Warum ein zweiter Top-Coach der Schlüssel zu 20M ist

0:00Unternehmer/Gast Big fan, big fan. I've been watching you for like 5 years now. I'm really excited to work with you. Um so >> Yeah. Um so I'm going to come on to L3 really, really soon. Really, really excited. But till then, let's hop on the hotline with you. So I mentor TikTok Shop Affiliates into getting high-ticket brand retainers, brand deals. We're on track to do 2 million this year and I want to get to 20 million. Mhm. I'm turning away clients because I only have one coach besides me and it's my only expense. Okay. I spoke Yeah, I spoke to Ned. He told me get a coach, 100k. Got it. We're going to be good. Okay.

0:33So my best my best coach was a successful successful client first. Uh-huh. So I know that talent is like in my pipeline cuz I'm training them to get these deals. Yeah. I'm doing two things like too many things at once. What should I do? What are the two many things? Right now it says you can't take on more customers, right? Because you still have a supply constraint. So how are you getting leads right now?

0:58Uh right now it's all I do free content, but 90% is referral. Okay, great. >> Word of mouth and like they love it. That's awesome. I mean, to be fair, when you when you help influencers, they are by nature vocal people. And so they like even without social media, that type of person tends to tell people about their stuff. So like that's good. Um but I mean, it sounds like you're just supply constrained. So functionally, what stops you from hiring a second coach?

1:23Well, I I uh I will, but um it's like that's one coach and then how do I get to like way more? What stops you from hiring 10 coaches? I feel like it's the delivery delivery. As in What So what part of delivery is the thing that's holding you back? Delivering the brand deals on a consistent basis where I'm like, "Okay, I got it." So you're getting them deals or are they doing stuff?

1:49No, I get them deals and I have them pitch. I basically teach them how to sell and they sell themselves to get the brand deals. And you get intros. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so intros is the is the constraint, not the coaches. Yeah. Got it. Okay, so you just need someone in house who's doing kind of outbound for you, correct? Is that is that true?

2:14Alex Yeah. Okay. So, um a couple things. There are already platforms that exist that have aggregated a bunch of brand deals together, which I'm sure you're aware of those. I would see if I could one, do some deal with them. That'd be my first course of action. Second course of action, if I can't do that, would be to recruit one of their top kind of brand acquirers, whatever you want to call it, um and see if they would work for me. That probably be my second course of action. Third down the list would be I would spin up an OpenClaw instance and do outbound uh to brands over X followers uh or X sales on TikTok.

2:57Alex And see if And I would just generate it that way. Um that would probably be my third setup. And so, in either of those things, if you have more brand deals Like, whenever you cuz functionally you're you're starting a mini marketplace, right? So, you have supply and demand. And so, whenever you start a marketplace, you always want to start with the hard side. And the hard side is the the product. Like, demand will come. So, like, if you're starting the first thing you need to do it's if you were to Airbnb, is you need to have a place to rent.

3:25Alex Okay. Yeah. Right? So, you got to get a seller who's willing to rent space, right? And so, to the same degree you need to go get deals brand like brands who want to give money and then finding influencers who want money is not hard. Yeah. Right? That's why I have so many Yeah. Right. And so, the constraint of the business So, like, what you're offering fundamentally is just money. Like, that's what you're basically selling to these people. And so, if you want to make more money, you got to go get them more money.

3:54And so, if I'm thinking about the strategy of the business, I want to reorient my entire business because what you're going to see is every brand deal signed up, you're going to have some math around it. Do you get any percentage of the revenue that they do with the brand deal? Uh I tried at the beginning, but it was a little too complicated. They didn't want to do my help then. So, what I did is I have I have them on retainer. So, they pay me a flat rate to be with me and my access. But, once they're in, they get access to all my my deals that I've done as mhm me being an influencer myself.

4:25>> Yeah, yeah. Um you'll be able to do some math on that. Um and like the the more grown-up version of your model is you're just a talent agency. Uh so, if you look at like WME or CAA um as a model for that, just look at their digital practices. That's going to be kind of like a baseline of like what am I going to look at in order to model? Uh because you'll find very quickly because the thing is you have a flat rate, so you're incentivized by volume.

4:51Alex But, if you can close get somebody to close a, you know, $5 million deal and you get 10 or 15% those add up pretty quick, right? And so, that model already exists. Um and since the the industry is very relational driven, like the single point of greatest leverage for you is the acquisition. So, what you need to When I say acquisition, I mean acquisition of brands. And so, you need to figure out LTV to CAC on a brand.

5:17Does that make sense? Yes. So, how much marketing effort does it take me to close a brand on entering my network? Now, my cost nothing as long as they're willing to take the call. They'll probably give you some sort of requirements of like we only want to talk to influencer above X or whatever. Um there's also probably a a version of the business that for the low tier allows you to uh pool the influencers. So, like how many customers do you have right now?

5:43Uh now I'm at 25. Okay, 27. And it's like it's a lot. >> Yeah, yeah. So, in time there's probably a low touch version of this that you say, "Hey, you're like you're not big enough to like really score deals on your own. You've got 20,000 followers or 80,000 I don't know whatever your minimum requirement is, below that, right? Um and so you can say, "Yeah, but they'll do a deal with a hundred of you."

6:10Alex And so that allows you to also you can bake in your premium cuz you're hurting the cats yourself. Okay. And so there's probably a bunch of opportunity there that I'm thinking about. But if I did focus all of your effort on one thing for right now today, it's just LTV to CAC on brand acquisition. That's it. And from a tactical perspective it's I would probably spin up Open Claw well the three that I just outlined. First I go to the platform and see if I can do a deal. Second I'd go recruit somebody from that platform. Third I'd go Open Claw instance and charge during DMs for accounts that are over X and do that on a regular basis. That would be my one two three approach.

