I'll help you add $1 million to your bottom line

All right, we're gonna, I'm glad that Jesse is in here. We're gonna do so much here today. And our big goal is to help you, as you can see on the screen, add $1 million to the bottom line. I'm gonna do a quick intro and then we're gonna go into hot seats. We've got people, uh, who are already set to do the hot seats with us, but I wanna tell everyone a little story about how Jesse and I met. Jesse and I met when I interviewed him years ago, over a decade ago on my podcast. And at the time I was like, I don't wanna interview someone who's running an agency. Agencies don't ever go any anywhere. It's usually, One guy doing the work. He gets a sale that's like a brother, a friend, a cousin, a past employer, and then he goes and does the work, and then he has to go and get another client because that one client is kind of shaky. And when they go to get a new client, that one client falls away, and then they finally get a new client. It was like a lot of up and down. I said, no, but I kept hearing, no, Jesse is different. This guy is super organized. He comes from a McKinsey background. Everything about him is organized, systemized, good with people, good with building infrastructure. I said, okay, let me meet this person.

And I met him and I did this interview with him and I was like, oh, this guy's phenomenal.

And one of the things that I learned about him, having gotten to know him in this interview, is he would see these little things that all of us dismissed and go, that's the one, that little thing that you all dismiss. And here's an example of it. Google Ads were big. There was this ad and that ad and display ads and banner ads. And this guy decides that he's gonna get into the thing that seemed like the most side little game of the internet, Facebook. And he goes, let's, let's experiment with that. And he discovers that Facebook ads grew.

Yeah.

big.

He saw the possibility before they did, before most other people did, back when all the bloggers and everyone in business was talking about how they were useless. And he had built his business largely by recognizing that one place where you can grow. And he then helped introduce companies like Clash of Clans, like Dollar Shave Club. Like, what are some other names, Jesse?

Uber.

Uber.

Uh, Blue Apron, Peloton.

All these companies depended on his business, Ampush, which you can see here in a TechCrunch article raving about them because Ampush got them to scale using ads. And then he had sold the company and he followed it up with a company called GatewayX where he's launched multiple businesses. Here are some of the CEOs in the businesses. I'm on there because I've run a company with him. And one of the things that I've gotten to know as I've run a company with him is that people will, like the billionaire founder of Red Ventures, invite him into their office and say, hey, help my team find these kinds of opportunities. We have many people who pay $48,000 a year to work with Jesse to have him help them find ideas that will help them grow. And I said, Jesse, listen, we've got this company Bootstrap Giants. Would you do that for free to our audience and just support them? And he said, yeah, let's do it. Let's teach them. I'm all about teaching. He said, let's teach them. And so that's what we're gonna do here today. Here's what you can expect from us. We're gonna have Jesse go through several hot seats with people. He's gonna identify the facts, like what's the business about, see the way that he understands the business. He's gonna find areas for growth. And I'd love you as you're sitting back, Sandeep, Hey Sandy, I just realized it's, it's you, Sandy. As you're—

hi.

As you're sitting back, Sandy, as you're sitting back, Stan, Joel, Walton, see if you can also find ideas and see if you can prep yourself that way. And then he's going to show you how he can think like a private equity firm to find opportunities for growth. All right, I won't go into the big spiel about who we are. You kind of got a sense of who we are. Jesse, thanks for being on here. We've got some hot seats. Vernon, Who is our first hot seat? Who's the first person who's gonna present their business today? Uh, I believe it's Andrew Dwyer. All right, Andrew, let's bring you in.

Before we get started, uh, you know, I wanna just say thank you for the folks who volunteered to be in these hot seats and, and I wanna just have everyone give a virtual round of applause. I think it's pretty, a lot of you guys are entrepreneurs. It's an extremely courageous and challenging journey. And then to get up in front of a bunch of people and talk about your business openly, Uh, is hard. And so we appreciate you guys doing this for all of us. And, you know, the only other thing I would add to that for the, for the contestants is like, I'm gonna dig as much as I can for the purpose of being helpful. And I will be direct and clear and try to, try to find things, but we're gonna have to be pretty fast and don't take it, don't take it the wrong way. I, all love in my heart. Um, and I wanna help you get better faster so that there's gonna be a certain pace to this.

Thanks, Jesse. Andrew, let's cue this up. Tell us a little bit about your business. Um, we're talking about Venturi and yeah, go for it. Tell us a little bit about it and I'll let Jesse direct.

Sounds good. Uh, Jesse, Andrew, good to meet both of you guys. Watch you guys for a while. Um, back to the Mixer G, uh, days, we're in. So, uh, yeah, so Venturi, uh, recently launched. Basically I did a, I did performance marketing before, mixed that with MBA and saw a lot of value in retention metrics that companies weren't optimizing And so what Venturi is basically a new agency about is I've been doing kind of fractional COO stuff and doing this one-to-one more integrated, and now I'm launching this more productized offering for it. And so that's the basis of it is there are, there's usually money left on the table, not just in retention for revenue, like retained revenue, but if you're looking to expand or raise a new round or exit, especially with private equity, like, you know, Jesse, you know all about With, you know, with AUX and everything is that a lot of companies, a lot of CEOs and founders that I've spoken to see this as a problem, but don't see it until it's too late when churn is starting to catch up with them. And let alone the potential gain if they were to start taking care of this early on. So where I'm at, yep, venturegrowth.com. So where I'm at right now is figuring out, having conversations, having, you know, Discovery strategy calls.

So retention, let me just, I just play it back real quick. Retention kind of solution. So that includes analytics, actions that need to be taken for, is there a certain type of company you work with?

Uh, so my kind of 2 main ICPs is people that would really value retained revenue, which is I'm right now targeting like $2 to $10 million B2B, um, B2B SaaS companies. So I just got off a call with about an hour ago and then, um, maybe like high you know, high retention revenue type of agencies. Those kind of, those are kind of my 2 main focuses.

Well, one tip, I would just cut the second one because, you know, focus until you're a certain scale and size, it's just a distraction and agencies are gonna have a whole set of slightly nuanced problems that are different than SaaS. And so you gotta pick one and go hard at one. So what's the dream in a year? Where do you wanna be in a year, Andrew?

Yeah. So I want to bring this to like $200,000 in net income per month. And I'm not—

By this time next year?

By this time next year, yes.

Okay.

Would include, in my opinion, EA, at least a couple of salespeople, but I'm also focused on really strong unit metrics. And so that's—

And what do you charge per customer?

So that is my main, you know, Vernon asked me, come in with a question. And my main thing is pricing and positioning on Who exactly and how exactly should go about. But what I'm doing right now is 3 main things. The, let me scrolling down. If you look at it is one is the retention roadmap, retention value roadmap. So that's all of the diagnostics and what you would do, where the value gaps are, et cetera. And that's $15,000 for that. And then that upgrade slash, you know, into the transformation side. And that I'm looking to do like $30,000 to $45,000, 3 to 6 month transition project. And then the third thing, um, which is really just kind of encapsulating what I'm currently doing is fractional advising services. Um, you have the resources and the people, you just want to make sure that what they're doing is aligned with your CEO kind of founder goal of I want to exit in 3 years, so on and so forth.

So the first thing I would tell you is how big is your team?

It's me.

Okay. That's a lot of things for one person.

That is a lot of things for one person.

So the first thing I would tell you to do is let's come up with one SKU.

Okay.

