How She Scaled Her Agency Past $10,000,000

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00:00 How They Built an 8-Figure Agency
00:50 The Origin Story
01:44 The One Change That Doubled Results
05:58 Stacking Authority to Own a Niche
07:48 What They Actually Do for Clients
12:23 Zero to $100K: Working 5 Jobs
17:55 Scaling to $500K a Month
25:47 Staying Lean at 10% Marketing Cost
29:09 Why Home Service Beats Coaches
35:56 Hitting 8 Figures
41:30 The 3M Framework for Better Ads
53:51 Building a Funnel That Converts
1:02:23 Does AI Video Actually Work?
1:12:11 Working Together as a Married Couple

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So most people think that agencies are a business that can't scale. But who I talked to today, Emily and Austin from VSL Queen, have a UGC agency specializing in producing female creatives, and they've scaled their agency to over eight figures extremely profitably. So in this podcast, we break down their journey of scaling to eight figures. So how do they get from zero to a million, a million to five million, five million to ten million, and their plan to scale even beyond that? So enjoy the podcast. So you guys own an eight-figure UGC agency called VSL Queen, right? Yep. And so I'm curious, you know, especially with a UGC agency, and you know, the name VSL Queen, it's rather unique. So how did that all start? Because you guys do it together as husband and wife, correct? Correct. And so how did it all start? How did you guys start working together? Like what's kind of the story behind all of it?

SPEAKER_04 0:50

Yeah, it it involves Austin directly. He um so he had an agency for a while and would always be like walking around the house, like filming all of his own ads for his agency. I made him a lot of content for the agency's clients. They were, they are a bunch of pet brands and like other supplement companies and stuff. So I was always making them a lot of like standard UGC content. Sure. And then it was like, hey, I'm getting pretty good results for these brands. What would happen if you gave me a script to film for like one of your own ads? And this was like, I don't know, four, four and a half years ago. And at the time, ton of personal branded agency owners, info guys, like it was always very standard for just like that personal brand to be the only person in their ads. And ended up taking one of his scripts and basically shot that video and like that ad did well.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

How much better did it do? Because and the main premise of your guys' agency or unique angle is that it's a lot of female creators in the ads, right? So did that ad do significantly better, which is kind of like what spurred the idea?

SPEAKER_04 1:56

100%. Yeah. I mean, it was it was like whoa, insane amount of like new bookings, I I think on calls. I I ended up filming the VSL too, which hence eventually where VSL Queen came from. Yeah. But shot the VSL, and yeah, I mean, they yeah, would you say do you remember like exactly?

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Yeah, I mean, it was just like, wait, is this actually a real result right here? Like this is like we didn't spend any more on ads, and we were probably getting about double the amount of bookings and the improved conversions twice as much. It was just by having maybe right up to double, but it was like right about double the results, and the only thing was just the face change. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:35

So then what ended up happening, and this is actually where you're indirectly involved here. I ended up filming my first like VSL for this offer. Right. And I was like, hey, Cole Gordon's testing out women in his ads right now. Right. I was curious and ended up using my boyfriend. He was my boyfriend at the time. Uh ended up using my boyfriend's agency and kind of prove it, prove the concept out. Yeah. And so, anyways, yeah, you you like were clearly onto something too at the time, but it was definitely a little more, yeah, just guys weren't really doing that.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, that's interesting. So that I remember when we first started really testing it, it was in 2023 in the spring. Okay. And so 2023 in the spring for our industry, for whatever reason, is the best ad cost. Like we just are like we're going through that actually right now. Yeah. There's always just and your marketing team. I mean, granted, marketing team, my marketing team does a phenomenal job, but also like I even remember when I was running the team back then, because this is before I had the CMO, like, we thought we were just crushing it, like we're doing the best ads, all this stuff. It's also a headwind, or it's also a tailwind of spring for our industry, is just the best. I don't know why that is, but it's the best ad cost and the best lead quality. Not that the rest of the year is like garbage, but it's just the best time of the year. Agreed. And so it was 2023, and we started just taking their proven scripts and testing women in the ads. And I mean, I same thing with us. We probably got like $300 to $400 cost per qualified call. And I remember it being at some one point, like when we first did it, like it breaking $90. Yeah. Which was insane. So you guys had the same experience. And then, okay, continue the story. You're like, wow, this these results were crazy. Yeah. What if we do this for other clients? What happened next?

SPEAKER_04 4:18

I was actually working for another agency at the time, and they started to prove out the concept with me as well, being in their ads as well as their clients' ads. So it was a Cairo lead gen agency working with a bunch of chiropractors helping them get patients.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

Sure.

SPEAKER_04 4:34

Ended up making some of the chiropractors' ads, but also was making that agency ads as well. Those did well. He ended up connecting me with Joel Kaplan, started making Joel a bunch of ads for a lot of his different offers. Then I nailed a pretty killer DM script. And my my DM script was basically like, hey, agency or info guy, you're in all your content. You're pretty good at what you do right now. Your ads look, your ads look good, but um, would you be totally opposed to testing out a woman in your ads? And I got like five yeses and a couple weeks, months down the road, like five really killer case studies. And that was really where we were like, okay, let's uh we're on to something here.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, Emily did a great job of landing some pretty big names in the outreach and DMs. Cold DMs, really good script, that compounded. As soon as she nailed that, it really set us up to transition into ads. Just like our ads did very well because of that first round of authority she built with some of the clients she was able to secure.

SPEAKER_04 5:42

And I think on top of that, I was in some of those bigger named ads. I was either like speaking on those guys' behalf in the ads, or like I was just kind of representing those brands. Yeah. And then that started to lead to some pretty natural referrals and things like that, too.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Yeah. So what what's really interesting, what you guys did, it's very, it's very proven a lot a lot across a lot of companies. I see hit eight figures. So I got this from Alex Becker, which you you know, you'll when I say it, you're gonna see you're like, oh yeah, he he did this exact thing. He did the same thing where he stacked like the you want the best case studies in the industry, basically. And then once you get those, everything after that is like so downhill. Like he did the what he focused on was he got like the Tony Robbins and the Dean Graciosis and all that stuff and the Alex Ramoses, but then he also got the best like media buyers and the best agencies. And then when you say those people in your ads, it's pretty easy to like everything just works so downhill from there. Yeah, and I inadvertently, I mean it's kind of common sense, but I invertently did the same thing too because for me, I landed Frank Kern, and then from him I got Dean, and then from Dean, I got Tony, and then from Tony was like everybody. Right. But you know, when I had those, I remember filming the first ads and having those three as like the top authority in terms of my proof section. Yeah. It just like it almost allows you to capture the industry. And so anytime I think about and I talk try to tell people like to go into a new industry, a huge part of that is like who's the best people in that industry, and then it can go kind of go downhill from there.

SPEAKER_04 7:15

And that was exactly like the the bigger agency guys at the time were the very ones that I was like putting into my DM script because those are the very ones that we had worked with, and yeah, it was cool.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

That's cool. So I want to get into you guys and your journey and scaling to eight figures, because even as an agency, that's really rare to do. Like a lot of agencies, it's tough for them to actually scale. And then the way you've done it is so unique, just being a UGC agency. But first, just to understand a little bit more about what you guys do like what's the actual deliverables of a client that you work with? Like when you're working with a client, like what do you actually do for them? What do you give them, et cetera?

