09:03Tom Youngs · Talking Head
Copy This YouTube Strategy (It'll Make You $1 Million)
A 9-minute case for posting a simple, ugly weekly lecture by Monday lunch — and why 500 views of the right person beats 500,000 views of the wrong one.
June 14thThe argument in one line.
Switching a coaching business from large upfront payments to monthly recurring doubles lifetime value but collapses near-term cash collection by roughly eight times, and the marketing messaging takes about a year to catch up.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A coach, consultant or mentor already past six figures who is weighing a switch from upfront payments to monthly recurring and wants the cash-flow damage quantified before committing.
- An operator who wants a working example of a quarterly planning cadence with distinct rest, audit and sprint phases rather than permanent execution.
- Someone building an AI assistant on top of their own client data who needs to know what infrastructure has to exist underneath it first.
- A creator who suspects long-form view hours, not follower count, is the number tied to revenue, and wants to see the correlation on real numbers.
- Anyone curious what a seven-figure online education business actually costs to run each month, line by line.
SKIP IF…
- You are under roughly ten thousand a month, where the constraint is getting clients at all, not restructuring how they pay.
- You want a tactic you can run tomorrow. This is a review of decisions already made, not a step-by-step playbook.
- You need the strategy proven before you will consider it. These results are mid-pivot, with annual revenue likely finishing below the prior year.
- You are looking for a general business video. Almost every example assumes you sell your own expertise to other experts.
The full version, fast.
Eighteen months ago this consultant cut his addressable market twice (no beginners, no personal-development niches) and moved pricing from upfront and split payments to monthly recurring. Lifetime value doubled from seven thousand to fifteen thousand, retention passed ninety-five percent, and the median incoming client went from five thousand to twenty-two thousand a month in revenue. The bill was immediate: monthly collection fell from roughly seventy to a hundred thousand down to about ten thousand, profit margin dropped from above eighty-five percent to forty percent, and the content messaging took a full year to re-target. 2026 cash collected sits at four hundred and forty-eight thousand through September, likely finishing below 2025.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 03:55
01 · Intro and the quarterly cadence
Sets up a Q3 life review and explains the three-block quarter his members run: two weeks of rest, two weeks of audit, then an eight-week sprint.
03:55 – 08:43
02 · The bets that nuked the cash flow
Niching to business coaches only, dropping personal-development offers, and switching to monthly recurring. What each one cost in market size, cash and margin.
08:43 – 12:45
03 · The next milestone and the laws
Five hundred thousand monthly recurring with a small team, borrowed from Sam Ovens, plus six written constraints on how the business is allowed to run.
12:45 – 18:50
04 · The Summer Perspective retreat
A members-only event in the Austrian Alps built on two hours of workshopping a day and the rest outdoors, designed for perspective rather than revenue.
18:50 – 21:45
05 · A last-minute half marathon
A personal detour: registering an hour before a 5,000-runner mountain half marathon in road shoes, the day before the retreat began.
21:45 – 25:20
06 · Alps road trip and Montenegro
Driving to the Italian Dolomites to meet his parents, a blown tyre in rural France, and a trip to Montenegro earlier in the quarter.
25:20 – 30:50
07 · Member results
Over seven million in cumulative member wins across more than 180,000 data submissions, plus individual content breakthroughs from members escaping low view counts.
30:50 – 35:20
08 · Doubling lifetime value
LTV from seven thousand to fifteen thousand, a fifty-thousand five-year target, retention above ninety-five percent, and the rising quality of incoming members.
35:20 – 39:30
09 · Inside the Scale20 app
The custom business intelligence platform: context rooms, psychographic profiles, a skills repository, and the per-member AI assistant built on top of all of it.
39:30 – 45:30
10 · Custom game plans and phase gates
Generated first-90-day plans in the member's own language, and the four phases (launch, loaded, spinning, compounding) with the gates that unlock each one.
45:30 – 47:44
11 · Content gone nuclear
YouTube view hours up twenty-seven times quarter on quarter, Instagram past a hundred thousand followers, and the channel now run by a content manager.
47:44 – 52:22
12 · The website that closed a member
A thesis that a high-quality site is now the minimum trust bar, validated by a member naming it as the reason he joined, then packaged as a teaching asset.
52:22 – 56:00
13 · The Q3 side quests
Two projects at a time, one better and one bigger. Project Moneyball on value engines and benchmark data, and Project Glassbox on making the company visible.
56:00 – 59:36
14 · Cash in and what it costs
The full quarter P&L read aloud: cash collected, operating costs, special project spend, operating profit, core margin, and a line-by-line cost breakdown.
59:36 – 1:03:44
15 · Q4 projects and the ad numbers
Content performance totals, ad spend and cash return on ad spend, inbound lead and qualified conversation counts, and the Q4 project slate.
1:03:44 – 1:07:22
16 · Where we're heading
Year-to-date cash collected, the admission that 2026 will likely finish below 2025, the two named opportunities for Q4, and the closing invitation.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Moving from upfront payments to monthly recurring cut monthly cash collection from roughly seventy to a hundred thousand down to about ten thousand, overnight.
- Lifetime value doubled from seven thousand to fifteen thousand in twelve months without raising the price of anything.
- Content messaging lags a positioning change by about a year, because the audience you already built matches who you used to serve.
- Two years without a single sales call still produced a million dollars in revenue.
- Profit margin fell from above eighty-five percent to forty percent on purpose, as reinvestment into team and infrastructure.
- Past a certain revenue level the bottleneck is perspective, not tactics or tools.
- A client retreat does not need to be profitable. This one netted roughly nine thousand and existed purely for retention.
- Long-form content view hours, not follower count, is the metric this operator tracks as tied to cash in the bank.
- View hours rose twenty-seven times and views forty-one times in a single quarter against a flat prior baseline.
- An AI assistant loaded with full client context absorbed nearly ninety-five hours of conversation that would otherwise have been live coaching.
- Before an AI layer is useful you need a database, tracked data and a working pipeline. The assistant is the last step, not the first.
- One new member named website quality as the specific reason he joined, paying back the build cost many times over in a single sale.
- Median incoming client revenue rose from five thousand to twenty-two thousand a month after the repositioning landed.
- Cash return on ad spend near twenty-seven times at only six thousand spent means the constraint is willingness to scale, not unit economics.
- Two hundred and fifty-three inbound leads produced forty-two qualified conversations and fourteen new members in one quarter.
- A seven-figure education business ran on roughly thirty thousand a month in costs, with team accounting for half of it.
- Running exactly two projects at a time, one to make the business better and one to make it bigger, is the whole focus system.
- A roadmap written a year ago is already wrong after a year of AI change, so revalidating it is its own project.
- Former clients returning after leaving is a stronger product signal than any new-client number.
What a recurring-revenue pivot actually costs.
THE REAL NUMBERS
Doubling lifetime value took a year of eight-times-lower cash collection, a deliberately shrunken market, and a profit margin cut in half, and the payoff still is not visible in annual revenue.
01Intro and the quarterly cadence
- A quarter runs in three blocks: two weeks of rest, two weeks of audit and realignment, then an eight-week implementation sprint with a hard deadline.
- Rest is scheduled before planning, not after execution, so the audit happens with perspective instead of inside the exhaustion of the last sprint.
02The bets that nuked the cash flow
- Cutting a market from everyone down to one niche shrinks the addressable audience immediately while the revenue benefit arrives roughly a year later.
- Moving from upfront and split payments to monthly recurring dropped monthly collection from roughly seventy to a hundred thousand down to about ten thousand.
- Content messaging lags a positioning change by about a year, because the audience you already built still matches who you used to serve.
- Reinvesting into team and infrastructure took the profit margin from above eighty-five percent to forty percent, a deliberate trade against a seventy percent target later.
