Modern Creator
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Matthew Larsen · YouTube

The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts

A three-hour slide course arguing that the offer is only one of seven linked decisions, and that industry choice and cash-collected unit economics decide whether it ever scales.

Posted
yesterday
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
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204
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Big Idea

The argument in one line.

An offer only scales when it sits inside a real industry, targets a precisely defined buyer, and cash-collects at least twice what it costs to acquire and fulfill each customer.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • You run a service business (agency, consultancy, lead gen, done-for-you) and growth has stalled even though your ads and funnel look fine.
  • You serve e-commerce brands, SaaS companies, agencies, coaches or 'small businesses' and every client feels like starting from scratch.
  • You have a profitable offer but keep running out of cash when you try to spend more on ads.
  • You are choosing a niche or rebuilding your front-end offer and want scorecards to rate the options instead of guessing.
  • Your ads bring in leads that are too small or too early to buy what you actually sell.
SKIP IF…
  • You sell physical products or run a local brick-and-mortar shop; almost every example is a white-collar service sold with paid ads and sales calls.
  • You want upsell, back-end or recurring-offer design; the course deliberately covers only the front-end cold-traffic offer.
  • You want a quick checklist; this is three hours of slide-by-slide theory with one hypothetical business as the worked example.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Most offer advice tweaks the promise, price and guarantee, but the offer is only one of seven connected decisions: industry, ICP, offer, unit economics, big idea, messaging and proof. Industry sets the ceiling, because in a real industry one winning ad or process can be copied to every client, while 'non-industries' like e-commerce, SaaS and agencies force custom work every time. The offer should be something buyers legally, functionally or competitively must buy, scored on perceived value and on what it does for your own business. The hard rule is cash-collecting at least 2x acquisition plus fulfillment cost upfront, which makes growth self-funding. Then a belief-based big idea, exact customer language, dozens of angles and four tiers of proof carry it to market.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 01:20

01 · Cold open and credentials

1,800 offers reviewed, fewer than 10 built to scale. The course promise, the downloadable presentation, and the presenter's 12 years in lead generation.

01:20 – 09:44

02 · The marketing system and the Core Seven

Traffic, capture, conversion and offers form the funnel; above it sit seven linked decisions. The Core Seven count for 80% of results and the funnel for 20%. Running example introduced: an agency selling leads to residential HVAC companies.

09:44 – 28:20

03 · Industry: real industries vs non-industries

Why the boat matters more than the rowing. Non-industries force custom work per client; real industries let one learning compound across every client, shown in an e-commerce vs roofing agency profit comparison.

28:20 – 42:57

04 · Industry scorecard

Six criteria scored out of 30: customer LTV, ease of reach, market size, significant pain, spending power, market direction. Worked ratings for wealth management, managed IT, roofing, restaurants, print newsletters and HVAC.

42:57 – 57:15

05 · ICP: who you sell to inside the industry

Industry is the market, ICP is the buyer inside it. Scale by moving the ICP upmarket, find two to five traits shared by 80% of past customers, then map problems, circumstances and outcomes by customer level.

57:15 – 1:13:30

06 · Offers: sell what people must buy

The three beliefs every purchase requires, the legally, functionally and competitively must-buy ladder, the five things every offer must do, and translating time saved or risk reduced into a dollar ROI.

1:13:30 – 1:35:56

07 · Offers: value formula, mechanism and guarantees

Dream outcome, perceived likelihood, time delay and effort applied to the HVAC offer. A unique mechanism is just a believable explanation. Guarantee mistakes, and why not to sell done-for-you services to first-timers.

1:35:56 – 1:53:09

08 · Offers: perception and the two-part scorecard

Perception equals reality, so value you never state doesn't exist to the buyer. Part A scores the offer from the customer's side out of 40; Part B scores it for the business: 2x economics, standardization, five-year relevance, fit with the main offer.

1:53:09 – 2:06:40

09 · Unit economics: cash collected vs profit

Profit on paper versus cash in hand, why breakeven still can't scale, and the rule to cash-collect 2x acquisition plus fulfillment cost upfront. Diagnostic benchmarks when you miss it.

2:06:40 – 2:13:11

10 · Unit economics: capacity, selling air and the three tiers

Once cash is solved, fulfillment capacity is the constraint, so standardize and move toward low marginal cost. Tier 1, 2 and 3 offers defined, with the HVAC pay-per-lead math landing in tier 3.

2:13:11 – 2:28:55

11 · Big idea

One unifying belief behind all marketing, captured from what the ICP already believes. Ten checks scored out of 50, with Shelby Sapp, Jeremy Haynes, De Beers and the HVAC example rated.

2:28:55 – 2:38:00

12 · Messaging: exact language and in-market buyers

Messaging sets targeting on ad platforms. Research the buyer's exact words from calls and reviews; the auto insurance story where price turned out to be irrelevant. In-market vs out-of-market buyers.

2:38:00 – 2:52:55

13 · Scaling with angles

Start with a direct offer and raise spend about 20% a week until it breaks, then scale horizontally with new demographics or vertically with 50+ angles. Workhorse vs niche angles, customer lingo, and a five-point angle scorecard.

2:52:55 – 3:00:23

14 · Proof: four tiers

Buyers pick the safest option. Language, content, evidence and time in business each answer a different question in the buyer's mind; build three monster content assets and sort evidence by objection.

3:00:23 – 3:02:57

15 · The self-improving loop

How the system keeps compounding after launch: objections into marketing, proof sorted by objection, call language into ads, lower costs, higher prices, trimmed offer, refined ICP.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Out of roughly 1,800 offers reviewed, fewer than 10 had the potential to reach eight or nine figures per year.
  • The same offer, skill set and team can produce 10x better results just by moving to a better industry.
  • E-commerce, SaaS, agencies, coaches, consultants and 'local businesses' are non-industries: the clients share a label but not the problems, so nothing you learn transfers.
  • The real reason to pick an industry is fulfillment, not marketing: past $1-3M a year, delivering consistent results is the bottleneck, not getting clients.
  • The test of a real industry is whether you can copy one client's ads, funnel and sales script, swap the logo, and get the same result for the next client.
  • Most service businesses scale by selling the same thing to wealthier clients, not by adding more clients at the same price.
  • Look at your last 100 customers and find two to five traits that 80% of them share; that is your ICP, whatever you thought it was.
  • Nobody buys until they understand the offer, believe it solves their problem, and believe you are the one to deliver it.
  • Selling something people legally must buy removes the education and belief steps, so all your marketing can go into why they should buy from you.
  • A unique mechanism does not need a clever name; its only job is to make a reasonable prospect nod and think 'that makes sense.'
  • A guarantee of 'or we work for free until we do' makes no sense: if you already failed, why would the client want you to keep working?
  • Only guarantee outcomes you fully control, so a lead-gen agency can guarantee booked calls but not closed clients.
  • The costliest objections never reach a sales call, because they stop people from booking at all.
  • An offer can be profitable and still cash-flow negative, and that alone will stop you from scaling ad spend.
  • Breaking even on the first payment still caps growth, because the sales cycle forces you to float ad spend for weeks.
  • Cash-collecting 2x your acquisition plus fulfillment cost on the first sale lets every customer pay for themselves and the next one.
  • You cannot create belief in a market, only capture one the buyer already holds and connect it to your offer.
  • On algorithmic ad platforms, the message itself chooses the audience, because the platform reads the ad and the pixel learns from whoever responds.
  • Rewriting auto insurance ads around claim-denial complaints instead of price took one business from about $250K to $3M a month in four months.
  • Two ad angles that are 80-90% alike can still perform very differently, so test both instead of merging them.
  • Proof comes in four tiers: speaking the buyer's language, content deep enough to use for free, results and testimonials, and years in business.
Takeaway

Your offer is one of seven decisions.

THE CORE SEVEN

Pick an industry where results copy between clients, sell buyers something they must have, and collect twice your costs upfront before polishing the promise, guarantee or ads.

02The marketing system and the Core Seven
  • Treat the offer as one of seven linked decisions; a weak industry or broken unit economics caps results no matter how good the promise sounds.
  • Fix the Core Seven before funnel metrics, since most click-through, show-rate and booking problems trace back to one of them.
03Industry: real industries vs non-industries
  • Test your industry by asking whether one client's winning ads, funnel and sales script would work unchanged for the next client.
  • Expect margins and retention to suffer in non-industries like e-commerce, SaaS and agencies, because every client needs custom research and delivery.
04Industry scorecard
  • Score candidate industries on customer LTV, reach, market size, pain, spending power and direction; a 1 or 2 on any core factor is a warning.
  • Aim for roughly 10,000 potential buyers in your ICP, and plan to leave declining markets rather than fight them.
05ICP: who you sell to inside the industry
  • Keep industry and ICP separate: roofing is the market, while the head of marketing at a multi-state roofing company is the buyer.
  • Define the ICP from data by finding two to five traits shared by at least 80% of your last 100 customers.
  • Research problems, circumstances and outcomes at the right customer level, because small and large buyers in one industry want completely different things.
06Offers: sell what people must buy
  • Move closer to something buyers legally, functionally or competitively must buy, so marketing only has to prove you are the right provider.
  • Convert every benefit into dollars for the buyer, such as cost per hour saved or years of avoided fines, instead of leaving the math to them.
07Offers: value formula, mechanism and guarantees
  • Raise perceived likelihood with specific, industry-matched proof, such as results from 27 similar companies, rather than broad claims.
  • Give customers a meaningful quick win within 24 to 48 hours, and remove any task the customer does that isn't strictly necessary.
  • Never guarantee a range, an outcome you don't control, or 'free work until we deliver'; guarantee something specific or nothing.
  • Avoid selling done-for-you services to buyers who have never used that service before, however large their company is.
08Offers: perception and the two-part scorecard
  • State time to first value, effort and risk reduction explicitly in ads and sales pages, because unstated value does not exist to prospects.
  • Score the offer twice: once from the customer's side and once for your business on economics, standardization and five-year relevance.
09Unit economics: cash collected vs profit
  • Separate profit from cash collected; a profitable offer paid monthly can still leave you thousands in the hole per new customer.
  • Design the front-end offer to collect at least 2x acquisition plus fulfillment cost upfront, so each sale funds the next one.
  • If you miss 2x, check gross margin, effective hourly rate, application, booking, show and close rates to find the broken stage.
10Unit economics: capacity, selling air and the three tiers
  • After cash flow is solved, fulfillment capacity becomes the limit, which only a fully standardized offer can scale.
  • Push toward low marginal fulfillment cost with SOPs, templates and automation, so collected revenue rises faster than delivery effort.
11Big idea
  • Choose one big idea built on a belief your ICP already holds, since changing beliefs is far harder than connecting to existing ones.
  • Score the big idea on simplicity, relevance, surprise, concreteness, credibility, emotion, stories, offer logic, consistency and ownability.
  • Repeat the same core belief across ads, content, funnel and proof so marketing compounds instead of resetting every campaign.
12Messaging: exact language and in-market buyers
  • Write ads in the buyer's own words from call recordings and reviews, because messaging decides who ad platforms show the ad to.
  • Research complaints before assuming the pain point; in auto insurance, claim handling mattered far more than price.
  • Build angles for out-of-market buyers too, so the 95-99% who aren't shopping remember you when they are ready.
13Scaling with angles
  • Run a plain direct offer first and raise spend around 20% per week until returns stop, then add angles or demographic variants.
  • Generate 50+ angles, keep near-duplicates separate, and expect about four broad workhorse angles to carry most of the budget.
  • Match the buyer's vocabulary to their level; sophisticated companies talk contribution margin and payback period, not ROAS.
14Proof: four tiers
  • Build all four proof tiers: exact language, deep free content, organized evidence and years in business, since each answers a different doubt.
  • Sort testimonials and case studies by the objection they answer instead of piling up unsorted screenshots.
15The self-improving loop
  • Turn sales call objections and language into marketing, and let proof accumulate around each objection over time.
  • Keep cutting fulfillment cost, raising price as capacity fills, dropping unused offer parts, and narrowing the ICP around the best customers.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

ICP (ideal customer profile)
The specific buyer inside an industry that an offer is built for, described by a few shared traits plus the problems, circumstances and outcomes that buyer has in common.
Non-industry
A label that looks like a market but groups businesses with little in common, such as e-commerce or SaaS, so learnings and processes from one client rarely transfer to another.
Front-end offer
The first thing a business sells to cold traffic, people who don't already know or trust it, usually through ads or outreach, as opposed to upsells or recurring services.
Unit economics
The per-customer math behind an offer: what it costs to acquire and fulfill one customer, what that customer pays, how fast the cash arrives, and the resulting margin.
Cash collected
The money actually received at the point of sale, as opposed to total contract value; a $30,000 deal paid at $2,500 a month collects $2,500 upfront.
CAC (customer acquisition cost)
The total cost of winning one new customer, including ad spend, sales commissions, tools and labor spent before the sale closes.
LTV (lifetime value)
The total revenue or gross profit a business earns from one customer over the whole relationship.
Value Formula
A model for how valuable an offer feels: dream outcome times perceived likelihood of achievement, divided by time delay times effort and sacrifice.
Unique mechanism
The plain, believable explanation of why an offer should produce its promised result, meant to make a prospect accept the logic rather than to sound novel.
Risk reversal
Anything that shifts the downside of a purchase from buyer to seller, such as a guarantee, limited scope or low commitment, reducing what the customer loses if it fails.
Time to first value
How long a customer waits after paying before receiving the first meaningful win, which can be much shorter than the time to the full result.
Big idea
One core belief that all of a company's marketing repeats and reinforces, chosen so that once a buyer accepts it, the offer looks like the obvious solution.
In-market buyer
A prospect actively shopping for a solution right now; typically only a small share of a market, with the rest out-of-market until their situation changes.
Horizontal scaling
Growing ad spend by keeping the same message but producing versions for different demographics, such as different ages, genders or ethnicities of on-screen presenters.
Vertical scaling
Growing ad spend by going deeper into the same buyer with many new angles, each built on a different problem, circumstance or desired outcome.
Workhorse angle
A broad ad message that can absorb large daily budgets and carries most of an account's spend, supported by many narrower niche angles.
VSL (video sales letter)
A recorded sales presentation, usually on a landing page, that explains an offer and asks the viewer to buy or book a call.
Theory of constraints
The principle that a system's output is capped by its single weakest part, so improving anything other than that bottleneck changes little.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:53linkUltimate Offers Course presentation (free download) ↗
00:53productHyperoptimal App
00:53productLead Generation Academy
03:38book$100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
10:02bookWarren Buffett shareholder letter ('what boat you are in')
2:16:53bookMade to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
2:23:35channelShelby Sapp (big idea example)
2:25:45channelJeremy Haynes (big idea example)
2:33:26toolTrustpilot (customer language research)
3:02:57channelMore Matthew Larsen (second channel) ↗
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:00
“I've seen about 1,800 offers personally, and fewer than 10 of them had the potential to scale to multi eight figures and nine figures per year.”
number-driven cold open that stands alone→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
12:22
“The same offer, the same skill set, the same team can get 10x better results in a better industry.”
one-line contrarian claim, no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
19:30
“Having an industry is primarily for fulfillment reasons.”
reverses the common 'niche down for marketing' advice→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
45:28
“You actually make more money and you scale your business by scaling the ICP.”
clear rule with an obvious follow-up example→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:00:25
“The greatest lesson, the biggest meta is selling stuff that people must buy.”
short, quotable thesis for the offers section→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:25:48
“Unique mechanism is simply the believable explanation for why your offer should produce the result. Nothing more, nothing less.”
debunks a jargon-heavy marketing concept in two sentences→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:30:31
“Either have a real guarantee or don't have one at all.”
punchy verdict after the 'work for free' rant→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:37:44
“The deadliest objections, the objections that cost you the most money in your business are not the ones you hear on a sales call.”
surprising reframe that invites a payoff→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:59:36
“Our goal on our offer is to cash collect at least 2x fulfillment and customer acquisition costs.”
the course's single most important rule, stated plainly→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:16:02
“So we cannot create belief. We can only capture it.”
eight words, fully standalone→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
2:29:42
“So your messaging is going to determine your targeting.”
counterintuitive claim for anyone running paid ads→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
2:38:08
“A lot of the time, the best copy to sell a horse is horse for sale.”
memorable image for direct-offer ads→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:55:09
“If you can articulate their problem better than they can, that is the strongest proof of all.”
clean closing line on proof→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:57:46
“That taco stand down the street didn't survive 20 years by poisoning their neighbors, right?”
funny, concrete analogy for time-in-business proof→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script

