How to Price High-Ticket Without Fear | Ep 903
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I am a big believer in having like almost the same size recruiting team as I do sales team. And so that was also one of the big ways that we were able to basically fill in exec teams and leader teams within these portfolio companies we bring them in. It's like there's only two winners. Either we can pull the winners out or we can put three more winners in and now we have a full company.

Pest control, $8 million, pacing $12 million this year, running really good margins. Yes, sir. Biggest constraint we have now, we have a marketing agency. We're paying about $100,000 a year. We want to pull out all that marketing in-house, but we don't want to lose performance. What would you do if you were in my shoes? Why? I just feel like there's a disconnect there somewhere. Were they performing? It seems to be doing all right, yeah. Why is that the most important thing?

I just feel like we can get a better LTV. I just don't know if we're getting a lot of quality leads. Why not just start marketing and not cancel them? We could do that too. We do a lot of online social media stuff now. We have a big YouTube channel, a big TikTok. I'll give this as a rule of thumb in general for me. I will typically never stop flows. I'll just add flows. It's like, okay, we've got this marketing agency. It's like, cool, we can hire two more marketing agencies and they can all market for me.

I'll probably not make less money. And then like, we also want to build it in house. Cool. We'll also build it in house. Like more promotion almost never makes you less money provided you have a product that has gross margin and makes sense. Right. So yeah, I would not, I basically will never sacrifice the thing that puts food on the table. Right. Even if it's not as efficient as I want, I'm not going to risk, I'm not going to risk the whole business just because I want to gain efficiency.

so i'll add so i would say just adding not canceling now if the added thing then crushes it and just like makes the other thing superfluous i still am like well we're paying these guys 100 and making you know a million or making 500. if somebody gave me an investment that i put you know you know 100 grand in and make 500 back i'd still probably say yes so just more smart last pretty straight easy that was an easy one it's usually not like that

It's usually like, I've got this partner, and they're not here. They don't support me. What's up, man? Nate Burkett. I'm a deck builder in East Tennessee. Yeah, you've niched down. Decks, niched down. Made more money. Do about three mil. I'd like to get to the point where we're above 10. I think the biggest thing that's stopping us is really me, first of all. I was here a couple years ago and learned how to one-call close from a gentleman, and I overcomplicated that whole thing, and now I can't train and sell it.

to the people that are working for me because they don't have what I have. So, uh, I've kind of come to the point where I think the pitch is the offer is a little too much and I want to kind of too much as in what, as in like, it's kind of slimy. It's, uh, it's called an ambassador program. And, um, basically the month that I'm building your deck, uh, rather than me spend a bunch of money on advertising, I'd rather partner with you and, uh, in exchange for a few things. So for instance, um,

I spend quite a bit on ad spend. I'd rather spend that in your deck, make your backyard look like my billboard, and you be my radio ad, my spokesperson, in exchange for that Google review, that kind of thing. So I'll cut the bill down quite a bit. And people seem to kind of think that that's a little pressure sale, and then we don't really get anything from it. When I did it, it worked well. My guys are getting feedback that it's just not a good fit. Do you have any recordings? Vague, no. Yeah, that's it, man.

I guarantee if you heard them say it, you'd be like, God, dude, no, you're just... There's no... I think it's... Dude, they're sucking ass at it. That's all it is. It's all it is. By the way, if anyone here doesn't record their sales calls, listen to them for the first time and you will want to kill yourself. Um...

So, no, I don't think, like, if you have the offer that already worked really well, they're just phrasing it wrong or they're presenting it wrong. So I think you need to get sales recording. So it's like, how do I do that? It's like you can have them put their phone in their pocket. Because you sell in person, right? Yeah. It's at their house? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so you can just record it. And then based on laws of that area, you can let them know they're being recorded. That's what you should do. Okay. Disclaimer. I got you. Just want to be clear. Sounds good. Thank you.

But you'll be able to get that feedback. I guarantee you, as soon as you listen to it, you'll hear it in two seconds. Like rather like, actually, this is a really good one. So many times we want to change our entire business because of something that's just like, oh my guess. Like I have, I just haven't heard the sales calls. So like record the sales calls, listen to the sales calls, see what the problem is and like not change my offer, my pricing, my marketing, like all of that because we just had to avoid like, okay, I don't, I don't, I don't have any visibility. So if we're actually looking at which one this one was, it was a data one. The data was that you didn't have the calls.

Man, these are light. These are light. This is normally not like this. Hello. What's up? Thomas, I buy equity from business owners. Buy equity from business owners? Yeah, I run a private equity firm. Oh, okay. Cool. So we're doing about $25 million across the group. We want to get to over a billion EV. Do you have LPs or is it you? It's family office money, yeah. Okay, so it's just you? Yeah, yeah. So we can scale through institutions with family office LPs if we need to. So you don't syndicate anything? It's just all...

uh we do it deal by deal we'll go to family officer institutions that we need got it okay and what's stopping me really is this scaled like institutional quality capability a bit like you guys have to say like i can go into portfolio companies do a roll up scale it take it public oh it's absolutely but uh what we want to do is obviously build out a capability so that we have lots of assassins going out and doing it so how did you do it

A lot of money and a lot of time. Yeah. I mean, to be like, so the... Like phase by phase. If you go from where you guys started through the phases of now getting to more of an institutional scale. So I would say that, do you feel like you can't generate alpha in bigger companies?

