AMA with Jesse Pujji: Mastering Sales in 2025

All right, so here's the goal. I'd met Jesse about a decade ago. He was the only person who I saw who was building an agency who didn't hate his life. And the problem with people who, founders who were running agencies is they'd always have a friend who was building a software company and the software was, yeah, struggle to build, but eventually software kind of sells itself and you get people who are using the software on its own. And the problem with people who are building agencies is that They have to sell and then they shift over to, you know, servicing. And when they're shifting over to servicing, they're not selling. And so the sales slow down and then there's servicing and then they have to come back and get sales because there's churn or a problem with the, with the customers. And so they go back to sell and while they're selling, they drop off on service and all this just keeps going. And I remember asking Jesse, Jesse, why did that not happen to you? How were you able to build up your business to the place where it was so solid that you can pass on the CEO role to John and allow it to go on and sell the company and allow it to go on. And it kept continuing. And you know what, maybe instead of me saying that, Jesse, do you remember what your answer to me was? This was at the fire in front of a fire in your office in St. Louis.

Well, I, I don't know what it was then, but right now it's like, I didn't think I was building an agency. And I always thought of it as like I was building a business and like, and in my mind, a business had to be an independent thing that wasn't, wasn't me just doing the work for all the people all the time. And so from the get-go, I never thought of myself as I'm gonna, okay, this is the person I have to do the work for. I always thought of, okay, I gotta set up a system that's gonna get the work done for this, for this client. Is that what I said?

I actually believe you used the word refused and you said, I refuse to keep doing this. And so what you did was you built these systems, you built these processes. And so especially, and this is what we're all here to talk about today, when it came to sales, we have recordings of Jesse doing the early sales at companies. Like a moment ago, you saw him use the backdrop from Growth Assistant, his other company. We have recordings of Jesse selling at Growth Assistant using a process that now someone else at Growth Assistant uses. And we've introduced that process to all of you who read our newsletter, all of you who've come to our past workshops. And the process is this: Jesse figures out who his ideal customer is. He puts down a list of names of people who fit that ideal customer profile, and then he finds someone who could make an introduction to each of those. Sometimes it's 3 people who can make an introduction. And so when he's selling, he's got a warm intro to the person who he's selling to, an introduction from a mutual friend, and that creates a better relationship and that creates an easier sales process. And frankly, Jesse, I used this last week and I was late by 8 minutes. If this was someone who was just a cold email, he would've just dumped me and said, I'm never talking to you again. Instead, he was totally understanding. He goes, Andrew, I could actually use the time too. Let's talk a little bit later. And we talked and we closed. And that's the experience that we're introducing all of you to. And many of you are going deep in that world.

Yeah.

And you have some questions. And so whether it's questions about that, questions about how to do any other B2B sales, or questions about anything related to how Jesse's been building his businesses, we are here to talk about that. He's built Ampush and sold it using this technique. He's building right now Growth Assistant using this technique and Aux and other businesses, and he's taught so many other people to do it. We're going to get right into it. Jesse, welcome.

Thank you. So, all right, so how are we doing this? I think, I think people can ask questions. I think in the chat people can share when someone else asks a question what they might have learned or taken away from that question. Uh, it's, to me, I like that device because everyone, I think you can always learn something from watching anyone interact, whether it's my answer or the question itself, and start to think about how to incorporate whatever you're learning into your business. What, one of the things you're going to realize about Andrew and myself is We care a lot about results coming from this. There's a much bigger vision at play here, which is, you know, I started GatewayX where I'm super hands-on with the companies and I'm involved in them. And part of what we're trying to figure out is, can we be, can we take these systems and actually help people scale up businesses and growth? Because maybe we're going to do that in a year for equity or other types of devices. But a lot of what we're, we're really focused on people here taking the things, learning them and seeing if they can work for their businesses, almost as an experiment for ourselves to figure out whether we can Put this material out there and see how it works. So you're going to constantly see Andrew. Andrew will harass you. I will just keep pushing you to use everything you're learning and tell us how you're going to use it in your business.

And then if someone does stump you with a question, I did promise $100. I can't imagine it happening, but I will give it to somebody here. All right, let's get into the first question. Andy, Andy B, why don't you just unmute yourself? Let's bring you in here. Hey, good morning.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Excited to hang out today. So I'm thinking about building an alternative expert network platform specifically for healthcare buy-siders. So anyone that's, whether it's PE, whether it's venture, whether it's hedge funds. And I really think there's a better way to do it than like GLG, Guidepoint, Et cetera. And I'm trying to understand the optimal sequencing on how to build this. And so since Jesse, since you just launched in the last couple years, Aux Insights, I'm curious, how did, uh, like you go get your first customers? Um, which came first? Was it building out the team, like your shop to actually do the due diligence for the PE deals, or first customer and then find your team to service customers?

If, yeah, if you guys follow along in the newsletter, it's a great question, Andy. And I think it's a cool idea. And I think vertical expert networks is going to be a very good play. So, Early congratulations to you on a good idea. One thing you guys, if you follow my newsletter, as we're building businesses at GatewayX, because, you know, we're, I'm not typically a CEO kind of has, takes a problem and figures out how they're going to solve it. In my case, Andrew's the CEO of this business. Casey's the CEO of Aux. I'm not, I'm not the one in the day-to-day solving the problem. So I'm trying to find ways to, to play like a weighted dice game. And so like my answer, Andy, is a little, it might be a little unsatisfying, but like, The design of Aux was predicated on me first going like, where do I have unfair advantages? And so I would not have started Aux in my case if I didn't have, I don't know, 70 friends in private equity. We've got all these guys I went to college with and screwed around with. And, you know, early on in my career I worked at Goldman. And so the short answer, again, unsatisfying, is the first way we got customers is like, I called my old college buddies and I was like, hey, And frankly, they were already calling me. A lot of them were calling me about digital marketing stuff because it was showing up in their investment committees and they didn't have an answer to it. And they would call me. They knew I had started a digital marketing business. And so that was a, you know, one of the, one of the sort of tongue-in-cheek tests we use at GatewayX to start a business is, can Jesse text the first 10 customers? Does he know, does he know people that well that he can bring in and get the initial flywheel going? So, you know, in your case specifically, unless you have those contacts, Either way, I guess I would start by going, you got to go get— I wouldn't get many, but you need like 3 to 5 customers to then go build the supply side of your network out. So I would figure out, you know, I don't know if you've got the blueprint or you've seen the mutual intro thing, but, you know, we explain it all the time. Go on LinkedIn, figure out who your targets are, find the healthcare partners at various private equity firms, figure out if you have a friend of a friend who knows them to get you in the room, and then be ready. And it doesn't take much, I think. To get a few of those people excited. Um, the other thing though is a lot of the bigger PE firms, you probably know this, they actually have people who are in charge of this part of the business. Like they work with the GuidePoints and the GLGs. And so that's a, another person I would try to figure out who's in charge of buying the, the expert network services.

And like, would the title of those people like data procurement or like what?

You know what, I can, we can ask someone. I, there's one, one woman who works for Aux who used to work at GuidePoint. I can, we can ask her and get, get that back to you.

Thank you. Jeffrey, let's bring you in here.

Oh, great. Thank you. So, um, I guess as I put in the chat, one of the, one of the questions I'm facing is how to refine my ICP. This is in the context of the Bootstrap Giants accelerator. Um, I guess one of the, so my company, we basically do a lot of contract R&D for the defense work. I do work for DARPA building sensors for nano drones. I do work for IRL building, building sensors to integrate into clothing. We design chips, all sorts of stuff. And I've been doing this for 25 years, so there's certain, like, an approach we take. It just required me this long to barely be able to understand what's going on. We're growing, we're 4 people. I can't simply hire someone and do a mind meld and give them 25 years of experience. And so my thinking is, for the ICP, is probably the low-hanging fruit would be to find other people that need our technology so that we can adapt it. with a simple, minimal amount of effort, with that adaptation, something that an engineer without my 25 years of experience can do. My concern is that that may be too narrow. And so I'm just trying to figure out how to balance out between just how broad or narrow it should be so we can grow in a sustainable manner.

So Jeff, if you If you got an email in your inbox and it's your dream email, you're like, they tell you, they describe what their company is, they describe their issue, what would that sound like?

Jeff, we've seen your work on X, Y, and Z doing this for drones. We have this project for XYZ agency. We really need to have it happen. Let's have a conversation and figure out how we can integrate your technology into our drone or into So that sounds like what you just said sounds more like the offer or the scope to me.

Who, who would be sending that email? Uh, what's the company type that's sending that email?

It could be, um, I'm just gonna make up a name. It could, it could be some, um, like a sector manager of a, like a Lockheed Martin. It could be, um, a chief autonomy engineer with a smaller company. No, you know, one, one. more of an agile company, but one that has buying power.