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metaphoranalogystory
So for the past few years, I've seen about 1 ,800 offers personally, and fewer than 10 of them had the potential to scale to multi eight figures and nine figures per year, and many of them actually did. The problem is that almost every course, every book, every video about creating offers teaches you just the same basic crap while leaving out the actual really important high -level decisions that will determine how big your offer can actually scale.
So in this video, I'm going to walk you through the entire process of building an offer that can make you an absolute disgusting amount of money when you do it right. So this will be the ultimate offers course. So this course is going to be about three hours long.
You're going to learn everything you need to build a huge business. We're going to go into very in -depth theory, frameworks, examples and action steps. If you want a link to this presentation that I'm going through, you can get that in the description and the pinned comment.
It'll send it right to your email. If you don't know who I am, you've never watched one of my videos before. My name is Matthew Larson.
I'm 30 years old at the time of recording. I'm from Canada, but I live in Dubai and I've been in the lead generation space for 12 years. I have grown and sold three agencies and one newsletter business in that timeframe.
And nowadays, I am the founder of Hyperoptimal App and the founder of Lead Generation Academy. So, this is essentially the marketing system that we will want to build if we are in any form of service -based business. At the top, we have four ways to drive traffic, paid ads, content, outreach, and partnerships.
In the middle, we have different landing pages, lead magnets, email flows to capture and nurture leads. Near the bottom, we have different conversion mechanisms, our webinars, our VSLs, our newsletters, our communities, our appointment setters, etc. to get people to book a call.
And then at the bottom, we have our offers. So our offers are the natural last step in the process. But because they're the last step, they're kind of like the foundation too, if you invert that.
And our offer is going to make everything easier in this system. So as far as your business goes, there are seven things that work together to really determine if you're going to basically go to the moon or you're going to basically speed run reputational ruin or just stagnate out of kind of a very small business.
And these are your industry, your ICP, your offer, your unit economics, your big idea, your messaging, and your proof. And we'll notice that your actual offer is just one of these seven things in the core seven. And that is really the problem.
If you've never heard of someone in another video, or a book, or a blog post, or whoever's talking about offers, maybe you paid someone to help you, if they're not talking about your offer specifically in the context of your industry, ICP, the unit economics, the big idea, the messaging, and the proof behind that offer, I would probably just not really take them seriously.
Nothing else is going to matter. Anyone can just... you know blah blah blah apply value formula get a good offer but the other seven the other six things are actually what builds your business for you so those seven things are going to sit basically above our marketing system we have our literal offer where we're putting it down here but all of these things kind of encapsulate and incorporate this system it's kind of like this system is the fish and those seven things are the water it's just so you know, it just surrounds everything you do to such a degree that everything becomes inseparable and you don't even notice they exist a lot of the time.
So like I said, your offer is only one part of the business and people focus so much on that. It's really all you hear about, especially if you're in really kind of hardcore marketing circles, you know, offer, offer, offer. And we will blame Alex Hermosi for that, for writing a bestselling offer book.
Terrible. And of course, Your offer is extremely important, but it is just one of the core seven things.
And in most cases, we don't actually need to make bigger promises or lower our price or have a stronger guarantee. We can and we should fix the fundamentals of our business outside of our offer, and then everything will kind of sort itself out. So the seven things that control your destiny are your industry.
So to give you an example of that, like roofers would be an industry. They're your ICP, which stands for your ideal client profile or ideal customer profile. That is separate from the industry.
A lot of people think of those as the same thing. The industry is roofers. The ICP would be like a VP of marketing at a roofing company, for example.
We know what your offer is. That is what you are trying to sell to people. The unit economics is actually the math, the profit margins, the customer acquisition costs, the cash flow behind your offer.
The big idea is... The main marketing message that essentially will make your offer make sense and be desirable. Your messaging are all the different angles you can basically take in your paid ads and all that kind of stuff to attract attention to yourself.
And then proof is proof. Screenshots, logos, case studies, testimonials, reviews, you name it. And most people only focus on number three, which is the offer and maybe the proof.
But to me, those are the kind of the lower level. in the amount of importance if you're really going to try to rank these things. The very important thing to understand about your offer as it relates to all these things is all seven are inseparably connected and all of those things are only good or bad as they relate to each other.
We're going to evaluate them as separate things throughout this course and they are separate things but none of these work in isolation and we have to evaluate how well we're doing for each in relation to the others. and the theory of constraints applies heavily to this you could have a you know you could have a great industry a great icp a great offer a great message and great big idea and then great proof but if the unit economics behind it are trash you know it's not really going to work out very well so we want to know that these core 7 they're both one -time setups but they're also never -ending loops And I made a graphic like that to show you later in the presentation.
But you're going to choose your original industry, but then eventually you're going to also be improving that by becoming more and more known and established inside of it. You're going to choose your ICP originally, but you're going to continually refine your ICP and go up market as you get more proof. You're going to make your original offer, but you'll tailor it and improve it based on customer feedback, objections, desires, learnings, and more.
Your unit economics, you're going to set that original price, but as you get more and more practice, your speed should increase, your cost should decrease, and you're going to raise your price as you get more proof and demand. You're going to choose your original big idea, and it will become more effective and compound and become associated with you more and more and more as you repeat it over days, weeks, months, and years.
You'll have your original messaging, but over time, you're going to add more and more angles to help you appeal to a broader and broader audience. And then, of course, You probably have some proof right now, but you should be stacking all forms of proof as you grow and get recognition in your industry.
So this is an offers course, but we have to get all seven of these things right if we want a long -lasting, very valuable business that maybe we could even sell one day if we desire. You don't have to do that. We could just keep it, but I'd predict that most people watching this course...
are already going to have an industry. Obviously, they're already going to have an ICP. They're already going to have some of this stuff.
But even if you think you have some of this stuff, it's worth taking the time to watch this and thinking about if you are on the right trajectory and you're making the right decisions. And especially in regards to your industry, which is the thing we're going to talk about first, because your industry is what really determines the potential of your business.
We should also note before we dive into it that. As much as you can obsess over your click -through rates, your ad creatives, your landing page, your funnels, your show rates, how well your sales team is doing. And of course, these things are important.
Almost all of the problems in your funnel are the result of the core seven. But because these things are theoretical and high level instead of tangible things that you can measure, people will often not consider these when something goes wrong. They'll obsess over their book a call rate when...
you know, six of these seven core things are absolutely broken and then nothing is really going to work long term. So this stuff, the core seven is 80 % and your funnel is 20%. If you want to be successful, you got to get these core seven things right.
And then you obviously have to do your funnel too. Even though the core seven are 80 % and the funnel is 20%, we can't absolutely botch our funnel either. We have to do everything well, but we should focus more on the core seven than our actual tactics.
So in this course, we're gonna talk about the front end offer only. We're not gonna talk about any upsells, recurring services. If you have that stuff, great.
We're only going to be talking about the intro cold traffic offer and that's the one that you do in ads. Throughout the business and each of the core seven parts, I am going to basically give you an example so we can work with one thing the way through. The example I chose is to be a marketing agency for residential HVAC companies.
So basically people who stall. air conditioning and houses. And if we have this one example, that will allow you to see how it progresses throughout the course and works in reality instead of just theory.
So the first thing we'll talk about of the seven is your industry. And your industry actually matters a lot more than your offer. And so many people focus only on their offer and they just...
How can I improve my offer? Over and over and over again. They kind of get obsessive about it.
But your industry is actually more important and it is so important because your industry is what determines the potential of your business. I really love a quote usually attributed to Warren Buffett from a letter to one of his shareholders one year. And it says, it matters more what boat you are in rather than how hard you row.
And in the letter, or at least the popular version of the story. He talked about how in university he had a classmate who he was very close with who was smarter than him, harder working, and more focused.
And then that classmate, or they both graduated, and the classmate went on to have a very good career in the steel business, but Warren Buffett became Warren Buffett, right? The steel industry versus high finance at the time. There's nothing wrong with the steel business, but it cannot compare to the overall high potential.
And this is... A very good example that applies on a micro level, basically to everyone watching this video in terms of your industry. And to understand why this is true, I basically want to visualize that you are a marketing agency, but you could do this with whatever service that you want, accounting, legal, marketing, bookkeeping, videography, like whatever.
And basically... Your job here as this marketing agency is to generate leads for your clients. So we basically let you say we run Facebook ads, we build the funnel and then we do appointment setting and all of the client has to do is close the deals, right?
They do the sales. So all in all, whether we're targeting wealth managers in this example or dog walkers, our fixed cost, our offer, our team, they're basically going to be the same, aren't they? We're generating leads with Facebook ads.
Basically, the process goes Facebook ad to landing page to appointment center to sales call. That's the same in every industry. But in this example, who do you think is going to pay us more?
Wealth managers or dog walkers? And it's very, very obvious when you say it like that. But the thing that you need to understand is essentially the same cost, the same process, the same team.
And it is the same offer. We are generating leads with Facebook ads. But one is significantly better in terms of how much money you can make than the other.
And this is very, very important to understand. The same offer, the same skill set, the same team can get 10x better results in a better industry. And I've seen this so many times, both in others and myself.
I've seen people who have the same offer, the same skill set, the same process, the same team, and all that kind of stuff, switch their industry and really almost instantly 2x, 3x, 10x, and sometimes even more overnight. For a personal example, this basically happened to me almost overnight when I sold my e -commerce agency and then went into insurance, both auto, home, life and Medicare.
Previously, I never did more than 13 million revenue in a year in an agency. And basically the next year doing this full time, I went to 35 million with a smaller team and less work and pretty much the exact same skill set. And you see this quite a bit when someone switches their niche from coaches, consultants, agency owners into a better niche such as home services, insurance, healthcare, law, all of that kind of stuff.
And it's pretty insane that you can literally do nothing except change the industry and sometimes get a result that is orders of magnitude larger. And that is why I have this part in this course and feel very safe claiming that your industry is the most important part. Of course, like there's certain businesses, maybe some people watching this where it's not really possible to change your industry like that.
Like you, you're a banana farmer. It's very difficult to just become an apple farmer overnight. You are a roofer.
You can't really just become a kitchen remodeler overnight or you have some sort of brick and mortar store. You're locked in. And I understand that completely.
But for those who have kind of more skilled. digital white collar service, this is something to very much consider both philosophically and theoretically, but also actually, literally in reality. The thing that I think is going to be the most important part of this section of the course, but maybe even the most important part of the course for a lot of people watching, just knowing my average viewer, is that the number one reason that people have a hard time in a marketing agency or a consultancy or an accounting business or like all of these kind of stuff is because they're serving what I refer to as a non -industry.
And this is an industry that seems like an industry, but it's actually not, hence the title. And the most popular non -industries are e -commerce, SaaS, agencies, coaches, consultants, local businesses, or if you just say that my target market is small businesses in general, like that is an egregious example. So if you have, you know, one of these as a like if you're in one of these industries and you just feel like you're trying really hard, you're actually doing all the right things, but it's just harder than it should be to grow.
And you just can't quite put your finger on it. This is the reason. And once you see it, you'll probably be very depressed.
So let's let's get to depressing you real quick. Let's do this with the example of e -commerce because there's no shortage of e -commerce agencies, e -commerce software, people who serve e -commerce because e -commerce is a huge non -industry. And I know this because I have grown and sold three e -commerce agencies, Facebook ads, Amazon, and CRO.
So I know this from experience. I'm not simply being a hater or trying to have a controversial opinion on the internet. This is exactly the reason I am not in e -commerce anymore.
The fact of the matter that when you're in the e -commerce niche or the e -commerce industry, e -commerce stores have basically nothing in common with each other other than the fact that their website is hosted on Shopify and other than the fact that they sell a product. So let's take an example. Let's pretend we have a paid ad agency in e -commerce because I've done this before.
Let's just say we have a bunch of clients here. Well, maybe we'll have more about this as just an example. Let's say we have a collagen client, an apparel client, a home goods client, a freeze -dried candy client, a protein powder client, a beef jerky client, and a beverage client.
And then, you know, there's so many niches, like we could just... We also have a boat cover client, like whatever, right? So let's just say this.
The problem with non -industries and e -commerce in this example is if you find a great ad that absolutely prints... for your collagen client, because we're doing paid ads in this example, you can't simply just recreate this ad for apparel or home goods or any of your other clients and just expect it to print as well. It just doesn't work like that.
When we have some success and we get some learnings, we might kind of learn some general lessons, but a lot of the time, especially when we have multiple clients, we're not really... like paying attention the way we would if it was our business only, if you know what I mean. A lot of the time we're not even going to know ourselves why an ad is successful with a high degree of certainty.
We just know that in a lot of cases the ad is doing well. And when you try to like break it down and evaluate it, it's very easy to come to the wrong conclusion. And that's the part that's problematic with data in general.
You know, 10 different people can look at the same data and come to 10 different conclusions. It's just... part of being a human and learning, I guess.
But the really fucked up part is not only could you not use that same ad for apparel or home goods or other stuff, but a lot of the time you couldn't even recreate the same ad for a different collagen brand and expect the same results because everybody in e -commerce has different branding, different marketing, different value props, different customer base, different price points, et cetera.
Nothing in e -commerce or any non -industry will just work. like this in the way I'm describing, no matter how hard you try. Like the other non -industries, SaaS, software as a subscription, has absolutely nothing in common with a different SaaS other than the fact that they're SaaS, right?
It's the same with agencies. An email marketing agency has nothing in common with a Facebook ad agency versus a Google ad agency, even if they are in the same customer base, so to speak. It's the same with coaches.
It's the same with local businesses. And this is an insanely huge problem when you're trying to grow. So if something doesn't feel right, this is probably it.
And a lot of people don't understand that we choose a niche, we choose an industry primarily for fulfillment purposes. A lot of people will say that we need to niche down to make it easier to do marketing and get clients. That is true, but having an industry is primarily for fulfillment reasons.
And I'm going to show you why this is true. Having your industry like does make it easier to get clients and you become known in your industry and your messaging and your marketing and your assets and all of your stuff are all pointed towards your industry. But the primary reason is for the scalability of our fulfillment.
Because once we get past kind of the beginner stages of our business. Getting clients is no longer really the problem. And this is especially true when you get to the $1 to $3 million per year range.
It's fulfilling all of these clients while maintaining quality that is the problem. And this only gets more and more complicated as you scale. So if you're watching this and you're stuck, especially in the $1 to $3 million per year range, and you are serving a non -industry, I assure you that this is the problem.
And this is why... It never feels easier month after month, year after year, etc. So essentially, I made this graphic here.
So if you're just listening, look at the screen to describe why non -industries are so bad. It's because you never develop compounding learnings and compounding processes and all of that kind of stuff. So in a non -industry, let's take this as e -commerce.
You know, like these are a representation of our clients. They might be the same thing, I guess. You could say they're in e -commerce, but they're all completely different.
You know, one's a circle, one's a square, one's a triangle, one's a... I don't know what a six -sided thing is, and I don't want to say whatever this shape is. Versus in a real industry, and we'll go in a roofing example, every single client is the same.
So if one client gets a learning... you can basically apply that to all clients. So let's get there.
We are going to do this example right now. So let's just say we have a paid ads agency for e -commerce and we have a paid ad agency for roofing. And let's compare it because we're just going to be, in this example, running Facebook ads for both.
Roofing is a real industry. E -commerce is not. E -commerce is this non -industry that we're talking about.
We've already gone over why e -commerce feels so tough for a lot of people and it is tough in reality. So let's flip this.
Let's basically do the same thing. What happens if we find the same winning ad for our roofing marketing agency? And we can do this in one sentence, right?
Every time we find a winning ad or a winning landing page or VSL or email or appointment setting message or sales tactic, we can apply the exact same thing to every single one of our clients the next day and all of them will benefit. exactly proportionately. So if I successfully learn to generate leads for a roofer in Los Angeles, or I'm in this business and I get a breakthrough that's 50 % better, for example, I can just clone those ads, clone that funnel, swap out the name and logo, and basically know 100 % that I can get the same results for a roofer in New York, Tampa, Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, Orlando, Salt Lake City.
you name it, and so on. And that is because roofing is a real industry. So the ideal thing that we want to do or we want to hold ourselves to in the industry department, we're going to know if we have a real industry or not, is if we can copy and paste the results between or copy and paste the setup and get the same results for every client.
And that is why we choose an industry to ensure that we're able to fulfill. If I had this roofing agency and I was doing an amazing job for one client, I would have near 100 % certainty that it would work for another client. And that is not the case in e -commerce, agencies, SaaS, all of that kind of stuff.
And like I said, in those industries, you can't even usually clone the exact same assets for the exact same business type just because there are too many different factors. It's very, very disheartening when you find yourself in one of these industries. without understanding this.
So maybe you can understand this and have a better quality of life. So if you want to scale a large business, the ability to copy and paste results in this way is going to make everything so much easier that it's actually like dirty and disgusting to think about. You are basically going to be able to have less fulfillment costs, faster time, and you're actually going to get people.
a better result because you know it's going to work just by copy and pasting versus doing everything from scratch in something like e -commerce so let's do the copy and paste results for let's just do the roofer so the research you know the common homeowner problems you know because we are going to be generating roofing leads for these basically roofers so we only have to do research once unlike e -commerce we have to do an insane research process every single time The advertising, the angle, the format, the explanation, the actual ad itself can just be reused.
The exact page structure, sales page, thank you page, application form, follow -up process in the funnel, exact same. The sales system is exactly the same because they're just roofers. And then the tracking, reporting, testing, all that kind of stuff is exactly the same.
And that is... why you have an industry and why you don't want to find yourself in a non -industry where every single thing I showed you on this list is custom for every client. So this compounds insanely over time.
And these numbers are just an example. We have to make some assumptions here, but let's just say we charge 5 ,000 per month for this basically agency, you know, versus e -commerce versus roofing. So because everything's copy and paste in roofing, You know, 70 hours in e -commerce, probably about eight hours in roofing.
You're just literally cloning something. Eight hours might be generous, wouldn't it? The delivery cost on the labor, if you're charging $50 an hour or something of that nature, $3 ,500 versus $600 here, where you can even pay a little bit more in roofing.
The other fulfillment costs are like software, all the tech, all the testing is going to be less too. Your gross profit in this example is $1 ,000 in e -commerce versus $4 ,200 in roofing. That's a 20 % profit margin versus $84.
Because everything's custom and because you don't really have any compounded learnings, a lot of the time your churn rates are higher in non -industries. So 20 % versus you basically know you're going to get that same result every time, 8 % in roofing. So that is a 5 % average customer lifetime value versus 12 .5 months.
And basically the gross profit, $5 ,000 in e -commerce over the course of this client relationship versus 52 ,000 in roofing. And this is a very, very real, this is an example and we put numbers in here, but it'd be amazing for you to see how this actually plays out in real life, especially if you are in a non -industry.
You don't know how good your quality of life could be. Because the final thing when you're in this roof and these non -industries, your quality of life is absolutely terrible because nothing actually gets easier. And then when you are in an industry, it's very, very good.
You just know that you have a license to print money, basically. The compounding sequence is when we have similar or identical customers, we get reusable learnings and processes. We get faster, more consistent delivery.
We get better results and then we get better economics because we can raise the price. And that will lead us to more money and more time to improve the business, which means more similar customers, which means more reusable. And it becomes an insane positive flywheel.
The better results you get give you more proof and help you retain people and improve your reputation and get referrals. Your team gets clearer training and better internal technology. More routine work can be handled by.
People following an established process while the most skilled people improve the process and solve harder problems. You personally have to figure out less stuff for every customer, which gives you more time back as the owner to work on acquisition and building the business itself. And as the business gets more proof and you raise prices, it becomes more profitable.
You can hire stronger employees and A players and eventually have a proper leadership team, which will. make everything better in and of itself, which will start this sequence over and over and over again. I'm not even going to depress you if you are in a non -industry by showing you the inverse of this, but I'm sure you can probably guess.
So I have a framework here to help you determine how good your industry is, just so you can know. And this is, of course, my opinion, and it's going to be basically done on the average qualified customer in the industry.
Of course, there's going to be extremes on either end. But the first thing we want to do is make sure we're not in a non -industry, if at all possible. If you're already in one and it's too late, it is what it is.
But that's criteria number one. And criteria number two is this framework. And this is how we will evaluate different industries.
So the first thing that we want to evaluate is what is our customer's LTV? Always obsessing over our LTV, right?
And our LTV is pretty damn important. So we should be obsessing over that. But also, and this has to do with some industries are better than the others and what opportunity you're in.
What is our customer's LTV, right? This goes back to that dog walker versus wealth manager example. And this kind of explains why that's so important.
Dog walker. I'm not sure. I don't have a dog and I've never hired a dog walker, but I can imagine it costs more than $50, $100 to have your dog walked at least one time, right?
