I Made $31 Million This Year... Here’s What I Learned

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Transcript

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We'll do 31 million this year in 2025. And in this video, I'm going to give you my three biggest learning lessons I've had this year, and how I'll use those lessons to help me get to 50 million next year. And the first lesson is to only give your company ideas at the rate that they can digest them. So Jeff Bezos' mentor once told him, Jeff, you have enough ideas to kill your company. And you can only give your company ideas at the rate that they can digest them. And it's true, and it kind of corroborates with the saying that more companies die from indigestion than starvation. So I learned this the hard way. And in fact, I got put through the absolute ringer with this. So just to give you some context, in January of 2023, I was doing $4 million a month collective between two portfolio companies. So I had a B2C sales certification company that was RCA, and then a B2B sales staffing and sales training and scalier sales team company, which is basically SDA. Then I got the not so brilliant idea of expanding and taking on eight portfolio clients. And so these were clients that we took a minority percentage in for no money down. Then in exchange, we ran their marketing and sales. And here's the thing every one of those eight deals that we took on, every single one of those grew. But that wasn't the problem. We had a different problem, which is really just we weren't getting a good ROE or return on effort. So in other words, these companies were doing well, but we were working insanely hard doing all their marketing and sales for very little profit and return. It almost felt like between those eight companies, we could have just started a whole other company and gotten it to several million a month and just kept way more profit. And instead, we were getting barely anything. And all of these companies were doubling or even tripling. Okay. And some of that was a combination of the deals we chose. Some of it was a combination of how we structured the deals. If you want to watch a video on that, I have one on the channel called I Build It to 7 million a month and shut it down. That breaks down all my learning lessons with that. But the key thing to know about this is basically we went from eight, we decided to uh call all of those down and drop some down to where we were just down to a medical company, which we took 50% of the equity in. Then we went on a crazy scale path to that company, took it from 50k a month to 3 million a month in 14 months. So crazy growth rate. So by the time we got to January 2024, we were doing 7 million a month, all three companies combined, collected in one month, which sounds pretty cool. Again, but here's the problem my profit in January 2024 was literally the same or even a little bit less than my profit in January of 2023. And despite that, I was doing double the amount of work at least and double the amount of stress. And on top of that, each of the companies weren't executing at the highest level that they could. And I want to be clear, it's not like they were terrible or they were bad, but I have a very high standard. I know what great and excellent execution looks like. And it just felt like we couldn't do any one thing well because we were spread too thin between too many different things. So at that point, I made an emotional U-turn. So essentially, I went a little fast here. I shut down the B2C, was doing $20 million a year, just shut it down. And then six months later, I left the medical company. Okay, so my idea was of doing all of this and kind of going back down to one company is that I could create more success, maybe not in top line, but in profit by tripling down into one company instead of three companies. But what actually happened was I made the same mistake as before, but instead of making it with three companies, I just made it with one company. So I'll explain. So looking back in context, the portfolio I had of those three people or those three companies didn't work because we were really just two to three high-level executives short. So I think if we would have had a few key extra people, we actually would have been fine with the three companies. And also, if we just hadn't grown everything so fast, we also probably would have been fine. But we didn't. And so what happened was is our growth outpaced our leadership capacity. So going back to the lesson, the amount of stuff that we were doing outpaced our ability to digest those ideas. And unfortunately, even going from three companies to one company, I still didn't learn this lesson. So when I took back just the one company, what happened was is I launched five different growth initiatives all at once because I had all this energy from these three different companies. And I'm like, let's just push it all into this one company. So we launched two different outbound divisions. We launched a speaking sponsorship and events division, we launched con like a media division, which really didn't do anything because we didn't have the time to do it, and we also launched a mid-market division. And guess what happened? None of those things went exceptionally well because we were spread too thin. And I didn't really realize