Forex Trader Sells His $20 Million Business To A Fund - William Brown | Titans Of Tomorrow #19

On a single funnel, he's generated over $10 million.

I know the problem so intimately because I had the problem myself. So that's what gave me an edge in this field because I've been a losing trader. I've bought the courses. I know exactly what words to say, how to say them, when to say them, in what sequence.

So you've probably heard of Alex Hormozi, probably come across Alex Becker. You've probably come across Sam Ovens. And in this week's episode, we have a rising star who will be up amongst those names in the near future, I'm sure. Introducing William Brown. Now, Will, who is a good friend of mine, has achieved so much in his business and entrepreneurship care career, scaling his business to over $15 million in revenue. And the crazy thing is he grew this entire business without social media, without an Instagram page, without a YouTube channel.

Over the last seven years of actually building the company. I never had a personal brand. I've had an Instagram for seven, eight months. Three weeks ago, my YouTube had 300 subscribers. Videos were getting 200 views. It was pathetic. I really want to show you one of our best performing ads because it is so. It's a picture of a chart with subtitles. There's no video, there's no face. It's just a picture of a chart.

Why do you think that was so effective then?

I can tell you exactly why it was so effective is because.

Well, Will, thank you very much for joining me for a bit of context for the guys that I know you've. I'm first of all really excited for this episode, more so for myself, beyond maybe what the others can, can gain from this is because just through hearing your stuff online, I can tell you just love business and it's something you love to talk about and it's not something you. A lot of people are glamorizing entrepreneurship and everybody wants to be a businessman, everyone wants to have a business. But there's another side of the spectrum which is, you know, you just love business. You want to know the ins and outs and the details and I feel like I resonate with that totally. And that's part of the reason I started this podcast and not to make it a traders podcast, which is what I am. Rather, I wanted to make a business podcast because that's what I enjoy speaking about all the time and learning about. So having yourself on with the things you've achieved, I'm pretty sure this will be a deep dive. So I want to throw it to you first, just to Give a brief introduction on yourself and kind of what you achieved specifically this year, which is some phenomenal things, and then we'll jump right in.

All right, for sure. Well, God, I mean, yeah, this, this year's been, been a wild ride, for sure. So we scaled up to. I mean, we had our biggest month ever in May, so we did 824k. So not kind of the biggest business on earth, but, you know, not kind of small anymore either. And also, as you know. So I exited recently. So I started the sales sale process in January, just closed two weeks last Saturday. So I exited to a private equity firm in America called High View for Multi seven figures. And now it's kind of a bit of what am I doing next? Building the next chapter.

Yeah.

So exciting, exciting times.

Brilliant stuff. So the first thing that, what I was just saying to you now that stood out to me was there's a lot of people that scale an info product and an elearning company, and it's kind of a, it's a booming market and a lot of people are doing it in various industries. So that to me was nothing that stood out. What really stood out to me was the numbers you've managed to achieve. When I saw your clickfunnels plaque crossing the $10 million mark and then I see the follow account that you have, I'm like, this doesn't really line up to me. How is this possible? Because it's usually a direct correlation, but the bigger the influencer, the bigger the leads and therefore the bigger the revenue. Whereas yours is completely inverted. So talk to me a little bit about that.

Well, yeah, I mean, over the last seven years of actually building the company, I never had a personal brand. You know, I never. Dude, I've. I've had an Instagram for. Oh God, I don't even know. Seven, eight months? Nine.

Brand new.

Okay, so I'm brand new to Instagram. Three weeks ago, my YouTube had 300 subscribers. Videos were getting 200 views. It was pathetic. And I posted this video on, on YouTube, which has gone absolutely mental. And, and that's been a crazy last couple of weeks. But yeah, over the last seven years I've just been shutting up and doing the work, you know, just building the company and just, just, just stage by stage, you know. So first I kind of figured out the offer, then I figured out product market fit, then I figured out hiring and scaling and preparing for exit, just stage by stage, very, very slowly. You know, it's been actually, you know, these days you see a lot of people kind of pop up and they're doing 100k a month in what seems like eight weeks. But yeah, it's been a slow, steady journey and one of my mentors once said to me like slow is steady and steady is fast. Right. That's kind of what it's felt like. Slow and then all of a sudden compounds. It really does compound. Yeah. So.

