What It Takes To Build A 7-Figure Agency In 2026 With Zarak (DTC X Info Products)

Bro, this is recording. Let's make this value packed as hell. Coming on board, bro. But yeah, guys, we're back with another video, another sophisticated ass podcast feature, and I'm here with Zarak, of course. We'll do an introduction shortly. But we've been talking for a long time, bro. I remember when we were in a telegram group chat. Copy. No, what was it called? Dr. Demons back in the day. And since then, there's been a lot of ascension, bro. And I know the people on Twitter are stoked for this one. Just kind of give a warm introduction in what you do, like the ventures that you're working on and then we'll dive into all this. Was, bro.

Yeah, of course, bro. And thanks for having me on. So, I mean, my name's Eric and I write copy. Well, not really anymore. I mean, actually, no, I write copy every day. But that's how I started. I run a couple businesses online. I have my newsletter, TheCopyCouncil.com and I have my agency, Mailer Profit. And those are like the two main things I'm working on. I have some stuff, some other stuff that I've dabbled in over the years.

Sick, bro, Sick. Like, all of these ventures, they stem from direct response. And recently there's been a weird shift in direct response. Like marketers already using AI and all these prompts and stuff. Right. But when we started, these weren't a thing. Right. Like, how did you first stumble across direct response? Like, what was that epiphany moment that you received? Like, okay, bro, like, there is money in this.

Yeah. So I think. I mean, how far back do you want to go? Like, all the way to the beginning.

The. The first moment we stumbled across it. Yeah, like, the first moment you saw. Okay, like, this is a piece of copy. This is interesting.

Okay, so around, I think I must have been like 16 and back then I was watching like all the youtubers on how to make money online because I felt like I was in a race against time to, like, get rich before I had to go to uni. And also, you know, growing up, we had a lot of financial struggles. Even though I come, I. I was really fortunate in some ways, in many ways, actually growing up. But in other ways, you know, things were always unstable. And it was like my parents were so heavily focused on education and just. And while I understand the value of education, it just wasn't going to uni. And being an npc, like, it wasn't for me. I didn't want to, you know, so. And I knew that from young. And I knew that I wanted to be rich so that I could take care of my parents. Because I knew kids growing up, growing up who like, would take private jets on holiday and like, they would go first class. And then, you know, every time we went on holiday, which sounds. It sounds like such a spoiled brat thing to say, by the way, every time we went on holiday. But it was like whenever we did, it was just stress waiting in lines and like, you know, trying to save for it and all that stuff. And I was like, I don't want this stress. Stress is not good for anyone. And so from young, I was looking at ways to make money online. And I even started an E commerce store before I knew what copywriting even was, because that's a long. A whole other story. But when I was like 14, me and my friend in class, he was in my psychology class, we were the only two guys in psychology. So we would just be at the back of class, like, scheming. From first we wanted to do a CS Go gambling site. Obviously we never did it. Then we did. We started an E commerce store using a boxing page that we had on IG to drive traffic. And you know, I knew about dropshipping and E comm and I knew how to go on a burlo and set up a shopify store. But I didn't have money for ads. So anyway, fast forward a couple years. I've just been dabbling on and off, watching these videos, coming up with different ways to make money and never really commit to anything. And then I think I hopped on Fiverr and I was doing. Oh yeah. So I watched the YouTube video just randomly on my. It came up on my feed and it was. I think it was Nate Schmidt. I don't know if you. You know who that is, of course, og and it's funny because his video was like, I made $5,000 last month writing emails. And I was like, what the fuck? Like, how. How is that even possible? And I remember I watched the video and he introduces the concept of copywriting. And obviously I was like, yeah, I'm not. I've never. I'd never had like four. Four figures in my bank account in my entire life. So I was like, probably. Yeah, I was like, I can't afford this. So what I did was I started to order some books on copyrighting. So the first book I read was how to Write a Good Advertisement by Vic Schwab. And I just read it and then I read like the Boron letters. And this was before I even wrote any copy. I just wanted to understand more about it. And I had always, since a child, been a bookworm. Like, one of the earliest memories I have is, like, my cousins and stuff, always being like, you know, he reads so many books. And every time we would go visit my family, like my older cousins, I would go in their room and, like, steal their books. So that was always my thing. Like, I was always reading even into my teens. So I read a lot about it, and I was like, this is cool. Then I jumped on Fiverr, and I was just like on Reddit R copyrighting as well, and I made some friends there. And then on Fiverr, I also, at the time, I was like, freelancing for my local MMA gym. That's how I was making some money, like $5 an hour or whatever. So, yeah, that's kind of where it started. And around the same time, I had my exams, my A levels. So I wasn't taking it too serious, the copywriting thing. And then after A levels finished, my family were like, yo, we're going back to the uk because we were living in Malaysia at the time. And my parents were like, we need to go back to Scotland because we have a house in Scotland, and it needed to be, like, taken care of and we needed to do renovations and all this stuff. So we're going back there. And the expectation was that I was just going to go to uni in the UK anyway, because I studied the British system. So in my parents mind, they're like, yeah, we'll go to the uk. We'll fix up the house. His brother's in uni, his sister's just finished uni in the uk. He's going to go to uni too. I was like, no, no, no, wait, let me take a gap year. And to be fair, my parents were against it, but my dad was the one who was like, yeah, okay, take a gap year. And I was like, yeah, let me take a gap year and let me try this thing out. And if it does well, then I won't go to uni after. And that's kind of where it started, because, you know, from that point, we moved to Scotland. And I had been to that house before, but I never really grew up there. I mean, we lived there for a few years maximum, so I didn't have any friends or social life there. And, you know, I was just working every single day trying to get clients for copywriting. That's kind of where things started to snowball.

Interesting, bro. Interesting. Yeah, man. We all have different Paths with copywriting. Like, my one is slightly different. I was interested in how you picked up the books before exposure. Like great books, by the way, like born editors. These are insane books right along your journey, right? Because you said that you were like a bookworm, right? Were these strictly only like copywriting books? Like, let's say like non fiction or like. Because, like, I know that you put out tweets around the impact that fiction books have had on you, right? Like, how impactful have fiction books been on your copyright journey, like back then and like even now? Because I know that you mentioned like a lot about them.

Yeah, no, growing up I was mainly reading fiction, bro. Like when I was really young, I used to read all the Goosebumps books. I don't know if you ever read those.

Roll back. They. Damn, bro. Throwback.

I. I think Skull Duggery, Skull Dudgery, Pleasant, I think is the name of another series I loved growing up. And this was when I was like 8, 9. Like, I loved books. And at the time, it wasn't like, I wasn't eight years old thinking, yeah, I'm gonna read so I can write better copy. I was just like reading because I genuinely enjoyed it. And it was every time. And the thing is, my parents back then were struggling. You know, my dad was always away working, but I remember my mom was like, every time we'd go into the city center to pick up my sister from school, because I have an older sister and like I was going to public school, like a free school, but my dad insisted on my sister being in an all girls school, which was a private school. So like, my parents always had a really strong. They always prioritized high quality education and they would, you know, pull the money together and make, make it work. Because that was, you know, they wanted to give us the best future. So, you know, every time we go into the city, I remember we'd drive past Waterstones and I would like beg my mom to stop so I could buy a book. And we would go into Waterstones and I would get one or two books and it was always like that. And I think, to answer your question, like, nowadays I still read a lot of fiction. I mainly read like fantasy and sci fi. I've read a lot of Stephen King stuff. I mean, he has like 10 books that are really good, in my opinion. And then anything that's new that he released is kind of shit. It just became like super liberal leftist. Like, I don't know what happened to him. I mean, he probably, I don't know he's probably in the Illuminati or whatever anyway, but still, like I started, his books are good. He has a very good book called On Writing as well, which I think every copywriter should read because he basically, I mean, after reading that book and going through some of the greatest direct response books and courses, you kind of realize that it's all just the same thing being told to you in different ways. There's another book called the Creative act by Rick Rubin that I read last year, which I'm going to reread. That's another thing is I track every single book. Not fiction, because fiction I purely read for enjoyment. But there are tertiary benefits to reading fiction books in my opinion. Like, you sleep better, your dreams are more vivid, you're more creative. And it also just improves your vocabulary and your ability to like, you know, write and come up with new ways of saying different things and all those things. So fiction definitely is beneficial, but the difference is you shouldn't be forcing yourself. In my opinion, you should read fiction because you actually are hooked. You know, like I'll go on a plane and I'll finish a 300 page book on a two hour flight because I just couldn't put it down. So fiction is 100%, you know, I really enjoy reading fiction.

Yeah. Stephen King Arc the Art of Writing. Incredible book, by the way. Highly recommend you guys pick up a copy. I try to read Carrie because I heard good things about of course, his novels, right? But then, bro, with Carrie I was kind of, I lost midway through. Now I'm reading the Count of Monte Cristo. That one there, by the way, is insane. It's kind of a massively in depth book by about like fiction books are an insane mechanism. And of course like books of course help with copywriting, right? But like if we look at the journey, right, like writing sales letters, of course growing the agency and right, like understanding direct response. What were the main like mechanisms for growth? Like, how did you sharpen your copywriting skills?

I think I just was lucky that I had the right teachers because obviously when you first, when you first start anything, first of all you're shit at it. And second of all, you don't know how you are. And third of all, you don't know what good looks like. And that's the same with literally everything. And the worst position you can be in is thinking you're good at something when you're actually, when you stop, that's when things get dangerous. So I think I was just lucky that I happened to stumble across you know, that YouTube video and then instead of buying the course, because the thing is, you know, when you start something from scratch, that's always going to be your subconscious foundation that you build off of. Like everything is going to come back to that first thing. Just like, you know, if your mom. I don't know if someone said something mean to you when you were 3 years old, you, like, you might not remember it consciously, but your actions today are, you know, dictated by what that person said to you, amongst many other things. But I believe in that theory really strongly. And it even happens when you're older too. So like if you start copywriting and the way your introduction into the whole industry was from like some random guy who doesn't know what he's talking about and is selling on the Internet, then in my opinion, it's like on a subconscious level, you're just not going to be as good as X, Y and Z. A person who started with the real fundamentals and the basics. So I think I got lucky in that sense because I didn't know this at the time, but you know, choosing to learn from the books and the OGs just gave me like a stronger foundation, an understanding of the entire world of direct response. And then, yeah, I think that that's game.

Like in terms of that subconscious exposure. Was it only the books or like along the journey. Did you like seek expert from. No, like seek expertise. Apologies from like mentors, like copyright mentors as well.