No, no, we've done, I've done big, we've done like a few hundred million companies. So then I think that, I think, I mean, you're, you're, you're rather than reinventing the wheel, I think you're running into the issue that everyone runs into, which is like, we did just for, I mean, for your sake, like we did 24 deals in 24 months from let's say 2021 to 2020 end of 23, somewhere in there. And so during that process, we quickly were like,

wow, this is taking up a lot of bandwidth. And a lot of these are just not worth it. And so the star performers in the portfolio so much outperformed everyone else that I actually just gave people their equity back. I was like, you can keep the money and the equity. I just would rather not talk to you. Yeah.

Some people took it well. We've done a similar thing too. Right. It's just like, this is just not worth the time. Right. And so I think the point that I'm making here is that almost every private equity firm just ends up raising more and more money and doing the same number of deals that they have bandwidth for and just doing fewer, bigger deals. And so it's like, that's why I asked, like, do you feel like you can still generate alpha with the bigger deals? If so, awesome. And I brought that up just because if you look at

Um, constellation, you familiar with them? Yeah. Yeah. It's like their, they know their alpha is just going after, you know, $3 million deals and doing 600 deals a year. And that's their, that's their whole thesis. And so they have to build a whole model around that. But if you're like, I can go bigger than it's like, maybe you do keep the few assassins and you slowly acquire people. Um,

Through the process. And one of the, one of the interesting tricks is like, sometimes you find, you know, you, you look at a company that the company sucks, but there's like a really fucking good marketer in there, or there's a really good sales leader or whatever. And it's like, Hey, um, maybe you should, we just pull you into hold co and then we can get so much more return on this person's skillset across the whole portfolio than just in, in this one small deal. And so in a lot of ways, it's like, there's usually, especially in the small businesses, um, only like one or two people who are good.

And then it's just like finding who those key drivers are. And then just the rest of it, it's like almost more valuable to just pull out the diamonds, forget the business and then put it into a better business vehicle. So to answer the question of like, how did we do this? It's just like, we are always looking for talent. And I would say that as a company, like internally, we're in the talent business. People like when we're like, what business, like we're in the talent business, a hundred percent. And so,

I am always hiring and always willing to overpay. So we pay 90th percentile, which is pretty high for all of our roles because I just want the best. And we get so much more alpha return by being willing to pay significantly above market. It's just like for everybody, I would strongly encourage you. Let's say market for a sales director is $200,000 a year. If you have a sales director that you think is an absolute savage and they want $400,000 a year, you will make $4 million a year extra by getting the savage.

And so thank you. That's a little like, amen. Um, uh, so, so I think, um, from a, from a, from a, you have your core team, you have these deals. I would start basically divesting time into the deals that are small. And then I'd see if I can pick off people from those portfolio companies, pull them into hold co that's going to start bolstering up hold co that might help you identify better opportunities that are bigger. If I can raise more capital, then I'll still do that. And then ongoing, I don't know who you have at your, at holding company, but

But having a director of talent who's experienced with executive recruiting. So like the core function that we ran as basically almost our primary value driver in the very beginning of acquisition.com was recruiting. We're just very good at it. And so, by the way, that's how you scale stuff. And so we had to get really good talent in. And so I am a big believer in having

Like almost the same size recruiting team as I do sales team. And so that was also one of the big ways that we were able to basically fill in exec teams and leader teams within these portfolio companies we bring them in. It's like there's only two winners. Either we can pull the winners out or we can put three more winners in and now we have a full company. Is that out? Yeah, yeah, cool. So go bigger and get better talent. Yeah. Just only the unsurprising, very painful reality. Mm-hmm.

Thank you, Alex. Yeah, you bet. Solar sales driving around. Yeah. Just did in 10 months, you did 500,000. Yep. All right. And we need to get more salespeople in the business. And the biggest lever would be selling remotely. But we're not ready for that yet because we need to get more cash flow. So let's just do more of what we're currently doing, which means we'd have to put in a center tape. Shoot. Yeah.

Yeah, my name is Anthony. We sell solar to homeowners. But yeah, about $500,000 in revenue. But we're operating around 78% profit. So, you know, doing pretty well. We'd like to be at $3 million. And I think the biggest things that's stopping us is BDR, our BDR team's performance and retention. Yeah.

What's compensation for the BDR SDRs? Yeah, so we do a super small base, 500 bucks every two weeks. So I think we need to change that.

but we do the still uncapped commission. So our industry is usually door knockers, which has just commission only. So we thought we were being competitive with the 500 every two weeks. Are those guys door knocking? No, these guys are virtual all over the world. We've tried different people from different places. I think US base is going to be the best with just a higher base, just not really sure how to structure it.

One thing you can do is do like a try before you buy type situation, which is like we're going to make you a contractor for 30 days. And then if you pass the, you know, pass the KPIs, then we'll roll you in. That way it's way less of a like, hey, hire and fire, hire and fire. But then that way it's like an after 30 days, we'll lock in your base. So letting them like work for 30 days for kind of like a slightly adjusted lower base just to try it out.