03The next milestone and the laws
- Pick a milestone from someone who already lived it. Five hundred thousand monthly recurring with a small team was borrowed from Sam Ovens.
- Written constraints stop success building its own trap: no sales calls, capped Zoom hours, no evening work, one day reserved entirely for golf.
- Two years without a single sales call still produced a million dollars, which makes the call an optional component of selling high-ticket, not a required one.
04The Summer Perspective retreat
- Past a certain level the bottleneck is perspective, not tactics, so the retreat ran two hours of workshopping a day and spent the rest outdoors.
- A client event does not have to be profitable. This one netted roughly nine thousand and existed to deepen retention rather than to sell anything.
- Every attendee left with one named constraint and one committed action, which is a tighter outcome than an agenda full of speakers produces.
07Member results
- Tracking member wins as a public running total, over seven million across more than 180,000 data submissions, turns client proof into a compounding asset.
- The outcome data collected from members becomes a benchmark dataset, which is a second product nobody else in the niche can copy quickly.
- Long-form view hours, not follower count, is the metric tied to cash, so a member jumping from three hundred to twenty-six thousand views is the signal.
08Doubling lifetime value
- Lifetime value went from seven thousand to fifteen thousand in twelve months by selling a longer relationship rather than a bigger upfront price.
- Retention above ninety-five percent plus returning former clients is the signal that the product works, not the signal that the marketing works.
- Median incoming client revenue rose from five thousand to twenty-two thousand a month, which is what a repositioning looks like once it lands.
09Inside the Scale20 app
- A context room holds everything known about a client in one place, which is what makes a personalized AI assistant useful instead of generic.
- An AI assistant with full client context absorbed nearly ninety-five hours of chat that would otherwise have been live coaching time.
- Before an AI layer is useful you need a database, tracked data and a working pipeline. The assistant is the last step, not the first one.
10Custom game plans and phase gates
- A custom plan is generated from the client's own numbers and situation, then delivered in their own language, including Spanish and Korean.
- Four named phases with explicit gates tell a client exactly where they stand and precisely what unlocks the next stage.
- The gates are countable: ten full-price sales and five case studies, then ten email leads a day, then one qualified inbound inquiry a day.
- Turning a written plan into an audio briefing lets someone hear their own business described from the outside, which lands differently than reading it.
11Content gone nuclear
- View hours rose twenty-seven times and views forty-one times in one quarter, measured against a nearly flat baseline the quarter before.
- Handing a social channel to a dedicated content manager moved it after a year of sitting stuck at eighty-five thousand followers.
12The website that closed a member
- When trust is low, buyers search you before they buy, so the website becomes the qualifying step rather than the brochure.
- One member named website quality as the reason he joined, which paid back the build cost many times over in a single sale.
- Asking every new buyer what specifically pushed them over the edge turns guesses about what marketing works into recorded evidence.
13The Q3 side quests
- Run exactly two projects at a time: one that makes the business better for existing clients, one that makes the business bigger.
- A roadmap built a year ago is already wrong after a year of AI change, so revalidating it deserves to be its own project.
14Cash in and what it costs
- A seven-figure education business ran on roughly thirty thousand a month, with team at half of that and advertising at only three thousand.
- Operating profit of thirty-four thousand on a hundred and sixty-seven thousand collected is what heavy reinvestment looks like on a profit and loss sheet.
15Q4 projects and the ad numbers
- Cash return on ad spend near twenty-seven times at only six thousand spent means the constraint is willingness to scale, not unit economics.
- Two hundred and fifty-three inbound leads produced forty-two qualified conversations and fourteen new members, a usable funnel ratio to benchmark against.
- The honest admission is that project completion, not lead generation, is the weak point, which is why the next quarter's single focus is deadlines.
16Where we're heading
- Cash collected of four hundred and forty-eight thousand through September will likely finish below last year, and that is the stated cost of the pivot.
- A hands-off digital product is the planned way to serve people below the price point without spending any of the founder's own time.
Terms worth knowing.
- Time under attention
- Total long-form content view hours rather than view count. The idea is that an hour of someone's focus predicts revenue far better than a thousand quick impressions.
- LTV (lifetime value)
- The total amount a single client pays across the whole relationship. On a recurring model it rises slowly as people stay, rather than arriving at once as an upfront payment.
- MRR (monthly recurring revenue)
- The predictable revenue billed every month from active subscriptions or memberships, excluding one-off payments.
- TAM (total addressable market)
- The full set of people who could plausibly buy what you sell. Narrowing a niche deliberately shrinks it in exchange for sharper messaging.
- Acquisition model vs retention model
- An acquisition business makes most of its money the moment someone buys. A retention business makes most of its money from people staying, so churn matters more than close rate.
- Context room
- A single stored profile holding everything known about one client: their numbers, situation, history and psychographic profile. It is what an AI assistant reads before answering.
- Phase gating
- Defining named stages a client moves through, each unlocked by hitting specific measurable gates, so progress is objective rather than a feeling.
- Side quest
- This firm's internal name for a project. Each one carries a deadline and a definition of done, and only two run at once.
- Core margin
- Operating profit as a percentage of cash collected, excluding one-off special project spend, so the ongoing health of the business is visible separately from one-time bets.
- Cash return on ad spend
- Cash actually collected divided by advertising spend over the same period. Unlike reported ROAS it counts money received, not attributed revenue.
- Micro-cult brand
- A small, intensely loyal audience built around a specific worldview rather than a broad personal brand built on reach.
Things they pointed at.
09:20channelSam Ovens
35:30productScale20 app (custom business intelligence platform)
36:40toolClaude
36:45toolCodex
50:10toolWebflow
51:40toolManyChat
51:45toolKit (email platform)
59:00toolMeta Ads
1:04:49linkTaki Moore (Austin boardroom event)
Lines you could clip.
06:02
“This change to a monthly recurring essentially overnight reduced our cash flow by like basically like 8x. So all of a sudden when we were banking like 70 to 100 grand a month, it was like we're banking like 10 grand a month.”
08:12
“I might be on track to make less money than I did in 2025, which is nuts to consider how much better my business is and how much better I am as an entrepreneur.”
09:09
“I haven't done a sales call in nearly exactly two years. Made a million bucks. Pretty damn happy about that.”
13:26
“When you get to a level where you've already got traction in your business, it's not about more tactics. It's not about more tools. It's actually about you needing to gain more perspective.”
33:24
“He's typically been floating between 100 to 300 views. He's in that YouTube views jail. Next video went to 26,000.”
38:30
“Tom AI has saved me theoretically 96 hours in client management. There have been 5,748 messages.”
44:54
“Think about how good your business could be if you had 30 qualified inbound inquiries per month, one every day. You'd never be worried about money ever again.”
48:51
“The quality of the website gave the perception that this could be world-class. Now, if that doesn't validate my thesis, I don't know what does, because that literally made me over 20 grand.”
1:06:08
“We are really bad at getting projects completed. And so this is going to be the single focus for us in Q4: setting clear deadlines, setting a clear definition of done, and then sticking to it.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphorstory
Right team, if you've ever wondered what it actually takes to run, manage, plan, do everything you need to do for a online education business, if you're a business coach, maybe you're a mentor, consultant like I am, then this video is for you. Over the past few years, I've grown Scale20, which is my consulting and advisory firm, to seven figures.
And we've had a very interesting year, kind of last 12 to 18 months because of some... strategic decisions I made about 18 months ago. And I kind of feel like it would be really potentially interesting and useful for you to see exactly what the realities of making strategic bets, changes, and the challenges along the way.
So what we're doing today is a Q3 life review. Now, I run Scale20. We help online experts, business coaches, mentors, consultants scale from six figures to seven figures per year.
