He Got 750 SaaS Clients at 23 with The World's Simplest Offer w/ Clay Lawrence

People like truly lock in for a year. I don't think there's any reason people can't hit $10,000 a month. Like I've had multiple people, no business experience, go hard for a year, make over $10,000 a month. I very first review specific client I sold, but I basically just texted him. We had a coffee shop and he had given his guard information, I ran it, it worked. I know we have a solid base of $25, $30K a month that isn't going anywhere, because they've just been clients with us for so long now. I can probably close people in like 10 minutes. We've got over 750 active people paying us every month. And I think right now we get 4-5 support for us today, so that gets nothing. Welcome back to the latest segment on this channel called What's Working, where we talk about what's working right now to get clients using high level. In this video, I sit down with Clay Lawrence, who you've probably seen on YouTube, he runs a review automation SaaS, meaning he helps local businesses get more Google reviews, and it all started with good old high level. Now, as of the time of recording this, he's doing about $53,000 a month, spread across clients that are only paying him about $99 to $199 a month. So this is a very stable business with lots of low ticket subscriptions, which I know tons of you want to build. Now, as I mentioned, what's working is usually around how to get clients. However, we recently filmed a video now just talking about how to get clients, but actually showing you what Clay does to get clients, and how he scaled up to $10,000 a month. So in this video, we're going really deep into a topic that most people just ignore, which is retention. Clay currently has a churn rate below 1% per month, which is absolutely insane. And it's because of a few specific strategies that we cover in this video. So we're going to go through a little bit of his backstory, which will help you see the mindset that helps him build this business. And then we're going to go straight into tactics that you can use to make sure your churn is as low as possible. One of them is actually directly from one of Clay's mentors, who has a software valued at over $100 million. So let's get into it. Clay, welcome to the show, man. It's stuck to be here. Good to have you. Yes, there. So as you know, the name of the series is what's working. And typically we talk about what's working to get clients. However, we just filmed a video all about that and not just talking about it, actually doing it. So if you haven't watched that, it should be out by the time this podcast comes out. It's going to be a banger. What I want to focus on in this podcast is what's working for you in terms of retention, fulfillment on boarding that I believe after having hung out with you the past couple days. And obviously over the last couple of years as well. That's going to take your review harvest business. That's at 41, 42,000 a month right now to be a $2 million your business in the next couple years. Yeah, for sure. Because you're putting in a lot of painful work, I think, to do the right thing so that you can actually sell someday. And that's just a mindset that a ton of people lack. So I think that's going to be the most valuable thing today. To get to that point where we talk about why you do the things the way you do, we kind of have to understand where you came from. Yeah. Because you've sold like 15 to 20 different marketing offers throughout your career, you're only 23 and you've gone through about 20 variations of your business before you landed on what really stuck. Yeah. And I think that probably makes you a lot better operator and a lot better like a long-term thinker. Yeah. So let's hear it. Like what was that story? Yeah. It's the first client I ever worked with. I walked into the shop and I said I will run your Facebook ads for free for a month and they were a local just a t-shirt brand and I tried to record ads for them. They were awful. They looked so bad. I tried to run ads for them. It didn't go well, but I was just learning. You know, it's just like 15 or 16 at the time. And so I did some Facebook ads for them. I didn't end up working out, never got paid from that. So I was like, okay, this doesn't work, right? Of course. I just didn't know what I was doing, right? And then from there in college, I tried to sell high-level just as an everything CRM. Just sit down, look at all these amazing things it can do. That led to a lot of, oh yeah, this was awesome. I'll get back to you on this. And note of that, I did get a couple of realtor setup on just like everything in high-level. And that just kind of fizzled over time. I've sold a content offer where I went with my camera and my phone and I just went and took as much content as possible of the business every month or so and posted on social media and used it as ads and stuff like that. That was a lot of videos and editing and stuff like that. It wasn't my really forte, but I knew businesses valued it. And so I was able to get some cash flow in after I graduated college, which was nice because I needed the money at the time. And then from there I sold a Google ads and like SEO offered to photographers. So I did that for about seven months and was able to get some clients from it. You know, I was able to get, I think probably eight or nine thousand dollars in recurring revenue from photographers. But I was coming at it from a marketing perspective of like, hey, let me make you the most amount of money. And a lot of these photographers I was working with were like family photographer girls on the beach aesthetics. And so everything I did to try and make them more money had to go through the lens of like, I don't like the way it looks. And I'd have like the date of like, hey, this is making you more money. And there's still like, yeah, how do I like the way it works? And so sold that for a bit. And I was kind of like, I feel like this is probably the avatar I want to work with long term from there I did websites. So I did, I was doing, you know, $1,500 websites or whatever and then trying to sell them on the other automations that high level has to offer. Actually, still have some of those clients today. That was good once again for cash. And I was basically going into their business saying like, hey, what are your problems? Let me solve this with high level. And I still probably have a couple thousand dollars a month coming in from, you know, clients where I was basically just helping them automate their end voices or automate their booking and stuff like that. But what it kind of landed on was I was in this range of doing 15 to $20,000 a month had been about a year out of college and I was just doing so many different things like all that stuff I just talked about. I was doing it and there's no way I could hire somebody to do all those things for me. And so my wife actually was like, I was like, hey, I do this review things. My wife's like, yeah, everybody loves the review thing. Like every like, and you set it up like once in a couple hours and then it just works. And she's like, what if you like just did that? And obviously all the doubt goes to my head and I'm like, no, no one's going to pay you just for reviews or that doesn't make sense or how could I build a big business just with reviews. But it only takes a couple Google searches to see that there's already a lot of other companies doing it. But they had had spent tens of millions of dollars on development and building their own software and stuff like that. And I was like, well, I can just take what high level has and I can just sell it over and over and over again. And it just let you gave me that clarity of like, okay, sweet. Now I can work on my business, just focus on reviews, sell it to somebody and they'll pay me every month for it. So that's kind of how I landed on that and about sometime in 2023. Well, and I'm struggling because you're really 23, but you're talking about like, you've been out of college for a number of years. Yeah, yeah. When did you finish college? So it was very popular in my hometown to do and roll. So it wasn't like I was super smart or anything. It's just that, my actually, I was able to work a lot on marketing stuff and I played a lot of tennis. My junior and senior year of high school because I only went to school twice a week and I went to the community college there and you graduate high school with two years of college done. And so from there, when the University of Florida and I graduated in 2022, I think, 2022 or beginning 2023. And so yeah, that's why I was able to graduate like 20 or something, 21. Sure. And did you have any other offers in high school besides the one T-shirt brand Facebook guy? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, specifically for the marketing agency, not really. I tried drop shipping. I tried my clothing brand, which I feel like everybody's gonna just give that a run at some point in their life, you know. And that flopped miserably. But learn a app or a clothing brand. Yeah. The things are gonna start an app. Yeah. And one tip is like, you're gonna start your clothing brand and all your friends will tell you it's sick and it's awesome and they want the shirts and all stuff. And as soon as you send them the website link to go pay for it, cricket. So I think we made like, I think we made like a thousand dollars and like six, we looked at like 650 that was from our friend family. Like everything else was just luck pretty much. And so we went out that for a couple months. And so I was just always dabbling and stuff. Some entrepreneurial stuff. I did a couple of local businesses. I had a beach chair company, which that's kind of a long story. But there was a gap in the marketplace between these vacation rental companies already had chairs. And they were paying for new chairs. And so I was like, I didn't need a permit because I was using their vacation rental property chairs. So I would just show up in the morning, take all their beach equipment down to the beach for them and then pick it up later and get paid anywhere from 70 to 100 bucks a day to do that. And so I did that a couple summers as well. So that was another little dabble in the entrepreneurship boy. Yeah, that's it's like car detailing. But if you live in a beach town, every high school has started a car detailing business. Yeah, I hit the long care company too. I did long care for I'd mowed yards for a summer as well. So how much were you making on the the beach comor thing? Yeah, the beach chair thing. I think some of the, you know, you really only do it from the summer season. When it's, but I think I was making probably $45,000 a month from beach chairs doing that. And you just show up in the morning for 30 minutes, drag it down there, you know, come pick it up in 15 minutes at the end of the day. And so it was a good gig. I also coupled that with two other summer jobs. So that summer I came back from that summer. I worked from spring break to like late summer. And I think I looked at it and I made almost $50,000 that summer for all my gigs. And my mom was a teacher at the time. And I was like, that's more than a teacher. I was like, I don't have health insurance that mom. But that's insane. Like talk to the pest control salesman. Like that's huge here in Utah where I'm from. And a successful summer is