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In this article I will draw the curtains and show you how I scaled my business to $150,000 a month without ads.
And on top of this, I will show you how you can use this same strategy to grow your business.
This will be a long article, since I will go into great detail and try to share everything with you. It is most relevant for people selling higher-ticket offers, such as coaching programs. Or agency owners. But I believe regardless what type of business you’re in, you’ll learn a ton from this.
First of all, let me give you some background first.
A friend of mine and former client called Anthony Aramini told me about the whole high-ticket opportunity in July 2018. Before that, I was mostly doing drop shipping and selling low-ticket and mid-ticket online courses through my YouTube channel.
But for a few different reasons, I decided to stop doing drop shipping early 2018. And since I wasn’t doing it anymore at the time, teaching drop shipping as a business opportunity didn’t feel aligned anymore.
I was one of the first YouTubers to talk about e-commerce and drop shipping at the time, dating back to 2016, but it was time for me to move on. At this point I had done $350,000/year selling courses.
So I was looking to restructure my business and figure out what was next for me.
Anthony, the guy I mentioned earlier, was making up to $40,000 a week selling his high-ticket coaching program. And I got really curious how he was doing it, since he didn’t have a big audience or an email list.
He was purely doing this from his Facebook profile.
So he did his whole “high-ticket” sales thing on me, scheduled a call with me and after some resistance on my end, I enrolled in his program for $7,200, which was a big chunk of money and really uncomfortable for me at the time.
But I loved Anthony’s mindset, his confidence and I felt like he genuinely believed I could do well with my own high-ticket offer. This was my first real experience with a high-ticket coaching program.
I was super pumped, and scared at the same time. And I used that mix of emotions to take massive action, follow Anthony’s advice and launch my own high-ticket offer.
The offer I launched was a $5,000 offer called “Backend Accelerator”, a coaching program designed for business owners with an email list or social media audience. The goal of the program was to help clients do what I did using my own email list and YouTube channel: Do big online course launches.
I had done a course launch in 2017 that did $178,000 in a week. And this was one of my biggest financial achievements at the time, which is why I felt confident that I could help others, if they already had an email list and audience, do well with the same strategy.
Anthony taught how to do organic marketing on Facebook at the time. Since my entire YouTube audience was almost entirely interested in e-commerce content, I didn’t feel like marketing my new offer on YouTube would feel aligned.
So I treated my program like a brand-new offer, and relied almost exclusively on my personal Facebook profile to market that offer. What I did, and what Anthony taught at the time, was to post long-form, valuable content on your personal Facebook profile as well as in relevant Facebook groups. And then have conversations with people who liked your posts, send friend requests and build intimacy in the Facebook inbox.
And whenever there was alignment and a feeling that I could genuinely help someone, I’d invite the person to a strategy session. I had learned about strategy sessions before, and I had taken Sam Oven’s Consulting.com course the prior year, but I didn’t have any high-ticket sales experience.
I remember trembling on my first strategy session that I booked from my Facebook profile.
I was extremely nervous, because I’m generally more of an introverted person. And getting on a Zoom meeting with someone and pitching them a $5,000 offer, something I had never done before, felt incredibly uncomfortable at the time.
However, despite my shaky voice and grossly sweating during a majority of the call, the person ended up paying $5,000 and I landed my first real high-ticket client. I was euphoric and exhilarated
I took massive action, and I went on to become one of Anthony’s best clients. In my first month, I collected something like $20,000 in cash and I still remember posting this screenshot in Anthony’s “High Value Accelerator” Facebook group.
Things went on and I kept enrolling clients, and in November 2018 I had a record month and did around $35,000 in cash collected. I got a little bit over-confident and my ego got a hold of me. Recency bias got the best of me.
If you don’t know what recency bias is: It basically means that we feel like whatever has been our recent experience or results will continue on like that forever. So if times are bad, we feel like the bad times will never end. We have a recency bias that’s negative.
And if times are good, we feel like the good times will never end. And we have a positive recency bias.
I had a massive positive recency bias in November 2018 and decided to take on a first team member as well as rent an overly expensive luxury office for $3,500 a month. I thought I would be able to sublease the other rooms, but it turned out to be a massive mistake. I ended up having to pay $10,000 to fix up the office, pay a big deposit and I signed a 2-year contract.