Yeah. I actually just wrote an email about this today, but I don't think. Now this is gonna be biased because obviously I sell a course or I don't even sell it. We haven't made money from my program in like three months. I haven't opened enrollment. But I don't think there's any modern copywriting or marketing courses that are actually good. Like genuinely. I mean, I don't, I mean, besides from mine, but I have reasons to believe mine.

And mine. And mine. And mine.

And I got reasons as well. Yeah, I got reasons to believe mine is actually genuinely a needle mover. But that's because there's not really another one like it. I know of one that's similar and talks about, you know, similar content of cold traffic copywriting for E Com. But the guy who made that course was one of my first students and my. One of my most successful students. So it's like. But I mean, yes, I took. I spend a lot of money on courses, a lot of money on consulting. I think at this point in my career there's not Really a course I can buy that's going to get me to the next level because I've surpassed like I have a business, we have 24 employees at the agency and like so many clients. And then I've got this going on and that going on. So there's not really a course that's going to get me to the next level. However, you know, if someone's done what I want to do or something similar, then I'll always pay them money to, you know, just get on a call with me and in many cases they'll just refuse to take my money and be like, no, bro, like we have mutuals, let's just hop on. So definitely that's been huge. However, I think one pivotal. There was two pivotal, like mentors or courses. The first one was RNBC by Stefan Georgi, which I went through like years and years. I can't even remember. It must be like six years ago now or seven. That course was big because I was writing sales letters beforehand. But that gave me like a framework to use and go and close clients and be able to deliver with a system, you know, know. And also just it gave me exposure to so many other copywriters. So I got to rub shoulders with people who are doing better than me, which always helps. And then I did consulting or one on one mentoring with Doug Diana, who's like a legendary copywriter. And that was huge for me at the time. That really helped.

Yeah, that exposure to like experts who've done the things that you've done, by the way, is, is like hugely like impactful. I remember even in Dubai, I believe it was you actually who connected us with Peter Zemes. I remember. I believe it was you, right?

Probably. Yeah.

Yeah. And then bro, like one call that we had with him, he suggested this thing about like a downsell offer to implement one of our clients. Right. It's like 120k in like 4 weeks with emails alone with revenue share. And it was all because of that one call that we had with a mentor. So. Yeah, but I'm seeking expertise is like powerful as hell. Powerful as hell. Now, bro, I'm not sure what your stance is on AI. Like I do understand that you are leveraging it with the agency.

Right.

But as I mentioned, like earlier on is right. It's like when we started there were, there was no such thing as like AI and all these prompts and Claude and jbt, Right. So like how is the copywriting process now compared to what it was before AI? Like before, of course you're Doing the research manually and all these big ideas. Now, AI is a lot easier, right? But like, what's the big difference that you've seen in copywriting?

Well, I still think that like an A level copywriter who's more meticulous and you know, does manual research is going to produce, is capable of producing something better and more successful than someone who just knows how to use AI to prompt some shit together. I wholeheartedly believe that. And I don't think that's ever going to change. But the other thing as well is like, if we're being completely honest, no, cope or cope aside, I don't think AI has actually changed. I mean, I don't think AI has changed things that much. Like, I think people talk about it so much and they're constantly saying, AI did this, AI did that. But it's just slop. It's just like people are just posting AI slop all over the timeline on YouTube, talking about AI agents, but it's literally just like zapier. I mean, like, you know, I mean, if we really look at the process of copywriting, it hasn't changed that much. Okay. You know, when I first started rolling out and becoming popular, I was the first and I genuinely believe I was the first copywriter to drop a course showing people how to use AI to write copy. It was the AI copy accelerator all the way back in like the end of 2022. Because end of 2022 or maybe summer, I can't remember I have the exact dates. We were already testing chat GPT to write copy. Like it was already a thing at the agency and we were about to hire a new copywriter. But then Thomas, my main guy, he's like my most senior copywriter, I told him, yo, play with this, this is interesting. And he was like, I don't think we need to hire another one to have bandwidth. We can just take on more clients. And that's when I was like, yo, let's make a course on this. This is crazy. And that angle and everything I predicted in that sales letter has come true. Where it's like the biggest benefit was really just the increase in efficiency. And when you have an increased, when a copywriter can write copy faster to the same, same quality, what happens is the business owner doesn't need to have as many copywriters and there are so many like second order benefits of that, such as, you know, the more employees you have, the more lines of communication there are, the more margin for error there is. And if you have less copywriters there's less margin for error in terms of just operations and day to day communication, which costs a lot, which saves you a lot of money in the long run. Also, you can extract more value out of a single copywriter because I mean, if we're talking from a service business perspective, you can have more clients assigned to that copywriter. So. And overall, my point is, since releasing that program, the system for writing copy hasn't really changed that much. Like there might be days where you discover a new way to prompt, or there might be a new tool like Gemini or Manus or, you know, there's Claude chatgpt. Sure that stuff has changed, but the actual process of writing copy using AI has not really changed, you know, and, and I think it ultimately comes down to the copywriter and the person doing it. How good are they? Are they actually writing copy? Because if you're not that good at writing copy, then AI is not going to help you do a better job. I haven't seen someone who sucks at writing copy produce copy. That's like amazing with AI just because they had special prompts, it's like that. I don't think that's a thing. Obviously AI has changed a lot in terms of video production and ad making ads and making landing pages. But again, it's just made it easier and more efficient and cheaper.

I agree, bro. There is a huge difference between copywriters who started before AI to like now copywriters slowly rely on AI. Bro, there's a huge, a huge gap, bro. It's. Bro, it's huge. It's huge.

Sorry if I keep muting my mic, I'm blowing my nose. Got mad boogers coming up, bro.

Yeah, bro. Okay, bro. Of course the course was dropped in 2022, right? And your AI processes and like prompt engineering systems, it may be different to how it is now. Like even like miniature speaking. Right? Like what were you doing with AI before? And like how are you using AI now? It's specifically for your agency. Okay.

I mean I could talk about the agency for so long because I mean, how are we use. I mean the main process is with obviously writing copy, but we're looking, we've implemented it into the design process as well. To be completely honest, I don't know how I have such good people running this business helping me that a lot of things are going on that it's like I don't need to be involved in the weeds or know what they're actually doing on like the trench level. I just know that they're doing something and it's working. For example, we just hired a new project manager and she's onboarding today. And I haven't spoke to her, I haven't met her, I haven't interviewed her. Like we're at that point now where it's like people are onboarding and I don't know who they are. But yeah, definitely. I think the biggest thing is with writing copy. We also have like internal softwares built out. You know, one thing that was huge is we used to pay an accounting firm like $3,000 a month to pros to make invoices and to do our P and L and stuff. And you know, it's a necessary part of the business because I don't want to be making invoices. I had my assistant doing it. But then we still need P and L. And I realized, you know, we were doing like six figures profit a month every month. And this is like two years ago. But I'm like, okay, you know, this isn't a legitimate business. We need to know like every single number. And I spoke to Taylor Holiday, I paid him for consulting and he runs a very big agency, ctc. And he told me like, yo, you need to know these numbers. Otherwise you're basically just junior. Like you're just a freelancer with a bunch of guys working for you, you know, I was like, yeah, that's true. So now it's more of like a legitimate business. Like I can tell you today because of internal tools that we built using AI, I can tell you how much money's gone out. I can tell you how much percentage of our expenses over the last 12 months has gone towards salary, software, miscellaneous stuff. I can tell you the revenue per client on average. I can tell you our ltv. I can tell you how long clients stay for. I can tell you why clients churn on average. I can tell you why clients sign up. And this is based all on metrics and numbers. So that's been operationally, that's been huge for us because we also completely took accounting in house because, you know, you, you run an agency before where you had rev share. So one month you're going to invoice them 12k, the next month you're going to invoice them 9k. If you know their top of funnel drops off. And this has to be done manually, you can't, you know, whereas when you're just charging 4k a month retainers, you can just slap them on an ACH rebuild through stripe or whatever your payment process processor is. And sure, it's easier. But you know, when you're running, when you're providing much more personalized and higher quality service, I'd say, and you, you're qualifying for commissions and rev share with your clients, then someone has to be calculating that there has to be a human involved because if you send an invoice to a client and it's higher than what the actual number is, even though it's a genuine mistake, like it doesn't look good, you know, so that was our issue is we needed accounting and an agency to calculate all that stuff manually. And then we have to build a system where like every month the tech team creates the monthly reports for the clients and then those monthly reports get added to a specific drive folder. And then on the second day of the month, the accounting team checks the drive folder, calculates the rev share for each client. And some clients, it's like completely different deal structures. Some of them is like, you know, all of them had a flat retainer which was the same, but some of them, it would be 5% above 100k. For another client who's a nine figure business, it would be 5% above a million. So it's like everything has to be manually calculated. And we've completely brought that in house, saved ourselves thousands of dollars a month and automated it too, using some AI tools which my head of operations built, which has been huge for us as well.

Interesting. Interesting, bro. Like with the KPIs and like knowing the numbers, right? You mentioned, of course you understand the LTV and the reasons why like a client may trend, right? How do you receive that feedback and how do you adapt that to the agency.

So Well, I mean the way we receive is we'll just ask, you know, a lot of the times a client will turn and they'll just be like, oh, like we're going in house or we're going to another, another agency or whatever. Like, hey guys, we're just heads up, we're terminating the contract and on the customer, because the client is a customer. At the end of the day, the two words are interchangeable. In this context, they don't really feel like they like a lot of the times they don't feel like they owe it to you. Another thing as well is a lot of clients are like Matt Jr. Because working with an agency or a freelancer is a skill. You know, some people are better at it than others. And the clients who are better at working with us get better results because they're thinking more long term. A lot of clients will sign and they're like, okay, we just gave it to an agency, we want results. If they don't get results, we're going to off board. But there has to be like some sort of back and forth communication while the agency learns and optimizes. And those are the clients who stay the longest. The ones who we have that open dialogue with where it's like, hey, this design is not on brand or like, you know, here's our branding folder. Hey, we can't say that it's on compliant. Like we need that back and forth in the first ones two months and those ones stay the longest because there's that collaboration. And then the ones who leave, they're just like, oh, it wasn't good or they're going in house or they're going to another agency. What I will personally do is I'll like press the client and I'll be like, okay, look, you can leave. You know, here's our contract terms, 60 day termination. That's another thing that's been huge for us is our LTV's always been high, but previously we never had like, you know, in order to run a business that's less. In order to run a successful business like an agency at scale, a huge part of it isn't about growth, it's about reducing your risk. Because if you want to go sell the business, a huge part of the value of the business is based on the risk that the buyer takes on. And one way to reduce risk with a service business is to get in writing contracts, that client will stay with you for X amount of time. And we tested so many different structures because at the end of the day everyone, every agency or service provider wants the client to sign a 12 month or 24 month contract where they cannot leave. And to be fair, it's easier to get bigger businesses to commit to it. But anyway, I'm going on a bit of a tangent. Let me just get back to my main point. But regardless. So one thing we're doing now is 12 month contracts with a 60 day termination clause. So it's 12 months, that's all we're doing. If you want to terminate or leave us, cool, go ahead. You gotta give us 60 days notice though. Now 30 days notice is pretty much industry standard. And even from like a point of common courtesy, you do want to give one of your employees or a service provider 30 day notice. But we do 60 days because that allows us to forecast where like okay, they're leaving in 60 days, we can easily replace them with two more clients within these next 60 days, no problem. But yeah, that's another way we reduce risk is by getting those longer term commitments because, you know, we're providing a service to a limited amount of customers and we can't infinitely scale because this is a business that's run on primarily people. You know, we can't just triple our client base overnight, otherwise everything's going to break. And if we do that, you know, the service quality will drop off for the existing clients. So there is sort of that mutual understanding where, you know, you, you stay here, you, you sign a contract if you want to leave. We're giving you flexibility, but we also need to be able to forecast and no one's had an issue with it so far. So, I mean, I can't even remember what the main talking point was, but.