Yeah. Okay. Or you can just pay full and just say you have 30 days to prove it. Okay. I mean, let's, we have to think about like, what are you going to lose money on? You're going to lose money on, but like typically they're super padded on the upside. So the base of, if you pay somebody like $40,000 a year in terms of what you'd actually pay them, call it 50 for simple math. So it's a thousand bucks a week. If you pay someone for two weeks and you don't think they're good, you lost two grand. Like you're running 75, 80%, you know, net margins. Maybe you give up some margins so that you can scale.

and just get better people. And again, like the star BDRs are going to probably want some base when they come in because they're going to like, well, I've got to build pipeline. And so it's like, how reasonable is it for them to just immediately? I don't know. But like typically pipeline starts to build up usually within, you know, especially for a transactional cell like yours in 14 to 30 days anyways. Yeah. Would you say the comp plan is the biggest lever for this? Yeah. I mean, you're doing remote SDRs. They're like, you're like, we're being competitive. It's like, but you're not,

The remote SDRs that are potentially working for you are comparing your opportunity not to other solar opportunities, but to all other opportunities. And so getting $500 every two weeks is like... Yeah, 100%. You know.

So fix the comp. I would probably try the comp first. So I think for you, it's like fix the comp that gets the better SDRs in SDRs, increase sales, increase sales, increase cashflow, increase cashflow. Then we can start investing the extra time into getting the virtual, uh, sales so that you can go from doing, you know, four or five of consults a day to 20 plus. And then you can start duplicating that sales process and somebody else. But like that gets us the, like, let's just do that first. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it.

My name is Sam Coleman. I sell luxury real estate here in Vegas. Oh, sweet. Revenue last year I did a million three. This year I'm on track to do a million five. Amazing. I would like to get to ideally in my world about 10 million. And what's stopping me is focus apparently. The Ascension plan for most successful people.

real estate is by rentals whatever so right now I started the fund a lot of my clients who have cash have just given me cash because they believe in it and I want to be a developer as my endgame so my question is you know and I also started doing paid ads I know that I started doing paid ads for more what do you think I'm gonna say

i started doing paid ads for my real estate business and then i started paid ads for as an agency for other yeah of course why wouldn't you don't want to leave money on the table yeah right do you want to we should draw up this org chart shall we so we've got hold on we've got this will be fun so we've got we've got the uh your realtor right so we've got this business and then we've got um agency right yeah over here and then we've got fund

over here, and then your goal is to be a developer over here. Okay, cool. They're all in real estate. Yeah. You know what's crazy? All of my businesses are businesses. Isn't that like same, same? I hear you. I'm trying to make myself feel better. No, no, no. As long as you feel better. And like, let's play. Hold on. I'm going to play a fun game. And you have...

One person in her team who's kind of like your right hand you under pair But you're gonna play a little bit more because she's great and then you have like two other people who are irrelevant and You do most of this yourself. I got rid of the other two So just you and your right hand and I have two showing agents that show all of my listings and Admin staff, okay the other two that were irrelevant. I got rid of those two. Okay, okay, so

I was trying to replace myself so I can like go do the other things. Yeah. And then I was losing clients. So I was like, let's go labor. You're like, yeah, what I do so easy. I can train somebody who gets paid nothing to do it to these luxury people who were like, why would I go for this person? 50% of a lot is a lot. 50% of zero is zero. Correct. Um, so, so you've got one business per person, um, who works for you right now, roughly. So what do you want to do, man? Like this makes you money.

Right. And this, you know, is a distraction, obviously. But, you know, you have to figure that out. But what do you want to do? My end game is to be a developer. What stops you? Yeah. OK. The challenge that I'm having now is focus. The amount of focus that is required to get into development and all the systems and processes and people and we're going to actually raise money.

It would take me away from my everyday that actually makes me money. And to go raise capital and schmooze and do all this stuff is what I do now for my current business. So I thought originally that like, oh, I can just do both. Yeah. But I'm not able to do both. So you want to do fund into development, right? That's what you want to do. Correct. You might have a lifestyle issue. Like you make a million plus a year, right? Yeah.

So like you could stop doing that and then hit your base up and say, this is what I'm doing now. Give me money. I'm going to go develop properties now. Yep. So you could just do that. So why don't you do that?

Golden handcuffs, I guess. Lifestyle? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just how bad do you want it? Do you want it enough that you would live in a different neighborhood, drive a different car? Sure. Okay. Well, then do that. I don't have any payments. I don't have any payments. Yeah. I mean, like, it's a lot. You're like, basically, if I stop being a realtor, I'm going to stop making money being a realtor. It's like, yeah. Yeah. But you'll do the other thing that makes you more money long term.

Yeah. So then you have to give up short term for long term. Correct. And so we have to give up short term for long term. I'm married. She's got to go. Dude, I get it. I get it. Also, best response of the day, which is awesome. Yeah. Honestly, it's a conversation. Yeah. It's like, sweetie, I know you love all this stuff. What if we had 10 times more stuff in like five years? Yeah.

I can text you our number. Yeah. No, but that's it. That's the rock and hard place. I got to give up this to get that. Real quick, guys. I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast.

Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale

and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D, roadmap, roadmap.

These are fun. These are good ones. Hello. Yes, ma'am. My name is Laura Roeder. I sell industry vertical software to coaches like executive coaches, life coaches. You sell software to coaches? Yeah. So it's an industry vertical run your business tool, payments, scheduling, client calls. CRM.

