Web Design Business with Josh Hall
The Web Design Business Podcast with host Josh Hall is here to help you build a web design business that allows you to have freedom and a lifestyle you love. As a web designer and web agency owner of over a decade, Josh knows the challenges, struggles and often painful lessons of building a web design business without any guidance, proven strategies or a mentor to help you along the way, which is why this show exists. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of coaching, mentorship and guidance to help you build your dream web design business. All while having a good time doing it. Through interviews with seasoned web design business professionals and online entrepreneurs, solo coaching episodes with Josh and even case studies with his students, you’ll learn practical tips and strategies for web business building along with real-world advice and trends that are happening right now in the wild and wonderful world of web design. Subscribe if you’re ready to start or level up your web design business and for all show notes, links, full transcriptions for each episode, head to https://joshhall.co/podcast
Web Design Business with Josh Hall
399 - Getting to 200k/yr in 3 Years through Local SEO with Sam Sarsten
One of our biggest Web Designer Pro member success stories, Sam Sarsten, is back on the podcast with an update on how he’s grown his agency to over 200k in 3 years, primarily through Local SEO.
We’re getting into all the nitty gritty on this one:
- How much he charges
- How he finds clients
- How he measures and tracks results
- How he’s scaled his team
- How he offers web design + SEO
And more!
Heads up, we had some technical issues + a guest interruption (Peaches!!) who wiggled some chords so this one is a little more edited than normal. But the gems were too good to re-record.
Head to the show notes to get all links and resources we mentioned, along with a full transcription of this episode at joshhall.co/399
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you know, if you're doing $1,000 per month, the you know if you think about like to get to 100,000, you know it doesn't take that much, right? It was 8,300, right? So you're looking at like eight or nine clients. Realistically you're probably not going to charge $1,000 out the gate. So I'd always try to like temper people's expectations there. It's like okay, you're probably going to have, like you know, one that's around 500 and maybe a couple that are at 700. But you could get to six figures pretty easily.
Josh Hall:Welcome to the Web Design Business Podcast, with your host, josh Hall, helping you build a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love. Hello, my friend, it's great to have you here and we're going to have some fun in this one because I am pleased to present to you a recent conversation that I had with Web Designer Pro member who is one of our shining stars in Web Designer Pro, one of our biggest success stories, the king of local SEO, sam Sarsden. Now Sam was back on the podcast in episode 342, where we talked about kind of part one of his, the first phase of his success story, where we dug into how he brought his business to nearly 7K MRR. I'm very happy to report that exactly a year later, his business is now at over $200,000 per year, with most of that being MRR monthly recurring revenue through local SEO. So we're going to unpack exactly what he has done over the last couple of years in his business to get to this point, how it's structured, what he's offering, how much he's charging and a whole lot more.
Josh Hall:Before we dive into this one, a couple of links that are important. The show notes for this will be at joshhallco, slash 399. So head there for all the links we mentioned. Sam is the owner of an agency called Then Can Design. That will be linked over there. He's also the founder of Web Designer Pro's sister community, local SEO Academy, and he's got a special offer for you as a podcast listener. He's actually gonna give you the same deal he gives Web Designer Pro members to jump into Local SEO Academy If interested. That link will be found at localseoacademyco slash Josh2.
Josh Hall:That will, of course, be linked below and before we dive in disclaimer, we had a trifecta of technical issues on here. We had Wi-Fi issues on Sam's end, we had some video issues and Peaches. We have a guest appearance from Sam Sam's dog, peaches, who, uh, messed with the cords mid action, but there were so much good stuff that I want to make sure you hear that. I didn't want to rerecord the whole conversation, so this one is a little more edited than it normally would be. So just a heads up, you'll see. You'll hear some more breaks, but that's not typical on this podcast of your first time listener. All right, here's Sam. Let's talk local SEO and 200K baby. All right, all right, sam, here for round two. I just said before I hit record how does it feel to be one of my like lead success stories of all Web Designer. Pro members Enter, sam, because you were getting going. I was like I got to record this.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, I hadn't put a lot of thought into this episode. I wanted it to be pretty natural. I was just thinking of some things this morning so I was driving back and forth to my kind of referral networking group. I know you had yours and I got mine and uh, I was like you know what? Yeah, like just thinking of the whole journey and you know, go back to the last episode, whatever the episode number is. Hopefully we have it memorized by the end of this so we can keep referring back to it.
Josh Hall:But it's like you know I won't rehash, yeah 342.
Sam Sarsten:I won't rehash the whole thing, but it's like you know, those drives back and forth to like my folks' place around Christmas time and coming back and just like not having enough time and some. You know your tagline used to be you probably know it better than me is, you know, build the web design business. Finish the line for me. So you have freedom and a lifestyle you love. Yeah, freedom and lifestyle that you love, right, and it's like that's all I ever really wanted, you know, like being Josh's biggest success or whatever, making a ton of money which I haven't quite gotten there yet, but we're getting there. None of that stuff is really that important. It was more of like the lifestyle, right, and so, like you know, like we were talking about before we got on, I just took my first week off in business for the last three years and everything was fine. You know, the team did their job, projects move forward and I was able to relax and think and not think and and, yeah, and.
Sam Sarsten:So I guess, like I don't know, like it's cool, it's cool to be definitely one of the bigger success stories and I'll always say, you know, like I said on the last episode, all glory to Josh, because you know I I submitted right.
Sam Sarsten:I got to this point where I was like I just want to live life a different way and I said, well, I don't know how to do this, so I'm just going to trust this person and you know who to thunk that that this guy that says hot dog would pack so much value into these courses when it first started. And then that commitment to jump into the community so early when I really couldn't afford it, and then to just stick with it and who knew how much value I would get out of that and then to get the opportunity to get to meet you in real life this past year has been really awesome. So yeah, I don't know, pretty incoherent answer to your question there, but the goal wasn't to be Josh's biggest success story. The goal was to get the freedom and lifestyle that I love and you know I feel like we're right in the middle of that right now, so it's pretty cool.
Josh Hall:Yeah, it is pretty cool, Sam. It's freaking awesome dude. I mean, what's really incredible about from what I've seen with you and I know we'll get to kind of like part two with this kind of success story? Part one in episode 342 was about how you literally went from zero to about 7K monthly recurring revenue. But at that time of us talking last year you had a lot of positive momentum and like a huge boost. But then you had the all too common dry spell and in those challenges that happen and like the dip, it's like a roller coaster. There's like a bunch of momentum, you have some huge wins and then there's always like some dip of some magnitude. But you weathered the storm through that and then now I mean I'm seeing you become very, very quickly a multi six figure web design business owner, scaler you know, studio owner.
Josh Hall:So what's interesting about that is you went from successful solopreneur really quickly to and maybe this is a part of your model with doing local SEO and a lot of growth plans to where you you just literally can't do everything yourself. So I imagine like your model probably forced you to scale pretty quickly. But it is really cool to see you fast track the Web Designer Pro journey. I mean, for those who don't know, we have three categories of members builders, growers and scalers. Builders are folks who are early stage, getting the business going, getting clients figuring everything out, making up to 25 to 50K. 50k growers are making around six figures and going past six figures. Scalers are doing multi-six figures, having a small team. So you did what I would think would be a five to seven year journey into like two years. So I love seeing that you're happy and free on the other side of that man.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, I mean, it's not easy either. You know, I think it's. You know, as somebody that started to get into this space. You know, with Local SEO Academy turning over a year, you know learning what it's like to try to teach and coach people of how to do the same thing. It's hard because I want to tell people the truth and tell them, like this is this might be the hardest thing you've done up to this point in your life, but that turns people off, that scares them. So, like I don't want to do hard stuff, right, I'm going to go to the other channel that says you know, that has the get rich quick scheme and says, oh, I'm going to tell you how to make six figures in three months, or you know whatever the latest you know buzz thing is.