I believe I touched on. Oh yeah, like using AI. Right. We touched on how you're able to track LTV and the reasons why a client is able to turn right, like, so how do we use these reasons to like adapt at the agency?

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, you just ask a client what's wrong. And I've actually retained so much business just by asking. You'd be surprised how many agencies will have a client be like, yeah, we're churning, we're going to another agency or whatever. And the agency is just like, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. You know, we'll help you off board with me. It's like, not like I'm gonna fight to keep your business and I'm gonna do it in a nice way. I'm not gonna be a dickhead and be like, no, you have to stay. I'm just gonna tell them why. Like, tell me why. Because at the end of the day, every single interaction you have with a client is a sales call. And every single interaction you have with a client is an ability to retain them. It is an opportunity to retain them. So, you know, I'll ask them, why do you want to leave? Like, we had one client recently.

When.

We onboarded them, they were doing like a million a month or 1.7 million a month in top line revenue. And they sell perfume and fragrances and stuff. It's like the, you know, I don't know if you've seen those brands that sell products where it's like, it's kind of a dating offer where it's like pheromone infused fragrances. It's actually a pretty cool idea where like, you know, we've infused attractive pheromones to make the other gender more attracted to you. And then they dive into the biology of how pheromones are actually what makes people attracted, et cetera. So we do, we signed them, they're doing 1.7 mil a month. It was like a six month contract in the beginning because back then we weren't doing the 12 months. And I told the client like, yo, and they were doing like 6% of their revenue from email and SMS and we signed them on an email and SMS marketing deal. Obviously they want to increase that. In the first two months we weren't able to increase it, but there were so many reasons as to why. You know, first of all, the deliverability sucked, which means we have to throttle sending. We have to make like small segments. You know how it goes with email marketing. Like it, it can be slow in the first couple months, especially if things aren't already dialed in and especially if the brand's already scaled so much. It's like, you know, it's not gonna catch up overnight. But the client wanted to leave after months too because he was like, yeah, we're still on that. Not at like 15. And I told him like, and he said like, yeah, we're gonna be leaving. And I said, wait, did you sign a contract with another agency? And he said no. I said, cool, don't leave, just give us another month. In the third month we hit 15% and now it's at like 21% and they scaled to $11 million a month. They 10x their revenue. So it's like he almost churned again recently and I stopped him. So you know, imagine had I not been proactive to ask him why. And then when he explained why I explained to him, I would then just counter his objection and, and given the real explanation as to why he shouldn't leave. And again, it's your choice, but this is the objective truth about your decision to leave. Had we actually done a poor job on his account, which, you know, now we joke about it, he's actually grateful that I stopped him from leaving. At the time he was like kind of annoyed about it. Like it was kind of a back and forth. But now he's grateful because we're doing 25% through email and we just rolled out a huge subscription program through the email list and I think we even reduced his three month LTV churn from like 60% to sorry from. We increased his retention over three months on his LTV offer from 63% to like 87%. And that's just through like setting up some stuff with subscription and you know, different touch points on the subscription journey, et cetera. Now he's grateful. So what you do is you just ask the client, why are you leaving? If they have genuine, solid feedback, then it's your job to go and talk to your team and ask them about the feedback. At least that's what I have to do because I'm not involved day to day. I can't. I can't answer every question like that. I have to talk to my team and say, hey, is this true? Or, hey, is it? Can you explain your side of this? Or what is he talking about? Then I get the full big picture. Then I go back to the client and I say, look, so here's what actually happened. You're right, we should have done better here. I've just implemented this. We just rolled out a new system to ensure this doesn't happen again, blah, blah, blah. You have to just implement quick if it's genuine good feedback, and if it's not good feedback or just a perception issue or the client being unreasonable, then you have to say that to them in a nice way. And because these are logical people, at the end of the day, they run businesses, so you can just. It's all based in logic. There's no, like, famous in here. There's no cap, there's no finessing. A little bit of finesse, but it's more like just, if you genuinely did a bad job, own it. Never blame your team because then you just look like you're folding. That's the worst thing you can do as well, is like, oh, my team did it, my employee did it. That's the worst thing you can do. Like, I never want to be that guy that folds on my own team. I always stand on everything they do. And if they make a genuine mistake, I'm getting not angry, but I'm, you know, taking them. I'm talking to them in private, and I'm telling them this was retarded. How could you do that? That's so dumb. You've made us look so bad. The client and I talked to my team like that. Like, yo, you're so much better than this. This is embarrassing. Like, I have a name on the Internet and you've just gotten tarnished that not only have you tarnished my name, you've tarnished your own name and you've tarnished everyone on your team's name. I will talk to them like that in private, but to the client, I'm telling the client, look, this is completely my fault. I was involved in this process. Take Full responsibility always. So that's a game.

That's game. No, no skip going around here. We don't do skip going around here, bro.

Yeah, never blame your team. You just look like an idiot. You know, you look so dumb to the client because then the client's gonna be like, so you're just blaming your team. You're not even coming up with a solution. At the end of the day, it's your team. It's your fault. You set the culture, you set the standard.

So, yeah, but we're gonna touch on Client Acquisition. But you said a good point around you asking the client the reasons why, right? And most agency owners, bro, like, if a client is questioning to leave or like they're going in house or so, right, the actual agency owner, they won't question the client on their decision behind it. Meaning that they provide the client like an easy escape from the conversation, right? They just say, okay, like we can easily, like upward you, here's what the process looks like, et cetera.

Right?

Now, this principle with Client Acquisition around, like asking and signing clients, right? Like the first question is like, before AI, before claude, before chatgpt, even before the market got increasingly sophisticated and aware, right? Like, what did you need to do to sign clients? I. And then we'll compare it to now. Because I know that the game has changed drastically with Client Acquisition.

It depends for what, right? Because I'm kind of in a strange position where I have this agency that runs kind of without me. I mean, I'm still involved, especially because we're scaling hard right now and we can touch on that too, because I ran an E Commerce business last year. I made over a million dollars from info in the last couple years. But I've basically shut everything down just to go all in on the agency. Because I believe this is the true wealth building tool that I have at my disposal. And it took me fucking around with like two or three different businesses before I saw. Saw things for how they were. And I did a lot of hypnotherapy to help me get to that realization. Anyway, but we can talk about that later, I guess. I think that would be a very valuable point for the viewers. But sorry, your question was client acquisition then versus now.

So.

Well, back then I was like, I didn't even know what I was doing, bro. Back then it wasn't like, oh, I'm an agency owner, I want to scale an email. Back then it was just like I was freelance copywriter. And while most of the clients I had were, you know, vsl Clients or affiliate offers or people offer owners who had a bunch of affiliates running their stuff. I think a big, big, big portion of it back then was just like writing samples and sending them to copy chiefs at different publishing houses or you know, using Apollo to scrape Ecom brand founders and then go through their emails or their top of funnel ads and write them a new script or write a sales letter for them and send it to them. And I was doing that like 10, 20 times a day for months on end. Like a whole summer. Every single day I'd be up at 6am in Scotland. Cold plunge. Listen to, you know, do breath work. While I was cold, plunging and while doing, you know, there's a certain type of breath work you can do where you start to genuinely feel like you're high on drugs after like two, three minutes. And I was doing that every single day in a cold like 2 degree Scottish. I don't know if it's 2 degrees, but it was mad cold. It's in Scotland and I live up north in Scotland. Not even like in the city, bro, we're far so like super cold water. Breath work. Focusing on my breathing, practicing mindfulness. And while doing the breath work, just imagining someone I love congratulating me on like signing a new client that day. Like something that creates a lot of emotion in your head. So that was like the daily practice. And then I just jump out the cold bath, take a shower, you know, journal and get to it. Start writing copies, start handwriting sales letters, start reaching out to clients. Check on my spreadsheet where I'd have like all my leads. Okay, so I've reached out to them three days ago. Let's give it another day and follow up. I haven't reached out to them yet. Let's write them a sample. And then I'd have client work to do. So do client work. That was it, you know, and it was always just based on like providing some sort of value up front where I would write a sample. So that was the first way. And then, you know, still I was broke back then. But then eventually I sent some copy to the right guy, the right person at the right time. And he was like a very, very, very wealthy copywriter who wrote an offer called, I think it was the island where people forgot. Forget to die. And that's like a, you know, this is an idea that's been ripped a thousand times. The island where people forget to die. And it was a health, it was a supplement. And he was saying like these people on this Greek island don't Die young. They all live over average age. The average death age is like over a hundred. Here's why. And it was like a one hour long BSL script. And he was the original guy who wrote the original one. And he was now working as a CMO for like a $20 million a year supplement company. And I sent my copy to him. No, I sent my copy to the owner of the company and he forwarded it to him. And this guy was like, oh, this is actually decent. And he replied to me and he was like, hey. And he sent me like, it's so funny. He sent me like three, three sentences. He was like, the copy is this. It's not that good. You need to improve better. You need to do this. And I was like, oh my God. He responded. So I just went and implemented everything he said. Next hour. I sent him back new samples and he was like, these actually look pretty good. We could honestly deploy these as they are without much copy cheaping. Then he invited me to get on a call with him. I got on a call with him and he just gave me more feedback. He was like, yeah, we could deploy these. These are much better. I implemented his feedback, instantly sent it back to him. Then he was like, okay, this is great. One of our copywriter, and this is like we're talking about over like a three week period because he ended up ghosting me. So I kept following up with this. New samples. I was like, hey, have you seen them? I implemented your teachings from our call, blah, blah. And I thought it was a rat. Like he hadn't replied. So I was like, ah, I probably lost that opportunity, but whatever. Then he randomly hits me up and he's like, yeah, the copywriter we have just quit. So let's get on a call today with the owner of the company. And I got the call and the owner's like, okay, cool. So you know, he says, your coffee's good, when can you start? I'm like, I can start today. He's like, how much? What's your, what's your budget? Or what's your feet? And it's the first time I've ever been asked that in my life. You know, like up to this point I've been making like max, like couple hundred dollars, 500, maybe a thousand in a month on a good month. So I'm like, I'm like £3,000. And I swear to God, bro Wallahi, I'm not capping. My hands were sweating when I, when I named my price. I was literally sweating in my chair. Bro, in my parents house. And there was like an awkward silence after I said it. And then the client was like okay, cool, can you send the invoice over to our finance team and we'll get you onboarded today? I was like, fucking hell.

