5 Live Callers Get Brutal Startup Advice from Hormozi & Shaan

I want to try something different. Okay. It's the Hormozy Hotline. Take 5 listeners out of the crowd, have them call in, tell us about their business, tell us a business problem.

Cool.

So this is the Hormozy Hotline. Are you down?

Let's do it.

Okay, we got Flo here. Flo, I want you to give us the— what's the name of your business? And give us the 1-minute description of what you do, Give us a sense of where you're at revenue-wise, and then we're gonna get to what's your biggest business problem, and we're gonna try to help you out here in a couple of minutes.

So like I said, I'm Flo. I live in London. I own a company called Wentworth Protection. And so what we do is we install, uh, security bollards on people's driveways. Now, if you don't know what that is, basically like a metal pole that you put on your driveway to stop your car from getting stolen. Um, I started this business as a side hustle in January 2024, so we're now like a year and a half in. It's just me and my best mate. We both still do this as a side hustle. We've got a couple of installation guys. First year we did just 250K revs. This year we're probably going to do 500K. And kind of the biggest issue we're having right now is content.

The problem you solve is people in the UK are getting their cars stolen and there's some— you put a pole in the driveway that prevents that.

That's correct. Yeah. Car theft is just through the roof in the UK, especially around London. So this pole comes up through your driveway and it means even if someone gets into your car, they just actually can't drive it away.

They're stuck. Okay, got it. So you get $250K year one, $500K, you're on pace for $500K this year. And give us the quick and dirty on how are you getting those customers today? Because you said it's a side hustle. So where, where are you getting business?

Yeah, yeah. The first 3 months is basically purely door-to-door Saturdays and Sundays, just knocking on doors, which, by the way, in the UK, people find that really, really strange.

Yeah.

But now It's about kind of a 50/50 mix between Google Ads, just like search, and mainly SEO. So we get loads of organic leads coming in as well, and then a little bit of referral in there.

Okay.

All right. How much do the poles cost?

And so average ticket's about $1,000.

Okay. So what's— so what's your— what's cost you to install?

We go on roughly 50/50 margin. So like paying the installation guys and buying the units, it's about 50% of ticket.

Okay, got it. So you make $500 in gross profit per. Does that sound right?

Correct.

Okay, got it. So what do you want to have happen?

I want more leads.

Okay, got it. So what stopped you from doing more door-to-door?

Honestly, it's a time constraint currently. It seems like the conversion rate on door-to-door and the amount of time that it takes, it just doesn't equate to extra effort put into content or writing more blog posts or trying to reach out to commercial partners, that kind of stuff.

Okay. So one of the big things is like, I think you have to get a little bit narrower in terms of how you want to get leads because you're super resource constrained right now. Like you don't have a ton of capital that you can like put to work or anything like that. And so it's like you've got, you've got search, you've got SEO. You just mentioned commercial partners, which I'm guessing you're doing through outbound. Is that how you're getting it? And you also said content.

Yeah, correct. Content is basically the nut that I'm trying to crack. I inherently know that content can be really big for this business. But it's just like we did a viral TikTok 2 days ago, did a million views and it's just not translating to any increase in kind of lead flow.

Yeah. So, okay. I want to, I want to rewind for a second. I think that, so fundamentally, cause you have these, you have these 3 ways that you can reliably get customers and then you have this other way that you would like to get customers, but aren't really getting customers from yet. Does that sound right?

Yeah.

Okay. So why not, like, what are you spending on, on, on search right now?

About 3K a month.

Okay, what do you make back on the 3K?

LTV, CAC, about 3 to 1.

3 to 1, okay, so what stops you, so you're making 9 grand a month roughly off Google?

Yeah.

Okay, and then SEO's bringing in how much?

About the same.

Okay, what do you spend on SEO?

Honestly, I'm just doing it all myself. I buy backlinks every now and again, but I'm just doing all the writing and all the technical SEO myself.

Okay, got it. And that's bringing like $9,000 a month as well?

Pretty much, yeah. It's about 50/50 these days.

And you stopped doing door-to-door, right? Now you're not doing it anymore?

You stopped doing it because you got tired of it or because it stopped working?

No, it's just, it was such a grind in the early days.

It was like, that was the way for us to get the business off the ground because we had no money and we just had to hustle, speak to people. But at the moment, it's like, I still have a job.

I have a kid.

My partner has a job. He has a kid.

Yeah.

And trust is find anytime.

Yeah.

To go door-to-door.

No, heard, heard. Okay. So, and then the rest is referrals?

Uh, yeah, it's referrals. There's a few little platforms like Nextdoor, Checkatrade, Bark. Like if we get a dribble in through those.

But, but those must be small cuz you basically said about $10K from each of these. That's $20K a month. That's $480K a year. That's basically what you said you're on track to do.

So those are 20, right? So that would get us to 250. You said your run rate's 500?

Yeah, correct. So a lot of this is pounds. So the numbers I gave you—

Oh, all right, whatever. Big picture, um, more, better, new, right? So if you've got, if you've got search and you've got SEO, you do, I will, I will, like, I am staring at the door-to-door thing. I'm not gonna, I will come back to it, but what do you have to make in order to quit the job?

