How to Scale Your Business With $5 a Day Ads with Lova Kremer

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I'll tell you there's 5 guidelines that we keep for every single ad that tends to work overall. The 5th element, it is the difference between selling a lot and selling average.

I'm telling you, it's one of the biggest things that if you are going to scale your business, especially if you're somebody who I know most people, I hear this conversation all the time, don't love having to do social media all of the time. This is such an amazing option. Lova, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Okay, so I am extra excited for this podcast because selfishly I feel we start podcasts to get educated and you are to me in my world known as the ads guy. The guy to go to who has skilled people and taken them from the true belief that you can start with $5 a day up to $1,000 a day and taking and making people's companies very successful. So when people see a lot of the successful companies out there, you guys, Lova is typically one of the people behind it who is helping them scale their business and scale their ads. And you know, I was telling you before this that I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs, absolutely myself included, both hands are up, kind of feel like ads are this elusive thing that are super challenging, that you have to hire an agency for, that can be really confusing. You can really mess it up. You can spend a whole lot of money that does not work. And so I know that you're here to help us build confidence in that. And to help us learn how to do it. Like, you actually have some things that we're going to be talking about and offering at the end where people can really get this experience of really getting to learn how to do it themselves, getting really empowered on their team so that they can put this back into their hands. Because let me just tell you, Lova, I have put this in so many other people's hands, and the thing that we always talk about on our team is bringing this like in-house, having us learn enough to be deadly, you know, having us learn enough to be able to know that we can do that. So I think one of the main things is you're, you're super diverse, Lova. Like, you've done TED Talks, you've spoken on stages of Google, you've been into, uh, talking about peak productivity, work-life balance, and now you're really in ads. You're known as the ads person. So I just want to kind of go back though about the beginning of when you got started, and I would love to hear just what made you start to know that you have this message that you want to be sharing with people. Like you have a message that you wanna be on stage for. Have you always been somebody who's wanted to be on stage?

I mean, honestly, no, I don't, uh, very much like attention, but what has happened is that over time, I started my agency really young, um, more than, more than a decade ago in 2014. And we got really lucky because within, I think, the first 12 months, we were able to get Coca-Cola as a client. And Coca-Cola basically opened all the doors. I made sure that when we shot the commercial for Coca-Cola that I was in it. So it was like undeniable because we were scrambling for actors who were on a deadline. But it opened a lot of doors for us. And because the doors kept opening up, I started being known as like the person who runs ads, companies. We had a lot of influencer clients as well, like YouTubers. And so we had pretty early on success that opened a lot of doors. Had I not had some of that success early on, I would have probably scaled slower. And as I scaled more and more, people just kept asking me more questions like, how do you work so much? How do you do so much? And so initially, how I got like a TEDx speech was because somebody knew me. They knew how much we worked, how much we were doing stuff, and they were asking questions. And then they knew the organizer of TEDx. And like, that's kind of like how that world works. You get like invited and then you do like a pitch or an application, they vet you. And so a lot of these opportunities kind of pop up. When you go on like TEDx, for instance, you can't speak about like performance marketing or like how to do a $5 a day ad. You speak about the things that are more relevant to people. And in that case, I had a very big belief inside our company that we need balance so that people can be happy. 'Cause we work very creatively. Ads on the one side is very data related, like $5 a day and how do you scale that to $1,000 a day? But a lot of it is like you read the data and then you have to creatively come up with a strategy to make sure that the ad actually works. So we need a lot of creativity. And I remember reading a book called Creativity Inc., which is like my Bible. I love that book. It's like the COVID is peeling and it's about one of the founders of Pixar and how they within Pixar basically create stories and create all these like amazing creative movies that win awards. And so I very early on realized, thanks to this book, that we need like calmness and time to be bored inside our company so that our ad campaigns could actually work. 'Cause without, with only the data, we're not gonna actually, you know, scale and make successful ad campaigns. And so work-life balance gets introduced. Productivity gets introduced and then you get invited on like a stage, you speak there. Also, I did my TEDx talk in the Netherlands where we're based in Amsterdam and now we're like opening in New York and Dubai and all that stuff. But back then I was based in Amsterdam. It's a small country, so everybody kind of knows each other, especially when certain doors open. And yeah, it's a small community.

I feel like you're a natural networker too. You're pretty good at like going up and meeting people and introducing yourself, has that played a really big role for you?

I initially, like, I call myself an introvert.

I wouldn't have guessed that because by the time I met you, which is obviously not that long ago, I wouldn't say that about you.

