How Did Manny Take His Company Past $50 Million In 1 Year? Find Out 🍿

Manuel Perez takes the stage at Affiliate Summit East in New York City for a powerful panel hosted by Davis, breaking down one of the biggest differences between making money and actually building a valuable company.

A business can generate massive revenue and still be incredibly fragile.

In this conversation, Manuel and the panel dig into the gap between affiliate marketing cash flow and true enterprise value—and why a $100M affiliate business can potentially be valued below a $50M software, marketplace, or technology company.

The question is simple:

**What do you actually own?**

Traffic can disappear. Offers can disappear. Buyers can disappear. Platforms can change.

But when you start building proprietary distribution, technology, customer relationships, recurring revenue, data, retention, and infrastructure, you're building assets that can dramatically change the value of the company.

Manuel walks through the evolution from affiliate marketer to operator and eventually to owner.

The conversation covers using AI to scale without unnecessarily bloating headcount, understanding the entire call and conversion funnel instead of simply chasing the cheapest leads, and focusing on buyer value and customer outcomes.

Then the conversation moves into an even bigger opportunity:

If you're already creating demand every single day, **why not own the supply?**

Manuel breaks down the transition into insurance ownership, where the value isn't just in acquiring a customer once—it's in retention, lifetime value, renewals, residual income, customer service, cross-selling, and building a brand customers actually trust.

The panel also goes deeper into building at the FMO/IMO level, including software designed to remove bottlenecks around onboarding, compliance, quality assurance, retention, and agent performance.

And with AI becoming a true "second brain" for businesses, operators now have the ability to identify patterns, improve performance, and scale smarter than ever before.

If you're an affiliate marketer, media buyer, lead generator, call center owner, insurance entrepreneur, or founder trying to build something bigger than monthly cash flow, this episode is packed with lessons on:

• Enterprise value
• Business valuation multiples
• Affiliate marketing
• Pay-per-call
• Lead generation
• AI and automation
• Insurance ownership
• Customer lifetime value
• Retention and renewals
• Building recurring revenue
• Creating proprietary technology
• Turning distribution into an asset
• Building a company that could eventually be acquired

The ultimate goal isn't just making more money today.

It's building something that has **defensibility, optionality, recurring value, and an asset somebody else would actually want to own.**

THE LFG SHOW

The LFG Show brings you conversations with some of the top entrepreneurs, marketers, investors, media buyers, operators, and top 1% performers in business.

We sit down with people who are actually building companies, generating revenue, investing capital, scaling teams, and finding new ways to make money online.

If you're interested in entrepreneurship, affiliate marketing, lead generation, media buying, AI, investing, sales, business growth, and learning directly from people operating at the highest level, you're in the right place.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE LFG SHOW
👍 Like the video
💬 Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments
🔔 Subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next episode

And send this episode to a founder or entrepreneur who is still optimizing only for cash flow instead of building long-term enterprise value.

---

## POWERED BY OUR SPONSORS

RINGBA

Ringba is the industry-leading call tracking, routing, analytics, and performance marketing platform built for businesses operating in pay-per-call and inbound calls.

Track your calls, optimize your campaigns, understand your traffic, route calls intelligently, and use powerful technology and AI to get more value from every conversation.

https://www.ringba.com/

### ISELLFORYOU

iSellForYou provides education, community, resources, and opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to grow in affiliate marketing, lead generation, media buying, AI, sales, and online business.

Learn how today's top marketers are building and scaling businesses in the performance marketing ecosystem.

https://isellforyou.com/lfg

---

## CHAPTERS

0:00 Multiples And The Optionality Mindset
1:17 From Affiliate To Insurance Owner
2:24 Using AI To Scale Lean
3:49 Stop Buying Cheap Leads
5:03 Owning Supply With An Agency
6:31 Retention, LTV, And Brand
7:44 Building The FMO Layer And Platform
9:55 AI As A Second Brain
11:47 The Asset Ladder And Valuation
13:58 Closing Takeaways And Thanks
14:35 Final Reactions From The Room


**The LFG Show — Learn from the people actually doing it.**

#TheLFGShow #AffiliateSummitEast #AffiliateMarketing #ManuelPerez #PerformanceMarketing #LeadGeneration #MediaBuying #PayPerCall

Transcript

Multiples And The Optionality Mindset

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Last year we crossed 50 million dollars of revenue. That wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for other people. Business that does 100 million dollars in affiliate marketing is that more valuable than a business that does 50 million dollars and is a software and is a marketplace. An affiliate business, right? Average, you could expect two, three X multiple. And when you talk about technology, when you talk about the marketplace, you go to like 9x, 13x, average. These are customer numbers, so I've heard 20x. Is it getting you closer to building more value in your business? Learn to distribute on the customer, on the revenue, on the technology, on the data, and then on the entire ecosystem. Cash flow buys freedom, assets buy leverage, but enterprise value buys choices. What I mean by buy choices is when you build a business that has enterprise value, you can decide whether you exit partial, whether you exit the whole thing, whether you keep building, but you have the option of deciding. Don't optimize your business just for cash flow, but make sure you optimize for optionality. Thank you very much.

