How to Build a Hyper-Profitable eCommerce Agency – w/ Cody Neer

TRANSCRIPT

Guys, if you guys are in the chat and you are watching this hit me up with like a one a hundred just so I know that you guys are alive in your here 100 in the chat. What’s going on Facebook? We’re now live in the Facebook group in the marketing to the Facebook group. Facebook, if you’re watching this live Hashtag live if you’re watching the replay, hashtag replay.
Let’s get this chat. I’m actually looking at, just so you know Cody, I’m not looking away from you. I’m looking right over here. I got my side screen here going on. Let me pop open this Facebook so I can pull some comments up from Facebook, which would be nice too. And then we’ll get started man. We’ll get started. Cool. Let’s get Facebook live if you’re watching the replay, actually. Cool. All right. What’s going on Facebook? How are we doing? Everybody?
All right, cool. Scott, Kayla and Franklin and Jerome. Kevin, not Matthew, Philip Zimbardo, Steven Wise, George Angel. We got people pilot or what’s up everybody? How are we doing? And we got code in here with us here today. He’s going to drop some serious bombs on you guys on how to build a hyper profitable e-commerce agency. This man right here actually watched him live for the first time. The first time I met you was that at Dan Henry’s event at ad con thing. It was way back. And I think you presented on stage and you were talking about just basically how to blow up using e-commerce, how to build basically seven figure ecommerce businesses. Is that right?
Absolutely. Yeah. That was a few years ago. That was a, that was a vaguely weekend. It was wild. It was wild Batman. What’s going on Bro? And Hey, I’m, so what I’m going to do is I’ll let you introduce yourself and then I’ll let you take it away. Guy, just so everybody knows. We’re going to do a hard stop probably around a, I would say like in about 50, 45 minutes at about like two 50 Est. We’ll do like 10 minutes of Q and a and then Cody’s got to go on. I got to go cause I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today too, but I’m within that time that we have together. Cody’s going gonna blow your mind. So I’m just gonna let you go ahead and take it away.
Yeah. Awesome. So I first of all, appreciate it and glad everybody’s out here. So I want to start out with sharing my screen real quick and let rock and roll. So make sure you guys, everyone see that? Yep. All right, cool. So obviously we’re going to talk about how we grow a hyper profitable e-commerce agency. Number one, I’m going to just go through kind of like the itinerary of what we’re going to talk about. Say, who am I, why am I qualified how we find client fits for us, contract and retrain and retainers. And then what are three focal points for client success are today as we go through, I want to make sure we understand that there’s a difference between being an agency and then being an ecommerce owner, you have to understand mindset of both sides of the fence.
And that’s why I believe you know, we can be successful. So who am I real quick? I am CEO of 77 digital. In 2015, I became partners with Kevin Harrington, the original shark from shark tank to 2017. After that business I created seven to seven digital. The reason it’s called 77 digital St Petersburg, Florida, 77 area code, pretty original. So from there we built a 25 person team. That 25 person team now has $250,000 a month after its first six months of being open in retainers, client contracts month over month we’ve been higher. We’ve been lower. We average $250,000 since our six months in business. That’s been several years ago. Like I said, there’s 25 employees. A majority of us are remote. So if you think that you have to have an office and you have to have everyone around you to be successful and make a ton of money as an agency, you do not.
On the flip side of that you do not have to be in an office and have everyone around you to be successful as any commerce entrepreneur as well. I have currently managed and managed over 350 Shopify stores that are projected to 60 million plus dollars in 2019. That is a, I’ll give you a little bit more information about that in a second, but that is why I am duly qualified to understand as an agency owner, as any commerce owner how both sides of the business works, it’s vitally critical to understand how any commerce business actually functions. What key points you need to look at, what, what’s the proper way of setting up offers, funnels, ads in order to create client success. The good thing about it is prior to becoming an agency owner, I was an Ecommerce business entrepreneur. I had the commerce brand academy.
There’s over 2100 students since 2017. In that academy, I have over 306 figure earners come through that academy. There are 16 courses inside that academy. They range from Facebook, Google being Pinterest, Etsy, Google ads being ads project management, how to build an asset. There’s a ton of really good things inside the academy there. I’ve been featured in Forbes, entrepreneur, buzzfeed, thrive global and many other online publications. I don’t say that to brag, but I say that to know that just so you guys understand that have a little bit of knowledge on both sides of the fence from both teaching, from being an agency owner and from actually managing ecommerce businesses. Why am I qualified? So let’s dive in. In 2018 I became a partner with a company called income store.com. If you’re around the computer right now, go type it in.
What they do, their unique business model is they actually bring on investors who invest in their business and they manage our building an online asset. That asset gives them a net monthly return every single month. Okay. I am 100% in charge of managing the ecommerce side of that business. Every single Shopify store, ecommerce business that comes to that company. I am in charge of. Our job is to build, scale, manage all of those brands. And like I mentioned before to do 60 million plus dollars in two, not a 2019. I have myself built and sold 17 ecommerce brands for well over seven figures. The most recent being three days ago. My 17th I’m on both sides of this business as a daily e-commerce [inaudible] newer manager. I run Facebook ads, Google ads being ads, I’m in the business on a daily. And on the flip side of that, we are working both with clients in our own stores to create success. Any commerce. [inaudible] So let’s dive in real quick and if there’s any questions before we dive into the client fit and how we actually can create a profitable agency. If there’s any questions so far we can surely answer those. If not, I’m going to roll right into how we find the client fits and how do we get clients? What does a good client, everyone knows the difference between a good and a bad client and how we can create success for this business. Any questions so far?
