7 Figure SMMAs Are Switching To This Simple Agency Model for More Profit and Less Work w/ Sam Carlson

In this video, Keaton Walker interviews Sam Carlson, the innovative founder of UpHex, who reveals why top agency owners are abandoning their 7-figure businesses for a groundbreaking agency model. Sam unveils the simple yet powerful SMMA strategy that's revolutionizing the industry in 2024, promising wealth without burnout. This beginner-friendly approach, focusing on a low-ticket SaaS agency model, is not only attracting established entrepreneurs but also offering newcomers a path to build profitable agencies. Discover how this game-changing method is reshaping digital marketing and learn how to leverage it for a thriving, sustainable business that even makes million-dollar SMMA owners envious.

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Timestamps:

0:24 - What happened with Uphex?
4:03 - GHL!
4:45 - Scaling an Agency the right way
13:56 - What is Agency MVP?
31:13 - Doing a million a month is horrible
40:20 - The art of saying no to more money
49:21 - Finding the right leads
58:34 - Sam's Lead Data!!
1:04:23 - All about Acquisition
1:13:16 - Interacting with other agency owners
1:15:14 - All about Retention
1:24:27 - Making sure leads are converted
1:26:51 - Simplicity is key!
1:32:38 - Why agency MVP is for you

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#smma #uphex #gohighlevel

Transcript

Sam: 0:00

In upex last year, we did 1. 7 million leads at an average cost of 12 and 18 cents. You're worried about what to learn, who to learn from, whether you should pursue this niche or that niche. Here's what I'm going to do in five or six months. I started feeling bulletproof entrepreneur. When you look at what you can do, when you combine a software company and a coaching company, you can get some crazy outcomes. Your impulse to build a product as an entrepreneur. There's is your downfall. That is what is going to kill you.

Keaton: 0:25

How's it going, everybody? Welcome back to another interview with the one, the only Sam Carlson joining us all the way from Boise, Idaho, near Boise, let's call it close enough. And he's got some updates for us. If you listened to the last episode. One of my favorite episodes we've ever done on the podcast. And this one, I think we'll probably blow it out of the water. So I can't wait to catch up with you, Sam. Good to have you on.

Sam: 0:55

Thanks, man. I appreciate you having me back.

Keaton: 0:57

Yeah. So give us an update. It's been a big six or seven months since we last spoke.

Sam: 1:03

Yeah, we got a lot going on. I mean, um, I guess some of the macro. Um, update some of the cool things we have going, uh, well in my own life, I sent a kid off to bootcamp, um, you know, about a month ago. So that's, you know, kind of crazy at all the kids and wife, they're all doing good family life is good. Um, sold the agency. Um, it's been probably about six months ago, um, which is great because, um, You know, that agency obviously brought me into where I'm at today, learning everything. I was, I did that for the better part of nine years, right? And so that's why Apex kind of became what it was is because of that background, but we sold that that way, um, me and the team, uh, including my director of operations from that agency. Could come over to up packs and we could serve, um, all of our awesome agencies who are trying to replicate that success, those, that same model. Got it. So we brought the team over, uh, a hundred percent focused on, um, making both up X in our community, um, the best product and the best place to learn how to, um, how to win in the agency game. So,

Keaton: 2:20

so cool. So it was more of a focus thing then, Hey, we're going to have this big payday. So you look at

Sam: 2:26

focus and resources. Yes. Yeah, that's right. But focus and resources, right. Um, the, our director of operations, her name is Heather Kelly. Uh, she ran that entire agency. She started as a part time stay at home mom doing support for us. Uh, kind of graduated through the ranks, learned how to run our entire business. She's a genius at high level. She's a genius at Apex and she knows the operations and. Me and my partners, whenever we would be doing, whether it was daily classes or creating content or customers or whatever it was like, man, if Heather could come over and do this, it would be so much, such a better experience for our agency customers, because they're working with a person who has done how many onboarding calls. Right. You got a question about onboarding dude. She's done a ton of them. Yeah. Right. So it was resources. It was my focus. You know, I still, um, was getting calls from customers about not necessarily service stuff, but Hey, can you come speak at this conference? Hey, can you, whatever it was. And it's just distractions. Right. And we really want Apex to be. The best thing possible. And I think that just focusing and removing distractions was right for that time.

Keaton: 3:46

Um, I love like that type of employee you don't, it's impossible to hire cause it's a higher plus train situation. Yeah. Yeah. But that model of like give them a little bit and if they crush it, then. Give them a little bit more and and that growing over years is really cool Hey guys Just jumping in here to give you a quick word on our sponsor high level before we get back to the interview If you don't know already high level is the top sales and marketing solution for any business But particularly agency owners or anybody that needs a software product to resell to their existing customer base It has everything you need to capture nurture and close leads for marketing clients And the best part is high level believes in not taxing the agencies On its platform so you can get unlimited clients for one low flat monthly fee. The best features include a CRM, funnel, website and email builders, course hosting platform, robust marketing automation builder, a consolidated chat stream with WhatsApp, email, SMS, Instagram DMs and Facebook DMs, reputation management, social media, posting, tracking, and analytics, and so much more. And as if that wasn't enough, HighLevel is fully white labeled, meaning that you can take the platform and put your own brand on the desktop and mobile app and resell it to your industry for whatever price you want. Essentially, what HighLevel has done is brought the bar for starting a software company way lower so normal people like you and I Can help our clients with an amazingly robust software without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs. I am not kidding when I say hands down high level is my favorite software of all time. It has been integral to my success with my agency. It helped me increase my client's results and retention and I use it every single day for my own business. And if you sign up for high level today, not only will you get a 30 day free trial, which is not available on their website, but you will get all of the bonuses listed at it's keaton. com forward slash mastermind, which gets you support templates and courses to kickstart your high level journey and get those first few clients or scale to your next few clients. If you're already a high level customer, you can also get all of those bonuses by upgrading to the next highest plan underneath my link. Instructions for that are also at it's keaton. com forward slash mastermind. Um, just because I know there's going to be a lot of people asking this, give us some more context on the sale itself. Sounds like it was a merger, but like how did the, how did the payment structure work? How big was the agency when you sold it and are you completely hands off or was there a transition period?

Sam: 6:11

Yeah. So, um, we actually merged with one of our top Apex users. Um, it was a agency called grow local. So they obviously knew our model, right? Um, uh, So they came in and, uh, they're just juggernauts when it comes to sales. And so if nobody was acquiring customers over at patient stream, you know, the, is it, we did have some churn. low, we did have some, so we brought them on to really say, Hey, let's kind of merge these, these things, these powers that be, and, and really have a, uh, a more dynamic, um, relationship between the two of those. And they're great guys over there. Uh, really great guys. Um, and man, they are go getters, enthusiastic, um, and just. You know, their vision for patient stream, to be honest with you, got bigger than what ours was for patient stream. It started meeting our vision for what we want Apex to be, right? And in a way, we kind of adopted their vision of where they wanted to take it. Right. And, um, so we did that for a while. And, um, after a while, we just said, you know what? I think you guys should take this over. I think you guys should take this thing to the next level. There's nothing like building something and having yourself be really proud of it and like seeing it do awesome stuff. But when somebody else can take it to another level, it's a, it's a different thing. It's actually really cool. It's really cool to see them. They added in some coaching elements to it. Which, you know, we were effectively straight software at that point. And people might think that's awesome, but when you look at what you can do, when you combine a software company and a coaching company, you can get some crazy outcomes, right? So they really started doing a lot of that. And, um, we were, we stayed on for months in terms of like the, the, uh, acquisition and in terms of going through, Hey, we're handing over the batons in terms of team staff, everything merged, the companies did all that. Um, and then they just took it over. And in terms of like the sale itself, we're under an NDA, a fancy NDA. Uh, but everybody walked away happy. Yeah, that's cool.

Keaton: 8:41

It must be kind of like, uh, uh, Jeff Bezos handing off the CEO role moment. Like this has grown, you know, obviously the same level as Jeff here. So congratulations there.

Sam: 8:55

Yeah. Well, I don't know if I'm on the same level as Jeff, but you know, again, like it was like a win win.

Keaton: 9:03

Right.

Sam: 9:03

Because you get in a situation where those guys are hungry and focused.

Keaton: 9:08

Yeah.

Sam: 9:08

And you know, because of Apex, because we're hungry and focused with Apex, our, you know, our satiety level to take patient stream to that next level. It wasn't there anymore.

Keaton: 9:20

Yeah.

Sam: 9:20

You know, it was, it was a good agency. It was, it was almost like we kept that as a case study to say, Hey, this is the model that you guys need to build. I mean, we had over when, you know, when we were running that, and by the way, that agency built Apex.

Keaton: 9:34

Okay.

Sam: 9:35

You know, so it paid the bills, it paid the developers, it paid everything that agency did all that, where there are no patient stream, there would be no up X, right? And so that model was really awesome. But as soon as up X took off, I started to, um, really enjoy. And love helping agencies replicate that success. Right. And so that became my focus and where your focus is, that's kind of where your energy goes. Yeah. And in a, in a way it wasn't even, it, it, it became less fair to our customer base and to patient streams potential to stay at the head of it.

