The Game with Alex Hormozi - Recruiting, Ops, and Churn: Real Business Fixes in Real Time | Ep 884

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

In Q&A, Alex (@AlexHormozi) breaks down the real bottlenecks inside 8-10 companies, from e-comm hatmakers and mobility coaches to high-ticket consultants and medical practices. Whether you're stuck at $2M trying to get to $10M or trying to fix churn, CAC, or hiring, this episode is a masterclass in decision-making at scale.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast, you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Wanna scale your business? Click here.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | AcquisitionMentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap

If I said, hey, no one wants to come to Vegas who already has like a huge amount of, you know, marketing knowledge because anyone who's really good at marketing can make more in the, well, there's plenty of marketers who can make a million dollars a year in revenue and take home 200, you know, 250 with all the headache. It's like, well, I can pay you double that. And you can just deal with high level business centers all day. And for some people, it's like, that's pretty good deal. Hey Alex. My name is Mark. We help live poker players win more money who are already winning. We do about $2 million. We'll do $2 million. We'll do $2 million. this year and we'd like to be a 10 million. The problem is we have two front end offers and both

are converting like crazy to the back end. But we have one that's 7.5K for 28 days and one that is 2.8K for seven days. We are demand constrained on the high one, the 7.5K. Do you upsell from the first of the second? We're not really converting because they're overlap too much. Okay. So is it just a down sell? It's a downsell for players who aren't playing full time or guys who are more weakened warriors as opposed to. What percentage is each? We do 12 a month of the 7.5K and we do 16 to 32 a month of the 2.8K. It's a big range of the other one.

Okay. So what's revenue split there? It's 12 times 8. So called 100 on the high ticket side and then the other one is... 50 to 70 on the... Okay, so less on the other. Okay. Keep going.

So the question is how do we differentiate these or do we just switch to a single offer? that's more of an ascension and make the one that's maybe three days or five days and less expensive and then we can upsell to the 28 day. Or do we just say, screw it, let's just do the 28 day and drop the thing on the front end? You said your supply constraint on the seven day thing? If we start doing a bunch of those, we need to hire more coaches. Okay. And how are you not supply constraint on the other one? Is it less coaches for the more expensive thing? Geth and my business partner in the front row, he does. Is it less fewer coaches for the on the lower thing

on that one that I so won't you very quickly be constrained on the top thing four times please it's a lot before okay three times a day got it

okay so so the problem though is that you need another person to sell more people into the front end thing well because they're running to my pegies is like so if I'm 13 boot 10

yeah I'll be down up there the same. I think I have an ops issue. So right now if I said, could you sell more people if you had unlimited capacity? Like, could you sell more if you had a limited capacity? We could sell more of the seven-day thing because they go four times a month. So it requires less on our part. I feel like, I feel like reskinning the ops on that.

But when I have two products that are really similar. Probably the higher, guys. And you sell them direct into that, right? Yeah, direct from warm inbound. whatever you're doing. Oh, from warm inbound. Yeah. Oh, God, it hurt. Okay. Well, if you cut off the low thing, you have no real scalable demand in right now. It's just you make content and then that just you get what you get and then you sell those people, right? And we're kind of capped on, the warm is growing, but it's slow and we wanted to start dipping our toes into paid.

Yeah. I mean, that's going to be the thing that's going to unlock. As much as I want to say, hey, cut this one or that one, if you cut either of them right now, you'll just lose money because you don't have an ability to get customers kind of on demand. If I were to fix this, I would think, let's fix ops first, number one. Like, how can we reconfigure the delivery of the offer so that you can get 3, 5X the operational capacity for you? And then all of a sudden, that'll unlock it so that then, when we then go run paid ads, we can then actually bring enough people in.

And then at that point, we could say, you know what? Now we have enough of the 7500s, which you might as well charge. Well, I'll just say that you have enough of the 7500s that then you can make the call and say, you know what, we have this much capacity overall. if I just cut this, I can then triple this one and then you just do that. Do you like the pricing on those two or you were hinting it raising? Honestly, this is where I would be like, we need to do our research behind the scenes so we could, because we do price analysis all the time.

And sometimes we get lucky. Like we had a business that we acquired that we did a ton of pricing research and we basically said, you are actually so underpriced that we will double the price. And it took me nine calls to the founder to get him to like sack up. Ladies, I apologize. Grab his go nads. those were unisex anyways grab those and then make the move and not only did we double the price conversion rate went up because it was so cheap people didn't believe it and so the thing is that

sometimes we sell out of our own pocket but you actually sell to gamblers correct yes so you might you might actually find yourself in a situation where the more it is the more they'll believe it which is called a vebling good but we would do a pricing kind of like deep dive on that before i would make a pricing wreck for that specific avatar but yeah that's the tieldy arts i'd fix ops first, then I turn paid on, and then at that point, we'll make the split call. Cool. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah. Hey, Alex. My name is Jared, and we sell body count contouring and body transformation to patients. I heard, like, that sounded so different from the onset. Sorry, body what? Conturing. Okay, body contouring. So it's our primary service is like melting fat.