And this is the journey that I've been on over the last few years. I hit my first 100K month in November. I think it was November 2024.
So coming up to two years ago now. And I've been on a cool journey since then. And I think like things are really starting to...
take shape now after doing this and running this business for three years. And so I think this is going to be a really interesting video. So if you are new here, there is a link down below.
It'll take you to a free mini course that'll go to your inbox every single day for the next seven days. I call it six to seven figures in seven days. Totally free.
It's everything that I've done to build my business. Get to where I am. straight to your inbox.
So shall we dive in? This is the 2026 Q3 quarterly life review. So let me give you some context first.
If you're new, like I said, my name is Tom Youngs. Hopefully you know that by now. You probably clicked on my channel so you know.
In Scale20, in my consulting business, we help our members with what we call an entrepreneurship cadence. Most... entrepreneurs, most folks out there, they just operate just fucking trying stuff out.
They have no cadence. They have no rhythm. They have nothing that holds them to basically an actual plan.
So what we do in Scale20 is we... We plan our year as quarters, just like any business would do. And so what we do is we have three different segments to the quarter.
Now, the first segment is the first two weeks. So it's currently Saturday, October the 3rd. And so we are just here.
We are in the third day of the quarter. So we are in the rest and recovery phase of this quarter. That lasts for two weeks.
This is me giving my members and myself the opportunity to get some perspective on our business, take the foot off the gas, get some time away from the business so that we can properly enter the next phase, which is the second two weeks of the first month of the quarter, which is the review and realignment phase. In Scale20, I walk my members through a process of a...
quarterly audit, where we audit their business, we figure out where there are opportunities, where there is the constraint in their business currently right now, and what projects they need to focus on to fix the constraint. Now, interestingly, this video is kind of a real look underneath the hood of how I'm doing this right now for my business.
So what you're seeing today is quite literally the process that I get my members to go through. And so hopefully it's kind of interesting to see like, this isn't just me telling my members to do this. This is me doing this literally here for you right now.
So once we do the second. phase of the quarter. We go into the final phase, which is an eight -week implementation sprint cycle.
So this is what all of our members do. And this is what I've just finished and just wrapped up. We call projects side quests, by the way.
And the key thing is that we hold people to a deadline. So that's a little bit of context about why this video is going to exist. Here's a little context on me and what's going on in my business right now.
Like I said, Scale20 is right now only for six -figure -plus business coaches, consultants, and mentors, people like me. I've never run a different type of business. So I've run different types of businesses, but not very well.
This is the type of business that I've run pretty well. 12 months ago, I decided to stop working with beginners who I had been working with previously. Now, that immediately dropped my total addressable market, shrunk it massively.
But then I made another strategic decision, which was to stop working with folks with personal development offers. So people like life coaches, fitness coaches, health coaches, anyone outside the realm of helping businesses grow, I stopped working because I looked at the best. performing members that I had, everyone that was having the most success were folks like me.
They were business coaches for niche experts. For example, Alan, he's an electrician over in Sydney in Australia, and he helps other electricians grow their businesses and start their businesses. I don't know anything about being an electrician.
I'd have to call one round. If I had some issue with my electrics, I'd have to call an electrician, someone like someone like Alan Round.
So I help him structure his mentorship business. And so that's where I decided to like knuckle down in. And the cool thing is, is now we've really made that, that kind of specific decision, things are starting to move really well.
But it massively reduced our TAM about 12 to 18 months ago. I then also made a decision to pivot to a retention model instead of charging upfront and split pays. This was tough, but...
I knew that if I wanted to have a long -term business that was iconic, then I had to make this decision to move towards focusing on the business being a retention model rather than an acquisition model. So we changed our pricing model to monthly recurring. So at the start of this year, we had a project called 10 out of 10.
And the idea was we highlighted 10 LTV lifetime value projects that if we felt we could build them to 10 out of 10. by the end of the year, then we would have a really solid foundation of a retention business. And last year, about a year ago, our lifetime value was around $7 ,000.
And in the past 12 months, we've now doubled that to $15 ,000, which is really cool. So the signal's in the right direction. However...
It's been a challenging 12 months from a cash flow perspective because this change to a monthly recurring essentially overnight reduced our cash flow by like basically like 8x. So all of a sudden when we were, you know, banking like 70 to 100 grand a month, it was like we're banking like 10 grand like a month because of what we were, the change in our model.
Also, there was a lag because my messaging from my content that I've been posting, where it was targeting pretty much everyone at any level, maybe even more towards beginners, there had to be a lag. And that has essentially taken a whole year to catch up to where we're at now. But the good news is the signs are positive that the messaging is now caught up.
So I've also invested heavily into infrastructure. I've built my own business intelligence platform over the past year and things are going well. I've also been investing into my team.
So my profit margin from 18 months ago has basically dropped from like 85 % plus to where it's currently at right now, which is 40%. And that's from me reinvesting in the business. Now, is that what I intend to have the profit margin to be long -term?
No, but this is me basically and being like, I'm going to take some risk, make some bets and invest in my business. so that eventually the profit margin ends up going back up over the next couple of years. And really what I'm kind of aiming for is like 70%.
I think 70 % is a sign of like a healthy business that is investing in itself, but also profitable. So that's the aim for me. And what this all means is that I might be on track to make less money than I did in 2025, which is nuts to consider how much better my business is and how much...
better I am as an entrepreneur, how much my clients and my members are doing better. But I might, by the end of this year, make less than in 2025. So it'll be interesting in the Q4.
You're gonna have to wait for the Q4 review in January 2027. But frankly... I don't give a fuck.
As long as I can get some pizza, I'm a happy boy. So here's my next milestone. The aim is 500 grand monthly recurring revenue with a team of five.
Sounds like a punchy target. I'll tell you where I got it from. A couple of years ago or a few years ago, I listened to Sam Ovens talking about stuff and he was talking about how his favorite period of business was when he was doing 500 grand a month with a team of five.
And he said that was the most fun business was, it was the most profitable it was. And so I'm like, that's for me. Keep in mind, I have no intention like he did to become like a tech billionaire.
Like I use tech. I feel like I'm really progressive when it comes to that, but I don't want to build a unicorn. I don't want to do that.
So for me, getting to that 500 grand MRR as a next milestone with a team of five is six. So right now we're at like 11 .4 % of that because we switched to a monthly recurring model about 12 months ago.
So this could be a, who knows, five years, 10 years, three years. I don't have a fucking clue. I've never done it before.
So come and join me for this ride. Let's do this. So this is where we're at right now.
October the 3rd, 2026. In September, at the end of September, we're doing 56 .8k in monthly recurring revenue. This is up 26 % versus quarter two.
We billed 374 ,000 in new business deals total in the quarter. That's up 33 % quarter to quarter. And just a highlight number, because this is like one of the big kind of wins over the last few months is my YouTube, basically 9x my YouTube views, which is key because if you've been following me for a while, you'll know that my number one metric for leverage is time under attention, which is long form content view hours.
So we'll dive into the numbers. You're going to see behind the scenes, you're going to see everything underneath the hood. I'm showing you everything today.
So here are my laws, by the way. So the laws of scaling for me are around building constraints so that you don't end up building the . So what are my laws?
Super simple. Number one is no sales calls. I haven't done a sales call in nearly exactly two years.
It's coming up to a two -year anniversary now. So I haven't done a sales call since then. Made a million bucks.
Pretty damn happy about that. Dream clients only. This is something that I have...
massively noticed over the last year, I no longer work with pricks. How sick is that? Like literally no issues whatsoever, which is amazing.
Four to six hours of Zoom per week max. So this is really important for me. Zoom calls nuke my energy.
I try to save them for my team and I save them for my members in scale 20. Six hours is on the max end of the spectrum if I'm doing a onboarding workshop with new members that week. So I will do a two -hour onboarding workshop with new members once a month.