SPEAKER_04 7:48

Yeah. So we come on as a creative testing partner. And what we essentially do is we agree to a certain amount of final video ads that they're gonna want to test with our team every month. We have a couple guys that actually test net new ads with our team every two weeks. So we f figure out the cadence of delivery that they want to have in a testing process. Yeah. And then, yeah, I mean, we come in, our whole unique approach is we've got over 40 talented, data-backed women on the team that are all the on-camera talents. So come in and essentially handle all the strategy and the scripting that's going into the ads that we produce. We handle all the casting and coordination with the on-camera talents and then get a good edit on the ads and in most situations hand those off to their respective teams, whether that's off to a media buyer or like another media buying agency and let the ads cook from there, look at the results and then rinse and repeat going into subsequent months.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

And how how hands-on do you have to be in terms of like helping? Do you help the client at all with their creative testing process? Like, do you have to do that or do these clients already have that down?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

What is a lot of them struggle with the actual setup of the ads, I would say. Like they don't know how to filter out bad leads. So you oftentimes have to give them direction on this is how you set up an ad, this is how you filter out bad fit leads, this is how a funnel should look. You take them from ad to conditional logic lead form to VSL to then they book a call. So some people they need help on that part, and then that's typically where we we give support on the ad on that process.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Yeah, because I was gonna ask like, how important is it for your clients? I'm sure you obviously want them to have like everything all figured out, a good creative testing process, a good funnel, good controls, whatever. Do you have to work with people who have that? Or do sometimes you kind of have to like help them sort of like fine-tune and building.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

The marketing size of the client, like guys who are already running ads successfully, it's a little bit more hands-off for guys who are let's say under a thousand dollars a day in ad spend, they're typically needing some hand holding a little bit. So we have like SOPs or bonuses that just come for free with really any ad creative package.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

And do you always model their controls, or do you sometimes you just have you're like looking at the controls and you're like, yeah, I think we should just write something new. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Yeah, I mean it's it it it depends on size of business. Like if they again, if they're if they're not if they're size, if if they have a successful business and they're already running ads, yeah, you might look at their control and then expand on that. Yeah. Typically the easiest levers to pull, you have change the face, you have change the messaging, you could change the environment, or you could change the accessories and props, and those are kind of the four different things you could do differently to the ad. And then the lowest hanging fruit typically ends up being the face. Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Because with us, what's you know, we place salespeople in the companies. But what has always been frustrating, even though we've kind of used it to our advantage, is that similar, it's like, I bet you probably wish, like, okay, I wish every single one of my clients had like a killer funnel, they have controls, we can just like change the environment, phase, prop, whatever, and then we know it's gonna work, right? But in reality, you probably have some clients who you're like, oh my gosh, like your funnel sucks so bad, like your your lead nurture's really tough, etc. And it's the same thing with us where most people reach out for salespeople, but their marketing is like trash, right? So we kind of have to like fix their marketing and give them the salesperson and fix their sales ops and fix their sales management, which is fine. Like that's what I designed the company around to do because it's just such a common thing. But yeah, it seems like you guys run into the same problem.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Yeah, and sometimes they'll even want to sell, they want to sell one product. So let's say they want to sell, like, let's say it's an electrician and they want to sell um, let's say they want to sell some niche wiring that they do, but instead you might know that the best things working for electricians would be like installing new generators or um EV chargers. Yeah, and you have to kind of pull them, even though it's not what they want to do. They would love to just get sales on their other products because this is what the market is resonating with most. You have to you want to sell things that are already being bought on Facebook, and that's helped give direction for a lot of those types of things.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

We have to do the same thing, and it's like, hey, okay, I know you want to do that, but do you want to do that or do you want to make money? Exactly. And I'm like, they're like, I want to make money. So okay, so I want to walk through uh the scaling journey. So we s we we talked about how you guys started. What was like zero to the first one million like for you guys specifically? And like what did you have to figure out? What were kind of the keys, etc.?

SPEAKER_04 12:34

So let's I mean we can see.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

We're talking about a million per year, right? Yeah. So we'll we'll get to a million a month later.

SPEAKER_04 12:41

Zero to a hundred K, I want to hit first, I guess. Uh I started the company working five jobs. I was working literally five full-time roles and was doing VSL Queen on the side. So at the time I was working for a couple different agencies, info offer. I was full-time at a fintech startup. Okay. And I prior to that, I also worked for NBC. Whatever. I was learning a lot though in getting so much exposure with the different info guys, with the agency owners, and so on and so forth. And so when I was putting VSL to Queen together, I was kind of like taking a bunch of those little nuggets along the way. Like, I like how they do things here. I saw firsthand how Austin's other agency was running and like seeing what I liked there, what I didn't like, so on and so forth. And so, really, the first like zero to 60 was me just being an octopus in a lot of different directions, doing a ton of different things. And I I basically I remember coming into Austin's office one day, and I was like, I'm done. I I am stopping everything, I'm I'm quitting and closing doors, and I'm going all in on VSL Queen. And he was like, Let's go. Like, it's about time. Like, you yeah, you're ready. And I felt really ready. Like I was I was pumped up. And so probably like two months before doing that, Austin also was like, Hey, um, I think it's about time that we turn on ads for VSL Queen. And I was scared. Like, it's funny because like all the clients that we had worked with thus far, obviously all they do all day is ads.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:28

But taking the leap to like stop my little DM outreach journey and like turn $50 a day of messenger ads on was freaking scary. So I I had my I had my little DM funnel kind of kick in. We were booking, we were probably booking two really qualified calls a day at $50 a day in ad spend.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Oh, that's wild. And it was a joke.

SPEAKER_04 14:53

I mean, it was it was an absolute joke, and we were just like looking at everything.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

We're like, okay, like So did you know when you were doing that, you were like, holy shit, this is gonna like scale like crazy. He did. Yeah, he he probably did. Yeah, because I was a little naive to it.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

I'm always the one like push and spend, and Emily's like, nah, draw back, draw back. It's too much. Yeah. So it's that it's that balance.

SPEAKER_04 15:16

I just I just went into it like not wanting to scale some like massive company. I just I wanted every single week I would be like, I want to remain efficient. I want to be hyper, hyper efficient. I don't wanna, I don't wanna come on to manage a huge team. And my other roles, like my role at the fintech, I managed a five-person team and I I didn't like managing people. And I I'm just a really like fast worker, and I I wanted to just leverage my like good speed on things and like just felt like I could get a ton of things yeah done. I don't know, were there any other things that were like going on between zero to oh, I guess one other call out for zero to a hundred K was us primarily just working with agencies. So our our core market was agency owners and info offers.

SPEAKER_02 16:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 16:03

When we when we got into scaling, I don't know, 100 to 500k was when we really started to open up and working with home service guys.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

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SPEAKER_04 18:04

Yeah, so I have a background in acting and like always wanted to do something in actually like being an like a live actress on film, whatever. I I worked in their content distribution group. I was actually gonna go and work on the Jimmy Fallon show, but I I didn't end up doing that. But um yeah, I I did it was an internship, but uh you know, it it was very much going to lead to a job post-grad and COVID sent things south there. Yeah, but uh yeah, I I worked in the in the content distribution department.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

So was it oh so you were like you weren't like a news anchor. No, no, no, no. I thought you were like a journey. That was the end goal though, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:44

Honestly, no. I I knew I I did seminal productions.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Yeah, but some of that probably I mean, even that, it's interesting. You were building skill sets that you're using now in in some way, shape, or form.

SPEAKER_04 18:56

Yeah, no, I mean I was like a professional child actress, and like what what we do, like what I'm doing all day, and like coordinating the team of all of our on-camera talents and stuff, like there's there's so much synergy with what I was.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

So you were building skills you didn't know you needed all the way back then. That's how it happens with a lot of people too. Okay, 100 to 500 grand a month. Uh okay, what were the keys there? What were the challenges? What was that like?

SPEAKER_04 19:18

Yeah, well, one other thing I want to comment on real quick was you mentioning kind of feeling the real momentum here of the offer and who we were serving. I think at the time UGC agencies, especially for e-commerce, were a little bit more of a commodity, and they they definitely are today. The fact that we were leading with obviously we had we have the female hook, but we also are serving agency owners and info guys at that time. There really weren't any other content agencies out there that were trying to service those guys. I don't know how you felt it for like you recruiting the couple different talents that you were using at the time back in 2023.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Right.