Guys, if you guys have any questions at all, I guess feel free to drop them in the comments below. I also have the Facebook feed opens. If you guys have comments on Facebook, feel free to drop them in.
We don’t have to do a straight strictly where I just sit here and hammer away. I’d love to be interactive and you guys ask questions as we go through this. Questions in the middle of these things are going to allow me the opportunity to maybe answer a question that more than just one of you might have right now. So don’t hold anything back. So the first time or the first place that we start to build your conversations. See Number one is you gotta figure out how to get clients. You got to figure out what’s a good client, who do you want to work with? And let’s just start with the most important thing to create successes. Does the client have a brand? And a business already. So there’s two main words inside that sentence. Okay. Brands and business. A brand is something that Mike get used very loosely.
The reason why I have the e-commerce brand academy is because a brand does not always mean that you have a Nike check or some kind of logo and you know, you have created some massive success and money. That’s not essentially what a brand is. A brand could be just how you do business, who you do business with, where you do business at, how you control your customer service. How you do your product fulfillment. That’s all a part of a brand. Remember we do not want to build businesses for people. We are an agency. We need to focus on what we’re good at. So it’s kind of tough to you know, to get paid to build somebody else’s business for them. There’s, there’s a, I don’t know what the numbers, but there’s a ton of businesses that get open up every day, every month, every year.
And the percentage is really high for the number of failing businesses. The reason being is they have an established that brand. They already, they do not have a business technically in place. What does a business mean? You know, you have processes, procedures, systems in place. So the questions you need to ask them and specifically when you, you know, want to go into ecommerce as an agency is do you have a product? It’s a very basic, simple question. Do you have a product to sell? Do you have the ability to fulfill that product? The most important thing, hands-down, period is do you have a product and can you fulfill on that product? The last thing we want to do as any conversation Si is take on a client. They’ve got 10 things in stock. It takes them 17 months to get some more.
You sell 10 of them. Next thing you know, you’re out of business because you have nothing to sell. Vice versa, they they’re drop shipping for, maybe I’ll express Amazon, Etsy, Ebay, the tons of places you can drop ship, that’s completely fine. But they have to have a system in place to make sure that they can keep up with fulfillment. So if we go get them a ton of orders as an agency, do they have a process or procedure in place to make sure that those four products get fulfilled to the customers? Third thing is, is do they have a budget? Do they have a marketing budget? The most, the biggest question that an ecommerce business is going to ask you as an agency, hands down the number one question they’re gonna ask you as a marketing agency is what should my ad spend be a month?
That’s the number one question they will ask you. And I’m going to give you a little bit more detail of why that is a tricky question, number one, but number two, how you can position yourself to answer it correctly, to set yourself up for success as an agency owner. And like I mentioned, systems and procedures we don’t want to build a business for anybody. Final, last but not least is do you like the person that you’re talking to? Money might be great, but if you don’t like dealing with them, working with them on a daily it’s not fun to wake up and go to this. I think Chad, you can attest, I was just going through, we just fired somebody last one of our clients. We just fired one of our clients last week as it just wasn’t a good fit for us, not on the dashboard side, but on our retail agency side. It just was not a good fit. The guy was a local guy. He wanted to keep coming into the office. We don’t like doing in house meetings cause it just screws up the whole production flow in the workflow for everybody here. And just wasn’t gonna get fit and he was paying us I think like two grand a month. We just let them go. Just wasn’t a good fit for us sometimes there man. Don’t be scared of fire people guys.
No hard feelings. Sometimes you just you might not just like him as a person, but the way they do business is not the way you do business. And remember, you got to run your business as efficient as possible, so make sure they fit into your, your business model. I’m going to go through now that you’ve gone through the asking the right questions, do they have all those, did they check all the boxes? They had products that have systems, they have ways to fulfill you. Like okay, potentially this might be a good client. How do I even set up a contract? And then when they say how much money should I spend a month? Or what should my budget be? I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell you exactly what you’re going to say at the end of this one. So, contract structure, you’ve heard of retainer, you’ve heard of flat fees.
I’m a retainer based business means that you’re gonna charge them every single month, right? You’re going to charge them a retainer. That means that you’re going to a flat fee. Is the difference of, you know, I’m gonna charge you no matter what happens this month, but a retainer means no guaranteed, no matter what I do. That’s the absolute minimum I’m going to get. So let me explain the difference between a retainer and a flat fee. A flat fee means that I might charge you $2,000 period and nothing else. That’s, that’s the word, a flat, right? Whatever that cost is, nothing more, nothing less retainer means that this is the absolute minimum for me, me took for me to even open my laptop for us to do business together. When you work on a retainer based business, there’s other fees that you can add in there.
So for instance, ad spend percentage, when you start managing aspen, if you manage $3,000 versus of ad spend, it’s a lot different than managing $300,000 event spend. There’s more ads, there’s more ad sets, there’s more people involved, there’s more time, there’s more energy, right? There’s definitely more of a responsibility on an agency owner when you have a lot more ad spend being spent on your paid media channels. Remember doing a flat fee versus a retainer. There is nothing wrong with either one of them. You have to know going into it when you asked the question product fulfillment systems, right? You asked those questions ahead of time. So, you know, is this person a potential good fit for a retainer with percentage of ad spend or are they, do I want to charge them just a flat fee? Flat fees of clients may look like someone who has one product, one funnel, they have fulfillment and all your going to do is run the Facebook ads.
