The Hard Truth About Growth Most Founders Avoid. Hormozi Hotline feat. Leila Hormozi | Ep 976

0:00Guys, I have a special, special treat for you. This has only happened one other time in human history. This is historic. So you guys are going to get this. And it's from downtown Vegas. My lovely wife, Lady Layla herself, Queen Lay, is coming to join us and spit some fire on Ramozi Hotline. And we're going to be taking the recalls together. First of all, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you. So, yeah. My name is Joshua. I run a performance based marketing agency called Asnitzos for Kitchen and Bathroom Remodels and Auto Living Company. Currently at 8K per month, it's profit at 7K. We work on a paper show model and positioning for high end projects, so not like discounts, etc.

0:50Without retainers or ad spend on their ads. So we take the risk there. Right now it costs me around$250 to acquire a customer on the last start where I ran the app. I have a$1 ,000 setup fee and I charge$500 to$600 per qualified opponent shell. Great. To get them one opponent shell, it costs at the worst times, like I'm aiming for 210. 10. If I don't get them at least 10 appointments in the first month, I refund them the setup fee. Now, currently to let you know, I do have two clients on this, but I have three other clients still in tree service, which I kept for cash flow because that's what I ran before.

1:36And my question is from just what I told you guys now and from your experience, what do you see, which I currently don't see? So what would you do in my position to absolutely like scale this or maybe do differently um are you keeping the customers no um until i'm basically i wanted to keep them until i'm at 10k sufficiently in the modeling and then completely ditch so the question was i mean i don't think you should cut your cash flow you haven't you only have like four customers right currently at five okay so you have five customers and that means that if you're doing eight thousand dollars a month you said eight thousand top line seven thousand bottom line but you said your cost of getting a show is 210 on 500 those margins don't make sense what am i missing so for the 8k i'm not basically counting in the 200 which is lost it's just counting the 300 okay the one guy i'm current the one guy i'm currently onboarding so i only have one guy currently on it uh yeah the other The guy's currently on onboarding.

2:43And when you say guys on onboarding, you mean a client? Yeah. The one company I'm currently onboarding to get them into the$500 thing. I got his$1 ,000 setup fee, basically. But he's not actively enrolled with... And you have five clients, right? Yeah. Currently, I'm looking to scale this now. Yeah. I mean... Go for it. I know you're going to... Say what you're going to say. Well, I was just thinking that we have to run some more water through the well. So I need to get more data. Yeah, you need to get more data. I mean, at that point, that sample size is so small. I think we need to focus on getting a bigger sample size.

3:20And then we can go from there. I understand. Well, what would you say? What is just your opinion about the model, the offer? I'm running it because all other agencies are basically running the paper appointment. and yeah uh yeah they you know and they pay 40 yards but like the trust is really low in that market so i was thinking about doing that dude i think everything's fine i think everything's fine the the i'd say one risk that i see that's relatively significant is your cost per show relative to the revenue per show is kind of low i would say the guys who i see like really murder it are at like 20 so you're a little you're at like 60 uh i'm sorry 40 so i would i want to see if we could drive that down because my fear of the business is that when you take this to scale, you'll be less efficient and your margins are going to compress.

4:09That's like, I would say like, that's kind of like my biggest red flag. Overall, the model of lead costs and arbitrage, there's nothing wrong with it. I've seen some massive agencies that run that model. The next issue that you're going to run into is the types of businesses that you're serving. So you're going to want to go up market for people who can spend 50 ,000, a hundred thousand,$200 ,000 a month in ads, that's what you're going to want to go after because the volatility of your business is going to be predicated on the volatility of their business. So when you go after, and this is super common for small business owners, for everyone who's listening, is like you go after, if you go, most people who are poor, I'm not saying you're poor, but like most people are starting out in business, go after other people who are also starting out in business because that's where your confidence level is.

