Helping Ali Abdaal Scale From $300K/mo to $1M/mo

Cole Gordon helps Ali Abdaal scale his online business from $300K to $1M/month by identifying constraints and optimizing client success and marketing.

Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.

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Key Takeaways

The primary growth constraint is usually demand generation or sales efficiency, not client success.
Segmenting client success by activity completion helps identify actionable improvements.
Scaling exposes operational weaknesses that must be addressed for sustainable growth.
Fear and mindset issues can limit scaling even when the product and team are ready.
Effective KPI tracking and team management are critical to scaling from $300K to $1M/month.

What the video covers

Cole Gordon hosts a mastermind for high-revenue entrepreneurs, assisting Ali Abdaal to scale from $300K to $1M monthly.
The main business constraint is identified as demand (marketing volume or sales efficiency), not client success.
Ali’s mission is to build the world's best online business school, aiming for beginners to make their first sale within 3 months.
Client success metrics should be segmented by client activity to better diagnose and reduce friction in the customer journey.
Scaling reveals fulfillment and operational bottlenecks that are hard to predict at low volume but become clear under stress.
Fear of scaling and self-limiting beliefs can prevent business growth despite readiness.
Tracking KPIs related to client actions and results helps improve interventions and overall success rates.
Operational complexity and team management strategies are discussed as the business scales.
Organic vs paid marketing strategies and their impact on closing rates and growth are analyzed.
The importance of balancing marketing, sales, client success, and operational efficiency is emphasized.

Chapters

What is the main constraint in Ali Abdaal's business growth?

The main constraint is demand generation or sales efficiency rather than client success or fulfillment capacity.

How does Cole Gordon suggest measuring client success?

He recommends segmenting client success by the completion of key activities to identify friction points and improve interventions.

What mindset issues can limit business scaling according to the video?

Fear of success, concerns about increased workload, and negative perceptions of growth can cause self-limiting behavior that prevents scaling.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

So part of our $36 million a year business is we have a three times a year boardroom mastermind strictly for people who are above 100 grand a month all the way to 5 million a month and more. And so today I have Ali Abdal and

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we're going to help him go from 300 grand a month to a million a month in his business. So Ali's got some questions and I'm going to answer them.

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So you kick it off. Amazing. Okay. So the first question is we are currently 300k a month. We hired a sales team like a month ago. We started running ads like a month ago.

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We've been doing entirely organic for the last nine months. How do I figure out what the constraint of the business is in the sense of right now client success could of course always be better. I'm like, you know, the

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curriculum is improving and I'm doing new this and that. Currently we've got like 30 students to a coach but from speaking to you and the people here a lot of people doing 60 per coach. Yeah, but is that client success the

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constraint or is actually could we just get more people in the front end? It doesn't sound like a constraint. I mean the easiest way to think about it and especially in our business which is like courses, coaching, professional

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services, etc. It's a demand constraint business. So most of the business is pred- I mean you have to have a good product, you have to get your clients results right and if you- and you could have a constraint in terms of capacity

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issue on fulfillment but you don't have that or you would have told that to me that would be pretty obvious so your constraint is either volume most likely in terms of marketing coming in or it's going to be that you have enough volume

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but the volume is not profitable enough because you're not converting up enough of that volume with your sales team or it's not efficient enough with the setters or the ads aren't good enough.

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Right? So, it's either a volume or efficiency thing, right? I mean, that's how I would look at it. It's going to be either one of those. So, it definitely doesn't sound like it's client success to me.

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So, you mentioned the thing around getting the client's results. So, like my mission for this is to build the world's best online business school because I think it would be cool to help beginners start

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their first online business. Our goal is to help them get to their very first sale within three months and then ideally to get to 10K revenue within the next, like, well within six to twelve months. Right now about 30% of people

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are getting to that first sale milestone within three months and a lot of them are like not doing the work or mindset issues or, you know, all of this sort of stuff.

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Yeah. And so what I'm thinking is like do we have a results issue with that? Because I mean I ideally want that number to be 100%. It's never going to be 100% because it's, you know, outside of our

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control. How do you know when client results are good enough to where you feel like you're good at scaling the product?

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Exactly. Well, there's a couple of things. I mean, I think one thing that's valuable for everybody to hear is especially like you do need to put some volume through the system to actually see where the breaks are in client success. And

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actually, as you scale, it'll become more obvious where the breaks are and what essentially needs patched, right?

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Because what happens is at a low scale, there's not a lot of volume. And so like if you think about signal versus noise, the signal doesn't separate as well from the noise because essentially the occurrences are going to be more

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spread out, right? But as you scale and you have more people going through the system, you'll know right away, right?

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Based on your kind of stance towards things, I think you should focus on just getting more clients and I don't think you're going to be the type of person-

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What do you mean based on my stance? Can you elaborate? I think you overindex on there. There's, you know, people usually lean one way or another.

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Like some marketing really bro type people, they lean way more towards marketing and sales, marketing and sales. I'm just going to make the product good enough so I don't go to jail, right? I don't think you're like that

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type of person, right? I'm not saying that's how they are, but they lean that way, right? I think you're more, "I got to make the client results good. They got to be good. They got to be good. They got to be good."

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And at some point it becomes a procrastination of scaling, right? I mean, it's the classic fear of success thing to where a lot of the reason people don't scale past where they're at is they're

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actually afraid of what that version of their business is going to look like. Whether it's, "Oh, I'm going to have people post about me online and they're going to say negative things." Or if it's, you know, if they have an

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association between growth and pain because they can't rely on other people. They're like, "Oh my God, well, I'm working 60 hours." In their mind, they might think, you know, going to 400 grand a month from 200 grand a month

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might be working, you know, 80 hours or 90 hours. And they're like, "Oh, I can't do anything more." So, they self-limit. They self-cap, right? So, I could tell by your stance towards things that it's probably more

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you just need to grow it. And I think as you grow it, the fulfillment problems will actually become more obvious because a lot of times we don't know what systems to build until we scale to stress or even break the systems. But

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then when those break, it becomes very clear and very obvious what actually needs to become in place. It's very hard to mentally masturbate it ahead of time unless this is like a, you know, if you're a serial entrepreneur and you're

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starting another business and it's very similar to something you started before. I mean, that's a little bit different.

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But I think the way I would give you some tactical advice though, what I would do is for an offer like yours where a lot of it is predicated on them like they got to do stuff, right?

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You should segment the client results metrics to where, hey, out of the people who did all these activities, what is the success rate then? Oh, right. So, you should segment it like that because you could control that.

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Now, frankly, you can control what can we do to reduce friction to get them to do more of the activities, but that would be like a separate KPI, you know, and that would help you diagnose a different problem, right? So,

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you would think about, okay, out of the people who have like a bunch of mindset issues to where they can't even make a post or whatever it is, how do we decrease friction? And also, part of decreasing friction is

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decreasing limiting beliefs that keep them from taking action. Yeah, but if you track that into a KPI like who even takes all the actions? Well, then you know, okay, why aren't they taking the actions? You can do research

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on that and then you can add in implementation or interventions, is what I meant to say.

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That'll actually make that better and reduce that. Does that make sense? And then out of the people who- Okay, let's say there's four key things they need to do to get their first client. Okay, out of the people who did those four key

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things, how many people got their first client? And then okay, the people who didn't, why didn't they do it right? And then the other thing to remember too is you also want to segment like you don't want to think about client success in a

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program like this as binary first client, zero client because, you know, if you think about it to go from zero clients to one client you have to overcome mindset stuff, you have to maybe learn a little bit of marketing,

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you have to like, okay, learn a little bit of sales to sell a client and then you got to also be confident in your fulfillment enough to take on the client. So, somebody if you think ab-

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might not get to one, but they might have gotten to three4s of building all these skills and they see themselves making progress and they're actually happy.

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Y but you know, you're like, "Oh my god, they didn't get their first client. They hate my guts." Right? So, it's just one thing to think about too in terms of how you measure success as well.

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This is good stuff. Um, yeah. Okay. Okay. So, what I'm taking away from this is client success is should not be binary and should not just be one non-segmented metric cuz I am thinking 30% across the whole you have to

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but there's a load of people that like have not actually done the stuff. You got to think about it like a pipeline, right? Like there's like ad and then after that it's like how many people got to the opt-in page, okay, how

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many people opted in? and how many people, you know, think about it like moving people across. I mean, literally physically, you can build or have essentially a pipeline of people moving across um almost like you would like a CRM, you

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know, based on where they're at. Did they make who made their first post? Okay. And I think when you get clear, I think part of your issue is you're not you're thinking about the metric and you're not clear on where the breakdowns

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are and then so you're not even sure what the interventions are. But I would say this, you know, there's this concept of working in parallel. So like uh if you ever use clog code, like sometimes cloud code will launch parallel agents,

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right? So if you think about that, you could do two things at once. Like you can make all these interventions with client success and probably increase the volume and start to scale your business.

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So it's not pure theory of constraints like only. Well, no. You know, because the thing is is like think about it this way. If you're gonna make an intervention, it is theory of constraints, but let me explain. If you're going to make an

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intervention in client success, it could you could make the intervention and then it could take three months to really see how that's impacting. Does that make sense?

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And so what are you going to do in those three months, right? And and I think so, you know, you we can work on multiple things at once. Yeah. Right. Like Elon Musk has several different companies and I mean I got the whole parallel uh

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things working in parallel that comes from the book of Elon by Eric Jorgensson. That's where I got that and then I thought about clock code like oh yeah clock code you know they work in parallel so you can do two things at

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once. Um but yes you know you do want to really focus on the constraint and know what that is because that should be you know really the priority but you might fix the constraint and then it's like okay we got got to wait 90 days until we

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know what's happening with this constraint. If you ever wanted to get my one-on-one help in terms of scaling your business then listen up really fast. So, we're taking on a few clients where I can personally one-on-one audit their

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business across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance to be able to tell you what your constraint actually is, and ultimately what are the one to three things you need to do next to be able to scale working entirely one-on-one with me. So, if that's

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interesting, there's a link in the description that will say Cole one-on-one that you can go book. But essentially, not only will you get my personal advice, but we'll also be opening up our entire playbooks of my $36 million year company across

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marketing sales operation fulfillment, finance. So, you can basically model the best practices of what we've done right into your business and it'll include the opportunity to meet in person up at an event with me.

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So, if that's interesting, click the link in the description and mount back to the video.

Speaker A

Okay, let's stick on client success a little bit because I also have questions about sales team marketing, like like the whole shebang. On the client success front, Currently, we have, I think, a reasonable amount of operational complexity in that some of the stuff is

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on Circle, some of the stuff is on Slack. Uh, we're offering one-on-one Slack support, but we're also we've also got like accountability squads with a group and like a coach and stuff. And there's like a lot of moving parts.

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One view is simple scales, complex fails, make it as simple as possible. Another view that I've heard is the business that can survive operational complexity wins.

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Yeah. Any both are true, right? So operational complexity it is like complexity is the enemy of scale. So it does reduce your scalability at the same time operational complexity if chosen correctly is a mode against all the competition. Right? So a

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great story about this is like when I was scaling our recruiting business I you know was big you know I was like an original Sam Ovens student. So you know I'm big on simple simple simple simple simple.

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Yeah. And I had the sales recruiting offer and I was like, man, this thing will never scale because you know like it's too complex. It's done for you.

