635: The Meta Ads System Working in 2026 | Nick Shackelford

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He's the co-founder of structured agency Partner at Bres and one of the most respected meta ads operators in the world. He scaled hundreds of ad accounts through iOS changes, rising CPAs, platform volatility, and multiple algorithm shifts. And he's here to say this clearly. Meta isn't broken. Most founders are just reading the wrong signals. After the growth at all costs, error of 2021, 2022, the playbook has fundamentally changed. Cray volume is up, complexity is up, but performance is down and many founders are just flying blind. And in this episode, Nick is going to break down what actually matters right now. You'll learn which metrics are actively misleading founders in 2026. Why testing more ads is often making performance worse, not better. And the exact point when meta advertising stops being a media buying problem and becomes a business model problem. This is the 2026 opera's playbook for meta ads from someone who's managing millions and millions and millions of dollars in spend in accounts, real accounts right now. Let's get into it. Here are the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth in future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chath. Nick Shackleford, welcome to Melbourne. It's very nice. Feels very much like America if I'm being honest. It's been really cool hanging out. I'll talk about why you're here from multitude of reasons in Melbourne. This is your first time in Australia. I want to talk with you Facebook ads. So the game has changed. I think so. I kind of been yelling about this for a while. I know. I think this is going to be a controversial take. I think most of these people are going to feel probably they've been doing stuff 2019 2020 2021 because it's like tried and true. You want to do the same. For like I'm going to curse like same shit that got you to where you are. It's just not that way. I've just seen too much stuff nowadays. Yeah. And so I really want to unpack that. And I also want to talk about as well what we're working on. And some really cool stuff is going to be game changing. But first and foremost, like I've known you for now. It is coming close to eight years. You taught a program for us. We launched that in 2020 when absolutely gangbusters. And a lot has changed with Facebook ads. And you have spent profitably. We talked about last night yesterday. You pretty much lost count. But it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars profitably yourself. You yourself managed to like look at and you've grown brez from zero. We talked about it. You've you know, you're a partner at brez. You've been behind the scenes growing that business from zero 70 million gross in two years. Yeah. Do you want me to be I'll be a specific. Yes. It was 76 million. Two years nine months. And today it would be eight days. Okay. There you go. You can't get much better than that. Like I don't know the hours. I'm sorry. Yeah. Now we would show the receipts. But there's no point. Right. Because it's literally that it's literally on the hour. So you know, you've been behind the scenes. You've been growing brands for over the past decade using paid advertising, using performance. You're running behind the scenes. Like, you know, we've been hanging out. You shed like five or six, seven other brands that you're deep within in the D to C space. Like you are the guy when it comes to ads. So talk us through like what has changed and what do people need to be thinking about when it comes to paid advertising, Facebook ads met our 2026. I'm going to take you a little bit further back just because I was I was known as just a Facebook guy. And so you kept asking yesterday, like, what is like, how much have you have you spent? You kept going like Nick, what are you spending you spending? And I go, I was responsible for hands on keys. Like I call hands on keys, the actual media buyer, the person that's like slinging clicks, like they are the clicks linger trying to get the conversions. And over time, like, if you if you want to evolve into the space, like I'm not I'm not a visionary, I'm not a dude that's going to like I didn't start breeze. I didn't start the brands. I'm supporting it being a part of. But I'm really fucking good at running it. I'm really, really good at being in the in the right places at the right time and managing the team because like, I know what it should look like when it works really well. And I when it looks really bad, I know exactly like, okay, we shouldn't be doing this. Here's how we kind of re correct it. Operating to a degree, right? At some level. And so over over the growth of it, it's all revolved around meta and it's all evolved around how to spend ads. Like what is a correct way to spend on what is a correct way to create ads? What is the system that you have to do all these things around? Because before it was and when we made a regional course, right? That was it was incredible. But what was even better about it is like the things inside of it would still be relevant today. If the dashboards were still the same. Yes. If the way that creative was presented, if some of the audience targeting was a similar. And so I was really proud of that. I've been proud of that for a very long time. And even to this day, we get a ton of comments and people speaking on it. But it's had to change in evolve because a, you know, A. I come into the space. You have meta who bought an incredible AI tool soon that I was open my eyes to madness, which you open my eyes to this. And obviously in the market, if you see these big tech giants evolving, changing, updating. The way we use the tools have to change an update. That's just a non-negotiable. And so you have in drama that you have lattice, you have gem, you have a couple of these like internal judging scores of how ads are ran, judge, categorized. And honestly for us as on the outside or on the growth side, we have to adapt to that. And I think that's something that I want more and more founders to have an idea around and not even just the founders, but the person that's in charge of like generating revenue, you have to be aware of it. And so for the brief side of things, when I was, I wasn't the one that knew how to run that type of growth because we play in a restricted space. Like there's a certain funnel that you have to run. There's a certain way you have to position these ads to the right landing