SPEAKER_04 20:02

But I doubt that you were working with another like agency of what we do, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:06

No, no. I mean, we just found our people. I don't even know how we found them, but it was funny. We found this one lady who was the best performer, and then all of a sudden she became she started showing up in everybody's ads.

SPEAKER_04 20:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Maybe you guys used her, I don't know. But like I remember her name was Crystal.

SPEAKER_04 20:21

No, we don't know. I don't think we still use her.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

But all of a sudden I was like, I was like, we should assign like a freaking non-compete or something with a crystal. Like, Crystal's in our competitor's ad, she's in this other person's ad. Yeah. But no, like, it wasn't it's it's it's interesting. It wasn't like uh like intuitively I knew it. I knew like, okay, if you have different faces, because I first started with Aaron, we were talking about him earlier, and I was like, cool, Aaron can shoot the same thing as I shot, and sometimes Aaron's works better. And I'm like, okay, like I'm out, you know, like I don't want to do this anymore. Like I'll write the ad, but if I don't have to shoot it, like great. Because I, you know, as you scale, you need more and more creative, and then that's like a founder bottleneck or whatever. And then, you know, we started having, I was like, you know, if it works for Aaron, it'll probably work for all these other so we had like women on my team, etc., then UGC creators, and it kind of just snowballed from there. But I agreed, probably when you guys started, it wasn't like a I think people were more actively looking for it now. Uh probably when you guys first launched, it was more of like when they probably saw your ad, they were like, Oh, I never thought about that before, but it makes sense, which I think helps a lot.

SPEAKER_04 21:26

Yeah, I think our winning hooks at the time were like, Hey, business owners, do you hate filming your own ads? And do you feel awkward on camera? Those hooks were like gold for us. And yeah, I think it was a message that a lot of a lot of guys that were being like very much content creators for their brands and stuff, even then, that that message hit. They're like, Yeah, I hate doing this. I feel kind of uncomfortable that I have to do this.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

I don't know if you knew this or not or considered it, but is especially if you look at the term it's it's very funny how this works. You look at the cons like, you know, my market is like our core market at least when we started. We work with a bunch of different industries now was coaches, consultants, and agencies, right? But consultants and agencies are mainly dudes. Even even if they're doing the same stuff, a dude will identify with a consultant more than a coach on average. Coaches though are all women. Mainly women, I way more identify with that. And the other thing is too, is there's a lot of women who only work with women. And so I think a lot of people intuitively know this. And like I'll see, I'll give you an example because I am able to see so many offers. I'll see the same offer, like with very similar copy, and a guy will be doing it and he'll just be bombing like it'll suck. Woman, same thing, and it's like it's crushing. And it's just because it's not just because you know she's a woman and she's in the ad, it's just that there's a bigger market over there, then like there's not a lot of like dude coaches, in my opinion. You know, I don't know if you guys felt the same way.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Yeah, I mean, we see the same, we work with a lot of well, it's kind of like if you're an agency owner and you're there's so many bro like agency owners kind of look like you and I. Like they don't look like Emily. You look like an agency. I look like a traditional agency owner. I don't identify you look like you took Joel Kaplan's program. I didn't, but but I think that's important because when you go to make ads, you kind of look like everybody else, and there's natural sales resistance. Yep. So it just does not hit the same. And then same thing with we work a lot in the blue-collar space. A lot of blue-collar guys kind of look the same. So if you can instead, and they're selling to wives of the household, they're selling to women above 50 years old. So if you put somebody who actually looks like a wife of the household in the ad, it's not Emily who's actually our best you know face for that industry. It's actually, it tends to be an older, an older demographic. Who just looks like the buyer?

SPEAKER_01 24:02

It literally, yeah. Okay. I want to talk about this home service thing, but first you gotta answer 100 to 500 grand a month. What were the big key shifts or big challenges you had to overcome?

SPEAKER_00 24:11

I think we increased our price point. We had bigger price point options and we spent more on ads and did more of the same.

SPEAKER_04 24:17

And we tapped in to other markets.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

And we kind of we we saw okay, who are our top 10% best customers? Who are you know bottom 10% customers?

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Shifted your marketing right now.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Yeah, let's just literally shift our marketing to go after our top 10% who make us the happiest.

SPEAKER_04 24:34

Yeah. Have a five or 15k call out on who's spending what on ads.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

So what about operationally? Because I mean, scaling a done-for-you business is hard to scale. So was there any operational challenges there?

SPEAKER_04 24:45

We brought on a small but very mighty team. I mean, people doing extremely um we just have really clear roles for what each individual's doing, and all they do all day are those roles, whether that's we're talking copywriting, we're talking editing, being the on-camera talent. Um, Austin and I have actually remained as the two closers, so did not bring on a sales team. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

And um, yeah, I mean an example of that would be like our copywriter. It sounds so small, like, oh, I'll put the copywriter in the Slack channel with the client, but that that communication over and over and over again in that process, for us, our model, like not that scalable compared to it's just like a all we want him doing all day is copy.

SPEAKER_04 25:39

And yeah, I mean, we have a gal that's fantastic at client comms, and she has a great little dynamic going with that copywriter. And I mean, the conveyor belt just is it's moving, and it's so simple.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Like what's allowed you to keep so I mean, you're you're kind of saying a lot of this stuff already, but you guys run a really lean, like high margin operation. So what's allowed you to keep everything so just like lean, you know? Because a lot of agencies, like there's another one I know, I'll give you an example, I won't say who it is, but they're big, and but I know their margins probably aren't as good, right? Just because it's like, you know, a lot of agencies they do like 900 things for clients, right? And then it just becomes this big bulky operation. Um, so obviously part of that is you just focus on one problem. You know, is there anything else that that's helped like operationally?

SPEAKER_00 26:25

I think one thing is like um Emily has no ego, so it it's me seeing there's a lot of like content out there that's like scale, scale, scale, higher, higher, higher, ad spend, 20 to 30 percent of your revenue. And Emily is just like, I don't understand that. So she'll challenge me and be like, why was our marketing cost percentage 11% when our goal is 10%? And it's it almost puts a constraint on it where you have to kind of think, okay, well, how should I operate differently to fit within that constraint? And I think that's been a big unlock for just keeping things lean because we've just not even allowed ourselves the option to you know make those extra hires and and and spend more ad spend. So it it's just forced us to keep things leaner.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Yeah, what you're saying is basically you've made your scaling decisions not based on analogy and what other people are doing and what are the standards of the industry, and instead like challenging the assumption from the very beginning of like, well, why do we even have to do that? Yeah. I like to do the same stuff, you know, but it's like getting your team to do that too is is big.

SPEAKER_03 27:40

100% getting you getting you a little bit more on board for it too was I mean it's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

I mean you and you hear of home home improvement guys too. There it in that industry, it's five to ten percent marketing costs as a standard.