So maybe if you get your dog walked for 12 weeks, generously, you might have a $600 LTV. I don't know. I'm just kind of making that up, but sounds reasonable.
Versus that wealth manager, one client, lifetime of fees, $50 ,000, $100 ,000, sometimes even more to them. So your LTV is very, very important, of course, but your client's LTV, now there's something to think about. So I'm not going to go through all of these, but at the highest level, you know, you have a huge customer LTV, $50 ,000 plus, and at the lowest level, you have a low customer LTV and...
low limited volume. And you have the same offer here, but one is going to have extremely high potential. One is going to have a hard ceiling.
So this is very, very important to consider. The second thing is how easy are these people to reach? How easily can you identify qualified prospects and get your message in front of them?
So the general ways to acquire a customer or reach a customer are paid ads, content, outreach, and partnerships. And everything we do will fall into one of these four things.
But we also need to consider how many gatekeepers stand in the way between you and the decision maker. And as you go upmarket, as your ICP goes to C -suite level people, there's always going to be a higher likelihood you run into executive assistants as a gatekeeper. That's not really what I'm talking about here.
I'm saying in general, some industries have more gatekeepers than others. Like, for example, you very much could export a list of doctors, but they're with patients all day and you're going to have to get through their secretary. That's an example.
So a very, very easy to reach, like you can basically find and reach them through multiple channels. So paid ads, content outreach, you name it, with very few gatekeepers in the way. And the very worst one is you have no real reliable way to identify.
and find these customers at all. That's not a good position to be in. And everything else kind of falls in between.
So give yourself a rating out of five here. The next is going to be market size. So how many qualified customers exist within the industry, the location, the company size you're targeting.
And then we want to compare this to how many customers we want to see if we can actually support this business. And of course, like the customer value matters here too. There might be very few hedge funds, but if you've got a hedge fund client, that's obviously very valuable.
So this kind of is going to be determinant on your ambition size too. If you just want to make a $1 million per year business, any market's big enough, even a $10 million per year business. But if you want to go for $50, $100 million, you've got to be, or even more, you have to make sure that this can support that.
So for example, let's just not... only hate on e -commerce right there's e -commerce is a massive massive market with hundreds of thousands of stores that could realistically pay you for your service so that is in that fashion it's an excellent non -industry versus the tiniest market you know dog walkers in ann arbor michigan which is a town of a hundred thousand people if you aren't american or you don't know that That's a very tiny market.
We're probably going to run out of prospects quite quickly. But usually a lot of stuff is somewhere in between. And for this, it's very important.
And we'll talk about our ICP in depth, especially in the next part. But we can't just go all Shopify stores here, for example. We have to filter Shopify stores by location, revenue size, and that kind of stuff to make this accurate.
Really, as long as you have about 10 ,000 people in your ICP, it should be okay. The next is significant pain. How painful or urgent is the problem you intend to solve?
What happens if a customer does nothing? That's a very, very important question to ask yourself when you're choosing your industry. Do they lose money?
Do they face serious consequences? Do they struggle to operate? Or can they just sit there and...
There's no real consequences. So essentially, a very good industry would be auto insurance, right? If you want to drive your vehicle, in most countries, you legally must have auto insurance.
If you drive your car without auto insurance, that is actually breaking the law. The first time you get caught, you might be fined. But if you keep doing this over and over, you have a big risk of losing your license.
I don't think that you're probably going to be thrown in jail for this, but there's very serious consequences. Another one is filing your taxes. You have to file your taxes or at an extreme example, the IRS will throw you in jail versus no serious problem.
These are a lot of the time, you know, luxury goods, but you could argue that status is a problem and they want to feel happy and status feels whatever. A good example, kind of in the mid thing. is, you know, let's go back to that doctor example.
A lot of the time, you know, in theory, doctors need leads, don't they? But a lot of the time, doctors have so many clients, or a lot of like, you can apply this to a lot of medical professions, like a good doctor, a good chiropractor, a good massage therapist, a good, you know, psychologist. Of course, they need leads in theory, but a lot of them just have so many clients already that You know, it's not necessarily that important to them to do it.
It's a real problem, but they can wait. And that's a new, like that's a middle of problem. We're definitely going to go over the significant pain in the offer section.
So we'll stay tuned for that too. The next is the spending power. Of course, like the best example is you have an amazing offer, but it's for people who are unemployed to help them find jobs.
Everything else could be amazing, but they don't have enough money to pay you. They're unemployed, right? Versus you are selling to, you know, large scale real estate developers who are going to pour tens of millions into this project.
They have a lot of spending power. So give yourself a rating. And the final one is going to be, what is the direction of your market?
Is it growing? Is it stable? Is it declining?
Right now, AI is the hot market. No matter what you have in AI almost, you get the tailwinds of this market versus print newspapers. That's a very dying industry, and it's going to be an uphill battle no matter what.
Say most of these examples or most industries you can get in are going to be a stable market, are going to be pretty neutral, and that is completely fine as well. So add your score up out of 30. I would say unless if you have anything less than neutral, I would definitely consider changing industries.
If you have a bad market, I would probably plan to quit everything that I'm doing right now and brainstorm the next opportunity. But also a lot of the time, if you have a one out of five on a lot of any of these. like a one out of five on any of them, even if the other ones are good, can really, really tank your industry.
So it's very, very important to score that and take that into account, right? If everything's great, but they have zero spending power, you know, like if everything's great, but there's not really a problem there. So it's just a very tough a lot of the time.
So here is I want to just go through a few quick examples. So the wealth management example, you know, the LTV is excellent. Easy to reach is neutral.
The market size is good. There's plenty of people who need wealth management. You don't need that many of them.
Is there a lot of pain? You know, maybe. But a lot of people, if they like just if they don't have a wealth manager, they're not really losing anything.
They're just not gaining something. And that's very different. Spending power is usually excellent.
Growing market is good as more and more people retire. The average age of the population, at least in the United States, is getting older and older. So there's more demand for this.
So it's a good industry. Another one is managed IT services. It's another good industry.
The LTV is insane because a lot of people will keep that client for years.
It's easy enough to reach through multiple things. The hard part is identifying who actually is the one who's going to need this, I guess, if that's the reason it's not a five star. It is a large market.
A lot of people need IT support but don't want an IT department. They do have significant pain because if their systems go down and nobody can work, obviously a big problem. And they do have good spending power because if you need managed IT, you're not just starting out.
And then it is a growing market as more and more technology. comes into play.
Also, we had an example before about a residential roofing. You know, the LTV is good. A roof costs 8K, 15K, that kind of stuff.
The downside of that is you don't necessarily need more than one roof, especially for the next 10 to 20 years. So it's kind of a one -time thing. They're easy to reach, kind of.
You can reach homeowners through Facebook ads, mostly. But finding out who needs a roof and who's ready to pay for it is kind of a bit hard. Good large market, you know, millions and millions of homes.
The pain is excellent, especially if there's water coming through the roof or something like that. Spending power is neutral. You know, a lot of them will need financing or insurance to cover it.
And then it's kind of a neutral market. So it's a neutral industry. And then we have an independent restaurant, basically not.
And I mean independent, I don't mean a chain or a franchise or anything like that. So the LTV is very poor. I don't know what the average restaurant, but let's just say the average person spends $50 and the average person doesn't go to the same restaurant twice, right?
You need a lot, a lot of customers. People are easy to reach through SEO, Google, social media, ads, all that kind of stuff. It is a huge market.
A lot of people will go to restaurants, but... You know, some people don't, too. The pain is not I wouldn't say it's not a one, but it's definitely not a five because they need to eat somewhere.
But there's lots of different options. You could cook at home. You could order food.
You could go to a different restaurant, that kind of stuff. Spending power is a bit neutral in the growing market. I would say it's a bit neutral, but I would say that the reason it's not good is through the rise of meal delivery services.
So this is a poor industry. And it's one that I would consider getting out of if I was in it. And then let's go through a bad industry where I would just quit this the next day, right?
And this is the local newsletter, specifically printed ones. The market is very poor. Most people do it online now.
It's somewhat hard to reach people, but I would say neutral. The LTV people are paying, you know, I don't even know, but, you know. $10 a month for a newspaper.
I wouldn't even know. And you need a ton of the subscribers. Print readership has been shrinking for years.
You're basically trying to fight a losing battle. And this is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad market. So for our business, which is that residential HVAC company, it'd be similar to the roofing example.
We have our air conditioning units that we're installing, for example. That's a upfront fee, but then Better than a roof, I would say, because repairs, maintenance, replacements over time makes it valuable.
They are easy to reach, basically. We could reach these HVAC companies through Facebook ads, through SEO, through Google ads, through content, through outreach, through cold calling. You name it, very good.
It is a large market. I just checked for this example, and there are tens of thousands of active business types. They do have significant pain, especially the large ones, because they need to keep their crews busy or they're going to be losing money.
They do have spending power. They are established businesses, but the price per lead has to make sense in the context of their margins and their economics. And then this is a fairly stable industry.
So this is an example of what most people will kind of get, a neutral industry. And it's one that we can kind of go on to. The next thing we'll talk about is our ICP.
So the ICP will stand for ideal client profile or ideal customer profile. Some people call it the avatar. You can call it whatever you like.
So the ICP and the industry are two different things, at least in my view. And a lot of people will lump your ICP and industry together and they'll just call it your niche or your niche. I don't necessarily think that's a good idea because when you lump it together, you lose a lot of important thinking in the process, in my opinion.
Your industry is the overall market you serve, and your ICP is the person you sell to inside that industry. So basically, roofing is my market. Head of marketing at multi -state roofing companies with a call center is my ICP, for example.
And that is a very, very important distinction. when we go deeper into this course in our offer creation our big idea and our messaging it's very very important to understand that everything in this course and everything we do in our business is downstream of our icp so if we really get this wrong here everything else is going to be wrong because everything else is specifically crafted for this and if we don't do this intentionally We're basically doing it accidentally, and it's very unlikely that we are going to be doing it correctly, quite frankly.
And it's very, very important to also understand that an industry that we did previous, even with all those ratings, an industry can be good or bad based on its ICP. There's some better industries, such as the finance section, the healthcare section, the law section that manage IT and you name it.
And there are also some, I would say, bad industries like newspapers, restaurants, realtors, etc. But especially with neutral industries, whether they're good or bad is going to be dependent on who we're going to target inside of them. So if we're targeting higher level people, they're usually quite good.
If we, and this is usually accidentally, but we target lower level people, it can be pretty bad. So In most businesses, you scale your business not by getting 1 ,000 clients at $3 ,000 per month, but you actually make more money and you scale your business by scaling the ICP.
So not always the case, I guess, but if you really want to scale in, I would say, 90 % of skilled white -collar service -based businesses, this is what you have to know. People scale their business. by selling essentially the same thing to wealthier and wealthier clients, which increases their total average value and also increases their profit margins because you sell essentially the same thing.
You don't pay any more labor costs or tech costs or anything else. You just charge more money, right? Very, very important distinction.
So you basically scale by selling the same stuff, but for more money to a better client. And a great example that we've used so far is selling lead generation services to roofers because we've used this example before. You would make a lot more money selling to private equity backed multi -state roofing companies with call centers than you would to a solo owner operator roofer who has a couple of helpers.
Right. So as you collect more and more proof. and you have more and more better results, and hopefully you're in an industry where you have copy and paste results, you will and should be increasing your prices and going after larger and larger clients.
And that is how you'll ultimately scale. Instead of charging $3 ,000 per month to 1 ,000 clients to get to 3 million a month, you would charge $30 ,000 per month to 100 clients and get basically the same revenue for one -tenth of the cost. Extreme example, of course, but you know what I mean.
Your ICP basically should represent about 80 % of your total customers because there's kind of two things. On one hand, we're probably going to intentionally choose our ICP during this process and build all of our stuff around it. But on the other hand, like the people who buy are going to be the people who buy.
We're going to do our best here, but we don't control who buys and who doesn't. So what we want to do is we want to look at our past 100 customers or past 1 ,000 if you have more. Just go back kind of like the last six months to make it current.
And what we're going to try to do is try to identify two to five shared characteristics that 80 % or more have. It's not going to be 100 % perfect, but 80 % is very, very possible because there's always going to be outliers on the extremes. But if you dive deep into your customer base, you will be able to identify these characteristics.
And these are very useful sometimes in things such as ad targeting, like your age, your gender, your location, or job title, that kind of stuff, employee count when you're exporting a cold outreach list. But this is going to be extremely important. in the messaging section later on.
I'm not going to spoil it for you. We'll get to that later. So when you're identifying these characteristics, there are some standard -ish ones, and then there are countless niche ones.
So the ones that, you know, we get two to five of these, the B to C ones, you know, age, gender, location, race, marital status, homeowner status, kids, household income, net worth. Like those are kind of the standard -ish. B2C ones.
Then the standard -ish B2B ones, age, gender, location, job title, revenue, employee count, tech stack. Like these are the ones where you're kind of like when you're identifying or trying to describe your average customer, like these are the things you kind of have to choose from. You could go further and then like do interests, you know, that kind of stuff.
save the problems, the circumstances, the outcomes, that kind of stuff, the interest for the later section. But these are the kind of ones, right? So I have, or I don't have it anymore because I shut it down, but I had an agency program, basically teaching agency owners to get more leads.
It's a good example of a non -industry, which I don't serve anymore for that reason. But basically I sold about 1800 agency owners in an 18 month period. And after looking at the data, here are the shared characteristics.
Like I said, two to five. There's four in my case. Age 25 to 34, male in the USA, and their revenue is $500K to $5 million per year.
That represented 91 % of these total 1 ,800 customers. Is there anything stopping someone 24 and younger or 35 and older from buying? There's no.
Is there anything stopping females from buying? No. Was their clients located outside of the USA?
Of course. Pretty much. I think it was over a hundred and one or no, 35 different countries and 120 different niches, I think rings a bell to me, but yes, nothing stopping them under 500 K kind of something stopping them.
They probably wouldn't be able to afford it over 5 million, probably don't need it. So kind of, so there's nothing stopping anyone. outside of these characteristics from buying it.
But you better believe that when I'm running my paid ads on Facebook, I specifically target 25 to 34 year old male in America. No questions asked. That's just how it is because that is who buys my product.
The second thing that we want to do in our ICP is we want to find the problems, the circumstances and the outcomes. that they have in common. So the problems they face, the circumstances they find themselves in, those are usually negative circumstances and the outcomes they desire.
So to do this, we're going to basically do deep research and having those shared characteristics from the previous step can kind of make it easier to visualize and research, although sometimes this is not needed. So these things are going to be extremely important when we create our big idea. We create our offer and we create our messaging.
So if you are watching this as in the video form, bookmark or make note of this problem because this is usually the single point of failure when you're done all of this theoretical work and you're trying to basically get clients is basically you misidentify these things or you confuse these things between. basically different levels of ICP.
So an agency owner, in my example, you know, 500k, let's just say an agency owner that does 3 million per year is going to have very different problems, different circumstances and different desired outcomes than an agency owner doing 5k a month, right? That is extremely important to understand. And a lot of failure on paid ads, content, outreach, messaging, that kind of stuff comes from not understanding this, or at least not doing it properly.
So if you've ever, let's say your average client is $10 million per year, an e -commerce brand, let's just say that. And when you run Facebook ads, the only people who opt in or book a call are people who do like 100K a year. Like this is usually the cause of that, misidentifying this or just not knowing how to do this to begin with.
And we're going to go very deep in the messaging problem. So I want to just do a example here. just because the messaging problem is the sixth part of this course and we're at the second part.
And we're going to talk about it way more in depth there. But here is an example, right? And I kind of just said one, but let's just go over two levels of ICP in the agency owner industry.
Not industry, but industry. So small agency owner, large agency owner. Let's just go over five of each, 10 total.
So a small agency owner, their outcome might be to get their first paying client or their outcome might be to get to 10K per month. Circumstances, no one's taking them seriously on sales calls because they don't have any proof or case studies. A problem they might face is no one's responding to their cold emails.
And then a problem is they don't even have an offer yet or they don't even know what to do. Very realistic, I would say. Like these are just a good mix of what this agency owner might face.
A large agency owner, a circumstance, every time they try to scale past $1 ,000 per day in ad spend, their cost per acquisition skyrockets. Very, very, very different circumstance, right? Another circumstance, they're looking to sell their agency in the next two years and they need to diversify their lead sources.
An outcome, they would like to hire their first sales rep and get out of sales. They like to add a second acquisition channel. Problem, their closers don't close at the same level as the owners.
So these are both agency owners. But as you can see, like insanely different problems, circumstances and outcomes. And if you don't understand this, and even if you do understand this, you don't do it right.
Everything is going to be very, very problematic for you downstream of this. So I'm also in auto insurance, right? That's my main business nowadays.
So if you sell auto insurance, your ICP is not everyone with a car like most people probably think of it is. Your ICP is age 25 to 60 homeowners married because that implies more cars and then two plus cars. So reason for this, more cars on an auto insurance plan is more valuable, right?
And home and auto insurance are often bundled together to make the economics work. That's why it's important they're a homeowner. Below age 25, a lot of the time they're either still on their parents' insurance or they're just less likely to have a car in general.
And over 60, they're more likely to be near the end of their driving career and just old people are less likely to convert in general. So like this is an example of knowing your ICP, your shared characteristics are very valuable in this sense. So for our business, the HVAC company, We want to target places who have at least three sales reps, who already have a call center, who have run ads before and operate in at least three states.
This is a lot more specific than just any HVAC company. If they basically have never run ads before, they're going to have a tough trouble kind of adapting to this versus they just are used to trying to convert people off of Google, for example, or SEO. They don't have at least three sales reps.
They're probably not equipped to deal with the service we're providing and they're going to fail and they're just going to churn. We can just say already have three sales reps or a call center. Like the call center is to set and qualify the leads.
They don't necessarily have to have an internal one, but they have like somebody has to set these appointments, right? It has to be us or them. So somebody has to have a call center.
And then if they operate at least three states, that gives us a better. or a better size to do our ad campaigns to versus they only serve in like a 10 mile radius and there's like 10 people in there. So this ICP is going to let us have more successful clients selling the same service, which means charging more and being more profitable.
Next thing we will go to is the offer section. And this is probably the part that you clicked on this course for. And I completely understand that and I sympathize.
But like I said, this is one seventh of our total problems or total things that we have to consider here. So all of this background is very, very important. So let's get into it.
The offer, at least in the context of this course, is what we sell to cold traffic. It's the thing that we're going to have in our ads. It's the thing that we're going to sell in outreach.
It's not necessarily the large recurring service or the main service or the main project work or the main upsell or anything like that. It's the thing that we are going to sell to cold traffic. So the people who do not already know, like, and trust us.
And if we can sell an offer profitably to cold traffic, we have something extremely powerful because then our businesses and our fate is kind of in our own hands. We're no longer dependent on referrals, relationships, or someone consuming 50 hours of our content first. And that's really what we're trying to build towards.
So we need to understand as well that our offer, just like everything else in here, is only good or bad as it relates to our ICP. There's no such thing as a universally great offer. So a $50 ,000 service might sound insanely expensive to a small business.
But that might sound very cheap to a hedge fund or a large scale real estate developer. Like the price is not what really determines it. It's more like the promise.
And a promise that sounds incredible to a beginner is probably going to sound completely irrelevant to a higher level buyer. And that is why we spend so much time defining our ICP. If we go back to my agency program example, if I had...
was trying to get $5 million per year buyers, if I had all my, when my offer was around, get your first agency client in 90 days, that wouldn't even make any sense, right? They would not click on it. It wasn't resonating with them.
Subconsciously, they would just scroll right past that or never respond to it. Or if I was actually trying to target these beginner agency owners and my whole offer was how to grow and scale an agency sales team. That wouldn't even make any sense or be desirable to someone who doesn't even have their first client yet.
What do they need a sales team for? So your offer is really only good or bad as it relates to your ICP. And that's why we're spending so much time developing this ICP and inside the overall industry.
In order for someone to buy your offer, three things must happen. And this is true in all industries and all business types with every offer that has ever existed. Number one, they must understand what your offer is.
Number two, they must believe that it is the solution or a potential solution to their problem. And three, they must believe that you are the person or your company is the one to do it. And they literally will not and they literally cannot buy unless all of these things are true.
I would say the greatest piece of wisdom, the greatest lesson, the biggest meta is selling stuff that people must buy. If you can get your offer in a position where this is true, everything else is going to be dramatically easier.
If they must buy it, then we don't need to educate them on it because they already know what it is or they'll educate themselves. If they must buy it, we don't need to convince them that is the solution to their problems. They don't really have a choice.
It is the solution. And if these two things are true, we can spend all of our time convincing them that they should buy it from us. And there's three main versions of selling something that people must buy.
The first and the best is they legally must buy it. The second is they functionally must buy it. And then the third is they competitively must buy it.
And the closer that you get to one of these three things, especially the legal version, the easier it becomes to sell because the demand is built in. So this is kind of like what it is.
They must buy it legally, functionally, or competitive. They know what it is already. They see it as a solution.