But other than that, typically it's four hours per week max. No evening work past 6 p .m. This is something that three years ago would have been considered what the hell when I was starting my business working all the time.
But now I'm pretty stoked that that's pretty... I've already got this one sorted. Okay.
Fridays are for the golf. If you know me, if you've been around, you'll know that I love golf.
And what I would like to get to, what I would like to get to is by next summer, be able to have Fridays where I can just go play golf all day. That's like practice in the morning, get around, maybe even two rounds in a day. So that is what the goal is like long -term because I want to do that.
So that's where I want to get to. And a team of five. So this is context like full -time, five full -time staff.
We're currently at two full -time staff. That's where we're at. And we've got like three part -time freelancers who work with us.
Okay, let's dive into Q3. So I'm going to go through like projects and just highlights. right now.
The big highlight for me was our summer perspective. So this is the marquee event that I'm planning to run biannually. We're going to have a summer perspective and a winter perspective.
I took, I think it was like basically 10 of my favorite folks. crew in scale 20. And we went to my favorite place on earth, which is the Austrian Alps.
So this is where I met my girlfriend nine years ago. This is when I was working, scrubbing toilets, earning like three euros an hour, having the best time of my life. I used to work as like an Alpine chauffeur as well, like driving people to and from the airport from Geneva to the Alps.
And so the Alps are like my favorite place. The Austrian Alps are a touch of class though. So the key idea for this event was that like, And when you get to a level where you've already got traction in your business, it's not about more tactics.
It's not about more tools. It's actually about you needing to gain more perspective. So last year, I went to some events, to some mastermind events, and I went to some shocking ones, to be honest.
And one I went to was just like sat in a big fucking boardroom in some boring ass hotel. In fairness, it was a nice hotel, but like... sat in a conference room, name tags or whatever.
And I am like, this is, I did those networking things when I was in a nine to five. I was like, I'm not going to be part of the problem here. So instead of focusing on people sat in front of a screen, listening to people do speeches or talks or whatever, all that stuff, or spending hours inside, like just, I was like, no, no, no.
We're going to do like two hours max of workshopping per day. And then we're going to spend the rest of the time outside. And that was the plan.
We did some hiking, which was awesome on a couple of days. We had a beautiful day out there first day. We had Sam Gaudet, who is Dan Martell's creative director as our VIP guest.
So it was super cool having him there. Everyone loved him. We got to spend a lot of time with him.
He was doing a trip with his fiance, Rose. through Europe, which was awesome. So it was amazing to have him there with us for the week.
This is my view from my bedroom, by the way. How unbelievable is that? Incredible place.
We had some beautiful weather, even though it was the start of October by this lake. It was just insane. We did a boat trip.
We did some hiking. We did all of this stuff and we tried to get outside. So the aim was to give ourselves some perspective.
Check out this photo that my girlfriend took, by the way. arguably one of the best photos I've ever seen. This is going to get printed and framed for sure.
It's going on the wall. It was so cool just getting to hang out, having drinks by the lake, having drinks in the hotel. This is Hugo, by the way.
Hugo is one of our, I think he's now coming up to his, he's going to start his third year in the Scale20 crew. And he passed a massive milestone this year. He just got a million followers on his Instagram profile.
And this is him. taking a photo of me and check out this photo. How insane is that?
So I'm officially a subject in a Hugo Corhonen photo. How unbelievable is that? So that's the behind the scenes.
That's the photo. So super, super cool. We had a couple of hikes.
We had one which was like a nice sunny day, one which was a bit of like a wet, damp day, but had different vibes. It was super cool. This is the Lawton over here.
And then we just had a couple of hours each day where we did some workshopping around constraints, around really what everyone was struggling with. intention was to get every single person by the end of leaving the week to have full clarity on exactly what they need to do next, and then a commit of action of what they're going to do to basically unblock where they're currently blocked.
Really fun. I didn't like spending more than a couple of hours in here. It was perfect.
So yeah, this was a lot of fun, a lot of laughs, a lot of joking. There was some... I think there was a little bit, there was some tears, a lot of deep reflection that we did, but it was an absolute pleasure.
Here he is, quarter million Steve. So Steve, whilst he was there, one of the crew in scale 20, cheekily closed a 260 grand deal. So absolutely insane.
You can see he's smiling here because he's got a nice beer and that's how we like to roll. So absolutely. thrilled for Steve.
I'm thrilled for this girl. So this girl is my girlfriend. And Lucy has had a rough couple of years.
So she has been struggling with long COVID for the last two years. A year ago, she couldn't walk more than 10 minutes. She's had some serious challenges.
And we're very lucky that she's like 90 to 95 % of the way back to full recovery. But this time last year in october and september we were in munich and the alps where she was getting super invasive medical treatment multiple times a week for like a month and it was brutal i had to be there with her and i was in clinics with her all day um every day for like three four weeks and That was when I ended up inadvertently completing the four hour work week because I literally didn't have more than four hours in a week to be able to run my business.
And so it was very cool being able to be there with her. And she was the one that planned and managed this entire. event because she's a, she's a luxury events planner.
And so she hasn't been working for two years, but like this was, she helped me with this one. And then she helped me with the Barcelona trip that we did last year, which was the first one. And so it's, it was very cool to see her happy and smiling and she, yeah, she fucking crushed it.
I also did a cheeky last minute half marathon the day before. So I arrived a couple of days early and two before everyone got there. And I, when I was walking around the town, I saw them, they'd set up like these, they were setting up these flyers and it just looked like a finish area to a race.
And I looked it up and it turns out it was this half marathon that they do every year. And so I was with Zach, the filmmaker who joined me. And literally the morning of the race, the race started at 10 AM.
breakfast. We had breakfast at 8am. I went and registered at like 9am, an hour before the race.
Keep in mind, there was probably like 5 ,000 runners in this. I had no idea what the race was. I didn't know.
And there's going to be a film coming out about it, but like the race was like actually half running and then half hiking. And so I was completely... Yeah, it fucked me up, but in a really good way.
So that was really cool. I managed to get a half marathon done literally the day before everyone arrived, which was fine, which was amazing because I didn't get injured, which was the main key. So it was a little bit risky.
It was fucking risky to be fair, especially because like half of it was like this hike and I was wearing road running shoes. So I'm very lucky to have survived that. We brought Zach, the filmmaker, for this.
I wanted to make a film out of this. Zach isn't just a videographer. He's an actual filmmaker, a fucking legend.
And this may be the last time I ever get to work with him because I think he's going to be moving on to bigger and better projects. Although I know that he is specializing in helping a few people kind of like... doing what I do, but he doesn't take on many projects.
He is a legit filmmaker. You can see 430 ,000, 610 ,000 in the last few videos that he's posted. He's a legend, a future goat, and it was a blessing to get to work with him.
These are just the top line numbers of this. The event wasn't intended to be a revenue producing event like a lot of dickhead. people in the online education space tend to do uh this was i wanted this to be for my members um so yeah you can see the numbers here if you're interested just take a look but like um essentially uh we ended up like net nine nine k so it wasn't revenue producing anyway it was an amazing event i'm going to be doing these the idea is i'm going to have a summer one every single summer.
So we'll have one in the Alps, everything, every single summer. And then the aim is to also have a winter perspective, which will be ski themed, which is my other thing I love doing. And that will be in like the winter.
So yeah, I'm thrilled. I'm excited to make those bigger and better every single year. It was such a great success this first time around.
I then had the blessing. I got to drive straight to Italy, which was just an hour away from where we were, to the Italian Dolomites to go hang out with my parents for a few days. We stayed in this really cool restaurant hotel, which my dad had actually been to apparently 15 years before with his mates.