this until February 2025 this year, to where February 2025 was a weird month because it was the most top line our B2B company has ever done, but it was one of our worst PLs our B2B company has ever had. And really what I realized at that point is it was just so much bloat from all these different initiatives. And the thing is, is that 90% of our revenue was coming from just two different funnels. So I made the decision to cut everything out except for outbound, which was doing well. And since we made that change, our profit has gone up by 3x. Really quick, if you're looking to land a lucrative high-ticket closing role, so something that's six or multiple six speakers a year, completely remote, and with an offer owner that has good lead flow, good comp structure, as an actual offer that gets their clients' results and the offer owners are cool, but you kind of feel like that you don't have the track record or the experience or even the connections to break into the industry and land an offer that's actually good, one that's worth their salt. I want to invite you to take a free quiz that I essentially created that will assess where you're currently at in high-ticket sales, whether you're a complete beginner or you're very advanced or somewhere in between. And then after the quiz, it's gonna give you a customized game plan of how to up level your high-ticket sales career, whether that's just breaking in or taking your current position and really leveling it up to the next position. So the quiz is completely free. It takes 60 seconds. The game plan video is also completely free. So check that out. Just click the link in the description and now back to the video, which leads me to lesson number two, which is to exploit the upside you've already earned. So let me give you an example of how this works. So if you run ads, there's essentially two ways you can continue to scale your ads. Okay, you can drive down your front-end costs, which is like through better media, better funnel, better creative, making more ads, all of that stuff. You can try to drive down CAC, or you can basically try to drive up LTV, or really just in other words, because it's not just LTV, it's driving up, getting more out of every dollar that you can spend, which is really increasing LTV, but also another thing called DPL, which is dollar per lead, which is basically just how much you're making on the front end versus how much you're making on the back end. So you can either try to drive CAC down or you could try to get more out of the existing ad spend that you're already spending. Okay. So for instance, to get more out of what you're already spending, you could maximize your setup performance, you could maximize your email performance, same with SMS, you could increase your closing rate, increase price in AOV, you could do better with remarketing, you could increase your LTV in your back end or add a back end, do cross sells, upsells, etc. Which do you think is easier? Obviously, if you're watching this video, you probably know the second one is easier. The biggest companies in the world, they don't focus. I mean, it's not that they don't try to focus on lowering their CAC and their ad costs, but really where their main focus is focus is, and the reason why they're the biggest companies in the world is they do the exact opposite. They try to increase LTV as much as possible, which is really what Hermosy's books, you know, the uh offer book as well as the new money models book, that's what they're really all about, is not just trying to drive down lead costs as much as possible, but creating a money model or an offer that allows you to really charge a premium so you have a really amazing LTV to cack. So in 2025, when we removed all these initiatives and we started to focus and we had a lot more bandwidth, where we allocated that bandwidth was to a lot of new ideas that weren't necessarily like new initiatives, like whole new things, but just new ideas within our existing two funnels that we're working, just to increase the amount of return that we were already getting from spending money on ad. So I'll give you a few examples. The first thing that we did was we maximized our setter performance. So we ran an analysis on the optimal amount of leads our setters should be getting per month. Okay. So the way we did this is we looked at monthly data for how many setters we had in X, Y, and Z month, how many number of leads we had that month, how many number of sets we had that month, and then ultimately our lead to set ratio. Then what we did is we identified essentially the point of diminishing returns. In other words, at what level do the setters have too many leads to where it starts to drop lead to set ratio? Okay, now here's the thing. I've consulted 3,000 plus clients on our sales team, setter teams. I run a sales recruiting business. So I know the common benchmarks for how many leads setters should be getting per month, even for different industries, different offers based on your funnel. Like I'm very good with those benchmarks. So I was using those same benchmarks for my business. But here's the thing after running the analysis, we actually realized that the common benchmarks were way off for us. And we were actually way understaffed on setters. So as it turns out, the benchmarks that we were using