How Robb Bailey from Fit Club Accelerator Scaled to $2.1 million in Agency Sales in 21 Months

What is up, everybody? This is Andrew on Agency Journey. So excited to welcome Rob Bailey back to the podcast. Rob, how you doing today, man?

Doing well, man. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. I'm really excited to bring you on here and just capture some of your agency journey. You've been on a crazy journey since we chatted first way back in like 2015 maybe. Like it was a long time ago the first time you're on the podcast. So would you mind just for anyone who hasn't heard your name before, give us a recap of your evolution and your story as an agency owner and where you've been.

Yeah, absolutely. So when we you and I Met actually before 2015, it was a few years earlier than that. I think it was like 2012 or 2013 at a conference.

Yeah. Back at Inbound, way back in the day.

Yeah. So at that time I was running what I would call a one stop shop agency. In other words, we did any kind of service that we could, you know, perform for any kind of client almost. And so that agency looked really good on paper. I mean, we, in three years, we grew a lot, but man, that thing was just a total failure. It was a bust. It was not profitable. You know that my story on that and I think I kind of described it more in the first interview that we did. But, you know, it was, it was really odd because I had all these great corporate clients that we're doing a ton for and you know, it was a seven figure agency and we had a cool office downtown with like, you know, the, the brick, brick interior with the exposed beams. Just like the typical, I guess, you know, startup look. And so everybody was like, oh, you're uber successful and whatnot. There was just no profit in it. And we were grinding so hard. You know, we just, we were so spread thin that, you know, we were experiencing burnout. But my business partner and I had different times, experienced burnout. And then I started having kids. Like we started a family, my wife and I. And I wasn't getting any sleep, so it was just brutal. So I made the decision to shut that thing down and I went back to just helping local businesses, which is where I got my start actually in marketing and advertising, which is a passion of mine. So really I slowly started to build the agency back up. But the second time around, I started to really focus in on one service and one niche or one bundle of services. So we had one offer basically, and we grew that in the past, I guess in the past two years we chose to focus on the Fitness industry. We've done $2.1 million in like 21 months, something like that. And that's just agency revenue. Yeah. So it's been quite a ride. I've made every mistake in the book, but that's what I'm here to share with you guys is, you know, the wins and the losses, I guess.

Yeah.

Because you can learn sometimes you learn more from the losses, to be honest.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, I think when we talked last time on the podcast, you had kind of made that shift working with the local businesses and you were focusing on Facebook ads for local businesses, and you had tried, like, real estate and tried a couple little niches here and there. What was it that in that place you'd still niche way down from where you were at your kind of traditional one stop shop agency now at FIT Club Accelerator, like, you're even. It seems like you're even further down there where you're not just one service, but you look at the fit. The fitness clubs and say, like, what do they need at the end of the day? And you guys make it your job to give it. Give that to them. Can you talk to us about, like, almost that second tier of going deeper and obsessing about what your clients need?

Yeah, absolutely. So what. What I. What I started to do was I just did what every other Facebook advertising agency would do. Just saying, hey, I know it works in the fitness industry. Right. But what I noticed is that there was common problems that they all had that had to do with what I was already doing for them. In other words, if I just did lead generation and then cut it off there and said, hey, here's your leads. Hope you crush was wildly variable what the different clients would do with that same, let's say 100 leads a month. And so I started to notice that they all had the same problem. It was just a matter of whether they were already solving it or using a system to solve it or not addressing it at all, etc. And that really had a big impact on the retention that I had with them. Right. So a lot of people who do Facebook ads, it's kind of like a common thing now that, like, it happens, the client calls you and goes, these leads suck. You know, and you're like, what are you talking about? Like, I've got this other client over here who looks just like you, and they're closing 80% of them, and you're over here and you're saying you haven't closed a single one. You know, I mean, so this is a really Common phenomenon. So what happened? There's actually a story behind this. What happened was I booked another Facebook ads client, but it was at the gym that I went to. It's, like, a couple blocks from my office. And the guy that signed me up for the membership there was an excellent salesperson. Like, very, very good, but. And he did it the right way. He had a very, very, you know, like, customer centric approach to selling me. And I was like, this guy gets it, you know? And so we're just chatting after he signs me up, and he's like, so, hey, what do you do for a living? And I go, facebook ads. And he turns the screen around and goes, what am I doing wrong? He's like, the sales director here, and I don't know how to do Facebook ads, but no one else here does either. So anyway, signed him as a client. And over the first handful of months, he was, like, closing everything in sight. I was like, dude, what are you doing over there? And I would walk into the gym, you know, go in the gym three, four days a week and see him closing people, and I just hear. Hear him working. And I was like, man, that guy is a beast. He's, like, so good and whatnot. So we kind of became friends, and then he decided he wanted to leave doing fitness sales, and I snatched him up. I said, hey, listen, whatever you're doing from the point where the lead gets handed over to you, we can help a lot of people with this, man. Starting with my client roster. So we just started consulting with them and calling them up and saying, hey, let us help you with these other two buckets, which is lead nurturing, getting the prospect to show up to the door, and sales, closing the person and doing it the right way. And that's literally how we started this. So we just like. My thought process then was that the closer that we can help, like, the more that we can help our clients get to their goal, the more valuable our service will be to them. And so we made it our goal to help all three buckets, not just the one that everyone else who owns an ad agency does. Right. Um, so we decided to tackle that, and we've just been obsessed with getting them results in all three buckets instead of that, just one ever since.