Yeah, yeah. And we make a website for them also as part of it. So a theme that came up a lot this morning was how to scale low ticket SaaS because it has been a struggle. And I thought you might have some relevant experience with school. So our price point is about $50 a month. We don't have anything higher or lower at this point. Our ad payback period is 12 months, which is impossible, right? Impossible and terrible.

What has worked for scaling school? It's your viral. So what's your viral coefficient? Um, I mean, coaches, you know, no other coaches hire other coaches. So how many, how many, how many customers come to you every day and sign up for $0?

For $0, we have about like 2,000 free trials a month, about like 6,000 leads a month. That with no marketing? No, no. We do lots of marketing. Okay. So if you did no marketing, how many customers would sign up? About half. Okay. Yeah. So then your payback period on those is immediate. So basically, if you want to scale a low ticket software...

It's all about virality. It has to be able to compound on its own based on word of mouth, based on quality of the product and based on the growth factors that you'll put into the actual software customer experience. So like school obviously has ones like you start a school community, then you invite 200 people. And then of those 200 people, a couple of those people start school communities and they've turned by 200 people and it kind of continues onwards. And so that is what you have to solve for.

So yeah, how do you do that? It's like we're doing that very slowly. How do you do that? How do you make that happen faster? It's a data question. Okay. So basically what you do is you look at something called M12 retention. So month 12, right? So you're like, okay, let's look at all of the people who have stayed for 12 months. Now let's reverse that to the present. What did these people do? Actions. And then what do they look like? Demographics.

that increase the likelihood that that M12 retention occurs. And so when you do this correctly, you'll say, okay, if someone gets their site live, that 4X is the likelihood they make it to M12.

If they add a custom URL to their site, it 8x's the likelihood they get to M12. So you'll basically rank order all of the things as they correlate to M12 retention. And then you'll say, cool, how do I build this into the front-end onboarding flow so that I increase the likelihood these things occur?

And then it's like, okay, how do I decrease friction for each of these steps? And so this data problem first, and then it becomes an engineering issue for how you do onboarding. Once you do that, then basically the people who are coming in, then it's like, great. Now that we're not, we're losing people. Now we can look at the basically virality of it, which is how can we encourage people to, you know, bring more friends. So like for Facebook, like growth in SaaS looks like this. A hundred people sign up.

That's what growth looks like. You're like, how does that look like growth? These 50 people never leave. And then you just can't stop growing. That's how it actually looks for growth. So would you reallocate? So now we're spending 30K a month on our super long payback period ads. Would you reallocate that to onboarding engineering? I actually don't think this is a money thing. This is a...

I have to do the math and have a good data engineer who can basically plot out looking at all customers and software. So you should be able to see what actions they're taking within the software. If you don't have that, then you have to get the tracking in place so that you can basically make the correlations based on the actions they've taken on the way in to M12. And if you're like, man, this sounds complex. It's like, there's a reason that billion dollar companies don't get shit out of the sky. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. But that's, that's the reality of it. That's the real answer.

And how do you think about, so I imagine it would be similar with school. Most of our turn is just people being like, I didn't make any money coaching. I'm not coaching anymore. Should I think of that as a problem to be solved or something that's out of my control? Part of that's marketing. Okay. If you frame it as, if you use your software, you're going to make money. You will get people who, if they don't make money, they will think that your software failed. If you say this is the thing that helps you build communities and you can build a community for free, then they were successful if they got 20 friends to do skateboarding in an online community. Yeah.

yeah yeah okay thank you yeah congrats on the business uh my name's jack i sell tiktok shop agency services to econ brands uh we do two and a half million in revenue i'd like to be at 12 um and what's stopping me is a woman in the red dress who's with me today yeah she's there she is that's stunning um

So I started at the same time hedging my bets. I came out of a very sour partnership and both have grown really nicely since last year. I'm very good at growing the business, like kind of both sides. Theo is a supplements brand, just for a bit of background. Supplements brand, growing like crazy on TikTok shop. Obviously the agency kind of services the growth, which is great. And Theo is great with content and product knowledge, right? Yeah.

Um, I can't do both because obviously now we've hit a point with the agency service where we're bringing on like a lower ticket. Um, and I also kind of want to, and you're probably going to, I know what you're going to say, but, um, on the higher ticket or like done for you service that, you know, are kind of main. Who do you sell to for the agency? Um, econ brands that. What size?

it's a tough one because like the top two brands we have are completely different avatars uh and hence is why a reason we also wanted to bring in a lower level service because like we don't know what they're going to be like till we get them the other side um hence why we can kind of like incubate them for a lower level service and cherry pick hopefully econ brands with a good appetite for risk and throw money it sort of works so the question is the question is um i want to so i know typically it's like

one or the other. I kind of want to merge it because we can also invest in these brands that look good at the third business. We could solve our two business problem by adding another one and investing on

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing. We have opportunities daily coming to me saying, I've got this brand, jump in. And I'm like, we could smash it. I just need that extra little department to clean up the brand. And then it becomes a good client for the agency. Yeah. That's two places making most money. One with a big brand, so Whale, and one with a brand we own, which is also the next Whale, which is why it's like, it's fucking 50-50. I don't know which way to go. I'll tell you this. First off, there's no right answer. It's going to be what you want to do.