Yeah, I had massive anxiety when I was like a teenager going up to people. I was I joined this mastermind from Jesse Itzler, who is amazing. He has a great Instagram channel. But Jesse had this great like retreat in at Duke University where Tom Brady spoke. And in that speech, he was like asking him a certain question. Tom Brady said something along the lines of like, if you're starting a business and you're an introvert, you probably shouldn't be starting a business. And that kind of resonated with me because I feel like you can be an introvert, probably start a business. A lot of software businesses do it. But if you want the business to succeed, like you can't have, you can't like have your weaknesses become your identity. You have to go out there and learn to be social and network. And I think the way it got through to me that made me want to be social as an introvert is I learned this one sentence, which is just leave people better than when you found them. And so when I talk to people, I just kind of talk to them and try to figure out how I can help them. And so the more I give, I know that eventually it'll come back. And now I'm in business like 12, 13 years now. Like things are like circling back, like 5 years in, it was like the first time things started circling back to me. So at this point, I just, every time things go bad in the business, I'm like, where can I give? Where can I give? Where can I leave people better than when I found them? And so I don't see it as networking because I'm still nervous approaching people. And sometimes I enter a conversation, I don't know how to hold the conversation. But if I see that I can help people, that's when I start blooming. I'm like, oh, I can actually help you. Like, let's go on a 2-hour conversation. And that seems to work.

Mm-hmm. No, I, I, I fully watched you in rooms and I've chatted with you in rooms, um, in the mastermind, which is awesome. And just watching exactly that same thing happen where all of a sudden you found the door of how you can help and now you don't shut up, which is the best because people love that. So something else about you, which I think is a really great characteristic, especially of a successful, um, entrepreneur. Uh, I love talking about traits of entrepreneurs, so I feel like you are really direct, you know, but in a very loving way. So I'm wondering, is that something that's been natural for you? Like, you've been able to just like cut to the chase, tell what you're seeing, not sugarcoat it, but at the same time it does not feel harsh. Is that something you worked on? Is that a trait you saw, or was that natural?

Oh, the harshness is definitely something I worked on. Um, so I didn't realize this until I started going more towards North America. So I'm apparently very Dutch, and Dutch people are just very direct. I remember spending some time in North America, like a couple of months, and then coming back for a month to like visit our office in Amsterdam and just getting like an interaction back with a Dutch person. And I was like, wait a second, you're rude. And so I realized there's like a cultural difference that I didn't realize when I was in the Netherlands. I was naturally always pretty direct. My brain is very logical. So when somebody tells me something that isn't like a fact, I just, I, it's not like I call it out. I just say, hey, that doesn't make sense.

Mm-hmm.

Um, which I found out is very Dutch, but it's not that I'm calling it out. It's more I'm trying to understand what the process is. Yeah. And so people have called me direct, but to me it's just like, I'm trying to understand where it's coming from. I'm trying to be kind and figure it out. But if somebody tells me like, I had this the other day, we were like talking to a lawyer and he's like, oh, the fee to do this thing is like, I don't know, it's a couple of thousand dollars. And I was like, literally I went on Google and I'm like, I have a website open in front of me. It's $200 to do this. Why are you charging me a couple of thousand dollars? So to, I, from my understanding, this is the directness people talk about. Mm-hmm. I'm just genuinely trying to understand why are you, you know, upselling me a couple of thousand dollars worth. And if you can explain it to me and it makes sense, I'll pay it. But if you get uncomfortable and defensive, then in that moment I know you're basically ripping me off. And I hate getting ripped off.

I think we all do. Um, no. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pretend I'm from another country and I just don't know. No, it is super useful. It's super powerful, you guys. Even in our mastermind, I watched as, um, you know, members would be talking to each other and trying to help each other and trying to get to the point, trying to figure out what the real problem was and what the solution could be. And a lot of times, Lova, you spoke up to ask a very direct question to kind of cut through maybe all of the niceties, all of the things we don't need in there. And I just— I learned a lot from watching how you ask very direct questions and how quick things can move when you actually sit and go, what is the real problem? How direct can this question get? So huge, huge, huge trait that just cuts out a lot of time. And as an entrepreneur, that's what you wanna do. You wanna really be able to move a lot quicker. So what's been something that you've really had to like unlearn for yourself, for how you were raised in order to experience the success that you've had?