Like, let's come up with one thing you do, and I think you can decide right now or, or after this call, is it, is it a project? Like Aux, for example, sells projects and they have a certain price and the whole business's motion is built around projects. And then, you know, Growth Assistant as a contrast sells subscriptions. It sells like a subscription to something.

Right.

And I don't necessarily understand your business well enough to know which one's more appropriate. Do you have a sense for which one's more appropriate?

Um, I, I think that a project is more appropriate. Um, but that's what I'm not exactly sure about because, you know, at the end of the day, as I'll give it as an example, 'cause I think you should follow the customer lead here. I just got off a call. The guy wants to exit in 2 years, B2B SaaS, $8.5 million in ARR. And he really, really was excited about the potential.

Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I want to, the easy question maybe to ask yourself, or what's going through my head, Andrew, is Is your offering the kind of thing that is like, Aux is like, we come in, your marketing's all messed up at your portfolio company, or you need us to analyze something. We do it. There's a very clear one-time reason for us to spend time that has a lot of value to it. And then like the value goes away partly cuz we're not an agency. I can't, I'm like not allowed to sell agency services cuz of my non-compete, right? So, so that's part of the reason it's a very, it's a consulting business. Um, again, growth assistance, like the person shows up to work every day and does work, or an agency does work because every, every, every day, every week, every month they add value.

Okay.

So which one feels— yeah, so it's a project. So you're gonna come in one time, you're gonna soup up all their retention capabilities. They're gonna get a dashboard, they're gonna get, uh, you're gonna show them, put light on all these parts of their business they don't see today. And then they're gonna walk away with their retention rate going up, which spells X, Y, and Z growth for them.

Exactly.

Okay.

So it feels like a project business.

Yeah, I agree.

And a $2 to like a $5 million SaaS business. I guess I have no sense for this, but how much can you improve their retention?

Well, it depends. So this last guy, he had pretty okay retention rates at like 85% for industry standard for his industry. It was low to benchmark, but he wanted to exit in a couple of years and that was going to lower his exit value. So what our, what my plan effectively was, was be able to raise that 5 to 7%. Would be like kind of the conservative goal.

But what are your capability? I'm more interested in your capabilities in terms of your confidence level. Like one of the things you, you'll see in a services business, especially your tech-enabled services, your ability to deliver outcomes to people, um, is what they pay for ultimately. So you have to get real, and part of it is you're gonna be building a playbook over time. You're just starting, but you're gonna build a playbook over time where you're like, I, I look at these 5 things and I pull this lever, I pull this lever, I pull this lever, and on average I'm gonna improve retention by this much.

Yeah.

So my question to you is, and you can say like, dude, best case scenario, it's, I could take it from this to this. Base case is this. And in a bad scenario, it looks like this, which I would encourage you to come up with those numbers or if you have them offhand.

Yeah, sure.

Do you have them offhand?

I don't have them offhand, but I would say 2 of them, right? So I can't say what the best case is because you have a starting point, right? They might be terrible. But if you're at industry standard, my base case is going to be at least 5%. And then if you're best case, I would say like, If you have nothing tracked, like you're even not even trying to expand and you have no customer health index, 5 to, you know, like 7 to 10%. Um, but then like low would be, I mean, doing anything.

So what's 5%? What's that worth to a $5 million SaaS company?

So the, the, the conservative metrics, and I'll choose the guy that I talked to today, it was $8, $8.5 million and over a year or 2 years. Uh, so over a year it was an extra like $500,000 based on what he was selling, how it was, it was like $500,000. Minimum and in ARR. In ARR.

So if like, and that's $5 million effectively in, in exit value or something like that.

Yeah.

$3 to $5 million, let's call it.

Which is why it was a lot of the, are you doing this? And it's like, you're not doing this.

No, I like it a lot. So you're basically saying, hey, pay me $50 grand. I'm going to get you $500K of ARR and $5 million or $3 to $5 million more in EV. Mm-hmm. And look at, yeah, go ahead. No, you go ahead.

People will try to, will go and get a customer service manager and hopefully implement everything, but they're not looking at it always from the business value.

Right. And from the, the other nice thing about one-time projects, the downside of one-time projects, just to be clear, by the way, I already have thought of your go-to-market. I mean, you probably thought of this, but your go-to-market similar to Aux is just go to VCs and like once you do one good thing in one of their portfolios, they'll just send you around. 'Cause one of the challenges with project-based businesses is The benefit of it is nobody thinks of it as a real cost because they think of it as one time. So they're more likely to say yes. The downside is it's hard to manage a bunch of projects instead of recurring revenue. Okay, so you want $200K a year from today. So it's April 2026. Let's talk about what your P&L looks like.

Yeah, right now, I guess. But it's— oh, it just—

Let's talk about your dream P&L.

Yep.

Dream P&L. So that's going to be, I said at minimum 50%, 50% net margin. So I mean, I want to be at 70 to 80% gross margin. Like you said, building out playbooks. And I'm not sure exactly what that team would look like as far as what that compensation structure at that level would look like. But I mean, that's $400 grand a month in top line and then minusing out from there.

Okay. I want you to, I want you to know the P&L off the top of your head. And it sounds like this, Jesse, I'm going to have 8 projects running simultaneously at $50 grand a pop. That's $400K.

Yep.

Each project gets delivered, you know, for 8 projects, I can have a team. I don't know. You'll have to fill this in. I need 5 people per 8 projects or 10 people per 8 projects. That means I'm, I got to pay on average, say $120 grand a head. So $10 grand a month. That's $80,000. You know, I'm making something up, but that gives me $320,000. Then I have some overhead on my offices. I have this, that's how I'm gonna clear $200,000. The clearer you are about it, the more likely you are to achieve it because you'll actually start to think about what it takes to get there and what it looks like. And then the next question we have to ask, right? This is where all the money is made in this conversation is how the hell are you gonna get 8 customers a month?

Right.

Yeah.

Because, and so you don't know this yet because I assume you're too early. And so, but you know, if we assume you convert 20% of the conversations, I'm just going to do some silly math, right? So then that means to get 8, you need, somebody help me, 40. You need 40 meetings, like 40 conversations. My guess is it'll, it's going to take you 3 months, maybe longer initially, 4 or 5 months to convert a customer. Right. So we essentially need to be having like 40-ish conversations a month that are like relevant, good conversations. And then in order to get those 40 conversations, we gotta figure out a way to get meetings or market. That could be writing threads on Twitter. That could be, we have this thing called the Mutual Intro Playbook, which we teach, which is how do you use your network to drive in warm meetings?

Mm-hmm.

And I would call these SQLs, by the way, which is like people who are qualified or interested in this versus an MQL, which is like, Just some random person who wants to talk to you on the phone. Um, so if I were building this business, right, I, I would essentially work backwards from this year thing very clearly. I would, by the way, do more of the headcount stuff than we did just now. Like I'd know how big the services team is, you know, do you need salespeople? And you kind of have to build both things simultaneously and solve on the margin for how they work out.

Yep.

Um, realistically for you to get going, 'cause you're just starting from scratch. You have to hustle 3 to 4 clients ideally, like, and then get a small contract team and then try to get that motion moving, moving in a fluid way. And, and again, the challenge of the business is always gonna be, uh, it's a revolving door. So you're, you have to keep that pipeline really, really rolling, which I think, by the way, is why VCs or maybe PE are great customers for you.

