Before You Run Ads, Fix This One Thing First | Ep 964

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Before You Run Ads, Fix This One Thing First"

The Game with Alex Hormozi | Episode 964
April 23, 2026

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Overview

This episode of The Game features a dynamic Q&A session with business owners from various industries. Co-host Sam Ovens leads the conversation, providing strategic advice on scaling businesses, achieving greater impact, transitioning roles, pricing strategies, and optimizing marketing funnels. The central theme is that before rapidly scaling or running paid ads, entrepreneurs must first ensure their business fundamentals—offer, audience, operations—are rock-solid to avoid inefficiency and wasted resources as they scale.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Scaling Local Businesses & Transitioning to National Impact

(00:00–06:52)

• Home Flipping Entrepreneur's Struggle:
  The owner explains his journey: building an ecosystem around flipping homes, coaching, and multiple verticals (eg., HVAC, roofing, contracting). Struggled with being too busy, recently brought in a COO, and feels stuck between scaling locally and desiring greater impact.

  Key Advice from Sam Ovens:

  • Don’t rush to national expansion without dominating your local markets first:
    • “In order to conquer the world, you have to conquer a country first. And before you conquer a country, you gotta conquer a city. And right now you haven’t conquered a city.” (Sam Ovens, 02:24)
    • Warning against overexpansion: “When armies over expand, they collapse.” (02:24)
  • Focus on local intensification—there’s untapped revenue and impact in your backyard: “You could probably get to $100 million a year just in that market alone.” (02:24)
  • On making an impact: Create and distribute content about your processes to reach millions, rather than trying to convert everybody into a home flipper through programs. (04:02)
  • Optimize operations now that a COO is in place; use the leverage to transition into content and higher-leverage activities.

  Actionable Takeaways:

  • Double down locally and refine your offer.
  • Start making content to scale your impact.
  • With COO support, shift time from operations to high-impact growth activities.

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2. Pricing, Offers, and Misconceptions About Local Markets

(05:12–06:52)

• Discussion on Offer Structure and Pricing:

  • Sam Ovens outlines typical high-ticket coaching offers: done-with-you ($15k–$25k) vs. total turnkey ($100k).
  • Business owner says, “No one in my market can afford that,” (05:40), but Sam counters with market statistics:
    • “That’s just not true… If you run ads, yes. 9% of people in America have a million dollars in terms of their net worth.” (Sam Ovens, 06:52)

  Actionable Takeaway:

  • Don’t assume market limitations based on small sample sizes; increase reach and test higher price points, especially with advertising.

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3. Doubling Down on Profitable Event Models & Learning from Competition

(06:53–12:07)

• Motocross Training Business Owner:
  Shared an epiphany—five-day training camps are vastly more profitable than single-day events, but worried about losing market share to a copycat by reducing single-day offerings.

  Sam Ovens' Perspective:

  • “You’ll never go out of business focusing on the customer.” (Sam Ovens, 09:01)
  • Cautionary tale about competing on price or features alone:
    • Lowering prices in response to competition cost $6–7M per year and did not improve churn.
    • “Don’t lose $50 million. Let him figure that out for himself. You just focus on the customer, and you’ll win.” (Sam Ovens, 11:59)

  Actionable Takeaway:

  • Focus resources and energy on delivering superior value and customer experience—don’t chase a competitor into unprofitable terrain.
  • Scale the profitable model even if it means letting competitors have the low-end segment.

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4. Brand Building, Organic Content, and Paid Advertising

(12:28–17:44)

• Real Estate Coaching Business Owner wants to double his $2.5M business and wonders if hiring a brand manager is the key.

  • Sam Ovens insists that true core functions (conversion, attraction, delivery) should never be outsourced.

    Quote:

    • “For you, your brand is arguably the most important asset that you have and for sure would not be something that I would outsource.” (Sam Ovens, 15:57)

  Organic vs. Paid Scale:

  • Growing organically (via content) expands your audience and builds a long-term asset.

  • Paid ads provide short-term boost but reveal weaknesses in funnels and sales processes.

  • Both should be developed in tandem for sustainable growth.