Mindset was massive. Communication was important. Leadership was important. So with communication, my brashness doesn't pay off. I had to learn to be, to reflect before I speak instead of just like right away comes out. That's probably This is why I love business. To me, business is like the ultimate personal development journey. It is. In the first 2 years, I would just be me. But me can, could it, like, if I just blurt out what I think I say without thinking about it, I could say things that make people defensive or maybe they don't feel, they feel like I attack them, which I genuinely didn't in that moment. But when I reflect back on my own words, I can see how they can interpret it that way. And so one of the things I've learned is definitely take a beat and then just kind of like reflect about what it is exactly that I'm gonna type into an email or write. Hmm. Um, with leadership, it was the leader-servant model. Like, it's not about me, it's about my people. How can I serve them? How can I help them? Which resulted in like, at one point we had like 42 people in the office full-time with interns and everything. That meant like I would work crazy hours. I was first in the office, last in the office, like not fun, but, but it helped and it created a lot of loyalty, which pays back like by a big margin later. Just in the moment, not super fun. But yeah, there's the mindset. One was the biggest though. I've noticed at every stage of my business, I think certain things and I have certain limitations around money mindsets. Mm-hmm. Uh, and if I resolve them, like my business kind of shoots up. If I don't resolve them, it like doesn't and it feels like I hit a ceiling. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think the biggest one around that is making sure that I would invest in coaching. Mm-hmm. Because in Europe that's not a very common trade. And honestly, I notice sometimes when I talk in, in like North America, like I'm in Canada right now, or I go some in some places like smaller cities in the US, people like don't really want to invest what is necessary. But yet every time I have invested, I would enter rooms with people who think differently and it would instantly expose. It's like a mirror. It instantly exposes all the thoughts that I have that are completely holding me back. And then it feels like an overnight success and kind of feel sad that I had to like almost pay to get into a room to understand that. I wish I could just read a book and fix it. But like even that speech with like where I was like last month where Tom Brady spoke, I've seen Tom Brady online. Like I'm from Europe. Like we kind of know who he is. It's not like a big deal because we don't have American football. It's a whole different energy when he's there and like speaking. And the speech wasn't recorded. You couldn't access it. But like, I saw other speeches after that because I became like a fan of him. But like, I saw other speeches on YouTube. It's not the same. Like, there's something about— and I'm fairly logical, but there's something about energy in person. That can completely shift how you think. And then you take that back to your business and suddenly you're like, why am I thinking so small? Why am I holding myself back? You start calling yourself out. Mm-hmm. Whereas before you wouldn't call yourself out. So stuff like that really jumps out as like the big movers for me.

Oh my God, the, it's the same story for me. There's something about in-person, like I can go read all the books, I would listen to all the podcasts, but it wasn't until I really started getting in those rooms with people and it is an energy transfer. You— there's no other way to explain it than like somehow when you're in the room to proximity with people, their energy and belief transfers into your body, and somehow you leave, you leave different. And I don't know if it is because like now that you're in the room, you kind of do have to confront all of those emotions that are coming up, and they're very clear. Where like, if I'm just sitting and watching Tom Brady on a YouTube, like I'm not really feeling like you know, I'm in a room where I'm questioning myself or my life. I'm more just like getting entertained, right? Like, but when you're in a room with all of those people and him, you, you kind of ask yourself questions and you measure yourself. Good thing or bad thing, we measure ourselves against the people that we're around and how we're feeling and observing all these emotions that are coming up and why, and asking ourselves questions that you do not ask when you are watching a YouTube. So I love that. It is like you get in the rooms and it is like mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror. Here. Like, wow, I didn't know I still had all of these things to work on. You'd mentioned about money mindset, because we're going to get into your business here, which is all about money. It's about spending money to make money. Um, and you had mentioned people don't necessarily want to invest, and the only way for people to grow their business is to invest. So that's a really big deal. So for you, your money mindset kind of has to be dialed in, not only for yourself but also to help some of your clients. Truly. So tell me about the work that you do on money mindset for yourself, and then we can talk a little bit about for your clients too.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, if we're talking numbers, just this year I joined like, I think 3 masterminds. It's like 6 figures, uh, that I spent in the period of like 2 months or something like that for the whole year. And that's just those masterminds. And then in general, coaching, business coaching. I was trained for ads by one of like the best ads people in the world. He was called the Godfather of Facebook ads back in the day. I think he's like retired now or something, but I have a very big belief that I want to be at one point like the best at what I do. And if I want to be the best, I can't just like read. Sometimes I have to read a book like Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. I can't access, you know, I can't just go to Pixar and be like, hey, you know, can you teach me? I probably wouldn't be able to afford his coaching either. It's probably a couple of million dollars for a session or something. But, But I'm working my way up, maybe one day. And so sometimes you do read a book and it is as close as possible to that energy transfer you can get, especially when you read a book that is so profound. Mm-hmm. Um, but then sometimes it is like at one point, one of the things that was very massively helpful is I took an online course at Stanford, uh, called Startup 101, and this was, This was around the time that I was scaling. So we had scaled from 6 people to, I think it was like 12 or 13 people. And that was in a period of couple, I think it was a couple of weeks. And I was like, I remember being at 13 people looking at like my right-hand person and I told her, I think I'm good. I think I can do this. Like, this seems easy. I can totally manage all these people. I'm a great, Also, by the way, I'm in my 20s when this is happening and I'm like, I can do this. So over the summer we went from, I think it was like 13 to 28. And that was horrible. That was like so bad. Everything that you can imagine could go wrong, went wrong. And we needed basically to get HR a couple of months later because it was just horrendous. Uh, I did everything wrong. I was in my 20s. I literally don't know what I'm doing.

You do everything wrong in the beginning.

Yeah. And you think you're fine cuz 13 people is manageable. You know everybody still, you can't manage 28 people alone when you have like a core team client.

Oh God, no.

