0:00

I've been marketing for 13 years. I built and

0:02

sold nine companies. I sold my last company for $46.2

0:04

million to American Pacific Group. I've

0:06

also written two books on marketing that have

0:08

sold over a million copies. Here's 13 years

0:10

of marketing advice that will make you more

0:12

money. Piece of advice number one, start with

0:14

low prices or even gasp free. The

0:17

reason that I say that is because if you

0:19

start there, then you can go up. It's very

0:21

difficult to come down. And in

0:23

the beginning, you wanna get flow through

0:25

the system. And so it's totally fine to start it

0:28

free and then start bumping up from there. And so

0:30

I'll give you three quick examples and then I'll show

0:32

you how to do this tactically. So when I started

0:34

my first ever business, it was a online personal training

0:36

business. This is 13 plus years ago. And

0:39

when I started, I didn't know anything and I was

0:41

so afraid to charge people money to begin with. And

0:43

so, but I did want them to pay something because

0:45

I wanted them to be invested because otherwise people don't

0:47

follow through with their workouts or their nutrition plans, et

0:50

cetera. And so I said, hey, just donate

0:52

to the charity of your choice, whatever charity

0:54

you want to. In exchange, I will

0:56

then train you for 12 weeks. And so people would

0:59

donate, I think it was 500 or a thousand dollars was

1:01

their choice to a charity of their selection. And by doing

1:03

that, I actually got my first 13 or so customers just

1:05

by making posts and DMing people that I knew. And it

1:07

didn't feel weird because I was like, hey, I'm doing this

1:10

kind of nonprofit thing. I wanna help you out if you

1:12

wanna lose weight and you can feel good about it and

1:14

it's a write off. And so we were like, oh, this

1:16

is pretty cool. But the thing is, is like, that was

1:18

the first time I ever did it. And then from there,

1:20

I said, huh, would you guys be willing to pay

1:22

me now after we finished this 12 weeks? And a lot of them were like,

1:24

sure. I was like, yeah, I'm the charity now. So

1:27

after I did a good job, they were willing to do

1:29

that and refer me customers. The

1:32

next business that I did this with was GymWatch when

1:34

I actually started flying out

1:36

to other gyms. So I used to do turnarounds and I

1:38

did that for two plus years where I'd fly out to

1:40

a gym, set up all the pricing, do the marketing and

1:42

all this stuff. And I did it all for free. And

1:44

I did it that way because I didn't know how

1:47

I could sell those gym owners. And the

1:49

deal that I made was, I only make

1:51

money if I make sales and I'll front

1:53

the cash for the marketing. So like they

1:55

took zero risk on and

1:57

I would do everything, including pay for my hotel, my flights, my... my

2:00

food, my rental car, everything. But

2:02

being able to do that, it allowed me to

2:04

get way more yeses quickly, test out the system

2:06

in 30 plus markets that I had, which then

2:08

eventually led me to license in that system to

2:11

5,000 plus locations, and that was the company that

2:13

I sold to APG. The

2:15

third time that I did this

2:17

was when I started my software company, Allen. And so

2:19

when I started the company, I was like, I need

2:21

to get some case studies, I need some testimonials, I

2:23

need some stories to show successes, right? And so I

2:25

think a lot of people in the beginning think this

2:27

is only a beginner thing, but even if you're a

2:29

big business owner, when you start out a new product

2:31

or a new division, starting with

2:33

free customers just makes a lot of sense.

2:35

And it's for four reasons. One

2:37

is that free customers become customers, you become paying after the

2:40

period as long as you do a good job. So it

2:42

makes money in one way. The second way it makes you

2:44

money is that they'll also refer you customers because you do

2:46

a great job, they'll just send you other people, and that

2:48

can be contingent on why you do it for free for

2:50

them. The third is that they'll leave

2:53

you testimonials and reviews. So those reviews and those testimonials

2:55

also, you advertise and you can get more customers from

2:57

them. And then finally, whenever you do stuff for

2:59

free, I do it in exchange for feedback. I say,

3:01

hey, tell me what I could do to make

3:03

this better. And again, it's not saying like,

3:05

tell me all the ways I suck, it's just saying, tell me

3:07

how I can make this better. Tell me how I could make

3:10

it worth it for you to want to stay and continue to

3:12

pay. And ideally, the

3:14

easy test of knowing whether or not this

3:16

works is that they actually stay and pay

3:19

afterwards. And so it's

3:21

the easiest way to get going on any new

3:23

product, and I think so many people start trying

3:25

to sell stuff too soon without enough proof, and

3:27

in the beginning, you suck. That's why it's a

3:29

new product or a new division. And so I'd

3:31

rather not ruin my reputation. Say I'm giving away

3:33

for free, give the reason is I'm brand new

3:35

at this thing or I'm trying this new thing

3:38

out, and that way I'll get a little bit

3:40

of grace, and then that way I can make

3:42

the thing better in an iterative process much faster

3:44

with way more people because I'm giving away for

3:46

free or at cost. And then once I get

3:48

those massive success stories that they feel like they

3:50

owe me because I've done a great job, then

3:52

I can market those and go at full price.

3:54

So here's how you actually do this tactically, going

3:57

from starting at low prices to moving all the

3:59

way towards. where you want to be, which is

4:01

high prices with big premiums, right? And

4:03

so, what I'd say is after you have

4:05

your first test case study batch, so

4:07

call it 10 or 20 people depending on the size

4:09

of your product or your services, after that, every five,

4:11

I just go up by 20%. And

4:14

so let's say, okay, I started at zero and I

4:16

have a marketing agency. I might say, okay, the first,

4:18

the next five I'm gonna do for 1,000 bucks, right?

4:20

And then from there, I might say, okay, the next

4:23

five I'm gonna do for 1,200 bucks. The

4:25

next five I'm gonna do for 1,500 bucks. And

4:27

so you just keep going up by 20% until

4:29

the conversion rate times the price goes down. So

4:31

that way you can just calculate the total amount

4:33

of money made off of X number of sales

4:35

calls. And by doing that, you'll be able to

4:37

see, okay, here's the sweet spot where I sell the

4:39

most amount of units at the highest potential price.

4:41

So my company, Jim Launch, that I sold for $46

4:44

million. That company, you

4:46

know, at its peak before I was selling it,

4:49

we were taking home over a million dollars a month in personal

4:51

income. But that's what a lot of people

4:53

think happened the whole time, but it wasn't like that. The

4:56

actual very first business that I started in fitness,

4:58

I actually gave away my services for free. I

5:00

actually did it as a nonprofit for charity so

5:02

that I could get clients in the door and

5:04

test out whether my stuff actually worked and that

5:06

I could deliver services. And when you're having the

5:08

conversation with those first few people, whether you're doing

5:10

it for free or you're gonna do it for

5:12

a big discount, you say, hey, I plan on

5:14

going to this price point, but I'm willing to

5:16

do it for free in exchange for X, which

5:18

is usually a feedback, feedback for me, and a

5:20

public testimony if you're comfortable doing it. And

5:23

by having those two things, then one, you

5:25

guarantee that you get the feedback, which is the thing you need most,

5:29

but you also can get the testimony that you can leverage. And then finally,

5:31

you can also tack on a referral if you want

5:33

to. Again, I'd say the testimony and the referral should

5:35

be contingent on you doing a good job. And you

5:37

say, hey, if I do a good job, would you

5:40

be willing to do these two things? If they say

5:42

yes, then you're good to go. The fourth one, which

5:44

is, do they actually wanna buy at full price later,

5:46

which will be the real test of how good you

5:48

were. And I think the bottom line here is that

5:50

when you start out, you're not that good. And even

5:52

if your ego is like kind of convincing you that

5:54

you are good, which I think is silly, just

5:57

even imagine two years from now that you're gonna be

5:59

much better than you are now. Well, that guy is

6:01

probably way more experienced. So give that guy a running

6:03

start by starting free now and then building momentum into

6:06

it. And I have this saying that I repeat all

6:08

the time in my team, which is create

6:10

flow, monetize flow, then add

6:12

friction. And so it's like you have to

6:15

run water through the machine. You have to

6:17

get flow into the system to see where

6:19

it's going to break so that you know

6:21

what real actually looks like rather than just

6:23

trying to get rich on Excel. The second

6:26

is the framework that I use for scaling

6:28

advertising or scaling marketing in any niche. More,

6:30

better, new. When you're starting out,

6:32

more is almost always the answer. And so

6:34

I remember when I was thinking

6:37

about getting into content, I paid someone who

6:39

had made a lot more content, had a

6:41

much bigger brand. And I said, hey, what

6:43

should I be doing? Like, what

6:45

should I do to make my content better? And he's like,

6:47

dude, he's like, you don't need to make your content better.

6:49

He's like, you're just not making anything. And so what he

6:51

did was he pulled up his profile on LinkedIn and he

6:53

pulled up my profile on LinkedIn. He was like, I posted

6:55

five times a day. You haven't even posted. And

6:58

then he pulled up Instagram and he pulled up my

7:00

Instagram. And he was like, I posted two times a

7:02

day. You posted once a week. And I was like,

7:04

man. He's like, okay, let's pull up YouTube and then

7:06

my YouTube. And he just went platform by platform. And

7:08

he showed that he was doing 3X, 5X, 10X, the

7:11

volume that I was. And he was like, dude, you

7:13

just gotta do more. And that was

7:15

just like, I felt embarrassed because I just

7:17

paid all this money to have someone just look at me and

7:19

just say, do more. But hopefully I can save you the money

7:22

and just tell you, you probably need to do more. And

7:24

the interesting thing about this is that I later

7:26

on at the

7:28

point now when we had maybe, this is gonna be

7:31

a year ago, I had five-ish million subscribers across all

7:33

platforms, I had a friend of mine who's a billionaire

7:35

who wanted to start getting into personal branding. And he

7:37

said, hey man, can you check out my Instagram and

7:39

see what's going on and why we're not growing as

7:41

fast as I want to? And so I

7:44

said, well, before I look at it, I was like, how many

7:46

posts will we keep making across all platforms? He's like, oh, got

7:48

that now. He's like, I'm posting once a day. And

7:50

I was like, dude. I was like, we post 50 plus

7:52

times a day. And he was like, got

7:55

it. He just was like, you don't need

7:57

to say anymore. I understand. Because he had had enough

7:59

experience. and other realms to know that like, oh,

8:02

all of the things in volume that work

8:04

in sales, that work in customer success, that

8:06

work in product in terms of iterations, the

8:08

same concepts apply to advertising and marketing. Like

8:10

you just need to do a lot in

8:12

order to figure out what works so that

8:14

you can do better later. Now,

8:17

what's interesting about this is that this also applies

8:19

on the paid side. So I remember there was

8:21

a chiropractor agency that approached me, they

8:23

were doing about two million bucks a year, and

8:25

he was like, hey man, I think I've

8:27

saturated Facebook. And so I was

8:29

like, and this is when it was Facebook, not meta, and

8:32

I was like, what do you mean? He's like, I just think

8:34

I've saturated the chiropractor niche. And I

8:36

was like, this is a $10 billion a

8:38

year industry, and you feel

8:40

like your $2 million per year agency has

8:42

saturated Facebook. I was like, do you know

8:44

of any chiropractor agencies that exist? He's like,

8:47

yeah, there's loads, it's like, you know, there's

8:49

hundreds of them. I was like, okay. So

8:52

explain to me why every sale that is keeping

8:54

all of them in business is

8:56

somehow not sales that you should be making. He

8:59

was like, got it. I was like, right,

9:01

you're spending 40 grand a month when in aggregate,

9:03

all the agencies that are selling to chiropractors are

9:05

probably spending four million a month. And

9:07

so all of the spend that

9:09

those businesses are able to make in your market

9:11

is your opportunity. Is if you can out-compete them,

9:13

you can provide better service, you can have longer

9:16

LTV means you can spend more to acquire the

9:18

customer than they can, and then you can eventually

9:20

price them out of the marketplace. Because fundamentally, paid

9:22

ads is actually an auction for attention. And so

9:24

people bid against each other for ad space. And

9:26

so if you can outbid your competition, you can

9:29

have an ethical monopoly by literally bidding more

9:31

than everyone else while still making money.