    Quote:

    • Ads “will not convert the same percentage you currently do… The economics of the entire funnel will change.” (Sam Ovens, 17:19)

  Recruitment Strategy:

  • “We just poach. We just, I mean just outreach. Hey, you’ve crushed it with so and so. Can I pay you more to do it here?” (Sam Ovens, 15:08)

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5. Tackling Churn, Improving Activation, and Customer Segmentation

(17:51–23:42)

• Sales Coaching & Lead Gen for Financial Advisors:

  • Biggest challenges: churn and activating new clients (who dislike “sales”).
  • Pivoting from lead gen agency to sales coaching model—questioned if training clients on sales is scalable.

  Sam Ovens on Effective Training:

  • Break sales training into core modules and deliver regular, team-based roleplay (example: the “boiler room” approach from Gym Launch days).

  • If clients activate (adopt the training/process), retention is high; therefore, optimizing for client “activation” is crucial.

  • Segment your avatars—prioritize prospects with demographic and business traits that indicate a much higher likelihood of success and retention.

    Quote:

    • “There’s probably some advisors that are better that you need to basically scan out and say, all these people, we’re not going to service because they have a low likelihood of actually working... adjust price to only accommodate those people.” (Sam Ovens, 22:25)
    • “What behaviors did they do that caused them to activate and stick? ... That becomes the activation process we reverse engineer.” (Sam Ovens, 23:05)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Overexpansion:

  “When armies over expand, they collapse.”
  (Sam Ovens, 02:24)

• On Local Focus:

  “In order to conquer the world, you have to conquer a country first… Before you conquer a country, you gotta conquer a city.”
  (Sam Ovens, 02:24)

• On Customer Impact via Content:

  “It would be far easier for you to just make content about the stuff you’re doing. Impact millions of people that way.”
  (Sam Ovens, 04:02)

• On Chasing Competitors:

  “Don’t lose $50 million. Let him figure that out for himself. You just focus on the customer, and you’ll win.”
  (Sam Ovens, 11:59)

• On Brand Ownership:

  “Your brand is arguably the most important asset that you have and for sure would not be something that I would outsource.”
  (Sam Ovens, 15:57)

• On Ad Funnels:

  “It’s totally different selling to cold than is to warm. And so… the economics of the entire funnel will change.”
  (Sam Ovens, 17:19)

• On Segmentation & Pricing:

  “If I sold everybody who identified as a fitness person, then gym launch would never have been able to exist because I would have had too many shitty customers.”
  (Sam Ovens, 22:25)

• On Activation:

  “What behaviors did they do that caused them to activate and stick? ... That becomes the activation process we reverse engineer.”
  (Sam Ovens, 23:05)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00: Introduction and entrepreneur’s business model—local market struggles
• 02:24: Sam’s advice: Dominate your local market before expanding
• 04:02: Importance of content for broader impact
• 06:52: Market misconceptions about ability to pay
• 09:01: Sam’s $50M mistake—don’t chase competitors on price
• 12:28: Branding, paid media, and in-house brand managers
• 17:19: Transitioning from warm to cold traffic, funnel economics
• 22:25: Segmentation, pricing, and activation for coaching/agency businesses
• 23:05: Reverse engineering activation for higher retention

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Summary Flow & Usefulness

Throughout the episode, the hosts stress the critical importance of business fundamentals before deploying scale tactics like paid ads. Key patterns emerge: dominate your current market, focus on delivering superior customer value, create scalable systems (with a focus on activation and retention), use organic content to grow your base, and only then consider scaling with ads—coupled with robust sales processes. The episode is packed with raw, practical wisdom, cautionary tales, and a strategic mindset toward sustainable entrepreneurship.

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Listeners who missed the episode will find this summary a comprehensive, actionable breakdown of every major topic discussed, with direct quotes and clear next steps.

Transcript

[Sam Ovens]

I've been in business for 14 years. Last year our companies in total did over $250 million in aggregate revenue. I co own the platform School which is over 22 million users. And Skool's a platform that allows people to start and scale digital businesses. And so I have access to quite literally millions of data points on what makes digital businesses work and what doesn't. And so in this video I'm answering your questions about how to scale.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

I sell dreams and I built an ecosystem to make it happen essentially.

[Sam Ovens]

What does that mean?

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

Let's get into it. I started off flipping homes. Okay, thank you. Okay. I started off flipping homes and it

[Sam Ovens]

to a point where I saw hope and opportunity.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

It works. I flip houses. Got to a certain point, we got about 30, 40 consecutively. Every market revenue is about 4 mil.