Well, they do say what happens fast doesn't last. And when, when I look at the opposite end of the spectrum, which are usually influencer based elearning or info products and they driven by more lifestyle kind of things, they would achieve big numbers and that's, that's not something to shy away from. They will hit 100k a month in these kind of things. But what I find is they have a few problems. One is longevity because if they don't provide the value that they seem to be have, you know, the lifestyle that they're living, if they can't provide that value, then reputation doesn't last and then you know, these things do crumbling, come crumbling down with yourself. It was more a paid media approach, I gather. And what was very interesting to me was I always had the naive view now after watching a few of your videos that an E learning company that is linked to an influence or a link to a personal, therefore a personal brand based academy couldn't be exitable. It's not a sellable business unless you stay working in it and you're under a salary because how is someone going to take your name, which your company was, and then take you out of it and still scale it? So yeah, there's a lot of things that you've done which is kind of breaking the norm. One which is entering the trading space and not being an influencer per se and scaling it to big numbers that compete with the influencer based ones but with longevity because you're still here. Whereas they kind of come and go in one or two years and then managing to exit it for a nice multiple. So what do you think was the keys in that journey that was able to do for you to do things different to the ordinary person that fits the market at the moment?

Yeah, well, one thing is knowing that I wanted to sell and building it to sell. So I kind of knew that about two, maybe three years ago when I was at a Mastermind once with a guy called Dan Bradbury and we were on a lunch break and Dan said to me, so when are you going to sell? I said I can't sell. It's a course business that's named after me and it's my face, my voice on everything. And he was like, you can sell. The only difference is the buyer and the price. So right now you might be able to sell for 20 grand, 50 grand, something very small, to probably someone like you that just wants to pick it up and build it, or you can build it to sell. And if you build it to sell and you build a great team, you de. Departmentalize things, you remove your face. That, that was very important. And also, I mean, the, the private equity firm that just bought us a rebranding to wbt. So it's not going to mean any, anything. It's just going to be kind of letters for them. So they've been kind of smart with that to, to take my name off it. But yeah, one thing that really helped me was thinking ahead by a couple of years, thinking, how much do I want to sell for? Who would I like to sell to? What would they want to buy? And what would the team have to look like? What would the product have to look like? What would the front end, the back end, the ltv, the kind of ad side of things have to look like? And I built it to where I thought it would be sellable. And then I went back to my mentor Dan and said, look, Dan, I think it's sellable now. Please could you help me sell it? So I paid him a few grand a month to kind of hold my hand, help me find a buyer. He helped me find my M and A advisor, Dominic, who actually introduced me to the private equity firm that ended up buying us. And the rest kind of happened from there. It took us six months of due diligence for them to kind of go through the product, interview all the team members, rebuild all of our financials, make sure that the founders, founder and the partner were happy. And then, yeah, we, we kind of closed two weeks last Saturday. So good times.

There we go. And tax free. We're in Dubai.

Say no more.

There we go. And so a couple of things that I want to ask you specifically is my belief has always been that.

The people that provide the most value into the marketplace are the ones that usually get the most paid. And usually price is just a reflection of the value you provide. And therefore a good offer is therefore a value to price ratio, where if you buy a Ferrari for 5000, the 5000 wasn't the problem. It was cheap compared to the Ferrari. But then you see a 5,000 for a chocolate bar. The 5,000 all of a sudden becomes expensive. So price is always just related to the value you get. So when it comes to, let's say, an info product, one thing that I find is especially because you were charging high ticket, the people on the other side, the buyer, they don't necessarily know what they're going to buy. They know maybe the testimonials, they know what you're showing online and stuff. But it's very hard for them to realize, realize for a high ticket what they're truly going to get. And therefore that decision making process can be quite difficult where others come into the industry and they'll charge 2, 3, $400 and therefore it's easy to just throw the money and think, let me find out. But when you're charging 5,000 or $10,000 to that range, the decision making can be quite difficult even if the value is there and even if there is more value than the money you're paying. So how did you overcome that hurdle which in the online space still there is that stigma of even though university people spend tens of thousands in their university career, but in the online learning space, even a thousand dollars is sometimes like, oof, you're spending a lot. So how did you come into the marketplace, especially with traders, and justify such a high price point and still grow a business without building up resentment or ill will amongst your members?

Yeah, really good question. We kind of talked about this off camera before we dived in. But it's not that hard to kind of make a product, take it to market, scale it to 50, 100, 150k a month. But like you just said, if the product's not good, it's not going to last. You've got maybe a year, maybe two years max. And then you're going to burn the market. You're going to get a bad reputation. I've seen it multiple times. And then the people just disappear, man. They turn the business off, go to Bali and you know, try something else. Yeah, they kind of jump ship and then two, three years later, they're now a drop shipper or something like that. So I think one test of a product is longevity. Like you said. Now we sold the exact same thing for just below seven years. The exact same thing. But it's been, the product's been on a fucking journey, man. Because here's how this whole thing happened. So I used to just trade financial markets and I had a little Twitter with maybe 700 followers or something and I would just, just talk to my friends on there, share some trades on there and trade and that was it. I was doing music on the side as well, which was kind of giving me some money to live on. But one day, one of my friends and followers, this guy called Wissam, messaged me and he said, hey, will, if I PayPal you 50 pounds, can I come to your house like, you know, on Wednesday or something and just sit next to you for two hours and just watch what you do? He. He sent me the money, he came over and we. Across the two hours, we made this like Word document together. Like the shittest one page Word document that he took away with him. And a few days later, I just thought if I tell people about this, maybe some other friends would want to buy it. So I messaged a few other friends on Twitter. A couple of them said yes. And I didn't know it, but that was the start of the E. Learning company. And then those two or three or four people gave me feedback and they were like, oh, how do we do this now? And this, making this mistake, what I do. The Word document turned into a 6, 7, 8, page ebook. And then I started charging like £95 for it or something. Then it became a Dropbox folder of videos and a few PDFs and stuff. Then I charge like £250 for it. Kept making it better with their feedback, you know, so, oh, this isn't working. Well, let's change this. What about this? Blah, blah, blah. Make a video on this. So I was.