From Affiliate To Insurance Owner

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Seven years ago, I was sitting in a very similar room, the Disney SAR conference, and uh we were introduced for the first time about affiliate marketing. And honestly, it's kind of like cool to like be back here now on stage and share about the everything that we have done and how we have evolved from being an affiliate to now also owning an insurance agency and also building a platform. So I'm gonna talk about how we went from affiliate to asset and how we are optimizing our business for our next city. It's good as our last month, and sometimes uh it's not really um stable business, right? You have good months, you have bad months. You're not really building an asset, you're not building a book of business. So, you know, realizing that, hey, the marketing side is the tip of the iceberg. What's really valuable here is distribution. Marketing is a skill set that you rent out every single month. Distribution, that's a real asset. You could build brands, you could build businesses with distribution. Talking

Using AI To Scale Lean

SPEAKER_00 2:24

about distribution and AI, um as you know, AI has made a big impact in our industry. In the last uh few months, our team has actually went from 60 to 30 people, and we kind of uh have used AI to replace a lot of the skill sets um that you know were a little repetitive in our business. So every department now has an agent, uh, an orchestrator, and also sub-agents with sub-skills. And it's really helped us scale. It's serious to help us scale. Um by the way, uh, I agree with with uh with uh Adam, but we were saying that AI is not just the mope, AI is helping us accelerate our business, and we definitely have to adapt to AI. But at the end of the day, we need to not lose perspective that you know if we're building content and we try to be relatable. Um almost like the the symbol of the of the purple cow, right? Everybody's going right, go left. So even though a lot of our process is still AI, we still do UGC content. And I'm I love the fact that everybody's making AI content so that we can just kind of like dominate with UGC content. Even though we're still doing AI content, but UGC real content is still outperforming that. But for the most part, we have an AI agent for every single skill set in the company. Our

Stop Buying Cheap Leads

SPEAKER_00 3:49

mind starts shifting. We stopped optimizing for the cost per call and the cost per lead, uh, because a cheap call doesn't really generate value for our buyers. So again, this is all under distribution. We realized how can we get to high scale? How can we get to high volume of calls? We need to understand the whole entire pipeline. We need to understand what happens after the call, what happens after the lead. Um, talk to our buyers and realize how can I bring more value? You know, it's not just about the ROI, it's about building long-term value. And that's how we got to massive scale. That's how we got to consistently doing 130,000 plus per day uh last year. And our company actually has grown thanks to uh paper call. So shout out to the Ringba team, shout out to Adam and Harrison. Uh, because without without without honestly, without Ringba, the same way I said without this show, maybe our business wouldn't be here today. Without Ringba, we wouldn't be doing all the cool things that we're doing. So thank you for that. And yeah, optimizing for not just the sheep uh lead and the sheep call, but what brings the most value? The

Owning Supply With An Agency

SPEAKER_00 5:03

next thing that we realize is okay, so we're generating all this traffic, all this lead, all these calls, but you know, if we are creating this demand, why don't we also own the supply? Like if others can't do it, why can't we? That was the question that we keep asking ourselves. If somebody starts an agency, why can't we start an Agency as well? And so, quick story, we were generating about um 15,000 calls per day in 2023 in ACA, and we're dropping 3,000 calls every single day. Um, but we were still profitable in the front end, which is pretty cool. Uh, but you know, 3,000 prospects that wanted to talk to our buyers and couldn't. So that kind of sparked the idea of like, why do we start an agency? What if we use this overflow and start our own book of business? Can't be that hard, right? I mean, it's it's a little hard, but like anything in life, it takes time and work. Um, but yeah, why can't we own the policy? Why can't we own the renewable? Why can't we own the residual income? You know, why can't we build real enterprise value instead of just being an affiliate marketing company? And that's how Better Ways started. We right now, after two years, we actually write policy on ACA, Medicare, final expense, live, which is um IUL, terms, and also auto insurance.

Retention, LTV, And Brand

SPEAKER_00 6:31

And the main, it's hard to summarize everything that we have learned along the way, but the main takeaway, guys, is when you're building a book of business, when you're building an agency, lifetime value is everything. Retention is everything. I probably mentioned the word retention like 20 times per day, every day. Uh, retention is the backbone of your business. Now we realize how do we build better retention? How do we build more, longer, healthier lifetime value? We know that CAC, customer organization cost is important, but how do we extend the lifetime value of our customers? And the answer is building a brand. You know, building a brand and building loyalty around their brand. We take customer service very seriously. We obsess of our customers. We talk to our customers all the time. We try to help them. Um, instead of upselling them to other verticals, it's like, hey, if I would, if I was able to help you on your health insurance, if you drive a car, let me also help you on your car insurance. So this cross-selling, upselling is actually helping people get more coverage. And it's helping us build that brand, that loyalty, and that uh retention and light and value that we want.