[Sam Ovens]

Okay.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

Just not line itself. But it got to a point there's too much competition, you had a hard time being profitable per flip. So then developed a model where we convert competition to collaboration. Start a contracting company instead of buying the product, becoming the product and then starting a coaching channel where I feed this ecosystem. Vertically integrated H Vac company, roofing company, dumpster company, contracting the whole nine yards. So teaching people how to do it and I'm giving them the process and how to do it. All that is different. Revenue drips for me. What's stopping me? I got too busy too fast and owner operator for a long time up until about three months ago, hired a coo. Now transitioning a lot of the operation stuff onto her.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

Really.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

I don't know what the fuck I'm doing because like I'm trying to transition myself out. I don't know how to run a CEO.

[Sam Ovens]

Are you trying to transition out of the role or out of the company?

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

A little bit of both. So out of the role because to be honest, I don't really care about the revenue growth factor. I care more about the impact. So the promise I made myself is that I want to impact at least like 1 million lives before I die. So how do I do that? I'm not going to be doing that flipping homes at a small scale. But I built a company that's so based in locality that I'm trapped within it because it's so local. My team is there, my resources, my companies. The coaching program only makes sense because it's local. But because of my market size, there's only so many people I can get consecutively every time unless I keep dropping prices, the opposite of increasing price. So what does that mean? I have to go to a national stage is how to. How do I take this coaching at a massive scale? And that's where I'm stuck at because I'm too busy in the operations. And that's where Amy came in as a COO to kind of help me get out of it and focus on the next phase of the origin story.

[Sam Ovens]

So, dude, I appreciate the national scale vision. I think you could probably get to, given the ticket size and how you can monetize the customer in all these hundreds of ways. The reason you would do that setup is so that you could dominate a local market. You're not dominating a local market right now. You're barely getting started. And so you could probably realistically get between Fayetteville and Raleigh. You could probably get to 100 million a year just in that market alone. Yeah. And I think if you just take your eyes off of like, I want to conquer the entire world. It's like, maybe, but like, in order to conquer the world, you have to conquer a country first. Right. And before you conquer a country, you got to conquer a city. And right now you haven't conquered a city. And so what happens is when armies over expand, they collapse. And so you need to fortify your base better because 10 to 10amonth is nothing.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

So what do you recommend? Do I try to automate what I have or do I just put myself more into it and double it?

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. I think you should just ignore the national thing.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

And let me just ask the simple question. Can you. Could you sell 20 people a week right now? Not like, let me say differently. Can you handle 20 people a week?

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

We will be soon. The CEO has kind of taken.

[Sam Ovens]

So you could have an 8x increase in sales within your current infrastructure. So that would take you from 4 to 32.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

That solves a revenue problem, not the impact problem.

[Sam Ovens]

Do you make content?

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

I don't have time. Yeah. If you couldn't tell. Yeah. But that's where I'm slacking the most.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Yeah.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

It's the content.

[Sam Ovens]

It would be far easier for you to just make content about the stuff you're doing. Impact millions of people that way.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

Than try and get every single person in America to be a home flipper.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

And that's not achievable anyway.

[Sam Ovens]

I agree.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

It's more about the financial education, like selling the dream of, like, you could be something more than just what you think you are and where you came from.

[Sam Ovens]

And you can make content about that and you can distribute it for free with leverage. It's a beautiful thing. And so, like, you can be legit because you have a legitimate business and then you can talk about it and help all these other people. And then you just keep growing this thing.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

Okay, so double down locally.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, you already have all the, like, you went through whatever the hell you did to go through and build all that stuff. It's like, you just build it and you're like, you know what? I'm going to leave it now. I'm going to do another thing. It's like, no, I'm glad you brought the COO in, but it's probably so that you can do some of the stuff you're doing now, so you can do the stuff you know you should be doing, but you're not. And so if you want to do the impact because you don't have time, you have the coo, go make some content. It's not going to take that long anyways. And that way you can scratch your impact itch. And then for everything else, it's like, you need to learn how to run paid ads and sell shit. Because, like, you for sure can sell 20, 50, 100 people a week in a local market, no problem. For the offer that you have, should

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

I increase pricing to make it better or should I keep it where it's at? Given that it does feed my other

[Sam Ovens]

channels, you probably have a better time just like charging 100 grand and saying you'll do that stuff for free or at cost.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

But yeah, I mean, can you raise prices? It's just like, can you sell and can you, like. Yes, you could. Typically, an offer like this is 100 grand.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

So usually they have a done with you style offer that's between 15 and 25. And then there's a total turnkey offer which is $100,000.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

No one on my market can afford that. That's the problem.

