Transcription
Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I have made pretty much every single mistake that you can make over my 17 years in business. I've done over $250 million in my agency. I've run businesses. I've run businesses into the ground. I've sold businesses. And through it all, I've generated my clients over $7.8 billion in sales and became a shark on Shark Tank.
So, I'm going to give you everything that I have learned, all the mistakes that I have paid for in full. And I guarantee you that by the end of it, you will look at your business different. And it all comes down to seven truths.
So I believe that every single business, the lid of that business is the founder. And most people, they think that they have business problems when they really have personal problems that are masquerading as business problems all the time. It's because of you. And I have a saying, it's like if it's meant to be, it's up to me. Because that is something that you can take full control of. And if you're not able to attract the best talent, that's a you problem. If you're not getting enough sales, that is a you problem. If you have a culture issue in the business, that is also a you problem.
When I first started my business, the first thing that I was thinking about was operation don't be broke. I wasn't thinking about having offices in multiple countries and having all of these clients. I was just like, how do I not be broke right now and not be experiencing this pain? And I ran King Kong like that for probably the first 9 to 12 months. And I had very healthy cash flows coming in. I was working 16 to 18 hours a day. And I had a realization where I was like, what are you doing here? Like, are you just going to be building this cash flow consulting business where you're going to basically be in your pajamas, working from home, keeping things very lean, or do you want something bigger for yourself? I had to sit down and have that very serious inward conversation with myself because if I stayed where I was, that's exactly where I would stay. Exactly where I was. But if I wanted something bigger, I had to start thinking bigger.
Always in business, there are these inflection points. And it's been no different in my business. At every single one of those inflection points, it was a change within myself. So, in order to build a business that the entire thing isn't rested upon you as the founder and it can run even when you're not there is you need to make short-term sacrifices on how much money that you're going to make. Like I was making great money in the first 6 to 7 months. For the 3 years that followed that, I pulled $36,000 per year out of the business for both me and my wife to live on. And so I was able to basically sacrifice 3 years of making money in order to start hiring a team, fitting out an office, and doing all of these things. You want to grow, the only way to grow is to hire people. But if you hire people, then you're going to basically be putting all the money on the line, and you're not going to be making any money at all. They've got an ego attached to theirel where they think the business needs to run exactly like them and no one can do it at their level. therefore they can't go out and hire people when they just need to come to the realization is like you need to hire enough people that the collective group of those people is way better than you at 100% because then that actually gives you a business and not just a job.
So if your business is stuck and you feel like you're wearing all the hats, you're spinning all the plates yourself, a very good thing to think about is actually a book and it's called who not how. And that's not how do I get to the next level, but more so who is the person that I could hire that would help me get to that next level. Because then you are not the constraint and then you can focus on the main thing which is to actually grow your business. And that is truth number one. The business that you build is simply a mirror of who you are.
So when it comes to growing a business, if you sit down with most business owners and you're like, "Hey, what is it that you need? Like what is holding you back from getting to the next level?" and they're like, "Oh, we could just win these types of clients or we could get more leads or more traffic." But the thing is is you just want more for the sake of more. It's almost worthless. So, the way that I like to think about it is I like to keep the end in mind. So, think about exactly where is it that I'm trying to go? What does the goal look like? Is it 100 clients? Is it 200? Is it a thousand?
When you're looking at most businesses and you're talking to them about growing their business and you're like, "How are you currently getting customers?" They're like, "I'm spending 20 grand per month on Facebook ads." And I'm like, "Amazing. How many clients do you want to get?" You're like, "I would want to double it." And you're like, "Okay, cool." Have you tried spending double the amount on ads? No. Is there any reason why? I guess I've just never thought about it.
So for me, I started my business cold calling and I was doing all the selling in the day and then I was servicing those clients at night. I was always as a founder trying to be as efficient with my time and squeeze out any little last bit of wastage out of my day. And so I got it to the place where I was able to make like 150 cold calls per day, send out five proposals and land one client per day. I always had other things pop up in the business and then I hired those things out. It came to a point where I was the bottleneck. There was only so many calls that I could do per day. There was only so many people that I could speak to. Instead, I figured out what that number was and I built a plan and I then started to hire salespeople and spend more money on ads and bring people in to actually service the client and do the client work. So I wasn't working 16 to 18 hours a day doing absolutely everything.