Sent me dancing in the background, bro.

So happy. And then I bought my dad a new computer because he had an old one and he worked so hard his whole life. That was the first thing I spent my first like real money on was new computer for my dad, which I ordered. Yeah, I closed them and they, they. So I was writing copy for them. And then a few months goes by and I realized and I was just writing like sales letters and stuff and a few emails for their affiliate program here and there. And then I checked like I had, I was like, yo, can you add me to Klaviyo? I want to see what emails the agency is sending. And it was like, it's an agency that we're actually bigger than now, I think. And we take a lot, we've taken a lot of their clients. But back then they were popping off this email marketing agency. I'm not going to name names. But they sucked. Like they were sending like super shitty copy and the email wasn't making that much money. So I messaged the owner, I was like, yo, what do you think of this agency? It was like, eh, they're okay. And I was like, how much do you pay them? And he told me the price. It was like six grand a month. I was like, you pay me £3,000amonth. What if I learn Klaviyo and just take over the email marketing in house and you don't pay me anything, just pay me 5% of the revenue I generate. And he was like, yeah, fuck it. He offboarded them the same day I bought, I think I bought some, watched a YouTube video on how to use Klaviyo and it was a wrap. Like they, they were my first email marketing client ever. And they were actually the first case study. And then they stayed a client until literally three months ago because the company went bankrupt. So they had to close the company down. But they were literally with us for like four years. They were mailer profits. First ever email marketing client guys.

By the way, there's a lot of subconscious lessons I picked up on during that small extract that you can easily deploy. The first one, bro. Zarek, you said following up, bro. When it seemed like you didn't care no more, you kept following up, right? And I believe you said as well, like keep following up. Until they always say no. Right? That's the first lesson. The second one that I picked up on is like, and I think it ties into client acquisition. Now you thought about ways on how to provide value upfront. Like bro, you gave them free sales assets because you never had the case studies to back up. Of course your work, right? Is like, is that what you recommend for like let's say people now without name association, without status, without case studies, do you think that they should learn a prospecting with like free work? Is that a way to do it?

Not necessarily free work, just give them something. You know I have been saying for the last two years that I don't think if you want to start off as a copywriter that I don't think you should be or I don't think your best bet is to be like, yeah, I'm an email copywriter and just start spamming E comm brands. Because first of all, an email copywriter for E Comm, it's like, what do you even do? You just write copy. But what about scheduling the email? What about the design? What about the campaign calendar? What about the deliverability metrics? What about all the other stuff? What about sms? Like it's a whole system to run the retention channel for an E commerce business. Like it's not just, okay, an email copywriter can get work, but your work is going to be getting hired by an agency who has a designer in tech or an account manager or in the very rare, like few cases, there are some businesses or brands that have that build their own team around a copywriter, a designer and a tech full time on email, which is rare. So it's like there's not many options and all the biggest brands are already doing email and they're either have a team or they're working with an agency and you can't compete with those. Or you can, but it's gonna be difficult. It's like one of the worst ways to get your foot in the door. So that's when I realized like, you know, there's no point even selling a course on email marketing because it's like I don't, if I had to start from scratch today, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't. The reason, the way I even got an email marketing client in the first place was because I downsold them onto something. And then we just organically grew through word of mouth because people need the service, the service isn't going anywhere. But it's just like over time we got more clients, more clients, more clients. And now people are like oh, we need email. Oh you know it's working with, oh shit, I can't say that brand name. You're gonna have to blur that out. Or like Neuro's working with Mailer profit or is working with Mailer profit or this brand is working with Mailer, you know, I mean it's like a network effect where it's like oh, they work with Mailer Pro, let's just go to them. That's what we've built now which is a moat that you can't very hard to compete against. So what I say is start with what I started with which is cold traffic stuff. So sales letters, advertorials. Advertorials are huge now. All the E comm brands are using them. All of them want good advertorials. I mean in fact this month in January I didn't want to take a salary from the agency because I want to stack like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars just in the business account. So I'm not taking a salary for the next like two, three months. And what I've been doing to just pay for my shit is I messaged one guy and I said yo, can I write a funnel for you? And he's like, yeah, because he already knows who I am. I closed him for like 12k. It's a nine figure skincare company. Then next month I'm just gonna do the same thing. I'm just living off that money, you know, agency stacking, stacking, stacking because yeah, and that's on cold traffic stuff and that's where I'd recommend starting. You know, write a few samples, send them to people you want to work with. Eventually someone's gonna buy and it's not easy at all and it takes a lot of work and no one can promise that it's gonna happen within X amount of time. But that's the way to do it. You know, you're fighting an uphill battle and going from zero to one. You have to brute force it and yeah, definitely you need to keep some sort of value up front.

Yeah bro, like conventional KO email marketers trying to enter the industry inside clients now bro. Absolutely cooked in my opinion bro. Yeah bro. It's so difficult.

Yeah, that's why bro, I would love to you know, spin up an info product and scale it on like how to start an email marketing agency or how to. But like I, you know, from an ethics perspective I just can't because it's like I wouldn't personally do that. If I was starting today, there's no way I would do it. Thank you.

Game, bro. Game now, bro, man, I know, of course we've got the list, we've got the YouTube channel.

Right.

And you mentioned the fact around like organic referrals actually skill accumulating, getting killer results for brands, taking that case study and signing more clients. Right. Is that the primary source of growth right now for your agency? Like organic referrals or have you got any like outbound systems in place?

So since we started the agency, we, I mean, obviously in the beginning I was doing outbound, like DMing people or you know, read cold emails, et cetera and that's how we signed our first few clients. But over the years, you know, I, I hired sdr, a few of them didn't really do what we needed them to do. And I think like you said, email marketing, just in general, even as an agency with our case studies, using cold email is kind of cooked. Like, it's just the brands that are on the leaked databases that you're reaching out to are getting emailed by like 20 other agencies per day. So. One sec, bro, I need to blow my notes.

Recovery monks.

Oh yeah, recovery maximum for sure. Yeah. I don't know bro. Like it's mainly organic and I don't post, you know, on Twitter. I've never been that vocal about Mailer Profit on YouTube. I've never been so vocal about I own mailer profit. Here's 10 email marketing templates. And I did that on purpose because my thing was always like I have my personal brand, I have me my newsletter and I have my skill and I have this business mailer profit and that's just an avenue of that I use to make money, but it's the same skill and I didn't want this business to fully rely on my face. So what we've managed to build over the years, as I kind of alluded to earlier, is that we can just, you know, people know us, we've been doing this for a while. And as a general rule of thumb, and I'll talk about how we're getting clients in a sec, but as a general rule of thumb, like if you have like a 6 to 12 month period where 80 to 100% of your, you know, your, what's the word I'm looking for? Let's say 80 of your client experience or 80 of clients who work with you have something positive to say, then you're going to be good for the next two, three years just based off that 80%. No so if you do good work for six months and just focus really hard and 80 of the people who come and buy your product or pay for your service have a good experience. 80, that's all for the next six to 12 months, to 24 months, whatever. You're probably not gonna struggle to get clients. Maybe you're not gonna be getting 20 clients a month. But, you know, the world has a funny way of working. We're like, we'll lose a client, but then another one comes straight in. Because this guy referred us to his friend and he ended up closing. Or someone I reached out to six months ago just randomly DM me and said, hey, can we start now? Someone who ghosted me a year ago just reached out, you know, I mean, it's just like everything has. When you build something and it's something that's good, the universe will always fill it because empty spaces always get filled. So. And maybe that's just like a self fulfilling prophecy too, because I really believe that, like the rulers of Dubai, when they built the uae, you know, he said, I think he was the ruler of Dubai, I don't know, but he said like, build it and it will come. And I always thought that was mad interesting because it's like, you build something good and people will come. And if 80% of people have a good experience with you, then not gonna have a problem getting more clients. So a huge, huge, huge part of our business is organic referrals. Huge part. We have single clients who probably make me over 100k a month and just referrals, bro. And you know, a lot of them are really good people where it's like, yo, let me send you something. Let me do this for you. They're like, no, I don't want money. Just keep doing a good job for us. I'm like, okay, cool. So that's a big one. Outbound. Yeah. I might send the odd VM here and there, but usually I'll, I'll message someone I know and be like, yo, can you intro me to him? Or like, we have big enough clients that if there's a brand, I know someone who knows them, you know.

Hey, bro. Yeah, guys, As a general rule of thumb, bro, as Eric said, build it and they'll come. Even with your agency, your freelancing business, where I think people go wrong, by the way, bro, they put cash on a pedestal. They taste cash, cash, cash, and then they neglect what matters the most. That's skill and service. When you perfect your skill and perfect your service, bro, the clients will Come naturally, bro. It's even, bro, the analogy is, do you know, like that guy who chases the girl doesn't focus on himself. He's fat, he's obese, he's lazy. But he chased the woman, he never gets the woman. But then the other guy who, bro, who worked on himself internally, who like gets a physique, right? Like spiritual success, bro. He will eventually attract the females into her life, Right? The same principle applies with agency, bro. As Eric said, the build and they'll come attraction rather than chasing. That's like the underlying principle, right?

Yes. And I mean, I 100% agree with that, but I've kind of changed my stance on that a little bit where it's like, you know, you can't be needy, you can't chase people. But. And the way that client acquisition works and client dynamics is very similar to like, you know, dating girls. You can't be needy, you can't show weakness, you can't fold, et cetera. Otherwise you just lose frame. When you lose frame, they lose respect, they pay you less, they don't feel good about paying you, etc.

Etc.