[Sam Ovens]

That is just not true. No one in your market that has heard of you through word of mouth, of you emanating your presence into the workshops that you run once a quarter or whatever can afford it. If you run ads. Yes. It's just that, like, how many people show up to your thing?

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

The venue holds, 55 is packed out every time.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. So you have 55 people a month that come in the doors every three months. Yeah, every three months. Right, dude. So it's like the way this looks in reality is you'll bring a hundred people in the room and you'll do three of those in a day and you'll pitch and you'll close 10, 15. You'll close 3 or 5 at the, you know, like the 100k and you'll close a handful at the, you know, call it 15 to 25K. And that's the business. So you're like, you're, you're like, you see 200 people a year and you're like, my market can't afford it. It's like, well those 200 can't. It's like look at 2000. I'm sure there are some. Let me give you a stat. 9% of people in America have a million dollars in terms of their net worth. So if you include value their home like 9%, it's significantly higher than you think it is. They just look older, real.

[Home Flipping Entrepreneur]

Okay.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

We sell motocross training.

[Sam Ovens]

Okay.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

So we, we hold five day camps. What we did to be able to get our projection to 26 to the 4 million is we scaled down our single day tour dates. We were, we, we did more in 24. Love this first, we went all the way to, we scaled from 70 single day tour dates in 23 to 140 of them in 2024. And it was just a ton of operational drag. I mean it was like we were like a rock twice as much. It was nuts. But what we realized and looking back on it is the bottom 20 of those were net negative. The next 20 were net less than a thousand dollars. So inconsequential. And then I started looking at. In 2024, we did three of the five day camps kind of as a test run. Each of those net well over 100 grand each. And I'm like, well, hang on a second. This is the answer. So this year I told the team at first I called them, I said, hey, I just had an epiphany. Here it is. We're going to do 10 camps. And I said actually no, we're actually going to do 25. And they're like 25? What do you mean 25? My question is, do I continue to my.

[Sam Ovens]

Were you just able to charge more for the three day than the one day? Why did they make some earth? Sorry.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

So the one day is $300, which is probably not enough. The five day is $1200, which is definitely not enough. So that's what part of the question.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Too cool.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

I want to continue to scale the five days and scale down the single days. But my fear is we basically own the space. Nobody else does what I do. It's pretty large market. There is one copycat company and he's trying to hit all these single day Tour dates in the regions that we're doing them. So I'm afraid if I scale them down too much, we won't be able

[Sam Ovens]

to copy the model that makes the money.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

That's a great point. Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

Love this for us, right? I hope he does okay.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

I could honestly, I could go home right now and I'd be happy after that. Yeah, you're right. You're right. And I feel more confident that I don't think he could do what we could do anyways. But he certainly can't do what we can do in a five day event. I mean, we've run those five days like no.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, and I'll land the plan on that for you too, which is that you will never go out of business focusing on the customer. And I'll tell you a quick story. So the biggest business mistake that I've made, the two most costly business mistakes I've made, one of them has nothing to do with this. This is the other one which has everything to do with this. I had a competitor that ended up taking a bunch of my top testimonials that we kind of converted to semi employees because they were big evangelists and back in the gym launch days. And as soon as they took them and they were, they were big ads for me. All of a sudden they were running ads for this other guy. So it's kind of like when the Verizon guy went to the AT&T. Remember that, that, that switch over that actor? It was kind of like that. And this guy was offering one on one coaching to help people out. I never did that. And so. And they were cheaper. So they were cheaper. They were doing one on one. And they had some of my top, you know, customers becoming advocates. And they said that the 10 of them had come together, they partnered. He partnered with these 10 people or something. When that happened, my feathers got all ruffled and I was like, it's war time. We got to go to the mattresses. We got to really change the business up. And so I did this big kind of like relaunch internally to my existing customer base. I did this big value stack. And then I said, you're going to get all this extra stuff not for the same price you're paying me, but for less. And so I took my existing recurring base and I reduced my revenue by $500,000 top line per month. And so that translated because we take it off top line and the cost went up, so I increased my costs and I took my top line down by 6 million and I ended up losing in profit somewhere in the neighborhood of six to seven million dollars a year for that business at the time. I then ended up selling that business, obviously. And the business never recovered that profit. It stayed there. And when I did make that move, the first comment in the chat after I dropped that it was less was a complaint that I had not done it earlier. So it was not, thank you so much for lowering the price and giving us more shit. It was, I can't believe I was paying more. And I was like, I want to fucking kill myself. And. And here was the best part of all. My churn changed zero. So I just cut my top line by 20%. Churn remained the same because the willingness to pay change that I made, I basically reduced it from, call it 3,000amonth to $2,500 a month. It actually made no real difference in whether someone would cancel or not. It was past a threshold that this is a lot of money. And so it changed nothing. I just made less money. And then when I sold the company, that six got multiplied by a lot. And so that probably cost me in the neighborhood of probably $50 million. And so the big lesson that I learned there was that I shouldn't. And that competitor ended up killing that business because it wasn't fucking profitable. And so I was the market leader, and someone came in to undercut me. And then I said, oh, I'll copy the moron.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