Okay.

And has a bleeding neck.

Let me give you an example. Let me give you an example that might be helpful. When I was at Ampush, if a founder of a D2C brand that was spending more than $10 million emailed me, and it was a subscription product especially, and said, Jesse, my CAC has gone up a ton the last 90 days. I asked around and they said, you're the best in the business. I need your help. I would Start drooling because I was like, okay, this is big. I know exactly how to solve their problem. And, and like, I know exactly how to sell them also. And like, it would just be, they'll be a client within a few weeks. As a, as a, another kind of counterexample that if some gaming company emailed me that spent $2 million a year and had 3 games, like I, I look at it and I kind of go, ah, I don't know what to do with this. This isn't, it's gonna take me longer to figure it out. Do I really want them as a client? I don't know. And so if you can describe the size of the client, like the nature of what they're asking, you know, the nature of their business, how big they are, who the person is, you mentioned that before, that's kind of how you start to narrow your ICP. And in the beginning, I would just start with the same question, which is, what's my dream based on what I've done for the last 25 years? What's my dream thing that would pop in? And then let's go look at how big that is in the market. Meaning if there's only 5 of those, okay, well then we, to your point, we probably need to expand it. Or figure out, and I always like to think of it as a, as a bullseye target. So you've got something in the center and then maybe one rung out, you go, okay, Jesse, there, this is my ultimate dream. And there's only 20 companies like this in the country. Okay. But one rung out, there's like 200. Uh, and one thing you'll hear me say a lot is I think people sometimes go like, oh, I need 10,000 potential customers. And then early on, I don't think that's true. I actually think most people need 20, you know, I don't know how much you charge per month for your, for your offer.

Um, we don't really, it's not charged per month. It's basically for projects. So typically a project is anywhere from $500,000 to $1.5 million.

Yeah, well, there you go. So if we can get you 10 customers a year, that's a pretty awesome business and then we can go to the next level. So, so we just need to find 100 to 200 customers who are fitting in your ICP based on this. I would again, start with what you would get you excited. And then we go back to LinkedIn or we go back somewhere else and figure out if there's a list and how long that list is of those companies.

That's a big thing that I've taken away also from the accelerator, Jesse, just watching you say, look, we don't have to go for such a broad market. We're not looking for that many customers. Let's get as narrow as possible that the person who we're trying to sell to feels like, oh, this person gets me.

And I have, by the way, uh, I mean, once you're at a $10 million business, you have money, resources, time, energy. You can go find another market. And like, I mean, that's how I prefer to build businesses because I also like to build defensibility in whatever I'm doing, the core of what I'm doing.

And Jeffrey is part of what, as he mentioned, he's part of our Sales Accelerator. If you are doing any B2B sales, I'm going to tell you later why you should be joining the B2B Sales Accelerator. Jesse and I will work directly with you to understand who your ICP is, your ideal customer, what your ideal customer profile is, how to refine your offering so that they understand what you're selling and it's compelling for them. And then also how to get meetings, how to close sales. And we're going to work with you step by step by step in the process. I'm going to put a link for it in In the chat right here. And I'd love for any—

Everyone listening, again, back to this kind of thing. I wanna make sure people are getting, what'd you learn from this exchange I had with Geoffrey? What'd you learn from the exchange we just, we had earlier? Just what are, what are you taking away for your business?

Yeah, hit us in the chat with that and I will be bringing—

Thanks, Geoff. Excited for you to be in the accelerator.

Thank you. Thank you.

Tony, great.

You had a great question because your question is one that I'd asked Jess— it relates to what I asked Jesse about, and he basically gave me the answer he's going to give you. Great background.

No, so I can't stump him. Oh no, so I've got to choose something else then, Andre, right? If I can't stump him. Uh, no, so my question, Jesse, is basically I'm a freelancer, right? And it's exactly what was described earlier in the call, sort of you go through the feast and famine. And so there's a few different routes, right? Like the agency route where I would grow, right? And I would sort of do sales and fulfill the service sets or sort of productizing, right? So that's also what I'm thinking, but I'm curious to know if I would want maybe to stay a freelancer. Uh, how do you see that sort of going through the feast and famine? It's very hard when you're alone. I'm fulfilling the service.

I want to upsell.

So I'm keeping, you know, Tony.

Yeah.

How do you pitch yourself? I want you to pitch me for 30 seconds.

Ooh, all right.

I thought you're the hot seat.

Right, so I'm a data engineer and I help you get all of your data from all of the different places in your company, right? I set a pipeline so that you can see all your new leads. Okay, pause, pause, pause, pause.

I didn't work on the pitch here, as you can see.

No, no, no, you described yourself fine, but I did that on purpose. If you think of yourself as a person and you sell yourself as a freelance person, you will be received by the market as a freelance person. For Aux Insights, as an example, we have people, I mean, it blows my mind. They, they work as marketing help for the private equity firms directly. The private equity firms are like, well, I'll pay this person $10,000 a month. We walk in and we say, we're Aux Insights. We're a firm and we are blah, blah, blah. We charge $200,000 a month for our services. And it's literally a collection of 4 people who they could be paying $10,000. But in a buyer's mind, you just said I, I, I, I, like, great. If I'm buying Tony, then I'm hiring a freelancer and I expect Tony. Right. And listen, let's listen to how this sounds different. Hi, I'm Tony. I am the founder and CEO of. Data Inc., you know, whatever your company's name is. My quick story is I was a data engineer for a long time. My business started to get a lot of momentum behind it. And then I, you know, now I've started a firm and we're the best in the world. We do this, we do this, we do this. Here's our rates. Here's how it works. Blah, blah, blah. Now there's so many things that are powerful about that. One, you can charge more, but two, and I think equally importantly, they don't expect you now. You're like, so here's how, here's how it's going to work. We're going to get you a project manager. I'm going to stay involved on a weekly basis. I will update you, but I'm, you know, I'm running a company and nobody expects me or Casey and nobody expected me at Ampush to be in the work because I never said, I'm Jesse, I'm a marketing expert. I'm going to do all your marketing for you. I said, I started this firm, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's what we'll do. So try it just for fun on your next call. Just like, I don't know if you have a name for the company, but like name the company, sell it as a company and see how differently the person reacts. to you. Now you may have to change like who you're talking to, because if they want a freelancer and you're selling a company, then that's like, that's a different part of the thing here. But, but like anyone who's listening, and I want people to respond in the chats, like that's one of the most common things I see. And it was, I did that on purpose because I, I guess you were going to present yourself as an individual doing things. And the second you do that, forget about it. You're going to be stuck doing the work. You're not going to be able to charge as much.

Go ahead, Andrew.

What if, what happens if he doesn't have a team? Like you had Casey at Ox Insights, you had other people who are doing the work. And so you could legitimately present yourself as a we and have other people interacting with your customer. What happens to Tony if it's just Tony?

You, you, there's no such thing.

What do you mean?

Do you find contractors or you find— no, I mean, if you wanna build a company, you gotta build a company. You gotta think like a person building a company, not like a person doing freelance. That's, it's not just a, it's not just a semantic game. It, it's a real thing that if you wanna be building a company, you gotta be building a company. And a company, the CEO does not do all the work. That's just not how a company works. No company works that way, right? So, so yeah, I mean, to be specific, to answer your question, Andrew, I would get a handful of contractors ahead of, ahead of going out to sell. I'd say, hey, I'm going to bring in some business. Are you available for this many hours? And the first few projects are going to be a little, you know, ghetto for lack of a better word. Like you're going to have to be chasing people around, whatever. And then eventually you'll go, hey, I've got enough going on.

Okay.

Now I have a few full-time people and so on and so forth. But But you always have to act like there's a company and then that has to be part of the case. So don't, again, people will figure it out, by the way, if you go in like, I have a company, blah, blah, blah. And then you're the guy, you know, you're like the guy at every counter doing all the work. They're going to be like, okay, this guy says he has a company, but he's not a company.

I'm going to bring Saurabh on next. Was that helpful, Tony?

Love it.

Love it. Thanks, guys. I do actually, Jesse, really love seeing the takeaways. Bring in the takeaways in the chat, folks. Let me know what you've taken, what you remember from this, what's helpful for you. The big thing for me, Jesse, was I knew you were gonna say present it as a company, but actually having the company and bringing in contractors and freelancers, that's the gutsy move, especially when you got your first customer. That I think is a, is a very Jesse step to take.

It's a mindset thing. It's, it, you feel like you have a company and imagine talking to someone when it's just you and they're negotiating and you don't actually have to pay somebody else money. So you're just going, oh, it's me. Do I get $10,000 or do I get $9,000? And you're like, all right, fine, I'll do $9,000. But if you have to pay somebody, you're gonna go, well, hold on guys, I'm running a company here and I gotta pay people and I gotta make a profit. And your whole brain changes when you go, this is a company. It's a thing. It's a, it's a, it's not me. It's an organization that's separate from me.

