Bildungsanbieter für Einbürgerung: Wachstum trotz Lead-Deckel

0:00Unternehmer/Gast Alex, you're the man. Thank you for everything. Thank you. Uh Alex, so I run a business, I run a school where we help Russian-speaking green card holders pass US naturalization become US citizens. Mhm. Yeah, we currently do 1.35 a year and we really want to get 4.5 million. 1.25 per year?

0:25Yeah, 1.35. 35, excuse me. 1.35 million per year and you want to get to where? 4.5. 4.5, okay. How big is this market? How many people are in that little bucket? It's not a little bucket. >> There is a million people a year that pass US naturalization interview. Out of them, well, Russian-speaking is not a million, obviously. After them is Latino.

0:52There is no exact statistic, but but it's it's like um 70 to 50k people per year. Okay, so like I said, the little bucket. >> [laughter] >> Okay, so 50 to 70k, all right? That's fine. So you have 50 70,000 people there, all right? What are you charging right now? The core offer is 2,000, average price. Okay.

1:18Got it. Uh that sounds good. Um so for you to hit 4 and 1/2 million, we got to sell uh 2250 2,200 or something like that of those? Exactly. 2,230. Okay. I'll just say 2,500 just to make sure we're good. Okay, so you got to sell 2,500 of these units. Um so that's going to be what, 50 a week?

1:45Okay. Yeah. Which is seven per day. Okay, so what are you doing right now to sell these customers? We run meta ads. We have a big or a relatively big YouTube channel within our niche, dominating the niche. Um yeah, so Meta is the biggest acquisition channel. Actually, the constraint that we have right now is that we can't scale past uh 10 to 12K per week. At 10, we run into webinar.

2:15And um we currently enroll about 10 students per week. It's like 4X and doing Okay. And then when you scale ad spend, what happens? We scale the ad spend, but we just don't get more of the good leads. We just get a bunch of the tire kicks that are you know, either too early to actually apply to or they don't have a visa or they're out of the country.

2:40So we should just do phones or something. I'm tired of these systems. Um say it again, man. Yes, can you hear me? Yeah, go ahead again. Yes, so we run Meta ads through the webinar as the biggest acquisition channel. And we have a YouTube channel. Yeah, and what stops you from scaling it? Uh yeah, when we when we scale we just don't get quality of leads get it's bad.

3:08That's what that is. Okay, so right now uh how many pieces of creative are you making and uh how much are you spending per week? Uh we're spending 10,000 per week. We have two campaigns running. Between them, we have about 30 40 active creatives. Okay. That's not bad. Um and do you make 30 to 40 per week new?

3:34Uh uh we we could, but we don't because you know, I can't I mean it seems like with my ad spend we're not able to like swap out the ads all the time. Like I need to give it more breathing room. And uh you know, to see if it's possible or not. But when you spend 20K a week, it you said the lead quality goes down. Yeah. So, the lead quality is going down for one of a few reasons.

3:58So, number one is because either the creative isn't good enough. Um number two is because you don't have enough creative because of the Andromeda machine that exists. Uh so, you just actually need to hit more fresh creative to feed the machine. Option three is because you're going outside of your warm audience and you're going into colder traffic. Which one do you think it is? Yeah.

4:23You go ahead. Which one do you think it is? Um I think we're going to the cold Okay. >> Well, as far as like the creative, the way that it looks in the in our at a meta is that like five to seven ads print well. All the other ones are either not getting any traction or or I kill them because they spend a lot of money and they Yeah, so with Andromeda, the way that it it's function, this goes for everybody.

4:50When right now, this is how the new system works. You feed it a ton of ads and then it picks the top like 10% that it thinks are good and then it runs it to those, which makes advertising more efficient. So, advertisers are happy, but you have to feed that machine because your 100 ads only turns into 10 useful ones and so you got to feed it again. So, you get way less waste cuz I mean every advertiser would say like if you could wave a magic wand, you'd say, "I wish I could only run the ads that are going to perform." And so, Andromeda more or less does this for us. But the problem that you realize then is like, "Well, oh my god, I have to make so much creative to find these 10 winners." And that is the creative machine that has to get built. And so, I want to say two things from a solution perspective.

5:32Number one is we have to spend more, but in order to spend more, these are the two paths. Path number one is that of the customers that are coming in, we need to create a self-licking ice cream cone. So, what that means is that we need to be able to take these 10 new clients per week and get two or three ads from each of them. Right? So, how do we do that? It's like we could have lifecycle ads, which I talk about in the in the play books. This is in the marketing machine playbook that you already have. All right? So, look at the lifecycle ad.

5:58Alex That's number one that I think will be really successful for you. Number two, do you do any kind of in-person events? No. I would encourage you to do some sort of in-person events to do two things. Number one, primarily to capture testimonials and videos and clips and media. And then number two, you can sell some sort of continuation thing, job placement, things like that, which could be significantly higher ticket, which would for sure on its own on the back end get you to your goal.