It's like, we sell body counts. I was like, that's, this does, this does benefit body counts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one leads to the other. It's a, yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's It's a daisy chain. Got it. Yeah, yeah, I heard. So you get the contouring to increase your count. 1.2 in revenue. Yeah.

With our, we're on track due to two this year. In person medspa? In person medspa. And what's stopping me and my question is to start off from the top is we now sell a $6,000 package for a year. Uh-huh. The medspa is to help them scale using our pillars. Okay.

So two businesses. Two businesses. Heard. And right now, trying to figure out what to do. So first one, right? First one. And then this is this one. Keep going.

So business one. We did start another location two years ago. So three. Yeah. Okay. But the nice thing is we only do, we only did one service for like two and a half years. I do like. I do love the raising canes of just like we make chicken tenders toast, coast law.

And yeah. And then the cash is so good in the consulting that right now I'm like, do I set up the exit, move to consulting? What do you want to? So do you want to sell the med spots? Not for nothing. Well, no, I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But like, what do you want to have happened? I would like to be coaching. It lights me up. So you like doing that better. You realize there will be no exit there. So within the coaching, this is why they've stayed together. Yeah. Is we get all these clients and then we're able to pick the key ones for the spa group exit of like a 50 spa group, 100 spa group exit.

Okay. So I've got one that we do. So you want to do a roll up of med spas. Okay. I think that's smart. But they kind of go together. It feels like. Okay.

Hurd. How outsourced? This is such a loaded question because everyone says they're totally outsourced. How many times have you gone to the? med spa in the last six months. Some weeks zero, some weeks once or twice. Okay. I see where you're going. I think putting a roll it together, very easy to say, harder to do in practice. And then also the deal structure around that can be like just a couple of ways of restructuring can make it a more tax efficient for you and also you capture more upside in a way that when you pitch it to them

makes it seem like they're getting a better deal. So there's there's nuance to that. But beyond this scope. I do think that I want to get you out of the day to day of those because that's not the opportunity at all. Because if you can do the roll up, basically nothing else matters. So I'd be willing to eat margin on the two to put somebody who's intelligent in IQ per square foot so that I use my cell phone talk. Have you guys heard my cell phone talk? Here, here's the cell phone talk. So you get intelligent person and say, hey, intelligent person. I'm going to pay you, you know, 100 grand a year and 5% or 10% of the profit of the business, invest over four years. And if we sell, you'll get 10% of just the contribution of these in EBITA to the overall. Cool. All right, but here's the trade. This

doesn't ring. Let's roll play it. Cushman comes in. They're super upset because they had some weird reaction to contouring. What do you do? Any answer that is not call me is the right answer. Okay, you have a whole full stack and then the ceiling starts leaking in the middle of the day. What do you do? Anything that's not call me is the right answer. And so I do this to make the point when you have that conversation because you're like, I'm giving you this ownership position. I'm going to put your picture on the wall. We're going to call it your facility, not mine, so that you own these. And then you can go and hunt.

Cool. And if you have questions up with the deal stuff, we're having help. Sweet. Thank you. Hey, Alex. My name is Josh. We sell to athletes and fitness enthusiasts, like yourself, with mobility and injury prevention.

So we help them overcome muscle tightness, joint stiffness, recurring injuries. We're at 33 million in revenue. We want to be at 100. We've been scanning very fast. Now we're at a point where our cactus LTV has like squashed down to 2.1 so we don't have the breathing room. Is coaching or info? Sorry, coaching info or products? Info. Okay, got it. Yeah, coaching. Low ticket to high ticket ascension.

Okay, got it. Yeah. So our KAC to LTCT is now two to one. We just don't have the cushion to like continue scaling the sales team. To run us means to double the sales team, we just need more cushion. Yeah. So what I was referencing earlier about LTV to KAC at each of those kind of intervals of manual labor that resonate with you a little bit? Yes. Yeah. So you need to increase LTV. So are you all direct response? Is it all paid or do you have organic? We have a big organic following, but it's mainly like 70% of the clients come from paid. We run a lot of paid. Yeah, yeah. So I've got good, good news and bad news. If right now you're at two to one, I would imagine the profit margins are compressing, right? So sales are high, but yeah, margins are lower.

Yeah. The issue is that, believe it or not, if we were to pull out the 30% that's coming from organic, the business would probably not be profitable. Yeah, it might be less. and I'd have to check exactly what that is. Well, what are your margins? 20%. Right. 20% is coming from the free traffic and then the other 80%. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah. So a part of it as well, like our closed percentage as a company is 20%. The reason for that is like we've gone from four sales reps to 40 sales reps in like three months. So a lot of our sales reps are still in ramp. It's like it should be like 30, 35%, which would give us a bit of breathing room, but it's still, yeah, like anything else we can do to equidate more in the front end. I think this is actually pure ops. So it's going to be the sales motion and dialing that in and probably adding some elements of education prior to the close in addition to what you're currently doing to make it easier for the sales guys to do their job with less ramp. And then getting, I mean, I'm sure you're proficient in doing sales because you're in fitness and obviously have a, you know, hardcore sales.