page. But what taught me is like, I had to go run retention or how to go understand how email plays in this or how subscription plays into this. And so I was able to like kind of round out what was necessary and it was. There's a lot dude. Like you we just finished a phone call with my team today and you're like, it was after we just exiled because it was intense. I think that's the levels that it should have to be at right now. And meta as a core piece, it was a negotiation like how much money do I have to spend was what was on he was giving the unlimited number that I can spend. And but that's not an ads question. That's like what can the business maintain? What is a margin? What is the product? What is the cash on hand? And I think that's it's more holistic now, man. It's not it's not lighted up. Get a couple ads that you ripped from somebody else and turn it on. And like you've played at the highest levels. What's what's the most you spend in a day? 200. I would say 275 300 300 thousand. I think that's a profitable day. That's a profitable day. We have a great mutual friend, Jordan Menard, as an incredible brand instant hydration up there. And he talks about this term of natural cack. What is this a little little we'll try to anchor you. Okay. So there's like this level of we believe the all knowing mighty zuck has an idea of what a customer costs to everybody in everybody in your niche that you're selling against. Use me. I'm a beverage. He knows how much all the other beverage companies are spending to acquire a customer based on all the information fed back to him. You think about capy. You think about even a raw term post backs. How much information we're giving back to Madda. We believe he'll know based upon how much information we give back to them. Are they subscribing? How much AOV that he's going to basically just bucket us and charge us $100 or $200. I believe that too. How could you not have so much information? How could it not be that way? And the most advanced one. So you look at maybe snap doesn't have this, but maybe Google has this. They put there more of a demand gen. So maybe they don't have it. But I've thought so deeply about this. So the idea right now to crack is to be able to spend $200, $300 a million a day. Let's talk about like I know I know not me, but I know within my range people are spending a million day. Major moments like Black Friday, Cyber Monday when the offer is right, when the demand is pent up, when the season makes sense, you can get up some crazy proper numbers. I would say across the immediate portfolio that I can go and like go slack by slack, probably between $500 to $1 million a day across these seven eight brands. So that's that's real thought. And as you know, we we hourly updates. So it's not it's not fake. Crazy. It's real. And so when we when we look at this stuff, we go The difference between what has happened now at those higher levels is the diversification of how many ads you have in the account and how many different types of AOVs you're able to present what we call in the front end, the first touch point because that's going to define the different type of customer and how long they're going to be with you and how much they're going to buy from you. And so, but it's funny, that's not an ads question. Ads are driving. Ads are the first touch point or second touch point or third touch or whatever. And that's that start the steamroll of that customer coming into you, but it's not necessarily what type of ads do you have to do? It's more encompassing. Yeah, and that's one thing I've noticed now and I want to talk more about this more than ever. It's this holistic ecosystem approach, 2026. It's about the offer. It's about what we do on the creative side. Media buying isn't as much, knowing, near. Like I heard you say yesterday, Facebook ads. It's 70% creative, but at the same time the offer trumps all right. I think so. Yeah, truly do. And more than ever, you are playing around with the offer stacking over free shipping, like like playing with all of these variables. It pages. That's a big part of your your playbook as well. Has to. Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying the interview with Nick Shack. Chances are if you're listening to this episode, you either have your own brand or business and you're seriously interested in how to scale with Facebook ads, meta ads and performance marketing. And that's exactly why I want to tell you quickly about founder operators. It's our performance membership for e-commerce founders where you don't just learn theory, you get to work directly with operators like Nick, Phoenix, Har and incredible team of media buyers who help you scale your ads, diagnose what's actually driving your growth, working through creative, working through your economics, working through your ads. And we're only accepting 50 people right now. So if you want real support, you want to scale your ads, you want to prove and system, you want to learn from Nick's system, go to founder.com/operators or hit the link in the show notes. All right. Now it's jump back in. Yeah. And I'll tell you why because I wasn't I had to get sold on this. I was not I didn't believe this. I was in the camp of like, I'm going to media by my way out of the situation. I was all I defaulted there. People would make fun of me because I'm more of like technical in the accounts. I really default like that's my normal status of like just do some optimization within the account. But you actually you have to think about levers of influence at doors, call doors of influence. If you're in the ad account, easiest thing you can do today to make a change, whether it's working well or it's not working well is to make a campaign optimization, small door, small swing. The next level up to that is like, okay, maybe we can do new creative a little bit more ahead. It's a heavier lift to bigger door to harder to push. Hopefully a bigger outcome. The next you go into this is maybe the different avatar. Maybe you're going to go speak to a higher quality customer that will spend more to you. Okay. But that's still going to be in the creative realm. The biggest lever, the biggest movement is building a web or building a landing page with a unique offer to attract an individual consumer. It's the most amount of time you have to be conscious of it. You have to think about the margins, you have to think about the product, you have to be thoughtful of the bundle, you have to be thoughtful of