Transcription
Well, I guess I didn't technically fail because we did hit $1 million a month in November, that you can see right here. And we ended up really doing more than that—about 1.22 million over the 31-day period from November 5th to December 6th, which you can see here. But it wasn't in a way that I could predictably repeat month over month over month over month, which is ultimately what I'm trying to build with this business.
So, in this video, I'm going to walk through the story of the last four months: scaling journey, failing to consistently hit a million dollars per month, what I wanted to do, what ended up happening, what I'd do differently, what I'm going to do differently now, and then lessons and realizations to apply going forward. So let's get right into it.
And by the way, if you don't know who I am, my name is Dicky Bush. I'm a former Wall Street hedge fund trader turned digital writer, and now I run a portfolio of writing businesses that I talk about on this channel because I wish other business owners made this type of content: talking about what's working, what's not working, what they're trying to build, where they're trying to go, their frameworks for doing things. And I just like to open-source that knowledge. So let's get right into it—the story of the last four months.
I'm not going to spend a ton of time on the background of this business because I did make an entire hour-long video breaking down, um, our mission, vision, values, which you can find linked in the description somewhere, as long as well as our, um, operational framework for the different departments we have. But high level, we run a group coaching business, uh, call funnel that has two main departments: acquisition, which is getting new customers, and success. So I'm going to talk about, in this video, my attempt to scale the acquisition department to 120 units per month, and from a place of about 60 per month. And so everything that goes into the marketing, the success, the sales side of things to expand a business like that, uh, I'm going to talk about what I try to do in this video.
So, immediately, the goal should have been chunking that down from 60 to 120. It kind of blurred my thinking, and it made me think that I had to get there in one shot, which ultimately ended up being mistaken. Throughout this video, I'm going to break down the mistakes kind of in line as I talk about, uh, the entire story of the last four months. And so I, I'll ch, I'll jump around, I'm going to repeat myself, but you'll see some of the core mistakes pop up time and time again, and I'll make sure to call those out. So right away, I should have chunked this from 60 to 80 to 100 to 120, rather than trying to get there in one jump. And throughout this, you'll see how just this faulty way of thinking, uh, led to a couple of decisions that ultimately didn't let us get there as quickly as I wanted to.
To accomplish this goal, I needed to thread the needle of the three main parts of this business, which is Marketing, sales, and fulfillment. So to do this, you typically have to work in reverse, which is first success, then sales capacity, then marketing flow. So to increase marketing, you need to increase the sales team capacity, because otherwise you're just not going to be able to convert that demand. You're going to either go spend a bunch more money on ads, or you're going to go make a bunch of new content, and ultimately no one's going to be able to service, or sorry, not service, convert that new demand because you don't have sales capacity. But if you want to scale the sales team capacity, you need to be able to fulfill on the new converted demand. And so unless you have additional either client success or whatever system you use to fulfill that demand, you're not going to be able to provide a good experience to all the people that you sell. So you have to work in reverse. If you want to scale marketing, you actually have to scale success first, and that's what a lot of businesses do wrong, and where you see people run into, um, problems is ultimately they scale marketing without having additional, uh, success to fulfill on that, and then a bunch of bad things end up happening.
To prevent that mistake, I started by building excess capacity—success team. And this was the right choice. So at least I made one right choice here. We brought on three additional CSMs with the expectation that enrollments would double over a four-month period, which gave us plenty of room to fulfill on that new demand. Right, this was the right choice because the worst thing you can do in any business is scale the front-end acquisition system without enough success to deliver a great experience, because ultimately that leads to refunds, negative word of mouth, on top of I just think it's ethically wrong if you bring someone in that you know you are not going to give enough attention to make their purchase worth, um, the money or investment that they make. And so again, this is the choice that I made, and this was the right one.
So this happened during the month of August 2024 and early September. I'm filming this as of February, so this was about four to five months ago. And this gave us the foundation we needed to move into the next phase, which was scaling the sales team. So again, I wanted to increase marketing, but to do that I really needed to expand the sales team first. So we took the team from three to five closers in September, bringing on two new reps. Now, pausing for a second here, at the time I was running the marketing team, the sales team, and really the high-level strategic decision-making part of the business. Now, since then, and because I rode this roller coaster up and down, I have been able to bring on additional talent that's going to help us attack this next scaling, um, journey, I should say, without, uh, splitting my attention in multiple ways. But it was only through trying to do it myself that I realized how much help I actually ended up needing.