Well, I'm guessing if it's 40 phone sales guys selling info, like it's pretty hardcore in terms of the selling perspective. Who runs the sales team? So we've got 40 reps. There's then four pod leaders, managers, and then there's one director. of sales. Got it. Who developed the sales training? Myself, like, it's kind of come from myself. It's evolved a little bit over time from our top sales reps, but there's many me and the sales director. To solve this business, it's going to be a recruiting and training thing. Like in terms of sales reps, better reps? Yeah. So like we look at the whole business. It's like we have to

solve that. Now, could we also probably look at the ad side, like are there things on the creative that might be able to give you a lift probably? Conversion rate throughout the funnel. Sure, any incremental return is going to be positive. But I would bet right now that it's going to be, how do we get the best guys to 40, 45, and then have the meet, you know, the median be, you know, 30, 35. Yeah, our best guys are close to 40. Okay. But right now, were you saying the team averages? Team is 20, yeah, because there's so somebody still around. So part of it, yeah. So recruiting and training is going to be the business that you're in from a selling perspective. And so you have a sales business, fundamentally. You have a sales business with a direct response media on the front end. And so there's so much that goes into sales training.

I just rewrote the ACQ sales closer handbook and all of our onboarding process. There's so much, like, nuance that goes into it. And a lot of it is just there's so much wasted effort that happens and untraining that occurs on the job when it's done the wrong way that most sales or, I'd say, 95% of sales organizations, their primary method for basically scaling the sales team is higher as many people as possible, let the bad guys die out, which is scaling through selection rather than scaling through training. And when you scale through training, you can scale with higher margins.

you don't have to pay the mercenaries their king's ransom because you can take anybody off the street and they can immediately sell. And so that's where your alpha is going to come in compared to people like in your space who have to just take the mercenaries who will jump from offer to offer to because you can pay them less and you'll be able to ramp them higher and you'll be able to get more of them. And so fundamentally like that is the motion that's going to be the competitive advantage of the business outside of the obvious like you need to still be able to run really good ads. Yeah. So the 80-20 for us then is like to increase OTP. is like better sales team.

Yes. You're not going to increase LTV. You're going to increase dollars per lead. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And what is the healthy cat to LTV for our business model at this scale? I mean, honestly, you want it to be bigger.

Yeah. I definitely want to be bigger. But someone said, yes, they 10 to 1. And I don't see how that we could do that. I think that you could get to 5 to 1 as a good target. And that would probably get like getting the sales function where it should be would get you to three and a half, maybe four-ish. And then I would say the other kind of 20, 25% lift that would have

and there. It's going to happen front-end conversion rate optimization stuff, media. And then we'd have to look at what's the renewal rate on the back end? How many people renew long term? Because like the two most profitable pieces of business for you are the customers that are coming in for free, which is basically the entirety of your margin right now. And then customers that renew that you don't have to pay KAC for, right? There's the things that are dropping the bottom line. Everything in the middle is literally just to facilitate these two things. Yeah, exactly. And so we just need to like, how do we double down on these two? Because these are the most profitable things and then lift this so that we can unlock more to get to 100. But if you get to four or five, then you can get to 100. So, I mean, although this, like,

this will be ops heavy. This will be work. But you also get paid 70 extra million a year. Yeah, okay. All right, cool. Thank you, ma'am. Yeah. So my name's Chandler. I sell cowboy hats and custom hats. Sweet. We do around two million in revenue right now. Awesome. I'd like to be at five. Okay. What's stopping me is, so everything is mostly through social media. Cool. We've got about 780,000 organic followers. Cool. We are doing some paid ads, getting a 12 to 18 row ads on the ads. And the issue is, is I've got this big red shiny button on my desk.

And at any moment, I can just slam it and just double the content, like you say, I can double the paid ads, but I can't make the hats. And it takes, but it takes years to take somebody and make them into a master hatmaker. And the issue is, as much as we can say, it's a recruiting problem. Sure. Hat making is not like an inherent skill. So it's you could bring in a person that does artistry. You could bring in a person that does anything like that.

And all of a sudden, if they don't have the vision for it, they can't shape a hat. And so you need the hat making combined with the customer service in order to be able to talk to the clients. So what's the price of the hat? Right now, anywhere from 800 to 1200. Okay. Got it. So there's a super high end kind of like artisanal. For sure.

You know, hats, they're all custom, et cetera. And we do like end to end like full virtual. So every single person normally when they buy a hat goes into a hat store. And the issue is is that hat stores are all locally based and it's a dying trade. And so what I did is I harness the power of the social media. And then we do all the video calls and everything virtually with people. So people feel like they're watching the video that they love on social media, but it's made just for them. Yeah. So it's totally recruiting issue. Totally. Yeah. And I mean, fundamentally, if you're like, I have unlimited demand for this stuff virtually, right? You can just slam the button and just get double the sales,