The customers were teaching her what to teach. Essentially.

They were actually helping me find product market fit and they were building the product in real time for me without me even knowing it. Because I didn't. I never thought. I just thought, oh, this is cool. I'll make like one or two grand a month extra. Put it in my trading account. That's great, that's really helpful. But that first year, I think it was 2018 that that happened. And I did about $27,000, something like that, like across eight, nine months of making it better, raising the price, I realized I was onto something. So I started doing, you know what cold outreach is, right? Yep. Well, I was doing cold outreach, but I didn't know it was cold outreach.

It was. This was still at a low ticket offer. The ebook Dropbox.

This was very, very cheap. This is like honestly 1, 2, 3, £300 across that year. And I kind of knew I was onto something. So I started taking Twitter more seriously to grow the audience, to try and sell them the product. Then I started a small YouTube channel and I thought, let's get another traffic source and I'll put Videos on there, get people interested. Then I made a website and it had like, you know, bronze. Just the files for 250, all the videos and files for 500 videos and files. And some coaching with me for like 900. In the following year, we did roughly 270, 280K.

Just by increasing your lead flow.

Yeah, just by.

Okay.

So then we had the Twitter, we had the YouTube. We was making the product better. We was offering a couple of bits of different, you know, bits and bobs, like the files, the videos, coaching with me, blah, blah, blah. And then in December 2019, I was in London before I was meant to DJ at this club called Fabric. I was in the hotel room and I saw a YouTube ad from a guy called Alex Becker.

Yes.

And it was all like, about ads and funnels and dude, I did not know what a sales funnel was. I. I'd scaled to 300k a year.

Big number.

Yeah, I didn't even know that I was doing cold outreach. I didn't know about much. You know, it was, I just was learning every step of the way. I just thought, can I increase my price? Can I make the product better? What if we do this, what if we do that? And I kind of figured out, let me get traffic and I'll hopefully make more sales. And it was very hope based. Right. And that changed in 2020. I bought Alex's Mastermind. I learned what paid ads were, I learned what a sales funnel was. He taught me how to build like, he taught me to build YouTube ads, build a basic webinar funnel and you know, like a fake live webinar that we all love and Not Webinar jam. Yeah, yeah, Webinar jam. And we were also just coming into Covid, I think, in 2020 and like the stars aligned, man. Like, we did like 1.3, 1.4 million that year, quadrupled in size. You know, I started hiring some of my customers to help with like, support and coaching carried on making the product better, made it bigger, made it deeper, added things that people were asking for along the way, coaching, data, blah, blah, blah. And that's kind of when it started to become quite serious, you know, when it kind of crossed a million a year and I had a team, you.

Know, so up until that point. Is that when you started to take things seriously in terms of having a backend and a sales team and so forth. Not yet.

We were just getting there. So when we did that, the price of the program. So we went from bronze, silver, gold, platinum, to just one thing, just one program, one 5k soul viral webinar with YouTube ads. That's what got us up to that 100ishk a month, maybe slightly more. 125amonth, something like that. And then the next year, I joined this other mastermind. I think it was Sam Oven's Quantum that I joined in 2021. And Sam helped us move from a webinar funnel to a VSL funnel with a sales team.

Okay.

And again, we went from 1.2, 1.3 the year before to, like, closer to 3 million. The following took hiring very seriously. That's just when I moved to Dubai in April, May that year. That was when it became very serious. You know, we were doing like hundreds of thousand a month. We had a team of seven, eight, nine people.

Predominantly closers. Setters of closers or.

Yeah, so we had like one or two supports, one or two coaches, Tom and Azri, and my first ever rep, Alex, my second rep, Zubin, that I hired from an Airbnb on the Palm in my second month in Dubai. It was very bootstrapped. It's always been very like, what do I need now? Who has the answer? Or some ovens, right? Let me join his mastermind. Or now I need to build a sales team. Who has the answer? Cole Gordon. Right. I'm going to buy his mastermind. And the key thing, I think, honestly, the fucking reason that I'm here today is because every time I've hit a roadblock and a problem, I don't sit and worry and be like, oh, what do I do now? I just buy a mastermind, man.