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It's going to require too many people yada yada yada. Yeah. And I was like, we got to do like a coaching thing. And then that's why I launched the BTOC RCA offer at that time is because I was like, that's how I'm

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going to scale. But then the B2B kept scaling and I got to 500 grand a month and I was like, ah, this is probably it, but you know, we'll grow it a little bit more and maybe it'll cap out at 700. Then we got to a

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million a month and I was like a this is probably capped. This probably all it's going to do. Then we got to 1.5 and then we got to 2 million a month with the B2B offer. And at that point I was like, you

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know, I think that I could just scale it to however big I want to scale it. But what I also realized is that, you know, I bitched and moaned about the recruiting the entire time. Like I [ __ ] hate this recruiting. It's so

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complex. You know, it, you know, it's done for you so certain clients get more pissed. But then I also realized like, okay, this is also why I have like no competition because like look at all I had to go through to build all this

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stuff. Who's going to build all this stuff? Right. Anyways, what I would say to you in regarding to all your things is I don't know why you wouldn't be on school instead of circle because the engagement is better in school. I found that the

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accountability groups for beginners now if you're doing it right, I mean I'm not saying it couldn't be bad, sometimes it can become a little bit of bitching and moaning sessions.

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Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing is too is then it kind of also like you know it's one of those things where it's sort of like takes away like you know it's giving them it's confusing right it's giving

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them an confusing uh where do I go for support right what we want to reinforce is you go to the account manager so I'm very good with like have a simple system I do like the one-on-one support because

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it it dramatically more than anything else you do will increase results. What are your thoughts on one-on-one calls versus one-on-one asynchronous on Slack or Voxo versus a bit of both?

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Yeah, we do. Well, I mean, I recommend even when I did B TOC, I recommend one-on-one calls plus one-on-one Slack, you know? So, that's what I did.

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Why? Well, I mean, the one-on-one Slacks to be able to get immediate support for questions, uh, to review documents because not everything has to be a call, right? Like, if we're overviewing an offer, it could be just like, okay, we got to

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revise this offer. or we could just do it over Slack. I could send you a Loom, whatever. Right? The one-on-one calls is a good like what a call does effectively it adds a deadline to where you know they have to get those certain

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milestones done by these certain calls. If your account manager is walking them through the implementation pathway the way they should be, right? And so and also the calls is where you could address a lot of the mindset issues. You

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can challenge the way of thinking all that stuff. And what you want to be able to shift your account managers and client success towards is they need to be not customer service. They need to be leaders, right? And the difference is a

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leader challenges the person's thinking and really pulls them up the mountain, right? And is always shining a light on what the what is around the next corner, right? What is going to be the next thing? And so that's very very important

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as well because you'll notice your best people if you track client success correctly. Your best account managers tracked on those metrics are also going to be the ones who have the most amount of like as a trait disagreeableness in the sense that like

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they can have confrontation with the client and gain that client's respect and be able to tell the client like no you're wrong here. No, like this is your fault.

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You know, stuff like that, right? But client success tends to be like a touchyfey thing, which you know, I'm not saying like, oh, that's bad. It's just that they need to have that level of leadership as well.

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Um, okay. In the context of one-on-one calls, would you recommend doing it as a weekly thing, bi-weekly thing, or as a once you hit milestone X, you get rewarded with one-on-one call? Why? How do you guys think about it? So the

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default I would think about is frontloaded on average bi-weekly but front-loaded. So usually onboarding is week one, week two like week two we do another call then week three we skip week four we do another call week then

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week six and then after that it might be we skip three weeks and then we might skip another three weeks then we might go four weeks.

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Right? So, it's kind of front-loaded to get momentum and then it's check-ins and then you got the slack, right? That's how I would think about it.

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And do you have a number of what is a good number of students to have for a given coach?

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60. Yeah, 60 to 80. I mean, it depends. And done for you, it can go as low as 20.

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As you get more done with you, do it yourself, it can go as high as 80 to 100. If you're gonna do a BTOC coaching program with real one-on-one coaching, it ends up being about 60 to 80.

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Okay. Yeah. Because right now we're at 30 to 40 and the coaches are Yeah. They they're like, "Oh my god, I'm so busy." Well, what happens is, you know, the law that is uh what is it's like Parkinson's law. Work expands to fill

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the time. Yes. It's like whatever um whatever expands fill the time. You said it you said it better than I than I could have said it. So essentially, you know, if you have 20 hours to do a project, this

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is going to take 20 hours. If you have five hours, it's going to take five hours, etc. It's the same law with client success to where I mean, you could give them three clients. Yeah. You know, next thing you know, they're going

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to be running those clients businesses, right? Because essentially they got three clients, they're going to work 30 hours a week in those clients. So they got three, you know, they're like part-time employees for three people.

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So the key is, and this is something that I I thought I remembered telling you this, but maybe I didn't tell you.

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You got to really catch this from the very beginning. Design your comp so it's around 60 to 80. Set set the expectations of what it looks like. Hey, here's what your calendar is going to look like at a full roster of 60 to 80.

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You're going to have this many calls a day. The cadence is going to look like this, etc. It needs to be very structured because otherwise, yes, the work will expand to just to fill all the time.

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Does that make sense? So, so you're showing them what the calendar will look like because well well and the other thing is too is you got to think like if if you have let's say it's an 8week program for

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simplicity and between that eight weeks you have six calls right and then so you know that essentially they're going to have um if they can do a 60 client load on an 8week program that's 30 clients a month new they can take on minus their

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renewals if they renew people and they stay on y right so then that way you could think of okay that's how many new people are coming on. That's what that's what the full roster is going to be.

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Okay, 60. Based on those deliverables, you can like Tetris essentially the calendar to see like what is their calendar going to look like fulfilling six calls times 60 people. Does that make sense? So 120 calls over an 8week

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period. How is that going to fit in their calendar? And then do they have time on top of that to block Slack team meeting and whatever else?

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So you could just reverse engineer it based on calendar. Does that make sense? It's the same type of thinking that um you know if you're running group sessions at a gym or oneonone like if you're trying to fill your gym's

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calendar for all your trainers it's like the same type of thinking you know if you're trying to fill the seats in a med spa same type of thinking does it make sense yeah I often think like at the level of

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like the weekly time block calendar for myself but I've never thought to actually think about it in the context of the coaches yeah so you have to reverse engineer that and then what you do on the interviews is you show them what the

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sample calendar is going to look like and you say can you do And some people will be like, "Oh my god, that's a lot of calls." Yeah, it is. You're a client success director.

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You're going to be talking to clients, right? And other people will be like, "Oh, yeah, that's great. I love calls." You know, so um Okay, interesting. Coaches, our coaches are often like um saying that Slack support takes up too much time.

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And we think that it's because they're context switching between Yeah. How do we how should we Well, they have to block it. So, this goes back to the calendar. So like if you if you tell them in terms of best

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practices that hey the best thing for you to do is do two hours of slack in the morning and two hours of slack at night or or an hour hour right that way because what what happens is the reason Slack will drag on in terms

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of client support is you get caught like okay you clear the whole batch right you have 30 unres you clear them all five people immediately respond then you clear those and then four of them respond Again, you clear those, the same four respond

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again. You clear, and then then you get down to one where you're talking to one person for like 40 minutes.

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Yeah. So, what you have to do is you have to if you have to batch and tackle it. I would do like two or three rounds, stop.

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Then you should be on calls. Then you revisit in a couple hours, two or three rounds, stop on calls. And in between calls, you can do it, too.

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Um, do you guys recommend using any sort of Slack ticketing system or just raw dog uh channel?

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Raw dog. Um but there is a way we have created like we hired a developer who's really good with AI and basically what he did is and he's doing this across every department in our company is he created essentially a software that sits

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on top of all of our other software that acts as like a control board for the manager. Okay.

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So we can essentially see like what Slack channel sentiments are yellow flag, red flag, green flag based on a variety of things. We can see um is there anybody on Monday through Fridays who has response time that's not

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in KPI? It's kind of still being built right now, but that's going to be what it is essentially.

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Yeah, I've been trying to vibe something. So, it's like, you know, because the the typical and the really good client success system is the red, yellow, green system where every client has a status and also, you know, you know where

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they're at in the milestones and all that stuff. And then what you're really trying to do is you're trying to move them along the milestones and move them back from red to yellow to yellow to green. Y, right? But the visibility can

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be the hard part of that and I think AI makes that a lot easier.

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Yeah. Okay. Um at the moment we have milestones that are like you know niche identified 100 people messaged first sale 10k. Uh those are quite there's there's quite a lot of gap between for example messaging people and getting your first sale. For

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example uh messaging a first person then messaging 10 people having your first discovery call turning that having your first proposal call presenting your first proposal actually getting the first sale. What is a good number of milestones and sub milestones to be

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probably less than five? Probably five or less. Yeah. I mean worst case seven or less. If you can get it down to four, that's perfect because you know four is the max we can hold and work.

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Yeah, because we have about four right now, but I'm concerned that there's like a grand canyon between some of these milestones.

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Well, you know, I mean it's okay to have like a great course for instance, it really goes over like it hits the like if you have a four-week course, like there's the four major milestones, but then there's the milestones within the

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milestones, right? And so that would be fine to have kind of almost like breakdowns, but then that way you're always repeating these four things. And those four things in those four pillars, four is a good number because it's like

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the max you can hold in working memory anyways. So I like the number four if you can do it. Five is, you know, is it going to be the end of the world if you do five? Probably not.

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And so you're tracking client progress in terms of the milestones. And then red, yellow, green. Is that client sentiment or like like what goes you could do it in my case in your case that would be more the sentiment in

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like the essentially like their rate of progress like are they progressing and what's the sentiment and then the milestone is where they're actually at.

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So think about it this way. The milestone is almost like closing rate. It's quantitative data.

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Y the red, yellow, green is a representation of qualitative data, right? of like how is the person doing?

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You know, cuz like for instance, you could have two people on milestone two, right? One person's [ __ ] pissed and then the other person's like, "This is the greatest thing I've ever done.

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I'm so excited." Yeah. Right. Um so we have sometimes we have people on milestone one, but they're like, "Oh my god, this is the best thing ever." They're attending all the sessions, but they're not like doing the thing.

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Yeah. And so what we've been thinking is if they haven't done the thing for more than x number of times, should we automatically make them a yellow or red or is the is the red green basically how happy are they?

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Well, I mean I think that's up to you. I think you could do it both ways. What needs to happen is is somebody needs to be like don't come on another group call until you've done this thing.

Speaker A

Mhm. Yeah. When I joined my first ever program that was group coaching, it was to build my agency and I got on and I attended a group call and I was like, "Yeah, this is great." And then I got on

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another group call and she was like, "Have you launched your funnel yet?" And I was like, "No." And she was like, "Don't get on another group call until you launch your funnel in front of everybody." And I was like,

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"Oh shit." I was like, "Okay, I'm going to launch this [ __ ] funnel." I launched it that day.

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Yeah. And if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't even gotten results because I just was in my head. I was like I was just dabbling, you know, like I wasn't which is which is crazy to think now, but it's like I just was I don't know

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afraid of taking the step, I guess. Yeah, because at the moment we have a lot of people who are rocking up to the group calls because it's vibe and fun and not doing the thing. So actually I've I've never actually thought to in a

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nice way call them out on it. Um I think you should. Okay, sick. Uh, what does a good director of client success do? We hired one like two days ago.

Speaker A

Well, you probably should have asked that question before you hired, but um, we spoke to Elizabeth about it and stuff. Yeah.

Speaker A

Yeah. Okay, great. So, for the sake of the pot and also cuz I'm I'm curious about your So, what is a what is I mean, first of all, they need to know the job and they need to do the role. So, like our client

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success directors, all of them that we've well, your is the only one we've ever had for SDA, but for RCA, we had, you know, a couple. They all were CSMs and they did the role, they knew how the

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role worked, all of that stuff. So, that's very important. I would never, especially in this business, it'd be very rare to just put in a manager and be like, "Yeah, you know, you're managing the team now." Like, they have

Speaker A

to actually manage the clients, know the clients, know the system, kind of experience firsthand what it's like to go through all the, you know, thing.

Speaker A

Like especially if you're trying to coach a CSM on how to manage their calendar, pretty hard to do if you've never been a CSM, right? There could be exceptions. Like I mean if you found somebody who was literally the client success director of

Speaker A

a really reputable competitor who was doing the same exact thing you were doing. I mean that could maybe work.