4:52But they don't know anything either, right? So it's the blind leading the blind and you're like, what's wrong with my business? All these people are churning and they're churning because they don't know what the hell they're doing in their business either. And so you're going to want to earn the right to go a market as fast as you can. And if you have five clients that pay you what they're paying now versus having five clients and each one pays$1 ,000 a month, you could run the same ops and have a hundred times the revenue. I was going to say the next thing that you're going to want to realize is that like we've done the pay per show model and we also had a software that used to enable the pay per show model.

5:26there's two things that you want to watch out for which is one when you're doing pay per show a lot of times the businesses are going to think well if they show but they don't close why the fuck am i paying you and so then you're going to be really tempted to be like oh can i just help them sell these people i'm just going to also maybe i should start a sales agency and close these motherfuckers that's the next thing that's going to happen the the second piece to it and by the way don't do that go upmarket instead because people that are upmarket have their own sales team and they understand that concept that even though you get somebody to show it doesn't mean that they're guaranteed to close you so you have trained salespeople so do not give in to the temptation don't try and serve an avatar that isn't best for you more that's the biggest mistake people make which is like you're serving an avatar that isn't your best avatar and you try to go above and beyond for it you just don't want to do that the second thing is that okay that's like i feel like that's like 2010 that was good uh the second piece is that with the paper show model here's the place where it goes wrong, which I saw firsthand, which is why agencies had churn with it, which is that customers want to be able to predict how much money they're going to spend with you.

6:32So if you look at churn and you look at customer retention, the customers who retain the most are the customers who understand how much they're going to pay. And so one thing that you can do is you can give people a range estimate or you can give them a heads up different times through the month as to how much you're going to be billing them. Now, it seems contrary because you think, okay, well, if I tell them how much they're going to be paying, they'd be like, oh my God, that's so much. But the reality is actually, if they get a bill that's unexpected, that is like, it looks, and it's like, once you get one unexpected bill from a company, it's like by the second one, there's a 50 % likelihood that they're going to turn.

7:05So think about how you can communicate with those customers. Maybe it's every other week. Maybe it's every week to show them what their tab looks like. Or by increment of revenue. Yeah, or by increment. That's a great one too. Yeah, it's just like every 5 ,000, or whatever, every 1 ,000 and 5 ,000 they spend, You just let it just automatic, just letting them know that this is happening. We can turn it off whenever you want. So I think another piece that you can also ask is when you're getting the sale, when you're onboarding them, ask them what their budget is. I know it seems contrary, but it's like if you want to get them to spend more money with you, you also need to show them that you're OK spending as much as they're comfortable to start.

7:40Does that make sense? And you can coach them up from there once you get buy in. Yeah. OK. Yeah, that makes sense. I currently what I currently do is I built like this lovable thing where I put in the numbers so close rate average contract value etc and Basically, I do that on the sales call though. So that's great Because then I can always like weekly tell them like hey This is how much you should stand and that's what you should expect in the long term to get a return So thank you for that. I mean if you were me here how would like you think about going from like 8k per month right now to like 50k in the exact model as fast as possible and all per s just being sustainably dude this is we we answered it so i want to ask you what do you think we what do you think we just said just i want to make sure you not switch my business model and get them to basically convince me to get them to sell and also make sure that they know how much they get charged and go up market

9:00market the one thing i want to ask what do you think about the editor one million in both because that was being in but just go up just just like in your ads or your outreach look for people who are doing ten times those numbers number go up good yeah big number good okay okay cool like thank you literally have the same side you have in terms of headcount literally just add a zero to what the people that you're trying to attract are and you will make significantly more money and love your life more mm-hmm cool yeah thank you All right. Should I increase? That'll be? No, I don't think yet. Dude, it's five people.

9:39Yeah. You got to get more water through the well. Also, there's a, like, for everybody listening, like, it's like, okay, increase your prices. But, like, you haven't even gotten to the threshold of delivery. So until you get to a point where delivery is stressed and you can see how your team and how your company operates when you are stretched when it comes to your client load, do not increase your prices. You increase your prices when you know that your product and your delivery is rock solid. So we got to get more water through the pipes first. Yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate you. Next caller?

