Prospecting On Demand Hits $1.5M With 47 Agency Coaching Clients. Running Lean & Strong

TRANSCRIPT

What’s going on everybody today, we have the Alex Schlinsky from prospecting on demand all the way from Tampa, Florida, Alex, what is it that you actually do? And how do you generate revenue for prospecting on demand? Absolutely. So, yeah, we actually have two different companies prospecting on demand. The real company has actually sky social media LLC, which was originally my agency working with attorneys, started that in 2010. Thankfully I don’t have to work with attorneys anymore because anyone that works with attorneys out there, they aren’t the most nice people ever. But we do still have that agency working with about 15 attorneys across the United States, but prospecting on demand. What we really do is we help agency owners, coaches, and consultants scale their businesses from six to seven figures, helping them remove themselves as freelancers and building a real business. That’s an asset automated systems, which program what’s that what’s program, but which business between the two does more revenue. And that’s like where your main definitely pod is a seven-figure company. And then Scott social media is about half a million which I’m really proud of. Cause I don’t really do anything for sky social media things in large part to our fulfillment partners into dash flakes into these types of companies makes a huge difference. As many of you are listening, understand white labeling super important. Cause I don’t know Jack shit about ads, just prospecting.

So let’s, let’s do this interview. We’ll focus Prospecting on demand. Just so people in the space can understand. I want to focus on one company so we don’t mix metrics or anything like that. So if you can in prospecting on demand, who is like your ideal perfect avatar, is it just purely agencies? Is that who you’re going after? I would say the ideal avatar would be agency owner just cause we have so much experience with it. But I think we’re probably expanding to the idea of working with entrepreneurs mostly that are freelancers. So someone that had an idea figured out how to be good at prospecting generating opportunities, how to then convert them from a prospect to a client and then how to retain them, but realize, Holy crap, I can’t do this with 10 or even 20 or 30 people. Cause I’m by myself. How do I build a system around everything that I do really good myself.

Those are the ideal people we work with. And agency terms, probably people that are like three to seven clients, 3,500 to 5,500 recurring and maybe have like a VA in the Philippines that helps them. But no, that would be your ideal client. That would be the ideal. If you did these massive gross with helping them implement systems that change from this is all I need to now have a process and a team to rely on, which is obviously incredibly valuable. What’s the team size today? How many people do you have? And just give me a quick breakdown of, of what they do. Wow. I felt my head. I think we have nine people, so I’ll give a quick breakdown. So Brian downer is our head coach and client success manager. Kemet Domingez is another one of our head coaches and systems, operations manager, Shira.

My wife and my business partner is our backend operations manager. She works on all the SLPs and systems and make sure payments are done and all that kind of stuff, Jennifer. Right? Our executive assistant she handles making sure that we’re on track. She kind of holds us accountable. It’s funny. We hold everyone else accountable. And she holds us accountable, which is great. Katina Flores. She handles our group our content, our emails, thank God for her. Cause I would be dead if I didn’t have her address. Velasquez does all of our images and copy. We’ve been doing a lot of silly images online. If you guys haven’t seen it recently, they’re kind of fun. And then we have John here, who’s our tech expert. When someone asks me a tech question like how this thing works with Zapier, I’m like, Oh, I thought it was magic. But John, he makes magic into reality things that I don’t understand. And then if I’m missing anyone, I don’t want to live like a jerk, but I think that might be it. I think that is seven people and loaded.

You get the breakdown. So you got, you got customer service guys essentially. Right?

We just break it down and then anybody on sales or is it just purely be in Kemet handle sales? I love doing sales. I think a lot of people ask me like, why do you do sales? If your company is doing so well, it’s like, I enjoy it. So like they do in their businesses, do what they want to do. Like does Chad have to do a podcast for dash clicks? No, he wants to do them. That’s part of it. He has a bunch of people that can do it. The idea is doing what you want in your business. Not just falling into a trap. That’s like, no, this is what a CEO is supposed to do. And who says that this is my business. It’s 2020. I decided what I want to do. I love him man.

And how many how many active people are in a pod?

How many would you start? Which is insane amount of clients we’ve ever had? I said we would cap at 50. But I don’t know if we can actually, cause there’s so many people that want to work with us. I think we just don’t need to cap, man. You just gotta grow your team. And we got to hire another team. You shouldn’t put a cap on your business and never do that. You gotta hire another coach.

There you go. Exactly. So let me

Really quick. If you could take your entire audience. Okay. And I’m talking about your email list, your Facebook followers, the people in your group your many chat bot, subscribers, whatever it is, take all of that shit. Put it into one bucket. If Alex tomorrow wakes up and wants to send a message, how many people do you think you can reach? What’s your audience size? Wow. so I have 15,000 active people on my email and then like active campaign says there’s like 6,000 inactive from the last 10 years. So those wouldn’t count, but we have 15,000 active people there. I guess we can say 5,000 Facebook friends. Brian’s email list is about 10,000 and Kevin’s is about five. So probably like 30 or 35,000, which is a lot of people. So you, if you want to say something tomorrow, you’re essentially talking to an arena full of people.