Okay. Um, before I bring Soren in, I will say this. If we don't end up stumping Jesse with a, with a question, my kids are curious since I just showed a $100 bill in the Maven email. They go, well then who gets it? So the answer is going to be, I will have everyone vote on the best, most useful question at the end. We've got Jeffrey for the first question on ICP, Tony for freelancer versus agency, and we're going to get Tony, uh, we're going to get Soren's question next, but let's get it to be the best, most highest quality question, and then we'll vote all of us to see who's, who's, who's had that.

So I'm going to go by Andy.

Andy.

Yes.

Thank you. Unmute yourself, sir, and you should be good to go. Oh, hi Jesse.

Well, thanks for responding to my emails previously. So my question is essentially, how do I pitch to PE firms specifically that invest in insurance firms? So I used to work at a PE-backed insurance firm and I delivered some great results. I have 10 years experience in the industry, insurance industry. And after going out on my own, I realized that I'm targeting the wrong people because I'm working mostly with insurance agency owners and just don't have the budget. So that's why I'm making this switch to try and pitch to PE firms.

Right. What are you pitching them?

Um, mostly SEO, SEM, um, scaling their digital presence.

You would do that for the PE firm or for their portfolio companies?

For the portfolio company.

Got it. Why do you want to pitch the PE firm?

Well, because they have the budgets that I need to get them results.

But do they have the budgets or do the portfolio companies have the budgets?

I would assume that their portfolio companies have the budgets.

Why are you pitching the PE firm? That's what I'm missing. I'm missing something here.

Because, I mean, my understanding is that like, whoever's in charge of of the portfolio companies? Like, they have KPIs that they look at, and I always understand that they have preferred partners that they work with.

Yeah, I don't think most PE firms are gonna be interested in a marketing services pitch. You know, I'll give you an example, just to make more sense. So if somebody pitches me something for Bootstrap Giants, I don't— I go, I don't know, Andrew's in charge, I'm going to hand it to Andrew. Or even Andrew is not like— I'm going to hand it to Richard or someone else on the team who's in charge of that thing to make that decision. And so most PE firms, at best, they're going to be a channel for you, meaning like you get them excited and then they're like, hey, go, go sell my company something. Um, but I— what I would do instead is I would, I would try to find a portfolio company, do some good work for them, Then go and say, well, can you introduce me now that I've done good work for you? Can you introduce me to your PE guy? Then use that as a case study to get to the intros to the other portfolio companies. But if you just go into a cold PE company and say, I do this, they're going to, I don't, we don't, first they won't take the meeting probably. And even if they do take the meeting, they're going to go, well, we don't, we don't know what the hell you're talking about. We're like finance guys, but here, you know, here's our marketing lead and they can have a conversation with you and. You know, so it's, uh, unless you have direct relationships or connections with those people, like, you know them already. If you know some of them from your previous life, then I would just start with those people and say, hey, I've launched this firm and I'm an insurance expert. And, and can, you know, then, but if you don't know anyone, it's, it's not the route I would start at because it's actually a much harder route to break into than just finding, you know, their portfolio companies, getting into the portfolio companies, and then, and then using it as a way to sell up.

Got it.

Does that make sense?

Yes, it does.

Okay.

It does feel like a lot of businesses want to sell to PE firms, VC firms, and so on, because they're just such a big collection of companies that they represent. Is that part of what your motivation is, Saurabh?

Um, yes. And also because, um, like my previous company was acquired by, uh, by a PE firm. So like, I figured like, um, they would be looking for one of the reasons they acquired the company is because Can you go back to that private equity firm? I can't.

Yeah, I'm trying.

That's what I mean.

That, so that I'm all about, right? And just remember the unfair advantages, like generally PE, I'm like, no, that's stupid. The PE firm who knows you and has some relationship with your connection, and then you go, hey, I have this thing. Can I talk to some of your other portfolio companies? Now you've got a reason that they'll actually facilitate intros that can get you meetings that'll make sense. I think that's where, again, you guys are always talking. I talk a lot about unfair advantages when people are starting new businesses. I'm always just like, who can you sell to that you know already? Because that's a really easy way to get going. And Andrew, I think a lot of, to answer your thing, what you just said, Andrew, I think if you ask most people, unless you have traction with something, I think a lot of VC and PE can be a waste of people's time. Because I mean, at Aux Insights, just keep in mind we're selling to the private equity firms. They're actually the customer. It's different. We're not selling— I mean, sometimes we do stuff for the portfolio, but we're going to them and saying, you're diligencing an investment, we're going to help you, and you're paying our bill. So they're actually the customer. So if you can come up with a pitch to the firm themselves, that's a different animal.

But the role assistant is not going to the PE firms and saying, hey, PE firms, you have all these companies in your portfolio.

The only time we'll do it with VC is when, when they already have a portfolio company that works with them. What exactly what I said to Suren, which is, hey, Can you introduce us to other people? Look, this, you know, this has already got traction in your portfolio.

Got it. And sorry, one quick question. So instead of selling, pitching them digital marketing, could I be pitching them research?

If it's something the PE firm buys, then yeah. I mean, figure out what you think is of value and then that's a wholly different pitch, which is for the PE firm, you just have to figure out how they make a lot of money from it in a very decisive way. 'Cause that's all they care about is how do they make money from whatever you're selling to them.

Got it.

Got it. Thank you.

Yep. Thanks, Ryan.

Hey, Chris.

Chris, there are 2 Chrises in here. Were you the one who asked that question? Me?

It was, yeah, I put one in the, uh, the chat section.

Yeah. You asked a question that's been coming up a lot. You want to bring it up right now?

Yeah. So, so Jesse, you're, I think you're familiar with, uh, my agency Playbook Media, Brian and Derek Cox. So, um, yeah, I, so my question is this. I do feel really good about our sales process. I feel great about work that we do for our clients. It's just initiating those first conversations, right? I mean, it's, as you know, growth marketing, performance marketing, there's a million agencies out there that are banging on the doors of these brands. It's, you know, how my question is, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you, you know, outside of referrals, which is mostly what this business has been based on, What are some ways that, that you can kind of get these conversations going? Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts, Chris. You know, at Ampush, what we, in the early days, you probably know this from the story, because you have some former Ampush people there, like, we worked with a lot of different types of customers. We had gaming, we had e-commerce, we had marketplaces, we had even like brand clients like MasterCard and stuff. And over time, you know, we found it to be difficult to differentiate and stay competitive across all of those different things. So So one suggestion would be like, again, kind of like what I talked about earlier, um, with, uh, Jeff, what we did at Ampush was we realized again, D2C, certain scale, certain problem they're facing, that there were enough people out there that were having that problem and that we could just, you know, it was shooting fish in a barrel. So I would, most people when they're not growing, it's because you're fighting a war on too many fronts and instead pick one path. So pick one type of customer. And just obsess over that customer. And then what happens in the marketplace, by the way, is your brand becomes known as the customer, as like the, hey, you want this, you have an agency that you got to go, you got to go use. And these markets are so big that like, honestly, you could pick almost anything and you can build, I think, a, I think a like $20, $30, $40 million business. I mean, you can, you can grow a company on a niche. And then what happens once you get that kind of mass following, then you, you know, It's, it's weird. You start getting inquiries from outside verticals.

Yeah.

You become at Ambush. We just became known and then it became a thing where it was like, hey, you talk to Jesse if you're in this, this predicament, in this situation.

Yeah.

And it was only once we were, now you, people had to kind of tie me down a little bit to get me to agree to doing that, which is common for founders is because founders hate saying no to things.

Yeah.

But, but eventually they, you know, I was convinced and it started to work as a strategy. The other suggestion, you know, and this is a lot of what we do in the accelerator is You know, how do you operationalize, how do you make referrals more predictable?

Yeah.

And that's a big part of what we do is facilitate, like, and we have a whole system for how to facilitate mutual introductions from our customers, by the way, as well as from friends of ours in the industry, as well as from others where, you know, you get, you make it really easy on the other person. You identify who knows your people and then you're just constantly sending those out and you send 30 messages a week, you get 5 meetings a week and All of a sudden you start to see the business, uh, grow and compound. So the other way is just how do you operationalize? Because every, most services businesses grow on referrals. And so my, I was always sitting there going like, how do I get more of those? And we, we created a bunch of ways to facilitate more of those warm introductions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris.

