#290 Jordan Platten - Are Agencies Dying in 2025? - Kickoff Sessions

Episode Transcript
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Jordan Platten (00:00):
setting very clear expectations and actually
pushing clients away and saying,just so you know, these are the
things that we can do, butthese are the things we can't do
and this is what we aren'tgoing to do for you and what you
have to do.
Those conversations.
Actually, the only skilldeficiency I believe that would
cause you to fail an agency iscommunication.
If you can't communicate withpeople, both clients and team,

(00:22):
if you can't motivate a team andhave them want to give their
time, or if you can't buildgreat relationships with your
clients, then you're going tofail.
If you can build a successfulagency, any other business you
touch, you'll be successful inOur agency is dying in 2025.

Darren Lee (00:35):
With AI automating everything, outreach burning out
and clients demanding more forless, most agencies are stuck in
the past, but Jordan Plattenisn't.
He's one of the OGs of theagency space scaled to 100k plus
and coached thousands offounders to do the same.
In this episode, we break downwhat actually works in acquiring
clients, sales and deliveryright now, today, including how

(00:59):
AI can replace your entire team,why cold outreach is dying and
the real reason your agencymight be failing.
This episode is how tofuture-proof your entire team,
why cold outreach is dying andthe real reason your agency
might be failing.
This episode is how tofuture-proof your entire
business.
Do you think building an agencyis still a viable business
model right now, in 2025?

I think, for as long as we have online business
agency will always be arguablythe best business model for
people to start with noexperience why is that?
because the barrier to entry isso low, because it's a simple
service exchange which and itteaches just fundamental good
practice of business I still Isay this all the time like if

(01:39):
you can build a successfulagency, any other business you
touch within reason once youlearn the model you'll be
successful in, Because you haveto manage sales, you have to
manage clients, you have tomanage team and when one of
those things break, the otherthing breaks and there's so many
moving parts and it takes somuch resilience and failure that
even outside of it just being agood vehicle to make money,

(01:59):
it's just the perfect vehicle toprime you with the grit that is
required to actually besuccessful I would say it's
almost harder than other things.
It's one of the hardest mod.
It's and that's the yin, theyang, right.
It's because it's so easy tostart and because the barrier to
entry is so low.
It's that much harder in orderto get to a certain level of

(02:20):
scale, like I truly believe thatan agency beyond like 200k a
month, 300k a month, it startsto become like it's diminishing
returns as far as like the, the,the, the stress is concerned,
and there are other models thatare more suitable at that point.

Darren Lee (02:36):
So it's kind of like a gateway business you know,
but at the same time it's notnecessarily like it's for anyone
.
Does that make sense?
You, if you started that andyou were going from zero, you
don't necessarily, you're notnecessarily able to keep going
up without anything's breaking,like things will inherently
break over and over again ohyeah, and the minute you think
that one thing is fixed, thensomething else breaks, and so on

(02:57):
.

But that's why it is so good, because you are
forced to continually adapt andit just teaches good business
practice.
I mean, you'll probably be thesame.
You have friends in, let's say,e-com, and I have a great
friend who built a verysuccessful e-com brand and he
got it to multi-millions on amonthly basis.
But that business, when I havea conversation with him about

(03:20):
his level of experience when itcomes to building a business of
depth, when it comes to managingloads of clients, managing
loads of team, it's such, it'sso much more of a simple model
when we're talking about thedrop shipping guys and
cryptocurrency and so on, andthose people quite often will
struggle when they go to startanother business because of the
lack of no other way of puttingit.
Depth of business acumen youhave to have to when it comes to

(03:44):
running an agency.
So normally the guys that runan agency and come from there
first and then go into somethinglike ecom or then go into
something like sass or info orso on, are usually primed to
succeed at a better rate why doyou think, uh like a lot of
agencies actually fail?
though a lack of resilience isthe number one thing.

(04:04):
There's no doubt not skill umskill, do you say?

Darren Lee (04:07):
yeah.
Would you think it's more likeresiliency, or do you think it's
more like a skill deficiency?

the only skill deficiency I believe that would
cause you to fail an agency iscommunication.
If you're a shit communicatorbecause you're an egomaniac, if
you can't communicate withpeople, both clients and team,
if you can't motivate a team andhave them want to give their
time and dedicate their life toyou or that portion of their
life, or if you can't buildgreat relationships with your

(04:36):
clients, then you're going tofail.
But the marketing piece, thedelivery piece, that's something
that anybody can learn over aperiod of time.

Darren Lee (04:44):
Just want to take one quick break to ask you one
question have you been enjoyingthese episodes?
Because, if you have, I'dreally appreciate if you
subscribe to the channel so thatmore people can see these
episodes and be influenced tobuild an online business this
year.
Thank you, dude, I have such afunny story for you on this.
So I worked with a mentor on,like, how to understand your

(05:07):
clients, so, like, what's theirpersonality type, what's their
personality trait, and like, whothey kind of are.
And there's like a grid, right,if you imagine x and y axis and
you put ego on one side and youput, let's say, insecurity on
the other axis, and then youstart to position your clients
who are high ego, decisiveness,low ego, indecisive, and then
you find almost the, the modularbetween it.

(05:28):
The reason why you do that isso that you know how to
communicate to them, and what Ihad found was clients that were
high ego I would often clashwith, because I would be like,
oh, we need to do xyz, and theywould say, well, I need to do
xyz, and it would be a conflictof interest.
And there was two things I didfrom there.
Can you imagine, can you guess,what I did, I know so one.

(05:49):
It was either learn and learnto become more empathetic,
sympathetic, like moreunderstanding, which I went on
to do, or second was hiresomeone to do the communication.
So my good mate Tom came in aslike head of client success.
Purely because those like Iwouldn't even say difficult
clients, but clients that aresimilar line to me in terms of,
like our energy, I was not thebest person to be positioned

(06:13):
there and it took me three, fouryears to realize that skill and
it was so interesting man.
And my mate Tom was a teacherin Wales, so he understands how
to work with difficult peopleand I think it's a very
important thing because I lookedit out myself and I was like
I'm just not the best person atthis.

That's interesting and I feel that I
think a lot of agency ownersstruggle with that, which is why
they then struggle to becausepeople aren't.
There are many agencies thatcan deliver a good service in
whatever service that they arein, but what people buy when
they're working with an agencyis someone they can trust in a
good relationship.
That's why they stay for a longtime and that's why churn will

(06:53):
stay low.
There are that there's not ashortage of agencies, have
client acquisition on lock andthey can get new clients, but
actually be able to retain theclient and then get the thing
that really helps you excel,which is get referrals and all
of that Like that's a completelydifferent story.

Darren Lee (07:07):
Let's double tap on that, right, because everyone is
selling acquisition, but no oneis teaching retention.
But you and I watch your videosand like the focus that you put
on retention in terms ofreporting, being there with a
client, by the way, if you'reteaching, if you're doing
coaching, this is equally thesame, like how many touch points
do you have effectively to getthem the result, but then also
to show them that you care?

(07:28):
So you mentioned in one of yourvideos about that, how it's
okay absolutely articulating thevalue, but then there's also a
second effect here which isimproving the relationship, like
how do you?
think about that process.

Yeah, it's interesting and I'm glad you
picked up on that.
I mean we literally awardagencies for consistently
generating exceptional results.
Most people award agencies inthe, I suppose, agency education
space for making 100k, gettingrevenue levels and so on.
But we know and we recognizevery early that it was all about
results.
If you can't get results, thenyou're not going to be able to

(08:02):
retain clients, and actuallywe've got a lot of people that
have come to a certain point ofascension in their agency.
The ultimate place that mostagencies find themselves in is
they don't actually need anyclient acquisition systems
beyond a certain point becausereferrals just build a life of
their own and so then it justcomes about, you know, creating
free lead magnets, giving valueand so on, and then the agency
just just I think.
I think client acquisitionstrategies, outbound and paid

(08:27):
within the agency model, broadlyspeaking, are a weapon for
momentum and then when you gainthe momentum as if your service
is great and your ability tobuild a relationship is great
then you will drive the businessforward through that and um
like, even for us in the agency,because obviously we still own
affluent agency and we work withdirect to consumer e-commerce

(08:47):
brands, but we also have.
We have like an info division.
We actually just started alittle lead gen department as
well and content, so we'veexpanded over time.
But what we do is we make surethat all of our key clients
we'll take them out for dinner,we'll fly out to them, we'll
build a good relationship withthem.
We try, and actually from thevery early days we did this, and
I don't know whether it wasjust because we were young and

(09:07):
almost a little bit naive, Isuppose, but we weren't.
We had no business experiencelike many of us.
We weren't surrounded bybusiness owners, we didn't have
any corporate mentality, and soit was always a very, very
personal relationship with allthe clients that we built.
So so we've always gone theextra mile to make sure that our
clients become our friends.
And then there's that wholeother layer where the clients

(09:29):
know that you're doingeverything that you possibly can
to make them successful, andeven if things aren't going
perfect because they don'talways go perfect they then at
least trust you as a human andknow you're on their side.
And I think that's one thingthat many agencies miss.
Many agencies will over-promiseto the client of a certain
result.
They don't bring the client inon the result itself, so they

(09:51):
actually take ownership over toomuch of the result because
there's so many variables.
Like an ad agency, you're an adagency but the client doesn't
have a content creation capacityor the desire to create content
, and so you can't put newcreative iteration into the ad
account.
You're never going to getanywhere, it's not going to
perform.
Many agencies at that pointwon't address that to the client
, won't be, will be afraid tohave those difficult

(10:14):
conversations that do strengthenthe relationship, that do say
hey, I'm trying to do my pieceright here, but this is what you
need to do and this is yourpiece of the puzzle and I'm here
doing everything possibly can,but I need you to work with me
on this and this is the way it'sgoing to go.
And that vulnerability, Isuppose, is what strengthens
relationships and we areunafraid to have, very matter of

(10:35):
fact, vulnerable conversationsthat most agencies will think
will increase churn, but in ninetimes out of 10 will decrease
churn because they just knowthat you're in it with them and
they're responsible just as muchas you are it's a partnership.

Darren Lee (10:49):
I've had that exact same scenario like literally
word for word example this week,which was I I categorize it
like under the theory ofconstraints right.
So let's say you want to getmore sales or you want more
coaching clients and you want toget them successful well, you
need more sales, but to get moresales.
Or you want more coachingclients and you want to get them
successful Well, you need moresales.
But to get more sales, you needmore leads, and to get more
leads, you need to createcontent.
So a client wasn't able tocreate the content for us to be

(11:13):
able to create YouTube videos,podcasts and so on to create the
lead flow.
And then the feedback was we'renot getting leads.
And I said, look, dude, likewhatever that we have under the
theory of constraints, we needto fix this issue up here, which
is the content gap.
Here's how we can do it andhere's a seven page report on
like the roadmap that we can puttogether.

(11:34):
But we need to do two thingsOne, identify that as the
biggest constraint, and onlywhen we've identified that's the
biggest constraint, we canagree on the roadmap to solve it
.
And, as you said, like they'rethe tough decisions.
So you might be familiar withSahil Bloom, so Sahil's a good
friend of mine.
He's a very famous line in hisnew book, which is every
unresolved conversation andevery different conversation

(11:56):
carries a debt and that debtonly increases through time
until you have to pay it off andit actually increases in
severity.
But you have to pay it off andit actually increases in
severity, but you have to pay itat some point.
And it's just such a goodreminder that you know you can
try everything but you need toface those conversations.
I think again to your point.
That's what strengthensrelationships 100.

I couldn't agree more like ultimately, agencies
are a relationship game and thisis something you mentioned off
camera with an agency, theminute there's an element of
done for you.
This is very different to info.
When there's an element of donefor you, the expectations are
all of a sudden huge.
It doesn't.
You could be doing one.
Let's say there's a scale ofone to ten and you are doing

(12:38):
you're done for you covers fourout of ten, so there's six.
Whatever that hypotheticalthing is that someone else has
to do, there's a there's a biggap.
More that hypothetical thing isthat someone else has to do
there's a there's a big gap,more than than than the majority
that someone else has to do.
But just because you arecontributing that 40% to the
macro, you're at the expectationthat you are the person that's
going to be responsible for theoverall success of the.
Whatever the thing is you'retrying to achieve is massive,

(13:00):
whereas info because there it's,it's kind of I'm going to teach
you, you're going to do ityourself that expectation people
blame themselves if they're notsuccessful.
They will.
They will take more ownershipover that.
The minute it's an agency basedrelationship, there's so much
more pressure on the agency tobe the sole entity responsible
for the success of whateveryou're trying to achieve.
I just I think that people wantsomeone else to blame for

(13:25):
reality and I think that wedon't have that problem.
Most agencies have that problembecause they fail to set very
clear expectations from day one,because they're so obsessed
with getting the sale and makingthe money that they think those
expectations with getting thesale and making the money that

(13:45):
they think those expectationswill put the client off and,
ironically, setting very clearexpectations and actually
pushing clients away and saying,just so, you know, these are
the things that we can do, butthese are the things we can't do
and this is what we aren'tgoing to do for you and what you
have to do.
Those conversations actuallyincrease close rate because we

(14:07):
are in this.
You know everyone's talkingabout this like trust epidemic
that we're in.
I feel that completely and I'veseen that and observed that
across the industry over 10years of being in the industry.
We are definitely at an all-timelow when it comes to trust and
what most people do when there'sa trust problem is they do the
opposite of what needs to happenand they're just like, oh, we
will guarantee this thing andwe've got this risk reversal and

(14:27):
we've got this, and they justgo more, more, more, more of
this over from the thing thatfeeds the trust crisis, whereas
the smart guys are like nowthese are the things that can't
happen and if you want that,then we're not the people for
you.
And actually, you know, just atthe start of the call they say

(14:48):
well, just so you know, we willonly say yes to working with you
and make an offer to you if wegenuinely believe that we can
help you, and if we don't, thenwe can just part ways from this
and you can take some value awayfrom this.
Those people that are willingto have those conversations are
the ones that are closing rightnow, whereas most people are
feeding into the problem withthe thing that got us here in
the first place, which ismassive over promising across a
whole industry.

Darren Lee (15:04):
It's very interesting, right, because if
you say you're going to do more,that's output related, but then
this also ignores the factabout the outcome.
People are promising, right,like how the fuck can you
guarantee an outcome when you'relooking blind at something from
just a 30 minute call, likeit's just irrational.
You know and I say this a lotwith a lot of the it depends on
the framing.
For us, it's like hey, we'llhelp you grow your YouTube

(15:27):
channel and your podcast andeverything, but we're doing it
with the intention of gettinggood leads, not becoming famous.
We need to set that expectation, which is and it's also who
you're for, right, we are forbusiness owners.
We're actually not for creators, and it's a very clear line
that we actually try, saidbecause, like I'm actually not,
you're going viral guy, you know, I'm more like, yeah, we'll
optimize it for the business.
That's as far as we can go, andthen we'll help you with all

(15:50):
the other shit too.
So it's a very interestingdilemma, right?
Um, do you think?
Uh, guarantees are bullshit?