They have history of saying, I have never spent more than 10 grand. I’ve been a business for the years. I know that my sales are consistent. I just need you to get in there, manage my ad spend. Well, you’re not going to sit there and charge them a percentage of ad spend. You’re not going to charge them to build funnels. You’re not gonna charge them for optimization. You’re not gonna charge them anything else because there’s nothing else involved in that business besides running the ads or managing the ads. You will get a lot of clients that that simply just wants you to get in there and manage the ads. You know, maybe set some ad sets up a duplicate, some keep some creative and copy fresh your flat fees. You know, typically when you start, if you’re brand new at this can start anywhere from $500 a month and can go all the way up as much as possible pending on the business.
A very good question you should ask when you are bringing on a client is what is your current monthly revenue and how much revenue gross revenue did you do last year if they were in business last year. Two very important factors. Number one, if they were in business last year and they did $100 million in revenue, number one, you better have a team. Number two, you better know what you’re doing. And number three, they’re going to have a lot of moving parts. If they say, I’ve only did $10,000 in revenue last year, the probably one person team one product focus, one funnel, one store, you’re probably looking at flat fees, right? You got to ask that question. Revenue question for the part of being. You have to know who you’re getting in business with. You start getting in clients that, that that make a lot of money. You have a lot of responsibility to handle their ad spin. Maybe their information here, you’re probably going to have to sign an NDA of, of some custom product customizations and certain things like that. Chad can attest that there are multiple clients that have some pretty cool things going on and do not be afraid if it’s private or a potentially unique business to sign an NDA just so you can get your business.
Yeah, we’ve done it. We’ve signed the NDA before as we work with big comfy companies. In fact, we worked with this one company even a long time ago. This was like when we first started right now for a startup, I guess like maybe like five years ago, anybody ever seen that thing on shark tank where you put in the toilet and it goes up? It goes all the global thing that you put on your toilet. Yeah. So we actually we actually built all of the ads for global. We built their website and we ran ads for them. And the, the ads that we ran on Facebook, and this was like five years ago, right? The ads that we ran on Facebook went so viral that it actually, it crashed the server because there was too much traffic to the site. They ended up doing, they started at like, I think it was like 1500 bucks a month in ad spend.
And when, when they left us and started doing everything on their own, cause they brought it all in house. We were doing about a hundred k a month in ad spent. So just be ready, like he’s saying, like sometimes you’ll even, sometimes you’ll start off with a small fish that that is just starting out. And we’ll get to a whale, right? And that’s also just throwing that in there. Like for, for those of you guys, obviously all everybody in this who’s watching is in Daschle. So if you’re managing your ads with dashboards, like that’s something that you guys don’t even need to worry about because we had that team there for you to fulfill those orders you can up and get the huge businesses or even get the low business, the low hanging fruit businesses, even on the low end that you’re charging maybe 500,000 bucks a month or something like that to run ads for.
Yeah, we did some good business together as well. I’ve done some cool things with his, got a new, a Tri Luma lamp that he just launched it.
So next part of a contract structure is make sure in that contract when you do establish whether you’re gonna do a retainer or a flat fee retainer with percentage or flat fee, that you establish what standard operating procedures are in that contract. You want to know what you’re getting into, what’s expected of you on a daily, weekly and monthly. Are you the bonus and part for you guys having Dash Click is you’re going to have reporting and you’re going to have all this information that you can disseminate to your client. Use that to your benefit. Put that in the contract of here’s what you’re going to get from us. And use that as a bonus. When you go sell a client, there are a lot of people who do not add daily, weekly, monthly reporting access to information. Use that to your benefit inside your contract. I’m Chad, do you guys have contract?
I was just going to say, so for us, we’re actually we’re creating a, a minus, let’s say, but fuck it, whatever. We’re creating a whole tool that’s going to be like the proposal and contract builder inside of Dash Six. We’re going to be able soon to fire off contracts for customers right from dash lakes. Get it signed. Kind of like dogs and trying to go through that whole process. But for right now guys, for, for those of you guys who are using gastrics for fulfillment even if you’re not screwing, you can use it. Just go to the store in dash clicks and under every service that we offer, which is probably what you’re selling to your customers. We have literally exactly what we do for set up, literally written down pass by tests exactly what we do and then exactly what we do every single month. Just copy those two columns and drop them straight into your contracts. That’s all you need to do. That way there’s no like what are you supposed to do this month? Did you do this this month? Like nothing. Like everything is like a factory almost. So just just copy and paste those in your contracts guys.
Do we have a question coming in from the chat? You guys got any questions? So for any questions if you’re on Facebook too, I’ll take questions too. I got Facebook pulled up. Any questions so far? And for some reason you do not have any questions. We’re going to keep moving, but if you have any questions, if something like sparks her interest, if you’re confused about something, just drop the question in the chat. And then once we get to like a stopping point inside of the actual the a, the, the presentation here we’ll enter any questions you guys have. Not only that, if you guys are watching this live in the Facebook group and was a bunch of guys in the Facebook group right now, probably more in the Facebook group that are actually in the the Zoom Webinar. But either or like wherever you guys are dropping your comments and just wake up. Don’t make me jump through the screen and shake you guys. Drop a 404 right now in the chat that you guys are awake. We want to make sure that you guys on the same page because what Cody’s telling you guys, just like the beginning stage, you guys got to get this into your head. Do you want to be successful?