So, bringing on those two new sales reps, I had to recruit them, I had to train them, all on top of running the different parts, and I found myself stretched a little bit too thin. In that month of September, we also held an in-person team, uh, event on top of a mastermind that month. So just a lot of things happening all at one time, but that's what we signed up for. At the time, we were running a small-scale, uh, paid advertising funnel, and it wasn't at the point where I really felt strongly about turning up the dials. Right, the nice part about marketing is if you have a system that works, you click a couple buttons, and boom, you're able to show yourself to a lot more people. That is not the case for sales or success, which are, you know, more human labor intensive, because you need more sales to convert on that demand if you sell anything higher ticket, and you need success to give them a good experience. So I thought at the time that actually the marketing system it required additional work, but I was unable to give it my full attention because I brought on the new closers. So you can see how these priorities and different departments that I was running started to kind of take from one another, and that'll be a common theme throughout this.
For some reason, and you know this might have been right, this might have been wrong, but basically I thought I needed additional sales capacity to figure out the marketing system. The reason being, we didn't have enough excess sales capacity to, um, run our ads at a level that would give us the true cost per call. This is definitely getting in the weeds here, but because we didn't have enough sales capacity when I was running ads, they were often being shown a calendar that was full, so I couldn't really see if our ads were working in terms of the advertising side of getting people on the calendar. However, I should have actually looked further down the funnel, through the isolation of our cold traffic funnel versus our organic traffic funnel, and I would have realized that we weren't converting—the show rate was low, the type of person that was showing up was not our, not our ideal client. And so there were, there were problems there that I wasn't able to see because I was focused on the wrong thing. You again, getting in the weeds here, but you'll can see, you'll see as I continue to tell the story here how these start to build on one each other, on one another in not the best way possible.
So we made it through that month of September. The new reps were starting to perform. So just a level set here, we have a team of five closers at the end of September going into October with pretty good expectations. Unfortunately, uh, we had one of our new reps who had been with us for about three weeks go on a self-exploration vacation, they dubbed it, and when they came back they let me know they were not interested in sales and instead just wanted to paint full-time. So to each their own, I'm glad they did what worked best for them, but this did set us back because if I kind of look back here, we wanted to get to 12, 120 enrollments, right? And so to do that, around 25 units per closer per month is what gets you to around 120 with a team of five. Now when that team went to four, I immediately said, okay, I'm not going to be able to get to the goal that I ultimately want to get to, and I feel like I'm in this season right now with hiring, I should go and hire additional sales reps because that way I don't have to do it again later, I can have a full team, then I can go scale, um, the marketing to fulfill or to fill the calendars of that entire team. Again, a strategic mistake because I was thinking that I had to get there in one shot.
So luckily, at this time though, after that one churn—and this was the first churn we've had on our entire team since it started, and it was a very strange feeling cuz we used a recruiter, they didn't come through any of our organic stuff, they didn't really know much about our business—and I kind of took a shot on them because I was like, let's see if what it feels like to bring in someone who's not as familiar. And I should add this to the lessons that we'll talk about, but like an organic hire is so much, it's like an organic customer, an organic hire is more likely to stay, more likely to tell their friends, and more likely to be fully bought in versus someone cold that you had to convince to come here, who's always going to be one foot in, one foot out. Another good lesson as I, you know, continue to learn from this painful but ultimately very rewarding last couple months. So anyway, luckily I hired two closers at the same time, and by hiring two at the same, same time I was able to onboard them really without that much additional effort versus hiring one. And so we were able to get one who is still with us today and is absolutely killing it, so very happy with that.