Now, why would they buy it from you? And when we only have to focus on that, we'll just spend more time doing that and it will be better, but it really narrows down our focus quite a bit. So let's go through these a bit.
They legally must buy. This is the ultimate position to be in with your offer. If people legally must buy whatever our offer is, then, like I said, it doesn't fall on us to educate them or convince them it's the right solution.
And that's a beautiful position to be in. We must have it. And some examples, and we kind of touched on them before, but auto insurance, if you want to drive a car, you legally must have auto insurance in most places.
Filing your taxes, if you don't, you are going to get fined or maybe even thrown in jail, depending on the circumstance. And then a lot of times compliance in medical related fields, especially in the United States. There's HIPAA.
There's a lot of these different things where you must be compliant or your business will be fine, shut down, you name it. That's the legally must buy. The next is the functionally must buy.
And this is kind of like the legally must buy in terms of importance and how much they need it. But there's not necessarily any law. You're not going to be fined.
You're not going to be thrown in jail. But in reality, you functionally must buy these things. If you know the term de facto versus du jour, like those are old Latin terms from, you know, the Roman Empire.
One means in reality and one means by law. You know, there's no law here, but in reality, you need these things. Like some great examples are home insurance.
If you want to buy a mortgage, there's no law, but almost all mortgage lenders will require you to have home insurance or they're not going to give you a mortgage. And most people don't pay cash for their house. Then other stuff like food.
You know, there's no law saying that you must eat, but you're going to die if you don't, right? Shelter. There's no law saying that you have to rent or you have to buy, but unless you're going to be homeless, pretty important, right?
So functionally must buy. And then the third is you must competitively buy it. It's not as strong as the first two.
It's not as good as legally or functionally, but this is a category where if... They want to have a nice business or life or you name it. They basically must buy this offer.
Some good examples are email marketing and e -commerce. There's no law. There's no real thing forcing someone or compelling someone to do email marketing if you're an e -commerce brand owner.
But ads are very expensive. Competition is fierce. If you want to scale your e -commerce brand, email marketing is competitively something you must do same with lead generation you don't not legally required to generate leads you know i guess you technically don't have to generate leads but if you want to have a good business you have to do this same with air conditioning and the business that we're doing at least the customers of our residential hvac company you know i guess you don't have to get air conditioning but if you don't want to hate yourself during the summer months you basically have to or if you don't want to freeze to death during the winter months, you basically need to get heating.
So there's these three levels. And I would recommend whenever you're creating your offer there that you make sure it's in one of these three levels, at least a loose connection. Because an example, you know, nobody really needs that agency consulting service that I was selling.
You know, like not legal, not functional, not even competitive, really. It's more like a nice to have. So it's just you really want to take care of this stuff when you are building your offer.
And let's go back to the idea of the three things that must happen when we sell stuff that people are either legally, functionally or competitively obligated to buy. We'll be either taking care of the first one and the second one or just the first one by default. And it's a very, very beautiful spot to be in to have one and two.
So they understand and they believe that solution taken care of, because then, like we said. we can spend all of our time on the third, convincing them that we are the solution. And having one and two is great, but even if you only have one and they understand your offer, and I'll give you an example of this in the next slide, that's still better than having to do all three.
So when you have two, for example, in that auto insurance, like if you are in the auto insurance industry, I would reckon that you there's not a single time in your career that you would have to you be introducing someone to the concept of auto insurance. Right.
Everyone knows what auto insurance is, or if not, they're going to be educated real quick, like just automatically. And everyone also believes that auto insurance is the solution to their problem because it is the thing in and of itself. They must have it.
They're not legally allowed to drive without it. There is very real consequences. And therefore.
You only need to believe that your auto insurance is better than your competitor's auto insurance, and then you'll have successfully closed the deal. An example of when you only have one is like lead generation as a service, for example. We probably don't need to spend any time educating people about lead generation.
You know, they understand it, usually even understand the different methods at a high level, at least. They might not understand the ins and outs of ads, but they know what a paid ad is as a concept. But the problem here is the education kind of takes care of itself, but it's not necessarily a case where they automatically...
believe that your specific way of lead generation is the solution to their problem, that you still have to convince them of this. There's so many different possibilities for lead generation, right? There's paid ads, there's content, there's outreach, there's partnerships, there's networking, there's referrals, there's SEO, there's infinite sub things in all of those large buckets.
Then there's the do -it -yourself courses, the done -with -you programs, the done -for -you services. Then it's retainer -based versus performance -based versus project -based. There's a ton of different possibilities here and yours is not necessarily going to automatically be the solution to their problem in the same way auto insurance would be, for example.
So in this case, you don't really have to educate them, but you'll still have to convince them that your solution is the best and that you're the person to do it. This is not as good as the previous example, but this is still much better than you having to educate them too. The education part is probably the most important part that you're going to want to have to take care of by default in your offer.
So in general, all offers must do one or more of five things. Make them more money, save them time, reduce costs, reduce risk, or increase speed. And it's hard for me, especially as I was putting this course together, it's hard to imagine or think of a reason that someone would buy something.
Without one or more of these things being true. Like I can't really think of it. And of these five things, making them more money is always the most powerful because that's usually the end goal for most people.
And making them more money is the easiest to conceptualize and justify because you can kind of just do this math and this ROI on paper. You know, if you pay something, if you pay someone 10 ,000 and they make you 100 ,000. That's a 10x ROI versus they save you X amount of time versus they reduce your costs versus they reduce your risk.
Like some of these things can get a little abstract. So no matter what you're doing, so if you have an offer that doesn't necessarily make them more money, I would always try to translate whatever benefit that you get them into a dollar ROI. So if you basically, let's say you save them time, instead of just saying we save you X amount of time or we help you increase your speed by this much, try to literally write out a huge example for them and then make it clear, like put charts, put graphics, et cetera.
Don't rely on them trying to do this in their head. And I'm going to show you a few examples of this. So if we had a save time example, and these are just very, very general round numbers.
So let's say. Your offer saves the customer or someone on their team four hours per day and your offer costs $15 ,000. Saving four hours per day, like who would not want to do that, right?
I certainly would like to save four hours a day for $15 ,000. It's valuable, but it's very abstract. And most people don't naturally translate time into dollars without like just automatically.
So we got to do the math for them. You know, four hours per day times five days per week. times 50 weeks in a year, or two weeks vacation, we'll say, is 1 ,000 hours saved per year.
So basically, at a $15 ,000 price, those 1 ,000 hours are basically worth $15 each. So if we have a chart here, let's say I make $250 ,000 per year, that would imply a hourly value of $125, right? If I make $125, This offer to me is essentially an 8 .3 X ROI, right?
Because, you know, if I pay myself or I pay an employee $15 a more hour, this offer makes sense. And that is kind of the same thing. Like you are basically selling them an offer that is four hours and that might be your offer, but this is the math that makes a lot of sense and easy to justify.
Oh yeah. Like this task is a $15 an hour test. Let me buy this, right?
It's very, very easy when you really do the math in front of them like this. For the reduced risk example, let's say like most reduced risk come from like compliance offers or sometimes consulting offers. So in this example, let's just say that you sell to healthcare businesses who need to securely store patient data, which is the law in most places.
And if they get hacked or they don't do it properly, they can face pretty hefty fines. And I did a little research and a lot of the time, at least this specific type of situation that I was researching, the average fine is about $250 ,000. So let's just say the average fine is $250 ,000 and your compliance service costs $2 ,500 per year.
I would literally kind of spell this out for them. If you have a data breach once every 100 years, this offer still makes mathematical sense. So, you know, 99 years times 240 or two.
So let's do it on a thing. Ninety nine times twenty five hundred. Ninety nine.
Oh, my God. Calculators blowing right now. Not the best time, but it is going to be two hundred and forty seven thousand five hundred dollars.
So it could basically you could not get hacked for ninety nine straight years. And then on the hundredth year, this will still break even and pay for itself. Of course, I don't have any chart here, but I think that you understand what I mean.
And that is much more powerful than, oh, like we just will make it so you don't get hacked.
After you have kind of finished and you hopefully at this stage, either hopefully you're already doing it, but maybe you are thinking of changing your offer to something that people must buy. That is part one of succeeding with an offer. And once you have the right offer.
I would always go to part two being the value formula from Alex Hermosi. I will usually use this to amplify the offer. So if you've read the book, a hundred million dollar offers on the top, we have dream outcome multiplied by perceived likelihood of achievement.
And then in the bottom, we have time delay and effort and sacrifice. And this is kind of like a division math question. So let's just say dream outcome is a 10 out of 10 perceived likelihood is a 10 out of 10.
as well. But the time delay is very long. Let's just say it's a 10 out of 10.
And then the effort sacrifice is huge, also a 10 out of 10. That's basically 100 divided by 100. 10 times 10 divided by 10 times 10.
And that is a 1 for value. So 1 out of 10. But let's just say that you had a 7 dream outcome and a 7 perceived likelihood of achievement.
So what is that? 49 on the top. And then you had a 7.
time delay, but a one effort and sacrifice. So it's basically 100 % done for them. That's 49 divided by seven and it's a seven out of 10 for value.
And I hope that math makes sense to you because it's really important math to understand how valuable your offer is. So the first part of the value formula is the desired results. And this is simply how bad your ICP wants the offer you provide.
So basically, The stronger the desire, the more valuable the offer becomes. And this is where, you know, it's nice to get them any results, but this is where the legally required, the functionally required, and the competitively required result comes in.
If they're legally required or even functionally required, this is a 10 out of 10, right? Just by default. If it's not required or not something people must buy, then you have a lot of different things.
Making more money. you know, pretty good. Like that's a pretty strong result.
Getting more customers, also pretty good. Losing 50 pounds, you know, that would be nice, right? Getting out of sales to free up their time, yes.
Saving 20 hours per week. These are all very strong desired results, even though none of them are necessarily, you know, you have to have them. But basically the important thing is that you need to know that your desired result is the one of your specific ICP, not just your industry -wide desired result or something that sounds good in general.
You should always be asking, what does this person actually want? And then as you get more customers, this is a fluid process and then it becomes more and more clear and your desired result, although will be a little bit more static than the other three things, you can refine it and you can make it more specific and you can make it more appealing to your ICP.
as you refine and narrow your ICP down. So again, I did this example before, but let's say we are selling to agency owners from 500K to 5 million per year. A terrible desired result, get your first client.
Like that would be essentially a zero out of 10 for this ICP. For a different ICP, the beginner agency owner, that might be very good, right? but not for our agency owner.
They already have clients and therefore the offer is a zero to 10. It doesn't make any sense. A better desired result would be get out of sales, scale your paid ads, build a second acquisition channel, build a marketing team, like that kind of stuff.
And the better we understand our ICP, the easier it becomes to identify the results they actually want. And it's very important to understand that they might want a hundred different results, right? What is the one they want the most?
And that is the one that your offer should be built around. The next is the perceived likelihood of achievement. Again, I would say that the key word here is going to be perceived.
And it doesn't really matter how incredible your promised results and the desired result is if no one actually believes they will get it. You could promise to make someone $10 million a year. But if they think that there's virtually no chance of this happening, then the offer is not very valuable to them.
And we're going to go over this in detail. But that is why proof, specificity, your unique mechanism, reputation and understanding of your ICP matter so much. The customer should look at the offer and they should see your proof and specificity and your unique mechanism.
And they can't just think that I believe this will work for someone. And even in my niche, they must believe that I can see it working for me. Very, very, very, very important.
So essentially, we need unique mechanisms. We need specificity. We need proof.
And when you compare this, like compare it to this in our business that we're doing, we help businesses generate more leads. And that's our offer or that's our promise to this residential HVAC company versus. We work exclusively with residential HVAC companies with three or more crews.
Here are 27 examples of companies like yours where we generated qualified leads, what they paid per lead on average, the show rate, the close rate, and how many turn into jobs. We didn't really necessarily change the result here. We've just made it very specific.
We've just made it very believable. We've just shown a lot of different proof. And as a result, their perceived likelihood of achievement is much, much, much, much more.
Or much stronger than the general version. And that's why, you know, relevant and very specific proof is also much stronger than just random proof. And this is one area that I think going back to the industry part where I said that the kind of like the main reason you want to have an industry is for fulfillment.
This is if I had to kind of label it. This is the big part where it helps in your marketing. the specificity of it.
It's always going to be more believable than if it's just general. Like the kind of industry doesn't necessarily help your desired result. Everybody, you know, in this case, businesses everywhere want more leads.
It might help your time delay a little bit because you just know what happens. It might help your effort and sacrifice, but not necessarily more than anything. But the proof, the perceived likelihood of achievement when you choose a specific industry is what really helps in your marketing.
The third part is going to be time delay. And basically is how long does someone wait after they pay to begin receiving the value that they bought? And all things being equal, faster is better.
This doesn't necessarily mean the entire result needs to happen, but some results take months, years, you know it, but how quickly can we give them their first meaningful win? So if the ultimate results, even if that takes six months, but they get something genuinely valuable within 24 hours, this offer becomes dramatically more valuable.
And my favorite time delay examples are in the weight loss industry for illustration. You know, working out and eating right on your own takes a long time to see results. That is why the calorie tracking and fitness apps only can charge about $9 .99 a month because the value just isn't really there.
Working out and eating right with a personal trainer and a meal plan still takes time, but probably faster results. And that's why personal trainers and meal prep services charge more than the apps. Liposuction, regardless if you think that's a good idea or not.
I personally don't, but lots of people do. That works extremely fast. And that's why the surgery charges thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for it.
But the ultimate version of time delay. Imagine you had a method where someone swiped their credit card and they instantly had a six pack, whatever their body type was before, instantaneous six pack, instantaneous, let's just say 12 % body fat, no waiting. They immediately paid and just there, the results there.
You could probably charge hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for this to the right ICP and be the richest person on earth. And the closest that you can get Or the closer that you get the customer to the desired result, the more valuable the offer becomes.
And if you have an offer that takes a while to get going, make sure you try to get them some quick wins that actually put a meaningful impact in those 24 hours. Like when I sell leads in auto insurance, well, they get their leads within 48 hours, but I instantly give them five quick wins. Okay, say this for your sales script.
Put this for your appointment setting message. change your branding to make it look like this for your page that we're actually running the ads. Like I just get them a bunch of quick wins that get them value right away, even before my core service is delivered.
And the final part is effort and sacrifice. So how much bullshit does the customer go through to get the result? And people don't just evaluate the result.
They evaluate what they have to do to get there. You know, the calls, the homework, the learning new software, recording videos, managing employees, all of this is effort and sacrifice. And the less work the customer has to do, all other things being equal, the more valuable the offer becomes.
And this is the primary reason why you can charge more for done -for -you services than you can for done -with -you or do -it -yourself. Because you're doing more for it, your effort and sacrifice is less. So imagine that...
two companies promise the exact same result. So offer A, you basically a course or a program, you attend three calls per week, you complete the homework between the calls, you learn the process, you build everything, and then you spend five hours per week implementing it. Versus offer B, you complete a 30 -minute onboarding call, give them access, and they do basically everything else for you.
So if we assume the result, price, time delay, perceived likelihood of achievement are identical, Which would we rather buy? And obviously offer B.
So the question, every time you are fulfilling for a customer, why the hell, why the fuck are we making the customer do this? If they literally don't need to, and there's no instantaneous clear reason, we should remove it. So it's just one of those things.
And when we have, basically, they get their desired result with a high perceived likelihood of a success. As quick as possible, with as little effort as possible, we have a very, very valuable offer. For the effort and sacrifice, there's certain things that become very hard to scale.
Like, for example, a YouTube agency. You can do everything for them, but at the end of the day, they still need to film. And that's why a lot of content agencies aren't on the level of a lot of paid ad agencies or a lot of outreach agencies where they have to scale.
So it's just something to consider when you're kind of offering. The next thing that we want to talk about is the unique mechanism. So many people will read marketing books and come to the conclusion that they need a unique mechanism.
It's kind of a term in and of itself. And then because they usually are complete amateurs and have a very surface level understanding of this concept, they will create a very stupid sounding name for their offer and say this is their unique mechanism. You'll say something like we help e -commerce brands maximize email through our six step email revenue vortex or something equally fucking retarded like this.
We definitely don't want to do this. This is not what a unique mechanism is. The only thing that we need to know and understand about our unique mechanism is that the goal of it is to get the customer to watch our ad or VSL or read our sales page and just quietly nod like that makes sense.
So you're. Unique mechanism is simply the believable explanation for why your offer should produce the result. Nothing more, nothing less.
It does not need to be fancy and usually shouldn't be. Its only job is to make a reasonable person nod and say that makes sense to themselves. That's all you need to do.
As far as guarantees go, to me, they've become so played out and just bigger and bigger claims, increasingly unrealistic guarantees that they've kind of killed. guarantees for the entire market and i blame alex hermosi for this with his 100 million dollars offer book the guarantees are kind of like unique mechanisms and kind of like a lot of things in life when like it's great advice for the high iq smart individual but when you give the same advice to the low iq dumb individual it actually does a lot more harm than good and there's a kind of examples like this in life.
And I'm not going to go through it here. The truth is though, that in my experience, guarantees don't really help you close more clients that much. They primarily will get people to look at your ad, click on the ad and book a call.
And the really messed up part is that a huge percentage of people will book a call because there's a guarantee maybe. And then they get on the call a couple of days later and they don't even remember that there's a guarantee at all. To me, that's proof that it's the primary way to do this.
And if you are using a guarantee for that purpose, go ahead. But especially over time, you're going to want to accumulate enough proof, reputation, increase your perceived likelihood of achievement to such a high degree that you don't need an insane guarantee to get people's attention. I would also say that guarantees are more likely to attract the kind of client that you don't necessarily want to attract.
In general, not always. But the guarantee should be the cherry on top. It should not be the reason that they believe you or it should not be your entire offer.
If someone is very obsessed with your guarantee in the sales process and they're only buying because your guarantee, that is a huge red flag. And it's very, very unlikely that this is going to be a good type of customer for you. So you really, in my view, have to evaluate the pros and cons of this.
Something that is very important is that we should never be guaranteeing a range. So I saw a truly horrible guarantee recently that we will get you 5 million to 500 million views on your content or we'll give you a full refund. Another one I saw, we'll get you 5 to 50 booked calls per month.
Like what the fuck, right? This offer either could be terrible. Let's just say that five to 50 calls was for $10 ,000 a month.
You know, if this was five calls for $10 ,000 a month, fucking worst offer I've ever heard, $2 ,000 a call. If it's $50 per call, you know, that might be pretty good, right? Similarly, if I paid, you know, 50K for 5 million short form views, probably be terrible, I would say, or it's 500 million.
This could be a best offer in the world. So really terrible to offer a range. It just sounds so ridiculous, sounds so goofy that like we really can't do that and expect to succeed.
And I'm very sympathetic to people's line of thinking. I've been in this industry a long time and I do fully grasp and understand that most of the time when they offer a range like this, it's to account for or reflect for usually different customer starting points. Like if you have no social media presence, you probably can't guarantee them 500 million.
versus they're already kind of famous when they come in. It's very easy. And I completely understand that.
But from the prospect's perspective, it looks really stupid. And they're not going to like inquire for more information. They're not just not going to book a call and move on.
And you're never going to know one way or the other. So we either want to guarantee something specific or don't guarantee anything at all. The next thing we never want to do is any form of, or we will work for free until we do.
or other stupid guarantees. This has got to be the dumbest thing in the world to me, and you see these guarantees all the time. We will get you X, Y, and Z results, and if we don't, we'll work for free until we do.
Let's just think about that logically. If you fucked up so bad, and you didn't get them the result that you promised to the point where now your guarantee is in play, why the fuck would they want you to keep working for free? You clearly have no idea what you're doing.
Like, why would I want you to work for free on my business anymore? You know, we'll get you 100 calls or we'll work for free. You get me two calls.
Like, OK, great. Why the hell would I want you to keep working on my business? Either have a real guarantee or don't have one at all.
You look very stupid doing this. And this is a form of guarantee that probably does more harm than good. The next thing is never guarantee a result that you do not fully control.
Very, very important here. And because many services, many offers have parts that are either largely or fully done by the customer. And those things are out of your control completely.
And a good example of this is like basically any lead generation offer. You might do the things like the paid ads, the content, the outreach, the funnel. the flows, the appointment setting.
But at the end of the day, your customer is the one who's going to get on the sales call and the one who has to close. And you have essentially nothing to do with that. Even if you've done your entire job right and you've set them up for success, if they don't close, you're going to have to give them a refund.
And if you're doing lead generation, this example, you know, you don't want to guarantee the clients. You might guarantee booked calls, might guarantee, you know, X, Y, and Z, but it's very difficult to get clients. The only situation to guarantee them to get clients, the only situation where you might not do this is if you are very confident in your service.
Like, let's just say you get you're going to hit your guarantee. You know, let's just say you've done a thousand clients and nine hundred of them, you know, got the got the result to fulfill the guarantee. Then you might put one in there because, you know, if you get 50 percent more clients.