Absolutely. So like I mentioned, make sure you outline exactly what your goals are in your contract. And the leave nothing for guesswork. Do not let the client assume what you’re supposed to do for them and make sure that you’re clearly outlining exactly what you’re going to fulfill on. So as I mentioned what should my ads bin be? That’s probably the number one question the client’s gonna ask you. And I’m going to share how you answer that the way, what should my ad spend be when we start? The very first thing you should say is, I need to look at what your margins are of your products. I need to look at any historical data in your Facebook ads. Do you have that set up? Make sure it’s structured out right. The number one thing that you have to ask them is, I need to know what your margins are in your products.
We are running ecommerce businesses that sell physical products. These are tangible items that you’re going to, you’re going to buy for one price and you’re going to sell for another. And I will tie in why. Knowing the margins of the business is very, very, very, very important because you can run an ad that does $1,000 so that spent, right, and the product sells one time and it has $1,000 margin. You break even on your ad spend. Does that make sense? Or you can run an ad that only has $1 margin and you spend $1,000 how many of those products do you have to sell in order to break even on your ad spend? 1,000 of them. Common Sense says, if I have to sell a thousand of something just to break even on that spin, let me clarify why breaking even on an ad spend, it’s at least important is number one.
If you’re spending money and you’re not at least breaking even with the margins, because again, you’ve got to cover the cost of the product. You’ve got to cover the cost of your ad spin in order to be successful in this business. Okay, let me clarify and explain what I mean. If a product costs $10 you sell it for 20 you have $10 of margin built in. That means that you have a max potential of spending $10 to acquire that customer or make that sale. That’s why asking what the margin is on the product is so very important because if the client turns around and says, I want to sell you know, 20 of these a month, well then you’ve just created the ad spin for yourself. Okay. In order to sell 20 of these a month, I need to know number one what the margins are. Okay, so what do I have in there? Built in that product sale to actually spin to acquire the customer and the margin of the product. Right. Is that clarified? Chatted? You get what I’m saying? Falling along?
Yeah, you guys guys dropping a two Oh three right now in the chat if you guys were on the same page, because if you’re not, let’s go guys, you’ve got to get with the program. Philip actually has a question. He said, what percentage do you charge on ad spend?
Question. So, depending on my retainer, if I charge a higher retainer, my percentage of ad spend will be lower. If I charge a lower retainer, my percentage of ad spend will be higher. That is a very broad answer, but it ranges between anywhere from 7% when I’m dealing with the hundreds of thousands of dollars all the way up to 25% when I’m talking about, you know, two and three and four grand. Yup. And also just to help you out, fill up inside a dash looks in the store. There’s actually, we have different tiers. We have like tier structure, right? So you can get tier a, B, c, d, whatever it is, like the basic plan and that’s like $0 million all the way up to like three grand in ad spent and then that’s an x amount of dollars, right? And then you want to go from there. So you can also do ad spend based on a tiered plan, right?
If you’re spending this one, this much be an ad spend, I’m going to charge you this month. The second you hit that second tier, I’m going to charge you more or I’m going to charge you less or whatever it is. Like Cody saying, like obviously the higher up you go, the guy’s spending a hundred grand a month in ad spin. He’s probably, he’s probably not going to take 25% a retainer fee that’s 25 grand in that and just service fees, right? So obviously the higher up you go, you want to work with the clients. I agree with Cody 100%.
Perfect. So I’m to further reiterate, asking the margin of the product that you’re selling is vitally critical for you to know how much cost you can spend to acquire a customer that has how you answer, how much ad spend. You’re going to start with, or again, these clients are going to have goals. They’re going to know, I want to sell this much, I want to do this much. Okay. By the end of your contract, inside your contract, you’re gonna want to make sure you put inside the contract exactly what the goals are. So if they say, I want to sell, you know, a certain number of units, they say they want to do a gross amount of sales, the number one thing you’re going to ask is what are the margins on the products? Okay. That’s going to give you in the margin of the product that’s going to give you whatever dollar amount it is that you’re able to spend in ads to actually acquire that many sales or sell that many units.
Hopefully that is clear as day. Okay. now at the very bottom of your contract, you’re probably going to get some signatures, but there’s a couple of ways to do it and jazz Klutz has a very good system of setting this up, but you can do month to month payments with the ability for both both sides to leave as anytime you can do three months, six months, nine months, whatever kind of contract deals you want there. I leave that wholeheartedly up to any individual’s discretion. I like personally, the way we do it is month to month. Number one, you dropped the barriers in the walls down from a client. Okay, fine. At the moment the client says, wow, I can just try this out for one month. Well, if you’re confident about your, the way you do business, you know that after month one, they’re going to go to month two, and after month two, they’re going to go to a month three.
So saying month to month should not scare them short nor scare you. Number two, it gives you the ability to walk away from a client. So that month to certainly you can set up with a three month, six month, nine months, even a year contract. But make sure when you do those a longer month retainers or contracts that you always give yourself via ability to walk away square, meaning that you don’t have anything that you owe them. They don’t owe you anything. The reason being is locking yourself into something that you may not like in three weeks, a month even. It’s hard to do when you’ve got a contract and you don’t want to get yourself in legal trouble for some unnecessary reason. Again, when you like the client, you understand their business, you know their margins, you know you can be successful. Creating longterm contracts is excellent. And let’s just remember the way that we, myself, our business currently guarantees that we can be successful is that all of our new clients are only promised one thing by the end of three months. That number one thing that we promised them is we will find out what your CPA is for your brand on Facebook and Google.