By the way, Jesse just brought up the accelerator. One of the things that I love about the accelerator is that you do have access to Jesse, not just for big broad questions, but for questions in the moment. Jesse, we had a member, Ben from Rodeo. I did a live session with a few graduates of the accelerator and I said, what did you get? And he goes, I reached out to a customer, they seemed like they liked it and they were talking with me and then they disappeared and I didn't know what to do. So I pinged the group, meaning Jesse and the GatewayX team, and Jesse responded back and said, here, send him this exact thing. And immediately he got a response, like immediately he got a response. And that's our goal here with the accelerator. Yes, we teach you a clear framework and Kenny, you're in the pro— in the program, you're gonna learn it and you're gonna use it, you're gonna do it. But one of the things that Kenny will be able to tell you, and everyone who's in the program will be able to tell you, is we keep, we keep inviting you. This is the Kenny, right, Kenny? I keep telling you, if you have a question, you have a problem, reach out and we're gonna, we're gonna work with you directly on it.

Andrew, I think, I think a, a, a more interesting point in that interaction. So this guy had a, a prospect drop off and he was gonna write this fucking novel to this guy. And you, one thing you're gonna learn from me is I don't write novels. I write very, very short messages. Like the shortest messages you've ever seen. And I said, hey, write, write one sentence. And I, and then we said, well, why, why were you not following up? Or why were you writing a novel? And what was underneath that was he was feeling a lot of fear and rejection. Like, you know, he was, he was feeling like, oh man, I gotta explain myself to this guy. I gotta do all these things. I said, well, what if the guy's just busy? He goes, oh, I didn't even think about that. I was so in my own head that I didn't think he's— and I say, you must be busy. Can we get on a call tomorrow and I can install this for you in 5 minutes? And the customer came in and they closed, right? And so one of the big things, one of my most passionate points about all this work is the actual mindset shifts that we talk about that always show up from a random sales thing, but they end up being, oh, I was afraid my product's not good enough. I'm afraid that I don't want to keep pushing this person and annoying them. And the second week in the program is my favorite, which is all about mindset and how do we start to notice when we have those fear responses come up and what do we do about them?

Kenny, you were going to say something about how I keep encouraging you to reach out to us and we haven't even started.

Oh yeah. I was going to say that Andrew is like not kidding.

He's at least 10 times since I met him. I only met him like, I don't know, 5 days ago or something.

Um, so excited about the service.

I'm glad you're in. Yeah, I do. And Kenny was like, Kenny's one of the few people, Jesse, who joined without even knowing us. And I go, the conversation's different 'cause you don't know us and we weren't introduced through someone else. Google me. And he, when he Googled me, he Googled you. He said, all right, I see a decade of work here. Well, I'm glad you're in. Thanks, Kenny. I'm gonna give everyone else an opportunity to join in a little bit, and I'd love for them to join in with Kenny and Jeff and so many others. Eloise, you asked a great question. Bring it in.

Hi everyone. Um, I'm Eloise. Um, I'm an ex-VC, ex, uh, M&A investor, and I'm now the founder of Luminar Labs. I'm mainly focused on our investor clients and we'll help with anything from research, strategy work to biz dev and due diligence, mainly on a project basis. And I thought what you said earlier was really interesting, Jesse, about how you're able to charge for $200,000 a month for what could be $10,000 a month per person. And so I think part of that I'm sure is, you know, choosing the right clients that have those budgets and kind of understand your value. But I think the other part of it is probably kind of how you, the kind of the narrative around, um, totally. And yeah, so I, I, my question is really like, how do you approach pricing? How do you structure packages typically? How do you explain how you came to that number?

Yeah, it's such a good question. Um, You know, the, when we started Aux, Casey thought I was batshit crazy 'cause I would walk into these conversations and they'd look at the price and she's, she's a, you know, she's been a CEO, she's an awesome professional. She'd never started a company. And as many of you know, and you must know this, Elise, like you were a VC, whatever, but starting a company's fucking scary.

Mm-hmm.

And you don't wanna hear no, right? You just don't wanna hear no. And so I was like, yeah, it's $50,000 a week. That's what we charge, blah, blah, blah. And she said, crazy. And so I had to kind of convince her to go with it. And one of the things I did is, and this became such an awesome line in our pitch, is McKinsey, Bain, and BCG charge $200,000 a week.

Mm-hmm.

And so I would always anchor there. I'd say, well, we do this. We are ex-McKinsey people. We're ex, you know, marketers and we built this unique offering. It's, here's why it's different. And they would kind of believe that. And then pricing would come up and we go, well, look, we know McKinsey BCG charged $200,000 a week. Um, we only charge $50,000. And like, even me saying it to everybody on the line, $50,000 a week is fucking insane. But, but I just said another different number and everyone, everyone on this call go, yeah, I guess that's much cheaper actually. Right? L.E.K. charges $100,000 a week.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and we're, so I think part of what we do is we try to establish ourselves as, as better subject matter experts in that specific instance. And then anchor to something much, much higher. And then, and then again, it's just like the old, it's the old trick of like, well, that's the number that I just got in your head. So you're waiting for a number and then you hear my number and it just mentally, it like literally psychologically sounds, uh, sounds smaller. So, so that's kind of the top-down way, if you will, that we think about it.

That makes a lot of sense.

The bottom-up way I always think about it is I, I wanna make sure that my, my minimum gross margin threshold is 60%.

Mm-hmm.

When I say minimum, what I mean is like, probably want to target 70. Maybe if I have my utilization is down, there's other issues, it might drop down to 60. And so, you know, we think about the most basic thing. Okay. In the case of Aux, like it's a quarter of a partner's time. It's an engagement manager's time. It's 2 associates. Make up numbers. Say we pay them $300,000, $150,000, $150,000, $600,000 a year, plus another, you know, call it $500,000 for the partners. That's $100,000. So it's like, $125,000, that's for the year. And then I think to myself, okay, like how much, what do I need to mark that up at? Or what it needs to be priced at in such a way that I can generate that gross margin that makes sense. Um, and you know, another thing we talk a lot about in the accelerator, just on this point, and this is a choice, by the way, for everyone, but, but I'll just share my opinion on it. I like premium. I like to sell premium services.

Mm-hmm.

Growth Assistant is a premium. It's $3,000 a month. And there's all this debate on Twitter. Oh my God, you can get these people for $1,100 or $1,200 a month. And these guys charge $3,000. What the fuck? And, you know, every— people stay at the Four Seasons Hotel. And there's reasons they stay at the Four Seasons Hotel. Like the service is incredible. You know what to expect, whatever. And I, as an entrepreneur, this is kind of like a little mental hack. When I'm selling a premium— Ampusher is always a premium. When it's a premium service, then my team also goes, well, shit, we better deliver. Like we really need to deliver here because we know these guys are charging more. And, and then what, in my experience, what happens is everyone plays at a higher level internally. Then you kind of live up to the pricing you're charging and then you become known for really good work. The flip of it is like constantly commoditizing your pricing and playing this really commoditized game of like, oh, freelancer, you know, like whatever's freelancer, I'm a little bit more expensive. And like, to me, that's just a race to the bottom because you can't really invest in the relationships and you can't.

Yeah.

You can't really offer something differentiated. So I'd prefer to charge more money, get my team to play at a higher level. Maybe it's a different market. I have to say that, I mean, certain customers won't make sense for me, but for services especially, like if you're Aux and you're, we charge you $200,000 due diligence on a deal and you're, it's a $500 million deal, like, you know, in the grand scheme of things that doesn't matter to them.

Yeah.

So I don't know, that was a bunch of random thoughts. I don't know, is that helpful?

Yeah, that was super helpful. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Louise, I will say this, that if Jesse had just told me that about how charge higher and your people will wanna rise up to it, I would've said he's kind of bullshitting so that the audience sees it, why he's charging higher prices. But having seen that, he is, he's gotten us to increase our price at the accelerator to $5,000 where I would've started maybe with $1,000 and earned my way or felt I had to earn my way to $5,000. That was the plan. And what I've seen is The whole team says people have paid a lot of money to be a part of this. What else can we layer in? How else can we be there for them? And if we've got this high price point, the team is thinking, well, who else should we bring in to support them? What else, what other software can we bring in to be available to them? And it really does help a lot. And as far as anchoring, absolutely. I've seen him do this a lot. In fact, just talking constantly about how he's comparing what they're doing at Aux to McKinsey, to Bain and the others.

Right. But I'm also intense with all the teams in every business about, I also want to be sure we're delivering the value that we're like. So if you sit in an Aux meeting, we'll talk oftentimes, guys, they're paying us, like, what are we creating for them that's really worth it to them? Or for Andrew, same thing, or for Growth Assistant. Why, like, I will ask the team every single day, why should they pay us $3,000 for this head when they could like go find the person for $1,200? And they're, and like, we need to have reasons and they have to be compelling reasons. And if they're not, Then, then that's just silly. Then you're just charging, you're, you're, you know, you're not, it's not going to work.

All right. I'm going to bring— Great questions. Did you get everything you needed?

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right.

Good to meet you.

Great to meet you.