Second thing though, is that I like to think about things from like, what's the end state gonna look like? And then kind of reverse it into the present. And so the end state of your TikTok agency, there's gonna be two, there's two issues with your existing model that will decrease the likelihood that you have a very big agency. Number one is that you service small customers. Small customers are inherently volatile. Their volatility will relate back to your volatility as a business will make your business unsellable and not valuable and definitely not very fun to run. Problem number one. Problem number two is that TikTok shop for now

is a hot arbitrage opportunity and will not be here forever. And so in three years, the likelihood that it has the same returns is low. And so you basically have, again, an arbitrage opportunity that exists. There's two kind of big long-term issues there. You're selling to the wrong people and you're selling to short-term people or short-term opportunity. Mm-hmm.

So it doesn't build a long-term business. What I do like is that you have this good infrastructure for marketing. I don't think the idea of the whole merging thing is as... I think there's a tweak on it that would make it better. So if I were you, I would take my existing very large infrastructure on the agency side, cut all my clients, and then take all that marketing horsepower and put it towards Theo. And then own a big-ass brand. I see. What stops you from doing that? It's volatile. It's TikTok shop. Only that brand. We're...

slow on meta etc we're getting there we've got an agency on board we're going for it so that's the only reason I would say like not sure Theo's Valor Moody no no he gives Moody vibes Theo's great it's cool careful no no I'm just saying no no it's good and I love the agency side and I think okay I love it but also I do see a huge opportunity in the info product model with it because it doesn't exist in the UK and

a lot of people would buy it. Well, yeah. But what do you want to have happen? So I would like that to go. I would like the info. You said you want to get to 12 million. Either of those could get to 12 million. Cargine business gets to 12 million. You can sell socks and get to 12 million. So what do you want to do? Okay. Would you prefer to be an agency owner? Yeah, I would. What I would like to do is bring in a big hitter to make sure that the growth and stability of that side can go so people can keep marketing the fuck out of it. That'd be great.

great and then agency side i would love the the lower ticket like 3k learn it all etc and buy pieces of the agency model whereas and when you kind of need to it's much more scalable for us and rather than doing like everything sell that to masses and then cherry pick like the ideal clients out of that when we see them performing in an ideal world of course yeah ideal world where great people fall out of the sky and immediately know what to do and just run everything for you for a fraction of the compensation oh so you're 50 50 on this brand yeah

Okay. And it would have been so elegant if you were like, you know what, I'm just going to go all in on this DIA thing. It would have been so nice. But you're like, no, I want to be an agency owner. It's really just, it's limited by your ambition. So if you want to do $12 million a year, literally any of those things will be $12 million, which actually doesn't serve as a really good filter. If you were like, I want to build a $100 million thing, then I would say it's going to either, well, I mean, you could, your existing agency model wouldn't get you there.

You'd have to serve as higher end customers. You find like Hexclad and, you know, whatever, you know, Fie, that's the yogurt brand, whatever, just naming consumer brands. And you find big brands and then you probably wouldn't sell TikTok shop for yogurt, but you get the idea, right? You'd find those big brands and be like, okay, we're going to build this whole thing out for you. We'll do some sort of rev share on it. And I think rather than trying to invest in the brands, just do a revenue share.

It'll be much easier. It'll be much cleaner. And most of these brands will never sell anyway. So you might as well just like get the cash because that's the only thing they're really going to produce. Makes sense. Yeah. That's the model now. So our main done for you service on the agency side is like rev share and fixed costs. But you sell to small businesses. Yeah. You sell to bigger businesses. Stop selling to small businesses and you'll build a bigger business.

So would it be reasonable to say like, okay, so main service that takes a lot of the manpower, like big businesses only, price raise, high ticket, and then the info product that a lot of people might be interested in, you could just sell that and then... Yeah, or you could just not sell it.

You could just live your life and just service the high-end customers and make more money. Cool. So last year was the first year that I noticed in my life that I didn't have FOMO. It was weird. It's been a lot of years that I've had FOMO where I'd see somebody doing something really cool and I'd be like, man, I really want to do that. I should stop what I'm doing and I should do that. I don't know what happened where FOMO disappeared for me. But I can tell you that it is the worst thing

drive as an entrepreneur. It's really fear is the driver. It's the first letter.

And so it's this fear of missing out or like, and so there will always be more opportunities than you can possibly do. It's just the nature of life. Life's short and you'd like, and the more skilled you are, the more amazing opportunities you have to say no to in order to do one opportunity all the way. Because if you just do one thing really well for the rest of your life, it'll get really big. But if you do two things for the rest of your life, you won't either do either really well and neither will get big. And so it's like, you have to just learn to say no.

And so you're like, but there's also this other, it's like, you know what? I also thinking like all these small guys, they also need a little software and we could, I could put this to you. It's like to stop. Like why not sell newspapers? Right. Want some orange juice? They drink orange juice. I mean, you know, like, like what are we doing? Right. So like, there's always something else you can sell, especially if you know how to sell and promote, but like you have to, like, this is a discipline thing. Like you have to learn how to say no.