10:08Next caller. Hello? Hi. Yeah. Super nervous right now, but thank you for the call. You should be terrified. What if I'm nervous? Yeah. My name is Jazz. I run Winnipeg Digest. It's a local newsletter slash media company. Okay. With an audience of 110 ,000 people in Winnipeg. Sweet. So that's about$70 ,000 on socials,$40 ,000 newsletter lists in the last 18 months. That's awesome. We do about$10 ,000 in revenue right now,$6 ,000 profit through local advertising. Is that per month or per year? That's per month, yeah. And then we currently have six annual advertisers, mostly paying about$1 ,000 per month, with two paying$2 ,000 per month.

10:55and then the rest of the revenue comes from single one-off ads my question is a little two-part so the first one is how do i scale to a million without running out of local advertisers in the future which i'm afraid of or running into a supply constraint because we only send out 12 newsletters per month so basically we have 12 primary no we send out 12 newsletters per month so it's three per week okay every monday wednesday and these are digital right yeah these are these their digital email letters yeah okay yeah and are you yeah so that's my part yeah so i would not be worried about running out of advertisers there's 110 000 people in the city there's you can for sure get enough advertisers that's not an issue so put that one away um you running out of ad space is more uh more possible so you have how many people on your list yeah so we have 40 000 on the list the city is a million people this is a million hundred and ten thousand yeah so the city is a million people the hundred and ten thousand is what our audience size is so it's 70 ,000 on social media oh word you have so much room you have so much room so much room yeah so that's kind of so okay so if I have room then kind of from a growing perspective then I'm afraid that we'll run out of ad space so we'll run into a supply contract you're not going to run out of ad space you're going to have to make sure that your price of your cpm is appropriately so said differently if you have you know 250 ,000 of the people out of the million in the city on your newsletter you could charge a truck you I mean every ad would be you'd be you know a hundred thousand dollars like it would be a lot you know what I'm saying so yeah so the space itself obviously have limited you don't have you don't want to send your entire newsletter it's just all ads right that's not gonna work the way that media scales is via impressions and and quality of impressions.

12:52And so you can charge more for the same space. That's what you have to do. So it's like, how do I steal this business? You get more eyeballs. But it's like there's not that, or like with, I don't know if there's enough businesses that can pay me 200, like$100 ,000 per ad, you know? There are for sure businesses, well, again, you're selling 12 ads a month. $1 ,000 a month in advertising is not, like many businesses can do that. Many businesses can do five or 10. mm-hmm dude like my dad used to run my dad's local business owner right he used to spend 10 or 15 000 to be in like baltimore digest or something or baltimore's whatever like one yeah one magazine per month went out he would spend 15 000 to be in that thing for like a half page right so okay yeah so that kind of that kind of sent me i guess that kind of answers my second question too which was like it was either okay should i expand to new cities stay in the current one but niche down so let's say go start another one but say winnipeg real estate digest or something right or just keep i want you to keep stealing this i do not think it's worth you uh splitting splitting your attention right now i think you have way more way more impressions to capture the other piece that you want to consider here though is like you're sending a newsletter it's like are there other places you could like you have 70k on social it's like we can charge for posts we can charge for stories we can charge for youtube video integrations we can charge for news like i would rather you do all that stuff first before even considering the channel for now okay but what you would say the next step would be to niche down after like no no for i don't even want you to think about nicheing down i want you to just do more you need way more okay okay and And then, okay.