So that would repeat that man, because that, this is like the number one question we get in dash clicks and we probably get a couple hundred support tickets a day and everybody is always asking what’s the CPA? And you can’t, you’re never gonna know that by just flipping the switch on a campaign and then waking up the next day, you’re not going to know that. Right? So what you just said here is like the stamp right there of approval. Like, that’s it takes. And I usually tell people at a minimum, at a minimum, at a minimum, you should know that, you know, after 30 days, once you’re running a campaign and you’re starting to generate the data that’s coming through, then you’ll know what your average CPA is. But even like, like Cody saying here, like three months, like you’re 100% on point.
Yeah. So remember as Chad mentioned, at the end of 30 days, yes, you’ll probably get a baseline for your CPA. But the idea of being an agency is you want to have a client come back a month, two months, three months, four. So if I start promising my clients in 30 days, I’m gonna tell them their CPA and they go hold that to me. They’re going to expect that CPA a month, two month, three, month four. And again there’s no harm, no foul in going month to month. And then remembering, telling them that I’m going to go month to month with you, but just remember that I’m going to tell you what your CPA is at a absolute minimum at the end of month three. At the end of month three I’m going to then say, here’s your CPA to acquire a customer on Facebook. Here’s your CPA to acquire a customer, Google and bing.
Why is that important? Let me tell you why that’s important. As any commerce business owner, I then can know what my ad spend is going to be. I don’t have to ask what is my ad spend? If I know, if I know my CPA for my business and I know my revenue goals and I know how many units I want to sell every single month, I can reverse engineer what my ad spend is going to be at the end of the month and at the beginning of next month. So let me clarify it one more time to say that another way, if I know it costs me $10 to acquire a customer, $10 to acquire them and I have a $10 margin built my product, okay, that’s a breakeven and if the customer or the client or your commerce business owner says they want to sell a hundred of those, you know the re you can reverse engineer.
Okay, it’s going to cost you, you know, $100 to sell a hundred of those, right? Thousand Dollars. Now 10 times $100,000. Then when they ask you what should my ads bin be? Well, based on your goals that you set forth, it’s going to cost us, here’s the CPA, $10 to acquire the customer. You have a margin built in there for $10, so you’re not going to lose any money. Okay, let’s, let’s just establish that in order to be successful in business, you have to make money. And then number two, for not a very long time, you can’t be losing money, especially in an ecommerce business. Again, that’s the let’s not go into the Uber’s of the world that have been you know, net negative for the first 20 years of their business, right? Tech businesses. Here we’re talking about ecommerce businesses, but it’s critical that you understand margins.
You understand CPAs and you just clearly put that in the contract for your client. Again, if it’s a new client, make sure that you tell them, hey listen, best I can do and the in the guarantee I can give you is that I’m going to know the CPA to get customer for you on Facebook or Google and bing, right? And again, that’s a, that’s a, a very low hanging fruit for you. If a client does not know their CPA coming into your agreement, then that is an easy promise. If they know their CPA and you go in there and you check their data and you can see that their CPA’s x and a client asks you what their ad spend should be, you should ask them, well, what are your revenue goals? If I know it costs x to acquire the customer and you want to make this much revenue, you’re going to have to spend this much money.
It’s, you guys should be screenshotting this page, man. This is a lot of value right here. So I’m as a e-commerce agency, there’s three focal points that our agency focuses on. You can be a a designer or developer, you can build the stores, you can, you can do any kind of creative business as you want. You can be a creative agency. I want to say that before I bring my three points because you can literally never run a paid ad. You can never be a product fulfiller. You can never do any of these three things, but you can design and develop ecommerce businesses for people. And that’d be your only focus on business. You can develop design, Shopify stores, design funnels by itself. You can design Facebook ad creative. You can do that thing just alone for a commerce businesses and do very well.
So remove that factor that you can do just creative and be successful. Let’s stack creative with these three points here. So number one, most people want to get somebody to run their paid media for their ecommerce business. That’s majority of whatever ecommerce business is going to request. They always want someone to manage their ad spin. So that’s going to be our first focus. Number two, funnels and offers. So a funnel as essentially could be inside click funnels. It could be inside Shopify, it could be on a wordpress site. Our funnel does not have to be just a click funnels. Kartra style funnel funnels can happen on Shopify. Funnels can happen on wordpress funnels can happen on any landing page on the Internet. So I categorize funnels and offers together because your funnels and offers can essentially be your product pages.
A lot of people will send ads directly to a product page with no description no order bumps, there’s no quantity discounts, there’s no strategy behind it on a product page, that’s a recipe for failure. However, you can create your funnel just on a product page and give them quantity breaks, you know, discounts for adding more to cart. You can give them order bumps, that’s part of a funnel. You can give them all sorts of incentives on that product page. And that is essentially building funnels for people. Don’t get caught in the funnel as only when someone does an upsell or a down sell after they purchase them. That is, that is a misconception in the ECOMMERCE business. Now I want to point out a fact that I put in parentheses. This isn’t product design or creation. So when I say offers, you’re not going to design a product or find a product or you’re not doing product research.
For the drop shipping businesses. There are a ton of drop shipping businesses or entrepreneurs out there that might ask you, can you run my ads for me? It is a very tough business to build funnels and find products for other people’s ecommerce business. You know, searching Ali express and finding winning products. That is a losing model. If that is your only focus. Now remember if that is your only focus to find a winning product, you’re going to have to spend a ton of money. You don’t know CPAs, you don’t have good contracts that favor the, the business is not in your favor to be successful. So clearly in your contract, you’re the last slide we had. Make sure that if it is that type of business, you clearly put like, hey, listen, I can test these products. I can search products, but this is not on me to design your products or find your products or create your products for you.
