Transcription
What's up, ladies and gentlemen? Tyler Clark, pretending to be Alex Heros, coming to you today to discuss how I spent, uh, more money than most people will put into a car, into one day of consulting with Alex Heros. If you don't know who Mr. Heros is, you may be living under a rock, uh, but he's one of the biggest online sensations in the entrepreneurial community right now. He's the Jack guy with no strips, kind of, you know, he's a little bit smaller than me in the B steps, but, uh, really, really unbelievable business leader. You should be paying attention to his content.
But what I want to share with you is why I spent that much money with him and ultimately whether or not it was actually worth it. Uh, so I'm actually going to take you way back in time. The first time I ever heard or learned about Alex Heros, I had just actually sold out of my accounting firm, and I was at a digital marketing conference, um, known as Funnel Hacking Live. And I was like, under the ether; I was in love with this company. I was in love with everything they had, and they had this one particular award; it's called the Two Comm Club. You've probably seen it in the back of a lot of people's, uh, setups. It's this plaque record and essentially says that you made a million dollars with ClickFunnels. This award was like the crème de la crème for me when I was starting out. I was like, I got to win this thing; I got to get on that stage.
And during this event, there were multiple speakers, and one of those speakers was a young Alex Heros, with his I think then girlfriend, potentially wife, uh, Lea as well. And I want to just say something very clearly: I was the biggest hater of Heros. Like, I was the biggest hater when he came on stage. My jealousy and envy that he was approximately my age, on stage with a beautiful girl—I had a beautiful girl next to me, and I was like, "My wife, Marine, I was like, 'That should be us up there, not him.'" And anytime you find yourself saying stuff like that, just check your ego, like seriously. Like, I could not even hear the value that he was sharing because my ego was so loud in my head, and it was pathetic. I listened to everybody else, but for some reason, I could not hear what he was saying. And ironically, it was about high-ticket sales, something that I'm a huge proponent of, something I believe deeply in, uh, because those who pay, pay attention; those who pay more, pay more attention. And quite frankly, I love when our clients are deeply engaged with us, and I love when our clients' clients are deeply engaged with them, and usually the precursor for that is how much money they spend.
So anyhow, I, um, fast forward a year, and I actually do end up on stage, but for a different reason. I won the ClickFunnels Dream Car Award. I became a super affiliate for them. I win a—I win an award, not the million-dollar award, but I was starting to make progress in online marketing and developing a community in the accounting space. I based all of my trainings and teachings on how I use ClickFunnels in my accounting firm. Very, very cool experience, but something was very odd. Heros wasn't there, and I said, "This fraud isn't here," and he was listed in the brochure. I said, "He—they're saying this guy made $1 million," I'm like, "No way," I'm like, "This—I'm starting to think everything's a sham, everything's a scam. I'm—I'm just like, my eyes are open. No way. What could possibly be more important than being here to collect an award on stage to increase your status? What could be more important than that?" The idea that it didn't even cross my brain, the thought that he was just focused on his grind. He was the reason he made $10 million was because he's not distracted by crap like this anymore.
Fast forward a little further; he starts putting out some YouTube content. It's him with a nose strip in a closet, and I'm like, in love with this content now. I'm like, "This is amazing; this is some of the best, best content I've ever heard in my life," and it's free. It's like a master class, and I've been spending all this money on courses. Like, "This is better than all the stuff I'm spending money on." I'm like, "Maybe I—" It starts to dawn on me. I'm like, "Maybe I was wrong; maybe this silly envy and hatred I've had was handicapping me all along." So then his—his book comes out. I don't have his book on my desk; I must always do—his first book comes out, "100 Million Offers." And "100 Million Offers" is the only—only business book that I've read, uh, digitally bought the copy of, read the physical copy, and listened to the audiobook of. It's the only book I've consumed in three different media formats, all within a tight period of time. And what ended up happening is that basically, in the six months from reading that book, we broke through the million-dollar annual threshold. Like, we just—we radically changed our offer; we aligned it; we followed every principle that was in that book, and then boom, we took like a rocket ship right through the barrier or the threshold that had been holding us back.