with your guarantee versus not having one, and then you only have to refund 10%. Mathematically, that's great. But most people's service, quite frankly, is not good enough to, or that really comes into effect.
The truth is most people's service is pretty quite bad.
I would honestly, as much as I make fun of the pure guru types, I would say the average agency service is a bigger scam than the average course. And we'll move on, but... Unless you're extremely confident, never guarantee a result.
The last thing here is more to do with your offer. And maybe I should have put this earlier, but it is my view and an incredibly underrated piece of advice and dare I say wisdom that you should never ever or at least seriously avoid. doing done for you services to complete beginners.
And that doesn't even mean like a biz op or people who are complete beginners in general. That means beginners as it relates to your service. They could be very experienced.
They could have large companies, but if they've never done what you offer before, they're still way less likely to get result. And a good example is that my insurance pay per lead agency, the greatest indicator of success, like pre, like before we get started working with someone is. When they fill out a form, the greatest indicator of success is not their revenue level or their budget or how large their company is or how many sales reps they have or how fast their proof or how great their speed to lead is.
The greatest correlation, and this is over 95 % correlated to if we get them to buy three times or not, is whether they bought leads before. That's it. literally their revenue, their budget, how many reps they have, how long they've been in business does not factor into this correlation.
But our benchmark is getting them to buy three batches or more of leads. And 95 % of the time, people who buy more leads have bought leads in the past before we worked together. That means if they've never bought leads before working with us, there's only a 5 % chance that they get to order number three.
It's pretty crazy, right? So a lot of people, especially those who have paid ad agencies or YouTube agencies, they see a huge business owner opt into their funnel and it's just like, wow, what a great opportunity to work with them. Spoiler alert, it's not.
It doesn't matter how successful it is. If they're a beginner at YouTube, for example, you're going to teach them to be confident on camera, set everything up, come up with ideas, get over all of their self -limiting beliefs. Terrible.
Similarly, if you're doing a paid ad offer and they built their business to $50 million per year through speaking at events, for example. They have a big business, but it doesn't change the fact that currently they are ill -equipped to appointment set, close, and convert, and serve people who are coming from paid ads. They have literally zero experience in it in this example.
It's not going to be easy. Definitely, I would say don't do this or heavily avoid doing this if you have it all possible. This almost belongs in the ICP part of things because this is more about choosing your ICP, but very, very important in my opinion.
The thing we want to understand is, of course, the perceived likelihood of achievement. We've gone over that. In your entire offer, your entire funnel, your entire business, perception is reality.
And we really need to know this because you hear this a lot of time. Our service is the best. This is the best pizza on earth.
Sure, right? It probably isn't. That's the fact of it.
But let's just say it is. It doesn't matter because people don't know how good or bad your service is until after they buy from you. Before, they're just going off their own perception and their perception is based off what they see.
It doesn't matter if we nail their desired result, have the most proof ever, get them value extremely fast and they barely don't have to do anything. If we just have a really poor job and don't say any of this thing before they even get on a call. So again, I...
recently came across a horrible example of someone's content offer. It was actually the same one who had a 5 million to 500 million view guarantee. And it basically said, work with us for a year.
And if we don't get you 500 million views, we'll give you your money back. Whether or not that's true, let's just say this is true and you're going to get 500 million views, but really an entire year. I'm thinking to myself as I see that.
Really, it takes me an entire year to get the value. But the reality is if you go deep into this funnel and this offer, they get their first content and the first video is live within 48 hours. So the time to first value, time delay is really 48 hours, not a year.
But they don't say any of this in their sales funnel. They don't say any of this in their VSL. They don't say this in their ad.
So therefore, from perception equals reality standpoint, this doesn't exist. Basically, the time to verse value is a zero out of 10. You know, very important.
Perception is reality. And this is so important because the deadliest objections, the objections that cost you the most money in your business are not the ones you hear on a sales call. Those are actually a very, very small percentage of total objections.
Those people still book the call. The deadliest objections, the ones that will keep you from making tens, hundreds, billions of dollars over your career, is the ones that stop people from booking in the first place. They see your ad, your VSL, your sales page, you know, too expensive.
Probably won't work for me. Sounds like a lot of work. Probably will take a long time.
I don't trust this. I don't believe this will work for me. These are the objections that cost you an insane amount of money.
And you never really... uncover these because they don't book a call. You never hear about them.
They just leave the page. You never even get a chance to handle the objections. And that is why we have to identify and answer all of the objections before the sales call through our ads, VSL, sales page, email, proof, and content.
And the goal of this is to increase the perception of our offer and eliminate as many objections as possible before they even come objections in the first place.
Definitely a top five idea in this course, this slide, alongside some other stuff we've talked about and some stuff we have yet to cover. So when we like, I would probably do this as the exercise version of this right now. Like there are a few things you need to check right now for the perception of your offer.
So like make sure it matches reality because a lot of the time your offer will actually be a lot better than. the perception of it because you're doing a pretty poor job marketing it. So go right now and check your ad, check your sales page above the fold, check your VSL, check the rest of the sales page, check your email flows and sales process and proof, and make sure that, especially as far as the desired result, the perceived likelihood of achievement, the time delay, the effort and sacrifice are concerned, make sure if you do stuff to reduce the time delay, you do stuff to reduce the effort and sacrifice.
This is clear as day to them. Don't hide this or don't assume they know or don't like hold it in reserve and like over deliver. You need to say this up front if you want to have a very desirable business.
So go ahead and pause the video and check and do this if you'd have to. So similar to the industry, I have an offer framework for you to evaluate your offer through either your current one or your future one. I actually have two parts of this.
The first is. from the point of view of the customer. And the second part is from the point of view of your business.
And I feel like a lot of people don't talk about the point of view of your business, part B here. Both are extremely important, but both need to be evaluated separately in order to grasp the full understanding, in my opinion. So let's do that right now.
So the first check we want to do is, does this offer make sense for cold traffic? We've talked about it a lot. But a lot of the time, people's offer doesn't, right?
And this is usually a case where you're selling something that people don't have to buy. And then usually, this is kind of that education part that really gets in the way. So does it make sense to someone who does not know or trust you without having to consume 10 hours of your content before understanding what you sell and why it's relevant to them?
So at a five star level, they would immediately understand what you sell and why it's relevant. And then on the one stars, they're still confused after you explain it. Something is, you know, everywhere in between.
This has got to be like a foundational check for this, where, you know, selling something that they must buy almost immediately. gets a five star. And if that's not true, it's going to be that one to four star range.
So you're going to have to kind of understand that. The next is that dream result and something people must buy. How badly does your specific ideal customer want or need the result?
So basically five star B, it solves an urgent problem that the customer feels they must address now. Kind of like your auto insurance or something has gone awry or it's tax season type thing. And then on the other hand, one star is someone solves a problem the customer barely cares about.
And there's anywhere in between. So something like that e -commerce email marketing might be between a three and a four star. You know, in this case, eating in shelter is probably going to be a five star thing.
And then lots of services, lots of offers are going to be somewhere in that range. The next is going to create obvious value. And the keyword is obvious there.
Creating value, not necessarily enough. It has to be obvious from a perception point of view. So basically, does it make them more money, save them time, reduce cost, reduce risk, or increase speed?
And then how substantial is that? And how clearly can the customer see that relative to what they have to pay? So it literally could be a five star, you know, after they receive it.
But this is... when their perception of it as well. So on five -star level, it's a substantial measurable improvement whose value clearly exceeds the price.
Good example of that are you owe $200 ,000 in taxes, this costs you $40 ,000, this tax offer, and you're going to save $120 ,000, right? You buy it now, you're going to save $80 ,000, for example. And then on the one -star, Let me rebuild, you know, who knows?
Like a two -star, let me rebuild your pop -up for e -commerce brand, email marketing. It's kind of vague. It's kind of minor.
It's not really that valuable. For the perceived likelihood of achievement, five -star, basically you have an overwhelming amount of proof from customers in similar situations, and it makes success feel extremely likely. And on the other side, there's no real reason to believe it'll work.
No proof, no track record, no nothing. Right. The number five is a clear result or deliverable.
So it'd be ideal that you sell that result. But if you don't fully control it, we should have a clear deliverable. And five star would be clearly defines a result or deliverable what's included and when the customer receive it.
And then on the number five, the offer is completely vague and then everything is somewhere in between. I recommend you kind of pause the video if you want to actually read the in -between parts because I'm. really just going to go one star and five star.
The time to first value, not necessarily the whole result, but when do they receive the first meaningful result? Within 24 hours is five star, more than 90 days is one star. So for example, that one thing that I said where work with us for a year, that is the perceived timeline.
So that would be a one star, but they get their first basically video up within 48 hours. within maybe 48 hours to seven days. So that's technically a four star.
So to improve this score, we want to simplify the onboarding and give them a customer quick wins early. For this, how much work does the customer have to do? So five stars is like almost everything is done for them with minimal onboarding and almost no ongoing work.
One star is more like a course where the customer must do everything. And then for the risk reversal, like how much downside does the customer face if it doesn't work out? Remember, their fee is not necessarily their only risk.
They also lose time, money, opportunity, and reputation if this completely fucks up. So number five is there's almost no realistic downside risk for the right customer. And on one star, the customer assumes almost all of the risk.
So, you know. They'll work with you for free until we do. That's basically all of the risk, even though there's a risk reversal guarantee in theory.
If it's kind of like, you know, we will remake your top five winning ad creatives for you using different UGC actors. And if it doesn't perform at least as well as your original, then we'll give you your money back. There's realistically almost no downside risk, maybe a little bit of ad spend, but that's a better offer.
So calculate your total score out of 40. Probably want it to be at least acceptable. If it's terrible, a lot of the time it's just so bad that you should probably just start over and rethink your offer.
But anything acceptable or better should just kind of be amplified if you can. And then we also need to do the second part because what's lost on a lot of people, especially like the direct response kind of guru types. is that it's not just about making grander and grander claims, lowering the prices, making stronger and stronger guarantees.
Our offer actually needs to be good for our own business too. And a lot of people don't understand that. And that's why they come up with a new offer every month or every quarter.
You know, they just sell it, sell it, sell it, churn it, burn it to the ground and try again. But ideally... you know morally but also we're going to make more money if we do this we want our offer to be permanent and stable so we need to take care to construct the side that's you know has to do with our business too and this is where unit economics determine whether it works or not The next section is all about unit economics in painstaking detail.
But in terms of actually scaling, most people are never limited really by their ads, their funnel, their sales team, etc. They're limited by their unit economics. So business and unit economics are kind of one in the same thing.
And most people don't put any thought into this whatsoever. But the unit economics section is next, and it's likely the most important part of this entire course. And the unit economics are...
More so than any other check or more so than any other thing is what will determine if your offer is going to the moon or if it's going to die at a couple hundred thousand per month and ruin your quality of life and reputation in the process. So it's pretty important stuff. So let's go into the part B of the framework.
So we're going to talk about this exact math soon because this is the end goal of everything. But does the offer pay for the cost of both acquiring the customer and fulfilling the customer? And ideally, that offer should cover both those costs by at least 2x.
So on one star, our offer loses a substantial amount of money. That's not great. Most people aim for actually what is a three -star result, which is it approximately breaks even.
And number five stars would be produces at least 2x the combined acquisition and fulfillment. So if you collect... Offer costs, you know, $2 ,000 to get a customer and it costs $1 ,000 to fulfill.
That's $3 ,000. So do you cash collect at least $6 ,000 would be like the test here. And if so, then it's a five star.
The second has to do with kind of what we talked about and how the offer ties back to our industry. And is it standardized and is it repeatable? If we go back to that.
e -commerce non -industry versus roofer industry example, five star would be fully standardized, becomes better, faster, and more profitable every time. And one star would be completely custom every time. When you have a...
non -industry here. The best you really can do here is getting a three -star offer, which it has a repeatable core, but requires substantial customization. Like you could argue in a paid ad for e -commerce that definitely has a repeatable core, but no clients to sustain.
Everything has to be customized versus that roofer. You can copy and paste these results. It's five -star, becomes fully standardized, copy and paste different cities.
Learnings become better. The process becomes faster and the costs reduce and it becomes more and more profitable. The third check is, is this offer going to be relevant in five years?
And when we basically, a good example at the time of recording this video, at least, is there's so many AI offers. AI is definitely a trend. That market direction in the industry is like five star.
But a lot of the time, it's hard to say or it's hard to... even argue that a lot of these things are going to be relevant even six months in the future not that ai is going to be going away but ai is moving so fast that by the time you help them with their like if you built your entire offer i don't know if you remember about clodbot you know i don't even hear about that anymore and that was got to be like three to six months ago max so you really If you're going to do this, you probably want to solve an evergreen problem that people will always need to address in some form or another.
The tactics will probably change a little bit over the years, but we really want it to be at least relevant in the future. And then this one is kind of like an applicable one. So your front end offer, your intro offer, the one we're talking about in this course, is kind of just the one you use for cold traffic.
And then you have an upsell or a main recurring service. does that offer naturally lead into the main service? Like, of course, we don't want to have a paid ad intro offer if our main service is SEO.
That doesn't make any sense, right? So completing the offer naturally should create the need for the main offer in a lot of cases. And that would be the last check.
So basically, for our business, our residential HVAC one, We are basically going to sell them the leads on a pay -per -lead basis or even a retainer basis. They're going to get their first lead within 48 hours.
We're going to handle the CRM integration and provide the sales assets and script. Their team just handles the sales. So is leads good for cold traffic?
Yes. Do they have to buy leads? Competitively, yes.
Is there obvious value? They're going to make more money. Is there perceived likelihood of achievement?
It would, I guess, depend on how we set up. But remember how specific we were in that example. We did this for 27 HVAC companies just like you.
Here are the results from the last 27. Like that would probably do a perceived likelihood of achievement. We can't really control clients, but we're going to give them the deliverable, which is leads.
Their first lead, 48 hours or less, time to first value. They don't have to do anything. They don't even have to set up the integration or anything.
They just do the sales. So it's not everything's done for them, but it'll probably be at least a four out of five. And then risk reversal, probably going to be a one because we're not going to give them any risk reversal because nothing really makes sense for us in this thing.
And then offer test for B, we're going to do the math on this in the unit economics part. So we're going to skip that. Naturally leading to the main offer, the leads just kind of are the main offer.
But leads will always be relevant in five years. The way we get these leads is going to be standardized and repeatable. So overall, our business is going to really very much pass this.
So next, we are going to talk about unit economics and pricing. Beautiful. If an offer course or an offer book or an offer blog post doesn't...
dedicate an insane amount of time to talking about unit economics, the creator is probably a retard and doesn't know what they're talking about. And you should probably ignore it so you don't get any bad ideas. This is the most important part of creating your offer.
And it's something that you need to understand and pay attention to so much. So this is the most important part. I think the top three most important parts of a business are the unit economics, the industry, in that order.
Your industry determines your potential. The offer depends on how easy it is to sell, but the unit economics basically are the limiting or the sole factor as if this is going to work or not over the long term. If your unit economics basically determine whether you're going to end up being an info product scammer who hops offers every three months, or if you're going to be respected, insanely profitable long -term business that you could sell one day.
To understand unit economics, we need to understand cash flow versus profit. And it is a rite of passage as a business owner. The first time you have an offer that is profitable while also being cash flow negative.
And if you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about or what that means, one day you will. You just haven't got there yet. It is a rite of passage.
And everyone knows that our offer needs to be profitable. Like the point of a business is to turn a profit. That's obvious.
But we also need to design it to be cash flow positive on the front end cash collected basis or we're never going to be able to scale. And if you truly have no idea what that means, that's a complete gibberish to you. Don't worry, we're going to go over this completely in depth like right now.
So we need to understand cash flow, right? If it costs us $5 ,000 to acquire and fulfill for a customer and we ultimately collect $10 ,000 from them, Like we made money.
That's two X ROI basically. Right. And that's great.
But there is a very important question when we are trying to scale and we're trying to create an offer in general. And this, when do we actually get the cash? If we spend $5 ,000 today to acquire and fulfill a customer, but they pay us a thousand dollars per month for 10 months, you know, that is profitable on paper, right?
Our LTV is $10 ,000 in terms of revenue. Our costs are $5 ,000, $5 ,000 in gross profit, on paper at least. The problem is that we're not collecting all this cash at once.
And basically with this, we are $4 ,000 in the hole. We had to pay for our sales commission, our ad spend, all of our software, all of our labor, basically upfront, right? We don't get to amortize that $1 ,000 per month for 10 months.
So we've basically spent $5 ,000 and we got $1 ,000. So we are cash flow negative. So if we wanted to go get 100 customers this way, we would need an enormous pile of cash just to fund our own growth.
And that might work if we are a venture capital -backed AI company who can be unprofitable for five years before finally making it work. But statistically speaking, especially for those who watch this video, no, that's not going to be the case. And that's why...
profitability is not enough. We also need to understand scale when we're talking about this stuff. And we need to design our front end offer to be cash flow positive on the cash collected on the first sale, right when the customer buys, because otherwise our ability to scale will be eventually limited as well.
So a lot of the time you'll hear people saying, I just made a $30 ,000, just got a $30 ,000 deal. But if, you know, it's, you know. $2 ,500 a month for 12 months, right?
That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about, in that case, our cash collected would be $2 ,500, not $30 ,000. Hopefully you know what that means.
So basically, we need to at least break even on the front end. But if we want to scale on the front end cash collected, it's not merely enough to break even. So hopefully you understand what up to this point.
But let's add some more examples. Let's say that... We collect $5 ,000 and our cost of fulfillment plus acquisition is also $5 ,000.
This means that we are breakeven cash flow wise. We're no longer cash flow negative like we were in the previous example. And that's okay in theory, right?
We're breakeven, $5 ,000 collected, $5 ,000 spent. And we could do that forever in theory, but theory is not reality. Because when we try to scale, there is going to be a lag period.
between when we spend this money and when we get it. There's a sales cycle in everything. If you spend $100 on ads today, you're not going to get $100 in revenue today.
It could take three days, seven days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. In the higher up market, the higher level of ICP, typically the greater delay there's going to be because there's multiple stakeholders, bureaucracy, and that kind of stuff. Breaking even is great, right?
We're acquiring customers, we're not losing any money, but we're never going to be able to significantly increase our ad spend like this because we still have to, normally people call it float that money for those few days or weeks to account for the sales cycle. And if we're trying to scale, like this might be fine if we're going to go slow and steady, but if we really want to scale, eventually we're either going to run out of cash, run out of credit or buckle under the pressure.
It's one thing to spend $10 ,000 or $25 ,000 or even $100 ,000 on ads, depending on your level. It's another thing to float a million dollars and wait for yourself to get that money back. So breaking even will never truly work if we want to scale aggressively.
If we want to scale aggressively, we have to do better than that. And this is where we kind of get... Back to that one check that I was talking about in the offer part B a few minutes ago.
Our goal on our offer is to cash collect at least 2x fulfillment and customer acquisition costs. Collecting at least 2x your fulfillment and acquisition cost is the promised land. Like this is what all of the religions talk about and all the philosophers and all the schools of thought.
This is heaven on earth, right? Obviously a joke, but as far as business going, like this is heaven on earth. This is Valhalla.
This is, I don't know what the other names for this heaven. We're just going to go with this is heaven on earth. So basically what this would mean, an example of this is if our acquisition costs and our fulfillment costs equal to $5 ,000, this means we collect $10 ,000 or more up front.
That's very, very important. So it's at least 2x. It could be 10x.
That would be even better, but at least 2x. The reason for this is if we collect $10 ,000, now we have $5 ,000 to cover our costs, right? So we have $5 ,000 to cover what we spent on ads, commission, tech, and our labor.
But then we also have $5 ,000 more to go get the next client right away instead of having to wait or anything. And then when we basically acquire that new client, this $5 ,000 is spent to do that. But then we have another $10 ,000 to pay for that one and then the next one.
And then it's basically just a chain cycle over and over. So it's not enough to be profitable. It's not even enough to break even on cash flow.
If we want to scale and make an insane amount of money, we need to achieve this goal in our offer. And if someone... If you're ever talking about offers or watching a course or watching a book or whatever, anything to do with offers and they don't tell you specifically this, then they have no idea what they're talking about, basically.
And anything they say is going to be irrelevant. If you only remember one thing or one slide from this entire course, this should be it. If you're on a computer, screenshot, phone, screenshot.
This is essentially... the condition we need to have unlimited cash flow, self -funding growth. And in theory, if we achieve this, there will be absolutely no limit to how big we grow our business.
In reality, like our capacity to fulfill in terms of labor and stuff would be a constraint, but we have unlimited cash flow, literally zero constraints at this point. And hopefully you understand this. If not...
literally take the transcript, put it in a chat GBT, screenshot this and stare at it until you do because it's literally that important.
So essentially, this is going to be our main goal, but very few people are going to achieve this right away. If you are, you're very blessed and or just very good at designing offers. But realistically, We're going to get to this point after going through a few phases.
So the first one is, you know, let's get someone to buy our offer at all, even one time, in terms of paid ads, cold traffic, outreach, regardless of the cash flow. That's a big milestone. I'm not saying it's not.
Let's get someone to buy from us once ever. Once we do that, we're going to want to work towards the point where we're at least breaking even, essentially 1x acquisition and fulfillment costs. Like that is a very worthy goal in of itself.