It's easy to let happen.

[Sam Ovens]

Yes. And so don't lose $50 million. Let him figure that out for himself. You just focus on the customer, and you'll win.

[Motocross Training Business Owner]

Good answer. Thank you.

[Sam Ovens]

Appreciate you. If you're a business owner, I'd like to invite you out to come to our headquarters in Vegas to see how we scale businesses using what we call the value acceleration method, which is a compilation of all the stuff that we've learned breaking down different businesses across different industries. And if that sounds at all interesting, you can click below and book a call. And we'd love to potentially meet you and see you in person.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

I sell coaching to real estate agents. I do two and a half million. I'd like to double it. What's stopping me? That's a good question. Your boy Ed, he seems to think I could be just super famous. And he's like, you need a brand manager. And so he's like, you need somebody that has already kind of achieved that with someone else. So I guess my question is, how do I find that person? Because 99% of the stuff out there is scams, basically.

[Sam Ovens]

Totally. That kind of thing. And I would even define them as scams, just people that are not that competent scam. I think it comes down to deception, whether they intend to deceive or just aren't that good. But back to your point. Yeah, I agree. So fundamentally if you want to just make more money and you are a brand that promotes itself, then you need to advertise more. Are you constrained on your delivery?

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Delivery as far as the fulfillment?

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

No, it's group coaching. It's easy.

[Sam Ovens]

So you could double the amount of customers you have right now and it wouldn't be an issue. Quadruple.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

Okay, well then yeah, I mean this is a pure advertising play. You probably, I mean I'm interviewing sales

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

guys and I'm looking at paid ads like hiring people for that. So like I'm getting into that.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, the paid side is going to give you call it like a 1 time, 3 to 5x off of a baseline. Not a promise or guarantee. Just saying. That's what I would say is kind of typical. If you've gotten to this point off of just organic, obviously we can help you with that stuff. But the long term kind of, well that you need to keep digging is you want to so think about like this. So you have just imagine this as your audience. Right now you're monetizing these people, the people who are just like super hot, they love you forever and you continue to promote and this gets filled up with new eyeballs and then they come up because they see your stuff and then they give you money.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Yay. Right?

[Sam Ovens]

So when you start doing, if you do more organic and do it across more platforms, do it more consistently, do it with higher volume, do it with higher quality, then what you're going to do is you're going to grow this base, this percentage will stay about the same. But now it's going to go to here. Right. So then that dollar sign goes up. That's a great long term play. And you just want to keep growing the pyramid. What ads will do is that ads will keep this the same and then it'll move this line down. And so you want to do both. So like in the short term, if I was like, how do I double your business? It's like that wouldn't be that difficult. I would just be like, cool, just pull the ad lib, it's done. But if we're looking at a 10 year horizon then I would say, well, we need to do both of these in parallel. We need to continue to plant the seeds and, and Then the ads kind of reach off the top and skip. That makes sense.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Yeah, for sure. So how do you find an ad manager? I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean a brand manager. So that's good.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, the best thing, I mean I just, we just poach. We just, I mean just outreach. Hey, you've crushed it with so and so. Can I pay you more to do it here?

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Right. Tends to work for you, I guess. How do you realize who those people are to poach?

[Sam Ovens]

Like who look at the brains that you admire and then reach out to them and offer them more money to do it for you.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

But you see the brand, but you don't really know who's behind the brand.

