I Spent $312,000 To Learn From Online Gurus (Here's What I Learned)

I've spent over $312,000 on coaches, courses, and masterminds to learn from online gurus like Alex Hormozi, Iman Gadzi, Sabri Subi, and more. In this video, I'm gonna break down exactly what I learned and answer the question, do I regret spending that money? And look, I already know what some of you are about to comment. Bro, you got scammed. You're a dumbass for spending all that money. You could have just learned it on YouTube for free. So, look, if that's you, totally fine, go ahead and drop your comment. I welcome it. But just that's probably why you're still broke. So go wipe your tears with your liberal arts degree that cost the same but taught you nothing about making money. All right, let's get into it. So just to give you some quick context on what I do and what my business is, because I think that'll frame the rest of this video. We basically run an AI marketing agency that serves life insurance agents and financial advisors. Basically, we run ads for them, we build them funnels, and we implement AI and automation to help them get leads, get qualified appointments, and close more sales. We scaled the company from doing literally nothing in 2022 to now we do about $500,000 per month. All right, so with that context out of the way, let's dive into the first investment that we made, which was paying ravi Abu Vala $40,000 to teach us how to implement systems into our business. So we bought this program, I think it was, back in 2023. And basically, up until this point, we were running the business like complete chimpanzees. Right? Like, we were.

As the founders, personally via, like, Facebook, messenger, email. And then we'd also give out our personal cell phone couple vas that, like, barely did anything. It was just, like a complete and total operational nightmare. Our sales and marketing skill set had gotten us to where we were, but we needed to learn how to actually build a business, something that could run without us putting full force into it 24. 7. Basically, we're completely disorganized, but we knew how to sell and market. He has a company called Scaling with Systems, where they basically teach you how to implement systems and make your business a lot more streamlined and simple. And so one of the things that I really learned from Ravi was a framework, which is eliminate, automate, and delegate. So essentially, whenever you have a problem in your business, here's essentially how you want to go through solving it. Number one, is this problem even a problem? Can I just Completely eliminate it and not even do this thing. And would anything actually happen? And oftentimes you'll find that that's the answer and you just stop doing it and you don't waste any further time thinking about it. Number two is you automate it. So you build a process. Could be an automation, could be an AI automation. Now it could be an AI agent. There's a lot of different things you can do now. When this came out, AI agents weren't really a thing, but essentially automating a process. And then the third, this would essentially be the last resort is to delegate it or give that task to somebody else. And so we started looking through our business and finding all these different things we were doing, ran them through the framework. Eliminate, automate, delegate. We streamlined a lot of the operations of our business. Another thing that I learned from Ravi, how he actually ran his personal life. So he lived in. It was like a high rise apartment in my Miami. And basically he had a executive assistant and a house manager. His executive assistant would essentially, like, schedule out different things in his personal calendar. And then his house manager would come in and like, clean the house, charge his toothbrush. He did this in a way that I haven't really seen many other entrepreneurs do, which is he offloads everything in his personal life so he can just completely dedicate himself to his business, which is something I found very interesting. I'm now implementing in my own personal life. So this one took a longer time to roi, but the skills that I learned from this still helped me today. I would make this same investment again. It was $40,000, really taught us, like, operations and how to actually run a business as opposed to just scaling an offer. So one of the next investments that we made was paying Cole Gordon $103,000 to help us recruit, train, and manage a sales team. So essentially at this point in the business, I was doing all of the fulfillment, marketing, and client work. My business partner was calling and setting his own appointments and then taking calls to close for the offer. We realized that we had this problem of like, qualifying leads. We were getting a bunch of people booking on the calendar, but most of them, and I mean, no exaggeration, we had people that would be living in a hotel, living in a van down by the river, could barely pay rent, could barely afford groceries. Like crazy, crazy situations. We. So we were trying to figure out, like, how can we solve this problem of unqualified leads booking on our calendar? And what we realized, actually, this is going to sound weird, a good way to solve that problem was to hire appointment setters to screen the leads for you. So essentially the way we do before is we would just have all these people that would come through in the calendar. Obviously