Yeah. And how. Just, like, for a snapshot, how is it focusing on 3 buckets versus 100 buckets like you used to? What's the big difference? Looking back?

Oh, night and day, I mean, you know, the repeatability of it, like, there are still some nuances, but It's. I mean, we had to figure everything out. I always tell people it takes, you know, about 30 hours to figure out a new niche that's just like, to get results with the ads. I mean, if you. I mean, if you look at, you know, the hundreds of other things that we were doing for clients, like trying to figure everything out for the first time and barely ever repeating it, I mean, we just bled time, you know, that meant we bled money. So comparing that with this, it's like once we figure out something that works, we can test it small, but then go like, okay, the data is there. We can roll this out to, you know, 10, 25, 100 locations. And, you know, overall it still works the same because the. It's more like an assembly line, right?

Yeah.

So all of our clients basically get the same prescription, but. And I know that's going to drive some of you nuts, right? You're like, well, how can it be the same? And it's like, so for example, we helped a kickboxing franchise and they all have the same brand, they all have the same price points, pretty much. They all have the same classes. There's nothing different from location to location except placing the people. That's it. So we were very fortunate to help over 200 of those locations. And they're just killing it with our system. So it's been awesome, man, because we can go so deep and help them so much more. And I mean, you know, we're saving them 10, 20 hours a week from what they were doing manually before with our lead nurturing system and software. And then they're much more efficient closing because they, you know, some, some people have gone from like a 10% close ratio all the way up to like 83, 86% within a week. And so their efficiency is just, you know, so, you know, it's, it's allowed us to really. It's fun because we get to be obsessive about figuring out what works and just keep working on that one problem. Right? Yeah, it's been good.