And so now I had gone from—and this is a—this is just a larger point that I want to make about content production for people—is like, you're going to have haters. Over a long enough time horizon, you deliver enough value; you'll convert your biggest hater into your biggest follower and your biggest fan. So stick with it; don't let the noise or like whatever else stop you; like, just live in the fact that like, out-compete them. That's what Heros did; he just out-competed everyone, and he earned my respect by not talking, by doing and then showing what he was doing, which is again, just hats off to him. So I—I read the book, break through the milestone, and now I'm—he's getting ready to launch his second book, "100 Million Leads," and he's got an affiliate contest. And if you are in the top 10 of people who register for his live event, you'll have a chance to interview Alex. Fast forward; we—me and my wife, we put a bunch of Hail Marys together: email list, incredible offer, DM campaigns, like you name it, and we just went crazy, uh, promoting it, and we ended up beating 25,000 other businesses. We placed—I think we had registered 1,200 people for his event, uh, just hats off to me. And the reason that I—I—I bring that up is that the reason we were more successful than people with much more cash to spend and much bigger lists than we are is the same reason our clients can out-compete bigger firms: you make smarter offers. Our offer was, "Get $30,000 of value in exchange for 30 seconds of your time—just register for this, and we're going to give you this stack of bonuses for free," and we just sent that to every person that we possibly could, and it worked, and it worked really well. Did the interview; it's on the YouTube channel. I'm not going to cover it, um, in detail, but super cool experience. Alex is a great guy; a lot of amazing insights. You haven't watched it yet; go watch it.
And then something interesting happens; couple, you know, two, three months go by, and we get an email from his marketing director, Tobias—great guy as well, British dude—and he—he said, "Hey, uh, we're planning this event; do you want to come out to it?" I'm like, "Oh my God, it's amazing; I would love to come. Like, are you kidding me? Like, this is super cool." And I think it was like five, maybe $5,000 bucks all in for both me and my wife, so like $2,000 or, you know, $2,500 a pop, um, for a TS, and it's their first ever workshop. And so I go there, and I'm like, "We're going to be—again, I think we're going to be the small fish in the room. I'm like, 'There's going to be all these huge heavy hitters here. I'm so excited to be here.'" Oh my God, I get there, and I think we were probably like top 5% of the businesses there, which surprised me. It—it—it was a little off-putting, not terribly, but there were some startups there; there were some side hustlers; there were some people in their early six figures. All great people, don't get me wrong; like, there was a room of really great people, and then there were some—some really big people doing, you know, eight—eight M, uh, you know, eight figures or more annually in their businesses. And the event, you know, for the first one, I thought it was awesome; truly like, great value; really helped us understand things from a value perspective for investors.
My big takeaway for the event, and I—I—I think that this is something everyone could—can benefit from, is a question that one of their managing partners, um, in Acquisition.com, asked, which was from Neil—I can't remember his last name off the top of my head—but he essentially said, "There's no disadvantage to thinking, um, about your business from an investor perspective. If the goal is to eventually sell your business, you should start planning for, uh, all of the things that they value now and acting accordingly." So they—they value revenue growth more than anything else, right, because it's easier to cut costs than it is to grow revenue. So there were all these different things that they just like cemented for me that I thought or maybe had an inkling towards, and I was just like, "Wow, I'm so happy to be able to know this definitively now, and I can act smarter for it." However, where does the $50,000 come in, Tyler? You've only spent $5,000 so far, so what—what's going on? Well, if you know anything about, um, Alex, he loves money, and he's not—not bashful about it. So during the event, um, I guess it was a two-day event, I think two or three day—I think it was two day—and, uh, at the end of the first day, they go, "Hey, um, we're going to do this thing; we're not sure if we're going to do it," you know, scarcity, urgency, all the—all the gems, um, and essentially, it'll be a semi-private day with the acquisition team where we dive deep into your business, and you know, small group with Alex and, you know, with the acquisition team. And uh, it was—to be fair, it—it was $40,000. So it was $40,000; $5,000 for the event. I know the title says $50,000. Now, if you factor in airfare, hotel, and all that, whatever, it was $45, all in, but it was 40 grand. So 40 grand for one day of semi-private consulting. I just want to make sure everyone actually hears that and doesn't—doesn't lose—lose the plot. I—I had to—I was sitting down; I had to sit down again. I was like, "Excuse me, did you just ask for 40 grand for a day of consulting? For not even private, semi-private group." In other words, I love how—group and semi-private, right? Like, just think about the brilliance of the language of semi-private instead of group.