Sam Sarsten:But you know, at one point in life I had this really good friend and we were working out together which I think is like a good analogy for discipline and we were doing these really difficult workouts and I was like this sucks man. And he's like, hey, it was easy, everyone would do it. And I remember blowing that off at the time because I was like whatever man, but for some reason that stuck with me forever. And it's like, if it ain't, if it was easy no-transcript. Or do you want to be brave? Do you want to take these leaps? Do you want to? You know, and I think that's the thing Like, it's like, from going from here to there, it's taken a lot of growth and a lot of mistakes and a lot of not so easy times, but on the other side of it it can be all worth it. So, yeah, I'm not really sure what the original question was, but that's something I felt important to say.
Josh Hall:Tell me about that, because I I couldn't have asked you this last year when we, when we had our first, like you know, success story, unpack. But I can ask you this now, being that your business is more stable and you've been doing this for how long you've been doing it?
Sam Sarsten:technically, two and a half years it started at the start of 2023, so we're coming up on three years so, almost three years into it, is was the hard worth it three years into it well, I feel like we're still in the middle yet, like I said, there's no yachts or ferraris or, uh, you know mcmansions in bend, oregon, where I live, so, um, but again, you know, like I was saying earlier, that's not what it's really about. Right, there's different types of freedom. Right, there's freedom of time, there's freedom of money and things like that, and I feel like you know, just the ability every week to sit down and be like what am I going to do this week? Like that's not what it's like when you have a job. Right, and there's still obligations I have to do.
Sam Sarsten:Right, and I'm a big, I'm a very avid fan of like seven habits of highly effective people, creating like a hierarchy of concerns, starting with Sam, working my way down to like the personal connections and the other things that are important to me and getting way down the list to the things that actually make me money, before I start putting that into the roster for the week. But I don't know, like, yeah, I would say, just because of that, it's worth it. Like you know, we use money as a shorthand in this society because, typically speaking, if you have more money, you tend to have more freedom, and that's fine. And you know I definitely don't not seek money. But yeah, I think the more important thing is that like time freedom, that freedom to be able to kind of set your schedule and kind of do what you want, that's something.
Josh Hall:I heard recently I forget who I heard this from, but the new. It's an idea that the new true currency of like wealth is complete and utter calendar control. Like no one can put anything on your calendar except for you. Work wise, of course, I know I have three kids, so everything kind of revolves around them now. Work-wise, of course, I know I have three kids, so everything kind of revolves around them now. But I do like that idea because it is kind of a metric of freedom, which is if you can control what calls you do, when you do them, who you have meetings with, where you're obliged to show up. If you control all those things, I mean, yeah, you may want to get financially more free within those constraints, but you've kind of made it like that. That's what freedom is, that's the best, that is the absolute best.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, I mean one of my biggest things I mean I don't like sharing about this a lot, but I'll share about it here because I think it's important is, you know, back in August my family, they had a house fire and you know it was sudden it. They had a house fire and you know it was sudden, it was electrical and it was devastating, right, they lost everything. And so, you know, within a day I was packed up and moved out there, or didn't move out there, but I grabbed all my stuff and didn't know when I was going to come back. You know they luckily insurance did their job and put them up in a hotel. But you know that was a lot of trouble with a puppy and a and a lot of other stuff, like to just stay in that hotel for a month straight, um, and then eventually to get new rental and all those things, um, and I remember like the one of the first things I did before I left is I just sent a loom to all my clients and I also sent a loom to all my the members of my team and I said I don't really know how we're going to get through this month, but I'm going to need your help.
Sam Sarsten:And it was like by the end of the day, they were already like messaging back and forth of like you know, why don't we have a Slack? You know why don't we, why aren't we doing these things? And it was almost like it forced us to kind of get together and build this into something more cohesive. And obviously a lot of the clients you know we're like you know, take your time, take your time, do what you got to do. And I feel like you know it just reminds me of your story in the NICU. Right Of like you got to this like tipping point where you had to do something differently because your life was changing for whatever reason, right, and. And so I made that decision to like kind of make the team more cohesive and all that stuff. And then that made it so we needed to add more help and then eventually we realized that our systems weren't that dialed in. So we ended up getting help for that as time went on. But it's like that was really where the growth started to happen.
Sam Sarsten:And you know it's like obviously you don't ever wish these things, but you know the universe has a funny way of presenting you with these situations that feel impossible in the moment and then somehow you get through them. You know, a couple of weeks ago, for the 4th of July, they moved back into their house. You know they have a fully rebuilt home. It was covered by insurance. You know they're back in their you know safe space and everything, and you know they made it and it's nice to be on the other side.
Sam Sarsten:But you know, throughout this last year there's been so many times where I'm like I'm so grateful, just go be there and be with them. And you know, like I, if you would have, you know, interviewed me on a podcast episode, day one going into pro, you'd be like, what are the things you want? Like, well, when a terrible tragedy strikes my family, I really hope I'm going to have the time to be able to show up exactly how. I hope that's just doesn't show up on our list. But then real life just does its thing and you know, either get to show up or you don't, right, and so, yeah, like that's an intangible. That has just been incredible that I think I would have been able to do the same thing. I would have figured it out, but it would have been a lot harder and it was nice to not have to. It was one less worry when there were a lot of worries going on.
Josh Hall:As beautifully said, man, those intangible results that you know may not look sexy on a sales page. That's truly. What we want is just ultimate freedom, which is what we have available to us, and you're a shining example, man. I mean the first. So let's dive into, kind of, where the business is now and then specifically, what you've done over the past year, because you, you went to six figures in what, about 18 months? If I recall, it's about a year and a half that you kind of got your. Let's do some real math here.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, yeah, I think. Yeah, when we had met yeah, I think I talked about this at wdp con, which is web designer pros yearly conference, which is going to start being hosted in hawaii, according to joshua no, I'm just kidding, that's the goal, baby. Um, but, yeah, I got to sub in at the last second as a speaker and after our podcast interview, I did my math and I was in this like state of like, uh, I shared in this talk, which maybe enough time's gone where we could post this on YouTube, so I think it was good talk, but anyway, um, but I shared in the talk where, right before we had that interview last time, uh, I had my first loss in business, you know, and I was like, oh my gosh, how am I supposed to do this success story interview with Josh when I'm losing money over here? But when I actually sat down after the interview because Josh, of course, got into coach mode and told me to stop, because I said, oh, I got so many things I need to think about and he said why don't you slow down and think about what you've accomplished over the last year and a half? Because I was like almost squarely a year and a half into business at this point and I did there's a little hill over here, it's like 500 feet elevation, and I just would go up it. I wrote some stuff down, you know, went down, went back up to the top, wrote some stuff down and I was like holy smokes, like I've really done a lot in the last year and a half.