the incentive. That is the biggest incentive. All that starts and then gets everything else to do, you have to do below it. You have to make the creative, you have to do the target, you have to set it off correctly. So all that system, you have to really pay attention to. It's not as easy to do it. If you're just by yourself on a founder on an island going like, my ads aren't working. The amount of times I've gone into these accounts and talking about it. It's not working because you're not going to make enough money to spend over here or it's not working because people are just not converting on this area. It's not an ad issue. It's like the way that the business is being positioned and ran. So I do truly believe in this. Especially if your goal is not to spend a thousand or it's all going even more. If you're at $300 to $500, I think that you're probably in the creative issue. Maybe it's so creative, maybe we can get some conversion elements changed on the PDP. But really it's, I'm like in the thousand a day, maybe I'm going to 3000 days. That's a good amount of money to be spent. The thoughtfulness is like how many different types of entry points can we get these consumers into? For instance, we have February coming up. What happens in February and America? Super ball. Huge day. I thought you could say Valentine's Day. I'm a boy. I'm a boy. I'm a boy. I'm a man. Then this is going to hit the altar. And this is going on. We get so much trouble for that. So the most important thing to me is, of course, big football guy, not at all. I'm actually not a football guy at all. But we actually don't, what we should do, sidebar, what we should do is we should probably make like a lover boy, lover girl lover boy campaign. And it's like a biopac get a pack and a thing. So you both can just absolutely bliss. Anyway, the incentive is we have, so business needs for us right now. We'll be a little vulnerable about this. We're in a turnaround situation where we are needing to buy our way into subscriber-based growth. Yeah. Okay. How do we do that? Well, we want the highest quality customer. For me, what I've learned and being in this is a customer that starts on an eight pack, the faster I can get them to order a 12 pack, the longer they will stay with us. I don't know how many times you can ask a consumer like, what is their best product that they can sell that equals the longest they'll be with them. It's a very important question, hard to get there. But once you understand that, the eight to 12, then I can understand the higher, essentially what it is in the simple sentence, the higher the quality that they're willing to spend with me at the beginning. And we can meet up. We could make good on the promise of the money that gave. We've earned that respect and we're going to stick with us most likely. So we've flipped that on ahead. And so now we're selling like 160 cans. Support the party. Self of the party. So that's like the positioning angle we want to go to. But that's going to get me a couple of customers. That conversion rate is going to be pretty low. But that customer is going to be very high and very worth it for me. So I want the lowest entry point you can come with me, 40 bucks, 30 bucks, all the way up to this $1.6200. And then it's up to us to kind of measure the value that these customers are. That's not an ad issue. That's not an ad thing. That's a business structure positioning play. And it's the economics, right? We're working on this incredible membership, which we'll talk about a little more. We'll found our operators. And they pulled out like six different spreadsheets around how you're tracking everything. It's a system, you know, of itself, but a lot more numbers than I would have even thought. That's frustrating. Yeah. Because one hand, you're like, I want to hand on like screenshotting cohorts from a dashboard into cloud or TbD and going like, give me my LTV to pack. And it gives you this analysis. Hopefully it has my information. But then to get to those numbers, there's like four or five different spreadsheets we're going through. Again, we'll go back to the call that we just had. We were scenario planning around AOV's contribution margin, different row-ass, different conversion rates, returning customer revenue to customer revenue. And all that would spit out to us like two numbers that we have to look at. That's all like aggregated data and sitting there. So there are a lot of things you're going to kind of piece together. But if you're by yourself, that call was nine people. If smart dudes were working through it, like you don't get that. That's the problem with what I see is going on right now. It's like you don't have access to these people or you get short clips on YouTube or you get short clips from a call like this or an interview like this and you just can't build it yourself. Some people can connect the dots. But if you don't have that area to just be like, "Yo, can you just check the way I'm thinking about this?" So important now. So if somebody's got a brand right now, let's just say, "I think a product market fit." It's selling, maybe making 20, 30, 40, 50,000 dollars a month. You're running ads, maybe spending a few hundred dollars, let's just say $5,000 a month. The profitable deal algorithm tells you, "How do you scale?" In this like 2026, how would you be thinking about it if it can't come your way? I'll give you the raw answer, then I'll give you a more flushed out one that you want me to say. For someone who's add more zeros. If you already had me, if you were like, "Hey, it's working." You give me the laptop. I'd probably go 0, 0, 0, and hand it back and check it in two days. That's my gut reply. But if I were to be like, "All right, let's understand why this is working or how this should work, how we should make this better." I'll develop that scenario a little bit further to see if I can go more specific. You hand me this. You talked about 5,000 spend. It's working. You tell me that I have two really great products, but we're really only spending on one. I'm one hero product. I'm like, "Okay. Of that product, we'll probably analyze some of the assets that you have. It's selling all problem solution. This thing does that thing. Cool. It does that thing at this cost. Then you start adding on the different stacks with this thing. You feel this way based upon an emotional tie. We'll try to expand some of the problem solution into problem aware, into solution to see if we can expand a little