13 Years of Marketing Advice in 85 Mins

0:00I've been marketing for 13 years. I built and sold nine companies. I sold my last company for $46.2 million to American Pacific Group. I've also written two books on marketing that have sold over a million copies. Here's 13 years of marketing advice that will make you more money. Piece of advice number one, start with low prices or even gasp free. The reason that I say that is because if you start there, then you can

0:20go up. It's very difficult to come down. And in the beginning, you want to get flow through the system. And so, it's totally fine to start at free and then start bumping up from there. And so, I'll give you three quick examples and then I'll show you how to do this tactically. So, when I started my first ever business, it was a online personal training business. This is 13-plus years ago. And when I started, I didn't know anything and I was so afraid to charge people money to begin with. And so, but I did want them to pay something cuz I wanted them to be invested cuz otherwise

0:47people don't follow through with their workouts or their nutrition plans, etc. And so, I said, "Hey, just donate to the charity of your choice, whatever charity you want to. In exchange, I will then train you for 12 weeks." And so, people would donate, I think it was $500 or $1,000, it was their choice, to a charity of their selection. And by doing that, I actually got my first 13 or so customers just by making posts and DMing people that I knew. And it didn't feel weird cuz I was like, "Hey, I'm doing this kind of nonprofit thing. I want to help you out if you want to lose weight,

1:13and you can feel good about it, and it's a write-off." And so, they were like, "Oh, this is pretty cool." But the thing is is like that was the first time I ever did it. And then from there, I said, "Huh, would you guys be willing to pay me now after we finish this 12 weeks?" And a lot of them were like, "Sure." I was like, "Yeah, I'm the charity now." Uh and so, after I did a good job, they were willing to do that

1:29and refer me customers. The next business that I did this with was Gym Launch when I actually started uh flying out to other gyms. So, I used to do turnarounds and I did that for 2-plus years where I'd fly out to a gym, set up all the pricing, do the marketing, all that stuff. And I did it all for free. And I did it that way because I didn't know how I could sell those gym owners and what I the deal that I made was I only make money if I make sales. And I'll front the cash for the marketing. So, like they took zero risk on. And I would do everything

1:57including pay for my hotel, my flights, my my my food, my rental car, everything. And but being able to do that, it allowed me to get way more yeses quickly, test out the system in 30 plus markets that I had, which then eventually led me to licensing that system to 5,000 plus locations. And that was the company that I that I sold to

2:13APG. The third uh time that I did this was when I started my software company Allen. And so, when I started the company, I was like, I need to get some case studies. I need some testimonials. I need some I need some stories to show successes, right? And so, I think a lot of people who are in the beginning think this is only a beginner thing. But even if you're a big business owner, when you start out a new product or a new division, um starting with free customers just makes a lot of sense. And it's for four reasons. One is that free customers become customers who become

2:40paying after the period as long as you do a good job. So, it makes money in one way. The second way it makes you money is that they'll also refer you customers cuz you do a great job, they'll just send you other people. And that can be contingent on why you do it for free for them. The third is that they'll leave you testimonials and reviews. So, those reviews and those testimonials also you advertise and you can get more customers from them. And then finally, whenever you do stuff for free, I do it in exchange for feedback. I say, "Hey, tell

3:03me what I could do to make this better." And again, it's not saying like tell me all the ways I suck, it's just saying, "Tell me how I can make this better. Tell me how I could make it worth it for you to want to stay and continue to pay." And ideally, the easy test of knowing whether or not this works is that they actually stay and pay afterwards. And so, it's the easiest way to get going on any new product and I think so many people start trying to sell stuff too soon without enough proof. And in the beginning, you suck. That's why it's a

3:30new product, a new division. And so, I'd rather not ruin my reputation saying I'm giving it away for free, give the reason is that I'm brand new at this thing or I'm trying this new thing out. And that way I'll get a little bit of grace, and then that way I can make the thing better in an iterative process much faster with way more people cuz I'm giving it away for free or at cost. And then once I get those massive success stories that they feel like they owe me because I've done a great job, then I

3:52can market those and go at full price. So, here's how you actually do this tactically going from starting at low prices to moving all the way to where you want to be, which is high prices with big premiums, right? And so, what I'd say is after you have your first test case study batch, so call it 10 or 20 people depending on the size of your product or your services, after that every five I just go up by 20%. And so, let's say, okay, I started at zero and I have a marketing agency. I might say, okay, the first the next five I'm

4:19going to do for a thousand bucks, right? And then from there I might say, okay, the next five I'm going to do for 1200 bucks. The next five I'm going to do for 1500 bucks. And you just keep going up by 20% until the conversion rate times the price goes down. So, that way you can just calculate the total amount of money made off of X number of sales calls. And by doing that, you'll be able to see, okay, here's the sweet spot where I sell the most amount of units at the highest potential price. So, my company Gym Launch that I sold for $46 million, that company, you know, at its

4:47peak before I was selling it, we were taking home over a million dollars a month in personal income. But, that's what a lot of people think happened the whole time, but it wasn't like that. The actual very first business that I started in fitness, I actually gave away my services for free. I actually did it as a non-profit for charity so that I could get clients in the door and test out whether my stuff actually worked and that I could deliver services. And when you're having the conversation with those first few people, whether you're doing it for free or you're going to do it for a big discount, you say, "Hey, I

5:13plan on going to this price point, but I'm willing to do it for free in exchange for X," which is usually a feedback feedback for me and a public testimony if you're comfortable doing it. And by having those two things, then one, you guarantee that you get the feedback, which is the thing you need most, but you also can get the testimony that you can leverage. And then finally, you can also tack on a referral if you want to. Again, I'd say the testimony and the referral should be contingent on you doing a good job. You say, "Hey, if I do a good job, would you be willing to

5:40do these two things?" If they say yes, then you're good to go. The fourth one was just, do they actually want to buy at full price later, which will be the real test how good you were. And I think the bottom line here is that when you start out, you're not that good. And even if your ego is like kind of convincing you that you are good, which I think is silly, just even imagine 2 years from now that you're going to be much better than you are now. Well, that guy is probably way more experienced. So, give that guy a running start by starting free now and

6:06then building momentum into it. And I have this saying that I repeat all the time in my team, which is create flow, monetize flow, then add friction. And so, it's like you have to run water through the machine. You have to get flow into the system to see where it's going to break so that you know what real actually looks like rather than just trying to get rich on Excel. The second is the framework that I use for scaling advertising or scaling marketing

6:28in any niche: more, better, new. When you're starting out, more is almost always the answer. And so, I remember when I was thinking about getting into content, I I paid someone who had made, you know, a lot more content, had a much bigger brand. I said, "Hey, what should I be doing?" I like, "What

6:45should I do to make my content better?" And he's like, "Dude." He's like, "You don't need to make your content better." He's like, "You're just not making anything." And so, what he did was he pulled up his profile on LinkedIn and he pulled up my profile on LinkedIn. He's like, "I posted five times a day. You haven't even posted." And then he pulled up Instagram and he pulled up my Instagram. He's like, "I posted two times a day. You posted once a week." I was like, "Man." He's like, "Okay, let's

7:05pull up YouTube." And then my YouTube. And he just went platform by platform and he showed that he was doing 3x, 5x, 10x the volume that I was. He's like, "Dude, you just got to do more." And that was just like very like I felt embarrassed cuz I just paid all this money to have someone just look at me and just say, "Do more." But hopefully I can save you the money and just tell you you probably need to do more. And the interesting thing about this is that I later on had like at the point now when we had maybe this is maybe a year ago I

7:30had five-ish million subscribers across all platforms. I had a friend of mine who's a billionaire who wanted to start getting into personal branding. He said, "Hey, man, can you check out my Instagram and see what's, you know, going on and why why we're not growing as fast as I want to. And so I said, well, before I look at it, I was like, how many posts a week are you making across all platforms? He's like, oh, got that nailed. He's like, I'm posting once a day. And I was like, dude, I was like,

7:51we post 50 plus times a day. And he was like, got it. He just was like, you don't need to say anymore. I understand. Because he had had it enough experience in other realms to know that like, oh, all of the things in volume that that that work in sales, that work in customer success, that work in product in terms of iterations, the same concepts apply to advertising and marketing. Like, you just need to do a lot in order to figure out what works so that you can do better

8:15later. Now, what's interesting about this is that this also applies on the paid side. So, I remember there was a chiropractor chiropractor agency that approached me. They were doing about 2 million bucks a year. And he was like, hey, man, I think I've saturated Facebook. And so I was like, and this is when it was Facebook, not Meta. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, I just think I've saturated the chiropractor

8:34niche. And I was like, this is a $10 billion a year industry. And you feel like your $2 million per year agency has saturated Facebook. I was like, how many I was like, do you know of any other chiropractor agencies that exist? He's like, yeah, there's loads. It's like, you know, there's hundreds of them. I was like, okay. So, explain to me why every sale that is keeping all of them in business is somehow not sales that you should be

8:57making. He was like, got it. I was like, right, you're spending 40 grand a month when in aggregate all the agencies that are selling to chiropractors are probably spending 4 million a month. And so, all of the spend that those businesses are able to make in your market is your opportunity. Is if you can outcompete them, you can provide better service, you can have longer LTV means you can spend more to acquire the customer than they can. And then you can eventually

9:20price them out of the marketplace. Because fundamentally, paid ads is actually an auction for attention. And so, people bid against each other for ad space. And so, if you can outbid your competition, you can have an ethical monopoly by literally bidding more than everyone else while still making money. And that's the crazy thing. And that's what fundamentally what you want to build in terms of the mousetrap of your business is how can I make more money from every customer than anyone else does so that I can spend more than anyone else can to acquire them. And so I had a I had a portfolio company CEO

9:46who's a good marketer, you know, come up to me and he was like, "Hey man, I think we really need to scale our ads." And I was like, "I agree." Um and I was like, "Well, how many how many pieces of creative are you putting out, you know, per week?" And he's like, "Oh, um well, I just record once a month." I was like, "Okay, fine. Then how many ads are you making per session?" He was like, "Uh we do about 15. So we do about 15 new ads per month." And I just kind of looked at him. I was like, "Dude, when I was trying to go from your size to five

10:10times your size, I was making 35 a week." And like nowadays, we make way more than that in terms of content and in terms of the ads that we do like cuz I make ads for school and then I inform the ads across our portfolio. And so the big saying that I have that's like plastered on the wall that actually applies to sales and marketing is volume negates luck. Like if you don't want to rely on luck and rely on one of those 10 ads or five ads that you make to be amazing, you just make more ads. And I I can't tell you the amount of times that it just reset