Speaker A

Yeah, that's kind of our situation that that that could maybe work. I would still have them ramp as a client success manager for the first 30 to 60 days, right? Just so they can learn the role and then they can, you know, if they're

Speaker A

as good as they say they are, then you can move them up. Now, once they moved up, what are the responsibilities? Well, they run a daily team meeting. On that day, daily team meeting.

Speaker A

Daily? Yes. daily team meeting. Why daily? Uh well, like we were talking about earlier in terms of actually improving team results, the higher the frequency of the feedback, the better, right? The more immediate the feedback, the better, right? And also, it sets a good rhythm

Speaker A

for the team, especially if it's in the morning, to where it just kicks everything off on a good note, and it's daily training and projections and accountability for the team. It makes a huge difference. I mean, if anything,

Speaker A

back in the day when we only did sales teams, um, the number one thing I would try to get clients to do if they had underperforming sales, I mean, no matter what their sales team's performance was, the number one thing is just run a daily

Speaker A

team meeting. That was 60 minutes. Yeah. The number one thing if I could get them to do that, a lot of times it would fix a lot of their performance issues.

Speaker A

But, you know, they were running once a week. I I feel like it's more of a standard now, but back when I started it was actually rare people did a daily meeting, weirdly. To me, it's weird. So, you run a daily meeting.

Speaker A

Okay. Sorry. Uh, daily meeting, multiple time zones. How do you juggle? Well, you got to find a time zone that works for everybody. And then you can't hire people that can't make the meeting.

Speaker A

So, um, you know, and some people will stay up and they'll change their calendar or whatever. And then you got to assess, does that make sense? Are they going to be able to really do this job long term? They say they are, but

Speaker A

you know, I would only h if somebody's like, okay, I'm going to have to work nights to work here. Oh, but it's fine. I would make sure they've worked nights before because, you know, you might get somebody who's good, but they're four

Speaker A

weeks in and then they're like, "Yeah, this isn't for me, you know, like I can't work nights and it's like, well, you know, you shouldn't have tooken the role, but they didn't know." So, you don't want them to test that out for

Speaker A

you. And so, the daily meeting has everyone or at at some point, do you split it into two pods of different No, I mean, it it's going to have all the client success directors. I mean, you might split into pods at a certain

Speaker A

point, but you're I think you're pretty far from that. Okay. Like, we got seven coaches in one.

Speaker A

That's enough. Yeah, that's enough. And I mean your coaches need more people too. So you need to increase capacity.

Speaker A

But yeah, you have the daily meeting. You would do wins in the beginning. Then we do projections which is based on it dep for you. It's going to be if if they do renewals, they're going to be projecting renewals or referrals. But

Speaker A

then also you're going to be walking through how many clients they have in every stage.

Speaker A

Uh in terms of milestones. Yes. Oh, nice. Yeah. So that would be the next thing.

Speaker A

And then you would do some sort of training whether that's a call review, whether that's common situations or questions that are brought up, something along those lines. That's how I would run it.

Speaker A

Yeah. So, we hired our sales team like a month ago and for a long time I was resistant to it because I heard you talk about daily sales meetings and I was like, who's got time for that? But the

Speaker A

sales meeting is really fun. Yeah. I mean, hang out with the boys. And if you and if you run the meeting correctly, it is fun. Like when I you know when I started my company I had a lot of people in the very beginning

Speaker A

maybe people still say this but I remember them saying like I used to hate meetings but I like the meetings in this company like they're fun you know and so I enjoy I still hop up meetings cuz it makes me feel better

Speaker A

you know I feel like I know what's going on. Um okay even sticking on client success um for now I mean renewals is a metric NPS is a metric there's all sorts of metrics in terms of clients reaching particular

Speaker A

milestones yeah uh we could come up with a list of 15 different metrics do you have a sense of what are the ones that matter well renewals referrals or testimonials um those are good y but if I had to come up with just a

Speaker A

couple for you it would be probably renewals because only happy people pay more. Y and then one or two major client success milestones would probably work.

Speaker A

So like the first sale milestone for but I would keep it below three. I wouldn't have more than three.

Speaker A

Okay. Um and then these three are being reported on the daily meeting or in the weekly leadership meets like what's the Well, here's the other thing I was going to say. So, in the beginning phases, you might already be past this, but in the

Speaker A

beginning phases, what I used to do is we'd hop on the client success meeting and I would just pull up the client list and I just go down every single person.

Speaker A

Where is this person at? What are they doing? Where is this person at? What are they doing? And similar to projections, like if you don't know where the client's at and where they are, what they should be doing, you get yelled at,

Speaker A

right? So, I would go down every single person and just check. And that was kind of like my inner control freak because I was giving away one-on-one fulfillment for the first time. And then what I did is eventually you're like, "Okay, well,

Speaker A

if I do that, I'm literally gonna only get through, you know, 20% of the roster on this meeting." Yeah.

Speaker A

So then what you can do is you can either do that on one-on- ones or what we did is we had everybody send a Loom video report of where all their clients are at and why and they would

Speaker A

have to do detailed notes in a sauna at the end of each week. We might still do this and um yeah, we started doing this as well.

Speaker A

Yeah, that that's very effective. Um, okay. So, in terms of where the client is at, you know, there's red, yellow, green, there's the milestone. Um, the bit we struggle with is the what should they do next sort of thing and like why

Speaker A

aren't they doing the thing and sometimes it's like mindset which I don't like as an explan explanation because I feel like anything can be called a mindset issue and it's like why is the client not progressing?

Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah. You should just have the account manager give them a call. You can do this on the meeting and then just be like, "Hey, Ali wants to know why you're not progressing." It'll work. Yeah, it'll work. Especially like, "Hey, he

Speaker A

specifically asked about you in this meeting. He wants to know why you're still here." Yeah.

Speaker A

Is there anything we need to do to help or are you like caught up in your own mindset or what's going on?

Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah. And so in the You need to put more pressure on people. Like it should be like a little bit of a pressure. This is what they want even though they might not say it, but you know, I call it the drag them up the

Speaker A

mountain mentality. Yeah. It's like, it's like, look, you bought, so now my reputation's on the line to make you freaking succeed. So even if you don't want to succeed, I'm gonna make you [ __ ] succeed, right? It's

Speaker A

like that mentality. And that's how I think about it, too, because I'm like, I I'm not going to wait for you to just go through and see what you do and don't do. They're like, "No, I'm going to

Speaker A

[ __ ] like I'm going to push you up there." Yeah. And make you stay. Right. Because it's like, you know, I feel like it's my reputation on the line if they don't succeed no matter what. Right. But I

Speaker A

don't like that. Yeah. So what Okay. So if if you're looking at your like client success CRM or whatever, you've got red, yellow, green, you got the milestones, what sort of stuff would your CSMS be writing in the

Speaker A

next action or whatever thing? Well, it's where are they now? What's going on? And then what would be the next step? That's always what we did.

Speaker A

And then obviously now, you know, you would have all the Fathom kind of summaries in there. there and I'm sure you can do a bunch of cool stuff with AI with it in terms of like summarizing kind of the client journey and all those

Speaker A

things. I don't know if that answers your question. Um, it does to an extent, but it's like in in terms of the next step like in in our case is the next step they're sending 10 DMs this week or is it

Speaker A

they're going to try and book their first sales call or Well, it depends on what they're get over their mindset issue or like Yeah.

Speaker A

Yeah. It's next step of what the account manager is going to do with the client.

Speaker A

That's how I would do it. What they're going to do with the client. Yeah. So if they if they need to send 10 DMs, it's like, okay, make sure they're doing it. Or if they're not doing it, it's like get on with them and be able

Speaker A

to see, okay, do I need to sit with you and send 10 DMs together? You know, like that's good. So it's like, yeah, the account manager, what are they doing next?

Speaker A

Ah, rather than what the client is supposed to be because what are they doing next for this client?

Speaker A

Oh, fine. Okay, that is very different to what we're currently doing. And that would be super helpful.

Speaker A

Yeah. Because often in that list, it's like client has a mindset issue. It's like, okay, but what are we doing about it?

Speaker A

Yeah. What are you doing? Yeah. Right. And I recommend too, it may help to have a professional mindset coach. You pay per session. Yeah.

Speaker A

Do you have this? Uh, one of our coaches, two of our coaches are professional mindset coaches and former therapists. Clients absolutely love them. They so many they're really great when you get good ones.

Speaker A

And you know, you could pay extra per session. I wouldn't do it to where every client gets a session. It's just kind of like it's something that you can use in your back pocket when the account manager is

Speaker A

like, "Look, this is a little bit above my pay grade. like I can't like this person's got some emotional issues, you know, but people will the nice thing about having that is people will say the investment was worth it for for that a

Speaker A

lot of times because especially like the issue with like mindset and therapy is it only works to the extent in which something can be addressed real time. So it's very hard to go in cold and be like, "Yeah, I need to work on my

Speaker A

mindset." But if like somebody can't send DMs and then and it's obviously like an emotional block. Yeah.

Speaker A

And then they go see a coach that's good. It's they can have a huge impact, right?

Speaker A

Sick. Hey, if the way you sell your product or service is through phone sales, you need to stop using booking systems like OneUp, Calendarly, Eye Close, and other booking systems that aren't designed specifically for a phone sales approach

Speaker A

or a phone sales team. So, we at Saleskick just launched a new calendar and booking system that would decrease your cost per book call because it's conversion rate optimized specifically for call funnels. Whereas most other calendar systems are meant for corporate

Speaker A

all-purpose booking and it'll increase your show rates. So we've had clients see 30 to 100% increases in their show rate because our calendar system is specifically designed for call funnels and other funnels that are high volume sales call booking funnels. And the

Speaker A

software does so much more. It's really the only product designed specifically for sales teams with inbound booking systems. So if you're interested, go to saleskick.com, check it out. Now back to the video. What are your thoughts on Okay, so currently I I'm spending ages

Speaker A

on the curriculum and like the zero to first sale road map and we did a V1 of it for the first few batches of clients.

Speaker A

Got data from it, realized, okay, people are struggling with X and Y, okay, therefore we need to update the curriculum with with this sort of stuff.

Speaker A

Uh I've noticed within STA, you only do some of the trainings. You have experts doing the rest of the trainings. Um, what are your thoughts on me doing curriculum stuff versus bringing in an expert to do some of it versus Yeah.

Speaker A

Well, I mean it just really depends. Like I generally try to do everything that I can do unless it's like a tutorial like here's how to set up GHL.

Speaker A

I'm not, you know, I don't need to do that. But I try to do generally everything.

Speaker A

Now, if it's something to where I feel like man you know, it's like I could do it, but I'd be like kind of plagiarizing this other person, I just ask the other person, hey, like can you just do this?

Speaker A

you know, cuz like I think your stuff's the best anyways. I don't have a unique take on it. So that's how I think about it. But I mean in mine I mean I would say 90% of the stuff is me, you know. So

Speaker A

um does that answer your question? Yes. Okay, that's good. I don't think about it too too hard. I mean, the more I will say the more it can just be you, the better because you'll have an idea of the product

Speaker A

better than anybody else and you'll know where everything fits in. And you can tie it back to like like you could be doing a training on, you know, YouTube ads or whatever and you're like, you get to this one point, but then you're like,

Speaker A

and we should have covered this back here, so make sure you did this. You know, nobody else is going to get that.

Speaker A

And you've probably been through programs too where it's like a poo poo platter of like a million different people and it's like not coh like you're not learning a cohesive system. Yeah.

Speaker A

Right. I like it. Um couple more questions of client success. Uh any thoughts on uh I I'm currently feeling the the sirens call of building our own custom student platform with a developer and stuff and not using Circle and because we can

Speaker A

integrate our own AI tools and all of this sort of thing. Yeah, I think that's just more uh client success, masturbation procrastination.

Speaker A

I don't think you really And the thing is is that I don't even think you have enough clients to know what to build.