Don't think I'm demeaning that either. It's just not the promised land. And then once we get this, we'll work on reducing fulfillment costs through efficiency, through tech, through SOPs, through compounded learnings, et cetera.
We'll also continuously reduce the customer acquisition costs through better ads, funnels, sales processes, offer improvements. As we accumulate proof and client results, we'll raise the price. And eventually when we keep doing that, we will get to this 2x plus acquisition and fulfillment costs.
And then we can basically scale. And as we scale, in reality, I have a note on the bottom that our customer acquisition cost probably is not going to go down too much because as we scale, our ads show to broader and broader audiences, less and less effective, but should always try to reduce our customer acquisition cost too.
The thing that we have to kind of remember before I move on is... If we serve a non -industry, little to no chance of ever going through this process because we're never going to get our fulfillment costs low enough and our proof high enough to really hit this goal. It's very, very important to understand.
Being in a non -industry is going to make it very unlikely that you achieve this goal. And then because this goal is the most important thing in your entire business. makes having a non -industry very difficult.
I'm not saying this is impossible, by the way. You are just going to be five, ten times as talented as someone who is in a real industry to do it. And then as far as supplemental goals go, I think it's a useful slide.
But this 2x plus cash collected goal is kind of like the equivalent of having a good CPA with your Facebook ads, a cost per acquisition. As long as you're hitting your target CPA, every other ad metric could look terrible and it's fine. So as long as you're hitting your 2x cash collected goal, you don't really care about anything else.
But if you're not, here's how you would diagnose it is kind of what I'm thinking. So if you are not hitting your 2x cash collected target, let's make sure that we have at least an 80 % gross margin. Let's make sure we have at least a $250 effective hourly rate.
So, you know, if... It takes 20 hours to fulfill. We should be at least charging $5 ,000.
We should at least have a 6 % to 10 % application rate on our ads, at least a 3 % to 5 % qualified book call rate, at least a 50 % to 70 % show rate, and at least a 20 % to 25 % close rate. Then if we still aren't there, we can raise our prices by 20 % every four customers as long as our close rate remains over 20%, and then we can come and evaluate.
If you come back to this course one day and you are not able to achieve this, this would be a great slide for you to look at and plan around. Once we get to this 2x plus capacity or cash collected, our capacity becomes the constraint. Now we have to scale fulfillment.
In theory, we could keep acquiring customers forever, but... Most businesses are made up of people and people can only fulfill so much, right? And this is the reason why a lot of SaaS can be such a desirable business model, not automatically, but software is valuable because it largely fulfills automatically.
And that's why they get the huge multiples. If you could get this basically to X plus in a SaaS model, then you're probably heading towards a billion dollar unicorn status, right? Because capacity becomes this constraint, this is why we need to be in an industry and not a non -industry.
That is why the offer needs to be standardized. If it's not standardized, solving this constraint is going to be 5, 10, 100 times harder. But when it is standardized, we can build all of our people, processes, training, technology around fulfilling the same thing.
over and over and over. And that makes increasing our capacity as easy as possible versus extremely hard when it's a lot of it's customized.
That comes back to the a little bit more elaboration on that offer standardization. If our offer is not standardized, whether we're in an industry or non -industry, we'll never hit this goal without it being standardized. We can do the custom crap on upsells and backend offers if you want.
but we should never have a custom or non -standardized offer here. And the main reasons that this is so important is that your fulfillment costs decrease through compounded learnings, better processes, everything I said before. And if the fulfillment is different every time, this process won't occur.
Your customer acquisition costs decreases through better ads, better funnels, better sales processes, et cetera. And if you're selling something different every time, like this can never occur. And then your price increases as you accumulate proof, but more important, the confidence to charge more because you know you're going to get client results.
Things aren't standardized. This is never going to happen, right? You're never going to make it big on a front -end offer, or you're never going to make it big in business with a standardized front -end offer, and you should not even try.
Probably the second most important part here is we want to get... as close to selling error as possible. The best businesses have high revenue, but very low marginal fulfillment costs.
Like software, digital advertising, great examples. Once you've built the software, or once you've built Facebook ads and gotten the users, selling you more SaaS or selling you more Facebook ads from the perspective of meta costs very little. After the phone company gets you as a client, costs you very little to add the second line, third line, fourth line.
Once the insurance company gets you as a client for a car, if you get a second car, you add homeowner's insurance, you add a third car, costs them almost nothing to do so, right? And that is the reason businesses like that can scale so large. Like we are a service business probably selling a, you know, done for you offer, I don't know.
So we're probably not going to ever get to this level, but the goal is the same. We want to increase what we collect while reducing the cost and effort required to fulfill as much as possible. Ruthless standardization, ruthless SOPs, tech efficiency, AI, very, very important stuff.
So I do have that framework that we're talking about here for this one as well, just like I've done with the others, but it's more like tiers. So he kind of went over it. It's kind of a little bullshit to even do a framework here, but...
Tier one is losing money. You are losing less than 1x or collecting less than 1x your combined acquisition and fulfillment costs. Most people aren't stupid.
Most people are not going to intentionally run an offer that's not profitable. Where most people will be in tier one is they have a profitable offer, but they're just not collecting enough cash. So we need to...
make a bigger commitment. Like it's like that example, it costs you $5 ,000 to get $30 ,000 in revenue, but that $30 ,000 is 12 payments of 2 ,500. Like that isn't profitable, but that's an example of losing money and a tier one offer in terms of how much you collect.
Tier two is anywhere between you're collecting one X, but less than two X because you are breaking even, but you're not quite have enough cashflow for unlimited skill. perfectly acceptable to live in tier two forever. If you don't have insane ambitions, you just want to have a nice business that gets you a lot of money, you could very much stay in here.
But if you ever want to scale to the moon or you ever want to sell your business, you need to work towards tier number three, as that is the target. So anywhere in there, that is what you really want to do at the end of the day. So for our business, I just assigned some numbers to our HVAC business because...
You know, I have to. So we're going to sell qualified exclusive HVAC leads for $100 each and each cost us about $25 to generate an ad spend. I know this is realistic because I do this as a minor vertical in my pay -per -lead agency.
So essentially, it will cost us $2 ,000 to acquire the HVAC company as a client. We're also allowing $500 in labor to set up the CRM integration, the setup, you know. account manager, all that kind of stuff.
So we are going to say that they have to buy 100 leads and pay up front. So we're collecting $10 ,000 up front. Essentially, it's going to cost us $2 ,500 plus $500 to fulfill this client.
So that's $3 ,000 plus the $2 ,000 to acquire. So basically, that means our total acquisition and fulfillment costs are $5 ,000. So in this case, we would be, if these numbers were all true and they're true for me, at least, this is a tier three collecting 2x or more offer.
And it should be noted that, remember on that one page where I said the troubleshooting, where was my troubleshooting page? Supplemental goals, 80 % gross margin was one of the targets. And that is a worthy goal for every business, I would say.
But our gross margin here is only 70%, right? But we passed the 2x threshold. So who gives a shit?
Very important to have that mindset. The next thing is the big idea. So we've already done the, what have we done?
We've done the industry, the ICP, the offer and the unit economics now. Now we're getting to the part where we're going to actually put this into reality. And that's very, very exciting.
So I'm very excited to do this part and show you everything that you need to know to take your high level offer. and put it into reality. So let's get into it.
For a long time, this was the missing piece for me. And I have had an internal version of this course that I used for my employees for over eight years. Of course, I've updated it as I learned more.
But it wasn't until 12 to 18 months ago that I finally discovered the missing piece that really tied everything together. That's the big idea. And the big idea...
is the core unifying concept that everything in your marketing comes back to. And this is tough because without one, your marketing just never has that oomph or that X factor. It's kind of like a tiger without claws or, you know, just doesn't really have it.
So important to have this. Because a powerful big idea completely changes the game for you. The moment you capture your big idea is the moment all your marketing changes.
Your ads become easier to write. Your content becomes more consistent. Your offer becomes easier to explain.
Your proof becomes easier to organize. And everything starts... tying back to and reinforcing that same belief that your big idea is based off of.
So instead of constantly inventing new marketing, you're basically saying the same core thing in 100 different ways. And this helps you own an idea in the market, occupy mindshare, and make your marketing compound over time instead of just fizzling out the moment you stop running ads. Your big idea is what makes your offer make sense and become desirable.
And we're going to go over messaging quite extensively in the next part. But your big idea is what connects all of your different individual messaging angles back to your offer. And without this big idea to unify everything, your marketing often feels disconnected and just leaves people thinking like, who cares?
But with the big idea, it starts to make sense on a deeper, almost subconscious level. So it's important that we choose a big idea and we build around what our ICP already believes. So your big idea is similar to your offer.
Like ideally you build your ICP or you build your big idea around something your ICP already believes for the same reason you want to sell things that people must buy because it's a lot easier. And I think this matters even more with a big idea than with an offer because You can technically sell plenty of things that people don't have to buy.
But changing what someone believes or doesn't believe is extremely difficult, especially quickly. So we cannot create belief. We can only capture it.
And this is what we should be doing here. We're basically harnessing one of the biggest things that our ICP already believes and then basically hijacking and connecting that belief and basically presenting that. our offer, like connecting that belief to why our offer makes sense as the solution to that.
So the framework for this is basically number one, something that's simple and repeatable. Number two, something that's relevant to your exact ICP. Very important.
It's unexpected and distinct. It's concrete. It's credible.
It's emotional. It's demonstrated through stories. It makes the offer feel logical.
It's reinforced across the entire business. And then it's durable and ownable. And a lot of these points, not all of them, six of them, are from a book called Made to Stick, which talks about big ideas and why some ideas kind of persist throughout history and why lots are forgotten.
Recommend you read that book if you want to learn more about this stuff. So basically this framework will evaluate how clear, memorable, believable, and useful the big idea it is. It should be noticed that this kind of goes back to the concept of propaganda, right?
Something doesn't necessarily have to be true to hijack it and use it maliciously as your big idea. But use everything responsibly. So the first step is, is it simple and repeatable?
So can the big idea be immediately understood and repeated in one sentence? So it should communicate one core belief rather than several competing messages. And for reference, before we go through these checks, I would say that 95 to 99 % of people I've ever worked with, these 1800 plus agency clients, did not have a big idea.
And that's why everything feels pretty flat for a lot of them. The ones who do have a big idea, not very coincidentally, are... 10 million a year, 20 million, 30 million, 100 million plus at this point.
So do with that what you will. This is the stuff that will act as the missing piece a lot of the time. So if you do all of the other steps properly, but it still isn't quite working, usually the big idea.
So back to simple and repeatable. It's five -star big ideas immediately understood and accurately repeated after one exposure. And then...
One star idea is where most people are. There is no identifiable core idea. And then everywhere in between.
The second check, is this relevant to the exact ICP? Does the big idea connect to something the specific ICP generally wants, fears, believes, or experiences? And it should come from the ICP's real problems, circumstances, identity, desired outcomes.
So five star directly connects to an urgent problem, powerful desire, or important part of the ICP's identity. One star B, the ICP really has no idea to care at all. Kind of in between three stars, it's relevant, but it's too broad or weak.
Number three is unexpected and distinct. Does the big idea challenge an existing belief or introduce a surprising opportunity? It should be different enough to get attention, which is kind of the core reason, without becoming unbelievable here.
So basically a one star would be indistinguishable from everyone else's marketing. And that describes most people's stuff. Five star would be completely changes how the ICP understands the problem while remaining believable.
And then. Kind of three star would be using a familiar idea with a slightly different angle. You see a lot of success with that too.
So that's like a very good option for a lot of people. Is it concrete? Can the ICP clearly picture what the big idea means?
Use specific people, problems, outcomes, mechanisms, numbers, examples, instead of vague language. One star would be built entirely from meaningless claims and buzzwords, most people. But number five would be extremely specific and easy to visualize.
Number three in the middle, understandable but still contains some vague language. Number four, is it credible? Does the ICP have a reason to believe the big idea?
So we support it with proof, demonstrations, case studies, you name it. So it's supported, Five Star B is supported by overwhelming proof that is easy to believe and verify. Number one is unbelievable or contradicted by the available evidence.
And in the middle, number three, it sounds plausible and has a little support somewhere. It's one of the most important ones. Is it emotional?
Does it actually make the ICP care? It should connect something to something that's personally important, including money, time, freedom, status, security, identity, fear, ambition, etc. So five star B, it creates an immediate and powerful emotional response.
And again, number one is it gives the ICP no real reason to care. And the middle road is it's valuable, but primarily logical. And you can do a pretty good job with that, too.
It doesn't like make you want to tear up, but. it's pretty logical as to why you should do it. But emotion is very, very powerful.
Number seven is, is it demonstrated through real stories? So founder stories, customer transformations, specific before and after that make it easy to understand and remember. You know, number one is it's just all theory, never really demonstrated through a story.
Number five is just has endless reinforced through several compelling stories. And then number three is like, there's at least one clear story. Like a lot of people will have one clear case study.
Like for example, in my channel, I made a case study about myself that got 230 ,000 views led to like $9 million in revenue, but I don't really have that many other good ones. So you can do really well with, you know, three star, but I've never, and I've tried to make a few case studies. I never got more to that level.
You know what I mean?
Number eight is, does it make the offer feel logical? So basically, does the big idea change how the ICP understands the problem and make the offer feel like the logical solution? A lot of time, this will explain why the old way doesn't work and why this approach makes more sense.
So basically, number five is the offer feels like the inevitable solution once the big idea is understood. Three star would be it connects to the offer, but you still really have to sell it. And number one would be terrible.
It does not support the offer in any way. Number nine, is it reinforced consistently across the entire business? The ads, the content, the funnel, the sales process, the proof, you name it.
So five star would be every visible touchpoint clearly reinforces this. And then number one, the marketing is pretty disconnected. And then the final one is, is it durable and ownable?
Because a lot of big ideas may pass the first nine. sit here and go through this course again and trying to do something, but is it possible for you to really own it? And a lot of the time, especially when you have so much competition, it can be tough to really own it.
So five -star would be, is it durable, distinct, and already strongly associated with the business? And number one would be completely generic, short -lived, or already owned by someone else. And three -star is durable, but generic, or distinct, but too narrow.
So those are the kind of things. So do this and give yourself a final score. I would assume that 95 to 99 % of people watching this will have a bad one because there's just really no real big idea.
And that's a good opportunity because you can create it from scratch using this. Very, very important.
So I have three good examples and two of them are current that probably be relevant to people watching this video. The first one is Shelby Sapp. I would say she has a very, very good, you know, Big idea, which is that girls can be in sales and make their own income in sales.
Very easy to understand. It speaks to the direct ICP, like the girls who want to make more money, who don't want to just slave away in like some 60K per year job. It's kind of unexpected and distinct.
I'd say it's four out of five, not necessarily five out of five, but usually sales is kind of like a, especially her high ticket selling niche kind of, usually is male dominated. It is concrete. You know, her content shows women actually taking calls, closing deals, doing the job and stuff.
It's credible due to her own experience and all of the student results that she has. It's definitely emotional. Be like even more than a five out of five where, you know, I want to be a pink Pilates Porsche kind of girl type thing.
That's what a lot of women in her ICP will want. It's demonstrated through a lot of stories all the time. The offer is obviously the logical solution, training you how to be in sales after the chief's convinced you that you can make money this.
Her whole brand is reinforced across the entire business in this way. So it's just very good. And it's durable and ownable to a degree.
It's four out of five. She can repeat it for years, but there's going to be a lot of competition in it. And there was already competition in this space before.
She does kind of own it, I would say. She's definitely the one, but there's a lot of girls training businesses kind of like it. But to me, she's 47 out of 50, an excellent job.
A second example is Jeremy Haynes, his big idea, you know, one million a month. Perfect for the ICP, simple and repeatable, relevant to that ICP. You know, I would say that a lot of time his main service he provides is not really his, you know, content or his offer, but it's just.
basically increasing your, or reconsider what's possible for yourself in a way. It's concrete, as concrete as it gets, million dollars per month. It is credible.
Like he has his own results. So many of those trophies that he has for his clients, client interviews, et cetera. But there is going to be a skepticism from the average person stills that I would say prevents it from being a five, no matter what.
It is emotional. Like that's really what anyone wants to be a big business owner and demonstrated through a lot of good stories. The offer is logical.
You want to make $1 million a month? Look at how many people in my offer are at $1 million a month. We should buy it.
He does a tremendous job. One of the best I've ever seen at reinforcing across the entire business. Every single piece of content, every single thing he does is based on this.
And it is durable and ownable. I would say that in his ICP and in his space, at least, you see a lot of people trying to deuce versions of this now. And it's very strong.
Like he owns the $1 million per month, especially in kind of that info product, you know, high ticket offer space. Excellent job. I would say perhaps one of the best and most recognizable ones of all time is De Beers, which is a diamond company.
The big idea is a diamond is forever. Really smashes through all of the boxes. And I would consider this to be the gold standard example if you want one that's kind of.
mass market, like all time example after the ones that are kind of relevant, Shelby Sapp and Jeremy Haynes. So for our business, that HVAC company, I was thinking what a good idea was. I never got to one when I was creating this document that I would consider excellent, but I would probably do mine.
Like the only thing that separates big HVAC companies from small ones is how many leads they get. Simple and repeatable enough. You can kind of argue whether that's true or not, but I would kind of say it is like this is a commoditized.
Home service, in my opinion. It's relevant to that exact ICP. They have more crews and more room for work.
Getting enough customers is what they care about. It's unexpected and distinct. We're making a strong claim about why another HVAC company is bigger than ours.
It is concrete. You can quantify leads, jobs, see the connections. Is it credible?
I don't know. That's the one I was struggling with. You could definitely argue that this is not the only thing, but I tried my best here.
It is emotional, especially for people who want to grow their business. The only reason those other HVAC companies are bigger than you is because they get more leads. That is, in my opinion, an emotional response.
Demonstrated through stories, we would have to do that if this was a real company, of course. I think that the big idea makes the offer that we sell leads pretty logical. We would have to reinforce it across the entire business, but I don't think this is necessarily...
that durable and ownable. Like we could use it indefinitely, but other companies could very easily say that same thing too. So I gave myself a 41 out of 50 rating.
If I thought about it more, maybe I'd come up with a better one, but that is an example for our HVAC business. The next thing we'll talk about is messaging. And this is really the part where we take all of this theoretical work, including our big idea and start turning it into things we can actually see, which is very, very important and very, very exciting.
So let's get into it.
Messaging is where all of this theoretical stuff, including the big idea, even becomes real. Because your industry, your ICP, your offer, your big idea can all be correct. But if you communicate them badly, your marketing is going to fail still.
And messaging, this is one of the biggest reasons people get nothing but low -quality leads. Their offer might be good, but their messaging... accidentally speaks to the wrong person or the wrong level of customer.
And messaging ultimately determines who pays attention, who clicks, who applies, and ultimately who books a call and becomes a client. So your messaging is going to determine your targeting. More than almost anything you can change inside the ad account, your messaging will determine your targeting.
in Facebook ads, Google ads, anything that is algorithm -based advertising. And this is a triple whammy. So first, ad platforms analyze what your ad is about, you know, automatically transcribe visually, especially using AI these days, it's even more powerful.
And they try to show it to the people that they determine are most likely to respond. Second, the people who resonate with the messaging are the ones who naturally click, apply, and book calls. And then third, all of that conversion data feeds back into the pixel and optimization system, which teaches the platform to find more people like them.
So your messaging determines the audience, like who actually sees it. It determines who it's going to resonate with, obviously. But then those two things combine to feed like basically pixel data back, which it looks for the same person.
So it can quickly get out of control if your messaging is wrong. You know what I mean? So this creates a loop.
you know, messaging response, pixel optimization, more of the same people. So if your messaging accidentally goes to the wrong ICP, you can obviously see how we're going to get nothing but unqualified leads. That loop is insanely powerful.
So what we want to do, and the thing that we can do with our messaging to make it the most likely to succeed, is we need to describe their problems, circumstances, and outcomes in the exact way they describe them. And by that, I mean our ICP. So we did this earlier in the ICP section.
We need to correctly identify these things. And then we need to also, aside from correctly identifying them like the literal sense, we also need to correctly identify the way or different ways, because there could be multiple, that our ICP describes these things. It's not enough to say that the problem is they can't get clients with paid ads, right?
that's probably not the way that they would describe it. They would say, you know, no matter what I do with my ads, no one books a call. No matter how many landing pages I try, no one books...
Like, we got to describe or we got to find out how they would say it in addition to what the actual problem or circumstance is. And if we don't, the messaging is going to be very soy. It's going to be very lukewarm, half -ass, not really likely to resonate with anyone.
But if we do... It will resonate 10 times more and it will feel like an absolute dagger twisting into their heart, which is what we want in this case. And the thing we want to do is don't guess.
We want to do actual research. The best source to do research is actual call recordings. If you have hundreds or thousands of them, almost everything you could possibly need is right there.
But we could also supplement it with things like Trustpilot reviews, comments, Amazon reviews, Reddit threads, Quora. forums or anywhere that your ICP is likely to congregate. And we can use AI to sort everything by frequency.
We could go to, you know, copy and paste 10 ,000 Trustpilot reviews from different companies in our industry or ICP, ask AI to preserve the language and sort which one comes out the most frequently. And the goal is to find kind of 50 different options to test. So I love this auto insurance example because you're going to learn at my expense.
I'm fairly big in the space. And for years, almost all of my ads were some variation of, okay, save money on auto insurance. Usually auto insurance starting at $67 per month, et cetera.