10:41the bar and that's what I'm hoping to do with this video is like the amount of volume that the people who are ahead of you are doing is is not 2x or 3x more. It's oftentimes 100x more, right? Even that the 35 times uh four, I think 140 pieces. The guy was making 15. It was 9x

10:58the volume of what he was doing, right? And some of you guys are making five ads a month or one ad a month and thinking that that's somehow going to be sufficient to get to your goals. And nowadays, and I'll explain later in this how my whole ad creation process, but just the big headline is that in the very beginning, you just need to do a lot more than you think you do. The second is once you've done more, then at what point do you start shifting to better? And the way that you can figure that out is when the return on effort for better exceeds one incremental unit

11:27of more. Meaning, if I've got one sales guy, if I add a second sales guy, then I think I have a high degree of certainty that I can probably double my sales by doing that. But when you have 10 sales guys, adding one more sales guy is the same level of effort as adding going from one to two, going from 10 to 11, but it's only a 10% increase. And so if I can increase the overall throughput of my entire team by 20% or 25% by tweaking some sharp rate stuff or doing a headline split test or or changing CTAs on my ads, then those are things that would make me more money

11:59per unit of effort. And so in the beginning you usually just need to blow as much volume through there as possible. That's the create flow, monetize flow, then add friction. The The optimization steps really only matter when you have flow going through. And so you do more first, and then once you're big enough, better becomes a better return on effort. But once you then go through the better steps, then you usually have to go back to, "Okay, how do we do 10 times more than we are now? How do we go from 10 sales guys to 100 sales guys?" And that's the thinking that you have to go through in order to

12:27start scaling in terms of orders of magnitude. And when you have so much volume, you're able to iterate so much faster. Like even us recently, we started making uh more content on YouTube. And we already noticed as a team we're like, "Oh, this is awesome. We're learning so much faster again with like we're literally putting out four or five videos a week instead of one video a week." And so we're learning about headlines and thumbnails and there's less pressure per video because we're like, "Cool, learn that. Let's move on to the next one." And so it allows you to just iterate so much faster without getting your ego and your emotions, you

12:57know, tied into it. Here's how I do it is I ask the question, "What would stop me from 10x-ing the business right now?" And if the answer is nothing, then we 10x the business. Now, most times there is something that would break. Like what would break first? And so as soon as we identify what is the first thing that would break if we 2x, 5x, 10x, we then isolate that thing, put all of our focus towards fixing it, and then we do the

13:20increase in volume. And that is how we continue to de-constrain until we go to the next bottleneck, and then de-constrain that, and then grow into the next bottleneck, because we have a fundamental belief that all businesses will continue to grow until their point of constraint, and then they will grow no further. So, you identify the constraint, relieve the

13:35constraint, and allow it to grow again. Growth occurs as an aftereffect of the inputs you put into the system. Now, once you've done as much as you can, more, and you've done it as well as you can, better, when you can't do any more any better, you start and trying something new. And the thing that the reason that I have new last is because the cost of change of doing something new is guaranteed, but the return on something new is not. And so, I like to say that is a big warning for the fact that the vast majority of entrepreneurs want to spend 80% of their time on doing

14:04new stuff when really they should spend 90% of their time doing more and better of what is already working for them. The only time you do new stuff is when nothing is working. So, when you're starting as an entrepreneur, everything's new, and you keep trying and keep trying until something works. Once it works, you have to unlearn the whole experimentation idea, and then you have to go, "Great, I need to do as much as I possibly can, and do it as well as I possibly can." And so, it's a different mindset that you have to get

14:27into, but that's how you start scaling. Now, what point do you start doing something new? Well, if you've already said, "Okay, I can't I can't do more for a very clear reason that there's a big cost." Like, sometimes there's a huge incremental cost past a certain barrier. You're like, "Okay, I think we really are You know, let's say you're a local a local gym, all right? If you're a local gym and you're spending, call it, $10,000 a month on ads, you're reaching every single person in your radius multiple times a week. And so, that's on one platform. And so, you're like, "Okay, in order for me to scale this,

14:59it's not really about doing more or even doing that better. It's like, I've saturated the crap out of the eyeballs here." Well, that's when doing something new will yield a higher return. You'll get a better return on effort. And so, that's where like, "Okay, maybe I'm going to start doing an outbound, or I'll start doing the paid ads, but just on another channel. I'll start running YouTube ads. I'll start running Google search ads. I'll start running um I'll start running display ads. I'll start I'll start doing direct mail pieces. I'll start radio ads. Like there's a number of things you could do in terms of other channels, but

15:27they would be new. And so this is the thought process that I have when I approach that, which is if you could double the sales of your company and it would take a year, would you do it? But you had to wait a year before they doubled. Most people would say yes. If I said you had to invest, call it half of your profits in order to getting your

15:45business to double, would you do it? Yes, that'd probably be a really good return on return on investment. If you would put half of your profits and you double the business, you're getting a 200% return. That's awesome, right? And so the thing is is that people start something new and they spend one month of ad spend and they say, "Ah, it didn't work. I lost money. Why would like I'm going to stop." But the reality is that it's going to take you 3 months, 6 months, sometimes 12 months to get the that return to actually pay off. And

16:10what I mark is progress, not the dollar. So it's like, "Okay, first are we getting clicks? Okay, we're getting clicks. Okay, are we getting opt-ins? Okay, we're getting opt-ins. Are the opt-ins we're getting the right type of people that we're looking for?" Okay, yes. Or if they're not, then we start tweaking the messaging, we start tweaking the funnel until we get the right people. Okay, now we have the

16:27right people who are opting in. Great. Now can we get them on the phone? Can we get them in person? Can we get them to show up to some sort of conversion event, some sales event that we can then try and sell them something, right? And so you keep walking walking the dollar over the bridge until eventually it comes to the other side. But that takes money and that takes time and that takes learning, but it's a return on investment because if you do double your

16:47lead flow in a year. One, it doubles the business. Two, it more than doubles the value of the business because now you have two different ways to get customers. And so it makes the business more stable because if one of them goes down, then you still have the other one. And so you have a more stable business that's also bigger. Market advice number three, how to do better. And so this is double clicking into the better concept because this is especially for the bigger business owners. So if you're at a few million dollars a year to tens of millions dollars a year, like this is really going to start paying massive

17:14dividends. So number one is optimize front to back when it comes to marketing. So, that's the 80/20. So, David Ogilvy said famously, "After you've written your headline, you spent 80 cents of your advertising dollar." So, he knew that 80% of people aren't going to do anything past read the headline. And so, he would put 80% of his effort towards those first few words. And the really experienced marketers who are watching this are like

17:38nodding their heads right now. The first 5 seconds, the headline, the packaging in my history of the 13 years that I've been doing this has only increased. I haven't even gotten to a sweet spot. They just continue to become more and more important in my mind because it's the frame through which everyone contextualizes what they're about to consume. So, one, it increases the likely they consume it. Two, it introduces the frame that they consume the advertisement or the promotion through. And like we now have such great data even across on the content side that like if we have two different thumbnails, you can literally see the

18:10average view duration go up by two or three minutes sometimes simply by changing the thumb that people click before they watch the video. It's wild. And so, how people the frame that people consume the content in has a massive impact on how effective it is. Now, I'll tell you a quick story to show you just how how important this is. So, a friend of mine Dean had this massive advertising campaign. And he had written a new book and he went on Larry King Live. And so, he wanted to use the Larry King interview to advertise the book. And so, he shot the whole interview and he basically wanted

18:47Larry King to introduce him in a cool way to make him, you know, sound cool of course, you know, and like he would laugh if I was if I'm telling the story now. And so, he knew that the ad was killer and so, he ran it. Spent 250 grand and nothing came back. And he was like, "What's going on? Like I know this I know this ad's a killer. Like what's

19:05happening?" So, he went back through his old history of ads and he looked at the top performing ads he'd ever done. And as soon as he started watching me, he realized that he missed the hook, that the hook was wrong. And so, he flew Larry King back out. They He paid him again. They set up a whole new set again

19:23just to re-record the first 30 seconds. And so, they re-recorded the first 30 seconds with the hour-long interview, and then re-ran the infomercial, and did a hundred million in sales. And so, when I heard that story, I was like, this is why that the first 5 seconds, the headline, the hook, is so important, and that's what I spend now a disproportion of my time on. And people are listening to this, and you guys are nodding along, but you're not You're still not getting it cuz it's not real for you. It took me forever to figure this out. When we make ads, and I'll get into my ad creation process later,

19:56um you have like I I I do 10 times the effort on the first 5 seconds. 10 times. Actually, 10 times. So, if I have an hour, I would I would spend 55 minutes on the first 5 seconds, and then 5 minutes on everything that's after that. Like, that's the proportion of how much time I'm spending on just getting that first part right. I'll give you a diff- a content example of this. So, I was invited to this uh content creator thing

20:22um with all the, you know, top guys. Probably 10 guys there. Uh the lowest guy in the room was me, and the next lowest guy was at like 10 million plus subscribers only on YouTube. So, they just had me there cuz for entertainment, who knows. Um and and I remember one of the guys had about 15 million subscribers, and he was pissed that this other content creator had basically copied his video, and and the copied video had done better than his, like, three times more. It got like 30 million views, and his got like 10 million

20:47views. And the main guy there, who had several hundred million uh subscribers across all his channels, was like, let's pop it in. Let's Let's roast it. And so, they press play on the video, and 5 seconds in, he stops the video. He's like, "Dude, you didn't confirm the thumb." He's like, "The headline and the first 5 seconds weren't confirmed." He's like, "I don't need to see any and he just walked out of the room. And so this guy had spent weeks, you know, making this thing, obsessing about every detail of it. He had a 20-page-plus brief on how he was making this video and he missed

21:18the first 5 seconds and that was the guy who had the multiple hundred million subscribers was like that's it and he just walked out and got lunch. And so when I saw that I was like, wow, like it just reinforced how important this was. And recently just at a micro level, one of our portfolio companies is at eight-figure-plus business. Um we simply changed the headline on the

21:39landing page, like we did nothing else. We kept same ads, just changed the headline. We increased booking rate by 62%. Now here's what's crazy is the opt-in rate remained the same, but simply because of the frame of the promise in the headline, 62% more people chose to book calls for that business. And so it just shows you that how you frame what people are then going to consume has a massive impact on how much value and how likely they are to take the next step. So here's how you do it in terms of optimizing 80/20 front to back. So number one is assume that they have no idea who you are, what you do,