So the best practice that I have found that makes this very very effective is at the end of every year is to first before you write your plan for the next year is to take stock on the last year. Look at all of your numbers. Look at the topline revenue bottom line profits. Look at whatever the inputs that are driving those two numbers whether it's leads or traffic or customers for your business and get very very clear on what that looks like. Then you sit down and you think about, okay, what would the next 12 months have to look like for me to sit down at the same time and be like, hey, I'm really happy with the progress that I made over the last 12 months and use those same metrics that you just revisited and have a look at what are the things that need to move within that business to get you where you want to be. Then once you're clear on what that is, now you want to break that down into okay, what needs to happen every quarter? What needs to happen every 7 days? What happens every day? And that then becomes your road map. And that is truth number two. Most people are executing blind.
But here's the issue with this is even if you have a clear picture of where it is that you want to go, what I have observed is that most people, they're not really clear on who it is that they're speaking to or even if they are, they're actually speaking to the wrong type of people in order to get them to that goal. So when it comes to business, I like to think big. Who are the three biggest gorillas in the space? Like who are the guys that are getting all of the customers? Now, typically when you observe this in any market, what you will realize is that it is very rare that those people are speaking to the 3% of any given market that is looking to buy right now. It takes an enormous amount of scale to build a big business. If all of your marketing is engineered at only speaking to the people that are willing to buy right now, your customer acquisition costs just get too high and it becomes too prohibitive to actually spend huge amounts of ad spend to get huge amounts of customers. So therefore, the thing that I really look at is what is the opportunity to speak to the other 97% of the market that aren't looking to buy right now. They're good candidates. They might be thinking about it. They might be in information gathering mode. How do I engineer a business that can serve all of those people?
So then what we do is we design something called a high-value content offer which is basically how do I look at this market and how do I provide more value through the forms of content and education more so than any of my competitors are willing to do. Like how do I basically find what my competitors are charging money for and how do I just give that away for free? give away the information and then sell the implementation because that in all markets is usually the largest opportunity.
So when I started my business and I looked around and I thought okay who are the biggest players here and what is it they're doing? They were all running Google ads selling SEO or some kind of other digital marketing as a service running them through a landing page where it was like get a quote and speak to our team. Now, at the time, I didn't have any money, right? It was like 30 bucks a click for anything related to SEO, SEO agency or digital marketing agency. So, I was like, that's not where I want to operate in. Instead, what I want to do is I want to look at the educationalbased keywords. People that are outside that top three of the pyramid. They are in the market. They have a business. They're always looking for new ways to get more clients, more traffic channels, new opportunities. Let me put out free information. and I put out a whole number of free reports which effectively allowed me to go out there and get 10 times the amount of leads than my competitors were getting for the same cost. And most businesses don't do this because they're scared and they think, "Oh, I'm going to give away all of my secret sub. Then everyone's going to have all of my advantage and then they're just going to be able to take that." >> That means they can hire one of your former employees and that's the only thing that's stopping them to build a business as big as yours. Then you don't have any moat. don't have a business. Everyone can watch Bruce Lee do a 1-in punch. Not everyone can do a 1-in punch. And that's the way that I like to think about business is I want to practice something and be so good at doing the fundamentals better than anybody else that even if they see how I do it, they can't do it to the level that I can. And then the second thing is value. And if you provide enough value, it's the opposite. People are like, "Holy this dude's giving away all of this stuff for free. I've implemented it. I've gotten the results. their paid stuff must be absolutely legit because you will get 10 times more people that will come to you in order to learn something than you will that are willing to come to you to buy something. And that is truth number three. You are only fishing in the smallest pond in your market.