We could quit right now. I'm just a little bit of a pussy, to be honest.

Okay, fair. Well, then how many hours are you dedicating to doing this versus the job?

It's like 40 hours on my job and 50 hours on this.

Heard.

Every waking moment I'm working on this business.

I got it. So let me ask you a quick question. If you actually just went door to door for 40 hours a week, I'm not saying you do this, but I just like to ask the hypothetical. If you went door to door, basically replace your job with spending 100% on door to door. I'm not going to say you do that, but just hypothetically, Would you be able to replace your income if you did that?

I think probably not.

I mean, it just, just like running really quick numbers. Let's say I get, let's say I do make 2 sales a week or 3 sales a week from door-to-door, which would be really impressive for us at this point.

That would bring in $1,500 gross, 6 a month.

That wouldn't cover it.

Okay, great. So then what stops you from spending like $10,000 a month on on Google Ads?

Yeah, great question. So we just scaled our Google Ads from $1,500 up to $3K.

Okay. And it's taken us about 2 or 3 months to get that to scale.

Okay.

Flo, one of the things I love about business is that every problem has already been solved. And so one of the things I would ask is, can you work backwards from a business that already is doing what you're doing? So are you the only guy doing this? Are you the only company that offers this service? And if not, who's that company and how do they get customers?

Yeah, yeah.

There's a couple of much, much bigger players in this space. And I think what they've cracked is they're just really, really, really good at organic. They just get like maybe 5 to 8x the amount of traffic that we get.

When you say organic, I don't think you're saying that the incumbents are amazing at TikTok. What do you actually mean when you say they get organic?

Sorry, I literally mean like Google search. Okay.

So they rank high.

SEO.

SEO is how they get their traffic.

Okay.

Heard.

Well, let me ask you this question. Like, so if I bought your business tomorrow, my first ads would probably be Meta ads. Because like making Meta ads work. Yeah. Making Meta ads work. And the thing that you have is one, you have a clear fear. Like people are afraid of cars, their car getting stolen. And I'm sure you can put some stats up on the board that shows like big arrow to the right. Oh my God. Cars are leaving. Right. And you also have a service that is, that is tangible and visible. Like you can demonstrate it. Much harder to say, hey, like in an ad, I'm really good at SEO. It's way better to be like, look, car got stolen. Like literally you just like, like you could just do a before and after of like, look, guy with a mask on gets in the car, walks out, and then right afterwards, guy with a mask gets in and then he's like, oh no, this one. It's literally the ads that I would mirror are the carjack ads. If you, so Google that, it's the little like the—

The bar you used to put on your steering wheel.

Yeah, the bar. Yeah, you put on the steering wheel. Those ads, and then you just go local targeting do a, you know, 10-mile radius or whatever that is in kilometers. That, I would bet you right now, would get you the— like, that would scale like really high. Like, you could probably get to 10,000, 20,000 a month.

We did, we did Meta ads in the early days, and I told myself that didn't work, but it was just the creative was just terrible.

Yeah, I'm sure it was. I mean, advertising works. It's not like Meta ads don't work, right? It's like you just needed to get the process down. But if you just do a very simple narrative ad with your iPhone, demonstrating the product and the problem that it solves and keep it under 60 seconds, I guarantee that you'll be able to get leads. And then all you have to do is just call them, get a deposit on the phone for you to show up, and then, and then roll the deposit towards the, the $1,000, which is like, hey, it's $100 for an assessment. It's just to make sure that you show up. And if you suck at sales, then say, hey, just put a card down and then I'll only bill you if you don't show. It's just to make sure, because I'm going to send a truck and a guy out there. It's just, we don't want to get no-showed. Most people will be fine with that. And then you just roll it right into the $1,000 if they just decide today. And that gives you a little bit of urgency in the sale when you show up.

Even better, we don't even have to show up.

We, we can just, we can just do the whole thing.

We don't, we don't really do site visits. Can I ask you a question, Alex?

Wait, you just install it on first go? There's no scouting?

Explain that. So you just go out and install it first shot, right? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, they just send us a picture. We say, let's go for it. They send us a 50% deposit. Yeah. Okay.

Great. So that's, I mean, literally it's a phone sale. So if I'm looking at all this stuff, the first thing I would do is say like, let's see if I could triple, you know, triple Google Ads. You already went to 3K. I'd be like, can we get to 9? And then it's like, cool. That buys you your job back, right? If you got it, if you tripled and you kept ROAS the same, would that allow you to quit?

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Right. And I would, before doing Meta, I would keep hitting Google Ads until I can't do it anymore. I would buy all the traffic. And then once I'd maxed out Google locally, I would 100% put all my stuff in Meta ads.

What's the rationale on keeping going on Google rather than just running with, like, doing now every, every extra penny into Meta?

Because you haven't done it yet.

Got it.

If you're making money somewhere, make as much as you can first, and then once you can't make any more, more, better, new.