Brilliant.

Yeah. I just, I just go, I say, who is the biggest and the best at this thing? Do they have a mastermind? Yes. Join it. No. Do they have a course? Join it. Yes. No. Can I just pay you for some hours on Zoom? Just tell me what to do and.

What is the wisdom behind doing that? As opposed to figuring it out yourself and saving some money, Maybe speed.

Speed. And getting it right straight away. You know, like, I've always, every time we've made a move, I've always. It's always worked immediately. And I think that's because it comes from whoever is. Is the best at it.

You know, you quoted Hormozy in one of your videos, and he's probably my favorite person on the Internet right now. And it was basically saying, your ignorance debts. If you're not making a million dollars a year, you is costing you a million dollars by not knowing how. I think you just summarized that where. Yes, you Might be thinking what you're spending on the masterminds, but you're not thinking, thinking from that frame. You're thinking what it's going to cost me if I don't buy that mastermind. So in your years of growing your business, how much have you approximately spent on your own education in terms of coaching masterminds and learning about business or consultings?

Yeah, I'd say, well, Cole Gordon's Mastermind was like 64,000 for the year. Sam Oven's was 36,000 for the year. I think a lot, a lot of expensive. I've just joined another mastermind last week. I've just sold my company. I'm straight into another mastermind. You can't stop, so I can't stop. But yeah, no, spent at least $200,000. Like at least, probably more.

Okay. And when, when it came to actually scaling the business, I've understood now you're doing kind of a webinar with. It wasn't a high ticket offer at this point yet it was still at the 1.5k mark.

So the webinar. Yeah. So when I joined Alex's Mastermind, we built a webinar funnel that was 1.5k the price. When we moved from a webinar funnel to a sales call funnel, we raised the price to three and a half thousand dollars.

Okay.

We did three or four or five months at that. And then I learned about the importance of unit economics within the sales process. Right. So it costs you so much to run paid ads. It costs you so much for a lead, for a booked call, for a taken call, on and on. You can affect that by, you know, the better your ads are, the cheaper leads are, the better your closes are. The higher you close the calls that you've got, the higher your short rate is, the cheaper the booked calls are. And so there's all these little mini levers that you can pull within a sales process. But nonetheless, we knew that if we wanted to scale further, we would have to raise the price because the cost per sale, the cost per acquisition was coming up basically. So, you know, when we started the call funnel, it was maybe costing us like 1.2, 1.3, 1.4k to make a sale.

Okay.

Quite high at low scale.

Okay.

And then we thought, well, if you want to scale, that's going to come up. So we need to go from three and a half thousand to. We went from three and a half to five. Then we went from five to something else. I mean, when I sold the company, the front End was eight and a half thousand dollars for the, for the program. And we had a backend mastermind, an online mastermind that was a further $7,000.

Okay.

And the ascension rate into that was 12%. So if 10 people buy the front then you know, 1.1.2 will buy the back. And then we also had a Software that was 350amonth as well. So it wasn't the deepest back end in the world. But we stretched the ARV far enough to be able to scale to like just below 850amonth.

So when you were charging the 8K price point, the system would look like you had a VSL and then booking a call with your sales team. That was kind of the structure to it. And what was your average.

The cost to get a booked call or the cost to get a close when you had the high ticket? Because for me looking from outside perspective, it's more like when you're doing back in the early days outreach or cold outreach and you're sending DMs and whatever to get a cold lead to pay you 250 or 300 for an ebook. It's not the biggest ask, but now let's say you're not familiar face on the Internet. So if a random trader has come across your ad, they're not a warm lead. And yes you've retargeted them, but you still come across through ads. So they always have that sales rejection already just because it's through ads. And then to ask for such a high ticket, I'm sure there was a big change from the cold outreach days when the offer was, you know, didn't change too much. So how did that process look like of you know, going from a cold audience to a warm lead to then actually a paying customer. And was that all just through the paid ads flow and a vsl or was there more intricacies into follow ups and giving value or maybe a lead magnet, something like that?

Yeah, I think this is actually going to surprise some people watching this. But we were taking people from absolutely stone cold, did not know who we were or what we did. Seeing an ad.

Yeah.

To giving us eight and a half thousand dollars with an on average three.

Days.

Just by a VSO.

Yeah. So it was literally just they see a YouTube ad.

Yeah.

It resonates with them. They click on it and land on an opt in page. The opt in makes them a promise. So in order to get through to the free training on the next page, they give their name and their email, the phone number. Then they Go and land on a VSL which was about 12 minutes long. It just basically talks. Yeah, it just talks about what we do, how we do it, how we're different, what they're probably doing wrong, the problem that we solve, blah blah, blah.