But here's the thing, even if you are talking to the right people, if what you're putting in front of those people is the wrong thing, you're never going to get to where it is that you want to go. So when most business owners look at a market, they are thinking about it through the lens of how do I extract the most out of this marketplace, right? How do I make the most money? Instead, what you want to think about is how can I provide the most amount of value to this marketplace? Like look at all the competitors. Look at everything that they're doing. What would be a way that you could come in by night and literally take over this market? Like think about Elon Musk in the electric car space. like his ultimate vision was to be able to sell cars that were way better than combustion engines for cheaper and that were actually better vehicles and they were faster as well. And there's an opportunity to do this in any single marketplace. And usually the right answer comes into the form of basically treating your prospects as if they were paying customers already. If you simply do that and you do nothing more, you will get outsized returns because it is completely different to how most people think about it. If you have a landing page and you're running traffic to it and your offer is get a quote, typically these landing pages, depending on the market, are going to convert at 1 to 3%. If you have a offer that has a piece of information or a video training on it, it is not out of character for these pages to convert at upwards of 25%. Heck, in some markets, they convert at 50%. And then we further educate them, provide value to them, and then when they are ready to buy, they buy from us. And I call it giving your market crack. There's crack and then there's kryptonite. What the kryptonite is to reach out and speak to a salesperson. People hate jumping on sales calls. They hate being sold to. And basically what you want to do is you want to put out free information that gives them the specific answers to those burning problems. That's the crack. Because when you're on Google, what is it you're looking for? You're looking for answers to questions that you've got. In other words, you are looking for information. You do not want that information to be gated by a salesperson. You want the information now.
So, a way that you can apply this right now in your business is have a look at what are the big hair on fire problem questions that your market has got. And then what you want to do is take all of those insights, create a down and dirty free PDF ebook or a report. It doesn't need to be your life's work. I'm not talking about some magnum opus. Like, it needs to be a 5 to 15page report. That is not a promotional piece about your company. It genuinely just gives them the information that whether or not they choose to do business with you, it's going to better them, right? You want to leave prospects better them than when you found them. And so, it can't be some thinly veiled self-promotional brochure. It has to be of genuine value that's going to give them the answers that it is that they want. And that is truth number four. What your market wants is information. Yet, what most businesses have is a marriage proposal.
Now, this is where most businesses fall flat on their face. They're like, "Hey, I've tried putting out some free information before Sbury and it hasn't worked." Because they get the leads coming in, but then once those leads coming in, they're like, "No one's buying." Yeah, no Like, what did you do with these people? Every single sales team is guilty of this. They all look for the lowest lying fruit, the little cherry that the salesperson can just pick up and the person's ready, willing, and able to buy. and then they might work on those leads, maybe call them two to three times, then put some excuse in the CRM as to why they didn't buy. And all of these leads that we spend an enormous amount of money on bringing into our world, they just go by the wayside. And that's where most people get it wrong, right? There is a a step in between the getting the free information to then following up on that lead. a video sales letter, a webinar, something that basically takes them from who the hell are you to shut up and take my money.
If you want to triple your sales, the easiest, cheapest, quickest way to do that is just to get them to follow up on every single lead, three times more than what they're currently doing right now. If you have a look at all of your records in your CRM and you actually do the analysis and find out how many follow-ups does your sales team does, first of all, you get a pat on the back from Captain Subie that well done. You actually did the work. But the next thing it then is to actually sit down and write a plan that triples that. If you do nothing more, you take nothing else away from this video and you do that one thing, you will triple your sales.
Now, how I came across this insight is yes, I have read lots of industry reports and research about the power of follow-up. But I had created a X-ray tracking is what I call it within my business, which is basically closed loop tracking. So, not only was I tracking, you know, where I was getting the cheapest leads, but I got full kind of lifetime value stats and cohort on like how many people buy in the first 7 days, in the first 14 days, 28 days, and whatnot. And I saw like, holy like look how long it takes for somebody who comes into my world to actually buy. And I found that the largest cohort of customers that was worth the most amount of money to my business was beyond 90 days. It's like a lot of times we're investing in that prospect far before they're ever investing in us. We're doing it in the form of free information, free education. And the reality of it is that we will lose money on the vast majority of those people. Like we will invest in them by paying money to put free information in front of them and then follow up and they will still never ever buy. And I'm completely fine with that because I know as a result of having that mindset and that approach that I'm going to get a much bigger chunk of the overall market that will go through that experience and be like that was awesome. These guys are completely different to everybody else. When I am ready, I'm going to come to them and we're going to get much more of those people coming back to camp. Whether it's in 30 days, 180 days, or even 3 years from now, I'm okay with that. And you might be thinking, "But you're only at that stage now where you can afford that." Well, I'm still getting the 3% of guys that are are willing to buy right now. Once I had that realization is when I started to extend my time horizons, how long it takes to get that money back. And that is truth number five. The fortune is in the follow-up.