Keaton: 10:17

Yeah. Right. Yeah. But that's great to have like when, when the potential can be fulfilled by someone else, that's. I think very few entrepreneurs actually get to that, that level where they can hand off something like that. So congrats.

Sam: 10:32

Well, and those guys before we merged, I mean, they were doing three times the revenue we were,

Keaton: 10:37

okay.

Sam: 10:38

Right. So they were crushing it. These guys are just hungry. And so they're great guys to merge with. Yeah.

Keaton: 10:46

So the, uh, patient stream. That was a combination of kind of the OPEX SaaS model and some legacy clients that were more done for you, right?

Sam: 10:56

Yeah, so PatientStream was probably an 80 20, you know, just a rough delineation. Um, about 80 percent of our customers were, um, straight SaaS. Right. Meaning we onboarded them. Uh, we would do weekly calls, right? We offered proactive support. So if ever, if, if you know, somebody who's running their own ads and we'd never wanted somebody to run their own ads and that lack of confidence to have them churn because of just not feeling confident. So as soon as they would run their ads, we would in a way, so it became kind of swaths, we would say, Hey, we noticed your campaign. We're starting to, the lead costs are starting to go. So we made some adjustments. You should see those change over the next three to four days. have an awesome day. Right. And so we did those things, but it was very minimal. Like I said, over a hundred, that agency patient stream had well over a hundred customers and it was run by a part time stay at home mom and a part time PA. Um, and then we did keep, and what would happen, this was just like organic, right? Uh, people would, Want us to do it for them. It's we actually outsourced to, uh, a company. Uh, her name is Jen Troy, the Troy method, man. If you guys are, by the way, if you're in like the chiropractic or patient marketing niche, you should look up the Troy method because. We completely outsourced the, uh, you know, calling, booking appointments, all of that stuff to them, they managed their performance in terms of, they would give them reports on a monthly basis saying, Hey, we booked this many appointments. We made this many calls. You got this many leads. And they did that as a full service provider to them. And we just got a pass through fee.

Keaton: 12:42

Nice.

Sam: 12:43

Right. And that was a really slick model because we trusted them. They did a good job and we made some more money on each of those clients.

Keaton: 12:52

Yeah. And where it's full service, like it's one thing to have a white label agency. It's another thing to have a white label call center reporting media buying.

Sam: 13:02

I would say that the, the key to making the, you know, the, the SWAS model, I guess we would call what Apex plus high level is, is really slick. It's very simple. Right. When you add in that done for you element, I would say the secret to success. is a call center. We didn't even call him a call center, but a call center that narrowly focuses on that one niche, because a lot of call centers are, you know, outsourcing to India or whatever, just, you know, whatever are doing that. And so their caller, the calling agents don't have that one little bit of care, nuance application. They don't have that extra layer and that is what really moves the needle, right? And so the fact that her business was specific to new patient marketing made it a perfect fit.

Keaton: 13:58

Yeah, that's very cool. So since then you've launched a program, which I want to talk the majority of today about that because just the name I've, I've heard people silently begging for this program over the last year and a half since I sold my agency and have been more in the coaching world where it's like the name of the program is agency MVP. And there's a lot of people looking for, Hey, I want to work about 20 hours a week. I, I want some more time to spend doing what I enjoy hobbies, family, friends, and I don't want to spend my entire life on support calls, onboarding calls, et cetera. And because there's so much information and misinformation out there from the guru verse, people end up with these bloated agencies. And so when I heard MVP and kind of some of the principles that this was built on, I was like, Oh. Sam's going to crush with this. And as we know, it already is producing a lot of these results for people. Yeah, it's awesome. So a little bit of context for those listening, but I'd love to hear the origin story from you. How did you come up with the, like, why, why sell the coaching in the first place? And, and what's the origin there?

Sam: 15:19

I appreciate that question because I will say this, I did not want to create. This program, I really did not. Like I, like Apex is, you know, promoting Apex and building that business is a big lift already, but luckily we've got a great team. But so I'll, I'll say this in terms of context, maybe mid 2023, me and the two co founders of the other founders of Apex started looking at our different tiers and we were looking at our users and we wanted to see, you know, what, what. It's healthy for retention, like churn rates for our different users. And if you guys don't know, Apex bases are pricing off of the amount of customers you have, right? So if you have zero to three customers, sub accounts and high level, it's 97 bucks, four to 10. It's two 97 and then 11 to infinity and beyond, uh, is four 97 and the two 97 and four 97 price point. Our, our churn is really healthy. Like really, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's like really good. Like once people, once you get customers using Apex, they don't want to stop using it. So, you know, thus, you know, that's really sticky, um, retention for us. But the 97. Was pretty not good. Like the churn rate wasn't good. And as business owners, you know, what, what doesn't get measured, can't get managed. And so we started looking at that and we're like, well, why is that? But why, why is, why is that price point? Why are they struggling so much? We know the tool, you know, you kind of go through a little bit like, Hey, our tool's really good, man. It's not about us. It's about them. Yeah. And so I started doing some customer research and really when people would cancel, I would just. Do a phone call. We'd send exit surveys and we did that for a couple of months. And these two recurring problems came up. The first one's pretty obvious. You know, I don't have any customers. Right. And there's a lot of reasons why somebody might not have a customer. I don't know how to make an offer. I don't know how to pick a niche. I don't know, um, like what to offer that person. A lot of different things that you can do that would cause you to, um, not have clients. And I think there's other people that already teach how to get clients. Right. But this other one came up and it was kind of like sneaky. Like I didn't expect this one. And it's something I coined as agency overwhelm. Right. And I think you kind of alluded to it. Like people have been asking for MVP. Well, I didn't know that this was going on. Yeah. Right. And so I'd get feedback as, I don't know where to start. There's so many things to learn. There's so many features in high level that I don't know which I should be using, which I should be, you know, whatever. And it was just overwhelmed, overwhelmed, overwhelmed. Like everything was overwhelmed. Everything was confusing. Everything was complex. Right. Well, as a lifelong entrepreneur myself, I remember as an entrepreneur being in this kind of like boom and bust cycle. And not feeling that confidence. And the thing that changed it for me was in around, around 2014, I got the opportunity to work with this really successful, um, business owner, like super successful guy. And he mentored me. And he showed me what to do. He taught me business principles and he kind of laid it out for me. And the crazy thing was all of that time as an entrepreneur previously, I had all these dots, you know, of, of failure and some success and whatever. When I worked with him, I connected all those dots and it took me probably five or six months, which sounds kind of crazy. But in five or six months, I started feeling a bulletproof. Yeah. Entrepreneur, right? And so with that kind of as my own background, my own experience, as I was looking at all these people, I'm like, Oh my gosh, I think these people. Need a paint by numbers or, or I think they need a program that walks them through in sequence, by the way, because mentorship doesn't teach you things scattered. They teach you this thing first, then this, then this. Right. And I said, I think this is what they're asking for. So I took a small group of our users and I said, Hey, I'm thinking of creating this program. Here's what will be in this. Well, I first said, you guys all feel confused and you all feel overwhelmed. That's what I've learned. You're worried about what to learn, who to learn it from, whether you can have confidence in that, whether, you know, you should pursue this niche or that niche. I get it. I've been there. Here's what I'm going to do. I hadn't created the program at all yet. Here's what I will do. I will create a program that goes through a minimum viable snapshot for high level. That doesn't mean, by the way, minimum viable product is MVP, but it really stands for most valuable product.

Keaton: 20:19

Hmm.

Sam: 20:20

Because if you like, there's a, I think at Leonardo, uh, Leonardo da Vinci said, some simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Keaton: 20:27

Yeah.

Sam: 20:27

Right. So we're going to give you the most simple approach to the market, including an agency snapshot, sub account snapshot, our ads library. That is simple. Like you only need six to 12 ads in your library to crush it.

Keaton: 20:43

And

Sam: 20:43

we're gonna help you build this. If you guys are in, Pay me 2000 bucks and I'll build it. I was kind of hoping nobody would out of the 24 people, I think 21 of them paid me. And so clearly it was like, boom, you know, yeah, this is exactly like you said, this is what we've been asking for is what we didn't know we needed. Um, And so we started building it and we would drip out one module per week in a small beta group, uh, without promoting it, without doing anything. And, um, so it got done maybe two months ago and we're super proud of it. And it's a pretty cool program that we've got together. So agency MVP, uh, it's a simple way to build the model, by the way, that I built in APEX.

Keaton: 21:33

Yeah. Right. And that's what I really want to get into is like, what is. The deeper I get into entrepreneurship, it's all about the model. It's like committing to, I don't know, a spouse or a business partner. Like your model is changeable, but it's. If you can set things up from the beginning in the right way, you're going to save yourself so much headache down the line, divorcing, so to speak, from that model and trying to adjust. So, uh, this is what I believe to be the best place for people to start right now is what you're about to describe. What is it? And what is that? You know, what is the snapshot include? What are the? The base principles that people need to start with.