Well, I thought I could. So there you go. You learn lessons. But so, um, yeah, sometimes it's books. Sometimes you have to go. Masterminds, you meet people. Sometimes it's straight up one-on-one coaching. And I noticed that the more comfortable I get around money. So this is how I got comfortable around ads. Actually, this is a great analogy. When I learned to drive, I probably shouldn't say this, but this is 15 years ago, so statute of limitation probably is over. But I remember I was scared of speed. So I remember being like learning how to drive. And then I remember my parents took me, let's just say this is Germany on the Autobahn to keep it legal. Okay. We don't have to go into the details, but let's say, so he took me on the, he takes me on the highway where it's allowed to like basically drive. And he's like, and I'm telling like, I'm opening up. I'm like, I'm scared of like driving fast. That's why like I'm not comfortable in the car. I used to do go-kart racing. So on the track, like, it was fine. Like, I did like a Red Bull go-kart tournament. It was amazing because when you crash, there's a barrier and you're also in a go-kart. So you're not like going super crazy. Like, you'll survive in a crash. You'll be fine. You have a helmet. But then you have like this 2-ton car and it's like you're on a road with people you don't know who don't know how to race. And now you're like, what the hell's happening? So I'm on the highway, I say this, and then basically they just say, you know, start driving, like start driving fast, go to like, what was it, like 150 kilometers an hour. I don't know what that is, like 120 miles or 110 miles an hour. Go over the speed limit, I guess. Right. And so suddenly I'm driving this car and I'm driving really fast and I'm like, oh my God, oh my God. And then we like go to the legal speed limits. And it suddenly feels like good. It doesn't feel scary anymore. And so that analogy is the same in how I do it in business. When I got one-on-one, like coaching from my mentor, I remember going to the workshop and it was like a, it was like I had like the one-on-ones before and then it was in the rooms, like 10 people. And I remember him walking in and he said, So I could give you like the standard workshop, guys, but I got this big law firm as a client and they basically asked me to spend $90 million in 90 days and I got to start like today. Would you want to see how I do that? So $1 million a day. I'm like fresh. This is like many years ago. I don't like— I start getting into ads. We're running some ads and we're not running $1 million a day. And so everybody, Obviously he's like, hell yes. And so I got a crash course by one of the best people in the world in like 3, 4 days. And in front of my face, he would literally click the buttons 'cause he was doing it for a client. And I would see like a million dollars a day being spent for 4 days in a row. And so after that, when I came back, I was like, oh, this is like a totally different ballgame. Like $1,000 a day is not a thing anymore. Or like $5 a day is like, Nothing. Obviously I didn't go into $5 a day yet. That's a whole different skillset. But suddenly like these normal projects, like $1,000 a day, $5,000 a day, like it wasn't, I wasn't nervous. We have a saying in the company where when you get these like fresh people or people with like less than 5 years of experience, they get like twitchy fingers. So they're like really good until like a certain budget, but then for sure, after like $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 a day, somewhere there, you start getting twitchy fingers, which means that if a day goes really bad, you start freaking out and you start adjusting budgets or changing things when in reality you should just be waiting it out. But it's so much money that they get twitchy fingers. And the reason I know how much year— how many years of experience they have is because I know that they haven't driven really fast to then slow down. Maybe you're just building it up. I had a mentor a long, long time ago. He would tell me, don't stair-step your goals. And so I've always believed in that saying. That saying was the exact reason why we got Coca-Cola within a year. It was— everybody was like, you know, build it up, do a little bit, do a little bit. And I saw an opportunity for Coca-Cola and I was like, I'm not going to listen to everybody. I'm going for it. Like, I don't, like, I'll figure it out. I don't know if I can deliver, but I'll figure it out. And we delivered better than they expected. So just don't stair-step your goals and, and like, just make sure to like go faster sometimes so that it becomes more comfortable when you go slower. What happened over time though, is I learned that there's a different skill set at higher budgets and lower budgets. And none of my friends at those higher budgets like nobody wants to accept the lower clients. It doesn't make sense for them. They make like tens of thousands of dollars a month from a client. Like why would you accept the $5 a month client, $5 a day client? It just doesn't make sense for them. And so there's very few advertisers that make that transition. It took me also like a year to do it. The only reason I wanted to do it is because I got fed up with corporates. Like I really didn't like corporate. I didn't like how every 6 months they would change. I didn't like how every 6 months I had to fight to keep them when we had preferred supplier contracts with them, but they would find a way. There's always a sneaky way to not use a certain supplier or bring your old supplier, like corporate politics. And I was just like, I was kind of like, I don't want to do this. I had my team handle that and I specifically wanted to do small business because I had a couple of clients that literally when they came to me were not even advertising. And then by the time, like, I have some clients with me that are 9 years with me, but within like a year or 2 years, sometimes they were rivaling corporate clients in ad spend, like a small corporate client. And then I was like, so I really enjoyed that. And some of those clients would invite me to their weddings. I would know like their families. Like it's just like you change their lives. They're so appreciative of you. Corporate wasn't very appreciative. So when a client like appreciates me, I obviously like wanna appreciate them as well. And so I specifically wanted to do small business. I thought there was much more impact, much more potential there. My charity has always been about impact. I had like a podcast that we called Impact Talks. So this was like a very big deal for me. And so I completely shifted away from the corporate side. Every so often I give like a keynote or some expensive speech if they pay me for it. But my thing is like small business. And so when I transitioned, I learned that a lot of small businesses just cannot go for like $30,000 a month. They are sometimes even scared spending $10 a day. Like it's literally just scary spending like a couple of thousand dollars a month. And so you end up in this situation where you kind of have to hold their hand and make them feel comfortable around the fact that ads work. And so that's when I started learning the skillset of like, How can I show that ads work? So not right away jump into $1,000 a day with these people, but like, let's just show them that it works, like $5 a day. Initially it was like $50 a day, 'cause that was kind of like the minimum I thought would work, but even that was scary for some people. So then I kept like lowering it, then it was $30, then I kept lowering it at $10. I was able to get kind of similar like data points. And then at one point I went to $5. $5. And I was like, oh, we're still kind of getting the same data points. We just need more days. Instead of like 3 days, we needed like 7, 5 to 7 days. So it was just like a longer period. And so that's kind of like how it grew from like $50 to like now $5 a day. And so now the catchphrase is like, we'll take you from $5 a day to $1,000. But actually what I'm doing is I'm taking on businesses where the offer is like good, it's good enough, like it works. I'm showing to those people who are skeptical that these ads work. Like this is a legit thing. If you have a product that you sold before, there's a very high likelihood you'll sell it online as well. So let's show you with $5 a day, what are you going to lose? Like what, $150 a month? Just try it, do a couple of iterations, lose $150. But eventually you'll find an iteration that works because you sold it before. And once it works, I have these crazy stories where I recorded case studies and everything, but literally in like a period of 10 days during a Black Friday, I would take a client from like $10 a day to like $1,700 a day. And there's like a way to hyperscale, but it's because the offers work. And initially there was skepticism. I showed that it worked and they had like some crazy return on investment, like 50x or something. So now you scale like crazy and the return just kept coming, kept coming. So I go up until 3x. So around the $1,700 a day mark, we were hitting like 3x return. And then in the next day, I think it lasted for like 2, 3 days and then it started dropping below 3x. It started going more towards the 2x, at which point I now started lowering the budgets and it kind of eventually balanced out within like 2, 3 weeks. It started balancing out and the new baseline became $500 a day. So they made a ton of money in that period. I proved to them that it worked. And now when I was spending $500 a day, it felt like not a lot of money to them. So yeah, basically at $5, you're trying to figure out if your offer works and how to position it. And once that goes, you're pretty fast. You go to $100 a day. Between $100 and $500, you're doing a lot of iterations to make sure to stabilize everything. And then once you start hitting $500 plus, you're basically scaling now.