6:42Okay. And that part makes sense. Like just look for more brands. You it's usually free. But I want one question that I want to ask before. But there's still a cost associated with getting them to sign up and go through the process. Even if they say yes, there's still cost of the outreach, the call, the like there's still cost the business will incur. Okay. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Cuz also your ROI isn't even necessarily clear either because you have a flat rate for everybody. You adding more brands indirectly allows you to bring more people on but not directly.

7:14Okay. If you had a percentage then you could very clearly see each brand does an average six deals. I get this percentage. Average deal size is this and then you have some math around it. But for right now you're on a flat a flat fee thing and that's fine. I'm not I like I'm not I'm not offended by it. Um but like you will find that some like of the 25 you probably have one guy who's really good or two guys, right? >> yeah, yeah. That guy on his own probably has half the revenue of the business if you were to have a percentage based approach.

7:42And so the the game that you're in is you'll have to decide strategically whether you want to be a volume player or you want to be a a high-end player. Both are fine. It's just that we need to decide day one which business you want to build. What do you think is best? It's not a it's not a which is best it's not a which is best thing. They both work. CAA is a high-end. You know what I mean? Like and those are it's a massive company. To the same degree many people have tried to build these platforms. I have yet to see what I don't even know the names of any of them. So I haven't seen like there probably are some big ones. I just haven't seen any of the names. So I'd say it's it's it's probably difficult to do the herding cats one. Um but it's it's the nature of almost every service business that you go up in price.

8:31You develop a reputation, more people want you, better people want you, those people willing to pay more, and up and up you go. Otherwise, you build it for scale first which means the entire process of marketing sales onboarding is almost all automated. The brand deals are almost all automated and you're just you're just clipping coupons on either direction. Both businesses are valuable. The high volume one is more valuable if you can demonstrate retention of both brands and customers.

8:58Alex So charging them a flat re- right to be in the network of >> Yeah. I would I would encourage you to like I have to I have to look more at the numbers but like the thing that makes a company valuable is revenue retention, period. And so if you can demonstrate that these influencers never stop wanting to pay you, that becomes a very valuable business provided you have good gross margins. It's amazing margin. It's like 94% Per what?

9:25No no yeah that's profit. So that's good. But like what about but it's also it's it's you in starting out. So like but what about um retention though? What's the churn on them? Uh before it was like they would stay for 2 months and then leave. Mhm. I got better, came to the event. I went to L1 again and did the whole thing. Yeah. Uh, been here. And now it's it's uh, 90% retention. Okay. >> But, I'm really over delivering. Good.

9:50Alex >> And because I'm like one-on-one and it's like I'm like I'm sweating. I'm like Yeah. >> I'm out of time. I do the one-on-one calls. Like running on it's too much. I can't That's why I'm turning people away cuz it's like Yeah. over delivering so much. >> So, again, no matter what path you do, whether you go up or you go down, what you're going to have to automate and really get into building out with AI is normally I would say you could hire people, but the world has changed. And so, like now you just build this out with AI workflows.

10:22You can build a billion-dollar company with this. No question. And it's because the game has changed. So, like if I were to start a marketing agency 5 years ago, it's not the best opportunity vehicle. You can make some money, but it's a very hard business to make a lot of money in. Fast forward to today, um, I think it was A16Z, one of the one of the guys said this and I like the quote, but he said, "The next trillion-dollar company is a technology business disguised as a services company."

10:55And so, you think you're signing up for an agency, but the whole thing on the back end is all, you know, Claude AI, whatever workflows have been built. And so, all the stuff that you're doing manually, you have to think about it from a workflow perspective of what are all the actions that I do on a daily basis? You probably do a shitload of them, right? And you have to be able to one by one bucket those actions into workflows that create the outcome for the customer. When you document each of those workflows, and you might have 67. It might be a lot, right? That actually create the outcome for the customer, one by one you will automate each of those.

11:27And so, when you do that, you can actually scale this thing to the moon the way you want to. And the thing is is that no matter what direction you're going to go in, whether it's high-end or low-end, you having all of these workflows dialed in I see as important and probably a worthwhile thing to do now before you get over too overwhelmed in actually running the business. And so a lot of people who start businesses in this, you know, now-ish time have a tremendous advantage over income like existing businesses because like I've got 200 plus people that I got to deal with plus our portfolio company employees. And so I've got a lot of dead weight that I have to to to deal with to move the Titanic, whereas you it's like you can be more nimble. And so like you want to play to your advantage and not like just purposely take on weight when you don't have to.

12:10And your current clients? Yes. No, no, not clients. The the employees that you're going to have in order to Basically, don't grow faster for some arbitrary reason. Fix the ops of the business so that you can get your time down to almost zero, then scale zero. And you can do it now cuz you got the cash flow and you got the time. So it's like this is it. You got to go slow to go fast.

12:36You dig? Perfect. Thank you so much, Alex. Appreciate you, man. Congrats on the How much did you grow How much did you grow since you've been doing our stuff? The whole business is in Alex Hermosi like I have the I I read your books all the time all every day. I'm in number one like I'm I'm all the whole thing. When I was when I came out to L1 in September, I was doing about you know, I had about five clients and now I when I came back, I'm at 27.

13:03Signed up one today. We're doing 10K days. It's been eight days hitting it 10K day. That's awesome, dude. I love it. >> going too fast, so that's why I wanted to ask. Thank you. >> Don't grow too fast, yeah. Rock and roll, man. Appreciate you. If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through, and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages, and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at, and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team, and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas, and we'll do this in person live.