7 Figure Agency With A $10M Annual Run Rate Selling Agency Coaching Programs

TRANSCRIPT

What’s going on everybody today, we have Joel Kaplan from the 7 figure agency all the way to Denver, Colorado. Joel, what is it that you actually do and how do you generate revenue for your company? The 7 figure agency?

So what we do is we teach agency owners how to scale to seven figures and beyond I pride myself in having some of the biggest numbers in terms of what we do for our students and the results that we get them. Personally, we have a ton of a hundred K a month students. At this point, we have a lot of 50K a month students and a ton of six-figure agencies as well. So that’s what I do. And

We’re going to dive deep into that here in just a second. Cause I want to know metrics. I want to know it all. But first, when did you actually start the company? How long has it been?

So I started entrepreneurship about three and a half years ago, scaled my agency to over seven figures in about a year and then about a year ago. So about two years into my entrepreneurial journey. I started the coaching company 17.

Awesome. So this company 7 figure agency has been open for one year pretty much just one year. Right. Awesome. And how many team members do you have that are currently working with you on this company? And what’s just a quick breakdown of that. What do they do,

Man? I’ve got over 20 for sure. And all us so awesome. I think we have two amazing virtual assistants and then about 20 US employees. We’ve got a COO, media buyer copywriter, five salespeople, three appointment setters student success manager, operations manager, head of finance. Love it. That’s it. There’s maybe a few more, but I know you want to go fast. No, you’re good. You’re good. I’m like trying to get through the answer as quickly.

That’s good enough then. And how many active clients you serve right now in your coaching program? How many people are in there right now? A few hundred. Awesome. What would you say? Like 100, 200, 300. Give me like three to 400, three to 400. Awesome. and you know, like I’m at a job interview right now. I know we’re, we’re doing, we’re just getting warmed up. I want to get fun. Joel, if you want it to send a message out to the world tomorrow morning, right? And he took your email list, you took her many chat subscribers, you took whatever other, your Facebook group, whatever other things that you have, any other assets, as far as the lists, right? How many people do you think you have on your list? How many people are you going to reach with your message?

Mm, I thought the question was going to be, what message would I send? I don’t know if that’s coming just yet. I was going to let me answer that one and then I’ll give you the message, the something that’s been on my mind lately is leading with a heart. I think we’re all very competitive people and we’re very fierce, intense, even human. Like you just you’re there with full energy, full force. And we can’t forget about the heart and just being empathetic and really caring. But in terms of, in terms of reach, well, we spend $5,000 a day on ads. So I know my face is getting plastered everywhere in terms of the,

Well, just your list though. Let’s say if you combine your email list or mini chat list of people in your group, like things like that, like physical lists that you already thousand maybe awesome. 30,000.

We also, one of the keys that I’ve really followed in order to scale has been firing myself from the process. So besides knowing high-level metrics, like how many appointments are we booking? How many appointments are we closing? I’m not involved in the email strategy. I’m not involved in the actual bot blast. I’m not even involved in posting my content on Instagram. So, so you’ve, you’ve removed because it’s hard to answer some of these.

Hey, that’s, that’s perfectly fine, man. And what is your pricing model look like? What’s what does it cost to join the coaching program?

Oh, you got to hop on a call, never reveal price without demonstrating value. First

Are we, are we talking about five? We’re talking

Millions because that’s what it costs you. If you don’t join. Okay,

Fair enough. I’m going to get into some questions here and we’ll try to do some kind of get that price. You have a value ladder in your business. Are you starting at one spot and then kind of moving up from there. You’re getting people into a tripwire. Talk to me about like what your sequence.

Yeah. As you know, well, Jay Abraham talks about there’s three ways to grow your business. I truly believe that there’s really only two ways. Get more customers, customers make more from your customers or clients to keep it really simple. And I’d say a top secret third way would be to improve efficiency within those two ways of growing your business. That’s pretty much it. So with that in mind, with that in mind, the first year was really focused on building an amazing client base. And now we’re really shifting our focus towards providing more services and helping them solve additional problems in their businesses so that we can also make more from them. Given that we’re adding more of that.

Well, what about your, your actual value ladder? As far as like, I’m going to reword it just to make sure we’re on the same page.

We have $7 products up to, you can hire me for a weekend for 50 grand. Yep.

Okay. So you’re basically starting at seven bucks. What, what’s your most successful campaign that you’re running right now? Are people coming into your, your, your mid-level let’s say coaching program, which is what a majority of your students might be in? Are they coming in from a $7 product and then going up escalate?

The two biggest ways we have a product called steal my ads. Okay. Where we essentially give away all the ads that we’ve used to scale our agency to seven figures. Okay. All of the proven that we ever launched and successfully booked appointments to land clients with. And then that’s, that’s one way that we’re bringing people from there into our seven figure agency coaching program. The other way is we have an offer, which is a hundred booked appointments. If you join seven figure agency. And of course, if you follow the program and show up and do what needs to get done on your end to hit the guarantee those are the two biggest ways that we’re bringing people in.