Yeah. A lot of people, but to be totally honest, I mean, Frank, how many of those people will open it? Like maybe like 15%, probably, maybe like 20 to 50%. So depending on the, depending on the source, right email obviously is going to get like a 15% open rate. Yeah, exactly. Obviously a lot higher than that. SMS is hard at that, but we get the juice. Okay, good. And what is your pricing model look like for pod? Let’s say come in right now. I’m interested. What am I what’s my fees to get in? Absolutely. So we have a couple of different products. Mostly though we just focus on our main program, which is prospecting on demand elite. It’s a $9,000 program. Essentially in the 90 days, we’re trying to add on at minimum $10,000 recurring revenue to you freeing up your time pretty significantly, and then ensuring that you have the systems to scale to seven figures.

And then beyond that, is it a three month program? Is that what it is? It’s 12 months, but we do a honeymoon phase for three months where it’s like, let’s see if we like working together. I want to work with people that I like. That’s why I have the attorney business. So I don’t, I don’t have to worry about the cash side. I can just work with people that suck like attorneys and then work with entrepreneurs. I enjoy working with because as you know, Chad, there’s plenty of entrepreneurs and agency owners that are not want to work with. So yeah, that’s what we do. We use a nine K nine K a 12 month term, essentially three month honeymoon stage. That’s good. And what’s your value ladder look like? Do you have anything coming in on the front end or back end of that offer?

Yeah, so we don’t have a down sell course for a thousand dollars that we sell really for anything from 500 to a thousand, depending on the person and their situation. But I really try not to sell the course at all anymore because I do strongly believe that basically anyone that’s been in this space for any amount of time has enough information. It’s really about accountability, specific, customized mentorship support and ensuring they move in the right direction. Not just like more information. There’s a lot of good stuff. Taking a courses is night and day between joining a high level elite coaching program. I think the time has passed for most people. That courses make sense. Like it really made a lot of sense in like 2015, 16, 17. I think the dilution of how many courses are now and how much free information there is online.

It’s tough to make someone invest in a course unless they just want to, you know, get the information from one guy. They really like, which that’s fine. But I think mentorship is the big key. That’s my focus. The second thing that we do, we have the 12 month program thereafter, which is great. We love that. That’s why we retain our clients, which is the most important metric to me, retention over sales. And then we also just built out a SAS product called the budget, pull the tool, which we will be launching hopefully in the next month or so maybe by the time this comes out and you guys here. So I’m pretty excited about it. What would you take if you could take the one thing in your business, let’s say you can think about anything that you’ve done in pod. What is that one needle mover for you?

What was the one thing that you did that was like, Holy moly. This is like the best thing since [inaudible] no question. The biggest change for sure. My, my business life was everything before pod library event and everything after pod lab, man. I found it pretty challenging before pod lab in the last three, four years to retain clients past three months. Cause it’s just something that I didn’t do. It wasn’t something that I had experienced specifically. We’re talking coaching clients, not the agency. And then at pod live the ability to connect with someone in person as you know, with dash days and stuff. Yeah. It’s just an entirely different experience. And then having someone commit on the dotted line for 12 months and then backing that up financially and their, with their word as well has been just huge. I mean, it’s been unbelievable for us this year. So I would say without a question, that’s the biggest one. Okay,

Good. And look, we’re in 2020 now. What’s, what’s the most successful automation that you’ve set up in your business that either saved you the most time or makes you the most money. What’s that one thing that you have that’s automated that no touch that. Just say gee, either a shit ton of time or makes you a lot of money.

I’ll go both. So the one that saves us the most time is we’ve Slack to communicate with our clients and share on my wife, used to send out messages every day for accountability. And like I said, we did some magic also known as savior that automates all of those messages, which is amazing. That said that two hours of time, especially when you have 50 clients that you’re trying to message every day. So that’s pretty wild. And then the thing that’s probably made us the most money. I don’t know if this counts, but I’ll go with ads. I mean like running ads and set it up, doing outbound prospecting has created a, it’s not like we’re not even to be Frank, not even that good at it. Ads are pretty hard in this space cause there’s so many people running it. But even if you’re booking one qualified conversation a day and three of those people of the five you speak to every week or like, I want to work with you, you end up the end of the week, like 12 to 12,000 to $20,000 more in revenue. It’s pretty fast.