Mm. So how could somebody listening literally take the $5, like take that simple $5 bill and put it into an ad tomorrow morning and see a win without knowing anything about tech?

Oh, I'll give you a perfect example that we're doing right now, literally with clients, also with myself as I like go to like certain like countries and cities where I'm allowed to do this, I, I do it. So there's like, there's two types. So there's more ads, but there's two types of ads that quite relevant for your audience, like lead ads and sales ads. Sales ads are simple. Like you have, let's say you're selling a course, you're selling a product, like anything on Shopify, you have a landing page, you run a $5 a day ads that goes to the landing page. I would say if your product is below $300, it should work if the offer is good enough. I've proven it multiple times over. You can run an ad straight to landing page, sales page if it's below $300. If the offer is good enough, it'll work. If you have a low ticket offer, so below $50 or maybe below $100, it usually works. If it's a good offer, like the chances of it working is much higher than the $300 offer. But those are kind of like the sales ads. So right out the gate, you know, okay, this will work for me. And worst case, if it doesn't work, you've wasted like a couple of like not even $150 a month to figure out that this iteration of your offer won't work. So then you change the sales page, change the headline, you change like what you give, how you position it, any, any of those things. Another one that I think is much, much more relevant is DM ads or lead ads. So within lead ads, you have several, or several, you have the lead form ads, forms, people's opt-in, or you have DM ads. DM ads are probably the easiest. You can literally go on Instagram right now, create a professional account, and then open up an ad. This is not boost post. It's you go on Instagram.com, go to your dashboard. I like doing the Ads Manager, but I'm explaining the easy way, which is on Instagram.com. Go to the dashboard and then literally just set up an ad and you'll select the create an ad that won't show on your profile. Once you select that, you can literally go in, in a radius of 5 miles around your office or around, like, let's say you're a personal trainer. You take the nearest gym, you make a 5-mile radius around the nearest gym, and now you can just select that and you select men, women, age range, what they're interested in, like fitness. And you can just put up an ads, go on ChatGPT. ChatGPT has a collaboration with Canva, I think now. They make amazing ads now. You go to ChatGPT and you say, hey, listen, I'm a personal trainer. I want to like get more personal training clients. Make me like an Instagram creative. They make you the creative. You take that, put that into the dashboard, hit publish. $5 a day. We're getting— I'm not even joking. We're getting like 0.80. So like $0.80 per conversation right now. We have a client that we scaled to $200,000 a month. This is a client that they were doing really bad when they joined. So one of the things that I got a reputation for is turnarounds. Companies that used to make a lot of money and then they start like seeing like a dive down. I got a reputation for turning those people around. So they came to me, they were like, apparently what they told me is they were like a couple months away from bankruptcy. They told me after to relieve the pressure. They got in, literally like turned them around. They like got to like $200,000 in a couple of months per month. And it was all DM ads. It was just having conversations. They just kept having more and more conversations with people, sending them to a sales call. Hmm. Again, this is why I gave the small example of a fitness trainer, 5-mile radius. But you can take that. Let's say you get after like $5 a day. Let's say you run that for a month. Again, let's say it's— I'm getting $0.80, but let's say you get $1 per conversation, or worst case, let's, let's go averages for the markets because not everybody's an advertiser. Let's say it's $3 for, for a message. $3 for a message, $150. That means you will have 50 conversations.