So, Flo, one last thing that I think is important is You basically said something that I think is emotional but not logical. And I think you could counter either emotion with emotion or logic with logic, but don't try to counter emotion with logic. So you have— you basically were like, I haven't quit my job. Why? Because I'm being a bit of a pussy about it. So I think you got to have a conversation with yourself about how you feel about that. Do you want this to be a forever side hustle or would you actually like this to be your main business? And if so, where would you get the courage and the conviction to do this? Because you have some evidence. Do you have currently enough evidence? Would you like some more evidence? What would that take? Because, you know, you're going to be limited by your own bandwidth in this business. And so we could give you 5 strategies that would work. But if you only have 10 hours when you're fatigued to go execute them, you're going to walk away saying, ah, it didn't really work because you didn't really try it. And so I think for your long-term success, you got to be able to go all in on this. And it maybe, maybe now's the time. Maybe it's not only, you know that, but it sounds like that's something to address today and try to figure out how do I want to think about that? I know how I have been thinking about it, but how do I want to think about that going forward? Right? What's the narrative? What's the narrative to myself about that? So don't answer that now. But I think that's something worth doing.

That's a—

that's between you and your therapist. So, but I think it's important to answer that. I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have gotten success started on the side. I don't know a lot of entrepreneurs who finished with it as on the side. Right? So unlikely that that's your end outcome with this, is that this stays a side hustle. And so the question is, how do you get there from where you are today?

Yeah, yeah. I love nothing more than, than being in the game. So I think that's where I'm headed.

All right, Flo, we've been charging you $1.99 a minute, so you owe us some money now. Thank you for calling the Hormozy Hotline. We will see you later.

Thanks, dude. Appreciate you.

Let us know what happens.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

See you at the book launch.

Hey, let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsor, HubSpot, who's making this episode possible. Listen, if you're trying to build something big and I'm talking about $100 million or $1 billion company, one of the most important things is to focus on the market. Where is the opportunity? You are like a surfer on a surfboard and you're trying to find the biggest, best wave possible for you to go on. Well, HubSpot has put together a cheat sheet that is studying and sort of reverse engineering what's working today. So they're looking at the top performing industries that you could be looking at. The funding routes that work the best, and the growth strategies that the fastest growing companies are using. So if you want a one pager that is a cheat sheet on the, uh, the big company playbook, you can get it right now. Just either scan this QR code that you see on the screen or click the link in the description below. All right, back to the show. All right.

All right. What's up? Who am I speaking to?

Speaking to Carson. Nice to meet you.

Carson. Pleasure, man. Tell us about the business.

So yeah, my name is Carson. I have a recruiting business. I tell my clients hiring should make you money, not cost you time. That's why I built Diamond Connect.

I'm a customer. I use this business.

Work with a lot of companies like True Classic, X-Cloud, and Hard Rock.

Okay.

Full cycle recruiting.

Got it. So you do support or what, what, what roles do you recruit for?

Yeah, really all roles. Junior to C-level roles, did a CMO for Sean, did performance, creative, retention, social media, head of ops.

So a lot more on the marketing and revgen side.

Carson, here's your ad, Carson. Carson found me my CMO for my e-com business who's now the CEO of the e-com business.

That's as good as you could do. There's your plug. All right, what's revenue right now?

Right now, for last year, did $1.6 Okay. This year, tracking to hit around 2.

Okay, got it. So, uh, what's the, what's the issue? What's holding it back?

Few things. Uh, being a contingency-focused recruiting agency ultimately allowed us to, you know, get a lot of clients in the door. It does come with flaws of pausing roles, slow communication, how to let's get in the game. Um, and so I think really like We've learned once we unlock the first hire, they see the value and stick with us.

Mm-hmm.

Really just trying to focus on kind of building that first role with them to show them what we're doing.

Okay. And what's the issue with your current way of doing it?

We, we have like a really good process. It's just we have a lot of clients that sort of like pause, pause roles. There's a lot of potential on the table for candidates that we have that are interviewing. And I think there's a lot more potential of Kind of getting more of a streamlined process, me getting less in the weeds.

Carson, let me ask you a question, 'cause I think ask a better question, you'll get a better answer. Is your question, how do I streamline operations? Is this an operational question or is this a scaling question of, okay, I did $1.6, I did $2, I want to get to $5 or $4 a year, and right now I don't feel like I'm able to do that because of either A, my business model, or B, my operation. So what is your question on the business model and the growth side of things, or is it on the operation?

Yeah, I would say it's more on the business side, like the first you said. I guess I kind of said it in two questions, but mainly I want to scale, right?

We're about to hit $2 million this year.

I see a lot of potential. I want to figure out how do I take this contingency recruiting business to $5 to $7 million being so lean.

Yeah. So how do you get customers right now?

Really like 98% referral. You know, I have a really good, really good palombe, really good Cutler Bay and a lot of people in the e-com space.

This is such a niche space.

Yeah, we get a lot of referrals that way.

Got it. So, um, if I mean fundamentally, I'll say, I'll ask a different question. If you doubled the amount of people who are asking for, you know, roles right now, would you be able to handle it?

I would say yes. I think I would need to, um, bring on maybe a few extra recruiters at scale, but ultimately like these clients used me. Because of me and the relationships we have.

Sure.

I'm trying to figure out how do I stay in the lead, but also kind of still ramp up and scale, right? Like, yeah.