Sam: 22:18

Well, let's, let's do this. What are some of the core problems that people have when they're, when they're starting their agency in order for your agency agency to crush it, you have to relearn a couple of things. One of the big things is offer like offer has become such a cliche, ubiquitous thing that lives out there. Right. And because whenever words, Yeah, Become cliche. They lose their meaning and this should be a scary thing. And if you're listening or watching this, if you think you know what an offer is and you think you can create offers, that is not how you create that you do not build an offer by creating it. You can only discover offers. Right. And, uh, there's a guy named Harry Brown that has a book and it's, I think it's titled the secret to selling anything. And he's got a couple of quotes in there that are really like, and one of them is you can't motivate anyone to buy your things. You have to identify a motivation and then create the sloot or create the solution that matches or satisfies, satisfies that motivation. Right. And to put a finer point on it, he's also the same guy that says, ask people what they want and then sell them that thing. Okay. And so when I look around, do you know what Daryl Eves is by the way?

Keaton: 23:37

Yep.

Sam: 23:38

Okay. So Daryl Eves, I was at a conference with him this week, this last week. Um, I got a funny story about him. Cause

Keaton: 23:44

YouTube guy, if anybody doesn't huge

Sam: 23:46

YouTube guy, uh, Mr. Beast mentor, um, Just huge. You OG

Keaton: 23:52

YouTube. Yeah.

Sam: 23:53

I didn't visually know what Daryl Eves looked like. Okay. And I stood next to him with the buffet line. He had a YouTube hat on. I'm like, Hey bro, you're a YouTuber. It's a little embarrassing. It's like, yeah. And I'm like, Oh, you at the conference? He's like, yeah. He gets up on stage the next day. I'm like, Oh, that's terribly. It's like, Oh my gosh, I had his audio book up off my phone. So anyway, sorry. This is a little sidestep. It does. Dovetail back into this. There's a couple of things he said, and it was very validating for me to hear this too, because I mean, that guy's way ahead of me, right? He said, how many of you in this room have a niche? And this is a room full of agency owners, by the way. And most of the room shot up their hand. How many of you have broad agencies, like three or four people? And he goes, you guys are going to really struggle with YouTube. And you guys are really going to struggle with your agencies. And I was like, Oh, we have a niche conversation coming. Cause you know, I'm, I'm the riches are in the niches. Right. Um, and so he went through all of the reasons why you have to have a niche, both in your, for your YouTube content, as well as your business more broadly. And that's the first thing that people do wrong. Okay. So. You know, you asked about what's in the snapshot and all that kind of stuff. The funny thing, Keaton, we don't touch software or the snapshot until week four.

Keaton: 25:22

Nice.

Sam: 25:25

And we don't do that because your impulse to build a product as an entrepreneur is, is your downfall. That is what is going to kill you. You don't build products, you discover them and then you assemble them. Right. And when, when we go through, we do a very deep dive. It's all the business principles. That I learned from my, uh, mentor that go into the first three weeks of understanding your audience, really understanding your audience. Um, understanding their demographics, understanding their psychographics, understanding their online behavior and their offline behavior. Understanding, understanding their impulses based on their, uh, demographics. Are they Gen Xer? Right. Are they, uh, are they a baby boomer? All of these things matter. Okay. And when you can do it, right. Um, there's, I got a, a quote. On our MVP webinar, where a guy named Daniel Nugent agency owner for like four years, won the SAS preneur award last year, tore his agency down to build an MVP agency. So last, last year, 2023, he gets, gets the, uh, SAS preneur award and he hates his agency. He's just like, dude, we were just overwhelmed. Seven figures fine. But had to tear down, he built this one, right? And he said on this video clip, he goes, I've never, I've been in the, he said, I've been in the click funnels and marketing world for four years and I've never heard anybody talk about how to create offers and do research like you guys do. He goes, I got in a brand new niche, did my research, follow the formula, put my offer out there. And in his words, he goes, and it just bites, like meaning he puts it out there And people like, yes, that's what I want.

Keaton: 27:24

Yeah.

Sam: 27:25

So the same way you were talking about, you know, agencies have been hungry for this. Yeah. That's living in the ether. Like those sentiments, those situations, those feelings are living in the ether. And really what you are is you're a receptor to frequency. You need to be able to identify that frequency so then you can convert it Into an outcome and your ability to do that and develop that muscle, that skill, which it is a muscle, right? Like anything else is what will make it whether you're successful or not. And by the way, once you get that skill, it doesn't matter if it's a marketing agency, it doesn't matter if you open up a, you know, a soda shop down the street, whatever it is, you can make money. Right. It's just about going about the method and the formula properly so you can execute properly. And that's what goes into MVP. And by the way, the snapshots are almost a checklist of what not. To include. Okay. Doesn't mean you can't

Keaton: 28:32

drop moment for every beginner. It was like, tell me what's in the snapshot. Like, like list it all out and you're like, Oh, it doesn't have this. I don't need that. I need a snapshot that has, I don't know, twice anything.

Sam: 28:49

We have a guy, another video testimonial, hilarious Gary Rieger. And he goes. He says in our community goes you guys should have seen my rat's nest of snapshots that I had my agency And he, he tore it all down and started from scratch and just is building it up the right way. Listen, if you want to do different things, like there's some people who teach seven figure agencies and like add all these different services. You want to know what the problem with building an agency like that is for me. Okay. I'm in my forties. I'm more about lifestyle than I am about revenue is every feature. You add branches off into three channels of either service, support, tech, um, training, whatever it is, it branches off into those different things. It also branches off into additional reasons why people should quit your service. Okay. Because clarity is the friend of conversion. Complexity will kill you. Right? And so we all have an in an MVP dude. I'll just keep talking. My bad. If you know, sorry, you're just keep going. We have this, um, there's a lesson called that we call the law of entropy, right? And every entrepreneur has suffered from, from entropy, meaning I'm close to my thing that I'm building and a customer tells me, Oh, it would be cool if we, okay, I'll add that. Right. And I'll add that. Add up over time and before long you start getting customer complaints. Your retention is like your churn is going up. Okay. You have to hire more people. So your margins shrink and you're thinking, well, we're doing the business model that everybody else said we should do. But what you don't realize is it's death by a thousand cuts. Keep the main thing, the main thing, the thing that made my Apex agency so successful was because we basically gave them a dialed in ads library. A button to push to get leads and then a streamlined clean workflow and then proactive communication. Like that was the broad framework of how we did it, how we maintained it as what we teach in MVP and how we got clients is what we teach. Yeah. And then VP.

Keaton: 31:15

So it reminds me of like everyone. They can flash the a hundred K months, but like, if you're making a hundred K, you've got a partner, you've got a team, you're actually taking home 10. I'd rather take home 10 with a 15 K a month agency and one VA and a couple of softwares than I would with a hundred K agency.

Sam: 31:35

Yeah. And then how many hours you got to work? Exactly. Your partners, you know,

Keaton: 31:39

you can flash the revenue number, but it's, it's all, it's a sign of a sophisticated entrepreneur when. You know, you and I can sit here and be here. Someone's like, they're, they're doing a million a month in a. You know, full service agency. And you're like, man, that sounds horrible, terrible, terrible. And that's like the dirty secret that they don't want to

Sam: 32:03

talk. Nobody talks about this, by the way. And those are the guys that are getting the clicks. Those are the guys that whatever. I mean, maybe they're, and they're probably smarter than me.

Keaton: 32:11

Yeah.

Sam: 32:13

I will say, and you're probably the same way because of your current, like where you lie in the environment, like where you say our placement, I get a bird's eye view into many agencies. And it's man, I just simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. That's all I can say. And like my webinar says how to build a lifestyle agency. And I use that word lifestyle. Because it's not just about money. Money is important. Okay. But money is not revenue. Money is profit. What you get to keep. That's what you should be focused on. Um, there's a guy, uh, do you know Quinn Nolan, by the way? Uh, rings a bell. You should have him on. You'd really enjoy talking to him. Okay. Um, Quinn Nolan, he's a solopreneur. So what I mean, no VAs, one dude, he's got a pretty decent size YouTube channel. Um, that's how he gets most of his customers. And all he does is the up X plus high level model. And he makes like 30 grand a month. With one dude,

Keaton: 33:20

and

Sam: 33:20

he's not like out there with crazy customer support. He just keeps it simple. In fact, he has two templates, two ad templates, and I'll tell you this. He's got two ad templates and then he got crazy and doubled them up with the same ad template, but instead of a short form lead form, a long form lead for. Right. You're talking about two templates, but duplicated it's the same ads. Yeah. The discipline. That it takes to stay that simple makes that dude bulletproof. Yeah. Right. And that's what you want. I mean, oh my gosh. By the way, he's like, I don't know, 25 or 26 making a ton of money. And just having it simple and he's figuring this out at a young age. Yeah. I didn't figure it out.

Keaton: 34:08

That works discipline. That's what it is. That's what it is. Um, yeah, it's when I think this is a Naval quote. It's like, well, the Naval quote is retirement is when you stop trading tomorrow for today or you stop trading today for tomorrow. Um, but I think he has something else as well. That's like being rich is when the money you say no to feels better than the money you say yes to.