That's awesome, dude. I love your story because it's just like, it's so motivating and for, for Gray and I, as we are shifting from doing bound to Zenpilot here, like your story and just your guidance was a huge impact on us and kind of the shifts that we made to figure out how do we become more efficient, how do we put ourselves in the seats where our strengths are maximized and our clients get the results for that. So that's what I really respect about what you're doing right now, I'm just curious, like, when you're focusing on just these three buckets, what are some things that you've been able to do to help your clients take action and actually, like, follow your system without, like, holding their hand and, like, having to do everything for them? Like, is there any tips you could share with folks on how to streamline the activation side of it?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you already know this because you came to our workshop, but the biggest thing that we did was we. So this kind of goes in line with that philosophy. Like, okay, if you can obsess over the problems that they have and be proactive about solving them, your product meaning, like, your package service will just continue to get better and better and be more and more useful to them. Right. But what we figured out was that instead of consulting with people one on one all the time, what we do is create a video portal that has basically a course, digital course, on all the things that they need to understand in order to execute on our service. Right? So, for example, sales training. We can't physically go in and help them sell side by side. We. I mean, we can. It's 25,000 bucks for us to fly out for the week. And we've. We've done that before. But it's not like something that we. Like, I got three kids at home, and I'm not dying to leave for a week. You know, my wife would kill me. But also for them, it's just. It's just again, for them, it's better because they can get in. Like, the moment they sign with us, they can get in. They can study at night if that's something. Like some of our clients have a day job or they're going to law school or something crazy like that. And they own a gym. And so they're like, well, I can't meet during daylight, you know, And I'm like, well, I'm not staying up till midnight for you, bro. So, you know, but we can still serve that. That client by saying, Look, 24 7, anytime. This is our best stuff. It's like we produced a movie in this portal, sort of. And now nowadays, it's not that hard. We just have some simple screen share Software and a PowerPoint deck and you're good to go. Right? That's how we started it. So now they can go in anytime and get this like, like a premium sales training, like something we should be charging $25,000 for. But. But it's included with our program, right? And so for Them to go in and get that type of training and knowledge on demand is just like a huge, huge benefit to them. Right. So that was the first thing that we did. The second thing that we did was we created our own lead nurturing tool. It's a software two way text messaging platform. And what we do is we will train our clients on how that works. We'll get them integrating the app with their Facebook ads through Zapier, so that the second a lead comes in, our text message tool will send a confirmation text and get them to book an appointment. And then we also train them on how to book the appointment in our system and follow through with the reminder sequence so that the person, the prospect who's opted in has a higher likelihood of showing up. We also show them once they're there, what to do, how to, how to present to them based on the offer that was made and how to close most of them on day one with some incentives. And so all of that is in a video portal, but it's also us getting on the phone with them and onboarding them properly and saying, hey, did you watch these videos? Here's how to do the step by step, the clicking of the buttons and everything. But let me do the first one for you. You'll see how it's done and then I'll let you handle some responses. That way you feel comfortable responding to these things. Cause it only takes about 30 minutes to an hour to do that once. And they're like, I got it. It's amazing. Bye. I'm gonna go sell some memberships. Yeah. So, you know, that's the other thing is we just simplified the whole process like you mentioned in the beginning, cutting down from 100 things to three things. I mean, we really only have one, one offer. So you get all of this or you get none of it. And when these people figure out what's like, the simplest parts are the most powerful parts. We're like, look, work this until you're blue in the face and you're bored and you don't want to do it anymore. And then hire someone and put them in and go. You click the buttons, you book the appointment, you say this when they come in, right?

Yeah.

And now those are the people who are like, well, I'm scaling with your system. I've got, you know, I'm ready to open two more locations this year. I'm a buy three more next year, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's awesome. So you, you guys have been evolving as you move this thing along, as you Scale with the clients. You mentioned building your own software tool. When you look back at 18, what are some of, like, the biggest lessons you guys learned from failure in 18?

Some of those stories, yeah, for sure. I mean, we failed plenty too, trust me. You know, I think the biggest thing was that we learned this year was that, you know, I still think that our client roster, like, you know, if you believe in the 8020 rule. If you look at our client roster, I think this year I broke my own cardinal sin, which was that we put too many people into our program who are not ideal fits. And it's a mistake that I had made constantly before. You know, we're getting better at it, but I would love it if our client was full of, like, every single person on our roster was a case study. An active client was a case study. Every single one of them. That's like an ideal world for me. And we had great success with most of our clients, but there were still some people who walked into the program and we should have said, no. They said, yeah, here's my money. I want to do it. But there were some red flags. Like, you know, oh, I can't even show up. You know, they just didn't show up to their business, period, you know, for whatever the reason. So we had some absentee owners who just never stepped foot in the gym and expected it just to go. And, you know, that's not how it works. You know, like, if again, if you pay us 25 grand to fly out there, we'll close them all for you, bro. But, you know, we're not there and you're not there. Like, who do you expect to run the dang place? There was a lot of things like that that happened, and we should have just been like. I mean, some of it we didn't know. Like, you don't know until they get in there and do it. But, you know, we can be picky now. Like, we don't have to take. Like, we're not desperate anymore. Like, our system is for a very specific type of gym owner. It's not even for every gym owner. Like, it's just for gyms that sell memberships that are at a higher price point. That's what, like, our ideal fit. So even within our niche, we have, like, we've sub niche twice. And so I think we can be more disciplined this year moving forward basically, with just helping our ideal fit client and just making every client a case study.

Dude, that's awesome. Have you, like, through that, have you learned what are some of the Things that you've learned that like to identify those good fits before you even start working with them. Like in the application screening process.