Mm-hmm.

Um, because like what we've noticed with Aux is that it's project-based, but it's like the same PE firm keeps calling us back for a different project. So in some sense it feels more recurring than Uh, typical thoughts, like recurring versus recurring. I gotcha. Yeah.

Gotcha. That, that makes a lot of sense. That was my, my biggest kind of thought was I see where people would go to VC or PE, but then the companies that I'm talking to and that I'm more used to are the actual, you know, founders and people of these businesses that might eventually become portfolio companies. Um, but I see what you're saying as far as like going to the top and, 'cause that's a different go-to-market motion, I think.

Let me ask you something, Andrew. Immediately when Jesse came on, he was like, cut the offering, cut the clients. And I'm thinking, Andrew's gonna feel really painful. You, Andrew, he's, he's gonna push back. But no, you just said okay. That was such a quick okay to cutting off a part of your business. I understand why Jesse does that, but are you really okay doing that?

Yeah. I mean, Jesse knows this a lot better than I do. Like, that's why I'm here, right? Like, I, if I, if I knew, if I knew that, then I wouldn't have asked that question, right? And so that's, that's my thought. It's like, okay, this guy's, he literally runs Aux for private equity, like is doing this bootcamp driving thing, like here for a reason. So. It's also, it is easier. That's, I mean, even, even now I'm trying to, do I focus more on the, the individual companies that I'm in more circles with, right? As like a, you know, an MBA grad and people that are starting founders or VC/PE, which I don't have as much experience. I have circles in, not as much experience in.

So yeah, let's, um, did you get what you needed, Andrew? I know you had questions. I just wanna make sure that you got what you needed.

No, I, I, I do. Uh, I did. I think my, my last kind of like thought on that, 'cause you, again, you've, done both, right? Now you're working with founders on the Bootstrap Giants things, but with Aux, you're working with private equity. Is it worth even trying to like just focus and say, hey, focus my marketing, my attention, my everything on building those relationships in VC firms, private equity, et cetera, and say, let me try this for one of your portfolio companies. Or rather, like, that was something I was thinking about doing eventually, but rather going to like, you know, friends or other company, not friends, but Yeah.

I mean, look, I, regardless, the, if you can make yourself a subject matter expert on this topic and then go around and people say like, this guy did this and he drove results for me.

Mm-hmm.

You're gonna be fine either way. The beauty is if you do it for a, an a16z portfolio company, you have an immediate like, okay dude, go introduce me to 5 other companies. And what we've seen, the PE's a little different 'cause they own the businesses, right? Versus VC's just an investor. But, but you still get the value of a, of a16z. They did this, they did this for our other portfolio company, and that's gonna be the thing. That really drives growth for you. And, and so one last thought for you is even if I was, I started talking about the pipeline and all this stuff before I would worry about any of that stuff, I would get 3 or 4 case studies to hang your hat on where you actually moved the needle for the business.

Okay.

That's part of the hustling part right now. So I appreciate that. Thanks.

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you, Jesse. Um, I'd love to hear from everyone what you got outta this one session. I, I took down some notes. Here's what I got. Immediately Jesse cuts down the offering. Immediately he cuts on the types of businesses that Andrew should pursue. Reach out to VCs. He also said, where's the revenue gonna be? What's the P&L look like? And I love the rigor that he asks for because he's asked me for that and I've struggled at times to have the level of depth that he's looking for.

Excuse me.

And then once you know where you're gonna go with your revenue, how, what's your conversion rate when you're having meetings? How many meetings do you need to close this many sales to get to the number? Let's see what everyone else says. And by the way, as we're continuing, I'm about to bring Ernesto on here. Andrew, thanks for jumping in. Ernesto, before I do, I'd love to see more questions from people. Come on in here with your questions in the chat. If you have any suggestions for what he can do, if you've taken anything away from it, saying it publicly will help reinforce it for you and also help everyone else get more out of the program. Ernesto, glad you're here. Talk about your business and how can Jesse help?

Hello everyone. Uh, can you hear me all right?

Yeah, I can.

Yeah.

And I'm going to bring up your site, but it's going to be in Spanish, but it'll give people a sense of what exactly.

Um, I'm Ernesto from Argentina, currently, uh, traveling through Italy. I'm the founder of Firmaway. Uh, what we do is, uh, we help Latin American entrepreneurs and professionals to set up a US business, open a bank account. And we also do their taxes for them year to year. It's basically a productized service kind of business. Our package in order to set up the business goes for an average ticket of $590 and the maintenance, the renewal, the yearly renewal. Uh, goes for an average of, uh, $700. So that's basically what we do. The company started 4 years ago in 2021. Uh, we currently have formed, uh, more than, uh, 1,500 businesses and have around, uh, uh, 700 active clients. Uh, last year we did a million in revenue and, uh, we're currently sitting at Something like 700K ARR. So the place where I want to be a year from now is hopefully 1.5 million ARR and also 25% EBITDA. I didn't talk about EBITDA. Last year it was 17%, uh, if I remember correctly. So, uh, what we are currently doing in order to bring, uh, EBITDA up is, uh, bringing some of the, uh, cost of outsourcing, uh, tax preparation services in-house, which is helping a lot, uh, with bringing EBITDA up.

Ernesto, let, let me pause you.

Yeah.

What, so the business is I'm an entrepreneur in Argentina, but I want a company in the United States and I come to you and you handle all the shit for me. Did I get it right?

Yeah.

And you charge me initially, it sounds like $600, and then every year you charge me $700. Is that right? And what, what's the, can you walk us through like, what's the, what's the gross margin in the business? So if I pay you $600, what, what do you, what does it cost you to deliver that to me?

Okay. Um, that, I, I'll try to, uh, give you the best answer I can. Uh, the, the one service with where we have the Largest margins is the renewals, uh, the yearly renewals. The, the, uh, package where you become my client is the one where we have the lowest margins. Uh, we, we, even though we—

So what are the, what are the margins, Ernesto?

Uh, um, I don't have like a sharp answer, but, uh, they should be—

Okay, let's get a sharp answer to that question because you cannot run a business if you don't understand What? So, 'cause for example, if I'm, if you pay $600, if you receive $600 and then you make, it costs you $500 the first time, but then every year after that you make $700 and you only cost you $100. It's an expensive business to scale. Still a great business, by the way. And just for what it's worth, I love this business. I kind of want to buy your business from you because I think it's such a good idea. And it's just such a smart, I, it's, it's the kind of thing that people will pay and they'll forget about it. And, but I think you really have to understand the only answer to growth. And I'm going to ask you another question that came to my mind, but we need to understand first what the, what it costs for that upfront first year versus the next years to understand what it's going to take to scale the business. The flip of it is if you said, Jesse, it's $300 and I get $600, so I make $300 on my first customer. That gives me a lot more room to play with, right? Do you have a sense just even directionally which it is?

Yeah, the direct cost of opening the company for us runs for around $200,000. I can't—

If you take $600,000 and the hard cost is $200,000, and then there's some labor associated with opening up the company and doing all the paperwork, and that's the one you're saying you're murky on.

Yeah.

How many people like are opening? How many accounts are you getting per, per quarter or per month?

Uh, per month we're getting an average of 50.

50. Okay. So, and how many people do you need to, to service that?

Um, well, currently, uh, we have 29 employees.

Oh, wow.