SPEAKER_04 27:53

So I think the I think the agency and the info spaces have been okay with being kind of inefficient. Everybody's okay with 20 to 30 percent marketing cost, and we see firsthand all these other businesses out there that are very, very efficiently spending a lot on ads and keeping marketing costs at that like five to twelve percent range. And it's opened up our eyes to just test way more ads. I mean, the the whole lever to pull is essentially the product we sell, so just have way better content and don't make excuses kind of for like why ads are so expensive right now.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Like, well, that's huge because most companies, I can tell you this because I work with a lot of companies in the space, their marketing cost is usually between 25 and 35 percent. Right. Right. And obviously that's a third of your whole cash collection just gone. And the difference between that, that's like a 3x. So, like, you know how Hermosy talks about LTB to CAC. So you could do a calculation to figure that out and la da da da da, and you gotta look at a bunch of stuff. One of the biggest proxies to actually look at that and just kind of see what it is very quickly, is just look at how much cash you collected and how much went to ads. Because over time, that basically is your LTB to CAC. Right, right. And so what you're saying is like you can operate at a 10X when a lot of other people were operating at you know three, three, which is which is crazy, right? And so, okay, home service. I do want to talk about this. And so you you tested, I think, the home service market, and that proved to be a big winner for you guys. So one thing I want to point out is I've seen a lot of companies in our industry, they have a tendency, and I'm even to a degree guilty of this myself, but we're trying to break out of it, of automatically just okay, well, we're just gonna target coaches, like we're just gonna target the industry, like we're just gonna target other info entrepreneurs opposed to looking at other traditional businesses out there. And I've seen like a great example of this is Daniel Isles. Do you guys know who he is? So I talked with him and I was like, you know, okay, you know, congrats on your success. Like, what do you think are the biggest shifts? Right? I should have him on the podcast, but what do you think of the biggest shifts? And he was like, Yeah, the biggest thing was I just was targeting coaches in the beginning, and then I started targeting like traditional businesses, and then all of a sudden we raised our prices to like 30, 40k, which was like way higher than what we had before, and we were doing like three million a month in like three months, you know, from like you know, not three million a month, very much, much lower than that. They just rapid scaled. And so a lot of people that they're stuck in going after info. I'm curious, what have you experienced? Like, what's been like working with like home service businesses? Like, give me give me some examples of like the type, like what's the size, what type of home service, and what's been working with them like versus let's say the info agency bro or your agency bro, 23 years old in the basement. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:55

So the home service guys are awesome. They're like, let's talk like psychographics real quick. They're married.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

They they've typically got like three years old.

SPEAKER_04 31:06

Yeah, two, two little two little girls. Uh they're they're they love their team. Like they're they're trying to obviously scale up their business, scale up their team, but they've got a family to feed, they they care about their Yeah, they have they have new res they have new responsibilities.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Right. It I mean it kind of fits in perfect because they want to, we we call it kiddifying their business. We want to kiddify our business one day, but for these guys, they want to kiddify their business, so they might hate filming ads or they don't have time to film ads, or they just don't want to because they have a family. So that plays into it a lot. We're a creative system where we'll just do it for you, big unlock. And then the second thing is with new responsibilities of kids, they're motivated to make money, and that's what we're helping them with. So those two things we've just found it our service is like made for them, and an agency owner coach doesn't necessarily have that.

SPEAKER_01 32:02

Well, do you find that they have more money than the average coach? And number two, that their LTV working with you is better than let's say the average info coach person.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

I'd say both.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Yeah, that's what I would imagine. Yeah. Because number one, they they're probably more likely because here's the thing about the coaching space that I think is there's like biz op and then there's kind of like coaching, you know, because you can kind of just say there's no barrier to entry to be a coach or an agency owner. You can kind of like watch a YouTube video or something, and then all of a sudden you're now an AI agency owner, you know, because you watched the YouTube video and then you decided that's what you're gonna do. And so, yeah, you might have an offer, which means I guess, and you have an LLC, which means you have a business, but financially, you're not much more qualified than like Biz Op, you know? Whereas if you're like there's a bigger barrier to entry to like at least having some employees and doing 500k a year, for instance, as a plumbing business or something. Sure. You know, like you have to kind of have you're gonna have better credit, you're gonna have at least some better cash flow. So I'd imagine they're they they probably have more money. And they're probably I'm I imagine they're probably not as likely to churn based on like their business. Oh, all of a sudden my business went under.

SPEAKER_04 33:22

Yeah, you know. No, we yeah, we never face that. I mean, even even your 500k call out, I'd say we're mostly servicing guys that are closer to that, you know, already like one to three mil a year mark. Yeah, one mil plus. Yeah, one mil plus isn't it? That's generally the market I see. Yep. Yeah. And you know, they've got at least two to three guys that need appointments to run. And I mean, we we love to work in the remodeling trades. They're typically selling a 12k plus thing. The service guys, I mean, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, they have high-ticket things to sell. Their narrative's a little bit more different just because they, in a lot of situations, historically, have gotten most of their business from Google. And all their Google leads in the service trades normally have that like emergency thing to fix, and that emergency thing to fix is not always the high-ticket thing.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:15

And so if we're able to, and what we've been able to do is kind of um just reframe the offers and get out ahead of those like emergency things and instead market the full replacement on the HVAC unit or the EV ascension to a panel upgrade or the water filtration system, whatever it is. And yeah, those have all done, you know, very well.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

The other thing I'll add on to that is there will be money going into garage door replacement, window replacement, AC replacement. So without marketing, like they're still getting business, so they have more runway, more cash. Where an agency coaching model, it's like you get clients by marketing.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

There's not just cash going there, which is why you, if you look at a lot of like private equity, they're going, they're buying up trades businesses, because there's money getting well, and the and the biggest thing too, I think, is that it's it's everybody's starting in HVAC or this or that, or in private equity, ever all the private equity shops are like all over that right now. I think the best positioning you can have, because it there's also AI, right? Which people see home service as relatively AI resilient. I mean, if robots are remodeling your kitchen, then I don't know what world we're living in, but you know, okay. I mean, what what other pivots am I gonna make right now? Like uh going with home services your clients is a pretty good bet. But I think a good way to position yourself is literally how you guys are, where you're kind of attached to the industry, but you're not, you know, the primary actor in the industry. So it's kind of like if that's the gold rush, you're like selling the shovels and the picks and not you're not rushing for the gold. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's fair. Cool. 500k a month to uh uh you know, eight figures, a million a month, etc. Uh just more of the same, or what what's been the biggest shifts there?

SPEAKER_04 36:07

Uh we killed off our smallest package. So naturally selling higher ticket things. We um we haven't mentioned this to you yet, but with about five to pen five to ten percent of the businesses that we're partnered with, we actually do manage their campaigns.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 36:24

And so with that five to ten percent pocket, we don't take a percentage of ad spend. We don't have equity in the business. We actually have a Rev share model in place. Oh, nice. I think a lot of guys like love the equity share approach because it sounds good.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

It sounds good. Yeah. I'm not a big fan.

SPEAKER_04 36:44

Yeah, I mean the likelihood of these guys selling eventually, it's like very low. Okay. Well, I think I think the Rev share model has it really started to pick up steam, going from you know, that 500 to a mil because we just started getting really killer results with our our guys that we're actually running their ads for.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

And um, yeah, so that increased your client LTV.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Yeah, but then outside of that, well, you just spent more on ads and and then you notice and then you notice okay, who are the biggest Rev share clients and what if we again position the marketing to go after those guys? Yeah. And it just it's uh it just filtering out more, honing in on who your best clients are in the marketing, and then it just gets better and better and better.

SPEAKER_04 37:27

And the other larger creative partnerships we were landing in that phase was also service serving uh lead ags. So we would partner with lead aggregators and essentially come in to be their number one creative provider. Yeah. They need a lot, a lot, a lot of volume of content. And so they've been, you know, fantastic partners as well, I'd say. And are those people mainly in home service? Uh we we see it all. I mean, we're in law, we're in insurance, we're in home service. I'd say those are our three core largest categories for the lead aggregators.

SPEAKER_01 37:58

Yeah, law has got to be a big one.

SPEAKER_04 37:59

It is, yeah. PIs kill, I mean Yeah, that's huge.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

Yeah. And they they do Facebook ads too. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Google, there it's so expensive. You know, a million dollars a click or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_04 38:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Cool. Uh so what is the ultimately the next step then? So, like, where do you wanna take this business to or scale it? What's the vision? Do you guys have the same vision? Is there disagreements between where you guys want to take it?

SPEAKER_00 38:25

We're just trying our best, our best out here. We're we're uh I eventually we're gonna we call it kiddify the business. So we're gonna try to not work as much as we are now. I would say that's the main thing. We obviously want to progress, do better, make more money, help more clients, but eventually the next phase will be all right, we can't be on sales calls all day long and doing a ton of work and just working long days. Even though we have a good work-life balance, it's just not we want to be able to at 11 a.m. go to like our favorite brunch spot, and I want to be able to take a tennis lesson at like 10 a.m. and and be able to do that type of stuff. Right now I can't, but that's just I'm an able person right now, so I'm I'm working.