that clients actually tend to have success with, and really, this is for our B2B company. So some of these benchmarks came from our B2C company as well. What we realized is just using those, we were just giving our setters way more lead than they can handle, which frankly is kind of embarrassing. Uh, because I'm somebody who I would, I would admit is I'm pretty good at this, I know what I'm doing. But I think it's a lesson of like this is what happens when you're just unfocused for like 18 months to two years and you have too much stuff going on. You can't even look at details like this. So, coming back to the story, once I realized this, we quickly just hired more setters, took us like 30 days, and then guess what? Our CAC dropped by literally 20%, saving us millions of dollars a year on ad spend. Okay. Now, the second thing we implemented also has to do with setters, also kind of embarrassing, is a pipeline setter division. So this is a setter team that is solely focused on calling old leads. So, really, our inbound setter team, our MDR team, is essentially working new leads. So leads that are like seven days or less old, or 10 days or less old. Whereas the pipeline setter team takes it from seven to ten days to basically all the leads in the CRM. So they're gonna get way lower answer rates and be doing way more volume. Whereas the newer uh the setter team that's on the newer leads, they're a little bit more experienced. There are really good setters, they're hitting the hottest leads, but they're working them with higher frequency. Okay. So we built out a whole setter team for just all of our old leads, which we have thousands and thousands and thousands, obviously you probably do too, just sitting on the CRM. So, to give you a little backstory on this whole thing, all right? We had built out this division before, and we had built it out multiple times, but we never really took it seriously, we never put that much time into it. And what would happen is is like we would have some pipeline setters, as we would call them, they would do okay. And then as we needed to expand or we had a churn on the main setting team, we would just like promote them through. So, like we never really like took that division like a serious, hey, this is a new division. Okay. So, in other words, we were doing it, but we just weren't taking that seriously. Then what happened was at my own mastermind event, again, kind of embarrassing, but at my own mastermind event, one of my clients mentioned how he built out a pipeline setter division for his business and it added almost $10 million a year run rate to his business. So, again, like this is my jam. So I'm kind of embarrassed, but this is just what happens when you're unfocused. Like, you just don't go deeper on currently what you're already doing, getting more out of everything that you're already doing. So uh after that event, I was like, man, what are we doing? This is like so obvious. We've done this before, we just never took it seriously. So boom. I mean, the nice thing is, since we are good at this, we basically implemented the full division, like hired a ton of people, implemented the full division, trained them within 30 days. Within 30 days, we doubled our sets. Okay. And we're really just getting started. We should be able to probably like two or three months from now get an extra 30% of revenue with no additional ad spin at all just by calling old leads. That's it. Okay. Now, another big thing we did this year, this is the last one I'll give you, then I'll move on to lesson number three, is we implemented something called live transfer closer. So if you're in the industry, you know the show rates are a problem. So what we do is we run tons of data on our applications, and then based on several data points, we either double book or single book appointments. If you want to know how to do this, I have a show rates training in my YouTube channel somewhere. You can check that out. It's much more detailed on this. But I'll just give you an example. Um, if a lead confirms the appointment, or is they're from our website, or they're doing over 100 grand a month, or they're from IG DMs, or they have been following me for over six months. That's an automatic single book. Okay. But let's say if they don't confirm, or they're from certain industries that we know show at lower rates, or like they put one word in their application, we might double book. Okay, I'm just giving you kind of broad strokes that's more advanced than this, but it's it's a longer video that you'd have to go through yourself. So, anyhow, this maximizes the amount of live calls each closer has per month, which is critical because really what you're trying to do is you want every single closer, this is very key, to be at 70 to 100 live calls per month, particularly 80 to 100 live calls per month per closer. All right. And really what you want to do is you want to do the most amount of revenue with the least amount of closures because then that way you can actually pay your closers a little bit less in terms of percentage of commission because they're gonna be doing more deals. So they're actually gonna be making more money and hitting a competitive entrepreneur. Also, because they're making more money, you can recruit better closers and it kind of creates this nice flywheel where