One day out of the blue, I had the amazing idea to actually do research and take my job seriously. And at this time I went to the Trustpilot. I think it was Trustpilot, but it could be another site for all of the big insurance companies.
I copied all of their public reviews in a spreadsheet. And then manually, like this is pre -AI, sorted and ranked all of the things that people complained about the most. And guess what?
Price was not even in the top 15 things that were mentioned in either positive or negative reviews. And I was flabbergasted and very embarrassed because I've been running for years at this point on save money on auto insurance angles. The there's a lot of things, but the biggest things are like they were very helpful during the sales process.
And then they ghosted me when I actually needed to claim or they lowballed me on my claim or the claims process took forever. Or I paid my premiums on time for years. And then when I finally needed them, they fucked me over.
This is how the ICP would describe it and so on. So then I started making ads around these problems. Instead, I recorded exactly how they describe these things to in their exact language.
And a lot of time when you get one ad angle. In this way, like one problem, one circumstance, one outcome, you can make like 20, 30 different ways they describe that problem. And you can make a lot of unique ads that way.
And I literally 10x this business in four months. And I'm not even joking whatsoever. Like not even 1 % joke.
My run rate from about, I think it was about $250 ,000 per month to $3 million per month in four months just by having this. I unlocked so much more. I unlocked so much, you know, basically better, like my ads resonated so much more and my click -through rate went through the roof and the actual amount of people who spelled out the application went through the roof.
And this is a good example of why you shouldn't guess because then you don't want to be like me for several years before I actually did this. We also need to understand the difference between in -market and out -of -market buyers. There's two broad groups of people we need to think about.
In -market people, which means they're in the market for our solution right now. And out -of -market means they're going to need it eventually, but they're not currently shopping for this. If they're not currently looking for it, they're out -of -market.
It could be for so many reasons. They already have someone. They are doing it internally.
Bad timing. They don't even realize they need it yet. Whatever.
It doesn't really matter. The important thing is that we cannot force someone to suddenly be in -market. The creator of this concept basically indicates, generally speaking, about 1 % to 5 % of your market will be in market at any given time, which means 95 % to 99 % will be out of market.
Our goal here is not to try to convince someone to be in market. It doesn't really work like that. We want to have great messaging and we want to have a very diverse problem, circumstances, and outcomes so that when they...
Suddenly, so like they see us over time and think, wow, this guy really gets it. So when they suddenly are looking to buy and they're in market, they just think of you first instead of shopping around or asking like their group chats if they know someone. Like that is what we're trying to accomplish here.
The thing we want to remember, though, is out of market buyers still have the same problems as in market buyers or the same ICP. They're just. not actively shopping for a solution.
But when we basically, let's just say we have 50 different ad angles that are all relatable to them, they're going to see them over a week, a month, three months, six months, a year, and then think of us. And that is the goal. But it's not like these are two separate groups of people.
So when we are doing our messaging, like realistically, we should always start with a direct offer. Because a direct offer is what, like, is it going to work with your in -market audience, right? Just tell them exactly what you sell, who it's for, show them some proof, and then tell them what to do next.
This really can take you very far for your messaging. And depending on the size of your market, you're going to be able to spend hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per day, even on the high end, without really needing anything more sophisticated than... So you should just keep increasing your ad spend until it stops working.
And then once it stops working, you basically, that's when you need to expand. But keep it simple. A lot of the time, the best copy to sell a horse is horse for sale.
Just direct offer, static image ad or VSL, and great place to start. When you increase the ad spend until it no longer works, a lot of the time you'll just do something like 20 % per week. And then eventually, like, let's just say you go from 500 to 600, 600 to 720, 720 to whatever the math is.
And you get to like 2000 a day, whatever this amount is. And it's going to be different for everybody. Like eventually with your direct offer, increasing the spend will no longer, you know, lead to a direct correlation of new customers profitably.
And then that's when you max out. And then you have basically two options, which means horizontal scaling and vertical scaling. So option number one is horizontal scaling.
I typically will do this if it's a mass market offer, B2B or B2C, but mass market offer really works well. So essentially you're going to keep the same direct offer, the same messaging your ads, but you're going to create different versions for different types of people. So let's just say me, Matthew Larson, you hear me right now.
I am 30 year old white guy, right? So I would remake my same ad with. a black guy, white guy, Asian guy, Latino guy, East Asian guy, South Asian guy, Arab guy.
Then I would do the exact same thing with different girls. Then I would do the exact same with different age ranges. And then you get the point.
And when you do this, you could get a lot of permutations of your ads because you like it or not, people will buy and click on ads of people who look like them. If you have, like, I'm a white guy. 30 years old at the time of recording, my ads are more likely to show to other white guys.
It's just how it is. That's how the algorithm works because that's who it resonates with. And horizontal scaling can get you your, you know, your ads to like, you could just get the exact same ad, but you could absorb a lot more spend when you have different avatars with it.
And this is why it's really good for mass market offers. If it's, you know, you have a not a mass market offer and you are just selling to a certain ICP, probably wouldn't start here.
But in stuff like auto insurance and stuff like personal training and stuff like, you know, even accounting a little bit like this, really, if everyone needs your offer, like this is a very valid thing to start doing. You wouldn't necessarily choose horizontal or vertical like you do both, but it's just which one you want to start with.
Very, very good if you have a mass market offer. And then the vertical scaling is different. Instead of just expanding like this with our mass market offer, we're trying to go deeper in the same ICP.
And this is more of the problems, the circumstances and the outcomes route. So if you have like 10 ,000 people in your ICP and only 3 % are in market, let's just say. your basically direct offer is great for those 300 people.
But what about the other 9 ,700, right? They still have problems. They're still in certain circumstances.
They still want like certain outcomes. They're just currently thinking, I need this offer. So going to vertical scaling, expanding your messaging angles is going to work for the in -market people because I guess not everybody will want to click on a direct offer, but it's even more important to get mind space and start owning like mind share in the category for.
your greater campaigns, basically. So this is where all of that ICP work we did earlier starts to matter. You know, every ICP is a different set of problems, circumstances, and outcomes.
And basically our job is to identify what these are for the exact ICP we want, and then start basically building messaging. And the more, the better. Like you're probably going to settle on three, four, six, eight, 10, 15 total maybe, but you can and should test.
dozens or if not hundreds of different versions. So the problems, like something is going wrong that they want fixed, a circumstance is a situation they currently find themselves in, this is usually negative, and then an outcome is something they want to achieve. And it's very, very important that we stay inside our ICP when we do this.
We've said it probably a lot of times at this point, you're probably sick of it. But it's very important. If you do it wrong and you accidentally do this for the wrong ICP, you're going to absolutely nuke everything else we've done up to this point and everything in your entire funnel.
Because different levels of customers, different ICPs have completely different problems. Remember, an agency owner doing a million a year does not think about the same things as someone trying to get their first agency client and quit their job. A VP of marketing at a privately backed...
private equity backed roofing company does not think about the same things as a roofer with two helpers. And if your messaging is to beginner, you're going to attract beginners. And so many people accidentally do this and then they complain that Facebook sends them shitty leads.
So what you want to do, come up with 50 plus angles that sound similar and don't combine them too quickly because you'll notice when you see problems, circumstances, and outcomes, like they really are kind of like the same thing, but resist just choosing one of them. Because a problem, my ads don't work. Circumstance, I've tried 50 different ads and I can't get anything to work.
And then outcome, I want to get clients through paid ads. Like that is essentially the same parent or the same core thing, right? But when you...
make these as three different ads, even though they're essentially seeing the same thing, you'd be amazed at how different they resonate with different people. Even if two or more angles are 80, 90 % similar, they can still produce very different results. So resist the urge to combine them.
So you might think of 25, 30 different kind of core things, but those can branch out into 75, 90, 150, 300 different angles if you do it right. eventually you're going to kind of get to what I call your workhorse angles. And these are going to be the more broad, the more general angles that kind of can scale the most and absorb the most ad spend.
And realistically, like if you can find maybe four of these angles over time, you can basically scale your ad campaigns to tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per day, almost regardless of the. niche or the ICP you're doing. These are kind of going to be the backbones of your advertising.
And then you could have like dozens, if not hundreds of different ads in these four angles. Then you're going to fill in the gaps with what I call your niche angles. You might have 10, 25, 50, 100 more niche angles, and maybe each one can only carry maybe a small amount of ad spent.
Like these are very specific problems that resonate very strongly. with someone who is facing a certain circumstance, but that circumstance is, let's just say, not that general. These can really get you clients in ways that your workhorse angles might not.
But the bad side or the downside is a lot of these can only have just so much spent. Like your niche angle maybe could only do $200 a day in spend because it's just so niche. But who cares, right?
They still reach people that your workhorse angles miss. And someone might ignore 15, 20, 50 of your workhorse angles and then see this one insanely specific ad describing their exact problem better than they could themselves. And now you have them.
So these things do have their place. And the thing you want to understand with all this is that your messaging angles work together very well. Your ads don't exist independently or in a vacuum.
Like someone might see one ad today and then five times more tomorrow than 20 times more this week. Over the course of a month or six months, they might see hundreds of different ads, hundreds of different angles. And you are the person who just gets it when they scroll their feed.
So when they think of you six months later, now you're getting it. You're getting their business. They're not thinking about anything else.
Different angles give them different reasons to pay attention every time. One talks about their sales team. One about their ads.
One about their outreach. One about their content. One about their offer.
One about their hiring. you know, management? What about getting out of fulfillment?
And then over time, all of these basically reinforce that you understand their world and you solve the problems they have. And then now six months, a year down the line, I need to buy. I know exactly who I'm calling and that's how it works.
It's almost like when you have all of these different ad angles, they kind of work like a long term YouTube strategy in some ways where you have so much different problem and you're just the guy who gets it. And then finally, none of this works nearly as well if you describe their problem like a marketer instead of like them.
Every industry and every level of customer has its own unique language and lingo. A small e -commerce brand, for example, might obsess over ROAS, but the bigger, more sophisticated ones obsess over... contribution margin and incrementality and payback periods.
And if you're trying to sell to the sophisticated company or the sophisticated ICP while talking like their problems are purely about ROAS, you're kind of signaling that you are a beginner who works with smaller companies. They probably won't even recognize like this is why they don't like your ad or this is why it doesn't mean anything to them.
But they're just going to think like, this isn't for me. This guy doesn't know. So when we pull the language directly from sales calls, emails, reviews, customer conversations, our messaging really gets a lot of teeth versus just being a little bit stale.
We know what they care about. We know how they describe it. And we say it back to them better than they can say it themselves.
And that is what really gives your messaging that punch. So framework one. would basically be like find the most 30 common problems your ICP talks about and then basically kind of rank them out of 10 in terms of a frequency and then tie them back yes or no the big idea.
I just have five here instead of 30 just to save space. But this is what you would do. You would literally go through your calls and rank them like this.
Find the different ways they describe it. A lot of the time they'll describe it many different ways and you should write all of them down and then rank them how frequently it happens. The second part is basically going to be how well this ties back to your ICP.
And then we're going to rank them that way. So let me show you what I mean. I have the thing here.
So criteria number one is, does this angle actually speak to the customer you want, including their level in that industry? Like remember, an established agency owner has different problems than the beginner agency owner. So when you go through your calls and you basically or you go through reviews on Trustpilot or however you find them, you're going to put them in here.
You're going to do it and then you're going to rank how clearly they talk to your exact ICP. Because a lot of the time you might get a thousand reviews copy and pasted when you do your research, but not all of them are necessarily. made by members of your ICP.
So you need to do this one at a time. The best would be, you know, it clearly reflects the circumstances and priorities of your ICP. A bad one would be it directly appeals to the wrong customer or level.
The next is, does it speak to a real problem? And the stronger the problem, the easier it is for the customer to recognize themselves in the message. So the ad angle speaks to a frequent, painful problem your ICP clearly cares about.
That would be obviously the best. And then a bad one would be it doesn't speak to a meaningful problem. The next criteria is how well does it use their exact language?
The angle uses the exact language phrases and situations would be a five out of five. And then a lot of the time, the bad one, the angle sounds nothing like how the ICP describes a problem. If you want to think of a bad example, just literally go to any venture capital backed tech company and you'll see exactly.
the difference.
And then criteria four is how well does it tie back to the big idea? Because not all of them necessarily will. It's not the worst thing in the world if it's not that apparent, but the best angles will clearly and naturally reinforce the big ideas.
But as long as it kind of can connect to the big idea, even if it needs some explanation, that's good. But if it doesn't connect to the big idea at all, Probably not something you want to build your, especially workhorse campaigns around.
And then does it make the offer feel relevant? Of course, that is an important step, but we've gone over that a lot. So here's an example for the marketing agency for roofers.
And we could basically use the exact same thing in our HVAC. So instead of just like, are you sick of the phone not ringing? Are you sick of losing leads to the competitor down the street?
Are you sick of feast or famine revenue cycles? Are you sick of relying on referrals? Like to me, those will target a very low level roofer.
If you want to target the high level roofers, like roofing companies, do you need more lead flow to fill your sales team calendar? Like if they have a sales team, they're a big business. Roofing companies, are you in danger of missing your quarterly revenue targets?
Like small businesses don't have quarterly revenue targets. Roofing companies, are you looking to diversify your lead sources? Only a large roofing company would even know what that means, let alone want to do it.
Like an owner operator roof or a small company don't care about diversifying their lead sources. They just want to get off the ground, right? Like these angles would be more tailored towards that private equity backed multi -state roofing company that we used in our example.
And hopefully you understand like how this works. For our business, the residential HVAC company. Like the problem, not enough work to keep their crews busy, not enough opportunities for their sales team.
They're dependent on one lead source. Like those, we have more room for jobs, but we aren't getting enough leads. We need more leads to fill our sales team calendar.
Too much of our business comes from X lead source, right? So essentially, I didn't put an example here because this is a great example for our HVAC one. Just literally swap roofing companies for HVAC here.
Very, very good.
Then the final section is going to be proof. So proof generally means evidence or information that shows something is true or correct. The key word obviously is evidence here.
And proof is a big part of the high -level architecture and strategy of your business. And it will basically make everything easier. So in our case, it's evidence that shows we can solve whatever problem someone is coming to us to solve.
And in the value formula, this is very tied to the perceived likelihood of achievement. So basically, the quantity, intensity, level, and type of proof all contribute to how likely someone thinks that you can actually get the result for them. And buyers usually will choose the safest option.
And this is especially true as you increase your level of ICP. Reputation, history, time of business are also forms of proof. People will often choose a Fortune 500 company over a boutique provider, even if the boutique provider might actually do better work.
Why? Because the big company feels safer. When you go to McDonald's, you know that it's not going to be the best meal of your life, but at the very least, it's not going to be terrible, right?
That random restaurant down an alley in Italy probably has a high chance of being the best meal you've ever got in your life, but there's also a decent chance you're going to get stabbed, right? And the same thing happens in business. Especially as you sell to larger companies, the buyer in your ICP is increasingly an employee and not the founder.
And very quickly as you go upmarket, the priority is often less about hitting a grand slam and more about not fucking it up and getting fired. These people have mortgages. They have family to feed.
They don't want to take a chance on you a lot of the time because... They're going to get fired if you screw it up and you're not a reputable company. So there's four tiers, and the first tier of proof is language.
Understanding your ICP is proof. If you know their problems, their circumstances, their desired outcomes, their objections, and describe them in the exact language they use, it's the ultimate form of proof and status symbol that you've been there before. You must do it all the time.
If you can articulate their problem better than they can, that is the strongest proof of all. The second strongest tier of proof is actually content. And basically great content is proof that you actually know what you're talking about.
If someone takes an idea from your content, applies it and gets a result before they even paid you, they now have personal proof that your ideas work. That is much better than claiming or harping that they should do X, Y, and Z. It's also better than just showing a bunch of screenshots or testimonials.
Before they do this, they always thought, okay, assuming these testimonials are true, like I seen he has done it for these businesses, but will it work for me? And this is where the content really gives them ideas to try themselves. And if it work, then they buy.
This is how I personally buy most of the time, at least when I'm buying from content creator type stuff. So I like... three monster content assets i like a full course kind of like the one you're watching i also like a really in -depth audit and case study and then i like a complete walkthrough of you actually doing the work make all of these extremely in -depth you know four hours each eight hours whatever the point is not the length the point is that by making these monster content assets very long The point is that you know enough about your subject to talk intelligently about your craft for hours and hours without hiding behind a teleprompter or editor like so many of your competitors will.
So lay out your entire service, all the steps, make a course of everything you know. Watch a video of you actually doing the work inside your own course. Watch me build this thing in 12 hours, for example.
And then just a really big in -depth audit or case study. These are the best forms of proof assets you can possibly get. If people come in through ads, they're eventually going to find these things and these will really help your ads.
The third tier is evidence. And this is what people normally think of as proof, like the screenshots, the testimonials, case studies, reviews, you name it. These are very important, but they are the third tier of proof.
And you want to have quantity, diversity, and intensity. A lot of proof, different kinds of proof, big results, small results, medium results. And then it's even better if you organize these results around each objection.
And then the fourth proof is time itself. How long have you been in business? If you have been doing something successfully or successfully enough to still be in business after 5 or 10 or 20 years, people reasonably assume that you probably aren't terrible at it.
That taco stand down the street didn't survive 20 years by poisoning their neighbors, right? They're probably doing something right. You can't manufacture this one necessarily.
You earn it by staying in business. And every time you switch your offer and switch your business type, a lot of this really resets. So that's another reason why you want to build something to last.
So we need all four tiers because they all answer a different question. in the customer's mind. Language is the, do you understand me?
Content is, do you actually know what you're talking about? Evidence is, have you actually done this before? And time and business, are you established and safe?
You can be strong in one and weak in another, but a lot of the time people will only have the evidence. Have you done this successfully before? But that leaves a lot of stuff.
Do you understand me? Do you personally know what you're talking about? Anyone can fake a screenshot.
It's a lot harder to fake the language, the content, all of that kind of stuff. So all four work together. So as far as the proof goes, like for language, your messaging shows a deep understanding of your ICP situation.
I'm not going to talk too much about this because we just did it in messaging and throughout the course. The content is your content goes deep enough for someone to understand your process, use your ideas and get a result before paying you. That is the ultimate version of this.
The worst one out of five is your content's either surface level or it doesn't exist at all. Evidence is you show substantial results for customers like your ICP with enough context and supporting evidence for someone to understand what happened and why it matters. Most people who put a bunch of proof just have screenshots.
They don't actually show the context or why it matters. Most people's really proof. even if they have a lot of it, lands in this neutral category.
And then obviously, if you have no proof, it's a really bad thing. And then time and business. You have a long, continuous operating history with customers still buying from you today.
Neutral is kind of what most people have, a short but established operating history. And then absolute beginners have basically bad. And then your final score rated out of 20.
So for our business, our HVAC, over the course of five years, We would want to learn the exact words from our sales calls, talk about keeping their crews busy, selling these leads, etc. We want to make full HVAC marketing courses, audits, long -form walkthroughs.
We want to collect as much evidence as we can, and then we're going to have a five -year track record. This is the most made -up version because this is not a real business, but that's what we would do. And then all of this leads towards what we'll call a self -improving loop.
Because I said at the very beginning, This is very theoretical. You would go into the lab in the trenches and set everything up.
But once you set it up, it still improves over time. And that's a very important thing to wrap up this course with. So let's show you some of the things that can work.
And this is going to be a faster section.
But basically... Like some things is over time, we're going to turn sales call objections into marketing in terms of stuff into our offer on our sales page and our emails via sales ads and all that kind of stuff and preemptively overcome objections, which will increase the perceived likelihood of achievement. We will collect and sort our proof by objection.
Let's just say there's 10 main objections. We're going to take all of those screenshots, case studies, and organize them underneath each. So people will have the objections and they'll see 50 different examples of people who had that objection and what happened.
We'll take language from the sales calls and incorporate it into our messaging. We will reduce costs through better processes, basically document it, automate it, template it, eliminate it, et cetera. The same offer will get cheaper and easier to fulfill over time.
We'll increase the prices as we fill our capacity and demand increases. So we'll be selling the same thing for more money, which means higher margin. And then we'll remove parts of the offer that turns out customers don't really care about.
And they'll always be these and you just have to identify them. And then basically we'll refine our ICP based on who turns out to be our best and most profitable customers who stay the longest. complain the least, are the easiest to fulfill, and are the most profitable.
As we get a lot of clients, and we should be able to scale when we do all of this stuff right, we'll quickly get 1 ,000, 2 ,000, 5 ,000 examples. And over the course of a year, two years, three years, we will quickly learn who is the proper ICP. And that's the customer we want more of.
But that is the end of the actual steps for this course. And that is really how you would make an offer that converts and really, really scales. A lot of people think about it's the offer on its own, but it's actually the combination of all of the things in our core seven that really help us scale it to the moon.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