SPEAKER_04 39:12

Yeah, we're loving it. I mean, we we love this current stage, and I love how I I love the the controlled scale, I guess, that we've had. But um, yeah, I mean I think I think the next phase will be developing out a little bit more of a of a mini team.

SPEAKER_02 39:29

Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:30

We we made a mistake of bringing on two closers that were part-time, and I mean won't do that again. So I I mentioned it's just been us on the calendar. We did, you know, try to try it out with it.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

We do. Yeah. And you could just pay them well, and then you're gonna get all that time back. And then do you need people for like operate, like somebody to manage the ops, or is that already kind of there?

SPEAKER_04 39:54

It's there. Um, yeah, it's I mean, I think me stepping off the calendar as well as you on calls is gonna allow for us to give a little bit more attention to the ops there too. But we have a s a small but mighty team there that's yeah, I mean, it would it would be in theory pretty simple to double right now.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

Uh-huh. Would you guys ever exit the business or no? Not even thought about it.

SPEAKER_04 40:20

I mean, I I can't say the thought hasn't crossed our mind, but like it's not on our radar.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

Yeah, you're not planning. No. But you never know. It would be what's cool about what you guys have done is that if you ever did want to do that, it's on the table. But if you build your business in a way in which it doesn't require, you know, you guys to be on sales calls, yada yada yada. Number one, you could exit, but also a good exitable business is a good business to just have. And having a lot of cash flow coming in is is great.

SPEAKER_02 40:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

You know, a lot of people who have a big lump sum of money, they, you know, it's interesting, you know, because a lot of those people are born like the tech world, and they really want the cash flow. Whereas our industry has the cash flow, but they're all like, oh my gosh, I don't have an exit. You know, so it's just always grass is greener on the other side, in my experience. That's what I've heard. So one thing just in terms of what you're seeing with the industry now, number one, I'm curious. I mean, obviously, when you did his ads, it was like twice the performance. Do you have any stats in terms of like on average, how much better just swapping a female face does?

SPEAKER_02 41:23

Do you have those numbers?

SPEAKER_00 41:24

I would I would say so there's a lot of things with creative that you can improve. So you have the face, you have like the way we like to look at it is like there's three M's improving an ad. Number one would be you change your messenger, or we would call this like the 3M framework. Number one, you change your messenger. So, for example, if you're selling to homeowners and currently it's a blue-collar guy, maybe try putting a wife of the household in the ad, and that's something that can improve the ad. So that'd be M Messenger. The second thing would be the message. So a lot of what I think we're good at is, yeah, for marketing purposes, we say put a female in ads to increase your ad ROI, which we see to be true. But that alone, because a lot of people think they could just go throw their wife on camera or you know, anyone. Yeah. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna get them their best performing ads. So that's where on the message, on the message side, I mean, we I mean, we're we've worked in over 100 industries. We work with very big advertisers, we can see okay, what ads are producing the best. And even if it's in another industry, because you know, human psychology is you know, it's relatively transferable to other industries, we could customize it for that offer and still win on proven messages. And then the third one is the money math. So a lot of people, if ads fail, as you probably know, you've worked with a lot of people, you see the money math on the back end just doesn't even make sense. So if you could fix that, as well as even to the market you're selling to, sell to the highest your top 10% customer who actually could easily afford your services, it allows you to get ads at scale. So I would say that's really where we're improving the ads. It's it's not just the face. I know that. I just want to tell everything.

SPEAKER_01 43:18

I know, so you're really helping. It's it's kind of the same thing I do with sales. Like, I can't just give you the sales rep, but I have to like improve your entire business so the sales rep can succeed. Yeah, like you can't just give them an ad with a female in it. Yeah, you got to make sure it's in the right system. I was just curious if you had like a data, like, oh, it's generally probably even just that is.

SPEAKER_00 43:37

Our main thing is like our goal is 33% win rate on ads. So every three ads we make, one of them can profitably buy. That's pretty high. Yeah, too. Very high. Like, I think industry average would be like 10 or 20 percent. 10 to 15. And then the third thing or the second thing would be our goal is to get their best performing ads within three months. And if we could do that, even with big advertisers like Like that's a big win, regardless of how we get there. Because we do have guys on our team. Sometimes we will put a husband and wife in the ad together. So that is something we we use.

SPEAKER_04 44:11

But well, and I think sometimes like the bar's either really, really high or what we're working with, it's quite simple to do super well. I mean, you take a you take the blue-collar guy, he's in the company shirt, he's standing in front of his wrapped truck, and you know, he's trying to spit out an offer. I'll give you a thousand dollars off your HVAC unit.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

It's like let's just redo it from scratch.

SPEAKER_04 44:33

Let's just, I mean, yes, putting a female in there, we're gonna, we're gonna double the row ads, right? Like, but sometimes, you know, we're working with accounts that have over 400 active ads in them already. And it's like, okay, game on, this is gonna be a little more, but but they're working with us for different reasons. Maybe they've already tested out a female, but they just need a they're they're trying to get out of their like for an example, like having, yeah, 400 active ads. Oftentimes those businesses, they have their own internal creative infrastructure already humming. They're just trying to get out of their own like echo chamber of ad ideas as an internal organization. So they tag team us and say, hey, you guys get exposure to so many other industries. You guys are probably sitting on so many other winning strips with really talented people that we'd be equally excited to test with in these ads. Like, let's let's just throw you guys into the mix here. We're not gonna try to tell you what to do either because we have our own thing that's pretty nicely dialed. And then that's just um, yeah, it's a different game, I'd say. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:35

What are some like interesting ads or ad concepts that you've seen work really well? Like if you just think about maybe a specific some specific examples from clients or something.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

Well, concepts like I mean, one hook that has done really well, and it's you could use it in a lot of uh industries would be like hardly anyone bothers with this, but it's the easiest way to save big as a homeowner. That I mean, that would be the hook. So that hook can get put onto like tons of different offers.

SPEAKER_04 46:07

Well, and I think even going back to one of our first killer case studies was me working with uh the the Cairo agency, the lead gen agency there. And you take all of your agency guys and your info guys out there that all kind of recite their ads the same. They're all kind of like trying to do the same thing. Some of them maybe are now testing with props and having fun with it there. But like my winning ad for them, like four and a half years ago, I we, you know, we had an image of the ad, and I'm like singing to the camera, this ad right here generated a doctor 20 new. And like that was so weird at the time for us to do something like that, but like it crushed. So uh, I mean, we we still use that concept today, like that.

SPEAKER_00 46:52

Yeah, we're seeing a lot of our best ads right now do have proof that is believable. And if you can have a process internally to be able to grab those clips from clients and then put them into your ads, longer shelf life, and those ads just they they can hold much bigger spends and and be said proof from believable proof, you mean like case studies that the client has and you're clipping it in? What do you mean? Um a lot of it would be like you do a client check-in call, and this would be right after a big win, you're just checking in with them, and they're like, Man, yeah, I had one of these the other day. It was like, man, Austin, and this guy was super skeptical. We spent 4K on ads and we generated $120,000 in sales, and it was just and this guy does not really run ads like that. He he's like new to advertising, and that's just a I'm like, great. Clipped, hit him up afterwards. Hey, can I get some a little love and support? We're doing a competition this week that we're aiming to get three positive video testimonials this week. We're at two. Would it be crazy if we just use this for our marketing person uh purposes? He's like, Of course you can, sure, use it. That's great. So then you could build a process like that, and then you use that in your content. Yeah. And it and it just we need to do more of that too, just coordinating it, you know. It just it's just making the ass too, having a copy and paste template that everybody knows to use. Because in your client conversations, you're probably gonna get those like really unique sound bites that are good. Yeah. We uh I mean, we had another one too where guys like, Well, guys, last year was awesome. We made 4.2 million dollars from BSL Queen ads. And I'm like, all right, that's great. Like, I'm and same same process. Clip, can I use this? Great client relationship, and then you just have this flywheel of proof that you could use in your ads on proven bodies that you know have already worked. Yeah, just putting that.