you're having more profit, better closers, they're closing more, so you have more profit. You actually can pay them not maybe 10%, but instead 9% or something like that, because they're actually closing more deals and they're actually hitting 30k a month without having to do 10%. So it's just a nice little profit flywheel. All right, so you want the biggest amount of revenue for the least amount of closers. So that's why doing this double single booking system nowadays, if your show rates are an ibert like 60%, it's very important. Okay. All that said, the only downside of this system is when two people show up at the same time, the leads are dished to a setter. Okay, now that's not ideal because number one, the setters should be working people who are a new lead that's coming in, or in the pipeline setter, in case an old lead, but basically somebody who's a lead but hasn't booked, right? That's what they should be focusing on. So what you're doing is when you dish them somebody who literally showed up to an appointment, you're taking them from working the leads that haven't booked, they're just basically managing a lead that did book, and then just getting them to rebook. And then on top of that, the second issue with this is it creates an extra step for the prospect. As you can imagine, if you're a prospect, you're like, man, I booked an appointment for this time, I showed up on time, and now you're telling me I gotta show up at this other time, right? Now, sure, like the setters can do some stuff to uh make sure they get value, make sure that they show up. And our our setter share rate from these types of things is like 90%, so it's totally fine, but still it's an extra step of friction for the prospect. So in January 2025, we had an idea and we implemented what's called a live transfer closer. So this is basically a floater that takes double bookings when they happen, and so they're just available like nine to ten slots a day, and then whenever a double booking happens, they just take it. So at first, we thought this would be like an easy way to ramp new reps, all right? But what happened completely surprised us. This new live transfer closer did more revenue in their first month than any of the other closers and of the other closers who had direct bookings. So the closer who we didn't give any bookings did more revenue than all the closures with bookings. So, in other words, we had a 20%, we basically added a closer and got a full production out of that closer with no additional ad spend. So we basically had a 20% increase in revenue without spending a penny more on ads, and then the bonus wise is less of those live transfers went to the setters so they could focus on getting other leads who hadn't booked to book, which is their job, right? So it was like a double whammy here. So later that year, this was about three or four months ago, we really decided to expand just looking at the numbers to instead of having one live transfer closer, having two live transfer closers. So, really, if you were to implement this for your business and you're doing double or single bookings, kind of like we are, for every four closer calendars that you're filling, you want to have one live transfer closer. That's about the right ratio to do this with. And honestly, it's just they'll get a competitive, if not the same amount of unitslash revenue as your other people, but they don't even have you don't have to fill their calendar. It's amazing. There's other things that we did as well, but you get the point. All the things that we implemented really this year, we're just doubling down, tripling down on what we were already doing and figuring out ways to get more deals out of what we're already spending on ads. Okay, now speaking of making ads work better, that's gonna bring me to lesson number three, which is the ads made me lazy. Okay, I'm gonna explain this. And this is one of my biggest business regrets. So let me give you the full backstory. In 2019, I started our company 100% organic. Okay, the first company I started was SDA Sales Team Accelerator, really under closures.io. And it was our B2B sales training, sales stopping company. So I was posting on Facebook, I was networking, I was doing referrals, I had a large Facebook group, which rest in peace. It did well for me for a long time, but that group is dead as a doornail now, uh dead as a doornail now. And so uh I started in 2019 by Q3. So I'm thinking like September, October, and 2020, we were doing 500 grand a month completely organic, mainly just off ripping Facebook posts of my personal profile. Then what happened was I cracked ads in December of 2020. And back then, the results on ads were just insane. Okay, so I just threw organic out the window. Like I was begrudgedly kind of doing organic anyways. I couldn't have been more excited to stop. And in my mind, this is just like the natural ascension of things. I was like, yeah, you do organic until you figure out ads, and then like you're better than organic. And I'll even tell you, like, I, in fact, if you had to do organic to get clients for your business, I almost look down on you as like uh like it, not like you, but I look down on people who had to do organic as like, oh, they're just not advanced in their business yet. Like almost like they're inferior. It's kind of