bit into where you are. Because chances are if you're spending that amount and it's working really well, probably don't need that high of a row S to continue to spend more. But the big number on the row S sign makes me feel really good. It makes me feel like it's working. It is. But you don't know your numbers, which early on we talked about this. Can I make money in the calculator? We used to play with them the first one. Know your numbers. which provides the confidence in which you were able to accelerate the spend to generate more customers. But if you don't know your numbers, you're not going to be confident doing this. So first of we would talk about can we expand just on the specific creative that you have in that to see if that 5,000 good is 6,000. If they're only buying one of them, is there an easy way, just a product lens itself to buy more buy one get one buy two get three buy two get one the different types of place because what I'm trying to do I want to manipulate the a of you want to manipulate the other maybe play with a free ship free shipping threshold what what is the like the mean across of them rather than the average. So I would look towards the a of e because give give the the founder of the team a little bit more confidence that they could spend a little bit more money without having to do major changes major changes meaning build a new website go find new creators or go find new assets like that that take time it's not not not a today thing. And so today thing is I can make a new bundle I can add the secondary product. Second is I would probably just ask the customers that have been buying especially at the beginning you don't really know why they're buying it you're hoping for a specific reason. So I would probably shoot off a couple just from the founder emails because that that size is not that super it's not that big customer base is probably growing a little bit but you can get a couple that's bought multiple times from you. Can you either call them or get it asked them to to give you a little bit of a testimony immediately screenshot testimonial of a review from an email from a founder does very well as it as just a plain asset probably it would stick there and immediately and my question would actually go to the back of like are these people coming back and buying on their own. That repeat purchase rate is important to me because they might be they might be buying it. They fit the right price point they had they didn't have to like ask their partner to spend this dollar amount they didn't have to think twice they're maybe in the market already for the specific product. But if they're not coming back on their own free will to buy it or maybe they've seen an open it email came back. I probably think about if they're not coming back how good really is it you we were able to fool them once we use that term loosely fool them to buy it but if they're not coming back on their own they might actually it might not be there product market might actually be there. It's really interesting as well you know there was this boom time COVID and then there was the iOS 14 stuff and then you know now I'm seeing like a season where we've got AI we're in a real creative mix with you know this ecosystem play which I love what you're you're going with and and how you're making all these other brands that you work with just not only just like can't scout but really scale but you're talking about signals and I'd love to hear right like because I'm seeing I see I speak to a lot of people we talked about this like I get a lot of stuff where people write to me and all sorts of things going on and and a trend I have noticing Facebook is back right like like Facebook it's not like it was three four years ago like where it was like you know I hear a lot of friends be like oh my god it's like it's really tough so it is back but the signals piece has changed and you said to me you know meta hasn't stopped working founders just stopped listening to the right signals what do you mean by that I think this is I think this is actually what we're speaking about towards more in drambita like the drambita papers that came out a while ago it's not new now it's maybe new to someone to listen to this for the first time or or or not aware like they knew something changed but what really did change I think that they will refer to in drambita the one in the drambita updates there's a couple I implore you guys to go look into a gem lattice and there's one other one sequence and I believe if I see between 20 to 40 if I'm really aggressive 20 to 40 new add accounts on a weekly basis 20 to 40 now low spend to high spend different countries and you look at it and you go and say and you go there probably have one or two or three creatives that are all the same and they're really working like they're like these are you go like what are your best at it they send it to you and they'll look the same to do to or to check talking about the product here's what it is the same thing like the the difference might have been like she's in their kitchen versus her bathroom it's all the same signal the signal is a white girl white guy in a bathroom in a kitchen whatever it is same shit the more the diverse it is and this is where you hear me talking about the a o v the intro like the customer that we're able to speak to meta knows what they're willing to spend on and how likely you are to spend at different levels of threshold of spend the person that's going to buy a $30 a $45 or $200 that signal you're not listening to that you're not listening to what the the frequency in which they're buying but because we're only presenting them the same thing one product on a product page home page maybe there's a collection page with a couple things into a product page they don't have the ability to create multiple scenarios of a o v output probably probably it's probably the same thing on a day to day basis the more diverse you were able to position different a o v's different landing page experiences and the different ads that they see to get there is going to produce a different outcome that you need to continue to reward until meta I want more of these people I want more 112 a v's I don't want to $55 or I want to $55 but it needs to be much cheaper than what you can afford to and before the U.T. is put it in one adds like to be one campaign one ad set you have 30 to 40 ads into it they're all buying different things they're all going through the same experience