Etc. It's like a. Causes a cascade of basically. But I think these days, like, the chase is actually not a bad thing necessarily. Like one of our biggest clients who's been with us for years now, very good friend of mine in real life, I bought this guy a Rolex. That's how good of a client he is, you know, A nice Rolex too, not a shitty one. But like this guy, I mean, I was introduced to him one time. He didn't work with us, bro. I, I spam. Not spam, but like, I followed up with this guy for like a year. And it wasn't like I was hit. Please, please, please. Every day. It wasn't like that. It was like. And it wasn't even like I. Even after a certain point, I didn't even want to close him. I didn't care. I was just like, oh, I haven't reached out to him. Let me just annoy him one more time. It was like a habitual thing where like, I wasn't even thinking about the end goal. I was just messaging him once or twice a month. That's it. Over the course of a year. And then he closed. And he's been like our like a staple client for years and has sent us so much business. And we talk about that and he's like, you know, it's funny if you, every time you followed up with me when it came to the point where we actually wanted to needed someone for this specific thing. You know, I just thought like yo, this guy is relentless. We want to work with him, you know, so. So there's that too where it's like. And also even like when you meet a girl, I mean if she's a good girl, I'll put it this way, like let's say there is that like group of people like the looks maxers and which I think a lot of this stuff is really smart, you know, work on yourself, don't chase women, etc. But if you really want a good woman, you're gonna have to chase her a bit if she's really that good. And no self respecting woman who hasn't been like ran through is going to just oh my God like chase after you. You know you're going to get low if that's all your. If your lead quality when it comes to dating or client acquisition is purely relying on yeah, you know, let's attract them to me. Cool. You'll get clients and you'll get girls but you're not going to get the best quality ones because the best of the best takes work. You know, you might meet a girl who's never spoke to a guy before, really innocent, whatever, like sweet girl, you're gonna have to work, talk to her for a long time, you know, make her trust you, be a good person for her. That stuff you could call it chasing. So I think chasing and neediness can be done. Are not like they're mutually independent. You can do them, you can chase, but you can't be needy. Need is thing that for sure as soon as you cross that line of looking needy it's kind of, it's a wrap at that point. Like even if you do sign the client, they're just gonna think like oh this guy's my worker. Like they're gonna look down on you. And in some cases you have to just you know, kind of firm it and deal with being the low status freelancer. We were all there, you know, it's.

Part of the process. Part of the process. But yeah bro, I do believe in the chasing but I do believe in like high value chasing. Like where many people go wrong especially with clan acquisition bro, they follow up and they seem like needy as hell bro. They follow up meaningless stuff like send all these like cringy memes like just bumping this up like helping a saw this etc like the way that you conduct follow ups by the way, are they like value centric or like what is your methodology with follow ups?

Not necessarily I'll just send a guy. Hi. You didn't reply. Anything going on? Like what's up? I mean now things have changed because I'm not freelancing anymore and the service I offer is not like I'm not going around like bro, let me, you know, I can write a funnel for you here and there. I'll write funnels for my friends in the space but no one, not some random Tom, Dick or Harry can just DM me. Hey bro, I heard you write good copy. Can I work with you? I'm gonna tell them not. You can work with my agency on a monthly retainer, on email and SMS and if you sign a 12 month contract then I'll let one of my copywriters write a funnel for you. But that's not what we're like focused on. We're focused on the MRR and the, you know, I'm a businessman now. So my goal is to acquire clients on this service and scale our monthly recurring revenue. If I just, I could go around and make and like if I wanted to in the next few days I could close a hundred thousand dollars worth of, you know, close 10 clients on like funnels. I could easily do that and just deliver all that work in like 20 hours. But actually no, that's an exaggeration. But I 50k or whatever, it's just not what we offer. So what we do now is like, you know, if you come to us and you're already depends, you know. One thing we're doing now is building a system for sales. That's the last like the final step of really dialing in the agency, you know, because right now we're doing like 200ish a month at a very, very healthy margin. But what we're looking to do now is create a more predictable stream of new clients because the problem with organic and referral is it's not a predictable stream. So we're building out paid acquisition systems. I launched a software tool that is doing very well on paid. We're launching a newsletter for the agency and yeah, that's kind of our method to acquire clients more predictably and I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought. One sec.

What was the big idea?

The big idea?

No, it was around conducting follow up.

Oh yes. So basically, yeah, when a client comes to us, we'll do a free audit. After we audit we have a very dialed in system there. Our audits are like insanely valuable too. And we'll frame it in a way where it's like yo, these are Big problems. What we're so meticulous. Like we'll find, for example, we'll comb through their Klaviyo account and we'll find examples of a customer receiving, you know, hey, this customer got abandoned checkout email. And then they received the welcome email within 10 minutes of each other. You tell that to a nine figure brand owner and we tell them, hey, we found multiple examples of this happening on your account. This is probably happening to thousands of people who come to your brand every single day. That's not the customer experience you want. And the brand owners are like, fucking hell. Like, you're right. But most people don't know how to find that. And most people aren't meticulous enough to find that. So we find that, hey, we can fix this. We have a system in place to make sure that things don't overlap. And then we send them the price and we say, let's get on a call, run through the proposal. But most of the time they don't even get on a call. We just do the audit. I send them an email, like a sales letter email, where it's like, hey, this is what we found. Here's the full audit. You can click here and it's like a 20 page audit. And then here's our pricing. All I need is a yes to proceed. If they don't reply, then I'm just following up for eternity. Pretty much, you know, once a week, once a month, whatever it is, I'm just following up. So it's still the same thing, the same idea, like we give them something for free that's actually valuable, tell them how we would fix it. We don't tell them how, we just tell them what we would fix and then we sell them how we could fix it. And then we just follow up, follow up, follow up.

Hey bro. And then bro, like before the sales call is conducted, that acts kind of as the entry level, right? So they do, they need to consume that before they hop on a call with you, which is optional because some people pay by email.

Sorry, could you ask that again?

So like the, like the audit, right? Is that framed as mandatory to consume before they hop on a call with you? Right?

No, this is why we need to build a system because it depends. Sometimes a client will just like, you know, sometimes they don't even need the audit. They're just like, hey bro, my friend's working with you. You said you guys are good. And then I get, I'm like, cool, let's get. I always get on a call first. Because I want to know who I'm talking to and I want to know what they're looking for. And then I, at that point, bro, you just have to flex. Really, A lot of sales calls isn't like, so how do you feel about this problem on a scale of 1 to 10? Like, that's what most people are doing. I don't do that. I just get on the call and I flex about the agency. I'm like, yeah, we got this. I'm building this. Because, bro, when you have not even flexing, like, I'm actually passionate about this business and passion trumps everything. Because when you talk about something with passion, people just want to get involved. Like, that's just how the world works. That's why when I go to dinner with my clients, guys who are making tens of millions of dollars, in some cases tens of millions per month, when I talk and I tell stories, people are listening because I talk about. I don't talk about stuff I'm not passionate about, first of all. And when I talk, I talk with passion. So that's what I do. I get on it. I'm like, bro, look, so we had. And also I'm really transparent, which I think is really. It disarms them. So I'm like, I'll share my screen and I'll show them our revenue, our profit, our average client retention rate. Because these are metrics that are actually good and I'm proud of them. That's the thing. So it's like I'm showing you, hey, look, this is our average retention rate.

What?

You know, this is how our contracts work. This is how we hire people. This is how I train my copywriters. I also have this business. And then I tell them, look, last year I ran an E Commerce brand with this same in house team that I'm going to put on your account. And we did $4 million in like seven months. And then I shut the business down because we had so many payment processing issues and I kept losing money and I just overall lost money in this E Comm brand. But we scaled hard. The funnels were done in house, the email was done in house. Like, bro, you just have to flex on them on the call. And then after that, you know the how. At that point, if they're a really warm intro, they might be like, okay, how much? Let's start. And then we just start. In other cases, if they're less warm, I'll say, so look, the next logical step is that we audit the account because I can't really Bring you on board. Unless I've seen the account first. I don't want to bring on random accounts because it's not a one size fits all approach. And I'm not even lying. It's genuinely true. Like, there's no, like, buttons we can press and just apply the service to the account. It doesn't work like that. So then I'm like, yeah, let's do an audit. It's free. And then give them a deadline. Yeah, I'll turn this around within 72 hours, hit that deadline or get it done earlier. Then at that point, I just send an email. Look, give me a yes or no, or if you want, we can get on a call. But really, this is all the information. I just give them all the information they need to make a decision. Now, if you speak to a closer or a sales guy, they'll tell you, no, bro, you got to close them on the call. One call close, blah, blah. And I could do that. You know, there's ways you can close people and manipulate them into, like, making a decision on the call and signing a contract on the call. It's easy to do. I used to do that. I was younger. I'm 24 now. I just turned 24 when I was like 21, 22. I was aggressive. I would just be like, so, why don't you want to work with me? Like, why don't you want to make it? And they'd be like, oh, we need time to make a decision. I'm like, so I mean, like, what do you need to decide? Like, I already showed you the audit. Or, you know, you know, your current agencies are very good. You can do that, but you just create buyer's remorse. So the way I like to do it is like, I'll send them the entire proposal, the audit, all the findings, and make them, like, make them feel like this is the most. This is your only option. If you're looking for X, Y and Z results, like, there's no one else doing this. Like, that's it. You know? And then when they come back to you with a yes, they, you know, they spent time thinking about it and they truly believe that this is the right decision for them. When you aggressively close someone on an agency offer, I mean, they're going to have buyer's remorse, and they're instantly going to come into the relationship with the wrong frame and think like, oh, like, this guy forced me to close. And, you know, anything you mess up at that point is going to look 10 times worse. And they don't Stay for as long. And I just, I haven't tested this with numbers ad, scientific test. But I know that if I aggressively close someone who wasn't 100% certain on it, they're likely going to turn sooner than someone who I just gave all the information to and followed up with until they gave me a yes or a no.

Interesting. Bro. One thing that forced into that right is if you set up the paid traffic system right for client acquisition then being open and like let's say, okay, don't know, like the audit method works to code traffic, peeps will be like a different game. Right. How are you looking to adapt that sales process to your cold traffic leads?

I don't know yet. Honestly, we're gonna have to see. I think we're gonna, I don't know because to me it's so long term like all of this probably like get them in on a newsletter or drive traffic straight to book a call funnel and then just disqualify. Those are like the two main tests we're gonna run. The newsletter is going to be more long term, but just owning an asset where we have a, you know, a bunch of ecom brands in this newsletter and we're sending them value and then here and there we're opening cohorts to book a call and sign with the agency. I don't know bro, that's one thing I'm going to brainstorm today actually. And we're going to launch this week.

Yeah, interesting. Because bro, like Cooldown Organic is completely different than like different games. Bro, when someone comes cold, there's a lot more moving parts that come to the equation, as you know.

Yeah, of course. I think the quality of clients we get from paid traffic is going to be worse too.