So the focus of the VSL was not to focus on a pain point or an emotion that they have what they're struggling on. It wasn't a feelings or emotion based vsl, it was on testimonial based. It was more informative of this is what we do, this is how we do it.

Well, the raw point of a VSL is to sell the sales call. They. Oh yeah. Not, not sell the sales call because.

It'S kind of to justify, to get on the call essentially.

Yes. So the, the point of an ad is to sell the click.

Yes.

The point of an opt in is to sell them on the free training the vsl. The point of the VSL is to sell them on booking a call and then the kind of intermediary follow up that happens between the booking and taking it is there to sell them on attending the call and then obviously the call is to sell them on buying the program. So each part of the whole sales process, each mechanism, it's just the only point of it is just to get them to the next step.

Okay.

So but yeah, dude, I could, I've lived in an ad tracking spreadsheet. I've looked at it like honestly 3 to 4 to 5 to 6 times a fucking day for years. So I could almost tell you every single metric. Yeah.

What was your cost per clothes in terms of in the paid ad side?

So when I sold the company, the cost per attended call was about $330 for the 8K for the 8 1/2 thousand dollar program.

Yeah.

And then we would close at about 20 to 23% on average. So for 10 calls, let's just say it's $350 per booked call. So it costs us about three and a half thousand dollars to book 10 calls and we'll close two on average.

And what was the key to. Because the issue is not necessarily the value you're providing. I'm sure that was there. And the funneling process, as you said, it was designed to just push them along to the next. And you'd found a way where the VSL and the ad was strong enough, the copy and there was strong enough to ignite enough emotion for the individual to proceed along the funnel steps. So what now comes to my mind is once you've got the person in they can go through the lead and you had the numbers for that. You knew the percentage, you knew how much it would cost you and you could recover that through a high ticket. But then I'm just stuck at the front end now where the leads that you're targeting, it's not through content, it's not through social media, you're not a familiar face, it's a complete cold lead and the end is a big ask. It's 8.5k. How are you able to specifically target through paid ads, customers or leads that not just need your products? There's plenty of people that need help to make money online. It's probably the biggest industry. But people that are willing and can afford to pay that price point, how are you able to target that through your ads?

Dude, I really want to show you one of our best performing ads because it is so shit. It's like a. It's a picture of a chart with subtitles and a voiceover. There's no video, there's no face, it's just a picture of a chart.

Why do you think that was so effective then?

I can tell you exactly why it was so effective is because the copy, because I know the problem so intimately, because I had the problem myself. So that's what gave me an edge as an operator in this field. Because I've been a losing trader. I've bought the courses, you know, I know the problem that people have so intimately. I know exactly what words to say, how to say them, when to say them, in what sequence. So that I'm being pretty big headed here actually. I should shut up.

No, no, you deserve your flowers, man. You've achieved something incredible that there's probably thousands of trading educators in the space that would love to have achieved the things you've achieved, not just that you've achieved in the way that you've done them. So I'm sure a lot of people listening and just thinking, what I want to pick this guy's brain.

Yeah, it's just copy. It's literally just copywriting skill number one. But knowing you, your, your avatar, your audience, knowing their problem. Because if you're good at copy but you don't know the problem intimately enough, you can kind of just about make it work. Probably do 50k a month, 100k a month. But to really get.

To build good ads, you know, you need to be good at copywriting. Which I learned from Alex Becker by the way. So. Okay, you know, thanks to Alex for that and a bit Sam Ovens as well. But I Just knew what to say to them. And I knew how to position our offer in a way that it just sounded like common sense to buy it.

And then it was kind of just put your ads in front of as many faces as possible and kind of you eventually capture the right person. Or was the strategy to target people that can afford such a price point?

Well, here's the thing. So in terms of leads, we were converting about 0.9% of leads.

And that's into a sale, by the way. So for every hundred leads that we would buy, we would make about one sale, right? So there's a lot of leads, 99 people are not buying from us. So that's where the kind of other strategies come in. Utilizing email properly setters sms. SMS is one of the most profitable things I've ever done. It's so it's cheaper than email, right. And the open rate on a text message is pretty high. Like tell me someone who gets a text message and doesn't at least just read it quickly and scan it. So SMS made us a fucking lot of money. Most people don't even know to use sms, for God's sakes.