22:13how it works, they're in a rush and they have a third-grade education. All right, so clear beats clever, deletion beats explanation. And so what you want to do is you want to try and make it as short as humanly possible and then once you have it as short as possible, put it into a third-grade reading calculator, look at the grade level and keep editing it down until it's third grade. Cuz the thing is is you're not going to attract dumber people. You're going to make accessible to everyone. A smart person needs to use less brain power to ex- to understand simple language and it makes it understandable to everyone else. And

22:44as a reminder, 30% of people can barely read. And so this is like relying on them to have this skill, it's like you want to meet them where they're at. And there are some very rich people who can barely read. And so it has nothing to do with intelligence, it has everything to do with how they were educated, which has which may have no no connection with

23:01their purchasing power. Okay, and tactically what I'll do is I probably I'd make about 50 hooks every time I start recording ads. So, I have 50 hooks that I've written down that I think are awesome. And then I have three to five meat pieces of an advertisement and then I do one to three CTAs, meaning call to actions at the end. And so, that means I have way more on the front end in terms of effort compared to the one the three to five and the one to three that I do on the back. And that's because I know that that's where all of the effort needs to go cuz that's where

23:27all the returns are. And here's the here's the difference and this is why I say from you optimize advertising specifically from front to back because it's very rare that you're going to be able to double or triple or quadruple the amount of throughput you get uh in a funnel by optimizing the back end. If you have a you know, a 30 you know, call it a call it a 50% show rate. Okay, if you get it to 75% that's massive, but it's a 50% jump and that'd be a massive

23:50increase in show rate if you did that. But, I can absolutely get CTRs from 1% to 4% by just optimizing the hell out of the front end. And that's a 4x increase. That's four times the throughput that goes through the entire funnel. And so, I put my effort there because you can achieve 100% 200% 300% increases on the front end whereas it's much more difficult on the back end. Now, for sure you want to optimize those things, but if I'm going to allocate my effort, I

24:13want to get the biggest bang for buck. So, when you're making your hooks, I call it a call out. So, I'm reading page 136 from my book. A call out is whatever you do to get the attention of your audience. Call outs go from hyper specific to get one person's attention to not at all specific to get everyone's attention. So, let me explain. If someone drops a a tray of dishes in a party, everyone looks. If a child yells mom, then the moms look. If

24:36someone says your name, only you look. But again, they all get attention. And so, I try to make my call outs as specific as possible to get the right people but broad enough to get as many of them as I can. So, pay close attention to advertisers use call outs especially the ones targeting your audience. And so, what I'll do is I'll look at all the ads from other competitors who are targeting that same audience as me. And the ads that are running for long time, I know that that call out is working well. And so, I will write down all the call outs that I see,

25:01and then I will write out the words that I know my customers go by, and I'll either start with a problem that I think that they're struggling from or a question that I think that I know that they'll say yes to, or I'll simply state moms in Nevada, homeowners in Clark County, right? Very clearly calling out this is for you. And that's exactly what you want the person to say when they read the headline or hear the call out,

25:22this is for me. And the more specific you get, often times you'll be surprised. You think that going as broad as you can is going to increase the number of opt-ins, but when you get really specific about the type of customer you're really trying to attract, you will often find that they're like, "Oh, I wouldn't have responded to the broad thing, but this one's just for me." And you get more people in terms of qualified leads in the door by being more specific. Piece of advice number four, LTV to CAC is the only thing that matters. And if I had only one metric that I could find out

25:52about a business, if I only had one that I could pick, it would be the LTV to CAC ratio. And let me tell you a quick story that will kind of drive this home. So, a friend of mine owns a bow manufacturing business, and they do, you know, 20 30 million bucks a year, so relatively large business, established. And he was like, "Hey, we're trying to get into paid ads." Now, they had all these distribution relationship, but they want to open up this new channel. And he says, "Hey, you're the, you know, you're the marketing guy, right? So, can you,

26:15you know, what what would you do here?" And so, as I was explaining the the process that I that I the strategy that I wanted to outline for him, he was like, "Well, what's the benchmark I should be looking at in terms of leads?" And I was like, "Dude, the benchmark is irrelevant. It everything just comes back from what's gross profit." So, he's like, "Okay, so what's the average gross

26:31profit on a bow?" I'm making this up. Say it's $500. Okay, so if we get leads for, call it, 20 bucks, and we know that we can get one in five leads to buy a bow, then it means it cost us, our CAC is $100, and our gross profit from selling each bow is $500. So, it cost us $100 to make $500 of gross profit, five to one. Awesome. And so, fundamentally, is $20 a good lead cost? Well, yeah, he's getting five to one. If it was at

26:56$10, uh then he'd be getting 10 to one. And that's assuming the same ratios. And so, it just depends on what percentage of customers you convert and at what price point you're converting them at. CAC to LTV or CAC to LTGP. So, I use LTGP to be more specific. Lifetime value is just the amount of gross profit you make from a customer over the lifetime of them being a customer of your business. CAC is the cost to acquire a customer, which is the all-in cost, including sales, marketing, software, everything, to get somebody to give you money. And so, the CAC to LTV ratio is simply how much money it costs you to

27:27make more money. It's the foundational economic unit of any business. And so, making sure that you know how much money it costs you to make money, that fundamentally feels like a very important metric in order to scale the business. And over time, as long as you don't have uh some big capital expenses in terms of scaling your business, that fundamental return that you get will reflect the compounding growth of the business provided you don't have other constraints to growth. So, for example, if I have meals that I sell for $10 and it cost me $9 to package and ship them and deliver them, then I have $1 of

28:00gross profit per meal. And so, if someone buys 10 meals for me, I'm not making $100, I'm making $10 in gross profit. And if the average person buys, call it, five weeks of meals, then I would make $50 in lifetime gross profit. And so, the only way that I would want to be able to acquire customers is that the cost to acquire a customer in this example, I don't want to have probably at $15 or less. Cuz you can't do it at even because then there's no money left over to do everything else in the business. And so, the rule of thumb is that you want to have at least three to

28:27one on LTV to CAC. But again, LTV is not lifetime revenue, it's lifetime gross profit, right? And that's what people I think a lot of times mess up is they don't even know what their gross profit is, and then they spend blindly. So, I'll tell you a fun one. So, if you've seen Starbucks advertise, now a lot of them they just use their storefronts as their advertising at this point, but they make about $14,000 in LTV per customer. And so they can spend absurd amounts of money to get customers in the door. Like even if it cost them $500, they're still making 28:1 on the money they put in. And that

28:59is why that company's been able to scale to the moon in terms of the number of locations. And so I will say that the all the money that I've made in my life that has been the crazy money has come from crazy LTV to CAC ratios. And so the smallest ratios that I've made crazy money on is 30:1 all the way up to 100:1 to 200:1 returns in some of the businesses I have. And so those those windows don't stay forever. And when you do have one of those, you just want to dump as much money into that machine as you possibly can because a lot of wealth

29:28is made in very short punctuated periods and then sustained by long periods of maintenance where you're getting 5:1, 8:1, 10:1. Those are fine numbers. But most of the time when you're at 10:1, as soon as you start scaling it, it might drop to 5:1. And so I actually end up seeing the bigger the ratio is at the beginning, the more indication it is that I can scale profitably. Because if I'm let's say spending, you know, $1,000 a day and I can get 100:1, then I know that I'm probably going to be able to get to $100,000 a day and get 5:1, right? And so that's the idea is like

29:59how can I how can I scale this up? And I care about absolute return, not relative return, but the CAC to LTV ratio gives me an indication of how much room I have to blow this thing out of the water. The easiest way to calculate what your lifetime gross profit is is look at all the customers that you sold over the last year, look at gross profit. And if you don't know what gross profit is, it's just the cost of goods sold basically the price you charge minus the cost of goods sold, which is whether it's if it's services, then it's the labor that you use to provide the

30:26service. If it's a widget, then it's the cost of the widget and the shipping associated with it. So the cost of goods sold minus the revenue and that left over is the gross profit. And so you say, "Okay, I had 100 customers this year. I made this total amount of gross profit this year." You divide that amount of gross profit by the total of number of customers. That'll give you a broad brush stroke of what you make per customer. Now, that'll always underestimate it, especially if you have a recurring revenue business, because they're going to hopefully have some people who buy again and again over time. But, I would always rather be on

30:54the safer side and underestimate my lifetime gross profit or lifetime value, rather than overestimate and potentially lose money. If I want to then take that number and say, "Okay, well, what am I willing to spend per customer?" then at most you want to have a third of that number. But, for me specifically, I want to make sure that whatever I collect in the first 30 days, I want to make sure

31:12that I collect that back from customers. So, if I'm Let's say I sell something for 10 bucks a month, people stay for 10 months, and there's a 100% gross margins to make this simple. So, I make 100 bucks in gross profit. I want to see if I can find a way to make $10 back or get my CAC back in that first 30 days. And so, sometimes it means having a one-time upcharge up front so they can offset the cost of acquisition, so then the remainder of the customer relationship can be profitable. And if these concepts about scaling, like LTV to CAC, are interesting to you, we just opened up a

31:43new workshops division at acquisition.com for companies that we're not invested in. If you'd like us and my team to help you personalize kind of applying this stuff to your business, you can go to acquisition.com, click the scale button, and you can see if your business qualifies. Otherwise, back to the video. Piece of advice number five, my ad creation process. So, I've been running ads for 13 years. And I'm saying when I say running ads, I mean like I've been making ads or directly influencing ads that have been run across my portfolio or companies that I directly

32:09owned or founded for 13 straight years. And so, I have this process pretty nailed. And I haven't really ever gotten too far away from it, partially cuz I like it a lot, um and I've gotten just pretty good at it. And so, this is how I do it. So, number one is that at all times I'm collecting data. What I mean by that is like, if I see ads on Instagram, I see ads on YouTube, like I have no pre-mic accounts on any platform, cuz I want to hear the ads. I want to hear the hooks. I want to hear

32:36what they're doing to draw attention. And I like using that stuff because I'm also a business owner. So, the people who advertise to me are the people that are going to try and hook my attention. And so, I can still use that stuff to get to my avatar. And so, if you are your avatar, the ads count double for you. And so, I I I I screenshot, I record the stuff that I find interesting. And I add it into one folder. Then, when I get to my ad creation process, which is I do once a week, I then sit down first thing in the morning and I do these the same day I