Mm.

If you get even one client and you're a personal trainer, let's say it's $1,000 for you. You just spent $150. You made $1,000. That's like 8x ROAS. I don't have my calculator with me. But so now you take this and you have $850 extra. You put that back into ads and now you potentially on the next try, you're making again like $10,000. And then on the next month, you're doubling that again. And like, and it keeps going and going until you have like a client like mine who then crosses $200,000 in sales. And so it feels like it's a lot, but the reality of it is it starts with this like one close and now you have $850 that you never thought you would have in the first place 'cause you're still doing the normal things that you were doing for your business. But now you have $850 that you never expected you would have. So put that into ads 'cause you just proven an offer. And now next month you're making $10,000. Now you put $10,000 into ads. Obviously your cost per DM will probably go a little bit up, but if you manage it properly, it might even go down. This— you're not still— you— $10,000 a month, you're still not spending enough to reach like how many people in America? Like 370 million people or something like that. You're not reaching everybody. You're barely dominating in your little 5-mile radius. And there's so many big cities in the US, North America, Europe, you know, you can scale. And we have clients where we literally scale them internationally that way. And it doesn't have to be a big corporate, like it's a small business and they've proven something works in Miami, so it works. So then they transfer that over to LA, you know, they change the images slightly, they make it a little bit more LA-focused. But then they work there and then they go to San Francisco, then they go to New York, then they go to Austin, they go to Georgia, they go like, and he just keeps going and going.

Mm-hmm. Okay. So you talk a lot about like empowering someone on your team, bringing this in-house, teaching an assistant how to do this. Why do you advocate for handing them, handing everything over to them?

Yeah, I have a firm belief. After having started with the corporate and going down to the small business, uh, that under $1,000 a day, you're gonna burn money on agencies. So what will happen is you'll hire an agency and because your entire funnel and offer are not proven yet, they might maximize whatever it is that you have, but then all your profits will go to the agency.

Mm-hmm.

So even if I was on a sales call, I would still not sell the person if I feel like they wouldn't be profitable. Profitable. And so that's the main issue. If they're not profitable after they pay my fee, that means they're not scalable. And we are dependent on scale because we have a percentage of the ad spend. That's how we get paid. So if we can scale you basically forever, then we'll make basically the same amount of money, or if the market goes bad, we'll start making less and less money. So it's just like a bad relationship. So I believe that if you're under $30,000 a month, first of all, you should understand your data so that if you do hire like a freelancer, even that you understand that you're not getting ripped off. You need to understand the basics either way. Just, you know, outsourcing it to a freelancer is not the solution because what happens if the freelancer is gone in 6 months? What happens if they get lazy? Maybe they do a great job in the first month and then they get lazy. You don't even know how to check them. So either way, you're going to have to learn it. The other part of that is the freelancer is not internal. So that's a problem. Agencies have a purpose. It's once you crack the codes, if you have someone internal, they can actually run the ads for you. You will unders— if you understand how it works, you'll be able to guide them and you'll know what to click. But at one point, let's say you do hit, we call it the $1,000 a day like boundary, but it could be $500 a day, it could be $5,000. There's a point where you have to make a lot of content, just like if you would be a YouTuber or something or Instagram, you need to make a lot of content because like 80% of the content won't work. So let's say you make 100 ads, you know, 20 won't work. Now if you're spending $5 a day, you'll make like 5 ads. You're fine. You can do that. If you, even if you like spend $200 a day, you'll make like 20 ads. You can do that too. Go on Canva, you'll figure it out. If you spend $2,000 a day, like who's making 200 like creatives? And what if we need to make videos? And if we need— so agencies have a purpose. They're not out there to like, there's a reason why agencies are successful. Manageable. There's agencies that make billions of dollars and go IPO. So there's a purpose for them. And it's when the quantity starts hitting like incredible numbers. But when it's manageable, you should probably keep everything in-house. And so my thing is that I think people should be doing everything in-house until it becomes unmanageable because you're basically having so much money., and you just don't have the time and you just want to sip cocktails on the beach. And at that point, yeah, get an agency involved. And so my thing is like, if I can teach you how to do it yourself and keep it internal until you're like, literally it's just too much. And at that point you call me and I'm the one who built everything or taught you how to do it. Then it's an easy plugin for me. Like you, we take your business and it plugs easily into our agency because you've built it with the same systems, with the same like ideas and everything. Because that's another thing. I get a lot of businesses, those turnarounds that I tell you about, 99% of that is me cleaning things up. I'm basically a glorified cleaning person. Like I'm cleaning up systems, putting them on CRMs that are scalable, that don't crack. It's like a whole thing. Yeah.