Sam Sarsten:When I got home I actually sat down and made a better spreadsheet that kept track of the MRR better and it had been going up and to the right. You know, people listening at home, trust me, my hand is going up and to the right and that was good. You know, it's hard to say like when you hit six figures, right, people know like when you're building MRR, it doesn't hit right away. And so, yeah, I guess when I hit, you know, seven or eight, you know, I guess it'd be $8,000 per month, was probably around that 18 month mark, but definitely within the first year. You know, one thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is that first year was under $25,000, right, a lot of feast or famine, um. And then the second year was about 125,000. And this third year is everything's good, knock on wood, knocking on the desk should be $250,000. And so you know to think going from that first year of $25,000 to the third year of $250,000, like that's a 10x jump in 24 months, like that's a pretty big jump and so, and so I think that is probably the title of the episode and people might be wondering how the heck do you do that?
Sam Sarsten:And the very first thing that you got to do, I think if you're a web designer, you're hoping to start a web design business, is you need to commit to having an MRR service which stands for monthly recurring revenue. And you know Josh calls these growth plans. Obviously, I like local SEO. That's the one I ended up choosing, but having that consistent income changes the game. You know we have over 50 people now in the community local SEO Academy where we all are trying to learn how to do local SEO better together.
Sam Sarsten:And the number one thing I hear there in our weekly Q&As is you know they're afraid to take the leap because they don't want to lose that financial security that they have from the nine to five. And that makes sense, right. And the problem with like web design which I think you'll agree, josh is like you really don't get that security when you're just doing websites and you know, josh, you know, over time, was able to build his business through MRR, through maintenance plans, and I think the big difference between doing the maintenance plan route because I actually just saw Cami at WordCamp, us and she's got, you know, I think, 10,000 websites on maintenance plans right now. So she's crushing it.
Josh Hall:But that took a long time.
Sam Sarsten:Right, well over 200. Yeah, well over 200, that's the real number. Yeah, but I mean, think about it. If you have well over 200 people on a plan that's between $50 and $100 a month, you're going to be doing all right, right, but that takes time. You can't build 200 websites overnight, and so it's like how do you shortcut the process? That's where the MRR, the growth plan, comes in to social media, email marketing. I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities with AI as time goes on. But yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that I want people to know is like, do you need to build websites? Yes, and you need to also, because that's the hub of the digital marketing. It's still so important. And you need to build websites that actually convert, because otherwise, what's the point? Where are you sending people to? But then the other piece is like something that gets people a return on their investment. Um, I think that's really important so sam is back.
Josh Hall:We had a uh, we had a puppy. We had a puppy technical problem. I think sam's pup was rubbing up against the cord, something like that yeah, peach is here and she is causing chaos.
Sam Sarsten:Peach is peaches yeah she's not a peach. What a silly girl. That's all right at the time it's all good.
Josh Hall:We love pups on the web center, what was on our pro calls or the podcast. Pups are always good. So, sam, you had mentioned the first 18 months was up and downs, with fixed one-off projects and slowly building that. Mrr. You're at a place now where, like you mentioned the, the true way to like fast track, mrr, is to have higher paying growth plans. You had mentioned cammy meeting up at word camp and a few other. What is on our pro members who are doing multi-six figures, who have just support maintenance plans? It's very possible, but it's at scale and they're generally building that slowly over time. So, to fast track it, yeah, it's either either local SEO or some growth plan. So, specifically this last year, sam, what have you done with your growth plans? You committed to local SEO but in order to get to a quarter million range ARR, basically annual recurring revenue what does that look like? Like, how are those breaking down to what your plans and what you're offering?
Sam Sarsten:What does that look like? Like, how are those breaking down to what your plans and what you're offering? Yeah, the vast majority probably like 60 to 70% of that, when everything is said and done is going to be just our SEO. I call them TLC plans for traffic, leads and clients, because that's what people want. They want more of that and so, yeah, that's like that's our bread and butter bread and butter.
Sam Sarsten:So, you know, around a year ago, right before we had our last podcast interview, I finally committed to just doing yearly contracts, yearly commitments, because there's a lot of reasons for it. You know it's a it's a good business practice from my perspective. But also, you know there's a lot of people that are switching between agencies all the time. You don't really want to do that. You want to commit to somebody. So it's actually kind of a two-sided. It's like a win-win because it makes it so we're both committing to doing this for a year and it's worked out pretty good. We just had our first two clients get to the end of their contract that were on a contract and they've stuck around, so that's been great to see. You know Eric talks about we celebrate the 13th month, right, not the first month, and so you know, we're seeing them stick around the 13th month. So that's good, I mean, so we must be doing all right.
Sam Sarsten:And so when I made that switch, you know, I tried a couple different pricing strategies out and when I made that switch I said, okay, you know, a lot of people know the big secret of local SEO is that there's a lot of front end work in the strategy side and then there's a lot of building and stuff there and then you're kind of getting this like maintenance mode. Sometimes there's some spikes here and there where you might find some new opportunities, or you know the honeydew list from the client increases or whatever, but for the most part it's front loaded work. But there's, you know. And so I was like, okay, what can I smooth the cost out to be? And so what I ended up landing on was $1,000 per month for 12 months, which was the most I'd ever charged.
Sam Sarsten:I remember being so scared to do that, like literally so scared to do that, and I don't know how. Like I just look back at all the little blips of luck that the universe has blessed me with along the way. But I had changed the price and then I had I didn't get any sales for a little while. And then Michelle Bourbonier did a copy boost on my sales page and I think we published it on Monday. And one of the things she told me to do is like hey, if your number is going to be on the page, you should just tell people that they can text you. And I was like okay, and so, literally so Monday we published it. Tuesday I get a text. Hey, it says I can text you. So here's me texting you. None of the times on your calendar work, can we get a call this week? And I'm like and that ended up being our first contract to client. And so it's like I wish it always worked out like that. Right, but it does not always work out like that.
Sam Sarsten:But that was the proof that like people are willing to pay that much. Because this is the other thing I hear in local SEO Academy all the time is I tell people like, hey, like you got to start at a higher price, because if you end up with four $300 per month local SEO clients, you're not going to have the capacity to grow a team and start charging more. Like you've got to start charging as quickly. You got to start charging more as quickly as possible. Sure, you probably do it for free for one of your web design clients that you already have or for yourself, so that way you can build those skills right. You don't really deserve to charge any money until you know you can sort of kind of do it right, but then you got to do it at half off and then you got to do it at a quarter off and then you got to do it a full price. You got to get yourself to full price as quickly as possible, and so that was kind of you know, the part we're skipping is the part where Iote to not having a stable income is growing, that MRR. And so now each time I added a client, it's $1,000 per month increase. And so it's like, oh, now I can afford another person, now I can afford that extra license of SEMrush, which is freaking expensive, and it helps make those decisions more confidently. It helps make those decisions more confidently and sometimes it doesn't feel as secure as getting a good old-fashioned paycheck from a nine-to-five job. But it's like now I can consistently say we're going to make this much money this month and that's amazing.
Sam Sarsten:And the biggest switch in the last six months is getting to the point where it's like, okay, maybe we can charge more than $1,000 per month. You know, I got comfy, just like everybody does. People get comfy charging $2,500 for a website when they should be charging $5,000, when really they should be charging $7,500 or $10,000, right. And so that was something that's happened, you know, more recently, actually at WDPCon, made it worth my plane ticket and everything else. Because you know, more recently, actually at WDP con, made it worth my plane ticket and everything else. Because, uh, you know, shannon Matters uh little training that she did. Uh, I shouldn't say little training, because it was massively helpful but like I was able to close two deals using her uh like pricing structure and so I mean the total of those deals is nearly 30,000 and the difference, the difference per project, is 2,400.