33:00record. So, that's just a piece of advice that that has worked well for me, like cramming for the test. I cram for my ad sessions cuz then everything's top of mind as I go into the day. And so, I pull up all my swipe files of all the things that I want, like my inspiration from. The second thing that I pull up is

33:14all my historical best-performing ads. So, I look back 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, sometimes at all my best ads. And I drink those back in and and I watch the first 10 seconds, watch the first 30 seconds to see, okay, how was it capturing? What was the angle? What was the hook here? And then, I start the actual hook creation process. Now, 40 of my 50 hooks that I'm going to write out are going to be stuff that is tried and true. I'm not going to try and reinvent the wheel. We've already spent zillions and zillions of dollars. I know that

33:39these hooks, these entrances work well. Now, 20%, the last 10 is where I get to use all my inspiration and other ideas to try and experiment on. But, most people flip this. They try and do a little bit of the stuff that worked and then they have lots of new ideas. I'm telling you, I've done this a long time. It's way more efficient to just do more of what worked and then leave a little bit experimentation so that if some of those things stop working over time, you have this fresh batch that you've been trying out that then can become the control that you try and beat. So,

34:05citing back to the 80/20 concept of you put 80% of your effort into the hooks and 80% of your effort goes into stuff that's tried and true and 20% for the things that are new. All right. So, I make about 50 hooks. So, 80% of that is 40 hooks and 20% of that is 10 hooks. So, 40 out of my 50 hooks, I do for things that I already know have worked

34:24in the past. 10 hooks I save for my new creative ideas. And so, that's for the inspiration stuff that I see or or that I come to that cram session that I want to get out. From there, I then have my three to five angles that I'm going to write that's going to be educational or some sort of value that I'm going to deliver or some sort of belief that I want to break or some sort of list or steps or stories that I want to tell as the core meat of the ad, some sort of proof I want to demonstrate, and then finally just a quick CTA in terms of

34:48call to action. But the majority of my effort is all on the 50 or so hooks that I'm going to write, 40 of which being recycled versions of things I already know work, and 10 being net new. And this sounds boring, and it is boring, but it's also what works. And believe me, I have tried to change this process

35:04a lot of times. Like, this works. Let's say that you have your a mega winner. And these happen. And this is where you get This is the This is power law. Like that top 5% makes 95% of your income. Like you we run all these ads to figure out which is the one ad that can sing and just crank and print money. And so what I do is I I use something that I call the kaleidoscope process. I've never heard anyone else sell it, so I'm owning that title. All right. And so the kaleidoscope process This is how you do it. Is that let's say you've got a

35:31winning ad. So I had an ad at Gym Launch that actually the now president Kale made when he was a a customer of him in front of his gym, the gym being full, and his wife's next to him, and he's like, "You know, 6 months ago, I was working a full-time job in order to pay rent at this gym, and my wife was pregnant, and we had and I had a 2-month-old, and I had no idea how I was going to make ends meet. And then here we are 6 months later, the gym is full, it's completely outsourced, and I've already got an offer for $250,000 on the

35:58gym. If you've ever been worried like take the jump, just follow the process, it works." Right? It's a very simple ad. But it murdered. It absolutely crushed. And so, rather than say, "Wow, okay. Well, that was nice. Let's try and do that Let's try and get somebody else to say that." We took that and we squeezed the living life out of it. And so here's 10 things that I did to get more out of that ad. So one is I changed the color of the backgrounds if I can do that, right? Or backdrops. Is there a way that we can record that ad with a different

36:25background or a different background color like if you had a green screen. Second, is are there different props that we can introduce that ad? All right, so can we show stuff? Can we Can we show visuals or we can show physical props? Three, can we just reenact it? Just say, "Hey, Cal, can you just do it again? Just literally do the same ad, different t-shirt if you want, same exact thing, just do it again." And if you're the one making the ads, you just do your best-performing ad again. You can four, reorder it. So, we took the ad that was already the original winner, and we just re- rechanged the order up

36:51of the ad, and it still converted. The next things we added visual filters. So, think black and white, think sepia, think high contrast, low contrast. These are all different things that made the ad look different than it was, but it still delivered the same message. The next one was visual effects, right? VFX, like doodads and and wizbangs and things like that that you can add to, again,

37:08make it look different. The next is changing fonts and captions. So, it's like if we had a font style that was one way, we just changed the way the font style looks. Another is that you can change the pacing or the speed of the video itself. You can actually do it at 1.2 or 1.5 and have it

37:21go through or slow it down at portions. You can add music to it. Um there's another one, right? You can also use the same hook, which is like we knew the hook from that first ad obviously crushed, and then just say, "Hey, re-record it again. We'll use the same hook and use a different back." Right? And so, all of those are different ways that will take a winner and then 10x or 100x how much that winner gets us. And I'm telling you, if you if you take one thing from this video from advertising, squeeze the living hell out of the winners. So, marketing advice number six

37:47is that there is only four ways that you can let other people know about your stuff. And so, think about this like a four-box. You've got one-to-one conversations and one-to-many, which is broadcast, right? There's the two styles of communicating. You either communicate to a group of people or one person individually. And you're either talking to people who know who you are or you're talking to strangers. And so, if you cross that, you've got four ways. You've got one-to-one to people who know you, one-to-one to strangers, one-to-many to people who know you, one-to-many to strangers. And if you look at that in terms of what that is in advertising, it

38:14means this is warm outreach, cold outreach, making content, which is one-to-many to people you know, and then running ads, which is one-to-many to strangers. And so, those are the only four things that you can do to advertise, to let people know about your stuff. And basically, if you're not spending your day doing one of those core four things, you are not advertising. You are not marketing your business. And so, sometimes it gets you have to get it to that simple when you look at how many hours per day am I spending letting people know about my stuff, most people spend zero zero zero per day letting people know about their

38:43stuff, and then for some reason they're curious as to why their business isn't growing. Well, no one knows you exist. I was at a conference I was at Gym Con recently, and I asked the audience, "Who here wants to grow their gym faster?" Everybody raised their hand. And I said, "Okay." And these are all small businesses. So, these are most of the guys here are doing I would say $500,000 a year to $3 million a year. So, these aren't massive businesses. They're normal, you know, one location, three location, five location owner operators of service-based, you know, training

39:09businesses. And I said, "Okay. Who here is spending the first 4 hours of their day promoting their business, either doing cold outreach, making content, or running ads? Who is spending the first 4 hours every day on that? Literally, no one in the audience had their hand raised. And I was like, "This is why you're small." Like, this is it. Like, it was mind-blowing to me that that was what it was. And so, if you're if you're making less than call it a million, maybe $3 million a year, like all of your effort, the the first 4 hours of your day, which

39:40if you have to wake up early, awesome. If you have to stay up late to do it, awesome. I don't care, but you need 4 hours that you're dedicating because you got to you got to do the job of promoting, and then you got to run your business. But, if you're just running your business, you're never going to get

39:52ahead. So, if you want it to grow, you got to force it to grow. You have to force people to find out about your stuff, and you do that through advertising. I recommend this so violently because small businesses need to do more. And in the beginning, they just don't get enough leads. So, fundamentally, like most businesses, if you just had

40:08more leads, you would make more money. Now, realistically, and I'll get to some of the some of the specifics on this, is that in order to get more leads, you need to be able to do so profitably, which then comes back down to the business and building the business back to front. We advertise front to back, we build the business back to front, and I'll get to lots of details on that in a

40:26second. But big picture, you just need to get, especially when you're starting out, you're at 500 to a million, you know, less than 3 million. And those are big numbers. I don't say I don't mean that to demean it, but I want you to build massive enterprises that make huge impact. You have to get more flow through the system so that you can learn how to improve the product so that you can build a better back end. And then you basically you promote and you stay at that level of promotion until you tweak this and nail it. Then you go back and scale it. And so one of our sayings

40:55internally is nail it, then scale it. So nail the back end, you do enough promotion to get flow in, right? Then you monetize, then you create fiction. That's when you tweak the hell out of it, and then you can go back and say, "Hey, turns out we can spend five times more to get customers." Then you scale. So I'll give you my quick back of napkin scaling framework for this. So when you're at zero to six figures, you sell one product to one avatar on one channel. That's it. No shiny object, no multiple channels, no trying to scale yourself out of it. You're just selling one product to one avatar on one

41:27channel. When you go from six to seven figures, you scale you sell one product to one avatar on one channel consistently. Because in the beginning you're super volatile, right? You're not you're making a sale this week, not next week, then this week again or the next month, whatever. It's super volatile. When you get to seven figures, it's more consistent. You just you you get it to be reliable. So when you go from seven figures to eight figures, you go one avatar, one channel, two products. That means you have an upsell, you sell

41:52something else. And then you do that consistently, right? That's what gets you to eight figures. That's what gets you to 10 million bucks a year. And if you want to go to, you know, multiple eight figures, then you start going two channels, one avatar, two products consistently. And so over time, this is how I've seen I've just seen this pattern. Now, can you

42:13find somebody who disobeys this pattern? Sure. AG1 has one product, one avatar, a zillion channels, right? So, yes, there are ways to break this rule. But, when I look at by and large, the vast majority businesses, they follow this structure, and they mess up along the way until they follow the next step. And you'll notice that scaling up to eight figures, and even sometimes a little beyond that,

42:33you're still only focused on one avatar. And I'm going to talk about this in a lot of depth in one of the later advice points because it's super important and this may be one of the bigger unlocks you could have in the business. Marketing advice number seven, state the facts and tell the truth. This is probably one of the most repeated phrases besides volume negates luck that I have internally to my business. And so, I remember when I was at that same little meetup with uh the super creators, and I was I was talking to the the the guy who had the the most, you know, subscribers there, and I was like,

42:58"Yeah, you know, like we don't really like this whole clickbait title thing." And he looked at me with disgust, and he was like, "You absolutely make clickbait titles." He said, "You just back it up with truth." He said, "So, it's crazy clickbaity." He said, "But, it also happens to be true." And I remember when he said that to me, I was like, "Shit,

43:16that's that's real." And it's funny because that was a concept that I have in terms of uh paid ads, but I hadn't thought about it in terms of content. And so, it's so interesting how some of these principles just apply across across domains, but like sometimes you have to relearn the same lessons, which I hate doing, but I did it anyways. And so, the problem is that most businesses don't track results. And it's because if you don't track, you don't care. Now, they don't track partially because if they it's kind of like ignorance. Like, they know they don't deliver good results, and so if they track it, then