Okay. A lot of people have their own opinions of the algorithm right now. Uh, what, like, explain how it actually works to a business owner.

Yeah. Honestly, the only thing you need to know about the algorithm is Meta. So that's Facebook and Instagram, YouTube and Google, same thing. They just care about the user experience. Mm-hmm. And they want to make money while keeping the user experience as original as possible. That means that they prefer creators. If they could, it would only be creators, no advertisers. They don't, they don't want advertisers, but they want to make a lot of money because they have a lot of ideas. This is Silicon Valley. So if you give good content, Facebook or Google is always going to prioritize you. When algorithm changes happen, the people, and this is the same when you're a YouTuber in organic, maybe people like are going to resonate more with that. If you're making those faceless channels with AI, obviously at one point the jig is over. Like Meta is gonna come, YouTube's gonna come and be like, you're ruining the experience. We're gonna do an algorithm change and we're gonna take away your YouTube channels. The advertising side of it seems so mysterious, but the reality of it is it's exactly the same thing. The only difference between organic and paid is exactly that, that we pay, but it's the same thing. So because we pay, we can get away with more. So you can put up an ugly ad until the, you know, until it's over. And then Meta is like, we're not gonna accept ugly ads anymore. So sometimes people get away with ugly ads. I mean, the amount of times that ugly ads work, I'll tell you, it's great.

I've learned.

Yeah, but here's the thing, like memes work super well too. On organic. So we do meme ads as well. And so it's not about whether it's an ugly ad or not, it's about what are you doing for the user experience and are you improving the user experience on the platforms? When you go in the Ads Manager on the ad level, there literally is a column that's called quality ranking and it'll give you above average, below average. If you're putting out, you know, bad content, you're gonna get punished. Punished. So when Andromeda comes out or some algorithm change comes out on Google, everybody's always like, adpocalypse, like this is how like everything's getting too bad. And, but the reality is like, if you have a great ads, here's a great example. I had a client a long time ago. She was a pottery workshop instructor person. Her whole thing was we set up the ads for her. Her whole thing was like she would turn on the ads when the next workshop was coming up, fill it up, and then turn it off. And then like a month later, again, turn it on, turn it— she didn't do anything. No iterations, no variables, no 100 creatives. It was literally turn on, turn off, because sometimes that's enough when you have a great ad. Now, if you're scaling into the millions and millions and millions, Obviously that same ad, we get bored of it and that's a user experience issue. So if we get bored of it, we need a new ad. And if you start pumping out bad ads, you're gonna get eventually punished. And so Andromeda is this entire algorithm where everybody's saying you need hundreds of creatives 'cause the algorithm will go and choose for you. And that's true. Hmm. But Many marketers, and that's not only me, but many marketers who are like top of their fields, I think I saw a post the other day from like one of the top marketers and he was also saying like, and like 50% of our ads like work with Andromeda, like accounts work with Andromeda and the other 50% still work with the old way of advertising. So you need to fill out your accounts, you need to fill out kind of everything, how it works. But at the end of the day, the way advertising works is the same way it worked 100 years ago. If you have a good offer, the ad looks good and people click and they watch the commercial or they buy. Facebook sees that and it chalks it up to a good user experience and gives you more people for cheaper.

Mm-hmm. Okay. I love that. So for the people right now who are thinking about, okay, I want to try this, but I don't know if I'm great at creating ads. Like, I'm a visionary. I'm not necessarily a copywriter. I don't know what it should say. What's a great way for someone like that to start?