So I'll cut you off for a second just to— yeah. So basically the, the question that I'm asking, I'll tell you the intention by the question, which is, are you demand constrained or are you supply constrained? Right. And so right now, if I were to say I can go send you more business, could you handle it? If the answer is yes, then we don't focus on the supply side. We focus on the demand side. If it's I could handle more, but I, I, I've got more people than, than I can handle right now and I need to go get more recruiters. So which side is it?

Yeah, I think we can handle more.

Okay, great. So your demand constraint. All right. So from the demand perspective, if you only have referrals, then you need to have an input output in the business to get more leads.

Correct.

Okay. So, so it's actually going to be so best way versus the best way for you will be two different things. So you've got your you've got the core 4. Have you read the book?

Correct.

Right. So you've got, you've got warm outreach, you've got cold outreach, you've got content, and then you've got ads. And then on the other side, you've got affiliates, right? Okay. So based on your background, you get recruits via outbound?

Yeah, like that's outbound, outbound, or really all referrals directly from clients. Yeah.

When you, when you recruited my CMO, it's because you're, you're blasting people on LinkedIn. Hey, would you be interested? Hey, I got some— you're doing outbound to get candidates, which means you have the skill and muscle of outbound already. You're just only using it for your supply. What if you used it for your demand?

Ah, that makes sense.

Light bulb moment. Let's go.

So there we go. So fundamentally, you already know your, your metrics for your outbound funnel, which is like, you know, we do 100 connects and then 100 connects get us whatever, 5 meetings, and then 5 meetings turn into 1 fix or whatever it is, right? All you have to do is just turn that external. Same exact funnel.

Yeah. Crew, just focus more on the outbound.

Yeah, because it's your main game. It's your main game. I wasn't going to be like, hey man, learn ads. It's just like, if you were like, you know what, we're really— because the secondary thing, I'll just be transparent with you, because of the nature you're recruiting, you probably have access to very good marketers. And so if you could go recruit a CMO who could run the ads for you to go get those customers, that would also be a play. But in terms of if I'm going to give like the absolute, I had to bet my baby on the fact that you'd be successful. I would say do more of the thing that you're already doing. Just change the, change the target. That's it. And since you've recruited for a whole bunch of different roles, recruiting for customers, if you think about it like that, is I think the natural step. And you can for sure scale that to the moon.

For sure.

Question on the, like, being a contingency focus, right? Like, a lot of skin in the game. Obviously it's low risk for them, high reward for us. How do I really kind of like demand sort of more communication, making sure clients are pausing roles, there's a lot of things out of our control that scale.

Yeah.

I'm trying to figure out how I—

Two things, two things. So, or three things. So one is gonna be the customer vetting, right? You have to have certain types of customers. If you have shitty customers, they're gonna treat you shitty. If you have good customers, they tend to be more professional. So part of that's gonna be what is our ideal customer? Number one. Number two, the contingency thing. The question is whether it's a feature or a bug, right? Like this may just be a, and like this happens all the time. I'll have these conversations where I'm like, what if we decide this isn't a problem anymore and all of our metrics of the business are fine? So what are your margins right now?

Probably about 50%.

Right.

Okay. So your margins are fine. And the issue that you have right now is just like, it's like sometimes customers don't do what I want them to. And I get it. And your preference is not for that. So the only tiny tweak you could consider when you have more demand, but you don't have that, which is why you have no leverage, is that you can say, listen, our way of doing this is that you put a card down. It is success-based. But if you don't follow our process, we bill you a penalty. Because you're wasting our time. So you can do that. It's an easy, easy fix on the front end and say, listen, the role is $15 grand for the, you know, the price range you're looking at. We get 30%, whatever the hell it is, right? But we charge 5 if you waste our time. Now, we don't want to charge you anything, right? We don't want to charge you anything. Now, if you get a little bit more, again, this is where supply and demand becomes important. If you continue to get more and more demand, then you start to have more and more of the leverage shift to you and you say, listen, I do half now and half when we complete the role. Because I've got— and if you don't want it, that's fine. I got 10 other guys behind you.

Ah, yeah, that makes sense.

So you have no leverage right now, and it makes sense. So number one, I don't think you have a, a steaming fire because you've got 50% margins and things seem to be going okay. You got 98% referrals, which means you're good at what you do. So I think we just need to put some more in the front end, which is going to be take the outbound engine, point it towards customers, and then be hyper-targeted about the customers that are going to be the best types. And ideally, you probably know what they look like. Like if you take the top 20% of your customers now that are worth the most, the beauty of outbound is you get to snipe who you want. And so you can just say, I'm only going after people who I know are going to do 5 rolls a year.

That's a good, that's a good way to put it that way.

Yeah, Carson, Carson, I think, I think what Alex just said is huge for you. I would not have used you had you been like, give me a $20K retainer for this role. Why? Because you were a college kid. You're like 22 years old. You haven't even mentioned that part.

It's not broken.

You were doing this while you were in college. And so I think you use that to your advantage. So I think that reframing it in your own mind as a feature instead of a bug, I think will do you a lot of good. Good, again, psychologically, because it's your own mind as a founder that drives you nuts. And once you just literally just relabel the same experience you're having, you will have a new experience. And so try, try that out along with the outbound. Was that helpful, Carson?