14:42And from an acquisition standpoint of subscribers, we are currently running Facebook ads and acquiring subscribers at like$1.40. Okay. So that's correct. So my question then is, do we continue to scale Facebook ads? Because right now it takes about like three months to break even on a subscriber. Okay, so you already know. Yeah. I mean, that's fine. Yeah. Okay. And so keep stealing Facebook ads in social. Yeah. you can also sell people longer you know periods of time on the front end and is there and is there like a front-end offer like because i know a lot of people in the space try and try and achieve like negative costs for acquiring a subscriber right so um having some sort of a front-end offer would you say i should still continue to just push b2b advertising or you can push b2b advertising as you do your facebook ads for people often for the newsletter just have something called an slo which is self-liquidding offer on the thank you page okay do you have anything on the thank you page that you sell them no nothing right now i mean i'm about to change your life i'm about to change your life you ready yeah i want you to offer a a 10 pack of guide to winnipeg's best restaurants guide to winnipeg's best new uh spots guide to winnipeg's best ski dessert best dessert like literally just put a put 10 different kind of like magazines do it was uh make that 10 pack like 37 put it on the thank you page if you can get one out of 37 people to buy it your cost of acquisition is zero and then you can scale the thing to the fucking movie so those are the physical like physical things they're like digital guys you can make it digital it's fine okay i was literally about to offer that for free in our welcome sequence so there we go okay and yeah okay no i think that kind of

16:40yeah i mean no like i mean i've been i've been like going back and forth with like oh shit i start a christmas holiday late company on top of this no dude no what that sounds fucking awful no it sounds horrible do more of this all you have to do is add a self-liquidating offer the front end you'll be able to grow the hell out of your media you can charge more you can get more advertisers in done and done you can also to your concern you can also parse your lists right so let's say you triple your list size if for some reason you can't find advertisers you can pay more which i wholeheartedly reject but just to show you that you can still be creative here you You can say, I'm going to send 12 emails to these people, 12 emails to these people, and 12 emails to these people.

17:24List A, B, and C, because you made the list three times fake, and you can charge that many more times. Okay, got it. That answers, I think, all my questions. All right. Rock and roll, man. Appreciate you. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. You should take this one. What are the questions that we're prompting? Yeah, I feel like I smashed that one. I'm not going to answer a marketing question, so tell us what the next caller is. Hopefully it's a people question. They'll be like, people, they're alive. Anything but marketing? Yeah, anything but marketing. Anything but marketing? I can help answer.

17:58All right, next caller. I'm not going to. What's up, guys? What's up? Hey. Tell me about the biz. Yeah, sir. I run a company where I essentially help remote high ticket sales coaches with their fulfillment by providing job opportunities and then coaching for their students slash clients on best application processes, interview, support, and prep, and things like that. So which part of the delivery do you do? Can you hear me? What part of the delivery do you do? so i like post the job opportunities inside of their community um and then i do group coaching calls once a week with some of the clients and then dm support answering people's questions reviewing their application videos and things like that okay what do they do they're responsible for sales yeah so they're sales coaches so they're teaching people the sales side of things and And most of them, before I come into the business, are doing part of the, you know, helping them land jobs.

19:07But often are struggling with having enough job opportunities. And they're coaching part of actually teaching people what to do properly to get hired. Got it. So they're really good at getting the clients. They're not going to getting the clients the opportunity. So you bring them the opportunities. You're responsible for the second funnel. Exactly. Okay. Great. um so i guess like the bottleneck that i have is we currently have 45 um communities that we work with wow we work on our retainer model uh we don't charge the businesses anything for the recruitment services not really recruitment services it's just like posting their opportunities in the community um and so the sales coaches pay after retainer uh it's anywhere from two to four thousand dollars a month um and i'm run the entire business and fulfillment and so i guess my bottleneck is that the business is not a business it's me um for placements when you get them opportunities no so it's just like a flat retainer model providing the job opportunity you're providing let me say differently these guys get jobs at businesses that need salespeople correct yeah so who those businesses you just give them people for free exactly so i don't charge the business as anything um so that that doesn't become a bottleneck so that i can have as many job opportunities as exist in the world so it'd be like i would come to you and say i need remote sales people and you would be like i'll give you some for free yes so let me know anytime you need sales reps i mean i wouldn't do it because i wouldn't believe that you were any good yeah there's that well we have uh anywhere from 500 to 600 job opportunities that we post for months so we've got a lot of people who do trust us i you get what i'm saying okay so what's the problem in the business well just that uh i guess i'm bottlenecked by i have no team and we have 45 I have clients.