And then in December and January I was hit by a sales slump, I just didn’t have any good clients during those months. I was getting on 1 hour long strategy sessions with completely unqualified prospects that couldn’t afford my program. And my mindset and revenue saw a big slump.
Beginning of 2019, I sought out a new mentor: Nazim Agabekov. He’s since become a good friend of mine. But he was expensive, ouch. Nevertheless, I felt like I needed to invest in myself. I felt like I was missing something.
Nazim helped me get out of my overly expensive office, into a smaller office with a month-to-month lease. And with the money I saved on the office, I got myself two full-time team members.
(This turned out to be another mistake later on, but more on that later).
I also learned how to restructure the sales process. Instead of jumping on a 60-minute strategy session right away, for the first time I learned about the concept of a “Triage” call. Or a setter call, as we used to call it back then.
The idea of a triage call is simply to restructure the sales process in a way where there’s a short 15-minute call to figure out if there is a fit, and if someone has the time, commitment and financial investment necessary for a program, before walking them through the strategy and making them an offer.
Why pitch someone a $5,000 program if they don’t feel like they need help? Or if they don’t have or want to invest money into themselves at the current time? Restructuring the sales process like this was a game changer.
Instead of giving my time to everyone and jumping on a 1 hour call, I booked quick 15-minute calls from my Facebook profile. I asked people if and what type of help they were looking for, what their current situation and goals were, how much time they could invest, how soon they could start and whether they had the financial investment to make it happen.
Around 70-80% of people were “disqualified” on the triage call.
It wasn’t a fit.
And instead of spending an hour to figure that out, and wasting my time and the other person’s time in the process, we could have a quick 15-minute no-pressure call to get to know each other and figure out if there was a fit or not. And if there wasn’t we’d end on a positive note and stay in touch.
But around 20-30% of people were a good fit, and ticked all boxes, from motivation, to time commitment, starting date and financial investment. And of these, I would usually enroll 50%-80% into my program.
So I went on to book around 15-30 of these triage calls a month from my Facebook profile.
And around 20-30% of them qualified. This resulted in around 4-6 qualified enrollment calls a month. And around three clients a month on average.
I also learned about properly hiring team members. Instead of working through Upwork, I learned how to put up LinkedIn job posts, interview people and get dedicated, full-time A-players on my team.
So I got my first two real team members in April 2019. One of them was supposed to be an appointment setter/triage call person. And the other one was a coach that would help me with client delivery.
Looking back at this, there were two flaws with this:
1) Appointment setters and triage call people aren’t the same thing
I hired an appointment setter but was giving that person triage calls, so I was mixing up roles and not fully understanding how to structure sales teams. An appointment setter is really someone who uses social media and email to talk to people and schedule meetings.
Appointment setters don’t take calls.
Triage call people are the ones taking the 15-minute calls. So as you can see, I was kind of mixing things up at the time. But there was a second problem here.
2) I didn’t have enough volume to need a triage person
So here I was, with a triage call person, but with only 15-30 calls a month. Taking 15-30 15-minute calls a month is really easy to do. And there is no need to get a triage call person at that point.
So unfortunately I didn’t have enough calls for my triage person. I gave her other tasks. But eventually I had to let go of her and I only kept my coach. My coach was an absolute rockstar and A-player, and she handled all 1-on-1 calls with clients.
So I could focus fully on taking triage calls, enrollment calls and focus on marketing.
In case you’re wondering how I actually got people on triage calls, the strategy is pretty simple.
It was hard but simple.
I committed to making a post on my personal Facebook profile every day. Sometimes a long-form post with an image, sometimes a Facebook live, sometimes a short-form post. I’d take off Sunday’s, but apart from that I posted daily on Facebook for over a year every single day.
You can check out my Facebook post archive if you don’t believe me.
The second thing I did is, I spent 1 hour per day engaging with people on Facebook, starting conversations, building intimacy, networking, and helping out people. And whenever I felt like I was getting along with someone and that I could potentially help them, I’d invite them to have a quick chat.