[Sam Ovens]

LinkedIn, like Frank and like solvable. Gotcha. For sure. Solvable. Yeah. I mean and most of the people who are really good at media stuff do have some presence anyways on their own, so they don't make themselves invisible. Like you could probably chatgpt search. Who are the people who are involved with that?

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Here's my question. Like, like, is that something that could be outsourced?

[Sam Ovens]

You mean recruiting?

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Sam Ovens]

Not the recruiting part.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Like the, like the brand manager part.

[Sam Ovens]

No, I wouldn't recommend it.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Yeah, bring somebody in house.

[Sam Ovens]

It's thing is what are the. So what are the core things to the business? So for every business you have attraction, you've got conversion, you've got delivery. Right. Those are the things that are core to every business. It, recruiting, finance. I see all of these functions as ancillary that aren't core to value creation for the customer. There are things that must occur for the business to continue to be a business, but not things that are core for the value to be created. And so for you, your brand is arguably the most important asset that you have and for sure would not be something that I would outsource. So bring somebody in house working directly for me. Yeah, I would poach somebody. Obviously we've done, we've hired a lot of media people, we can help you with that. But beyond that I would probably, if I'm doing order of ops, it'd probably be. Cause the thing is, is right now, are you selling, you're selling, who's doing the sales?

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Well, so I do it in a challenge, that's the only time I offer it.

[Sam Ovens]

You know, you do one to many, five day thing. Something like that, yeah. Okay.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

And so I'm gonna switch to book a call, single cell guy, close and

[Sam Ovens]

do it on a recurring kind of evergreen basis or still do it in this launch, I'll do it both. I'll do it both. Okay. But you're selling straight to checkout. Got it? Yeah. That motion, as soon as you turn on ads is going to break in all likelihood because it's totally different selling to cold than is to warm. And so the break you will not convert the same percentage you currently do.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

[Sam Ovens]

By a lot. And so the whole, the whole, the economics of the entire funnel will change. And so that'll take some adjustment in motion. So just more like preparing you for that because that's what comes next. Yeah. So high level recruiting for brand manager that's going to start building the base and then ads plus sales motion are going to have to come in tandem because they both have to be good, the ads have to be good and the sales motion has to be good. If the ads are great and the sales motion sucks, it won't work. If the sales motion is great and the ad suck, it won't work.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Cool.

[Sam Ovens]

Does that make sense for next steps?

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

What's that?

[Sam Ovens]

That makes sense for next steps?

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

Yeah. Yeah. Go to LinkedIn and poach somebody. Got it.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

We sell sales coaching and lead gen to financial advisors. We're at 6.6 million. We'd like to be at 20 plus

[Sam Ovens]

app down paid ads events. How do you sell paid ads?

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Okay.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. Straight to VSL to phone team.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Correct. Cool.

[Sam Ovens]

Yep.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

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

[Sam Ovens]

Okay.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

So yeah, the main question is have you seen other agencies successfully pivot from legion to sales coaching or you know, in like very non sales or industries where founders or business owners are sales deficient. Have you seen companies successfully train their clients on sales?

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, sure.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

So like a gym launch, how did you guys successfully do that across thousands of gyms?

[Sam Ovens]

We had something called boiler room. We trained their trainers and front desk people every morning and drilled them, role played and separate them in the groups the same way we would our own team. So we just did it every morning for them and it was just an

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

add on, just group roleplay basically.

[Sam Ovens]

Just like you'd have a sales manager meeting where you'd role play whatever particular part of the script they were all struggling with. And so we Break sales training from the team side, not on the one, on one side into five parts. We've got intro, we've got disco, we've got offer and then we've got objections and looping and then fifth day is basically whatever is kind of the hot topic of what's the thing that we think is going to benefit the team the most. And so that's kind of how we rotate through. We have to keep each part of the script crisp otherwise they'll fuck up something. And so that keeps the short, you know, the sword sharp. And that's what we did, you know, across the team. We do that for our teams too. But I think it's likely that it's under. Basically you need to provide more value or you need to lower the price. And so if you want to tackle Churn, it has to be like there are for sure businesses that work in the space that you're at. I think Big Head, Long Tail is a great model. Like charge the upfront and then just make the continuity much, much smaller. So it's a no brainer. Like they almost pay that just to be kind of in the network. Sure. And so this is, I'll just, I should have said this earlier but it's like I try to answer the question so that it affects as many people as possible in this room. But the problem with information and kind of coaching or education type businesses is that people try to make continuity out of the front end value that you're providing and then the value drops once you have the skill. And so you have to separate out the consumables from the one time things. The one time things also have significantly more value than the consumables do. Now sometimes they don't have the money to pay for the one time thing because they don't have the skill the one time thing would give them. That's kind of the issue. So in order to separate it, it's like you just have to think what are the things that they get on an ongoing basis and if we only sold that, what would the price point be? Likely significantly lower. And if we got from that skill it would be significantly more. But once they have the skill, assume they have the skill on the ongoing basis.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