like 12 grams. - Yeah, it's different. - It's different. - It's crazy. - That's between your freshman and the sophomore year of college, you just go do that. - Yeah. - There was days in the summer that I would make over $1,500 in a day from tips and all the jobs I was doing. And so yeah, it was a good gig. - Dang. - So you were no stranger to money. - Yeah. - You kind of, you know how to get a person to pay you. But I don't, you don't come off as the classic sales, like hard seller either. - Yeah. - And what did you say, like did all these early experiences teach you about what did all of those early experiences teach you about actually getting to a credit card getting swiped? - Yeah, I think a lot of it for me was I wanted to make sure I was solving a valuable problem. And the times when I did like ran ads for that local clothing brand, like I didn't charge anything 'cause like I knew I wasn't providing any value. But once I started doing the beach chair stuff or the landscaping or my early marketing services where I was building websites or stuff like that, I like knew what I was selling was valuable. I knew people would pay for it. And so I didn't really just led to some natural conviction of like, hey, this is gonna help you out. And I don't think I'm great at sales. I think I probably just have done, especially with reviews. Like people will watch my sales calls on reviews and like sales guys will like critique the hell out of it. Like, oh you suck at sales. But then like everybody else will be like, oh my gosh, that was so easy for you as so natural. It's just like, I've done that sale process so many times. It's just like, I know what they're thinking. They say things in a certain way that most sales guys won't understand, but since I've done 2000 of them, I know exactly what they're talking about, what they're concerned about. And so I don't know where it just came natural or what, but I feel like it was really just putting the reps in and making sure you have the conviction in what you're selling. - And what I've noticed is you're like, you're looking at other companies that are already getting paid for that. And that's your proof, you're like, cool. If that person can get paid for it, why not me? - Yeah, there's a billion dollar review business. Like people probably pay for that. For sure. Whereas most people are like, oh, you know, like Miscaltex back the, whatever you believe about Miscaltex back, I don't never work. There are companies with millions and millions of dollars of annual recurring revenue with Miscaltex back. - Yeah. - Which is like, yeah. And it's, yeah, it's crazy. - Okay, so you've basically been an entrepreneur for like 10 years. By the time you get your first reviews client, but how did you sell your first reviews client? Was it reviews only or was it like an ancillary thing of a website bill, or what was it? - Yeah, the first person I set up on reviews was actually somebody I was doing website, stuff on their website for SEO. And I just seen a video about, hey, you need reviews to help them rank. And so that was kind of the first time I sold them. And they were already paying me, I think, a $2,000 month retainer. And so I just kind of included it as something I was doing. But my very first review specific client, I sold, I've talked about this charge a lot, but I basically just texted him and said, hey, I saw this bad review, I reported it. And we got talking about reviews, what are you doing to your reviews? And he had like 12 or 13 reviews. And then I was able to get him to meet with me at a coffee shop. And I know what to sell it for. And so he told me he had a list of a couple thousand previous customers. I know from the other customers I had worked with at that point that we could get a lot of reviews from that list, right? And those were all paying me retainers or other money for other services I were providing. And so I was like, how about a $1,500 setup for the reactivation and then $4,200 a month? And he was like, okay. And he was like, we had a coffee shop and he gave me his card information. I ran it, it worked. And then I set him up. And that was what I specifically remembered this. It was spring break. My family was in town, we were at my grandparents' beach house and I was like, I need to do some work. And like back then I was like, oh, I worked all day on delivery. And so I go back to my grandparents' beach house and I go up on my computer and like within an hour and 45 minutes everything was set up and automated. And I was like, whoa, I just made like $1,500 just for what I did. Plus he's gonna pay me now $4,29 every single month after this 'cause I was integrated with the system. And we were gonna get him reviews on a recurring basis. And I was like, that was delightful. I was like, I wanna make that hour and a half trade for the 1,500 to the 4,29 as many times as I can. And so that was when I was like, okay, we really need to push this. - Wow. So how long did you sell it with that set up fee? 'Cause you don't do that anymore. - Yeah, I think I sold it a couple more times locally. I mean, when you're sitting across the table face to face with somebody who's local, it's just like that trust. And the conviction I had from the results I'd already gotten from people, I was able to sell it for $1,500, $1,000 or a couple more times. And then as soon as I kind of took it off out of the face and hey, I wanna run ads, I wanna do outreach and get them on Zoom calls. That's what I noticed. It was a lot harder to close people on the 1,500. And so I was still getting some yeses. I transitioned to 565 set up. I don't know why I landed on 565. I was thinking like, 500 was like, if they'll pay 500, I'll pay 565, right? - Yeah, it's 1,570. - I know exactly. And so I landed on 565. And I sold probably my first 30 or 40 clients on 565. And then like, 279 a month or something like that. And then from there, I was still working. I was still working with a lot of local people. But I still noticed like, I got to the point where I could set somebody up in like an hour. This was before you had to verify phone numbers too. And so I could set somebody up in an hour. And I was like, I'm getting a lot of noes on these sales calls. I might as well just like get a lot of yeses, and take the hour. Because I'm already talking to them for 30 minutes on the phone. Might as well turn that into an onboarding call and get everything we need and just start getting them reviews. And what I realized when I went to the free trial, if I got them on an onboarding call and I got Google Business Profile and a customer list, my back then, my trial conversion rate, even for my first like 200 customers, was like 100%. I mean, I don't think I had a single person cancel before the trial when we launched the reactivation campaign for those reviews. And so I got a lot more yeses on the trial. And that's kind of when things started to take off. - Oh, okay. And the trial, how does it work? How many days is it? When do you typically launch a review reactivation? Which if you're listening to this, you don't know what that is. You take those past 2000 customers or so, you reach out to all of them and you boost their reviews. Maybe 10 if there's a smallest, maybe 100 if there's a big list. - Yeah, for sure. So we were doing two week free trials back then. One thing I always listened to Alex from his, I know he said speed value is really important. And so I was pretty adamant about, I would do sales calls all day and then I would try to set everybody up that night or the next morning. And so we'd be able to launch the reactivation campaign 'cause once you've done it a couple of times, it's really not anything special. And so we were able to launch the reactivation campaign the next day and then a lot of times they were getting reviews that day or the day after. And so by the time the 14 day trial came around, like we had already gotten them a decent amount of reviews, we changed a 10 day free trial now. It hasn't really changed anything. We just get money a little bit faster. So then after 10 to 14 days, we've already gotten them a lot of reviews, but you don't wanna react to that whole list too fast, especially if it's a small profile. If you send a 100 reviews in a week, Google's gonna make what the heck. And they won't shut the profile down. I've never seen that. I know people say that, but I've never seen that happen over 1000 plus times. They'll just filter the reviews more harshly. And so what we'll do is if they give us a list of 1000 customers, we'll drip that out over sometimes, three, four, five weeks, depending on how big the business is and how many reviews they already have. If they already have 500 reviews, you can reach out to 1000 customers in a couple weeks. But we like to drip that out because now we're getting a lot of reviews month to month to month to. And so that's just making sure you do that the right way. But okay. And then their card would go through for what amount on day 14? - Yeah, so once we quit this setup fees, they would go through for normally in that 200, we sold for 279 to 239 for multiple years, or for like a year, I think. And then we finally kind of transitioned into, we had a lot of really small people that we know we could help get reviews, but it's like they didn't have that much customer volume and we maybe get them a couple of reviews a month because they didn't have any customers. And so we created like a $99 more package for them. And then 179 and 279, that's still kind of where we're at. - And you just kind of feel it out based on what you think they'll close on? - Yeah, we have a number of contacts. So hey, how many requests outside of the review activation? How many requests do you want to send them on? And so you can change these numbers up and down. We've gone back and forth with it, but the 99 is like less than 50 review requests a month. 