we would have a survey that would disqualify people based off of what they put in on their application. But a lot of disqualified people would get through. So what we did is we had a setter triage, which a triage is basically when the lead goes to the setter and the setter says if they're qualified or not. And if they are, they get onto the salesperson's calendar and then they're also calling all of the other leads to find the qualified people that didn't book. So essentially makes your entire sales process like five times more efficient because your closers are only talking to qualified people and you're able to book with a higher percentage of your leads. So the initial program we did with Cole was around $15,000 and that was three months where they came in place us with a setter. And then he has this whole course inside of his program that teaches you how to actually run a high ticket business. Marketing agency, coach, consultant, whatever it is. High ticket business is kind of like the overall theme of that course. So it teaches you everything from the marketing, how to structure the fulfillment, fulfillment, how to hire, train, recruit people, there's even some stuff on email marketing. And so essentially we just kind of like copied their playbook of running a business and installed it into our own business. So then after that three months, we upgraded and we paid $68,000 for a year of his mastermind, where basically we got to meet and interact with a ton of other business owners that were in similar situations to us. So I remember I was going to this conference, this is about a year ago in Scottsdale, and we were one of the smallest businesses there. We were doing around $90,000 a month. You're supposed to be doing $100,000 a month. But we like, we snuck in and I just remember like meeting and talking to all these people, trying to understand like what was the difference between what they were doing and what I was doing. And what it really boiled down to is they were spending more on ads and they had more setters and closers than we did. And the third component is they were selling to a better avatar than us. From realizing this, being around all these people that like, I don't mean this in any way of disrespect, but like, we're not smarter or more skilled than us. They just had more things figured out and they were further along in the journey. Being around that environment, we were able to take those lessons and then just implement it. So, like, one of the most valuable things was just getting around other people that had similar businesses that were bigger, but simply because they had taken the right actions. And so I would say that was a massive, massive reason that we were able to go from literally this time last year we were doing $90,000 a month to now we do $500,000 a month. A massive piece of that was getting in a room with people that were doing similar things. So on the Cole Gordon investment, I would definitely make this one again. In fact, we're renewing for another year of the Eight Figure Boardroom mastermind, so that will be an additional $68,000 we're paying to be a part of that. So the next investment that I made was paying Jeremy Haynes $60,000 to teach me how to market better. So if you don't know, Jeremy Haynes has a YouTube channel where he talks about scaling businesses to a million dollars a month, which is the next stepping stone goal that we're trying to get to. And so he puts out a ton of free game on YouTube about all these different marketing strategies, ideas and frameworks that you need to understand in order to get your business to a million dollars a month. And I would say there were three main things that I learned from Jeremy. Number one is this is what really taught me how big of an impact the messaging in your marketing actually has on who you attract and ultimately how your business plays out. So before we used to get a bunch of broke, unqualified leads, what I realized is like, when I go back and watch those ads, we literally used to run an ad that said if your profits are drying up in the desert, you need this lead system. It's like, well, obviously we were getting people that were desperate and in a bad situation. It didn't really click for me until I was in Jeremy's group. And I just like, saw in real time how, hey, if I say if you're currently selling X amount, oh, I'm just going to get people that are currently selling X amount. For example, if you're a lawyer that's doing $10 million a year, well, the people that are going to watch that ad and click on it are going to be lawyers doing 10 million a year versus if I say if you're a new lawyer, I'm going to get new lawyers. And it's literally that simple. I had overcomplicated it, but it's literally Just that simple. That was one of the biggest things that clicked for me. The next thing I would say is that scale doesn't happen by accident. You don't just grow your business. You have to force your business to grow and you have to decide. It is a conscious decision and an effort to grow your business. If you're doing 100k a month and you want to get to 500k a month, you got to spend more in ads, you got to hire more people, and you got to do more. Like that's it. It's not rocket science, it's just math. And so Jeremy is very big on, like, stop being a dumbass and just do the math and then spend the money to get the result that you want. And the third biggest