eCommerce Brand Academy Does $1.4M With Over 3k Students

TRANSCRIPT

What’s going on everybody. We have Cody Neer here from e-commerce brand Academy out of Tampa, Florida, Cody. What’s going on? What is it that you actually do? And how do you generate revenue?

Yeah, what’s up everybody. So I sell physical products, leveraging Shopify, Facebook ads, Google being, click funnels, simple as that. E-Commerce selling products online.

Awesome. Now, Cody, I know you from the past, do you have an actual, I’m assuming you have an actual course or do you have an education side to it?

Yeah. So the brand Academy consists of 19 courses that cover everything from Facebook ads to Google being Pinterest, Etsy, eBay, Amazon literally everything it takes to sell a product online.

The is the company a whole like e-Commerce Brand Academy? Is that your physical Shopify stores plus your also your whole education?

No. So my Shopify stores are separate, so I have an entity that runs all my eCommerce businesses. And then I run my education info business in e-Commerce brand Academy.

So that’s what this is just to want to make sure all the viewers are on the same page. Cool. So this is the education side to your business, where essentially you teach people how to get success. Like you’ve had a running in the eCom space, right? Exactly, exactly. Love it. And who’s your ideal avatar, like your perfect client, who are these people? If you can put them into like a bucket, who would they be?

Typical brand owners who sell physical products online who have a, a brand presence who spend money on advertising, understand their sourcing. They have a product where they’re sourcing it. They understand their margins and their numbers very well. And they understand the, the actual impact that their product makes on their customer. Typically trying to figure, figure it out along the way, or figure out how to drop ship from here, finding random winning products. That’s not our model. It’s typically really, really good brands that have products that are in a niche that make an impact.

Gotcha. So would you say that most of the people who are using were buying your courses, are they doing it for their own company? Are they doing it to like resell and offer like digital marketing services and stuff like that?

Yeah, so we have a it’s about a split. So some people take our programs to understand how to better serve their clients in the eCommerce space. So like agency owners, but then you have actual brands and actual brands, employees that we have. So we actually have an actual program where we pitch brands, employees to come through a program where we take them through the entire Academy. If say they onboard a new a new employee, we take them through the entire Academy. So they have a really good understanding of what their brand’s expectations are from a, from an eCommerce business standpoint.

Awesome. And how many team members do you have today? And what’s a breakdown of those.

Yeah, so we have roughly nine and a it’s everybody from product sourcing to accounts receivables, to Facebook ads, experts to funnel builders, to order fulfillment and customer service, and obviously myself, which I’m, you know, the quarterback.

Awesome. And so I know obviously COVID is going on. Is this all in house or is everybody working remote right now?

So everyone’s remote and luckily, luckily we were pre pre COVID. We were remote team already. So now it’s just the norm.

I love it, man. Love it, man. And I know you’re in the education space, so me asking you how many active clients might be a little off because in the education space, people come by course, and then they’re gone, right? How many people have actually taken your education products? Like how many how many actual clients do you have?

So throughout the entire Academy, we’ve had 3,111 students come through the attire Academy. What that means is they’ve either purchased one course or they’ve purchased the entire Academy. So sometime they’ve, they’ve done everything or one of the individual.

How long have you been open for how long has that?

It’s about 18 months. We’re we’re we’re about a year and a half in.

I love it. Love it. And what, as far as like a, you know, you’re following, so let’s talk about like, you know, maybe you guys have a YouTube channel, you guys have an email list, you have a Facebook page, maybe Facebook group, whatever it is, we can take all those people and put together how large do you think your audience is?

We’re we’re right below a million people have active, engaged audiences across pages groups, YouTube, Instagram, and then we have an Omni channel, which is part of our email and everything else.

Got you. And what is your actual pricing model look like? So let’s say I come in, I find you on YouTube. I’m watching one of your YouTube videos. I hit your landing page. What am I getting hit with first? What is your pricing model look like? And also talk to me about maybe the pricing model, how it connects to like a value ladder, maybe on the back end and you go in, you know, $17 trip wire and then bringing them up into the full blown Academy. How does that work on your own?

Yeah, so, so understanding our Academy has has 19 programs and those programs are individualized based on a marketing channel or marketplace. So our, our advertisements and our YouTube and our Instagram and all of our front end products are individualized. And I should say front end content is individualized based on the channel. So someone sees a Facebook ad. If they see an Instagram e-comm ad, if they see how to do Amazon, they come in and they’ll actually get essentially pitched or sold on that exact program. When they buy that one program, they would then get pitched, Hey, order bump, upsell. You can get the entire Academy for you know, a onetime offer. And then from there, once they get inside the Academy, we have a a coaching program, which is our next step up. And then from there we have a yearly mastermind. So it’s really incremental individual’s course.

What let’s say, I comment, I buy an Instagram course, roughly how much is that course?