So super helpful, both of you. Thank you so much.

Rock and roll, baby. Later. Crush it.

All right, let's take maybe one or two more. What do you think?

How much is it hot? Let's do it. The weather is cold, but the deals are hot.

What's up? You're on the line. How, how you doing, Jordan?

Hey, how are you guys?

Oh, we got a group call. We got the co-founder in here.

Is that right?

The co-founder is here.

All right, you got Sean and this is Alex. Can you give us, give us your names and your business name and then give us a 1-minute description? What do you guys do and how is it going revenue-wise?

I'm Jordan Egbert. Justin Frober, my co-founder, is also on the call. Our business is Elite Travel Hackers and We help business owners take their families on $30,000 to $50,000 luxury vacations for little to no money out of pocket using credit card points. And we do that in two ways. The first thing is we help them optimize and maximize the number of points they're earning per year. So most people will earn 1 point per dollar on their credit card spend. We're typically able to get at least a 3, 4x on those points earned.

So you help them get more points and then you help them spend it well.

Yeah.

And then we help you spend it well. Book first-class flights, 5-star hotels, luxury travel, all for little to no money out of pocket.

So Jordan, is the business working right now or is it broken right now?

What are we working with? Yeah, what's revenue? What's—

yeah.

Yep, business is working. We're doing about $40K a month right now. We do have some hurdles that we've come into and I'll let Justin kind of go through those.

Oh, he's the guy who deals with the problems?

Okay. I'm going to guess that you're demand constrained. That's going to be my guess. I could be wrong, but go for it.

Um, yeah, so, uh, last month we actually had a really big month. We scaled to $85K.

Awesome.

And, uh, spent a lot of time refining systems, processes, automations, getting the next round of staff hired so that we can make the next big push on, uh, leads. Um, right now the majority of our business comes from referrals actually, and then 20% of our business comes from like organic traffic, and we only have a 23% close rate.

There.

Um, so there's a massive gap between the referring and organic close rates.

Are you saying 80% of the business is referral, or you said that was the close rate?

No, sorry, 69% of the business is referrals.

Okay.

98% close rate on referrals.

Okay.

Okay. Everybody closes and then the rest of the business is through organic. Do you just mean web traffic from Google search or do you mean content-based or, you know, a mix of everything?

Content-based.

Okay.

Is your question, like, try to state the question as crisply as you can. So what's the question you guys have?

How do we build trust faster and increase close rates from cold traffic? Is there a tweak in our offer?

Yeah. All right.

I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to rock your shit in a couple of seconds. So just tell me, so what's the price point right now?

$3K to $15K.

Okay. So it scales depending on their whatever.

Number of trips they're taking.

Yeah.

And how much they're spending out of pocket.

Okay, got it. Heard. And so right now I'm assuming that you have the same sales process for referrals as you do for people from content.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the issue. So every, every traffic source has to get treated differently because they have a basically, if you think about a customer on a continuum, there's a certain amount of information that has to get consumed in order to make a decision. And so what you need is a microwave. You need something that's going to heat them up really quickly. And so right now, walk me through the click to close. So someone sees some post or some reel, They then what, DM you or they go to your link or they comment, they get a ManyChat, like what do they do? Click?

DM, DM.

Okay, so they DM you, got it. So after they DM, there's a setter in the DMs, right?

Correct.

Okay, so DM setter and then what happens after that?

Into sales calendar.

Okay. Okay, got it, and that's it, that's what happens? Is there anything else that? Like they consume between set and close?

There's a 60-second warm-up video saying, hey, come with this, you know, these data points so that we can maximize what you're doing.

Yeah, so you're missing a VSL. That's all. So two things. So here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna write a 7-minute VSL. All right? And very simple. You'll probably, it follows the same concept as a YouTube video. So you'll have a promise. You'll have a pain that they're going to help them avoid. You're going to give them a plan of how it's all going to work. And then you're going to have proof that you can help them do that. And that's going to be in the first 60 seconds. And then you're going to have basically belief 1, belief number 2, and belief number 3. So basically the 3 biggest objections that people bring up typically on, on sales calls, you're going to break those down as FAQs during the thing. And then, and then you'll put your 60-second, this is how you prep for the call. All right. That's what you do. Now you're going to script that whole thing out. And then I also want you to take that and put it into a PDF and then you can send it because some people, especially the more ballers, they're bigger readers than they are watchers. And so you can say, hey, here's two ways to consume it. Just watch it before the call. And then when you do that close call, the first question you ask after you say, hey, how's it going today? Then, which you don't open a call that way, but as you know, whatever. Then you say, hey, did you, did you get a chance to watch the video, which you should have already done? Like the closer should double-check that prior to the call. And if for some reason they have not done it, you say, hey, no worries, I'm going to grab a cup of coffee, you can go play it and I'll come back in 7 minutes and then we can talk about it. That way I'm not just blabbing a whole bunch of stuff because that way you can see the visuals and you can see everything as tight as humanly possible. It's the best use of your time. Got it. That's literally it. Now, the second thing that I want to do, though, is I want to kind of shift your belief a little bit because you said we're only closing 23%. 23% isn't dogshit. Like, I would say that you're going to probably like, if you just do this, you're probably bumped to like mid-30s. But that's, that's just not— it's not, it's not weird. That's just like a normal close rate. And referrals are amazing. That's why everybody would love to have referrals. But like, if you, if you like, if you really want to have your— get your mind blown, start running ads. It's going to be way worse than the content leads. So you want to treat warm like cold and you treat cold like cold by giving them more information prior to the close.