Yeah. So now we, everybody who applies to work with us has to fill out an application. We won't get on the phone with them unless they fill this document out. And it's only like, I think eight questions takes two minutes. But basically we can tell from the application if they're going to be a good fit or not right away, minus the intangibles. I mean, we still get on the phone and we do a full blown strategy session with them and give them a ton of value up front. I just believe that's the way it should be done. They sign up or not. But, but what's interesting is that, for example, minus the intangibles, the first three questions in our application, we can pretty much tell if they're going to be a good fit or not at this point. And the reason why is because if one of our clients has a database of a certain size, we know that we can reactivate that database without any ad spend and get them a bunch more customers right away, like within a week or two and get them fired up real fast.

Yeah.

And so really the goal of that strategy is to get their, the bill that they just paid to us paid off like in a couple weeks.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And then by the time we turn the ads on and everything, they're getting some, some fresh blood in and they're getting some referrals and you know, we call them buddy passes. They get some buddy passes coming in. They get their current members to bring other people in. But our bill's already been paid, so everything that happens after that is upside for them. And they're making money hand over this from our service. Right. So yeah, that part of it is. So if they have just a few assets that we know very powerfully how to use, and we do, then we get on the phone with them and we talk about some of the intangibles. You know, we can, we can tell within 30 minutes to an hour real fast. But some people are just, you know, if somebody comes to us and they're not open or they, they just opened and they've got, or they're a tiny facility, they're like doing it out of their garage, you know, I mean, it's pretty easy to tell that we can't help them. So, you know, and we were, we try to take care of everybody, but, but you know, we, I think we had over 2000 applications to work with us last year.

Okay.

And you really have to be careful with that. I would say this as an agency owner. If your business isn't serving you first, it's very difficult to help. The amount of people that you probably want to help and say long term is probably impossible. So I'm actually getting notifications from our app that people are signing up for the passes. It's pretty cool.

That's awesome. So 18, that was the year you launched your own software tool, right?

Yeah, so we launched one. We actually launched the first version of that in the summer of 18, and we're actually finished up the first beta group for the 2.0 version of that tool. It's called Nurture. We're finishing that up this week, and we're launching the new version in two weeks from tomorrow, I think. Yeah.

Now, we walked a journey where we were an agency. We build a software tool. I know it's not as sexy as it looks from the outside, but what I like about what you did is you perfected a process, and then you build a tool. You didn't do it the other way around. But would there be any insights or any lessons that you learned from venturing into this space of building tools to, like, increase your efficiency that you'd want to share?

Yeah, I mean, I. I personally made the most mistakes with this part of our business this year just because I'd never done it before. And I stupidly didn't take the time to stop and, you know, hire a mentor or hire a coach who's done it before. So I kind of learned the hard way. Um, but I'll tell you, man, those.

Are the most expensive coaches I know.

That's right. It's just really, every again, you know, I'm stubborn, I guess, or. Or stupid or both, but. But it's made this mistake before. But this is the thing that I will say is I think it's much smarter to, like, what we did is we said, okay, we figured out what works, and there's some tools that will help us do it better. And we kind of pasted them all together. Right. Some publicly available tools. And then again, we became obsessed with being like, why does this stink so bad? I mean, no one solved this before, and we really tried. I mean, we tried every tool on the market that even remotely came close to doing what we thought we needed to do to execute our system with it. And so finally, when we built our own, it was probably like 40 to 60% of what we knew it could be, but it was still getting People, awesome results. It was still better than everything else that the pasted version of the public tools like, way better. So I would say two things. Hire someone who's done it before if you've never done it to help you and guide you on all the steps that it takes and the particulars. And then number two, don't be in a rush to put a bad product out there. But also don't be afraid to put something out that's not as good as, you know, it could be, that it's even better than the stuff that's out there on the market because that, you know, you're gonna help people with that first version. It might be ugly, it might not do everything you know it can do, but if it's still gonna help people and it's better than what's out there, you're ready, just get it out, you know, because we still, you know that I think that step was like, we're not here unless we make that first step in some way, shape or form. So now we are here and you know, publish is better than perfect. So. Yeah, dude, that's my attitude. Yeah.

What is, like, what is. How does having nurture out there impact your client business? Is this rolled into their service or like how from a business standpoint, how are you setting all this up?