but you can't deliver on it. It's also kind of like the sales thing, different in terms of the delivery. But it's going to be recruiting and training issue. The thing that I think is underutilized right now is the fact that it's a dying trade. That to me is where the really exciting alpha is. Because if you tell me, okay, there's all these people who are dying on the vine who can barely make ends meet. And then I'm over here printing money with the exact same skill set they have. I'll bet you, you could probably pay them better if they're making $1,000,000 hats. But I'm in Kentucky. Yeah. No one wants to be in Kentucky besides us. No one wants to be in Kentucky

for what you pay them now. That's true. So compensation is you can be overcompensated or you can be under compensated. So if you are supply constrained and you are making money hand over fist, you are underpricing your talent. Okay. So it's like how much more would I need to pay somebody in order to get them to be one willing to move to Kentucky

and two, be willing to go through the training for it? If I can get them to do that, do I still have a good margin? If so, great. And it's like, okay, well if I paid them 30% more, we'd be good to go. Okay, well, what does 30% look like in terms of if we change nothing about price? What does 30% look like if we pass through the price to the customer? Does it change anything about our acquisition? If so, then jack the price, jack the talent, and then you're good to go. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together

our scaling a roadmap. It's breaking scale. into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. We show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you, so it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you enter the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to

watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap. How would you jack the talent, like just, I mean, because I don't feel like recruiters can find hatmakers. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I think they can totally find out there.

You think so? I mean, I would just Google Hatmaker, and then I would call all the business owners. I'm just being like, this is how I would do it. Yeah. Like, they're business owners. And so if they have the opportunity to, because the thing is they're probably not making anything. Yeah.

And so many of them are artists. They don't have business sense. And so if they can make the money they want to make and do the thing they want to do, that's a dream life. It's a pretty good offer. But then they have to work for me and then the ego thing gets in the way. Yeah, but not for all of them. You need what, three more, five more, ten more? I would say like two to three more to get to five to seven.

I'll make a point. This is important. So you guys met my team today. Does it now make sense that they don't make $100,000 a year? Yes? Like the people that you talk to make between, you know, 200, well, two, I'll probably hire this. So probably 300-ish on the low end all the way to 750 plus, right, the people that you spoke with. And so if I said, hey, no one wants to come to Vegas who already

has like a huge amount of, you know, marketing knowledge because anyone who's really good at marketing can make more. Well, there's plenty of marketers so you can make a million dollars a year in revenue and take home 200, you know, 250 with all the headache. It's like, well, I can pay you double that. And you can just deal with high level business centers all day. And for some people, it's like, that's a pretty good deal. Okay. This would be. horrible if I was just trying to be like, how do I pay kind of as little as I can and then be like surprised that no one wants to come here. But you have the margin and you have the pricing power. Yeah. So, one last question. Yeah. Can I hit the big red button and then that way and then

supply first? And supply first. Get the people first? Well, you have margin, right? Like 40 to 45%? Yeah, you got margin. Okay. Because I'm just wondering if I hit the big red button, then I have more money and then I can afford the power. Well, how much capacity do you have right now? Are you fully like, are you fully tapped out. Right now currently when someone buys a hat from us, the soonest they'll be getting their hat is like October and November. So you would just be pushing out delivery when I could push out delivery technically. The industry does delivery at six months to a year for a custom act. We're still technically two months under. I know it's fucking crazy. I hate using latency. But I do think that there's no difference between six and eight months. It's just forever. Okay. What is?

And that's like at about the three to four month like you get you have to essentially just slowly grab everyone off the ledge. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, I mean, if you want to slam your red button just so you can just jam some cash in. That doesn't really bug me. Pushing from six days can change absolutely nothing about the conversion process. Okay. Recreting problem. Rock and roll.

My name's Max. Nice to meet you, Max. So I sell cannabis, hemp dispensaries cross country. Cool. 22 million a year. Grower? Goal is. Are you a grower?

No, distributor. Oh, distributor. Yeah. So we buy it from California farms and distribute it out to. Okay. Goal is 50 million. And what's holding me back right now is regulatory changes. in the hemp industry. So that fear of, you know, something changing, a few states are changing right now

that are key markets and it's kind of holding us back from reinvesting and expanding the team. So basically the uncertainty that the market is going to be there is what's holding you back from getting more locations on board to distribute to? Pretty much. I mean, from basically expanding the sales team and what's the alternative? I guess kind of stagnant. Really? Mm-hmm. So what are you afraid of? I guess what I was more wondering is like, should we change product categories? Because there is other products like in the cannabis space that we could distribute to our current customer base. Yeah. Rather than just flour. Like that's been our full focus right now. Yeah. I would probably think about it like this, which is regulatory is like the number one concern in your space. Also sometimes in healthcare as well. So that's kind of sometimes an issue because they're heavily regulated. That being said, most regulatory. everyone's fears that it's going to end tomorrow. But typically, one, you'll have heads up because bills are on the line. On top of that, they have to get voted for. Once they get voted for, there's going to be a time they're effective. By the time they're effective, they usually have a phase in because they typically don't want to disrupt