43:44they'll have facts and truth that they will be proven that they're delivering bad results. But, the first step is tracking it. Because once you start tracking it, you can improve it. And measurement as intervention is actually a scientifically proven method to lose weight, to improve sales, to improve anything you want. You can literally simply tracking it, not trying to do anything else, but simply tracking your weight, simply tracking your close rate, simply tracking your ad performance will improve it because you're just putting attention on it. And so, if you don't track, you don't care. Now, once you do start tracking it, you can start doing things to actually improve it beyond

44:17just measurement as intervention. And so, when you do that, lo and behold, your stats get better. And then, you can state the facts and tell the truth and have that truth be wildly compelling. And so, real talk, part of the reason that GymLaunch to this day has still not been beaten or dethroned as the the the largest company in that space is because we still have better stats and better results than anyone else does. The average gym who goes through 12 months of GymLaunch makes over 100 plus thousand a year in added profit by using the systems we have. That's just what it is. And so,

44:51like if someone if it makes sense for somebody to triple their money, then they make the they make the purchase, right? It's It's I like to take a lot of emotion out of the sale. Like if this makes sense for you, if this return makes sense for you, then do it. If it doesn't make sense, then don't do it. Now, the risk they take on is what about the bottom 20%? And so, the nice thing is that we track that. So, the bottom 20% average $40,000 in additional

45:10revenue. So, they basically broke even. And so, it's like that's the bottom. And so, like if if if that's you, then it's like, yeah, you worked and you basically broke even. That kind of sucks. Now, I'm not talking about the top 20% cuz this guy's at 500,000 plus per year. But, the thing is is that if you track the stats, then you can promote the stats and you can do so truthfully. They go from unsubstantiated claims to substantiated claims. Like one of the things that I'm most proud of in school, uh school.com, which is the platform for people who are trying to start their business, this is

45:35this video is mostly for people who already own a business, but if you're trying to start a business, um 30.44% of people who finish their first month make their first dollar online. Like I'm super proud of that. And we just rolled out this massive new thing um to basically make it even easier, even faster to do it. And right now we have 35% more people actually succeeding there. So, I think we're going to be at a little bit over 40% now. Um so, I'm super stoked about that. But like, unless you measure, like if you don't track, you don't care. Here's the

45:59tactical steps. Collect data first. So, you implement a data step where you collect data from people day one, day 30, day 60, day 90, at the end of the program, or whatever your implementation is. You track data throughout. Number two is you keep improving things until the data becomes compelling. And number three is

46:16how do you actually present that data? So, there's four variables that matters when you're presenting the data. Number one is the percentage of people, whether that's the median, the average, or the percentage overall of people, that's number one, who two achieve X outcome, three in Y time or after X attempts, and four under Z conditions. And so, it's like we get X percent of gyms, so as whatever is the average average gym, so right, average gym owner makes an extra $100,000 per year in profit, so that's the outcome, after their first 12 months in GymLord, right? And so, those are the conditions, right? And so, it covers all four of

46:52those. So, so when you're making these, you want to you want to hit all four of those things when you're explaining the data publicly. And I will say that the fewer conditions you have, the more compelling it is. Because for example, if I said, uh the average gym who spends $10,000 a month and has 10 employees and uh has two two methods of acquisition and a large group training and a small group training achieves the like I'm by the time I even get to that, you're like, whatever, right? And so, you want to you want to strip away and really like I would rather have a fewer condition

47:27statement that has lower results me personally than a higher result one with more conditions. Marketing advice number eight, say what only you can say, show what only you can show. And this is one of the other isms that I have internal to my business. And so, if you're the only triple black belt in Ohio for Muay Thai, then say that you're the only triple black belt in Ohio for Muay Thai, right? This is talking about the things that you have done rather than telling people what to do. It's how I versus how to. And so, my my concept for making amazing ads and making amazing content is two steps. Do

48:02epic stuff, talk about what you did. And so, you can out out come people or you can out work them. So, it starts with the out working and then the out working creates the out out coming and the out out coming is a much shorter headline, but the out working them still works, right? I can start by saying, "Hey, I I put I wrote these two books." Writing

48:22two books would be an out working thing. Like, anyone could do it. There's no outcome, but hey, I wrote these two books. But then if the books are good, then I get the outcome, which is that we sold over a million copies. They're still number one and number two in marketing to this day multiple years later. And so, the idea is that first you do the work and then you get the outcome, but most people want to say epic stuff having done none of it. And so, you can get past the judgment of other people because you're not saying, "Hey, you have to do anything." I'm

48:45saying, "This is what I did." And so, the idea is that everybody wants a return on their time. All right? And I remember hearing this first concept from Erac, who's a YouTuber. And he said, "Dude, I made this thing where I went on 100 dates in basically did an entire season of The Bachelor, but I did it in 16 minutes." He's like, "What a steal." And he said that to me and I was like, "Man, such an interesting concept." Like, he just took something that was really long and made it really short and he crammed it in there. So, value per second was super high. And I'll just give you this one is

49:14that it's not about seconds of value, it's value per second. That's what matters. Like, everybody has access to infinite information. So, you just saying I'm going to give you more stuff is not helpful. What you want to do is curate it and pack it and distill it and crystallize all the value in as tight a package as humanly possible so that their value per second skyrockets. And you can do that by saying, "Hey, I spent 10 hours editing, you know, you know, I spent I spent 20 hours making a summary of this book and you can read the whole thing in 10 minutes." That's why

49:44summaries still always work, right? Because people want to get a a deal on their time. If they get the same result for a fraction of the time, it's always a good deal. By the way, if you ever want to sell to rich people, just promise the same result in half the time for twice the price. And even if you think about this video overall, it's like, well, I spent 13 years doing all this stuff and I'm trying to compress those lessons into whatever amount of time this video is, certainly less than 13 years. And so, this is a great deal for the right person, for the right

50:08business owner who's actually trying to scale. So, how do you actually do this? So, if I had a marketing agency showing what only I can show, I want to demonstrate. And so, rather than say, "Hey, I'm going to get you leads." what I want to do is get them a sales call and I'm going to play what a live lead that I got for one of my companies, one of my clients sounds like. And I'd be like, "Hey, listen to this call. It's a minute long. Do you think you could how much could you take 50 of these a month?" Wow, so much more compelling than saying, "I'll just get you 50

50:33leads." They're actually getting a a fractionalized version. They're getting a taste of what it looks like to be in the future, right? They're experiencing the result vicariously through the other person. And fundamentally, that's what a good testimony does is they they put themselves in the shoes of the person who got the result and then they account they they put a discount on that and say, "Okay, how how likely is that for

50:51me?" And that's what I'm willing to pay. Now, if it were guaranteed, then all money-making opportunities would be worth it because, hey, if you spend a thousand dollars to make a hundred thousand dollars a year by buying this course, then everyone would buy it if they knew for sure it would happen. That'd be an amazing deal. The problem is that people apply a discount to it

51:06because of how unlikely it is for them. And so, we want to increase that likelihood by showing them rather than telling them, right? And so, agency example, that was that one. The software example that I have is this is why demos are so effective, right? That you want to see this Hey, you have a a video clipping software. Great. Do you have a video on you? Cool. Send it to me. We're on the phone. Great. I'm going to pull this video up. This is what we do to put the captions on and and shorten and find those moments. Click, click, click, click, click. Okay, so normally, how

51:31long does that take you? Well, it takes me this long. Well, watch me do it. Click, click, click. Wow, would that make your life easier? Yes. Cool. Boom. They go in, right? You're demonstrating in advance. And I'll give you a final one. When I was at my gym in Huntington Beach, it was my first location I ever had. I remember this I had a door-to-door sales guy who came up, all right? And this guy was a clear

51:47sale a pro. He was really good. Um and he sold me cleaning products. He really did. Like it's the it's probably the only door-to-door thing I've ever bought. And it was just cuz it was such a good it was such a good sale. And he had it down it's so tight. I think he was in and out in like 13 minutes. Like it was stupid. And so he just said, "Hey, I've got this stuff. It'll take care of any stain that you've got on this floor." And I had turf. And so I had gum that I got in the turf it was really black and like gone in there. And

52:11so he just took that thing and he poured it on the gum and he just got on his hands and knees he scrubbed it and it actually came out. And the gum was actually impossible to get out. And I was like, "Wow." Like he I didn't have to think, "Will this work for me?" He just did it in front of me on a stain I actually had. He was like, "Cool. Looks like you got 20 other stains. If this is worth it, it's a 100 bucks for this stuff." So I paid 100 bucks for some cleaning supplies, but it was totally worth it, right? And I ended up using

52:32that stuff for actually years cuz I had the he sold me huge gallons of it, right? Um and so again, it's whenever you can and don't say, "Oh, this doesn't work for my business." Try and imagine, "How can I make this work for my business?" Show them what what they will experience and do it in a way that no one else can do it. And so for example me, I the reason I say like do epic stuff and then talk about it is that you continue to live life every

52:56day. And so things continue to happen. And so you can use the things that happen that you're doing as the content that you're making. And the content will always be shorter than the amount of time it took for the thing to happen. And so we have a portfolio of companies. And so I share case studies on this channel of like, "Hey, here's how we added 40 sales guys. Here's how we, you know, increased, you know, we cut cut refunds by 2/3. Here's how we XYZ." And it's cuz we're doing stuff and then we just talk about what we did. And so the key point step one is do stuff and then

53:22step two talk about it. Everyone else is stuck in the step where they don't want to they want to figure out what to talk about, but it's because they haven't done anything. If you do stuff, you have more than enough to talk about. Marketing truth number nine, how and when to expand your market. There's five ways. Now big picture, the vast majority of people need to do way more with their current market. So just to give you context on this, I had a a guy who came out to a workshop and he said, "Hey, I

53:43I'm a coach who coach coaches, right?" And I was like, "All right, fine." And he said, "I'm spending, you know, I'm making 2 million bucks a year. It's a really saturated space, so I think should I go broader?" It's a general business. And I was like, "Dude, how many coaches coaching coaches exist?" He was like, "Zillions." And I was like, "Dude, I think you just need

53:57to get better." Because if you were the best coach of coaching coaches, then you would be able to take all of the market share that all of those guys have and it would come to you, right? Winner takes all if you're the best. And so, just to give you an example, and this is the one I gave him. I said, "Gym Launch. Everyone knows it's a gym company, but you don't know how niche it really is. So, one, we didn't work with personal trainers. Number two, we didn't work we do now, but we didn't for the first four or five years work with big box facilities. So, large, you