What would they still pay for? Now you have the lead gen thing.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Really? I mean the lead gen. Oh, everyone wants it.

[Sam Ovens]

No one can deliver.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

When they learn how to sell using our process, they stay okay. So the biggest thing is just making sure they actually, they just don't know how to close. So it's so it's like, it's activation as well. So like getting them to come in and actually engage.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. Because most advisors it all remote.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

It's all remote. And they don't. They also don't like sales. Like the word sales. Like, they like cringe inside.

[Sam Ovens]

Sure.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

When they hear it. So we've literally like banned the word sales. Like we. We just say consulting. We don't call them sales calls, we call them consults. So, like, you know, like that. But yeah. I'm just curious.

[Sam Ovens]

So it sounds like you just have to get better at training them. Yeah. So, okay. Your issue though is that if someone gets activated, they stick.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

For sure. For sure.

[Sam Ovens]

Well, then all of the effort we have is how do we get them activated better, faster. Which is going to be a function of two things. One is going to be, are there some avatars that are better than others? So we only sell those avatars and we split that into three buckets. You've got demographics. What do they look like? You've got the quantifiables, which is like, what size business do they have? Whatever. And then you've got. I said demographics and there's quantifiables. There's a third one I can't remember. But those two at least get you on a head start in terms of segmenting the traffic. So you can be like, this is who the avatar is. These ones have a significantly higher likelihood of converting. And what'll happen when you do that is your CAC will go up, but then your stick problem will get fixed.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Okay.

[Sam Ovens]

So like, for example, if I sold everybody who identified as a fitness person, then gym launch would never have been able to exist because I would have had too many shitty customers who are personal trainers, who've got 10 clients, whatever, and they can never pay, and it doesn't matter what I do. And so for me to deploy the resources required to actually get them up to snuff, I have to have somebody who at their onset can pay more so that I can actually help them. Because below a certain extent, it just needs to be diy, which is a different business, not the business I wanted to be in. So there's probably some advisors that are better that you need to basically scan out and say, all these people, we're not going to service because they have a low likelihood of actually working. And maybe you need to adjust price to only accommodate those people in that newer avatar.

[Real Estate Coaching Business Owner]

That's better.

[Sam Ovens]

So this is fundamentally an avatar issue. And then obviously the ops on the back end in terms of activation is what do. Yeah, that's the third bucket, the behaviors. So what are the people who have the right demographics and the right quantifiables? What behaviors did they do that caused them to activate and stick? And what do the other people who look like them not do? And then that becomes the activation process we reverse engineer.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Makes sense. Quick last question. How did you optimize for time to value at your launch and how can we potentially do something similar? Because for us, deal cycles are.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, we'd email their list. They make a sale in the first seven days.

[Sales Coaching for Financial Advisors Owner]

Okay, so just reactivation. Okay, sweet. Appreciate you.

[Sam Ovens]

If you are doing a million dollars or more a year and you'd like to get to 10 million or a hundred million dollars, I can promise you absolutely none of that. But what I can do is create an environment where you can actually talk to other business owners and players within those businesses that are those numbers. And for me personally, the big breakthroughs that I had in my business was when I came in with an open mind and was like, I don't know what I don't know. And so you probably have one of those, like, how do I get my content to scale? How do I recruit these first salespeople? How do I recruit my 20th or my sale by VP of Sales or Director of Sales? Every single level of this game has more complexity than the last. And so if that sounds at all interesting, I'd love to invite you out to our headquarters for two days to talk to me and the team Director of Sales, Director of Marketing, Director of Strategy, Director of Ops, Director of investment, all the people that who actually run our [e-mail] and as a bonus, all the other business owners in the room are doing a million dollars plus. And yeah, so this is your invitation. So if that sounds interesting, click book call if it's a good fit. Love to invite you out here and maybe see you in here in Vegas.