And, and, um, Directly related to servicing, uh, our new customers, maybe, I don't know, 10 or 12.

And then how much is an employee in Argentina? $2,000 a month?

Um, I'd say an average of, uh, $1,200 to $1,300, maybe.

Okay.

So if I do $1,300 times 10, That's $13,000, right? Just tell me if my math is right. Divided by 50 is $260. So back of the envelope, you're charging $600 and it costs you $460 to deliver.

The, the, the average, uh, ticket for the opening is $500, not $600.

Okay. So $500 and you're, you're costing you $460. You're making no money basically on the first year of the customer. Can we change that?

Start to shake. Start to shake.

Because, because the thing, the first thing that went through my mind when you started talking about your business was, why is your goal $1.5 and not like $5 million next year? I don't know.

I guess I just wanted to be realistic.

But why? What is real? I mean, for everyone's benefit, goals are set as things that are things you want to go and accomplish and achieve. And if you start looking at today's, if you start looking at today's numbers, setting a goal based on that, it's not really, that's more of like what I call a projection versus a goal. A goal is something I'm striving for. It's something I dream about. It's something I want to work backwards from to create versus a projection is like, I'm an investor and I want to guess. An entrepreneur's job is to dream and think big. An investor can go, well, I think you're only going to get to 1.5, which I think both brains can be valuable for people, but Anyone, if you're weighted too far in one direction, some people are, you know, they say whatever, dream without execution is a delusion. And I think that's true, but also you don't want to necessarily, to me, you're going to miss the major point of your business, which is if I ask you 5, you're going to go, well, Jesse, how do you get your customers today, Ernesto?

Number 1, organic Google traffic. Number 2, referrals. 75% of new leads are organic.

Yeah. If I ask you to 5x the business, you're going to go, Jesse, the only way I could do that is like Facebook ads. And those Facebook ads cost me a lot of money. I can't afford them because I give up all the margin in the beginning of the business. Why don't you just charge more?

Um, how do I know if I can charge more?

Right after you get off this call, Go to your website, change the number to $750, and then let me know in 2 weeks what happens. And I will also bet you $100. I'll bet you $1 that nothing will change at all other than you're going to make more money.

We've raised prices previously and nothing happened.

Honestly, I would probably start at $1,000, but try $750 and let's talk, you know, in 2 weeks. And my guess is the only thing it's going to do is you're now going to have marketing dollars to grow your business. And that's how we get it to 5x a year from today. But I just think, I mean, even by the way, knowing that your margin comes later, there's probably gotta be all kinds of other ways you can pull cash upfront in your business, Ernesto. Like we charge, I'm making this up, we charge $500 plus $700 plus $700, or if you wanna pay everything today, just gimme $1,500 and I'll cover the first 3 years for you and you're set for 3 years now. Not only will you be making a lot of PNL, but the cash generation in the business will become nuts because now you can go spend $50 per customer on Facebook and you'll, it's literally a money machine. The business is a money machine. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Um, but it's also why thinking big is important, dude, because if you just go 1.5, you kind of keep doing everything. When you, when you keep things realistic, inertia sets in and you just keep doing shit the same way because you, you go, oh, 1.5. Okay, here's how I'm gonna hit that. But if you second, you go 5. You have to think of something different than you're thinking of, right? I don't know if my email went out this past weekend about this, about goal setting and like, this is why big goals are important because they, they shift the way they, they force you to think differently, which then breaks up your, your inertia that you most, almost every business has inertia in it. A lot of inertia.

Mm-hmm.

Did you get what you needed, Ernesto?

Yeah. I mean, I wanted to ask just one more thing. Uh, what metrics should I look into if I raise prices? In order to decide if I should keep them higher.

I mean, the simple metric for you is conversion rate, visit to purchase. I could give you a more complicated one, which is like revenue per visitor or like margin. You know, you can think of the fact of like, you'd technically be okay if your conversions drop 10%, if you're, if you've raised your prices 50%. So you can do that, but I bet you, I'm willing to bet honestly that you are not going to see any change in conversion rate. Um, and because remember that I assume the first, everyone who's starting a business for the first time here, this is another just sidebar for us, right? Like, think about your customer. Everybody here started a business. You started a business. That's not the thing you're, especially if you're a Latin entrepreneur trying to start in the US, you're not trying to scrape by and scrounge on that. You're not trying to be cheap in that moment. You're like, I'm starting my business. Okay, $750. Like, that's what I gotta pay. Like, okay. Like, that's not your moment to save money. It's, you want to make sure it's done right by a reputable firm, which I assume you are. And like someone who's an expert in all those things. So I just, it's a, you know, what you'd call in economics, an inelastic purchase, right? I just don't care how much it costs me because I need to make sure it gets done right and I don't want to fuck around with it. And so I just think, I don't, anyway, do it. I think it'd be really fun, but I think I would do it today. I wouldn't wait. There's no, there's no, and if dude, if it's horrible, change it back next week. Well, sorry. The other point I was going to make about this is all your customers are new customers for the first time. You have zero, probably zero recurring in the sense of like they recur next year, but they don't recur. It's not like I'm incorporating 6 companies through you and I'm like, hey, you raised your prices on me, you jerk. Like, You didn't do that. I'm a new customer every time I show up to the website.

Yeah.

How was that, Ernesto? Good?

Yeah, yeah. Got me thinking, got me thinking. I'm definitely gonna raise prices and let you know.

You are?

Awesome.

All right, my email address, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. You gotta let me know, send me a screenshot before and after. This is gonna be killer as a good case study. I'm seeing, by the way, Jesse, so many people who've been in our accelerator from Janak Mehta to Sandy Gomez, Chirag Kulkarni. And so they are smiling. I'm noticing the ones who are on camera the way that I am, because we've all had an experience like this with Jesse. Ernesto, I gotta tell you 2 stories and then we're gonna go into the next person, which is Jason. Please, Jason, get yourself ready for it. Before I started working with GatewayX, I talked with Casey who runs Aux, and I said, tell me about what it's like to work with Jesse. And she's like, all right, we get on a sales call and I'm pitching. And he's raising the prices. And I have a recording of this. If you go on our YouTube channel, you can see it. He's raising the prices on us. I'm like, I'm new at this. This is my whole business. He's just raising and raising and raising. And I said, in the end, was it worth it? He goes, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to do it. And I knew that about Jesse and I knew how scary it can be when he's just suddenly raising prices in a way that feels arbitrary or too much. We're just getting started. And then he did it to me. I started selling at $1,000. I go, dude, I text him. I go, look at this $1,000 sale we're in. He goes, Raise it. I go, okay, I knew what I'm coming in for. I double it. I get it. I, I show it to him. He goes, all right, we're gonna go up to higher. How about go again? Double. I double again. He goes, raise higher. I take it to $5,000. I still remember it. I've got a recording, I swear, of this guy Ben. I gave him the price. I go, it's $5,000. He goes, a month? And I go, no, just one time. And in, if you look at the video, I'm pinching my lap because I can't believe that what Jesse's doing is actually working. And if he wasn't there, Looking at the business, I swear I wouldn't have done it. I would've said, I'm going to come back to him 6 months from now and show him that in 6 months I earned the right to do this. You don't have that kind of pressure, but I really hope that you build that by having, you know, having everyone know that you're doing this in public because it is super powerful to do that.

All right.

All right.

Do it.

I'm definitely going to be interested and reward them the results.

