer it was and product it was. I think that's also what— how good it was. As like a product itself on the backend and the frontend is why we stuck around so long and kept up with like so much BS from like the founder and stuff. But you know, in hindsight, that was also a mistake. But that's the only reason we even did it. Um, but it was just so like, it was just prolonged. It was like 3, 4 months. So it was such a waste of time and like the stress, the daily stress. Like I remember I would wake up and then like every 3 days it would be like another issue. Some sort of like whether it's a customer, whether it's legal, whether it's payments, like always something. Yeah, so it was just kind of like, it was also a really huge learning experience of like no matter how good the potential seems, like you have to just move up fast. If you don't get paid for a week, you don't keep going, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, there's like not a better way to learn a lesson when you just like straight miss out on money.

Yeah, not even miss out, because it's worse when you've made the money, it's just you can't see it, or you like, there's nothing you can do about it.

Yeah, definitely, definitely makes us learn to vet a little bit harder on the front end.

Yeah, but it also showed, like, it also opened up like, like the potential of like what's possible, like with a good enough offer, because like we've never seen numbers like that.

Yeah, we, we literally, so we literally ran this offer, it was like really 3 weeks and ran it up to $700K collected. $0 to $700K, built it from scratch.

80x ROAS.

80x ROAS. Shut up.

That's what I mean.

Uh, LeBron and D-Wade, dude.

It was a combo. It was a combo of everything. Like, the show rate was like 90%, cost per call was like outrageously low, the close rate was insanely high, and the referral rate too. Yeah, so the product was so good.

So we just had an insane We had the same waiting list even though we couldn't even launch.

That's what happens when everything is dialed perfectly.

I mean, it just helps because like when the offer's that good, you don't really have to do anything.

Yeah, because it wasn't like anything specific that we did different in like the pre-call stuff, but our show rate was like way higher.

Yeah, well, yeah, that's a crazy situation. Like, I think like we're just kind of— I don't know, we've gotten over it now. Well, I don't know, it still stings. When I tell people about that situation Like, we're not, you know, the total amount is a lot larger, but like we're all individually owed certain amounts. So like when I tell people about our, like, our agency and like what we were owed, it's just like, it just sounds crazy to say.

Yeah, no, dude, I mean, that's what I was just saying earlier. Like, I do not think someone would believe me if I told them. Like, I'd just be like, what are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, so crazy situation.

Um, what do you got in place?

Y'all want to talk about any other hot topics?

I think we covered the top ones, bro.

Yeah, true.

For this year, yeah, a lot of big shit coming, man.

We're, uh, we make 8-figure companies, simple as that. We come on board, ride it out, 7 figures a month.

So if you got good products and you just want to grow really fast, you know, you know where we're at.

Master Affiliates.

This is an ad. All right, so here's the ad. Let us come into your business and blow you up.

We'll make you a lot of money.

7 figures a month or your money back.

Or your money back. Master Affiliates.

And we're gonna take most of it from you. But no, really, like, I don't know who's gonna be watching this. Probably a lot of salespeople, business But if you have a product that's super— you feel like it has potential to scale, it's high enough ticket to work on paid ads, your sales team sucks, your marketer sucks, I'll probably link everyone's stuff at the bottom in the description. But we can wrap it there, I guess.

Wrap it up.