9:34

And that's the crazy thing. And that's what fundamentally, what you

9:36

want to build in terms of the mousetrap of your business

9:38

is how can I make more money from every customer than

9:40

anyone else does so that I can spend more than anyone

9:42

else can to acquire them. And so I had a portfolio

9:44

company CEO, who's a good marketer, you know, come up to

9:47

me and he was like, hey man, I think we really

9:49

need to scale our ads. And I was like, I agree. And

9:52

I was like, well, how many pieces of create are

9:55

you putting out, you know, per week? And he's like, oh, well, I

9:57

just record once a month. I was like, okay, fine. making

10:00

per session. He was like, we do about 15.

10:02

So we do about 15 new ads per month. And

10:04

I just kind of looked at him. I

10:07

was like, dude, when I was trying to go from

10:09

your size to five times your size, I was making

10:11

35 a week. And

10:14

nowadays, we make way more than that in terms

10:16

of content and in terms of the ads that

10:18

we do, like because I make ads for school. And

10:20

then I inform the ads across our portfolio. And

10:23

so the big saying that

10:25

I have that's like plastered on the

10:27

wall that actually applies to sales and

10:29

marketing is volume negates luck. Like

10:31

if you don't want to rely on luck and rely

10:33

on one of those 10 ads or five ads that

10:35

you make to be amazing, you just make more ads.

10:37

And I can't tell you the amount of times that

10:39

it just reset the bar. And that's what I'm hoping

10:41

to do with this video. It's like the amount of

10:43

volume that the people who are ahead of you are

10:45

doing is not two X or three

10:47

X more. It's oftentimes 100 X more, right? Even

10:50

the 35 times four, I think 140 pieces, the

10:54

guy was making 15. It was

10:57

nine X, the volume of what he

10:59

was doing, right? And some of you guys are

11:01

making five ads a month or one ad a

11:03

month and thinking that that's somehow going to be

11:05

sufficient to get to your goals. And

11:07

nowadays, and I'll explain later in this help mile

11:09

ad creation process, but just the big headline is

11:11

that in the very beginning, you just need to

11:13

do a lot more than you think you do.

11:16

The second is once you've done more, then at

11:18

what point do you start shifting to better? And

11:21

the way that you can figure that out is when

11:23

the return on effort for better exceeds

11:26

one incremental unit of more. Meaning,

11:29

if I've got one sales guy, if I add

11:31

a second sales guy, then I think I have a

11:33

high degree of certainty that I can probably double my

11:35

sales by doing that. But when you have 10 sales

11:38

guys, adding one more sales guys, the same level

11:40

of effort as adding going from one to two,

11:42

going from 10 to 11, but it's only a 10%

11:44

increase. And so if I

11:46

can increase the overall throughput of my entire team by 20%

11:48

or 25% by

11:51

tweaking some sharp rate stuff or doing a

11:53

headline split test or changing CTAs

11:55

on my ads, then those are things that would

11:57

make me more money per. per unit of

11:59

effort. And so in the beginning, you usually just

12:01

need to blow as much volume through there

12:03

as possible. That's the create flow, monetize flow, then

12:06

add friction. The optimization steps really only matter when

12:08

you have flow going through. And so you

12:10

do more first, and then once you're big enough,

12:12

better becomes a better return on effort. But once

12:14

you then go through the better steps, then

12:16

you usually have to go back to, okay, how

12:19

do we do 10 times more than we are

12:21

now? How do we go from 10 sales

12:23

guys to 100 sales guys? And

12:25

that's the thinking that you have to go through

12:28

in order to start scaling in terms of orders

12:30

of magnitude. And when you have so much volume,

12:32

you're able to iterate so much faster. Like even

12:34

us recently, we started making more

12:37

content on YouTube. And we already

12:39

noticed as a team, we were like, oh, this

12:41

is awesome. We're learning so much faster again with,

12:43

like we're literally putting out four or five videos

12:45

a week instead of one video a week. And

12:47

so we're learning about headlines and thumbnails, and there's

12:49

less pressure per video because we're like, cool, learn

12:51

that, let's move on to the next one. And

12:53

so it allows you to just iterate so much

12:55

faster by getting your ego and your emotions tied

12:57

into it. Here's how I do it, is

13:00

I ask the question, what

13:02

would stop me from 10Xing the business right now?

13:05

And if the answer is nothing, then we 10X

13:07

the business. Now, most times there is

13:09

something that would break, like what would break first? And

13:11

so as soon as we identify what is the first

13:13

thing that would break if we 2X, 5X, 10X, we

13:16

then isolate that thing, put all of our

13:18

focus towards fixing it, and then we do

13:20

the increase in volume. And

13:22

that is how we continue to deconstrain until we

13:24

go to the next bottleneck, and then deconstrain that,

13:26

and then grow into the next bottleneck, because we

13:29

have a fundamental belief that all businesses will continue

13:31

to grow until their point of constraint, and then

13:33

they will grow no further. So you identify the

13:35

constraint, relieve the constraint, and allow it to grow

13:37

again. Growth occurs as an after effect of the

13:39

inputs you put into the system. Now, once you've

13:41

done as much as you can, more, and

13:44

you've done it as well as you can, better, when

13:46

you can't do any more, any better, you start and

13:48

try something new. And the reason that

13:50

I have new last is

13:52

because the cost of change of doing something

13:55

new is guaranteed, but the return on something

13:57

new is not. And so I like

13:59

to say that as a, a big warning for the fact that

14:01

the vast majority of entrepreneurs want to spend 80% of their time

14:04

on doing new stuff, when really they should spend 90%

14:06

of their time doing more and

14:08

better of what is already working for them. The only

14:11

time you do new stuff is when nothing is working.

14:13

So when you're starting as an entrepreneur, everything's new, and

14:15

you keep trying and keep trying until something works. Once

14:18

it works, you have to unlearn the whole experimentation idea,

14:20

and then you'd have to go, great, I need to

14:22

do as much as I possibly can and do it

14:24

as well as I possibly can. And so it's a

14:26

different mindset that you have to get into, but that's

14:28

how you start scaling. Now, what

14:30

point do you start doing something new? Well,

14:33

if you've already said, OK, I can't do

14:35

more for a very clear reason that there's

14:37

a big cost. Like sometimes there's a huge

14:39

incremental cost past a certain barrier. You're like,

14:42

OK, I think we really are, let's say

14:44

you're a local gym. If

14:46

you're a local gym and you're spending, call it $10,000

14:48

a month on ads, you're reaching every

14:51

single person in your radius multiple times a

14:53

week. And so that's on one platform. And

14:55

so you're like, OK, in order for me

14:57

to scale this, it's not really about doing

14:59

more or even doing that better. It's like

15:02

I've saturated the crap out of the eyeballs

15:04

here. Well, that's when doing something

15:06

new will yield a higher return, you'll get

15:08

a better return on effort. And so that's

15:10

where we're like, OK, maybe I'm going to

15:12

start doing an outbound. Or I'll start doing

15:14

the paid ads, but just on another channel,

15:16

I'll start running YouTube ads, I'll start running

15:18

Google search ads, I'll start running display

15:20

ads, I'll start doing direct mail

15:23

pieces, I'll start radio ads. There's a number of things

15:25

that you could do in terms of other channels, but

15:27

they would be new. And so this is

15:29

the thought process that I have when I approach that, which is if

15:32

you could double the sales of your company and

15:34

it would take a year, would you do it?

15:37

But you had to wait a year before they doubled. Most

15:39

people would say yes. If I said you had

15:41

to invest, call it half a year's profits in order

15:43

to getting your business to double, would you do it?

15:45

Yes, that'd probably be a really good return on investment.

15:47

If you put half a year's profits and you double

15:50

the business, you're getting a 200% return. That's

15:52

awesome, right? And so the thing

15:54

is that people start something new and they

15:56

spend one month of ad spend and they

15:58

say, oh, it did I lost

16:00

money, I'm gonna stop. But the

16:03

reality is that it's gonna take you three months,

16:05

six months, sometimes 12 months to get that return

16:07

to actually pay off. And what I mark is

16:09

progress, not the dollar. So it's like, okay, first

16:11

are we getting clicks? Okay, we're getting clicks. Okay,

16:13

are we getting opt-ins? Okay, we're getting opt-ins. Are

16:15

the opt-ins, we're getting the right type of people

16:17

that we're looking for? Okay, yes. Or if they're

16:20

not, then we start tweaking the messaging, we start

16:22

tweaking the funnel, until we get the right people.

16:24

Okay, now we have the right people who are

16:26

opting in. Great, now can we get them on

16:28

the phone? Can we get them in person? Can

16:30

we get them to show up to some sort of

16:32

conversion event, some sales event, that we can then try

16:35

and sell them something, right? And so you keep walking,

16:37

walking the dollar over the bridge until eventually it comes

16:39

to the other side. But that takes money, and that

16:41

takes time, and that takes learning, but it's a return

16:43

on investment because if you do double

16:46

your lead flow in a year,

16:50

one, it doubles the business. Two, it more than doubles

16:52

the value of the business because now you have two

16:54

different ways to get customers. And so it makes the

16:56

business more stable because if one of them goes down,

16:59

then you still have the other one. And so you

17:01

have a more stable business that's also bigger. Market advice

17:04

number three, how to do better. And so this is

17:06

double clicking into the better concept because this is especially

17:08

for the bigger business owners. So if you're at

17:10

a few million dollars a year to tens of millions of

17:12

dollars a year, like this is really going to start paying

17:14

massive dividends. So number one is optimize

17:17

front to back when it comes to

17:19

marketing. So that's the 80-20. So

17:21

David Ogilvy said famously, after

17:23

you've written your headline, you spent 80 cents of

17:25

your advertising dollar. So he knew that 80% of

17:28

people aren't going to do anything

17:30

past read the headline. And so he'd put 80%

17:32

of his effort towards those first

17:34

few words. And the really experienced

17:36

marketers who are watching this are like nodding their

17:38

heads right now. The first five

17:40

seconds, the headline, the packaging, in my history

17:42

of the 13 years that I've been doing

17:44

this has only increased. I haven't even gotten

17:47

to a sweet spot. They just continue to

17:49

become more and more important in my mind

17:51

because it's the frame through which everyone

17:53

contextualizes what they're about to consume. So

17:55

one, it increases the likelihood they consume

17:57

it. Two, it introduces the frame that

17:59

they consume. the advertisement or the promotion

18:01

through. And we now

18:03

have such great data, even across on

18:06

the content side, that if we have

18:08

two different thumbnails, you can literally see

18:10

the average view duration go up by

18:12

two or three minutes sometimes simply by

18:15

changing the thumb that people click before

18:17

they watch the video. It's wild. And

18:19

so the frame that people consume the

18:21

content in has a massive impact on

18:24

how effective it is. Now, I'll

18:26

tell you a quick story to show you just how important

18:28

this is. So a friend of mine, Dean,

18:31

had this massive advertising campaign. And

18:33

he had written a new book, and

18:35

he went on Larry King Live. And so he

18:38

wanted to use the Larry King interview to

18:41

advertise the book. And so

18:43

he shot the whole interview, and he basically

18:46

wanted Larry King to introduce him in a

18:48

cool way, to make him sound cool, of

18:50

course. Like he would laugh if I was

18:52

telling the story now. And

18:54

so he knew that the ad was killer, and

18:56

so he ran it. But

18:59

250 grand, and nothing came back. And he

19:01

was like, what's going on? Like I know

19:04

this ad's a killer, like what's happening? So

19:06

he went back through his old history of ads, and

19:09

he looked at the top performing ads he'd ever done,

19:11

and as soon as he started watching me realize that

19:13

he missed the hook, that the hook was wrong. And

19:16

so he flew Larry King back out.

19:19

He paid him again. They set up

19:21

a whole new set again just

19:24

to rerecord the first 30 seconds.