Sam: 34:36

Oh yeah, that's good. And that is, that

Keaton: 34:39

is for anyone listening. That's like, I don't know about this whole thing. Like when you get to the point when someone's offering you money and saying no to it feels better than saying yes to it, it's an unlock into. Like, okay, there's something else going on here. Like this is a, a lifestyle thing instead of just how much energy and time and resources can I put into this for like some future payoff? Yeah. Um, yeah, I really love that quote. Okay, so customer research is step one. Um, so that when you, you know, most my assumption and view of this is in my experience is like people are going to arrive to like 80 percent of the same product, but 20 percent of it is going to be so informed to that niche that when they drop it and they say those few things that just resonate. Yeah. It's like, here's what I need. Um, so even going, even if you feel like, you know, it going through those, that process is so powerful just for that extra 20%. Um, that's right. And um, the, the psychographics thing you talked about, one of the exercises I used to do was with. My students is like, think about like when you're asking somebody for a thousand dollars, 2000, 3, 000 a month for marketing, here's what you're asking them for. It's really take home their take home income, not the profit or revenue of their business. Like let's say they're doing a million a year, but they're taking home a hundred K and you're asking them for three K a month. That's a, a. Almost 40 percent of their take home income per month that you're asking them to risk on something that might not work out.

Sam: 36:30

Yeah.

Keaton: 36:30

And that sales conversation, like no wonder they're bulking at price. Like let's move up the ladder or find something cheaper or, you know, uh, figure out another way to pitch that. But, um, anyway, so crucial. I just wanted to, that, that little exercise had a couple of people mentioned had been helpful. So I wanted to mention it, but, um, What's the, what's the model? Like, what are you actually selling? What's that 80 percent that tends to be the same?

Sam: 37:00

Yeah. Um, so we know that, well, okay. So just a note on niche selection, um, niche selection is important. Right? One, making sure that you pick a son, Mitch, and then to making sure that you don't work with broke people. Like if I just want to be pragmatic, make sure their customer value is good enough to where if they make a sale or two, they're paying for me and then some. Right. And, um, so like work with people who can pay their bills. That means that that might exclude, you know, the window cleaner. I don't know what the window or what a window cleaner makes. I don't know. It might exclude some people who are, you know, More broke. It also might, you might learn. In fact, we've had a couple of people who have gone through our process and learned that in fact, they don't have a niche with any demand. Right? We've had people, um, come through our program and be like, you know what? We've been working on this niche and trying to pitch it and whatever for six months. And because of the way we did our research, we actually didn't have a niche. So, I mean, better late than never, but the amount of time that you save just by doing it properly and no demand,

Keaton: 38:10

you mean like they're already booked out for like years and they don't feel like they need, or they don't

Sam: 38:14

believe like there's a culture. There, there are niches where there's a culture where, uh, like I heard, uh, one lady say Pilates today, like apparently all Pilates instructors don't believe in advertising at all, like they're, you know, and at some point if that group think becomes a culture, you have to be aware of that. And if there's like a small pocket of people who do get it, okay, well, great. But that's not enough to build a business on. Right. So, um, so it's just going about that research. Right. And then the model. Is yeah, there's one thing that every person will always agree on. Do you want more business? Yeah. So lead generation becomes a big part. Of doing that. And if we make it specific enough, then it become, it can become really compelling to our, to our customers. Right? So the specificity is really important. The simplicity is also really important. To all you APEX users who come in and take our entire ads library and resell that, I would encourage you not to do that. We get a lot of people that just say, Hey, look at all these templates, put them all in. That's not the way to do it, right? And the way to have like customers that look at what you do, see the value and then stay for a long time. It means you're going to have to have clarity. And then adoption, like they're going to have to use your tool for a good amount of time. And then once they use it, they never, once you get somebody past four months, and really it can be, there's a way to shorten that timeframe, but they're using your tool. They're not, they're not going to put it down. Right. It's critical to their business. Uh, yeah. So the model is, uh, lead generation. We, we obviously lead with Apex. That's the model I know intimately. Right. So I can teach it. I can show people how to do it. Um, And then just turning those people into customers for a long time, how to do that.

Keaton: 40:21

Um, there's one thing you said there that I want to push back on because I don't think, I don't think you believe it at face value, but I want to, maybe you do, and I want to dive into it. There's people will never say no to more business. I actually found that to be. untrue in that when the juice is not worth the squeeze, like a lot of, and this is sort of the subconscious calculation. A lot of people are doing are like, Hey, do you want more business? Maybe they've been burned by agencies. They're like, I don't know. You're right. But it's also like, at what price? Like if I'm paying 2, 000 for a 3, 000 customer and my profit margin is, I don't know, it's 80%, like I'm only making 500 on that because I spent so much on the advertising and then also in a lot of these, like. Maybe not built to scale type businesses. There's this question of like, I, how much can I actually handle? And, um, more so than that, like I'm, I'm just burned out as a business owner and I don't really want. Like, yeah, if, if, if you just get me the jobs and they're delivered and they're signed, sealed, ready to go and everyone's perfect, sure. But I don't want leads. I don't want to sift through the leads. I don't want to have to deal with that. Do you find what's your take on that whole conversation? No,

Sam: 41:54

I agree with you a hundred percent and you know, here's Every new agency owner should understand your acumen and skill level in business really matters And in marketing, by the way, there are feelings. There are, uh, cycle graphics that you need to be aware of. Um, in whatever niche you, um, in, in whatever niche you decide to go into. Right. Um, a lot of niches had been hit up by agencies and have been burned. Like you said. And so knowing that needs to be at the forefront of your mind because you have to have a tool against that. And there are some people who are just overwhelmed and, you know, maybe they're at capacity. So yeah, maybe they don't want more business, but broadly speaking, people want to make money. Um, finding them new customers can do that, but doing it the right way. Is really important.

Keaton: 42:48

That's what I'm getting at is like, it's, they care how it's done. They're starting, the market's starting to get pickier where it's like, it's not just, yeah, send me a bunch of leads. I'll sift through them. It's like, I want the right leads. So

Sam: 43:02

you, you want to lean into something I call the value frame. Okay. And the, like people understand and people understand the, uh, the phenomenon of a first impression, right? The first time you meet somebody, you like in a split second, you have all of these judgments, uh, prejudiced, good, bad, whatever. About them. That is in everything we, everything we do. And marketing is no exclusion to that. So your advertising and how you generate leads for a business needs to go through a particular frame. For it to be effective. So imagine we'll, we'll use this, this value first frame. So imagine you meet a girl in a bar, you go up and she's dressed in wherever they dress like in bars and you're like, Hey, this is my first impression of this person. Okay. Take that same exact person and then meet them in church. Those are two different frames. Those are, you entered into the room in two different ways. When it comes to your customers, too many of the. Agencies roll out by being the hot chick in the bar, right? Your customers don't want that. They want healthy, qualified people. And there is in fact, a formula to doing that. Um, which it starts with what frame are you going through? What are you, what are the first things that you're representing, telling them, promising them, admitting to them, not saying to them when they first see you.

Keaton: 44:40

Yeah.

Sam: 44:41

Okay. What is that? And then how do you deliver value before anything else? All right, that's the very first part of the scenario. Then to just tactically speaking, does your advertising speak to a broad group of people? If it does, it's not specific enough to hone in on a very singular motivation. I'll give you an example of that. So I think I told you we had, like my agency had a published case study. Did I tell you this? A published

Keaton: 45:14

case study

Sam: 45:14

published case study by, by, uh, Facebook.

Keaton: 45:16

Oh, wow. No. Okay. So it's ringing a bell now, but I don't remember.

Sam: 45:21

Yeah. So we had a published case study, um, 2019 or something like that, where, where Facebook came back and they said, Hey, You guys are doing marketing, right? We want to publish this case study. We were like, dude, this is crazy. We're, we're going to be the only agency in our niche that has a published case, which is really cool. Yeah, but when you have a published case study, they give you a lot of data and it's not data that you see in ads manager, right? It's attribution data. It's like, hey, what, what money got made? Where? And for that particular, um, at that point in time, we were running three campaigns, a general chiropractic campaign, right? like just general aches and pains, whatever, a general acupuncture campaign, same kind of thing. And the very specific disc herniation, um, spinal decompression campaign. And the one that we were most excited about were the general ones because the lead volume and the lead cost. We're low and the volume was high. The cost was low, but when it came back and what made the money, it was an 80, 20 split, that specific spinal decompression campaign that was focusing on that one condition made all the money.

Keaton: 46:34

Wow.