Sam Sarsten:So we're looking at like five thousand dollars extra from just those two you know year long projects, just from like a small shift, you know, and we are providing great value. And so it's like, why aren't we asking for a little bit more? Right, and you know, like Shannon says, get out of your client's pockets. And so, yeah, I think, knowing that every time we close a deal, that would that helped like build confidence as we went along, and so the vast majority is still those SEO plans. We still build websites. Sometimes we build websites first, sometimes we build websites after we start a client and then technically, the local SEO Academy money is included in that. I'm just thinking about the whole business as a whole, then CanDesigns LLC, and so you know, if you strip that away, you know we're looking, probably it might be closer to 200,000 just from the agency. But because local SEO Academy is growing, which is good, josh appreciates that as one of our strongest affiliate partners. But but yeah, I mean it's definitely mostly the SEO plans and a little bit for maintenance plans still.
Josh Hall:K is a sweet spot $12,000 annually, of course. And then are you locking in 12 months for every client.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, I've tried a bunch of different little things. I have some experiments that I'm kind of working on right now. I've done, you know, I used to call them SEO six packs, where we do like six hours for a discounted price. That was okay, but it was hard to show the return and really the goal, what's the goal? The goal is to get them to work with us long term, and so I just didn't like that. So now what we've been rolling out and we have our first client on this right now, so I'm excited to keep exploring this more is called SEO Roadmap.
Sam Sarsten:In case you're a random local business owner, especially a contractor or a holistic medicine provider that's listening to this episode for some reason, you should check out our SEO roadmap. It's really cool For all the web designers. It's basically paid discovery and so we charge it's going to be around $1,200. And we basically do 75% of what we would normally do in the first month of working with a client and we basically write the strategy out, hand it to the person and then basically tell them like you want to keep working with us. That was your first month bill. Let's keep going.
Sam Sarsten:If you don't, here's this Go to Fiverr, go to your local agency, we don't care, but here's your plan. So I think that's a better tool to have is paid discovery, which a lot of people have been learning this past year, last couple of years really. Then I know Eric recently talked about local SEO boost and I think that works for people that have never had marketing done before for their businesses. I think that's a good tool for those businesses. It's something I might explore, but I'm really trying to work with more like bigger companies moving forward, so they there might not be the best fit for that, so we'll see, but it's almost always a year contract.
Josh Hall:So minus paid discovery. But it's almost always a year contract, so minus paid discovery. What's worked for you with a $200,000 plus annual business is a $1,000 sweet spot SEO package and then using Shannon's pricing matrix to have a more higher value offer. Is that right? That might be.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, I mean it's really just allowed us to charge more. Now it's $1,200 a month for our last two clients.
Josh Hall:Okay, so what's the additional suite of services for you? Right now, sam, your sweet spot is the $1,000 a month SEO plan. That's 12-month commitment. Websites you're doing as a part of that, or separate, depending on the situation.
Sam Sarsten:Depends, yeah, but yes.
Josh Hall:So do you know your average customer? Like is your average customer? 12 to 18 000 per year. Is that fair to say? Because if you break that down by a couple hundred, that's actually not that many. I mean, you know there's a decent amount of customers, but not that many. So even if we did 200 divided by, let's say, 15 000 on average, that's only 13 customers. That's what's wild about this and that's one reason I love the new revenue calculator we put out is if you have twelve thousand dollars, or let's say fifteen thousand dollars, of an average customer annual value, 13 of them will get you a two hundred thousand dollar business.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, yeah, I'm looking at this right now. Yeah, I would say most of them, yeah, because we have a couple of websites, you know. So those are like six thousand once they're fully paid or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, just, you know, snapshot right now, live, we have 17 ongoing clients that are paying us like the main price and so, yeah, there's a couple, there's a couple OGs in there that are on slightly lower pricing, but for the most part, everybody's on that. So, yeah, I mean it doesn't take that much. That's what I try to tell people in local SEO Academy. Right, it's like, you know, if you're doing a thousand dollars per month, no-transcript, temper people's expectations there it's like, okay, you're probably going to have, like you know, one that's around 500 and maybe a couple that are at 700, but you know you could get to six figures, you know, pretty easily. And then it's just a matter of like, okay, how do we get to that next level?
Josh Hall:so your suite of services. Currently, if we were to list this out on your revenue calculator, you've got website designs that you will do one off still. Is that right, sam, will you? Will you just do a website design, or do you? Yeah, yeah, we still do websites so what's the price points for those? On average, are you at like five, six K range or less?
Sam Sarsten:Roughly. Yeah, we've been doing I've been doing more of getting people on monthly payments, just to get them used to paying monthly. So that way if we want to upsell them to a SEO package down the road, so, um, or you know, just keep them on a maintenance plan. They're just used to paying us every month. Um, and I think that's a luxury of having cashflow and being established. That's harder to do. You know, eric, eric Schramm will tell you that. Right, I received Schramm. Steve Schramm, we'll tell you. Tell you that, right, um, I'm mixing up Eric Dingler and Steve Schramm. Uh, steve Schramm does subscription web design and he, you know he talks a lot in his podcast and his about how that's hard to do in the early days because you want some cash to to get running, um, so so, yeah, we usually do. I think it's 500 a month, so that's 6 000 over the year okay, so you basically do a payment plan over over a year?
Josh Hall:what about maintenance and support? No, so, no, no seo plans. But what's? What's that looking like in your suite of services?
Sam Sarsten:yeah, I have like a hundred dollar a month plan which includes like light updates, plug plugins, security, all that good stuff.
Josh Hall:I think we have like five or six clients on that very few, okay so again, you committed to local seo, found your sweet spot with a thousand dollar price point and now that's giving you the leverage to to be able to boost up, have some more custom projects and have your one-off web design services and then slowly grow your support. It sounds like do you use your support plan as a fallback at all? Like if somebody of the 17 clients who are paying you at least a grand a month, if one of those says listen, sam, you're so handsome, this has been great, but we're going to, we're going to back off the SEO. Do you upsell a support plan? Or has that not been an issue? What's that look like? So I'm going to say downsells. Do you downsell that?
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, we have kind of a fallback plan. It really only works for clients we've worked with for a long period of time. So this is usually like kind of the back pocket for if an emergency comes up and they're not able to continue at that rate and I don't want to take them to court. But I mean, you know, it's like I'm a human and it's like you know, sometimes things happen right and so it's like, okay, where can we take people to? And so you know, the maintenance would be the bare minimum. And so we try to figure out like what's something that can kind of keep the SEO momentum going without us putting too much work in, you know, because, say, they need to jump down to like a 350 or 250 price range per month, because that's pretty doable for most people, even if they're going through a rough patch.
Sam Sarsten:And so we have kind of a you know hidden package that we use. Sometimes that's mostly just authority building, because once you've done the heavy lifting, that's the most important thing is getting those locally relevant, industry relevant backlinks. And so we keep that momentum going and then occasionally we might look back at the content. But I try to not build anything on that plan. So we have a couple of clients that are on that plan right now. We're hoping to ramp those back up and so I would say that's our first place we go to. And like we have one guy that basically shot to the top and he's like I think I'm good, he's like I'm going to, went to a maintenance plan to keep his site updated and so, yeah, that was like the fallback for him and so I mean that works. You know, it's super easy to do maintenance.