19:27

And so they rerecorded the first 30

19:29

seconds with the hour long interview, and

19:32

then reran the infomercial, and did 100

19:34

million in sales. And

19:36

so when I heard that story, I

19:38

was like, this is why the first five seconds,

19:40

the headline, the hook, is so important, and that's

19:42

what I spend now a disproportionate amount of time

19:44

on. And people are listening to this, and you

19:46

guys are nodding along, but you're still not getting

19:48

it, because it's not real for you, and it

19:50

took me forever to figure this out. When we

19:52

make ads, and I'll get into my ad creation

19:54

process later, I do

19:57

10 times the ad creation process. on

20:01

the first five seconds. 10 times,

20:03

actually 10 times. So if I have an hour, I would

20:05

spend 55 minutes on

20:09

the first five seconds and then five minutes on

20:11

everything that's after that. Like that's the proportion of

20:13

how much time I'm spending on just getting that

20:15

first part right. I'll give you a different, a

20:17

content example of this. So I was invited to

20:20

this content creator thing with

20:23

all the top guys, probably 10 guys

20:25

there. The lowest guy in the

20:27

room was me, and the next lowest guy was at

20:29

like 10 million plus subscribers only on YouTube. So they

20:31

just had me there for entertainment, who knows. And

20:35

I remember one of the guys had about

20:37

15 million subscribers and he was pissed that

20:40

this other content creator had basically copied his

20:42

video. And the copied video had

20:44

done better than his, like three times more. He got like

20:46

30 million views and he's got like 10 million views. And

20:50

the main guy there who had several hundred

20:52

million subscribers across all his channels was like,

20:54

let's pop it in, let's roast it. And

20:57

so they press play on the video and

20:59

five seconds in, he stops the video, he's like, dude,

21:02

you didn't confirm the thumb. He's like

21:04

the headline and the first five seconds weren't confirmed.

21:06

And he was like, I don't need to see

21:08

anymore. And he just walked out of the room.

21:10

And so this guy had spent weeks making this

21:12

thing, obsessing about every detail of it. He had

21:14

a 20 page plus brief on how he was

21:16

making this video and he missed the first five

21:19

seconds. And that was the guy who had the

21:21

multiple hundred million subscribers was like, that's

21:23

it. And he just walked out and got lunch. And so

21:25

when I saw that, I was like, wow. It

21:28

just reinforced how important this was. And recently, just

21:30

at a micro level, one of our portfolio companies,

21:32

this is an eight figure plus business, we

21:36

simply changed the headline on

21:39

the landing page. We did nothing else. Same

21:41

ads, just changed the headline.

21:43

We increased booking rate by 62%. Now

21:47

here's what's crazy is the opt-in rate remained

21:49

the same but simply because of the frame

21:51

of the promise in the headline, 62% more

21:53

people chose to book calls for that business.

21:56

And so it just shows you that how

21:58

you frame. what people are then going to

22:00

consume has a massive impact on how much

22:02

value and how likely they are to take

22:04

the next step. So here's how you do

22:06

it in terms of optimizing 80-20 front to

22:08

back. So number one is assume that they

22:10

have no idea who you are, what

22:13

you do, how it works, they're in a

22:15

rush, and they have a third grade education.

22:17

All right, so clear beats clever, deletion beats

22:19

explanation. And so what you want to do

22:21

is you want to try and make it

22:23

as short as seemingly possible, and then once

22:25

you have it as short as possible, put

22:28

it into a third grade reading calculator, look

22:30

at the grade level and keep editing it

22:32

down until it's third grade. The thing is,

22:34

is you're not going to attract dumber people,

22:36

you're going to make accessible to everyone. A

22:38

smart person needs to use less brain power

22:40

to understand simple language, and it makes it

22:42

understandable to everyone else. And as a reminder,

22:44

30% of people can barely read.

22:46

And so this is like relying on them to

22:49

have the skill, it's like you want to meet

22:51

them where they're at. And there are some very

22:53

rich people who can barely read. And so it

22:55

has nothing to do with intelligence, it has everything

22:57

to do with how they're educated, which may have

23:00

no connection with their purchasing power. Okay,

23:03

and tactically, what I'll do is I'd make about

23:05

50 hooks every time I start recording ads. So

23:07

I have 50 hooks that I've written down that

23:09

I think are awesome. And then I have three

23:12

to five meat pieces of an advertisement, and then

23:14

I do one to three CTAs, meaning call to

23:16

actions at the end. And so that means I

23:18

have way more on the front end in terms

23:20

of effort, compared to the three to five and

23:22

the one to three that I do on the

23:24

back. And that's because I know that that's where

23:26

all of the effort needs to go, because that's

23:28

where all the returns are. And here's the difference,

23:31

and this is why I say you optimize advertising

23:33

specifically from front to back. Because it's very rare

23:35

that you're going to be able to double or

23:37

triple or quadruple the amount of throughput you get

23:40

in a funnel by optimizing the back end. If you have a 30,

23:42

call it a 50% show up rate, okay, if you get it to

23:44

75%, that's massive, but

23:48

it's a 50% jump, and that would be

23:50

a massive increase in show rate if you did

23:52

that. But I can absolutely get CTRs from 1%

23:54

to 4% by just optimizing the

23:57

hell out of the front end. And that's a 4x

23:59

increase. four times the throughput that goes

24:01

through the entire funnel. And so I put my effort

24:03

there because you can achieve 100%, 200%, 300% increases

24:07

on the front end, whereas it's much more difficult on the back

24:09

end. Now, for sure, you want to optimize those things, but if

24:11

I'm going to allocate my effort, I want to get the biggest

24:14

bang for buck. So when you're

24:16

making your hooks, I call it a call-out. So reading page

24:18

136 from my book. A

24:21

call-out is whatever you do to get the attention of

24:23

your audience. Call-outs go from hyper-specific to get one person's

24:26

attention, to not at all specific to get everyone's attention.

24:28

So let me explain. If someone

24:30

drops a tray of dishes in a

24:32

party, everyone looks. If a child yells,

24:34

mom, then the moms look. If someone

24:36

says your name, only you look. But

24:38

again, they all get attention. And so I try

24:40

to make my call-outs as specific as possible to

24:42

get the right people, but broad enough to get

24:44

as many of them as I can. So pay

24:47

close attention to advertisers use call-outs, especially the ones

24:49

targeting your audience. And so what I'll

24:51

do is I'll look at all the ads from other

24:53

competitors who are targeting that same audience as me. And

24:55

the ads that are running a very long time, I

24:57

know that that call-out is working well. And so I

24:59

will write down all the call-outs that I see and

25:01

then I will write out the words that I know

25:03

my customers go by and I'll either start with a

25:05

problem that I think that they're struggling from or

25:08

a question that I think that I

25:10

know that they'll say yes to or I'll

25:12

simply state moms in Nevada, homeowners in Clark

25:14

County, right? Very clearly calling out this is

25:16

for you and that's exactly what you want

25:18

the person to say when they read the

25:20

headline or hear the call-out. This is for

25:22

me. And the

25:24

more specific you get, oftentimes you'll be

25:26

surprised. You think that going as

25:29

broad as you can is going to increase the number

25:31

of opt-ins. But when you get really

25:33

specific about the type of customer you're really trying

25:35

to attract, you will often find that they're like,

25:37

oh, I wouldn't respond to the broad thing, but

25:39

this one's just for me. And you get more

25:41

people in terms of qualified leads in the door

25:43

by being more specific. Peace of advice number four,

25:46

LTV to CAC is the only thing

25:48

that matters. And if

25:50

I had only one metric that I could find out about

25:52

a business, if I only had one that I could pick,

25:55

it would be the LTV to CAC ratio. And

25:57

let me tell you a quick story that will kind of drive this home.

25:59

So A friend of mine owns

26:01

a BOW manufacturing business. And they

26:03

do, you know, 23 million bucks a year, so

26:06

relatively large business established. And he

26:08

was like, hey, we're trying to get into paid ads.

26:10

Now they had all these distribution relationships, but they want

26:12

to open up this new channel. And he said, hey,

26:14

you're the marketing guy, right? So can you, you know,

26:16

what would you do here? And so

26:18

as I was explaining the process that I, the

26:20

strategies that I want to outline for him, he was

26:22

like, well, what's the benchmark I should be looking at

26:24

in terms of leads? And I was like, dude, the

26:27

benchmark is irrelevant. Everything just comes back from what's gross

26:29

profit. So it's like, okay, so what's the average

26:31

gross profit on a BOW? I'm making this up. Say it's

26:33

$500. Okay, so if we get leads

26:35

for call it 20 bucks, and we know that

26:37

we can get one in five leads to buy

26:39

a BOW, then it means it cost us, our

26:41

CAC is $100, and our

26:43

gross profit from selling each BOW is 500. So

26:46

it costs us $100 to make $500 a gross profit, five

26:49

to one. Awesome. And so fundamentally,

26:51

is $20 a good lead cost? Well,

26:54

yeah, he's getting five to one. If it was at $10,

26:58

then he'd be getting 10 to one. And that's assuming

27:00

the same ratios. And so it just depends on what

27:02

percentage of customers you convert, and at what price, what

27:04

you're converting them at. CAC to LTV

27:06

or CAC to LTGP. So I use LTGP

27:08

to be more specific. Lifetime value is just

27:10

the amount of gross profit you make from

27:12

a customer over the lifetime of them being

27:15

a customer of your business. CAC is

27:17

the cost to acquire a customer, which is the

27:19

all in cost, including sales, marketing, software, everything, to

27:22

get someone to give you money. And so the

27:24

CAC to LTV ratio is simply how much money

27:26

it costs you to make more money. It's the

27:28

foundational economic unit of any business. And so making

27:30

sure that you know how much money it costs

27:33

you to make money, that fundamentally feels like a

27:35

very important metric in order to scale the business.

27:37

And over time, as long as you don't have

27:40

some big capital expenses in terms of scaling

27:42

your business, that fundamental return

27:44

that you get will reflect the compounding

27:46

growth of the business, provided you don't

27:48

have other constraints to growth. So for

27:50

example, if I have meals that

27:53

I sell for $10, and it costs

27:55

me $9 to package and ship them and

27:57

deliver them, then I have $1. of

28:00

gross profit per meal. And so if someone buys 10

28:02

meals for me, I'm not making $100, I'm making $10

28:04

in gross profit. And

28:07

if the average person buys, call it five weeks

28:10

of meals, then I would make $50 in lifetime

28:12

gross profit. And

28:14

so the only way that I would want to be able to

28:16

acquire customers is that the cost to acquire a customer in this

28:18

example, I'd want to have probably at $15 or less. Because

28:21

you can't do it at even, because then there's no money left over to

28:24

do everything else in the business. And so the rule of thumb is that

28:26

you want to have at least three to one on

28:28

LTV to CAC. But again, LTV is not lifetime revenue,

28:30

it's lifetime gross profit, right? And that's what people, I

28:32

think a lot of times mess up is they don't

28:34

even know what their gross profit is, and then they

28:36

spend blindly. So I'll tell you

28:38

a fun one. So if you've seen Starbucks advertised,

28:40

now a lot of them, they just use their

28:43

storefronts as they're advertising at this point. But they

28:45

make about $14,000 in LTV per customer. And

28:50

so they can spend absurd amounts of money to

28:52

get customers in the door. Like even if it

28:54

costs them $500, they're still

28:56

making 28 to one on

28:58

the money they put in. And that is why that

29:00

company's been able to scale to the moon in terms

29:03

of the number of locations. And so I will say

29:05

that all the money that I've made in my

29:07

life that has been the crazy money

29:09

has come from crazy LTV to CAC ratios. And

29:11

so the smallest ratios that I've made crazy money

29:13

on is 30 to one, all the way up

29:15

to 100 to one to 200

29:17

to one return to some of the businesses

29:19

I have. And so those windows

29:22

don't stay forever. And when

29:24

you do have one of those, you just want to dump

29:26

as much money into that machine as you possibly can, because

29:28

a lot of wealth is made in very short punctuated periods,

29:31

and then sustained by long periods of maintenance where

29:33

you're getting five to one, eight to one, 10

29:35

to one, those are fine numbers. But most of

29:37

the time when you're at 10 to one, as

29:39

soon as you start scaling it, it might drop

29:41

to five to one. And so I actually end

29:44

up seeing the bigger the ratio is at the

29:46

beginning, the more indication it is that I can

29:48

scale profitably. Because if I'm, let's say, spending $1,000

29:50

a day and I can

29:52

get 100 to one, then I know that I'm probably going to be able

29:54

to get to $100,000 a day and

29:56

get five to one, right? And so that's the

29:59

idea, is like, how can I? How can I

30:01

scale this up? And I care about absolute return,

30:03

not relative return, but the CAC to LTV ratio

30:05

gives me an indication of how much room I

30:07

have to blow this thing out of the water.