So it’s around 300 bucks, two 97, and then they go to the the full Academy, which is around a thousand. So it’s literally a no brainer. You go from one course, 300 to 19 courses for a thousand. It’s a, it’s a no brainer. Upsells.

They get the whole suite for a thousand bucks. And then what’s, let’s say I’m like Cody, I’m loving your courses. I’ll I want to work a little bit closer with you. What’s what’s your higher level.

Yeah, so we have a two, two packages. We have one at 3,501 at 7,500, and then after 7,500, we have a year long mastermind.

Gotcha. And how much has that, that year long mastermind for 15 grand for the year long mastermind.

Love it, man. Love it. And if you could, you know, a lot of those people who are a lot of our audience that people are going to be watching and viewing this they’re entrepreneurs, right. They want to know usually what that one thing is that made most companies successful. Right. So if you can think about what you’ve done in the last 18 months, if you can pinpoint one thing, what was the biggest needle mover mover for you? What was that one thing that you were like, Holy shit, this campaign was crazy or doing it this way was exponential growth for us.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that question is, is a, it’s a good question. Cause it unpacks very well. So in my opinion, there’s two things that kind of go hand in hand. Number one is systems, systems, processes, procedures, SOP is the cliche saying of you gotta be able to replicate what you’re doing, right. But if I even break it down simpler than that, the moment I realized that if I just take a product, put it inside a funnel and run an ad to it and make sales, everything else would take care of itself. I didn’t worry about the fulfillment and process SOP. Did I write the copyright? Does the image perfect. None of that shit really matters is if I just put an ad out there and run ads, sales are going to occur and all the other stuff will come in on the backend.

People get really confused nowadays. They try to set up crazy backend stuff and the front end isn’t even set up yet. Right. They’re not running any tests. Are you, are you also testing your offers to see kind of what’s working or are you like, are you creating the course and then selling it or are you trying to sell it, get some feedback and then create the course after?

Yeah, so typically what I do is I sell the program first and then I put the program together based on what I understand what I sold. Right. If I sell something or put it out there in the marketplace and no one’s interested in it, then I realized there’s no reason for me to build it. So I I’m a thorough believer in, you know, sell before you build, when it comes to an information product.

Understood. And what, what would be the Mo I mean, we’re in 2020 now. What, what do you think is the most successful automation that you have right now that either saves you the most time or makes you the most money?

Yeah. So email automation between individuals when they hit an ad. So when they get a follow up email, so when they register and rewatch the video, so anytime I’m selling something, the entire automation between the time they see the ad and the time they actually see my offer, I’m trying to automate the whole process between ad and offer. And then all the touch points in between that, because the only thing that matters is if they see the actual offer.

Yeah. And what are you using for that? Is it click funnels? Are you using the backend of ClickFunnels for that?

Yeah. So it’s a combination of ClickFunnels and active campaign. Yeah. Click funnels and active campaign combination. Cool.

And I’m going to ask you the next question, but this might tie back into it. What CRM system are you using? Is it active campaign,

Active campaign for all my sales and deals. Yeah.

Got you. And what is your sales process look like? Is it, is it low touch where people are just coming in buying courses and then maybe there’s literally, that whole thing is automated and fill. They actually need to jump into a higher level coaching program and then that involves a person coming in.

Yeah. So, so typically it’s, it’s the course the full Academy. And once they hit the full Academy and they’re in there for a certain period of time, and then we’ll have a touch point where we’re trying to get them into the coaching temporary, that, that ranges from about 30 to 45 days. So we’re not going to hit you up with, Hey, you should join our coaching programs until you’re in for 30 to 45 days. We’ve seen you’re actively in there going through it because otherwise you don’t know the content. You don’t know, you don’t have a problem that we can solve yet.

It’s outreach, right? Your outreach, how are you? What are you doing for that? Are you a lot of people, DME and they’re doing cold calls, what are you doing there?

Yeah. So we have an application, so we’ll do emails and ads at that point. And then we’re essentially asking them to fill out an application. Application comes to sales, guy, sales guys, schedules a phone call, a phone call, ends up just, you know, going through typical sales cycle.

Got you. And let’s talk about agile quick as it seems like you’re doing a lot of ads, right? What are you, what are you doing with all the people who don’t buy your product? People hit your landing pages, maybe watch your free webinars, whatever it is, what are you doing with those guys? What’d your retargeting look like?

Yeah. So I have a content strategy strictly only. So to build who I am, what I do, what we do, our value it’s typically if they’re not buying it because they don’t understand the value of what I offer. So the whole piece of a non buyer is to educate him on, on what kind of value we can give them, whether it be the YouTube, Facebook ads, email Facebook groups.

I’m gonna hit with ads again, though. It’s

Ads, ads, email, and YouTube videos. Correct. Awesome.

And for for your brain how much revenue have you guys generated in the last 12 months?