potentially and that's not that's that's confusion it's just more confusion to it because before what what do we used to do beforehand five or six ads you do introspace targeting each stack it you do some look alike audiences each stack it then you go broad right so you have like that's like the normal way that people would kind of launch the accounts nothing technically wrong with this but what is the what is the hypothesis of what this is going to produce for you and how are you making better decisions off of the signals that meta is giving you I think that's I think that's the confusion part that most people have now when it comes to creative I've got you know friends what one particular comes to mind when he told me he took a portion of his budget and this is something that some people don't think about he took a portion of his budget to say he's spending a couple hundred grand a month instead of spending a couple hundred grand he starts spending 180 and he put like $20,000 into just like a full day shoot creating the craziest creative and he double his business what would you say to founders when it comes to creative and looking at 2026 paid advertising performance creative how much should you be diversifying into testing and looking at creative right now especially with AI like you see so many things around like I created this with AI like you know me yeah I have a is the AI so do you want me to start with the thing or do you want me to go like the overall viewpoint of creative because yeah let's go the last light off yeah okay the first off congratulate for him to be able to invest that much into an asset into a campaign into just like a test that's scary for me like I think the lowering the beauty of AI and I'll tie it together beauty of the AI means like speed to ideation to put initial output is way quicker and way more cost effective because I still believe that I talked to this like I believe in the smoke test I've always believed in the smoke test I think it's the easiest way to make logical investments into where you're going and I'm assuming your partner or your friend one of your founder friends got to this place I'll explain to you how I care about this we call it the smoke test and it starts with the ideation it's usually product it's the concept that we care about for this case I'll use ours so the product is a beverage replacing alcohol it is what we idea so it's a beverage outside or it's beverage in a setting of a social scenario it's just a plain image that AI can either create for us or we already have it from a basic photo shoot the concept we have the bold call out of what we would want on it in bold text whether that's in the copy or it's actually on the image itself because I do believe that it makes a reason for the image for those words and then based upon the performance and maybe I have three of those core concept okay at a bar I can't fire in your house but the same as a replace alcohol try something better that initial depending on like the cost per cpm depending on the cost per carts depending on the cost per click I'm trying to get like a little bit of like is there smoke here is it worth investing more time and effort the image works and performs then I'm going to move into do I make a motion graphic similar to what I just shot maybe they can spins maybe the girl picks it up and put it down that's the second level of investment more time a little bit maybe a little bit more money third goes into maybe to full-fledged ugc or what we call egc employee generated content get it's quicker and faster and cheaper and then after that point I'm only then then it's been able to graduate like performance looked good at the smoke performance looked a little bit better at the motion graphic because it's now hitting up a different ad placement now I'm going to go full video investment and then now it's like we've seen the quality of this over appeared a week three weeks a month I feel the confidence in investing in this overall concept and I'm going to make as much as I humanly possibly can that's that's a logical investment from a creative knowing that the engine that we need is more creative diverse creative and quality of that creative and you know the angle and you know the angle you validated multiple times you didn't just get an incredible weekend where it popped off right I think that's the but what's the what's the challenge there how many of those do we get what's the engine of us we continuing start this up so when you go And I wonder if some of these brands are spending $100, 200, 300, $100,000 a month. The engine is often very difficult to do because you have two agencies over here. You have a creator manager over there. So the organization of the person that's driving that engine is very, very important to feed the machine of meta. And that, and so you then come into AI. I live in two different places because first of our brand is very AI focused. Like you would think about it, but it's almost in graphic. We use zero AI. I'm in the camp of going, "Do you don't be unethical? Don't do fake men losing hair." And like dripping in and it's like, "Oh my God, I've got a full head on my head." Like people are going to take it very, very far. And people are doing it right now. Do you like? I have this one brand that I love them to death and they are a little bit more aggressive than I personally like to tend to be. It's better for like gut health and cleansing. What happens when happens in your gut? How much do you get viruses? It's like a pretty graphic creative of it's like these viruses are in your stomach. Like that's like it just hits you, but then what it's selling you is like a spoonful of a medicine. And then you're going to buy 12 bottles. That's a lot. Like that is a different approach to it, but that creative works because what it is, it's agitate into problem solution. So I get it. So I get it. Yeah, super for your best, but these guys have been doing it. They've been ripping, yeah, too many times they would rip or how many I've come across the fake Joe Rogan CGI pitching thing. Oh, dude, I've actually seen you, you called me a couple of times way back when you're like, you'd be on a podcast with someone like, "That's nothing." That's why you see her. You never said that, man. I get a big shit. I don't know why it's said to you. But you do a full podcast interview with the guy that like definitely did not interview that. No, that's right. Seriously? I'm actually really, I just