30:09

The easiest way to calculate what your lifetime gross

30:11

profit is, is look at all the

30:13

customers that you sold over the last year, look

30:16

at gross profit. And if you don't know what

30:18

gross profit is, it's just the cost of goods

30:20

sold, basically the price you charge minus the cost

30:22

of goods sold, which is whether it's, if it's

30:24

services, then it's the labor that you use to

30:26

provide the service. If it's a widget, then it's

30:28

the cost of the widget and the shipping associated

30:30

with it. So the cost of goods sold minus

30:32

the revenue, and that leftover is the gross profit.

30:34

And so you say, okay, I had 100 customers

30:36

this year, I made this total amount

30:39

of gross profit this year, you divide that amount

30:41

of gross profit by the total number of customers.

30:43

That'll give you a broad brushstroke of

30:45

what you make per customer. Now, that'll always underestimate

30:47

it, especially if you have a recurring revenue business,

30:49

because they're going to hopefully have some people who

30:51

buy again and again over time. But I would

30:53

always rather be on the safer side and underestimate

30:55

my lifetime gross profit or lifetime value, rather than

30:57

overestimate it and potentially lose money. If I want

31:00

to then take that number and say, okay, well,

31:02

what am I willing to spend per customer? Then

31:04

at most, you want to have a third of

31:06

that number. But for me specifically, I want to

31:08

make sure that whatever I collect in the first

31:10

30 days, I want to make sure

31:12

that I collect that back from customers.

31:14

So if I'm, let's

31:17

say I sell something for 10 bucks a month, people

31:19

stay for 10 months, and there's 100% gross margins to

31:21

make this simple. So I make 100 bucks in gross

31:23

profit. I want to see if I can find

31:25

a way to make $10 back or

31:28

get my CAC back in that first 30 days. And

31:31

so sometimes it means having a one-time upcharge

31:33

upfront so they can offset the cost of

31:35

acquisition so then the remainder of the customer

31:37

relationship can be profitable. And if these concepts

31:39

about scaling like LTV2CAC are interesting to you,

31:41

we just opened up a new workshops division

31:43

at acquisition.com for companies that were not invested

31:46

in. If you like us and my team

31:48

to help you personalize kind of applying this

31:50

stuff to your business, you can go to

31:52

acquisition.com, click the scale button, and you can

31:54

see if your business qualifies. Otherwise, back to

31:56

the video. Piece of advice number five,

31:58

my ad creation process. So I've been running ads

32:00

for 13 years. And I'm

32:02

saying, when I say running ads, I mean, I've

32:05

been making ads or directly influencing ads that have

32:07

been run across my portfolio, or companies that I

32:09

directly owned or founded for 13 straight years. And

32:12

so I have this process pretty nailed.

32:15

And I haven't really ever gotten too far

32:17

away from it, partially because I like it a

32:19

lot. And I've gotten just pretty good

32:21

at it. And so this is how I do it. So

32:24

number one is that at all times I'm collecting data.

32:26

What I mean by that is, if I see ads

32:28

on Instagram, I see ads on YouTube. I have no

32:30

premic accounts on any platform because I want to hear

32:32

the ads. I want to hear the hooks. I want

32:34

to hear what they're doing to draw attention. And I

32:37

like using that stuff because I'm also a business owner.

32:39

So the people who advertise to me are

32:41

the people that are going to try and hook

32:43

my attention. And so I can still use that

32:45

stuff to get to my avatar. And so if

32:47

you are your avatar, the ads count double for

32:49

you. And so I screenshot. I record the stuff

32:51

that I find interesting. And I add it into

32:53

one folder. Then when I get to my ad

32:55

creation process, which is I do once a week, I

32:57

then sit down first thing in the morning. And I

32:59

do these the same day I record. So that's just

33:02

a piece of advice that has worked well for me,

33:04

like cramming for the test. I cram for my ad

33:06

sessions because then everything's top of mind as I go

33:08

into the day. And so I pull up all my

33:10

swipe files of all the things that I want my

33:12

inspiration from. The second thing that I pull up is

33:15

all my historical best performing ads. So I look back

33:17

one year, two years, three years sometimes, at all my

33:19

best ads. And I drink those back in. And I

33:21

watch the first 10 seconds. Watch the first 30 seconds.

33:24

OK, how was I capturing? What was the angle?

33:26

What was the hook here? And then I start

33:28

the actual hook creation process. Now, 40 of

33:30

my 50 hooks that I'm going to write out are

33:33

going to be stuff that is tried

33:35

and true. I'm not going to try and

33:37

reinvent the wheel. We've already spent zillions and zillions

33:39

of dollars. I know that these hooks, these entrances

33:41

work well. Now, 20%, the last 10 is

33:43

where I get to use all my inspiration and other ideas

33:45

to try and experiment on. But most people flip this. They

33:47

try and do a little bit of the stuff that worked,

33:49

and then they have lots of new ideas. I'm

33:52

telling you, I've done this a long time. It's way

33:54

more efficient to just do more of what worked, and

33:56

then leave a little bit of experimentation so that if

33:58

some of those things stop working over time, time, you

34:00

have this fresh batch that you've been trying out that

34:03

then can become the control that you try and beat.

34:05

So citing back to the 80-20 concept of you put

34:07

80% of your effort into the hooks

34:10

and 80% of your effort goes into stuff that's tried

34:12

and true and 20% for the things that are

34:15

new. All right, so I make about 50 hooks. So 80%

34:17

of that is 40 hooks and 20% of that is 10 hooks. So

34:21

40 out of my 50 hooks, I do for things that

34:23

I already know have worked in the past. 10

34:26

hooks I save for my new creative ideas. And so that's

34:28

for the inspiration stuff that I see or anything that I

34:30

come to that cram session that I want to get out.

34:33

From there, I then have my three to five angles

34:35

that I'm going to write that's going to be educational

34:37

or some sort of value that I'm

34:39

going to deliver or some sort of belief that

34:41

I want to break or some sort of list

34:43

or steps or stories that I want to tell

34:45

as the core meat of the ad, some sort

34:47

of proof I want to demonstrate. And then finally,

34:49

just a quick CTA in terms of call to

34:51

action. But the majority of my effort is all

34:53

on the 50 or so hooks that I'm going

34:55

to write, 40 of which being recycled versions of

34:57

things I already know work and 10 being net

34:59

new. And this sounds boring and it is boring,

35:01

but it's also what works. And believe me, I

35:03

have tried to change this process a lot of

35:05

times like this works. Let's

35:08

say that you have your Omega winner and these happen and

35:10

this is where you get this is the this is power

35:12

law like that top 5% makes 95% of your income. Like

35:16

you we run all these ads to figure out

35:18

which is the one ad that can sing and

35:20

just crank and print money. And

35:22

so what I do is I use something that I call

35:24

the Kaleidoscope process. I've never heard anyone else sell it. So

35:27

I'm owning that title. All right. And so the Kaleidoscope process,

35:29

this is how you do it is that let's say you've

35:31

got a winning ad. So I had an

35:33

ad at Jim launch that actually the now president

35:35

Kale made when he was a customer of

35:38

him in front of his gym, the gym being full

35:40

and his wife's next to him. And he's like, you

35:42

know, six months ago, I was working a full time

35:44

job in order to pay rent at this gym. And

35:46

my wife was pregnant and we had and I had

35:49

a two month old and I had no idea how

35:51

I was going to make ends meet. And then here we

35:53

are six months later. The gym is full. It's completely outsourced

35:55

and I've already got an offer for $250,000 on the gym.

35:59

If you've ever been worried. like take the jump, just follow the

36:01

process, it works. It was a very simple ad. But

36:03

it murdered, it absolutely crushed. And so rather than

36:06

say, wow, okay, well that was nice, let's try

36:08

and do that, let's try and get somebody else

36:10

to see that, we took that and we squeezed

36:12

the living life out of it. And so here's

36:14

10 things that I did to get more out

36:16

of that ad. So one is I changed the

36:18

color of the backgrounds, if I can do that,

36:21

right, or backdrops. Is there a way that we

36:23

can record that ad with a different background or

36:25

a different background color, like if you have a

36:27

green screen? Second, are there different props that we

36:29

can introduce that ad? All right, so can we

36:31

show stuff? Can we show visuals or can we show

36:33

physical props? Three, can we just reenact it and say,

36:35

okay, can you just do it again? Just literally do

36:38

the same ad, different t-shirt if you

36:40

want, same exact thing, just do it again. And if

36:42

you're the one making the ads, you just do your

36:44

best performing ad again. You can, four,

36:46

reorder it. So we took the ad that was

36:48

already the original winner and we just re-changed the

36:50

order of the ad and it's still converted. The

36:53

next thing is we added visual filters. So

36:55

think black and white, think sepia, think high

36:57

contrast, these are all different

36:59

things that made the ad look different than it

37:01

was, but it still delivered the same message. The

37:03

next one is visual effects, right? VFX like doodads

37:06

and whizbangs and things like that, that you can

37:08

add again, make it look different. The

37:10

next is changing fonts and captions. So it's like if we

37:12

had a font style that was one way, we just changed

37:14

the way the font style looks. Another is that you can

37:16

change the pacing or the speed of the video itself. You

37:18

can actually do it at 1.2 or 1.5 and

37:21

have it go through or slow down at portions. You

37:24

can add music to it. There's

37:26

another one, right? You can also use the same hook,

37:28

which is like we knew the hook from that first

37:30

ad obviously crushed and then just say, hey re-recorded again,

37:32

we'll use the same hook and use a different back,

37:34

right? And so all of those are different ways that

37:36

we'll take a winner and then 10X or 100X how

37:39

much that winner gets us. And I'm telling you, if

37:41

you take one thing from this video from advertising, squeeze

37:44

the living how to the winners. So

37:46

market vice number six is that there is only four

37:48

ways they can let other people know about your stuff.

37:51

And so think about this like a four box. You've

37:53

got one to one conversations and one to many, which

37:55

is broadcasts, right? There's the two styles of communication, either

37:57

communicate to a group of people or one person individually.

38:00

And you're either talking to people who know who you are, or

38:02

you're talking to strangers. And so if you

38:04

cross that, you've got four ways. You've got one to

38:07

one to people who know you, one to one to

38:09

strangers, one to many to people who know you, one

38:11

to many to strangers. And if you look at that

38:13

in terms of what that is in advertising, it means

38:15

this is warm outreach, cold outreach, making content, which is

38:17

one to many to people you know, and then running

38:19

ads, which is one to many to strangers. And so

38:21

there's the only four things that you can do to

38:24

advertise, to let people know about your stuff. And

38:26

basically, if you're not spending your day doing one

38:28

of those core four things, you are not advertising.

38:30

You are not marketing your business. And so sometimes

38:33

you have to get it to that simple. When

38:35

you look at how many hours per day am

38:37

I spending, letting people know about my stuff, most

38:39

people spend zero, zero, zero per day letting people

38:41

know about their stuff. And then for some reason,

38:44

they're curious as to why their business isn't growing.

38:46

Well, no one knows you exist. I

38:48

was at a conference, I was at GymCon

38:51

recently, and I asked the audience who here wants

38:53

to grow their gym faster. Everybody raised their hand.