business. And so you usually have way more time than you think you do. And so I kind of operate from the, like, we will operate this way until we know. Because otherwise, you just get stuck in this uncertainty of just like, what do I do with my life? And you can stay there forever. Ray Dalio has been saying, and I love Ray Dalio, to be clear. But like, Ray Dahl has been saying that like the world's going to end for like 14 years. And so, and he's like, almost there. Right. He's like almost right. But he's been almost right for like 14 years. And when it finally happens, I told you. Right. And the thing is that if you had like held gold this whole time, you would have missed out one of the best, you know, growth periods in U.S. history in terms of, you know, stock market appreciation. And so I say all this to say like capitalize on the opportunity while it's there when it's not there or like when you have a

heads up that it's not there, then you can very aggressively start selling the other products into your distribution base. And I'm sure I would imagine that getting the other products not that difficult. And training the guys to sell is probably also not going to be that difficult. So I would just go business as usual, still aggressively expand. And then if that happens, you'll make the pivot. Trying to guess the future is tough. Yeah. And so I would rather just deal with the, you know, the information we have now. And when that information changes, we'll change our behavior. Yeah. Thank you. Mine is Peter. We sell sports memorabilia, autographed Cool.

Sports memorabilia by athletes in the UK. Sweet. We currently do 3 million. I would like to be at 6.5 in a couple of years. Very precise. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm English. Yeah. I've been stuck at 3 million the last couple of years, the swamp, as you say. I think I need an A player. Also, I'm not sure. I think I've been focused on the wrong things as well. So yeah, just want some advice on that and what else it could be. What's limiting your ability to grow?

Leeds. Okay. Leeds. And then converting. leads. Leads is in getting people to buy the products or getting the products? Getting people onto the site and then our conversion rates 1%. So I think that's quite low for e-commerce. Yeah. Yes. Or the targeting is off from your traffic could be one of the other. Okay. Because I would say like if anything, some of you guys probably like obsessing about your CRO, but the issue is actually the

list. It's the traffic that's getting sent to the site. The easiest way to improve your conversion is get better people. I mean being super real. Like that's, it's one of the most underlooked way because the whole time you're banging your head against the wall and it's like, yeah, well, no shit. people are in Africa, they're not buying this, right? To your issue, though, do you know how to buy media really well? Or what's your core skill set? I don't know. I need to figure that out. Probably just managing the whole thing. Okay. Well, the core elements of the business are being able to source the products. Okay. Are you good at that? Yeah. It's like seeing a piece of memorabil being like, right, I could buy it for $200, sell it for $2,000. So I'd say buying.

So that's how you source. You just buy sell. Okay, so you're middleman, got it. So you're fine at finding the stuff that you know is going to sell at a higher price point. You're good there. Okay. So we don't have to worry about that. I mean, it sounds like, I mean, there's not much else into the business, if you already have supply side down for e-commerce, it's just media buying for the part and then building the brand. But for you, you do get some kind of brand halo because of the nature of the memorabilia that you have, which is kind of unique to your business. But the fact that you didn't immediately say, yeah, I'm really good at e-commerce and really good at media buying. I'm going to guess that's what you're missing. And that's probably the person that you need. And the thing is,

is you could go from three to six in like 60 days if you have the right person. You go from three to 10, 12. It's e-commerce. Like, it scales very easily. That's why a lot of people like it. The issue that then comes up is cash flow, which we can do with later. But like, as long as you have, so you're at three-ish million. What are margins? 400,000 on three million. Obviously, like 12-ish percent somewhere in there. This is why it's the swamp.

So you either have to learn media buying yourself or bring in somebody who's a star or stud and you might have to give up a few points of equity to get somebody who's really good without giving the entire margin away. Because like you've got cash and you've got stock. You've got different levers that you can use to try and compensate. somebody. It's just, it's like the really good media buyers make multiple hundreds of thousand dollars a year. And so most people who own e-commerce businesses are either very product brand focused or their media, hardcore media buyers. That's like, I would say those are kind of

the two genres of e-commerce owners that I encounter on a regular basis. You kind of sit in the middle of like kind of neither. And I don't say that as a slight. Just so you know where your deficiencies are. The nice thing is that your eye for product, you have a really good sense of the market where you can do the arbitrage on the 200 to 2000, which is great. But I'm going to guess this is the skill set that you need right now, which is getting that going. Once you have the media person, then your skill that you'll have to learn is how do I brand this thing so that I can long term become kind of like a household name of sports memorabilia. But for now, let's get more sales, drive revenue up. And then brand would be the next thing. Thank you. Cheers. My name's Nick. We sell sales

coaching and lead gen to financial advisors. We're at 6.6 million. We'd like to be at 20 plus. Outbound paid ads, events, how do you sell? Paid ads. Okay. Straight to VSL to phone team. Correct. Cool.

Yeah. Biggest thing is churn as with pretty much all agencies. We've basically transitioned from lead gen company to sales coaching company because we know that advisors can't close. No offense to any advisors in here. We're doing a lot of sales coaching now. So we have like the big head long tail where we can sell the lead gen on the back end. Yeah.