This was very cool. This is my car. This is my Porsche Taycan that I bought last summer.
This is my dad's car, which is an Audi TT S that he bought. law about six months ago now. And we both drove them from the UK to Italy.
And yeah, it was just like cool seeing our cars parked there together because my dad for the majority of his life, he's retired now, but he always sacrificed things like a car. to help us out, me and my brother, my brother and sister. And so to see him in retirement, treat himself to that.
to know how fun the drive is to go from like from the uk all the way through the alps driving through the alps in a sports car like this is i've done it like three times in the last year i've literally driven this car to the alps to and back from the alps from london three times now because it's so much fun uh so we had an amazing time it was very special to see our cars like part there it was just it just felt really cool i was just really happy for my dad to be honest We had some amazing food, obviously Italian pasta.
And this was the views, like the views around, like this was on the top of a mountain that I'd actually skied at like maybe nearly 20 years ago now, which is nuts to think. It was kind of cool to go back there. And this is a hike that I went on with my parents.
My parents love hiking. And so it's just really cool to be able to be out in the mountains doing... what they love.
And what they love more than anything else is getting a load of cake after a long bike ride or a long hike. So it was really cool to be able to hang with them. And very cool to drive the hog all the way to the Alps for the third time.
But I knew I was on dicey grounds because I knew the tires needed probably changing.
So on the way back, literally 100 kilometers out from Calais. to get the tunnel back to London, I bloody popped the front right. And it wasn't a slow puncture, it was a proper puncture.
And I could just see suddenly the bars were just going down on my sensor. And it was like, dink, dink, dink, dink, every 10 seconds. Yeah, luckily managed to get a replacement for the two front tires in a couple of hours, which is nuts to think where I was in rural France.
French dude couldn't speak a word of English. All we were doing, we were just going back and forth on Google Translate. It was a lot of fun.
So yeah, it was a thousand euros lighter though that day after that drive. I got to go to Montenegro at the start of the quarter, which was sick. So I went with my girlfriend.
We went for a nice little trip. I'd never been to Montenegro, never been to that area, but it was absolutely sick. I managed to get a full day of work in and then the rest was just like chilling out.
And yeah, stunning sunsets. Like if you haven't been, highly recommend. We had some insane food.
This was like a tasting menu that we went to and like... maybe one of the best meals I've ever had, like the precision on this, like insane. And I probably took one of the coolest photos I'll ever take.
So I went on a walk and I saw this TV just like perched on the top of this little like rock. And I was like, that is the maddest thing I've ever seen. And so I was like, took a photo, cool photo.
Okay, let's talk about the next thing. Next cool thing that's going on. Member results.
So we talked a little bit about life. This is the reason I do this stuff, by the way, is so that I can fuel my life and do cool things, hang out with my family, like go traveling and see the world and do cool stuff. So I wanted to give you that context first, like why I'm doing it.
Now let's get into the nuts and bolts of this. This is the actual running of a seven -figure online education business. So I wouldn't be able to do this stuff if I didn't get shit hot member results.
A very cool thing. We literally just hit seven. We passed seven million in total member wins literally today, which is really cool.
So everyone's doing their monthly totals. So this number will hopefully go up to at least seven and a half million by the end of over the next few days as everyone does their submissions. And talking about submissions, we have now had over 180 ,000 unique data submissions over the last couple of years.
So you can see we have that at the top there. So this is... Monthly totals, Monday wins.
These are data submissions that we need from our members. And so this is a huge amount of data from six, multi -six and seven figure online educators. And so what my ambition is, is to build the most comprehensive data set for people like you.
people like me, so that we know exactly what we need to do at every stage of our journey. And yeah, very cool for me. I'm nearly now at 2 million, which is nuts.
So yeah, very cool. Jeff hit 100 grand a month a couple of months ago, which is super sick. Patricia, she collected 20K cash in just three days.
And she's been working with her for now nearly two years. which is amazing. Max had a record 50 grand month.
He's been working with us now for like five months. So very, very happy. And if you saw her case study video a few weeks back, so she basically, before even opening up her doors, she already had 40 grand cash in, 95 grand in revenue before opening the doors.
So she's crushing it as well. Just very happy. So that's when it comes to like the cash gains, our members are crushing it.
Now, How do we get the cash? Well, we need to get leads.
This is Kit who started working with us a couple of months ago and he came to me. He's been in business for years. He's been business coaching for years.
He just never had done content. And so my job is to help him get traction with content. Literally in three months, he's now had his first 1 million views month and he is crushing it.
Killing it over there. So that's on Instagram. But then the big, big, big gains that our team have had is in the time under attention, which is long form content view hours gains.
So as I said, the number one metric that we have, we have tracked that is associated with cash in your bank account is long form content view hours. We call this time under attention. And I have had some very big success recently, which we'll dive into.
But what I've done is I've passed on my lessons and my success to my members. And I've said, hey, if you do this, like I've done this, you will get these results too.
The cool thing is it's happened. So Richard last week, after I showed them a new playbook last Wednesday, the next day Richard made a video. He's typically been floating between 100 to 300 views.
He's in that . Next video went to 26 ,000. I think it's past 35 ,000 now, a week after it's been posted.
So insane. Ali has also been crushing it, posting week after week after week. And she, I think, got to about 20 videos, still stuck under around like 200 views.
Boom. Last one she did, two and a half thousand views in under two weeks. So big outlier for her.
Ollie Carson's been crushing it recently. You can see this video just popped off. This video's popped off.
I'm really excited for him because like, I think, I mean, firstly, he's a fucking G, but his content is exceptional. His experience is exceptional.
And so I've been like, I've been for like two years now, I've been like, what is his content, his YouTube content? Start like fucking picking up and getting the views that it deserves. And I feel like now he's really starting to get into his own.
He's a very, he's an unbelievably creative guy, way more creative than I am. And like he makes incredible stuff. So if you're not following him, go follow him, go follow him.
Same with this dude. So Fred, the Great Dane, aka the Great Dane. So started working with him a year, a year or just over, was it a year ago?
No, year and a half ago. Yeah, shit, year and a half ago. At the start of last year, we started working together.
He is also, in my opinion, one of the best content creators out there. easily one of the best, but his content is crushing it. And kind of on the other end of the spectrum is like, I've been working with Rick for two years now.
Yeah, coming up to two, exactly two years. And he is a tennis... coach, and he helps young tennis coaches start training academies.
So he's a business coach for tennis coaches. And there's no one in the world doing this. And so I set him a challenge, get to 100 videos on YouTube, dude.
And in fucking fair play to him, he has been showing up week after week after week. And he's starting to now get some traction purely because he's now knowing he's running the playbook that we shared a couple of weeks ago, which is fucking cool. So one of the big aims over the last year was to increase our LTV, our lifetime value.
The cool thing is we've doubled it to over 15 grand. So keep in mind our member goal, the goal for our members is to get them to 100K net profit months. And that's circa 1 .7 million in top line revenue at a 70 % profit margin.
So the LTV goal for me long -term though, is I want to get people to 50K.
So I I want to be working with people for up to five years. So 50K over five years is that long -term lifetime value goal.
Now, keep in mind, after a full year of 100K net profit months, if someone has paid me 50 grand, that is a 3 ,300 % ROI. That is insane. And this is just the maths, by the way.
So this is no promise to my members. This is no promise to anyone that this is going to happen. If I get this number to 50K LTV over the next five years, and then I help our members get 100K net profit months, the ROI of working with me is disgraceful.
It's ludicrous. You think about people, they pay me 50 grand. I know dentists who are paying half a million bucks for a dental degree now.
So I was very lucky. I didn't have to pay much for my dentistry degree. But like, I, yeah, like it's insane.