I don't think guarantees are bullshit.
No, I think that for mostpeople, they're a band-aid to a
much bigger problem.
It's like, uh, people thinkthat for most people, they're a
band-aid to a much biggerproblem.
It's like, uh, people thinkthat they can create a guarantee
.
People put so much emphasis on,on on the offer, um, being the,
the, the guarantee, thetangible result that you were

(16:18):
promising people, um, and notenough emphasis on actually
improving their ability to getto that driven result.
It's like what are the wordsthat I can say to make people
think, oh shit, I need thisthing, rather than like actually
taking a step back and beinglike what's realistic?
What can I actually achieve?
What can I do?

(16:38):
And if I'm not happy with whereI am, because I think actually
you know most people in agencyinfo any business with these,
where they've, you know they'veread $100 million offers back to
front.
Most people, if they actuallydid a success rate test on their
guarantees, I think would beshocked at how many or how few
people actually meet theguarantees because of this huge

(16:59):
list of contingencies that theyhave to meet to get them.
I remember I was the firstperson at least that I knew of
when I did it when I launchedand you can still see this video
on YouTube.
When I first launched theAffluent Academy and I rebranded
from the social media marketingschool it must be like five
years ago now I, from myknowledge, launched the first
ever guarantee in the onlineeducation space and the
guarantee would be laughed atnow.

(17:21):
It was one client in 30 daysguaranteed.
You will sign your first clientin 30 days guaranteed as an
agency owner.
Back then I was so proud ofthat and I was like this is the
first piece of momentum thatpeople are going to gain.
If you promised one client in 30days, right now, people will be
like what the hell is that?
Because meanwhile you've gotother people like you're going
to get 20 clients in 30 days.

(17:42):
You're going to get, you know,quadruple your revenue in three
months, et cetera, et cetera, etcetera.
Because we've just got intothis rat race.
So guarantees are bullshit fromthat perspective, because the
world hasn't changed since I didthat.
That was just what I trulybelieved was realistic for
someone who hadn't had abusiness before that could start
a business based on.
You know the average that I'dseen across all the clients that

(18:02):
I worked with and I thinkthat's an interesting form.
It's like we've got lost intrying to one-up each other it's
like lost in the sauce, right?

Darren Lee (18:11):
it's just that that's kind of where the online
business space and why I respectyou so much is like it's always
one person over the other.
You know it's.
How can this person just outdoanother person?
And that's not even to do withthe results, man, it's just to
do with the marketing on thefront end.
Have you kind of felt thatyourself, even personally,
because you've had the agencyfor so long, you've had the

(18:32):
coaching and like there's onlyso many results.
That's even possible for just afucking person, right?
Whereas if we're in the spacewhere everyone's like trying to
outshine each other, how hasthat kind of impacted you, even
like personally?

it's something that I found very frustrating
over the years because it's a uh, you know, you hear that that
saying, if you can't beat them,join them.
And has the business over theyears been impacted by other
people with bigger, bolderclaims and progressively and
that increasing?
Yes, there's no doubt aboutthat and actually I will.

(19:07):
I will always stand by this.
I'm a.
I'm a person of ethics and Iand always ethics over money.
I've been in business for longenough to not have to worry
about money at all and I've gotgreat cash flow in the
businesses there.
I undoubtedly would be two tofive times richer than I am
today if I dropped my ethics andplayed the game that everybody

(19:28):
else played, and that's afrustrating place to be because
you're always going to becross-analyzed with the people
that were prepared to do thatand people always remember
people for the great things thatthey did, and we live in an era
that glamorizes money overethics and will place that in a

(19:51):
higher place in society and soon, and I think that is a shame.
It's something that maybe usedto have of me, but I couldn't
give a shit about.
Now I think actually it's nowcome to the place where I feel
quite smug in the fact that I'vebeen able to retain that and
say that I never fell victim tothat.

(20:14):
But I've definitely observedover the years us trying to
compete with people that areprepared to do and say anything
just to make money, just to getthat little edge.

Darren Lee (20:29):
So, before you came, myself and Lara were looking at
some videos of ranking SMAgurus and you were the most
ethical on top from some videoreviews.
Good Guys I put you on A to Fcategory and you were a for uh.
Most of them, a lot of guys,were 16 years old, probably a
job with beforehand.

I will.
I'm glad, I mean, I think, Ithink, like I think that you
could argue well why.
Why does it all matter if youwere working towards the same
thing, which is like making agreat deal of cash?
But, um, to me, I know that Iwill look back on this period of
my life and be very glad that Idid, and I will be.

(21:11):
Why would I act in a way thatgoes against the way that I
would want to raise my childrenand the way that I would want
other people to be around me,and I'll be very glad that I
stuck to those principles bearound me and I'll be very glad
that I stuck to those principles.

Darren Lee (21:28):
So, as I said to you before, like I'm in a lot of
the big programs and shit withlike some big influencers and
stuff and myself and some otherguys who are there made an
observation of their business.
A lot of these guys have gotlike 500k on, 600k on yeah, for
different industries, maybecould be info and they got there
with literally no background inbusiness.
It's fucking crazy, dude.
Like a lot of guys have nosales team, no tracking, no

(21:49):
customer success, nothing.
And then the feedback was wewere at dinner about a week ago.
A lot of guys were at mymastermind.
They were talking about thisand they're like how?
And my hypothesis was I said,behind closed doors on those
sales calls, you know thatthey're guaranteeing everything
their dream, outcomingabsolutely everything.
You know it's like a 19 yearold high ticket closer that's in

(22:10):
shanggu and he's saying yeah,yeah, no worries, yeah, you can
retire, mom, get to 10k a month,you can have my rolex when you
get there too.
Like you know, that's happeningso much that that's the reason
why like programs have a badname, agencies have a bad name,
whatever insert fucking anybusiness model.
Um, that was my hypothesis fromit, because a lot of people
they're not business owners, alot of them aren't and they're

(22:31):
not like someone like you who'sdone so many years of this right
content, sales, marketing,delivery like the full spectrum,
like end to end of a business,over and over again.
A lot of them just haveattention from TikTok or
whatever and then run that intoprograms.
Even that fucking ice guy Ashtonwhatever his name was
apparently the whole idea behindhis personal brand program.

(22:53):
Apparently it was all justbullshit.
It was just like average basicbullshit advice.
Did he care about the clientsuccess in there?
No, it was shit, dude.
He was too busy running withfucking dogs on the road right.
And there's like this balancewe talked about this before hit
recording which is like how muchtime do I give into my business
and over delivering and, youknow, over coaching and all this

(23:14):
kind of stuff, versus likedoing the stuff that got people
to get there in the first place.

It's a very interesting dilemma right it is,
and I think you have to if youare the kind of person that
wants that, has principle andbelieves we all know the way
things should be based on whatis morally correct.
Many we all know, regardlesswhether you choose to turn a
blind eye and you pretend to theoutside world that your line is

(23:44):
here and other people are herebecause they're scared or some
bullshit thing that you'resaying, we all know what is
right.
And to me, if you are the kindof person that does have that
principle and you want to holdyourself to an ethical high
standard, you have to acceptthat the world will always
glamorize even the people thatdon't have that, and so you have

(24:06):
to do it for yourself.
It has to be about what youbelieve to be true and it has to
be for you as an individual,and I just think success tastes
a little bit sweeter when youknow you've done it the right
way.

Darren Lee (24:15):
Yeah, and, as you said, right, the, the metric
that you're optimizing for.
It's funny, right I all.
I often heard this phrase,which is, like, stripe
screenshots only impress peoplethat are impressed by stripe.
Stripe screenshots, you know,and it's the same approach like,
your customers are a reflectionof you, the clients that you
have in your agency plus in yourcoaching.
They've come because they wantto be their mini use.

(24:35):
They're going through thatcycle of becoming you and you
probably hear that yourself, ora lot of people resonate with
your story when you were gettingstarted.
But I think it's a bigdifference here between like,
who's an actual business ownerin a space and then who's just
like I call it a wi-fi cowboy.
Like who's an actual cowboy.
And if I was to look at likewho's like a proper business
owner, you know surge, obviouslyyou know surge.
Well, serge kateri, if youspeak to surge, he just thinks

(24:59):
differently.
He just looks at a problem andhe would just say something and
he'd be like yeah, you do itthat way for this way, because
of this reason, because I alsowatched some fucking six hour VC
talk on AI startups in this wayand it's like he's clearly not
an online business, bro, andhe's actually more like an
actual entrepreneur and you canjust see that right.

(25:20):
You can see that in trades and Ithink if you get into something
with that approach, then you'llcrush it, because then you'll
know what you need to do morallyand then also like tactically
at the same time.
So anything else on theretention piece this is so
interesting, like if we were toseparate this conversation in
terms of acquisition retention.
We started with retention.
What else have you been able todo in your business to be able

(25:44):
to over deliver and get amazingresults for people and almost
manage a downside when thingsaren't good?

I think you have to own as much of the problem
as possible.
Um, and so certainly in theagency getting involved, I mean
we just started off just as likea meta ad agency and then we
fought only more of the problem,meant, okay, now let's start
doing email and doing this andstart doing that, like all these
different service stacks, andactually thought owning more of
the problem meant, okay, nowlet's start doing email and it's
doing this and it's not doingthat like all these different
service stacks, and actuallyit's more of owning more of the
problem from and it's it'sactually acting as if we are the

(26:17):
business owner ourselves andbeing a partner inside of the
company.
So when we are working with,let's say, a direct to consumer
e-commerce brand, we're gettinginvolved in the financials on a
much deeper level than just theads that we're running.
We're getting involved inconversations on their
contribution, margin and theproduct and manufacturing and so
on, and so that, from a logicalstandpoint, is one way to

(26:39):
deepen the relationship withclients is like, just own more
of the problem.
Like, think about the thingsthat they are thinking about
that keep them up at night, thatmake them stress.
So if your service does go well, if your ads do start running,
what are the other problems thatcould arise inside?
Like we mentioned earlier, yousolve sales and then teams are
problems, have team, and thenyou know clients are an issue,

(26:59):
and so on and so forth.
So if you, through repetitionof working with an industry for
a long time, you start tounderstand the patterns of
problems that will arise whenyou solve one thing, and so
preempting that and gettinginvolved in that gives you a lot
of longevity because it meansyou're just, you're ultimately
multiple steps ahead.
Giving people future when youwork with them is another big
one.
So working in phases so youmight have like, for example,

(27:24):
when we're working with anagency owner, there'll be like
10 phases of growth and agencieswill come to us at different
phases, but they'll always knowokay, we're working on this one
phase right now, we're going toget you to this stage and we
need to achieve this, this, thisand this in order to ascend you
there.
But then they know that thereare multiple other phases ahead
of them and having those kind offrames for agency and for
whatever that may be havingfuture, pacing the situation

(27:47):
that they are in right now givespeople future and means that
there's always something else towork towards, and that's not
just a good tactic from theperspective of you're obviously
going to retain more people ifthey have future, but it also
means that you're never runningbefore you can walk with a
client based on their situation.
So defining the situation thatthey're in in business makes it

(28:08):
much easier for them tounderstand where they're at as
well.

Darren Lee (28:10):
And again, just like that whole authority piece and
increases I think I've onlyreally learned that from the
coaching, which was thatobviously people can't just jump
in because magically have alltheir answers solved and I think
, if anything, it's criticallylocated.
I think I'm doing that more onthe on the coaching side versus
on the agency side, because theagency side for us a lot of it
is BAU.
It's like, yes, we need to getbetter numbers, get better

(28:32):
results, but it's like a systemthat's like always running Right
, um, and we often get handedwhat we're handed.
This with this piece of contentwe got to make, do what we need
to do.
But I think I completely agreewith you.
I think, even critically,looking and reflecting on my own
scenario, it's like if we cannot only take care of their
marketing but then also thesales side, that would make us

(28:53):
insanely more valuable, and thenalso even how they deliver
their own services, you know,their own uh, coaching and
consulting and everything likehow, and we do that to be fair.
But I just mean like a phasedapproach, because I always
compare that to our higherticket program.
It's leads, leads, salesdelivery, lead, sales delivery.
And then someone will come tous and they'll either have a
delivery problem easy fix, asales problem, easy fix.

(29:15):
Or leads problem, easy fix.
For content, does that makesense?
So everything is a fuckingframework.
Right, russell brunson wascorrect like name a framework,
put a framework on it.
But I think that allows peopleto tactically look at something
and you might find this quiteinteresting too.
I learned it from jeremy pogueof a podcast with him on tuesday
, which is, you know, you almostwant to give someone a map and

(29:37):
then show them in the map, likein the lucid chart, where are
they?
And then on a sales call youcan say, okay, you're here,
stage two.
We actually need to bring youback to stage one.
Here's stage four.
And then that map istransferable to 100 clients 100
customers, whatever that may be.

That's exactly what I'm referring to.
With the phases, many peoplewill think that they're further
along in their growth journeythan they actually are, and when
you're the person to educatethem that they're actually
closer to this point and like.
I don't want people tomisunderstand this, because what
this isn't about is about likemastering manipulation and
keeping people for a longer time.
What this is about isdemonstrating your knowledge and

(30:18):
authority on a certain fieldthrough hyper understanding of
where someone actually is, morethan their own understanding,
because most people thinkthey're bigger, better, more
established, more skillful, moreworthy of success and where
they should be than they are,and so bringing people back to a

(30:38):
reality point and you being theperson that allowed them to
understand that in a diplomatic,rational and logical way, where
you've got all these otherpeople that you have helped to
send through.
That is a big power play andallows people to trust in that.
It's like when you bring teammembers into the business.
Team members have to be sold ona vision.
They have to know where they'regoing inside of the company at

(30:58):
least senior team members or theguys that you just bring an A
player in and you know they'renot going to be satisfied in
that role for a long time.
So they have to have some kindof a future, and I think that's
one thing that most people lackin an agency is they will sign
up a client for a verytransactional thing we're going
to run your ads, we're going togenerate you leads, you're going

(31:18):
to get X amount money per month.
And then they do it for sixmonths and they wonder why the
client gets itchy feet and getssold by someone else who
promised them this other thingthat's more shiny, and so on.
And it's just because there'smore of a vision there, like
people get used to that youmight have the.
Your clients have a leadgeneration problem, let's say.
But if you weren't able to helpthem with that sales problem

(31:41):
that they're ultimately going tohave when they get an abundance
of leads, they're going to lookto someone else who can solve
that problem for them.
And then you've just lost theltv, your, your attention's
dropped.
So why wouldn't you have thatand create that future for them
so they can have a vision ofworking with you for a long time
?