Sam: 46:35

Right. And so Jacob and I, my partner, Jacob, we're like, uh, there's something to be learned here. And I think we need to change our entire approach to marketing. And so we came up with this thing we call the qualified lead formula. Okay. And we have metrics for that. And I'll tell you what they were. They were 2 percent click through rate, all 1 percent link click through rate and between a 10 to 20 percent conversion rate, we did not want above a 20 percent conversion rate. It meant that there was not enough of a filter on our audience or our offer. Okay. And by focusing on niche, like super niche conditions like that, just everything, like everything down your funnel works better. Your people are more qualified. You stop getting that, oh, I didn't opt in for that lead. Who is this? You know, they, you know, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Like when people say that, when we did that, that stuff kind of stopped happening and we went when we led with the value first approach. That stuff stopped happening now. It wasn't like hey, you're walking down the street and you see the girl that you met at the bar It's like oh, yeah, you know, it's like you see the girl you met at church like hi Sally or whatever, you know, hey And it is, dude, I got to tell you, it is mindset. Like we are so controlled by our psychology that if you don't take a minute to, to think about how your digital presence interacts with, like directly connects with human psychology and you think everything could be surface level, we're just gonna throw ads out that we're just going to do this. If you think that you can do that, you're going to be a long time struggling in this business. Until you can make, until you connect those dots and remember, these are people with thoughts and feelings and experiences. We match our message, our brand, our solution with them. We win.

Keaton: 48:32

Yeah. And what you're saying, I think you sort of blended two things here. Maybe you didn't mean to do it on purpose. I usually do, but I think there's the leads. There's the leads that are the, the people at the bar, so to speak, that are in, in my experience from 250, 000 worth of ad spend data, eight out of 10 leads are not going to convert six out of 10 aren't even going to answer the texts. We're going to say. You know, I didn't opt in, so you got right away. You can take your leads, your 10 leads and make them four, and then you can take your four leads and make it one or two that are actually going to close. Um, and then you, you have those qualified leads, but you also, when you approach a client, you're appearing either as. The person from the bar or the person from the reputable place, you know, the church or wherever that is for the, it's both. Yeah.

Sam: 49:23

And then both is the way you approach your client B2B like getting customers. And that's where you're right. I did two things,

Keaton: 49:31

but

Sam: 49:31

it's

Keaton: 49:31

B2C too. Yeah. It's your ad library. And it's, it's the, So as the agency, I'd love to hear your take on like, what are, what are the things that the reputable agencies approaching you aren't going to say, or are going to say?

Sam: 49:48

So the reputable agencies approaching who?

Keaton: 49:52

Approaching clients, B2B clients. Like how did they come up? They're not going to

Sam: 49:56

make them guarantees.

Keaton: 49:57

They're not doing guarantees. That's number one.

Sam: 49:59

They're not going to do any guarantees. Okay. Because the guarantees that people make, uh, one are borderline illegal. In fact, they probably are almost all illegal. Okay. And when you lead with a guarantee. It's the same. It's like a, like that little man syndrome, like he's got a huge truck because compensating for something, dude, it is, it is like a surefire red flag. Yeah. And the way

Keaton: 50:26

to attract broke people.

Sam: 50:28

That's right. Yeah, that's right. And then there's, there's a, there's a quote I made in our community. Um, And I wish I could give attribution to some of the quotes. Sometimes I'll hear something and it'll just go in there. I'm like, I'm never forgetting that. And the quote is this people don't want to be educated. They want to be informed. Okay. If you take that approach B to B with your chosen niche and you lead with that first, And you satisfy their curiosities, their insecurities, their fill in the blanks. You satisfy that first, you earn the value frame that you need to, to say, Hey, if there was a way for you to generate your own leads, eliminate an agency and get qualified leads only. Would you be interested, but you can't always lead with that, you know, and again, we say, sell the thing that sells the thing, sell the value. So you can sell your product. Yeah.

Keaton: 51:36

So the idea.

Sam: 51:38

Yeah, that's right. So like, for example, I remember one of, in my own agency, I kept getting questions from our customers. Hey, what do our, what should we be charging for spinal decompression cases? What should we be charging for neuropathy cases? Like what are like, what are all these things that we should be charging? Well, we had over a hundred customers. So I just started calling them. Hey, Ted, what did you, what do you guys get on average for a decompression case? Boom. And I just started aggregating data. I did my own research. I compiled that together and then I took what I had on my lead data, like how much it costs to get a lead and then conversion data, what that, what that costs for a customer, and I went by the top three, I didn't make it more than three, the top three conditions that people asked about, which were spinal decompression, neuropathy, and non surgical knee pain. And I just gave them, I said, Hey, the average case values are this, the average book, and I just gave it to them. Right. And I did the leg work to do all that. I got emails back of people saying, Oh my gosh, thank you so much for doing this. Nobody's ever done something like this for, they, they felt informed. Finally, a question that they had been asking and in their little groups, whatever, nobody wants to answer. Right. I just did it for him. I just did the research and I said, there you go. There it is. I got customers. I built my brand and my credibility up. And I could take, I took that exact same thing and I ran an ad and I said, in 2024, here's what you need to know. If you're working with spinal decompression, neuropathy, or knee patients, get the report now. And at the very bottom, it was like, Hey, if you want us to help you get more qualified, able to pay patients, click here to set up a demo call value frame.

Keaton: 53:38

Yeah. And it's, it's, uh, I was talking last week in a podcast that make. Come out before this one. He's an operations consultant that goes into agencies and gets everybody on the same page and kind of fixes things. And he's like, step one is come up with something that no one can argue on. Like, what is this piece of paper that we're going to all look at and be like, Here is the goal. Here's what's currently happening. Here's the current process or whatever. And your thing in this case is here's, here's what no one can argue on. We have data from a hundred people. These are the prices. Here's some other data. And when, from a sales perspective, it's ironic because most salespeople are more, you know, maybe wishy washy or emotional and not as, as hard data, bit of a generalization, but it's such a weapon. Like amazing weapon in sales when you're like, look, I have, I have cold, hard data to back up what I'm telling you. This isn't, I'm not cherry picking case studies that are all my best ones. And three months in, you're going to be pissed at me because. You're half of what these case studies are doing. Like, no, here's what our average client does. Here's what the average client charges. Here's average numbers across the board. I've pulled all of this. And once you have, you know, 25 case studies, 25 clients that you've worked with, you can pull all those average numbers and just give them to people and like, do you want this or not? Yeah.

Sam: 55:05

Can I give you, can I give the audience another little hack? Like this would be, if you listen to nothing else on this, this will be something that if you do it right, Brandon can get you customers like really easy. Um, we talk about this idea of borrowed credibility, right? A big, a big problem with agency owners when they're starting is they have a lot of the same problems, obviously, but getting their first couple of customers, they feel that imposter syndrome, they don't know what to offer, you know, they, whatever it is, and depending on their personality profile, they may never get over that. Right. That might be the downfall, but a really easy thing to do is as you're researching your niche, the category or the group of people that you've chosen to serve. Pretty much all of them have thought leaders. Okay. And they have big, huge thought leaders, and then they have micro small thought leaders. What you want to do is you want to focus in on those micro, smaller thought leaders, people who are, so go to YouTube, right? And find the smaller YouTube channels that are trying to put value out there that are them. So if I were going into the chiropractic niche, and let's say I didn't have all those customers. Well, what would I, what would I do? Well, I might go on YouTube and start searching those things and look for channels where there were doctors talking about this, but they're hard to find because man, there's only, they only have like 300 subscribers.

Keaton: 56:31

Yeah.

Sam: 56:32

You know, then I would approach those guys say, Hey, great videos, especially this one that talked about average case fees for this. Right? Would you come to a group of, you know, would you come to a workshop and share this with our community? Of course, dude, you're going to get tons of people, right? And then you take their case study, their experience, and you bundle it up with yours. And all of a sudden, it's kind of like, When the hot chick comes in with the like average looking guy, you're like, he must have something more to him. You know,

Keaton: 57:04

he's

Sam: 57:04

got something going on. Um, and so you have all that borrowed credibility and all of a sudden you bypass all of the cold, the trust, the, all the things that keep you from doing those first steps and man, you have. Uh, you know, some nice, you know, fertile soil to plant your seeds in and grow a business. Yeah So that's a little trick

Keaton: 57:26

love that. Um, okay. So going back to the model itself It's generating qualified ready to pay leads Via your lead generation formula or the qualified lead formula.

Sam: 57:44

That's right.

Keaton: 57:44

And they can launch it themselves with a minimum viable set of ad templates, which you will proactively update for them and a minimum viable workflow that I assume includes. Messaging them within an automatic message and some AI or are you not doing any AI?

Sam: 58:06

Um, I, I want it when I, when we rolled out the core curriculum, we rolled it out without a, I do think that AI has a place, even in an MVP, I think it's to a place now to where it's like, Hey, you know, grab clothes bought, you know, and, and throw that on because it's easy to set up. It's a good, simple thing that dude, Bryce is a smart guy. Um, but yeah, um, Yeah, that's effectively the model that, that we're helping them out with for sure.

Keaton: 58:37

And do you have data on. Like I mentioned, I pulled that data from the 250, 000 worth of ad spend and we had two, four, four and 10 answered the phone to one or two out of 10 close, depending on area offer, reputation, et cetera. Yeah. Do you have data on your, your formula and what, how many out of 10 leads end up coming in?