And you have to think about what's the most valuable version of this business. The most valuable version of this business seem to be big brands who you have big rev shares with. And you're just their TikTok guy. They don't even think about it. You send them a check every month. They're happy. Those are the right customers. Everybody's like, hey, do you think you can make it big for me? Wrong avatar. They're going to turn out and you're going to be their savior, which also means that you're their villain the moment it doesn't work. It makes sense. Right? And there's volatility and you have an arbitrage opportunity. Does not make it a very stable business.

So go big, go big companies, make your rates appropriate, change the marketing, the brand. Like I'm saying, you wanted to have a big agency. That's what a big agency looks like. If you're like, you know what? I have the skillset of knowing how to do these things, then you can build a big brand.

and he'd be like fuck the agency i'm really good at this okay but you but like you can also ignore my advice entirely and make a few hundred thousand dollars a month and like and feel cool makes sense appreciate just being real no no i hear it thank you appreciate it they're more like that that's usually how it is just whelmed you know like just hard it's a hard decision

yes ma'am hi alex my name is gri i'm from norway i sell three different products to three different uh clients and i've been telling myself this isn't pokemon we don't have to get them all you know what i mean so my issue is focus

I am at the revenue at a million. So you're over expanded focus and avatar. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And probably under price, but we're going to find out. Keep going. I have a business that's been making a million the last 10 years. Okay. And revenue about 500. Okay.

Sorry, $500. Yeah, $50. I put that revenue into another business, which is Airbnb business. So now I have four different avatars. Okay. Yeah. And so the issue is that I want to grow my business. And I've been at a million for the last 10 years.

I wanted to grow it the last four years. So that's what's stopping me. I need to focus. And I don't know which product to focus on because I tell myself that Norway is the smallest market in the world. Only 5 million people. Okay. So it is a small market. Do you speak Norwegian to your customers? Yes, of course. You speak English great. That's why I asked. You could tell the Americans if you wanted to.

Yeah, that's what somebody told me. And then I'm like, yes, I want to do that. But that would be a fifth one. Fifth business. Yeah. So I want to do that too. Why not? But then again, I like to take a day off once in a while. Not like you. So I'm going to introduce this because this already came up. I think that entrepreneurs need to think about investing differently than most people do.

And I, this is called a barbell strategy. I'll move this way so you guys can see it. There we go. So this is called a barbell strategy, which is basically you have your business, which then produces cash, which then, so this is active and this is passive. And this is, you know, gets your 10% per year, whatever, whatever you want here. I'll just, whatever you want that to be. The problem is that we, because we know how to do business, we know how to sell stuff. We're like, man,

I could get such a better return if I did this other thing, which is just starting another business. And so the highest returns you're going to get is if you can find ways to actually take money in your existing business and reinvest it. That's the best case scenario. Like if there's another building that's across the street, so we're buying the building across the street because it came up, but it didn't really come up. I went to the guy, I'll give you a million above. And then he said, fine.

but I'm buying that building across the street because my team's growing. Right? And so like, that's a phenomenal return. Now I just overpaid for real estate, but I'm gonna make a hell of a lot more on being able to have more of my team in person than if I didn't have that. And so that's going to be a really good return, but I have to analyze it differently because that's going to be in my active income. If after you've reinvested every dollar you possibly can in the thing that you control that you know better than anyone else, which is your business, if you still have extra cash, then you put it into something that doesn't take any of your time at all.

And you have to accept the fact that you're not going to get a better return on that than you are over here. But the key is it has to be passive. And it's not like, well, it's sort of, as soon as you start hedging, it's not passive. It's not passive. Yeah. Like if you can't forget about it for a year or two, year or two, then it's not passive. So that being said, you have this business that does a million dollars a year, $500,000 in profit. You want to grow the business. So what do you sell? I

I have a marketing course for those who hate their jobs and want to start their own business. So from zero to clients, that's a $3,000 course. Okay. And then I have a mastermind that I call a mastermind, but it's really a group coaching program at $12,000 right now. And then I have a VIP that is at $25,000. Well, those aren't three businesses. Those are products. So is that what you're saying is the three businesses?

Well, I thought so after. No, that's not three businesses. Okay. That's just three products. Okay. The same avatar and you upsell them with a thing. Yeah. That's one business. That's fine. Okay. So the issue is that you feel like you're limited. I mean, I don't think that Norway with 5 million residents is limiting to a million dollars a year. So I don't think that's true. Could you, if you had twice the leads, would you be able to make twice the money? Yeah. Okay. So your demand constraint. So you need more lead flow. So what are you doing to get customers?

Right now, we're just doing ads. And we do just two launches a year for the 3K course. Okay. Twice a year. What stops you from doing it four times a year? Just that launching is... Tiring? Pitch. Is pitch? It's a bitch. Oh, it's a bitch. English is not that good. Yeah. No, I think you nailed the English. I think the English was great. But the thing is, you said, I want to grow my business.

But he said, I was like, okay, let's just do more of that thing that works. And you're like, but that's hard. It's not hard. It's just that it's just me. So it's hard. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. Right. So it's hard. It's like, how do I make money easy? It's not that it's hard, actually. Well, then why not do it? I'm going to win this. Well, I'm telling myself...