Darren Lee (31:59):
spark so much in my head, man, I think that's so
that that was, as I said to youwith our education, why we put
in the second offer, why westarted putting in sales reps,
because people couldn't closethe door, let alone a fucking
six k, paid in full right, so wehad to show them elegantly how
to do it.
But that's also a component forthe agency is that can we bring
those people in, leverage ourpartnerships and everything.

(32:20):
So it's like different level,different devil, like you learn
this shit through trial by fireand it's like all right, how can
we just continuously improvethat ongoing?
Now my question for you in thisis like how do you manage this?
How do you manage all theclients you have?
How do you manage theirroadmaps?
And even you know fulltransparency?
I feel like sometimes I'm not asmuch on the ball specifically

(32:41):
with people's accounts because Ihave people who are right, but
that kind of gives me a littlebit of anxiety.
Sometimes I'm like, oh, maybe Ishould be, but it's literally
24 hours in a fucking day, right, like we have 115 active
clients across everything.
No, no, across everything.
The high ticket coachingprogram, which is, bear in mind,
is very close proximity to me,um, and the agency is about 115

(33:01):
now active that are payingmonthly, which is a lot, you
know.
So how do you do that.

So I will not sit here and take credit for
managing any of the clientsinside of the agency, because
Joe, my business partner in theagency, who is incredible, runs
the entire business and so he'smanaging the clients.
He's firefighting with anyissue.
Well, he's not managing theclients.
Our client success manager willbe doing that, and with account
managers and so on.

(33:30):
So that's the answer, right,yeah, you need that middle
management, and then you needsomeone senior in the company
who's going to stand in betweenyou and middle management,
ideally to be out of it.
I haven't spoken to a client inthe agency for years, but
that's good though thatliterally just means that like
it's working yeah, and and sothat's.
That's the situation.
On the agency side.
I spend a lot more time withthe coaching clients and again

(33:56):
it's the same situation.
It's having a team that peoplecan speak to.
They have.
It doesn't feel that manic forsome reason.

Darren Lee (34:20):
Maybe we just have good systems.
That's what I mean.
Right, you've fixed the holes athousand times over.
So when someone says, how do Iopen up a Google Ads account,
you have the training plus theCSM to resolve that issue.

We do a lot of one-to-one.
We have a whole client.
This is one thing that we dovery differently to lots of
education companies is we have awhole client success team that
aren't just your conventionalclient success managers that are
just managing communication.
They are one-to-one coaches whowill work with people very
intimately In our B2C.

(34:52):
So getting people to start anagency even more so than in our
established agency, becausethere's actually more one-to-one
In fact, every single weekthey're jumping on a one-to-one
call for the first 90 daysBecause this is something.
It costs us a lot of money todevelop and build that client
success team.

(35:15):
Let's say you were gettingsomeone from zero to ten came up
in their agency and it reallyjust came off the back of just
this little annoyance.
In my mind there's always beenthis thing and like, no matter
what niche you're in whetherit's agency, it's amazon, fba,
it's drop shipping, whatever Idon't care who you are and what
you do if you've got a biz opoffer where you're helping
people go from a consumer to abusiness owner, your actual
stick rate people putting in thework and doing the thing and
actually achieving the outcomethat they bought in the first

(35:37):
place is incredibly low, becausemost people are like, oh,
that's a bit hard, I'm not goingto bother doing that.
And I was just like how do Isolve this problem?
How do I actually get?
Because they have the dream.
They obviously want to besuccessful.
How do I stop people makingtheir first couple of cold calls
on their own and being likethat's shit, I'm gonna go to
this thing and go on to anothershiny object?
And so we got this clientsuccess team that we built and
every single week they areworking with them.

(36:00):
We actually took the model fromum I don't forget the name
something it's a commit action.
Are you familiar with commitaction?
It's an accountability coachingbusiness and you essentially
work with someone and they will.
You'll set your goals and thenthey will essentially um.
We model similar to this.
They will essentially set yourgoals and every single week you

(36:21):
will catch up with someone andthey will then hold you
accountable to what you said youwere going to achieve last week
.
And it's it creates that.
You know, when you have apersonal trainer in the gym,
you've got a personal trainer.
You feel guilty if you're notworking out in between that time
.
You want something to show forit.
You don't want to feel like aslob and you've skipped, and so
on.
Just having someone therecreates that pressure for you to
put in the work, and so wewanted to recreate that, almost

(36:41):
like having a personal trainerin business where every single
week they've got.
Okay.
Last week you said you weregoing to do X, Y, Z, whatever.
Where are you at with thatstuff?
Okay, we didn't achieve it.
Why did we not?
Let's coach through that process, let's review your calls and so
on, and then over the first,what we have now decided is 90
days.
Someone needs that Like justthat's enough time for them to
go through the transitionalphase of like consumer to

(37:03):
business owner.
But I mean, I don't know anyoneelse that does that.
They just let them do theirthing, which is fine if you're
okay with having a large amountof drop-off.
But I know these people come inhaving big dreams and I just
hate the idea that they come inand then that you one reason
they're not successful is themost in no other way of putting

(37:25):
it pathetic thing that couldstand in their way, which is
just not having the balls tostick at it for a long enough
time and then people create themost bullshit excuses of all
time, right, whether it'scoaching or agency in general.

Darren Lee (37:38):
Like they'll, they'll focus on some weird
external thing which is thereason why they're not getting
goal, you know.
So, again, that's a limitingbelief that steps in their way
and, dude, we have a clientright now, as soon as I do a few
one-to-ones of these people too, like on top of our CSMs, and
this guy was super experienced,10 years with a very senior

(37:58):
trading company.
He has like the experience outthe fucking back door.
But the guy was too afraid tohit record on a conversation and
I literally had to sit with himon Thursday evening, laying on
Thursday night, and say likelook, man, you've all this
information in your head is sovaluable to people that are just
getting into like theengineering space.
You need to get that out thereand no one is going to say that

(38:20):
you're a loser and you're abeginner.
If anything, he was superexperienced.
He's going to sit down andrecord it and by the end of 60
minutes he's like all right, I'mgoing to record three or four
videos.
I'm like all right, done, butit was that gap that's stopping
him right.
But the attentiveness that youhave with the CSMs are fantastic
.
My mate, dakota Robertson, he'sa very cool model which you
might find helpful.

(38:40):
They have like a weekly tracker,check-in tracker.
So they fill out a form likegive, what's your goal, what are
you focused on?
What's a bottleneck?
One to 10.
If anyone's like below, like afour, they send the data to
Airtable.
Then it fires like a fuckingnotification as API notification

(39:02):
and flags the client as like arisk or whatnot.
And then the CSM will come inand be like all right, what's
the problem here?
Like what can we do?
And also just people who aretoo lazy to do it.
They also flag when peopledon't complete the forms.
So on a Sunday, even if theydon't complete it, they'll hit.
Then they'll hit on Wednesdayagain.
It's like Wednesday, monday,wednesday and then a check-in.
You know.
So that's the only way that youcan really fucking do it right,

(39:26):
we do a similar thing.

We have we bought a system, we built a
system, we have an air tablesystem, but we have a notion,
front end for it and we justcall it our strike system.
So there are things thatidentify if somebody is an
at-risk client because theyhaven't turned up to a call or
they haven't achieved a certainthing, and then we obviously
give them that, that attention,which is you learn that from
agency, right?

Darren Lee (39:46):
you learn the the problem solving model, which is
like we're not getting thisproblem, we're not getting a
solution and we're not able tosolve it.
For this reason, how the helldo we communicate effectively?
Because I think what happenedeven in my scenario sometimes I
would say we need to do xyz, alldown here and you overwhelm
someone, and then they look forthat as an excuse as to why

(40:07):
they're not doing it too right.
It's interesting, as you said,like most people think they're
much further along in thejourney than what they truly are
, and then when you get them tosit down and look at it but this
has all just been retentiondude and like what's ironic is I
said this to will brown, I hadlunch with him yesterday, uh,
and I'd like to get yourthoughts on this we were mapping
out what a million a monthwould look like and I would, and

(40:28):
I was saying that a million amonth would look like and I
would, and I was saying that amillion a month is actually only
400K in new sales, because ifyour product is good, you should
be making like 400K in sales,plus the backend will kick in of
retainer clients plus yourcoaching clients all coming back
in and the velocity will meanthat you just need a good

(40:49):
product and they won't even goproduct.
You can just get more traffic toit, like he literally asked me.
He was like what's your biggestbottleneck?
And I was like we just needmore traffic because the
products get results.
You know, and it was veryinteresting conversation and we
were trying to like map it outbecause, like his last company,
he was pretty close to it and uh, it's not like new stuff.
New clients 24, seven.

Yeah, agree, agree.
And that new stuff, new clients, 24 7.
Yeah, agree, agree.
And that's the part that mostpeople have missing it's
actually being as self-observantas possible.
It's the thing I had that wrongfor six years probably.

Darren Lee (41:24):
That was will's problem with his last business.
Ask him about it.
So the only difference betweenhis last business, this business
, is that he's a reoccurring inthis one and and I said I was
like how didn't?
Because I come from the agencyworld.
So I was like how didn't youhave people on retainer or like
you know an upsell or whatever?
And he was he.
He honestly said I didn't, Ididn't think about it.
I was like you had fucking 15employees.

(41:44):
Not one person taught of likeuh, having them on like a some
sort of retainer model.

And he was like no, yeah, I, I sold, I sold
about two and a half thousandpeople on lifetime access and,
and, and it was like lifetimeaccess to coaching calls as well
.
Um, which is which is which ismanic, but I, I debate this like

(42:11):
all the time where peoplebrought, like all the time I
just thought that was whatpeople did and that's what I did
and and we, we managed to getaround it over time and people
get that, still kept that, keepaccess to the program and
they've got that.
But we changed the coaching andso we got around it and we had
a little bit of fallout aroundit, but the business just the
business wouldn't exist if wecontinue to do that.

(42:33):
Like you can't sign yourselfaway for for life.
There's not enough people inthe world.

Darren Lee (42:38):
It doesn't work dude , it was so funny.
It's in our mastermind.
Uh, the guys that had thatscenario, they were giving like
lifetime access and stuff, and Ihave a clip online you can see
it which is, um, and I get yourthoughts on this the duration of
.
Just because you're in aprogram longer doesn't mean
you're going to get more results, because it's like the.
It's like parkinson's law timewill expand to how much is

(43:00):
available.
So if it's infinite, they'relike ah yeah, I'll open up my
google ads account next month,next month.
So we had a 12-month program.
We brought it down to six sameprice, nothing, and results
stayed exact.
Stayed exact, same.
But the I love to get yourfeedback on this Um, the.
The kicker with this was, let'ssay, it's AK or 20 K for six
months.
After six months, you have anoption you can ascend, you can

(43:23):
stay in, which is like athousand a month or 500 a month,
depending on the program, oryou can leave, and if you leave
and you've got amazing results,fantastic, you're able to tell
more people if you leave.
But it was like how do wecreate a scenario whereby people
can just naturally move betweenprograms and they can stay in
the one that they want to, ifthey want to stay there longer,
and then they just pay.
And it's like a very fairexchange you stay, you pay to

(43:46):
stay, you ascend, perfect.
If you leave, that means you'vedone our job and it was like
okay, why don't we do this?
And that was what we were askedis like why?
Don't?
Someone asked was like whywould you do that?
And I literally just said tomake more money.

Yeah, and also, but it does increase.
So it's very interesting.
You still on six months now,but they're both six five, so
once a month rolling.

Darren Lee (44:06):
So so for the if, for the ak program it's 500 a
month to stay in after sixmonths 8K for the six months and
500 a month.

Yeah.

Darren Lee (44:14):
Or you ascend, okay, and then you can do a payment
plan for the 20K program Okay,because we have good trust.
And then the other one is 20Kand after six months it's a
thousand to stay in and likewhat's so funny is because we
teach whatever.
And then the feedback we get onsales calls is like so after
six months, I just got to giveyou a thousand dollars and
you'll review my sales calls.
I'm like, yeah, bro, yeah, it'schill.

(44:35):
Oh, my god, I'll review them.
I'll check the transcripts withai and they're like really.

I was like yeah yeah, okay, I mean that's a
banging offer.
I mean just as a caveat sidenote here, sales call reviews
for a thousand dollars a month.
It's a no-brainer.
It's like the single highestleverage thing that any sales
team can do and 200.

Darren Lee (44:54):
Imagine if they had 200 calls in a month and they,
well, yeah, and you're doing allthat with ai?
No, no.
They will basically like,they'll hand like a handful over
and then I will look fortranscripts and I'll be like,
give me the transcripts, we'llput it through ai and we build
out these like super autistic,like fucking different ai
prompts.
We'll get very, very detailedreports and then I'll go in,
I'll look at the objectionhandling, I'll go and review
them and all it's all scored.

(45:15):
So it's logical.
Plus you know the actual action.
And then I can even show you wehave this huge report and it's
all scored down.
I'll hand it back to them,we'll go through it together and
then I'll also help 50 otherpeople at some time, and it's
just this massive wheel ofmomentum and leverage which llm
handles that much volume oftranscript uh chat gbt if you

(45:38):
upload the pdf.

Awesome the doc.
Very cool, man, that's cool.
I built a similar system and II got stuck on that part and got
distracted with something else,so I was gonna buy gong and
stuff, right.

Darren Lee (45:49):
So I had a call with Gong it was so funny, they're
minimum four people, okay and itwas like 15K.
It was like 15K.
And I was on a call and theywere like, yeah, it's 15K and
you can review your sales calls,and this is just for enterprise
sales, it's not for coaching.
And I was like, okay, 15k forno one told for the year, for no

(46:12):
one told for the year for asoftware that is not optimized
for the offer that we're having.
And I literally looked at awoman.
I was like I'm just going tobuild in Chachi between 15
minutes.
I was literally the logic samewith even a sales, uh, the sales
management.
There's a very big company inthe space.
You work with them and I alsowork with them.
I closed, yeah, and I the guysare here, by the way, they're
racing volley I had a call withtheir sales team and it was like
10k and I was like, guys, Ialready have this shit, like I

(46:34):
actually already have it, and Ijust fucking press a button,
chat, gpt.
And I said it to them.
I was like, here's what we havealready.
And uh, so that's that'sinteresting around ai
development, which is like, howeasy is it for someone who would
have a quarter of a brain tobuild themselves?
Because, like, if you knowsales, hopefully I fucking know
sales um, it was very easy forme to see what the problem I was

(46:54):
trying to solve and then to useai to do it.
That's, I think that's the onlyrisk I see.

To like ai companies, yeah, is if someone
has a brain to do themselvesagree, agree, but uh, I think
that it is less about and I wantto come back to your, your
point just a moment ago on likethe on the month, yeah, yeah,
because, well, I'll just finishthat point.
Actually, uh, what you've doneis exactly what we did.
We went from 12 months to sixmonths and then we basically
have a similar like 1k monthlyrolling.