And so if we can keep on getting results like this for our members, and we keep having members like Max, who's like sending me messages like this, you know, excited to build this thing out with you for years to come. You know, that to me is like, that's the game. Retention is currently above 95%.
And the coolest thing is we've got, I've had multiple old clients who left. come back over the last couple of months and be like, Tom, I'd like to join again, which is fucking cool. Fred joined back up a couple of weeks ago, which is epic.
So it's great. That to me is the biggest signal, is that we're doing things that are, we're really at the frontier. We're pushing the envelope here in the online education space, is that we're getting people who are coming back to us, which is amazing.
The next big thing based off all of this is the quality of new members. And this is where my marketing is clearly now caught up. after having a bit of a, I had to play catch up after I pivoted from working with beginners to working with more advanced people.
So right now the median, the kind of median of someone, median monthly income of someone joining from scratch or joining us is 22 grand a month. And keep in mind that was like, you know, five grand a month a year, two years ago.
And the average of the last month's intake was 43 grand. So we had a couple of people who are already doing a hundred grand months who want to just like get even better. Guys like Jens, guys like Ayush.
These are all like legit players who are doing multi -six figures and are ready to crush it. So super, super cool getting on a call with them. And we sold our spots, which is amazing.
And then the biggest thing is like, you know, for me getting feedback from new members within the first like days or weeks of being a member of Scale20, which is like, Ayush, which is not going to lie, man, so far you've been showing how much you over deliver already. And I'm like, fuck, I wish I knew about investing with you sooner.
What's inside I'm seeing already in Scale20 is what I wish I had earlier. And that to me is like, really cool. I kind of know that he's experienced, you know, these guys will have worked with many of the big business coaches in the space.
I know that some of them, their stories are, yeah, got burnt. haven't enjoyed it, haven't had a good experience. And so I feel like my job is to really lead by example and lead the way.
You're about to see some of the cool stuff that I'm leading the way with, by the way. Alexa, who joined a couple of months ago, bringing incredible energy straight out the gate. And yeah, seeing a message like this in Slack is like, this to me is what fulfilling means, right?
This is what fulfilling is. The feeling of me reading a message like these. doesn't get better than that.
Luis, who joined as well a month ago, super happy. His clients are getting great results. So I'm thrilled that my clients who are starting, our members who are starting are getting amazing results and seeing that we're doing things differently, which is the most important thing.
So on that note, how are we doing things differently? So we have the Scale20 app. This is our custom business intelligence platform.
We started building this about 14 months ago now.
One of the big projects that we had was to build out what we call context rooms. So a context room is where all of our data from every single one of our member is in one place. Maybe I can just open it up.
So if we go to Scale20 app and we'll go to my profile, you'll see this is my context room. So I filled it out here. Literally, it's just like all this detail about me.
All of this detail is in here. And what this does is that this instructs everyone's Tom AI. So every single person has a custom Tom AI so that their Tom AI has full context on them, has access to their numbers, and a very cool thing, which we're adding in, which I'll leave a little open loop for you there.
But this has been just turbocharged. So very, very proud of what we've built. proud of the team for what they've built as well.
So that's really cool. We've now got like, what this has allowed us to do is allowed to streamline onboarding and now make our Tom AIs more turbocharged than ever before. We've also added in a psychographic analysis of all of our members.
So our members, when they start working with us, we are giving them a complimentary one -on -one. mindset and performance session with Jay who's our new performance and mindset coach and he basically does a psychoanalytical deep dive on them trying to understand their limiting beliefs their default behaviors their patterns that have stopped them from growing like currently and we dump all of this data into Tom AI so their Tom AI has that information as well which is insane We're building a skills repo.
So we, for example, the other day, I dropped in our website builder skill, which is a huge skill that is a multi -phase skill, taking people from scratch all the way to vibe coding their first. completely incredible looking website. This is what I've done.
And I was able to build this skill and give it to my members so they can literally plug it into their cloud, their chat GPT if they want to go to Codex, and they could do it themselves. So we have a bunch of skills in there already. And we're just building this every single month.
So let's talk about Tom AI then. So Tom AI has saved me theoretically 96 hours in client management. So there have been 5 ,748 messages.
And if we assume that like a chat that I'd have with a member would be like 20 minutes of my time, which it typically is when I chat to members, it's a fair bit of my time. That saved me 94 .6 hours or four full days of just chatting to members. Absolutely insane.
And the cool thing is, is these Tom AI is now more turbocharged than ever. Like I said, our members have access. to TomAI that has their context.
It knows everything about their business. It knows everything about everything that they're doing. It has access to their data.
It has access to our data. It has access to their psychographic profile as well. So it can literally help them cut through their bullshit.
They have the ultimate coach, accessible 24 -7. And this is definitely something that we want to help our members also build themselves. But to build this, you need to have a foundation of a database.
You need to be able to track data. You need to have a data pipeline set up. If you are someone who is curious about doing this kind of thing, and you're already doing six figures, you're a business coach, consultant, or mentor.
you should absolutely fucking join me in scale 20. You get my one -on -one help. So not only do our members get Tom AI 24 seven, so they can send them a message at 3am.
They get me during the day so they can send me a message at 3pm and they get access to my team as well. So insane. Okay.
Let's talk about custom game plans. Let's open this bad boy up. Let's see if we can click and open it up.
Okay, sweet. So this is a custom game plan. And if you are If you're Spanish, you'll be able to see this is Spanish.
So Marcelo joined us the other day, and this is the custom game plan that I gave him. And this is created by taking his context, his numbers, his existing situation, and running it through our TomAI model. And what this means is that we can give our members a truly customized first 90 days game plan.
So this is what this looks like. And the cool thing is... We have a global footprint now.
So I'm going to show you a couple of examples because we've got one in Spanish. So this is all of Marcelo's numbers, all of the key information. You can see where he's at.
everything just highlighting where his current business is. So the first thing we try and do is we get a diagnosis. We then put him into one of our phases.
So we have four phases, which I'll talk about in a second in scale 20. We have the launch phase, loaded, spinning, and compounding. So for example, where he's at in his business right now, we're going to stick him in the launch phase and get him to go through a certain number of gates to be able to get him into the loaded phase, which is the next phase.
So you can see all of this information here. We've then got like a, giving him a really clear idea of how his business currently operates. So how he's getting clients and where there is a current bottleneck.
We give them access to our 20K Sprint, which is a series of cash menu playbooks. These are playbooks that I've used over the last couple of years to generate a quick, basically a quick cash. So we recommend, we have about, I think we've got nine playbooks and we recommend different ones.
So Tom AI and me recommend different ones based on their current situation. So this is their custom game plan. We give them an idea of where they're currently at, where they need to get to.
And then what we do is we give them a scoreboard, a to -do list, and we give them a scoreboard of like, this is where we want you to get to. So this is where we need you to get to. And this is...
Incredible. So we're doing this for all of our members. What we're also doing is turning this into a podcast.
So our members get to listen to this. Imaginen un negocio facturando, no sé, picos de 62 mil dólares al mes. Una cantidad de dinero impresionante, claro.
Sí, total. So my favorite way to listen to my own data is by putting it through a model and then turning it into a podcast and listening to it. from an objective perspective.
So you're the subject, but you're listening to it as if someone's talking about you. And it's such a cool way and such a different way. You've never been able to do this before.
And so when our members get their custom game plans, they also get it in the form of a podcast so they can listen to it through that as well. So that is one really cool thing that we've recently added. And we've also had our first Korean member join us, YJ Park.
And so he got his custom game plan in Korean. I can't read Korean. And so very, very excited to turn YJ into our first Korean case study over the next couple of years.
One of the big, like awesome things we've added is Jay. So Jay is our new performance and mindset coach. New members get a complimentary one -on -one session with Jay in month two.