remember, I'm so about, I have this. I have, I gotta find this. But that, it's always, it's always existed. It's just like the ethics in which people are gonna leverage it to the point. I think if you're a new founder now, you AI incorporation of holding the product, don't do, I think when he gets weird, like when you start doing a lot of faces or like, you GC speaking to the thing, now you're, now you're, now it's not real. Like, what I think, and I brought this up to you because you and the founder crew, I was like, if it's Nathan, you said it, but if they want to scale the type of creative of you, and it's you and you've approved it, this is your shit. Wouldn't you just say, hey, like make me 30 videos of me saying these things I said a couple weeks ago? Why not? That's not an ethical. You did it, it's you. So what's the common thing that you say, you said you say 20 to 40 add accounts on the high level awake? What's the common mistake that you say? And I guess really from understanding like from a from a brand that's the go traction, somewhat traction, like it's just not brand new account. There's just like it's not brand new brand. There's just coming in this like all high my ads out working. What was the common mistake that you say found as I'm making there? They usually fall in a couple of buckets. The biggest bucket would be they have too many ads, too many ads and too little of assets and too little of campaigns. And then you go into each of these campaigns, it's small iterations of things that have worked in the past and it's like 10 or 15 of these. And so on a daily basis that ad might get a couple dollars of spend or the spending gets concentrated to like maybe two or three, but those are the ones that are driving the revenue. So it's like too much. Metacant sort through what they should actually allocate spend towards and you go and you're like to do this has been running for 20 days, maybe a month and it's only gone 40 dollars in spend, but you have 20 ads. I got 40 dollars in spend. So it's just eating away at the budget and it's like kind of like what I call like a slow chew. It's a chewing through budget. It's not really getting any learnings. And then you have the other side where there are too few of assets and they're not getting new things interested or introduced into enough. I live in two different buckets around the people like how do I scale? They ask this question like how are you scaling and depending on the scenario on the ad account, I do believe in a graduation period or what we call scale it where it lies. Graduation periods I prove this out at a certain level in my testing campaign and I'm going to duplicate it into another campaign isolated and maybe make variations and then launch it. Specifically it's one ad works. Maybe a video of a girl. I'm selling the product and then I'm going to pull a clip out. I'm going to make an image of it. I'm going to make a motion graphic of it and I'm going to keep that original video. So I'm going to give it we know something about this is working. Let's give it its chance to kind of flourish by itself. That's one. That's like the graduation style. And the other style would be a scale it where lies. So if it's performing in the ad account, rule one, don't fix it if it's not broken, increase the budget. So then that way you're just trying to scale and increase the budget where it is. You start to look at the ones that are starting to work. They're really only running to one or two pages. Again, it's shocking. That is that it will work. It will work. But when it doesn't work and I was talking to a brand this morning, he he runs his products exclusively and early. He notices that after the 15th of the month, the amount of purchases that are happening are much less because they're running out of money towards the back half of the month. So supplements. And he goes, yeah, I really only have two things working. I have my BoGo campaign working and I can't crack this new test we're going from page. But the new test is 80% of his budget. It's scary for me. If that one campaign is not working as 80% of the overall budget, but yet it's not performing like it was, what do you do? You don't have options. So you have to have multiple things in the ad account producing at different levels and all the time it's that ecosystem of how you have to run it. So I usually try to push and I was like, okay, what is the secondary product we can do? Can we bundle around this? Can we reposition how people are selling this? I push them as hard as I can into those two different directions. Because they, they don't have the muscle or be, they're, they're kind of half-assing. One thing I also see as well and it's a common thing. I don't know if you see it is there's a psychological piece around scaling and just like the numbers are there, but you just can't, like the person just can't bring themselves to truly kind of just like you said, add zeros. What is that and how do you help founders work through that? Because that's tough, right? And if it's your own money, then it's easy for you because you've spent at the highest of all high levels, you've maxed out the accounts. But yeah, there's this kind of psychological fear and mindset piece of just like, I'll just add like, you know, maybe an extra hundred dollars, like they scale too slow, like like all that pace. Yeah, dude. And I'm saying this as I owe MX, like $400,000 on my credit card. So like I'm saying this from like someone that like knows I have credit card interest building right now. And so it's very real. Like my money, that credit card that should link to Google. So I feel this. I think I have a little bit of a disassociation to the zeros or the dollars on the account now because of how long I've been doing it. That's all I'll start there. So I'm aware of where I'm, I'm aware of the privilege of what I have before I say this. Your, the confidence in the numbers is going to allow you to feel more confident and increasing the budget. And so first off, they probably aren't super confident in where they are. So we have to, we have to start there to fix that. Say, say we get to a point where like, yeah, I understand this is where it can make sense. But that's the baseline. The difference between a really good media buyer and this is a little tongue in cheek. The difference between a really good media buyer and a bad media buyer is that a really good media buyer knows how to spend money. Very loaded paragraph. The reason they said