It's crazy when it comes to these operations. I'm using Alex Hormozi as a reference because it's someone I've learned a lot from myself and his kind of beliefs, I'd say different to yours or more to the approaches that you've taken in your own career, where he's a big proponent of media right now and content. And he was also probably very similar to you before, where he was like, I don't want to be on social media, there's no need. And then when he realized Conor McGregor sold Proper 12, Kylie Jenner sold her, you know, they all became basically billionaires just through having a personal brand. He realized the day and age right now is personal brand. And then if you supplement it. In his new book he mentions if you supplement that with paid ads, it turns everything on steroids. So they just feed each other. Do you think now doing it all over again? If you were starting now, because the forex space has evolved a lot, the buyer has changed a lot. Where in your time when you first started, everybody was using a broker and therefore they were willing to deposit, let's say 10k into a trading account to get started. Now the average trader is going through the prop firms and they can get started with 500. So now the, the barrier to entry has got a lot lower. Therefore the buying power of, of the new traders in the industry is less so. Just factoring in the industry shift now the people are going for different styles of trading. E learning as a, as an industry has also changed and new participants have come in and they're doing all sorts of things. Factoring all of that in, would you have come in with the same strategy as you have with kind of very simplistic ads, going for paid media as opposed to content, or not focusing on content, but rather scaling through that route and through webinars and VSLs. Would that still be our approach in 2023?

Partly yes, partly no. Right. So at the moment, now that I've sold the company, my only source of income, apart from a bit of rent from a property portfolio, is mainly the business coaching that I'm doing. And my mastermind right now, when I do business coaching, it's a monthly retainer. And right now I'm making about $110,000 a month recurring from the small handful of clients that I've got. And from the mastermind, I make about half a million dollars a year, right? So right now I'm making roughly 1.7, 1.8 million a year dollars. 100% profit, 100% margin. No team, no ads, just Instagram and YouTube and I'm barely even known, no one even knows who I bloody am, you know. So the reason I tell you that is because from the trading company with like 16 members of staff spending thousands per day on ads, I mean, the margin was about 32%. So when we were up at, let's say, let's, let's keep it simple. So for every 100k in revenue, I'd make about 32k net. So, but there was all the stress. Team meetings or we've got a higher, we've got a fire, we've got to speak to the accountant for 90 minutes and I've got to have a meeting with the bookkeeper. And then this thing and that thing, man. Like, there's something to be said for Alex and Moses approach of content. You're paying with human time instead of money, you know, so when I make a YouTube video, I'm paying with time, not money. And both does work, you know, like, you can literally, we could create an offer right now over the next 2, 3, 4 hours, write and make ads, write and make a VSL, write and make a sales script and design an offer, turn ads on. And I guarantee you, like, I could have you a client within three, four, five, six days that gets on a phone call and pays you three, four, five, six grand, because I just Know like the back of my hand how to do that after all these years. But then you need ads, you need a media buyer. You've got to spend money on ads and all this, all this stuff. There's something to be said for just being on your own and making a couple hundred grand a month net, man. You know, it's, it's, it's very relaxing and, and simple and controllable. It's not scalable.

Well, the, the thing I want to mention here, just by listening to that is, is because you've shifted an industry number one and number the other switches. You were previously B2C, now you're B2B and therefore you can command a lot higher ticket. And because you're not relying on media anymore, it's just the operations have completely changed. But do you think you could still that the numbers that you're charging now for a mastermind or business consulting, do you think those numbers could be charged to a up and coming trader in a very simplistic way that you are doing now? Or is it more the elevation in your career or stages in your career where that was the phase one. Now you've kind of exited that. That's one chapter done and now this is the next evolution of that. Or do you think you could actually just skip that portion altogether?

I'm glad that you kind of stopped me there and added that because I think I was going off on a bit of a tangent. But obviously, I mean, I charge quite a lot for business coaching because I've made almost $20 million in sales and exited to PE. So it's kind of like worth it.

You bring the credibility that people want to be in your position. That's the definition of a mentor. Yeah, of course, yes, it makes sense.

But one problem that I see a lot of people have is with pricing. They don't know how to price. And one thing that a lot of people miss is adding a recurring element. Right. So, so one of my kind of newer business coaching clients will feed this back to trading. But they came to me with like a 3.5k offer just one time, six months. And one of the problems that they came to me with was like, oh, like we just feel like we're starting from zero every month. There's no recurring, blah, blah, blah. So I said, well, why don't we add this kind of coaching element and we add this community element and we charge 3.5k as you're doing now and then for month three, it's 500amonth because they get this and this and this. And since we implemented that, now they're starting to get 5k, 10k, 15k, 20k a month in recurring billings that they wouldn't have had had we not had that conversation. And coming back to trading educators.

People should consider more the recurring element and people should consider more the back end as well because I think a lot of smaller trading educators, they might be doing 50k a month, 100k a month with maybe one product, one offer, one single cheap offer. Yeah, yeah. But there's so much to be done on the, on the back end. Like you could do, you could do a meetup, you could do mastermind, you could do a software.

One to one.

Yeah, one to one. And then you can deepen the back end. And that's pure money free. You could just put that in the bank on, on the back end. Just using your customers and your leads as well. You can kind of all the leads that don't buy your front end, some of them can buy your back end. I've, we've had that as well. So use the leads that you're buying and kind of capitalize on this.