So that gets unlocked after month one. And he then helps by building a psychographic profile that then gets added into their Tom AIs. And this really helps with understanding default pattern behaviors, limiting beliefs, trying to understand what could be the potential roadblocks so that we can be proactive.
Or if these roadblocks actually happen, If these roadblocks actually happen, we can jump in and we know why they happen. This has been transformative.
It's been super, super helpful. Jay's a fucking legend. And this also now gets added into our members' Tom AIs.
We rolled out the new phase gating. So if we go back to the app, you can see... in mission control, we've got four different phases.
And so these are super important because like this helps our members understand exactly where they are and what gates they need to go through to get to the next stage. So for example, like our launch phase, this is all about getting off attraction. And to get off attraction, we need our members to have 10...
full price sales of their core client offer, and five case study transformations. And so for them to get into the loaded phase, that's what they need to do. To get into the spinning phase, they then need to get leads traction.
This is about getting 10 plus new email leads per day, which acts as 300, basically it's 300 new leads per month. We know for them to go from loaded to spinning, what they've got to focus on is they've got to focus on setting up their email foundation. They've got to focus on the skills of growing that audience on a short form platform.
And then they've got to focus on all of the skills to automate leads. And so this is super important because they need to be able to do this to move into spinning. The final phase is compounding.
Basically, to get into the compounding phase, you've got to be getting one qualified inbound inquiry per day. That's 30 qualified inbound inquiries per month. Think about how good your business could be if you had 30 qualified inbound inquiries per month, one every day.
You'd never be worried about money ever again, right? So this is super cool. This has been very transformative.
And this is also going to be... This is a big kind of like stepping stone in one of our big projects that we've got to focus on. We have been focusing on, but what we're focusing on next.
Okay, let's talk about my content performance because YouTube and Instagram have both exploded over the last three months.
So you can see YouTube views just gone nuclear. Time under attention, so view hours, nuclear. Instagram has also been picking up.
We had a couple of outlier videos. So this is views in January and February. So these are literally just one post that just went mega viral.
So that's not reflective of the performance we were getting. So we are definitely on an upward trend. And emails are doing pretty well.
and looking good heading into Q4. Passed some really big milestones. So I passed 100 ,000 followers on Instagram, which is sick.
So that's awesome. We also launched our scale 20 page, and that has just in the space of a few months gone past 3000 followers, which is awesome. And I passed two big milestones on YouTube.
I passed 40 ,000 subs on my main channel, on this channel here. And then I also passed 10 ,000 subs on my lecture channel. So the numbers, In the previous 90 days, so Q2 basically, we did 1 ,000 total view hours, that's time under attention, and 13 ,000 views.
And in the last 90 days, we did 28 ,000 view hours, time under attention, and over half a million views. And so there was a 2 ,733 % increase in time under attention and a 4 ,106 % increase in views. So as you can see, things have gone pretty nuclear.
Pretty happy with how things are going there. And one really cool thing is that this Instagram has been done without me. So I was like floating on like 85 ,000 followers for like the longest time, most of this year.
And the cool thing is my content manager, Yazeed, who I hired, now manages my... Instagram basically fully without me. And so this is very cool because it's now hands -off.
I don't have to worry about it, which is sick. Okay. Big project that we had for Q3 was our new website live and securing clients.
What do I mean by securing clients? So I had a thesis that in this new age of this new era that we're at, the AI era, that you have to have a comprehensive digital footprint. So people, because trust is so low, people are going to Google search you.
And if you don't have a high quality website or something that looks like it's got high quality, you're not going to be able to close clients. And this is my prediction. And I think so this is going to be the minimum bar.
Keep in mind, I used to be a website funnel analytics consultant for like some of the biggest brands in the world. Brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Chanel, Superdry. Selfridges, Harrods, Virgin Atlantic.
So my job used to be going on their websites and looking at their data, their Google Analytics, their user analytics and helping them find gaps, holes, plug their holes, helping to make their user experience way better. And so what I did is I made my website. with those skills.
And the cool thing is, this was in the context room for a member who joined last week. So the quality of the website, we ask every single one of our members, what was the specific moment or thing that pushed you over the edge? The quality of the website gave the perception that this could be world -class.
Now, if that doesn't fucking make my point and validate my thesis, I don't know what does, because that literally made me over 20 grand. By putting the effort into building this website, that has now made me over 20 grand just with this one member who's just joined. So what I did is I turned everything that I've done, all of my skills, my experience, all of the steps that I went through to make the website over the past few months, and I put it into a giant skill.
I turned it to a masterclass. We called it Brand, Turning Your IP and Proof into a Beautifully Branded Website. And I basically delivered 30 grand of value in 90 minutes to my members.
Why is it 30 grand? So not only did it close me a client, so let's say that's 20 grand. Last year, I paid three grand for a designer to do a rebrand for Scale20.
And then I paid five grand for a landing page designer to create a landing page. The landing page sucked. I hated it.
I couldn't change it. Couldn't modify it. It was built on Webflow.
Don't know how to use Webflow. And so That was like basically 10 grand.
And so I literally gave my members at least 30 grand of value in 90 minutes last week. So they not only have seen exactly how I did it, I did a demo of how I built my website. I gave them the skill that is now in our skills repository and they can go and they can literally go, pull it out, download it, plug it into Claudio Codex and build one themselves.
And it will run them through their like... brand design style guide. It'll run them through all of the steps that they need to do to be able to build a site, all of the backend stuff, all of the Facebook pixel tracking setup, all of the stuff that they need to do that they've now got.
And so Jason, who joined us last week, he was like, came to Scale20 to learn how to hit 100K months, stayed for better relationship with advice. This was a really fun session. And if you join and work with me in Scale20, you will get access to this.
On that note, again, if you're curious about what actually how Scale20 works and what it involves, there'll be a video down in the description box below. The first link in the description box is a video showing how Scale20 works. If you click that and then you either go search my website, if you want to check out the website, just go to scale20 .com.
And if you want to actually like find out more and you want to get the invite to work with me, the full invitation, then you just have to DM me. on Instagram, 77, and I'll send you the details. A really cool step that we did this year or this quarter was we implemented an inbound qualifying system in ManyChat and Kit.
So now in our pipeline in Slack, so this is like a Slack notification we get, you can see that we get a basically like qualification what revenue level people are at so that we know where we should be. like actually spending time speaking to the right prospects. And we are also now collecting that data in kit as well.
So we've got segments in kit. So this is a big step for us because this allows us to do more sophisticated and detailed targeting and messaging to the right people. Okay, let's talk about the side quests.
So in scale 20, one of the things that we help people with is focus. We don't believe you should be working on multiple projects all the time. We think you should be focused on two projects.
One focus, one project to make the business better. So better client results, faster client results, like more lifetime value. The second one is how can we make the business bigger?
So for us, the better project was and is right now, because it's still Project Moneyball moving into Q4. And this was about mapping value engines for the business. So for us, we've got kind of two big value engines.
One is the invite, so the inbound DM value engine, and the other is the fascinate one, which is taking people from Instagram, turning them into a lead. So we've actually completed that one too. So our members have access to these systems straight up.
They've literally got access to this now. So they know exactly... what steps they need to take.
This is part of what working with me looks like. I also revalidated the roadmap. So really, you know, the last 12 months have been such a fucking change when it comes to AI, when it comes to all of this stuff.
And so it would be stupid to think that the roadmap that I was helping my members with a year ago is the same as the one now. And so what we've been doing is we've been really like revalidating this and figuring out like, okay, what does this need to look like? And the cool thing is, is this is what it looks like now.
The aim of that was that we needed to get this roadmap revalidated so that we can complete this one, which is the ultimate scorecard. So like I said, we want to have the most comprehensive database and data set for multi -six and seven -figure online experts in the world. That's our goal.