they've seen the scenarios in which they should increase the budget and they've seen the scenarios in which they should reduce the budget. And a lot of this is reassurance of what we do. We call it the accordion view. The accordion view is the day of you're making decisions today. Today is actually those aren't the decisions. The decisions you're making today are actually based upon what has been happening for the past week. So you're decision we have three decisions on each day. If it's working, I either increase the budget. If it's not working, I decrease the budget. Or if it's too soon to tell, I leave it be then I accordion out. I go to the past three days of trend. Spend has been budgets being exhausted. The metrics around cart, the cost of cart, the metrics around cost per click. The metrics around CPM are trending in a stable or decline to the positive direction. It's getting more cost effective than I accordion out again to seven days. And we still see that trend. Maybe at the beginning it was too expensive and it wasn't hitting or it stopped spending for a couple of days. So the further you accordion out and then you come back into the day today and make a decision because now I go today this looks good. Why does it look good? Because baseball in the last three days, the trend of conversion has increased. The amount of budget being spent on this at is increased or stayed the same. And the performance of the carts have been steadily at a place where this will be profitable on the next conversion, next purchase. So this constant view of today, but today, but three plus seven. But today plus three plus seven, but 14, it is a muscle and it's a routine of habit of checking. We were shocked that we do day to day, we do hourly updates, right? We do hourly updates when you're when you're dropping a mill a mill a month, which would This isn't peak in July and August, to last year before we went into a retail expansion. That's important. Now I don't think people will spend, if you're spending $100,000 a month, I don't know if you need hourly, it'd be cool. But what are you really making decisions on at that point? The more channels you have, the more updates you need because the different type of opportunity, potential scale, I think that's where it gets the more intense. When you are getting an hourly update on performance, you start to realize that a change that I make at 7 a.m. will dramatically, the change I made at increasing budget at 7 a.m., if not reviewed by noon, and if not reviewed by 3 p.m. in your time zone, will result in you ruining a profitable day. That's crazy. I think that's what, and it's manual. This is also a very, very important thing to me. AI comes, it makes it a lot more easier for you to ask a couple questions. I love sidekick from Shopify. I think I use this on a daily basis. I'm like, can you give me like re-changing customers for some new customers? I love sidekick. I think it's great. We use cloud, we use a couple of the tools. I don't have anything custom. But I want these people pulling every single day. I want them to see the numbers. I want them, I want the scenario to come to me after like, I want it to be a dashboard interactive. Sure, it can be pretty sure. But I want them to be like inputting, we spent this on meta yesterday. We acquired this many AOV subscribers, et cetera. And I want them to see it, because you got to be in it if not, you're not really in it. You're not really operating. You're just, you're playing. So I think you really broke down like a really good framework for founders if they want to scale. But one thing I want to talk to you about is, agency's founders don't understand their own numbers. Oh God, okay. And what a founders need to know before handing over their ad spend. And you, you know, you have many different agencies. You know, found operators. This is going to be an incredible membership that we're launching. We're going to help founders know their numbers, scale up. You know, what they need to know. Yeah, I hear you on this one. So as an agency owner, we will lose more than we will win. If the founder comes in and says like, a rose needs to be a three X. Right. Like, okay, okay. Like, like, how did you get there? There's three X at 100,000 to spend three X at 400,000 and spend like the, the, the, the conversation, the narrative around like, your rose is this, your rose. Like, this is important. Rose doesn't mean shit. Rose is what the dashboard is telling you. You look at triple whale, you look at Northpeem, you look at meta, you look at Google, you look at Snapchat, you look at Shopify. They're all getting weird stuff. They're all on different attributes. You can trust them. And then they're all ganing to show you that they've got you return. Yes, you keep, you stay in the dashboard. Yeah, you keep it in the refresh there. So on the agency side, when, so say, and this is kind of like, where this is rooted in, is contribution dollars cash available to deploy money in the bank account. What is shop, what is your shop if I pay out, it's looking like, like, what is the net revenue that you're able to, that you're, you predict that you're going to be able to, to use for, for the day to day working capital. I was never needing to do that. When I'm, when I'm just, he can say, I go, like, cool, what are the numbers I need to make sure I hit? Ross is this cool. Then I can spend, they always do this, spend unlimited budget on, as long as you're getting a two X or three X such a bullshit, because that, that, all that means to me is either, a two things, actually, I'll take the back, two two things. It means that they know the numbers so well, so well, that they go, just look at this one number right here. Ross, okay? Or they don't know at all, and they believe that it makes them feel good, because others have told them that you should be at a three X. And so as an agency, like, all right, well, I gotta understand how to do this. So we always, you take the product costs and the shipping costs, their average order value, the, their, dollars, or you can put in the team that is being, dollars being spent on the agency, the fee, has to go into the overall net profit you have to make, you go into the cost of advertising dollars. Are you, are they covering shipping? Are you covering shipping? There's so many scenarios that you have to kind of plan through that and the fluctuation of like, how much of this is new customers versus returning. So all, all, literally all of