179 is 50 to 100, and then 279 is 100 to 300. And if you're going, if you're like, sound that pricing and you're like, "That sounds low or sounds high." If you focus on an niche, you can get much more tailored pricing, much more optimized pricing because you're selling just like a one person. And so since we sell the home services, that's what kind of works. But if you go to a different industry, lawyers, for example, some of them pay for $499 for review software. So. - Yeah. And then tell me more about the sales call and the epiphany of like switching it from a sales call to basically just an onboarding call. - Yeah, no, for sure. So that's, we did a sales call and then an onboarding call for the longest time. And what I realized was it was so hard for these people to, the people that we were selling, which was a lot of times home services, it was so hard to get them in front of a computer twice. And so normally the sales call, we're coming pretty easy. We try to get the card on file to make sure they show up the next time. But one day we just, I was kind of thinking, I was like, well, I can probably close people in like 10 minutes if I don't ask for their card right away. And they say, yes, that sounds good. And then we go directly into onboarding. And so instead of having a 30 minute demo and then another 30, 45 minute onboarding, let's just say, hey, here's what we do. What's asking the questions we need to know to make sure they're getting customers, they have their customer lists, like we can integrate all that sort of stuff. And even if you don't integrate, you can still have them out. But make sure they're a good fit, tell them how it works. They say yes. And instead of like asking for the card right then, like, all right, let's get you set up. And so what happened was, normally what was happening, we were asking for a card and then we'd have like 15 minutes of objections, you know, what about this, what about that? And you can overcome those pretty easily most of the time. But when we just went straight into the, hey, let's get you set up 30 minutes later, now we've done one 45 minute call, everything set up, we got access all the stuff they need. They gave us their Google Assistant profile, all the stuff. And they kind of have this sunken cost fallacy of like, okay, let's go. And so the last question was just sweet. Now to launch that review activation, we just need to get a card on file for the trial. And I have never had any, I've never had somebody say, no, to that after we go through the onboarding process, you know, because of that kind of sunken cost. It's just the, like, super calm. It's not even a price drop. No, yeah. Yeah, we've already told them price, you know, so you, you tell them the price before you start on onboarding. Yeah, after we know they're a good fit, we walked them through what we can do. And then we just say, unless the 90 seconds we explain our services, we say, hey, here's our price. And then from there normally they say, yes, and that's what we don't ask for the card. That's what you say. There's a free trial or you just say price. Yeah, we say free trial. And so they just think they're setting up on their free trial. We are setting them up on their free trial. And maybe they don't have the hesitation of any, my card now or whatever until we get to the very end and they're like, we're set up ready to go. We just need to click this button. So I'm an agency snob, obviously, I've never sold anything for less than $1,000. Of course. I know my worth. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I don't work for free. 21 year old with no experience whatsoever. I know my worth. And but seriously, like my feeling around the whole sass thing, when up to selling my agency and maybe like the year after, before I started seeing more case studies, like you're really seeing proof of, like, oh, this does work. It was like, if I'm going to get on a call with something, I may as well ask for a $5,000. I would want them to sign up like a $297 price point is low enough that they should be able to check out without a call, right? Yeah. So tell me about that. And I think that second point, like signing up for a sass without a sales call and like just people onboarding themselves. Yeah, it's a dream that everybody in this space has. How realistic is that dream? Yeah. So let's get to that. Secondly, first of all, why do you do it the way that you do? And do you want to feel that way where you're at the end of like an hour long onboarding call when the person couldn't find their customer list and know any of their logins are sitting there just like twiddling your thumbs, like, oh my gosh, waiting for everything. You got the card on file and you're like, are they even going to pay in 14 days? Which I don't, maybe you can speak to like what your trial to conversion rate is. Yeah. But yeah, I just that I'm again, I'm a snob. Yeah. But I'm like, I just want to sit on someone a call for an hour for that price point. No, I get it. I get it. I think I had to kind of transition to like realizing this is a $3,000 sale. This is a $2,000 sale. It's just going to come over the next couple of years and the expectations with that are lower than me. Then paying us $2,000 a month, right? And that's something that when I was, you know, it is a slower burn. Like you can't get to $10,000 a month selling something for $200 in a month. Like it's going to take time. But the difference is is that if we play it out and we go, you know, we go for a year down the road and you sold a couple clients a month, you have a much different business than somebody at the same MRR with an agency, right? So we're making $10,000 a month. You've got seven clients paying you, you know, $1,500 a month. You lose one. It's like, oh man, my road is just dipped, right? If you're making $10,000, $7,000 a month with a SaaS, now you want client cancels. You're not really, you're just like, oh, okay. No big deal onto the next, you know? And so you have a much more stable and reliable business. And I think the biggest thing for me is expectation. And so like when people pay for an agency, they, if you don't, if you don't do a good job of managing your scope with the work that you're providing, you are at risk to become there like full time marketing intern. Hey, this is off on our Instagram. This is off there. It's like, that's not what I'm doing. I'm doing your Google ads, you know? And so it comes with that expectation. Whereas the SaaS, like we've never had to deal with scope creep and all that sort of stuff. It's like, hey, this is what we do. You know, if you get more reviews, it's very simple for them to understand. And, you know, our clients, our customer lifetime value, just transparently, it's been pretty hard to track because we got two strike accounts. I made a pricing mistake with pay per review. And it's really hard to kind of manage. But I know it's well over $1,500 of the customer lifetime value. And so I'll sit on that 30 minute call and I'll take the $1,500, you know? And then, yeah. And so it just builds over time. It's way more steady and less stressful down the road. Sure. Not to mention that the whole service is automated as well. There's no delivery. You just set them up. Sure. But you do, like there's, for example, we just sold one and he had an 800 person list. And he was like, I don't know. There's some people I don't want to send it to, some people are too old. Like you kind of have to clean that up. Yeah. So how much time does fulfillment on a review, harvest, client take? And is there anything after those first seven days or so? Like once you get that cleaned up, is there anything you have to do? Do you have support tickets to you? Like what happens? So the guy we set up today, we did have to clean up the list. That is the exception to the rule nowadays, depending on how you're like marketing and selling. That's why I love the Facebook group strategy. Because it's very targeted. You kind of know how these people run their businesses. And so you get much cleaner lists and you know what to expect. But in a situation like this, I mean, we're going to spend maybe 15 minutes sending this list back over to him and then uploading it again for another 15 minutes. And then the rest of the setup is no more than an hour. I think that's generous. I mean, in the beginning, it's going to take longer obviously because you don't know what you're doing. And also the real kind of meta meta, you know, level four version of this is like, eventually you get to the point on sales and on boarding calls. We're like, they're talking about their messy list. And you know the right things to say so that they just send the whole list. Like that's like some big leverage that we've been able to tackle like certain words, certain phrases that you can say to kind of lower the risk of like, hey, we're not going to message them every single week. Like, hey, this is just like a one time deal. Like, hey, here's what happened with this other case study where he said the same thing. He was worried about this list. And then he actually ended up getting way more views from people he'd never thought would leave him review. And so as you get better, you actually end up doing less work on the fulfillment side. But yeah, we're probably two hours is pretty generous all and all to get everything set up. And then after you get them set up, it is support requests. And so you will see the first couple of weeks. You will have way more support requests than you do the rest of the time there with you. Because they're just wondering how this works and like, wait, you know, how are they getting the emails? Is it going to spam? Like, what's the photo you're sending out? Whatever it is. But after that, you know, we've got over 750 active people paying us every month, someone's subscription, someone's paper review. And I think right now we get four to five support requests a day. So that gets nothing. Yeah, it's nothing. We have an intercom and like we use that for our support and stuff and trying to keep our emails clean and stuff. And I looked at it was like three and like, that can't be right. And so like going through Carly's email and my email now, like, yeah, maybe like two or three more. And so it's not crazy. And what are the like ones that happen? Yeah. Six months down the road. Yeah, the ones six months down the road would be like, hey, they'll normally ask about maybe like something that happened on their Google business profiles. Like, hey, I saw this review at Messing or something like that. And that's just normal Google stuff and we'll help them get that resummeted. Or a lot of times they'll be integration based. If I, hey, we're actually switching our CRM's like we need to get you integrated in this now instead of the old one you're integrated into stuff like that. You know, nothing crazy. And with most of our clients, we don't help on another call after onboarding. But sometimes we do have like another 15 minute support call. But yeah, the bulk of the support comes in the first week when there's understanding how things work. Yeah. I saw your messenger this week a couple of people were like messaging you billing questions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then that's like that. That's what sucks about like and it's just it just happens. Like when you grow a business in the beginning, you'll talk to anybody anywhere, right? I'll tell I'll text you. I'll call you. I'll face a message you. And so like we're pretty good now. All our new clients are going through. Hey, email and intercom. This is like where everything goes. Because with intercom, we have like a help base of like, yeah, you know, answer questions they have for clean ass ones. But I still get the that was like an OG client, Ludo. He's an OG client. He was probably one of the first 50 people I onboard and he's just a Facebook messenger guy. That's how I solicit them. That's how I got him to sign up. And so he's always message me there. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So now let's talk about the SaaS dream of I set up my website. I changed the colors on my high level. I've got a beautiful logo. And I'm just going to go out and like get I'm obviously going to make a million dollars. But you know, tomorrow it's easy. And I'm not going to have to get on sales calls. These people are going to onboard themselves. They're going to know how to use the software. I just unload like a cool snapshot that I got from my affiliate. And we're good to go. Why is that not the case? Yeah. I think the big thing that people realize the big thing that people need to realize is that if you are getting people to sign up to a subscription or never without talking to you, it means that you're doing like really good marketing and you're doing lots of trust stuff. But also we found the easy end because we at this point, we have had people sign up without talking to us onboard themselves without talking to us all this sort of stuff. And what we found is that easy in easy out. There's no personal relationship there. They don't they didn't meet me. They didn't talk to my wife Carly on the call. And so it's really challenging to expect a business owner to understand how to use high level, understand how to use your software, just off some tutorial videos. You're like, oh, I made a loom video. I made a 15 minute loom video. They'll get it. And unfortunately, it's just not how it works. And maybe I'm not good enough to know that yet. But in my experience, It's just not how it works. And so it's been a lot more beneficial for us to take our time, to run ads or do whatever marketing we're doing and take 10 to 15 minutes on a call with them to talk about how it works. A lot of times now as you grow and as you get more referrals and as your word of mouth starts to spread, those calls become easier and easier because they're a little bit warmer leads and then setting them up, learning about their business and their friends and where they're from and their family, whatever it is, it's just a little bit of personal connection. Keeps them staying around for much longer. So this was really solidified for me because last year I was moving to everything towards low touch. I was like, everything needs to be low touch. We're going to do pay per review. So it's literally like risk free. It's like people should sign up with that on-boarding call and that happened. We got so many people to sign up with that on-boarding call because it only pays us when you get reviews. And so it scales up for big businesses, scales down for small businesses, etc. And so, but what was happening was we started getting not the best businesses on, right? We started people still requesting on-boarding calls and we're talking to somebody who has like four customers and they don't even have a logo yet or a Google business profile, whatever it is. And you're like, oh my goodness. And so I actually reached out to a guy who has a software company that focused on reviews and now they've kind of transitioned to some other things. But it's valued at over a hundred million dollar company. And I just DMed on Facebook and said, hey, I'll pay you 500 bucks for 30 minutes, building a review software. I would love your feedback on what we're doing and how we're growing. And he was like, I'll do it for a thousand. I was like, okay, boom, I paid him a thousand bucks and literally his whole advice, I told him, he said, hey, we're doing paper review. We're going to try and go towards low touch, make our marketing better. All this time that we are spending on sales calls, I can just spend on marketing now and get more people through the door. And he was like, it was almost like, that's so cute. And he was like, it's like, you're cute. And he's like, no, he's like, at your stage, how we grew is almost everything on one of our, your customers needs to send you a referral. And you want to be high touch, you want to be, you talk to them and you want to know about them and you want to get a referral from them. And not everyone's going to send you a referral, but through that you'll find some people that send you 5, 10, 15 referrals. And so we've kind of transitioned back to subscription pricing and making sure our MRR stacks. That was kind of the roadblock we were running into is that we're onboarding all these new users. But our monthly revenue was still going up and down and wasn't really scaling the way. And I thought it would with all the new users we had on. And so as soon as we switched back to subscription based pricing, we've been able to keep on taking up. Wow. And I think just to answer your question about the Guru dream, the real dream, like just the, what I can speak on for my reality now is that if I wanted to, my wife and I could go on vacation and we could check our email once a day for about an hour. That's the, and we could like block our counters off so we're not going to take any calls. And we could go respond to email for an hour and not worry about anything else rest of the day. That is the real dream. It's not that you're going to grow the business of a million percent while you're gone and sitting on a beach in Bali. Maybe you're better marker than me and maybe people can do that. But for me, it's been like, we'll go on vacation for a week. We'll respond to email for once in like about an hour a day. And then the next week our calendar will be full of all the calls we didn't have this week. And for me, I'm fine with that. For me, people want this guru dream, but it's like, to bring it back to my eyes, people go to school for six to eight years to hopefully make six figures. And they get $100,000 of student loans. And I've been able to build this business without any, I don't have any student loans. And like, I didn't use my college degree, but I've been able to build this business without any schooling without any student loans to make well more than a lot of other people are hoping to get after they get college educated. And so to me, that's awesome. Yeah, it's all about expectations. That's the secret to happiness. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Where do you think that dream originated? Like, where are people getting this idea that they're going to slap a logo on high level, put up a website and just start getting signups? I think that's the easiest dream to sell. It's like the easiest dream for people that are making YouTube videos about high level. I don't happen to know anybody that does that, but it's just, people are making YouTube is about running ads, whatever. It's the easiest dream to sell. Because it's like, I don't have to talk to people. They pay me every single month and I don't do any work. This is great. And I think the way that high level allows why, the software to be white labeled, allows this trick ourselves in thinking, oh no, this company is doing all the hard work. They've got the developers. They've got everything. They'll take it from there. This is how it works. But it's just not how it works. So I think that for me, although I am still grateful for those videos of the gurus selling that, because I would have never, I would have never got into high level. I would have never got into this stuff. And so it's like, when I'm talking about podcast reviews and stuff like, how do I tell the line between like, this is so incredibly hard. It is so incredibly worth it. I can work for wherever I want, whenever I want. People don't have that. I mean, I went to, I met all my college friends in Nashville a couple of weeks ago and I was kind of in this stage for the last couple of years. Like people don't understand how bad entrepreneurship is or how hard it is and I kept much of a challenge. It can be. But then I go and sit in this hot tub and like, I hear all my friends from college talk about how much they hate their jobs, how much they hate going into work every day, how much they're dreading going back to work, how they met a girlfriend at work and they can't start dating her or marry her or whatever and they're having to keep it secret because that's corporate policy. It's just like stuff that I never have to deal with or worry about and so, for sure, never that. Well, yeah, it was my wife and I are about to leave on a six week trip with our son and I still wake up most days. I'm like, the life we live. Yeah, it's pretty great. Exactly. Exactly. And it's the freedom from, and a book I read recently that I really like on this. It's called Never Enough, Andrew Wilkinson. He's basically the, like, many Warren Buffett, this Canadian. He bought all these businesses and he put it this way. He's like, as I started to make more and more money, I felt like it just insulated me from all of life's problems, most of my life's problems, right? However, it didn't fix X, Y and Z. He didn't go into that. But it's this thing. It's so true. It's like this insulator from not having to set an alarm. You know, they're going to walk whenever you want. And you earn it if you can deal with the uncertainty for six months to a year. Literally. Like you, you can earn the ability to go wherever you want. Yeah. I mean, if people like truly lock in for a year, I don't think there's any reason people can end $10,000 a month. Like, I've had multiple people in my community, no business experience, go hard for a year, make over $10,000 a month. How worth it is that? I mean, that's like, it's insane. And for me, it wasn't even like not setting an alarm because I still enjoy work right now, luckily. But for me, it was literally like, I don't want to have to like get in a fight with Carly about why we can't go out the dinner tonight. Like, I want to walk into the grocery store and I want to be able to buy the grass fed ground beef. You know, I want to get the best meat, you know? And now we just get our groceries delivered, you know? It's just like all these like small things like, like, I want Chick-fil-A when I want Chick-fil-A. And I, and it used to like in college, I would stress out about it. I can only go to Chick-fil-A once a week, you know. I can't do it more because I was worried about the money. Because we're at the 15 bucks, you know? And so for me, that's been the biggest like, insulators, like all these small problems that I used to stress myself out about mostly around money. I don't have anymore, which is nice. Yeah, very cool. I think you're a little bit closer to like how hard it is than I am. Like you, we were talking about this earlier. And I was like, it's kind of like having a baby like you. They say the mom like goes through the pregnancy, goes through the childbirth, goes through the postpartum. And they're like, I'm never doing this again. And then like two years later, they hold somebody else's baby and they're like, oh my God. It's like I miss you so much. And they forget it. It's an evolutionary thing where they forget how hard it was because we're, you know, meant to reproduce. Yeah. And so I feel like I'm sort of in that stage. I'm like, yeah, the agency sells me that hard. And I kind of think, to me, to be honest, I don't feel like it was that hard because I was single. I had no responsibilities. I had no debt. Yeah. I could move in with my parents if I wanted to. And it just didn't feel like insurmountable. In fact, the alternative of like finishing school and getting a job, that felt insurmountable and terrible, you know? Yeah. So we were talking about this before the podcast about how you've listened to a lot of hormones and content. And it's like, it's just hard. It's really hard. I don't know if it's a stage you are at. It's hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. But also, I don't feel like it's actually that hard. Like you're just talking to business owners about what they need. And they end up paying you directly instead of you going to a conglomerate, a multinational, huge company, and having them pay you $100,000 a year. You go to a bunch of other small businesses and have them pay you $1,000 each. Yeah. For sure. How would you spawn to that? I think like we have to index. I think I thought it was so hard of people think it's so hard because of the lifestyle they've been sold, right? It's like, what you said, it's all about expectations. When you think about it, if you're selling this like laptop lifestyle