Josh Hall:We all know that how, how, how um high will you go with like a custom plan? You mentioned shannon's presentation with the pricing which is basically just price anchoring and you give folks an option for a really high deal or the mid tier or a lower tier. But with that, like, what are some of your high end, the couple that you've sold? What do those look like? How drastic of a difference is that monthly recurring revenue for that type of plan?
Sam Sarsten:Yeah. So I mean at this point I don't want to give away all the Shannon's secret sauce here but you have three different tiers right, where the deliverables are essentially the same right, except for the level of care, and so that's basically the way I pitch it. I'm like, hey, if you want VIP service, you get direct access to us, less than 24 hour turnaround on all client communication. That's what this plan is. But it's X thousand dollars per year. Most people say, well, I don't necessarily need all that. I'm like, oh, okay, well, here's the plan most people sign up for. So that's the way I've been presenting it lately. And most people like that plan. And it's just now. It's positioned at a higher price point. And so the thing is like and I talk this a lot in Local SEO Academy is, if you go out and you look at most local SEO agencies, they're going to have tiers, and on those different tiers sometimes you see different things. Maybe they're building a certain number of citations based on the tiers. Maybe they're doing a certain number of GBP posts per tier. Maybe they're doing a certain number of blog posts per tier. They're doing that. Don't work with that company, because blog posts aren't that important for local SEO.
Sam Sarsten:But I really teach that there is one plan that you need to do for local SEO, one plan only. And it's like you need to work on the GBP, you need to work on their website, it needs to be well-structured, have pages for all their services and all their service areas, and you need to build authority. And you know the way we teach that. The structure behind that is you start with an SEO strategy sprint, so that way you have your plan and you have everything set in stone and everybody's kind of agreed on it. You know, maybe it's your team and maybe it's the client, definitely. Then from there, you go to the build phase, where you're either re-optimizing the content already exists, because a lot of what they already have, or you're kind of, you know, building new pages and all that stuff, or building location pages. A lot of times that needs to be done, and then from there you start building authority.
Sam Sarsten:Now you don't want to sleep on it, you want to check back in on the strategy over time and you might find opportunities where you can, you know, revamp a certain location pages. Or they say oh, you know what I actually want to target this service and we have a company that does blinds and they're like you know we need an audience page and so you know people just think about stuff down the road and we can do that. But that's the flow, that's the structure. With every single client it works for. You know, every contractor business we've worked with it works with holistic medicine.
Sam Sarsten:You know we've had small law firm, property management, mortgage broker, we had a storage unit, you know, and so it's like it keeps working over and over again and so like that's it. You know there is no high ticket, low ticket, middle. You know it's like this is the plan, this is what actually works for local SEO, and so that's what we sell, you know. And you know the rest of it is just kind of like customer service levels and you know like the bottom tier would be like a done with you solution.
Josh Hall:But we haven't really even got into that yet mostly I think it's going to be more work, so I'm kind of scared about that plan. Yeah, I probably. So you started off with just basically an add-on of vip support to take it up a thousand to twelve hundred no, so that's?
Sam Sarsten:that would be like a seventeen hundred dollar a month plan. That's never been sold before. Yeah, yeah, so Okay, gotcha, it's just charging more, just charging more, simply saying it's not $1,000 anymore, it's $1,200.
Josh Hall:And you got a well over $200,000 business with that. I mean, yeah, I think you could take that to a quarter mil for sure. So profitability, that's the big thing, though, and you rightly said, if you charge low for especially local SEO plans, you're going to have zero margin to be able to hire out. So what's the latest on your team, sam? How many little then cans do you have out there in the world now?
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, so on a weekly basis we have a newer VA we're still working on integrating her fully, which is mostly been my fault but we have six subcontractors that work with us on a weekly basis and so, you know, we have basically like a full web team. We have the designer and the developer. On the SEO side, you know, we have our SEO strategist and we also have he's kind of evolved into this new role called client success manager, because we realized we kind of need somebody that's in charge of that at this point with this many clients. And then we brought in Eleanor from Web Designer Pro as kind of our. You know, if anybody's familiar with the visionary integrator role, she's definitely the integrator, and so she's been kind of in charge of operations. We moved from Notion to ClickUp as a project management system. We have all our SOPs written out in there. It's been really good. We're, like I said, working kind of the optimization phase for SOPs. Yeah, I'm trying to think what else other people do ops.
Josh Hall:Um, yeah, I'm trying to think what else other people do, why? Yeah, I was gonna say I've got a, uh, I got a little to-do item for you. Why aren't these folks on your site? I'm not seeing anything about the team behind me that's literally.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, that's literally. The next thing on our list is, uh, I just hit the microphone, I'll put it in, unplug it, but uh, yeah, the next thing on the list is redesigning the website. Yeah, I think, I think that's been a limiting factors. You know, you're looking at basically last year's version of Vencan, not this year's, and so I appreciate the coaching call. Yeah, and because that is the next thing we need to do, and I want to highlight a lot of the case studies. We've had a lot of success and I think we have a lot of clients that'd be willing to either get on camera, at least write some stuff down for us, and that's what really matters, right, and so, yeah, my goal is to get that done end of the year for sure, but hopefully faster, and I want to do it in Divi 5.
Josh Hall:So that's another beast, but we'll see you could do it in Divi 5 right now, for sure.
Josh Hall:It's very, very close to official beta launch. But, yeah, if you're not doing like WooCommerce or have any other wild plugins, you could do Divi 5. Yeah, pro, you can do db5. Yeah, pros and db5. I had it for db5 for a year now. So, yeah, yeah, you're ready to go. Man, I totally agree. Yeah, I, I can kind of tell the site is a little, it feels a little jumbled. It doesn't feel like it represents. It does feel like it represents 2024 than can, but not 2025.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, that's yeah for sure, yeah, and we're getting ready to be in 2026, so, yeah, so I mean, you asked about profitability. So you know all those people, uh, they got to eat Right and we got expensive tools like SEMrush. Dang you SEMrush and your expensive prices Interesting and I try to share this, you know, pretty candidly, in Local SEO Academy, it's like you know, as you start to ramp up these expenses, you know start to pile up in this like middle phase between like 10 and 20 clients, but once you get past that, your tools are almost maxed out and you might be adding, you know, maybe like a couple of double digit dollars per month per tool, but you're really not adding to it. So it's like for me, when I look ahead at our vision we've been talking a lot about this, we've started a weekly manager meeting, which has been kind of fun the last couple of weeks and as we look ahead at vision, kind of our goal for the next, by end of Q2, I would like to be around 25 clients, because I think that's gonna be a sweet spot.
Sam Sarsten:As far as profitability goes, where we're starting to get to more of that number of, like you know, 35 to 40% profitability. Everybody's getting paid a little bit more Um and we're just providing better service to our clients. Um so, um. So yeah, that's kind of the track that we're headed towards, um, and we're still making money. So it's really cool to see that we're know we're profitable. I'm paying myself more um and you know we're you know making progress so 25 clients with that by q2 26 that's the goal yeah, sweet.
Josh Hall:What so profitability wise now, are you at like 30 ish after expenses and team, or is that included?