Yeah, we just rolled it in today. You can only get it through our service. So we don't even have like we have a URL for it, but we don't have like a public website or sales page for it. It's just in our program. So the second somebody pays us and signs the agreement and we onboard them, we sign them up in the system and you know, book their, their lead nurturing call where we show them the process of how to use it and all that. So they don't even really know the name of it until they get in. And it honestly doesn't matter because our process is the thing that gets the result. Yeah, again, this is just kind of a tool. But that. So it's been like that to date. But we are getting more and more requests from people to just kind of like have the software. So we're going to work on that this year, making it sort of a little bit more publicly available. And so we'll probably create like our system will be the training that we give to people in more of a traditional like online course. Yeah, so they're going to get like the strategy with the software that they can use in their own gym or their own agency. So yeah, that'll be. The other difference is we get a ton of agency owners who've asked us to white label our tool and the previous answer has been no. With this version, the answer is yes. We can definitely do that for any type of agency. Who's helping a client book an appointment is really who would use it. That's awesome.

Cool. I want to kind of dial into your mindset and when you look back at Rob Bailey in 2012 versus Rob Bailey today, what are some of the big shifts that you've made in this journey to kind of be the leader of your team and to be the leader of these clients as you continue to scale up?

Yeah, that's a good question. So one thing that I found through all this is like the business's growth, I think is directly related to my personal growth as the leader of the business. And so I'm not like, I wouldn't call myself a self development junkie, but it's more like I think the self development is a necessary part of the growth. And so, you know, like, I'll give you an example. I mindset wise, if I had a bad client experience or someone, you know, ripped us off or you know what, whatever the case may be, like a bad client day.

Yeah.

Everybody kind of knows what those days are, you know, I mean, dude, it would mess me up for like few days after that, maybe even a week, and I would just be in a funk. And now I've just got such a utilitarian attitude towards it that I'm like, well, I can either sulk about this for a few days or a week and let that person take my energy and decision making in the direction that I know that it shouldn't go, especially if I want to help other people. Or I can go help more people who actually want this kind of help.

Mm.

You know, yeah. And that might sound like a small, small thing, but I, you know, we kind of run a very heart centered agency at the core of it. And obviously we have lines and rules and, you know, things like that that we don't let our clients cross. But outside of that, we try to give as much as we can to them, as much of us as we can. And so, you know, previously I would just be in like total Debbie Downer moon for way too long for things like that to happen. But that's the thing is I have to view it like, yes, this is a business and it makes us money and that's the function of a business. Right. But when our clients are winning us, making money will take care of itself. So we've kind of become, like, obsessed with getting them results, but also have this healthy attitude, like, if somebody just doesn't want it that bad for their business, then there's not much that we can do to help them at a certain point, you know, and we just have to let that go and be like, you know, hey, come back to us when you're ready, or let us refer you to someone who might be a better fit. Or, you know, just. Just. You don't have to do anything either, you know, you don't have to hire an agency. Just do things your way, like, see how that goes for you. But those are the kinds of conversations we have started to be more okay with having. Right? Because. And it's a lot. I'll tell you guys this. It's a lot easier to have that type of attitude when you've got new opportunities at your doorstep constantly. You know, I mean, you know, we spend a lot of money on ads for client acquisition, and we get people applying to us, coming to us, like, almost daily, you know, so it does help when you've got other ideal clients knocking at your door saying, yes, I do want this help. Yes, I would love to have somebody like you, you know, get us those kinds of results. So does that answer the question?

That's huge. Cause it's. It's a. How you. How you address adversity. Because, like, adversity is going to either strengthen you or it's going to crush you. So how do you approach and address adversity? Is that going to be a motivator and help you move forward, or is it going to bog you down?

Yeah, it is. Like, being resilient is, like, a good thing to have, like, emotionally resilient and whatnot. But I'll tell you what, man. You know, I think it also comes down to, like, taking good care of yourself. And I know people talk about this all the time, but I didn't take good care of myself at my previous agency, you know, and we have had three kids since then. So there's a lot of nights where I don't get good sleep or much sleep at all. My wife doesn't, or whatever the case may be. And so you just have to kind of give yourself a break every once in a while, too, and be like, look, it's all right, man. Like, and I'm talking to myself here, you know, like, you know, not every day. Like, it's a lot like baseball or, like, you know, any kind of sport analogy you want to make, like, the Best batting. Batting average in history was not a thousand. You know, no one batted a thousand for a season ever. History of baseball. So, you know, you got to give yourself a break and just be like, well, today was a miss or I made a mistake. But tomorrow could be an awesome day if I'm open to viewing it that way, you know, and also having some perspective. Like, my family means everything to me. So a lot of times when I'm having a bad day, I just go give gratitude in general or spend some time with my kids and play and do something cool with them or take them to lunch or something. And, you know, it's like, okay, that silly client, you know, not even think about that anymore. So I think it is about. It's all those things mixed together. But that is the personal development side of it is like, I'm in control of my mindset. I'm in control of my decision making. I have choices. You know, my day doesn't have to look a certain way. It can look the way that I want it to in an ideal way. And so those kinds of things take effort and discipline and practice, though. So I would say it's definitely the kind of thing where you get better at over time.