54:21know, facilities where you pay, you know, $10 to 70 bucks a month to have access to the the pool, the racquetball thing, the cardio area, the weights, basketball, whatever. We we didn't work with them at all. I call this facility leasing. We didn't use those. We didn't work with yoga. We didn't work with spin. We didn't work

54:37with Pilates. We literally only worked with micro gyms that did before and afters of weight loss and transformations. They had to do fitness and weights or some combination of those. That was it. That's a niche of a niche of a niche. And that business still cranks out 30 plus million dollars a year. All right? And so, the idea here is that you want like the market, if you are the best, is still massive. You just need to solve the thing that matters most, which is being the best. Now, if you have solved being the best, there's five ways that you can expand. And so, I'll tell

55:12you what we did cuz Gym Launch has expanded. I told you now we do do big box, but there's five ways you can expand. One, I think about it like a pyramid. So, let's say you're in the middle. You can go up market, meaning you go to higher value customers. So, for us that would be health clubs, the big boxes like I was talking about,

55:27multi-location owners or franchisors. Those would be going up market, more valuable but fewer of them, like the pyramid. On the other hand, you can go down market. I could go after personal trainers. I didn't go after them. We don't go after them. But, if I wanted to, that would be a move that I could make. I would have to sell a lot more volume at a lower price and build the infrastructure to support that kind of volume. I could go adjacent, which would be, "Okay, I've got gyms. I'll do chiropractors. I'll do Or I've got gyms and I can do weight loss uh clinics, right? Or medspas or something like

55:52that." So, something that's adjacent that serves a similar avatar, but a slightly different business model. That would be adjacent. And the fifth way you can do it is that you actually go narrower. So, that was the fourth way. So, the fourth way is you can go narrower, which is say, "Okay, instead of all gyms or just microgyms that service uh before and afters, I say I only do, you know, uh ones that do weights. Or I only do ones that only do cardio, right? Or I only do

56:15boot camps. Or I only do semi-private." Like, I niche down even more. The alternative is that you go broader and I say anyone that's in health and wellness. And so, those are the five ways that you can spend. You can go up market, you can go down market, you can go adjacent market, you can go narrow, you can go broad. Now, despite me saying these five ways of expanding and everyone gets their juices, you know, their jollys off thinking about how they're going to expand, most time I'm going to start with that original story, which is that you can make 10, 20, 50 million dollars a year just serving one very specific

56:40avatar. And the vast majority of businesses, this is including portfolio companies that we purchased, I would say I would say more than half the portfolio companies we've purchased, we did this exercise and we made the avatar narrower. We got more specific, not broader. I learned this process from Vista Private Equity. So, if you don't know who they are, they're a hundred billion dollar plus private equity, one of the most successful private equity of all time. They focus on software companies. And I talked to their head of pricing and packaging and he gave me this one line and it changed my life. He said, "You want to know how we get the

57:07crazy returns that we do?" And I was like, "Yeah, obviously I want to know what you guys do." Now, obviously they do lots of things, but the one thing that he pulled out, he said, "We just know the company that we're buying's customers better than they do. And so, we get we go into the data rooms. Whenever you're doing an acquisition,

57:19there's something called a data room. You put all the data for your business in there so people can analyze it and make a decision about whether they want to invest." And so, we go into the data room and we analyze all their customers and we say, "Okay, we order them by who pays the most and who's worth the most." We say, "This is

57:33the 20% that does 80% of the revenue." And what they do is they look at what channels those people come in on, what offers, what marketing those customers do. And they basically stop doing the rest of the 80% and then they expand that 20% to be 100% of the business. And so by doing that, they can have the same

57:48size business but 5x the revenue. And arguably even more on the profit. And so just Pareto law, the the Pareto principle, 80/20 and they just apply it to the customers. And so right now, this is how you do it for you, is you look at all the customers you have up to this point, you look at the top 20% and you say, "Okay, what do these people all have in common?" And so I like to think about this in terms of psychographics, what do they think, geographics, where do they live, demographics, what do they look like, and then I would say like actions, like what have they done or

58:14what did they do to get this result. And so when I look at each of those frames, I try and eliminate as many variables as I can so I get to two or three variables that that clump all the best customers together. And then I make that in my marketing and I tell my sales team, "We

58:26only sell these people going forward." Because I know that these people are worth five times more or 10 times more. And then guess what is able to happen? We run ads for those people and then our LTV skyrockets so we can spend more to acquire customers and this is what allows you to scale by going narrower. And so the problem is that most business owners can't say no to fast money and so

58:44they never get the big money. And so I had two companies that came out for a workshop uh that we had and um one they were both agencies. It was a very simple example. So one was a generalist agency. They just did anybody who knocked on the door they would they would take their money. The other one just did professional services. So that's legal, financial, insurance, like

59:03those types of services. And the the generalist guys I said, "Okay, you have this big list of customers. I'm sure that there's a sub segment of those customers that you do exceptionally well with." They're like, "Oh my god, we crush it for IT people." And I was like, "Okay, cool." So what percentage of your customers are those? They're like, "8%." I was like, "But are

59:18they more profitable by percentage?" He's like, "Oh, by a mile. They're by far the most profitable." I was like, "Okay. So if your entire business" and they were really struggling in terms of infrastructure, they were like super stressed out, you could see it. I was like, "If your whole business was just those, do you think you would like that business?" And he was like, "Oh my god, that would be a breeze." And I was like,

59:33"Well, then we can build that business." And so, that means that from here on out you only sell those people. And over time, the slight the percentage of the pie that's those customers is going to continue to increase until eventually you can cut the customers that are not your main thing. And then, in a year or 2 years you've completely transformed your business into something that's been productized, you get really efficient, you get even better at it cuz you only serve those customers, you get better at acquiring them, get better servicing them, you get higher margins, and you actually like your life. And so, the same thing happened with the second

59:56agency where I said, "What are the customers you have?" And they're like, "Actually, we're really good at specifically family law attorneys, so like divorce attorneys." And they had all these other things. I was like, "But divorce attorneys you're really good with." And they're like, "Yeah." I was like, "Then just sell divorce attorneys." And because the thing is, if you just sell divorce attorneys, it's a multi-billion-dollar per industry. Like, there's no reason you can't do a hundred million dollars a year or two hundred million dollars a year just selling

1:00:17those people. And the same with the IT. So, the idea is like people start taking on more avatars cuz they think that's what's necessary to grow. But And I've said this before, but better creates bigger. Bigger creates bloat. And so, if the goal is to get bigger, you want to focus not on getting bigger, but on getting better, and then getting bigger occurs. Growth occurs as a result. Growth is not a goal. Growth is

1:00:40an outcome of inputs. And so, I'm telling you like it took me a very long time to understand this. So, I'm I'm trying to get like every entrepreneur has this ego goal of like I want to hit this a month, and I'll hit that a month, and I'll hit that a month. But the thing is just like you don't want to make the income the goal. If you do, it gets really hard to get out of that game because sometimes you take the wrong steps, you artificially inflate revenue, and then you increase costs to sustain that revenue, but it was the wrong strategic move. And but then you

1:01:03can't go backwards, you stay in the cycle forever. You don't want to do that. You have to think, "Okay, how do I make the core thing that I do better?" Because fundamentally, if this were twice as good as it is now, would I be bigger? Yes, because your customers would demand it. You get far more leverage by doing the same thing a hundred times than doing a hundred things one time. And so, the vast majority of businesses, especially when they're starting out, are doing a hundred things one time rather than the same thing a hundred times. And you get a hell of a lot better when you do

1:01:26something on the hundredth time. And so that means that you drive up your operational efficiency, you drive up your gross profit, you get better at your acquisition cuz your marketing messaging, your sales scripting, the results that you can promise, all those things get better. And now you're competing in a smaller pond so you can dominate everyone. But when people think small pond, they think that somehow that means that they're not going to make a lot of money. Like I said, Jim Wendler makes a lot of money and it's in a very, very, very, very, very narrow niche. And so you just got to be more specific most

1:01:50times and break the limiting beliefs you have around the idea that like, okay, well I just need to go from, you know, I've saturated chiropractors, right? I've I've saturated this with $2 million a year in revenue. Of course not, right? Every single other business that exists that serves your customer, the fact that they're allowed to be alive and breathe shows you how much opportunity you have if you were better than them. Number 10, provide value. Now everybody talks about providing value, what does that even mean? All right, so in in this book I talked about something called the value equation, it's probably the most cited chapter in this whole book. But I break

1:02:19down what are the elements of value. And so there are four. Number one is the dream outcome, which is what does somebody actually want? So if I were to offer like uh Daniel who's behind the camera right now, I said, "Hey, you can get in shape or I can make you a million dollars." Right? Making money for most men is more

1:02:33valuable than getting in better shape. And so the relative opportunity or the relative outcome will dictate how much money you can charge. That's why in general B2B offers are higher ticket. Now there are also fewer people who buy making money than people who buy consumer products. So you have about 1/10th. So 9% of people are business owners. Uh so you have a much smaller market. That being said, does the the the size of the market really matter based on the thing I just said? Probably not. But again, number one is dream outcome. That's what differentiates. Now let's say you've got two products that offer the same solution. So let's say

1:03:02the the the the weight loss example or the getting shape example. If I have a PDF for that and I've got uh liposuction, both of them promise the same thing, which is that you're going to get in better shape, you're going to lose weight. Okay, well then why is liposuction so much more expensive than a PDF that I could buy on the internet for 20 bucks? They both promise the same outcome. Well, there's three other variables. So, variable number one is the perceived likelihood of achievement or the risk associated with the purchase. So, risk would be the negative, perceived likelihood of achievement is the positive. And so, we

1:03:26want to increase the perceived likelihood as much as possible. So, if we had that liposuction and we've got one surgeon who's his first day out of medical school and we got another surgeon who's done 10,000 surgeries, which of these guys can price higher? Well, obviously, you'd want to take the 10,000 one even though it's the same procedure and the same outcome. The perceived likelihood of you actually getting what you want, the risk associated is lower, and so you're willing to pay more for that guy cuz he

1:03:45has more experience. The third variable of this is time delay. The equal opposite of that is speed. How quickly between when someone buys and when they get the promised outcome. Now, if you do liposuction, it's like, great. You make the purchase and you go to sleep and you wake up and you're thin. Very, very condensed, which is why it has a lot of value, right? Whereas if you have to do all this eating and this exercising and not drinking and changing your diet and all this waking up early and being sore, all this like there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of