21:11And so I'm not sure where to find the right talent, how to incentivize the right talent for the fulfillment side, like coaching, finding the right opportunities. I guess I just don't know what direction to go in to scale beyond where we're at currently. So let me ask you, in the business right now, where do you spend most of your time? Is it on sales? Is it on fulfillment? Like which piece? um yeah i don't really spend very much time at all on sales it's it's pretty much all on fulfillment so uh i guess like liaising with businesses who are looking to hire sales reps yeah um and answering questions and getting on group coaching calls with the students of my clients how many group coaching calls a week are you getting on uh currently around 20 per week so a little less than half of the total clients we work with have that as part of the services i provide.

22:03Gosh. Okay. And then of that time, the rest of the time you're spending DMing people, essentially like answering questions in the group. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And then what would you do if you weren't, if your time wasn't being taken by doing either one of those things? I think it would just mostly be acquisition, finding more clients and making bigger, better connections with businesses and people that are hiring sales reps consistently. Yeah. I think the first thing that you should try and get off your plate is the questions, because if you can bring somebody on and you can train them on answering the questions in the group, that's like it's almost like they're onboarding to then take over calls from you.

22:45My question is, when you're on the calls, what is the like if you were to tell me the top three things that you're teaching them on the calls, what would those three things be? uh i mean i i think the like the application videos would be the number one thing but the the majority of those calls and answering people's questions is all like personalized so it's based on their situation and their past experience because i work with some people that have a ton of sales experience and some people that you know this is going to be their first ever go at sales. And so it's mostly personalized, like how can we frame the experience they do have or the lack of experience in the right way to be able to help them land a better job than they have currently or their first job.

23:30Yeah. So it's essentially a lot of career coaching to a degree, just in like a less traditional sense. Yeah. Okay. So you're looking for somebody that can essentially be a career coach for the remote sales opportunity piece. Yeah, pretty much. And I think that struggle is, I don't know who has the understanding of the industry and I guess enough expertise. And obviously I can coach that. But to have authority in those conversations that isn't a great sales rep who could make a lot more money selling than helping people get jobs. So there's two different models that you can think of when you think of a coaching business like this.

24:08And I think this goes for like any coaching business in existence. which we've talked to so many and I've helped structure multiple teams like this. Like there's really two models that work and there's trade-offs in each one, meaning like you kind of just want to pick your problems. And so I'm going to describe each one and you can tell me which one you think you would rather have the shit that comes with it. The first one is that you hire people that are going to be full-time. The downside of this is it's going to be harder to find those people because they're competing with these other opportunities.

24:34So just like what you said, it's like they could go make more money somewhere else, which means the type of people you're going to find are people who directly want to learn from you. And they see this as a learning opportunity, not an earning opportunity. And they one day want to open up a business similar to yours. So there's two downsides here, which is one, they're going to be competing in terms of cost. And so they're looking at these other opportunities. They're not going to come in for super cheap, even though they're trying to learn because the anchor is just very high as what they're going to earn elsewhere.

25:01The second side to it is that there's going to be a finite timeline on this because they're coming in to learn. And so once they feel like they've learned enough that they can go off on their own or go do something somewhere else and learn more, they're going to do that. However, the benefit is that it's less management for you because if you bring these people in, you probably only need a couple of them, literally, to take care of all the clients that you have, and you get a ton of discretionary effort from them because they're full-time employees with you, and they're trying to learn, so they want to go above and beyond because they're trying to acquire the skills.

25:30That make sense? That's the first model. The second model is easy to find and also hard to manage, which is find people that essentially are doing what you just described. They're already those coaches making a lot of money, but they want to make more money and they want to have influence. They like the status. They like the teaching. And so as a side opportunity, they can do this for 10 or 15 hours a week, maybe even less. And so then what you would do is you would get more of those people, say you need, based on 20 calls a week plus whatever, say it's 40 hours, maybe you need four or five of them to cover you.