Building The FMO Layer And Platform

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Then we asked ourselves the next question is okay, so if agencies are valuable, you know, what owns the agencies? What is the next step? And uh obviously in the insurance world, you have FMOs and IMOs that sit on top of the agencies. Um, so we said, okay, if there's other FMOs, why can't we also do that? Why can't we um build something where other agencies and agents can work with us and uh can get contractors under us and write policy and also buy calls and lease from us. We can help them with distribution, we can help them with contracts, and that's how we built um BetterAs, our software company. This is a more recent uh company that that came about. So um along the way of working with uh Betterways, we learn about where it breaks, where an agency breaks, what are the breaking points, what are the bottlenecks. And we build tools around those bottlenecks. And we have like six, seven tools for retention, onboarding, uh, compliance, uh you name it. And we said, okay, let's put all these tools into one platform, one internal platform that we now use with our internal team, which is better agents. And now that we want to think of ourselves as an FMO IMO, let's empower other agencies, let's empower other independent agents to come to us. Um, write policy under our platform. Uh, obviously, we have a great backend. We I was just talking to Adam about it. Uh, you know, bring by RingBax as a as a back end, it's a very solid network. So we really believe that building this platform is gonna take us to the next step. And again, as you can see, everything, every single step that we've taken from the outside might might be might be seen as distractions. We are just going deeper and deeper downstream into owning the whole entire ecosystem. Every single step that we take is building more enterprise value. Uh,

AI As A Second Brain

SPEAKER_00 9:55

people in the book. Uh the AI learns, it's almost like a second brain that it learns everything that you're doing, everything that the agent is doing right, everything that the agent is doing wrong. So it's sort of picking on the patterns, it's it's it becomes more predictive tool. Call this person is about to drop on the from your book. Uh you should you should be training on this type of objections. All your calls are falling off on this objection. So from the leap being purchased to the copy and recorded, the QA, the application, the caregive decision, the commissions, the retention, the chargebacks, all the knowledge gets updated, and the next recommendation it proves. So our agents over time will be improving. Our goal is to make it so good that any agent that is not using better agents has a huge disadvantage. Because you have a second brain that is constantly helping you get better. Building uh affiliate campaigns, running leads, running uh Rimba. Guys, um, every step along the way was actually us being curious, asking ourselves how can we build bigger, the better. Um, last year we we cost 50 million dollars of revenue. Um, we take that with a lot of pride, and uh, you know, that would have happened if it wasn't for other people, uh other network faces here uh that were part of that. And so very grateful, very grateful to be here, very grateful to be in this industry. But yeah, from these icon, the focus on distribution, creating the demand, better ways is the operating lab, that's how we learn, and that's that's a book of business that we own internally. And better agents is the scale layer, that's how we distribute to who knows, or hopefully 10,000 agents plus.

The Asset Ladder And Valuation

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Um talking about enterprise value, talking about enterprise value. Let's let's look at multiple, right? An affiliate business, right? Average, you could expect two to three X multiple. And when you talk about technology, when you talk about the marketplace, you go on you go like 9x, 13x average, and these are conservative numbers, so I've heard 20x. Um, so think about what you're building, think about every step along the way. Are you building a real business with real value? You know? Um business that does 100 million dollars in affiliate marketing is not more valuable than a business that does 50 million dollars and is a software and is a marketplace. So think about this every single day. Every single step that you're taking is it getting you closer to building more value in your business? And so this is the asset ladder. Learn to distribute on the customer, own the revenue, own the technology, o the data, and then on the entire ecosystem, and then become acquirable. So these are both who um hopefully in the next four years um have the option of an exit. Who knows? Um, maybe not, maybe we'll keep growing. But it's good to have building the business that could be acquirable one day. And here, I have to be honest, I really have to be honest with you guys, is it was not planned. Like everything that we're doing today was not planned. Um, every bottleneck revealed the next opportunity, and we kept seeking those opportunities. So marketing revealed distribution, uh, distribution revealed ownership, ownership revealed technology, and technology has revealed AI. And AI, I'll be honest with you, I won't be talking about this in this presentation, but AI is giving us hints of what the next steps are. Um, even though we're not sure what is gonna happen, but there will be, there will definitely be something else revealed after AI. So

Closing Takeaways And Thanks

SPEAKER_00 13:58

this is a takeaway, guys. Cash flow buys freedom, assets by leverage, but enterprise value buys choices. What I mean by buy choices is when you build a business that has enterprise value, you can decide whether you exit partial, whether you exit the whole thing, whether you keep building. But you have the option of deciding. And so don't optimize your business just for cash flow. I get it, cash flow is important. Well, make sure you optimize for optionality. Thank you so much, guys. Guys,

Final Reactions From The Room

SPEAKER_00 14:35

that was deep, deeper than old school rap bed. There you are, right? That's the rap references. You know what's beautiful? I remember man started to call center two, three years ago. There was no one in there, right? It's just great to see the energy in there and what they're doing.