Sam: 59:03

Yeah. Down the funnel is hard, but I will say this at an up X right in up X last year, we did 1. 7 million leads at an average cost of 12 and 18 cents. Now that's cool. But what's really cool is. We reverse engineered all. So all of the performance metrics, we can clearly see what's doing well. What's not doing well. So we aggregated all of the top performing, um, templates. And we're like, Hey, our, our qualified lead formula is 2, 1, 10. Let's build an AI around that. Okay. And see if this AI can actually do that. And I got to tell you, it is crazy. So we now have, uh, Apex, we have a template building AI. That's can predict performance within a really tight variation broadly. So at the template level, it's not like people think sometimes they, they, they look at your ads and they're like, it's like a vending machine, like put that ad in and every time it works, it's not a vending machine. Like they're like, there are audience inputs. Like if you've got a small town or whatever, there are audience inputs. But broadly speaking, you use that temple, a template. Across all these audiences, this is the performance is going to get. And what's really cool is, uh, because of all of the data that up has collected. We've been able to build an AI that makes our ads pretty dang nailed, like pretty awesome. So, and we just roll those into B2B as well. So MVP, we help them with B2B stuff right in their ads. Um, but yeah, it's crazy because if you had had, here's a, we would have had that data regardless, but without AI. You couldn't have made heads or tails of it potentially. Right. I don't know that you would have been able to, but that AI can identify trends and all these different markers where you're like, Oh, when you, I'll give you an example, you want to know what the optimal word count is for a lead generation ad workout word count. How many words should be in your word count? Yeah, it is 70. 100 words. Okay. And the interesting thing is, both before that 70 and after that 100, it takes a dive in click through rate. Wow. Now isn't that interesting? Yeah. Right. And so if you know that your click through rate is an important metric. Mm-Hmm., okay. Well, best practices means you get like, don't say in 10 words what you can say in five. Okay. Right. And so you hone in and just make sure that hey. Is there a checklist? Yeah. Let's make sure that it hits that. Right. I'll give you another one. Urgency and scarcity. You know how people use a limited time offer and that's all they'll put in their ad. That doesn't work, but limited time offer only 30 available or expires on June 30th. The more specific, the more real you make the urgency and scarcity. It does work, but it will go from limited offer or limited time. If you only put that, it actually works against you. It makes your ads work worse. You're better off not having it in there at all. But if you, this offer expires on June 30th, that's an ad with real urgency and scarcity, right? And that will work.

Keaton: 1:02:54

Yeah. Quick side note. I was working with a dentist who was running his own ads and I was like. Please, please put like, I was, I had to beg him to put urgency and scarcity in he's, he's launching a new practice. He's like, I need 30 patients a month. I'm like, probably won't hit that right away. But like, whatever you do say, this expires at the end of the month. And there's only this many available. I told him to put like 10 because I, 10 would be a first grade month. He's like, I'm going to put 30. I'm like, all right, whatever. And every single person he saw from that ad before the end of the month said, I really don't want to miss out on this. Can you hold this for me until the end of the month? Exactly.

Sam: 1:03:35

Dude, exactly. I mean, and for all of you married guys out there, if you've ever seen your wives take advantage of coupons or deals, this is real, right? So yeah, urgency, urgency, and scarcity. If you are not including that as a element in your ad copy, Yeah. Just do that one thing, you'll probably see like a half percent increase.

Keaton: 1:03:59

Is Apex writing, is the AI writing ads as well now? And coming up with creative?

Sam: 1:04:07

And it's going through iterations and I want to say that right now we have Claude that's writing. Yeah. Those Claude is a really awesome. I mean, it's really, yeah, it's really good. Um, Jacob would be the actual go to on that, but yeah, it's right. And it's right now and it's right now is that

Keaton: 1:04:24

perform. Yeah. Um, so I want to talk acquisition for a minute. Um, and what I'm interested in specifically is what's the minimum viable way for us as agencies to only be seeing the qualified leads as well. Uh, and we, we touched on it briefly, but like, What are the top methods that you're recommending, especially for those that may not have a ton of budget at the beginning? And, um, obviously things are landing harder when you've got the better offer and you've actually done the research, et cetera. But what are the methods and anything you can speak to in terms of acquisition,

Sam: 1:05:07

getting clients? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, You know, it's, it's interesting because in MVP, we had a couple of case studies, like as soon as we had one guy go in and after two weeks, he was like, Oh my gosh, like he'd been in the agency game for like four years already. It's like, Oh my gosh. And he started getting 20 demo calls a day just by learning what was in the first three weeks. Right. So he already, he already knew a lot of the stuff. He didn't need some of what we had in there. Um, but what was in that first three weeks, he was like, Oh, and he goes out, starts crushing it. But normally people. If you're an agency owner that hasn't caught quite gotten out of the shoots, it's like, well, how do I lead with value? What is it that I can actually do? And one of the really cool things that you can do and that we tell our people to do and we teach them how to do. We've got a funnel in an MVP called the research funnel, all of the research. If we go back to the story where, you know, I compiled all that data. If you assemble and curate that in the right way. You can get customers from it. Okay. Um, and so an example would be, um, you know, if you're a dentist, you, you were just talking to a dentist, right. And, um, we actually have a person in dentistry and they want to do, uh, uh, what's it called when you snort sleep apnea. Okay. Right. I didn't know that was a dentist thing, but that's apparently a dentist thing. And so she wanted to know how do I get customers for this? And it was like, okay, in 2024, here's what's working to get sleep apnea patients. Who are qualified and able to pay new research reveals. Right. And so you're giving them something that doesn't feel like a pitch.

Keaton: 1:06:59

They're being informed. Not educated.

Sam: 1:07:02

Yeah. And so they want to be informed, not educated. And so you're tapping into what it is that they want. Now, if you want. To know what kind of research you should be doing, join their groups, like find a Facebook group for dentists, join those groups and just see the questions that they're asking. Right. And depending on what niche you're in. So like, for example, real estate, mortgage insurance, those are salespeople. Okay. Those people are like, they'll, they'll pick up the phones. They'll do the outreach. Like they know what to do. And so sometimes, uh, I remember. In fact, we had a, one of our first case studies was guiding forest ad set. And forest at the time was teaching before he found out about apex, he was creating a Facebook ads course for insurance agents. And when he saw what we were doing, he was like, uh, I don't, this thing can run ads. And you don't have to learn Facebook ads. And so his, um, his ad said launch Facebook ads in just 45 seconds and do it without ads manager. Okay. That was the hook. Then came the story. You guys, I was going to put together a course and I was going to teach every insurance agent how to run ads so they could do it themselves. And I was going to sell for some money. But now with this tool, you don't even need to learn Facebook ads. You simply click the ad launch, put in your budget and go. It couldn't be easier to set up a demo, click below. And the, the, the visual had a picture of the platform and he put his ad in there, but he made the actual creative blurry, right? So he demonstrated to them that it was real for them to take the next step. They had to check it out themselves. Now that would work in insurance. That would not work in like dentistry, home services, right? So you do need to know like your, Your niche, but you'll, you'll discover that and the way that you research things. Um, but yeah, the value is the legwork that you have already put in. You've already done all of this customer research on their behalf. You've done it. Just give it to them. Right. And that is almost confidence building for them because they don't feel like they're selling the whole, the secret to, to selling you guys is the value. Sell without selling, pull people to you. Don't push yourself on them. Right. Just pull them to you. Offer them something. Hey, we've got this cool thing. We did some research. There's some stuff you don't know about your customer base. That's going to help you get more, whatever. Right. Boom. There's your hook and there's your value and people are going to thank you for it.

Keaton: 1:10:09

Yeah.

Sam: 1:10:11

And be when they think

Keaton: 1:10:12

you can say, Hey, how about a little business?

Sam: 1:10:13

Yeah.

Keaton: 1:10:14

There's this, this undertone that we haven't mentioned explicitly, but I think is important to. I was just reflecting on my own journey starting out. And I did a lot of this somewhat, like just, I guess I just knew to do it. Um, so I did a lot of research, like, Hey, I have one question survey. What's your biggest marketing headache. I would get it back from orthodontists and I got, you know, 30, 50 answers. I got on calls, research calls, ask them questions for hours. Like that was my first six months. And I didn't, I never attribute that's, that's not the thing I talk about the most, um, although I should. Um, but what I, I was thinking about a friend who he has a, uh, agency in the landscaping space and he used to have like for a brief period was involved with the landscaping company and that's starting back up. He kind of had an issue with the partner, but now they're getting back together. And, um, he. He was saying, I just want to be able to, like, I, when my ads are running, someone books a call and I just take the call on the phone and like, Hey, I'm on a job site. Do you want this or not? Because, and like this, this job that I'm at right now was generated by the leads in the program that I'm going to run for you. Uh, so obviously that's not for everyone, but there's this, And you mentioned the dental groups as well. I'm in them all the time. And it's, it's a hilarious how much the conversation isn't about dentistry. Like these people are just nor, they, they straighten teeth all day. They do teeth all day. They don't want to talk about it. Like, yeah, they're, uh, dentists have the highest, I should probably blur out what I just said on so I don't get flagged on YouTube, but I didn't know that. Yeah. Um, so high, highest rate of, um, dissatisfaction and, You know, there's severe dissatisfaction, severe dissatisfaction ending in things that can't be mentioned here. Um, And that's, that's no joke. And so when you go in and they're, they're looking for this normalcy. And I think as these young agency owners or people just getting into the space, like they forget to just be a human that can relate to these people and just become their friends. And one of the most informative things I ever did was go in person to one of my clients, watch them do a consultation, see these people that have worked for them for 20 years. See, he had a, he had one of those like rowing machines in his office, you know, he's like trying to stay in shape. Like, These people are multifaceted and we tend to be in this agency echo chamber and just like sitting in our room and being like, you want to get on a zoom meeting to these home services businesses that are like, that's just not how I work. And being able to, to be flexible in either the sales process or the marketing process or whatever it is, you're going to land on the right stuff by just going into the wild and talking to these people.