That's awesome. You mentioned earlier that, like, you have a real heart for your clients and really trying to serve them in a deep way and give them everything you can. How do you, as the leader of the agency, transfer that same vision to your team to get them to operate with that same heart and attitude towards clients?

Good question. I've never thought about it that way before. I think it just comes down to a culture thing, hiring good people, people who also get excited about that kind of stuff. These are, I would call them tactical things. But first of all, hire awesome people who do care. A lot of these small business owners, we've been told several times we save their business, you know, we've been told several times that no one else would help them this way, things like that. So that's like, very rewarding. But, you know, one thing that we do is we always share client wins and team wins. Like, we've got a all hands meeting once a week for an hour. We try to make it pretty quick, but we start the meeting off doing client wins and we end the meeting doing team wins. And that just gets people excited, like, you know, and if those things don't excite you, like, you're probably not in the right place, you know, because it's like the direct benefit of our efforts and the way that we've set this up. I mean, our clients get quick wins. It's one of the things that I love the most about our new model is that we can help them very quickly put money in their pocket and keep their doors open or hire another employee. You're making a direct impact very quickly. So I think that's been the key is just to make sure that the people that we do have on our team care about those things also. And then making a little bit of time, at least just to be like, yo, this rad thing happened this week. Let's clap it up, you know, let's get weird, dance around for a second. And that's. That's pretty much it. I. Beyond that, I just don't. Like, I've never tried. I've never been like, hey, you should care about this, or anything like that. So I think it just kind of. It bleeds through, right? I mean, people. It trickles down, if you will, if you don't use that word. And that's pretty much it.

Now, you said just hire good people. Like, it's easy.

Yeah.

Do you have any tips on, like, what. How do you go out and find the right fit, the right person? Where do you look? When do you know it's the right time? How do you make those decisions?

Yeah, so that's another area where I grew a lot this year. I made tons of mistakes. I wasn't stringent enough this year. On that. That note, I think I should have been a little more picky, maybe a lot more. We. You know, so the decisions, I think, come from, like, I always look at, you know, number of units. Right. So meaning when we've got 50 clients and we know that we need an account manager. You know, account manager can handle about 50 accounts, something like that, depending on, like, if they're all. How they all look, they're all the same, you can do that. If they're all different, it might be a little, like, fewer. 30, 40, something like that. So what I always try to do is to measure things by units and just look at, like, okay, how much time, space do we have? Like, I'm okay even being a little bit overloaded with our team because our system is so simple. Almost anyone can jump in and help with any part of it if they had to, which is a nice, nice benefit to have. But, you know, like, we've. We've hired too fast because I was freaking out a little bit because we were growing so fast, and I was like, dang, we need some. Some more bodies in here. You Know, more hands and, and you know, I hired a little too fast and the person just wasn't a good fit. And I mean, it, it was apparent immediately that they were not going to work out. And so I would much rather like hustle for two more months and wait and find that kind of unicorn hire who's just going to be a perfect fit than like get someone in there who's not good, who's just making a mess of things and just totally like breaking our whole, you know, system, basically. System or possibly like spoiling the bunch, you know, like. Yeah, when things go wrong, a lot of people out there, they just, they don't know what to do or they react negatively or they, you know, complain. And it's like that can bleed into other parts of your organization. So I'm trying to be more like super careful because that's been very detrimental to us at times.

Yeah.