The only other thing I did on a daily basis, and this is something invaluable I learned from Anthony, is to do 5-15 minutes of mindset work per day. I had a mindset formula, a vision board and some affirmations I read every single day to keep myself energized and performing at this high level.
So all in all, the core “non-negotiable” tasks to keep my business going took around 2-3 hours per day. Maybe 30-60 minutes for content creation. 60 minutes to build intimacy on Facebook and start conversations. And 15 minutes of mindset work.
And then of course, I took the triage calls and enrollment calls, and spent the rest of the time thinking about big picture things like scaling, making my business more sustainable and things like that.
End of 2019 I started feeling a bit burnt out by being on the content “hamster wheel”. Spending an hour in the inbox speaking to people and posting one piece of content per day was sustainable for a year, maybe two. But 5 years or 10 years? Hell no.
I was pretty clear what needed to happen.
I needed systems.
But I was a rookie at systems up until that time and was only aware of it as a concept. Everything I had done up until then was based on hustle and my personal performance.
I was good at getting shit done, working hard and being a high-performer.
But I wasn’t good at delegating and had little awareness of SOPs, systems and how to get myself off the lead generation process.
So beginning of 2020 I began implementing some first systems:
I got a virtual assistant who researched ideal clients for me, and I began tracking how many friend requests we sent on Facebook and on LinkedIn. Through this process I also discovered some interesting things.
We seemed to only be able to send around 25 friend requests per day on Facebook, at least consistently every day. And around 75 connection requests per day on LinkedIn. Anything above that for too long, and we’d get some sort of message telling us to slow down or even a temporary restriction.
Although we were getting a good number of people accepting those requests, leading to conversations and although I got 2-3 clients a month consistently from this process, I was still lacking a few different things.
First of all, I had a VA doing lead research but for the most part I was still leading conversations, booking calls and taking triage calls. And this was one of the most exhausting parts, which was a problem.
Secondly, with social media limits in place there was no way I could scale on Facebook and LinkedIn. All of this was coming together for me early 2020.
I remember reading somewhere:
“Work the systems and the systems will work for you”.
I can’t remember where I read it, but it’s still one of the most profound truths and one of the most important lessons I’ve learned.
What happened next?
The pandemic hit in early 2020, and everyone, including myself began panicking. Some potential clients on calls told me they weren’t willing to invest due to the uncertainty of the situation.
It was a “rock bottom” type of situation. With all the news that was going on, my mindset began tanking. And although I’m generally a very positive person, there was doom and gloom all around us. I felt incredibly uncertain what would happen with my business.
And like many others, I had an urge to go into self-preservation mode.
I wanted to start cutting costs, reducing expenses and going into massive contraction. Since I didn’t really need the “appointment setter” I had hired due to lack of calls, I had let go of her at the end of 2019.
But I still had a coach working for me, helping with client delivery. And with everything happening in March 2020, I got so worried that I had a conversation with her and told her I had to let her go as well. But I remember being so sad and upset about this that I called her the next day and said we’re going to find a way to make it happen.
After a moment of extreme panic, I decided to give myself three months to scale my business. If I wasn’t able to pull that off and overcome the adversity, and survive the first few months of slower sales beginning of 2020, I could still downscale the business and go into “self-preservation” mode.
So instead of contracting, I decided to do the exact opposite. First, I stopped watching ANY news or YouTube videos related to what was going on in the world. I completely isolated myself from any external information and just focussed on my plan.
Secondly, I hired a bunch of additional virtual assistants, actually increasing my expenses in a time where I felt like contracting and reducing expenses. In order to overcome the LinkedIn and Facebook restrictions, I came up with an outreach email that we began sending to our ideal clients.
At first I thought this would be just another “test” that would turn out to be a fluke.
As a business owner you get used to trying stuff, testing ideas and them not working. And I was expecting this to be the same kind of thing. But to my surprise, we instantly started getting positive replies to the email.
We instantly started booking calls. And after seeing how well this worked, I created an SOP for our VA’s to register more inboxes and send cold outreaches to ideal clients using the same template.
In case you’re wondering about the template, here is the template:
(Insert template).
I began booking around 4-5 triage calls per day. And in April, things already began taking off. I went and got a new triage call person, since I already began feeling a bit overwhelmed by taking 4-5 triage calls per day. Not all of them were qualified. Around 15%-25% qualified. But given that we were doing cold outreach, this is perfectly acceptable.