Sam Sarsten:just I'm just kind of curious, just rough wise, because yeah, I know you say I just want rough, and then I pull up quickbooks well, I, it's like everyone's interested in growth plans.
Josh Hall:But then it can get dangerous when you do have to up all your subscriptions and do have to pay more because you can't do the fulfillment. So that that is the true beauty. Heads up for everybody about larger one-off projects in a scaled maintenance plan is the expenses are so unreasonably low. It's like it's ridiculous. So I was like just highly, highly profitable because I was managing 75 client. I think I was paying 124 bucks a month with man's wp, no other, no other seo tools. A few subscriptions that I had, but lifetime access to divi gravity forums was like 100 bucks a year, a few others. So it's like it's stupid. But seo is a different world with expenses yeah which is also why a thousand dollar plans.
Josh Hall:Highly recommend it at least.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah thousand dollar. Yeah, so I'm looking at a ballpark number right now, just looking at QuickBooks, and I feel like it's hard to calculate because now, as an S-corp, my payroll is an expense, you know? Yeah, now I got you yeah so it's like maybe that should be in the calculation but including that as an expense. Right now we're at like a 20% profitability. I don't know. That's great, great.
Josh Hall:We can ask ai to figure that out if you're paying, if you're paying all your subscriptions, all your expenses and your team and you and you have 20 profitability, especially three years into the business. That's incredible, sam, that's. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean I know quote, unquote the experts say an ideal range is 30, to have like 30 pure profit left over in your business after paying you, after paying team, after paying expenses and taxes of course. So 30% is the goal. That's kind of what I'm heading towards. It's my personal goal as well, but that's great, yeah, that's freaking awesome.
Sam Sarsten:Who knows where it ends up at the end of the year. And it's definitely a number I want to play with and I think we'll be better as we get more clients. And so 2026 is definitely a year where I'm like, okay, it'd be good to hit this number and this profitability, Like I think that's going to be kind of a big pivoting point for us. But I don't know, I've been kind of playing around with the idea of 10X, you know it's like over the last two years being able to 10, 10x look like, you know, going from 250 to 2.5, who knows?
Josh Hall:yeah sounds crazy, but I mean it's. I mean obviously it's doable, it's just I think the question is, at what cost? Like what? What is 10x going to cost? Basically, like, um would that be? It would probably have to be a mix of higher, much higher packages. Yeah, certain level of volume. Your team would be at capacity. You'd probably have a lot more expenses, a lot more taxes. So, yeah, it is kind of like a yeah, I don't want to hold you back from 10X by any means no, no, no, yeah, it's just.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, it's just a funny thought, cause I've been reading a book that's talking about you know, the 10 X is easier than two.
Josh Hall:X. Have you done the revenue calculator? Have you uh make a 10 X?
Sam Sarsten:version with a revenue calculator? Yeah, what's the link for that? Just so everybody knows.
Josh Hall:Just go in revenue calculator or you can ask Brock. Brock will, but yeah. Brock's a man. We love Brock. We love Brock. He's our AI assistant and pro shout out to my daughter naming him broccoli. So yeah, just search revenue calculator and it's a google or I can share it to you as well. You should find it quick.
Sam Sarsten:But there is Brock you just do the main search yeah, you can.
Josh Hall:I've got it all over. It's in web designer HQ, which has all the links to everything there's. It's in the business course, or you just search revenue calculator, it should come up. There's a little graph in front of it. But what I would do, sam, is yeah, map out you can have fun with it what's the 10x version, yeah, what would be, what would be the 10x or what would be the 10x version of that, and you can just map out how many units you need to sell, at what price points, factoring everything in all right, making a copy right now it's actually happening people.
Josh Hall:Okay, subscription model it's a Google Doc and, by the way, I will I will well, as of right now, whoever doesn't have this can get it for completely for free. Just need to jump on my email list. First thing you'll get is revenue calculator, so I'll put a link to that below. But yeah, man, I would map that out. Map out, yeah.
Sam Sarsten:I was playing around with it and I think it's definitely a lot bigger plan. You know, like, for instance, one number is like if somehow you were able to go to 5,000 per month, you know that's 41 clients. So I mean, yeah, it's not. It's not a huge agency.
Josh Hall:It may depend on the your clientele too. I imagine a lot of local businesses. 1,000 is probably like a healthy sweet spot. I feel like two. You could probably push it to two, but I feel like I mean 3,000. Itself is a $36,000 investment annually, so that's like they probably need to be hitting.
Sam Sarsten:They'd probably need to be like at least three million dollar businesses probably to hit that range so you know like just realistically yeah, and the other thing I keep telling myself too is, you know, like kind of going back to the chasing wealth, not money, right, it's like, and you said at what cost? Right, it's like, you go to this 10 X, you try to do this and you're burning the candle at both ends again, that's really hard. And you know, we all know, that there's probably a business down the street in all of our cities that's making 20 million a year gross revenue but it's actually not profitable. And then you know you look at little then can making. It's two, 50, but maybe end of the year with 50,000 profitability, like, like that's which business would you rather have?
Sam Sarsten:I feel like it would be a lot easier to run, right, and so, um, doesn't necessarily need to be more complicated. So, yeah, we're definitely looking at how do we get to hire ticket stuff, not necessarily 5,000, but, uh, you know, just kind of working with the right businesses. Um, that you know, because I think you know more higher ticket clients tend to be easier to work with. Right, they kind of signed the check and they say, okay, that's our marketing expense, we're going to trust these guys to do their thing where the other people might be looking over your shoulder the whole time being like so how are things going, you know?
Josh Hall:two quick, two quick thoughts. Do so definitely, sam. Do the do the 10 X on the spreadsheet and just see what that would look like. I do think that would be a nice little guiding light, even if you don't want to go for it initially in the next couple of years. But that's still in the back of your mind of like. Maybe the first stepping stone is you, but that's still in the back of your mind of like. Maybe the first stepping stone is you know what's a, what's a one or two X over the next couple years, based off of your model, because a two X at 250 is 500. So that's a whole different ballgame than 250 as well. So you're right there. I think it's a great start, a great spot.
Josh Hall:The other thing I was thinking when it comes to any amount of investment whether it's a thousand or two or three or 5,000, the only metric that matters is ROI. So that would be like from a marketing perspective for you it would just be of like there's, whether someone's paying you 500 a month or 5,000, if there's a net positive and ROI for them, it doesn't. That's it Like. It's just a matter of their capital, really Like some clients only have 500 a month. So it's like, well, let's see what we can do to get you an ROI. If a client can do 5,000 a month, you could probably do a lot more to get those results. So that's something to consider as well. So wrapping this up, bringing this home here Sam yeah, that's the big thing with those bigger investments is like it's all about ROI. Like that really is everything. And then the question is like how much do you want to invest in the ROI? 500 a month or 5,000 a month?
Sam Sarsten:So yeah, yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about. Wgp con ranks. Everybody's so scared to charge more, me included. Right At the time I was talking about how I was stuck in a thousand. Right Now we're charging 1200. So it's like incremental progress, but it's like you're not selling the thing, you're selling the difference Right, this opportunity for them to make more money, and so that's the important thing to understand. So, yeah, so at this, oh, go ahead guys. I was going to say and it's crazy to think this all started from filling in Yoast plugins from Josh Hall tutorials.