That’s the question when you asked on our very first slide is do you have products and fulfillment? That’s why it’s critically vital because funnels and offers mean that you’re going to take their products, you’re going to take what they have, you’re going to learn their margins, you’re going to build an offer around what they have. Again, this would be in the, in the sense of building a business. If you’re finding products for people and you’re trying to figure out which ones work, you’re in the business of building that store for them and that’s not the business you want to be in as an ECOMMERCE agency owner. And number three I’ll get just a spoken about his products itself. If and if, and only if the client comes to you with products you can be successful charging them money to build them funnels because they have the products right and running their pay traffic. If they come to you and they have their products, they have their funnels, then you can run their pay traffic. If they come to you and they have products and paid traffic but they don’t have any funnels, you can be successful by building them funnels. The key factor here is if the person comes to you without a product you do, they do not have a business. Okay. They do not have anything if they do not have number three.
What’s that? That’s a walkaway fast from that one.
Yeah. So just it’s easy to see when a person doesn’t have products in, and again, a factor of someone who doesn’t have products. If they rely heavily on just pulling products from aliexpress or online for drop shipping and trying to find one that’s winning, that means they do not have products. If they come to you and they have a product that is winning and ads and that they are running scalable ads to great, you might be able to sell them on the fact that you’ll build a funnel or create a better offer. That’s okay. They have a product that’s working for them, but if they don’t have products that are, that are making consistent sales that’s a, a factor to walk away, a quick firm. And as I just mentioned, you can focus on one of these to be successful or you can do all, but if they do not have a product, a walk away as quick as you can. I do want to stop the screen share real quick. Sure. Let we go get it back on me and then maybe dive into questions, thoughts and I’m going to share a couple of things after hopefully we have some kind of questions or anything but share a couple of things in the agency side of things. If anybody has anything, anybody got any questions? Now is your time to ask for those of you guys on Facebook, you got any questions for Cody? Cody’s been built multiple seven figure, Shopify and ecommerce platforms in campaigns. And so you’ve got the two comma club behind you up on the wall. Like guys, if you have any questions, this is the person to ask, right? Fill the beds. The question Phillip says, I have any commerce store and I’m an agency owner, and those three focal points are very true. And it’s not a question more for torical stay, but yeah, it is. Yeah. I agree with 2000%.
Yeah. If we, if we go wrap up, nobody has questions, whatever, I’m going to tell a little story then I think it’s a fun way to end a a little presentation. So as an ECOMMERCE agency I found out through the hardships of what I did wrong to create the very basic slide that I just presented to you. It might sound like, oh, that’s not world changing, but I can tell you the hardest thing or the worst thing you can do as an ecommerce agency business is to make it more complicated than it needs to be. Because the reality is that is, is not, it’s no more complicated to just the focus on traffic funnels and offers and products. If you ask your clients, you know, can I service you for traffic? Do you have a funnels and offers or products?
If I can service you in one of those three points, and they say, yes you have the potential to be very successful. Number two, I know 2015, going into the 2016 election, we built a Dresner that did almost $5 million in in about four months strictly through e-commerce. I bring the fulfillment experience to you from that experience with Kevin Harrington, what we did was we sold, and a lot of guys might know this, we sold almost $5 million in four months of the Donald Trump coin. Okay. That Trump coin was wildly successful. Our partners who Max Fan and, and Jeremy Adams with Kevin Harrington. The thing that we did not have in place was proper fulfillment. I’ll be completely transparent with you guys. We sold $5 million worth of stuff, but we had hundreds of thousands of dollars of orders that could not get fulfilled fast enough. And the moment that a customer does not get their product you’re failing business.
So let’s all just agree here that the moment you buy something online, what’s the first question you ask? The first question you ask typically is, when am I going to get my product right? I mean, if there’s not another first question, if you do have a first question other than that, please tell me. Cause I don’t think, chat out. Think you’d agree. The very first thing I agree by something, I don’t know. What am I getting it right? If I decided to buy it, when am I going to get it? So that’s why asking, when do you have fulfillment in place is critical. Next part of that equation is we had funnels and offers that absolutely crushed. We had paid traffic that absolutely crushed right? And we did have the fulfillment piece. And when we started charging percentage of ad spend, we start doing client work, we start charging percentage of percentage of ad spend. What we did was we actually had the client pay us the ad spend. So, and I’m gonna highlight this real quick. Always, always make sure the client’s ad spend is being spent on their credit card. It’s coming out of their bank account. It’s coming off their debit card, whatever. Do not ever in a million years except cash that is going to go towards adspend.
Damn five my brother, we had a whole conversation on that the other day and one or the other. In one or the other, a live, I forgot who I did with one of the other influences. We had a whole conversation on that man. Buttes you get refunds, you get tons of shit.
Yeah. It’s, it’s a, it’s nuts. I think Dan has a question. What should be the goal to get when trying to build an agency and leave your nine to five? Dan, that’s an awesome question. I’ll give you my opinion. I know Chad has one too. My opinion is you got to know what your nine to five gives you and less put in the mindset of a nine to five 40 hours a week is going to pay you x amount of dollars. Right. And in order to leave a job that pays you a certain amount of money, you have to know what you’re comfortable in making in order to leave. So if your nine to five provides you $5,000 of net income every single month, a very good way to look at it is I have to make sure I get retainers or business over here. That brings me $5,000.