funny when you're looking back because it's a huge mistake and a lot of ego and a lot of stupidity. But it's almost like I just had this mindset that like once you got ads to work, like you are better than organic. You don't need organic. Good, good thinking there. For the following years, even to this day, really, which I'll get to kind of like my whole transformation this in a second, but you know, for what the next five, six years almost now. Um, I really like I maybe posted some organic, but truthfully, like the appropriate was so piss bore. Like we didn't even really try. Okay. Even this year, we didn't really try. I've said I was gonna try, didn't try. Okay, and guess what? It didn't matter. To be honest, like most of my, you know, for really the first several years in the company, we were able to scale rapidly, like crazy, in like I think like two and a half years from a hundred grand a month to four million a month collected with amazing profit margins, no organic at all, or at least no serious organic at all. Then one day I realized I really made a mistake. Okay, so a couple things led to this. So midway through 2023, everything was getting a lot harder. So ads were getting harder, show rates are getting worse, prospects were way more skeptical. A lot of like big industry names in the info space shut their business down, fell off the map. Okay, at the same time, I had a few private clients. There's a few people I work with one-on-one, if they're like a really interesting case and a really interesting client. So one of these people is like super social media famous. Uh, you would definitely know who they were. And um, all these social media people I work with that like had big social medias, they were destroying it. And this one guy in particular, who you again you would know, um, I was looking at his ads and I'm like, with his team. I didn't say this out loud, but in my brain, I'm like, these are the worst ads I've ever seen. Like, if I ran ads like this, I would get precisely a 0% Rose. I mean, that's what would happen. Like, they were not good. And I'm also with his team, asking him about the data, looking at the data, and guess what? Ads are crushing it, like annihilating my ads, like his crappy ads that I know for a fact, no way in a million years would work with my company. Like, not in a million years. Like the way they were done, they were bad. They were so half-ass. Annihilating the results, cost per call, cost per lead, everything, annihilating my ads. Okay. And on top of that, you know, I would review their sales calls on their setting team and their clothing team, and people are coming on, they've followed this person for like 13 years. I mean, it's kind of obvious, okay, this is why they're annihilating me. So it was really simply just because he was famous. And like the way to think about this is when somebody gets served his my ads, it's like maybe the first impression they've ever seen of me. Maybe not, but probably. When somebody gets one of his ads, it might be the 20th, 30th, 50th, 100th impression that they've seen, not the first, okay? So that was kind of the first light bulb. Despite seeing that, I still didn't take content too seriously. And part of this just is, you know, I run my company. I'm like a good operator. And so um, you know, I'm busy. Another part of this is my own ego. I just was like, ah, you know, whatever. I'm just gonna figure this out without having to do content, contents for geeks, whatever. Okay. Also very stupid. So then I recently paid some time with Hermosy, and and really, like, I paid for some time to, I kind of knew what I was gonna go into because I was like, I need to get, I need to get this media thing sorted, like I gotta start doing this. And he told me two things I already knew, but I refused to accept. And the way he told me, I'm really cemented into my belief system. And the first thing was is to not look at content like another acquisition channel of your business, but as like a horizontal layer that improves all areas of your business. And this is very important because to me, one of the things that was extremely demotivating about making content is because I was thinking about it as like a new channel to get clients, okay? And so because I was thinking about that, I was like, man, well, I'm spending, you know, at our peak doing 4 million a month, for instance. We're spending probably 700,000 a month on ads, I would say. And so if you count out the impressions that 700,000 a month on ads is gonna get you, it's a lot, okay? And so I'm like doing the math, and I'm like, okay, to get these amount of impressions that I get from ads, I'm literally gonna be have to be like hormosey level famous. All right. I mean, maybe not quite at his level, but you know, up there. Like I'm gonna have to be one of the biggest people in the entire space. And that mountain is like so in my brain, it was like so high and hard to climb that it was like hard to even begin. And you know, I'm even telling myself, like, you know, is it is it realistic that I'm gonna be like, you know, as big as that or as big as Grant Card owner, you know, and I'm like, I don't even know if I want that. I don't know if I want to like be able to like not be able to go to the grocery store without people trying to take pictures with me. So that was kind