Fair enough is the majority of your, like, if I joined your coaching program as an example, and I have an agency, right. Are you teaching me how to just run paid ads? Is that what it is? Or is it organic stuff or is it just purely paid ads?

Man, I’m a huge believer in direct response just because that’s how I’ve always grown my agency and how I’ve helped other people grow their agencies and how I’ve grown my coaching program. So it’s definitely heavily focused on paid ads as a strategy to get clients there is like, for example, we have a daily paid ads call to help you with your agency ads.

Yeah. That’s how much it was. So if somebody comes into your program, they need money obviously to have to spend on paid ads. Right. You have to have that. You can’t, you can’t, you need budget to play with budget. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Which is, which is perfectly fine and what they should be doing. What are you saying right now? Let’s have some fun with the metrics. What are you seeing right now? Average cost per acquisition for an agency to get a new lead or a booked appointment, as you would say?

It depends on the niche. If you’re in an unsaturated niche, it could be as low as 150 bucks to get a, to, to acquire a customer, see cost per acquisition, and to get a book call. If we go into a random niche like fencing, it’s going to be it’s sorry. Someone was outside of my office, just being loud. If we go into an unsaturated niche, cost per book call could be as low as 20 bucks cost per acquisition. It could be about a hundred to 150 bucks. If we go into the more saturated niches, like chiropractic gyms, dental, where we have, where we have essentially big dogs spending a lot of money to capture the attention of the vertical, the cost per acquisition acquisition is going to be more around 750 to a thousand bucks.

Yep. And that’s, that’s enough because if they’re, I’m assuming the deals that they’re closing or, you know, two grand, three grand a month, things like that.

Yeah, exactly. And then we also have some ways to help our students charge higher, take it up front and position it as more of a 12 week program. So you can essentially get three months worth of retainers upfront, and then it goes into a month to month set up. So you’re immediately profitable on the front end, even if your cost per acquisition is even two or 3000.

Yup. And that fair enough. Hey, if, if you’re making more than your ad spend and there’s some good spread in between, then you’re in the clear, so that’s always good. What do you think the biggest needle mover was for your company? What, what made you get the most people into your program? What’s the biggest thing that you did that was like, Holy crap. Like

I earned the vote before I started coaching. What I mean by this is I didn’t go out and say, Oh, I know how to scale agencies until I had done it for myself and had processed, not one, but $2 million processed in my own agency until I had profited over $1 million profit, not until then, did I really commit to teaching? And even then I slowly transitioned. So I truly believe the biggest differentiator for me is that, and, and really all the successful coaching programs out there is that they earn the right to coach and they don’t do it prematurely just because they believe it’s a better business model.

Yep. No, I agree with that. I come from the same mind space. I’ve had my agency since 2009. Yeah,

For sure. And that’s why you’re, that’s why your clients get the best results. Because when someone hops on a coaching call with you, you’re not making up the answers when someone’s asking you about what to do. If if their client is , well, guess what? I’m sure you’ve personally been there on the phone with a doctor or a gym or whatever client you have dealing with the fact that maybe you overspent on the budget or you accidentally use the wrong creative or whatever the case might be. You can really speak. So I know you want to go fast.

I want to peel the onion back on one thing really quick. So let’s go back. Let’s go take one step back. I want to go back to the agency, client acquisition, right? So agency signed into your program. I’m assuming Facebook ads driving traffic to a, either two, three, four step funnel. And then obviously leads are booked. Appointments are coming out of the other end. Is, does that make sense?

We start with lead forms so that we essentially remove the variable of the funnel. Okay, good. Just to keep it even simpler and increase the chances of success. And then once we have a converting ad to lead form, which is easier to do than going at the funnel and getting huge variables to convert. Once we have a proven process to go from ad to lead form then, and only then do we introduce it?

Let’s have some fun with it. What does that ad look like? Talk to me about what that video or ad might look like.

Great question. The biggest one that I tell all of the students to start with is some sort of offer or a guarantee that they’re essentially throwing out into their market right on the front end, right on the ad. So for example, it could be something like we guarantee that will get your gym 30 members, or we guarantee that we’ll get you one roofing job guaranteed, some sort of offer that they could throw into the marketplace that has a big promise, has some risk reversal and has some sort of unique mechanism. Ideally they introduce some sort of system or process along with the big promise,

Let me play devil’s advocate with you a little bit. All right. What happens if I do that? And I don’t meet the guarantee, right? What happens if I don’t get them 30 gym members? What happens if I get them 10? Let’s just use it as just an idea

For sure. So I truly believe that offers having strong offers are a great way to hold yourself accountable and hold the client accountable. So if you go out into the marketplace and you throw this guarantee and you can’t back it up, then don’t start with such an aggressive guarantee. So for example, if you’re new, I don’t ever tell you to do a full refund. I say, Hey, guarantee 30 roofing job leads, or we’ll work for you for free until we hit it. Gotcha.