Got it.

That's lit. Like if you only need to do one thing, that's all you gotta do. And you have an increase in close rate. That being said, that's not gonna take you to $5 million a year. That's just gonna give you a, maybe a 50% lift on whatever you're currently doing. And so once you do that, you still have demand issues, which means that you still need to have a reliable, like basically like how can we make more and better content? Which is the, the larger and more important question.

Okay.

But do that first. Yeah.

Solve, solve that one problem at a time. And at the end of the day, you want to have your growth equation. I think that's what he's talking about, which is today, I forgot what you said, you're converting 29% or something like that. It's like actually a pretty decent number. If that, if that number was 40, what happens to our business?

Right?

Because you don't want to put a transformational amount of effort into something that doesn't have a transformational result on the other side of it. And you could just napkin math and save yourself a lot of pain if that's what the situation would be. It might be that you can actually just double the number of referrals you're getting by doing something simple. Maybe today you're just getting them and you're not actually asking for them intelligently and, and ramping that up where you already have a 98% close rate. So just make sure you do some napkin math on like, what does the top of funnel look like before I go try to beat my head against the wall increasing this conversion? You can increase your conversion and you should, but it is worth doing some napkin math to see if I did this, would this get me where I want to go? Or is this just one block and I'm going to have to figure out two more things after that? But it's at least good to know that going in.

Hey Jordan, would you have a referral script you use right now?

I'll take that one. Yeah.

So at the end of every onboarding call, we're asking them who else they know.

How do you ask them?

Just, hey, do you think anybody else could use our services? You've seen what it's like to do our credit card strategies. Can you connect me via text or email?

Yeah, so I would tweak that. This is just a, this is just a little golden BB for you. Compliment them first so you can reframe it. So you're like, dude, you're an absolute pleasure to deal with. My God, I talk to a bunch of different business owners every day. If I could talk to only people like you, I would. So what other successful business owners like you do you know? So that compliments them twice before making an ask. And most people are way happier to give you a referral. Also, when you say, I want other people who are successful like you, you'll also get better referrals overall.

Got it.

Makes perfect sense.

Yeah, a little tweak.

One other one that might help there. I think you said this really well with the gym business. You're like, people are in the maximum amount of pain when they show up the first time into the gym because for them to have shown up, that means they acknowledge the problem and have walked into your hands. How hard could it be to sell? In your case, you actually have a different situation, which is when somebody's on their way, you know, back from their vacation that you just booked for them for free. And they just had an incredible life-changing experience. It's probably a good moment to go ask them, how was the trip? And, and then see if they, you know, what are, what are they thinking for more trips as well as do they know anyone else that's looking at this? Because you're going to have, you're going to be riding a momentum, a huge wave of goodwill in that moment because you just, they're going to be on the high of their vacation. Planning a vacation is work. Experiencing and enjoying the vacation. That's, that's when they're in the sort of peak state to be able to ask as well.

And on the offboarding call that Sean's referencing, if I were getting really tactical with you, what I would do is when I call them up and say, hey, how was the vacation? I would ask, do you have any pictures? Now they're going to be like, oh, how many do you want to see? Right? And you say, hey, so what friends would you normally send these pictures to? If you want, if you three-way me, then you can say, hey, I got this whole vacation for free and send it to your friend. Just three-way me in and then you're rocking and rolling.

Yeah.

Helpful, guys?

Yeah, for sure.

Very.

As I asked my first girlfriend, was that the best 8 minutes of your life?

Yeah.

All right, fellas, we'll see you later.

See you guys. All right, Hormozy hotline.

Yeah, all right, here we go. All right, caller number 9, you are on air. What's your name?

Hello, hello, I'm Davi. Alex, Sean, great to be talking with you.

Davi, where are you calling in from, Davi?

Brooklyn, New York.

All right. Davi, single, married? Oh wait, no, wrong show. Here we go. Davi, tell us about, uh, what's going on. What's your business?

So I am a content creator and a little bit different than probably a lot of the businesses that call in because I have a big audience and I have all the traffic and I have absolutely no idea what to sell them.

You need a money model.

You have distribution and no product. Is that what you're saying?

I got distribution, no product.

Ah, okay.

And I won the school games last year.

Oh, sick.

And Alex, I met you in May and I was about to ask you the question I'm about to ask. And your assistant came in and said, Alex, you have a wedding. You need to walk.

That checks out.

Last year. And then I saw Sean's tweet yesterday and I was like, you know what?

Dude, if your life was a movie, this is, this is that.

This is that moment.

This is the moment where it comes full circle.

All right.

So what is the question you've been waiting a year to ask? Are you an entertainer or educator?

Real quick.