SPEAKER_04 48:50

So use them as the hook, and then we have like our one to two proven bodies right now. This is like for BSL queen ads. Yeah that frame has been.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

Any other things that just typically like work really well for clients that when a new client comes on, you're just you're always kind of going back to those like key winning ideas.

SPEAKER_00 49:06

Is there one or two more? A lot of it is gonna be using a proven creator that is proven on tonality and authenticity. So they've already proven themselves to us that they have that. Uh-huh. And then the second thing is they have a lot of data backing them too.

SPEAKER_04 49:21

Like it's it's one thing to just it's one thing for somebody to be to actually be able to deliver a good ad, but our team of 40 have a lot of data on them to 100%.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

And then the second thing is we have a rolling Google Doc of just ads that have done a certain amount in revenue. We we call it our like 100k script ad vault. So any ad that's what's the best one? I don't know the best one off the top of my head. But there's I mean, there's tons of them. It's just been like years of years of like building that up. So then you could see, okay, well, what if I just customize a script? You could pull stuff from a bunch of different scripts and then customize it for another company, and it has a very high hit rate just by having something that you can reference.

SPEAKER_01 50:07

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SPEAKER_04 51:10

I have the acting background, so I actually have a lot of friends from my past working for us now.

SPEAKER_01 51:17

Yeah, that's perfect.

SPEAKER_04 51:18

We've created a really great dynamic with our tight-knit core group. A lot of them also have friends that are in the industry and are killers on camera.

SPEAKER_01 51:29

Nice.

SPEAKER_04 51:30

Every couple months we'll say, Hey, like, know of any other friends that are doing this type of thing, and they say, Yeah, I've got three ladies that I think would crush. And you know, we have our audition process and slowly trickle them into the the equation. And I mean, to Austin's point, we've definitely got our core group that do or die are gonna like kill it most of the time. But um, yeah, I'd say between my my connections and just being in the film and acting industry in the first place had was was a really nice way to initially build it up.

SPEAKER_01 52:04

Because with me, it was like when I first started doing sales recruiting, like I wasn't a recruiter, right? I just sat knew a lot of sales guys. Right. And so I just like look in my network and I make a post and I'd be like, but I had so many people follow me for sales training that I I had in the beginning like a really good amount of people. And then one of my favorite saying, it's very, very similar to what you're saying, what but one of my favorite sayings for sales is good salespeople know other good salespeople. And so a big one of our three top sources of recruits for our pipeline is just asking salespeople who were proven to be good. Yep. Like, hey, who else do you know? Because a lot of times, like, that's the first time that they're selling something that's remote, they're making 20k a month, they're not having to go door to door. Right. And they're like, oh man, like, yeah, when I worked in Southwest or whatever selling books, I know 10 people who would kill for this, and they're killers and they're tired of going door to door.

SPEAKER_04 52:57

So well, what's been cool too is I'd say gals that are more in our age range, funny enough, you end up asking if their moms have any experience in it because like if they've got the personality for it, sometimes the moms are also, oddly enough, really good. And we we put that, yeah, we we put we put them into the into the system. There, there's some things to you know fine-tune, but they're they're also really, really good.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

And what's helpful about the growth partnerships as well is we can we have better insight into the real numbers of how those ads perform as well. So it's very easy for us to look at and kind of be like thumbs up or thumbs down just based on the data of like, okay, this ad clearly is crushing it. Who, like, what was the name of that crater? Good. All right. And then, hey, this crater, uh no. And and that's how we're able to kind of foster just people that are actually proven. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 53:51

Uh, in terms of like funnels and ways to acquire clients, have you seen what are the things you see just most working in, especially like our industry right now? Is it the standard stuff that you would expect, or have you seen anything unique?

SPEAKER_00 54:06

Good ads, filter out bad fit leads through conditional logic, lead form, or standard. We're using a uh calendar system that does it within the calendar system. Yeah. VSL booking page, thank you page. It's it's it's basically a standard VSL funnel, is our is our is our still our bread and butter.

SPEAKER_01 54:29

And still for clients too. Have you worked with any clients where you see some like weird something weird, you're like, holy shit, this is different, but it's working really well.

SPEAKER_00 54:40

No, like I I like the VSL funnel.

SPEAKER_04 54:42

There's uh I mean our home service guys aren't rocking with a VSL funnel. We go straight from the elite form to to booking, but that's that's totally different though.

SPEAKER_00 54:51

Yeah, I mean, in in the trades business or some stuff, you you might have uh an AC pricing calculator. How much does it cost to replace your AC in 2026? That's a unique type of funnel, and that is more to the people we're serving. But if you're an agency or a coach who I know is probably a lot of people watching this, I mean a standard VSL funnel works really well. Where you want to try to solve for is like how can you create a so basically there's like the three C's. You have your you have your call out, so who are you actually can you fix your call out by going more upmarket? What problems are you speaking to? So core problem would be the second one. So like certain like rich people have different problems than not rich people, and then the third one is conversion mechanism. So what type of angle can you put on something that is already being sold in the marketplace? The mistake is you do you try to sell something that you can't find another seven to nine figure company running meta-ads for. But how could you take something like an example, SEO proven in the marketplace? A lot of people are buying SEO, it will always be a thing. But that if you just run, hey, we do SEO for companies, it's not good enough. So what type of conversion mechanism or unique mechanism can you do to improve and make that sound better?

SPEAKER_01 56:09

Yeah, I call that just unique mechanisms like the main word for it, right? But for people who don't like sometimes they're like, unique mechanism, what's that? And then they think it's just like a name, like P90X. Yeah. And it's more of an easier way to think about it, I tell most people, is it's just how are you meaningfully differentiating yourself? Because if you're just like, hey, I do ads, you're basically a commodity, right? But if you're able to position yourself in a way where there's something unique and different about what you're doing and you're meaningfully differentiated, it's really what it is, is it's because you're different, you're giving somebody a reason to reach out. But another thing you said was really good was the call out and then also talking to the problems in a way where you're talking to problems of people who are actually in the more qualified portion of your market opposed to the lower portion. So, what are some examples of ways you've done that for clients and like what you recommend people do there? Because uh, just to give you context, I'll tell people the same thing and they'll go, like, okay, well, yeah, I'm gonna for my health offer, I'm just gonna say, Hey, busy professionals, you know, and like, okay, great, but everybody thinks they're a busy professional. So you just still get the bottom of the market. So what do you tell clients to do for that?

SPEAKER_00 57:23

So a lot of what we're again, a lot of our clients are in the local service space, so that's that's what's most relevant, but it it goes back to you have your call-out, but your call-out might not just be, hey, Georgia homeowners, you also could do county-specific call-outs, which we find to be really good. So you're you're going even more niche where you might not be able to scale as far and spend more money on it. But if you have a bunch of counties you're running ads for, crushes. So that would be the call out, but then you also have certain hooks that scale better than other hooks. So, you know, hardly anyone bothers with this, but it's the easiest way to say big as a homeowner. That's a that's a broad kind of problem-aware type of hook. So you have that core problems within that in Florida, we have hurricanes. So one problem for maybe an affluent person in Florida is they care about peace of mind and not being displaced when another hurricane happens in Florida. That's a rich person problem, right? Not, hey, are your energy bills really expensive? Exactly. So that's a much different problem in in in the actual what you're speaking to in the ad. Yeah. And then you just take it all the way through, but that I mean, just kind of think, what do these people actually care about? Speak to that.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