Sid, Sid, we've talked a little bit before, right? In email and a few other ways, right?

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So first of all, Jesse and Andrew, love you guys. Um, like really, uh, I happened to, happened to join one of the, one of the sessions accidentally. And I think it was one of the last sessions of B2B Accelerators. So just a quick compliment, the people over there, very energetic. I happened to meet one of them at the end, like it's a follow-up, and I was just getting some suggestions. And one of the things he right away told me that, dude, the $5,000 that we invested in B2B, we, all of us, like he said, all of us made it way earlier in the course itself. So I know Andrew and Jesse haven't asked me to do this, but I just wanted to just throw it out there to anybody that's on the fence. Just do it, man. Just do it. So yeah. And I'll just go ahead and ask my questions now. So I was software director in a Series A funded company, minority equity holder, 20 years in the software industry, very confident of what I do. I've been told that I'm a nice person, but don't have sales bone in my body. I got my company and I got well-paying job and I left it and I have got a company. I know I can help the customers. I just don't know how to sell. I've been doing 20 years of heads down slash teamwork, but never felt confident of actually going out there. I'm not from this country. I currently in the US, but I just don't know how to get started. Andrew did help me. But I feel like I still need a kind of push or sort of suggestion to just get started. That's my question.

So for someone who doesn't have a sales bone in their body, what do you recommend?

This is to start a company or start, just start selling or what exactly are we starting?

I have started a company. It's a software consulting firm. Um, uh, and basically I don't want to go too much detail, take your time, but basically it's a software consulting firm. Um, it's a company's there. I have one customer, but I feel like I'm actually trading my time against the money. What I want to do is I want to have people working for me and then sell it that way. So.

Yeah, I mean, some of the mindset stuff we talked about earlier, well, there was the stuff we talked about making sure you're thinking like you're running a company and not running an individual freelancer, which we talked about earlier. And then, you know, there's, there's 2 things that come up for me, Sid, that I would think about the. The bigger opportunity for you as a human is to actually reflect on what's making you scared. Do you have a sense for what creates fear for you around not wanting to go sit down and reach out to people or get on sales calls?

Number one, I've got multiple mouths to feed. I'm the single bread earner and my health insurance hinges with that said income. And be able to, it's a 9 to 5 that I have to give to my customer. And then I cannot just go out to conferences and be in front of the people. Uh, so that's number one. Um, that's kind of customer—

So let me make sure I understand.

You're afraid that if you start selling more, that you're going to not be able to pay the bills?

So currently I have one customer that I'm actually working for, trading my time against them, against it, but start selling the time, the time conflict, be able to go out there. talk to people, there is no guarantee that I'm going to get that, you know, money coming in. So telling this—

So you're kind of like one in the hand versus two in the bush. You're afraid of risk.

Yes.

Why are you afraid of risk?

Like I said, I have bills to pay and it's, it's not for me. I can, I can go on ramen noodle for a year. I have a kid and, yeah, exactly. Aging parents.

What do you think the worst thing could happen is?

Worst thing has already happened, perfectly. The job that I was working for, the Series A funded firm, like we gave them a year, like of my time, and we paid the employees. After co-founder, I was the minor, my most equity holder. I didn't get paid for a year. It was upwards of $200,000 that I didn't get paid for. So I'm currently in that bind where I just can't, in my savings, I cannot just put it out there. You know what I mean? But I mean, so, uh, but the worst thing happened and are you okay?

Or did your kids starve?

No, but I had to get that gig, right? Uh, I had to get this gig, uh, instead of just going out there, being in front of the people and start selling.

Yeah, we could spend a lot more time on this, but, but in general, like I would, maybe an activity for you to think about is to write down the things that you're most afraid of here. And what stories you're making up about them, and then see if you could see the opposite of those stories. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Like if I take a risk, you know, my kids, whatever, like, because what we do, we oftentimes take these things that are relatively innocuous, like taking sales meetings, and we've, we've added a bunch of additional baggage mentally onto them. And it stops us from actually being just doing the thing we need to do or we want to do. And so anyway, that's one sort of exercise I'd give you. The other just very tactical thing, this is totally different from mindset stuff, is, you know, if you're not, if you don't have a sales bone in your body, first of all, I don't believe that because I don't think, I think when you say that, what you mean is like, I'm not an aggressive used car salesman, you know, the traditional caricature of a salesperson. But if you believe in what you do and your own service ability and ability to deliver to someone, and you can talk to other human beings, then you can sell. Like, I believe that. And you just have to make it a style that works for your soul, like that makes sense for you. And so what I would encourage you to do very tactically is set up 5 calls a week with people you already know who you're comfortable talking to, not people you're pitching. And just say, hey, here's what I'm up to. It's, it's, you're my friend. Hey, it's Sid. I'm starting this business. Here's what I'm thinking about doing. What do you think I should do? Does this make sense? You know, and just, just commit to doing that for a month. And I will bet you, you'll have 2 customers by the end of the month. And you're not selling anyone anything. You're just out there having conversations in comfortable ways that with people, you know. And, and to me, that's like oftentimes where I encourage people to start is just really with the more comfortable settings. And, and in a, and, and like you believe in what you're doing, I presume. If you believe in what you're doing, you don't need to sell it. You just need to be it. You know, like just show up and go, here's what I do. This is why I think I'm really good at it. This is why I think I'm better than other options. And, and you'll see very quickly what's gonna happen that people will start to go, okay, yeah, I, I like Sid. I believe it. Yeah. And you have the thing I need.

Got it.

Thanks so much.

Sid, great question. One of the things that Jesse does in his companies, one of the things that we do in the accelerator is we focus on one metric to help organize your thinking.

And that metric, the metric that matters.

Matters is meetings. And the reason that I find that especially helpful for what you're talking about is if I have one meeting this month, I have so much pressure to close a sale. But if I have 7 meetings in the day, I'm in much looser state of mind. I'm okay if one person's not there. I don't feel the need to push. I don't feel the need to be, I know it's, it's not a scarcity mindset. And so one thing I'll ask everybody who's here is how many meetings How many meetings did you have in the last week? And that's the metric that if you work in one of Jesse's companies, he's gonna ask you, how many meetings did you have in the last week? And if you work with us, that's the metric that I'll keep checking in on you with to see how many meetings did you have. And if you don't have enough meetings, it's not like I'll come in and scold you or make you feel bad for it. I'll bring somebody in from the accelerator to partner up with you and help you get more meetings, whether that means finding the right people to ask, whether it means refining what you're asking. Whatever it takes, we're there to help you get that. Interesting, Jesse, if I'm looking at this, we do have people who do have meetings here. Let me share this poll, share the results. So we're looking at 33% who got 2 to 3 meetings. Can you imagine if they had 2 to 3 meetings a day, what they would be like, how much their business would grow? That is our goal to help you.

I kind of hate this question, Andrew, because I want to know what your average meetings per week has been for the last month.

Oh, you don't even like that. It's just this last week. You want to—

Yeah. One week you have 3 meetings. Whoop-de-doo. Right. If you don't have, if you don't have 3 to 5 meetings a week that you're setting up constantly, the business, you're gonna run into the feast and famine and you're gonna run into, and you're gonna feel scarcity every time you get on a prospect. You're gonna feel this, oh my God, I gotta close this person. Yeah. And then it gets rid of all your authenticity. It gets rid of all of your passion because you're so afraid that you're not gonna close the person.

So we will work with you and I'll show you in a moment how you can do this. We have a small opportunity for a few more people to join. We have our group almost fully assembled, but we have a couple of spots left. For anyone who is doing sales, not just sales, but B2B sales. If you're selling to businesses, if your price point is high, like if you're only offering a $50 price, we're not, it's not gonna be a good fit for you. But if you're selling something for $1,000, for thousands of dollars, we're gonna help you get more meetings and close those meetings. I'm gonna put a link in the chat right now. In a moment, I'll tell you a little bit more about it. I'd love for anyone when this—

So this is on Friday, right?

It closes on Friday unless we end up with more people than we expected, and then it'll close as soon as we do. So if you're interested, there's a link right there. It will show you, we'll walk with you and will work with you literally throughout this process. Let's take one more question from Ethan, and we're going to have a bunch more questions actually, but let me add Ethan to the spotlight. Ethan, dude, another guy with a great background. I feel like everybody today has had backgrounds that are fantastic.

Thanks guys. Jesse, I've been following you quite a while and our business is Growth Assistant and what we do at ProAssisting are very similar. But I, um, I have a feeling that your 60% margin threshold is about 40% higher than ours.

Um, by the way, Ethan, let me say this. We've had a few people who are in the, uh, in the talent space who've wanted to join the accelerator and have texted me and said, I can't join because Jesse's not going to want to tell me how he's doing things at Growth Assistant because we might steal his playbook.