I've been telling myself, so there's just 5 million people. So the ads goes up. That wasn't the question, though. I said, why don't you do it four times a year? Just because that when you do ads in Norway, it's just the ad cost just explodes from 50 to... Has anyone else seen that in the United States? Yeah. Wild. It's not a Norway thing. It's a bad ads thing. Okay. So if you're hitting a ad...

ceiling, right? So raise your hand if you've had an ad ceiling. You can't get past 1,000 a day, 10,000 a day, whatever it is. Okay, cool. So this applies to you. So the ways that you can solve this, you have a superior offer, conversion and optimization, better ads. None of them are Norway. And so right now, it's... So is anyone familiar with the old Spice guy on the horse, that ad? Okay. So cool enough, the creative directory design, that actually came to this like two months ago, which is kind of fun.

Um, so when old spice did that they were Like they had like 10 or 20 percent of the market of men's soap whatever post that campaign They had over 70 percent of the market share which is one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time And it was one ad and so when I see that that's what I consider the hypothetical extreme of advertising Is that if you make an ad so good it converts fucking everyone and that's what they did And so right now you're limited in terms of your ability to scale your ads based on the quality of the creative you have

Do you make content? Yes. How good's your content? Mediocre. Okay. Thank you for being honest. What's really interesting about now, I came from the direct response side and then started making content and my content is maybe better at direct response. If you get really good at content, ads are easy.

Because content is so much harder than making ads. Because ads, you get the reach no matter what because you pay for the reach. With organic, you have to earn the reach. So you learn what actually makes excellent creative. And so it might be actually a really good exercise for you to get better at your creative so that when you run ads, you can actually know what makes a good ad, which is the same as what makes a good creative. The only difference is that at the end, you make a call to action.

So like right now, you guys may have seen them. Some of my highest converting ads for acquisition.com are just my organic videos that are our top performers. And then I put five seconds at the end. It's like, hey, by the way, this. Would you run ads to the online course then or the 12,000? Whatever is your current acquisition process, I'm not going to break it. But I still prefer do four times a year as the most obvious choice for doubling the business. It's every 12 weeks. It's once a quarter. It's not that bad.

You don't burn out your list then? Well, you're marketing to cold, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you might just have more cold and less. Maybe you hit your list twice a year and you still do cold launches four times a year. Okay. But that would be like, if I were like, I had to go and make sure that your business doubled, what would I do? I would do that. Okay. But this is probably why you're hitting the ceiling. Thank you. You bet. Long-term, go international. Alex, this is your last question. Ooh.

That'd be a good one. Hi, Alex. My name is Jonathan. I sell dating services to single men and help to get their dating life together. Revenue, we range between $250,000 to $900,000. I would like my revenue to be at $1.2 million because I like to net $100,000 a month, ideally. What I believe is stopping me is that the metrics on all my social media have gone down and my fans have been telling me, your shadow ban, your shadow ban, I'm not getting notifications. So,

You would do anything political? I mean, I was endorsing Trump. So maybe that's probably it. I mean, might be it. Honestly. Passively. Not like a whole stream. I'm like, why? Not like why you should vote for him. Yeah. Was that when it stopped?

No. I have a theory. It was like when Andrew Tate went to jail in 2022 December, I noticed a big change in my viewership. And I don't know if my fans just really like me and they're just lying to me, like you've been shadow banned. But I don't know. This is a problem. Do you have some videos that do better than others still?

So I just, I don't do videos. I do live streams, but yeah, I consistently live stream. That's how I do everything. We were leading up to launches. All you don't make like videos. Not really. They just, it's just the live streams kind of like you're,

In my personal theory, live streaming is to a degree indoctrinating your following and then lowering resistance, and then eventually they buy in. So like I said, I've been able to do... All my business has been organic. My best launch was quarter million five days, which is 90, 85% profit. But nothing has really changed in what I do, but I'm seeing all metrics shrink, and it's like... Yeah. I'm freaking out. Yeah. No, I hear you. So...

I mean, basically at the simplest level, one of two things changed. Either you change something unknowingly, which is the concept is not as good or it's not, you know, as compelling or whatever, or something else changed, which is either the environment change. So like maybe it sounds tone deaf now or the algorithm changed in terms of how it's pushing out lives, which not, I don't know. You're the, actually the only person that I know that does lives as their primary organic strategy. Yeah.

I've yet to meet somebody to replicate my numbers. I'm also one man business. Yeah, no, no. There's tons of people who do your numbers are bigger with one man business. No, not with live streaming, but with making content on a regular basis. And so I think, I think it's like, we just need to, you see more views, man. Like this all really comes down to. And so it's like, I'll say this. If you keep doing what you're doing, it will continue to stop working and get worse. So let's not do that. I think you're going to have to do kind of the, um,

That gentleman was also talking to earlier with pest control. He's like, I've got this agency and it's working. Well, it's like, let's do the live streams. Can we also clip that and make that into content? Like the best moments at least. So yeah, my shorts are like my largest traffic source back then doing like 16, 15 millions. And do you not do shorts anymore?

The hit has been pretty big. They've gone down to like eight, nine hundred sometimes. I am happy if it gets to a thousand. Views? Yes, per short. Yeah. So, I mean, maybe you did get shadow banned. I don't know. The question is just how to fix it if I am theoretically shadow banned or how do I just... If you are shadow banned, it's like you probably need to start a new account. Okay. That's like Daniel... The good news about quote shadow banning is this.

