I Shut Down My Agency, Then Made $250k In 5 Days

So I shut down my $500,000 per month marketing agency to start a new business. And just last week we did $250,000 in 5 days. So in this video, I'm going to explain why I shut down my successful marketing agency, what the new business is that I started and the pivot that I made. And then lastly, how you can apply this to your own business to ultimately make way more money. All right. So I'm going to break down what we were doing before on the whiteboard and what the problem with it was. So we were basically running your traditional agency model, which is really made up of two main functions of the business, right? So you have customer acquisition and then you have fulfillment, right? So customer acquisition, you're gonna be generating calls for your sales team. Generating calls for your sales team, and then you're going to be closing deals, right? And so we were basically running like your traditional retainer model. So I'll explain what the offer was too in a moment, but we were selling your traditional retainer model. And then the second piece is fulfillment. So what we were doing was we would run ads for people, And essentially we were running ads for insurance agents primarily. And we basically build them their own VSL call funnel. Well, it was kind of the whole offer, right? So we called it the personal brand funnel. We put them in the ads, them in all the videos. So whenever a lead went through that whole process, they became more familiar with that person and then had higher intent when they jumped on the phone. Now the thing is with your traditional agency model, it really just becomes a game like 80%, well, yeah, we'll say 80% of your focus has to be on this, especially if you're serving like a high churn market, like what we were doing, insurance agents, high churn, or small businesses, you're gonna have high churn. So you have to spend all of your time acquiring new customers. The other thing too, you don't necessarily make more money the better you fulfill. If you're just charging like a flat retainer model, they're just gonna pay you that model, that amount of money every single month. And so it doesn't really matter how exceptional your fulfillment is. It just needs to be good enough for them to not churn, right? In all reality, that's what it really breaks out to. So you spend 80% of your time on this and about 20% of your time on actual fulfillment. Now, what happens when you're selling your general retainer model is this. So the reason that this is so hard to sell is let's say this is amount of money, right? Or like value created. And then this is time. So when you first sell a retainer to somebody, the value that you've created them is literally zero. So you're starting here. Right? And let's say your retainer for us, it was like $5K per month. So your retainer is $5K. This is flat, right? So when you start, there's this gap between what they have to pay you and what you've generated them in terms of value. There's also a lot of uncertainty. They don't know if you can deliver. They've had bad experiences with other marketing agencies in the past. It's really just a lot of uncertainty. And the first problem is this makes it insanely hard to sell, right? Hard to sell, which means your ROAS is gonna be lower. For our ads, for our agency offer, at one point when we did $500K a month, we spent nearly $200, a little over $200,000 on ads. So a lot of our money was spent on acquiring customers. And again, it's a hard offer to sell. So our close rates would typically be between 11 to 15%. We never got our team-wide close rate to like over 20%. And that is because there's this discrepancy between what they have to pay you and the value that they've received. But what happens is, especially if you're good at what you do, which is just a byproduct of what will happen over time, is the value that you're delivering them will far surpass what they're paying you. So they're paying you $5K a month, but at a certain point, what if they're making $300K per month and they're only paying you $5K? This is the problem with running your traditional agency model. Is in the beginning, they have to take all of the risk. And so therefore it's harder for you to sell, which means you're gonna be less profitable. But then two, the second problem is once you're actually delivering for them on a very high level, you're not making any money and getting rewarded for being good, right? So you have no upside. And so essentially what I realized is I needed to develop a new model, a new way of charging where it was easy to sell and we had hella upside, for lack of a better term, right? And so that led me to this new model and this new business, which I'm gonna explain now. Basically, we shifted from doing like a pure retainer model, which we were doing $5K a month for 3 months. So the package was $15K. And we switched to essentially, you could call it a pay-per-lead model, but I basically refer to this business model as pay-per-X. So I will explain what that means. So pay, per X. All right. So X, the reason I say X is because you can basically just sub in X for any thing, right? So I'll explain what I mean by that in more detail. So there's basically this spectrum here. And We'll say on this left end of the spectrum is like a click, okay? A click. On the right side of the spectrum is a customer. So essentially with the retainer model, again, you're just charging for a service. It's like, hey, we showed up and did work for you, therefore you pay us. With pay-per-ex, this is essentially the purest form of what's called performance-based marketing. Now, a click or an impression or whatever, we'll just say click for the sake of this video. Some people charge pay-per-click. So Google, for example, they charge you to bid on their platform, you pay per click. There's also affiliate marketers that will charge you per click. So per click that you direct to their website, they charge per click. Now charging per customer would basically be like, every time that I bring you a paying client, you give me money. So it's essentially like, hey, I'm gonna give you a $5 bill in exchange for a $1 bill. That would be pay per customer. So as you can imagine, on this spectrum, this would be easy to sell, harder to fulfill, right? Whereas