Who’s your actual sale process look like, can you break that down for me? Like, let’s say me, I come in, I see one of your ads. I, I, I opt into a, you know, sales page or an application page. And I get I’m on the phone with you or my own a zoom call with you. Like what, what, what happened?

Very specifically the biggest and most important thing that we do that I think anyone that’s watching this can take away from it and that we coach everyone is a demo video. So I joked with Chad before this, where he’s like, Hey, this is going to be like a short like podcast, try to keep your answers short. And I was like, good thing. You said that, cause I’m a person that doesn’t know what to shut the fuck up. So with that being said basically what I do is we have a 15 minute demo video that breaks down the program. And I kind of like in a joking manner, if I get on a call with someone and they haven’t watched that video prior, like they didn’t see the automations or whatever it is. I tell them in a joke like, look, I can sit here with you for the next 40 minutes trying to explain this whole program or I can know my weaknesses and say that I’m not going to be able to make this better than what the 15 minute video is. Once you watch the video and then we’ll continue talking so

Well, it’s a pre-frame video in a nutshell. Is that what it is? Would you say? Okay, cool.

Called demo makes a huge,

I had Rob Quinn on yesterday and he does something very similar after the application page. And he has like a specific name for it. I forgot what he said.

It was pretty cool. Three vault demo video, and it works for coaching programs or agencies. So like if you have an agency and you’re selling a product, just make a quick video on it, don’t include the price, explain the ROI, show them this is a no brainer. Show them some social, show them why it works and then we’ll get on the call and then bang. They love it. The investment

Let’s go through some metrics really quick, a hundred people fill out an application through your funnel. How many of those guys are booking a call? How many are showing up to the call? How many are closed?

Yeah, I have to look at the numbers, but I would go basically a numbers rate. I would expect about 10% rate or something like that. 10, 15%. So if you have a hundred people that go through the application, I’d expect probably 15, 10 to 15 people to fill it out from those people. We ended up probably getting on calls with about half of them. I wouldn’t say no shows is really a problem. I would say we decline a lot of conversations. Cause there’s people that are very honest where they’re like, I make $0 and I don’t know where to start. I’m like, okay, cool. Like here’s the thing that will help you start. And we give them like a 25 page PDF instead of getting on a call. Cause it’s not really worth our time. No offense to that person. It’s just that they’re just not there yet for you.

Exactly. We have other things to do. So yeah, I would say that’s the model. And then in sales, like you know, just frankly like anyone that’s qualified they’re going to join the program. We’re just, we’re really good at that. And we know who we can help. I think one thing that anyone can learn from, if they’re listening to this, tell someone to make the decision, people suck at making decisions. That’s why we do this all the time. Like, Hey babe, what are you, what do you want to do for dinner tonight? And you have no fucking idea instead of being like, I want sushi. Why do you always say, I don’t know, because people suck at decision making, right? They’re just terrible at decision-making tell them to make the decision. People want confidence, but only do that. If you really believe you can help them. And that’s something that I feel very strongly about that we can help people. And that’s why I feel so confident. Be like, stop dillydallying about this, make the damn decision. This is what you need. Don’t be stupid. Do it. And they’re like

In the last 12 months, how much revenue has pod generated?

Let’s see here. I’m pretty sure it is one and a half. Let me just double-check right now and try it. I’m pretty sure. Yeah. It’s one and a half. I’m pretty sure it might be a little bit more. This year has been crazy. I mean, we, we were having a better year than we did last year. Which is wild. I mean, it’s just crazy to say that. Yeah. So in the last year, exactly in the last 12 months, it has been one and a half million dollars.

Well, congratulations on all that success. That’s amazing. And what’s, let’s say you want to, you fast forward 12 months. Okay. What is, what is Alex’s goal to hit in 12 months?

What’s the, yeah. I think things changed a lot in, in 2020, obviously because of certain plans, you know, we had met up early 20, 20 before the event and that we were talking about your event and our event and one of our big things this year we wanted to do. And now I’m hoping in 2021 is I want to do an event every other month with a small number of people, 20 or 30 people, smaller mastermind style. Exactly, exactly. And then of those 30 people, like half of them would be current clients. Half of them would be leads. Half of those leads would probably sign up for the longterm program. And that would be the business model. I’d like, cause like just being Frank with you, you know, we have a good friendship and relationship. It’s so much more exciting to be with you than it is to be on zoom.

Even though 100% who I work with every day. I love the guy to death. I mean, I consider him like a brother, right? I haven’t seen him since the event that wasn’t March one. That’s a long time. Like I worked with this guy every single day and I haven’t seen him since March one. And we had a plan this year to do an event basically every other month and well, that didn’t happen. So hopefully next year that’s a, that’s what we’re looking at. So, so in 12 months you see you guys doubling revenue, you see you going from one and a half to $3 million. What do you, what do you, what do you think? So this is common. So I’ll talk, I’ll touch on this really quickly. Brian and Kemet and share are more adamant than I am about revenue goals. I’m much more adamant instead of revenue goals to like the satisfaction of our clients.