So we went into October with a team of five—not quite enough to hit that 120 a month. Because I was set on this goal, I looked to expand the sales team again, uh, so I could hit that number without having to hire. So at this time our four reps were at capacity, taking roughly six calls per day, which is pretty solid. I, I think if you can have six calls per day with a 75-80% show rate, they're getting five offers out per day, that's 25 offers per week, 120 offers a month, 25% closing rate, boom, you're at 30 units. Now that I can rattle those numbers off the top of my head pretty easily because I've been really focused on hitting them, and I was right there, uh, with this team of four. However, the cold traffic funnel was still roughly breaking even, but I was making decisions off of the entire system, and because we had such strong organic coming through, the business looked fine from a macro level in terms of show rate, close rate, offer rate, uh, upfront cash—all of that conversion from lead to close was all in the range at which I felt comfortable scaling. However, I was making decisions from these macro-level numbers rather than the funnel-specific numbers, which again I can only see with hindsight now that I've made that mistake once.
So on top of this, we just hired the additional success managers, and this is where that threading the needle part comes in. It's, I started to hire additional success, which then meant they were paid a fixed base salary, which meant I was just eating that cost even if they weren't fulfilling. So as you hire them, you have to thread the needle nicely such that you don't take your profitability to a much lower level because you're actually giving them enough new clients to go in service, and the sales team's able to capitalize on the demand. So you can see it's like this strange—and this is just my first time really taking a crack at it—of making sure all of these are expanded, have enough expanded capacity to work with one another without any of them being underutilized and without any, any of them being over, over, over utilized. A lot of caffeine this morning, um, and ultimately I now understand what it looks like to do that correctly going forward.
So here I am, sitting in the middle of October going into November, which is typically a great month for us, and I went ahead and hired three new reps. So we were at four, sorry, we were at five, we had one churn, so I had four. I knew I wanted to get to six because six at 20 units is ultimately where I think like the sweet spot would be, or so I thought—it's actually not that, but you'll see as I keep going—and I hired three. Now this brought us to seven. And so since I wanted to get to six, I naturally kind of baked in one churn, which was like, okay, I want to get to six and I don't want to have to hire again in the immediate term, I want to have a team of six that I can just focus on marketing if I go and take this to the, to the next level, like I just want this piece done. And unfortunately, it does not work like that. So hiring three at once, what I tried to do was shortcut the necessary onboarding, and I'll explain why I did that, and also just you can't give enough attention to three people if you hire them all at the same time. I thought I could—turns out I couldn't—and that ultimately led to some further down the line things that are all starting to compounded on one another, uh, as we entered the end of the year.
So here we are, it's the middle of October, I got three new reps coming on, and I start to onboard them, right? It's a very intense process to onboard a sales rep yourself. You have to review their calls, you're doing one-on-ones with them, you're explaining the company culture, you are helping them get familiar with all the system—it's a pretty labor-intensive process—and I'd only done it three times before that, so I didn't really have a great, well-documented system that was allow me, that would allow me to do that very efficiently. Then, as we reached the end of October, I realized, look, we just hired three new reps, they are paid commission only, they're obviously expecting to take a certain number of calls as that's what I promised during the onboarding process and during the hiring process. The only way I was going to ramp up that marketing flow was if I gave the marketing system the majority of my attention, because like I said, I was running the marketing department, so I needed to make sure that now we had success, we had additional sales, I needed to go focus on the marketing side. So my solution—and this was again a mistake, just full of mistakes over the last couple months, but it is what it is—I cut the onboarding short, and I switched up my attention to the cold traffic funnel. So I had new closers coming on who got like a 60 to 70% onboarding, uh, effort from me relative to what I would have done if that was the only thing I was focused on—like if we had infinite leads, what I would have spent my time doing is really just getting them up to speed—but because I short-changed that a little bit and went to the marketing side too quickly, they were not fully brought up to speed at the level that I would have liked before for having them take a bunch more calls.
So this is where the cold traffic funnel scaling attempt exposed the inefficiency of that funnel. So like I said earlier, I was making decisions based on the macro level of the entire business, and it didn't work because, well, once I actually was able to turn the dials, the coal traffic, you know, weighed the organic in terms of number of leads per day and per week, and I could only then see that this was actually an inefficient system, um, because the volume went up. So I ramped the spend, this increased the overall amount of call volume, the closers all had new calendar, or full, the new closers all had filled calendars, I thought it was looking great, but I quickly realized this was sending relatively cold traffic to relatively unskilled and untrained closers. I shouldn't say unskilled, I didn't properly onboard and train them correctly, so that was ultimately my fault. But we had plenty of call volume, but it was unprofitable given the type of person who was showing up on the call, and the experience of the closers to convert that demand was not there. So I kind of was in this tough zone where the I didn't have enough time to really give the marketing attention, marketing system the attention it needed, I didn't have time to do the, get the closers to the level that they wanted, and it was like, ah, it was a stressful time.