lesson I would say I learned from Jeremy is just that speed of action and implementation dictates your success. So the faster that you can have an idea and know what you need to do and then put it into action throughout, you know yourself, but also your team members and your organization, the quicker you're able to go through these cycles of iteration to grow your business. And so Jeremy just has like this intensity about him that just like pushes you to do more, scale bigger, do it faster. That energy is very infectious. So I would say this is probably one of the best investments that I've made. There's so many little tactical marketing things that I learned from Jeremy, but I'd say one of the biggest things is just like seeing somebody that operates at a really high level and is making just an absolute shit ton of money, seeing what goes into that and how that person acts so that you can emulate it yourself. So 100% would make this investment again. So the next investment I made is I bought a course from Sabri Subie where I think was $14,000. So basically I've seen this guy's ads on Facebook and if you've ever seen his ads, they just are absolute bangers. Super attention grabbing. They kind of remind you of like a Chamber Media or Harmon Brothers kind of ad, just completely grab your attention and suck you in. And so essentially he had this book funnel where he was selling a book called Sell Like Crazy. Bought the book, read the whole thing was like, this is absolutely fire. It would be really cool to be able to learn more from this guy. One on one or through a course. So bought the course that basically came with unlimited lifetime access to one on one calls with him. So any Thursday I can jump on with Sabri and ask him any question about my business. But the biggest thing that I learned from him was using entertainment and being very engaging in your marketing. So many people in the space are super boring in the way that they do their marketing, their emails, everything, right? And so Sabri just completely flips that on his head and he goes way to the other side of the spectrum is just like ridiculously entertaining. I think in one of his ads he had like two midgets like beat him against a tree in a bag, something crazy, right? I think he's on the total other extreme. But for me it's like, okay, how can I make sure that my ads are not only attracting the right people, but they're also engaging and interesting because for the Facebook algorithm that leads to lower costs, higher watch time, which is what they want. And so your, your ads are able to convert at a higher level and you can spend less and make more. This is something that we use a lot today is you don't have to have like some super high production quality ad, but if you use VO3, you can make super interesting and engaging ads like Sabri Subie does for like $5 and an hour and a half of your time. So I would say this investment was still worth making. I wouldn't say it was my highest ROI investment, but I still have a ton of love and respect for Sabri and everything that he does and I would still make this investment again. Alright, so next I paid Josh Snow, the founder of Snow teeth whitening, $24,000 for eight coaching calls. So as of now, I've done two calls with them. They've both been four hours. We booked this coaching call, it's like a couple weeks out and I think it was like on a Wednesday afternoon and this dude shows up. I think it was like an hour and a half late to the call. We jump on. We just had like a four hour session. He was asking us like literally every single thing from like your childhood. Just trying to understand me and my business partner on a super deep level, getting all of the context possible and we're just like spitting talking for like probably 30 minutes at a time. And he's over here just like jotting notes down on his paper and he asked us about our goals, which both of our goals are to have a nine figure net worth before we're 30 years old. So I'm 24, my business partner's 25, and our goal is to have a nine figure net worth by the time we were 30. From looking at everything, what we're doing currently just was not at all in alignment with our goal, you know, just running like a service based agency is not going to get us nine figures. And so what he did is like really like kind of forced us to think bigger, but also focus on optimizing what you have currently. So part of the reason that I'm putting out this channel is like to document what I'm doing with my current business and also lay the foundations for the next big move that I'm essentially going to take. And so I would say for Josh, the biggest thing that I got, I mean his teeth whitening brand does nine pictures a year. He's making so much, so much money and he sold a lead generation business. I think it was like $70 million. So the guy knows his shit. And so for him the biggest thing was like think outside of the box and if you solve for how to get to nine figures, your action steps are going to be totally different than if you're just focusing on running your day to day business but the way that you want to do it, keep what you're doing currently. You spend like 70% of your time on what you're doing currently and 30% of your time goes to building the next thing. So I'll have to report back after the eight coaching calls are done, but I would say so far Josh know has been one of the best investments that