26:04You pay them a lot less. You get them fractionally in part-time. The downside to it is that it's going to be more management from you because you have to build out a schedule. You're going to have to make sure that they're all, you know, clock in, clock out, whatever, all the compliance. And so I would say that if you have a hard time finding the people, then maybe go with a model where you have the part time coaches coming in. I would say the other upside to doing the part time is that if you lose one, it's not a big deal. You can replace them fairly easily. There's a lot of key man risk in the first model.

26:35And so if you don't feel like you're going to really be great at retaining them, I typically tell people to steer away from that model. Let me, yeah, I'm going to thank you back on that. So the nice thing with the partial model that Layla just outlined is that, one, you're placing all these salespeople right now, and you already have a history of placing a lot of salespeople already, right? And they already went through your training and whatnot. And so I would say take your most successful alumni and say, hey, want to make an extra$5 ,000 a month and give back to the community that you came from?

27:00Many of those guys would probably say, sure, I'd happily do it. because a lot of salespeople, they get tired of selling all the time. And so this gives them a little bit of a break and feel like they're giving back. Yeah, exactly. So I actually really like that model. And given the fact that you recruit all these salespeople, I don't think it'd be that hard. Second, because it would kill me and eat me up inside to not at least say it, you can double your revenue really easily. Can I tell you how? I would love to know. So I hear where you're coming from with the, hey, I want to have as many opportunities as possible so I can find as many places as possible.

27:34So making it free is a way to do that. I hear you there. But you probably know of all the candidates you have that there's probably 10 % of them that are killers and are going to do well, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Have a tier that's$2 ,500 or$5 ,000 per head that you say, hey, all these people are free. I personally screen these ones and give them a blue checkmark from me. And these ones are$2 ,500 or$5 ,000 a pop. So if you get 600 placements a month is what you're doing, if 60 of them are paid at$2 ,500 or$5 ,000, that adds$150 ,000 to$300 ,000 a month to the business. That makes a lot of sense.

28:15Boomerose. Okay. You're like, I got to get that one out. Yeah, I definitely need to implement. Call that a money model. Call that a money model right there. Right there. You should write a book. I should write a book about that. Does that help? So that way, let's solve your leader model, and that's all your money model. Rock and roll? Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you. That was a fun one. That was good. That was nice. A little spice. I had a little spice of life. That was fantastic. All right, let's do Nick's following. Let's rock and roll. Who else we got? Hey, I'm Brian. Hey, Alex.

28:54Hey, Lula. Hey. What's up? What's going on? So I run a online coding bootcamp for adults called Tarsity.io. And I'm in a pretty frustrating position where we've like basically plateaued at around 30 to 40 people per year. We have pretty good reviews. People seem to like us. I do pretty much only organic through a podcast and around 30 ,000 followers on LinkedIn. And I'm just wondering how do I hit this magical 100 people per year target? What do you charge? $9 ,200. $200? So$900 is what you charge, and you've got 30 to 40 people a year who are buying it? Yep. How long have you been doing it? This business has been around for about five years, and I've been running it for the last two.

29:43Did you buy the company? Yes, I did. I seller-financed purchase, yeah. Okay, understood. And last year, was it also at the same number? basically yeah like the it had a pandemic you know plateau it went up to like 50 or 60 people during the pandemic when it was the software developer market was really hot and now it's kind of gone to like 30 or 40 we're we're priced under most other coding boot camps and we're much more personalized but it just feels like yeah it's a little stuck at this point where are your leads coming good experience bad almost all through a podcast i do that has about 10 000 listeners per month but it just feels like it's frustrating to me like that's a lot of people but it's like no one's actually 10 000 unique so there's 10 000 downloads it 10 000 downloads right and how many podcasts do you make a month yeah uh two per week yeah eight per eight per month yeah so call it you know it's 1200 per episode downloads and not all downloads or listens that's right yeah right so you might only have a thousand people right you might only have a thousand or 500 or 600 people.