So ultimately, there were two problems going on at the same time, both of which would have required my 100% effort and attention to fix. The first was the overall lead quality and warmth of the cold traffic leads, which both required more nurture and harder qualification. The second was the overall skill of the new closers who are not operating at the level that I wanted. Both of these were my fault because I underinvested in doing them fully before moving on to something else. And that's the difficult part of scaling something when heading multiple departments at the same time, which I now know with the benefit of hindsight—it's if I'm in charge of marketing and sales, and both of them are in a period of expansion, if I invest my time in one of them, the other receives less attention than it needed—not that, not that it like had it been fully up and running, I can maintain it and also build this other department, but could not build two things at the same time, and that's ultimately what I tried to do and failed at.
All this happened during November, which was the tough part. Here is this was the most profitable month in the history of the business, as we launched a new product in our digital products division, and we had our highest number of enrollments. So we ended up hitting 100 enrollments in November. So like I said, I set out to hit 120, we hit 100 in November, and it was our highest number ever, but it was extremely, extremely chaotic. Ad spend was going up—it's still very profitable, but just overall ad spend was higher, show rate was lower, close rate was lower, cash collector was lower—it felt like chewing glass every single day because you're just dealing with more difficulty, and these types of things—like when you have a low show rate, it, it scales linearly but feels exponentially worse, right? So if the entire team is experiencing a lower show rate, yeah, it's just a number, but their days become so much more difficult, and they're reaching out with problems that it just emotionally feels exponentially worse. And so now I need to, you know, maybe I needed to adjust my expectations to what like a clean system feels, but I just knew that I could not run the business that way all of 2025 and keep my hair. So I had to dial it back a little bit.
So, given this combination of problems—that I couldn't give the marketing team the attent, the marketing system the attention it deserved—also during this time it was the election, it was the end of the year, Black Friday, Christmas, all that very expensive time to advertise, so I was like that was in my head a little bit. All of this to say, we entered 2025 scaling back the paid ad spend due to its general unprofitability, and I needed to rebuild the marketing system in a more sustainable way. And this is what's kind of kicked off a tougher last month or so from a business perspective relative to what happened in November and December, which were our two most profitable months in history. I showed you at the beginning, we hit over a million and a million point two in those two months, or around that period. And since then it's been a little bit tougher, but I understand why now, and I feel much stronger about giving it another go going forward.
So what happened? By dialing back our ad spend, this led to an overall decrease in the throughput of calls. So especially for the newer, less talented reps, I was going to, I'm not going to give them the volume if our more experienced, more seasoned closers don't have volume as well. So the way we do it is like a hierarchy where until our best closer has a completely full calendar, they're not going to, um, the, the ones further down the experience hierarchy are not going to be able to take calls. So what happened was, as the lead volume dropped, they get bored, right? And so the newer ones got a little bit insecure about their ability to earn and ultimately operate from a place of, um, scarcity and anxiety, and for good reason—like I would 100% do the same thing if I were them, if I had just started a new opportunity, I saw things expand, and then I saw things contract, I'm like, oh man, this is absolutely going to zero. And you know, they're younger guys, and they're a little bit more volatile in the first place. On top of that, we did not have a good system for turning the underutilized closers into setters. So I now know this is what we're going to build in the future, but basically if they didn't have a full calendar, they'd sit there and do nothing. And because I had a bigger team, I couldn't recognize that this one was underutilized enough and actually coach them to go and invest their time into a profitable activity. So this goes back to hiring three at the same time, having a team of seven, I was just not skilled enough to, to run, which then led us to this compounds the problem because they get rusty or disinterested. For the CSs that do show up, like if you're used to taking six in a day and then you only take two for every day for a week, those two are actually even worse because you show up, you haven't taken calls, you're not as excited, you're not as in flow, you're still worried about other things, you're giving other side hustles or whatever your attention, and then ultimately you just end up performing worse overall.