So, once you've got this system all in place, then it comes up with the question of like, how do I get the message out at the biggest scale that I possibly can on all traffic channels that are available to me to grow my business? If you don't have distribution, you don't have a business. you just have a hobby. Like if you can't spend a dollar and get $3 back in ads, you can't spend money to acquire customers, you do not have a business. In addition to that, you want to make sure that your ads do not look like ads. Things like Meta, that is a native advertising platform. If your ads look like ads, your CTR is going to be very, very low. It's going to work on a small scale. And the moment that you start to spend more money on ads, all of those metrics the bed. And it's because it looks like ads and people hate ads. So instead, what you want to do is you want to make your ads look like native content that people are already consuming on the platform. If you do that, you will be able to scale to ridiculous levels without your ads just the bed. Because when most people say, "Hey, Facebook ads don't work for my business." >> Facebook is just an abstraction of reality. And the way that I like to think about it is it's just the cold mass market of people. If you're going to go down to the food court at your closest mall, stand on the table and say, "Who is in the market for my stuff?" That is what Facebook is. It's just the masses of people. So instead of blaming the messenger of your message, look at the message itself and think about what would I need to say in order to get people to respond at a rate that is profitable for my business.
There's always going to be some credit card company out there that is going to be willing to issue you a credit card with 30-day terms, meaning you do not need to pay the money back in 30 days. So therefore, if you have the skill to get this money that is not yours, pump 10 grand of that into ads and then turn it into 50 grand, you have a business, right? You you have the skills that can convert attention into money. So how you can apply this directly in your business right now today is before you touch your ads, before you go to your agency, before you speak to your media buyer, go away and speak to your accountant. Look at all the customers that you got in the last 12 months and divide that by the amount of revenue that it is that you did. That will give you what your lifetime value of a customer is. Now, once you're clear on what that number is, ask yourself, what would you be willing to spend on a maximum level to acquire that customer? If they're worth 50 grand to you, would you be willing to spend 10 grand to make 40 grand? You should probably say yes to that. However, what most people are doing is they're just optimizing all of their campaigns for the cheapest cost per lead. They're not looking at the big picture. Then you figure out what your theoretical maximum that you can spend to actually get a lead into your business. Once you get clear on it, unlock that scale and watch what happens. And that is point number six of getting clear on what the real unit economic is. That's the constraint of your business.
So once you're clear on that and you've got it working, the next thing that most people get wrong is how they actually measure the impact of those things in their business. Most businesses spend 80% of their time thinking about how do we reduce our customer acquisition costs? How do we get cheaper leads, pay our agency less, basically get more for less. That's what they obsess over constantly in the ads manager launching new ads. And then they spend 20% of the time if that on how do I increase my lifetime value of a customer? But the biggest businesses in the world, they have that flipped. They spend 80% of their time thinking about how do we make customers more sticky? How do we delight them more? What are some other offers that we can basically launch off the back of end of that? What other services are our customers buying right now that we're not selling that we can launch and therefore increase our lifetime value? If you can afford to spend the most to acquire a customer, you go out there and you buy all the customers and you win. The easiest way to increase LTV for any single business is to basically look at what the leading indicators that someone goes through that will determine whether or not this person is going to cancel. You look at all of the certain attributes that make for a very successful client and for an unsuccessful client. And then you basically make them as checkpoints. you can notice that people aren't logging into your monthly reporting software or they're not opening up your emails or the cadence of communication starts to go where they start missing your weekly calls or your monthly calls. These are all leading indicators that somebody is going to cancel. And if you can manipulate those numbers, i.e. if you can make it that they do show up for those calls, then that is going to add another month or two to your LTV. Not a very sexy thing, but a very tangible thing. In addition to that is you're not just looking at a business that churns. Think about the product that it is that you sell. Look at all the customer service emails that you get of people asking, "Hey, do you sell this? Do you plan on selling this? Do you know a good company or a good product that sells something like this?" Whenever you start to see those things reoccurring in your customer service emails, then that is an indication of that it would be a great product for you to sell. that will double the amount that you're able to spend to acquire a customer. And often times for businesses, that means that they could spend five times more on ads and bring in five times more customers just by doubling their LTV. And that is truth number seven. You're probably focusing on the wrong thing entirely.
And these are the seven truths that cost me way more than I would like to admit to basically find. I have paid for these things in full so that you don't have to. And if you enjoyed this video, you're going to love this one that I put together, which is 17 years of marketing experience in 46 minutes.