That brings me on to then your situation in your company where a well oiled business as you're, as you're kind of alluding to is it's not just one single offer, it's more you have, let's say a well oiled machine is kind of, you have a free element that was your VSL or it could be an ebook or it could be YouTube videos, but there's a free element and that purpose is to be a lead magnet. Then you have a low ticket offer to kind of capture that audience, the people that can't really afford more, but at least you monetize that. You don't leave that money on the table and then a portion of them. The reason I started the line of questioning that I had was people don't know what they're going to get on the other side. They don't know the value you might have. And therefore what I found is in a low ticket offer. The purpose of that I found is you show them what they don't know, you give them value, but in giving that value you show them the next problem. And therefore the solution is your high ticket. So the low ticket leads to the high ticket and that's kind of your back end. So now you have free low ticket, high ticket and then a subscription element that could be community or monthly reoccurring. That sounds like a well oiled machine to me. And You've tapped into the person that can afford less, the person can afford more and you've deepened your ltv. So that's, that's a fully functioning structure. That sounds good to me. But you built an empire just on one offer, one price point, high ticket and no follow up, nothing really else apart from let's say a software at the end. Would you have changed that? Now looking back.

What, what you said there is a really great description man. Free element, low ticket element. Prove yourself, prove the value. Then maybe something high ticket, then maybe a mastermind, then maybe a software that's a million a month business. Right, right there. If I could go back and start again.

I would implement that structure. I would, I would do something like 1K front end. Because if you can't afford 1K, you.

Know, you can't send them.

Yeah, 1, 1 is just high enough but you know, not, not too high, not too low. Like 1K, you know, 995 is, is a great price to just put people in the, the front end. Maybe give them a three to six month program then offer them like some kind of strong back end. You know, it might involve one to one coaching, group coaching, a bigger, better, deeper program, more strategies, whatever it is, data, whatever you like. So that could be four and a half K, five and a half K maybe close to what, what, what we had like eight, eight and a half K because people pay it, you know, then a mastermind software, you know, you've just gotta what the way to think about it. Right. Is usually one problem solved, is another problem created.

Yes.

Right. So the 1k could just be the knowledge. No coaching, no help, no support, no community then. Right? Well actually we have one to one coaching and a community and this and that and that's 5k if you want to really go to the next level. Cool. And then what about if you want to come to you know, Dubai for three days and really go all out and that's like whatever. That's for higher level traders that are profitable, they're doing well, maybe they're funded, blah blah blah. And then you're really creating such a high LTV that you can scale that far. Very far.

Yeah. The last kind of points I want to touch on because we are very short for time. As I mentioned to you. I had the last two weeks, I've probably met more traders in my life than I ever have and it was a lot of people just happened to me in town being so it is Dubai. So I hosted a yacht event and it was probably like 25, 30 people going to attend and then last minute plus ones, plus ones, plus ones. Next thing you know is like 50 people on a boat. And then through that the, the festivities of the week with dinners and so forth. I probably met more probably like 60 trading educators. And there's a whole spectrum of type of educators. There is. But when I got to know all of them, what I kind of realized, everyone in this day and age is stuck in the super low ticket side where I was discussing with every single one of them like why don't you just charge $500? Why don't you charge just 1k? Because I know you guys can provide the value. But they're kind of stuck in because they're not understanding back end, they're not understanding funnels and they're not understanding paid ads at all. They're kind of just stuck with the 18 year old up and coming trader that's got his last $500. And because they are targeting their media to let's say TikTok or you know, that kind of audience, they're only attracting low ticket. So I've been having these long discussions with all of these people. I've you know, low ticket versus high ticket and then the other I have another guy who's done really well in his trading career and he probably scaled his education company to about $25 million and then stopped doing it a couple of years ago. So I also have the conversation with him and he's on the other side of the spectrum. He's like, stick with high ticket but don't do multiple offers. Kind of like you did. He was like, when you are an authority figure in an industry, people have a curiosity and you have a mystery and allure to you. It's like an itch. And if you can see scratch that itch for 200 as a lead magnet, they might not ascend because that curiosity is solved. Was that if you have one offer for 5K and nothing else, they'll find a way to pay it. So that it's just interesting for me because I don't know what the right answer is and I see the valid points on all ends. So how would you kind of solve that for the guys that are stuck in the low ticket or someone that's saying high ticket or versus do it all. What would be your best approach to all of that? To kind of summarize this dude, I've.

Got to tell you a story. Do you know who Sabri Subi is? Is.

I don't.

So he's, he Runs a marketing agency in Australia called King Kong. Right. He was doing a talk here in Dubai two or three months ago that, that I went to with, with some buddies of mine. And I didn't know it, but the guy sat next to me turned out to be a trading educator. Like a new, new trading educator. And he asked Sabri a question. He said, you know, Sabri, I'm thinking of doing a. Well, I'm trying to do a trading offer. It's 47 per month for one thing, 97 per month for the next. But I can't figure out ads. I can't make sales without losing money.