(47:19):
So so what you're doing isexactly what we're doing and we
saw and in that, in doing sixmonths, we saw a spike in
results because the pressurethat people have to put.
So it's a, it's a win-win foreveryone, win for the clients,
win for us.
So, on, ai companies, um, Ithink that is a problem on an
individual client basis, butit's not a threat to the ai
company itself, because and mostpeople will pay for convenience

(47:43):
, and I think sass is just asmuch about brand and community
as it is about product itself-yeah, 100.

Darren Lee (47:50):
if you think about sass, it's like running a low
ticket offer, you know becauseof the price, you know the churn
is and most people pay forconvenience.

There will always be smart people like you
that will go ahead and build asolution and analyze it
themselves.
Until what has to happen in theAI SaaS space is these
companies have to start buildinga moat.
They have to start buildingtheir own, what I see as
mid-tier proprietary tech, whichwill be the bridge between an
LLM that they're leveraging,because LLMs even by VC firms

(48:21):
are being viewed at.
I thought and my concern withAI software was that LLMs like
ChatGPT, companies that dependon them and so on the companies
that depend on them will be onwill.
The companies that depend onthem will be looked in a
negative light because it's likethere's so much dependency on
an external software.
Vc firms are looking at acompany depending on ChatGPT as

(48:42):
an econ brand is on Shopify.
You know it's just a technologyand it's just a given and it's,
at least for now.
That's just the presumed, it'sjust the back-end technology,
which is a presumed.
That's fine.
So where do you then create moreum ip?
There will be a gap.
I think that gap will be increating uh uh machine learning

(49:03):
models.
So let's say you, as, let's say, a company like gong um, have
um, their own system thatreviews sales calls and so on.
On an enterprise level, gong isa company that have followed
their growth for a long time anddone insanely well.
For anyone that hasn't seenGong's growth journey, it's
mental.
But what Gong do have is theirown internal machine learning

(49:24):
systems, which will then learnbetween and whether or not
that's just a great salesmechanism, I don't know, know, I
haven't used it that will learnbetween all the clients that
are being used and learn on youraccount.
So, for example, your clientshave been using it for six
months.
The, the model that iscritiquing the sales call, will
self-learn and get better atcritiquing the sales calls and
therefore you'll get betteroutput with the input that is

(49:47):
possible for someone likeyourself to build.
But if a business owner you'redoing it because you need to
create the solution to sell tosomeone else, the business owner
is doing it for themselves.
It's a huge amount of work ifthey're then looking to make it
that sophisticated.
So I think the moat is createdthrough machine learning systems
and then having the data acrossthousands of clients to make it

(50:09):
better, and that's what you'reselling.
You're selling the fact thatyour ai is better than everyone
else's ai because everyoneelse's is a surface level prompt
which may be great and havecontext and experience, but it's
surface level and it doesn'thave the context of all of the
other, uh, all of the otherthousands of clients that they
have and has kind of learnedover time, that's what I was

(50:30):
concerned about with thevaluation of them, because, uh,
of course, it is a ton ofcompanies that are coming out
that are building their own lmsand it was completely
proprietary.

Darren Lee (50:39):
But the ones that are leveraging chat, gbt or
fucking claude or whatever werethey going to be at risk as a
result?
That was my only consideration,but it sounds like there's like
a hybrid approach with that.

Yeah, I don't know I mean none of us know like
I don't think we can possiblypredict where it's going to go,
but at least at the moment it'sjust a presumed thing.
Like I just like.
What is the benefit of creatingyour own llm?
I had a massive.
I had a conversation last weekwith a huge company that have
their own llm and they're'regoing to be leading the.

(51:13):
I'm not going to mention them,but they had you'd be able to
reverse engineer it.
They had a $220 millioninvestment pre-product.
It's like Google, ai founders,silicon Valley.
They're going to be leading theAI agent field where you put in
a prompt, takes over yourcomputer type thing, and then
you will spend a whole dayworking on your behalf that kind
of prompt.

(51:33):
So the the evolution of astandard llm.
But what is the benefit ofhaving your own proprietary llm
if you are only just simplyusing it as a component of your
business?
Your business is what is is thething that you're trying to
achieve with that as that, as ajust a tool.
It's like e-commerce brandswhen Shopify first came out,

(51:56):
trying to create their ownShopify.
Why do that?
Your product is the productthat you are selling.
It's not the tech.
So it's just a tech and I thinkonly because it's new we think
it's a vulnerability, but it'sjust going to become the tech.
Eventually there will only betwo or three llms that people
actually use, bro, it's like uh,using chrome.

Darren Lee (52:16):
Like your website, your web app is hosted on chrome
, exactly you're not building aweb browser for your website
exactly.

You're not creating this web browser so you
can open my website.

Darren Lee (52:26):
You're not creating happening I guess the only
critique on that is just thefact that a company that's
coming in to value it wouldthink that is this something
that sits on top or is itsomething that owns their tech?
Because I think it's from theangle of do you own your tech or
not?
I guess do you own yourproprietary tech?

But they are buying your customers and
they're buying your brand equity.

Darren Lee (52:47):
But some people buy tech, though, do you get me?
Of course, that's what I mean,and that will increase your
valuation exactly so like youknow, if you're like a young guy
who's building like a micro sasor whatever, sometimes it could
be just the tech that you haveis seen as a threat to a
competitor, so people just buyit.
There's like, oh yeah, justlike.
I'm saying this because when Iworked at revolute, we used to
do that, man, like we would lookin the market to see who would
have some sort of like money,market money, uh, market fund

(53:11):
tech, and they would just nip,nip, nip, and then we do a lot
of integrations.
Revolut was a very funnycompany to work at because they
owned nothing.
They were a shell.
It's a shell company and theywould buy data which is
completely like as if fromvendors.
So they would go to, like, uh,morgan stanley, they'd go to
MSCI, we'd buy market data.

(53:31):
Then we'd buy currency datadude, so we'd buy like the
latest currency of like fuckingGBT or whatever GBP, british
pound and then we just have thisshell company with a bunch of
tech that was integrated with itand it was very interesting to
observe.
Now, obviously, revolut's worthlike $20 billion still.
So they obviously did well.

(53:52):
But that was my first awakeninginto fuck.
You don't actually need to knowtech that well to build
something very successful,because whenever we would look
to build something, it was sointeresting, I would build
something very simple, dude, I'dbe like a news feed for stocks
and it would be like okay, I usethese components.
How it would look who has thedata?

(54:13):
Let's ring the japanese fuckingbank.
See, do they have the data?
You'd ring them, find a price,you'd be on a retainer like an
agency service and that was it.
Funnily, how I got into agencieswas because of that.
I used to be the buyer, so Iwould have to do proposals.
It wasn't adding heavy, but itwas, for the most part,
proposals.
We'd have to go to fivedifferent service providers.
They would pitch, we'd do ademo, they would come in with

(54:36):
their pitch and they wouldexactly operate like an agency.
So this is a tech companyselling to a tech company their
data, and it would be a serviceprovider, otherwise known as a
vendor, and it would be fine.
It would literally be 5k amonth, 3k a month, 2k a month
for a tiny piece of data andit's the same.
As you said, your first thingat the start of the conversation

(54:58):
was when you learn how to buildan agency or a service
providing business.
It feeds into everything else.
This is enterprise fuckingsoftware.
We're buying at scale for tensof millions of customers and
it's the same shit as running asgetting a Google Ads contract
over the loon.

I think there's a huge amount of opportunity and
money to be made in micro SaaSin the AI space and I think
there's a three-year window forit.
I think in three years' timethings are going to get all kind
of fucked up.
I mean, I think in the shortterm, I think there's a lot of

(55:37):
money to be made in thosebusinesses, whilst things are
super inflated and and vc isloving that, because those kind
of companies can have likemassive cash flow as well but
there'll always be another thingthough right, like tech is
never going anywhere.

Darren Lee (55:44):
Right same with services.
Right, there'll always beservices just to make cash flow.
But I mean like and I'm sayingthis from someone who came up in
the fintech era um, like Idon't know where, you're not
familiar with it, but like theneo banks in london, I was in
the investment banks when theneo banks were starting monzo
n26, all this kind of shit thatcame, and then, like crypto came

(56:04):
, and then, like, now it's likeai is coming.
Now, of course, you want tostrike while the fires are
fucking hot and you don't wantto sleep on it 100.
But I'm saying that, like, techis always going to be getting
more advanced, and if you're nota potato, you should.
You should be stamping yourfoot there.
Do you not think there's awindow?
Of course, everything iscyclical.

Yeah, but I mean just at point.
Things are going toself-engineer and at that point
I think, I believe that onlinebusiness will roll up into big
conglomerates over the next 10years and I think that online
business as we know it willcease to exist.

Darren Lee (56:43):
What Tell me.

That's what I believe to be true.

Darren Lee (56:47):
In what way?

I cannot see a way at the rate that AI is
growing right now.
Have you seen the ai 2027prediction?
I would recommend you having alook at that and, for anyone
who's watching this as well,there's a few like
scaremongering bits in there,but there's a prediction that is
written by um, open, airesearchers, harvard university
ai professors, etc.
Like very credible people andjust on their prediction of how

(57:10):
quickly things are going to goand by 2027 they believe that
we're going to be a place wherewe have superhuman um, ai, as
has superhuman ability in codingin, in in workflow, in anything
that we possibly do, superhumanbeing better than any human can
do achieve right now, in anyonline-based web application,

(57:33):
from a development topractically completing a task,
to copywriting, whatever thatmay be by 2027.
And then at that point,companies will inevitably have
every role in the business thatisn't customer-facing.
Ai to some degree will be somekind of agent, because it won't

(57:54):
make any sense not to.
So, just as a precursor to this,go high level huge company
attended our awards evening acouple of weeks ago in London.
1500 employees across thatbusiness, huge, they said their
single biggest threat and thething that they are worried
about the most is young techstartups who are built using AI

(58:20):
from the start.
Because when you're a companyat the size that Go High Level
are now worth billions, butyou've got 1,500 employees, the
path that you have to go throughto go from 1500 employees to
rebuilding, essentially in acompletely new era where other
people are going to be able tobuild tools like GoHighLevel at

(58:43):
so much cheaper, so much faster,and so on, it's like Slack.
Slack is internally built byanyone Exactly, and so it will
then become about brand, it willthen become a community, and so
on and so forth.
That will be the single mostimportant thing, like in
business in general.
But if, anyway, coming back tothe main point, if people are,
then most of their workload is.
So by 2027, it's predicted that90 of all workflows will be

(59:05):
you'll be able to use ai forthem online.
So if, at that point, that'sour first progression, then most
we will end up eliminating themajority of the team that we
have, apart from the people thathave really demonstrated that
they have huge intrinsic valueas a human to to bring to the
company.
Aka, they have great ideas,they're good communicators,
they're creative, exactly.

(59:25):
Um, and so then where do we gofrom there?
Well, that weeds out a hugepart of the market because
everybody's super efficient,everybody's like there's, the
options are very clear,everybody's delivering a good
service.
At that point, because, unlessyou're a bad communicator,
because everyone's going todeliver, if you're in any kind
of marketing based business, ifyou're running ads, if you're,

(59:46):
if you're, your content issomething to be debated.
Um, with enough context, aiwill be better at content than
we are.
It'll be far better.
It knows humans, it knows whatmakes us tick, it can
cross-analyze algorithms andwhat makes things viral, it will
be able to do that at a muchfaster rate.
Mr Beast I saw in an interviewnot too long ago was talking
about how they grew that channel.
There was four of them, just 18hours a day.

(01:00:08):
They were just analyzingyoutube channels and they were
just analyzing thumbnails,analyzing titles, analyzing
videos, analyzing hooks, andthat is essentially what ai can
do much faster.
Put that in with something likequantum computing and we can't
even imagine the rate at whichthings can be analyzed and the
input from the creative with theexperience to know what to look

(01:00:28):
at exactly because the end, theoutput, is only as valuable as
the input.
Right and how you look at thedata and how?

Darren Lee (01:00:35):
yeah the out.
Yes, you have to know what goodoutput is.

Jordan Platten (01:00:38):
You know you can't.
Even ar could be the bestcopywriter in the world, but if
you don't know what good copy is, you won't be able to judge
whether or not it is actuallygood 100.

So would you say in that regard, the role of the
entrepreneur in that scenario isto know how to look at the
output in terms of if 19 oftheir workflow is going to be
taken care of and if agencieswhich required 40 people only
needs three right now.
What is the role of theentrepreneur in that scenario in
2027, when ai is taken over theworld?

to have a deep understanding of what good is,
because in the short term, likewhat we're seeing in info right
now and in agency, you've got ahuge opportunity for like 16
year old entrepreneurs with nobusiness acumen to come in and
make money.
And this isn't about makingmoney because, like, there's
money to be made in the shortterm, but creating like a
long-term business that's goingto survive.

(01:01:27):
That will be reserved for thepeople that have a depth of
understanding about a certainfield, because what actually is
going to happen with the guysthat are starting with ai now is
their intelligence is going todrop, like human intelligence
will drop over time because ofreliance on ai to give us the.
I mean we use chat gpt on adaily basis to to help us with
everything right I literallyrewrote my headline this morning
for a vsl ad, only with chatgpt.

and a funny thing was I gave it to my friend Lara,
who's one of the bestcopywriters, arguably like in
the world at the moment, and shelooked at the output of the
five different variations andshe was like pick number three.
That's one of the bestheadlines I ever read in my life
.
I didn't even tell her it wasvideo.

So what happens to people that don't have your
depth of experience?
They just stop learning how towrite good VSLs and therefore
they don't then understand whata good headline is, and then
over generations that drops.
Anyway, that's kind of like aseparate thing.
I think when businesses, wheneveryone's delivering good
results and so on, I thinkultimately roll-ups will happen.
We see in, the ultimatesophistication of any market is

(01:02:25):
when you see the M&A reallycomes in and everyone starts
doing roll-ups.
I think agency is actuallystill relatively young in M&A
and roll-ups we're seeing moreof it.
There's a company in the UKright now called Supergroup that
are doing a big roll-up withlots of agencies.
We're starting to see roll-up.
We had a conversation off cameraabout in the education space
and then as more people doroll-ups, as more people do M&A,
those M&A companies roll upinto other and eventually you

(01:02:47):
just end up with a core group ofconglomerates that control the
market.
And if everything can beautomated, what is the role of
people in that?
So I think long term we're allgoing to be back into physical
business.
I don't see any way that that'snot going to happen.
That's at least the way Iperceive the next 20 to 30 years
to go.