1:04:13delay there in terms of how much time and effort it's time specifically is going to take to get the outcome you want. So, the faster it is, the more valuable it is. And then finally, you have effort and sacrifice or equal opposite ease. How easy can you make it? And so, if you're trying to think about this in in in simple terms, it's how risk-free can I make it? How easy can I make it? How fast can I make it? And is the thing that that I'm promising, the outcome that I'm promising, something they actually want? And so, if you have all four of those, you have something

1:04:38that people really want, they have no risk of doing it, it comes immediately, and it's easy. It's easy as pushing a button, you've got an incredibly valuable thing. And so, when people say, "Add value," what you want to think about is, "What does my customer or what does my avatar want to accomplish or what do they want to avoid?" So, you've got towards good stuff and away from bad stuff. And so, you say, "Okay, I can help you avoid this bad stuff risk-free, faster, and easier than otherwise." And the dream outcome, the good stuff, same thing again, is how can I help you get that good stuff faster, easier, and

1:05:09risk-free? And so, every time you make content or every time you make a PDF, or every time you make a lead magnet, whatever it is, or you make content, the whole goal should be to be useful. The whole goal should be to provide value. And you do that by helping them achieve their goal, which hopefully with this video I'm helping you market better your business by making it risk-free so you don't have to make the mistakes I did, get to your goal faster, and get there easier. So, the easiest way to think, "Okay, got it. Well, how do I find the problems that people are suffering from

1:05:34so that I can make it faster, easier, and risk-free for them?" Great question. So, one is any comments that you get in in response to content, that creates more content. This is the endless content wheel. It's like you make content, people have questions about the content, you make content about the questions, they have questions about those questions. The good thing is that problems never end and people never stop complaining. And so, as long as people stop complaining and people have problems, you're always going to have problems to solve, which is one of the

1:05:52nice things about being an entrepreneur. You like humanity, if you told us hundreds of years ago that we'd have the internet in our hands and we'd have air conditioning and Wi-Fi and all this stuff, we'd be like, "Oh my god, all of our problems are solved." But we have more problems now than we did before cuz we're more aware of the problems that that we didn't know existed before. And so, whenever you solve a problem, you create another one. It's the

1:06:09problem-solution cycle, it never ends. And so, one is you can look at that. The other is you can look internal to your business, which is what are the what are the things that people struggle with internal in terms of implementation for whatever the thing that you do is, whether it's a product that you sell or a service that you sell, there's some friction points along the way. And you think, "Okay, what are the friction

1:06:24points and how can I make it easier?" Number 11 is a fairly well-known marketing saying, "Give away the secrets, sell the implementation." The way that I think about this is make your free stuff better than their paid stuff. And that's an easy ism to say, but the real real is like you actually have to think, "If I give away something for free, I have to be willing to charge for it." And if you were willing to charge $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 for the thing that you give away for free, my god, must that be valuable. Yes. And what that does is it increases the likelihood

1:06:50of conversion. It increases the likelihood that a person consumes the thing and then buys the next product. Because what a lead magnet is, or what content is, it's a complete solution to a very narrow problem. And that's fundamentally how I think about this. A lot of people are very afraid of giving away value, but you shouldn't be. Give away all the secrets. Give away all the things that you do, and then if someone wants help with implementation, they can call you up. And this allows you to provide value to the masses, build your brand up, and then they use results in advance as an approximation of the

1:07:17results they're going to get after they purchase. All right? And so, even when you're marketing in terms of making content, I like to think of being okay with narrow because deep is where the dollars are. All right, so let me tell you let me tell you a couple stories about this. So, there was a lady who I just recently met who was doing just under a million dollars a year in profit. Profit from 5,800 followers on Instagram. She had no other platform. She sourced 100% from Instagram. And this blew my mind. I mean, like I say this stuff, but having having that level like it was such an

1:07:48extreme example of tiny audience, big money. It it broke my beliefs even further than I already had them broken. And when I looked at her page, here's what's crazy. It wasn't like she had crazy deep engagement, either. It was like the post she would get would get, you know, one, five, maybe 10 comments

1:08:03on a great post. And she would get, you know, 10 likes, 20 likes, 30 likes if it was a crazy one. But, 100% of her content was about how registered dietitians can more accurately bill insurance to make more money. It was a niche of a niche. It was literally like registered dietitians who bill insurance and how to bill insurance

1:08:28more effectively to make more per hour. That was her offer, and that's all she talks about. Her cheat sheets were on that. Uh and she talks about different insurance uh companies and how to bill each of them, the codes that you go that you plug in like like all this jargon I had no idea when I went to the page. But, for her avatar, I'll bet you that of the 5,800 people that follow her, 5,700 of them were registered dietitians who were trying to find out what they needed to do uh to make more money by billing insurance. And so, she was selling five to 10 uh little cheat sheets a day at

1:08:58like 99 bucks plus two to three high ticket people per week into her thing, into her association of registered dieticians that followed her process for billing. And so, I say this because I've also learned this personally. We used to make some wider content for about 6 months. We did this We did this experiment. We got the data back. It turned out we got lots of views, but we didn't get lots of business owners. And so, we switched back to hardcore business stuff, which I love anyway, so I'm very happy about the experiment. And because of that, all of our stats are up. So, we have more opt-ins, more

1:09:27people buying books, more people, you know, going to work shops, whatever it is, more people applying to the portfolio, so we can invest in their companies. All of those stats were up despite the fact that the general views per video went down. And again, I'm here for the money, not for the fame. And so, I encourage you, if you can break your attachment to the ego metrics, like the likes and the views and things like that, and just focus on the bottom line, just get really specific on the avatar that you want to serve, and make content only for them that's useful. So, I've got a buddy of mine who runs a

1:09:55multi-nine-figure-per-year uh marketing company. And he makes content online. He has a personal brand. And he was like, "Oh, dude, my personal brand makes no money." He's like, "But And he goes super in-depth tactical like stuff. He's an SEO G, and so all of his stuff is like how to how to make SEO content, blog content, things like that. And his content gets like so few likes and engagement. And he has like charts and graphs and all this data to support all he does. He's obviously really,

1:10:22really good at this. But the thing is this, he's his lead quality that comes from him, he's like, "They're all Fortune 500, Fortune 100 CEOs, executives that are like, 'Hey, you obviously know this stuff. Can we just hire you?'" And that's exactly who he wants. He wants He He makes it so complex. He gives away everything. And he says it. He's like, "I give You could

1:10:40just follow all my stuff and do it." Most people are like, "Man, this is too much work." And so, they're like, "Can I just hire you?" Which is an exceptional way to get customers. So, here's how you do it in three easy steps. One is you just give away your best stuff. Give it all away. If you have a low-ticket thing that sells to lots of people, and high-ticket thing, I would encourage you just give away the low-ticket thing, too. You're probably not making that much money on it anyways, and those customers are probably a pain in the butt. So, just give it to them. And you can even show,

1:11:03"Hey, I used to charge for this and I'll give it to you for free cuz I love you." All right? And by doing that, you make an exceptional thing, and you put really heavy uh effort into follow-up and calls to action within the within the content itself. All right? So, within the thing that you're giving away, you have CTAs, and you follow up with your team to try and ascend them in the next thing if they're qualified. And I'll give you a pro tip on this. When you want to make the CTA, make it about personalization, not about more. So, instead of saying, "Hey, if you want more stuff like this,

1:11:31go here." Say, "Hey, if you want me to help apply this stuff to your business, or apply this stuff to your body, or this stuff to your life, then let me know." It's personalizing it, cuz that is significantly more valuable than just more stuff. And what's crazy is that a lot of people use the things they give away as an afterthought. It's the last thing they think about. But here's the crazy stat, is that 99% of people who consume your free thing will never buy from you, which means that your reputation's getting made by the 99% of people, not the 1%. And so, if you want

1:11:56to improve your reputation in the marketplace, make sure the stuff that you give away for free is awesome. Also make sure the stuff that you sell is awesome. And if both those things sound like a four-letter word, which is work, welcome to business. And so, I talked earlier about going up market or getting narrower on the avatar that you want to serve. A lot of people have down-sells, and I think over time I've gotten less and less into having down-sells, and more along lines of like, if we have a lower avatar and we're down-selling 10% of calls into this thing that's paid, if 10% of people

1:12:23are buying something that's 1/10 the price cuz it's a down-sell, then it's going to change my revenue by 1%. I don't really care. It's not even worth the headache. I'd rather just give that away to hundreds of people for free, because if the cost is free, way more people will consume it, and then get a higher percentage people to buy my next thing, and I allow my marketing messaging to attract the higher quality customers. So, this is the last thing to go up market or narrower, and give away all the other stuff so I can create my more qualified customers. The amount of businesses that I know that one that

1:12:48we've invested in or do that we've helped simply make way more money by just giving away the thing that was their big headache that was a low ticket thing just so that they could focus on serving the best customers. Most times you'll make money going up market. Marketing advice number 12, all advertising works. It's just a matter of efficiency. I'm really I like I want to I want to drill this down people's throats. The amount of time I've said Facebook ads don't work for us. Google ads don't work for us. TikTok ads don't work for us. Direct mail doesn't work

1:13:13for us. Radio ads don't work for us. Content doesn't work for us. Outreach doesn't work for us. Fundamentally, if you have a qualified person on the other side and you make an offer to them that solves a key problem for them, if you can get them on the phone, you can make money, period. So, if you can rephrase the problem as I don't know how to make Facebook ads work for us. I don't know how to make TikTok work for us. I don't know how to make content work for us. I don't know how to make outreach work for us, then that becomes a problem that you can solve. Now, this

1:13:37is really important. So, I talked earlier about optimizing your advertising from front to back and that's true. But, when you optimize a business, you optimize it from back to front. And so, the back, the LTV, how much you make per customer enables how much you can spend on the front end. And so, you optimize the throughput on the front end, obviously, because that's where you get the highest returns, but the engine that you can spend on that depends on how much you make per

1:14:03customer. And so, you can either be really really really exceptional at lowering CAC or really really really good at increasing LTV and if you do both, you have huge arbitrage and that's where you make stupid money. And so, let's go through a hypothetical. Let's say that you sold something that was a billion dollar thing. Okay? If you have a billion dollars in gross profit that you'd make from one sale, you could reach a lot of people on Earth. And just to give you context on this, if I wanted to become a A-list celebrity, uh I back calculated what I believe it cost to become an A-list celebrity. It was about

1:14:3350 million dollars. And the way that I calculated that was I thought, "What person went from complete obscurity to no one knew who they were, obscurity, to omnipresence or some like that everybody knew?" And so, the simplest example are people who were no-name actors who become the star of a big Marvel hit. And so, what I did was I said, "Okay, how many of these have I seen? What was the movie budget?" Now, you have to divide that by the other characters in the show or in the in the movie. And between the big blockbusters, where we had to you think about like the Hunger Games girl,