Any Ads creative— these are guidelines I'm going to say right now, not rules, but across the 2,000+ customers that we had in 12 years and the 2 awards that we won for commercials, I'll tell you there's 5 guidelines that we keep for every single ad. That tends to work overall, like most of the time. The 5 guidelines are, has to be big and bold and clear headlines. So if you have an ad or a video commercial, like it needs to be clear what it is that you're selling. The second thing that we found is neon colors. When people have monotone colors, people scroll through it, never see it. Neon colors tend to pop. The third thing is a person, preferably smiling or pointing at the text. Those tend to do super well. Which person? Literally doesn't matter. Experiment with all races, all genders, all ages, like variables. You gotta test everything. And then the fourth thing is like some sort of mockup of the product so that people now know what it is that you're selling. They can see it. Remember, this is still like humans. So when we go to a shopping mall, we— shopping malls exist still because we want to go and see it. Same thing on an ad. People want to see the thing. And then once you have all those, you will probably have what most ads in the world have. And you'll see as you scroll through Instagram or Facebook, it's always the same. It's those 4 things. I found from this one client that we had a couple years ago who is in fast fashion, that when you add the fifth element, it is the difference between selling a lot and selling average. And the fifth element is urgency. Mm-hmm. Uh, and urgency can be discounts. That's the most common one, but it could also be like a spring sale or summer sale, but it could also be like limited spots. Go on like any AI bot and say, give me urgency triggers and it'll give you like 20 options of all these different things. The main thing of urgency is it should be like authentic. It should be real because if it's a real urgency, I think Russell Brunson calls it like a rush of the table. When you have, when you have real urgency, you literally see people at a conference rushing from their seats to the back of the room to buy a product. Mm-hmm. Uh, and that's when you know you have real urgency. And so a lot of times when people come to me, they'll show me an ad and it won't have the fifth element, which is urgency. And I'll, I'll tell them, hey, just change that. Not all the time, but a lot of the time still come back to me and say, hey, this one did better, or this one got a sale. So that's kind of how we judge ads. And so you can take those 5 guidelines, put them into like a ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and say, hey, listen, I need to come up with an ads. I don't know how to design. Take these 5 guidelines, put them in there, uh, and ChatGPT will come up with something or go on Canva, find the templates and, uh, and start there.

Awesome. What do you think is the biggest myth about paid advertising that keeps people from doing the first step?

A lot of people don't think they can start with $5 a day. Mm-hmm. They would rather, somehow they would rather go rent a studio or buy an expensive camera for a couple of thousand and pump out a lot of organic content, spend hours and days figuring everything out, outreaching to like hundreds of people going on LinkedIn. I think the limit there's like 20 a day, DMing 20 people a day, posting every, doing basically everything except for spend $5 a day. Just to give context, we have an account where the CPM, so the cost per 1,000 views is like $2. It costs me, for $5, I'm getting 2,500 views, like real people that I've targeted and fit my criteria. Like the chance of me going on TikTok, which is the most organic of the platforms, posting a video and getting instantly 2,500 views is small.

Mm-hmm.

Like I've tried on multiple accounts. Uh, if you have a banger video and you're great at organic, yes, you can like go and get millions of views or tens of thousands of views. But again, you, you're building a skillset now. Whereas if you would take the same amount of time and build it into ads, again, I'm not telling you to become a master expert, spend a decade like me, get trained by the best. I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying just get good enough to get to a certain amount of money and then just hire somebody who's like an expert. And I have a lot of influencer clients. The chance of you becoming an influencer and having millions of subscribers is like the chance of that is just so much lower than if you start ads and figure those out. And here, here's like a kicker. If you start ads and you figure those out and you start getting into the $1,000 a day, the people, when you run ads, people go to your profile and follow you. So the chance of you becoming an influencer when you spend millions of dollars or thousands of dollars on ads is much higher than if you go organic with nothing.

Mm-hmm. Oh my gosh, that's awesome. That's like a double. Yeah, you don't think of it that way. Like you're, you're actually gaining followers just from doing your ads as well. So that's huge. Okay, so Lova, people are ready to run ads and learn this whole thing. How can they work with you? And I know you're giving a special as well.

Yeah, we have a, launch special for the next cohort for anybody who's on this podcast. We have obviously our group thing where we basically take any person in your team or yourself, you can go through it. I have 4 coaches from my team, I'm in there and we're literally guiding you through the entire process. We have our swipe files in there of all the best creatives that you can literally take, upload into ChatGPT, take the 5 guidelines I just gave you, which are also in there, and literally make creatives for yourself. Then go to any of the coaches, ask them, or your admin can ask them. And basically that entire cohort program that we have is built for people who just wanna learn how to do this internally instead of getting burned by an agency. And I think the discount that we have, don't pin me on this, It's like 40%.

Yeah, it's 40%. I'm not gonna help you. You gave it 40%. That's amazing. What I'm gonna do, you guys, is everything is linked just below in the show notes. So all you have to do is just scroll down to the show notes and you can see it all there. I have it linked at the top. So 40% off. And you guys, I'm telling you, it's one of the biggest things that if you are going to scale your business, especially if you're somebody who I know, most people, I hear this conversation all the time. Don't love having to do social media all of the time. This is such an amazing option for those people. So you guys scroll down, go check it out. Um, I'm super excited for you, Lova. This is awesome. I know you get to work with so many huge people, but I also love that you are taking the time to do this offer for all of the small businesses that really, really need it. So thank you for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And if anybody has any questions specifically for me, you can also add me on LinkedIn, ask me a question there.

Amazing. And I'll also put his LinkedIn below so you guys can check it out there. Okay, Lova, thank you so much.

Thank you.