(01:03:08):
I think online business isgoing to go for a shake,
shake-up that most people therewill be no adjustment period and
how quick that's going tohappen.
I think that I don't believethat any of us, at least in our
lifetime, have ever witnessedanything that has came and

(01:03:32):
changed our reality as quick asai both already has and is going
to.
I think the rate that ai willmove and grow will be far
quicker than most people havethe ability to adapt to 100 and
it was so interesting becauseyou'll love this.

When I started the agency, when I went kind of all
in on it, it was like 2022.
I've been doing it for beforethen, but this is when I like
put more team onto it andeverything.
We had got to like 20 clientsor 30 clients and I remember we
were using ChatGBT in the earlyfucking days to help with copy,
to help with transcripts, tohelp with short form at the time

(01:04:12):
, and I remember at that pointbeing like I would need 50
employees right now.
If I didn't have this and itwas me dude who was running the
transcripts through ChatGPT I'drun it through, I'd see the
issues, I'd see what needs to beremoved, I'd see the titles I'd
need like seven copywriters.
That was in 2022.
And the whole logic, the entiretime was like my mental model is

(01:04:32):
like how do we get to theresults faster and easier, with
less of the heartache and lessof the headache?
It's always a mental model justfor everything in life and,
looking at that right now, therestill is people who are just so
resistant to it.
But they're dumbasses.
Let's be clear.
Right, because why would younot do it right?
It's like it's like the wholedebate with like Ozembic, right,

(01:04:53):
it's like, yes, the underlyingbehavior is that you're still a
fat fuck 100%, but you can getgoal this way.
And I'm not necessarily faragainst it, but I'm saying it's
an interesting observationbecause it's just human
psychology, right, I said to youearlier about my dog.
My dog can jump on the table andshe knows that's where the dog
food, the cat food, is.
Now we have an AI feeder thatfeeds the cat cat food when the

(01:05:20):
cat's head's there.
The dog has now learned thatshe can play off the cat for a
cat to feed out the food and forher to eat it.
That is the best example ofevolution.
It's the fucking best example.
The cat will do it, the dogwill do that until the cat dies
100%.
And I think it's looking at you, that lens, and that's an
amazing example of the rightpeople doing it.
Because I've actually had aclient said to us before that we
were using too much ai and Iwas like and my feedback was

(01:05:45):
this is not process, not anoutcome.
My feedback was we wouldactually be a fool to not do
that, because why else would wedo it?

you know from you have the ability to do so
because you have the depth ofexperience on what good is and
that's, and, and I think, Ithink that that's what process
improvement is, by the way.

Yeah, you know, if you look at process, if you
looked at I didn't mean tointerrupt you if you looked at,
like coca-cola and the conveyorbelt and manufacturing, they
will look at process and say,hey, we're losing x amount on
efficient inefficiencies.
We need to change the sparkplug over there.
That's, that's what processimprovement is largely.

Don't get me wrong in all this.
This does not change the factthat, in the short term short
being three to five years peoplelike you and I 90% of people
watching this right now are soearly to what is going to be the
greatest opportunity of many ofour lifetimes.

I said it was the Trump administration is our last
hurrah, because when it wasflaky about Trump getting
admitted, I was thinking that ifthere was a huge like mega
1930s, a colonization recession,all the service providers would
get like chopped um to another.
So actually let me correct soit takes it back when I started
my agency was when, initially,when all the markets crashed,

(01:07:02):
that was the best time for me toget into the space, because I
was selling b2b into america andeveryone on sales call would be
like don't tell fucking thatbitch britney, but I actually
want to go with you.
So don't tell fucking thatbitch Brittany, but I actually
want to go with you, so I don'tneed to pay for their healthcare
and their days off andeverything.
And then I was like yeah, noproblem, you can come with me,
you can leave whenever you want.
If I don't do a good thing, youcan walk out the door.
So we were selling a ton of B2Bbecause they wanted an

(01:07:25):
outsourced marketing team.
And then I thought in 2024, whenthe election was happening, if
Trump doesn't get elected, maybethere's a deeper recession
which would mean that coachingpeople would pull out on their
investing in education budget.
And then it didn't come to cometo be Trump, got elected and

(01:07:46):
then I said to my wife I waslike let's just run it for four
years as hard as possible,because, like those, rebalances
do happen, man, and maybe arebalance in the market, like
the financial markets, is tiedto a rebalance in technology.
Ai increases so much, jobautomation becomes so much
higher that unemploymentskyrockets, even though GDP

(01:08:09):
actually increases.
It's like this weird time inhistory whereby the market
breaks from society yeah, 100.

It's interesting .
I was in a conversation acouple of weeks ago um and uh,
it was secondhand conversationwith a guy called steven
bartlett who, who some peoplewill know as a he chain and big
agency, exited that.
Now it's like an investor andDiary of a CEO podcast.
You, of course, very familiaryourself, and he was having a

(01:08:41):
conversation at an event that Iattended, and that conversation
was the way that they werelooking at AI across the group
of companies that they work withand they have launched a
company-wide initiative acrosseveryone's side of the business
in which everybody now has beentasked with making themselves
redundant through AI, and thatdoesn't mean they're not going

(01:09:03):
to have a job.
It means that their job as theyknow it right now will cease to
exist and then they will evolveinto something else.
Whatever that is, where can weactually add value?
So it's like looking ateverything that I do which is
mundane, where this shouldrepeat which could be automated
with today's technology, butalso planning the things that
will soon be able to beautomated with future technology

(01:09:25):
, and re-looking at the way thatthey fulfill their work.
It's making people teams.
The worst thing you could do asa company is protect your team
from AI, your team now, earlytoday, because, as I said, that
adjustment period is coming.
The adjustment period is goingto be a shock to most companies
and they're going to be likeshit, what do we do?
We're panicking, blah, blah,blah.

(01:09:46):
Smart companies right now willbe having those conversations
with their team and saying justso you know, AI is coming for
your job, but I'm not going tocome for your job.
I want you to be here becauseyou're amazing for all these
reasons, but I want you to startthinking about how you can
replace yourself with AI beforeit replaces you without your
control.
And then I want you to thinkabout where you can add value to
the business outside of whatyou do right now, and I think

(01:10:07):
that's a very valuable frame toapproach this new era that
people are going to come into.
It used to be an info that you'dbe able to create a new VSL and
it'd be like that's nice, 12months, I can just run them ads,
I'll just let that run, and soon.
You'd be able to create one newconversion vehicle that you've
got some new ads running.
You'd let them run for likethree months, so on.
But everything is justincreasing, the rate in which we

(01:10:29):
need new creatives every twoweeks.
Now we need to be split testing.
It's so much faster.
We can no longer.
I remember I used to have, Iused to upload this one YouTube
video every year.
I did upload every week, butthere was one significant
YouTube video that was like howto start a social media
marketing agency.
That video generated 90% of myrevenue.
It generated me millions, andthen I'd create a new one the

(01:10:51):
next year and a new one and Ijust that was my main conversion
mechanism that we would neverwatch.
Now that's like you might.
You might want to do one ofthose like maybe every month in
order to retain, like some kindof authority and get enough
traffic coming into the business.

I've literally had to do that we always said, like
the hero vs out approach.
We were like, oh yeah, this isthe video, that's fine.
And then a month later it'slike no one's fucking watching
the thing.
It's the main video on thechannel.
No one's watching.
Gotta make a new one, gottamake a new one.
But but again like and then you, being you and being an animal,
you're like, yeah, I, we needto do this right.
Like you look at it objectivelyand then think, okay, this is

(01:11:26):
the next step.
But for me, like the biggesttake home for this from this is
it's a consultative approach.
It's just consulting, likeeverything is consulting and
coaching.
And I think, as much as peoplelike hit on Infospace, if you're
a good coach man and you cantruly like mentor and guide
people, it adds a lot of weight.
It's almost like, as you said,the physical business component
of just the human part is themost important.

(01:11:48):
It's like looking at all thedata, it's all sorted correctly
now, because before data wasunstructured but now everything
is structured.
So looking at it and saying,like you should do this.
You know, you probably know thefamous it's actually a fable of
the guy in the warehouse, themanufacturing plant.
Oh, this is such a good story.
So there's a story of thismanufacturing plant and they're

(01:12:11):
bleeding money, so every monththey lose $50,000 and they can't
figure out what's wrong.
And they got these pipes goingand this thing running and
there's a ton of things movingand they hired this consultant
and this guy comes in and hewalks around and they think,
yeah, it could be this and itcould be that and it could be
this.
And then the guy walks over tothis massive machine and he puts

(01:12:33):
an X on the top of the machineand he says change that and all
the inefficiencies will be fixed.
And the guy's like, thank you somuch, thank you so much.
And he said, yeah, I'll sendyou the invoice.
And the next morning the bossopens up his laptop and he sees
the invoice and it says fiftythousand dollars.
And the guy shits his pants andrings him and he says, hey, I
just got an invoice for fiftythousand dollars, what's up?

(01:12:55):
And he said the x was onedollar and where to put it was
forty nine thousand nine hundredninety nine dollars.
And that's what took him 25years to learn.
And that's the whole approach,that's the consulting element in
what you do, I think.
Think it's super interesting,man.

Yeah, it's awesome man, and I agree that
being a consultant I mean it's awhole being a consultant is the
result of doing something verywell for a good period of time.
Like I do think the bestconsultants are the guys that
have jumped in to you had yourpodcast that evolved into, you

(01:13:34):
know, having the agency.
That evolved then into verynatural.
You've had a very similarjourney to me in the sense that
it's been a very naturalevolution of what you've done.
It's kind of like you've felt afool not to make that next step
because you have thisopportunity that presents you.
We have a world now, though,where coaches, uh, never did the
thing before they startedcoaching.
Um, I think there's always beena huge element of that, and, uh

(01:13:57):
, and their testing mechanismhas been whether or not the
clients have got results fromthe advice that they gave them.
So it's like, let me give themthis advice.
Did it work?
Oh, no, it didn't.
Okay, I won't say that anymore.
Did it work?
Yes, it did, whereas we kind oftest through reality and then
apply it to at least in my case,test through reality in the
agency and then apply it to theclients, because I know it's

(01:14:19):
already proven.
So I think AI will inevitablyend up reducing the ability for
people to jump into the coachingspace.
In light of that, if, uh, ifit's going to become more
important that we are actuallyjust good coaches and know what
we are talking about yeah, it'sjust.

It goes back to the proof elements.
I think you always have to doit for yourself before you do it
for anybody else and likethat's the first marker, right?
I thought people like yeah, youmay not have a ton of
testimonials, but like did youdo it for yourself?

Yeah.

Like I literally know, like fat loss coaches who
are fat.
It's like, bro, like that's thething that you sell is fat loss
and you are overweight, andit's like it's a lack of
awareness, like a lot of people,a lot of entrepreneurs, just
have a lack of awareness.
There's optimism and delusion,which is really, really
important to be able to look atsomething like yeah, I think
it's going to work.

(01:15:13):
But if you're just actual,straight up delusional, that's a
complete different issue.
Man, you know, I think, uh,let's kind of go back around to
even like how you, how thesecompanies are growing right, so
you've worked with, even if youlook at your podcast, some of
these agencies have grown scaleso much, right, do you think
it's realistic to run like amillion a month agency realistic

(01:15:36):
?

sure over a long enough time frame five years
probably it would take you tounless you have a really unique
service to a unique marketplace.
Whether you would want to isanother thing entirely human man
hours and managing teams ofthat scale.
I think a business, or at leastan agency, becomes a very

(01:16:01):
different beast when you have tohave middle management, when
you have to have not just amanager but you have directors
and then in between yourself.
I think that is the point wherethings start to get very
stressful for the model.
I think there are better modelsthat exist beyond that point,

(01:16:22):
because if you're running anagency at a million a month
unless you're working towardsexit, if you're working towards
an exit so there's a goal at theend of it, then great.
But if you're working forcashflow, which most
entrepreneurs are, at least inthe first bunch of years, then
there's probably better vehiclesto be making a million a month
on.
So you definitely can.
There's hundreds, probablythousands of agencies I mean

(01:16:45):
probably hundreds that are atthat point.
But to give context to that,there's an agency who I've
worked with since the birth ofthem.
They're a UK-based e-commerceagency.
They were at Xero, started inuniversity.
They now are doing 750k a month.
They're going to be doing amillion a month soon, but they
have 100 team members across twooffices Now.
100 team members a million amonth.

(01:17:06):
There are info businesses with20 team members making a million
a month.
There are sasses making abillion a year with 20 team
members making a million a month.
There are sasses making abillion a year with 30 team
members.
You know, telegram has 33 teammembers.
What so when you compare themodels and it's whether you want
to, it's not whether it'spossible, it's whether you want
to.
You've got to really, reallylove it to run an agency at a

(01:17:28):
million a month because team hasgot to be huge that's so
interesting.

I'm even comparing it to like dan martell's
coaching.
So he's rough.
Apparently he's doing between20 and 30 million a month.
No sales call.
Sorry, 20, 30 million a year.
Uh no, no sales calls, like 14closers that are all sold by
chat and then just a few csms.
And I know that martel, is thatmartel right?

how many team members?

sorry, total, roughly uh probably 20, yeah,
around 20, 20, 30, and they'reall support coaches with him and
then sales.
So let's see, that's it.
And he has so much volume ofpeople coming through, it's like
how do we again, how do wethink about solving that problem
?
Right, like, how do we get tothat cash flow number?
How do we get to that revenuenumber?

(01:18:14):
And we discuss this in the nextsection, which is profitability
.
Right, like dude, I've seenfucking hell, I've seen some of
the big agencies doing 25million a year and I can't
imagine their revenue, theirprop margins, more than, like,
eight percent.
I would say it's literally lessthan that, because some of them
are taking their product splits, so their profit share of the

(01:18:39):
product.
So they have client pays,retainer pays, their OPEX, and
then they take a profit share,like 10% of profit, obviously of
profit and know, and then theyhave staff and huge staff.
It's crazy man.

I think if you're running an agency at
scale like a million a month, ifyou're doing a good job, you
can still maintain a good 30%profit margin.
That's not to say it will alwaysbe the case.
The thing is with agency profitis it always fluctuates because
you're always hiring for demand.
You're always hiring in advancefor demand and it's very hard
to predict demand when you getto a certain point in the agency

(01:19:14):
where outbound doesn't sustainyou and so you just rely on an
inbound and referrals.
That's why most agencies, themajority of very big corporate
agencies, just rely on inbound.
It's only an inbound play veryfew of them.
So since launching agencygiants that the, the agency
podcast and we've just beenspeaking to bigger, larger

(01:19:37):
caliber agencies agencies havehad exits for eight figures and
um and and to to multinationals,I think, apart from the, the
agencies that I've interviewedthat have gone through my
mentorship if I can't think of asingle one that has an outbound
account acquisition system anda single one that actually runs

(01:19:58):
ads other than retargeting.
Every single one of them, atbeyond a certain point is
referrals, which is why theretention piece is so important.
Fucking hell, that's supersurprising.
It's interesting, isn't it?

yeah I.