In order to replace that income. That’s how, that’s how we look. I looked at it back in the day when I was starting. It’s a very simple way of looking at. But the second part of, of what should we show, what should the goal be? Let’s remember that if your nine to five pays you $5,000, and I have to bring out my calculator to explain this this concept real quick. Let me grab my calculator real quick. So nine to five, let’s say 40 hours a week pays you five grand. So $5,000. Okay. Divide that by 40 hours a week. Okay? Excuse me. Let’s just do 40 times four. There’s four weeks in a month, and then let’s do that to 160 hours. Let’s do $5,000 divided by 160 hours. You’re valuing your time at $31 and 25 cents. Okay? If we break it down to the absolute finest detail, as long as your clients in your work that you are doing can pay you $31 and 25 cents per hour you can leave that nine to five jobs.
So if you’re a graphic designer, you’re a copywriter, your whatever it may be, just break it down. So what you currently get paid in order to leave and replace that income. Now on the flip side, most people want to get paid more than they make in their nine to five. So the mindset is, if I want to get paid more than my nine to five, and you’re an agency owner, you have 24 hours in a day and a nine to five you’re only working eight hours. So if I value my time in a day at $31 and 25 cents for eight hours, well, 24 hours, minus those eight hours at 31 25, you have 16 hours in a 24 hour span a day that you’re not making any income, right? So you can place a value on your non-income producing time at at least a minimum. What your nine to five job is paying you.
So 16 hours times set by 31 25 now, right? That’s $500. Okay? You, you can make an extra $500 every 24 hours. You’re now making absolute minimum every single hour that you value yourself then. So that’s the concept of building true wealth is, is if I work a nine to five, I only produce income between a nine to five. But the moment I can start producing that same amount of money, all 24 hours of the day then you’re, you’re truly creating some kind of a, a financial success, online freedom, whatever it may be. And you know, I agree dude. I agree with you 100%, man. I would just say obviously, you know, you don’t want to, you don’t want to leave your job if you don’t have any clients. Obviously don’t, don’t make a move like that. Don’t just jump the gun and the, you know, everybody’s got families, they got bills to pay. You know, like Cody said, you want to make sure that you’re covered. You want to make sure that you get the amount of clients when you get there, even if it’s freaking one client or two clients that are matching up to that five grand a month want to make sure that once you get that transition, and I would also recommend you know, in the agency space it can be very volatile sometimes. Sometimes you might get a client and that client might cancel for one month.
Even if you’re doing a great job for you, that can be many reasons that clients cancel, right? You’ve got to be careful of that too. I recommend writing it out for, for a little bit. Making sure that you have a steady stream of income that’s coming in and also at the same time, making sure that you’re able to get new clients and keep, continue to build your business. If you see that you’re building your business and you’re getting one client every like four months it might not be a good idea to leave your nine to five, you know what I’m saying? You have to come up with a strategy and a type of way where you know in your head that you can excel past that five k a month. Right. If you’re there and you don’t think that you’re going to get past that and you think that, oh, I got this one client, it’s pay me five grand a month, I’m just going to leave my job and I’m gonna leave everything. Just be careful that too, because that client you cancel cancel on you. Right?
Absolutely. Yeah. If there’s any other questions or whatnot, drop them in the chat right now. We just got a couple minutes left. You can drop in any questions about anything that you want, anything at all. Just go ahead and drop in a question and we will answer for either myself or Cody or even both of us. Those of you guys on Facebook, you guys can drop in questions as well. Now what Facebook’s supposed to be the goddamn social media channel. You guys are not being so social. You need a wait. They’re over there on Facebook. Like we have a little bit of action happening here on zoom, but we’ll try with you guys today on Facebook. Man, wake up, wake up, hit the light button, dropping some comments.
Hey Chad, I’m asking you a question before we go. Then real quick, what’s the number one hurdle for most of your clients in DashClicks, not getting clients. The biggest issue that we have right now with the members in dash clicks. You know, we have a broad spectrum of, we call them avatars here at Dash Lake, right? It can be that one person that’s just going in and starting their agency and trying to figure this whole thing out. And they’re maybe like in month one, month two in that whole agency’s face, right. And they’re trying to figure it all out. They don’t even know what it is to go out and get a client. Right. And then we have companies that know how to get clients. They’ve been out for six months a year and they just still can’t pick up clients. Right. So for us, for us, I feel like I’m the biggest hurdle for, for agency owners inside of Dashi cause we do have a lot of new beginners is not being able to actually go out and pick up their first client.
Cause once you get your first client, it’s a little bit easier. And it’s, you know, you kinda like get that weight off your shoulders, right? You finally signed up a client, but just to get past that barrier of getting your first clients the hardest for these guys. So that’s what we’re working on with them. And hopefully like all these videos that we’re providing guys, like these are awesome ideas. We can go out and try to pick up coins. Also Jeremy has a question. He said, how did you feel when you got your first client? Your first one? I guess it piggybacks off what we just spoke about, which is good.
Yeah. My first client I’ll be completely honest with you. It was holy Shit, what am I going to do now?
There’s a long time ago. But what I did was basically stopped at the, to figuring out exactly those three things that I talked about. I made sure that I told them exactly what I was going to do for them. I told them how I was going to perform or what I was going to be guaranteed to, to make sure that they understood. And on the flip side of it the feeling of excitement of getting your clients is a good feeling. Keep that feeling and know how it is cause that’s the feeling you got to feel in order to go get your second one, your third one.