Um, so anyhow, I place a deposit, because the deposit's refundable, of course, and they've got dates in June or whatever, and it's—it's early January, so I'm like, "I got a couple—couple months to think this through, figure out if we really want to do it." So my wife and I go home; we have a new baby, okay, right? Like, we got a lot of stuff; we got a business to run; it's a long trip, France to Vegas; uh, it's not cheap to get there; it's 40 grand. Got to say that again. It's a day, semi-private. Got to say that again. And, you know, we went back and forth a lot on that decision, and what really ended up being the defining, uh, decision-making factor for us was we said, "Has getting niche-specific education ever not netted us an extremely positive ROI? Has that ever been the case?" And you're like, "No." I mean, every single time we've done this, it's made us more money. Every single time. They're like, "Okay," and then we're like, "Well, what's the likelihood that we're going to be able to do this again at this price?" And we're like, "Well, it won't be this price ever again, because we know Alex, and there's a good chance they never even do it again." So with those two things, we said, "All right, let's do it." So we pay all the money; we fly out there, and, um, how was it? Was it worth it?
Before I answer that directly, I just want to say I think a lot of people here are spending $40,000 for a day of someone's partial attention, and—and they have a very hard time fathoming it. When I first heard that Russell Brunson's Inner Circle was $25,000 a year, and this was like almost 10—almost 10 years ago, I guess seven years ago at this point, I was like, "You would have to be a stone-cold toady to pay for that." I was like, "There's no way it could possibly be worth that." Now, keep in mind, Heros was in Russell's Inner Circle. Like, almost every heavy hitter that you have ever heard of spent time in Russell's Inner Circle, so the networking effect alone is tremendous, and the fact that all of them are significantly wealthier today, largely due to the fact that they make those investments, is also true. So if you've never spent on this type of thing, even $5,000, the idea of spending $40,000 is like incomprehensible. I know that because I felt the same way, and then all of a sudden you get larger, and so the type of people that can solve your problems or help you gets so much smaller, because the number of people who've taken a business from zero to a million is pretty high; the people who've taken a business from a million to 10 million is extremely small. Heros is one of the few people that we would have direct access to that is actually willing to talk and speak with us through the current stage of our business to get us to the next level. He—he basically just says, "You don't need to go through the pain and suffering that I went through; here are the solutions. I'm gonna—I'm basically—he's basically a time portal for making your business better." $40,000 is a—is a—is a bargain when it comes to the cost of time and the money you have to spend to make the mistakes.
So just very quickly, context of the room: there's six other business owners; everybody brought a partner, so there's 12 people in the room, and Heros sat there from 8:30 or 9 until about 5:30 or 6; did not stop; just monster. He—like, you can't actually understand, truly—and I've been around a lot of really smart people—you don't know how smart that dude is until he's talking directly to you about your business, and even businesses that he's never been a part of, he—he knows more about—about them than they do, somehow. It—it's masterful; like, truly, the guy is just an—it feels like almost a never-ending spout of wisdom and knowledge; it's masterful, uh, to behold. So go check out the workshop, at the very least, seriously. So one group—one group goes, second group goes, or third, and you know, I've got a lot—I've got tons of notes from the event, and if there's enough interest, maybe I'll just share them from the event itself as well as our consulting, that you know—I—I'm just typing furiously away at everything; like, I've got pages and pages of notes, all fantastic stuff, and the ability to shift from hands-in-the-dirt tactical tonality, uh, whether it's scripting, whether it's process changes, to really high-level vision strategy, and have it seamlessly work together. So he can fill in the details and the gaps, but you can also talk about like—like, "Where's this going? What's the highest possible return that you can get from this business?" Again, awesome.