this would be harder to sell, easy to fulfill. Now there's a lot of other things in between here. So one thing, for example, is And this is why you just sub this for X, lead, right? So you've probably heard of the business model pay per lead. Well, what about pay per appointment? What about pay per qualified, showed appointment? right? And you could come up with an infinite amount of things that go in between here. You could also just say qualified lead and anything else that goes in here, right? So basically instead of selling the retainer model where there's no real upside for us, like the better we do for a client, they're still paying us $5K a month. Instead, we shifted to the specific model that we, picked is pay per qualified show, right? So now we charge a flat rate per qualified showed appointment booked directly onto their calendar. Um, and the beautiful part of this is the more successful our client is, the more appointments they buy, so we make more money if they do better. So we have upside And then also when they jump on the phone with us to look at purchasing this product, it's like, what's the real risk for them? Because if we don't deliver a qualified show appointment, they're not charged, right? And nobody wants to deal with no-shows. Nobody wants to, nobody wants to call leads. Nobody even wants to call qualified leads. No one wants to deal with no-shows. So what if you only paid for qualified shows? And that's essentially kind of how we got to there. Now, obviously, if you did pay per customer, that's even better. There's some offers that do this, but at this point you might as well just run the business yourself, which I'll get to that in a moment. So this is why we switched to this model. So basically, again, instead of doing retainers, we switched over to pay per show, pay per qualified show. and from doing this, our return on ad spend went from roughly like a 2 to a 3 on average to now. So we went from like a, let's just say like a 2.5 ROAS to now we are consistently getting a 6+ ROAS. On the front end, like a 6+ cash ROAS, not revenue ROAS, the revenue is even higher. And we even have certain customers that are spending $40K per month plus with us. We had one guy actually jump on our calendar and offer to pay us over $100 grand a week for qualified show appointments. So, so what I want you to understand, if you're running one of these retainer-based business models, that's not a bad thing. I did that for almost 4 years to get to the point where I am now, right? What you need to realize is it has an expiration date if you want to really build FU money, right? There's 3 main things that you get from running a marketing agency that allow you to pivot into the next stage. Okay. So the first one, and if you're running a marketing agency, these are the things that you really want to hone. And if you feel like you already have them, it may be time to make the leap and go into the next level, which I'm going to talk about. Obviously, we talked about pay per X, but there's a level even beyond that that I'm going to explain in just a moment. This is going to be a little bit of a longer video. I want to go very deep on this topic because I wish I had seen this 2 years ago. I'd be way further along than I am now. So the first thing that a marketing agency allows you to develop is a skillset. This is by far the most important freaking thing ever because your skillset is the foundation of everything else. Yeah, we did $250K in a week, but the actual, like where the business that I'll talk about in a minute actually goes is we're talking about a billion-dollar business that was built on the foundation of skills that I learned from running a marketing agency, right? So skillset. Number 2 is connections within an industry. And number 3 is opportunity, opportunity selection, or just becoming aware of an opportunity. right? So a marketing agency allows you to develop a skillset to, I mean, you literally get to test and learn on somebody else's dime and they're paying you to spend their money. So that's awesome. Number 2 is connections. So you need to pick a good industry and make sure that you are in a good industry that has like very high margins, businesses are getting bought and sold, very commonly and it's gonna be around for a long time. But if you found a good industry like that, developing connections sets you up to make a way bigger play. And then lastly is opportunity. So the opportunity that I discovered now, I never would have just like found that online or just came up with it. I only found it from being in the trenches and discovering the different things. But once you've developed a really good skillset, you have good industry connections, which a marketing agency allows you to develop, and then you've identified a huge opportunity, that's when you now need to pivot into pay per X. And then what ends up happening is if you're generating really good leads, really good appointments, and you're noticing that your clients are making a ton of money, well, what if you just did what your clients did internally? So like if you're doing lead generation for, for legal, Like for lawyers, well, what if you just owned your own law firm instead of selling leads to everybody, right? Or if you are doing lead generation for roofers, well, it's like, well, what if you just started your own $100 million roofing company? Or if you're generating a bunch of mortgage leads, what if you just sold mortgages yourself? Or in our case, if you're generating a bunch of leads for financial advisors, well, what if you just started your own financial advisory firm. So that's kind of the next play. So that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why I shut down my $500K per month marketing agency and how pivoting into a new offer using Pay Per X, we did $200K, over $250,000 in one single week. And now we're going to be parlaying that into building a billion-dollar company. So on this channel, I'm going to be documenting that, sharing the journey, sharing what I learned along the way. Um, so if you guys want to be part of that, either as a team member working at our company or just following along on YouTube and learning the lessons that I learned along the way, uh, either way, hit the subscribe button and I'll see you guys in the next video.