And we'd, we've had to let those people go. But as far as how do I hire people, what I try to do, to be honest, Andrew, is I try to find people who are not trained in this industry. Like we've always, you were at the workshop, we talked about like, we have a lot of single moms, but like stay at home moms, part time stay at home moms who also want to work from home. And that's worked out really well for us. But the people who we hired did not necessarily have like a particular skill set that was specific to our system when they came into our organization. So we hired mostly for the intangibles and for general skill sets like computer savvy, able to problem solve quickly, used to using apps, things like that. Just basic stuff basically able to learn quickly, able to be efficient, self discipline. If you're working from home, you got to basically be in charge of yourself to a degree, um, honesty, ethics, like all that stuff. I mean, it sounds almost silly, but that's really what how we hired. And you know, for example, Betsy, who's been with me for years now, she's like, I mean, the flexibility that this offers and the fact that we're able to help these clients and wake up every day and like be stoked on what we're doing is like rare. It's hard to find, you know, for someone like her. And so we've really had good luck just doing it that way. Rather than posting like a job description on Indeed or Monster or whatever people do and getting 5 million applications and going, oh, this guy was a rocket space technician, so he'd be great at this. Right. It's much easier for us to just teach people our way, the right way if they have a general skill set. So I guess not every agency owner can do that. But you should definitely consider your offerings if you can't do that. Because if your offer is simple enough, you can teach almost anybody how to do the moving pieces. That's when things get really, really good for you. I would say.

Dude, nugget right there, that's huge. I guess kind of the last thing here. Can you talk a little bit about, like you mentioned, I was at the workshop, what are the ways that you're helping agencies now with this model, with the lessons that you've learned? Anyone who's listening, who wants to learn more about how you're building things out, where would you point them?

Yeah, absolutely. So we do the occasional three day workshop which is, you know, the exact same event you attended. And what we do is we, we help agency owners install some of our best systems. So if you, if you want like a lead gen, a lead nurturing and a sales system as far as a client delivery perspective is concerned, we teach people how to do that for your niche. And if you're in the fitness niche, that's okay. If you're not in the fitness niche, that's okay too. We can still teach you this stuff. We also have an awesome agency sales training. So if you have inconsistent sales, my business partner did like 800 calls last year. He's an expert at this stuff. So we also train at this workshop on how to price, package and sell the way that we have. And one thing that we do that most people don't know that we've been doing this whole time is we have a one call close script. That's our system is like we have someone apply to us, they book a call and we spend about an hour talking to them. And at the end of that call, we make an offer and they either take it or they don't. And so I would say 96, 97% of our sales came from that one call. Close. And some people call us later, you know, but we didn't chase after them or anything like that. And we never wrote a single proposal. We just made the pitch right there on the phone and we just, it was all. Every single person that came into our system nearly was, came in on that first phone call. So that's been life changing. Actually a lot of the people at the workshop say that's the best part of the event. So there's that. And then in addition, you know, we obviously teach. A lot of people want to know about our lead nurturing tool, our two way text message tool and how they can white label that for their agency. So for the first time, we're actually on January 23rd to the 25th is our next workshop in San Diego. And when people can attend virtually or in person. The in person seating is very limited. But everybody who attends, no matter whether it's virtual or in person, is going to get a chance to white label our tool for the first time at that event.

That's awesome.

Yeah. So if people want to check that out, I can give you a URL if you want, but it's just robbailey.com and there are three Bs in there. It's R, O, B, B, B A, I, L, E, Y. People call me Triple B. Yeah, that's awesome. It's robbailey.comalchemy. the event's called Agency Alchemy. So that's the URL if you want to check out the stuff. But yeah, we've really been fortunate to help some awesome people like yourself. I mean, it's been so fun to do these events and we're going to do more of them in 2019. We decided just because we enjoy it so much. So we'll probably do like three of those this year. Three to four of them and then maybe some more virtual events. But this one is going to be the funnest because releasing our new lead nurturing tool is just like I'm a kid in a candy store. I'm like, yes. You guys are all going to love this.

That's awesome, man. Well, I can't recommend it enough. It was awesome. The way you simplify things I think is what a lot of people can apply to their business is just stop trying to focus on everything. We talked about that on a couple of the sessions already today. Just the common fear of focus, but the freedom you find once you've made that decision, you make that jump. It allows you to hire people with no specific skill set. You don't need them to bring the secret sauce with them because you've already sorted that out. You can focus on the people.

So yeah, absolutely. It's life changing, man. It changed my life, honestly. I mean, business and personal, it's just made all the difference. Yeah.

Well, dude, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for sharing your story and all the awesome nuggets here. We really appreciate it.

Of course, man. My pleasure. And anytime.

Cool. Thanks, Rob.

You buddy.