I would lean towards education. I mean, I make content for college guys and young guys about how to get internships, how to get jobs, how to date, how to manage negative thoughts, how to make money. Like, it's, it's really just virtual Big Brother stuff.

Okay.

I have 200 million views, 350,000 followers. So a big army of young dudes. I want to make a big swing in the—

per what? Per month? Per year? Per what?

200 million views over the last 2 years.

Oh, what are you, what are you getting monthly?

5 to 10.

Okay.

And this is TikTok we're talking about?

TikTok and Instagram.

Yeah.

Okay.

500.

Okay.

Okay.

Go on.

And so I have this big army of young dudes that I could do a paid community. I could do a mentorship, but I think that there's a bigger play either with maybe employing a lot of them or building an app and launching it across college campuses. And I just, I've been building this audience and I'm not sure what's the big swing that I should be making here.

But before we start being know-it-alls and telling you what to do, what do you— have you already tried anything?

I mean, I've just— I committed to making 2 or 3 short-form videos a day for the last couple of years outside of my day-to-day other pursuit. So I haven't tried much.

What's your day-to-day other pursuit?

My mom is a physician coach and she was doing $20K or $30K a month and now we're doing $230,000 last month. So basically just building high-ticket sales, marketing, fulfillment for burned-out doctors.

Got it. Well, I'll tell you a secret. Burned-out doctors have more pain and more money than broke college guys by an order of magnitude.

I know.

I don't want to keep freaking with my mom.

Okay.

I'm— yeah, I mean, if you think there's not a big If there's not a big prize here, then maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

The question is, what do you, like, what do you want to have happen? If you're like, oh, I think I've, so I'll tell you, I want to give a little tiny reality check, which is like 5 to 10 million views a month is not bad. It's also not crazy. So like you have enough to do a business for sure. This isn't like I'm sitting on $100 million. Like you're not getting a dollar a view. I just want to like put that, put some perspective there. Also, your TikTok views are not worth nearly close to what your Instagram views are. It's probably a factor of 10 to 20x difference in terms of the value per view.

Okay.

Especially if it's a little bit more meme, a little bit more humor, anything like that. It's just like you can just, you could just drop it to through the floor. Like education versus entertainment, the, the revenue per, per, per thousand views is like, it's huge difference. Okay. I just want to just level set there. So fundamentally, if you've got these guys and they want what careers, they want jobs.

Well, it's not like I'm like Mr. Internship. I'm not saying that I'm the best content creator ever, but they look to me for input on all this life stuff. Like whether it's how to land their first date, how to get an internship, how to whatever. And I get a bunch of DMs that are like, dude, you spoke the thoughts that were in my brain. You like, you know me so well. And I think I've built up enough trust with them that if I wanted them to like quit a job or come work for me or do something. So that's why I'm thinking maybe I could build something.

Yeah.

On the backs of them and not sell to them.

So I'll, I'll, um, I'll give you just a little bit of a continuum that exists for you, right? And this is super common for people who are content creators and it all, the, the, the continuum exists on, on a risk continuum. And so on one side, all the way to the end, you have start a business that you're going to do everything for. All right. That's like, that's all the way on the other side. It takes the most skill, but you have the most risk. All right. On the opposite end, you have, I'm going to be affiliate of something, which is I'm just going to promote someone else's stuff and I'm going to get a percentage.

Right.

That's the, that's the other extreme. Now, next to that, you've got sponsorship. So if I'm really good at that, people start paying me ahead of time and that's 100% gross margin and it scales as I scale my, my content, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In the middle, you've got partnerships, which is like, okay, I'm going to be the exclusive guy promotes this specific thing and I'm going to get some shares or get some royalties, whatever it is that I can negotiate in that deal. And I'll just let somebody else run the business while I just continue to promote. Next to that, you've got white labels. All right. So it's like, okay, I don't want to— I don't want to actually run the business, but I do want to have my own brand and I want to have all the equity. And then the very last one, which is what I started with, which is like you own it all, right? It's you, you, you source everything, you manufacture if you want to do products. And so those are kind of like, those are kind of your options right now. If you wanted to get in the business now, you can de-risk your current thing by a lot by trying some stuff on the left and seeing how it performs. So you can basically, you have the luxury of being able to test product market fit before doing anything.

Mm-hmm.

So you can easily affiliate someone else's thing, see what the demand looks like, and if it crushes, then you're like, oh, I got something here. And if it doesn't crush, then you didn't have to like do all the other shit associated with that.

Build their business.

Right, exactly. So you have this really nice position that you're in. So number one, I would probably work my way from least risky to most risky as I basically validated whatever thing I want to sell. And then secondarily for TikTok, I'll just give you a little hack. The people who, the people I've seen who monetize best off TikTok, their, their CTA on TikTok is DM me on Instagram. And then they work the DMs on Instagram for whatever reason. IG just converts way better to monetize than TikTok does. So they just drive, they just use TikTok as a traffic platform to send to convert on Instagram.

Got it.

Can you give me an example of some of the things that you would try affiliating for?