That’s the most important metric to me. So I’m not really the best person to ask about it. I think there’s this really bad problem in entrepreneurship that it’s like, nothing is ever good enough. Everyone’s fighting against each other. It always has to be a competition. Always have to make more. And I get that like capitalist mindset and I don’t disagree with it necessarily, but for me as someone that understands who I am as a person and what I want in my life, which as you know you know, I guess I’ll say it on the podcast, but you know, Sharon’s pregnant and about to have our first kid, like we’re, we’re making good money. We’re, we’re doing a lot of things for amazing people. Really, all I give a shit about in 12 months is that I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. My son is healthy.

My clients are happy and we’re doing good in the world. That’s really what matters. Let’s make more money. I’ll take, I like to wrap up your, if you could, if you could give one tip to a brand new person, who’s starting a business going into the entrepreneur space, they’re just literally getting their toes wet. What would, what tip would you give them that would shave years off their life, off their business life. Okay. I’ll do two so that I can get away with the emotional side and the, and the legitimate side. So let’s start with the emotional side. Cause I think this is actually really important. Like the mindset of being an entrepreneur is different than what you think it is, right? Like when you have a normal job, you can clock out like either metaphorically or literally, and then you go home and then the day is, are separate.

When you own your own business, it’s not like that. Like your business is your own baby. It’s like essentially a child that you are rearing and growing up with and trying to build it like a process around. And it’s a big challenge. Like there’s ups and downs and massive roller coasters. It’s never just a roller coaster that brings you up. You will have a drop, you will have enough. And I think like we just said like, feel comfortable with where you want to be, not where someone else tells you to be, feel comfortable with what your race is. I’ll give this quick metaphor. It’s like understanding the difference between you st bolt a short meter, distance runner and Mo Farah along get mr. Long meter distance runner who wins the race. You don’t know if, unless how sh how long the race is, right?

If a short meter you’re saying wins, if it’s along meter Mo wins, what’s the race of your running, not the race that Gary V tells you to run or Tony Robbins or, or Russell Brunson or me or anyone else, it’s your race. And it’s your race only. And that’s all that matters because no one else out there is going to give a shit about you, your nuclear family and what you’re trying to accomplish. I think that’s huge. So like understanding the mental aspect of it is absolutely key and something that I think a lot of people just don’t understand at all. They think it’s easy and that’s just not the reality in terms of a legitimate business recommendation. I would say the best thing to do is hire someone that has been there before you, right? Like make an investment in yourself, find someone that’s willing to actually support you.

That has proof they can help you. That actually gives a shit. There’s a huge difference between someone that, well, I’ll take your money and try to help you versus like, I’ll fight for you. And I’ll do what it takes to really get you where you need to go. That made a huge difference for me, all the investments I’ve made in mentorship over my 10 years of doing this has made a big difference. Not all of them have been huge wins obviously, but a lot of them have really grown me up pretty significantly. We’ve spent on mentorships since, cause I I’m very curious, cause I know I I’ve spent a lot too as well.

I won’t drop names just because, you know, I think it’s, we don’t need name drop, but one person’s program alone was $7,500 a month. And I did that for four months, which was insane. So that was pretty crazy. I did another program that was 10 to I’d probably spend man rounded off. You think it’d be about a hole between us and coaches? A hundred K I would say a hundred to 200. It’s hard to say. Like, because I dropped a lot of money on pod live to for like, not in a necessarily like program, but like coaching support on how to sell it really effectively from someone, you know, very well. Who’s awesome and really helped us a lot. Like I dropped 40 K on that and it was a thousand percent worth. It, it was like, it was not good question. It was a hundred percent worth it. So I’d probably say like 100 to 200,000 in the last five years. Cause the first five years I laughed when someone was like, Oh, you want me to pay you 1500? Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? And now it’s like, I’m sorry. I was so stupid

Understanding the value in the outcome of what you’re investing in. Right. And at the end of the day, it’s an investment, whether it’s yeah,

A thousand bucks or $50,000, if your looking at it as purely as an investment, what you’re going to gain out of it, the value, whether it’s learning something new, whether it’s a tangible item, whether whatever it is. So I think the time is really important. Like the time investment makes a big difference, like how much you’re required to do and what you’re going to get in terms of your time back. That’s really valuable as well. Love it. Hey guys, you guys heard it first here, Alex Schlinsky from prospecting on demand all the way from Tampa, Florida, Alex. Thank you so much. We look forward to having you on future podcasts, brother, have a good one.