So from here, it led to a series of turns one after another for the last two months. I left the names out here, but the first one ultimately had no volume, was our lowest performing closer, and I don't blame them for jumping to another opportunity. Then we had another one who was very volatile, uh, at odds with—I don't want to talk badly about any of these guys, I do really, I'm extremely grateful for everything they did, but it did just send a kind of cascading effect through our enrollment team because as much as I could pitch that we were working on things that were going to come further down the line, it's hard sometimes to sit in a situation where your earning capacity is relatively capped, um, by someone—that it was me—trying to figure out a marketing system that would allow them to predictably hit a certain number of enrollments. Now, had I, do I wish that they would have been a little bit more long-term thinking and understand that like, hey, every time I promised
That something was going to improve in the past; um, it has. And so the closures that are left are about to see a massive surge in the number of calls taken, number of enrollments, high-like quality of leads that are showing up. So if one or two of these would have thought a little bit longer term on it, but ultimately, that is what it is, and that was their decision.
So that leads us to today, where we're left with two closers—really three—and one Setter, but one's kind of a hybrid. So two closers, two Setters, or three closers, one Setter; relatively low ad spend; a fresh sales manager who is an absolute killer, which was the best hire I've made in a long time; and a very blank slate of where to deploy our efforts. Now, in January, we still did about 65 units and, you know, 600k or something in January. So it's not like the business fell off a cliff by any means. And what that's what excites me is we still have a much higher floor because of other things we've put in place. And now it's about taking a different approach to our scaling journey.
So what would I do differently if I could go back in time? Well, first off, I don't know if there's anything I do differently because, like I said, despite all this, we hit a million in November and really hit 1.22 in cash, uh, 5 days after that. And so as that everything came through there, um, we ended up having a great month, and I'm not regretful of that because that ultimately was a very profitable time. However, it did take a big emotional toll on me; it was definitely the more difficult one. Like, I watched my interview a review video, and I can tell that I'm just absolutely cooked. And you know, you sometimes have to pay with those emotional scars. But now I have a much leaner team; each team member that is on our team is fully bought in. Like I said, a new killer sales manager, and I have such, you know, battle wound level clarity that when we give this next one a go, I feel so much more strongly about it. And that's just how business works sometimes.
So for the thought experiment, what I would have done differently, I would have stopped at four closers after after the life reevaluation churn. So with that, I had about 50k a month in ad spend, completely full calendars, and the ability for each of them to profitably do 25-ish units a month. Then I could have maintained that system on the sales side and then hired a sales manager to continue to maintain that and then had them come on with a bigger team already that then I could invest a lot more time on the marketing side, uh, to more linearly, uh, milestone by milestone, hit that expanded amount of lead volume rather than trying to get there in one shot. Then I would have monitored the cold funnel completely separately and made tweaks just on that system such that our organic nothing changed because that was working, but I would have isolated every different part of the enrollment journey for our cold traffic funnel, made sure I tracked the right metrics there and not pre-like too aggressively scaled that before I felt that each system, uh, or each, you know, potential touch point was optimized at a level that allowed us to scale profitably, for lack of a better term. I would have made sure that we were closing, closing cold traffic at a rate that was higher or more profitable than it would be if I scaled it, because it only goes in one direction: as you scale ad spend, it gets more expensive to acquire a customer. Again, I only could learn that because I screwed it up, but I would have made sure we were very profitable at a lower scale and tracked every metric very, very granularly aside from the organic such that they weren't polluting one another. Then, so like I said, landing page, application calls, all script, even the closers who were taking it, I wanted to test and validate it; I should have been the one to take up most of those calls to begin with, but because I had my head in multiple places, I didn't have the bandwidth to do that.