Yeah, like bro, I know one of my friends, bro, he's 100. We're like, I would say like 80 paid traffic right now. And bro, 60 to 70 of his leads aren't qualified. And with those he hasn't got like a downsell mechanism in place. Meaning like he's not referring to them to like external agencies or like no down to offer. He's only worked with dream clients, like. But yeah, there is a lot of room for growth for paid ads, bro.

100. And I think as well like you know, our average LTV is more than $70,000 and that's only basing it off of clients who churn. If we're talking about active clients on the roster, it's much higher. But I can afford to spend thousands of dollars to book calls you know, qualified calls. So that's one thing that's like quite helpful about having such a high LTV is like, I don't mind paying 5K if the client's gonna pay me 70K at least over the next 12 months, you know?

Yeah, bro, like that's how you survive in my opinion, with like paid traffic. Because many people, they like emotionally react when like let's say their customer acquisition costs are rising. If you know, bro, that you can comfortably acquire a customer for 5k because your LTV is X, bro, you're gonna like beat all these minions like trying to like price drop and spend as little as possible for clients, bro. This has been game so far. By the way, midway through Plug Zarek newsletter is going to be first link in the description. Make sure you sign up, bro. Respectfully. Nevertheless, bro, we've walked over of course, like a lot of things right now I want to discuss like two things in particular, right? Is direct to consumer, brand scaling and like the differences that has with info, right? You're more heavily involved in dtc, bro. I haven't been in that space in a minute.

Right.

And within info marketing you've kind of got like the holy trinity system, right? It's the front end, the conversion mechanism, AKA the landing page and then your back end, right? With direct to consumer, I'm assuming it is the same like paid ads, the landing page and backend, right? In terms of that holy trinity, like first question is like what makes good front end systems? Like what are your clients like actively deploying that is allowing them to scale.

I mean it differs a lot, but I think one of the most recurring things we're seeing is like a good creative system to constantly pump out new creatives. That would be probably the number one thing we're seeing in brands that are scaling hard on meta. At least when you scale on native, it's a bit of a different game. It's not so much about the creative because on native, which is why I prefer running traffic. Like when I ran my E comm brand again, we didn't make. We weren't massive. We did like 3 mil in a few months or whatever. All the traffic was from Taboola and Outbrain. We didn't have Meta, Instagram, Facebook, nothing like pure Taboola Outbrain. What I like more is when you're running ads on native platforms, it's just a static image, you know, like, you know when you scroll down on MSN News and you see like this weird toenail trick reverse and it's Like a fucking ugly ass photo. And that's on Sprint.

I saw it on like Twitter was like, like a bed with some like brown liquid coming on the bed and shit. Like do they print those ads?

Print, bro. I mean we were doing, bro, you can print. There's brands doing millions and millions and millions. Our biggest brands are heavy native and heavy on Meta. But I prefer native because it's static, it's not a video ad and it's not so algorithm based like Meta where like, you know, with meta say you have a winning VSL that you're running and you're running it to a product page on Shopify and you know you're printing so you scale it, right? You're spending a million dollars a month on this, on this, this ad set. Well, what Meta will do and I don't know if it's like on purpose, but this is what I've heard from my biggest clients and what you know, all the biggest media buyers kind of allude to is that they'll basically be like, oh, so this guy can afford to spend, he can afford to pay $50 to acquire a customer and he's spending even more in scaling. Let's just raise the price and they'll just increase your CPA and then you have to make more creative and more creative and it just becomes this never ending, ending cycle where it's just concentrated. So that's why the best, like the ones who scale top of funnel hardest are like, they have a lot of creative. Another one is obviously very high average order value or LTV if they're running subscriptions because then they can afford to spend more to acquire a customer. Whereas on native it's like you have one winning ad set, that's it. You don't need to keep doing the new. We had the same ad live for like six months, bro. There would be, we, like, we, me and my business partner went on holiday for two weeks. We didn't even look at, at the ad account or anything. And like the revenue and profit stayed the same every single day because it's so funnel based. We just have to tweak the funnel. Tweak the funnel. This is a winning ad now it's everything is funnel based, which I prefer because you can so easily ab test the funnel into success. So that's what the biggest, you know, when it comes to meta, that's what our biggest accounts are doing. Another thing is obviously aov ltv. If they're running on Shopify it's a little bit harder to get the AOV up in my opinion because you know you don't have the flexibility for post purchase upsells or rebuilds. That's why a lot of them are using Checkout Champ or Funnel. Ish too or, or Sticky or Phoenix or all these other platforms.

Yeah, I heard about Checkout Champ. One example bro, like Golden Hippo Gundry MD is like on his like like landing pages, right? Like when someone commits to like one supplement. Oh bro, access denied. It's because I'm in Brazil and all these black hat direct response markets in Brazil are not let me like access this landing page. But nevertheless when you commit to like a supplement he's got of course like bundle offers, is that the best ALV boosting strategy that you've seen? Or like how are you increasing AOV for your clients?

I mean for our clients for the most part we aren't doing top of funnel stuff. It's mainly email and sms. But I can tell you how we do it in general for my brand definitely bundle. So first thing was on the checkout page testing different bundles. So we had one month, three month and six months. It's like the classic that everyone does. We tested 2 month, 4 month and 8 months, 15 and 12 months, 1, 6 and 12 2. Like every single variation we A B tested to see which one produces the most AOV. Then probably the biggest, biggest change for us was we raised the price of the product. So it was like $24 $25 for a 30 day supply, $55 for a three month supply and like $80 for six months. The 136. But we just raised the price to like 35 for one or $30 for one, $70 for three. So we just raised it by like X percent. It was funny, the conversion rate didn't change so we were just making more free money. The LV drastically increased and. And then what? Also downstream was straight after that checkout page we had a post purchase upsell. On the upsell page we upsold them a three month supply of the same product at like a steep discount. Keep in mind it cost us like 50 cents to produce the product we had. It was very from a unit economics perspective like it was a great product. It was also a shit product. That's why we stopped it. But that's a whole different thing. What happened was because we raised the price on the checkout as a test we forgot to reflect that on the upsell. So the upsell take rate just doubled because it seemed like such a good deal. Which means our AOV went even higher simply because we forgot to raise the price on the upsell too as a test. So that was a big one. Is literally just testing bundles, testing pricing and obviously to make it more profitable, you have to test leads, headlines, images, bullet points, etc. Even testing the placement of the of the bundle. So it would be like 1, 3, 6 and we would put 6 in on the left side and 3 in the middle and we would a B test all different variations. That makes a big difference too. He bro.

He bro. Yeah, like the game compared to info. Because like when someone buys like let's say it's like a lot of extension fund, right? The low ticket is 27, two order bumps. They buy that. They either redirect to a strategy session page or there is like an oto, right? With direct Consumer. If someone clicked no, I don't want this on your one time offer, you also hit them with like a downsell. And if they say yes to that, is it like also like a one time offer too? Like how does that customer journey look like?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly how you describe. If they say no, then they'll go to this oto. If they said yes, they'll go to the next one which is a different product. So if they said no to the first one, then we try and send them to another OTO which was just one month instead of three months. If they say no to that, then they go to the next one which is the sister product. Like a product that works well with it. So yes, we did have a setup like that, but most of the money was made on the first upsell.

Intriguing. Intriguing. Similar principles to info and bro as well. This question is not on the talking point, doc, but what are your thoughts on combining info marketing with direct to consumer? And what I mean by that is like I hopped on calls with people and they suggested an idea. Okay. On the front end we lure them in with like an educational E guide or e book or crash course Overcoming X problem, for example. I don't know, Gut health, right? And then when they're inside the ecosystem, we send them into ongoing subs and like direct to consumer products, right? Like have you seen brands combine info like online education and direct to consumer? If so, what are the best synergies that you've seen?

So in our client portfolio, I wouldn't say it's. It's a huge thing, but we've definitely seen it. You know, one brand that comes to mind is Performance Golf. They're like, that's what they do. They sell Golf Clubs and stuff, but also huge on info. I think it's another one that does that very well, I think the Golden Hippo. We have Golden Hippo employees in house full time at the agency, so they give me a lot of outflow from there. Yeah, those are three that come to mind. But in terms of our personal experience, I mean, like we tested an ebook on the order bump for my econ brand and it had a really low take rate. Like it wasn't even worth including. So. However, yes, I think it definitely is. Like it's a thing for sure. It's just not everyone does it and niches, you know. Another one, there's a. I can't really say the name of the brand because I'm actively trying to close them. And the guy, he's huge on Twitter. He's an anonymous account, but he's like low key as fuck. No one knows his offers, so I don't want to leak his offer, but he runs a Pilates offer and they do it very well. They have like, bro, it's an E. Comm brand, but they have a huge school community.

Bro, don't Bro. Like, it sounds super intriguing. Like I know Gunge md, they've got ebooks. I had a call with someone I can't name drop too much, but like essentially like peptides, right? And they suggested the idea, which I thought was pretty cool of like educating people on peptides, getting them to join a school community for like, okay, here's how you replenish, here's the best use, etc. You improve the product consumption, people get better results, better reviews, etc, I believe. Bro, I'm not in. Nice. Nice.

Bro.

Wait, bro, that is like a negative.

I like that. Bro.

Bro, I miss mine. Bro. Why are they banning Brazil? Bro, why are they done in Brazil? Bro, I'm in. I'm in agony. Nevertheless, bro, with this peptide offer, it's because like I believe the principles are same with info marketing and stuff. You like maximize product consumption, get people better results. You, you got more reviews, right? They also like suggested the idea of getting people inside a school community. So yeah, man, it'll be interesting to see that kind of synergy with brands like going into the new year, like in 2026 especially.

Also, we've worked with a lot of peptide and GLP1s, et cetera. And when I wrote funnels for GLP1 offers, I always, in the beginning I was confused. I was like, yo, do we have to educate the customer on like injecting themselves in the stomach because. And what I Realized after time is like, no, that market segment already exists. They already know that they have to inject themselves. So don't even mention it too much. But that's another thing that's interesting about peptides is like, I feel like right now people who are in the market for peptides, like they already know about it and they're down to inject themselves. Just something interesting. Because that was something that kind of confused me. For the first peptide funnel I wrote and I asked the client, I was like, what do you think? Should we mention this? Like, yo, you need to inject yourself. Is that like an objection we should handle? Like, is it painful? But he was like, let's test it. But he doesn't think it's gonna be an objection because the market is just there already.

Intriguing. But on there like oral peptides as well, right?

Yes, like, but like for example, NAD plus oral is not really like a thing. Like there is like a precursor which is just not as good, not as effective, you know, as like injecting it. BPC 157. There's oral versions which work well though.

Are you like, bro, are you still testing peptides? Like, are you using them?