Hell yeah.

Awesome.

Do it.

All right.

Let's bring Jason on who has been with us. We've known Jason for a long time. Jason. Tell us a little bit about the business and, uh, how can we help? And I'll bring up your website too.

Yeah, absolutely. Jesse, Andrew, good to see you. Long time no talk.

Um, what's up, dude?

Obviously I went through accelerator, so hopefully some of the things I did took some notes. Um, but in essence, so my company, we are a tech-enabled recruitment firm focused on venture-backed, uh, consumer brands really in the 8 and 9-figure range.

Did we see your screen, Andrew, or, or Vernon?

Oh, am I showing my wrong screen? My notes instead of the other?

Yeah.

Did I share anything embarrassing? Probably not.

I don't know. Yeah.

Okay. I have no clue. But anyway, so yeah, we offer executive recruitment and team building for 8, 9-figure consumer brands.

It's still going.

Strategically focused on venture-backed founders is what we do. So you'll see there, my old ICP was venture-founded companies across any sector skillset. And so the niche down that I took from your accelerator was consumer brands, 8, 9 figures.

Yep. And is it— this is an executive search in the sense you find someone and you make $100 grand? Is that the right way to think?

Yeah.

So I have 2 pillars. I'm trying to build an ecosystem where we're kind of an end-to-end partner with the founder. So I like to say we help you hire the leaders and then build the teams you need to win. So we have 2 business models, executive search and then embedded recruitment, which if you've ever heard of like RPO, Uh, recruitment process outsourcing. So instead of bringing full-time talent acquisition in-house, you leverage us on like a retain-plus model. So trying to get away from contingent, more retained.

How big is the business right now, Jason?

Um, so we're on a run rate of $1.2 million this year. Um, this is the first year full-time in. I built a recruiting company prior to it. Um, and so I'm relaunching, growing the team. Uh, last quarter we did $252K in revenue. 49% EBITDA across 7 customers, an average fee of $42,100.

And was that, and how much of that was the like placement versus the RPO model?

So placement success fees were 66%, engagement fees were 19%, and the monthly retainers were 15%. So I'd say 33% probably RPO and the rest executive or more placement by placement.

And what's the dream in a year?

So right now, goals 1, 2 this year, hit that run rate at about a 50% EBITDA. Next year I want to be at $2 million with around a 40% EBITDA. The dream state really is going from solo entrepreneur to a team that's delivering that. So that's why $2 million's the goal because it shows I have to get a sales flywheel going, delivery mechanism going, And that we can kind of prove business concept, I would call it. Gotcha.

And why 2, why not more than $2 million?

Yeah, it's funny. So talked with the coach this morning about it. So I have an issue with if I set my goal too high, I can't enjoy the journey because I'm just thinking on the $5 or $10 million. So what I do is I have a goal. So my goal is $5 million in 3 years, but I try to do a first, second, and third base hit. So my first base hit really is getting to 2 so I can kind of chalk it up in bites.

Yeah.

So that I can kind of enjoy.

How do we, what if we called it something different?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What if we stopped calling it goal and started calling it dream?

Dream outcome, future state.

Would that be, I don't, I, I just, I mean, when I build businesses, I don't have that issue, but like Andrew has that issue and lots of people have that issue where they get in their heads about their goals and if they're not hitting them, they're mad at themselves. And that's a normal human response. Um, but the thing I don't like about it is that it, it then like you ladder, you, when you, when you come up with the way you build the business, you build to this $2 million number. And I actually want you to build to like a $5 million number. And I want you to work backwards from 5. Now you may not hit 5, you may hit 3, but if you and I are talking in a year, you're like, dude, I'm 50% bigger than I thought I was. And it forced me to find all these efficiencies, or I got better at sales for the following reasons. And so Again, it's not to stress you out, but what I find is my thinking gets clearer, more creative. There's a bunch of benefits from going, how would you make this 5? It's like, you're going to have to find a way to get more people on the phone or whatever. It'll force you to kind of create a plan and a structure that's going to be more ambitious than the one that you're probably going to do right now. And then the other thing I would tell you is, everybody knows this, but invariably things go wrong in the business. And if you're planning to 2, you're probably gonna get to 1.8, but if you're planning the 3 or 4, you're probably gonna get to 2.5. And there's just so much of this is just in your control and how you choose to do things. So that's kind of my, one of my first observations. What was your core need or question?

I mean, you know, for me, allocation of funds to scale is in this type of business is always a little hard because you get big hits and they go down. Your sales cycle can be long. You know, I would say on the director and below, we're probably 60 days to close. On the VP through C-suite, depending on board involvement, can be 120 days plus, right? So it's hard to budget incoming revenue to then invest in to hit $5 million. So that's kind of one of my bottlenecks of like what you do today, you might not get paid for 3 or 4 months. So how do you hit those curves would be—

That's a cash flow thing though, to be clear, right?

You're not talking—

Yeah, more of a cash flow thing. Yeah.

Because you have to put in the resources upfront to get paid on a contingent basis.

Yeah.

So like we, we collect a retainer, but right now in full transparency, you know, my competitors are charging a third, a third, a third guaranteeing it. I'm going in and charging a third one time and then the rest on success, right? So let's say, call it $100K, you know, I'm making $30 grand, which is great, but then the remaining, you know, $60K, $60K.

And what are the gross margins for a search?

Um, after I pay my commissions, everything to the business before OpEx, about 60%.

So the first $30K cover, it covers you, doesn't it? Uh, depending if you had 10 searches, if I give you 10 searches right now and I paid you for all of them, would you cover you?

Yeah.

If I have enough volume of searches, which is why when I joined your course was really the sales engine is my biggest bottleneck to that growth accelerator. I need more wins. So a good example, to get to $2 million that I had shared with you, which we discussed maybe being too low, I need about 78 calls, 52 if I have a 50% close rate, right? I'm doing 3 to 4 calls a month and also flipping candidates. So I'm not, I don't have the velocity needed to continue the hypergrowth funding ecosystem.

And what's holding you back from that velocity?

Me, like just time. I still deliver, I still train the team that I'm onboarding, I still recruit, I still account manage. So I think part of it is just not enough of a keen focus.

Are you having any issue, Jason, getting the meetings?

I would say get it— closing the meetings is probably where I excel at. It's the getting the meetings that I need more. I need more velocity, more—

Is it like a, I guess my question is, If I could magically replicate you and all your time was spent on getting like sales and getting meetings, would you be able to get the meetings or is there a concern that people aren't going to take the call because you're just another recruiter and they don't really understand?

Um, you know, it'd be, it's going to be definitely velocity and effort, but I think we could definitely do it. I mean, if I was selling full-time, I think we could, we could get to the numbers at least to $2 million. Um, and then my plan would be to use that playbook to train and have other people doing it, rinse and repeat, et cetera. Because also in my business, very much a timing thing, right? When did they get their funding? What team got them there might not get them here. Did somebody fall off? So it's being in front of people.

You need surface area.

Yeah. Yeah.

What, and what's your staff look like right now?

So myself, 2 others, and then an offshore support individual. And then I'm bringing on one more kind of sales ops Uh, tech kind of ops, cuz I do a lot with Clay automation, AI to delivery quicker so that we don't need as many customers.

Right.

So we're small, we're about 3 today, 2.

And is there anybody who's dedicated to sales?

No.