38:55

And I said, OK. And these are all small

38:57

businesses. Most of the guys here are doing, I

38:59

would say, $500,000 a year to

39:01

$3 million a year. So these aren't massive businesses. They're

39:03

normal, one location, three location,

39:05

five location owner operators

39:07

of service-based training businesses. And

39:10

I said, OK. Who here is spending

39:12

the first four hours of their day promoting

39:15

their business, either doing cold outreach, making

39:18

content, or running ads? Who

39:20

is spending the first four hours every day on that? Literally,

39:23

no one in the

39:25

audience had their hand raised. And

39:27

I was like, this is why you're small. This

39:29

is it. It was mind-blowing to me that that

39:31

was what it was. And so if you're making

39:34

less than, call it a million, maybe $3 million

39:36

a year, all of your effort,

39:39

the first four hours of your day, which if you

39:41

have to wake up early, awesome. If you have to

39:43

stay up late to do it, awesome. I don't care.

39:45

But you need four hours that you're dedicating because you've

39:47

got to do the job of promoting, and then you've

39:49

got to run your business. But if you're just running

39:52

your business, you're never going to get ahead. So if

39:54

you want it to grow, you've got to force it

39:56

to grow. You have to force people to find out

39:58

about your stuff. And you do that through advertising. I

40:00

recommend that. this so violently because small businesses need to

40:02

do more. And in the

40:05

beginning, they just don't get enough leads. So fundamentally,

40:07

like most businesses, if you just had more leads,

40:09

you would make more money. Now,

40:12

realistically, and I'll get to some of the specifics

40:14

on this, is that in order to

40:16

get more leads, you need to be able to do so

40:18

profitably, which then comes back down to the business and building

40:21

the business back to front. We advertise front to back.

40:23

We build the business back to front. And I'll get to

40:25

lots of details on that in a second. But

40:28

big picture, you just need to

40:30

get, especially when you're starting out, you're at 500, a

40:32

million, less than 3 million. And those are big numbers.

40:34

So I don't mean that to demean it, but I

40:36

want you to build massive enterprises that make huge impact.

40:40

You have to get more flow through the

40:42

system so that you can learn how to

40:44

improve the product so that you can build

40:46

a better backend. And then

40:48

you basically, you promote and you stay at that

40:50

level of promotion until you tweak this and nail

40:52

it. Then you go back and scale it. And

40:55

so one of our sayings internally is, nail it,

40:57

then scale it. So nail the backend. You do

40:59

enough promotion to get flow in, right? Then

41:01

you monetize. Then you create friction. That's when

41:04

you tweak the hell out of it. And then you can

41:06

go back and say, hey, it turns out we could spend

41:08

five times more to get customers. Then

41:10

you scale. So I'll give you my quick back

41:12

of napkin scaling framework for this. So

41:15

when you're at zero to six figures, you

41:17

sell one product to one avatar on one

41:19

channel. That's it. No

41:21

shiny object, no multiple channels, no trying to

41:23

scale yourself out of it. You're just selling

41:25

one product to one avatar on one channel.

41:28

When you go from six to seven figures, you

41:30

scale, you sell one product to one avatar on

41:32

one channel consistently. Because in the beginning, you're super

41:34

volatile, right? You're making a sale this week, not

41:37

next week, then this week again, or the next

41:39

month, whatever. It's super volatile. When you get to

41:41

seven figures, it's more consistent. You

41:43

get it to be reliable. So when you

41:45

go from seven figures to eight figures, you go one

41:48

avatar, one channel, two

41:50

products. That means you have an upsell. You

41:52

sell something else. And then you

41:55

do that consistently. That's

41:57

what gets you to eight figures. That's what gets you to 10

41:59

million. bucks a year. And if you

42:01

want to go to multiple eight figures, then you

42:03

start going two channels, one avatar,

42:06

two products consistently. And

42:09

so over time, this is how I've seen,

42:11

I've just seen this pattern. Now, can you

42:13

find somebody who disobeys this pattern? Sure, AG1

42:15

has one product, one avatar, a zillion channels,

42:17

right? So yes, there are ways to break

42:20

this rule. But when I look at, by

42:22

and large, the vast majority of businesses, they follow

42:24

this structure. And they mess up along the way

42:26

until they follow the next step. And you'll notice

42:28

that scaling up to eight figures, and even sometimes

42:30

a little beyond that, you're still only focused on

42:32

one avatar. And I'm going to talk about this

42:34

in a lot of depth in one of the

42:36

later advice points, because it's super important. This may

42:38

be one of the bigger unlocks you could have

42:40

in the business. Market advice number

42:43

seven, state the facts and tell the truth. This

42:45

is probably one of the most repeated phrases besides

42:47

volume negates luck that I have internally to my

42:49

business. And so I remember when I

42:51

was at that same little meetup with the super

42:53

creators, and I was talking to

42:55

the guy who had the most subscribers there. And

42:57

I was like, yeah, you know, we don't really

42:59

like this whole clickbait title thing. And

43:02

he looked at me with disgust. And he was like, you

43:04

absolutely make clickbait titles. He said, you

43:07

just back it up with truth. He's

43:10

like, so it's crazy clickbaity. He's like, but it also

43:12

happens to be true. And I remember when he

43:14

said that to me, and I was like, shit,

43:16

that's real. And

43:19

it's funny, because that was a concept that I have

43:21

in terms of paid ads, but I

43:23

hadn't thought about it in terms of content. And so it's so

43:25

interesting how some of these principles just apply across domains,

43:28

but like sometimes you have to relearn the same lessons, which

43:30

I hate doing, but I did it anyways. And

43:33

so the problem is that most businesses don't

43:35

track results. And it's because if you don't track,

43:37

you don't care. Now they don't track partially because

43:39

it's kind of like ignorance. Like they know they

43:42

don't deliver good results. And so if they track

43:44

it, then they'll have facts and truth that they

43:46

will be proven that they're delivering bad results. But

43:48

the first step is tracking it, because once you

43:50

start tracking it, you can improve it. And

43:53

also, measurement as intervention is actually a scientifically proven

43:55

method to lose weight, to improve sales,

43:58

to improve anything you want. literally

44:00

simply tracking it, not trying to do

44:02

anything else, but simply tracking your weight,

44:04

simply tracking your close rate, simply tracking

44:07

your ad performance will improve it because

44:09

you're just putting attention on it. And

44:12

so if you don't track, you don't care. Now

44:14

once you do start tracking it, you can start

44:16

doing things to actually improve it beyond just measurement

44:18

as intervention. And so when you do that, lo

44:21

and behold, your stats get better. And

44:23

then you can state the facts and

44:25

tell the truth and have that truth

44:28

be wildly compelling. And so real

44:30

talk, part of the reason that

44:32

Jim Launch to this day has still not been beaten

44:34

or dethroned as the largest company

44:36

in that space is because we still have

44:38

better stats and better results than anyone else

44:40

does. The average gym who goes through 12

44:43

months of gym launch makes over 100 plus

44:45

thousand a year in added

44:47

profit by using the systems we have. That's

44:49

just what it is. And so

44:51

if it makes sense for somebody

44:53

to triple their money, then they

44:55

make the purchase. I

44:58

like to take a lot of emotion out of the sale. If this makes

45:00

sense for you, if this return makes sense for you, then do it. If

45:02

it doesn't make sense, then don't do it. Now the risk they take on

45:04

is what about the bottom 20 percent? And so

45:06

the nice thing is that we track that. So the bottom

45:08

20 percent averaged $40,000 in additional revenue. So

45:11

they basically broke even. And so it's like that's

45:13

the bottom. And so if that's you, then it's

45:15

like, yeah, you worked and you basically broke even.

45:17

That kind of sucks. Now I'm not talking

45:19

about the top 20 percent because this guy's at 500,000 plus per year. But

45:22

the thing is that if you track the stats,

45:24

then you can promote the stats and you can

45:26

do so truthfully. They go from unsubstantiated claims to

45:28

substantiated claims. Like one of the things that I'm

45:30

most proud of in school, school.com,

45:32

which is the platform for people who are trying to start

45:35

their businesses, this video is mostly for people who already own

45:37

a business. But if you're trying

45:39

to start a business, 30.44 percent of people who finish their

45:41

first month make their first dollar online. Like I'm super proud

45:43

of that. And we just rolled out this massive new thing

45:46

to basically make it even easier, even faster to do it.

45:49

And right now we have 35 percent more people actually succeeding there.

45:51

So I think we're going to be a little bit over 40

45:53

percent now. So I'm super stoked

45:55

about that. And unless you measure like if you

45:57

don't track, you don't care. Here's the

45:59

tactical. steps. Collect data first.

46:02

So you implement a data step where you collect

46:04

data for people day one, day 30, day 60,

46:06

day 90, at the end of the program or

46:08

whatever your implementation is. You track

46:10

data throughout. Number two is you keep

46:13

improving things until the data becomes compelling. And

46:15

number three is how do you actually present that

46:17

data? So there's four variables that matters when you're

46:19

presenting the data. Number one is the percentage of

46:22

people, whether that's the median, the average,

46:24

or the percentage overall of people, that's

46:26

number one, who to achieve X outcome,

46:28

three in Y time or after X

46:31

attempts, and four under Z conditions.

46:33

And so it's like we get X percent

46:35

of gyms, so it was whatever is the

46:37

average average gym, so right average gym owner,

46:40

makes an extra hundred thousand

46:42

dollars per year in profit, so that's the outcome,

46:45

after the first 12 months in

46:48

gymlords, or gym legacy, which is the the program

46:50

that we have a gym launch, right? And so

46:52

those are the conditions, right? And so it covers

46:54

all four of those. So when you're making these,

46:56

you want to hit all four of those things

46:58

when you're explaining the data publicly. And

47:01

I will say that the fewer conditions you

47:03

have, the more compelling it is. Because for

47:05

example, if I said the

47:07

average gym who spends ten thousand

47:09

dollars a month and has ten employees

47:12

and has two methods of acquisition and

47:15

a large group training and a small

47:17

group training achieves, like by the

47:19

time I even get to that, you're like whatever,

47:21

right? And so you want to strip

47:23

away and really, like I

47:26

would rather have a fewer condition

47:28

statement that has lower results, me

47:30

personally, than a higher result one

47:32

with more conditions. Marketing

47:34

advice number eight, say what only you can say, show

47:36

what only you can show. And this is one of

47:38

the other isms that I have internal to my business.

47:41

And so if you're the only triple

47:43

black belt in Ohio for Muay Thai,

47:46

then say that you're the only triple back belt

47:48

in Ohio for Muay Thai, right? This is talking

47:50

about the things that you have done rather than

47:53

telling people what to do. It's how I versus

47:55

how to. And so my

47:57

my concept for making amazing ads and

47:59

making making amazing content is two steps.

48:02

Do epic stuff, talk about what you

48:04

did. And so you can out

48:06

outcome people or you can out work them.

48:08

So it starts with the out working and

48:10

then the out working creates the out out

48:12

coming and the out out coming is a

48:14

much shorter headline but the out working them

48:16

still works. I can start by saying

48:19

hey, I wrote

48:21

these two books. Writing two books would be an out working

48:23

thing. Like anyone could do it, there's no outcome but hey,

48:25

I wrote these two books. But then if the books are

48:27

good, then I get the outcome which is that we sold

48:29

over a million copies, they're still number one and number two

48:32

in marketing to this day multiple years later and so the

48:34

idea is that first you do the work and then you

48:36

get the outcome but most people want to say epic stuff

48:38

having done none of it. And so

48:40

you can get past the judgment of other people because

48:42

you're not saying hey, you have to do anything. I'm

48:45

saying this is what I did. And so

48:47

the idea is that everybody wants a return

48:49

on their time. And I remember

48:51

hearing this first concept from Eric who's a

48:53

YouTuber and he said, dude, I made

48:55

this thing where I went on 100 dates in

48:59

basically I did an entire season of The Bachelor but

49:01

I did it in 16 minutes. He's

49:03

like what a steal. And he said that to

49:05

me and I was like, man, such an interesting

49:07

concept. He just took something that was

49:09

really long and made it really short and he crammed it in

49:11

there. So value per second was super high.