Yes, not, not and not too much. Like I'm 24, bro. I don't want to, like, I, I don't want to jump on like performance enhancing drugs before I'm 30, you know what I mean? But I, I, I have always been an athlete my whole life, competitively in combat sports, et cetera. So you know, injuries, I've had lingering injuries which through using BPC157 I've like fixed another peptide. Now this is the funny thing, like I don't even do research. I'll just be like, oh, this one looks cool. Well, not always on some of them, like there's some peptides I'm not going to touch. Like there's one called cjc which from what I heard, again, I'm not an expert, but it like increases your body's ability to produce growth hormone which is obviously going to have huge effects on your gains and everything. Really. I haven't taken that because I don't want to with my hormones or anything. But bpc, I've used it when I've had injuries on my lower back of my shoulder. That one really helps. Copper peptide I've used for hair growth. That one helps a lot. And DSIP delta, Sleep inducing peptide. That one's pretty big too. Like that, that one is huge actually for sleep, especially if you're living like a Lifestyle, you're not dialed in if you want to get a good night's sleep in even though you've been eating junk food or staying up late and blue light maxing and you know, jet lag, whatever. That one is amazing. Gives you such vivid dreams and you wake up feeling really well rested. But I don't take it too much. Like right now I'm not using any peptides, but I have them. Oh, another one. C Max and Celan for copywriting. That's huge. Huge, bro.

Yeah, bro, I'm doing more research on peptides because we kind of got presented an opportunity which I can't be disclosing. But yeah, bro, it seems interesting. The only thing is, bro, the regulations through meta, like how do you surpass that? Like, I like the people that we're speaking with. Like they're mainly organic driven, like influencers. You reach out to these micro influences and shit like that. Right. But like how easy it, like how easy is it to like diversify with like meta ads? Money is like difficult.

It is, yeah. Well, I think they got peptides in America were at least recently like they were made like a stage two drug, which means you can sell them or something. But I don't know, honestly, you could cloak accounts, ghost account, whatever. Like you can do it kind of black hat.

Yeah.

Or I think if you present it as like a research for research purposes only that works. But I think peptides are going to be huge because they actually work. 99 of supplements just don't work. And you know, peptides are so sticky and expensive. People stay on them for a long time.

Yeah, probably like intriguing. I may spit her some. Split up some peptides. Okay, bro, man, we'll go over. Okay, look, more stuff on like direct. No direct response, specifically in DDC and info and then like transition shortly into like a service provider section and then we've got around like seven or eight questions via Twitter that we can get around to answering. But now we touched on scaling direct to consumer brands.

Right.

And how the principles are very similar to info. Right. The conversion mechanisms within Direct to Consumer. What is working best right now? Is it an advertorial funnel? Like what is that? How does that process look like?

It's really, I can't really say like one answer because if I look at our clients, like some of them are just running creatives through a Shopify product page and doing millions a month, whereas other clients are running like quite intricate funnels through native and meta with advertorials and three upsells and then Rebuilds on the back end. White hat. Of course we don't work with any black hat companies so it's hard to say. But I think advertorial is like a no brainer to test if you're even if you're running. Like I always tell my clients who are running to a product page straight from Meta, I'm like, let's just. It's such an easy test to run as well. Just put an advertorial in between there and see what happens. You know, I think advertorials like the easiest and most low friction place to start testing your funnel because you're literally just pre selling them before they land on the actual conversion page.

Yeah, similar principles to info and now like with info as well. Bro, of course you talked about your info product launches, right? Within two years you've done decent revenue.

Right.

How different have the principles been from scaling direct to consumer to scaling info? Like what are the key differences that you've seen?

Yeah, well with info, the way I did it was always through my newsletter. I never ran paid or did a huge organic clipping campaign or anything like that. There was the opportunity to, but I just think it's like a whole different business, you know. And I think as I've grown older I kind of realized I don't think I want to be that dancing monkey making videos 247 because I don't know if I just don't want to be that. Like I like being a businessman. I like that I have a business that I don't need to really show my face or dance around on camera even though I have made vlogs. But the vlogs I made was more for pure enjoyment, you know. So for me it's always just been make good content, have people sign up to my newsletter and then when the opportunity presents itself, drop something. And that's worked very well for me as like free money. But it's never been a business that I've consistently done like, oh, you know, I made 300k this month from info. It's never been like that. It's like, oh, I did a launch, I made 150k, nice, I'm gonna go buy a AP skeleton or something. You know what I mean? Like it's always been like that for me. It's never been let me get closures and all this stuff and tested it a little bit this year I realized like this is just a full time job and, and you know, the best info offers have organic and paid for the most part. I don't think organic's really my thing. Paid is cool. But then it's like if I'm running paid to an info offer, then like I'd rather just not put my face on it. And you know what I mean? Like just run a different offer, like financial or dating or something like that. So it's wildly different the way I run info compared to how we run our D2C stuff. Yeah.

Because we're like info marketing, as you said, bro, even when you were scaling your direct to consumer, bro, you've got the ads, you've got the landing page, you've got these split tests. If you were now to introduce a conversion mechanism like info marketing, the same principles apply, bro. You need your KPIs to be like dialed. You need AOV boosting systems, your backend, like recouping lost leads, bro, it's like it's a huge like business as you said, right?

Yeah, it's. It's a whole business. You know what I mean? And I. My face is not a business. I am not a business. I'm a person. So I always treated it that way. I never wanted it to make myself a business, I think.

Yeah. But the newsletter, by the way, is a cracked conversion mechanism. Like this year and before we go into like market predictions and stuff and like some service provider stuff like for your growth, right? Because I told this people, I tell this to people all the time, right? The importance of a newsletter, right? Like, how much of a profound impact has your newsletter had for like growth, meeting people, business? Like, how much of an impact has it had on you business?

Huge. I can't even tell you in numbers. Like it's been huge. It's been a thousand days and I've been sending an email every single day. So it's like, I can't even tell you. It's. So many people come up to me in Dubai like, oh, bro, I'm on your newsletter. Just random guys. Like, that's crazy. I'm meeting newsletter subscribers in real life. I'll go to dinners and people like random Ecom dinner. I get invited to. I go there, sit down. I know like two, two of my clients are there. I don't know anyone else. There's. But like everyone else knows me already from Twitter, from the newsletter. So it's been huge, bro. Also just free money when I want to launch a course. Agency clients through the newsletter. You know, we just had a. I had a guy reply to me yesterday. He lives in, in Europe, I think he lives in Spain actually. And he. Because I wrote an email about why E Comm sucks as a business model and why running. Why I decided to focus on my agency fully. And he basically replied and was like, yeah, you know, you make good points, But I make $1.2 million take home every single month from E. Com. It just depends on how you run it. So he's probably gonna become a client too. Like we. It's just being huge for everything.

Yeah. To do. That's the thing. Can't even go Tesco no more, bro. Can't even go Tesco no more. Okay, bro, brief few things right before we go to the Q A. By the way, bro, this has been massively value packed, bro. Appreciated time. I'm gonna be plugin your Twitter and newsletter link in the description so more exposure is received. People on my YouTube channel and newsletter specifically, they do come from informarketing background. Why not? But when you drop a course, why not? You know, now the next question is succeeding as an agency owner in 2026 and beyond. Right now with you, it's kind of a different customer journey because you've got the newsletter, the name association, credibility, you've worked with these brands, right? But let's say now I'm an agency owner making 10k a month, right. Like, how can I survive in today's market? Like, what do I need to be doing every single day in order to survive.

As a agency owner making 10k a month. Yeah, you just need more clients. Honestly, I think lead, like you need a lead pool. Constantly prospecting. You need to focus so much on, you know, a good surveys. I mean it's always been that way and always will be. It's just more clients, better systems. Improve your systems and better service quality and better people, you know, and that's kind of it. And then scale, build out pods, scale more, build out more pods, scale more, build up more pods. It's, it's literally just like that's how it is. Hire more people, hire project managers, hire account managers, get senior people involved who give you new ideas. So I think that's a big one. You know, that's fundamental. Like it's not nothing, there's no tricks.

Yeah. It just principles and bro, someone doing like 15 bands a month, right, with the agency, do you even like suggest for them to have a personal brand or like post YouTube videos or like what should they be doing in order to grow?

I think the answer is yes. But it's kind of weird because I never did that. I never, I never. I mean I tested on LinkedIn like posting about email marketing stuff. But it just always felt like, man, this is nerdy, bro. I don't want to be on the Internet talking about, oh, here's 10, like with my face on a thumbnail with email templates pointing at it with a red, you know, I mean, that's not me. You come work with us. You know, I'm on the back. Like, all I'm doing is just agency, better team, better service and you, you come work with us. You come work with us. That's it. You know, there's no. And I. That's funny though, because organic is huge for growth. Of course. Like, I'm sure if I drop one YouTube video about an email marketing case study, which I probably will start doing just to increase pipeline. But yes, I think for sure doing that stuff is super helpful, especially on YouTube or Twitter. It's just not something we ever really went. It's not really an alley we ever went down because I never thought it was necessary. I think slow organic growth has been better for us because if you look at our revenue over the last like two years, it's always been super, super like this. It's never been like this, you know, it's never been down, up, down. It's always been like consistent, consistent, consistent. And you know, I'm thinking long term, like I want to be able to. I mean, every single month I'm taking out like $40,000 to throw in the stock market and to throw in bitcoin and I've built myself a decent portfolio. And as long as things continue to grow, and they will, because I'm working on it every single day, I mean, there's no reason I won't be set in like one year or two years. You know, not set forever, but like, and obviously there's other wealth building vehicles that can catapult me into like a nine figure net worth that I can look into. But you know, that's how I view the agency as like a slow wealth building business that I don't want to, you know, I don't view it as like, okay, I got an agency. This is going to be my stepping stone to the next thing. Like, no, I have an agency and that's who I am. I am the guy who owns this agency and we're going to keep growing and stacking, mrr. And you know, if you got a business making half a mil a month at like, I mean, at our current predict like projection, we'll do half a mil a month and like a 40 to 60%, not 60 is kind of pushing it, to be honest. A 40 margin. And that's free money, you know, that's money that I don't need to keep in the account to reinvest into inventory or ads. That's money that I can take and deploy into the market.

So is that the reason behind you going all in on the agency? Just like the long term potential around it? Correct.

Well, all because I'm. I've always been. I have like a huge appetite for risk. Always have. I'm also very impulsive. And this 2025, you know, the business grew, but my personal portfolio of investments and cash took a hit because of my appetite for risk and miscalculated decisions. And I also got kidnapped and lost a bunch of money in that.

Bro. What? Wait, are we. Bro, wait one minute, bro, are we able to elaborate on that story? That'd be a killer headline.

I know, I know. I don't really know, bro. It's like an ongoing legal case, so I can't really get into it too much. But the gist of it is I was kind of set up and in something, I was betrayed by someone I trusted and I lost. I was kidnapped. I was held captive with a bag on my head, handcuffed for like eight hours and at gunpoint too. And I lost a bunch of money. I lost. The total losses were multiple six figures in like liquid crypto that I had. So that happened. And then I realized, like, yo, life is too. You can lose your life in like a minute. You know, people for. People don't realize that. People don't really think it's all fun and games until you got done to your head and you got your hands cuffed and someone's asking you for your trust wallet code. Then you're like, okay, this is how life. You know? So I think that made me realize, like, yo. And again, it didn't put me into survival mode because first of all, I didn't lose everything. I just lost some of my crypto. But it put me into a mindset where it's like, yo, you need to be a bit frugal. You can't just blow your funds. And then I really sat down and I thought to myself, after I got away, obviously I didn't really get hurt, but I was like, I just looked at everything I have. Like, this is what I have. My skills, my business, my personal brand, my network, et cetera. My mindset, my stress tolerance. And I was like, okay, what is the smartest thing and the lowest risk thing I could do over the next 10 years focus on this business, which I've had for three years now, which consistently makes me a lot of money, allows me to invest and build wealth long term, grow this business, make it an asset that could one day be acquired, which is kind of what we're working towards right now. Because I think agency acquisitions are going and are becoming a big thing right now because people are starting to wake up to the fact that an agency in so many ways is such a great business model compared to direct to consumer. And direct to consumer is a great business model too. But agency is just amazing. Like, you have such a high ltv, so much more profitable, so much more consistent, so much less risk if you run it well. So I was like, yeah, this is literally the highest IQ thing I could do. And also I want to have kids and stuff and get married young and I want to be able to give my kids a good life. And don't get me wrong, I'm still taking big risk when it comes to the market and crypto. But I just realized like, everyone has this pipe dream of like overnight becoming nine figures and you have to just ground yourself and be like, let's look at all the most successful people in the space. Okay, there's a few info guys who popped off on organic. Where are they now? Most of them aren't around, bro. Most of them, their organics dried up. I speak to their closers, I speak to their sales teams. I know what's going on. I know what happens when they launch webinars and they project X and it does X, you know, it does like a quarter of what they thought it would. Just organic's not the same. And I realized like that that idea of like slingshotting yourself into like a huge net worth overnight is just so dumb to even focus on because yeah, it's just not smart to focus your effort there. And most people unfortunately don't have a vehicle like mine. And I realized I need to be great. Like that's what this whole situation, that's another thing about the situation that happened to me is like, it made me more grateful. Like, yo, I have this vehicle that I can provide value with a legitimate service that I'm proud of selling because I put so much work into it and make so much money from it and secure my future. So that's kind of the main thing right now. I still, you know, have a good life. Of course, I'm very grateful that after this hap, after I lost money this year, I didn't have to like downscale or Downsize my lifestyle. So, yeah, that's kind of also, you know, I even started ecom thinking, like, okay, E comm is the next thing, and I made millions in E comm and don't have a dollar to show for it because payment processing credit lines have to put money in to pay off the credit line because Stripe was holding our money, and so on and so forth. So I realized, like, the grass is not always greener. In fact, it's almost never greener on the other side. If you have something good, your best bet is just stick with it. And that was the big shift I made this year, bro.

That's interesting as hell, bro. Like, bro, principally thinking and like, character trait driven, right? That situation that happened, like, what other epiphanies did you receive that kind of made you think, like, oh, my God, bro, like, this is the way that life truly is. Like, what else did you realize? Because, bro, most people, by the way, bro, in that situation, they would forward, bro. They would lose momentum. They would dwell on this bad situation for months. They would get there for the gas. Like, what other systems did you pick up on that, like, improved your character trait system, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I haven't actually even spoken about this online. It's funny enough, I probably will make a YouTube video about it soon, but I think another one. I. I think the main thing was just, like, trusting my gut, because I always had, like, my gut is never, ever, ever wrong. I'm always wrong. Not always. The only thing that happens is I don't trust my gut. And then I get into a situation where it's like, oh, if you trusted your gut, this wouldn't happen. And now it's like, my gut feeling. I don't know what it is. Since I was born, I just had this gut feeling about everything. Any person I meet, it's like, nah, or, oh, he's. He's actually a cool person. I've never been over by somebody or never. And when I say over, I've never. It's not like I'm constantly getting screwed over. My whole life. This is the first time, you know, I ever incurred a loss like this as a result of trusting somebody else's word. But even small things like, you know, you onboard a client and you have a. They just seem kind of weird on the first call. Like, maybe they constantly complaining about, oh, we hate agencies. Right? If someone says that to me on the call, like, why the are you here then? You have such a bad. And like, you know, that's a Gut feeling thing. Also the way they talk. I just pick up on this stuff and I'm like, you're not going to be a good client. You're probably going to turn. I don't even want to deal with you. And now it's just, I have even more trust in my gut. And as a result, I just don't like. I mean, this year I've kind of gone ghost on so many people because, like, I have my friends and that's it. There's nothing really outside of that. Like, I'm not meeting anyone. If you're not a client, cool. You know, there's a lot of people I respect, but it's like, I just, I'm not meeting you, bro. Like, can't be bothered because I have my friends I have my. I'm working on. And then there's some people I meet who I'm like, you're a prick or you're a liar or you're a scammer or you're not really what you claim you are. And no one seems to pick up on it except for me. And then I always end up. Right. So now I think a big epiphany I had was just like, you know, when that gut feeling comes, don't, don't ignore it. It's everything that's.

That's real game. That's real game.

Yeah.

But as I said, mostly would fall in that situation. And I know that this is like an extreme situation, but like, I liked what Alan Sultanic mentioned. There was one quote, it was like, how can you lose when every time you lose, you gain something in return? Right. Now, I understand that your situation is completely broke. Like most people would fall in that situation, but that loss allowed you to gain the epiphany that you've of course received. And now you've got clear directions and scaling the agency, right? So like, you can't lose when every time you lose, you gain something anyway. So everyone, that's a, that's a huge lesson now, bro. So far this has been massively value packed. I've got like a headline idea. If I'm not. If I'm open to using it around. Never really like never revealed before these kind of like these secrets.

Right.

I'm not going to go heavy into the specifics in regards to it, but wanted to finish this off with like some like a few questions that we received on Twitter. And then we can of course finish it off or do like a final CTA and then. Yeah, but man, this will be like, there was A real game discussed. There was a real game discussed. Now the first question I believe we touched on it like the roadmap to you took to find clients when you started freelancing. If someone's starting today pitching long form copy and cold traffic funnels, where would he look for clients and how to assess the client requirements for making right samples for them. We kind of touched this like fundamentally by like where should he look for clients and how to assess these client requirements for making samples.

Facebook ads library Just search for brands that are running advertorials and if they're actively running a lot of ad sets and different creative then you know that they're invested in growth and scaling and are test actively testing new copy. Make a new sample of them, write them an advertorial headline and lead and then just start mailing out samples.

Hey bro. And then you just say like hey first name I came across I don't know your ads library. I crafted a sample for you. Here it is right. Are you detached on a call in the first message? Yeah he bro he favorite doctor book that nobody talks about. Zarak touched on these at the start of the podcast. But what are some like hidden gems that helped you along your journey?

I think scientific advertising is underrated because it's such a small book. It's like a hundred pages. But I think that book maybe it's overrated. I think everyone's read it but I think it's underrated because it feels like yeah scientific advertising but they read it once. I think everyone should read that book like 10 or 20 times because every time you read it you learn something new.

Yeah, that was a heat book. Agreed. Scientific advertising Claude Hopkins go away book and prompting AI for copy deeper like deep research. Zach we touched on this fundamentally I'm not sure if Xarex open to revealing his exact systems DK legendary lineup will be ripped and insane. Bro's bringing on an actual marketing is good. Yeah yeah. Respectfully now here as well I believe we've got two more how big is the learning how big the learning curve really is. You see old heads preach practice but then you see 20 year olds saying that they are Gary Halbert Rena like running up crazy offers, especially info. I guess it's all about longevity of offers and consistency of success. But I don't know, you tell me like how big the learning curve really is. I mean bro, like as Zarek mentioned countless times bro, his mindset around longevity is already allowing him to differentiate when many people are kind of in the space of like okay, how can I do an organic launch and make as much money as humanly possible? Zarek knows his exact KPIs and numbers for longevity. Like Zarek. Like anything else to elaborate on this point around the learning curve.

I mean the learning curve never stops and as soon as you think it stopped, you cooked, you know, just never stops. You're always learning.

Always remember student of the game Ryan Holiday equals enemy. Yeah. Final one, bro. Predictions on future of both Ecom, DDC and info. I find that the more locked in one is, the more actually they can tell the future of the game. Yeah but man, with like direct consumer, like how do you see the market changing? Like of course AI is evolving and stuff but this year like how is the industry going to change?

I think just more TikTok shop, Amazon stuff. Brands are taking it more seriously. Chat GBT has an integration with Shopify now. D2C is still going to be a thing, but I think so much shopping is going to be done on platform. I think that's going to be something that's going to continue to grow. Besides that, I can't think of any major change. I think product quality is a huge one too. Like people are getting sick and tired. You just shit products and the brands that really do well, it's like all about product.

Yeah, it's like with they're unveiling ads, right for like free users. Like are they going to allow like let's say a direct to consumer brand to be publishing ads there? Then they can like one click buy it or like are they redirected to the landing page? Because I haven't looked into it.

I'm sure, I don't know but I'm sure that's, that's the plan, bro.

That'd be interesting, bro. That'd be interesting with info. To be honest my bro, it's the same things as they are cleaned out like in, like in. Instead of having a dialed in product that gets results with info is actually having a program or teachings that genuinely gets results. That's how you optimize for longevity. Like simple as that. Pabro Zarak. Once again, my bro, this has been massively value packed. A lot of things that were of course not disclosed elsewhere. And I'll be dropping of course everyone. Guys, please, please, please. Respectfully, first link in the description. I'll be dropping Zarak's newsletter. Every single day he drops a newsletter to his list. Any questions? Of course, hit me up inside the comments section. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And Zarek, my bro, once again appreciate it. I remember from direct response demons to now. Been a great journey, bro. It's been a great journey. And bro man, best of luck with growing the agency, bro. The epiphany is there. And yeah bro man, once again appreciate my brother.

Appreciate you, bro. It's been good to catch up and we'll be in touch for sure.

Amen, my bro. Take care, my bro. Bye bye bye.

Bro.

That was heat, bro. Yeah, super heat, bro.