Um, all right. So you're, you're starting to, uh, uh, A stress there, but yeah, I want you to know that I am, the reason I'm not jumping full in is that we are launching something tomorrow and then that goes live next Thursday and I can't wrap my brain around putting in the time and effort. So I'll put that to the side. But we provide fractional executive assistant support at a high level to executives across the country. We've been doing it since 2018. We charge $3,000 a month for 1/3 the resources of an assistant, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. We pass 80% of that onto the assistant. What that allows, it allows us to get assistants who could command 6 figures in major metropolitan areas.

All right.

What it— we created ProAssisting, my wife and I, to fill ourselves up with clients first. We have 45+ years of very high-level EA support experience.

And coming back to your question, you're trying to figure, you're talking about margin expansion, right?

Yeah.

Talk about that question.

So the question is, I've been told that 20% margin, that you're only taking 20% of the, the retainers that you take in and pass 80% to your service providers is too low. And We've been in the black from day one. We're running a multimillion-dollar company now. We're doing very well, but I do feel that our margin is too low. And so our goal with this launch that's coming up next week is to really lean into the training side on the executive assistant, in the executive assistant space. So we're then gonna be serving both sides of our marketplace.

Right.

And the goal, and Thinking that that training aspect could be substantial with the right focus and time and get to a blended margin that is more in that 35% and 40%. Does that make sense or does it make sense to just put complete blinders on and only focus on margin expansion on the service business?

Yeah, I, I assume these are US-based.

All US-based.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, I, in a traditional services business, I use that 60% threshold and I, I can imagine why people are telling you that, but let me, let me tell, let me give it slightly different framing, Ethan, that I think might be valuable for you. When you swipe your credit card, right? When you swipe your Visa, uh, Chase Visa, Do you know how much Visa takes? Like a $100 transaction, you know how much Visa takes of that transaction?

3%.

So it turns out the issuer takes about 2 to 3%. So Chase takes 2 to 3%, but Visa is just a payment processor. So they take like 20 cents. Now they have the credit cards, they have 60% of transactions globally. And so it turns out that that 20%, it's a tiny, if you look at it as a divided by 100, it's a tiny, tiny, what you call a tiny gross margin. If you look at their financials, they actually say they have, you know, no, they have 100% gross margin because they think of themselves as we take 20 cents of this transaction, we have no cost, we have no cost to deliver this ability. So I think one of the things if I were in your shoes that I would do is I'd first of all say, well, hold on, let me, let me decide what business I'm in. Right. And is the gross— there's a very like, again, another example at Ampush was we were managing, let's call it $300 million in ad spend and our net revenue was $30 million and our gross margin on the net revenue was like 70% because our cost of sales were actually the services against the net. Now, if we looked at it as a percentage of the media, it's like, well, that's a horribly horrendous business, but that's not, that was like a very gross number. And so what I don't, what I would need to better understand, or what I'd encourage you to think about rather than just saying margin expansion is there's a, in my mind, there's a framework, there's a continuum between what value-add services are you offering and what's your, what's your take rate essentially of the thing you're doing.

Yeah.

And I wouldn't necessarily raise your gross margin for the sake of raising your gross margin. I think you have to provide more value or be willing to provide more value. And that's why in this case, you're saying training is the thing that's going to get, get you a higher margin. So you can take a lower cost person, train them, right? And then you're going to command more of a, more of a margin. I assume that's what you're thinking.

No, it's more along the lines of taking everything we've learned in running the business and our EA careers. And having executive assistants take that on their own. And it could become a—

Oh, I see. You would train the executive assistants in charge of, you also wanna start an education business or something.

Absolutely. To marry it. And then through that process, we'll find great talent for the service side.

Gotcha.

Yeah. I mean, if, if you wanna start that business, then great, do it. If you're doing it just to raise your margins, I don't, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that because, I mean, you're already doing it, so it's, it is what it is, but like, I would actually just ask yourself the question of like, do you— I don't care if you make 20% or 60%. The question is really what's below that and are you happy with that and can you scale that? Like if you can take the 20% and you guys make, I mean, just doing the math, you know, $1,500 or $2,000 in contribution per person. And underneath that you don't have a lot of costs. So say you're running actually at that number, a very high margin business, like Great. Just scale it. Like, who gives a shit? Who, like, that to me is not a— now, if you, if you have to spend a lot of money recruiting the EAs and then getting in and there's customer service and there's all this other stuff so that by the time you're actually getting your bottom line, you're not making very much money. You're losing money right here.

Right here.

Yeah. So, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't just randomly, you don't need to raise gross margins for the sake of raising gross margins. If your EBITDA is strong and you make a lot of money and the economics work, I wouldn't, I would actually think of ways you could scale what you're doing so that it's maybe more self-serve or other things at that same margin level. Versus finding, you know, in some other way. Now again, if this is good for recruiting EAs and stuff, but I'm not, it's not prima facie to me that you need higher gross margins just for the sake of higher gross margin.

I appreciate that. And my training assistance is what lights me up more. And the service—

That's great to know.

Service business has allowed and given us a foundation that Stacks, and we have clients who've been with us since 2018. So awesome. That, that kind of, that allows the foundation for then to, I finally gave up my last client that I was directly serving in November. So, and we're, you know, and the EBITDA margins are good. We're less than $5,000 a month running this business. It's, yeah.

Well, Ethan, I, I'll say that you and Jesse share an interest and passion in teaching, and that actually does answer the question. And here's the other thing that I'll say, because you share a passion in teaching, but also you share a business that's so similar, I think you would be nuts not to join the Sales Accelerator. I'm gonna talk to you directly and show you what's on the inside. I wanna get your honest feedback on this. And then at the end, I think, I think you're gonna join and I want you to join and I wanna show you why. And I'll have everybody else Watch this too. And let's see if we can get, uh, if we can get Ethan to join right now. Here is what there is. And Jesse, by the way, I started out with the Sales Accelerator by just talking to members. I said, look, what do you wanna know from Jesse? What is it that Jesse's done? Tell me where you are. What would you like to know? And they said, I wanna know about sales. And so I said, all right, tell me more. And Jesse saw this. I got on sales call after sales call after sales call. And here's what I found out. Members told me, look, I've got sales. And, and many of you here who are listening to me have got sales. You've sold at least one person. But what they told me, Jesse, was they do not have a process. Ethan, do you have a sales process yet? I know you're kind of early.

No, I've been doing this since 2018. We do have a sales process.

How documented is it?

It's in my brain.

Okay.

But it's a very fast process. 3 steps.

All right. And one of the things that they were telling me was, I do my own sales. Are you doing your own sales yourself?

Yes, I am.

You are. And so the problem that they told me was doing your own sales is great, but it also means that they can't delegate because the process is in their brains. The process actually, many of them told me, is in their hearts. They're the kinds of people who knew how to sell the first person cuz they knew the first person cuz they were friends. They didn't, they don't have a process that they could delegate and allow other people to take the sales and grow it. They also told me, look, I hold everyone else accountable. In fact, they said, not only do I hold my team accountable and make sure that they all hit their numbers and do their work, but they said sometimes even at home, I'm holding my spouse accountable to make sure they do things. I'm checking in with my parents to make sure they take their medicine. I am the person who everyone, uh, looks to to hold them accountable. But they said, no one holds me to be accountable. I want someone to just check in on me and make sure that I'm making progress when it comes to sales. This is all the stuff that I found out when I was talking to our audience about The idea that we had about having Jesse teach a sales process and work with them in a more intentional way. I also learned that people said, look, I grew my company. I'm very proud to have grown my company, but now it's plateaued. I'm looking for the next big level up. They said, I guide everyone. I tell them exactly what to do whenever they need it, but there's nobody there to guide me when I need something. I don't know who to turn to, to grow it, to get the kind of feedback and the support that I give everyone else in my life. And so then I asked all these people, many of them I know are here in In the audience listening to us. I said, what's your 10 outta 10? Gimme your ideal. If you could work with Jesse, what would your 10 outta 10 be? And I'd love to hear from you in the chat. If you'd like to work with Jesse, what would your 10 outta 10 be? If you could work with me, what would that be? What I found out was they wanna work with us for 6 weeks intensely, just really obsess on it and really focus on sales. Nothing but sales. Let's make sure that we can get a system in place that works. They said, I don't just wanna learn. I want to do, I want to do sales as a way of learn. They said, I want Jesse to teach each step of the process, just like he's doing this now in more intentional ways, step by step, like he's teaching his teams. And I want the same access that the CEOs have. They also said they want clear sales assignments to know what to do week to week. They want to be kept accountable. They want in-between calls to be in our company Slack. And then at the end, they want a playbook, not one, Ethan, that's just in your brain, though I understand that you've got this down, but they wanted a playbook that they could then start handing out to people, hiring them to help grow sales. And so I took all that together and we created the Sales Accelerator, the B2B Sales Accelerator. And that is what we're, as Jesse said, we're closing out on Friday. We're going to get started immediately next week, and we only have a few more spots left to have people join. And if you're interested, I want you to notice a few things. First, I want you to notice you're actually selling. We will work with you to close sales. This is not one of these, Maybe you will, maybe you won't. You're going to learn and in the future you're going to do it. We will get on calls with you. I personally will get on texts with you and on calls with you, and our team will get on Zooms and work with you to close sales. We hold you accountable. This is one of our graduates.