of, hey, do these, click these buttons, do these things. Now you're going to make $10,000 a month and go enjoy your life. When you're selling that lifestyle and then you make your first 20 cold calls or you make your first 20, you know, outreaches and people say no or you have your first no show to your sales call, you're like, whoa, this is wrong. You know, like this is not what the guru said. This is wrong. This is not what does not work. You know, like you think that because the lie even sold, but it was just a resetting expectations listening to Moses' content or other people's content. It's like, okay, no, no, business actually is challenging. Like, it's not. the hardest thing in the world. I mean, literally yesterday, there's somebody that's in my wife's small group who is a teenager who's diagnosed with cancer. That's hard. Nothing else feels bad. Nothing matters compared to that. When I think about that, you know? So you compare it to that, it's like, no, this is like, these are challenging things that happen. And it's just being able to manage your expectations and emotions throughout the process and keep showing up and doing the things that you know should work. And in the beginning, you don't know what works, so you have to figure out what works should take from other people who are doing stuff that works. But over time, you'll have first party data. If I did this thing, it worked. I got paid. And then you have to figure out how to do a lot more of that. And just with numbers and more outreach and stuff, there's time for six people to call in a row. And you're like, ah, you know, I just wasted my whole day. You know, I spent the day before scheduling these meetings. You know? And so I think it just feels hard compared to the lifestyle that we're sold from the gurus. Yeah. And then just pick a set of problems to attack and then rather attack the problem of confronting the own demons in my brain and their, my own lack of ability to give myself out of bed and go work on the computer. Yeah. I'd much rather attack that than attack my boss's problem. Yeah. It's the, it's the choose your hard quote. It's like, you know, going to the gym is hard, being fat is hard. You know, it's just like, choose your hard. And I think most people nowadays, especially with like people being worried about their jobs and AI, I remember, it's like, I think more and more people are going to be funnel into entrepreneurship. And I think you have to realize that, you know, it's still going to be hard. It's just different, you know. So that's interesting. The comment about more and more people going into entrepreneurship because of AI. Yeah. We'll see, uh, the, uh, the one person billion dollar business is coming soon. That's right. And for all of that, there's going to be a bunch of one person. The vol has been calling that for forever. Really? Yeah. I think it was the, I heard Sam Alden say it, but. Yeah. So going back to the founder that you talked to that has a software worth $100 million you said at your stage, we were doing things that don't scale. We were talking to everybody. We're building relationships. How did he say he got out of that eventually and how, how was he grown from, you know, that to $10 million a year? Yeah. His, his strategy was to, like I said, get referrals from everybody and then they kind of, they kind of went really hard into a certain niche and started basically collecting more money from each person. Right. So they, they started to solve some other problems similar to reviews for a specific industry. And so that's kind of been their growth trajectory with like, hey, we're charging more. We're getting referrals from almost every person as well. And so now that we're getting people to stay a long time because we're writing really valuable service in a very specific niche where people know each other. Now we're able to funnel a lot more money into ads and then they also have been able to, um, actually, no, take that back. They funneled a lot of money into trade shows, very specific to industries and also into a calling center. So they do a lot of outbound calls, code calling to book calls. And so that's how they've scaled. And so I can take that blueprint and I can say, okay, I need to find an avatar right now where home service, which is a little bit broad. It's a little bit niche, but a little bit broad. And so we could niche down into this particular home service we serve really well that we think there's growth opportunity for we could solve a couple more problems and we stay high touch to keep you more referrals. And I think the big thing that we haven't done, which I've been trying to avoid is the trade shows. And so we've done some like expose and stuff like that and, you know, you can't replace getting in front of like a hundred ideal clients in one day. Like you just can't. I mean, we've been trying to figure that out with ads and we've been able to grow. Like we're adding, we did just under $45,000 last month. We should do over $47,000 this month. And so we are adding our MRR and some of that's from referrals and just growth from just being around for a little while. But getting in front of about 100 ideal clients and one day and having a problem that you can solve for them, I think is how a lot of the review software's growing. Nice job grew that way. So tell us is another one that they grew that way. Chirp is another one that grew that way. There's multiple examples of all the software's growing that way. One thing I will say to anyone listening to this, the niche that you pick will also dictate your churn and how long people stay. So this, I know the founder that he's talking about, the company is a licensed professional. You go to school for, you go to college, you go to PhD to go into that niche and your churn is going to be a lot less because that person has half a million dollars worth of loans. They committed to this, they put their family through this. And so when they find what they're going to use to manage their medical practice, then they're just going to use that. They're going to stick for a long time. Whereas if you have a friend of mine who had a software in the real estate market, to be a real estate agent, it's like starting a digital market in the agency. We're signing up for high level, slightly harder, but probably similar or same churn. There are agents who sell one to two homes a year. And they're still trying to figure out how to not dress and smell like a slaw every day. And it's just a very different avatar. For sure. For sure. I think if you're listening to this and you're worried about avatars or what niche to go after, I didn't worry about it in the beginning. I honestly just like what I recommend is like in your local area, do cold outreach locally, reach out to people in your phone, run ads locally if you can. If everything you do locally is going to have more people going to show up, more people going to trust you, more people going to close just because of that trust. And so start locally. And from us, we started locally and we just found out that okay, a lot of home service businesses are replying to our ads. Maybe this is a good indication that we could go take this further. And so that might be different for you. For me, I think I'm a lot more similar to a home service business owner than I am to medical practice or a realtor or a photographer. But if you're a girl whose mom is a photographer, then you might be great with photographers. You know how they talk. You know what they like, what they don't like. And so using any prior experience, even just from osmosis, from people around you, can help. And the caveat to that is like, let's say you're going after my niche, which was orthodontists, which is very much like PhD type, very high qualification, very much, you're not going to drop out of that profession versus photographers or realtorers or insurance agents, which friend of mine affectionately calls the knucklehead market. It's going to be easier to get clients, harder to keep them, harder to get clients easier to keep them. So you choose your problems there. And I think home services is a suite because it's a middle ground where a lot of these stick around for 10, 20, 40 years and you don't have the guarantee that they're going to be really good, but at least they have to get licensed and insured typically. Yeah. Well, and I know I don't want to sell everybody I'm going to home services because I'm sure there's, yeah, but that's fine. The great thing about it is that a lot of times you can get in touch with the business owner very easily. You don't have to go there multiple levels of management to onboard or make a decision. And if you, depending on the industry you're working with, they still have a million dollars sunk in this business. They've got a truck. They've got a trailer. They've got big equipment. And so they still have a million dollars plus in this business to keep them around. And so I also think that in the beginning, like serving the knucklehead market, like easier to get clients can be really, really valuable to you, to just get the reps in. You know, like I can't imagine if the first client I ever tried to sell wasn't worth it honest. And like, oh, I'm not going to do this. You know, I'm probably going to quit. You know, this is hard. And so, you know, just get your first couple and don't care too much about the niche yet. But then over time, you can figure that out. Yeah, I was, I was so, this 21 year old kid, I had to grow the beard out and like really make sure that I was, like, being, and I think I actually, I'm very analytical, orthodontist, are the top 1% of all dentists. And so maybe not 1% or 5%. Like they go to extra school on purpose. And they know they're going to start a practice and they know they're going to make $3 million a year. And they know that actually. And so I, and I didn't, I now understand the plight of like having kids, having more responsibilities and stuff. I'm amazed. I sold so many orthodontists with like, basically no grasp on reality at the 21 year old. So it's not to say that it can't be done. But I did my nuts were in my throat this time. Yeah, I do a lot of research. Yeah, a lot of research, right? Yeah. Glacier Furns, you can watch the podcast where he interviewed me. I just was too nervous to talk to them. So I said, can I, can I do research on your business model instead? What is your churn at review harvest and how do you track manage and try to mitigate it? Yeah, this is actually a really fun question. So it goes back to the easy and easy out. And this is great for any beginner's listening at home. The first one at the beginning was like, my first, I think I had 230 customers for the while and then like we did a really deep dive to look into what a churn has been over the year. It's like less than 1% per month. Like I mean, people just like stayed. And so, and this kind of goes back to the magic of when you are running this business model. So rarely have a local, but has a local business owner worked with a marketing company or software company and they provided exactly what they said they're going to. Yeah. And that's awesome about this. Reviews, that's the easy part. The easy part, like for the most part, you're going to set it up and you're going to get them reviews. You're going to have the conviction to go sell more people and you have this magic moment where