If you start a new account, because of how social media has changed, it has been largely democratized, especially for short-form content. So somebody who has a brand new account that has zero followers can make a clip that gets 10 million views. So it's not nearly the death sentence that it used to be because it's based on interest graphs now far more than it is followership.

So you can keep doing your lives on one channel. And I think that's like, again, that's the big if here is like, are you shadow banned? I don't know. Do you have a rep that you can reach out to? Cause usually they'll tell you. No, they just like, it's just some guy in Paraguay who doesn't give a shit.

I don't like pointing to things that I can't control. So I'm like, is there anything that I can do to make these shorts better? It feels unlikely that you went from, you know, 5 million a clip to a thousand a clip.

That feels like a pretty tremendous drop. 15. Yeah, or 15 million clips, sure. A big drop regardless. And so if I were you, I probably, like I would be in hyperactive mode right now, which is I'd be trying to find a new way to promote. And so you keep the thing because you have to keep the lights on. But I would strongly consider, is it, but are you only YouTube? I mean, I have 58,000 on Instagram and- Has it happened there?

Uh, no, it does not happen there. Okay. So can we double down on Instagram in the short term and then like create a new account on YouTube? I'm here to do what you say. Okay. Um, do you monetize Instagram at all? No. Well, dude, I mean, Instagram is one of the easiest ones to monetize of all platforms. Instagram is like the most monetizable, uh, because you can directly message your customers. Like every person who follows you, you could, you can DM, are you, um, you're still into webinars, right?

No, no webinars. Well, you sell to lives, whatever. I'm sorry? You sell via live. Yes. Right, and you do that how often? My show, I've been running it. How often do you pitch? Once a quarter. Okay. So it might be advantageous to, okay. I mean, it's leaning more towards that you might have gotten shadowbanned. And if that's the case, let's walk through this. So for Instagram, I think you do a mini chat integration and then DM new followers, right?

and replies and then send them to lives when you go live on youtube also go live on instagram very easy just get a second phone if you need to go live on both i do that okay so you do go live on this right get like four or five people okay so when we have this you can add them to the broadcast and then let them know when you're going live because you should get more than four or five

Nasty. It's just because we have this big question mark of are you bad at content now or did you have the gods of social media tell you that you're not allowed to promote anymore? There's a group of people. Instagram does tell you if you're a shadow ban though. So you can look at it in your client settings. So I would check that. And if they haven't, then it just might like I would so much prefer to know that like the content is just not that good because that's super fixable.

There's a group of people I'm associated with and they've all kind of been throttled as well. Like the Fresh and Fit podcast and some of these people, they're all like, we've all kind of been uniformly kind of flatlined from 23-ish, you know, because like they have a huge podcast and they've been stuck at 1.5 mil Fresh and Fit. You mean on Instagram? On YouTube.

okay and they just don't get views there either no they get views but we're all like our subscribership and whatnot is not necessarily growing and their views have massively taken a hit they used to do like three four hundred now they're at one ish one ish thousand hundred oh hundred yeah that doesn't sound like shadow panning okay going from like 300 to 100 just sounds like youtube's has shifted over time okay and like we just need to adapt to what's

what's working now the crazy part about my views is like my views have usually typically range between on the live streams 1 000 to 5 000 and then the money just kept growing so i was like great i have a fucking money printer yeah but now the views are still same maybe slightly dropped but the sales have just like it's just like abysmal it's so terrifying yeah um

That's why I'm here. No, I hear you. It's like you have this one trick that worked. And so I think you might just need to learn another trick. Okay. At least you have second platform. So it's like you've just only done live streams and that's how you've done it. It's like you might be able to just like push people to a phone call. You could push people to a webinar. Like you could probably do more than once every 12 weeks through a pitch. Like there's...

There's plenty of levers that we can look at. And I have high-tech immersion stuff that's like 10K, and those are easy to sell, but I just need more eyes and views. That, when you teach a guy how to date, he doesn't come back because he's outdating. Outdating, yeah. I mean, to be fair, it's education. And, like, there's no continuity program on Harvard. You just graduate, and then it's that.

And then they get you in the endowment and there's all that. I think we have to focus on the controllables, which is that the content needs to improve and you probably need to make more content and make more diverse content. Probably need to start using tools like oneoften.com if you're not familiar with that. You know what that is? Oneoften.com? Mm-hmm.

So one of 10.com is basically the YouTube repository where you can just search for topics and it will show you the highest outperformers in terms of headline packaging and thumbnails across all channels on YouTube. And then from there, you can basically create ideations of, okay, how can I apply this to my niche?

And so I'm guessing that like, the fact that the other guys went from like 300 to 100, like to me, that's not shadowbending. That's just like their content wasn't as good as it used to be. Or it's just like, it's not as relevant as it used to be. Like people aren't like bitching about Red Pill as much as they were before. And so it's like maybe part of any, like your content might have to adapt. So I would honestly prefer it just be that, which is the content's not good enough. Fine. Then like, let's look at topics and let's look at headlines and let's fix that. Let's make it something that people want. We've had to change our stuff all the time. And I think it's just like,

You learned a trick. It worked. It was a great ride. Now you have to change again. Okay. Thank you very much. No, I appreciate you.