From there, and this is what I'm going to do going forward, I would have expanded the setting team to increase the efficiency of our tire system. So you can see how all of these would have been better to have launched then, uh, before scaling to seven closers. I should have had four closers, four Setters, before I had one Setter, seven closers. Again, I was, I knew how to scale a closing team; I didn't know how to scale a setting team. I tried to do more of what I knew; that was the wrong, the wrong choice. So we could have launched a DM funnel over the direct application funnel, which was much more difficult, uh, to have; it was a very sales team intensive funnel with closers who had just started. And if I could do it again, I would do a DM funnel such that they had much more touch points with our, um, setting team such that they were showing up to the call more educated, more nurtured. I could have stuck with that direct ad funnel with a setting team that would triage to lower-quality ones and increase our show rate by making sure anyone who wasn't confirmed we could call. So that would have been more helpful than a setting team. We also could have maxed out all of our opportunity streams, specifically our school group and no-show re-bookings, which we were not doing very much with and underutilizing relative to the amount of lead flow that was coming in there. And then also I would have had a natural toggle from Setter to closer if a closer was underperforming. So basically what happened during that time with having seven closers, if they weren't performing, they had a low close rate, or they weren't utilized, it would have been very easy for them to then just go start setting and set their own appointments. I didn't have that set up, so when their calendar was completely empty, or not completely empty, but they didn't have full capacity, they would just go do other things and then be ultimately unfocused. So then once I had the correct Setter to closer ratio—maybe it's three Setter, four closers, or one to one—I would have expanded that unit with another two Setter, two closers and gotten here; I would be in a much different place right now than I am with the current team, but I do feel that we'll be able to get there much faster because I have that benefit of mistake battle wounds now.
So what am I going to do going forward? So we just a recap; we talked about what I do differently, where I would have stopped the entire scaling journey. Now here's what I see as a likely road map forward. First, first, we're going to ensure we have ample Setter volume. So we have tons of opportunity streams right now; we have no-shows; we have school group with like 14,000 people; we have, you know, 30% of our applications don't book or call. I'm going to make sure that those are completely maxed out before I try to expand our marketing because those streams—there's a KPI such that we know that there's enough attention given to them—and until we hit that KPI, it doesn't make sense to try to scale another funnel or another opportunity. But the one we are going, going to try and scale, because I think knocking these three out is actually pretty easy, it's just a matter of tracking the data correctly, is setting up a DM funnel on Instagram. So I'm growing pretty quickly on Instagram; my co-founder is growing pretty quickly on Instagram; it's by far, from what I've seen, other people have built massive businesses on the back of this. I want to start by trying to crack this because it is a very linear scale: like you spend a certain amount, you get a certain amount of DMs coming in; you get very clear metrics on how many of those you're turning into calls; and then if you, you're consistently able to model out the entire close from ad to close of that funnel with Setters doing the majority of the work, when you scale that marketing dial, it's just a matter of adding another Setter; you have the system already dialed in, and as long as that maintains profitability, you have, you're adding predictability to the system. So when I talk about the lessons, that's a big one. And so what I did here was just map out like what are the things on these opportunity streams such that I know we are properly allocated across the board, and that's just sub two-minute speed to lead, making sure we're daily bumping every lead for 10 days, then a weekly message, and that's pretty much the same thing across the board to do that effectively. I need to measure these opportunity streams to make sure that what we're doing is they are properly allocated right. So rather than just looking at the aggregate amount coming from somewhere, I want to look at efficiency metrics that say, look, if we had a thousand people coming through, it's very easy to set three per day. And so if you only look at aggregate metrics of one Setter, sure, it's going to look like you're doing a great job, but when you look at an efficiency metric, you go, okay, we should actually be setting 20% of people who join this group; we're only setting five; okay, clearly we are underinvested resource-wise there, and we don't have to scale the closing team; all we have to do is add Setters to this part of the opportunity stream of the funnel, and we're going to add prct add predictability and just have more calls coming through in general. So I lay out an example here that I just talked about. So it's my hypothesis that if we fully max out these streams with two Setters and three—this should say three—closers, we'll very quickly realize that we could add two more closers and I think two new Setters; I'm still kind of going back and forth, and it's going to take a lot of data gathering to know what the exact right thing is going to be, and maybe I'll make another video in three months saying, here's how I would scale the setting team if I knew what I was, knew all the things I knew three months from now. But ultimately, that's the beautiful part of business.
So this is where we're at. From here, we're going to scale the setting team with the current level of closers such that once I know that our three closers are fully maxed out, and then we have proper invested resources on every set Setter opportunity stream, I can then duplicate the entire system, just scale the advertising, and actually know that it's going to work this time. And again, we'll see where that ends up.