Speaker A

You you'll have a lot better idea of what to build when you have enough of your clients. I would really recommend school because the engagement is way better and that that is more valuable to the student than Circle because you can brand it the way

Speaker A

you want to. I'm very biased as the first investor, but I'm I'm pitching. Nice. Okay. The reason I don't like school is because it looks a bit janky and it has slightly make money online scammy bro vibes.

Speaker A

Well, they tried to change they tried to they tried to change that. That's why they stopped the school games.

Speaker A

Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, fine. Yeah. I would say I mean it's very like a lot of the people on there, they're making pottery. There's a whole new like school has actually allowed for an entirely different type of information

Speaker A

marketer creator course seller, whatever to exist. Like you couldn't, you know, sell a course on pottery high ticket with a sales call with ads because you got to basically do high ticket to make ads work now.

Speaker A

So I think it's opened up the market in a lot of ways. I don't feel like it has that brand anymore. I mean, I personally don't. And I mean in terms of the design, it's very simple, but it's intuitive, which makes it

Speaker A

easier for client engagement. But we can move on. I mean, okay, I don't have to convince you.

Speaker A

Um, okay. When it comes to helping a total beginner get to their very first high ticket client for, let's say, coaching, consulting, or a service, at the moment, the way that 95% of our students are getting it is through warm

Speaker A

outreach. is messaging everyone they know and saying hey do you happen to know anyone who needs uh yeah what whatever right um are there any magic bullets for that I'm missing in terms of helping sometimes people are like they've

Speaker A

literally run out of warm outreach and no one they they know knows anyone who's in their ICP or even vaguely related to their ICP which then I think is a niche issue and that we should broaden out a

Speaker A

little bit etc but then there's content I know you guys have the stuff around the short form funnel yeah I wouldn't recommend doing that for your clients for beginners um well I mean I also think I mean you're you're

Speaker A

more of the YouTube guy, but a lot of people can I mean you can post a video and get 200 views and I mean you can get book calls off of that, right?

Speaker A

Like so I think YouTube is a really good way. Instagram for some other people can be a good way. The other thing to think about is when they're designing like you said the niche and the offer. You also

Speaker A

like you'll have people who they're like, "Oh, I just want to make money." And then like, "I think I have this idea and I'm going to do this thing where I'm helping painters." And you're like, "Okay, why are you doing that?" And

Speaker A

they're like, "Well, I chated it and it said painters is a good market, blah blah blah blah." And then you find out that they're like a, you know, retired financial adviser and they went through all this burnout and then they had to do

Speaker A

all this stuff to be able to like help them overcome their burnout and blah blah blah blah. And then after they did that, they made way more money. And it's like their whole network's financial advisors. And you're like, "Dude, uh,

Speaker A

why don't you just do that?" And they're like, "Oh, I didn't I didn't think it'd be good." You know, because the novel idea to them seems better than the obvious one because of dopamine.

Speaker A

So oftent times, one of the most effective things you can do for offer creation is just have them tell your story. Tell their story. But you have to do it on Zoom because if you have them write it out, they'll like Yeah. They'll

Speaker A

what'll happen is they'll skip over the part that's really good because like they'll they'll be telling their story and then they'll just say something and you're like whoa whoa whoa like what was that and that's usually the thing but they

Speaker A

skip over it a lot of times because they don't they don't see the value in it but a lot of times like your real value to them is you seeing the value where they don't see it happens all the time

Speaker A

like and it happens in different contextes. So, like when I look at people's VSSLs, when they write VSSLs, I I like it when the client writes a VSSL, even though if it's like one out of 10, it's like

Speaker A

terrible because I'll be reading it and I'll be like, "Okay, this is bad." And then I'll get like all the way at the end of the page on page, you know, three and I'll be like I'll read one line and

Speaker A

I'll be like, "Oh my god, this is the whole thing." Yeah. The whole thing is this one line. It's like I found the big idea. Y, you know? So, but I could only get that by extracting it out of their brain. But

Speaker A

if you if you really listen to their stories, a lot of times you'll find stuff in there.

Speaker A

So kind of like a niche discovery Zoom interview with a coach rather than and I think the coaches when they get good, they'll kind of know like is this offer legit? Is this not? Who's this person's network? And they'll find stuff

Speaker A

that fits because they're going to see a couple steps ahead and they're going to be like, all right, like this is a crazy offer. Like I don't know how you're going to find anybody for this, but you could do this and I know you have people

Speaker A

in your network who would do this. Nice. uh thoughts on one call close versus two call close for a total beginner.

Speaker A

Uh it's almost all one call close, but that doesn't mean that certain calls won't go to follow-up. So, the default shouldn't be a two call close process.

Speaker A

Okay? It should be a one call close, but then there's times where it should go to a follow-up. You know, if they got to run it by their wife, they got to, you know, it's a real one run it by their wife.

Speaker A

Like, it's a huge investment. They have a shared account. Like, okay, obviously that's got to work.

Speaker A

Uh you know, wait, sorry. I meant for the clients, not for us. Oh yeah, if you got some real noobs, um it's fine to have them start with like a 15inute warm up triage thing and then go to uh

Speaker A

the real call. So that's a good way to like I find that helps beginners get decent close rates, you know, opposed to like the cold one call close.

Speaker A

Yeah. So in that context, I'm fine with it. It's better to graduate to a one call close. Yeah.

Speaker A

Yeah. Initially we were teaching them the one call close and we found that the that was the point where everyone was absolutely crumbling and so we changed it to like you know what you don't even need an offer you

Speaker A

just need to listen to them in in the discovery call then go away put together a proposal and then the second call is where you're presenting a custom personalized proposal and that has skyrocketed.

Speaker A

Yeah it really because it slows it down for the beginners. It does. Yeah. you know, and then then they can get on the call and they don't have to like do it on the fly and then they can graduate to one call close

Speaker A

after they've had 10 sales or 20 sales or whatever. Nice. Okay. I think that is all the questions I had around client success.

Speaker A

Anything you would say from it's pretty comprehensive. I think you nailed it. I think we I think we nailed CS.

Speaker A

Yeah. Nice. Okay. How can it be um Okay. Somewhat adjacent to CS is how how do you think about org design in terms of I mean obviously the sales marketing or marketing and sales but then there's CS operations product how do you how do you

Speaker A

separate CS operations product product is really just client success and it's really just you making videos yeah for the and then and then in terms of strategizing about the client success fulfillment system and how the that's kind of like the CSD and you you know so

Speaker A

I would combine those things the way I break it down there's what marketing sales operations finance, fulfillment, right? Marketing, sales, operations, finance, fulfillment. I have recruiting, too. That's why it threw me off. So, it's pretty basic. I mean, we covered

Speaker A

fulfillment. Sales, you have a sales director, you have a sales team. Marketing, um, you know, in the beginning, it's like DIY with a media buyer or a tech guy or something, but eventually you could have like a CMO and

Speaker A

a whole marketing team and all these things. And then finance and operations. I mean operations is really like your army of VAS and the person who leads them. At least in this business model finance, you know, you might need like a

Speaker A

controller with a couple admin level people under them and then eventually that graduates to like a CFO with a bunch of admin people under them.

Speaker A

And then on the operations on like the VA front, um, one thing that our coaches are currently spending time doing is like billing and a bit of admin. and this client wants to pause their thing because they're going

Speaker A

on holiday for a month and stuff. Do you think the coach should deal with that or should that be a thing that's they would submit a a form in Slack? So, we have a change of payment form. We

Speaker A

have a cancellation form. We have a going on pause form. We have all that stuff.

Speaker A

Okay. And the account manager submits that and then the operations person does it. Oh, okay. So, the account manager has to chat with the person. Well, they submit a form because the form autopop populates in a sauna task and then

Speaker A

they fine. Okay, nice. That's easy enough. So, your coaches are not actually doing the going into stripe billing blah blah blah blah.

Speaker A

You want to eliminate anything that's not a client-f facing coaching activity for them because that's what you're paying them for.

Speaker A

Yeah, that'll help you increase capacity too. Okay, nice. Okay, so shifting our attention to sales team then. So, we were salesless for a long time. uh for a long time, meaning like 7 months, and we're selling through the Takimmore

Speaker A

offer doc method. Nice. Which worked really nicely for the first like 100 of 150 or so people like, "Oh my god, we don't need a sales team." And then we graduated to people who are wondering, what is that?

Speaker A

Uh how does it work? You um we we we had a VSSL intern application and then if they met vaguely qualified criteria in the application, we just sent them a link to a Google doc that had like the offer and the price at

Speaker A

the end of it with a Stripe checkout link. Yeah. So, it's basically a sales page, just a Google doc. Looks a bit more like they would watch a YouTube video. Then they go watch another video.

Speaker A

Yeah. There was like a loom of me walking through the Google doc explaining exactly how the program works and blah blah blah and the guarantee and this that and the other.

Speaker A

YouTube video YouTube video to like an unlisted VSSL YouTube video or YouTube video to like a VSSL on a page.

Speaker A

It wasn't even YouTube video. It was more like we email our email list. Okay.

Speaker A

And send sent them to a page that had had a loom embedded at the top of it and a Google doc linked underneath.

Speaker A

Okay. With a Stripe checkout link attached to the Google doc. Yeah. And so that was great for the first 150 or so people who bought directly via via this link.

Speaker A

Nice. And then we were like we started to feel some sales resistance and where people are like applying and even paying a deposit to apply but then just not converting right?

Speaker A

And so then Angus would like try and DM close them and then there's all sorts of resistance.

Speaker A

And so then we're like, okay, we probably need a sales team for this. Yeah.

Speaker A

And so then you guys kindly helped us find two closers. Um so currently we have two closers.

Speaker A

Um and we have just brought in one of our friends, Aman, who's also part of a figure boardroom. um as like a fractional sales director to kind of work with them and help them train them up and stuff.

Speaker A

Okay. But the question that we were struggling with is so we've got the two closers, but some of them are not following the process. Uh inconsistent admin, inconsistent logging of calls, inconsistent filling out stuff on close.com. Um and none of us had the

Speaker A

capacity to review the calls and stuff like that. So we're like, do we need a sales manager or sales director? I was like, "Yeah, how do you think about Well, the the number one thing people need is a sales admin person who can

Speaker A

just also probably be part of your existing operations team." Yeah. And so I'll give you an example like with admin, very easy.

Speaker A

You tell them they need to do it. Okay. Then publicly on the meeting the next morning, anybody who didn't do admin the day before, y it's like the admin person's there and it's like, "Hey, John didn't do his

Speaker A

admin." Then you as the people person on the meeting is like, "Hey, you know, we already talked about why you need to do your admin and that you need to do it every day. Why did you not do it?" Oh, I

Speaker A

forgot. Are you going to forget again? No, we promise. Okay, great. And then the next day, if it happens again, you know, but the admin's going to catch it every single day. What's probably happening is you don't really

Speaker A

have anybody looking and holding them accountable every single day. And so it kind of goes like three or four days and then you're like, "John hasn't done his admin in three or four days." Now you're [ __ ] because John

Speaker A

doesn't remember his numbers. Yeah. So now John's numbers are all wrong. So you have if you just do it as a day if there's that, you see how that's a daily reinforcement cycle.

Speaker A

Almost anything you ever want people to do, if you find a way to build a daily reinforcement cycle, which usually filters into your meetings, they'll do it.

Speaker A

So that's really like a admin. You probably already have that person on your team. They just got to be on the meeting and they got to just look at everybody's admin the morning of and be like, did everybody do it? And then they

Speaker A

on the meeting tell them, "Hey, you didn't do it." And then the manager's like, "Dude, you didn't do it." And I mean, at a certain point, if you have somebody who's like, "Won't do it." You know, it's like you've asked them three

Speaker A

times in three days. And it's like, "Look, dude, the next time you're going to get a penalty to where we're going to have to implement a system where if you miss like three times in a row, um, it's

Speaker A

5% off your paycheck or whatever. I don't know. You don't get any closes of that day." M.