Yeah. Do you know who John Madsen is? He was the very last person I had on the podcast. And so he's the best example of somebody who's done this really well. So he does basically like online personal training. I mean, there's a lot more like better stuff to the product than that, and they do like some integrated medicine and stuff like that. But you could categorize him in the online personal training space, right? He does 50 million a year. Now I know because I would say probably like 10%, which is a large segment of my clients, are in the health space. Most of them, even if they're really good, they they struggle to get past, let's say, 300 to 600 grand a month. And so if you look at the differences between John and them, John charges 10K on the front end and 40k on the back end. They're charging like 3,900 bucks, right? So why is he able to do that? He's working with he works with super wealthy people. Now, I obviously if I went to any of these other people and I was like, hey, you should just work with both of your people, they're like, Well, we're trying, we're calling them out. Hey, moms who are busy professionals over 40. But the key is, and what he was able to do so much better than everybody else, is sure the call-outs like, hey, if you're making 150k a year and you're a dad or whatever and you're over 40. But what everybody misses is he only speaks to problems that resonate that only those people would have. You know? And and a great way to think about it too is like if I let's say if I talk about lead generation as a problem, I'm gonna get a lower segment of my market than if I talk about, hey, do you need a closer? Right? Because by the nature of speaking to that problem, it presupposes that you already have lead generation. If I say, hey, do you need a sales manager? Same thing. If I say, hey, do you need a client success director or a client success person, same thing. Hey, do you need to outsource CFO service because your books are a mess? Same thing. You know, does that make sense? Totally. And so that's where I think people miss is you have to speak to the problems in a way where, and this is the problem with BizOp, is because if you're just like, hey, do you want to make money? Like you're just the the pixel's just gonna optimize down to the deepest, darkest pits of Facebook and people who you're like, I don't even want to work with these people. Yeah, you know, like like they're getting out of jail or they're homeless or they got a tattoo on their face. I'm not even kidding. Yeah, I used to run a B2C on that. So the key is is you have to speak to the problem that those people are experiencing that the other people won't resonate with.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:13

Yeah, one thing to add on to that too is just build like having runway to be able to pay what an industry average cost per call is or cost per client of that marketplace. Because sometimes you okay, well, yeah, I'll just I'll go after if I'm an agency owner. I only want to speak to eight-figure e-commerce companies. Unfortunately, there's less of them out there, so you're gonna pay way more for that customer, so you just have to be prepared for that, and then that's where it's it is helpful to you know have good practices of saving money, having runway so you can get in the game on that thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

Yeah, the key is finding, and this is what John did as well, is because he basically his audience is accredited investors. I know that's like he's not calling them out that way, but through studying what he was doing, I was like, okay, he's just going after accredited investors, which is a great example of like he intersected enough TAM with still high enough quality. Does that make sense? Because I mean, yeah, like I can't. If I called out, hey, are you a business owner doing a million a month? You know, I mean, I'm not gonna get like I might get my cost per acquisition might be like 25k. You know, it'd be crazy. So AI, uh, what are you guys seeing with like AI? Because we're using some AI creatives that are just like made up, you know, it's not even a and they're and they're female too, not even a real person, and they're doing pretty well. So are you guys using AI? Are you guys thinking about doing that in your roadmap at all? Have you seen like it's tough to get those to work? Like, what are your guys' thoughts? I'm sure you've thought of it, obviously. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:51

We've seen some some decent top-of-funnel metrics with some of the AI videos. So you'll get a cheaper lead, you might get a cheaper booked meeting, but from a show rate standpoint, from a cost of close standpoint, we've had businesses literally run our ads parallel with a pretty robust testing system on AI videos. I had a guy that was literally testing 10 new AI videos a day, spending 10 grand a day, had 20 creatives from our team, actually turned our 20 ads off because the AI videos seemed to be producing better. They were producing a cheaper lead and they were producing that cheaper call. But from a sales metric standpoint, our our ads were attracting a much higher quality individual. They were scaling more efficiently. The the AI videos tend to break after, you know, 10 grand a day is not not a lot of money in ad spend. So like they were kind of bugging out a little quicker. And yeah. And then and then I mean, I what we see in the home service space, a lot of these guys are toying around with AI videos and things as well. And you mentioned it earlier, but from like a skepticism standpoint, I kind of view an ad as that like initial handshake through the screen.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:06

How do I feel after watching whoever it is on camera from an ad? The AI you can still tell.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:13

Yeah. And it eventually will be there, but for the time being, I mean, our focus is real people. We just see it work better. But it doesn't mean that AI doesn't work. It just we find like lower win rates.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:25

There's probably a way in which you can just I mean, if I was you for what this is worth, consider adding it into what you're doing because it could just so the way the main way we use it, if I'm remembering correctly, is you're like you're right. Doing like a two-minute full ad through AI is really tough. Because number one, it actually costs a lot of like tokens to actually make that, and then like you gotta like you know, you might only be able to put out 10 or 15 or even 30 second clips, is the most I've seen through like Cling at a time. Right. And then sometimes like you produce the next clip and it's like the person freaking looks different, and and they just don't sound as good. So you need a lot of b-roll and a lot of editing, but the way we use it is essentially we'll have somebody in the first five seconds whose AI dropped the hook, and then it goes into a proven ad, whether that's UGC or somebody else. Interesting. So like it can turn sometimes a winning ad into like 20 variations if we do it that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:23

I've seen the opposite too. You put a real person five seconds, yeah, and then it goes into a proven ad. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, both ways.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:31

That's cool. And are you guys using AI at all in your like operations or anything to streamline like management of staff, anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:40

Not really, to be honest. We're like our focus is what is a constraint, and it's it's how can we get more customers, how can we get more value uh from our clients, and then how can we make our clients more money? And in terms of you know, kind of where I feel like our constraints. Are it's it's just filling up the calendar space and um and yeah, just kind of doing more of the same and and making it better. So we haven't spent the time probably we should be on AI, but you know, in the future that can be more of something that we do.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:16

Yeah, yeah. My suggestion we hired a guy in South Africa who, and it's not even an expensive hire who is like a beast with this stuff, like 5k a month. You should just hire one of those people and just let them let them like build some stuff in your company. I'm curious, like what are what are like one or two things about it? I'll give you a bunch of ideas. So that's the thing is you know what's really interesting is that I've thought about this a lot, is it has it's definitely made our employees more productive, there's no doubt, but it's not something that's necessarily replacing labor. I almost just think it like it just makes our business work better. So I'll give you a few examples. So we have like for certain clients who want salespeople, but they're not ready for salespeople, we'll like set up and launch like their ads for them, their initial ads. Um, and so we'll have to set up the funnel and the GHL and all this stuff. Like we have a whole software that this guy built that basically after they input their assets and their data, just the agents just do it, right? So like we have that software, and then we still have people who have to communicate and face with the clients, obviously. Sure. But that just allows it to like all of the API connections and the connections and all the just it's all gone, right? So that's a really good one. Another one for sales, and this wouldn't work, you know, you guys it doesn't really matter for you guys right now, but if you had a bigger sales team, is you know, we have like let's say 10 or 11, 12 salespeople, 13 salespeople, and that's just closers, and we have more setters, etc. Well, you can't even if I have two sales managers, they can't review every call. And what they're trying to do, and the way we do it, is we're trying to essentially figure out okay, what are what I call the fringe deals? So what are the calls that could have closed that didn't close? And those are usually the best ones to review. But obviously, finding those is a certain process. So you can train, you know, we have a whole software that does this now, um, that basically is trained on all my sales training, yada, yada, yada. And it basically scores each call depending on how it was conducted, and then it flags anyone that is a qualified lead that probably could have closed but didn't close. And then those are the ones where we can find because the thing is the reps, a lot of times they don't submit to review the calls that could have closed but didn't close because they think they're gonna close. Usually it goes to a follow-up and they're like, oh yeah, it's gonna close. By the time the follow-up doesn't show up, they're they've already moved on. They're you know, they're not even thinking about it anymore. They're like, oh, that's kind of weird. So, but we can catch those deals before the follow-up. And then sometimes what we do is if the call if the manager reviews it and finds there's a bunch of issues, it's like, oh, that's not an 80% follow-up, that's like a 20%. But then the manager can intervene and then and actually call the person before the follow-up and then actually raise the probability a lot, right? So all QC manager stuff, that's good. Like on uh, you know, we have 10, 12 account managers who work with the clients, same thing with them, an account manager dashboard, making sure they respond with Slack at all the same times. We can see all their unresponded channels, we could see any clients based on sentiment that's unhappy, you know, or that might be a risk in the future. So, like these are things that is that replacing anybody on my team? No, but is it making my company work better? Yeah, you know, and so like for you guys, you could literally have through AI, let's say, a software that's hooked up and API to all of your clients who are running ad campaigns, and then you could probably see with all your creators and all your UGC creators, like a leaderboard of who has the best stats, like who got the most spend, who got the best CAC, who got this, and then even do comp competitive awards like on a leaderboard. Like that's something you could do. Is that a big constraint in your business right now? No, but that's just an example of something fun.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:01