So what did I learn from this process that I'm going to take forward? This is by far the most important part of this video. So if you didn't click away from this one because I didn't have a bunch of fancy graphics and you're, you're not a dopamine junkie that needs like 50 flash cuts, then props to you for still being here because you're the type of person that I either want working for us or that I enjoy talking to and working with, with in general. So what did I learn? Number one: never do two news at once. So we hired new closers, uh, while developing a new coal traffic acquisition system. This meant, as it was underperforming, it was either that we, we actually weren't sure what was going on: was it that the people coming through the funnel were not high quality or not nurtured enough, or it was a lead quality issue, or was it the closers; they weren't actually skilled enough? We did two news at the same time. So never do two new at once. If you're going to start a new funnel, it needs to go to closers you already have. If you're going to scale the closing team, it needs to go to the exact same marketing system that all the other closers are going to because otherwise you're unable to make a clear decision about what's actually the bottleneck: is it A or B? And if you can't make that clear decision because you do two new things at once, you're just, you're going to spin your wheels, and that's kind of what I ended up doing. So I can apply this to a bunch of different things: like if you're split testing a landing page, don't make two changes because you don't know which one worked; right, one change at a time, measure it, then make the next change. Second: systems naturally become more inefficient as they scale. So I thought, for whatever dumb reason, that if I was breaking even at four closes and 50k a month in ad spend, that for some reason if I got to 150k, the inefficient part of the system would just melt away, but actually it became glaringly obvious. And I want to give myself a little bit of, you know, grace for making that mistake because I thought that it was a marketing problem because our cost per call was kind of high, and it was. And so as we added capacity, I was able to take more calls, and they were much cheaper, but I should have looked more granularly at the calls that were coming through before we scaled, looked at the close rate, show rate, and recognized there's things that need to be fixed on this current level of volume that are only going to get more inefficient as we scale, and that only became u apparent as we hit that 150k a month in net spend. Number three: this, I think, is the most important one; you scale by reducing volatility or increasing predictability, then you add capacity. So when I was at four closers, I should have solidified every opportunity stream that we had with one or two more Setters, then looked to increase capacity, but because we still had volatility and in predictability and really just efficiency of the cold traffic funnel, I, I did them in the wrong order; I needed to solidify those and then add capacity. And so that's just another good lesson that I will take into our next one. This one I've said at least 15 times in this video, but I'm going to keep trying to just bang it into my head: it's that cold and warm traffic funnels are completely different businesses; they're not even different funnels; they are different businesses; they require different processes, communication cadences, framing assets, sales scripts, everything, and I dramatically underestimated that. I thought running paid ads just meant advertise to everything that's working on organic, and I just, there are so many parts of an organic business that you don't see because people consume so much of your content, they get so many of their questions answered that you actually don't answer in your cold funnel, and you wonder why they're not buying; that was me; I made that mistake. So now the beautiful part is organic businesses, or if you can make cold work, what works on cold works extremely well on organic, and so we know that if we can get that right, our organic business is going to grow too. So both of these things work on one another. Number five: we're flowing here, really firing off these lessons; test demand before hiring to fill it. So when I had those three additional closers with uncertainty about how I'd fill them, I should have just taken a dummy calendar, put it up there and seen how easily we could fill that demand, and I should have taken the calls as if I was the additional closer that was coming on. Then if I realized, okay, I have good lead quality coming through, it's predictable, and I know that I can hire to replace myself and add in the additional closer, and they're not going to be sitting with an empty calendar, I would have, but I decided to just test demand on the new person I hired, which ultimately ended up being a mistake because, like I said, I didn't have the predictability or reduced volatility to hit that consistently. Number six: max out an opportunity stream before adding another one. And so you can see like I used a lot of these lessons and weave them in throughout, but this is just like the nitty-gritty: what do I want to take away, and what can you potentially take away as you're trying to scale your business? It's max out opportunity streams before adding another one. So we probably wouldn't even needed to go cold if I would just better track the data in our school group or our no-call apps or DMs were already coming into us; if I had maxed those out with proper tracking systems, I probably wouldn't