Josh Hall:Yeah, because I do remember you saying, when you went through my SEO course, it was like once you got Yoast green and it was just thrilling and it is thrilling, it really is, it's very satisfying. Are you using Yoast as your main tool for all those?
Sam Sarsten:I did get SEO Press on a lower price. I use Yoast whenever I need to use the free version and I do think that they're kind of sticking ahead of the curve. So we might make a switch to Yoast. We'll see. So I definitely love Yoast. I think they're a great product and, like I said, we might switch to use him as an agency.
Josh Hall:the only reason I use him is they got in at a slightly cheaper price for seo press, but are you still using that, that framework though, of like title, metadata, content to, to try to match everything up in green for all location pages, service pages, etc well, um.
Sam Sarsten:No, there's a couple of reasons for that. One is, once, you kind of know what, okay. So here's the thing. If you're, if you've never done SEO before, welcome. This is Sam. In 2023, right, Literally like less than two years ago.
Sam Sarsten:I'm in the exact same boat as you those little green lights and those SEO tools which you should. If you're using a free one, you should definitely be using Yoast, because it's the best one out there. For sure, those green lights will teach you how to do it, how to optimize all those things you know. And if you get into blog writing and stuff like that, it's still very helpful, but eventually you're going to cross a threshold where you don't need that anymore. Um, and what you're actually doing, um, is you're putting information in um. It's called the, it's like keyword in the meta, Uh, and so if people want to, they can actually steal your keywords by looking at that, and Google hasn't looked at that for since 2008. So when you put that information there, it does. I mean, most people probably aren't looking for that, but that's just something to think about, and so we don't use that anymore.
Sam Sarsten:I actually had a client recently that uses Yoast. They're like wait a minute. Why aren't, why don't we have green lights? How do we know this is optimized, and I was like, well, because you know, optimized means this, right, what the green lights are looking for algorithmically is that we're using the keywords in the SEO title, the H1, the H2s throughout the body and all that stuff. Once you do it enough, you have your own green light system internally. But I think it's so helpful when you have no idea what you're doing, no frame of reference, Like it's so good to have something like that in the early days, and so, yeah, highly highly recommend starting there.
Josh Hall:And it is, it can be vanity metrics, because you're essentially optimizing for the plugin versus optimizing for the page.
Sam Sarsten:it sounds like it's kind of like page speed score and all that other stuff. Right, you know what, if we really, you know, eventually just got to throw in the towel, like all right, it's as optimized as possible.
Josh Hall:Right yeah, right yeah, that's good man. Well, I'm really excited. We're kind of recording this at the time where we're really about to like talk SEO a lot in pro. Michelle's going to be coming back on the podcast and going to be talking about AI and SEO. Obviously, what you're doing with ThenCan and then your local SEO Academy is huge. I mean, you're on the leading edge and the front edge of that.
Josh Hall:I'm about to revamp my SEO course for a new version and it's going to be a lot about sharing what you're doing with local SEO and then just kind of what I've learned over the past since I launched the initial version of the SEO course. So we're in interesting times with SEO. But I want to wrap up real quick with that thought when do you feel SEO is with AI? Real quick, like you know, your business is built on SEO. When I see like SEO is dead memes, I'm like I'm going to call bullshit on that and, interestingly enough, I'm actually personally doubling down on SEO. I think it's more important than ever in the age of AI, to own digital real estate. So, personally, that's where I'm at. Where are you at?
Sam Sarsten:Well, I think we should take a big step back to what the heck are we actually doing? Right, because we all kind of have fake jobs. Right, we sell these services on the internet. So what are we doing right? And what we're really doing is there's small local business owners and there's people in their area and the people in the area want to work with them. Maybe it's not just local businesses but, in my example, right, and for these people to find them, they need to use a tool to find these people. Right, because nobody talks to their neighbors anymore. And for these local businesses, they need to show up in that place where people are looking, and that usually means that these people need help because they're busy. You know doing garage floors and you know performing acupuncture and stuff like that. They don't want to go on the internet and figure this out. And so you know, even if in the next couple of years we switch to a complete metaverse, we're all wearing VR goggles and you know not going outside anymore Like somebody is going to be helping businesses show up in the metaverse. You know over the other one, and you know that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Spoiler alert over 92% of local searches still go through Google, which is only like 1% lower than it was the last couple of years. So don't panic, seo is not dead.
Sam Sarsten:I was just at WordCamp US last week in Portland and Danny Sullivan who coined the term search engine marketing. He was like one of the good SEOs back in the day, one of the OGs, and went to retire and then got scooped up by Google as a VP, as a new venture, and he's always like, tried to give information back to the community from the inside. He was one of the kickoff speakers the very first day and he had a slide that said, like you know, good GEO, aeo, elemento, peo is just good SEO. And you know some people will argue against that. You know it's Google.
Sam Sarsten:Of course they're giving us this information, but the stuff we found that might be a little helpful for AI search it's pretty much the stuff you would have been doing anyway, like. The end result is still the same thing and so I really think, especially in the short term, people are going to continue to use Google and if they start to use other tools like AI search or AI assistance, like chat, gpt, to do more research which I have to admit I've been doing myself, the stuff that's been working for SEO, you know, showing up in the local directories, having a well-structured website that's targeting all of your services and all of your locations and building authority by getting listed on locally and industry relevant websites. It's still probably going to be helpful, especially in the short term the next two to three years and as things change, hopefully the agencies you're working with and the talking heads on YouTube that you're listening to keep changing too, but not too drastically, because it's not changing that fast. So I mean, that's kind of my take.
Josh Hall:That's great. That's a great way to cap this one off. Man Sam, appreciate it. Love hearing about the success over the past year since our last kind of success catch up. So again, man, you're like just a shining example of how to take advantage of WebCenter Pro. Like you, just jump ahead first committed, you got to six figures in the 18-month range while building your MRR, became a stable soloprenereneur and then truly built a business and you had to scale quickly because of your model, because you went MRR focused local SEO with a lot of different. You know fulfillment behind that, but you can do it. So I love seeing you do it. Dude, it's freaking awesome, uh like I'll, probably have to reel you back a little bit.
Josh Hall:Just, I want you to have those 10 X goals, but I also want you to continue to love what you do as well. But you love work. Like if you love your work and it's fun to build and you have fun creating, there's also no shame in that. As much as I'm an anti hustler, it's like sometimes I do want to work. Sometimes this is what I want to do. I want to do this, I want to work on that sales page. That's more than anything I want to do.
Sam Sarsten:So, yeah, yeah, and it's about balance, right, it's like finding the time to go ski go, yeah, I climbed a mountain the other day, uh, two times this summer, you know, it's like you. Just you got to do the things you love, and sometimes the thing I love is working, but you know, I'm just trying to, you know, work a little less till two in the morning, uh, which I have been, and uh, and you know, just enjoy life a little bit more, right, I think that's what we're all trying to do.
Josh Hall:Um, yeah, your next season here is probably focusing on what profitability and just bigger swings maybe.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, I think it's probably marketing really.
Sam Sarsten:It's something I haven't focused on that much, but yeah, just bigger swings like marketing to kind of a slightly different audience and still probably capturing some of those other leads along the way. Not the 5,000 per month, but I don't know, we'll see but just trying to really identify like, hmm, luxury home builders, they make a really good margin, so they only need a few luxury homes per year more than the guy next to them, right, it's like kind of identifying those things and talking directly to those people. So, yeah, I'm excited to see what that looks like and dig into it with my team, who I totally trust.