Clients suddenly began coming in at a much faster rate than before. Instead of 2-3 we suddenly enrolled 10 clients in April and then 14 clients in May. Realizing this, my first coach quickly got to capacity. So I also had to look for a second coach to service more clients at the rate they were coming in.
So I got a second coach through a job post on LinkedIn. And that allowed me to go and further expand the lead generation team. So we increased the lead generation virtual assistants in batches of 5 people.
In the case of Expert at Scale, we help content creators and influencers do big online course launches. So our ideal clients usually hang out on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook pages, podcast platforms, TikTok and similar platforms.
Each lead generation team of 5 people was responsible for one platform.
So for example, we had 5 people responsible to find ideal clients on YouTube. We had another team of 5 people responsible to find prospects and reach out to them on Instagram. And we kept doing this for multiple other platforms to scale horizontally.
Initially, the virtual assistants were sending out the emails. But later on we switched the lead generation team only being responsible for the data mining. In other words, they only researched leads and added them to our CRM.
And then each day we exported our list and imported it into Quickmail.io.
QuickMail.io is a software tool that allows you to automate cold outreach. We also got an email deliverability consultant to help out temporarily. So I learned a ton about email deliverability, what email platforms and domain registrars work best, how to properly warm up and rotate inboxes and how to do ongoing deliverability tests.
As I continued scaling, I had a total of 40 virtual assistants, 2 coaches, 2 triage people and one operations manager. We had around 20-40 different domains and email inboxes that we rotated to keep the sender reputation and email deliverability as high as possible.
I’ll talk more about this in future training sessions, but the bottom line is, I think we ran one of the largest scale email outreach campaigns in the history of the internet. Of course, you have spammers that buy lists and do mass emailing. But I’m talking about legit B2B lead generation campaigns.
With this setup, we could send around 700 outreaches per day. The reply rate fluctuated between 10%-25%. And the call booking rate was in that range as well. So this means, we booked around 300-400 calls a month organically.
The majority of the lead generation costs went to the lead generation team, costing around $20,000 a month. So our cost per booked appointment was around $50-$75.
The cost per client ranged anywhere from $300-$1,800. And the offer we were selling cost $6,000 for three months, plus 10% of revenue share. And then around 40%-50% of clients continued after three three months and renewed for the whole year.
So this brought the average revenue per client to somewhere around $10,000-$15,000.
And between 2020-2022 we helped our clients generate around $10,000,000 in online course and coaching program sales. The total revenue of the business fluctuated somewhere between $120,000-$150,000 with 30%-40% profit margins after taxes and all expenses.
I also began doing a bunch of advanced stuff in the business, such as setting up omnipresent retargeting. For example, as part of the process, many people who got an outreach message from my team researched us online. And as a result, they ended up on my YouTube channel.
So I created a YouTube channel trailer and then set up YouTube ads in a way that retargeted anyone that watched the channel trailer.
And I also retargeted anyone that visited my website. This way, the cold outreach became the entry point into a whole retargeting machine using Facebook ads, YouTube ads and banner ads.
I also began treating search engines like a landing page.
So optimizing what appears for certain searches in the first 10 pages of google can really help drive your sales. If you can control, influence or at least have primarily good stuff showing up in the first 10 results on Google, you can immediately make a good first impression.
I also built a lead generation SOP for an appointment setter to continue sending 75 connection requests per day and start conversations. While we got around 10-30 calls a month from this, and a client here and there, it was never as scalable as email.
While we did experiment with some cold traffic for this offer, and joined various programs and worked with several agencies, we weren’t able to make paid advertising profitable for this specific offer.
So this 7-figure business was built entirely using organic methods, except for a bit of retargeting. The retargeting ad spend was only $1,500-$2,000 a month, bringing in a new client every month or so. So 90% of clients came from organic methods, spiked with the occasional sale from retargeting and client referrals.
Let me wrap this up with the top lessons I learned from scaling this business to $150,000 a month organically.
Those are some of the biggest lessons and takeaways. I’m sure there’s more that I’m forgetting right now. But I hope this gives you some insights.