49:13

And I'll just give you this one is that it's not about seconds

49:16

of value, it's value per second. That's

49:19

what matters. Everybody has access to

49:21

infinite information. So you just saying I'm going to

49:24

give you more stuff is not helpful. What you

49:26

want to do is curate it and pack it

49:28

and distill it and crystallize all the value in

49:30

as tight a package as possible so that their

49:32

value per second skyrockets. And you can

49:35

do that by saying, hey, I spent 10 hours editing.

49:37

You know, I spent 20 hours making a summary of

49:39

this book and you can read the whole thing in

49:41

10 minutes. That's why summaries still always work, right? Because

49:43

people want to get a deal on their time. If

49:46

they get the same result for a fraction of the

49:48

time, it's always a good deal. By the way, if

49:50

you ever want to sell to rich people, just promise

49:52

the same result in half the time for twice the

49:54

price. And even if you think about this video overall,

49:56

it's like, well, I spent 13 years

49:59

doing all this stuff. and I'm trying to compress

50:01

those lessons into whatever amount of time this video

50:03

is. Certainly less than 13 years. And

50:06

so this is a great deal for the right person,

50:08

for the right business owner who's actually trying to scale.

50:10

So how do you actually do this? So if

50:12

I had a marketing agency showing what only I can

50:15

show, I wanna demonstrate. And so I'd say, hey,

50:17

I'm gonna get you leads. What I wanna do

50:19

is get on a sales call and I'm gonna play

50:21

with a live lead that I got for one of

50:23

my companies, one of my clients sounds like. And

50:25

I'd be like, hey, listen to this call, it's a

50:27

minute long. Could you take

50:29

50 of these a month? Wow, so much more

50:32

compelling than saying, I'll just get you 50 leads.

50:34

They're actually getting a fractionalized version. They're getting a

50:36

taste of what it looks like to be in

50:38

the future, right? They're experiencing the result vicariously through

50:40

the other person. And fundamentally, that's what a good

50:42

testimony does, is they put themselves in the shoes

50:45

of the person who got the result, and then

50:47

they put a discount on that and say, okay,

50:49

how likely is that for me? And that's what

50:51

I'm willing to pay. Now, if it were guaranteed,

50:53

then all money making opportunities would be worth it,

50:55

because hey, if you spend $1,000 to make $100,000

50:58

a year by

51:00

buying this course, then everyone would buy it. If they

51:02

knew for sure it would happen, that'd be an amazing

51:04

deal. The problem is that people apply a discount to

51:06

it because of how unlikely it is for them. And

51:09

so we're gonna increase that likelihood by showing them rather

51:11

than telling them, right? And so agency example, that was

51:13

that one. The software example that I have is, this

51:15

is why demos are so effective, right? You wanna see

51:17

this, hey, you have a video clipping software. Great, do

51:19

you have a video on you? Cool, send it to

51:22

me, we're on the phone. Great, I'm gonna pull this

51:24

video up. This is what we do to put the

51:26

captions on and shorten and find those moments. Click, click,

51:28

click, click, click. Okay, so normally how long does that

51:30

take you? Well, it takes me this long. Well, watch

51:32

me do it. Click, click, click. Wow, would that make

51:35

your life easier? Yes, cool, boom, they go in, right?

51:37

You're demonstrating in advance. And I'll give you a final

51:39

one. When I was at my gym in

51:42

Huntington Beach, this is my first location I ever had, I remember

51:44

this, I had a door-to-door sales guy who came up, all right?

51:46

And this guy was a clear sale, a pro, he was really good.

51:50

And he sold me cleaning products, he really did. Like,

51:52

it's probably the only door-to-door thing I've ever bought. And

51:54

it was just because it was such a good sale.

51:58

And he had it down, it's so tight. of

1:02:00

course not, right? Every single other business that

1:02:02

exists that serves your customer, the fact that they're

1:02:04

allowed to be alive and breathe shows you how

1:02:06

much opportunity you have if you were better than

1:02:08

them. Number 10, provide value. Now

1:02:10

everybody talks about providing value, but what does that

1:02:13

even mean? All right, so in this

1:02:15

book I talk about something called the value equation, it's probably

1:02:17

the most cited chapter in this whole book, but I break

1:02:19

down what are the elements of value? And so there are

1:02:21

four. Number one is the dream outcome, which is what does

1:02:24

somebody actually want? So if I were to offer like Daniel,

1:02:27

who's behind the camera right now, I said

1:02:29

hey, you can get in shape or I

1:02:31

can make you a million dollars, right? Making

1:02:33

money for most men is more valuable than

1:02:35

getting in better shape. And so the relative

1:02:37

opportunity or the relative outcome will dictate how

1:02:40

much money you can charge. That's why in general B2B

1:02:42

offers are higher ticket. Now there are also fewer people

1:02:44

who buy making money than people who buy consumer products.

1:02:46

So you have about one tenth, so nine percent of

1:02:48

people are business owners. So you have a

1:02:50

much smaller market. That being said, does the size of the

1:02:53

market really matter based on the thing I just said? Probably

1:02:55

not. But again, number

1:02:57

one is dream outcome. That's what differentiates. Now let's

1:02:59

say you have got two products that offer the

1:03:01

same solution. So let's say the weight

1:03:03

loss example or the getting shape example. If I

1:03:05

have a PDF for that and I've got liposuction,

1:03:08

both of them promise the same thing, which is that

1:03:10

you're going to get in better shape, you're gonna lose

1:03:12

weight. Okay, well then why is liposuction so much more

1:03:14

expensive than a PDF that I could buy on the

1:03:16

internet for 20 bucks? They both promise the same outcome.

1:03:18

Well, there's three other variables. So variable number one is

1:03:21

the perceived likelihood of achievement or the risk associated with

1:03:23

the purchase. So risk would be the negative, perceived likelihood

1:03:25

of achievement is the positive. And so we wanna increase

1:03:27

the perceived likelihood as much as possible. So if we had

1:03:29

that liposuction and we've got one surgeon who's his first day

1:03:31

out of medical school and we've got another surgeon who's done

1:03:33

10,000 surgeries, which of these guys

1:03:35

can price higher? Well, obviously you'd wanna take the 10,000 one, even

1:03:38

though it's the same procedure and the same outcome, the

1:03:40

perceived likelihood of you actually getting what you want, the

1:03:42

risk associated is lower. And so you're willing to pay

1:03:44

more for that guy because you have more experience. The

1:03:48

third variable of this is time delay. The

1:03:50

equal opposite of that is speed. How quickly

1:03:52

between when someone buys and when they get

1:03:54

the promise that you outcome. Now, if

1:03:57

you do liposuction, it's like, great. You make the purchase and you

1:03:59

go to... and you wake up and you're thin.

1:04:01

Very, very condensed, which is why it has a lot

1:04:03

of value. Whereas if you have to

1:04:05

do all this eating and this exercising and not drinking and

1:04:08

changing your diet and all this waking up early and being

1:04:10

sore, all this, there's a lot of delay there in

1:04:14

terms of how much time and effort, time specifically,

1:04:16

is going to take to get the outcome you

1:04:18

want. So the faster it is, the more valuable

1:04:21

it is. And then finally, you have

1:04:23

effort and sacrifice, or equal opposite ease. How easy

1:04:25

can you make it? And so if you're trying

1:04:27

to think about this in simple terms,

1:04:30

how risk-free can I make it? How easy can

1:04:32

I make it? How fast can I make it?

1:04:34

And it's the thing that I'm promising, the outcome

1:04:36

that I'm promising, something they actually want. And so

1:04:38

if you have all four of those, you have

1:04:40

something that people really want, they have no risk

1:04:42

of doing it, it comes immediately and it's easy.

1:04:44

It's easy as pushing a button, you've got an

1:04:46

incredibly valuable thing. And so when people say add

1:04:48

value, what you want to think about is what

1:04:50

does my customer or what does my avatar want

1:04:52

to accomplish? Or what do they want to avoid?

1:04:54

So you've got towards good stuff

1:04:56

and away from bad stuff. And so you

1:04:58

say, okay, I can help you avoid this

1:05:01

bad stuff, risk-free, faster and easier than otherwise.

1:05:04

And the dream outcome, the good stuff, same thing

1:05:06

again, is how can I help you get that

1:05:08

good stuff faster, easier and risk-free? And

1:05:10

so every time you make content, or every time you

1:05:12

make a PDF, or every time you make a lead

1:05:14

magnet, whatever it is, or you make content, the whole

1:05:16

goal should be to be useful. The whole goal should

1:05:18

be to provide value. And you do that by helping

1:05:20

them achieve their goal, which hopefully with this video, I'm

1:05:22

helping you market better, your business, by making it risk-free,

1:05:25

so you don't have to make the mistakes I did.

1:05:27

Get to your goal faster and get there easier. So

1:05:29

the easiest way to think, okay, got it. Well, how

1:05:31

do I find the problems that people are suffering from

1:05:33

so that I can make it faster, easier, and risk-free

1:05:35

for them? Great question. So one is any comments that

1:05:37

you get in response to content, that creates more content.

1:05:39

This is the endless content wheel. It's like you make

1:05:41

content, people have questions about the content, you make content

1:05:43

about the questions, they have questions about those questions. The

1:05:45

good thing is that problems never end and people never

1:05:47

stop complaining. And so as long as people stop complaining

1:05:49

and people have problems, you're always gonna have problems to

1:05:51

solve, which is one of the nice things about being

1:05:53

an entrepreneur. Humanity, if you told

1:05:55

us hundreds of years ago that we'd have the internet in

1:05:57

our hands and we'd have air conditioning. and Wi-Fi and all

1:05:59

this stuff, we'd be like, oh my God, all of our

1:06:01

problems are solved. But we have more problems now than we

1:06:03

did before because we're more aware of the problems that we

1:06:06

didn't know existed before. And so whenever you solve a problem,

1:06:08

you create another one. It's the problem solution cycle that never

1:06:10

ends. And so one is you can look at that. The

1:06:12

other is you can look internal to your business, which is

1:06:14

what are the things that people struggle with internal in terms

1:06:16

of implementation for whatever the thing that you do is. Whether

1:06:18

it's a product that you sell or a service that you

1:06:20

sell, there's some friction points along the way. And you think,

1:06:22

okay, what are the friction points and how can I make

1:06:24

it easier? Number 11 is a fairly

1:06:26

well-known marketing saying, give away the secrets, sell the implementation.

1:06:29

The way that I think about this is make your

1:06:31

free stuff better than their paid stuff. And that's an

1:06:33

easy ism to say. But the real real is like

1:06:35

you actually have to think, if I give away something

1:06:37

for free, I have to be willing to charge for

1:06:40

it. And if you were willing to charge $100 or

1:06:42

$1,000 or $10,000

1:06:44

for the thing that you give away for free,

1:06:46

my God, must that be valuable? Yes. And

1:06:49

what that does is it increases the likelihood of

1:06:51

conversion, increase the likelihood the person consumes the thing

1:06:53

and then buys the next product. Because what a

1:06:55

lead magnet is or what content is, it's a

1:06:57

complete solution to a very narrow problem. And that's

1:06:59

fundamentally how I think about this. A lot of

1:07:01

people are very afraid of giving away value. But

1:07:04

you shouldn't be. Give away all the secrets, give

1:07:06

away all the things that you do. And then

1:07:08

if someone wants help with implementation, they can call

1:07:10

you up. And this allows you to provide value

1:07:12

to the masses, build your brand up, and then

1:07:14

they use results in advance as an approximation of

1:07:16

the results they're gonna get after they purchase. And

1:07:19

so even when you're marketing in terms

1:07:21

of making content, I like to think of being

1:07:24

okay with narrow because deep

1:07:26

is where the dollars are. All right, so let

1:07:28

me tell you a couple stories about this. So

1:07:30

there was a lady who I just recently met

1:07:32

who was doing just under a million dollars a

1:07:34

year in profit, profit from

1:07:37

5,800 followers on Instagram. She

1:07:40

had no other platform, she sourced 100% from Instagram. And

1:07:43

this blew my mind. I mean, like, I say this

1:07:46

stuff, but having that level, like

1:07:48

it was such an extreme example of tiny

1:07:50

audience, big money, it broke my beliefs even

1:07:52

further than I already had them broken. And

1:07:54

when I looked at her page, here's what's

1:07:56

crazy. It wasn't like she had crazy

1:07:58

deep engagement either. It was like. Like the post

1:08:00

you would get would get, you know, one, five,

1:08:03

maybe ten comments on a great post.