I spent 180 more , about 100, close to 150 000
pounds developing a software foragencies on an enterprise level
so they could track outboundsales data, to start that
podcast and realize thatagencies of a certain caliber
didn't do outbound, which is abig lesson, a huge lesson.

(01:20:31):
I mean we built it forourselves first, so we built it
for our own agency so we coulddo post course reports,
attribute, do all of the, youknow, attribute all the data
properly, and it was, it's been,it's paid dividends in that
sense.
But then we spend a lot ofmoney then developing it for
others, only to realize that onan enterprise level most
agencies are just referrals yeah, because I even think of the

(01:20:51):
big ones in the podcast space.

You know, like they're ghosts, they're just.
You don't see them.
They're not on social media,they don't do anything, they're
just.
And we, we feed into a lot ofthem because we buy or we'll
sell services to and from them.
Um, but I don't know them.
I just see their fucking, Ijust see their domain at the
bottom of emails.

I'm like, all right, that's julia, yeah it's
all human, it's all relationshipbased, it's all like your ogle
v's and so on.
That it's all.
Agencies will develop aphysical presence in a physical
location so they can spendphysical time with physical
people, and that's how theystill run, in a very traditional

(01:21:35):
way that's such an interestingpoint, man, that's such an
interesting agencies won't scaleto another region because they
don't have an office there if Ilook at lower street, which is
one of the bigger podcastagencies in london, they,
they're like that.

You don't know them at all.
The founder was on my podcastyears ago.
They work with like sam per andstuff from the hamptons, but
that's it and they're just.

They're just ghosts in the background that's
not to say it's the way thatit's, that has to be done.

That's what I'm thinking I'm like I wonder how
much does that restrict you?
Right?
Because it's kind of like youknow, the guys coming to you and
they probably ask you this dumbquestion which is, like you
know, I only sell in my localtown.
It's like, dude, like there'sall the other people in the
world too that you can sell to,right, like the many people that
have come into us who are notmaking money because they're
trying to sell to like joe'sbarber, and I'm like could you

(01:22:27):
consider just doing that in,like america, the?

the thing is with.
It is beyond a certain level ofagency.
When you're at like two, threehundred k, you only want to be
bringing in clients.
Minimum client value 15k amonth and that's like kind of
like 10 15k a month and your ltvis at least 50k.
You really want in projectvalue to be like 50, 100, 200k,

(01:22:51):
200k.
So the debate is does outboundhave a place when you are
putting yourselves in front ofpeople that aren't proactively
looking for that?
What is your success rate atthe volume of outreach that you
will need to do in order to getthe right person at the right
time, which is what reallyoutreach is.
You are getting the rightperson at the right time.
That is feeling the pain inthat very moment, which is why I

(01:23:12):
always recommend, let's say,you're doing email outreach.
You rotate for your leads everythree months and, yes, your
message has to be great.
Yes, your off-the-hand has toresonate, yes, your subject line
has to be good.
But most of the time, truth betold, if all of those things are
right and that's the baselineit's like content.
You could have content.
It just has to be good.
That's the baseline, you know.
But then your title andthumbnail is the most important
thing, but only if the contentis good.
The email has to be writtenwell, the subject and so on.

(01:23:39):
But when it all comes back downto it, you've just hit the
right person at the right timeand they were feeling the pain
and they resonated with you.
So how many times are you goingto do that and get like a 15k a
month client, 20k a monthclient?
So it's kind of diminishingreturns versus sending people to
events, versus going tonetworking events, versus
getting in front and going fortenders, which is what you do
when you pitch amongst another20 agencies who are going for

(01:24:01):
this.
When someone said I want thisthing and they're doing that,
and so what I hear most very bigagencies do is they'll always
look for what a?
I've forgotten the agency thatsaid this on the pod, but one of
the agencies had a massive exitand they said that they always
look for gateway drugs, and Iactually think it's Blackbeard.

(01:24:23):
They're a creative agency inManchester.
They have been around for about25 years, very well established
.
They always look for gatewaydrugs, and what they mean by
that is they look for thesmallest engagement possible
with the biggest companies thatthey can find and they just want
to prove themselves, becauseyou just prove that you are who
you say you are and you can dowhat you say you can do in this
world of thousands and thousandsof agencies.
They do that one little projectand it opens up the whole world

(01:24:46):
to building biggerrelationships, and that's what
they're really looking for.
It's like, who's looking forthese projects?
And can I not even just go forthe big dog?
Can I just do one small part ofthat project and then win the
big contracts and it's just all.

Relationship plays at a certain scale it's all
relationships, even even in thebeginning.
It still is relationships, youknow, for the very for.
That's why I try to bringpeople to bali when they get a
chance and it's made hugeunlocks but because it's low
ticket, outbound works reallywell and I'm a huge advocate for
outbound.

I mean, you know me cold, me cold called forever
door to door emails.
That's, I love it, that's howyou get going, like even an info
outbound would be massive forpeople just starting, but it's.
It only works when it's lowticket, and low ticket even
being under 10 K a month.

Correct.
Okay, so you've been in thisspace for 10 years.
What's the three biggestlessons you've learned?

that's a big one .
The three biggest lessons I'velearned?
Well, well, first of all, theseprobably will come to me this
evening and I'll be like well,those, those weren't the three
biggest lessons I've learnedsince I've been in this space.
Um, this isn't agency specific,but resilience being the single

(01:26:00):
most important thing in tradeof any entrepreneur.
Like full stop, like it's not,resilience is the single most
important thing that you couldbuild, and whether you build
that through going to the gym,whether you build that through
um, through through, I'm such ahuge advocate for cold calls
always have been just purelyfrom the, from the perspective

(01:26:20):
of it being so shit and and andand.
When you someone does it andthey're like but this is
terrible and there's no, I'mlike that is why you have to do
it like that.
If you do cold calls and youjust hate it to your core.
That's exactly why you need tokeep doing it.
So, so, so, resilience beingthe single most important trait
of any entrepreneur, just bottomline.

(01:26:42):
Um, it's a good question.
Opportunity is very scarce inthe early stages, which is why
you need to say yes toeverything, and then, when you
hit 10K a month, you need to getincredibly good at saying no to
the majority of things.

(01:27:03):
So you have to completelychange your mindset.
When you start getting,momentum is the hardest thing to
build.
When you gain momentum, youhave to protect it viciously.
So you have to say yes toeverything to get yourself off
the ground.
That whole niche down thing isgood advice for people who are
established.
If you're not well established,work with every niche.
Don't offer every service.

(01:27:23):
Just offer one service to startoff with, but work with every
single niche that you can Get afeel for what you're going to
enjoy.
Because the truth is one person, you can build a successful
agency in the majority of nichesthat exist if you put enough
time into them and get enoughunderstanding of them.
Most people just don't spendenough time with one niche to
understand them properly.
Or niching down isn't alwaysjust the niche, it can just be

(01:27:44):
the one service as well.
So you could just become anabsolute animal with creative,
for example, and work with allkinds of different niches.
But but do I call it scattergun?
Be scattergun to start off withjust spray and pray until you
start gaining momentum somewhereand then analyze what has
worked and just double, triple,ten, triple down on that one
thing, and then and then andthen you'll snowball over time.

(01:28:06):
So the mindset a lot of peopleget to 10k a month, not a lot of
people get to 100k a month,because they're trying to apply
the same logic that got them to10k.
And what happens is they get inthis huge mess they've got.
They're trying to scalemultiple departments and the
agency, they're trying to workwith all these kinds of
different people.
So that's a big one.
Um, and the third and finallesson of building an agency, or

(01:28:35):
just being an entrepreneur.
I think most peopleunderestimate how limiting their
ego can be when it comes tosuccess.
Most people act for ego and notfor what they know is

(01:28:56):
fundamentally true.
They will act for validation ona market and for everyone else,
to impress their mentors, toimpress their peers, and they
will and they will.
Most people don't trust theirown intuition enough and and
make the wrong decisions forthat reason.
I think, alongside that, whatcomes to mind is comparison.
Comparison is one of the it'sjust the biggest thief when it

(01:29:20):
comes to success, not just theenjoyment we all hear.
Comparison is the thief of joy,but I think most many
entrepreneurs are at a danger ofbeing so lost in comparison to
what other people have achievedand are achieving that they get
stuck in a never ending cycle ofcopying what other people have
done, and so they just live inthe shadow of others and I think
, uh, and that can get you to acertain point, but it's never

(01:29:42):
going to get you to ultimately,where you want to get to.
And then you end up lookingback at some point and being
like am I really who I wanted tobe when I started this journey?
So I think ego gets in the wayof success and you should never
do something because otherpeople are doing it or because
it will impress others, and youhave to stay true to who you are

(01:30:05):
and what you believe.
In the light of what we spokeabout earlier and holding up to
your morals, I think look backon everything that really
propelled me forward.
The biggest things came as aresult of me being prepared to
do something that other peoplehadn't done before.

(01:30:27):
Two years ago, I started a newagency from scratch and I
documented the whole series onYouTube.
We got like a million views ina couple of months and it was a
mental revenue driver for thecompany.
It was just actually at a timewhere we had a bit of a decline.
I was like, screw it, I'm gonnaspend two, three weeks building
this new agency.
I started cult.
I'm six years and or sevenyears in business.
I documented myself, coldcalling, I signed up clients.

(01:30:50):
I just showed what washappening.
It worked incredibly well.
When I launched the affluentacademy, I launched the first
ever guarantee.
The whole video was you can'tguarantee, we can't guarantee
success.
Well, what if you could?
And I looked at everybody'srefund policies like we don't
guarantee success, we don't goand I was like why can't we do
that?
And that was a huge bolster ofof of revenue in the company.
And so there are these momentswhere you'll get intuition to do

(01:31:12):
something different, to standout.
Most people don't do it becauseit's like a new path, right.

It's like I often get asked like do I still need
my podcast?
And I do it because otherpeople don't do it.
Like there's not manyentrepreneurs who can swallow
their ego or whatever that termis to interview other
entrepreneurs.
Most people are too arrogant.

That's given me the what is actually a more
valuable lesson than than thantwo and three, which is it took
me three years to off the backof ego, drop my pride and accept
help from other people.
I always thought that I coulddo it all by myself.

(01:31:57):
I actually once said to someoneI will never buy info.
Why would I buy informationfrom somebody else when I can
learn it myself and it.
And it wasn't until I went tosam ovens mastermind and I went
there, attended there and I wentfor years.
The first time I went to thatevent I felt like an idiot.

(01:32:20):
I was like what an idiot youare that you just have.
And sure, I got myself to acertain point, but it was the
realization of where I couldhave been in that very moment if
I had done that.
When I first started.
Like I started from scratch onmy own and documented on YouTube

(01:32:41):
.
Sure, learned by myself, madeall my own mistakes, but I never
accepted help from other people.
And then putting yourself outto network, to build
relationship, to invest that Isaw my second month of being in
in sam's mastermind.
I doubled my revenue and itnever dropped from one piece of

(01:33:02):
advice that he gave me doubleyour price.
In fact, it wasn't double yourprice, it was quadruple your
prices.
And we and I settled for tripleand we were still took the same
amount of clients inside of thebusiness, just just a small
reduction.
But we about doubled ourrevenue and it didn't drop since
.
And it was just this mentalbarrier that I had.
But I trusted him because hewas who he was and he had
achieved what he had achieved,and there was many things like

(01:33:25):
that over the time those pips ofadvice.
I actually think the culturehas moved forward more now.
I think most people coming intothe space are very open to
getting advice.
So, on the off chance thatthere is one or two people
watching this who thinks thatthey can do it all by themselves

(01:33:46):
, don't be a fucking idiot likeme, please.

So you might know Tim Stoddard by any chance
really big in the agency space,stoddard, so a guy from America.
He actually sold his agencyrecently enough.
They got her in five and a halfmillion a year.
Uh, with his few otherbusinesses, their seo, seo
agencies for drug rehab, so theyown directories too, so they
have really good ip and he'sawesome guy he's actually I'm

(01:34:10):
actually coaching him, would youbelieve, in sales, which is a
massive fucking impostersyndrome.
Anyway, he uh, I had aconversation with him about
three years ago and I was making13k a month and he was like, oh
, like, what are you doing?
And I was like I work 22 hours aday, dude, I'm super
overwhelmed and everything.
And he took a step back and hewas like do you think you're
better than everybody else atthese roles?

(01:34:31):
And I was like, no, I presumenot.
And he was like, well, that's,that's where you hire people.
And it was such it was this onething he said that unlocked
everything.
It was like, oh, I can get anoperations guy, I can get this
person, get this person, becausethese people add value, which
is money, to the business,because they're good at things.
And it was.
That was the first seed for meand then the next seed then was

(01:34:53):
like the first program that Ibought.
It was kind of bullshit, to behonest, not gonna lie.
It was like aka, but it stillstarted.
That seed of this is the gap.
You know, it's typical programwhereby they point out all the
things to do but they don'tactually help you to get there
right.
And I was like all right, Ineeded all of this stuff, this
is what I need to do.
Then I bought an agency programwhich is pretty good, but again
, it was quite high level.
So I think those constantreminders allowed me to actually

(01:35:17):
level up.
And it's so like fucking mlmbeing like you need to pay to be
able to go to the next level,but you do need to do it, man.

Why would you try and achieve something by
yourself that you've never donebefore?
If someone else has achieved it, why would you not?
If you have the financial meansto do so, why would you not pay
to fast track that?
Like that?
That shift in mentality is isso profound, like if there's one
thing that people can take fromthis and as a caveat, like,

(01:35:47):
don't let it be me, don't let itbe darren, unless we're the
right fit.
This is not a sales message atall.
Do it for you with whoevermakes the right fit, who is
right for you, but if you'retrying to achieve something that
someone else has alreadyachieved, you would be a fool
not to pay to play to fast trackthat I remember, even quite
recently, I went to will brown'slatest mastermind and before I

(01:36:08):
paid for it, tom, or head ofclient success, was like what is
it you want to achieve?

and I mentioned two things.
I was like one, I want to learnhow to run ads.
And then two, I want to learnhow to run a mastermind funnel.
And that was the first twoquestions I had was just two of
those.
We answered them all in aroundan hour and I had exactly what I
had done.
I sold out our mastermind fourweeks in advance to it, so four
weeks beforehand, and that'sthat's very unheard of, because
usually it's a last like week ortwo.