like Clay told me it was going to be more views. Clay got me more views. I've looked at SEO agencies, marketing agencies, ad agencies, all the things they've made all these promises and did it for a lot of it, but he did. So it's like, what else do you do? And it's like, what else do you do? And like, we did, in the beginning, we just started up selling after like three years we just started having an upsell. And so I can't tell you how much business I turned away and like refer it out to people because you will get the question probably. One one out of three or one out of four times especially in the beginning of like what else do you do? Because it really is the magic and that's the magic that that gives you the grace when they have a month We only get one review or two reviews or something, you know because they say I know Clay Clay's got us. Let me just email them what's going on here and a lot of times They just had a slow month or something like hey reviews every so many customers you have So that's already get you a lot of this month, you know and so that that's that's been really cool to look at but as we've grown And as I've gotten off the sales calls enough as we've had people sign up without a sales call our churn has grown especially going back to The subscription model now like with paper review. They're pretty much is no churn Like it's like there's people that don't pay us certain months because we didn't get any reviews because they are Because they don't have any customers But there's no churn there and so our data got really messy with that but I don't know if this is just like making excuses but to me when I look at all those things It's like it doesn't feel like true churn because when I look at their business. It's like oh, they didn't have a lot of customers Oh, we didn't have a good integration. Oh like in the beginning like well I'm not not if we weren't so good at sales and marketing Like as we are now I feel like we wouldn't even sold them then you know and so it's like we're almost selling more people that we know that are Probably not great fits, but since we're so good at setting up. Yeah, just set them up anyways And so it doesn't feel like true churn like when I forget I forget an example of this But somebody I set up a list it was a brand new business and they were Construction that's what it's construction and they did like big remodels They had like 20 customers and they paid us like two months and they canceled and I was like yeah, they had 20 customers We got them like three or four reviews and then they didn't add a single contact after that because we didn't have an integration Because they did everything in paper and so like yes that goes to the churn number But in the early days like I probably wouldn't have been able to sell them like I would have gotten them on a sales call and onboarded them because I wasn't good at it You know, yeah and You're kind of like you're not gonna turn those people away. Yeah, because you'd rather have the two months of subscription revenue If you hopped on the call it's not that much more work to just finish the call integrate them collect a couple months Yeah, and then go from there. Yeah, and we were talking about this earlier too You get like I feel like with any subscription model you have Your churn number you have the number subscribers you have but over time you just build this base of people that aren't going anywhere Yeah, you know you build this base of people that have great we get them a lot of reviews every month They love us. We know their friends. We know their family and we treat them as friends like their friends now You know and you build this base of people are just like aren't going anywhere and that's something I've been really confident like we I know we have a solid base of 25 30k a month that isn't going anywhere because they've just been clanced with us for so long now and Another thing about how we're managing it the cool thing is that we haven't done a single thing to like help with churn until like There's one thing I think I didn't wasn't even thinking about it as a churn play, but I think it has helped and I can talk about that But we haven't there's so many things that we should be doing to lower churn that we're not like we don't even send monthly reports Like I've kind of always I've kind of always had this thought on my wish me about need to change that's like They get a review they get an email from Google every time they get a review most of them and like we send them an email now too It's like why do you need to do more reporting like we're telling them like usually got you you know And we do other things like we save them a lot of time from responding to reviews repurposing reviews on their social media Adding to their site all that stuff's like so easy to set up in high level and so you actually are saving them hours And so I've thought about like creating a dashboard or creating reports like hey, we got you this many reviews this month You got this many additional clicks on your Google business profile and clicks and calls you can see that from the Google business profile data And we saved you an approximate you know 10 hours because we created this amount of social media posts and this matter of your applies and all this stuff So that's like something to do also we should have basically a Gifting process we're like sending handwritten letters or like sending some sort of small gifts after somebody's been accustomed for three months Like we should have that we just don't and so I think as we implement that will be able to Yeah, lower that churn yeah Churn is a function of three things. This is what I learned in my marketing agency client selection Expectations and results yeah And client selection is actually heavier weighted than Expectations and results. Yeah, yeah, the least important one is the results. I would say results is maybe 10 to 20% Mm-hmm and client selection is maybe 50 and then the remaining 30% is expectations Yeah, so small example on each one of these client selection There was an orthodontist from a foreign country who had moved to the US and she was on the sales go I didn't take the sales call my business partner did but he He told me about it and she seemed very like erratic and it was just her and one assistant and she was kind of like There was just something a few red flags in the sales process. Yeah, and like come to find out six weeks in she hasn't Closed anyone Why do we think she hasn't closed anyone? Hmm if I could sit in her console room watch the sales process if there was anything like she was on our Our sales call like that's how she's running her business That's how she's running the sales process and You know she churns she asked for her money back like all these all these headaches and I asked hilarious I asked our head media buyer was like if you could change one thing about our business What would you do? She's like stop hiring or stop closing stupid clients? Yeah Like people that don't know anything about marketing and have no like concept of any of this like they're so hard to talk to they can't close the clients They're upset. They're always asking for another call. Yeah Why are we closing them? Yeah, and in an agency sense? I think you really should be like this is not the right fit go away because you have higher payroll You have everything in your case is like you seem like you may you know have a few screws loose, but um Let's you know collect a few hundred dollars and get you a few reviews and we'll go from there And if you like berserk if you go berserk and ask for a refund like we're just gonna refund you and block your number Yeah, like yeah, it's very simple. Yeah So that's client selection the next one is expectations friend of mine His father-in-law was in orthodontist and this was at a time where I was like having an existential crisis because I had had my first 10k I'm on thought I was like what is life? I'm making way too much money. Yeah, this is crazy And I was noticing how variable client results could be in that ad agency world So same ads that you run in Salt Lake City Would do like half as well as in Dallas or vice versa or whatever And it makes it really hard to sell out a standard price and it makes it really hard to like set the correct expectations and I live I kid you not I got on the sales call and I was just like I Don't know if this is gonna work. Sometimes it doesn't work Because this is a family friend of mine and this was like gonna affect my personal relationships if it didn't go through Yeah, and I was like look this there's here like two or three case studies like you can talk to them if you want to Um, I think we'd probably do a good job for you as long as you call the leads But sometimes like the leads are incredibly expensive and we're not exactly sure why yeah, it's this much It's I think we're charging like 1200 bucks a month for ad management at the time. Do you want to sign up? And it took them like I think they were a bit taken aback by How you selling them? Yeah, it took them a couple weeks where they came back and they were like yeah, let's do it And they stayed long after I expected them to stay because the expectations were just they were so low Yeah, it was like as if you say We're gonna get you 10 patients in the first month no matter what guarantee you get what like all the Yeah, start on guarantees All of this stuff Then that resistance the last one, which is results At that point it doesn't really matter what the results are it does like they are Technically the most important thing But if you selected a bad client you'll never be able to get them good results And if you've set bad expectations and you still get great results it doesn't matter. Yeah, you're not gonna keep it No, I understand and that's like so when we started implementing our upsell which basically all we're doing is helping these local businesses Optimize their Google business profile making a few tweaks on their websites and make sure they rank higher on Google Um when I started selling it there's a couple clients who are in this like service area business They don't have an address listed which can typically be harder to rank and I was just saying like hey We need to do these things like foundational things on your Google business profile and on your website But like it's probably not gonna change pair like change your leads It's like you're not gonna make payroll by signing up with us like this is just some Foundational stuff that needs to get done so you can start ranking higher later But like you're not gonna notice a huge different huge huge difference and then at the end they're like okay Yeah, this sounds good. Here's my card And it's just like it's great because it's like the right expectations like I feel good because I was very honest with them Yeah Hey, what what it's gonna be like and I think you can also be in business a lot longer When you are selling that way And have a lot less backlash and you have the clients that come back to you that maybe didn't sign up But they three weeks later they do come back to you Because they just helped them with five other market agencies who promised the world and they're like Yeah, I feel about this, you know And so it is it's like selling with low expectations is a nice little skill to have Yeah, and you do have to realize especially if you're in the agency