1:08:05

And she would get, you know, ten likes,

1:08:07

twenty likes, thirty likes if it was a

1:08:09

crazy one. But

1:08:12

100% of her content was about

1:08:14

how registered dietitians can

1:08:17

more accurately bill insurance to

1:08:19

make more money. It

1:08:21

was a niche of a niche. It was

1:08:23

literally like registered dietitians who bill insurance and

1:08:25

how to bill insurance more effectively to make

1:08:27

more per hour. That was her offer. And

1:08:30

that's all she talks about. Her cheat sheets

1:08:32

are on that. She talks

1:08:34

about different insurance companies and how to bill each

1:08:36

of them, the codes that you go, that you

1:08:38

plug in. Like all this jargon, I

1:08:40

had no idea when I went to the page. But for her

1:08:42

avatar, I'll bet you that of the 5,800 people that follow her,

1:08:44

5,700 of them were

1:08:49

registered dietitians who were trying to find out

1:08:51

what they needed to do to make more

1:08:53

money by billing insurance. And so she was

1:08:55

selling five to ten little

1:08:57

cheat sheets a day at like 99 bucks

1:08:59

plus two to three

1:09:01

high ticket people per week into

1:09:04

her thing, into her association of

1:09:06

registered dietitians that followed her process

1:09:08

for billing. And so I say

1:09:11

this because I've also learned this personally. We used to make

1:09:13

some wider content for about six months. We did this experiment.

1:09:15

We got the data back. It turned out we got lots

1:09:17

of views, but we didn't go to lots of business owners.

1:09:19

And so we switched back to hardcore business stuff, which I

1:09:22

love anyway, so I'm very happy about the experiment. And

1:09:24

because of that, all of our stats are up. So

1:09:26

we have more opt-ins, more people buying books, more people

1:09:28

going to workshops, whatever it is, more people applying to

1:09:31

the portfolio so we can invest in their companies. All

1:09:33

of those stats were up despite the fact that the

1:09:35

general views per video went down. And

1:09:37

again, I'm here for the money, not for the fame. And so

1:09:39

I encourage you, if you can

1:09:42

break your attachment to the ego metrics like

1:09:44

the likes and the views and things like

1:09:46

that, and just focus on the bottom line,

1:09:48

just get really specific on the avatar that

1:09:50

you want to serve and make content only

1:09:52

for them that's useful. So I've got a

1:09:54

buddy of mine who runs a multi nine

1:09:56

figure per year marketing company,

1:09:59

and he makes He has a personal brand,

1:10:01

and he was like, oh dude, my personal

1:10:03

brand makes no money. He's like, but, and

1:10:06

he goes super in-depth, tactical like stuff. He's an

1:10:08

SEO G, and so all of this stuff is

1:10:10

like, how to make SEO content, blog content, things

1:10:12

like that. And his

1:10:15

content gets like so few

1:10:17

likes and engagement, and he has like charts and graphs,

1:10:19

and all this data support, all he does. He's obviously

1:10:22

really, really good at this. But

1:10:24

the thing is, is his lead quality that comes

1:10:26

from him, he's like, they're all Fortune 500, Fortune

1:10:28

100, and

1:10:30

he's one of the CEOs, executives that are like, hey, you

1:10:33

obviously know this stuff, can we just hire you? And that's

1:10:35

exactly what he wants. He wants, he makes

1:10:37

it so complex, he gives away everything, and he says

1:10:39

it. He's like, you could just follow all my stuff

1:10:41

and do it. Most people are like, man, this is

1:10:43

too much work. And so they're like, can I just

1:10:45

hire you? Which is an exceptional way to get customers.

1:10:48

So, here's how you do it in three

1:10:50

easy steps. One, is you just give away your best

1:10:52

stuff. Give it all away. If you have a low

1:10:54

ticket thing that sells to lots of people and you

1:10:56

have a high ticket thing, I would encourage you, just

1:10:58

give away the low ticket thing too. You're probably not

1:11:00

making the low ticket money on it anyways, and those

1:11:02

customers are probably paying the butt. So just give it

1:11:05

to them. And you can even show, hey, I used

1:11:07

to charge for this, I'm gonna give it to you

1:11:09

for free, because I love you. And by doing that,

1:11:11

you make an exceptional thing, and you put really heavy

1:11:13

effort into follow up and calls to action within the

1:11:15

content itself. So within the thing that

1:11:17

you're giving away, you have CTAs, and you follow up with

1:11:19

your team to try and ascend them into the next thing

1:11:21

if they're qualified. And I'll give you a

1:11:23

pro tip on this. When you want to make the

1:11:25

CTA, make it about personalization, not

1:11:27

about more. Instead of saying, hey, if you want

1:11:29

more stuff like this, go here. Say, hey, if

1:11:32

you want me to help apply this stuff to

1:11:34

your business or apply this stuff to your body

1:11:36

or this stuff to your life, then let me

1:11:38

know. It's personalizing it, because that is significantly more

1:11:40

valuable than just more stuff. And what's

1:11:43

crazy is that a lot of people use the things they

1:11:45

give away as an afterthought. It's the last thing they think

1:11:47

about. But here's the crazy stat, is that 99% of people

1:11:50

who consume your free thing will never buy from you, which means that

1:11:52

your reputation is getting made by the 99% of people, not the 1%.

1:11:56

And so if you want to improve your reputation in the marketplace,

1:11:58

make sure the stuff that you give away for free is awesome.

1:12:00

awesome. Also make sure the stuff

1:12:02

that you sell is awesome. And if both those things

1:12:04

sound like a four-letter word, which is work, welcome to

1:12:06

business. And so I talked earlier about

1:12:08

going up market or getting narrower on the avatar that

1:12:10

you want to serve. A lot of people have downsells.

1:12:12

And I think over time, I've gotten less and less

1:12:14

into having downsells and more along the lines of like,

1:12:17

if we have a lower avatar and

1:12:19

we're downselling 10% of calls into this thing

1:12:21

that's paid, if 10% of people are

1:12:23

buying something that's 1-10th the price because it's a downsell, then it's

1:12:25

going to change my revenue by 1%. I

1:12:28

don't really care. It's not even worth the headache. I'd rather just

1:12:30

give that away to hundreds of people for free because if the

1:12:32

cost is free, way more people will consume it. And

1:12:34

then get a higher percentage of people to buy

1:12:36

my next thing. And I allow my marketing messaging

1:12:39

to attract the higher quality customers. So this allows me

1:12:41

to go up market or narrower and give away all

1:12:43

the other stuff so I can create my more qualified

1:12:45

customers. The amount of businesses that I know that, one,

1:12:47

that we've invested in or do that we've helped, simply

1:12:51

make way more money by just giving away the thing

1:12:53

that was their big headache that was a low ticket

1:12:55

thing, just so that they could focus on serving the

1:12:57

best customers. Most times you'll

1:13:00

make money going up market. Marketing advice number

1:13:02

12, all advertising works. It's just

1:13:04

a matter of efficiency. I'm really, I want to drill

1:13:06

this down people's stories. The amount of time I've said

1:13:08

Facebook guys don't work for us, Google ads don't work

1:13:10

for us, TikTok ads don't work for us, direct mail

1:13:12

doesn't work for us, radio ads don't work for us,

1:13:14

content doesn't work for us, outreach doesn't work for us.

1:13:16

Fundamentally, if you have

1:13:18

a qualified person on the other side and

1:13:21

you make an offer to them that solves a key

1:13:23

problem for them, if you can get them

1:13:25

on the phone, you can make money, period. So if you can

1:13:27

rephrase the problem is, I don't know how to make Facebook guys

1:13:29

work for us, I don't know how to make TikTok work for

1:13:31

us, I don't know how to make content work for us, I

1:13:33

don't know how to make outreach work for us, then that becomes

1:13:35

a problem that you can solve. Now, this

1:13:37

is really important. So I talked

1:13:39

earlier about optimizing your advertising from front to

1:13:42

back, and that's true. But

1:13:44

when you optimize a business, you optimize this from back

1:13:46

to front. And so the

1:13:48

back, the LTV, how much you make per customer

1:13:51

enables how much you can spend on the front

1:13:53

end. And so you optimize the

1:13:55

throughput on the front end, obviously, because that's where you

1:13:57

can get the highest returns. The

1:14:00

engine that you can spend on that depends

1:14:02

on how much you make per customer. And

1:14:05

so you can either be really,

1:14:07

really, really exceptional at lower-end CAC or really,

1:14:09

really, really good at increasing LTV. And

1:14:11

if you do both, you have huge

1:14:13

arbitrage and that's where you make stupid money. And so

1:14:15

let's go through a hypothetical. Let's say that

1:14:18

you sold something that was a billion dollar thing. If

1:14:21

you had a billion dollars in gross profit that you'd make

1:14:23

from one sale, you could reach a lot of people on

1:14:25

earth. And just to give you context on this, if

1:14:28

I wanted to become an A-list celebrity, I've

1:14:31

back calculated what I believe it cost to become an A-list

1:14:33

celebrity. It was about $50 million. And the way that

1:14:35

I calculated that was I thought, what

1:14:37

person went from complete obscurance so no one

1:14:39

knew who they were, obscurity, to

1:14:42

omnipresence or some that everybody

1:14:45

knew? And so the simplest

1:14:47

example are people who were no-name

1:14:49

actors who become the star of a

1:14:51

big Marvel hit. And so what I

1:14:53

did was I said, OK, how many of these have I seen? What

1:14:56

was the movie budget? Now you have to divide that by

1:14:58

the other characters in the show or in the movie. And

1:15:01

between the big blockbusters, where we had to

1:15:03

think about like The Hunger Games Girl, right?

1:15:06

I can't remember her name right now, but that

1:15:08

girl. Like the marketing budget for those types of

1:15:10

films, you say, OK, with $50 million, she went

1:15:12

from no one knowing who she was to being

1:15:14

famous. And so for $50 million, you can reach

1:15:17

so much of America. And so I use this as a hypothetical

1:15:19

because if you had something that you sold for a billion dollars,

1:15:21

you could spend that and still make 20 to 1. And

1:15:24

so the idea is, yes, we optimize our advertising from

1:15:26

front to back. We put our effort on the front.

1:15:29

But in terms of where our

1:15:31

LTV comes from, we work from back to front

1:15:33

so that we can spend more on the front

1:15:35

end. A big problem in terms of efficiency is

1:15:37

that oftentimes if you do start running ads profitably,

1:15:39

for example, you reach some sort of ceiling. You're

1:15:41

like, hey, we can't get past $1,000 a day.

1:15:43

Hey, we can't get past $10,000 a day. Hey,

1:15:45

we can't get past $100,000 a day, whatever it

1:15:47

is. Usually it's

1:15:49

because the ads that you have aren't good enough to reach

1:15:51

the next level of awareness. So Eugene Schwartz

1:15:54

in breakthrough advertising talked about something called five levels awareness. And

1:15:56

so they go from unaware, somebody has no idea

1:15:58

who you are, what the problem is, is or anything, but

1:16:01

just unaware. The next level is problem aware. That's where you

1:16:03

see ads that are having trouble sleeping at night. Do

1:16:05

you have back pain when you lean over? Things

1:16:07

like that, they ask open-end questions that make someone aware

1:16:10

of the problem. Underneath of that

1:16:12

is solution aware. Have you tried this before?