1:15:05right? I can't remember her name right now, but that girl. Like, the marketing budget for those types of films, you think, "Okay, with $50 she went from no knowing who she was to being famous." And so, for $50 you can reach so much of America. And so, I use this as a hypothetical because if you had something that you sold for a billion dollars, you could spend that and still

1:15:22make 20 to one. And so, the idea is, yes, we optimize our advertising from front to back. We put our effort on the front. But, in terms of where our our our LTV comes from, we work from back to front so that we can spend more on the front end. A big problem in terms of efficiency is that oftentimes, if you are if you do start running ads profitably, for

1:15:41example, you reach some sort of ceiling. You're like, "Hey, we can't we can't get past $2,000 a day. Hey, we can't get past $10,000 a day. Hey, we can't get past $100,000 a day." Whatever it is, right? Usually, it's because the ads that you have aren't good enough to reach the next level of awareness. So, Eugene Schwartz in Breakthrough Advertising talked about something called Five Levels of Awareness. And so, they go from unaware, somebody has no idea who you are, what the problem is, or anything. They're just unaware. The next level is problem aware. That's where you see ads that are like, "Having trouble sleeping at night? Do you have

1:16:05back pain when you lean over?" Like, things like that. They ask open-end questions that make someone aware of the problem. Underneath of that is solution aware. "Have you tried this before? Have you tried this before?" This is where someone knows the solutions that potentially exist. Then you have product aware, which is them advertising you advertising your own product. Like, "Okay, have you tried like my product

1:16:23before? And let me talk you about this." And then finally, you have most aware, which is usually past and existing customers. And so, those are five levels of awareness. And so, most times, smaller advertisers, beginner advertisers, get returns marketing to most aware, right? If you email your list or you make a post or you send out message an email, right? Those are your most aware people. So, you can make sales from that for almost no money. One degree above that is like, okay, well, are there other people who are in the market? That's product aware. They're looking They're looking for something

1:16:48uh to solve a specific problem, right? Uh and they're aware of the options that are out there and you market to them. So, you have to be a little bit better to market to those people than to just your existing customers. Now, if you go one level above that, right, solution aware is that they know that there are

1:16:59people who are solving this problem. They don't know how they're solving the problem. They know that there is a solution that exists. And so, you have to have another order of magnitude improvement of your ads and the hooks to call out those people. And so, most times, the problem isn't that your market isn't big enough, it's that your ads aren't good enough and they're not specific enough to hit this next massive tranche of the audience. And I say this with our largest company um in the portfolio that is about $100 million a year and we spend millions of dollars a month in advertising and we go to the

1:17:27most unaware people. We go to people who have no idea that uh you know, this product or this problem exists. We actually have to make them aware of the problem and then we make them aware of the opportunity to solve it. And then we have to make them aware of the problem. We have to take them through all the stages of awareness in a very short period of time and that is come comes from a very well-crafted ad. And so, I have this saying that I have internal, which is that the size of the plane is directly correlated with the length of the runway. The bigger the plane, the

1:17:51longer the runway. And so, if you want to sell a very expensive thing or you want to sell a very cold person. So, the price and the the coldness or how aware the person is. So, the longest sale possible would be somebody who's completely unaware for a very expensive thing, right? The shortest sale possible would be someone who's very aware for a very cheap thing. And so, the amount of runway, the amount of selling, the amount of advertising that you have to do to get someone through these stages is directly proportional to those two things. And if you're having trouble scaling, it usually means that this is

1:18:19mismatched. You're trying to do You're You're sending a warm message to a cold audience or you're getting people on the phone who aren't prepared to spend a huge amount of money. They haven't been warmed up enough. And so, it's making sure that we're hitting each of these boxes for the audience that we're starting to target. And so, as you go to a new tranche of Let's say you go from uh solution aware to problem aware. So,

1:18:36that's a that's a bigger area, right? And so, think about this as concentric circles like a pizza. Like the area of the pizza, you know, like a pizza that's this big, if you could take an inch off, it's almost the same size as a as a 2-in pizza in the middle. Like the the diameter, circumference, whatever that is. I probably failed geometry. The point is is that um it just gets bigger

1:18:52and exponentially bigger as you go out. And so, this is a weird visual that I have for this. But, if you think about a watermelon slice, and at the tip there's lots of seeds. And as you go down, there's fewer seeds. But, you still have to pay the same amount to reach all these eyeballs to find the few seeds versus in the

1:19:09beginning when you have lots of seeds. So, your density of sales per thousand eyeballs goes down as you go to more unaware people. Because you're going to go to people who just simply don't care and never will care. But, you have to and this is where the LTV matters so much and the optimization matters so much. But, you still if you can be profitable in a larger tranche that's 10 or 100 times as big, that's when you start really printing money. Right? And so, if you have call it 20 to one LTV to CAC in the beginning when you have lots of little seeds, lots of density of

1:19:35potential buyers, goods is really warm, really problem aware or really really solution or product aware, right? Like really high end. As you go down, you might drop to five to one in the middle. You might drop to three to one at scale, but you're at a hundred times the spend. And so, in that case, you're still making way more absolute return on the investment. Another way to think about this is like a golf course. And so, if you could only putt, then you're going to only make 6-in putts. That's only the top little seeds of the watermelon. But, think about how much more area if you

1:20:03learned how to drive and you learned how to hit a three iron. I'm not very good at golf. You can obviously tell. And then you hit learn how to hit a wedge. There's so many more shots that you can make if you have these other skills in your arsenal. And so, think about each of the levels of awareness as another club that you have to learn how to hit so that you can get more balls in the

1:20:20hole from any part of the course. Marketing advice number 13, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. And I think this is one that's going to break a lot of your beliefs. And so, I'm going to I want to really emphasize this one cuz it's important. Once you start making content, once you start running ads, and you start putting stuff out publicly, start advertising, you're going to get to a point where you're like, I feel like I've said everything that I was going to say. Now, remember, you continue to live life every day, you continue to do stuff, and you can talk about what you did, so that

1:20:45can break that. But, my mom said this to me once, and I I I always I always remembered it. She said, "The news never changes, just the names." And I really thought about that. It was like, there's always a rape, there's a war, there's a murder, there's a car accident. Like, the actual story doesn't change, only

1:20:59the names. And so, if you think about that with content, like, there is no new content. Like, the human condition has not changed for thousands of years. Like, the older the problem, the older the solution. And so, we're making content, and we're putting stuff out there, and when I think about myself, the things that I follow, like, I follow philosophy pages because I am okay rereading Epictetus's stuff. Like, I read his stuff before, and I read it in quote form again, and when it comes up again, I like to be reminded. I like to keep the stuff top of mind. That's why I follow those pages. And many people

1:21:29follow your pages for that exact same reason, is that the stuff you talk about is stuff that they want to keep top of mind. They want to be reminded of that stuff. And getting taught is much more difficult than being reminded, but they're equally valuable. Because if it changes their behavior, then you still did teach them. Again, you just reminded them. And what's crazy about this is that, like, the Friends show right now, if you've ever heard of it, is being watched more now than it was a few years

1:21:52ago. So, reruns. Like, people watch reruns because there's nostalgia or whatever reasons you want to pick to it, but people are willing to rewatch the same thing because they know how it ends, they know they liked it. And so, you can make the same thing again because also, your audience who's new a year later hasn't seen that thing. And so, if you make something new to them, even though it's {quote} old or reminder to your existing audience, your existing audience doesn't mind the reminder, and the new people never saw it to begin with. And if you want to have different ways of creating variety, even around

1:22:23the same topics, I would encourage you, instead of thinking of getting into trend hacking and talking about the news, talk about your news. So, it's about what are the new things that are happening now. This is the do epic stuff, talk about what you did. And so, this is where we tell new stories to explain the same concept because for that specific audience, you'll reach a different type of person or different avatar that still may be within your market with a story about a mother and a daughter versus a father and a son versus a military vet versus a small business owner, right? There are different avatars and you can tell the

1:22:55same story, but it happens to a different name, just like the news. And people still watch the news every single day, and then what we want is them to watch our news. You can tell the same concept like the value equation. The value equation I explained in my book. I also have a course on my site that I explain the value equation in a different format. So, think about it in terms of formats. This is written. I have an audio. I've got videos that are

1:23:16on my site that are in a course format. I'm mentioning it here now. I have it on whiteboards that I've explained it. I've applied it to services. I've applied it to education. I've applied it to physical products. I've applied it to software. And so, you can take the same idea and think how can I display it in new formats, new mediums, and new contexts. And so, when you have that and then you extrapolate on top the news of your life, even though you feel like it's saying the same thing, the amount that it takes to create something novel is very small. And so, I'll tell you the

1:23:45story that I think will wrap this up. It's the story of Henry Ford. And so, Henry Ford had in his office, he had his marketing person right next to him. So, he walked past the marketing department over and over and over again. And this is back in the day when they like didn't have computer screens. So, it was just like they had mock-ups and like big posters and things like that for whatever the next ad campaign for a new Ford car was. And so, he walked past this guy's office for 3 months. At the end of the 3 months, he was like, "Hey John, when are we going to stop running

1:24:09this ad? I'm so sick of it." And John, the marketing director looked at him and said, "We haven't even started running it yet." And so, the thing is is that we get so much sicker of our own content before our audience even remembers your name. And so, the thing is is that we assume that every person consumes every piece of content you ever put out. We put out 50 plus pieces of content a day. I'm grateful if somebody watches one a week, right? And so, the idea here is that like you put out significantly more, but we have this assumption that everyone's paying attention and no one is. And so,

1:24:35we put out tons of volume with the hope that we catch one person on that one day. And you might have make I might have made four things about the value equation. Actually, you can give me good feedback, so this will be good. If you haven't heard about the value equation whatsoever in my content up to this point, drop a comment cuz I want to I want to prove that this, even though I've talked about it in a zillion formats, some of you guys didn't even

1:24:53know how to book, right? People need to be reminded more than need to be taught. And for those of you who don't know, the mission acquisition.com is to make real business education accessible for everyone. And I spent the last 4 years plus making content and hopefully giving away all the stuff you need to scale your business. And I love getting the messages and the stories that we do. But it would mean the world to me if you just share this video with another business owner who they can hopefully compress 13 years into however long this video ends up being to save them all the scars and so they can just have the

1:25:21lessons. Thank you.