(01:36:34):
That's stressful for events,man, because you don't know how
much people are there.
And then, with the ads, like Ihad just learned ads, basically,
and I also met someone as wellwho actually ran ads, uh, and we
were running very specific adsfor for instagram, and that was
it, and I was, I had anintention, so I wasn't just
buying random shit, right.
And then tom was like okay,like we'll go, and I was like
all right, and then that was it,and I went and I left and that

(01:36:55):
was it.
And I thought, well, yesterdayand he was like he's a coward
ads and I was like they'reworking and he's like oh good
that's the, that's the art.

Though, is going in with an intention, because
when you, at the start, have youever attended an event and you
just say you, you're like, youhave the list and you're like
I'm changing the business, I'mgonna launch this funnel, this
funnel, I'm gonna hire thisperson, I'm gonna do this, and
then, like, you come away andlike, create a mess, so I
learned this from you, so wouldyou believe?

so?
I remember when we had ourfirst podcast, you told me that
after your mastermind in mexico,you spent like three days doing
nothing and letting all likethe information, the data come
back to you, and ever since thenI've, whenever I went to
mastermind, I do nothing for atleast 48 hours, and then I also
tell people as well to donothing.
Like so.
Our mastermind was three days.
The first two days I wasfucking brainwashing everyone,

(01:37:41):
but the last day is calledintegration.
So I so, by the way, we do nocontent for three days.
I don't prepare anything, right?
People pay me 4k or 8k and youcome and I don't.
I don't show you anything, wejust do one to one the entire
time.
What's your biggest bottleneck?
What?
What's your problem?
What's?

the issue.
You rotate around the room andyou do that in front of everyone
, in front of everyone, and thenwe just have bottlenecks and
what's working well andeverything is leads, sales and
delivery.

And then we just spend two days going around in
circles solving problems,solving problems, solving
problems for it.
And then the last day is calledintegration.
So we go back to the start andwe say, all right, you have 18
priorities.
What's number one to five?
Okay, let's all map it out.
There's a few more questionsbeing answered.
How long, like how long are wegoing to do this?

(01:38:25):
90 days, all right, here's thepriority.
That's what I was doing.
So I would go to masterminds, Iwould record my transcripts,
I'd prioritize everything andI'd order everything and I'd
spend the next like three weeksimplementing them, and because
otherwise it's just noise.
You know, it was so funny thatyou probably felt this too at
yours.
I have one client, ryan, who'san amazing guy and he blew the
fuck up online.

(01:38:45):
But he blew up so quickly thathe's like so much things going
on and the only bottleneck hehas which is why he came into
our program was sales.
It was sell by chat.
It's only bottleneck.
And he doesn't have a contentproblem, he doesn't have a
delivery problem and on thefirst day we went around and he
had an issue with sales, as weimagined.
But then we started going aroundthe room and I'd be like yeah,

(01:39:06):
man, you gotta do that, yougotta do this sort of people.
And then we came back to himand I was like I ain't coming up
for you right now.
And he was like I'm gonna starta youtube channel.
And I was like no, I was likeyou don't need a fucking youtube
channel.
And it was a very simplereminder to me, which is that
like yes, there's great ideas ina room, but it's what's the
thing that you need?
And the same thing was justunderstanding sell by chat.

(01:39:28):
And that was it.
And for an entire weekend weuse that as an example.
Someone can easily, no fault oftheir own, be misguided by
wrong data in a room and likethat's the biggest role of uh,
of a facilitator.
100.

I agree, fucking crazy that that that give
yourself two days not of notworking after a mastermind is
the biggest hack ever.
I used to combine it with apsilocybin trip and and and then
what it did was it would allowme to then really know what my
priorities were when you haveyou ever you okay, so you, for

(01:40:02):
anyone who doesn't know what I'mtalking about, when you take
psilocybin, you kind of orenough.
It feels like a hard reset, andI'm not promoting doing or not.
You have to make your mind upthe but it feels like a hard
reset and you end up rebuild atleast from my perception of
rebuilding your life as you'recoming back to normality and as
you're doing that, you kind ofchoose what you are happy with
and what you're not, which iswhy it's so good for people that

(01:40:24):
are struggling, let's saymentally, because you get the
chance to choose yourrelationship with the things
that are happening as that is acertain type of psychedelic is
just mushrooms, just mushrooms,okay, or truffles, depending on
where you are.
But yeah and um and so thatexperience of rebuilding your
life as you're coming back tonormality and you're remembering
the business and oh, yes, I gotthis and I've got that, and so

(01:40:46):
on, and yes, I just went to thismastermind, and yes, and so on.
You then get to digest thethings that are important to you
again inside of the businessand your priorities at
priorities, and I that allowedme to go even deeper with that,
um, that prioritization of thelist that I created.
But I would usually take all ofthe notes from the mastermind,
then turn it into somewhat of anaction list and then I would
look at that list as I wascoming back and then I'll be

(01:41:06):
like, okay, that's the thing Ineed to focus on first that's so
cool, man.

I can't believe I learned that from you two
masterminds I've ran this year.
I literally and I forgot that Igot it from you.
I was like telling everyonedon't do anything.

Don't do anything, because I'm that
person that jumps in afterwardsand then you fuck, you screw the
team up as well, though youcome home and you bulldoze the
team and everyone's like whatare we?

doing now, bro, I remember, oh, I love james kemp,
but I left his mastermind and Iwas like we're doing weekly
pricing.
And then we launched weeklypricing the day later.
Everyone's like why the fuckare we doing weekly pricing?
I remember ltv like fell off acliff and about six months later
I was like we're not doingweekly pricing, you know, and
it's just understanding.
Like every information iscontextual, like everything is

(01:41:52):
context, you know, and I thinkthat depends on the type of
entrepreneur, too that comes toevents or joins programs and so
on.
It's like, yes, you really haveto.
I think that's a good part tohave in your program.
Is like in the beginning, islike you're going to learn a lot
of shit, but we got to makesure to figure out what's most
important for you in the cycleof life, in a cycle of business

(01:42:12):
that you're at.
You know, like we heavy pushsales calls.
Like like, basically, theeasiest way to make money is get
people on a call right.
So I extremely push sales calls.
Like all our chats and dms thatwe teach is all to do with sales
calls.
It's just well, all we'reoptimizing the sales cost that's
going to get results, becausemost guys are in their mid-20s
or early 30s that join us.
But if you're 45, some guysdon't want to take sales calls,

(01:42:34):
which is why the other programsare very appealing.
But if you're 19 years old andjames kemp tells me this too,
who does sell by chat he's likeif you're 19 years old and
you're afraid to get on a call,you're gonna find it tough, bro.
You know, it's all context.
So by chat is very good forpeople who are experienced, have
credibility and an audience.
But if you're 19 years old,you're not gonna be selling

(01:42:54):
fucking 5k programs no 100 it'sall context.

Man, it is, it is, and well, there are a
thousand ways to grow the samebusiness and and so it's it's.
It's also deciding what paththat you want to take in
yourself, like it's one thingwanting to go down the organic
route and build a brand and soon, it's another thing wanting
to take on.
I think lots of people naivelyjump, jump into ads, thinking
it's going to be plain sailingwhen they're going.
I actually think it's really asinteresting as something I went

(01:43:20):
through.
But I think it's much harder togo from organic to paid than it
is from paid to organic,because the business is
optimized around a certainprofit margin, a certain
expectation on close rate.
The sales team are closing warmand they suddenly have to close
to cold.
That's a hard journey, um,transitioning from,
transitioning from warm.
A sales team that have beenclosing my sales team were

(01:43:41):
closing on warm audience for sixyears before they started
closing on, and not everybody.
Well, I actually had one personthat had been there for the
whole time to school, um, but uh, most of them were still
optimized around warm the minutewe moved to paid.
It was just a completelydifferent beast and a massive
learning curve.

So that was the issue, though that's the issue
that we're currently facing,which is, all sales calls are
warm.
For the most part, we've runads.
The cost per call is fuckingjust super high, or some shit,
and we're still getting all thebookings from warm Okay, which
is offsetting the ad cost, butthen the ads.

(01:44:20):
So I think it's like 88 of ourclients are from warm, 11, 12 is
from cold in a month, and thenthe cost per call is super high.
The closed rate of the cold islike 20 versus a 46, that we're
getting on warm and yeah, and,and also the optimization of the
ads and the problem with that.

So we went for a very similar thing ourselves.
The problem with that is then,when you remove the warm guys
for attribution, you realizethat the cold isn't profitable
on its own, which means itdepends in your context.
If you were to remove so, if youwere to look at all your calls
and your sales for that specificfunnel that, because presumably
you're selling that same offervia cold and paid yes, yes so

(01:45:03):
then if you attribute thosesales to organic as well as you
can do because that's anotherthing if you go from organic to
paid and you start attributingit's a, it's a, it's an ass,
because you're trying toattribute.
You've got something going on ayoutube video, but then where
do you attribute if they'vetouched the ads and so on as
well.
So it's like first click versuslast click.
But it's hard with organic.
You, when you at least in myexperience you remove the paid

(01:45:23):
and you realize that the pay,you remove the warm and you
realize that the warm ispropping up the cold and then
the, then the cold in isolationisn't profitable, and so then
it's not scalable because beyond, the warm has only got a
certain amount of traffic.
When you scale ads it isn't.
When you scale ads, the warmisn't moving up at the same rate
that the ads is moving.

(01:45:43):
You're scaling ads beyond thatsame, you know,
disproportionately, and soeventually it will just be
unprofitable because you've gotthis much cold and this much
warm, whereas at the minuteyou've got this much warm and
whatever, a proportionate amountof cold.
You have to rebuild your salesteam for cold and retrain them

(01:46:04):
for cold and you have to have avery, very good incubation
period.
So most people don't know theirsales cycle as in, from the time
someone books a call to whenthey or there's yeah or there's
two.
Yeah, there's two types ofsales cycle you really need to
be aware of.
Number one it's the from opt-in.
So when they opt in, how longdoes it take for them to

(01:46:24):
purchase?
And then also from booked callto how long does it take to
purchase?
Most people, when you ask them,they're like, oh, it's like
five days.
The majority of inco guys islike 30 days plus I would say
like 90.

Yeah, I mean, that's what we're trying to do.
So, just for context, is thatthe guys are coming from the ads
.
We're trying to say that theysit in the ecosystem, which is
basically a model anyway.
So they're either just afollower or and that's engaged
in the content it's theirconversation order on the email
list and we let them cook andthen when they do book, then we
attribute that because they camein from the ad.

(01:46:55):
That's what I was thinkingabout.
But that can be.
We're giving 180 days because,like I want to see how much
people get caught up, right,because, like, how many times
have you seen an ad and boughtsomething?
Fucking never, bro.
But you come into the ecosystem, you know, does that make sense
?
It?

does 100.
Most people let people comeinto the ecosystem and just are
happy with just showing andthrowing them on a newsletter,
though, and it's like then it'sbeing as deep as you can into
that.
You've got, let's say, googledisplay ads big hack just being
everywhere all over the internetso they can see you everywhere.
Making sure that you've got ashitload of reviews and

(01:47:30):
testimonials everywhere.
Having a proper nurture emailsequence when someone books a
call like a 14 day nurture, likeevery single day, and then they
go into the email listafterwards.
But that 14 day nurture is whatis all of the leverage I've got
, what is every single piece ofleverage I've got, and can I
create an email about that?
What is that?
Whether that's reviews, whetherthat's testimonials, whether

(01:47:51):
that's stories about yourself,whether it's founder story,
whatever that may be, whetherit's awards, like where, all of
that, and it's those things thatmake a difference.
But ultimately, the hardest partis training a warm sales team
to go cold, because when wefirst did that um and yeah, when
we first did that our closingteam was closing at 45% on cold.

(01:48:13):
Some of them were closing at60%, or, no, sorry, 45% on warm.
Some were closing at 60 percent.
Oh, no, sorry, 45 on warm.
Some were closing at 60 on warmon attended, which kind of
indicates a price increaseneeded anyway.
But uh, we were going from thatand then on cold it was like 10
, I think we were the same.
Yeah, I think we're the exactsame yeah, which is which is
brutal and it makes it very hardto scale unless you're super

(01:48:37):
high ticket and your price pointis like 15k plus or like, I
think, actually 12k plus.
But if you're below 10k likeand you can't I haven't seen
anyone, at least that I know of,so correct me if I'm wrong that
has scaled, and by scaled Imean like 100k a month spend on

(01:48:59):
an offer below 10k to coldtraffic with a booked call being
the conversion mechanism, Ithink brook hitting is the only
person that I know, but I don'tknow what the price point is.

I think, brook, they're doing like two and a
half million a month and I thinktheir price point could be like
ak or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, so they run a callcomplete pure call, traffic to a
vso, to a webinar and then fromthe webinar then they book a
call and, um, I think that'sinto the mastermind or some shit

(01:49:32):
.
That's like 15k.

Then the down, sell down is like an ak I would
be very interested to knowwhether it was self-liquidating,
though, because most of thosepeople are then profiting on ltv
exactly so.

He has like softwares vendor relationships
for suppliers, because highticket drop shipping, um, he's
like two fucking softwares andshit.
I think he has two programseffectively.

So yeah, that's so it's ltv so like, but the
front end if the product is like8k or something like it's, it's
, it's I mean, I'm sure someone,some people do it, but it's so
rad.
The vehicle has to be perfect,the offer has to be perfect you
know, ryan clark yeah, uh, ryanclark us right c, l, o, g, g, cl
.

He's I met him through 8FL.
Guy's a fucking killer.
He's on like 70 million insales fitness coaching for women
and they have like this, youknow, they have it all Like
fucking lead magnet $1 product,$9 product, $37 product or some
shit.
He's so detailed with thenumbers.
It's crazy man.
Man, he's kind of going viralat the moment.

(01:50:35):
He's doing daily vlogs, dailyuploads on youtube.
They're not viral, but he'sgetting known on twitter and
then he has youtube.
So that guy ryan, I don't knowhow I fucking I think I forgot
about this, to be honest.
But basically they, they havelike those front end offers.
It's all of ads and they'redoing like 70 million.
They've done 70 million totalum, but that's the only example

(01:50:56):
I have of like something that'slike low ticket but for brooke,
yes, 100, correct.
Like there is that high, it'sall high ticket, you know, but
he's running everything coldinto that.
But oh, sorry, this was thepoint.
Ah, yes, this was the point.
So people really fuck up ltv andwhat they think ltv is.
Do you get me that?
They have like one person thatascended into a 60K mastermind

(01:51:20):
and then they're thinking thatoffsets everything else, like we
actually have a clientliterally right now and I need
to follow up with him Go aheadand get into the mastermind,
which was like they think thattheir LTV is like five or 6K,
but they actually have a freecourse into a 1K product and
then a bunch of weird shit andthen they have a 60k mastermind
like oh yeah, yeah, it's like 5kand I'm like I don't know how

(01:51:41):
true that is you know, so howmuch do you book calls for, like
what?

do I expand on that?
I want, I want to hear yourwhat your, your views are on
what ltv is.