What should I do? And Sabri literally just said to him, he actually said, charge 8.5K. He didn't know our price, but he was literally like, do you sell in what currency? Blah, blah, blah. He said, just charge eight and a half thousand dollars. Put it all into one program. Just sell it. He was like, I can't, I can't do that.

Mental blood.

I can't sell it for 8.5.

Yeah.

And I'd spoken to Sabri before about selling my business and, and stuff like that. We kind of had to catch up before the, the session. And he said, do you know the guy sitting next to you?

No. He was like, he's, you know, like he has a trading education business. He's got this front end, back end, a mastermind. He's preparing for sale. And he was like, what do you charge, will? I said, 8.5 K. How do you sell it over the phone? And this guy was like.

Hey, well, let me introduce you to some people in Dubai this week. You will get that same reaction, I'm sure. Yeah. Because I've been saying, like, why don't you just charge 500? I can't, I don't, I don't wanna.

It's the guy all over again.

And it's not, it's not a small problem. It's a lot of people in that, in the area.

It's. It, dude, it, it can be done. Like literally, that is what we do. We run ads into a sales process. We get people on the phone and close them at 8.5K. And we've done it like clockwork for years.

You know, I think part of the answer could be because it's not just the sake of increasing your price for the sake of it, because people pay it. Because that can kind of be a weird way to view your offer of like, if people pay it, why not? I think the root cause of the limiting belief a Lot of these guys have is, especially in the trading space, it's very hard to deliver results because my philosophy has always been as a trading educator, when it's a B2B format, you can always give value and eventually it'll lead to results. There's almost a certainty, it just depends how long. Whereas in the trading space, it's more a case of there's a bell curve where you have the 10% of people that will never ever make money, 10% people that will excel regardless, and the majority are kind of in the middle. So it's a bell curve. And our job as educators, just shift everyone to the right. But it's impossible to get the bottom 10% through your education to top 10% because there's so many factors out of our control. Their lifestyle, their dedication and so forth. So because it's an industry where it's B2C, an industry where there's no guarantee of results, I think people through that perspective think I don't know if I can provide enough value and. And they don't have belief in their systems enough. They think, okay, let me just charge 200 or 300, because what's the worst that can happen? And I think that's a position of unconfidence and maybe not aware of the industry or maybe not actually doing what they're doing, which is providing a good value and a good offer. It could also be a perspective of that.

Yeah, well, one thing that we've found, and this kind of sounds backwards, but, but, but it's just. It is what it is. So every time that we've raised our price, support tickets go down and customer results go up, refunds go down. Because, look, we all get refunds. Like I've, you know, whatever you sell for whatever price in whatever industry, we all get refunds. There's always a refund rate. But yeah, every time we've raised our price, support tickets go down, we get more good feedback from clients, and refunds go down as well. So it can be horrible to charge $200, $500, because you just attract broke people, you know, and it's almost like you said earlier, imagine if someone offered you a Lamborghini for five grand and said it was new. You'd be like.

What'S wrong with it? You know, this can't be be true, can't be real. So by charging low prices, you actually scare a lot of mature people off because they're like, well, I ain't buying. That's $500.

That's a piece of so Maybe skin in the game, where if you've only spent $500, you're not going to commit to the system and program. And I've also seen a lot of people, they tell me that the completion rate of the education, someone's pay 300, they'll watch 40 of it. So it's like, obviously you're not going to expect results because they don't even care enough to watch the damn thing.

Dude, you're asking that at the right time. I literally looked in the store about two weeks ago because I've still got access to everything. Whilst the PE firm had taken over, there was a guy that had paid us about, I think he'd done a payment plan of some sort and paid us maybe five, five and a half K and he was still paying. He'd never logged in. He'd never logged in. I looked at his like activity, he'd never viewed anything, never logged in, been paying the payment plan for, for maybe three, four months and I just thought, wow, that's mental. How rich is this guy?

There you go. Well, it was a fantastic conversation. Apologies, it was, it was just a very short one, but I feel like we could do a part two very soon. But yeah, you're, you're a man with the depth of knowledge that a lot of people and I know a lot of traders are going to be watching this or trading educators and they're going to be thinking, how can I get in touch with this guy? Where can I find it? Because I want to learn more from him. So I just want to give you the opportunity to let them know where they can find you.

Thanks, man. Yeah, so I only use two social media platforms, Instagram and YouTube. So if you want to reach me, drop me a message on Instagram. It's just, just type in William Brown and you're going to kind of find me on there and head to the YouTube as well. Those are the, those are the places. Yeah.

You know, I see that you're an up and coming home. Obviously, I think in six months to one year we're going to see a cool direction. But will, thank you very much for your time and it was a pleasure.

Thanks so much, man.