market people do interview multiple agencies Yes, and the clients that don't have a bullshit detector are not the people you want to work with Yeah, so if you're hyping things off the chart you have a crazy guarantee and it's like Way more expensive than it should be for a 21 year old who's doing this for the first time. Yeah 99% of people with a bullshit detector are gonna be like yeah, no But if they don't and they're desperate and they want you know, they're like I'm a three months from showing this business down They probably are gonna close yeah, and then it's like the self-fulfilling prophecy where you're over hyping it created the churn Yeah, whereas if you go the other way and you work with business owners that know that nothing in life is guaranteed yeah business is hard the leads aren't going to be the perfect, you know, like unicorn angel leads coming down from heaven. Giving you a $100,000 project with no work. Yeah. Those are the ones that will stick along to them. Yeah, for sure. And I think as well, the difference between agency and SaaS is that we operate in this low ticket space, $100, $100, $100, $100 a month. And like you do find people who sign up and they just do not, and that's why and SaaS is only an hour or two. So yeah, we'll sign them up if they're crazy. You know, and it's what it is. If they cancel later, that's fine. But we do sign people up who just never check their credit card statement and just like don't care and they don't care about what they're spending money on. And like we're setting them up. We're still getting them reviews. So we're still have, you know, have something integrated like we're doing our part. And we're not going to like go cancel their subscription for them because they won't respond to our email or something. And so like I've had multiple clients pay me hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. But we might still be getting them some reviews and stuff that they would never hear from them. And they just ghosted us, you know, if you can add clients who they say yes, I will send you a client list every single month. I was a new client list every single two weeks. And I've had people pay us for months and months on end. And they never send me a client list. And I'm like emailing, following up, texting them, calling them, doing all this stuff. Finally, I think there was one client like after like 10 months, I just went and canceled, I canceled this account because I was like I kind of feel bad at this point. But it's that's still not my responsibility. You told me that you were going to send me a list and we're trying to and we're following up. And so we do operate in that low ticket world. We're like you will get a decent amount of people that just never talk to you and just pay every month. Which is it's kind of it's a pretty cool feeling. Yeah. And I mean, that even happens in the high ticket space. Yeah, that's true. I had multiple agency clients, $2000 a month more. Yeah. That never responded to the onboarding call. Never responded to anything. And you sort of after vessel, it's like, okay, what's okay? But for a lot of businesses, a $2000 a month charge is the equivalent to what you would feel as a $10 a month charge. Yeah. Yeah. As an opportunity. And so they're like, oh, whatever. And I think and I was just quick store in that. I don't mind. I have a client that's pays me 279 a month. I was like trying to gauge out what he felt about our pricing and whether it's too high or too low. And it's that something that we're talking about. I was like, I'm talking about a charge. I'm monthly charge. I'm like, what is it? I was like, it's 279. He was like, you know that $80,000 goes on that MX every single week. I was like, I was like, okay, all right, actually, I think we need to raise our prices a little bit here. He's like, he's a massive business. Millions of dollars a month, lots of expenses. Yeah. He's not thinking about my 279 charge. Yeah. And so it's funny, we sell from around the wallet. You know, that's what Mozi says. Yeah, it's funny. Where we have this that meaning that we have like these artificial boundaries that we've placed on what's possible and what people will pay for exactly. Yeah. It's funny because if anyone, listen to this, has ever talked to Sean Clark, I feel like he's told this story. He's probably done it to you. He did it to me like the first five times I met him. Yeah. And he's like, he'll always talk about whatever the business is. So I told him I was in dental and he's like, for dental, the thing is, you got to have hands in mouth. Like that's how you're making money. Yeah. So for whatever your niches, they'll say something like that. And then it'll be like, and I always imagine the business owner and they're sitting down with their accountant and they're reviewing things at the end of the year. And the accountant's going, well, here's this charge, here's this charge, here's this charge. And they just start with the biggest ones first. Yeah. And then they go all the way down to the bottom. And by the time they get to the bottom, they probably already stopped. Yeah. They cut $10,000 worth of expenses from random stuff that the dentist or the carpractor, whoever, has been paying for the last six months. And they're like, that's great. You know, we just free it up a bunch of overhead. Yeah. And that's where he wants the high level people to live. Because he knows how the conversation with the accountant goes, which is really, it's, I mean, it's Sean Clark, like, yeah, that's billionaire. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We should probably listen to him. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So I think a theme that's come up throughout our whole conversation is SaaS versus agency. Like, and there's tons of similarities. There's tons of crossover. However, I don't even know if I see what you do as a SaaS. I think it is technically. But again, going back to the dream that's sold to most or many high level beginners is like, you're going to slap your own logo, you're branding, you're going to have like this awesome multi-million dollar software that you can just give to anyone. Yeah. But really, anyone that succeeds ends up pairing it way, way, way, way down selling one to three features and actually getting some results and clients on that. Yeah. And then maybe some of them ask for some more features six months down the road and you've actually helped them get on board. Maybe this sounds like a stupid question, but how do you see yourself? Do you see yourself as a SaaS or as an agency? Yeah. And how should a beginner think about that whole thing? Yeah. That's pretty. I made a video about this before because I love this question. I think that in the beginning, when 1000% you think about yourself as a highly leveraged service, you think about yourself as you are pretty much an agency. But the deal is you're going to set up an automation. It's going to take you an hour or two and then they're going to pay you a couple hundred dollars a month instead of a couple thousand. And so for me, that's a great trade. But when you treat it like an agency in the beginning, maybe a little more high touch, you're proactively reaching out to them, you're open to help on calls here and there, you end up with that lower turn in the beginning that I was talking about. And so I think the whole idea of somebody going to your website, signing up and creating their own account and onboarding themselves is just like, it's really hard for multi-billion dollar companies with a simpler offering to do that. Especially depending on who you sell. I mean, really so much of that SaaS stream that people have is when you're selling to high tech people, when you're selling to developers, you're selling to marketers. We can sign up for self-waring and figure it out. But when we're selling to Chuck and a truck who just blew the dust off his laptop to hop on a call with you, he's not going to do that. So when you look at it as a highly leveraged service, or you're charging a couple hundred hours a month and you let it get to make set up one automation, I mean, I don't know about everybody else's thing. But if I could take two hours to get paid 200 hours a month for a year, two years, three years plus, like I'll make that trade every single day, the week, still to this day, I'll do it. And so, but now kind of as we've grown and transitioned, I still, I think I still look at it as that highly leveraged service. But we worry about, we worry about more things, we've added more things in place to make it more automated, right? Like you get to a certain point where you have onboarded over a thousand customers. And there's a lot of things that you can build out that does make the process a lot easier, but it's not worth doing it when you're just getting started. Because it takes it, it can take a two hour process and turn it into, like the one thing that we would build can turn it into an hour and 45. It's like it's not worth it in the beginning because it took us three weeks to build this. And after onboarding a thousand customers, we know how to build it, you know? And so a story I love to say is that after I sold, like the first couple of you clients, I spent a full week, a whole entire week saying this onboarding process can be automated. And I'm going to make this awesome form and they're going to put everything in and the whole thing's going to be automated. And it's going to take them through this funnel and all this stuff. And I spent over a week building it. And I didn't even know how to onboard somebody. I don't, I'm only onboard like three people, you know, I didn't know the nuances. I didn't know how it was supposed to work. And so I think that just kind of comes with time. And so just, you know, get the reps and I missed out on a full week of marketing and promotion because I was trying to automate this. And I know people in the high level space, they love to tinker and love to change the color and stuff. But you got to just go reach out to people in the beginning. So to your point about like billion other companies that struggle to have people sign up on their own, I'm thinking of like MailChimp, like one of their small business softwares, do people like the small business owner finds it onboard themselves and knows how to use it on. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think like Gmail, like Google workspace, like it's like, I feel like it's almost nothing. I can't think of even Google workspace has you do a DNS. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, it's just like, there's probably so few in like the like it's in the niches that are not technical. It takes like job or and just go look at big and big softwares in each industry and see what they do. And I promise you what they're doing is right. If they're a hundred making a hundred million dollars, they've tested it. They've tried. So like a lot of the the biggest home service softwares, they have a grueling onboarding process where it's like they're getting them on calls over and these are CRM. So it's a little bit more involved a little bit harder and more sticky once they get in. And so we don't sell us that. We do not sell as replacement. That's hard to get your first sale. It is sticky once they get in. But we just sell as a bolt on. So less touch is required. And you really just need access. That's the different thing. If you want to build somebody a website, you pretty much have everything you need online for that business already. You can just build a website and now it's like connect domain. We're good. We're doing we're doing system deletes, right? That's pretty much it. You don't really need much connection. That's the difference with reviews. You really just need connection for the reviews. Connection to the Google Business profile connection to the CRM or wherever their customers are. And so that's that's going to make it a little bit more tricky. Yeah. Highly leveraged service. HLS. That's going to be start your HLS agent in 2026. Not even agency. HLS. HLS. Highly leveraged agency. We're going to come up with a because they have A-A-A-S-M-M-A. Sass. S-Wass. A-I-Sass. Yes. S-Wass. Software with a service. Or software as a service. Yes. S-Wass. Yeah. S-W-A-S also. Yeah. Yeah. Whichever you prefer. Yeah, we're going to we're going to claim HLS. I like that. We're naming. I've been thinking about a name. Yeah. I've been thinking about kind of a name where I'm going to click on our YouTube GLS. I know. And if it's it. It doesn't sound like a disease. MLS to your name. HLA. I don't know. Everybody put in the comments what we should call the highly leveraged service. Yeah, what do we got? And GGL SaaS. Yeah, GGL SaaS, there it is. It's pretty much what it is. Yeah, it's just, it is like this very important distinction that most beginners do not understand that their SaaS exists on a spectrum between do it yourself, meaning the customer signs everybody up and done for you. We're literally the customer. There are people who sell high level. The customer doesn't even know that there's a login on the desktop. Yeah, we lean more that way. We lean more that way, right? We sell it as it is an add-on service that bolts onto their existing systems. Most of our clients in the beginning didn't even have a login and we didn't promote the fact that they need to log in. Because when you log in, they just open, when they log in, it opens the door up to more support. And so, it does get a point where it's like you do wish there's a few things that people could do themselves. And so that's kind of where we built certain stuff out to help them out with that. But you can go in the middle, like, and it's niche dependent, like home services. I don't think those guys should ever be logged in. They don't want to log in. But like a dental clinic where the front desk person has to learn how to message people back. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Or add a contact or just stuff like that, simple. But I like that, that you didn't have them log in because if somebody responds and says like, "FU for sending me this reviewer, go ask me." Yeah, we actually, like, I had this whole graph of like, "Do they need to see all these responses?" Most business owners don't want to see, don't want another inbox to check. And so, what we just started selling it is like, "Hey, I know the last thing you want as another phone number to check." And another inbox has to look at every day with your DMs and all your emails and texts and all that stuff. And so, what we do is we just, we reply back if they respond and say, "Hey, you know, this is our marketing line. We don't have access to your response here. Please contact us here." And so, we just forward everything back to the business. And then after we did that, I was like, after looking at that and other review softwares that are much bigger, they don't show the inbox. Like that just starts messing with the psyche of people. Like, you want to show them, "Hey, we got you 100 reviews." Of course, there's going to be people that say, "Stop." But like, people unsubscribeing for the email or saying, "Stop." If you get 20 people to do that and you got 200 reviews, I'm going to go out and live and say that was worth it. A lot of those people that did said that either they just don't like being texts, it's no harm to a file. Or they probably were never going to work the ever again. Yeah, so. And the business owner doesn't get to see that. It's great. Yeah, just hide the conversation. Literally all positive. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's great. But the story I'd love to tell is that high level themselves couldn't sell to the small business owner. Like Sean Clark tried it. And all of his old, he had an invoicing reminding software. He sold that and then he started high level and he signed up a bunch of his old invoice clients. And they called him a month later and said, "Hey, can you stop billing us like what's going on?" He's like, "Are you an idiot?" And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, we know it's super important. We just don't have time to set it up." Yeah. We just don't have time to set it up. And you think that your fancy website and sass mode and special colors are going to convince somebody to stay long term. And all the in-app upsells and you're obsessing about the user experience. And it's like the amount of stories I've heard from people who are signed up on high level as small business owners. And they're just like, "I don't know how to use this." Like we set up a couple of automations but like it's not working. I don't know what's going on. I still, you know, we're paying for it but I don't know what to do. Like there should be an army of people in the comments helping those people just get set up properly. And either get them on your white label or just charge a big enough, like build out fee that doesn't matter if you don't have the sass on the back end. And realize that self-onboarding, I don't, I actually don't know if it exists. Yeah. Like I think like they went to marketing agencies because marketing agencies could figure it out. Right. And so like self-onboarding to us, like we can figure it out. And another thing about this is that we have onboarded people who use high level for reviews but they can't figure out how to work on to our white label version of high level. And got paid because of that. And so it's like the reason that people can't, that's kind of our value prop. Like our value prop is we will make sure it's set up right. And like if you're not willing, I just don't understand. If you're not willing to do like an hours worth of work, because if you're focused on what you're selling, it shouldn't be that much. If you're not willing to do an hours worth of work and maybe answer some support questions for a couple hundred dollars a month, like in everything else be automated, like why are we having this conversation? Like go live in La La Land, go get your lottery ticket, go quick, you know, keep gambling. Like what are you talking about? People still work all day for nine dollars an hour. Yeah. Come on now. Yeah, that's fair. And that's, if you, to your point about the marketers being able to figure it out, most of the time if the business owner has a CRM set up, either they've gone through a grueling onboarding process, and it's because all their friends told them you have to sign up for Java, you have to sign up for this or whatever, or they got the 20 to 25 year old kid that works for them to set everything up. And then they leave and start a high level agency. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And just, yeah, just if you are trying to onboard these people, go find the 20 to 25 year old kid to help you onboard. Yeah, that is the first thing you want to talk to, not the first thing. So let's sign up and like actually get the business up and running, but the business owner always say like the mission of my company is to keep people in their zone of genius. And that is the most valuable thing you can do for them is say, look, you want, you want to keep straightening teeth, you want to keep cutting trees, you want to, like, let me just remove everything from your plate when it comes to this. And then you have to think about texting the leads back, you know, you can respond like you are drunk every single time and you'll still close them. Like that's how the home service guys text me. I'm like, wow, what's going on here? People took a multi-million dollar business with that grammar. Yeah, and it works because that's their vibe. And you're just enabling them with technology that takes their vibe to the next level. Yeah, yeah, we love their vibe. To Clay, if people want to actually figure out how to sell a highly leveraged service with high level and have the whole playbook, just kind of literally give them on a silver platter. Yeah. What should they do? Yeah, well, you could watch all my YouTube videos and you could kind of reverse engineer it and put it together yourself. Or you could just join my community. So it's a little over $100 a month. I give you all the templates and automations that you need and you actually use just like one link to copy them all into your own high level account. And then from there you can be up and rolling a couple days. Well, and have you had like any recent wins in that community? Yeah, now we've had a bunch of people, you know, shout out to Hayden, Shoutout to Ben. They both had never made a dollar online over a year ago. And they joined the community about a year ago and they both just passed over $10,000 in MRR. Ones at 13, Hayden's at 13, Ben's over 10. They're both traveling the world while they're doing it. And it's really cool because I've had a lot of people join the community who had an agency, had some skills already. They'd tried a lot of things and seen a lot of success. But like both of them were just brand new to the game, joined the community and just been crushing it. And so obviously I don't, you know, I just created the community and the snapshots and stuff and they put in all the hours and hours of hard work. But it's really cool to see that happen in the community. We also had, after we introduced our upsell, the Google Business Profile optimization and the rankings for it, I know I've had three more people hit $20,000 a month since the upsell. And so that's been, if you've been killing that, it's all up to you. So guys, we sold Door to Door before this. It is the easiest door to door offer that I've ever offered. And it's, everybody understands it. Everybody knows what to do with it. And from getting somebody onboarded to this, the next step, like the amount of things that you could offer them, the branches you could go, the secret sauce that you can put on it based on your own experience expertise, what the niche needs is infinite. But just getting those first 10 to 50 to 100 clients is the hardest part and narrowing in on an offer that can do that. Like Google review automation. It's the best way forward. Yeah. And if you're not still sold on kind of the low ticket thing, I want you to think of the reviews as kind of the magic wand where if you can get somebody set up with the reviews, after you start getting the reviews, that is the like holy crap they trust you, what else do you do? And that's where like you said, you can go so many of it routes up what your expertise is and to sell it into upsells and stuff like that. And ways you can provide more value to them. Thanks bro. Yes, that's great. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Powerplace podcast. If you want to support the podcast, the best thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. 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