Well, so you, you, you said a lot of stuff. You're like, you have like dating stuff. You have like, you know, which probably gets into like looks maxing and all that stuff. I don't even know. Um, then you've got like, I want to get a job stuff. Then you've got like biz op stuff, which I'm not like the biggest fan of, but like, you could, you know, whatever. So like you have a lot of different pieces there. And then obviously there's just like services that you can charge for them. But the thing that I really hate about this particular customer is that they're broke. And so the easiest, I mean, I don't think the idea that you had on starting a school community is a terrible idea because you can, you can have a very large community, you can continue to serve them and you can have a low ticket price point that'll kind of like, you can, you can use that as an initial launch pad. Build the community and then be like, basically say like, tell me what you guys want and I'll do that. And then you can monetize in the meantime. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Got it. So that's a, that's an e— that's like the easy, super low risk. Like doesn't, doesn't, if you're like, hey man, I wanna make $100 million, I don't have a clear path for, from where you're at right now to get there besides just like starting as though you didn't even have the brand you have.

Well, if you had a fleet of loyal guys that maybe you could turn into good salespeople or turn into ambassadors, or if you had to launch something across college campuses, like if you had this resource and it was your only foundation to get to $100 million or $10 million, what would you do?

If you can train a skill, which I didn't hear, but that you just mentioned that sales thing. If you can train a skill exceptionally well, then you can absolutely source and place salespeople for large door-to-door companies that, and a lot of college guys are willing to just like relocate after college anyways and, you know, make 6 figures a year or 6 figures in a summer if they crush it, um, for that. And those companies are happy to pay, you know, referral fees upon success of those, of those types of guys. And if you can develop a long-term reputation is being very, very good at training them. Like, you can very easily run cohorts where you say, hey, you're going to fly out to this place, we're going to spend a week, I'm going to train you. And then after that, you'll graduate and then you'll go out into the world and be fruitful and multiply. You could very well charge, you know, probably $5,000 somewhere in there for people to come out, learn how to sell, and then basically you'll have a bunch of connections from different people that you can use your own content to go source those relationships with. So just get like, get a Vivint, get a, you know, get some of the big, get an alarm system company, whatever. And get those ones to just say, hey, will you take, take people from me? And then you can also make money on both sides there. That like the best thing that you can do for those guys is use them as the product.

Okay.

I got a question for you. Soul searching question. Are you trying to be a content creator who makes money or are you trying to be an entrepreneur who uses content to make money?

Great question.

Wow, that's a great question.

Gut instinct. You can change your mind later, but just gut instinct. When I said that, which one did your heart go to?

You have to fully commit to this for life.

Um, I want to be an entrepreneur.

You want to be an entrepreneur? Great. So I think the constraint of what business can I start using this TikTok audience for this customer is actually not serving you at all. You should just be thinking, what business do I want to be in where I see an opportunity and I feel passionate about solving it? And then I'm going to flex my content muscles probably as one of my growth levers to do that. And this, all this did was this was the gym where I was working out and building that muscle. but I didn't build it to use it in the gym. I built it to use it in the real world somewhere else. And so I think that sometimes you have to pick the constraint properly. The constraint of using it in this business, using it, using your current TikTok audience is not the right one. The other thing I would do is I would try to get real. So not only is a certain number of views different per platform, but just as a simple test, right? If you went to a college campus, if you just put on TikTok and put on Instagram, hey, I'm gonna be at Penn State if you wanna come hang out. I'm going to be at this place from this hour to this hour. How many people do you think would show up at Penn State?

Probably between 10 and 100.

10 and 100. Okay, that's a pretty big spread. I think you should go try it. I would be surprised if the number was 100. I'd be shocked if it was 100. I'd be surprised if it was even 10. And the reason I say that is because the way that the nature of TikTok and the nature of short-form content is that they're not loyal to you. They're loyal to the feed and you might show up from time to time. And so the reason to do that is to Basically, wash away your tie and your connection, your, your invisible sunk cost to, but I've already built this audience. 'Cause actually what you're, what you built was this, the muscle of short-form content. You probably haven't built an army of people who like, listen, and trust you. Like you will get more views, let's say on this, on your TikTok than I will get on my podcast. But if I tweet something out that I'm going somewhere for my podcast, I'll get people there because I spend hundreds of hours in their ears. It's a different level of connection. And so I say all this to just say, if you really want to be an entrepreneur, break out of that constraint of how do I sell these college dudes who I've been entertaining with random TikToks about random shit? And what's the best business I can build in that tiny, tiny box to be like, just get out of the box and then build the best business you can. And I bet you'd kick ass that way because you seem like you're somebody who's pretty high agency and pretty kick ass. But don't constrain you. Don't tie one hand behind your back.

And Davey, I'll soften what Sean said, which is normally not my role, but what you can use the brand for, let's say you don't sell to this audience and you don't sell them as the product either. Let's say you just say like, I did this thing and I learned this skill. You can still use it to recruit for whatever business you want. And that is actually still a massive W. So you can just skim off— you say you've got these guys who are super low and want to work. It's like, great, work for me.

Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

All right. Awesome, brother. Appreciate you. Thanks for calling in.

Appreciate it, guys.

Thanks.

All right.

See you.

Awesome.

There we go.

All right.

That's a wrap on the Hormozy Hotline.