30:54And yes, we read the chat by the way. And there's only 500 or 600 people who are actually listening. So the fact that you're getting 30 or 40, that actually sounds like you're getting, yeah, you're getting 5 % of your podcast to convert. Okay. So guys, has your podcast grown in the last year? Yeah, it did. But I think that was like from doubling the amount of episodes. So I think it was like, Oh great. I'm getting more people. Yeah. I think that was the issue. and so I've been trying to like explore LinkedIn I'm like okay I have like 30 thousand people on LinkedIn and then trying to write daily like not as many of I think most of the people come from the podcast and we asked well hey how'd you find out about it almost always through the podcast there's there's like I'd say let's say 25 % come come through LinkedIn and that's about it all right so you have a marketing issue no one knows you exist and it's it's great that you have a podcast podcasts are very very difficult to grow because there's very low suggestibility so you would want to take so i see podcasts and like email list for example is very middle and bottom of funnel yeah and so you need more top of funnel awareness type stuff so linkedin works that's fine but i would also be looking at i mean i know it's just you but i think you just need to make way more like instead of making more podcasts i think you need to make more linkedin content uh for sure because that's where a lot of people like i think that's a good place i think x is also a pretty good platform for people who are trying to like buy you know coding stuff also repurposing that content super easy between linkedin and x because it's almost all words but beyond that if you take the words and then you make videos of those words shorts or longs combine the best three four five linkedin posts you make and then make those into longs uh for youtube if you combine all those things together you'll get significantly more traction beyond that i'm assuming what's the uh what's how are people actually buying from you so i see a linkedin poster you're good i see a linkedin poster podcast what do i what's the point what what gets me to take action oh okay like at the end of each episode i'm like hey you know go to plug d.io and fill out this application yeah okay so thing one is we need a better lead magnet so it'd be like i would say you have your course thing i would say give the first module away for free and say hey like learn how to do this in under 60 minutes the first like the one thing that's really valuable like oh my god this is amazing and then all you do is all those people get that thing for free you'll get way more leads you can call them up and then sell them because a direct ask of like go apply is tough yeah for sure right super bottom of funnel like you have a very bottom of funnel business and so that's why it's not growing because everything is about just conversion yeah i was also thinking like we've had a lot of companies that we've worked with that are in this space and the ones that i've seen that have had the highest revenue they actually they make youtube videos so the reason i think it works well for that is because like it's a very um like a lot of people that get into coding like they like watching a lot of videos on coding so it's like listening to it is very different than like watching it i almost feel like you could take your podcast and literally just turn them into youtube videos i think that you'd get a lot more buy-in there'd be a lot more trust and then you probably honestly get way more lead flow that way because it's a platform that's easy to grow on compared to podcasts so it's like i wouldn't stop doing the podcast yeah in conjunction with what alex said i think the thing i'm thinking is just like you're putting a lot of effort into a channel that's not going to give you a lot of return yeah like my podcast and alex's podcast like that is like the it's the one thing that probably comes from like i would say like if we want to do it the right way it would take a ton of effort and be difficult to distribute across other channels optimized for those channels whereas youtube if you made youtube videos you could take that and put that across instagram tiktok snapchat linkedin like it's it's such a better source piece of content that when you're ready to scale again you can scale that across so many different platforms versus the podcast always just audio video turns into audio much easier than audio turns into video correct yeah so yeah where to be and that's probably keeping it going totally tldr two things you need to do thing one get a better league man thing two you need to advertise way more which means you put out higher valuable content across all platforms especially ones that have high deliver uh high discoverability yeah not tracks and you and so you probably wouldn't do ads at this point right no i think you can i think you just i think you can post no i think no i think you can you have so much meat on the bone with organic right now i would do i would just double i wouldn't double down i'd 5x down okay i appreciate that all right man rock and roll appreciate you cool hey thank you all right later brother simon appreciate the shout for the book i'm glad you like it he's referencing money models it's also free on my podcast for those of you who are broke it's also a free course on my site for those who are also broke it's also there you don't even have to opt in you can just watch it um but we're here now so let's do this next caller is red with a nick caller okay let's body slam what's going on guys can you hear me yes sir going on my name is josh i own a brick and mortar pest control company that focuses mainly on recurring service plans for residential clients.