I can't hear it.

Oh, I'm gonna move on. That was a, I, I didn't even know that that was in there. I, that was one of our graduates who said that he had closed a sale, $20K MRR while he's in the program. We do hold you accountable. Here's how I do it. I see this full chart in front of me every day that I log into my computer with your name, with your email address. I can reach out to you immediately. You're probably in my phone and I can text you and I can see when you didn't do it, when you're not making progress, when you're not sending out the offers to get in meetings, and when those offers are not being responded to. And I can, and I will follow up with you, Ethan, and say, look, you're not getting enough of a response. Let's talk about how we can get you more. And at the end, we'll build out your playbook. Ethan, at the end of this, anyone who's in this, at the end, you'll have a product, a guidebook to teach your team how to close sales, not for you, but with you at first. And eventually they'll take on and they're gonna blow your sales outta the water. And we also will do it with you. I'm gonna do it with you. If you join right now, we're going to start working with you on your sales. Here's the link. I'm gonna put it in. accelerator.bootstrappedgiants.com. Could you all just check that link and let me know if it's working for you? Ethan, actually, since you're unmuted and on camera, would you mind doing that? Mark, can you take a look? Once you all do go there and check me out, saying you all, here's what you're going to see. You're going to end up on a page right there. Lauren's in there. Thanks, Ethan. I appreciate it. And you're going to see the process. You're going to see our graduates. I always put the first and last name. Often I'll even put the email addresses of our graduates who rave about it because I know that many of you are reaching out to them on LinkedIn. You know them as friends, you're reaching out to them. And so I want you to see them. I want you to talk to them. I want you to see how effective this is at closing sales. And once you join, here's your first step. I introduce you to Jesse. We start getting to work immediately via email and we start getting you results. This is not for you though. It's not for everyone. It's not for you if you sell to consumers, if you're selling small Uh, price products, you're not in, it's not the right fit for you. If you're only looking to sell on the web, it's not the right fit for you. If you don't feel comfortable talking to customers, it's not the right fit for you. We're going to encourage you and we're going to help you talk to more and more customers. If you just want to learn, it's not a good fit for you. If you don't have a business yet, it's not a good fit for you. It's perfect though for people who are selling to businesses. This is why I was thinking of you, Ethan, especially because your, your product, your service is going to be so fricking similar to what Jesse's doing. It's basically copy paste. And you're in his world. All right. If you're selling services similar to Ampush, like I said, if you're selling at a high price point, if you're coachable, if you're prepared to have sales conversations, if your business is doing already $15,000+ in sales, we're going to accelerate it and grow it even more. If you're opening to hire a sales team in the future, this is going to be fantastic for you. And finally, and this is, Ethan, what I think is going to close you right now, I will guarantee a sale at the end of this product, this process. You will absolutely get a sale. I want to hear from you. What's, what's holding you back? And we're going to get into questions.

How much is it, Andrew?

Well, this is a program where—

How much do you think you're going to charge?

Yeah, we were told by our advisors, start selling this for $50,000 a year. Make sure that people are doing a mastermind directly with Jesse. And truthfully, we actually did that. We created a for— I had a whole slide here about how we're not going to do it. People said, well, I do want that. So we have people who are paying $48,000 a year to work directly with Jesse. This is $5,000 enough that if we can help you close 1 to 3 sales while you're in this, it should cover the total cost of being in the program. So Ethan, I'm putting you on the spot, 100% guarantee. You can show up back here 6 weeks and say, I did not close enough sales and I will give you back your money. Or you're gonna be on here in 6 weeks and you're gonna go, hell yeah, I can't believe it. I now know Jesse better. I've closed more sales. My whole system is no longer in my head. It's in a team of people who are closing sales. And I'm now out on a ski lift with Jesse.

Well, I, um, I like the fact that, uh, walking away with a complete playbook on how to think about bringing on someone to do sales other than I, even though I love sales calls as much as I love teaching, um, I, I think that's huge and potentially growing into a sales team. We aren't in a position right now to bring on a sales team, given that low margin that I was talking about and living our life. And that's why we're doing the training program. I am, I did not expect to get on this call and have a conversation. I did not expect to get on this call and—

I am putting on the Zoom.

Possibly 98% think I'm going to put the credit card down and pay the $5,000 and join. My concern is my time bandwidth as we're launching our other program. But I believe education stacks. I believe it's inflation-proof. I believe that getting coaching and mentorship from great people who've been there before is the shortcut. And frankly, it's a business expense. So maybe I'm now 90 years old.

Tax deductible.

What?

I said it's tax deductible.

Tax deductible. You get it. You got it. Of course. I really appreciate your time, guys. Thank you.

All right. Hit that link. I absolutely guarantee it. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put my cell phone number in to make sure that you have it. I'm gonna chat it over to you because you and I are gonna be working very closely together. And I think what you're gonna see is Jesse's gonna work with you to increase your, your profit margin. One of the things that I appreciate about Jesse is that he is the kind of person who will tell you the things that will make you feel uncomfortable. We had somebody in the accelerator. Like you could see something was up and I couldn't tell what it was. And Jesse's like, you kind of have these anger issues. You gotta like, and he started talking to him about it and the person was suddenly at ease. And I've got examples of people who he has done this with. I have a feeling that there's an issue here that Jesse has solved before, or that in a conversation with you, Jesse or I will tap into that will help grow your profit margins. But we're saying this all publicly. Your name is public here, Ethan Bull, your company, say the company name so people can check with you in 6 weeks and say, Hell yeah. Or did this suck? What's the company?

ProAssisting, proassisting.com.

All right, everybody, follow up with him. All right, let's go on to the next question from Rahul. Rahul, I'm going to bring you on camera right now. Uh, add spotlight. And Ethan, I'm looking forward to working with you. And for everyone else, including Kenny, John, and, uh, Joel, a few other people who are in there, I'm looking forward to working with you all. And there's still room for a couple more people.

Yeah, sure.

Rahul, talk about any issue you brought up and I—

Yeah, sure. Hey Andrew and Jesse, and thank you for your message also this morning. Jesse, I came to learn about you through My First Million podcast. So I was listening to them. I've been listening to them for a long time. Sam mentioned about what he started and then he met you there and then started to follow you from there. Your newsletters are super, super helpful. very high-value content as well as your LinkedIn posts. So yeah, I will just phrase my question like in the chat also right there, slightly lengthy. So in a sense, I run a management consulting firm out of the Nordics. I'm based out of Finland. It has a unique model. What we do is we have contractor MBB consultants and we have a great way of sourcing recent grads from Ivy League or top European universities, and we have internal managers. And these 3 together basically deliver projects to listed companies in Nordics, primarily Finland, Sweden, Norway, and so on. Now, what am I struggling with? What I'm struggling with is basically value proposition, pricing, but more importantly, I have a lot of repeat customers, but I want to be in a situation where my service becomes More like a recurring business model, like a subscription where any of these executives who are purchasing from me, they can think of it like a toolbox where they can quickly get my service instead of me doing this constant cold calls and conference calls and talking about case studies. And I want to get into that kind of business model. And with a typical kind of, say we have a sales process in place, we do about like 700 to kind of K euros a year. I want to get it to 2 and 3 million and 5 million. So that's just a kind of quick background.

Yeah, that makes sense. Is that like a— and you're running projects or in the Nordics with ex-McKinsey and top grads to deliver some kind of project work. What's the nature of the projects? Like what sort of problems are you solving?

Yeah, sure. So I mean, typical advisory projects, so market entry, product offering, categorization, service creation, mapping, so on and so forth. And they're across industries and across business function.

And is the desire—

I'm making up a story that you want recurring revenue because it's like annoying to run a project-based business and because you see other people in the world who have recurring businesses and you—

I will—

why I want to do this is something very similar to your presentation where right now I'm getting on a lot of these calls. So I have my whole calendar is booked with these kind of short conference calls where I have this kind of beginning of the year catch-up call, what's the goal for must-win battle for 2025. But basically it is a lot while I have a big team, but it's still kind of, I'm at the end of the funnel closing it and then I become the bottleneck.