have even needed to go try and acquire customers from somewhere else; I should have just maxed out what we had, and that's what I'm going to make sure we do before we try to expand going forward. This one, number seven: scale every higher for long-term alignment, especially sales reps. Uh, I'm going to ask a question: what would you do in your first three months if you make half as much as you expect? If they say they'll fully jump ship, I'm just going to say, hey, it's probably that if you have that mindset, you're going to be one foot in, one foot out, no matter what, looking for just continuous like it, it's just, it's what lens you have as you come into a, a organization, right? If you have the lens that, and really anything, like any program, any diet, any relationship, if you come in with a lens of like, I'm really not sure this is going to work, it's just not going to work. But if you go in full bore, it's like, I'm going to make this work, then you don't have to worry about it because it will end up working; you will shape or bend the world to make it work for you in whatever capacity that requires. So I'm going to make sure everyone that I hire in the future for this role specifically, I want them to be investing in a long haul opportunity, even if it means short-term income volatility, and I'll be very upfront about that from the beginning. Number eight: keep your best rep at full capacity before giving another rep a single call. So again, didn't know how to do this; now I know how to do it; makes me much more confident in our next attempt at this. So when we scaled overall, uh, call volume, and we, we added in additional sales reps, it meant our highest performing rep, uh, was not getting as many calls would he, or as he would have if the team was smaller and there was just like a, a tighter filter for calls that ended up being on the calendar. And so what happened was, even when he was at full capacity, quite a bit of that traffic was cold, which meant the other organic leads that he was much better at closing than everyone else were going to other closers who were not going to convert them at the highest level. So they had a couple things going wrong: one, our cold traffic was not that good to begin with, and we should have been running that; it's hard; there's like five different ways you could have done this, but basically what I should have done is made sure that as we scaled cold that organic still went to the best closer, and that cold, at least the other closers tried to close, but yeah, as I say it out loud, there's really no right solution to this; I should have just made sure that our best rep was not impacted by the hiring of other reps or the scaling of another traffic source because that's like the most predictable part of the business is that your best rep closes all the leads that they should, and you did, you, I need to make sure that that continues to happen, and ultimately I did not do that. All right, number nine, uh, set big goals, but attack them in milestones. So like I said at the very beginning, the foundational mistake that I made in this entire journey was trying to get there in one shot. And so going from 60 to 120, you just cannot double that easily in a linear fashion. And so had I just said, let's get to 80, let's get to 100, then 120, I'd probably be there consistently right now, but I do think that we'll be, we will be able to get there more consistently now going forward because of the three or four months of mistakes that I made, and hopefully as you're watching this video, you're downloading some of these mistakes as well. Number 10: hire in pairs, not trios. So I guess this ended up being 10, uh, lessons; I hired three closers at the same time, and that was a big mistake because I couldn't give them any of the attention that ultimately I needed to.
So that's 10 big lessons here. Ultimately, I'm extremely grateful for these past four months, despite, uh, being definitely the toughest mentally and emotionally of any, um, business chapter of my entire journey so far. And I, you know, coming up on three years of being an entrepreneur and being out of my 9-to-5 job, and sometimes you just have to sit and take these lessons, right? I wouldn't do anything differently because I get to make videos like this; I get to give this advice to other people when I recognize them at this part of their journey. So the number one lesson is you have to sometimes just take the short-term pain, make the mistakes, and you can only then do things more efficiently if you go in and attack these. So I, you know, I titled this video My Reflections on Failing to Scale to a Million Dollars a Month, and as I started to put that out loud, I was like, yeah, I failed. At first, I was a little insecure about, like, making a video like this, oh, you know, you failed, you didn't get there, but if you can't fail, if you just try again, and that's where we're going to go from here; it's, I've got these crystal clear, painful emotional scars, and we're going to apply them to the next one. And so hopefully in three months, I'm sitting here saying, here's my nine Reflections on Actually Hitting a Million Dollars a Month, and I know that if I get there, I'll make a video of what worked, and if I don't get there and I fail again, I'm going to take another crack; edit with even more lessons, even more emotional scars, and that is the beauty of business that we're all playing right now. So that's it for this video; hopefully you got a lot of value; if you enjoyed it, leave a comment, let me know what resonated, and that's it; I'll see you in the next one, peace.