that, like we walked through all these dashboards yesterday and there's no just like one place to like plug it all in. You can get close, like you can be dangerous, but you're not gonna get specific. But if you're not specific, you're not gonna be able to spend into a confidence that is gonna make you feel like, I can't increase this, not by $20, but by $2,000 today. And it takes, it does take some handholding, it does take some everyday updating and dashboarding and checking. But as soon as you start getting the trends over long periods of time, you feel confident. For instance, if Al, who's my head of performance, he's gonna come to me and he's like, "Shack yesterday." We, first time customer AOV was $107. Our blended new customer, our new customer, CAC, was $65. And our CAC to LTV is 230. He can give me these three numbers. I go, okay, you could have spent $120, minimum, including product cost. And you could have allowed that CAC, so that CAC could have been 120, not 60, because I know that payback was already going to hit month zero, the month that I acquired them. And so what we were doing in the call was like, what if we spent two times, what we spent last month, and acquired two times amount of customers, what would that result in? And then you, you scenario it all out? Are they coming back in times? I think that, Dad. And I just, he's not gonna do that. Like, they just, they just won't, they don't have the time. You're renting the human, you're renting the human cow that you're getting, and it's going to allocate a little bit of mood to you. And that's it. And it's shocking. I thought, we have three agencies. I'm very proud of these agencies. I love them to death. I think the leadership team is incredible there. But we, by design, and you're paying for this, you're paying for collective knowledge and acceleration of learning, and a level of professionalism and confidence in decision making. That's an agency. That's council, right? Yeah. That's, let's say someone's running paid me, they'll use USD. I won't do the AUD 30% off on this one. Okay. USD, say someone's running paid media, but $100,000 spent client, they're doing their email themselves. You're gonna spend on an agency between $5,000 and $7,500. Maybe that includes creative, maybe they get edits, whatever. Or, the $5,000 to $7,500, you put towards ad spend or new creative, or a portion of that's paid towards some of that can look over your shoulder, allow you to get the confidence to make these decisions. You pay a fraction of that 15, 2000, 2500, and now you are in control of everything. But that's literally a net save of an average contract, six months. Yeah. Do it in the mouth. Thousands of dollars, you're just blue. Yeah. So dude, this one I'm really pumped to talk about. I could talk to you about this all day. It gets me really fun. Dude, we could talk about all day. You have just absolutely just throw a straight fire on Facebook ads, the technical setup, how to scale in 2026. I want to quickly just touch on founder operators because this is a community we're launching, right? And we are so excited to build this incredible special community where we're gonna help you really kind of go through, learn the numbers, build that marketing strength in-house if you want to learn it. And so what does it mean to you to be an operator and why should people seriously think about joining this community? So I think it's, I've been wanting to talk about this for a very long time. I'm not a visionary. I'm not a, I'm a partner in everything. I've, everything I've done have always been a partner in it, right? There's a reason why this isn't like a big Nick Chacow for a shenanigan thing, dude. I believe I'm incredible. I'm an incredible support system. I'm an incredible manager and an incredible executor, which by definition all those three things are all into an operator. I like the day-to-day, I like the management of the team. I like the incredibly conversation. I like the incredible deep hard conversations of the shit you have to do. And also what I would say, I'm always on a pursuit of my locker room. Growing up in playing sports, growing up in playing in groups, I want to be like around common beliefs and interests of people doing that's why I love impression events, that's why I love community around areas of interest for myself. And when there's, when, if it wasn't for e-commerce, if it wasn't for online marketing, if it wasn't for agency, if it wasn't for digital, I would be a high school soccer coach at modern day high school in Orange County, California. I'd be doing, and nothing's wrong with that. That'd be awesome. But instead, I've been able to, I'm here, been able to influence and help a lot, a lot of founders in this world. And you start to realize the more that you do this thing, and everybody in your life has no idea what it is that you do. They see you open a computer. I love my wife to death 17 years. She's still like, I don't know what you do. I hear you talking and yapping in the phone all the time, but I don't know what you do. When you have a community that you only have to say a couple words and they fully understand what it is that you're going through and then have actual critical feedback or an opinion on it. Just do it, just mean a lot more. Yeah, so look, dude, we are synthesizing the framework, the source, the system, the blueprint. It's going to be a really special community founder operators. We have to work towards wrapping up, but if you guys enjoy this, I just want to say thank you, Nick. You've given us just an absolute masterclass on Facebook ads. I hope you guys enjoyed this. And if you guys want to find out more, you can go to founder.com, forward slash operators, Nick is our operator in residence. There's so much more coming soon, but thank you so much, Nick. This was great to have you. It's been awesome this past week, just hanging out, learning from you and building this amazing friendship. Thank you, brother. Hey, founder, fam. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. This podcast is 100% free. We work so hard to go out and find the most successful founders and entrepreneurs all around the globe. So your feedback helps us grow, improve and even bring on more incredible guests and insights. So if you have a second, please take a moment and leave us a review. It really means a lot to me and the founder team. It makes so much of a difference. Thank you again for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode.