Sabri Suby built King Kong from $50 to $20 million by making 150 cold calls a day, waking at 4am, and working 18-hour days for a year. Once he had capital, he scaled with paid ads reaching 150,000 businesses daily. He hires only when revenue supports it and uses a "King's audit" to delete, automate, and delegate his way out of the business.
Questions this video answers
$50
150 cold calls per day
Within the first two days
4:00am
About 18 hours a day
Chapters
If you've only got a small amount of cash reserves, it's very stressful and you just constantly are thinking about how you're going to pay for that person.
How did you grow King Kong over the first couple years? Were you practicing and working in the trenches in order to hone your skills more? More so not only on the digital side of things, but obviously you've been working in sales over the years. But what was the progression you took over the first few years to really grow that business?
For me, I started it with sweat equity. I didn't have any venture capital. I did not have any rich family members or like a bunch of inheritance or bar mitzvah money or there was no other endowment in my name, none of that stuff. Right. I had to pull myself up from my bootstraps and go out there with $50 and roll up my sleeves and get to work. So I just use sweat equity. I use my time. And I got out there and I started making 150 cold calls per day to businesses that were running Google Ads and to offering to get them ranked on the left hand side in the free listings of Google. And that was me all day long. I would wake up at 4am, go for a run, get myself in peak state, get, get into the, you know, get into my home bedroom where I had a computer that my girlfriend so kindly bought me. And I would start jamming on the telephones. 150 cold calls a day. And I did that, you know, until I got my first client in the first two days I think it was. And then I just kept on grinding, selling by day, working by night. I was working 18 hours a day and I did that solid without coming up for air for a year. And then I had enough money to start using capital instead of human capital to go out there and get customers. And I applied the same, you know, strategies that I was doing for my clients businesses to grow my own business. Really taking that message that I was using over the phone to 150 businesses a day and cold calling them. And I took that message and I put that in the forms of ads and VSL's and landing pages. And instead of calling on 150 businesses a day, I was able to call on 150,000 businesses in a day. And that's when things really started to take off.
Over the years, how did you know how to make the correct hires and how do you distinguish? How do you make sure you find good talent?
Yeah, I don't think that you know how to make the right Hires, right? In the beginning it's, you know, obviously looking back, in hindsight, it's, that's where, you know, all the wisdom comes from. But in the beginning, the way that I ran it through was what am I doing and is it going to make the company money, right? Is it going to move the money needle or is it just busy work? So like, I knew that like the thing that was going to be able to put myself in a position to grow a business was that I needed to have money. Like I couldn't hire anybody, I couldn't do anything until I had money in the bank, right. And then when you get to your first hire, if you've only got a small amount of cash reserves, it's very stressful and you just constantly are thinking about how you're going to pay for that person. So I just kept on selling and I start just, I started just delegate, automate and outsource the things that weren't the selling and hiring people to do those things and then manage those people so I could keep the main thing, the main thing which is to bring, get cash in the door, the oxygen, the lifeblood that just pumps into the lungs of a business. And then I did that and I was fortunate to hire some incredible people that still work with me today. You know, my first two hires are still with me. They still, they run divisions within my company and that makes me incredibly proud. And I've got, you know, incredible team members that have been, you know, a part of the journey. And I think that, like my advice to people is that when you're building a business, you want to make yourself redundant at each step of the way. So you want to do what I call a King's audit and you want to audit your time and you want to have a look at where are you spending the bulk of your time, right? And is that a revenue producing activity? Does it ring the cash register? If it doesn't, then the first step is to try and delete it if it doesn't. And sometimes a lot of the stuff can just be erased. It doesn't even need to be done, it's just being done. And then the other thing is to automate it. And then if you can't automate it, the third step is to delegate it and hire somebody to do those things. And as you go along your journey as an entrepreneur, there are different ascension points that you reach to. And at all of those different points, doing that audit is incredibly valuable because you spend your time on different things. Hey guys, if you're enjoying these videos, please like subscribe and hit the bell button as we're dropping a video like this every other day on YouTube. And if you've got any questions, just leave a comment below with hashtag heysubree and I will do my best to get to it.