So there's all sorts of stuff, and yeah, just just I do use Fathom a lot. I love Fathom for it'll automatically go in the close, and then you have a breakdown of what was so what was the problem, you know, what do we talk about, what are next steps, and it just makes if you forget what you talked about on the call, it it makes it very easily.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:20

It's like easily packaged for you to uh I mean all my sales guys kind of just jerry-rigged one version themselves, but we have like an in way nicer like proposal that they can like press a button and just based on the transcript, whatever, generates the 95% of the proposal. Yeah, and then it's just like okay, edit, edit, edit, edit done. And it looks amazing. It can even pull in case studies that are essentially just like the client to embed in the proposal or like on a sales call. Uh this is a super easy. You just click your Claude, the Slack. We have a Slack channel that's client wins, all client wins go in there. So Claude, the client wins, that channel's been around since 2019. So, you know, you'll know this as you have closers because you're in a in a space where you can probably remember a lot of your clients. I I can't even remember a lot of my clients that I had five years ago, even if they were super successful. And my sales guys weren't here five years ago, right? So they can just ask Claude, hey, I'm talking to a roofing business doing two million a year, struggling with lead gen. Is there anybody like this? And it'll just search that channel, pull up three people, even if it's from freaking 2021, right? And so, um, because you know, if you have a really good, like perfect just this cloud, this case studies banger, and it's exactly like the person I'm speaking with, you know that person's gonna be more likely to close. Totally. Because you're just like, yeah, like this person's literally just like you. Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:44

We have those pre-built out, but we're not using it at all.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:46

It's just a little like yeah, just a little chat, like I'm talking to this person, bam. Because then once you have, you know, you guys are the salespeople right now, so it's just not as big of a deal because you remember so much and you can just sell well. But as a salesperson, like they're not gonna know and memorize all those case studies. I mean, they you know, if you train them right, that's what we try to do, but now we don't have to do that. They just ask the bot. Yeah, you know, and then bada bing, bada boom. It's good. Nice and easy. Yeah. So let me see if I have anything else. Oh, I had one more thing. So, what's it been like? So, husband and wife working together. How do you guys divvy responsibilities? And what are like the challenges and then also the cool things about working together as a married couple?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:28

I feel like responsibilities have been pretty clear the the whole time. I I'd say I wear like mostly a CEO hat, and Austin wears mostly CMO hat. CTO a little too. You do, I mean you do a lot of. You're like on the back, like doing all your nerdy. We're just two guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:50

Yeah, we're just two people getting after it. But yeah, see, I'm more CMO, CEO. She's more on creative, I'm more on our growth partner, Regger stuff.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:01

I started just as sales, and then when we got when we had to take a lot more calls, you ended up jumping on sales. So, yeah, I mean the split's been fairly I don't know, it hasn't been yeah, it's been straightforward to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:18

In terms of like the dynamic, I personally love the dynamic. I can't imagine like having a any other like business partner. Yeah, I feel like we we work very, very well together.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:31

Like and what do you think allows you to do that, you know? I would just say good communication. It's I mean, we we all have the same goal of we want to keep improving as a partner both in our relationship, both in business, both in health, both in our family life. So as long as we're just waking up, putting our best foot forward, I mean it it it flows very it's really not as hard as what people might think. And I don't know if that's just unique to us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:02

But we have a really easy communication style and and and we did date for three years before doing anything business related together. So I think like dating, we sussed out like things at that level, like figured out communication.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:15

Well, we did we did business before we got married.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:18

I know, but we've been together now for a little while. So the first three years, we really you did your thing, I did my thing, like at that time, encouraged me to do like RIA and like had me, you know, we but we were very much doing our own things, and I think figuring things out as a couple and like getting to know each other there, and then like going into business, we had a lot of that stuff kind of already sorted, and then business was a little bit more, I don't know, easy, straightforward.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:45

Do you think there's certain couples who are definitely not meant to be business partners?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:49

Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:50

Yeah, why is that?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:52

Because they haven't really figured out the couple thing together first, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:55

That's probably true.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:55

And then like good luck trying to do do business together.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:00

Um I would imagine your your marriage and your relationship has to come first and it has to be solid, and then from there it makes the business part a lot easier.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:09

Yeah, I I agree. And I think something that I I care a lot about doing other things. Like I can't work for 16 to 18 hours in a day and not have like touched grass. I I'm always the one that's like asking Austin if we can like play tennis before we like start our work day. Or he wants to be on the laptop past like 6 p.m. and I'm like, hey, it's time for us to go out to dinner now. Like he wants to grab the laptop and like work at 10 p.m. at night, and I'm like, no, it's time for us to go to bed. Like I need to do a lot of other things than just like the company. Otherwise, I don't really like I I do feel like the company's pulling me away from like other things that I genuinely really still need to do. And I think that's been a little bit of a dynamic that we've sorted out together. I think, do you like it?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:03

Yeah, I think I think having those goals of like we want to play tennis in the mornings before we start work. We want to go grab a coffee before we start work, we want to be done by 6 p.m. so we can go to a restaurant we enjoy. So if those are our goals, well, it forces us to work much faster, less time for binge and Instagram while you're kind of in between calls. Like you're just you're just dialed throughout the day, and then afterwards you have fun and you can go play.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:31

Yeah. That's that's how I am as well. Is I am like I start at seven or eight, and then I end it, I mean, I end ritually at five every single time. I don't know how people just like carry on their work throughout the evening, but the thing is with me is like when I end at five, I'm fucking exhausted. Right. So and I and I really am very, very efficient. Like I used to be back in the day, like down to the 15 minutes of what I'm doing every hour. That was a little overkill. But I'm like very efficient and mindful outside of like lunch basically, of I just want to maximize that time, you know, which I'm glad I did because I think it set you well up for like kids. You know, I don't know how people who just let work like just go into all hours of the night. Yeah. I don't know how first of all, I don't know, that just sounds unpleasant to me. But second of all, it's like, how are you gonna build a life then? Because you have to have things, they have to be they have to come, yeah, compartmentalize or have certain boundaries, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:29

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:30

I I and I think you tell yourself, well, I'll just work harder and longer than everybody else, and you kind of tell yourself, like, I will be better if I do that. But I mean, when you're when you're staying up late till 2 a.m. and then you wake up later and you have just such variance in your day-to-day schedule, it's so hard to be actually focused, dialed in during the day compared to just you you do have those schedules. It I find it easier to just build momentum and and get what we need to get done done.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:01

Yeah, and we're like hungry to start. Like, we I mean we love work, like don't get me wrong. Yeah, but it's definitely like what we want to be doing right now. So the other stuff isn't like, yeah, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:13

So thanks for coming on, guys. I they find you at VSL Queen, probably the easiest way to find you guys.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:18

Yeah, yeah. Um VSLqueen.com, Instagrams, VSL.queen.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:23

Sweet. All right. Thanks for having us for coming out, guys. Yeah. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably gonna like this podcast I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here.