we've made. I've yet to ROI on it, but if I achieve my goal and this had course corrected me and put me on the right trajectory, by far one of the best investments that I've made in myself. And so the next investment we're going to talk about is I paid alex or mosey $24,000 to help grow my agency. So I actually recently just posted a video where I broke down the call that I had with him one on one. It's the most viewed video on my channel. So if you haven't seen it yet, go ahead and check it out. But essentially it's hard to put into like three things what I've learned from Alex because a lot of the value that I've gotten from him has just been watching a bunch of his free stuff over the years. A lot of my business philosophy and the way that I do things does stem from things I've learned from Alex. But for this particular investment that I made with Alex, here are the things that I found were extremely valuable thus far. Number one is really understanding your money model, focusing on getting more renewals faster from your clients. So not asking for them to renew at the end of their program, asking in the middle to extend out the contract. So applying a lot of his like money model frameworks with upsells, downsells, cross sells, having different offers that you can tack on and bolt on to the business are extremely valuable. And then one of my biggest takeaways from my call with him was that the quality of your clients is going to dictate the quality of your business, especially, especially in any form of service based business or agency. And then the last piece that I would say, which is really this is a very tactical thing. A lot of the other things were big strategy. This is very tactical, is basically running testimonials as ads. So he did this thing in gym launch where he would essentially do a competition. I think they did it like twice a year or something where they would get their clients to send in a video testimony testimonial for an ad and whoever's video performed the best, they would give some sort of a prize. So we did this ourselves internally and I got all of our clients to send us videos and whoever's video performs the best, we're going to give away an iPad to them. So those ads are some of our best performers right now. Literally just clients saying good things about your business in an ad, obviously that would perform well. Right. But that is a strategy that I learned from him that is already roiing in my business. And so I would say anytime I've invested money with Alex has always paid off. And so again, very early with this one, but I would say 100%, a good investment would do it again. All right, so the last investment is I paid Iman Gadzi $10,000 for his SMMA course back in 2023. Now to be totally honest with you, I started going through the course and I was a few hours in and the main thing that I wanted to learn was how to operate and systemize like the back end of a smma. And I think it was like two or three hours in, Iman was talking about like cable management to make your office like neater and nicer. Which. Okay, I mean I could probably use some of that right now. But it wasn't really what I was looking for. So honestly. And part of this is my fault. I'll take responsibility. I didn't go through the entire course. I know some people have seen great results with it, some people have not. But what I will speak to specifically with Iman is what I learned most from him is not in his course, but it's from watching what he does. That guy is a master of personal brand and selling info products. And so for me, watching how he runs his business basically gained equity in other businesses like WAP through his personal brand has inspired me to go and do my own personal brand because it's one of the highest leverage actions that you can take as an entrepreneur to open up bigger and better opportunities for yourself. So I would say from the course itself, I did not get a direct roi. Again, nothing negative to say about the course, just I didn't really go through it because it was like a 50 hour course and what I was looking for specifically I couldn't really find. But the biggest thing that I learned from watching Iman is just seeing the way he runs his personal brand and how massive of an impact that's had for his business. So to answer the question, would I make these investments again? I would make them again and I would actually make them again tenfold. And I'm going to continue to do that as I grow and grow in my business. I will spend more money on coaching and masterminds and courses than anybody else on planet Earth. Maybe a little bit of an over exaggeration, but that is my unique advantage, is that I am willing to reinvest into my skillset and into myself. So if you're watching this at home, I started off by buying smaller courses, little things here and there. Those are investments that I added in the total but didn't have a whole section about in the video. But every time that I've invested in myself and learn new skills and implemented, it's brought me further and further along in my business journey. And so if you want to progress faster and move along quicker and get results quicker, I would highly recommend making one of your core principles, investing in yourself and buying education and buying time. So if you want to watch that call that I had with Alex, I'm going to link it right here and I'll see you guys in the next one.