So when it's our turn, just to, you know, kind of cut to the chase here, interesting, um, point to make: be very careful about the language you use. So Heros is a fanatic with precision of language, and I think we all should be. A lot of our clients, um, accounting firms in general, they refer to prospects and clients as the same thing. It's—it's—it's very weird to me. They say clients, and they're—I'm like, "You—" They pay you money. They like, "No, but they're going to—" I'm like, "They're a prospect." Um, but I had a similar experience, but in a different way. I was under the impression we had a churn issue, and before going to the event, both the, uh, two-day event and the one-day, um, you know, semi-private event, they made us do a ton of due diligence on our own business, which I would argue was even more valuable than anything else, because you get tons of insights when you are forced to sync into your own business's numbers. Like, they need something to look at; you need to generate something for them to look at. So you're like, "Oh, that's our LTV; oh, that's our—that's our conversion rate on that; oh, oh, well, that's actually better than I thought; oh, that's actually way worse than I thought." And so you get this ridiculous wealth of knowledge just by forcing yourself to prepare for something like this. I didn't bring that point up earlier, but I want to bring it up now. So they had almost like a, you know, they basically had a—a, you know, a bio that we prepared and gave to them; of course, he reviewed it ahead of time and already was able to dissect what needed to happen. And so, you know, it's our turn, and I go, "Well, we've got a churn problem," and he's like, "No, you don't." I was like, "What are you talking about? It's my business; I like—what do you—" We definitely have a churn problem. He's like, "No, you don't," um, he's like, "You're basically in the education business, right?" I'm like, "More or less, yeah," and he's like, "And more than 90% of all of your clients are finishing their engagements with you." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I mean, no one ever cancels; like, literally, like, never." He's like, "So you don't have a churn problem," and he's like, "I think what you're getting at is you have an ascension problem." In other words, when people are done with your core service, you're not keeping them around longer, right? So your LTV shorter or lower because they're—they're not renewing for more accountability or more coaching or more support services. I was like, "That's right." He's like, "So you have an ascension problem." I was like, "I guess I do." So I just bring this up because sometimes you'll be talking to clients, and you think you're talking about the same thing, but you're actually not. And so get the clarity on what the heck you're talking about, what problem you're solving for, and then progress. Very—just like, very small part of the experience, but really insightful.
So then I go, "Oh, okay, well, you basically created a 40x version of the business that I have right now. Dream Firms is Gym Launch for accountants, more or less, and I—how did you solve this problem?" And so this is a great point for all the entrepreneurial accountants listening to this as well, um, when you are delivering a service, okay, the value that you provide is almost directly correlated to the frequency with which you bill, in addition to how—a lot of people deliver a ton of value very early on in the relationship, right? Like, they deliver a lot, and then the value tends to have a little bit of a falloff point once everything is installed properly, running appropriately, right? So like, it makes it—it makes people more resistant to price changes or even increase in length of services. The longer you wait to have the ascension conversation—this was a—this was a lightbulb moment for me because my mindset was always, "Sell them, get them on board, deliver a hell of a great experience, and if you do a good enough job at the end of it, they're going to want to stick around." That's always been my—my mentality, but what he said—he's like, "Well, they just finish eating a steak, and you're selling them a steak; that's why they're not buying, duh." Like, again, sometimes you just hear it, and you're like, "Duh." And so a classic Heros is, "Treat your upsells like downsells." This is one of the core principles we like to teach and help our clients with is that if your pre—if your service model is more premium in the beginning, and by nature it is, you solve a lot of really big problems early on, well, do you want to wait until a full year goes by or whatever the length of the initial contract is to then sell them again? Or do you want to have specific shorter intervals in which you deliver a very specific set of services and then somewhere when they're getting maximum value, offer them the opportunity to extend the service contract while also simultaneously changing their payment cycle so that it feels and it is like they're spending less money for more services, but both of you have won in the process? So this was again—lightbulb. When I say we—our conversion rate for ascensions went from 30% to 80%, I'm going to say that again; we went from 30 to 80 with this one—this is like—this was like the span of like 10 minutes of conversation, and we talked for another probably like 90 minutes just on our business. That one thing has already 5x our return on investment—one 10-minute conversation. Of course, we had to implement it; we had to build things to support it; don't get me wrong. I mean, I think a lot of people think, you know, someone says something to you, you should make your money back tomorrow because they said something to you. Obviously, you're putting in the work; I'm putting in the work; there's always going to be some time delay before you get your return, but honestly, I would have never—I would have never thought of that.