Okay. So some type of like backup protection,

Well, there’s always a way out. Or for example, let’s say that you do everything in your power to get them the 30 roofing jobs, but if a roofing job leads, but the roofer is not willing to do your offer. They’re not willing to spend as much as you recommend on ad spend. They’re not willing to follow your specific followup protocol that you’ve laid out. If they’re not willing to do those things on their end, then they don’t qualify for the guarantee. So it’s a great way to hold yourself accountable, hold the client accountable. And it was actually one of the reasons or one of the ways that I was able to fix the problem that a lot of agencies have when it comes to getting the clients, to do the follow-up and improve their sales skills. As we know, we can send clients thousands of leads, but if they don’t follow up and they don’t get better at sales, they’re going to eventually leave you because they’re not going to get an ROI.

One of the ways to make sure that they get good at following up. And they really, really level up when it comes to sales is for you to create a guarantee that holds them accountable and puts their back against the wall. For example, for example, you can create a course with, we actually have a seven figure chiropractor that does seven figures with his practice. And he created a sales course for our chiropractor clients to help them with sales. And we tell them, if you don’t go through the course within the first two weeks of going live, you don’t qualify for the guarantee. So it’s one of the genius ideas that we have been able to implement to make sure that we do what we need to do. And they do when they need to do in order to get results.

What, what, like agency comes in let’s talk about like ad spend. How much do I need to, what do you like recommend an agency to start off with? For ad spin

Depends on what your financial situation looks like.

Like the bare minimum of what you would like to call it. You got to do this, or like there’s no

Bare minimum. I call it the Chipotle rule. If you’re willing to go out and eat a Chipola, you have money for ad spend. It’s like seven, eight bucks a day, 10 bucks a day. If I catch you going out to eat and spending money on anything, that’s not cheap groceries, you have money for ad spent. Fair

Enough. I’ll take that.

If you’re brand new and starting out, did you know that you can go out to a crappy supermarket and buy like a hundred tortillas plus shredded cheese for under, for like 10 bucks and that covers 30 meals. Yep. There’s your money for ad spend whatever you saved by doing that, instead of going to [inaudible]

Fair. Fair enough. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t rebuttal that.

What I also tell people is like, look, if you are in a bad financial situation and you don’t want to get a job. So in other words, you want to be an entrepreneur and you want to capitalize on the upside of being an entrepreneur or freedom. Being able to do your own thing, having no cap on how much money you make, then be willing to do things that most people aren’t willing to do. So for example, for example, instead of not running ads and being like, well, I don’t have any money. Go drive Uber at night. You’ll easily make $30 easily. If you drive the whole night, you’ll easily make $30. There’s your ad spend for, for the day.

Hey now we’re getting into motivational stuff, which I love, but I’m going to, I’m going to keep going. I’ve got two final questions for you. Okay. one question is how many, how much revenue has the seven figure agency done in the last 12 months? And where do you see yourself in 12?

Hmm. Haven’t shared this publicly share it. We gotta get that instead of we’re doing eight figures, right?

Fingers. Okay. So in the last 12 months you’ve done over eight figures.

No, not in the last 12, but we’re, we’re at an eight figure run rate. As of now, keep in mind. I just started at 12. I just started at 12 months ago. So that would be

Got you. Give me a number monthly. What’d you do last year,

I’m doing a big release. I’m doing a big, big release. I’m going to keep it top seat.

I feel like the release should be here on the market as mine, where people would come on that

I had an eight figure run rate in terms of revenue,

Eight figure out, right. I’m just going to say and assume that you’re doing around 300 K per month to be able to get close to that number. That might be wow.

No, that was a trick question. You know, for an eight-figure run rate, you need to be doing it.

I had a big question

We’re doing in deals. So in revenue sold, we’re doing over a month. Alright,

Great man. Good for you. And where do you see yourself at, in 12 months from today? And what do you think that you have to actually do to make that difference? I call this the warm-up season. Okay, good.

We’re just warming up. So where do I see myself in a year? In five years? Like I have big plans to impact thousands of people with that in mind. I’m humbled by where I’m at right now. And I surrender to that bigger vision into the fact that I’m actually not entirely sure what that looks like. Okay. I don’t know how I’m going to change the world, but I know that’s the game plan. And right now all my energy is focused on helping change as many lives within the seven figure agency coaching program, helping people find a new way to grow their business, to live their lives and achieve financial freedom. That’s what I’m focused on right now. And I know in the long run, there’s something much bigger at play.

Love it. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, you guys heard it first on the Marketers Mindset podcast, Joel Kaplan, from the 7 figure agency, all the way out of Denver, Colorado doing a million dollars a month in sales or around that, we’ll say that which is completely crushing it in the space. You should Pat yourself on the back a thousand times for that. And Joel, it was a pleasure to have you on Mike. Always. I share the same energy levels as you. So it’s always nice to have somebody on that. Super excited about what they do, man. Thank you so much.

No, I love your energy, man. It just gave me so excited.

Hey, we’ll see you in 12 months from today, we’ll bring the energy up a notch, even higher, right? I think you’ll have it.