36:15So currently my constraint is to optimize my offer. I feel like it's just waiting for improvement. My constraint is what? My constraint is optimizing my offer. Offer. Okay. Okay. Yep. I've been bundling basically all the services into like a mother of all bundles type of deal. Yeah. I basically can't upsell with that since I'm bundling everything and margins get tighter, but my close rate does increase um but when we don't bundle the office that happens close rate margins do increase along with upsell potential so my question is which of the two would you deploy to scale the quickest um currently a million dollars to start the business a year ago looking to get to five next year my question is you said closer decreases when you take away the bundles right uh yeah so basically yeah with the uh that bundle um i basically just came up so yeah pretty much i'm curious do the customers do you sell less of a specific type of customer like in terms of like income range or type of house or something like that it's all upscale like uh yeah basically upper upper middle to higher is that what you're asking me yeah i was just trying to understand if like there's a specific type of customer that's more attracted that you're not getting when you switch that you lose with the switch but that the ones that you're getting are going to have a uh a greater ltd so it's like kind of worth the trade-off but i was trying to understand if there's a difference of customer yeah it's uh so the customer um basically yeah it's like so the customers are pretty much the same it's really not going to change so i pretty much i'm focusing on like a hired customer that's willing to yeah let me push back real quick so you said your constraint is your offer I would say, how do you know that?

38:17Well, so, well, Coach, because of the, I would tell, really, honestly, it's like that close rate. It drops when we don't bundle, and when we do bundle, it goes up. I mean, the business is rocking and rolling. It's doing great. Honestly, I don't. I'm just wondering if that is the constraint. It doesn't sound like the constraint. Like, what's that, like? Why is the business not doubling revenue? like yeah what's stopping you right now i mean you said your close rate's fine when you have the bundle so sell the bundle okay unless there's some other major problem so the only thing is that the upsell potential drops so the ltv does drop well then why don't you raise the price on the bundle yeah i guess i could just raise the price in the bundle i mean it's like love this for us i will raise the price on the bundle this is great i'm glad we i'm glad had this yeah okay we have this thing that everyone wants to buy but it has lower margins it's like well but you if you're especially going to upscale they don't know the difference so you know tack on 20 and then probably like double your margins they won't even know yeah you're right i love it yeah this was fun i'm gonna be seeing you guys in uh september oh fun well rock and roll man we'll see you out here pal so much more money you make in the meantime yeah that'd be lovely That's a full lot of money.

39:42You bet. Have a good one. We have a next caller. Okay. Let's do next caller. Who's on? Who's on first? This is Paul. So I run a marketing agency for Marshall High School. Oh. I offer lead generation. And yeah, I offer lead generation and appointment setting services. I currently am at$420 ,000 in revenue,$100 ,000 in profit. and yeah I guess the problem right now is that I kind of started this just doing freelancing and I stumbled into martial arts on a whim after having success with the clients I figured out like a repeatable system to get them results get people showing up get people coming up to the first class and that's kind of where I'm at today I guess my problem right now is you know I'm selling three-month contracts and uh turned pretty high still and i kind of just didn't really fix the churn issue i kind of just started selling a lot and getting clients and i have a good relationship with all of them but uh i've been kind of stuck at this range it's uh 35 000 per month for a while now and uh clients just leave for a lot of reasons out of my control either a i do a great job and they can't handle the one coming in or b they don't have the patience to kind of keep going with it and uh i think do you want to take this one i don't i don't uh run a muscle at school myself so sometimes i have issues with sales and um i can't really run and charl's that so i kind of just grew that agency on a whim what do you want to happen before i answer the question what do you want to what's your goal yeah that's the question i like to start with yeah i think right now i'm trying to figure out if i should keep pushing on this or if i should pivot and then like i didn't really set out to start the agency what do you want to have happen what's the goal it depends whether you should put your pivot there you try and make a certain amount of money you try to sell a business do you want a lifestyle business like you know what i'm saying like what do you want to do i think right now i think i want to learn how to make a lot of money and exit and learn how to use