And so this brings up another point that he, uh, shared that I love; I think it's one of the smartest perspective shifts you can have, and he opened up the conference with it, um, the pr—the semi-private. He said, "The mo—the most valuable move you can make is usually the move that's off the board; it's—it's the move you can't see." And I think that's why he's so successful is he just—he gets—he buys access to tons of people's perspective, and then he forms his own, but he's getting all of these different people to be able to come and rally towards him, right? Like—or excuse me, come and give him insights that he can't see. So what—how does that apply back to you, and how did it apply to us? So one of the other core themes that he brought up in his, um, inside of all of our—all of the conversations with us is, "What's the final version of your business?" And that's such a weird question to be asked because when you're building it and you're in it, you're like, "Well, a more profitable version of it; one that makes more money; one where I'm not the doer; I'm like the owner." Or like—he's like, "Yeah, but like, you could probably just align for a different end result and make this way more valuable without really changing a whole lot about what you're currently doing, right? It's just almost like changing the structure of the way in which you're either making deals or how you're positioning, branding yourself, and aligning yourself." You know, it's classical; if you know what the end result is, you can work backwards from it, and then you're going to be more efficient. And so for us, you know, we—we are basically all of the benefits of a franchise with none of the drawbacks. In other words, you still retain all of your agency; you still retain all your equity; you don't have to pay royalty; you—you don't have to do any of that; you come, you learn the best systems; you learn the smartest ways to grow your accounting firm; you—you learn the smartest ways to use outsourcing; you—you learn all the things, and then you have all of the additional support systems that franchises don't even give you; they don't even—they don't even—they're charging you tons of money, and then they're trying to own you for life, and they deliver a fraction of what we deliver in terms of results and services. So we give you way more freedom, way more control, and way more support and way more education. So—and the reason I bring this up is that he essentially said, "You're basically doing all the work that's associated with being able to facilitate a rollup; you take your top 10 or 20% of your clients."
You position the offer as you say, "Hey, look, and this is true, right?" If any competent accountant understands Financial Arbitrage, if a really big entity buys a smaller entity—a $100 million business buys a $1 million business—well, if the $100 million business is trading at 3X, the $1 million business trades at 1X, and as soon as the $100 million business buys the $1 million business, this $1 million book, on paper of course, is now worth $3 million just because of the fact that it's associated with the larger entity.
So what does that mean for us and for our clients? Well, the goal of all of our clients is eventually to sell their accounting firms, of course, and take it one step further: it is to sell it for a premium price. That's why they're working with us, because they want to put in the work that earns them a premium valuation. They want to have high levels of growth; they want to have great margins; they want to have turnkey operations where they're not doing the work—that's what they want to do.
Well, what does PE want? What do really large companies want in relation to buying assets? They want all those things, but they also want large revenue numbers, right? They don't want to buy the $500,000 firm, even if it has all of those attributes. I know that because I served up a firm like that, and they're like, "We're not interested; we're only interested in $3 million and up, or $1.5 million and up. It's just too much work for too little return," which I get.
However, if you were to bring to them $40 million-plus accounting firms, basically all in different verticals, all with amazing margins, if instead of the firm owner getting $1 million, or $1.5 million, or even $2 million, you could reasonably command 3 to 4X because of the size of all of them combined together.
So as soon as he said that, I was like, "I'm already doing brokerage; like, I'm already working in the buy-sell capacity; I'm already aligning all of these firms for all of these synergies. I just didn't think about it like that; I just didn't think, 'Duh!'" And I was like, "But why didn't you—you know, again, like he's—why didn't you do this for gym launch, right? Because gyms aren't sellable assets; Tyler, accounting firms are." I'm like, "Ah, you're right; of course, you're absolutely right."
I could share so much more about this experience, but I think if you just reflect on the things that I have shared so far—which is: stay in the content game; keep outworking your self-doubts; outwork your haters; you can turn your biggest hater into your biggest fan—I'm living proof. If you would have told me that three or four years ago I'd be giving Alex Rosi $40,000 for a semi-private lesson, I would have laughed in your face; that I would be putting on a stupid nose strip, I would have laughed in your face.
And then take it one step further, right? What else? There's the "give first" mentality; there's offering so much value before he even asked for a penny of me, right? Like, just master class in being able to pressure-cook your audience, speak to their core desires, educate them, put on a great experience, and then ultimately capitalize on a meaningful transaction, and then be able to deliver on that experience as well, to the point where I can proudly and boldly proclaim that that was the best money I think I've ever spent in my life, and I've made some really good investments, and that one was the best.
So that's what I got for you. Um, was it worth it? Hell yeah. And do I think you should go and check out Alex Rosi's next workshop? I think you'd be an idiot if you didn't do that. So my name's Tyler S. Clark. Thank you so much for your most precious resource. I'm going to take this silly nose strip off. Have a wonderful rest of your workday, and remember that only you can create your dream firm, but we are here to help you every single step of the way. Looking forward to seeing you inside of the Dream Firms Network. Check out what we've got going on to be able to help you to build the firm of your dreams. Have a great day, everyone. See you!