of a big block that I had, but that's actually where I was wrong. And so what I really learned from Mormosia is that the point of content isn't to really replace ads, it's to actually make your ads work better, like what I observed from that previous client I was mentioning earlier. The clients you get from content is really just the bonus. The real benefit is what happens in the ecosystem when you make content as a whole. That's why I said it's a horizontal layer that improves all areas of your business. Okay. So not only does having content make your ads work better, because it kind of works as like a natural retargeting, but it also even makes your client's excess better. So this is a different story. I had a different guy I was working with, also social media frames, also a really good friend of mine, so I'm not gonna name him. And uh, I took his program, it was about something, I'm not gonna say what it was. I took his program and it was like really bad. It was it was just it's not that he had bad intentions or like didn't want to make the program good. It just Wasn't a good program, like there wasn't good fulfillment, there wasn't a good community, that like the content wasn't structured very good, they had no support, no coaching, no slack support, like stuff that, like, if I tried to sell a program like that with ads, I would get destroyed. Okay. So one day I asked him, um, because I'm actually consulting him at the same time, but I happen to happen to take his program. So I asked him, like, what was what was his refund rate and his chargeback rate? And he looked at me all weird and he was like, I mean, I've had like one refund, maybe two ever. And I realized then, I was like, wow, this is simply just because. And this guy, he was doing about a million a month, and all of his people were coming in through content. And I realized at that time, I'm like, wow, you know, this guy's like literally just having clients come in who absolutely love him. And because they followed him for years, like they were already, like they almost were fulfilled on before they even bought, right? So they just had such low expectations, and because they've also been following his content, he's probably not having to make as much promises in the marketing and sales. So like all of those customers were happy, right? And I'm not saying like his program was just outright bad, I'm just saying it didn't have like all the things that I would typically expect in a program that you're selling from cold traffic, like the CSMs and the Slack support and all that stuff, like the really dynamic fulfillment that like we have. Okay. So uh again, lesson number one from Hermosy content is a horizontal layer that approves everything in your business. Lesson number two is I realized the effort that I needed to put in and the budget needs to go up by like 20, 30x. So again, I knew this, like I knew I wasn't really trying hard enough, but I did not grasp it until I really talked to Hermosy and like the level that I I after talking with him and really seeing the level of effort and budget that he's putting into his content, it really blew my mind. So he mentioned that he's spending about 25 hours a week on content alone. And I was like, wow, you know, like I spend like two hours a week, and he just goes, Yeah, it shows. You know, I was like, Yeah, it does show. And it kind of blew my mind because he's way bigger than me, obviously. He has a way bigger team, he has way more money, he's way busier than me, he has way more stuff going on, and he's still spending like 10 to 20x the amount of time I'm spending. I know he'd be spending more budget, but he's spending 10 to 20x the time I'm spending. And it was just a good example of what it takes to succeed. So this year, we're really focusing on building an in-house media team. We're gonna really like this content uh video I'm making right now isn't necessarily the content I'm gonna make in the future. Um, but we're gonna really revamp our entire content strategy, do different types of content. We're gonna have full-time videographers, we're gonna do more in-person events to capture more content. We're gonna hire specialists for every single social media channel, bring on an in-house content director, and so on. Okay. And one thing to emphasize about this is really Hermosy told me that really all the biggest personal brands in the space, if you look at them, they do tons of in-person fulfillment. So, like Dave Ramsey, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, even Hermosy now, tons of in-person stuff, which is not only crucial for content, because it just gives you so much content that you can use that shows you as an authority, but it's also really great for your relationships with clients and actually building that in-person dynamic, which is gonna be more and more important the deeper we get into AI. To wrap up to this point, back in the day, I was able to scale my business to 500 grand a month, simply just through Facebook posts because I had to make content to generate revenue and my business literally depended on it. So again, I had to make content because I had no other choice. And then when ads worked, I completely lost that mindset. So now I'm really taking the mindset again that I gotta make content like my business depends on it because it does.