Yeah. So I think it sounds like that sales ops person might be the hire, but I think one person in the organization who can be, who keeps that train running regardless, that'd be my, one of my first suggestions for you.

Yep.

And, and I think Clay is all great and automation's great, but the real thing I care about, that stuff is all in service of like, are you sending messages out? Are you getting media? Like, are you doing shit that's gonna actually yield results? Because people, I've seen people spend weeks and months messing around with Clay with no benefit. And like, I'd rather they just send a bunch of messages if that's the option. So finding, making sure it's a results-oriented person. And then the only other suggestion I'd have for you that has worked for a lot of people in 833. Is I think you gotta start your day off the first— what time do you get going in the morning?

Uh, you, I would say 8:30, 9.

Yeah. So I, I, I would recommend that say 8:30 or 9 until I would say noon to start. You are not allowed to do anything but sell and prospect. And so you're not allowed to take, you know, don't even check your inbox and tell your team, I'm not free till noon. Take your client calls afternoon. Like make that the, there's this concept called top goal. And essentially I think if you don't block it off, then you will, it just, it becomes the plug and you actually need something else to become the plug. Maybe it's a client follow-up, maybe it's a little bit of extra search or whatever. Search take a week longer. That's not the end of the day, end of the world. But if you don't plug your time, if you don't have that blocked in your time, like you're just going to stay in this zone forever. Yeah.

You know, it makes sense.

You can't build a business on hoping warm referrals come in. Right. And that's really how I've scaled Flipping Candidates. But the output definitely needs to be—

You can, you can. It's just, it's just gonna stay where it is.

Yeah.

And it sounds like you want something different. So like, by the way, I'm not making that wrong and there's nothing wrong with anyone who wants to run a business where you probably make half a million to a million bucks a year, a good year, make a mil like there. And maybe some people, by the way, have the goal of doing that and working 20 hours a week. That's also a wonderful thing. I'm not, It just sounds like you want something different. And I think if you want something different, to me, those are the 2 big suggestions I would make, right? Which is just like, make sure there's one person who sales never stops for them, that they're just not split. Their focus is not split. Like, you know, one of the reasons I don't have any resources across my organizations, across all these companies interacting, or nobody works for both companies, because I basically think that's impossible. I struggle enough myself with it. And so even internally, the more you can get people focused on one area and one thing, the more successful they'll be.

Question on that sales hire. So I've thought about, 'cause I can close right now, is hiring somebody like offshore to be like what I call a setter, right? So they're doing a lot of the activity, they're teeing up the conversation so that I can come in and close and then eventually hire someone who can run sales as well.

Yeah, let's worry about the second one later, but I think the first one is, yeah, it's an SDR setter. Who's techie.

Mm-hmm.

Like it's a younger person who, who is tech inclined so they could play with Clay. They, they like that stuff, but their job, their number one, they get excited when the meeting gets booked, their energy jumps. And, uh, we even ask them that, do you get excited by sitting there and the meeting gets booked and you go, woo, like I, I feel a thrill when that happens. And some of the too techie sales ops people are like, oh no, I like the machine and the system and it runs. And you're like, no, I don't. You'll get that one day, but that's not what you need right now, I don't think.

Do you think that can be an offshore person?

For sure. That person will require a lot of training and sort of the same sort of screens, but definitely.

Okay, cool. Thank you.

Yeah, for sure.

So we had a question from Joel in the audience. He says, what type of prospecting would you recommend that he do?

For his business? I think mutual intros or events are probably your best bet, Jason. I mean, being a recruiter is all results and everyone wants to know that you're good at finding people. So your whole business is like, there's recruiting is a tough, it's a commoditized business. So you really need some way. And I think everyone who sells some different finagled way of doing it is kind of bullshit. But someone goes, dude, this is the person. They will find you someone great. Then you'll work with them. By the way, Jason, do you know who you want to be when you grow up?

Myself.

No, no. What company is your, is your, is your like Michael Jordan? Like what company do you want to come to?

I mean, I would say if I could be like a Diversa Partners size-wise would be it.

Diversa, True. Yeah, True's like a $70, $80 million EBITDA business. My favorite one is Riviera, by the way.

Yeah, so Riviera is great. I love the tech. So Prior to this, I built a tech-enabled recruitment automation platform. So like, I'm eager to dabble.

Well, but tech came after. Just, just, just to be clear, what Riviera did was they put themselves in one search. We are the VP of engineering placement firm, and they became the middle of the market on both sides for everyone. I've used them as a client. They can bring talent nobody else can bring. Like, they built that event, then they put, they layered the tech on later. But dude, that company, it has equity. It had equity in Meta, it had equity in Dropbox, it had equity in Ampush, which is smaller, but like, They had equity in everyone and they had cash. And those guys, I mean, the guy Ali, the founder, has crushed it. Like he's done better than half of the startup tech founders I know. He's probably worth half a billion dollars. And it's all because he focused on one type of search and became the center of the market there.

But that—

Yeah, I love that.

That was also a big reason to pivot to consumer was there are the 800-pound gorillas in tech. There isn't much that I've seen that is the reverse of Riviera in consumer. And so I kind of want to bring that ethos. But yeah, they're, those are great examples.

100%.

Fun fact, I did beat them in a search. Just throwing that out there.

Nice. Nice. Jason, you gave them equity. I mean, Jesse, you gave them equity.

That's the only way they work.

That's how I beat them. I told them I wouldn't take equity, but I would do the same fees.

That's how good they are is they go, this is how we work. If you don't want to work, go pound sand because we're so good and sure we can bring you amazing people.

Speaking of amazing people, I'm looking at who's in the audience. Like, I just saw John Doherty come in. I mean, really, the level of people who are in the audience is fan-freaking-tastic. I'm watching you all in the audience. Say hi in the chat. Um, and okay, let me give it over to you. Hey, Drew.

Thanks for having me. Uh, working on a new project. Um, I acquired a company a few years ago and it was a complete dumpster fire. I didn't have any of the support I needed and, uh, Someone else in our cohort called it the stupid tax. Didn't know who to reach out to and reached out to a bunch of the wrong people and found myself in a, in a sticky spot. So something new I've been working on is peer groups for entrepreneurs. I've kind of built a niche in the acquisition entrepreneur space. So we have both a virtual and in-person format, 5 to 8 CEOs of companies right around that $10 million revenue mark. Uh, join our groups. Um, I've had good traction through my referral networks, but I've also found a, um, sales channel that's working. LinkedIn DMs is working really well. Um, so I'm booking like 15% of messages that go outbound. I brought in someone to do the messages. I'm converting 30 to 40% of the people that I meet with on that second sales call. Um, awesome. And, uh, trying to build it out to, you know, the 833 club, uh, see what happens. Um, there's a few other things on the website that obviously could be better. Uh, I've got a media company and some other investment stuff that I do, but I honestly don't care about the website right now. Like I'm just in sales calls and it's working. So that's where we're at on the business.

Wow.

I'm barging in here, but wow.

Okay.

Nice.

All right. I'll let you two go.

And what's the, what are we, what problem are we solving, Carrie?

Um, the problem I'm solving is I wanna scale it up to, from, you know, just $15K MRR to, uh, you know, that $85K to $100K MRR. The 2 questions I would have for you, one is, should I focus exclusively on acquisition entrepreneurs? 'Cause that's my niche. That's what I've done. I've intentionally been trying to broaden the funnel. I think it would be helpful for these groups to have a mix of both.