1:16:14

Have you tried this before? This is where

1:16:16

someone knows the solutions that potentially exist. Then

1:16:18

you have product aware, which is them advertising,

1:16:20

you advertising your own product. Okay, have

1:16:22

you tried my product before? Let me talk

1:16:24

to you about this. And then finally, you have most

1:16:26

aware, which is usually past and existing customers. So there's

1:16:28

a five-level of awareness. And

1:16:30

so most times, smaller advertisers, beginner

1:16:32

advertisers, get returns, marketing to most

1:16:35

aware. If you email your list, or you make a post,

1:16:37

or you send out an email, those

1:16:40

are just your most aware people. So you can make sales from that for almost

1:16:42

no money. One degree above that is like, okay,

1:16:44

or other people are in the market. That's product aware. They're

1:16:46

looking for something to solve

1:16:48

a specific problem. And they're aware of

1:16:51

the options that are out there, and you market to them. So

1:16:53

you have to be a little bit better to market to those

1:16:55

people than to just your existing customers. Now, if you go one

1:16:57

level above that, the solution aware is that they

1:16:59

know that there are people who are solving this problem. They don't

1:17:01

know how they're solving the problem. They know that

1:17:03

there is a solution that exists. And so you

1:17:06

have to have another order of magnitude, improvement of

1:17:08

your ads, and the hooks to call out those

1:17:10

people. And so most times, the problem isn't that

1:17:12

your market isn't big enough. It's that your ads

1:17:15

aren't good enough. And they're not specific enough to

1:17:17

hit this next massive tranche of the audience. And

1:17:19

I say this with our largest company in

1:17:22

the portfolio is about $100 million a year. And

1:17:24

we spend millions of dollars a month in advertising.

1:17:26

And we go to the most unaware people. We

1:17:28

go to people who have no idea that

1:17:31

this product or this problem exists. We actually have to

1:17:34

make them aware of the problem, and then we make

1:17:36

them aware of the opportunity to solve it. And then

1:17:38

we have to make them aware of the problem. We

1:17:40

have to take them through all the stages of awareness

1:17:42

in a very short period of time. And that comes

1:17:44

from a very well-crafted ad. And so I have this

1:17:46

saying that I have internal, which is that the size

1:17:49

of the plane is directly correlated with the length of

1:17:51

the runway. The bigger the plane, the longer the runway.

1:17:53

And so if you want to sell a very expensive

1:17:55

thing, or you want to sell a very cold person,

1:17:57

so the price and the coldness, or how aware the

1:17:59

price person is, so the longest sale possible would

1:18:01

be someone who's completely unaware for a very expensive

1:18:04

thing, right? The shortest sale possible would be someone

1:18:06

who's very aware for a very cheap thing. And

1:18:08

so the amount of runway, the amount of selling,

1:18:10

the amount of advertising that you have to do

1:18:12

to get someone through these stages is directly proportional

1:18:14

to those two things. And if you're

1:18:17

having trouble scaling, it usually means that this is

1:18:19

mismatched. You're trying to, you're sending a warm message

1:18:21

to a cold audience or you're getting people on

1:18:23

the phone who aren't prepared to spend a

1:18:25

huge amount of money that haven't been warmed up enough. So

1:18:28

it's making sure that we're hitting each of these boxes

1:18:30

for the audience that we're starting to target. And so

1:18:32

as you go to a new tranche of,

1:18:34

let's say you go from solution aware to problem

1:18:36

aware, so it's a bigger area, right? And so

1:18:38

think about these concentric circles like a pizza, like

1:18:40

the area of the pizza, you know, like a

1:18:42

pizza that's this big, if you take an inch

1:18:44

off, it's almost the same size as a two-inch

1:18:46

pizza in the middle, like the diameter, circumference, whatever

1:18:48

that is, I probably failed geometry. The point is

1:18:51

that it just gets bigger and

1:18:53

explanation bigger as you go out. And

1:18:55

so this is a

1:18:57

weird visual that I have for this. But if you think

1:18:59

about a watermelon slice, and

1:19:01

at the tip, there's lots of seeds. And as you

1:19:04

go down, there's fewer seeds. But you still have to

1:19:06

pay the same amount to reach all these eyeballs to

1:19:08

find the few seeds versus in the beginning when you

1:19:10

have lots of seeds. So your density of sales per

1:19:12

thousand eyeballs goes down as you go to more unaware

1:19:15

people because you're going to go to people who just

1:19:17

simply don't care and never will care. But you have

1:19:19

to, and this is where the LTV matters so much

1:19:21

and the optimization matters so much. But

1:19:23

you still, if you can be profitable in a larger

1:19:26

tranche that's 10 or 100 times as big,

1:19:28

that's when you start really printing money. Right.

1:19:31

And so if you have, call it 20 to 1 LTV

1:19:33

to CAC in the beginning when you have lots of little

1:19:35

seeds, lots of density of potential buyers because it's really warm,

1:19:37

really problem aware, really solution or product aware, right? Like really

1:19:40

high end. As you go down, you might

1:19:42

drop to 5 to 1 in the middle. You

1:19:45

might drop to 3 to 1 at scale, but you're

1:19:47

at 100 times the spend. And

1:19:49

so in that case, you're still making way more

1:19:51

absolute return on the investment. Another way to think

1:19:53

about this is like a golf course. And so

1:19:55

if you could only putt, then you're going to

1:19:58

only make six inch putts. of the top little

1:20:00

seeds of the watermelon. But think about how much

1:20:02

more area, if you learned how to drive and

1:20:04

you learned how to hit a three iron. I'm

1:20:06

not very good at golf. You can obviously tell.

1:20:08

And then you learn how to hit a wedge.

1:20:10

There's so many more shots that you can make

1:20:13

if you have these other skills in your arsenal. And

1:20:15

so think about each of the levels of awareness as

1:20:17

another club that you have to learn how to hit

1:20:19

so that you can get more balls in the hole

1:20:21

from any part of the course. Marketing advice number 13,

1:20:23

we need to be reminded more than we need to

1:20:25

be taught. And I think this is one

1:20:27

that's going to break a lot of your beliefs. And so I want

1:20:29

to really emphasize this one because it's important. Once

1:20:32

you start making content, once you start running ads, and you

1:20:34

start putting stuff out publicly, you start advertising, you're going to

1:20:36

get to a point where you're like, I feel like I've

1:20:38

said everything that I was going to say. Now,

1:20:41

remember, you continue to live life every day. You continue to

1:20:43

do stuff, and you can talk about what you did. So

1:20:46

that can break that. But my mom said this

1:20:48

to me once, and I always remembered it.

1:20:50

She said, the news never changes, just the names.

1:20:53

And I really thought about that. It was like, there's

1:20:55

always a rape, there's a war, there's a murder, there's

1:20:57

a car accident. The actual story doesn't change, only the

1:20:59

names. And so if you think

1:21:01

about that with content, there is no new content. The

1:21:03

human condition has not changed for thousands of years. The

1:21:05

older the problem, the older the solution. And

1:21:07

so we're making

1:21:10

content, and we're putting stuff out there. And

1:21:13

when I think about myself, the things that

1:21:15

I follow, I follow philosophy pages because I

1:21:18

am OK rereading Epictetus's stuff. I read his stuff before,

1:21:20

and I read it in quote form again. And when

1:21:23

it comes up again, I like to be reminded. I

1:21:25

like to keep this stuff top of mind. And

1:21:28

that's why I follow those pages. And many people follow

1:21:30

your pages for that exact same reason, is that the

1:21:32

stuff you talk about is stuff that they want to

1:21:34

keep top of mind. They want to be reminded of

1:21:36

that stuff. And getting taught is much more difficult than

1:21:39

being reminded, but they're equally valuable. Because if it changes

1:21:41

their behavior, then you still did teach them. Again, you

1:21:43

just reminded them. And what's crazy about this is that

1:21:46

the friend show right now, if you've

1:21:48

ever heard of it, is being watched more

1:21:50

now than it was a few years ago.

1:21:53

So reruns, people watch reruns because

1:21:55

there's nostalgia, or whatever reasons you want to pick

1:21:57

to it. But people are willing to rewatch this.

1:21:59

same thing because they know how it ends, they

1:22:01

know they liked it. And

1:22:03

so you can make

1:22:06

the same thing again because also your audience

1:22:08

who's new a year later hasn't seen that

1:22:10

thing. And so if you make something new

1:22:12

to them, even though it's

1:22:14

quote old or reminder to your existing audience, your existing audience

1:22:17

doesn't mind the reminder and the new people never saw it

1:22:19

to begin with. And if you want

1:22:21

to have different ways of creating variety even around

1:22:23

the same topics, I would encourage you instead of

1:22:25

thinking of getting into

1:22:27

trend hacking and talking about the news, talk

1:22:29

about your news. So it's about what are

1:22:31

the new things that are happening now? This

1:22:33

is the do epic stuff, talk about what

1:22:36

you did. And so this is where we

1:22:38

tell new stories to explain the same concept

1:22:40

because for that specific audience, you'll reach a

1:22:42

different type of person or a different avatar

1:22:44

that still might be within your market with

1:22:46

a story about a mother and a daughter

1:22:48

versus a father and a son versus a

1:22:51

military vet versus a small

1:22:53

business owner, right? There are different avatars and you

1:22:55

can tell the same story but it happens to

1:22:57

a different name, just like the news. And people

1:22:59

still watch the news every single day and then

1:23:01

what we want is them to watch our news.

1:23:03

You can tell the same concept like the value

1:23:05

equation. The value equation I explained in my book,

1:23:07

I also have a course on my site that

1:23:10

I explained the value equation in a different format.

1:23:12

So think about it in terms of formats, this

1:23:14

is written, I have an audio, I've got videos

1:23:16

that are on my site that are in a

1:23:18

course format, I'm mentioning it here now, I have

1:23:20

it on whiteboards that I've explained it, I've applied

1:23:22

it to services, I've applied it to education, I've

1:23:24

applied it to physical products, I've applied

1:23:27

it to software and so you can take

1:23:29

the same idea and think how can I

1:23:31

display it in new formats, new mediums and

1:23:33

new contexts. And so when you have that and

1:23:35

then you extrapolate on top the news of your

1:23:38

life, even though you feel like it's saying the

1:23:40

same thing, the amount that it takes to create

1:23:42

something novel is very small. And so I'll tell

1:23:44

you the story that I think will wrap this

1:23:46

up, it's the story of Henry Ford. And

1:23:49

so Henry Ford had in

1:23:51

his office, he had his marketing person right next to him,

1:23:53

so he walked past the marketing department over and over and

1:23:55

over again. And this was back in the day when they

1:23:57

didn't have computer screens, so it was just like they had

1:23:59

mock-ups and big posters. and things like that for whatever the

1:24:02

next ad campaign for a new Ford car was. And so

1:24:04

you walk past this guy's office for three months. At the

1:24:06

end of the three months, he was like, hey John, when

1:24:08

are we gonna stop running this ad? I'm so sick of it. And

1:24:11

John, the marketing director looked at me, said, we haven't even started

1:24:13

running it yet. And so the thing is

1:24:15

is that we get so much sicker of our own

1:24:17

content before our audience even remembers your name. And

1:24:20

so the thing is is that we assume that every person

1:24:22

consumes every piece of content you ever put out. We put

1:24:24

out 50 plus pieces of content a day. I'm

1:24:27

grateful if somebody watches one a week, right? And so

1:24:29

the idea here is that you put out significantly more,

1:24:31

but we have this assumption that everyone's paying attention and

1:24:33

no one is. And so we put out tons of

1:24:35

volume with the hope that we catch one person on

1:24:37

that one day. And you might have made four things

1:24:40

about the value equation. Actually, you can give me good

1:24:42

feedback, so this will be good. If you haven't heard

1:24:44

about the value equation whatsoever, in my content up to

1:24:46

this point, drop a comment. Because I want to prove

1:24:49

that this, even though I've talked about it in a

1:24:51

zillion formats, some of you guys didn't even know how

1:24:53

to book, right? People

1:24:56

need to be reminded more than need to be taught.

1:24:58

Hey guys, real quick, at acquisition.com, our whole mission is

1:25:00

to make real business education accessible for everyone. It would

1:25:02

mean the world to me if you helped us accomplish

1:25:04

that mission by sharing the show. If you can share

1:25:06

the show on your Instagram story or wherever it is

1:25:08

that you post content, you can tag me in it.

1:25:10

I'm sharing as many back to my stories as I

1:25:13

possibly can. It mean a lot. Thank you.