The $100M Service Business Playbook

0:00Gavin We solve sexual psychological dysfunctions in men like premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, orgasm inhibition, stuff like that. >> Hardcore. >> Yeah. Um we have a revenue of like 3 and 1/2 million per year. >> Cool. >> Profit is like probably going to be 8 900k this year. >> All right. >> Um and we would like to go up to more up than 100 million, which means we would have to scale globally into the English-speaking market, possibly other markets, too.

0:34>> Mhm. >> Um because I really feel like there's some potential. >> Is this remote service? >> It is entirely digital. We do like group online therapy basically and e-learning, also. >> In groups? >> What is that? >> In groups? >> In groups, yeah. >> Hurt. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> No, just like you know, noted. Okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. So um we would need to find a new business model to actually be able to scale this way.

1:02Also, like a lot of people there would want to be in a group. They want to be anonymous basically. >> Yeah. >> So we're thinking about AI, but basically we need we we need to find a way to scale we need to find a model that can scale globally. >> Well, the model is already I mean, you're profitable right now. How do you get customers? >> Um social media and ads. >> Organic? >> Yeah. >> What percentage is organic versus ads?

1:27>> Like 60 60 70% something like >> Something like that? >> Is ads? >> No, it's organic. >> Okay, that's a good split. >> Um so I'll I'll I'll challenge one of the things that you said, which is that you need a different business model. I don't think you need a different business model. Um and I'm sure there's things we could look at to figure out pricing and profit and some better packaging and offers and whatnot. Like those things are kind of like easy wins um that we could help with, but like big picture, you need a big brand.

1:53>> Yeah. >> Like that's how you get to a million plus and how you go international. You don't need a new model, you need a new way of doing business. >> Mhm. >> And so, if you have a pretty scalable back end, which it sounds like you do, as a combination of both group and digital, then I mean, AI like it's just for everybody. The AI stuff is actually, I think, often times going to be the same model. It's just going to be AI doing it. But, the model itself, like one-on-one consulting has existed for a very long time across lots of industries. It's just that the vehicle for delivery will have more operating scale.

2:27Alex >> Mhm. >> That's it. But, it's not your actually your actual business isn't necessarily going to change very much. Your pricing might tweak a little bit, but the actual like the motion of the business isn't going to change much at all. >> Mhm. >> So, the way to the way that I think about this is like what associations would the men that you attract Yeah, if you could do a Sydney Sweeney ad, that'd be big. Um I mean, you'd instantly have a 100 million other brands.

2:56Uh but no, but you get what I'm saying there though? Like, that's that's Okay, I'll say it differently. >> know who Sydney Sweeney is. >> Really? In in the space you're in, that surprises me. Um So, I guess a porn star would be a little too too tongue-in-cheek. But, who's the Okay, who's who's a super hot girl that everybody knows in your space? >> Uh that's a good question. Probably like mhm I'm just going to say Jessica Alba.

3:23>> Sure. >> Yeah. >> So, let's take Jessica Alba for example. Let's say that Jessica Alba became a celebrity endorsement of your services. Do you think that that would grow the business? >> Probably would. >> Probably. And so, I take that as a hypothetical extreme example to just to demonstrate what a large brand association can do to a company. And so, the idea is like, what are the handful of those aspirational associations that you can make that then elevates the perceived value of your brand and the reach.

3:54>> Mhm. >> And so, like you I'll I'm going to spell out the next year or two for you of what will happen unless you do this. >> Yeah. >> So, what's going to happen is that you will continue to spend more on ads. You'll want to grow. A smaller percentage of your revenue will come from organic because you your desire to grow will outpace your organic growth. Your margins will compress. You'll get to five, six million dollars a year in revenue and somehow be at the same actual profit that you have right now with more headache.

4:22Alex >> Mhm. >> And then that will stress you out and then you'll think I think the answer is we need to have you know, more more upsells and things like that which will then add operational complexity which will then make it a bit of a headache for you and then margins will still compress and then you're like, why am I even doing this? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, so I'm trying to avoid that. So, that's super likely that's the path. Um you need to invest double down on the brand. I would make sure that you keep your uh ratios at 70/30 in terms of how you're getting your customers right now.

4:50>> can't get. Basically, let your organic dictate how much you're willing to spend. >> Mhm. Okay. >> And so, that means that your primary goal should be growing the organic 70 as the way to grow the business because you can absolutely get to a hundred million dollars if you have a big enough brand. >> Yeah. >> If Mr. Beast says, "Hey, this is where I went for you know, dick stuff." Then then people would go, right? And so, that's the idea is like how can we how can we make these associations that your ideal avatar and it might not be women.

5:21I say that as you know, like as a hyp- hypothetical example. It might be guys. Um because it's it might be guys that guys want to be like and then finding out that they struggled with something that they struggled with too and then then they say, "Hey, this you know, this guy fixed it or this service fixed it." >> Mhm. So, then would you find like talent to actually go and find those celebrities or >> It doesn't have to be celebrities. So, I used that as an example cuz everyone here knows, but celebrities have some of the weakest pull overall. >> Yeah.

5:47>> It's going to be It's [clears throat] going to be like the micro-influencers, the live streamers, the people who have uh long-form audiences. Yeah. It's going to be people like that who suffer from an issue that it's going to be Don't get me wrong. I think a lot of people are not going to want to promote what you do. Um they do not want that brand association. Um but I do think that that is like kind of the way It's like who wants to promote genital warts stuff, you know what I mean? As a As an extreme.

6:15>> Um but I still do think that that's going to be the long-term thing. As long as the service is really, really good. It's still tough cuz you have you have a It's a bad referral thing, right? Like people don't want to tell their friends that they're dealing with this, right? So as I'm I'm solving this out loud, I think centers of influence, by the way, everybody can hear you guys. Everybody can hear you, just so you know. You're good. Um centers of influence is probably the best way to approach it. Uh meaning what businesses also serve this customer.

6:45Alex >> Mhm. >> And then probably going after them. So I think that's my plan. >> All right. >> That's what you need to do. So basically you need to go use an affiliate strategy um to go recruit the centers of influence who already have the people who are struggling with this. Cuz I'm thinking it's like you have ads, but we don't want to be ad-dependent. Organic can be tough. I mean you still Those are like Those are bread and butter. You want to keep doing those. But to get to what you're trying to do, brand association would be ideal, but really [ __ ] hard because no one's going to want to associate with dick stuff. And so it's going to probably be people who have businesses that already serve these avatars that have a different money model than you, that already acquire them for free, so they can send them over to you to do some of the services they don't want to deliver. There you go.

7:24Alex That's what I would do. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, you bet. If you are 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 scaling roadmap, 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.