Sam: 1:13:22

That's right, dude. That's, I mean, the, what is it? People don't care how much, you know, until they know how much you care,

Keaton: 1:13:29

or even just like, they don't care how much, you know, if you're like got a stick of your butt and you're annoying. Yeah,

Sam: 1:13:37

no, that's absolutely right. Um, and by the way, if you're a personality profile, here's another thing, just be, you guys be a little honest with yourselves. I interact now with a lot of agency owners and one of the blind spots where I'm like, you know what, if you just got a partner, you would probably start doing a lot better. I think that's something that, did you do your agency by yourself, by the way? I started out and then I partnered up

Keaton: 1:14:10

like a year.

Sam: 1:14:11

Yeah, I started out by myself, partnered up. Um, and I was like, I mean, the moment I partnered up, we went from probably three or four grand a month, my agency to 25 grand of monthly recurring revenue in 30 days, because all I had to do was the thing that, you know, God made me decent at, talk to people like, Hey, you You know, that's all I had to do instead of like, okay, let me see if I can build this funnel, you know, no, I didn't have to do any of that. So that's a hack for all you people out there who are stuck in, you know, beginner land, and I know it's hard. By the way, everybody's like, is there a secret to picking, uh, a partner? Just make sure that they're skilled and that they are your opposite. They're your yin to your yang. You don't want to front people. That's a bad idea, but you got a fulfillment. And an acquisition and that you're both good and you're both committed. And that's all you need.

Keaton: 1:15:13

And date for to figure that out date and don't get married. Agreed. Um, okay. So last thing I want to close out with is retention. You've alluded to a few things like the proactive support. Um, my, my concern, my initial concern with Alpex when I first saw it was, it's only a matter of time before the template fails. What do people need to know about this model? First of all, how much are they like, what's the target price point for retention? And then what do they need to know about the model in order to retain for, you know, Unlimited amount of time because they never want to cancel.

Sam: 1:15:58

Customer acquisition, like real estate, real estate, the number one rule is location, location, location, right? Um, you make your money when you buy and the agency game is you make your money when you select your customer. Okay, there's when you can give the same ads to one customer, you give 100 leads to one customer and that customer gets 30 new customers, right? And you give the same tools, everything to another person and they lose money. What's the number one solution that you can do model this person, right? So I know when you're first starting your agency, you'll take anybody. I understand that. And I'm not telling you not to do that. I'm just saying as you mature, and as you season in the agency game, the, if there is any silver bullets, the one that you can do is select better customers. That's number one, number two, with lack of communication, people, people make up their own information and it is never to your benefit. In lead gen, as well as in everything else, the moment that something negative happens, I got an ad denied, dude, ads get denied all of the time. It's not a problem. I get an ad denied customer gets a notification. Well, I'd go denied strike number one, right? Lead flow stops. Why does, why does lead flow stop anyway? It's because in small audiences, the learning can take some time. And as soon as it gets out of learning, then it thinks it's learned. And then it's like, Oh, we're a small audience. So it doesn't know how to kick itself back into learning on small audiences. That's why in Apex, we have a button that says refresh because you don't have a creative ad fatigue, you have audience fatigue, click the refresh button, get that thing going again. And if you're smart, you'll recognize that beforehand. And proactively do that and do the thing I said, it's like, Hey, Dr. Smith, we noticed that your lead flow had slowed down. We made some adjustments. You should see that pick up in the next two to three days.

Keaton: 1:18:19

And the adjustment, if you do that, refresh one time, change the audience radius by a mile. And

Sam: 1:18:26

yeah, if you are, if you're targeting by, uh, uh, by radius or by zip code, it changes, it bumps out a mile if you're doing it by. Oh, geez. I think it's state or whatever else will change. Instead of changing the radius, we change the age, bump the age out by one year, right? It's a, it's a media buying trick. And it's like, Hey, it was just put it back into learning. You know, you got a good ad there. It's not like the ad copy all of a sudden got crappy. It's like, no, you're, you just hit some algorithm.

Keaton: 1:18:57

And small audience is 200, 300, 400, 000. Like that's a small audience on Facebook.

Sam: 1:19:04

Yeah. But I will say, I mean, I have had campaigns running. Not for months, but for years in small locations like that, just by doing a couple of those things. Like we, we, I had a customer that ran the same. Uh, in fact, one of my case studies were in the same neuropathy campaign. Uh, he's been running the same one for four years. Wow. So you don't got to worry about it. Like there's enough people. Um, where was I? So proactive support, right? And then your ads library, like when you go into your ads library. And so your concern was whether or not you would be, your, your campaigns would, um, develop attrition over time, or they would stop working. How do you fight against that? So it kind of goes, you know, It's a process. So number one, you build up to that, to that, um, qualified lead formula. So two, one 10, right? You build up to that. And with Apex, like no other platform, we give you template metrics, meaning Keaton's got 10 locations. They're all running the same template. We want to know broadly what those numbers are, because they're going to tell us something. Yeah. Okay. So if we're, if we've spent, you said 250, 000, if we spent 250, 000 on this one template and it says a 2. 2 percent click through rate and blah, whatever that is, we should feel very confident. metrics. Okay. But we also have ad metrics. You click into the actual campaign and you granular, you narrow down to the visuals, the creative, you're like, good, good. Losing steam. Okay. You know what team, we're going to update this one. We'll come back and we'll watch it. Your whole idea is to franchise your leads. Or to franchise your marketing campaigns. And what that means is you want to standardize and get that thing working and then sell it as many times as you can. All right. And maintaining its performance. Is a matter of just consistently looking at it. Like look at it once a month. How's the creative doing? How's the ad copy doing? You know what? I, I see things kind of, it seems like maybe this has hit the audience too long. We've been running the same one for whatever. Okay. Click the AI rewriter, rewrite it in Apex and push that next version out. How's that doing? So there's some iteration here, but you guys, you own a business. You know, your product needs to adapt and improve over time, but it doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to be complex. And so if you build an audience, which by the way, or I'm sorry, a library. An ad library doesn't have to be robust and huge. My best churn rate, by the way, my best churn rate in my agency was when we had 12 ad templates, that was it. 12.

Keaton: 1:22:01

It's like rolling out the funnel and templates and high level. And it's like every industry and a billion different things. Like Why?

Sam: 1:22:11

Well, uh, it's the difference between like when you go to, um, the paradox of choice, that's a book, you guys should read the book. Um, go to a macro, uh, is it called macaroni? Uh, cheesecake factory. I hate going to cheesecake factory because you go there and there's a bajillion things on that menu. It's like, what do I get? You actually, at a psychological level, you hurt your, you start the churn process already. You give them too many choices. They start to churn too many choices equals churn. Okay. And then the last thing is just adoption. Okay. So why do most customers churn? It's because when you put the, when you give them software, they're terrified. If I push this button, what's going to break? That's what they think. Okay. And so sometimes you have to, and if you're listening, I'm taking one finger and I'm taking my hand and I'm pushing it down, that represents sometimes you have to take your hand and push their finger down on it and you do that in how you onboard people, like a really dialed in onboarding flow, by the way, don't automate your own onboarding flow that doesn't involve people. Okay. It should be, if there's like software, like SWAS, it should be like onboarding with a person, whatever that is. You want it to be streamlined. But you also want it to have a human element and it's mostly to help them adopt the tool. All right. And you don't want when they adopt the tool, it should be an Atari joystick. You know, this does this and this does this. There's a button and a lever. Everything else you take care of simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. If you can do those macro components, you will keep the right customers forever, the right customers. Now, will you have a trust? Yeah, you're going to have, you know, people who churn out. That is a part of this business, but you will keep people if you've never had a customer for years. You will start seeing people and once they get past like four months, they're going to be long time customers. Um, but you won't get that if they don't use your tool.

Keaton: 1:24:34

So two more questions I have. First of all, how do you make sure they're actually converting the leads?

Sam: 1:24:45

Ghost leads, secret shoppers.

Keaton: 1:24:47

Okay.