The main question is, have you seen other agencies successfully pivot from lead gen to sales coaching or, you know, in like very non-sales or industries where founders or business owners are sales deficient, have you seen companies successfully train their clients on sales? Yeah, sure. So like at gym launch, how did you guys successfully do that across thousands of gyms? We had something called boiler room. We trained their trainers and front desk people every morning and drilled them role played and separate them in the groups the same way with our own team, so we just did it every morning

for them. I know it was just an add-on. Just group role-play, basically. Just like you'd have a sales manager meeting where you'd role-play whatever particular part of the script they were all struggling with. We break sales training from the team side, not on the one-on-one side, into five parts. We've got intro, we've got disco, we've got offer, and then we've got objections and looping.

And then fifth day is basically whatever is kind of the hot topic of what's the thing that we think is going to benefit the team the most. And so that's kind of how we rotate through. We have to keep each part of the script crisp, otherwise they'll fuck up something. And so that keeps the sword sharp. And that's what we did across the team. that we still do that for our teams too. Basically, you need to provide more value or you need to

lower the price. And so if you want to tackle churn, it has to be like there are for sure businesses that work in the space that you're at. I think big head, long tail is a great model. Like, charge the upfront and then just make the continuity much, much smaller. So it's a no-brainer. Like they'll almost pay that just to be kind of in the network. It's like I try to answer the question so that it affects as many people as possible in this room. But the problem with information and kind of quote coaching or education type businesses is that people try to make continuity out of the front end value that you're providing, and then the value drops once you have the skill.

And so you have to separate out the consumables from the one-time things. The one-time things also have significantly more value than the consumables do. Now, sometimes they don't have the money to pay for the one-time thing because they don't have the skill, the one-time thing would give them, right? That's kind of the issue.

So in order to separate it, it's like you just have to think, what are the things that they get on an ongoing basis? And if we only stole that, what would the price point be? Likely, significantly lower. And if we got them that skill, it would be significantly more. But once they have the skill, assume they have the skill on the ongoing basis. What would they still pay for? Now, you have the lead gen thing.

How to sell using our process, they stay. Okay. So the biggest thing is just making sure they actually consume the coaching. So it's like it's activation as well. So like getting them to come in and actually engage. Yeah. Because most advisors. Is it all remote?

It's all remote. And they don't, they also don't like sales. Like the word sales like they like cringe inside. and they hear it. So we've literally like banned the word sales. Like we, we just say consulting. We don't call them sales calls. We call them consults. So like, you know, like that. So it sounds like you just have to get better at training them. Yeah. Yeah. So what did your team structure look like as well? So I was curious like, is it possible at scale to do that? And then what sort of team did you have on the sales training or coaching side? It is possible. But the answer to my question

isn't the answer to your question. So the answer to your question, me answering with what our team structure looks like will not help you because of a different business. And so for us, the fundamental arbitrage that existed by and large was kind of two main things. So one was the network in the community. That was a big component of it. You know, being a gym owner is very lonely. It sucks. The other component of it was lead generation, but not in the way that most agencies can't do it.

We were not an agency. So the one skill that I taught gym owners how to do was how to run out to the local market. And then the thing they would need on a regular basis was the creative. And so I licensed the creative every single month because they needed that every month. But they already had the skill. So I didn't have to have 100 fucking account reps to do with it because they knew how run their own ads and running ads in a local market is very easy drop a pin female go you know what I mean like as long as the create it's good and they were running it to our pages that we already tested

and so all we had to do is feed the black box with the creative and then after that they just run our process got it your issue though is that if someone gets activated they stick for sure for sure well then all of the all of the effort we have is how do we get them activated like better faster which is going to be a function of two things one is going to be are there some avatars that are better than others, right? So we only sell those avatars. And we split that into three buckets. You've got demographics. What do they look like? Right? You've got the quantifiable, which is like the size business do they have, whatever. Those two at least get you on our head start in terms of segmenting the traffic. So you can be like, this is who the avatar is. These ones have a

significantly higher likelihood of converting. And what will happen when you do that is your calc will go up. But then your stick problem will get fixed. Okay. So like, for example, if I sold everybody who identified as a fitness person, then Jim Launch would never have been able to exist because I would have had too many shitty customers who are personal trainers who've got 10 clients, whatever, and they can never pay and it doesn't matter what I do. And so for me to deploy the resources required to actually get them up to snuff, I have to have somebody who at their onset can pay more so that I can actually help them. Okay. Because below a certain extent, it just needs to be DIY, which is a different business, not the business I wanted to be in. So there's

probably some advisors that are better that you need to basically scan out and say all these people we're not going to service because they have a low likelihood of actually working. And maybe you need to adjust price to only accommodate those people and that newer avatar that's better. So this is predominantly an avatar issue. And then obviously the option on the back end in terms of activation is what do? Oh yeah. That's the third bucket, the behaviors. So what are the people who have the right demographics and the right quantifiables? What behaviors did they do that cause them to activate and stick? And what did the other people who look like them not do? And then that becomes the activation process. We reverse engineer.

Makes sense. Quick last question. How did you optimize for, for time to value at your launch. And how can we potentially do something similar? Because for us, deal cycles are pretty well. They need all their list. They make a sale in the first seven days. Okay. So just reactivation.