Speaker A

So, I never had to do that, but yeah, you could. I'm I'm not a big fan of like punishment as a consequence to It sounds like actually that's the the daily reinforcement of the Yeah. I mean, when you do it like that,

Speaker A

it's never an issue. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think we're being a bit too gentlehanded with it and letting it slide for way too long.

Speaker A

Yeah. So, there's that. I mean, you don't really need a sales director right now. Um, if you're like, you know what, I don't really want to manage a sales team and I found this guy and he can do

Speaker A

it. I mean, you know, it's not the end of the world. you could do it, especially with organic. You're not going to need like a crazy assassin level sales team, like if you were running ads. So, you could

Speaker A

definitely get away with that. Where was I going to go with that? Um, in terms of I mean, you should be doing a call review every single day. Um, in terms of them following the process in the daily meeting.

Speaker A

Yeah. So, like look looking at a random call or wins projections that's 20 first 20 minutes, the last 40 minutes is call review.

Speaker A

Okay. Yeah. where you just opening up grain or fathom and actually watching through or so what you want to do is you want to look at their end of day reports that's where they list everybody they spoken with

Speaker A

y what happened like who were they what happened what was the next step about three to four sentences then in the end of day report what you want to train the manager to do is look especially for deals that should have

Speaker A

closed but didn't close or deals that oh it was a great call it sounded really good oh it's amazing and it went to followup Because even really good closers might only have a 60% follow-up conversion. I mean, that'd be

Speaker A

really good, right? And so those calls that were really good, I mean, we know it's baseline 60% if that.

Speaker A

So, those are the best deals that I call the fringe deals to where you want to review those on the meeting the next day to give coaching because that's where their blind spots are because they thought it was a great call, but they

Speaker A

didn't see the angle to be able to close. And so, those are the ones where you can grab the most deals by correcting their behavior. The other thing you can do is since they have a follow-up coming up, you can strategize

Speaker A

on how to handle that follow-up. So it gets you kind of deals in both ways. Does that make sense?

Speaker A

Okay. So 20 minutes wins. That's a big thing. 40 minutes. And then the other thing is too is if they're not following the process, there needs to be a very clear like calls they can watch and training of

Speaker A

what the process is because sales reps learn through modeling. So they need like 10 calls that are perfect to the tea, badass calls. They can just watch, you know, you or whoever do a call perfect to the tea and then that way

Speaker A

they have a clear idea of what the process is because a lot of times if they're not following the process, I mean that's like I talked about in the event, I just let them go. But we have a

Speaker A

very strong if you go through my training, you should know what the process is. I mean the training itself is like 50 hours. So it's like you should know what it is. But the other reason I mean some people just don't

Speaker A

have a clear process to begin with. I don't think we have a clear process.

Speaker A

So like you need to make it very simple where you're like, "Hey dude, what's really easy, watch this call, just script everything I do out by hand on a Google doc, right? Watch this call, just copy this." If if you show up on the

Speaker A

call and you just say and say and basically do all the same [ __ ] I'm doing, you're good, right? Cuz like when you have the training right and you hire the right person and they go through the

Speaker A

training the right way, the impression you should get watching the first call is like, "Dang, that guy sounds like me. That's what you should get. If you don't get that, you know, hopefully you're close." Okay.

Speaker A

Otherwise, you maybe just let him go. So, but you need stronger training and you need what I call a baseline, right?

Speaker A

There's not enough baseline like the sort of the model of what good looks like for this.

Speaker A

Yes. Yes. So just remember sales reps win or win sales reps learn I mean everybody learns but sales especially um through observational reinforcement.

Speaker A

So what that means is is that if you ever read the inner game of tennis, it talks a lot about this. They will learn far like if you have a video that overviews the script, I'm not that's good. I'm not saying you shouldn't have

Speaker A

that, but it won't really like like it's good to have. It just is not going to be super effective for them to show the behavior that you want them to show. If you have 20 perfect calls of you doing the process perfectly, that's

Speaker A

way more impactful because they learn way better by observing, mimicking, and copying and then innovating later with their own personality than they do through like watching a instructional video. Yeah.

Speaker A

Does that make sense? Like you'll you'll find this is like your best closers who know what they're doing if you hire them, they'll like just devour and script out by hand your calls, right? And then you'll be like, damn. Like they'll use a

Speaker A

phrase that you're like, "Fuck, that phrase is not even in the training, but like they heard I I remember saying that phrase on a call and they use that phrase on a call." Like that's what you're going for.

Speaker A

So in my case, the last time I did a sales call was back in like like nine months ago when I was selling the very first cohort where the offer was very different and I didn't really have my

Speaker A

own script and I've never really done sales calls before. So sounds fun. Sounds like a fun thing to start doing.

Speaker A

Yeah. Um, so you have two options. I'm probably not the model that Well, you have two options. Your fractional guy either they need to do it or you need to do it. The good news is is you know it max it probably take you a

Speaker A

week to come up with a couple of calls that can act as that baseline. Yeah.

Speaker A

Right. It's it's it usually I just take calls myself for like a week and try and figure out Yeah. Yeah. That or this other person, you know? I mean, somebody needs to do it. Yeah. And the thing is is I mean it

Speaker A

sucks because you're like, "Oh, you know, I got to be a sales guy for a week." But the way to think about it is no, like my big constraint is ramping new sales people, getting them to do all

Speaker A

these things you talked about and I'm going to spend this week and the way you got to think about it is after I'm done with this week, the reward is that I'm going to have these perfect calls they could model

Speaker A

and my entire sales ramping will extend from there after this week. Yeah. If you if you think about your reinforcement and your reward is that it'll seem a lot more productive than like a why the [ __ ] am I taking these

Speaker A

calls [ __ ] cold [ __ ] told me to do this you know you'll be like a [ __ ] why am I in this [ __ ] program I need to go back to talky's thing and just do

Speaker A

the dock you know I mean that's but you got to think about it like you're not taking calls you're building the SOPs of this whole department for the next 10 years and you got to do it once it's a week

Speaker A

okay you're going to you're going to survive okay so I should just suck it up and do it even if it was two weeks And the thing is too, like if you do this, it's the same with running your

Speaker A

sales team. You're going to be like, I kind of like taking calls. Yeah. And now you do it for two months, three months, you're going to be like, "All right, you know, I don't really want to do this anymore."

Speaker A

Yeah. But like when I take calls, I mean, I'm probably built a little bit different. I mean, I'm a sales guy.

Speaker A

If I take a call, I it's I like start foaming in the mouth, dude. Like I I I'll close and then I will be so popped.

Speaker A

I'll go outside and I mean I'm running running like a almost a $40 million company and I'll like go outside of my room. I'll be like, "Babe, I just closed a [ __ ] call, you know, like I still

Speaker A

get super excited like I did way back in the day when I I mean I get probably more excited than when I was a full-time, you know, I was a full-time sales rep. I'm like, "Yeah, I closed a

Speaker A

call. That's what that's what I should be doing." Now I get on a call, I'm like, "Yeah, [ __ ] close this call." Yeah. I'm like getting into a three-point stance like [ __ ] you know, about to shoulder somebody, you

Speaker A

know, throw my body weight around. Um, okay. So, it's actually really fun. And then like the last time I did this, it's two years ago, but I closed this call, I got so pumped, I canceled everything for the

Speaker A

rest of the day and I just started taking other people's calls. I was like, "Give me another one." Yeah. I took I remember um because I we were having a sales manager transition and I just felt like the team needed a

Speaker A

little jolt and so I was like I'm going to take a day of calls and I took I literally maybe I took like two days but across that two days I took five calls I think I closed all five

Speaker A

and it was so fun. Yeah. Okay. But if I'm not like that then Yeah. What would you It's the same it's same advice. Yeah. I mean you might not start foaming from the mouth but I think I I do think you will enjoy it. I think

Speaker A

you will like it more than you think. I think you'd be like, "It's kind of fun." Yeah.

Speaker A

Yeah. I kind of felt that in the first month of doing sales calls. Like I would wake up in the morning, I see them on my calendar, I think, [ __ ] But then I would get into the calls and then the

Speaker A

time would fly and be like, "Okay, this is not bad." Yeah. Just make sure you get a good The thing that really annoyed me was the whole, "Oh, I'm totally going to pay." And then I'm having to follow up via

Speaker A

iMessage afterwards to get them to pay. And you say you, "No, you're going to pay now." Yeah.

Speaker A

Well, let's do it now. Yeah. Don't be that guy. Just joke around. Yeah. Like, do we know I know the game.

Speaker A

Let's do it now. Yeah, you know, draw the line in the sand and strip across it. You said you wanted all these things. Let's get all these things right. Let's take the first step right now. I'm here with you. Let's do it.

Speaker A

Okay. You just got to be have fun. If you have fun with it, Yeah.

Speaker A

you could apply a lot more pressure. Yeah. That's why I think Greg Carone is so good. I think he like people are like, I don't understand. I think he's like so fun that he can apply like all these like higher what people perceive

Speaker A

to be higher pressure things because that's what people criticize about him. But I think he's so good because he's like hilarious, you know? Oh, he's like he he he makes buying fun.

Speaker A

Yeah. You know, so if you like buying, make buying fun. I like buying, so I try to make it fun.

Speaker A

Okay. Okay. So, what I'm hearing is we need a baseline process. That baseline process either needs probably me, but maybe our fractional guy to run some calls and find like, okay, these are the canonical three to five really good examples of

Speaker A

the thing. Do we also need a script or a call map or Yeah. Yeah, you should have it, too. You should have that, too. And then like a training that goes over how it works.

Speaker A

Yes. But also have the recordings. Yeah. Okay. There's other things you need too, but you know, just as broad strokes. That's good.

Speaker A

And then presumably the script changes over time as you develop new Yeah. And then you just make a new video.

Speaker A

Okay. That's not too bad. If you're a business owner who has appointment setters or an outbound sales team, you're going to want to hear what I have to say for a second. So a multiple eight figureure business owner

Speaker A

texted me the other day and when he started using dollar.io IO for the first time, his pickup rates went from 9% to 20%. So imagine doubling your pickup rates and ultimately the throughput of what your outbound sales people and

Speaker A

setters are going to get. How does that impact your business? The answer is a lot. So if you want to check out d.io for a phone sales outbound system, just click the link in the description or just go to d.io. Now back to the

Speaker A

podcast. Okay, so we have a lot of leads coming in and the closest calendars are booked out like seven days out. Uh initially we were like 3 days and we're like four and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but my I have a fear around hiring

Speaker A

another closer where I'm like, okay, now this this feels like it's making the hamster wheel just go faster and faster where now it's like now we need even more leads in order to sustain the closers calendars and this gets heavier

Speaker A

and heavier and like oh client success isn't still where I wanted I want it to be and I'm getting p PTSD from a few years ago where we had to like let go of like bunch of the team and I'm like uh

Speaker A

what's can you therapize me and help me figure this out? Yeah, I mean The first thing is I mean how are you generating the calls?

Speaker A

Um is it email is partly ads plus organic ads and casual. Well okay look I mean here's the deal.

Speaker A

If you unless it's a YouTube mid roll where you're on your YouTube video are like yeah okay so if it's an email list I mean you just segment the list and you send to half the list on Monday and half the

Speaker A

list on Friday or whatever right? So if it's email, you segment it down. If it's ads, you just turn it down.

Speaker A

And then you can just have closers booked out for two days. The only the only way that what you're saying will come up is if you are doing like a YouTube mid roll to like book a call and

Speaker A

then like it's like everybody who sees it is going to book a call and then it's a [ __ ] ton of people booking calls, which that's a little bit of a different issue. But then you could just space out

Speaker A

your you could also just space out your YouTube mid rolls more. Yeah. So, we shouldn't really have like we we what I'm hearing is we should be able to turn the tap down on our lead so that we

Speaker A

don't have closes calendars booked out seven days up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you should just Yeah. I go for two two days. I mean, you could get away with three, but you're going to have a better experience two days for sure.