In the last 12 months, I think we’re at 1.4 million for the last 12 months and that’s information only. And typically an average month has been right in that 60 to 70,000 Mark. So you can see,

I mean, that’s awesome for education because education obviously is a larger spread versus you selling like services and you get any physical people to come running in there. Right. Right. Okay. That’s awesome. And what do you, where do you see yourself out in 12 months from today? What’s a realistic goal that you think you can hit?

So from a revenue standpoint, my goal is to get to where we’re consistently doing over a hundred thousand a month. That’s the, I’m going by month by month. So I’m trying to get my monthly average up to a hundred grand.

Got you. And if you peel your whole business back and you look at it from like a three serve, like a 10,000 foot view, what do you actually need to do in order to hit that revenue goal? Is there like specific things that you see that are just not working and you’d optimize? What are those things?

Yeah. So we’ve put something on our, on our board. It’s typically, we’d just need an number of leads. So leads to phone calls, booked for sales calls to calls, to sales closed. You know, we simplify it as

Do you know, the actual numbers. So let’s say you know, us marketers, we get super analytical, especially me, obviously when we’re running campaigns for dash flicks. Right. Do you know what the numbers look like, where it’s like, okay, I know that if I can get a thousand people to hit my landing page, I know that I’ll have a 20% opt in rate to watch my maybe free webinar that I know that people who watch my webinar, you know, out of those, you know, 200 people as an example 50 people might fill out an app or 50 people might buy my first level product for two 97 and then go and then maybe gets a higher ticket. Do you know those numbers? And if you do, I’d be curious as to know what those are.

Yeah. So our goal is to get 20 true applications a day. So if you do 20 times 30, I mean, we’re just trying to get 20 applications a day of the 20 applications. We’re trying to, we’re trying to work on our calls, actually show up like people who show up on the call, we’re trying to get that at 50% right now of people who show up on the,

Oh, we’re trying to get that obviously better. Let me jump in and say something because you just said something that’s really powerful, most people. And we, you know, we adopted a, with a lot of agency owners every single day, right? What I get is people having issues with no show rates, right? People filling out an application, we have it also a dashboard. So I think our average show up rate is we get it up to like 60%. Right? for those of you guys who are struggling with that, just a little piece of advice that I can give you is try to give them something for free. What we realized that bumped up our percentage going from, I think we were at like 45% and then we got up to 60% is we just recently added a little mini course for them that we only give them at the end of the phone call.

So we give them a little free piece of information or free little mini course, and they show up to the call and then obviously that’s a rockets, everything else down the road. So I’d also something that you could throw in in your agency, give them a free video, give them something for free to make sure they show up to the call. Yeah. I love it. We’re going to try that one other cool thing that I’m going to share with you anyways. Voice drops. So we set up a zap. Anytime they schedule a call that our applications are done through Calendly, right? So they’ll go to fill out account. They’ll schedule a time. Then they go through the application right there in calendar. We just ask them a series of questions. What we do is we have a zap doing from a drop cowboy, one hour in advance.

We send them a Zapier with a prerecorded message. And that’s a voice drop that says, Hey, it’s Chad calling from Dodge. Felix just wanted to give you a heads up. Your call is literally within the next hour. I’m just trying to make sure you’re buying a computer. Make sure you get this. And by the way, at the end of the call, we’re also going to give you the freebie, whatever it is. And you drop that freebie in there, we have that. Then we have the encounter. We have three emails, 24 hours, one hour and five minutes before the call and the same sequence with SMS messages as well done through Calendly that put together, all that stuff has increased our show.

Yeah. Yeah. We have a very similar setup and we yeah, it’s very, very similar model. We haven’t done voice drop yet, but we, we actually, we actually have we do have a, an hour before the call. We have a call service that we actually hired and they actually physically call and say, Hey, we’re not going to be the ones on the call, but we just want to confirm you’re going to be there.

That’s awesome too. And what’s is that like a third party service that you use for them?

It’s a third party service. I can’t remember the name, but they’re out of North Carolina. They’re 24 hours a day though. Cause our, our sales calls are around the clock. We have 24 hour sales calls.

Amazing man. Alright. Let’s you know, if you could give one tip to a brand new business owner that would save them the most time in their, in their business, just shave off years of their business. What would that one tip be?

Oh, fastest way to scale and get more people in front of your business is make sales via ads, all the, all the, all the organic and all that other stuff. If you’re not running ads and getting, it’s just a loss of average game, in my opinion, I mean, you, you can refine your process if you have more people, but if you only have 10 people, you only have 10 people. So if you’ve got a hundred, you can be really bad and still deal. Well,

I’m going to ask you a question. I know, I think I know what the answer is, but you’re going to tell me regardless, what’s a favorite software tool that you use in your agencies, that active campaign.

Actually, my favorite is wave apps where I can actually get people to pay the bills.

Well, yeah, you guys heard the first guys, Cody Neer all the way out of Tampa, Florida. E-Commerce brand Academy. Cody, thank you so much for coming on brother. And we look forward to having you on in the near future. Have a good one, man. Bye bye.