Mm-hmm.

you know, bootstrapped entrepreneurs and acquisition entrepreneurs. The second one is the virtual model is working. I think we can add some retreats to it and call it good. But I've also been building out peer groups in person in my city, in Austin, working with banks and whatnot. So those are kind of like the two, two big questions. Eventually I have to work myself out of moderating these sessions and the one-on-ones. Um, but the margin—

Yeah, I would start doing that sooner than you think.

Okay.

Um, 'cause just imagine the day, you know, I always tell people this story, like the day Ampush, a salesperson closed the deal, onboarded to the customer account management, then they delivered the service and then somebody collected the bill and billed them and collected it. And I had nothing to do with it. It was like a magical day for me in my life. Like I can remember it. And so for you, the same kind of thing as like, can you get the pod created? It gets run, they're happy with it, they stick around and you're, you're just like, Not as a part of it. So 80, let's talk about $85K or $100K. Let's just do $100K. How many members is that or how many people is that?

It's roughly about 100 to 120. I'm charging 'em $900 a month. There's an onboarding fee of $900 a month. Um, they pay a—

An acquisition entrepreneur is someone who's bought a company. Is that what that is?

Yep.

Okay.

Um, I'm trying to think, is $900, I guess it's a re— I guess the, I guess it's about the same as like a Hampton or YPO or something like that. Do they have to commit for the year or they have to, they can do month to month?

Uh, it's month to month. They can get, you know, a small discount if they do the year.

Why, why aren't you selling it annually?

Just didn't. I have a, 30-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked. So I could do the full year and keep the guarantee. Um, I was just stoked to get the groups going.

Yeah, I would do, I would sell the year. I would stop selling month to month. Um, and, and to me it's simple. The explanation is simple. Like you're gonna gain value for, you just bought a business by the way, which is like a multi, multi-year commitment. It's probably a 5 to 10-year commitment if you just bought a business. Like, it's gonna take you more than a month to figure out the value of sitting with a bunch of people around here. Like, and, and I would have, I mean, okay, it's up to you, but I would also say like, hey, if you ever aren't happy with this, I'll give you all your money back. Right. But, but like, but you can't wait around for a month or two. And, and invariably, I'm sure your churn is higher than it ought to be because you're only, because you're charging monthly. Um, and to me it's just kind of a, a thing of like, it was fine to get started, but now you're at a certain place. And to me, I would just go, no guys, we just do this annually. So that's probably the first thing I would do. I mean, you can do the math on how many conversations you need to have. I would stick with acquisition entrepreneur. I've actually never heard that term. Have you heard that term, Andrew?

No, no.

I've never heard that term.

I love that name.

Yeah, I love that name.

Owns it.

And I love the concept of the person who, because I would probably be an asshole as somebody who started a company from scratch and be like, that's not an entrepreneur. That's somebody just buying a business. But, but I like the concept. I like the idea of like, no, no, I'm an acquisition entrepreneur. I'm a person who buys a company and takes it to the next level. I, I love that conceptually.

Yeah.

And I would—

I would think that like it's too niche of a market, but that's exactly what I did.

I love it. I don't think you should go, I don't think you should do another group. Like the idea of selling somebody something is that they will buy it even though there are other options and because they know you're making money off of them. But that's, that's a call to action for you. Which is you need to be the best, right? And one of the benefits you have versus Hampton or whoever, and even 833 and BG has this, is like, no, like I texted Andrew the other day, I was like, Hampton with a point of view. Like there's Hampton and I love, I'm in Hampton by the way. I like Hampton. I've been in YPO. They're very general. Like they're so general. In St. Louis they had it and it was like all these people with family-owned businesses. It didn't make sense for me. In BG, it's like, no, I have a point of view. I want them to be bootstrapped. I want there to be B2B services. I have a point of view for how it works and like, I like it better for you as acquisition entrepreneurs. And like, that's what I have a point of view on. And I, I, there's problems you have that Jesse doesn't have cuz he starts his businesses from scratch and I want this to be tailor-made for you. So I think you have an advantage actually in being able to build straight for that, um, versus someone who builds the division of it and they, they have 6 other, like when I talk about Growth Assistant versus Somewhere, Somewhere sells to 20 different client types. Like we're gonna become really good at marketing. We're gonna focus on that area and we're gonna win ultimately in our, our category.

Yeah.

Maybe they'll win bigger or whatever. I don't care, but I know that I'll win and I can sleep well at night that I've built a defensible business. So they will, let's assume they all will and you still have to find a way to win. And now how do you do that? And that's why you stay focused because it'll give you an advantage. And just imagine the sell to the entrepreneur. Yeah, you can join one of those other groups. They have 20 million different people and I'm sure they're great. My, I wake up every day thinking about you and your plight. Like it's just, it's so much more compelling. Oh, did we get your question answered?

I think so. Yeah.

Okay. All right.

Well, it's not the last opportunity we, we met. Kay and I did in Austin. Since she's here in Austin, she's reached out quite a bit and I love getting to watch you grow your business.

Thanks, Kay.

I put your LinkedIn in the chat here for everybody to follow because your, your LinkedIn is on fire and I know that you're building it even further. Thanks, Kay. Jesse, how is it for you to just take these questions on the fly? That would be a lot of pressure on me to have to do it and then know that Malathi is listening, Ved is listening, Joel is listening. No issues for you.

You're good.

I'm just sharing my perspective. I'm not saying I'm right about anything that I just said. It's all one human's thoughts. Not, don't do it. You know, this is not, uh, Blind-tested, whatever medical trial that you can start, you know, running your body on it. It's just, just one person's perspective. All right.

Anybody try yet?

Can I just ask you, uh, yeah, can I ask you a question or a shameless ask?

Yeah, sure.

Jason, uh-huh.

You can ask for anything you want.

Yeah.

Would you be open to a mutual intro to the founder of Riviera Partners?

Sure. I mean, I'll forward him something.

Awesome.

Okay.

I'll write that up and Send it to you.

All right.

I love that you asked. I should say that anyone who's gone through the accelerator is almost an automatic yes. And we do have a process. If you don't know it, we can help make it easy for you. Reach out to me, Jason, but for you especially.

Cool.

All right.

All right.

Thanks everyone. Um, how was it for you all? Give us a rating. I'm trying to get Jesse to do more sessions and he's eager to do more sessions that are helpful. I wanna know how helpful this was. Scale of 1 to 10, be open. And why, if you don't mind, also tell us why you gave it that rating and what would've made it a 10 if it's not a 10. And I'm especially looking at you, Joel, because you've had really good feedback here in the chat, but I'd love to hear from other people too, like Aaliyah and Sally, um, Kay and everyone else. All right, Jesse, do you wanna take one last— actually, I know you and I have a meeting right now and we're running a little bit over. Can I just have one question from one person?

Sure.

You got a second?

Yep.

All right, good. I want to hear from one person. We're going to do this just randomly after having so many people picked. If there's someone who's in an eager spot, want to, want to do a quick question, let's have you unmute and come in. And that'll also give people like Slavo and Jeff and others to give their rating in the chat. Joel, love to see more SaaS focus.

Yes.

Anyone, anyone at all?

Yeah.

Can you guys see me?

Uh, that's Stan, right?

Yeah.

Can you see me?

Yes, we can. Hit us. What's the issue, Stan?