Okay. Sweet. Appreciate you. My name's Roddy. I'm an orthopedic surgeon, emphasis in orthobiologics and regenerative medicine. We do about 2.1 million. And that was with a shift in the last year for more of an insurance-based practice to more of cash-based services.

Awesome. Congrats. So obviously we want to continue to grow that. We think that we could get to 10 million. Ed encouraged me to mention that a lot of that cash-based stuff has come on credibility tailwind of some fortunate exposure on the Joe Rogan podcast. Oh, cool. But the question is, we would like to, we think our problem is top of the funnel because

our close rate's very, very high, like 80%. Okay. We need a way to bring more people to us that know and understand what we do and are looking for this. Uh-huh. The challenge is the marketing around it, and you mentioned earlier with health care, is that we're not really allowed to say some of the things in that way because of the limits with the FDA and the FTC. So how would you leverage some of these things and attack this from a

marketing standpoint? Well, you have the Rogan podcast. Do you get everyone to listen to that? No. Who's everyone? Well, the people that you want to buy your stuff. If I had 60 seconds to answer the question of like, how do I fix this business without any other context? I'd be like, okay, who are the highest likelihood candidates for the service that you sell? Let's put them into an audience. And then the thing that we're going to give them or that we're going to encourage them to listen to is a truncated version of the Rogan podcast. And they're going to want to listen to that anyways because it's probably a topic they would be interested in because it's Rogan. Plus, if they earn the demographic, then they would want to listen to it. If they listen to that podcast

and then you just have follow up to those people, it's like, that podcast does the selling for you. So basically that would function as your video sales letter in the process of sales. those customers. Any problem with that you could see from leveraging that from, for example, somebody building their business off of something that developed as a result of their interaction with you. So what you can do is you can, if you want to be clean about it, you just run it to the episode and then you just have to measure a return. I don't know if you did CTAs or anything like that. But if you don't truncated it at all and you just say like, here's the episode, let's drive traffic to it. And we just know the difference is that every single person is going to listen to Rogan,

a very small slice of that are people who might be interested in your stuff. If you only have people interested in that stuff who listen to the podcast, what percentage of those people then take the next action? So that would be like, again, if I have 60 seconds, both hands tied behind my back with zero ability to do anything else, to be like, let's just get as many people who are in the target audience to watch that thing or listen to that podcast and then see what happens. That would be like the first move. The second move would be like, okay, we'd have to do a deeper dive on, okay, what are the patients,

where the kind of like centers of influence for them? Is this better as an affiliate play? Is this better as a content play? Is this better as a paid ads play? And then saying, okay, based on your skill set, we think this is the lowest risk opportunity that we can pursue to get new customers in the door. Because right now you could take more customers, right?

Or patience, sorry. You could take more patience. Okay. And everyone that comes to you is nationally fly in, or is it local? Both. What's the majority? More local.

Oh, really? Okay. Well, then. Well, so let me say this. Yeah. More local in general, but more from out of town that are specifically coming to,

of that. I would take that same idea, but I would just drop a 50 mile radius pin on the map, and I would just focus on local because if you know the guy that Rogan talked about who did this thing is 50 miles from you, you're like, the likelihood that you want to go do this thing is pretty high. And so that demographic, that's the lead magnet. And then the thing that's missing in your process is you have known who does sales, right? That we do now. You do now. It's very common for healthcare to just have no sales whatsoever. And so you just need one person who's going to start working those leads so they can start booking appointments kind of proactively. Hey, did you get a chance to watch the podcast? What was the most such part for you? Oh, are you struggling with something like this?

Well, it sounds like it might be a good fit. I'll tell you about it. Great. Let's get you set up. the doc. We'll get you all taken care of. That's my 60 seconds hand ties behind my back and way that I would solve it. The thing is, you have this asset. I would like to leverage it in a clean way that doesn't, you know, fuck up that relationship. And I think that would probably be okay if you push traffic to his asset. If we did a YouTube video and you ran ads to the YouTube. video, I mean, you're promoting my show. So that's clean. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You go. Michael Ivy, I managing partner at Eclipse consulting, were a boutique services firm based out of New York City. And we provide data management, risk and regulatory change advisory services to highly regulated and data

intensive businesses. And historically, most of our clients are financial services, particularly banking. We were heavily concentrated in banking, Credit Suisse, Silicon Valley Bank. We're some of our biggest clients. So when that sector went down, we had to kind of reinvent ourselves a little bit and focus more on asset management, insurance, private equity, relatively easy. That's a wild change. That's a big change. Well, the cool thing is data management, risk and regulatory stuff, it's the practice is kind of industry agnostic. You need some of the specialty in the industry.

But it was a pretty seamless pivot for us, to be honest. That's amazing. We were just so, at one point, supply constrained on the banking side and then demand disappeared. and so we chased, we went to where supply was. So anyway, so we'll do, we were well over 30 million after three years. Awesome. With the banking crisis, we fell back down. We'll do around 15 million this year.

I want to get to 100 by 2029. I've almost invested too much time into working on the business. Sure. And I found I had a lot of fun doing it. So historically, a lot of ourselves were founder-led. And so we've really pivoted. I've been working aggressively. I know I can swoop in.