Yeah, I think that, let me give you, go in 2 different directions. Look, I think recurring revenue businesses are awesome. So, uh, co-sign that. I think the reality is if to, I wouldn't try to push your business into one for the sake of pushing it into one because it won't work and it'll create more friction and frustration. If there is a thing that your customers desire that can become recurring, then like try to figure out what that thing is, right? You know, Ampush as an example was an agency. Most of the time services, ongoing providing of services is a more recurring thing. You know, a growth assistant is recurring. It's every month you have the same employee doing a service and people are happy to pay just like you pay a salary for a recurring person or you pay an agency. Um, obviously software can be recurring, data tools can be recurring, but if you— but what starts to happen, Raul, that concerns me about is that's just a different business. You get yourself into a different business, right? So the other thing I would, I would challenge you to consider is You know, I think last time I checked, McKinsey does $10 billion in revenue. You know, we started this business, Aux, less than 2 years ago. This year it'll do $10 or $12 million in revenue. And it's same thing. It's project-based. McKinsey's project-based, right? And I think there's a couple different ways I would, I would just think about it. But, but the most important one is what is going on in your pipeline such that you're not able to create something that feels more like recurring business? So like one of the goals we have at Aux is By the middle of the quarter, we want the next quarter fully booked out in terms of project work. But that means that we have to like take a certain number of meetings. We have to build a certain size pipeline to be able to basically get to that place by the middle of the thing. The other thing you mentioned is that you're getting really busy. So I also would get very curious to look at your process. This is something we spend a lot of time in the accelerator. We actually, I don't know if you have that slide handy, Andrew, but we have this framework for how do you delegate the sales process? And I think oftentimes people in your shoes, Raul, they go, oh shit, I have to do all this because it's too, you know, I'm the guy, I'm the man. I'm like, I'm the one who's selling this and I'm good at it. And I do that too, but we'll take pieces of that and break out so that my ideal for you would be you show up at the beginning of the process and you show up at the end of the process. And there's a lot of other pieces in place so that you don't have to be so overly involved in every sales process to get deals done. Yeah.

So right now I'm not involved in all processes, but it turns out that consulting also is this kind of relationship business. So what happens is that often the people who I've worked with, they want to see my face.

Sure.

So we have like kind of cold callers and kind of early kind of SDRs and so on. But then this whole relationship aspect to any kind of consulting business then comes. Which then means that I have to be there. And I think that is part one of the problem. And part two of the problem is that because I'm involved in many projects, so there is a certain kind of knowledge with time that I've gathered, which means that if I'm on a call, there's a lot of relevant stuff I'm able to talk about, which any of my associates can perhaps not as extensively talk about.

How many, Raul, this is happening with Casey too right now at Aux, like how many of these projects can you support Concurrently at any given time?

How many? So, I mean, our model is basically like we have a pool of, we have 2 types of pools. So ex-MBBs and we have a lot of grads. So our grad pool is about 2,000 students, something similar to Muse by Katherine Minshaw actually. And yeah, so I also connected with her, but anyway, so then we could staff very, very quickly. We could start very quickly, but I've not been pushing on too much size because of fear of quality. So typically at any point—

No, but you're the bottleneck. You've already addressed that, right? So the question we have to ask is, now it doesn't matter how big your pool is. None of that matters. It matters how many can you personally be involved in at the level of service you want? And then we have to figure out a way to get that certain things off of your plate. Right. So at Aux, for example, right now we're, the number one focus is hiring a partner so that Casey can get away from having to run every project and sell at the same time, because it's just not possible. So we're looking, we have a, you know, you can get managers and associates all day long, but it doesn't matter. We could have an unlimited number of those people. It wouldn't change anything in the business.

Right. Right.

Right.

Right.

So how many can you support directly?

I mean, if I'm directly supporting them any month, there could be 4 projects maybe that I'm involved in.

Right. That makes sense. I think that's pretty normal for any consulting business, right? So I think what I would encourage you to do is it sounds like you might be at the place where you either, either need to raise your prices so that you can just make more money for the projects because you're involved in them, or, and, or hire another person who's at your level who can support projects that you're not involved in because you bring your project load down to 2, somebody else takes on 4. Now you have 6 going concurrently and then you're able to sell also. And then you kind of keep rinsing and repeating that process. But there's a lot to, I mean, services businesses, they just require people. That's, that's sort of the, the nature of the beast. And I don't, again, unless there's a glaring opportunity for subscription need, I wouldn't necessarily force that into your business because I think it can, it could be counterproductive. Sure, sure, sure.

I mean, that is really like a wish because it's just painful to constantly be on. So, I mean, I definitely get that perspective, like Well, here's an idea.

I'll throw a dumb idea at you. You have this massive pool of talent of young people who are talented. Why don't you just offer, create a staffing offering that says, hey, we will, we'll, at the end of our project, we'll match you with 2 to 3 people. We'll take a markup on them and they'll just stay employed through us to you for to take on any work you need them to do. And just, does that make sense? Yeah.

Yep. Yeah.

I won't be involved anymore. You have to be very clear. Like, I'm not there anymore as the partner, but you have great talent that's very high quality. It's going to stay involved in your business and I'm gonna mark up, you know, 100% their, their cost or whatever.

Well, yeah, I, I wanna be fair with everyone's time, Ro. Ro, sure. Um, one of the reasons why Jesse can jump in so quickly with these answers and work you through it is because he is so familiar with this business and this type of business. You and I have been on text, I think late last night your time, uh, or my time and early this morning. You know, we're available for you. We've talked to think about having you, you talked to Andrew Winter, one of the other people on our team about joining the accelerator, right?

Uh, it was Andrew. I thought it was you. Okay. So there's this, there are 2 Andrews. All right.

We have 2 Andrews whose names are very similar. We do have a big team here. It's not just videos. It's not just Jesse. It's a whole team of people here ready to work with you. And one of the things that you noticed is we are available on text. We are available on one-on-ones. We are available to be there for you. We can help you think through this. And I'd love to have you. The reason that I messaged you last night was I said, wait a minute, Rahul is someone who I really wanted in the program. I didn't get you in there. And so I messaged you last night. I'd love to have you in the program. Um, are you thinking of joining? Are you going to come in with us?

I am thinking of joining. There are a few, few factors I have to look into, but, uh, we are in touch.

What are you doing right after we're done with this? I'll give you a, I'll give you a ring right afterwards. Okay.

Yeah, sure. It's 9 PM here. I'm, I'm at work right now.

You are?

Okay.

Sounds like the kind of person I want to be in business with. I'm going to call you like 2 minutes after we're done here on audio FaceTime and we're going to get to follow up. About, about that and about anything else. We are at the end of our time here together. Thanks for everyone, to everyone who was here. I did want to talk to you, Andrew. Um, the, there's another Andrew in here who I wanted to bring up here. Can we do a one-on-one, Andrew?

Are you asking me?

Yes.

Am I the Andrew?

Yeah, that sounds great.

Do a DM with your cell phone number and I'll follow up with you.

Okay? Okay, cool. Thanks.

All right. I do want to work with you and I want to say to everyone here who's in the pro— who's in the program, I'm looking forward to working with you. For those of you who are not in the program, Yes, it is something that will help you grow your sales. I do absolutely guarantee it. And the reason I can absolutely guarantee it is because I've checked in with people who've gone through the Sales Accelerator in the past. So Mark, I see you there. Safir, I see you there. Faraz, if you are considering this, if Chris is considering this, I see you there too, Chris, even though your camera's off. I guarantee it because I've seen what we've been able to do for other people. We'll help you organize your sales process. We'll help you figure out who to hire. We'll help you build the whole thing and I will hold you accountable step by step. And yes, it is $50,000 worth of value for only $5,000. And also Rachel messaged me to say, look, tell people they could do it on payment plan so we could break it up so you don't have to do the full $5,000 all at once. If you are like some of the people who said, I don't really fully know this, I don't fully trust this, take that first step with us and I guarantee you're gonna get a sale. Do it right now. And the first thing that you'll do is connect with me and Jesse, and I'll be as available for you as Somebody who's fully on your team, because I am on their team, Jesse. Jesse, did I miss anything from here?

No, I just love your passion, Andrew.

I do.

I'm super— I'm like late at night on this too. I do have a list of people here who asked questions.

And you, and you got, you got Ethan.

Ethan's in. Good.

He's in.

I want Ethan. Ethan's exciting.

I love these conversations.

I was looking in real time.

Thanks, guys.

Ethan, let me, let me get you on here. Ethan.

He's turned himself off. He wants to move on.

Ah, he wants to move along, but I don't, dude. I'm going to be in your life to the level that, to the level that you want.

Not me much, Andrew.

Yeah, I got a lot going on, but you know, yes. We got to help him with this launch.

You are my obsession. Yes, we will. All right, Ethan, I'm excited to see it. Thanks. Thanks, Jesse. Thanks everyone.

All right, guys. All right, see ya. Cool.

And I will follow up to see what the best question was. Everyone will get it by email.

Thank you all.