Hey, well, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a dinosaur compared to you guys. I'm an 86-year-old serial entrepreneur. Um, owned newspapers, radio stations, um, for 25 years. Sold them, sold, owned 74 weeklies. Sold them to Warburg Pincus, Mike Noken, Ralph Ingersoll in '87. They wanted to take my newspapers. I was doing a million circulation a week. I controlled the insert market on Long Island, and they were going to take my newspapers and turn it into a daily newspaper to compete with Newsday. So when they were negotiating to buy my company, they told me how much they loved my management team. I had 570 employees. A huge printing plant that could commit— could print a million copies in 3 days. They were going to take it and turn it into a daily— and oh, and 74 salespeople on the street.

Wow.

They were going to turn it into a competing daily newspaper to Newsday. So again, they told me how much they loved my company. 2 days after they closed on the deal, they fired the general manager, the chief financial officer, the circulation director, the advertising director, etc. Brought in all new people, corporate types. Okay. 3 years later, they were losing $11 million a year.

They couldn't sell.

I finally bought it back for 10 cents on the dollar, put it back into the profit again, sold it 6 years later to Tribune Corporation for the same price they sold it the first time.

Wow.

Then went into VC work. Uh, not myself, but joined a VC group, fella named, uh, Harry Edelson. Out of New Jersey. Big guy in VC work, gave lots of talks on Wall Street and so forth.

And by the way, we should connect at some point after this. I've got your email address here to follow up, but because I'd love to know more about this and also see if we can feature some of your story. But it sounds like you've got a question.

Yeah, I do.

I do.

What is it?

I'm getting there. Okay. So when I got out of the VC business about 7 years ago, 8 years ago, We had one company that I really liked. It was a company in Schaumburg, right outside of Chicago. And it's a company who's a pay-for-performance model. And the company is 7 years old, does about $4.2 million a year, runs a profit about $500,000, should be much more, operates in all 50 states, have about 2,800 car dealers in our network. It's been hit with the worst luck I've ever seen any company in my life. It's before COVID hit us, we were selling 1,500 cars a month. Okay. And basically what we do is we do the marketing. You know, we buy data, we go through the data, we have algorithms that show what brands trade in for what brands we're representing. And so over A number of years, we developed a whole bunch of algorithms, how old your car is, what the brand is compared to the one we're representing, how far you live from the dealership, what's your credit rating, a whole bunch of things. We narrow it down and then we give a contract, we get a contract from a car dealer, let's say Joe Chevrolet. And Joe Chevrolet signs a contract with us that we're going to provide him with a manifest, names, addresses, telephone numbers, Et cetera, of, of, of the people we're going to give him, we prospected to, and we'll send out 5,000 direct mail pieces and about 25,000 emails.

And—

Forgive me. I'm sorry, Stan, just because we're a little bit over time, I want to make sure to get to the question. Would you be able to—

Okay.

Okay.

I'll do it real quick then. So he gets paid $425 a car. So he doesn't pay us until the car is sold. Got it.

Okay.

So I've got 2 questions. One, I'm really struggling. Well, first of all, I only spend 2 hours a week on this project, on this company.

Okay.

But I have a long-term partner who's dying of ALS. So I'm thinking, what do I keep this? What the hell do I do with this thing? Do I bring somebody in to run it? Do I keep it? Do I sell it? What do I do? I live in Key Largo, Florida. I'm not interested in Schaumburg. So I have 2 problems here. The number one problem is getting to the decision maker. I've used over the years telephone cold calling, had a team of 10 people calling. They get the general manager on the phone, which is very, very, very difficult. If they get the general manager on the phone, they turn them over to a closer.

Okay.

Closes it. But I'm having trouble with it. They've called so many times over the 7 years that it doesn't work well anymore. So I'm trying to find a new way to reach the car dealer. My grandson, who just graduated college, works for a marketing company in New York City. He's visiting me and he showed me some ideas and, and they're totally out of my realm. So my question is, anybody have any suggestions how I can reach general managers? You have to— when you call the car dealership, you got a receptionist. They don't want to put you through. Through. Obviously they did for years, but no longer with you. Okay.

I think I've got it. You want to get to general managers at these car dealerships, and I know they're incredibly hard to reach. Jesse, I happen to know that you've got a process for doing this mutual intro.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things we talk, we teach, Dan, you can use LinkedIn to essentially know, know who knows your target. So if, if the, whoever's running the business for you, the GM, they know a bunch of these different people, They get on LinkedIn, they add all the connections to LinkedIn, on LinkedIn, and they can see, for example, Andrew, anyone who Andrew knows, I can ask Andrew for an introduction to them. And I can say, Andrew, I see, you know, so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, can you put me in a room with them? And he just, if he has to say yes, or he'll forward them a message saying, will you meet my friend Jesse? That's what we call them. We call it the mutual introduction playbook. And that's a big thing that we'll use to, for all these kinds of businesses we're talking about to drive meetings.

Okay. Well, I did mention that I was a dinosaur. I meant that realistically.

Uh, well, we're, we're here to—

I asked, so here's what I'll—

my company, there's nobody in my company who belongs to LinkedIn.

Well, we gotta change that.

Then you gotta, first of all, get somebody outta the company.

I think you got, you got a whole group of young entrepreneurs on the phone. Maybe somebody needs to make a deal with Stan.

I'll tell you the one I really wanted to talk to. I asked my grandson to get me in contact with her, was this young lady who was just talking about, uh, acquisition, uh, entrepreneurs or something like that. That's the guy I gotta—

we'll get you in touch with her. Oh, that's easy. That's easy.

I want to talk to her. I mean, if it's easy, if I could, again, I don't know what the hell to do with this company.

Somebody here can run it. I believe that.

My partner's dying. He runs it. I'm not leaving Florida. I'm not leaving.

That we can help with. We can send a message out to a bunch of people seeing if they want to come run your company for you.

Would that work for you? Oh, he's going to unmute.

I would never thought. I, I don't know anything about this stuff. As I said, my grandson said, Papa, why don't, why don't you, I'm gonna go, he, Jesse, he talks about you all the time. So he says, why not? I'm gonna go right now. You wanna listen in? And I was playing poker on the computer and I said, I said, okay, okay, I'll listen in. But I really got entranced by what was going on because this is all new to me. I'm, I'm pretty much outta the business world now, you know?

Well, Stan, here's, here's what I'll do as a follow-up. I'm gonna follow up with you and, uh, you can introduce me to your grandson if you want us to do, uh, to talk with him I'll do a couple of things. First, I'll show you how the Mutual Intro Playbook works, and I'll send you a process for that. We've done a workshop like this where Jesse has done it in real time, but I'll get you a how-to on that. We'll introduce you to Kay, and then if you're interested in having somebody here run the business and you send us some information on it, we'll vote it out and we'll see if we've got somebody here who is in the hustle mode who would like to run the business for you or with you and let you spend your time in Florida because man, it sounds like a great way to live. Thanks, Dan.

It is.

All right.

You're not kidding.

All right.

And thanks, Jesse. All right. Fan-freaking-tastic. Thank you all. We're going to get a recording of this for you, and we're going to keep doing sessions like this. Keep letting us know what you're looking for and what we missed. And I see you, Sally. I'm sorry I wasn't able to get to you, to Joel, to Aaliyah, and others. We're going to do more sessions. Keep reaching out to us. Bye, everyone.

All right. Talk soon.