The course opens with a number meant to sting: about 1,800 offers reviewed, and fewer than ten built to reach nine figures. The claim that follows sets up three hours of material. Most offer advice polishes the wrong layer, and the decisions that actually cap an offer are made before the offer is written.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

02:11list

The Core Seven

  1. Industry
  2. ICP
  3. Offer
  4. Unit economics
  5. Big idea
  6. Messaging
  7. Proof

Seven decisions that sit above the marketing funnel. Each is only good or bad relative to the others, and the weakest one caps the whole business. They count for roughly 80% of results versus 20% for funnel tactics.

Steal fordiagnosing a stalled business before touching ads or landing pages
14:48concept

Industry vs non-industry

  1. Non-industry: every client is different, every process starts over
  2. Industry: one learning applies to every client and compounds

A real industry passes the copy-and-paste test: a winning ad, funnel or script cloned to another client produces the same result. E-commerce, SaaS, agencies, coaches, consultants and local businesses fail it. Illustrated as a $5,000/month agency: 70 vs 8 hours of delivery, 20% vs 84% margin, $5,000 vs $52,000 lifetime gross profit.

Steal forchoosing or pivoting a service niche
28:35list

Industry scorecard

  1. Customer LTV
  2. Easy to reach
  3. Large market
  4. Significant pain
  5. Spending power
  6. Market direction

Each criterion scored 1-5 for a total out of 30: Excellent 27-30, Good 24-26, Neutral 20-23, Poor 15-19, Bad 6-14. A 1 or 2 on LTV, reach, pain or spending power can sink an industry even if the rest score well.

Steal forcomparing candidate niches side by side
47:43model

ICP from shared characteristics

  1. Pull the last 100 (or 1,000) customers from about six months
  2. Find 2-5 traits that 80%+ share
  3. Then research their problems, circumstances and outcomes

The ICP is discovered from who actually buys, not chosen by preference. The presenter's 1,800-customer agency program resolved to four traits (age 25-34, male, USA, $500K-$5M revenue) covering 91% of buyers.

Steal forad targeting and cold outreach list filters
51:21list

Problems, circumstances, outcomes

  1. Problems: something going wrong they want fixed
  2. Circumstances: the situation they find themselves in, usually negative
  3. Outcomes: what they want to achieve

The raw material for offer, big idea and messaging. They differ sharply by customer level: a small agency owner wants a first client, a large one wants to add a second acquisition channel before selling the agency.

Steal forbuilding an angle bank for ads and emails
1:00:05list

Three things that must be true to buy

  1. They understand what the offer is
  2. They believe it solves their problem
  3. They believe you are the one to deliver it

No purchase happens unless all three hold. Must-buy offers settle the first two by default, leaving marketing free to focus on the third.

Steal forauditing a sales page for missing belief steps
1:01:01list

The must-buy ladder

  1. Legally must buy (auto insurance, taxes, HIPAA compliance)
  2. Functionally must buy (home insurance for a mortgage, food, shelter)
  3. Competitively must buy (email marketing for e-commerce, lead generation, heating and cooling)

The closer an offer sits to a legal requirement, the more demand is built in and the less education or persuasion it needs.

Steal forrepositioning a nice-to-have offer toward a requirement
1:08:21list

Five value levers with a dollar ROI

  1. Make more money
  2. Save time
  3. Reduce costs
  4. Reduce risk
  5. Increase speed

Every offer must do at least one. Always translate the benefit into dollars for the buyer: 4 hours a day saved is 1,000 hours a year, so a $15,000 offer costs $15 per hour saved; a $2,500/year compliance service still pays off if it prevents one $250,000 fine per century.

Steal forpricing pages and ROI slides on sales calls
1:13:33model

Value Formula

  1. Dream outcome
  2. Perceived likelihood of achievement
  3. Time delay
  4. Effort and sacrifice

Value equals dream outcome times perceived likelihood, divided by time delay times effort. Borrowed from $100M Offers and used here to amplify an offer that already clears the must-buy test, with an emphasis on specific proof and fast first wins.

Steal forstress-testing an offer's promise and delivery model
1:40:32list

Offer scorecard Part A: the customer's view

  1. Built for cold traffic
  2. Dream result / must buy
  3. Creates obvious value
  4. Perceived likelihood of achievement
  5. Clear result or deliverable
  6. Time to first value
  7. Low customer effort
  8. Strong risk reversal

Eight checks scored 1-5 for a total out of 40. Time to first value earns 5 stars within 24 hours and 1 star beyond 90 days, measured by what the marketing says, not what fulfillment actually does.

Steal forrating a current offer before rewriting it
1:48:19list

Offer scorecard Part B: the business's view

  1. Covers acquisition and fulfillment costs by 2x
  2. Standardized and repeatable
  3. Relevant in five years
  4. Naturally leads into the main offer

The side most offer advice skips. An offer that sells well but can't be delivered profitably or repeatably forces a new offer every quarter.

Steal forchecking whether an offer can be a permanent business
1:59:36model

The 2x cash-collected rule and three tiers

  1. Tier 1: collect less than 1x acquisition + fulfillment cost
  2. Tier 2: collect 1x to under 2x
  3. Tier 3: collect 2x or more upfront

Collect at least twice the combined cost on the first sale and each customer funds both their own fulfillment and the next acquisition, making growth self-funding. HVAC example: 100 leads at $100 paid upfront ($10,000) against $5,000 total cost is tier 3 even at a 70% gross margin.

Steal forsetting payment terms and minimum commitments
2:05:15list

Supplemental diagnostic benchmarks

  1. 80%+ gross margin
  2. $250+ effective hourly rate
  3. 6-10% ad application rate
  4. 3-5% qualified booked-call rate
  5. 50-70% show rate
  6. 20-25% close rate
  7. Raise price 20% every four customers while close rate stays above 20%

Only needed when the 2x target isn't met; if the 2x target is hit, these can all look bad and it doesn't matter.

Steal forfinding which funnel stage breaks the economics
2:16:31list

Big idea: ten checks

  1. Simple and repeatable
  2. Relevant to the exact ICP
  3. Unexpected and distinct
  4. Concrete
  5. Credible
  6. Emotional
  7. Demonstrated through stories
  8. Makes the offer feel logical
  9. Reinforced across the business
  10. Durable and ownable

Scored out of 50, six of the checks adapted from the book Made to Stick. The idea must capture a belief the ICP already holds. Rated examples: Shelby Sapp 47/50, Jeremy Haynes' one million a month, De Beers' 'a diamond is forever', and the HVAC idea at 41/50.

Steal forchoosing the one belief a brand repeats everywhere
2:39:06model

Horizontal vs vertical scaling

  1. Horizontal: same ad, remade for different demographics
  2. Vertical: more angles for the same ICP

Start with a direct offer and raise spend about 20% a week until returns stop. Horizontal suits mass-market offers; vertical reaches the 95-99% of the ICP who are not currently shopping.

Steal forplanning what to do after a winning ad plateaus
2:44:16concept

Workhorse and niche angles

  1. About four workhorse angles carry most spend
  2. 10 to 100 niche angles fill the gaps at small budgets

Generate 50+ angles and resist merging near-duplicates. Workhorse angles are broad enough to absorb large budgets; niche angles might only take $200 a day but catch prospects who ignored everything else.

Steal forstructuring an ad account's creative testing
2:48:13list

Angle scorecard

  1. Speaks to the right customer and level
  2. Speaks to a real problem
  3. Uses their exact language
  4. Ties back to the big idea
  5. Makes the offer feel relevant

Rank researched angles by frequency, then score each. Roofing example: 'Are you sick of the phone not ringing?' draws small owner-operators; 'Are you in danger of missing your quarterly revenue targets?' draws larger companies.

Steal forfiltering a list of ad hooks before production
2:54:45list

Four tiers of proof

  1. Language: do you understand me?
  2. Content: do you know what you're talking about?
  3. Evidence: have you done this before?
  4. Time in business: are you established and safe?

Scored out of 20. Most businesses only have evidence. Content proof comes from three monster assets: a full course, an in-depth audit or case study, and a complete walkthrough of doing the work.

Steal forplanning a proof library and long-form content
3:00:52list

The self-improving loop

  1. Turn sales call objections into marketing
  2. Collect and sort proof by objection
  3. Put sales call language into messaging
  4. Reduce costs through better processes
  5. Raise prices as capacity fills
  6. Remove parts of the offer customers don't care about
  7. Refine the ICP around the best customers

The Core Seven are set up once but improved continuously, so the same offer gets cheaper to deliver, easier to sell and more expensive over time.

Steal fora quarterly offer review routine
CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK
00:53link
“If you want a link to this presentation that I'm going through, you can get that in the description and the pinned comment. It'll send it right to your email.”

A single soft email-capture ask in the first minute, tied to the slides on screen, then never repeated. The course itself doubles as the 'monster content asset' the proof section recommends.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA
00:53linkUltimate Offers Course presentation (free download) ↗
3:02:57channelMore Matthew Larsen (second channel) ↗
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

course title over the full funnel map
hookcourse title over the full funnel map00:00
the Core Seven sit above the funnel
promisethe Core Seven sit above the funnel03:17
non-industry vs industry diagram
valuenon-industry vs industry diagram20:32
industry score out of 30
valueindustry score out of 3037:43
small vs large agency owner problems
valuesmall vs large agency owner problems53:44
Value Formula
valueValue Formula1:14:19
perception equals reality
valueperception equals reality1:37:11
unit economics section card
valueunit economics section card1:53:08
capacity becomes the constraint
valuecapacity becomes the constraint2:06:54
big idea section card
valuebig idea section card2:13:11
research 50+ angles
valueresearch 50+ angles2:43:29
proof tier 1: language
valueproof tier 1: language2:54:55
self-improving loop recap
ctaself-improving loop recap3:00:49
Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

course title over the full funnel map00:00the Core Seven sit above the funnel03:17Frame at 05:43 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts05:43Frame at 08:00 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts08:00Frame at 09:41 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts09:41Frame at 12:34 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts12:34
course title over the full funnel map00:00the Core Seven sit above the funnel03:17Frame at 05:43 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts05:43Frame at 08:00 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts08:00Frame at 09:41 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts09:41Frame at 12:34 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts12:34Frame at 14:51 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts14:51Frame at 17:08 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts17:08non-industry vs industry diagram20:32Frame at 21:21 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts21:21Frame at 24:00 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts24:00Frame at 26:17 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts26:17Frame at 28:34 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts28:34Frame at 30:52 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts30:52Frame at 33:09 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts33:09Frame at 35:26 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts35:26industry score out of 3037:43Frame at 40:00 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts40:00Frame at 43:00 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts43:00Frame at 44:35 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts44:35Frame at 46:52 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts46:52Frame at 49:09 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts49:09Frame at 51:26 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts51:26small vs large agency owner problems53:44Frame at 56:01 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts56:01Frame at 57:14 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts57:14Frame at 61:32 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts61:32Frame at 61:50 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts61:50Frame at 65:10 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts65:10Frame at 67:27 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts67:27Frame at 69:44 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts69:44Frame at 72:01 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts72:01Value Formula74:19Frame at 76:36 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts76:36Frame at 78:53 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts78:53Frame at 81:10 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts81:10Frame at 83:27 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts83:27Frame at 85:45 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts85:45Frame at 88:02 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts88:02Frame at 90:19 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts90:19Frame at 92:36 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts92:36Frame at 94:53 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts94:53perception equals reality97:11Frame at 99:28 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts99:28Frame at 101:45 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts101:45Frame at 104:02 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts104:02Frame at 106:19 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts106:19Frame at 108:37 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts108:37Frame at 110:54 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts110:54unit economics section card113:08Frame at 115:28 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts115:28Frame at 117:45 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts117:45Frame at 120:03 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts120:03Frame at 122:20 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts122:20Frame at 124:37 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts124:37capacity becomes the constraint126:54Frame at 129:11 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts129:11Frame at 131:29 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts131:29big idea section card133:11Frame at 136:03 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts136:03Frame at 138:20 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts138:20Frame at 140:37 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts140:37Frame at 142:55 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts142:55Frame at 145:12 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts145:12Frame at 147:29 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts147:29Frame at 148:59 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts148:59Frame at 152:03 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts152:03Frame at 154:21 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts154:21Frame at 156:38 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts156:38Frame at 158:55 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts158:55Frame at 161:12 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts161:12research 50+ angles163:29Frame at 165:47 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts165:47Frame at 168:04 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts168:04Frame at 170:21 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts170:21Frame at 172:43 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts172:43proof tier 1: language174:55Frame at 177:13 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts177:13Frame at 180:23 from The Exact System To Make An Offer That Converts180:23self-improving loop recap180:49
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