Speaker A

Okay. Why do we have so many leads? Why do we spend ads? Well, I think it's just a new offer.

Speaker A

Just turn down the spend or segment the list, right? So, like if you have a huge list, like we're not even emailing them very much about it.

Speaker A

That's like, well, then just spend less. Okay. Yeah, we're spending so little already. We're spending like Oh, we are. Okay, we're hiring a third closer. Fair enough.

Speaker A

Okay. Well, then have your third closer. You'll be okay. You'll survive. At what point do we think how how how many closers then warrant a sales manager or whatever the um about six.

Speaker A

About six. Okay. So, we've got head room. I mean, I wouldn't if you really found the right candidate. I wouldn't be like mad if you did it at four to five.

Speaker A

Yeah. But usually six is a good number for founders to stop doing it themselves.

Speaker A

Y um but if you find like man this is the perfect dude at like four or five I'd hire him. I mean hell if you even found the perfect guy at three. Yeah.

Speaker A

If it's if it's truly the perfect person and you have the money to do it then you could hire him.

Speaker A

But a lot of people like it works better when you have a little bit of a bigger team. You might find somebody internally that you promote or whatever. What's the deal around promoting a good closer to your manager versus bringing in an

Speaker A

external manager? Well, both can work. Uh, if you bring in an external one, I still, even if it's in secret, right, because some of them get weird about it.

Speaker A

I don't care if it's in secret, whatever. Have them take some calls because they have to know your process, your leads.

Speaker A

They'll say they, "Oh, I don't need to do it." Okay. Yeah. Why don't you need to do it? Because I'm so good. Okay. If you're so good, just do it.

Speaker A

Yeah. You know, do not deviate on that. I'm [ __ ] telling you. Okay. Believe me, so many managers, they are not good, but they think they're good. And you have them take calls and you'll be like, "How

Speaker A

the [ __ ] did you think you were a manager?" Right? So, for the love of God, just have them take some calls. And if they're as good as they say they are, and they close [ __ ] you know, if you give them 20

Speaker A

leads and they close eight in the first week, okay, you're the manager now, right? Like, if you're as good as you say you are, then you'll be be manager after week two. But they have to learn the product, you, your brand, Yeah.

Speaker A

the leads, you know? Maybe there's there could be exceptions where you could get away with it, but even the people you could get away with it with, whatever, they could take calls for a week or two weeks. If they're as

Speaker A

good as they say they are, they should be able to do it. Promoting internally, I really like that if you have the right person. And the bonus of that is obviously they're going to know all those things. You're

Speaker A

going to know they they perform, but what they have to have is like executive presence. And essentially like you'll be able to know this. It's hard to define this into like observable behavior, but you'll know it. You know, if you can

Speaker A

imagine them running a meeting, like you should be able to kind of get an idea of like can this person run a meeting, command attention, command authority, can they hold other people accountable?

Speaker A

They have they they have to have an even higher degree of disagreeableness than even a good rep because they have to be able to hold people accountable publicly, right? And at the same time, you know, they can't have like lone wolf

Speaker A

disagreeableness. They have to have like very good team energy as well. I don't know if that makes sense.

Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Okay. So, the the kind of unlock I'm having so far is at the moment I'm spending 100% my of my time on the client success side in terms of just make trying to improve

Speaker A

the curriculum and trying to increase these numbers of people getting their first sale, etc. But I've spent basically zero time like I've I I don't think I've reviewed a single sales team call which is probably a bad idea. Um

Speaker A

you could do both at once. Yeah. Yeah. You you can especially because really your constraint is not 100% identifiable to client success. And I think a lot of these it's not like like dude like if I have a client whose

Speaker A

constraints actually client success they're like yeah dude my refund rate's 15%. our Trust Pilot is like going down, you know, I have 10 bad reviews on Reddit. It's like, yeah, dude, you need to like [ __ ] stop, you know, like you

Speaker A

need to chill, okay? Um, you're you're not that. So, you can improve the product as you're growing the company, and I think it'll start to help, you know, especially because like I try to there's there's people who again, you

Speaker A

know, when I'm working with clients, I always can tell what their like natural tendency and stance is. yours is much more client success focused. So, I can already tell without knowing much more that you need to focus a little bit more

Speaker A

over here. Yeah. Right. Whereas there's other people who are the like we mentioned like the go go go go go they got to scale to a million a month ASAP and it's like all right dude like maybe you should try to get some referrals you

Speaker A

know like maybe you need to like you don't have to get there tomorrow like slow it down because faster up is a lot of times faster down.

Speaker A

So you'll see a lot of people in this industry they'll get to a million a month or two million. I mean, sometimes like even more than that, like four or five million a month, but they don't stick around.

Speaker A

It's very rare. There's very few people, this is why I respect uh Dean Graciosi so much is that he's been doing this for like [ __ ] 30 years or something, like at least 25. I don't know the exact

Speaker A

number. It's a lot and just consistent crushing it, which is super rare, you know. So, um, is there a sweet spot in terms of how fast to scale like move fast and break things versus go slow to go fast

Speaker A

kind of vibes? Yeah. I mean, there is definitely a sweet spot. Um, how would I define what it is? I mean I think you can scale I think you should you definitely need to scale faster but for generally how I

Speaker A

recommend it to most people is you can scale as hard and as fast as long as your client results remain relatively intact. The way the reason I say relatively is like you're going to have a chargeback and a you know your

Speaker A

client success manager who's new is gonna [ __ ] up a client. Like that's gonna happen. Like we scaled super fast. I mean, we scaled from 100 grand a month to 2.5 million a month and in what?

Speaker A

12 months. Oh, [ __ ] Nice. And, you know, I don't think we like crazy dropped any balls, but obviously we had new recruiters, we had new client success. So, like, was there people who should have gotten results who didn't?

Speaker A

Yeah, for sure. You know, and if we would have went slower, we could have mitigated that a little bit more, but it wasn't like devastatingly bad or anything.

Speaker A

So, yeah, I don't have a formula for how fast should you scale for you. Do I know it's faster than you're scaling?

Speaker A

Yeah. Okay. But I think for for most people, it's like as long as the client success remains relatively sturdy and the clients are getting results and those metrics aren't like if you're tracking those metrics and they're staying within

Speaker A

KPI, then I think you could scale. Yeah. How do you define the KPI for these metrics? Do you just make it up or um what for the client success ones or what?

Speaker A

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, KPIs are essentially proxy metrics. Product metrics are used to essentially assess um what's because the quality of your business is the quality of what's happening on the front lines that's defined as all the clientf facing

Speaker A

aspects of your business. Right? So a proxy metric is a metric that is used which is like a KPI to try to best describe what's actually happening.

Speaker A

Okay. Y right. And so I just think about it from that standpoint. And then yeah, like I just make stuff up, you know, like I just think about like I don't I'm not a I was never a big rule follower,

Speaker A

you know? I I like knowing the meta of any industry or system or like when I learned YouTube this year, like I first learned all like the principles and every but then I had to find my own way

Speaker A

to do it. I kind of had to like break some rules to get it to work. And so yeah, I mean I just kind of like what is going to be the most useful proxy metric to set up and and make for this. But

Speaker A

then the thing about proxy metrics is that a you know what happens is is over optimization of proxy metrics ends up reducing company quality. So the famous story about this is Jeff Bezos's podcast with Lex Friedman. I don't know

Speaker A

if you ever watched that. Yeah. where he talks about like how their proxy metric for an or customer success answer time or whatever was like five minutes, but then he had all this like gut feeling and this feedback that it's like not

Speaker A

five minutes. So he just picks up the phone or no it was like 30 seconds. It was supposed to be like 30 seconds. He picks up the phone and then waits 15 minutes and he's like, "Okay, like this

Speaker A

proxy metric isn't working." Because a lot of times what happen is people will overoptimize proxy metrics sometimes change how it's actually being tracked or all sorts of stuff is in good intention but it's nefarious and then it essentially backfires like

Speaker A

companies in order to reduce MQL cost which is basically qualified marketing application cost companies will sometimes change the way they define an MQL in order to lower the cost. Yeah, they didn't really change anything. They just lowered the quality of the

Speaker A

business. Does that make sense? It's a common example. You know, I'll give you another one.

Speaker A

This is why I never optimize my closers on close rate. Oh, okay. Yeah. What you could do as a closer, and I know this because I did this as a closer, not in my peak when I was really

Speaker A

good, but like in the beginning days, I would do this when I was a little bit more beginner, is if I could manipulate my close rate by let's say the prospect is kind of like not a good quality

Speaker A

prospect and and the first two minutes of the call they're like, I don't even know if I should have this call. You'd end the call and market a no-show. A ton of closers will do that, right? The other thing is too is if you if you um

Speaker A

calculate their close rate on offer to close, they'll withhold offers on people they don't think are going to close because it makes their close rate look higher.

Speaker A

Yeah. Right. So that's a good way, you know, it's another example of like you got to be careful with your proxy metrics.

Speaker A

Yeah. So what do you look at if if not close rate? I guess you look at close rate, but like what are your key Yeah.

Speaker A

The thing is is that we do look at it, but it's not the only thing we look at. not the main thing we talk about and it's not the main thing we reinforce.

Speaker A

So I make sure that they have enough slots open a day and they're taking enough live calls. If they're doing that, then what I look at is essentially what's their production in the form of cash.

Speaker A

Okay. Yeah. And units. That's the main stuff. Do you do you care about like contracted revenue versus cash collected or are you tracking all the numbers? And like for closers, we look at upfront cash collected. Okay. and we look at units,

Speaker A

but units is really a representation of cash of contracting. Makes sense. Um, at what point should we start thinking about setters?

Speaker A

Well, here's the thing is that it would help you. I mean, it would technically make your marketing more efficient now.

Speaker A

So, like you could do it now. M the thing is is that it doesn't really address a like marketing efficiency and ROI probably is not a constraint right now uh especially like the main thing it seems like is you got to get your sales

Speaker A

team performance up y right and then that would make your marketing even more efficient and your row more efficient so I would focus on that and then I'd probably revisit setters for you around three four five closers now other people it's a little

Speaker A

bit different like if you're pure cold traffic you don't have a brand you don't have an audience sometimes like like for our B toc offer if If we didn't have a setter, the the funnel wouldn't even work.

Speaker A

So for a lot of people who are doing cold traffic, you need extra volume from the setter.

Speaker A

Y to be able to make the metrics work in the first place. Does that make sense? Totally.

Speaker A

So for a lot of people, it's like you hire a setter usually right with your first or second closer.

Speaker A

Y for you, I mean, you could probably wait till four closers and then you, you know, okay, you got the closing team down, you feel really confident with the main sales team. Now let's start this new team.

Speaker A

Yeah. Right. But for now, I don't think it's worth the extra department essentially that it' be adding.

Speaker A

So, we currently have a 16% qualification rate on our type form. Uh we use your leads 1 2 3 4 thing. So, a three and a four is 16%. Uh the other 84% is a one or a two,

Speaker A

right? Um and currently ones and twos just sit in the CRM doing absolutely nothing. Should we be getting a setter to triage call the twos or I mean we've just seen a massive like the the primary lead score is just when

Speaker A

we ask the income question, right? And so yeah, so it's up to you because again if your return on ad spend is good, then if you know it's 5 to 7x plus you can just let them sit frankly like

Speaker A

it's not the biggest deal in the world. Now, yeah, eventually could you get one setter just to handle all the two great applications and set the ones that are qualified so that you get those set to Yeah, you could do it. It's just not

Speaker A

fixing a if you did it right now, it's fine, but it isn't fixing a constraint right now.

Speaker A

Yeah. So, it's really up to you. Like, you know, if it was me, I'm I'm good at this stuff. So, I would just do it now.

Speaker A

But like to me, hiring a setter and doing the setter processes and training a setter, like I've done that a million times. I could do it in my sleep.

Speaker A

Not a big deal. Y right for you. It's like I mean it is starting another department.

Speaker A

So if it's not addressing a constraint even though you are accepting Yeah. That's a little mini bonfire.

Speaker A

Maybe you just wait until you have foreclosures. Yeah. Right. If we were to have foreclosures um now that's like quite a lot of booked calls we need every week and every month to keep them fed uh and happy. But if we

Speaker A

then have a fire in client success and we need to turn down the volume in terms of like new people that we're accepting to fix up systems or this that the other, what happens to the four a couple

Speaker A

of the closers are going hungry as a worst. First of all, I I've almost never seen it to where you're going to have a bonfire and clients success so bad to where you need to turn down the volume. Worst case, if you did have

Speaker A

that, just give all your closers a week of vacation. Oh, okay. That'll reduce your volume by 25%.

Speaker A

Okay, fair. So, say you guys summer vacation, go get [ __ ] up, you know, whatever. So, um but but man, like any client success issue we've ever had, we just fixed it while maintaining the same volume. So, I I just doubt

Speaker A

that's going to happen. Okay. Yeah. One mistake we made with our first our first attempt at a high ticket offer a few years ago was we spent five months turn with sales turned off because we were like, we need to fix fulfillment.

Speaker A

Yeah. And then the whole thing became unprofitable and we had to Well, and the thing is too is that you can't even really fix fulfillment without the flow in the system. You got to keep the flow in the system to fix

Speaker A

it. Okay. So, I shouldn't be afraid of hiring a third closer and a fourth closer cuz currently I'm like, "Yeah, you're afraid to scale, dude. You need to scale." Okay. Right now, we are currently um ads or organic straight to a page that has a

Speaker A

video and an application. So, direct all the ads are directly talking about the thing.

Speaker A

Yeah. Um the direct funnel, I guess. At what point should we think about like webinars and stuff that are more indirect?

Speaker A

Probably not for a while. I mean, I'd say probably you're gonna be fine till a million a month plus. Like, you're not even sending emails. Yeah.

Speaker A

You could probably be going harder on organic. Yeah. You're not spending much on ads and you're doing 300 grand a month. So, it's probably going to be a while.

Speaker A

And then it really is like it's not like another ad channel, but it kind of feels that way. It's like you're adding another funnel.

Speaker A

Yep. to just have a little bit more variation in the marketing and increase the flow.

Speaker A

Yeah, it ain't going to happen for a while. You got a long runway. Okay.

Speaker A

So, I would just cross that bridge much later. All right. So, key constraint that's really coming up is just this sales process.

Speaker A

Yeah. Our close rates currently about 20%, show up rates about 75%. Um I think we can get both numbers up.

Speaker A

Yeah, probably 35. Yeah, especially because a lot of people probably booking probably follow your content and know who you are.

Speaker A

Yes. So, it's kind of organic. It should probably be like 35. Okay. I mean, that can be high. Like my closers on average don't close some close, you know, in the 30s, but they don't close 35 across the team,

Speaker A

but my guys are all really cold traffic and B2B, so not everybody qualifies. Yeah.

Speaker A

So, but it's real real cold traffic. But when I have organic traffic, like you can get organic close rates as high as 40 to 60 is super high. Okay. That's like pure organic. you're kind of like organic or adjacent, right?

Speaker A

So, that's like 35, you know, but even if they were all above 30, it's a good start.

Speaker A

Okay, nice. Um, what are your thoughts on revealing the price before before the call versus at the end of the call?

Speaker A

I would do it at the end, right? Yeah. It's just general best practice. Not the before the call can't before the call reduces I mean, here here's a way to think about it. Before the call reduces volume, increases quality.

Speaker A

Yeah. after at the end of the call increases volume but it reduces quality. Hopefully I said it the right. It's the inverse of the increases increases volume. You guys get what I'm trying to say? So uh yeah, it's

Speaker A

like a lever you can pull, right? It's a lever of friction. Yeah, it's really up to you. I the only thing that I would say is is if eventually you're going to have to move to a system where

Speaker A

it is price at the end of the call because you're going to need to maximize volume, you might as well do it now because the thing is is that the closers are always used to them knowing the price before.

Speaker A

You're kind of building a team of order takers. And so what'll happen is is eventually when you need to switch it, it'll totally change the type of prospects coming on and then the wall tank. Yeah. See, it's in my opinion,

Speaker A

it's like you might as well do it now. The exception would be like if you have so many millions of followers where you're like, "Dude, like even with telling them the price up front, we could staff 30 closers, you know?" Okay.

Speaker A

Well, in that case, maybe you just do it. But that's probably pretty rare. Like you'd have to be working with a pretty like dog on famous person.

Speaker A

What are your thoughts on guarantees broadly? I mean, yeah, they're good. The the way to do it is conditional and the way to think about it is you just make the guarantee those things that you know if they do they're going to succeed.

Speaker A

Yeah. So you just align the interest that way. A guarantee is really used in marketing to make your ads stand out and try to book more calls. It's is it effective in the sales process?

Speaker A

Yeah, but not really. Like it doesn't matter that much in the actual sales process. The way I like to use it in the sales process is if you have somebody right at the line, there's a conditional guarantee they can

Speaker A

pull out to nudge them across the edge to where it's like, "Hey, if I'm willing to do this for you to where I set this guarantee in place, would you move forward right now?" That's the most effective way to use it

Speaker A

in sales is like as an objection handle when they're kind of right on the edge and it's like they're scared.

Speaker A

But if you're talking about the guarantee in your ads and stuff anyway, well, then then you're kind of stuck.

Speaker A

Okay, fine. Yeah, you're kind of stuck. The interesting thing about the guarantee is is that you could state it in your ads and state the qualifications of how they need to qual like you need to be at I

Speaker A

know it wouldn't be for you but like you could say hey you need to be at 10k a month to qualify for this guarantee you'll get tons of people even if you state it plainly you'll just get everything and then so you can literally

Speaker A

point to the ad and be like hey you don't yeah qualify for the guarantee we can still help you yeah but you know just by the way the guarantee said this okay you know our current guarantee I would love your

Speaker A

feedback on this so Our current guarantee is um we guarantee that you'll make your first you'll make your first 10K within 6 months. Yeah. Um or we'll work with you for free for up to another 6 months until you do. And if at the end of the

Speaker A

12 months you still haven't made your 10K then we will refund you the difference between what you made and what you paid kind of thing provided you do the weekly.

Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. Whatever. Well, look, there's really no value in my opinion of the guarantee unless you need it for your marketing. So, if you're using it in your marketing as like the main hook, then okay, that's value and your

Speaker A

guarantee, whatever. It's fine. As long as you're happy with it, whatever and it works with your client success.

Speaker A

If if you're like, "Man, I can run ads without the guarantee." Dude, just run ads without the guarantee.

Speaker A

Interesting. There's It's really just a marketing thing. It's okay. That's good to know. So, Huh.

Speaker A

Yeah. Okay. Because I think our ads don't mention it right now. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe you just But our VSSL sort of does, but we can always test.

Speaker A

If your ads don't if it's not the primary hook in your ads, it's not why people are booking.

Speaker A

I guarantee it. So if you're saying it at minute three in your VSSL, most people don't even know it exists.

Speaker A

It would simplify our life a lot if we didn't have it on the back end because especially because now we like for me, I probably couldn't make my ads work nearly as well without it. But my my hook of all the ads is the

Speaker A

guarantee. Yeah. So, you know, okay, our whole business has it. You know, it just is what it is.

Speaker A

But yeah, I mean, if I could not have it, I would prefer not to have it.

Speaker A

And so, in that context, if we didn't have it in the ads or in the VSSL or whatever, but then there's a back pocket conditional guarantee that the closers can use as an objection handling. Yeah.

Speaker A

Which is only offered to a certain number of clients. Yeah. One issue that we've had on that front is that like because we've changed up the offer just a little bit across cohorts and people are talking to each

Speaker A

other. Someone from the March cohort is like speaking to someone in the make being like wait, you know, how come they got the guarantee and now we're Yeah. But you're testing stuff, you're changing it. Hey, the price is going to

Speaker A

go up over time. Like the offer is going to change. Yeah. And also like, you know, that's why I don't like the accountability groups as much. I just like them working with a coach.

Speaker A

Yep. I mean the community is nice but that's more of like the school what whatever your community thing is in school or circle or whatever and the group calls you know.

Speaker A

Okay. Something Angus just said is that he feels that our guarantee is more for my own personal conviction in the offer rather than really for marketing to our prospects.

Speaker A

I think that's kind of silly. I mean dude I think your conviction in the offer should be independent of having a guarantee or not. I mean I don't really know what to say say to that. I I I just feel like

Speaker A

I mean your offer should be in the I already know your offer you should have conviction in it. It's probably very very good. It's probably better than most of other people who are doing similar stuff than you and I think you just need to believe in

Speaker A

it a little bit more. Okay, fine. Yeah, I think you need to believe in it a little bit more and I don't think you need a guarantee to believe in what you're doing. You know, like you don't need that to do this. I do appreciate

Speaker A

this is why I'm saying your stance is very procrastinating by obsessing about client success.

Speaker A

That's like very much your stance and that's like what you do to occupy yourself to avoid the real thing that you need to do to scale your business which is the sales team and yeah which is which is you know

Speaker A

increasing volume increasing conversion you know what whatever the main metrics are there. Yeah. Okay. I mean, everybody has that to an extent. It's different for different people, but yeah, your thing is is you're avoiding the thing you really

Speaker A

need to do by focusing on client success and telling yourself a story that it's not ready yet and it's not good enough yet, blah blah blah blah, you know. So, it's it's going to get better as you scale.

Speaker A

Like, you'll scale and you'll continue to work on it. You should I keep working on it. Yeah.

Speaker A

And also do this other thing. Okay. Objection, your honor. Is there not? I've heard from various people that when it comes to info coaching type businesses, there is a sort of sweet spot range of profit. People often say

Speaker A

somewhere in between the 2 3 million a year mark which we are now at where like beyond which it starts to like your margins start to go down, overhead starts to increase, it starts to feel heavier, etc., etc. Is this all just

Speaker A

like Yeah, I mean I think I think people I always have a saying, people can only tell you what's true in their own experience. So the the most likely person to tell you that is somebody who's never like really scaled to a

Speaker A

million a month and done it probably. Yeah. Like yeah, you know, this is just how the world is. That's a story they told themselves of what makes it okay for them that they got to 400 grand a month and then they're like, oh no, like

Speaker A

200 was better, you know, whatever. Okay. So, um, look, the most the businesses who do the most profit that I know are pretty [ __ ] big.

Speaker A

Yeah. you know, like in this industry, the people who have done the most profit are the biggest. Now, that doesn't mean like there's limits to that. I mean, I do know some companies doing 50 to 70 million and like they don't do as much

Speaker A

profit as me. And I'm like, how the [ __ ] do you, you know, run your business? So, what I want to do is I want to have healthy profit margins, but I also want to grow bigger. Yeah.

Speaker A

I can do both of those at once, you know? It's not an either or. Now what happens is is like I don't know if it's a 200 or 300 or 400 but like you know let's say from 250 you could be really

Speaker A

profitable but then at 400 to kind of get there you have to add some infrastructure like a little bit more ops a little bit more finance whatever but then what's going to happen is the profit from 400 to 700 will go back up

Speaker A

but then at 700 you really got to invest in like an executive team and then so like the margin will go down a little bit but then that's more infrastructure and it'll go up Okay. So, there is truth

Speaker A

to yes, you need to add more quote unquote overhead as you scale, but also eventually it'll go back up. Like right now, I have the infrastructure to probably do 5 million a month.

Speaker A

So, every incremental next client that I add from this point on is more profitable. Does that make sense?

Speaker A

Yeah. So, okay. Another while we're on this therapy session, um, another thing I worry about is what if it all goes away? What if somehow the lead generation tab gets turned off overnight or something and now we have

Speaker A

all this overhead and then the business sort of crumbles? Yeah. Well, this is an example of catastrophying.

Speaker A

So, you know, the if I ever find myself catastrophying, you know, oh my god, we're having a bad sales week, and then I start thinking, what if it all falls down and all this stuff, what you want to do is first you

Speaker A

have to be aware of that. And then you have to challenge and question that thought with any evidence.

Speaker A

So, I'll start to think, well, how many other times has this happened and everything's been fine? A lot of times, uh, even when things did go bad, was I always able to fix it or come back on my

Speaker A

feet or figure it out or whatever? Yes. Right. Is it me just catastrophying and it's probably going to be fine? Yes.

Speaker A

Right. So, that's how I catch it in the moment. And I mean, at the end of the day, even if it whatever, you know, you got deplatformed on YouTube and shut down on Facebook at the same day, you're going

Speaker A

to figure it out. Like, you'll find a way back on your feet. You'll be okay.

Speaker A

But these are just things that are like kind of like what Elliot was talking about our mindset speaker.

Speaker A

These are things that you need to work on personally as they come up and that'll really help you with the growth of your business because these are the things that really hold people back.

Speaker A

Yeah. Is like fear of complexity, fear of success, associating scale with pain. Yeah. Um catastrophying, you know, and that pattern will just show up late. I mean, a pattern's showing up right now in this form.

Speaker A

But like, you know, it'll I went through this phase when I I went from 100 grand a month, like I said, to 2 and a half million a month in 12 months. So, I went from not a lot of money to making a ton

Speaker A

of money really, really quickly. And all of a sudden, I was like, I'm not even kidding. I started looking for nuclear bunkers on on like listings for bunkers and like getaway houses and stuff like this. And it's just like the catastrophying

Speaker A

pattern that I had that was previously applied to not having enough money or having been back at my parents or whatever it was just got applied to this other thing. That's actually when I started working with Elliot and he was

Speaker A

like, I think you're going to be all right. He's like, I don't think you're going to need a nuclear bunker.

Speaker A

Yeah. But I was looking at them. There's some nice ones. Oh, yeah. For a couple million, you can get one that goes deep, you know, like a silo. Have you seen silo?

Speaker A

No. Apple TV. Yeah. I was looking at some silos. Love it. Um, okay. Changing gears. Uh what is a good LTV to CAC to be roughly aiming for or is that the wrong question to be asking?

Speaker A

No, I mean it's a good question. Um it depends on the offer and the scalability. Hormosi has a really good framework for it and I forget what it is. It has to do with like essentially the more scalable your offer

Speaker A

is the lower your LTV to CAC can be. Long story short, in this industry, I would say that you want it above five to one minimum, but really like if you can get it to 7 to 1 to 10 to one, that's

Speaker A

really good. In the beginning, you want to really maximize it as much as you can because as you scale, it's going to go down because acquisition cost will go up, right? So, in the beginning, if you can get it to 20 to1,

Speaker A

sick, right? But how's 20 to1 even possible if if your saleserson commission is like if you No, no, no. Okay. So, I I'm talking about just ad spend.

Speaker A

Oh, I see. Yeah. So, I mean, you could do like I think fully loaded LTB to CAC or whatever it's called. So, you could factor it in that way. I I I only think about it just with ad spend, but as long

Speaker A

as you measure it consistently, you know, I don't think it matters how you do it. But, if you think about like 20 to1, that would mean for every $5 of ad you uh you put in, you get $100. So

Speaker A

that would only mean that essentially on your P&L 5% of your total cash collected revenue would be ad spend right so if you collected 100 grand you spent five which is doable if you think about okay let's say

Speaker A

because 20 to1 sounds like a lot but if you think about okay I spent five grand and then front end brought in 50 but backend brought in another 50 that see that's pretty possible like if we really profit maximized right now instead of

Speaker A

like trying to scale we would be at like 10 to one but that's because we have a big back end I mean 50% of our revenue is back end you know and are you so a front-end cash collected uh if people are on payment

Speaker A

plans and stuff are you counting overall revenue or is it just purely on that first transaction what you're optimizing for um if that makes sense. Well, we we KPI the reps on upfront cash collected and on units.

Speaker A

Yep. Um, obviously, you know, revenue and payment plans and all that stuff's good. I don't know what the question was, though.

Speaker A

Um, okay. The the question is when we're looking at the profitability of our ads and looking at our like rorowass and like uh our rorowass should we do it on the basis of the cash collected on that first transaction or on contracted

Speaker A

revenue or on theoretical lifetime value. Yeah. So if you're looking at front end just specifically I like to say you know 5 to 7x uh on contracted if not more hopefully more contracted.

Speaker A

Yeah. hopefully more cuz 5 to 7x is even you know at scale that's even good like but that's you're you're getting to tighter levels at that point that's like the minimum so ideally on contracted if you can get to like 10 to 15 that's

Speaker A

great on upfront it can be anywhere from like two to five okay you know so I know those are kind of broad ranges but okay no that makes sense that's good good bench it depends on where you're at like what

Speaker A

I want to do is I want to get it as high as possible in the very beginning because I know eventually it's going to go down you know ads are going to go up the more sales people you have the lower

Speaker A

baseline closing rate your team is going to have generally. So, and then to what extent do you try and model the cost of organic as well or not really?

Speaker A

Uh, I mean you could because you could take your media team divided by generated appointments or your media team divided by organic closes and you could see what the CAC is for that.

Speaker A

I mean it depends on how big your media team is. I think if you have big spend relative to the revenue coming in for organic, it's worth it. Like for me, our media team budget is not significant enough to where I'm feel like that's a

Speaker A

metric worth tracking. Okay. Yeah. In our case, we'd be doing the media team anyway. So like I I'm kind of like, should we model it or I mean you can you could look at it if you want. It's up to you.

Speaker A

Okay. Nice. Okay. This is a random question about email lists. So we currently have four different email lists. It's kind of annoying.

Speaker A

We have life notes, which is my personal newsletter. It's got like 350,000 people on it. We have like a productive notes which is just like a weekly productivity one that we used to that we still send.

Speaker A

We have a creator notes because we used to well still do sell a YouTube course.

Speaker A

And then we have a freedom notes one which is now for this new business product thing. And I feel like this is like three email lists too many.

Speaker A

Wild. Yeah. Yeah. Uh the creative notes has 150,000 on it. Productive notes has 150,000 uh on it.

Speaker A

Freedom notes has like 50 40,000 but that's by far our highest conversion into the the thing. Yeah.

Speaker A

Um, now some people are on some combinations of these different email lists, but I don't think anyone really knows what email list they're on. They just get an email from Alal some amount of times per week depending on their preferences and

Speaker A

stuff. Any thoughts on Well, I mean, ideally what you probably want one list in an ideal perfect world, right? So I mean the thing that I would think about is what was the expectation of people getting on this list and then

Speaker A

based on the content they've been receiving, what is the future expectation of like what they're going to get on the list, what you're going to email them and so on and so forth, right? And then if if you find that the

Speaker A

expectation of each person on the list is if out of any of those four, right?

Speaker A

If they're very similar like in terms of the con type of content they receive, what it is, blah blah blah blah. If you find those are relatively similar, I would just you could probably merge those lists without even telling them.

Speaker A

Now, if the type of list is like let's say one is uh your personal life updates and this other one is like only productivity. Yeah. Or like let's say one is moneym and the other one's like strictly productivity.

Speaker A

Yeah. Well, in that case that's a little bit different. And what you could do is is you could still let's say you want everybody on the money one. You could say, "Hey, I'm going to be putting more time and attention on this other list.

Speaker A

Let us here's what I'm going to cover in this. It's still going to be valuable.

Speaker A

It's about this and that. Let me know if you also want to get those emails because I'm going to be sending out more emails there and less emails here. I'll still be here. I'll still send some emails, whatever, but I'm going to like

Speaker A

and then they click and it autosubscribes them to the other list, right?" And then it's your choice if you want to keep sending emails to the other list or not. Yeah. Yeah, frankly. But I mean, do you want to go deeper on that? Is like

Speaker A

what's the expectation and essentially, you know, like what do people expect on each list? Like what's the content cadence for those lists?

Speaker A

For the most part, each one is a weekly newsletter type thing just for like life notes is often just whatever's going on in my life. But it's often related to either productivity or creator or business or all of the above. Creative

Speaker A

notes is like how to be a creator. Productive notes is like productivity tips which often overlap. There's like a large amount of overlap between these four verticals.

Speaker A

Yeah. Uh, and so if it's really similar and you feel like people would just like the same type of content, you could probably just merge it all into one list and just let everybody know, hey, I've been doing

Speaker A

four lists. This has made the content worse, so I'm going to show up even a more powerful way and this new list I'm calling X, Y, and Z.

Speaker A

And I mean, like probably what people are going to like is if you just talk like the life notes thing. That's probably like the talk about your life, talk about content, talk about business.

Speaker A

Yeah, most talking about productivity, most people will probably be down just to be on one list. But that's probably something to where you don't need to have them like click and resubscribe and all this [ __ ] You can probably just

Speaker A

merge everything and then focus on really nailing email as a channel by focusing on just one list.

Speaker A

You know, it's probably not a problem. There's two types of lists. There's what's called a churn and burn list and then there's a relationship list. So, you have four relationship lists.

Speaker A

Yeah. I have a churn and burn list and then I'm starting a relationship list, right? Because I'm going to get opt-ins from the content and all that stuff.

Speaker A

Those see like those you don't want to mix and match because the churn and burn is I'm going to send like 10 offers in five days.

Speaker A

Yeah. You know, like because I know it's it's kind of funny. It's like there's no point in nurture. The churn and burn list is when you are generating a list from ads.

Speaker A

Yep. So now granted if your ads are retargeting, you could maybe put those in the relationship list. I mean, you know, not the end of the world, but the turn and burn is like people who opt in from ads,

Speaker A

they don't want to be on your list. Yeah. You know, so you're really just hitting them hard in the first 14 days to try to get them to book for what they originally opted in for. After that, they're almost dead. Yeah.

Speaker A

You know, so Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Nice. That's that's a good what I'm thinking based on that is actually two rather than four. One is like life notes, which is the personal relationship list. And then because our lifestyle business academy is on its own

Speaker A

domain, lifestylebus.com and it's like like we can just have the lifestyle business newsletter if you're interested in building a business and then do a little bit of I think you could do both or or you could cross-pollinate and send certain

Speaker A

things to both lists. That would be fine. Um but I mean I almost I bet you could just do it all in one is my thing and you could CTA to the lifestyle business academy anyways.

Speaker A

Easy. Okay. Nice. Love it. Thank you. Okay. So, the point of this was for me to just try and talk to you and um for to help us scale from 300k a month to a million a month.

Speaker A

Yeah. Overall, you we've been chatting for a couple of hours now and we've spoken on Zoom on and off over the last year and we've been working with you guys. What do you see see is don't procrastinate with perfectionism and client success as

Speaker A

a way to keep you from doing what you should be doing. That's by far the number one thing because that's a pattern that's going to reoccur beyond just the tactics. And then in terms of the tactics, we talked about the client

Speaker A

success KPIs, client success structure, milestones, all stuff like that. And then I think the main thing is is, you know, focusing on your sales team and doing all the things that we talked about there. Turning down your ad spend

Speaker A

a little bit until you're ready to hire or or no, I guess you're hiring a third person. So, keeping the ad spend where it's at and you should be good, dude. Easy.

Speaker A

million a month coming and then we can and then in the next episode we can go a million a month to three million.

Speaker A

There we go. Perfect. Brilliant. Thanks. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably going to like this podcast I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here.

Topics:Ali AbdaalCole Gordonbusiness scalingonline business schoolclient successmarketing strategysales teamKPI trackingbusiness growthentrepreneurship

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