6:22So, that's number that's like 1.5. Now, in order to also scale the creative, you're going to want to think more top of funnel. All right? So, what that means is like how would I talk to somebody who doesn't know what I do or doesn't know my brand? Mhm. So, imagine you go to a party. All right? This is the easiest way to think about it. If you go to a party and no one knows who you are and you have to get that person to buy your services and they have to be in your core audience, what would you tell them?

6:51Well, I Do you have a green card? Right. That's probably the first question you'd ask. Do you have any hooks in any of your ads that are that question? Yes. Yes, of course. Okay. Well, Alex, I just want to maybe do back on that cuz it seems like that's the problem for us. Cuz we address people, "Hey, if you had your green card for 5 plus years, you want to become a citizen?" And your English isn't great.

7:17Alex Yeah. Some translating. That's our biggest pain point for the avatar. We have tons of ads like that and it just brings us the leads that are not actually interested in their conversation. But you're taking them to a webinar, right? Yeah. So, I will stand by the two things that I said, which is number one, I think you could do you need to create a self-licking ice cream cone so that you can get more creative out. That is what I think will allow you to scale. Number two, I think you need a back end in order to make more revenue per customer.

7:47$2,000 is a little low and I think you could probably make more. The back end is probably the thing that would get you to 4.5. It would also probably allow you to spend more to get cold traffic in and the self-licking ice cream cone gets you more creative. Alex, would you be looking to actually get profitable within the 30 days cuz it either constraint is like cost to acquire customer within a month is higher than what they bring within the first day.

8:11>> Are they paying $2,000 up front or is it a payment plan? There is a payment plan and some of them pay Yes. I didn't hear what you said. What did you say? We incentivize people in full but some of them choose the cuz that's all they can Yeah. So, when I hear this, it probably means you need a back end.

8:35We do have We do have upsell. Uh people that join the core offer they have one-on-one classes. Uh 30% take that and then we have English classes because the main problem for the avatar, they don't speak English well enough or either before they become a citizen or after they become a citizen with us, we take them on one-on-one classes for English and that's like fitness. You never get your English to 100%. We just you know, keep improving.

9:04Okay. So, what's the solution, man? The solution is to build the creative machine, right? Mhm. So, we can spend more. More creative. And you said you have a back end. You don't have a back end, you have upsells. I'm saying you need another another offer which you could sell at an in-person event where you could create you could get more creative. And I think it's probably around job placement stuff and job skills.

9:32Wouldn't that be completely different? So, think about it this way. Think about it as more as like job-related language rather than like job like not like a new business, just like a new kind of a new portion of language. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's how I think about it. Cuz basically >> We have a lot of elder Okay. >> done with work. Okay. Well, then it sounds like you just need to make more creative.

9:59Yeah. That's That's the plan. Yeah. I also think kind of like I started with the market that you're going after you said 50 to 70,000 are Russian, right? Now, of those Russians that are 50 to 70,000, how many of them are over 5 years and are struggling to speak English? Yeah, much less. Right. >> We make a we take about 1,000 people last year. That's a citizen. Right. And so, my point is is that like there is somewhat of a limit to this business because the pool you're going after is very small.

10:31Mhm. So, >> Wouldn't the next logical question be, you know, work with other immigrants that are on that process like more of a million people that actually go through? >> Yeah. I just thought as you know, you have to focus on the avatar, you have to focus on the offer. And I thought that would be like a distraction for I agree. I think you can Basically, you should be realistic about how many people this is per year of who are actually eligible for the things that you sell.

11:01And then, if you can get 30 or 50% of them, like you're winning, right? But, for you to hit your $5 million goal without an increase in LTV, you need 2,500. You said there's 50 to 70,000. Now, of those 50 to 70,000, we know for sure that a lot of those people are not necessarily struggling to speak English. Some of them are just They speak English fine, right? I have multiple Russian employees that work for me, and they naturalized, and they speak English perfectly, right? So, of that 50, is it half? Is there 25,000 that are there? Is it Is it a third that are really struggling? Is it 15,000? Selling 2,500 to 15,000 is very significant market penetration. And so again, yes, I think we can do more creative. Yes, I think we can have more cold hooks, but I think that in order for you to scale this business, you will likely need to add some sort of thing on the back end or you go adjacent.

11:47Damn. Do the ad thing first. That might be able to take you to three. Back end would be able to get you to like maybe five-ish, but I don't think this is going to fit become a $50 million thing unless you go kind of adjacent verticals for language. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. >> That's the plan. Appreciate you. >> Alex. Yeah, you bet. You're a G. 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 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 book a call with my team and we will look at your 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.