Josh Hall:So I mean, there wouldn't be any shame in having a 5k option and then your primary one is the 2000 or whatever it is. Yeah. So, or, you know I like the 2x model with pricing. Maybe maybe 5k per month is your your top plan, which you know is maybe very limited. Maybe you can only account for like one or two of those a month with your team and then you have a $2,500 plan which is your average, and then your $1,000 is your backup. Like that's your low plan. That's your low plan.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, I mean, when I look at like through your vision that was the thing that we talked about we're like you know, if we had 50 clients, you know how do we get to 1.2,? Right, how do we get to 100,000 a month? And that was one of the things we were looking at. I was like, well, we could have 100 clients at $1,200 a month, or we could have 50 clients a $2,500 a month. How do we start inching towards that?
Josh Hall:So yeah, I think that would be an interesting yeah, 5k, $2,500,000 if you were to turn on threes with a different level of Something like that. Yeah, because essentially your main plan right now could be the baseline. You know it works, it's proven already. So what would that look like with a $2,500 option and then a very select VIP $5,000 option?
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, it's fun times. I got things to think about Interesting, interesting interesting.
Josh Hall:What if $5,000 is like a six-month commitment and then the other two are annual? You know like what if there's a I don't know, just thinking out loud, alright, that's for the next one we'll check in next year and we'll see where we're at.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah well, I know we're getting to the end, so I just want to say, you know I am a big believer in the C1 do one teach one philosophy. And so a little over a year ago I was encouraged, mostly by people in pro, to just put some stuff out there, and so I've started to, you know. So I put some courses out there last year. Josh's advice in the DMS was do not do this, focus on your agency. And I said no, josh, I will, I will do as I please. And it was a terrible decision. It totally distracted me, but I'm glad I did it because it really forced me to refine what I was doing. And you know we're going through right now. We're actually revamping those courses. So the 2025, 2026 versions are actually coming out right now. The GBP expert course and the local SEO masterclass should be revamped by then and I'm kind of redoing the delivery course and the selling course right now. I'm pretty excited about what those are going to look like when things are said and done. And you know we're talking about local SEO Academy right now and the community is over 50 people at this point, which is crazy at the year mark and so, like, we have weekly Q and A calls, we've been having monthly expert training. Josh was one of them, shannon was on last month, which is really cool, and we got some cool people coming up talking about, you know, podcasting, talking about, uh, linkedin, short video growth and things like that. So, um, it's really exciting.
Sam Sarsten:I think, like a lot of people ask me, like how the heck did you do this so quickly? Uh, and you know, in a tongue, in cheek way, at WTP con, I joked about how it's like, well, don't have a partner, don't have kids, um, but really, it's actually like leaning on people for support. You know, I took a leap back in the start of 2023 and I joined pro at the community tier and I said, you know, I can't really afford this right now, but I also can't afford to not to and like, if you like, think about this. You know, like I'm not going to say prices out loud because I know they're probably gonna change throughout the year, but like go look right now what the full price is for local SEO Academy and for web designer pro, like at the coaching tiers, and add that up for the year.
Sam Sarsten:You know it's, it's probably less than you would charge for one website. And like you're going to get tapped into two communities that are both like super active, super fun and everybody's trying to do the same thing, and you don't get that anywhere else. You know, this is not some random ass Facebook group where people are trying to sell to each other right? These are people that are actually supporting each other. Like I've been building like real freaking relationships inside of Web Designer Pro over the last two years and that's been awesome.
Josh Hall:Yeah, one of them's on your team now.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, one of them was on my team. I pay her too much, no, I'm just kidding Freaking awesome, I know she's worth a lot more. Trust me.
Josh Hall:She's probably a dream to work with too. It's just good to work with good people Like Eleanor is someone you get a message or an email from and you're like that feels good to get a note from her. You know, rather than like yeah, what does she want now? Nope, that's not the case.
Sam Sarsten:No, yeah, eleanor, she else pitch. You know, go go check it out, go get support, go get the help that you need, because you know you need help to do this, and that's exactly what you get in these communities. And and yeah, if you want to get a deal on local SEO Academy, go to local SEO academyco. Slash Josh two. That's the link. I'm going to make work after this because it's our second episode together, so we're going to make it an even cooler discount. So check it out.
Josh Hall:Awesome, sam. Well, I appreciate it, man. We'll have that linked in the show notes. Obviously, you know, if anyone comes to me and wants to go further into the SEO world that's not something I cover in my course, which is more of a foundational course I know where to go. I say I know where to go. It's local SEO baby. So, yeah, that's my recommendation and I'm sticking to it. It is an honor to be a part of your journey, man, to be able to say, like I've had a hand and you know, seeing you get to this point, I'm pumped and look, we're just, we're still at the beginning of all this. So how exciting is that we're going to continue to take this thing to the next level.
Sam Sarsten:Yeah, yeah, if you don't have the foundation like I rave about Josh's SEO course all the time because it's like it you need that foundation.
Sam Sarsten:And I don't exactly remember what Josh said at WDPCon, the first in-person meeting for the Web Designer Pro community in Columbus last couple months ago tangibly right In person, you shared something where, like this is what I always wanted to build. You know, you have this like vision of helping other people grow business, like you were able to do back in the day, and you get to like you're seeing it come to fruition, like in real life. And you know, just, I can't speak for all the hundreds of other lives that you've touched, from the people in Web Designer Pro to the people that just watch the YouTube channel or just listen to the podcast, cause we know there's thousands of people that listen to this and get a ton of value and then just go forth and do the things that you'll never get to meet. But it's just like thank you, thank you for everything you've done, josh, cause it's yeah, I know I wouldn't be here without you and uh, yeah, can't say enough, I appreciate you.
Josh Hall:There's no better way to end than that one man. Thank you, sam. I appreciate it, dude, and yeah, you're freaking awesome. Love coaching Eagles. I love coaching Eagle and Sam. Thanks, dude, till the next one. What a shining example of what's possible when you commit, when you're hungry and when you just get down, put your work boots on and do the work.
Josh Hall:Sam is again one of the biggest success stories and highlights of of web Web Designer Pro, as far as somebody who went into this industry didn't know barely anything and utilize the resources. So I want to say right up front if you want to be the next Sam, what are you waiting for? Web Designer Pro is here for you. We have different tiers available now. So if you need time to go through the courses, if maybe you're working a nine to five and you don't have time to commit to the community or coaching, you can go through the courses and the courses tier. If you want to do what Sam did and just jump on in headfirst to the deep end and jump into the community, you can have both. You can go to all the courses and you can get the community aspects with our extra trainings and the actual community itself, and then we do open up coaching spots often now, when available, so you can get direct coaching me with me when you're ready. You can find all that information at webdesignaprocom.
Josh Hall:Again, head to the show notes for this one at joshhallco, slash 399. There you will find the links for everything we mentioned, including Sam's agency website, his special offer for you as a listener of this podcast, for his local SEO Academy and everything else that we talked about. Thank you so much, friend, for joining. Make sure you subscribe so you get notified on the next ones that are coming out. We've got some doozies ahead and again I just want to publicly say way to go, sam. What an honor to be a part of his journey. Thanks for joining, friend. If you want to be the next, sam, I hope to see you.