Yeah, no, it’s gotta it’s gotta be, especially for those of you guys, like a lot of people, a lot of you guys on dashboards you want to do, you want to go on scale and build this glorious agency with employees and like if you’re going to go out and do that, you also need to understand like the repercussions of doing that and scaling your agency is not as easy as you can’t scale your agency if you’re getting one client every three months. Right. What you need to focus on is the front end, which is how do I get a massive amount of clients fast? If you want to go on that scaling route, that 10 x grand per donor out, right. How do we get clients in a massive amount of time but also deliver of results? Right. And I think that’s like in my opinion, obviously bias, opinion, but whatever. I’ll say it anyways because I don’t give a shit. I think that’s the beauty of dash right where you’re able to go out and do your part and go out and sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. And then you can just go into Dash Clicks, upload your client, get all the services that you need. You don’t even have to double think about the fulfillment. We do the whole thing for you. You can just keep going out and scaling. So like tad teaming with dashboards is a fast way to just scale your agency.
Yeah. I’ll tell you my number one secret to getting clients is a, it’s definitely not running Facebook ads to try to get them. I don’t try to do discounts or make offers for them. I do not discount my services for anybody or anything. Even in my ecommerce businesses. I don’t run a discount offers for my products. I sell the number one thing I do is I create my network of individuals that I know can leverage my services and skills. So hands down, bar none. Your number one thing you can do in order to get clients is to surround yourself with people in a network that are going to have potential conversations. They’re going to have recommendations. By and far the number one way you’re going to get clients is referrals. It’s gonna be paid media. It’s not going to be cold calling. It’s not going to be knocking on doors. That’s 100%, 1985 ish. Your number one way is to create relationships with good people and tell them, here’s what I do. If you have anybody that could use my services shooter my way, and then make sure you give them a little bit in return you know, give them a hookup or help them out in some way, shape, or form. Be a good person. That way.
We got a, we got one more question from Tom. He said as somebody starting off from ground zero, does it make sense to offer one specific thing to get my foot in the door, but also see the fulfillment process play out rather than sell the world. Then say, okay, what do I do now? So I guess what he’s saying is, should I offer one thing, should I offer like a package and then just get like, like somebody like dash weeks maybe to fulfill it all enough to worry about it? Like what, what would you recommend? Maybe focusing on something that just, you know, that you’re good at? I Dunno.
Yeah, certainly. So the easiest thing to do is something you’re good at, right. Or you know what I mean, as best thing to do. So if you’re good at one certain thing, then absolutely we start right there. I wouldn’t definitely not try to build funnels if you’ve never built a funnel on it. Definitely wouldn’t try to you know, create offers if you’ve never, you don’t understand the psychology around offer creation. If you’re good at paid media, then then run the Facebook edge just to make sure that you understand the cost per acquisition and your profit margins when doing so. Yeah, being being hyper focused on one certain thing is certainly a good route to go. And I’ll reiterate it again. If you’re starting from scratch, your best thing to do is go find other people that are doing this. Go find a network of individuals that could use one of those services that you’re talking about and ask how you can service them, how you can help them. I’m trying to direct sell a client is a, you’re not your easiest route. Go find out people that have clients that, that could use your skillset to do a better job with those clients and then build it up that way.
Yeah, and not only that, I guess just to piggyback off what he said, which is I agree 1000% even like, let’s say like we have tons of people in dashes, they come from Ryan Stewman as an example. He has a course called funnel closers, right? And throughout his course, he basically goes out, he trains you on how to only sell funnels. Nothing else. I forget about like paid traffic, forget about anything, right? They just get really, really good at selling funnels. Right. And that’s kind of what you were saying earlier today, Cody was like, if you find somebody, like sometimes you don’t need to run the ad, sometimes you can just make a shit ton of money just being really good at either building funnels or selling funnels, right? Because at this point, like leveraging something like dash looks like we are actually the number one vendor for everybody in funnel closers.
So they’d go out, there’s a big group of people that are users in dash and all they do is just sell funnels. They don’t do anything else. They don’t even pitch marketing. They don’t do anything. They’ll go out, they’ll sell a funnel for five grand, they’ll go to dash links, we’ll get it fulfilled and then they’ll go do it again. So if you’re good, if you understand the psychology of it and you understand, obviously like you can’t sell something if you don’t know anything about it, right? So the first thing you want to do is educate yourself on maybe one or two services that, you know, perfect fit. I, especially nowadays, it’s frequent like Facebook ads and funnels. Like, that’s like our majority of orders that we get. So like educate yourself on the, the psychology of funnels. Like how the whole, how the, how it works with the offers, the funnels, sending traffic. Like CPAs, like Cody was saying, like, educate yourself on that first. Even if you’re not going to fulfill it, just at least get educated on it so you can be working with the client, managing the client’s expectations properly. So hopefully that helps guys. Now, Cody, I know we’re getting down to like the past three minutes. So what I want to do is if you can maybe tell these people, if they want to learn, they want to follow you, like how can they reach out to you? Just give them some tips.
Yeah. So linkedin, you know, you can find me Linkedin, Cody near you can go to ecommerce brand academy.com. Or you can look up seven to seven digital.com. So our agency, 77 digital.com. If your potential and for client, you guys have dash clicks. So you might want to learn more about how to get better at being an ecommerce entrepreneur, understanding how e-commerce works inside e-commerce brand academy. The better you are doing e-commerce, the better you are or will be at being an ECOMMERCE agency. So e-commerce brand, academy.com a would be a good fit for you guys.
Love it guys. Yeah, if you guys want any more education on that, just go there and Cody will definitely help you guys out. Cody, once again, brother, thank you so much. I know we’re limited on time, both of us, but thank you so much brother for coming on, drafting the value educating these people, entering the questions. Man, it’s much, much appreciated brother. And I thank you for that.
Hey, thanks Chad. We’ll see you guys. Appreciate it everyone. Alright, everybody guy has a good one. Bye.