I want to, I want to hear your wisdom on this um,
okay, well, we need to look atthe, the dispersion of offers,
right, and like how much peopleactually fit into the offers.
And then also you need to seelike, where are you
cannibalizing that money?
Right, because if we runsponsorships which is off cold
fucking email, which is offinbound email, would you believe

(01:52:11):
that obviously has a highrevenue but that doesn't offset
the coaching on the front.
So we need to segment theproducts case by case.
So you might have macro, butthen you need to say see, okay,
for your 5k offer, how much isit?
How much is the CAC number one,which is super important, which
involves the commission of thereps, the marketing expenses,

(01:52:31):
all that kind of stuff.
Then what's the LTV to CAC?
And then of that LTV, what'sthat general LTV?
And that will mainly just bethe pay in full right or the
people that bounce on the splitpay.
So we've got to make surethat's factored in.
And yes, there is an element ofpeople that ascend up there,
but unless they came through theads we can't really factor it
into LTV versus CAC.

(01:52:52):
But with AI you can do this now.
So the reason I'm saying thisis I'm very overly indexed on
what we capture, so that then Ican run scripts off of chat gbt
to understand exactly what it is, the numbers we truly have do
you have any done for youelements like inside, like I've
done for you up?

in the coaching yeah, well, we just put the
setters in.
I see you're placing thesetters and then taking a
percentage of the place setting.
No, there, no, or is it just acertain fee to place them?

We have a lot of partnerships with setter
organizations.

Yeah.

And then we shortlist them.
We have the offers for ourclients in the high ticket
program and then we match themLovely.

It just increases results and there's a
big uptake on that with theclient.

That ascent yeah.

Yes, but you have a lot of ascension from
your low ticket program to yourhigh ticket, yeah.
So I actually don't thinkthat's that common.
I think that lots of people Ihad this conversation with sam
ovens.
Sam ovens's general mindset waswas that?
Um well, his reality wasconsulting accelerator.
To uh, what was it quantum?
No, not quantum, it wasconsulting accelerator.
There was the mid one up level,up there was the consulting

(01:54:00):
accelerator, to, to, to,whatever the mid-tier was.
It was like that was there wasthe mid-tier and then he had the
quantum, so he had the freething.
Um, people, generally speaking,don't ascend from biz op to the
mid-tier.
So you're kind of not on biz op, are you?

you're kind of you're, you're starting off and
they're already establishedbusiness coming into even more
established business yeah,they're all making like five,
ten, five, if I start, like 10keven on your low ticket, yeah,
yeah because it's okay, you knowso, so.

so sam's reality is very similar to mine.
We do get ascension from thefrom, from from agency launch
into elite which is elite is foragencies that are already above
10K.
We do have ascension.
The ascension rate is lowbecause of the drop-off from
people wanting to start abusiness to actually
materializing that.
And Sam had the same thing withConsulting Accelerator, whereas

(01:54:51):
it was biz op, getting peopleto start consulting businesses,
but then the ascension from thatwas very low.
The ascension from the mid-tierto the high ticket was high.
So, for example, my ascensionfrom elite to a session, our
mastermind, is great, but frombiz op to mid-tier is not.
And then the reason I'm sayingthat is because lots of people

(01:55:12):
build their business presumingthat's going to be the case
until they get a thousandcustomers and then realize that
no matter what they do and bearin mind I'm doing that
one-to-one coaching every weekfor 90 days we're doing
everything we possibly can,maximum expenses in the business
and effort to try and getpeople to ascend you get a very
low ascension rate if you're inBizOp.
So then you have to revisitother things that you can do to
get LTV which is done-for-youoffers done for you, offers,

(01:55:33):
bits and bobs, upsells,additional consulting and so on.
So it's.
I think that's a difficult pathfor people that get into the
biz op space trying to model ofsomeone like yourself, because I
think when you're working withbusinesses that are already
established, that's the.

Well, it's funny because james kemp talks about,
like, ascension is not linear.
We think that it's linear andthey buy this thing, then they
buy next thing, next thing.
But the the goal is that youjust create an ecosystem of
fucking offers that people cancome into your world and they
can pick like a la carte.
So like, oh, I'm at this point,yeah, I'll go to a mastermind.
Yeah, I paid a 3k, a bum, forthe mastermind, so once a four,
like that's the best way to doit.

(01:56:10):
And it's so funny because theguys that came to our mastermind
who were outside of our circle,uh, so okay, for context,
people asked me after themastermind did you get ascension
from people to go into theprograms?
And I was like I don't pitchanyone because then it would
just demoralize the whole ideaof the event.
And it was so funny because somany guys had, uh, co-founders
that weren't there.
And you're like, yeah, yeah,like I'll chat to him about x

(01:56:33):
and I'll come back to you onthis.
And I was like I'm not going tomess you.
If you want to come and jointhe program, you can, absolutely
, and we'll talk about that, butI am not going to message you
because I don't want you tothink that I'm here to get you
to ascend Right.
You just came to the mastermind, bro.

(01:56:53):
You got a lot of tunnel value,it was fun and you learned a
funnel from here.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
You can pay me 20K, but I'm notgoing to force you to do that.

So two things on that.
Number one like is yourmastermind then a model that
isn't then super high ticket?
It's like more of a what's thegeneral price of the mastermind.

Okay, so the mastermind at the event is 4K.
The event, yeah, is 4kinteresting, okay, but then so
that was 4k, and then you havepeople down that who are in the
incubator, that'll come they'llget 50 off.
Yeah, then if you want apex, Iget it for free, and then in
core to get it for free too, uh,and then core can be anywhere
from 35 000 to 60 000 a year toagency, but as a result of that

(01:57:31):
that improves ltv.
And then we have another onecoming in september that will
brown speaking at and the guyswill stay in the program until
september, as in the guys willkeep paying yeah and then
they'll get their mastermind inseptember yeah you know, and
like I literally showed themthis as well be like this is how
you keep people.
You want to come in september.
Yes, okay, you've got to keeppaying me 5k until september and

(01:57:52):
then you show up in september.

Yeah, you know I mean that's the.
That's the best model.
I've ran it the other way aswell.
I did.
I did a 24k for the 12 months,four events in the year, so hard
to manage the logistics and theand the economics of that.
Doesn't help that we spent 60grand on one of the I remember
you told me dude and so, but,but that's that model is the
perfect model, I actually think.

(01:58:14):
Mastermind pay per event, lowerticket and then people are sent
but and I used to be of the samebelief and have the same
mindset towards not upsellingpeople at the event itself,
until I was exposed to I've gota very good friend.
His name is Adam Stott.
He owns a business called BigBusiness Events in the UK
Incredible business.
They do multiple millions on amonthly basis Just insane outfit

(01:58:36):
.
They do multiple millions on amonthly basis Just insane outfit
.
And their model is they willget people to an in-person event
which is like an in-personseminar.
They'll have like 100 people inthe room, sometimes 50 people
in the room.
These are workshops.
It might just be a social mediaworkshop or business.
So the TAM is absolutelycolossal.
And then at every single eventthey will pitch the next event
and that might be a retreat.
There'll be multiple pitchesabsolutely colossal.

(01:58:56):
And then at every single eventthey will pitch the next event
and that might be a retreat.
There'll be multiple pitches.

There might be a retreat, it might be another
event, and because of that he'sable to acquire customers for
about a thousand pounds and hisltv is 33 grand, at least when I
spoke to him makes sense,because it was funny was we ran
our master next mastermind theday after because interest at
the peak, people are followingtheir accounts, they're sharing
their story, whatever and thenwe run the next mastermind

(01:59:20):
afterwards.
Just that.
What I try to do is I makeeveryone aware of market
awareness and then we'll startlike chipping it down as time
goes on.
You know, um, and it's justdoing it again back to like an
ethical way that you want to runyour business.
Do you get me?

yeah, 100 works.
It's a great model and it's theone we took a pause on, our
mastermind last year.
We're going to bring it back,we're going to put an event on
this year and I'll follow thesame model as yourself.

It's great, and then like what I learned from Will
too.
He asked him about this you'lllove it, because I learned this
from Will which is like, if abreak for a month, the event,
the approach is like look, ifyou keep coming, you can come to
master free.
You can always use these aslike little fucking like cards.
So everyone in the in the highticket get joins for free, so no

(02:00:03):
, it's like if well, for us, yes, if you're in core and if you
want to come, you can come.
Right, but not everyone wantsto come because like america and
shit, but some guys might flyfrom dubai.
So if you want, in september,they're all going to pay like 20
to 30 K until September andthey can just call let's show.

And then.
But then you're absorbing thecost for the people that are
there.
So then it's just the peoplethat do pay.
You are then it's subsidizingthe cost of the event itself.
Yes, Are they?
Are they?
Are they built to be likeprofit generating events?
Or is it more of a wider playfor LTV, L for LTV, LTV?
But you're still making a lotof money, right?
So I'm still making money.

(02:00:38):
It's such an enjoyable part.

It's enjoyable, you know, but like it was, again,
it's from James Camp.
He was like you don't runevents to make money, you run
events for LTV Right, so youthink about it.
Guys came, they had a greatexperience, they've already paid
in, so they can pay their 4k,their ak, they can show up.
The event, I think overall costme like 10k in total for four
days.
And then we have other peoplethen who are in our lower ticket

(02:01:03):
program who pay 50.
So they pay 2k to 4k, dependingon the ticket size.
Dude, the event makes likewhatever 30, 40k or like 50 or
some shit, but then it actuallymakes a lot more if you factor
in all the people that arepaying the other subscriptions.
So it's like we have thissubscription model of where they
stay and they're paying 2k to5k a month plus you'll have
bought it does a lot ofdifferent transactions that come

(02:01:25):
, yeah, together yeah so it'slike it's the best of all worlds
.
How many events.

Are you running a year or plan to run a year?

this coming with herd in septd in September.
Yeah, cool.

One of my friends, Liam Ryan, owns Assets
for Life the biggest animal I'veever met when it comes to
events they're running.
They're building a villa inMarbella at the moment.
They're planning on running 36events a year just at that one
venue.
It's crazy.

I know guys are doing that too.

But that's just there.
They're currently runningretreats like every other week
you have to be built that way.

I'm not built different you know what I mean
the absolute animal dude, I waslike I was worried about this
podcast well in advance of mymastermind.
So how much it takes out of me.
Like monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, I was in tatters
this week like I was in properpain, man, and you wake up and
your back, your eyes are sore,like your legs are sore, my feet
were so sore from just being onmy feet for all day, every day,

(02:02:24):
um, I was burning probably likefive or six thousand calories.
Just mental calories too,they're burning.
Um, and it takes so much out ofyou and you kind of have that
calm down, right, because I waslike we did food, all food, all
foods included, all dinners areincluded.
We had a coffee shop inside.
We like, literally we paid fora coffee shop that's set up
inside, so we had to like takecare of that.

(02:02:45):
And then there was an issuewith like electricity and like,
does a trip wire work?
Dumbest shit ever, as you know,right, just dumbest shit ever
can go wrong.
But if they go wrong, it's areally bad image.
Right, it's not like it's notmy fault.
The tripwire wouldn't work, butI'm gonna get fucking.

I'm responsible yeah you know so how many people
are you?
What's your?
What's your?
Do you think the ideal numberis of an event that you've been?

so we did 20 and I felt like everyone still got a
lot of one-to-one care.
Yeah, um, we're gonna try to do30 next time.
Yeah, uh, and then will's.
Feedback to me was like youknow, anything over 25 ish.
It's very tough to keep thepersonal.

I had that experience.
I think we're not doing events,though you did, you did
activities right.

We did like uh fucking, you did like mountain
biking and shit.
Yeah, so I did that for my firstone and it was all fitness
activities but it was like gymand shit.
And then we scrapped it all andwe just did dinners.
And then I even said the willyesterday and he was like bro
cut the dinners.
He was like, trust me, you'relike, and everyone was fucked.
You know, I do like dinners,though, to be fair, I do like

(02:03:46):
them and I like fucking foodanyway.
So I was like, ah, okay, so itwas like the tree long days,
tree dinners, lunches includedyeah, yeah, that's what we do in
london when we do a london athome mastermind format.

It's the same.
We've got the venue.
People come for the day it'slike three days and then in the
evenings we'll go for dinnersand then you have catered lunch.
It's nice and simple.
Yeah, that's a.
That's a nice way to do it.
It's when you do the retreatsthat things get that crazy
enough.

Yeah I think, we'll probably do some more then, but
like it's just, it's that reallytakes it out of you but people
love that, though, like a lot ofour clients who went to the one
in january came back and theywere like yeah, like I wouldn't
mind, like a gym workout witheveryone.
And then I was like yeah,because I actually noticed that
people were closer together inthe last mastermind.
That was only two days versusthis one that was like four, but

(02:04:30):
it was, you know, three plus anight before they became like a
tighter knit community.
I think it's because just doinghard things together, doing
doing a gym workout together wedid like brett work in the
morning in a different area theyget a different uh gym and
stuff here, but, like bali's,you should do your next one of
bali, man.
You'll get a fucking greataudience here too.
We've got an amazing audienceright yeah, like for us, we have

(02:04:53):
like 50 of people fly in,always from all around the world
yeah, fly from australia, dubai, the uk, ireland, america,
canada.
People love to go on vacationfor something that's interesting
.

You know what I mean how do you uh, how do you
manage expectations with peoplethat are coming with the the
mentality they just want toparty?

oh, that's not in my ethos.
It's again the.
Your clients are a reflectionof you, right?
yeah, so I used to be a hugeparty boy yeah, I think you know
that before, right, I was likea huge, like clubber, uh, but
I've given up alcohol over athousand days ago and like that
attracts people who are likethat, like a lot of the younger
guys who are in our, in ourprograms, man, they are switched

(02:05:37):
on, they don't drink, theydon't party, they're proper
autistic, they're just like allin 24 7 and that allows me to
push them a little bit harderand stuff and especially the
older guys.
Then we have a lot of very oldpeople that are like kind of
like family people because I'mmarried, right, so like it
attracts, that's what.
That's why I share that shitabout my dogs and my wife is
because like I'm not a kid.
Yeah, you know, like I don'tact like a kid, I'm like I'm not

(02:06:00):
a kid, I've been through thatshit.
I don't have any opportunitycost.
Spoke to will about thisyesterday too.
Me and will was in his houseand I was like I just love
building shit and he was likesame, he's gonna want to go on
vacation.
I was like me, neither man.
I was like I just I was like Ijust like fucking vsls and he
was like same man, you know.
So I think it's it's a stagethat I'm in in my life.
I'm 29, yeah you know, I havenothing but to do, but to go to

(02:06:23):
the gym and build stuff.

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#290 Jordan Platten - Are Agencies Dying in 2025?

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#290 Jordan Platten - Are Agencies Dying in 2025?