I know I can use my network and relationships to drive leads and referrals. I don't consider myself an especially good sales guy. You're close to 15 to 30 in business. You're on that bad. Yeah, I've done multiple nine figures of professional services sales, but it comes from the passion, the consultative nature. So I think of sales as our last frontier, the operations, the people, the finance side, pristine like in your nine stages where you're solid eight-ish in all those areas,

but sales and marketing were lagging at time. And so been trying to figure out in the cells, if you look at our growth engine, from lead on the team's exceptional. There's some levers we can continue to tweak and enhance on close rates and on a commercial acumen to just enhance profitability. But we need more leads coming into the funnel. So that's our biggest constraint. We've been experimenting with a lot of different things.

The pandemic definitely kind of changed up the game a little bit. How do you source leads right now? So most of it's founder led. Most of it's just me texting someone on a web. Founder led, meaning you. Yes. Okay. Yeah. It sounded so fancy. I text people. Like, yeah, got it. Yeah. So you texting people that you know just because you've been doing this for a while is how you more or less source business. So it's warm outbound. Exactly. Okay. It's probably in your industry, giving me a combination of three things. So you need to dominate trade shows and conferences because you're going to automatically be able to, you can be elevated. That's where all the fish are in one barrel. This is especially true for kind of enterprise level sales like yours. And so enterprise is typically, a combination of affiliate partners in some ways. So kind of like the centers of influence who

can kind of do joint venture type deals with where it's like, hey, you do this element that we don't do. We do this element that you don't do. Like how can we share in deal flow and then basically co-participating a lot of deal work, which I'm sure will happen. The conference stuff is like we have a great conference playbook that we run for all enterprise sales stuff to happen to walk you through it. And then, I mean, you're doing warm out by which is always the first thing that you do and you just happen to be able to do it to 30. Which is great. When you do that for, membership so you get to about $5 a year. It goes to show if you add more zeros, the thing you sell, you can go a lot further sometimes. But with cold outbound basically becomes a back to those two

is the front end. So it's basically you use cold outbound to get your conferences and your affiliates. That's the outbound method that you're going to use as the primary action. The secondary action is securing the deals for both of those so that you can have your playbook that you run on a regular basis that you're doing to get those people in the funnel. And then to the same degree on the affiliate side doing the deals that you need so that you can share in lead flow. And so, Sharon here? Is here? No, well, he was in here earlier. So Sharon was the CEO or president, excuse me, of real brokerage as a publicly traded real estate brokerage. And so Sharon came in and six X the company from 200 million to 1.2 billion. And he did one thing. He did 220 speaking

events a year. And then he just went from stage and then stayed for two days and would just sell every person who would come up to him. And that's how they took it from 200 million to 1.2 billion. And so sometimes it's like we had dinner and I think I've told this story before, but like people are like, so what's the really scalable? It's like that's what he did. He did 220 fucking events in a year. And that's how he added a billion to the business. Oh wow. Yeah, we're doing 10 or 20. So we could probably do. You probably do more volume on this. There's probably way more you can squeeze per because there's a bunch of different conversion points you can do if you set up the other properly. And then on the affiliate side, I see these as really good long term things that you'll

also still be able to source from the events that you attend. So it's kind of a really nice cycle in terms of acquisition. So it's like we do the outbound so that we can get the events. The events then feed us in these multiple ways. One of the things that we triage that the event is potential partners so that we can actually between events have this as our ongoing kind of lead gen component. And then obviously we do direct deals from the event itself. Yeah, that's interesting. So we have a robust alliance partner framework. And so we have a lot of alliance partners. Our challenge has been activation, getting them to continue to refer business. Exactly. Because part of it is we almost have too many alliance partners.

Yeah, but they're not activated. That's the problem. Right. So we think about affiliates as a second customer base. So Allen had three levels as the software company that we had. We had SMBs.

And then above SMBs, we had agencies. And above agencies, we had agency influencers. So people who like helped agencies do stuff. And so we actually had to have three tiers of service. And when I started,

I thought I was going to be serving SMBs. And then I realized agencies were really the people that needed to use our software to service SMBs. Instead, became a huge level of leverage for us to service. scale the business really quickly. But then we're like, oh, wait, we also have these super affiliates that

have 500, 1,000 agencies that are in their network that could basically push us 100, 200, 500 agencies with one email. And so we had to basically create the, how do we make these guys feel amazing all the time that they're the best? And then these people who are coming in, we only made money when they activated and actually use the platform. And so it's basically customer success has to get put in as a function on top of the affiliate base. And so then that becomes a regular cadence of communication. with them. And then the same thing that we were talking about earlier with the sales coaching thing, which is like what are the quantifiables, what are their demographics and what are the behaviors that they did, the ones that are the robust partners that do send you leads, what differentiates

them from the ones that didn't? And then we just reverse engineer that into the actions that we put into activation on that regular cadence for the affiliates. I know that was a lot of information. Yeah, that's a lot. I just got to go flip the switch, I guess. Does that make sense? That check out. Yeah, that's great. The playbook sounds really interesting. Rock and roll. I appreciate you.