Sam: 1:24:50

That's the only way you can do it. And, and our approach when I was in the agency space was secret shopper leads. And if you guys don't know what a secret shopper leads, what I mean by that is as soon as they start getting lead flow, put in a dummy lead. And it should be to Sam Carlson or whatever, like a team member, like, you know, Heather, whatever phone number, put it in. I just see what they do with it. Because even though we have like closed bot and conversational AI and all that kind of stuff. That doesn't mean that we don't call our leads, right? Best practices is still like people buy from people. Okay. So you should have a protocol on there to where somebody is doing that. And depending on the way you approach the agency, which contrary to popular thought, I think some people should, um, offer a PECs as a black label. Meaning I'm selling you Keaton ad services, charging you a thousand dollars a month, but I'm just going to use a PECs to run the ads. And I don't tell you about up X. Yeah, I, I, I think that's smart. People, people, up X users, we have plenty of them that do that. You don't have to sell it as a SAS, right? Because maybe I want to charge them nine 97 and I want to bring in a VA from like level nine or something and have them do some followup work because for this niche in particular, they are completely unwilling to do that action, but it's critical, it's important. So you got to know, like you talk, I mean, we led into this thing with model. Yeah. But the way we did it was secret shopper lead. If they didn't complete the action, it was, Hey, we totally understand. Dr. Smith, adopting new things is hard for everyone. Here's what we have on Wednesday. We do a weekly training all about lead followup. Boom. That's number one or number two. Honestly, if you don't want your team to have to worry about training or doing any of this. You can outsource it to our team. They're already trained. You can plug into dialed callers and I can set you up a call with Jen today. What would you like to do?

Keaton: 1:26:57

Love it. And then what high level features are you including in this? Like, do they have the opportunities dashboard? Are you also doing reputation management or at least having that show up? Nope. Nope. The more things now,

Sam: 1:27:14

what, yeah.

Keaton: 1:27:14

What

Sam: 1:27:15

if, yeah, um, we want can ban workflows. That's all.

Keaton: 1:27:21

By Kanban, you mean pipelines?

Sam: 1:27:24

Yep. Pipelines and workflow. Um, anything else is a, is a distraction. Anything else is now that doesn't mean that, Hey, you've hit a little, here's a little trick, right? You acquire with your offer. You can retain with a proposition. Okay. So for example, like you can say, Hey, if you sign a year contract, Well, later in these other things, it's a, we call it the leaky bucket, the leaky bucket automation, right? But after, but you do this after they've proven your MVP after they've proven that they're already using your thing and then you plug it in, but you install it for them and you say, you don't ever have to touch this. It's just going to work for you. We've got this thing working on your website. We've got this thing. We've got that thing. We've got them all turned on, but you call it one, like one thing. The reason you call it one thing. So let's say you have miss call, text back a review, automation, a chat widget on the website. Like these are all things that they're not bad things. I don't have anything against them. I do if they cause complexity and churn. So if I productize them, meaning I call them the leaky bucket installation or something like that. I give in the mind of my customer who now has faith in me that, Hey, I've just installed something in your business that we did it for you. You don't got to worry about it. That's going to work.

Keaton: 1:28:53

Yeah. Right.

Sam: 1:28:54

And then that way they're like, Hey, we want to know we don't, we don't provide support to these things. You know, because that's not why you bought our service. We just did it to improve your hygiene.

Keaton: 1:29:07

Yeah. That, that slow adoption model is so crucial for everyone, for the agency and the client.

Sam: 1:29:17

Yeah. Well, and it's the difference between you needing six employees and you needing to,

Keaton: 1:29:23

um, and how much do you see people typically charging for this model?

Sam: 1:29:30

Yeah. Um, niche selection is very important, right? The ratio I like is one to 10. Okay. Okay. Um, if, if You know, if somebody can make 10, 000 bucks with your thing, then charging a thousand bucks is a healthy relationship. And what I mean by that is over the course of a month, not one customer. I mean, that would be not many, not many businesses are going to make that. Um, you can do that. Then you're, you're good doing that. But if I give you from my own experience in my own agency, we tested a lot of price points. Now, this testing would have been different in another niche, but in the medical marketing niche, we came out with 297, then we did 397, then we did 497, then we did 697, then we did 997, and we settled in at 497. But I will say, the people who are at 297, They never turned out, never. And so sometimes I do think, I wonder, and also they were the easiest to service. Like they came in when we had 12 templates, you know, before, before APEX, it was what you guys see today. Cause APEX is pretty built out now. It was pretty basic and we could only do 12 templates, you know? And that was one of those, Hey, I wasn't smart and figured it out. It was, Hey, I was dumb and that's all I could do. You know, is a limiting factor and that worked really well. Like, honestly, if I were new, like if I were, if I'm agency and, you know, zero to three years old, I'm charging two 97 a month and I'm just going out. I'm now I am. So I'm getting onboarding so to, to satisfy, to give me money up front, but my retention is 297. Great.

Keaton: 1:31:30

And now I'm boarding is just whatever you feel like you can charge at the time. Basically.

Sam: 1:31:34

Oh yeah.

Keaton: 1:31:35

No,

Sam: 1:31:37

roll out free, start free. We had a guy that was doing, uh, an old eight, like the old SMMA, uh, social media marketing agency, retainer model. Before he came into up X, he was doing that and he was really struggling, like getting retainers for 15, 2000 bucks. And then keeping them was even harder. Right. He came into Apex and he's like, uh, I'm going to charge nine. Oh, I'm going to offer them a free trial. So the ad offer them a 14 day free trial. Okay. Well written ad 14 day free trial, but they had to go to a demo call. I'm like, okay, cool. And then he was like, Nobody took the 14 day trial. The way they just paid nine 97 upfront, like, how's that a 14 day free trial? He's like, we just told him if they wanted to cancel it for 14 days, they could. All right. That's not what I think of when I think of a 14 day trial. So he actually just funded his whole acquisition by charging nine 97. He gave him three months. And then after that, he charged him for 97 months.

Keaton: 1:32:43

Yeah, charge a few months up front. That's great. Um, okay. So give us the final pitch for MVP. Who is it right for? How can they sign up? And what results should they expect? Um, In the first four months or so.

Sam: 1:33:00

Okay. So agency MVP, when I built it out, I thought it was for newer people who are struggling. If you're newer and you're struggling and you're overwhelmed and the conversation today has resonated with you, you're like, I want to build based on top of what I've heard it's for you. I was really surprised when we had a bunch of seven figure agencies come in and completely pivot and go back to, Hey, dude, this agency model, this seven figure agency model that I was enamored with and built. It's not what I want. I want to build the thing that you built. So if you want to have an agency that's built around a lifestyle, if you want to like optimize for having a hundred plus customers, But with just a couple of VAs, like if that's the outcome you want, if you want to optimize for profits, if you want a consistent discipline against adding overhead, that's what this program is doing. Okay. It's built in sequence, meaning the on demand program is 10 weeks. You are not allowed to skip forward. You can go fast. You don't have to do it. You can do it in like six weeks. If you're experienced, whatever. But if you don't have the patience to go through a 10 week program, you probably need to reassess why you're even an entrepreneur. Okay. Because I mean, it is. We are teaching you skills. We're giving you tactics. All you tactic people. Don't worry. There's tactics in there but if you're not willing to learn some skills and Like do some work it ain't for you. And then The last thing is you get access to me via Marco Polo. You use Marco Polo, by the way, okay, we should Marco Polo You get access to me for two months And that's why when we do the program, I use, I take people through in cohorts. I take people through in groups. So the July group, boom, we get them in. I can handle the people that come in in that group. Um, and it's not a big lift for me. It's not that bad. Um, but, uh, in terms of learning more, so we open it up via a workshop once a month. And that usually is like people are on a wait list or they attend the workshop. We open it up and then we close it down. Okay. So if you want to learn more about it, go to our website, apex. com, uphex. com, and then there's a little tab that says mentorship. Click on that and read the page. And then you can sign up to be on the wait list there and get registered.

Keaton: 1:35:48

Awesome. Thanks so much, man. This is great. And it's, it's a breath of fresh air amongst all. The, um, the revenue numbers being thrown around that aren't profit. And, um, I, I think all the time about the responsibility that we have as coaches, mentors, whatever you want to say to shortcut problems and how much of a disservice we're doing if we're not able to do that. And, uh, it's obviously you've put in the work to make. cut literal years off of people's learning curve. Um, and yeah, I think it's,

Sam: 1:36:25

I think it's also in that same vein of thought. It's also critical that we speak the unvarnished truth, right? And while we want to sell stuff and we want to make money and we want to do all this stuff, there's zero good that comes from a person coming into this mission, this journey with an Over promised, under delivered expectation, right? And I, I, I do mean it. If you can't sit through a 10 week program, then you need to reassess where you're at. Um, I know what, and you know what it took. You went through this too. Like, you know what it takes to build an agency, right? And so when you go out and you see, Some of these claims they're disingenuous, but they're the siren song. Yeah, you know, they're very tempting. I get it We won't do that with MVP. Honestly, I don't have to do with MVP. I really want to focus on up X This was not a money making endeavor necessarily But we did it because you know at some point in time It's like hey, there is a sense of duty that we have to this audience And we can do it. So maybe we should. And, uh, thanks for having me, dude. You're the man. Appreciate you. We'll see you next time.