So what we want is we want to make sure that we're benchmarking. We've got benchmark KPIs for the right metrics. And so what we've been doing is we've been reflecting on what are the right metrics to track and what should be the ones to help our members build like an actual, an ultimate scorecard that we have within the Scale20 app.
So all of our members submit data, but we're trying to make it as sophisticated as possible and we have it all in one place. So the bigger project was called Project Glassbox. This is named because when Yazeed, my content manager, started working with me, a few months ago, I asked him, I was like, so what do you know about Scale20?
And he was like, not much. And he was like, honestly, it seems like Scale20 is . And I was like, well, shit, we need to fix that then.
And so this is Project Glassbox. What this is about is basically making everything about Scale20 as visible as possible, screaming about it. to more people, letting people in the industry know that we're here, we're doing this stuff, we're getting incredible results, and leading the way when it comes to trying to transform the way online education is done, especially online business education.
So the first step to this was a new website. The second step is going to be building a brand score lead magnet or low ticket offer. So this is something that we want to build that is essentially like the ultimate lead magnet.
Taking our data set, allowing people to plug in their numbers, and then getting some sort of custom game plan or brand score that helps them understand where there are gaps and where there are opportunities. So this is something that I've been wanting to do for fucking ages.
But frankly, we've had to build all of these things in sequence. And we're finally now at the point where we're going to be able to do this. So this is going to be a focus for Q4.
Okay, let's get into the numbers then. So this is the Q3 business review. And I'm actually going to open up.
our business review here. So we've gone through the top line numbers, and this is kind of like the story of the quarter. So 160 grand, 67 grand in cash in, 91 ,000 in operating costs, 41 grand was spent on kind of special projects, the main one being the summer perspective, 34 grand operating profit, 39%.
39 .6 % core margin. So like I said, our profit margin has dropped since I've been investing shit loads back into the business. Again, this is me taking the long -term view of my business.
I want to invest as much as I can back into the business. So I haven't been taking money out and I've been investing back into team, investing back into infrastructure costs. 14 new members, which is awesome.
Okay. So revenue, these are just the numbers. So Scale20 membership in July, 44 ,000.
August, 45 ,000. September, 53 ,000. And so total 143 ,648.
We did two public workshops. We made $4 ,000 for each of those, 8 ,000 total. The summer perspective was 13 ,000 total.
And then school, I get like some affiliate money from school, I get like 1 ,000. So total cash in for the quarter, 167. New business value signed in total.
So you can see kind of what we've peaked just under 200 ,000 in September. And the aim is that we basically fill up for the year. Monthly recurring revenue is currently at 56 ,800.
And at the start of the year, it was at 30 ,000. We've really only started to kind of go for a push for growth in May. So we kind of had just been treading water because we were focusing on the LTV projects first.
And then June, July came around. We were like, let's try to grow this business now. I was like comfortable enough to know that the...
client and the member journey was so locked in, or at least it's pretty damn locked in. We're going to be remaking the app completely, by the way. So what you're seeing here is nothing.
It ain't going to be what we're going to have. So this first year of having our business intelligence platform has really been about just collecting data, seeing what members use, seeing what they find useful, and we're going to completely redesign it. So if you're looking at that and being like, I'm just going to copy what Tom's got.
Fucking good luck because it ain't going to look anything like that in six months time. Okay, so this is what it costs to run. Team is basically about 15 ,000 per month.
I'm in some coaching programs, so that's about five grand a month. Software, about three grand. Meta ads, about three grand on average per month.
My car, my business car to get me to the Alps and back to the summer perspective, that's basically just under two grand a month. Admin, a grand a month. Gifts for the members, just under a thousand.
And then like admin, all that kind of stuff, phone and that shit. So basically right now, average about 30 grand per month in costs. Highlights, our team is half of everything.
And ads are about 3K a month. As you'll find, this is like kind of the next phase for us. This is the summer perspective, which we went over earlier.
And this is the like... the Q3 side quest. So you can see orange is bigger projects and then green is better projects.
So the big ones are going to be Project Glassbox. The aim is to launch a product that helps people get qualified to join us in scale 20. I don't know when I'm going to launch this because the truth is, if I'm going to launch this, I need to build this really properly once.
I want this. I don't want it to be... The truth is like people from...
like below five, below 10 grand a month, need a lot of help. What I'm not going to do is I'm not going to be the person to help them. It's going to be a completely hands -off digital product.
So they will have Tom AI, they will have access to the training materials to get them to there, get them to be qualified for scale 20, but it will not involve my time. That's the key thing here. So this is a project that I don't know if we'll launch in Q4.
I have no idea. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. Proof.
So we've got a couple of cool projects that we're working on when it comes to a wall of wins on the website. We've got case study pages that are going to get put on the website as well. And then Moneyball.
So the company, this is basically the ultimate scorecard. So the next step for this is deciding on benchmark KPIs that are linked to our roadmap. Better projects.
So one is the great simplification. So this has been me basically rebuilding the member journey from scratch. And this is very important because this is the first thing that needs to happen for this to happen.
I can't build this until I've done this. So this has to come first. Really making sure that our onboarding is as lit as possible.
It's fucking lit, but it's going to get even more lit. So we've got some things we're working on there. The next thing is member success and accountability.
We're going to be holding our members to more accountable. But part of that is we need to be celebrating their progress, celebrating their wins. We need to be clearer on what their goals are for the next month, for the next quarter.
And then we're going to be holding them more accountable. We're going to be completely redesigning the app over the next six months, which is huge. Hopefully we'll have that done actually by the end of the year, but we'll see.
Again, not in a rush for that. And then a content system to member playbook. So this is something that we're working on basically like it's, How can we get our YouTube content to Instagram via Claude?
This is the system that we've built. And my content manager is going to be showing our members that system because it's crushing and they're going to crush too. Content performance.
So you can see 674 ,000 YouTube views. So 51 ,000 YouTube subscribers total, 3 .35 million Instagram views, 107 ,000 Instagram followers, 5 ,000 new email subscribers over the quarter, and then 17 long form videos in total over the quarter. So this is there just to give you a snapshot.
Again, I think it's kind of interesting to see the full detail. As you can see, you've already seen this YouTube views, time under attention, Instagram views, and then new email subscribers. This is our ads, by the way.
So our ad spend, we just, we're not, frankly, we're just like not, we're not trying to scale yet. This is going to be the focus for me over the next six months is scaling with more ad spend. But as you can see, ad spend like.
6 ,000 over Q3, up 16 % quarter on quarter. Ad reach up a similar amount. So that's interesting that that tracks at a similar percentage to that.
Ad impressions up 13%. CPM down a little bit, which is cool. Cash return on ad spend is 29 .6x.
So 27 .3X in Q3. Inbound leads are up 32%. So we had 253 inbound leads and inquiries in Q3.
Qualified conversations, we had 42. And then new members, we had 14, which is up 27 % quarter on quarter. So where we're heading, the 2026 cash target, the five -year shape and the four things Q4 is through.
So this is kind of where we're heading. And 2026 cash collected is $448 ,000 through September. Q4 is always the biggest.
Like I said, the aim is to get to that full mill. I don't think we're going to get there, to be honest. So I think we're going to make less money than we did last year.
And again, that's from compressing our TAM, pivoting our messaging, and . So yeah, just like... Again, things are going to be looking super, super different.
The Great Simplification is going to be a project for October, potentially Black Friday for the launch product. So that's going to be our accelerator product to get people into scale 20. The aim is to get a record Q4 in Q4, and that's going to be Project Glassbox.
And then Necker Island is where I'm heading in three weeks' time with a bunch of some of the coolest people in the world.
Crazy to think that I'm going to be there with Richard Branson and a bunch of super cool people in a few weeks time. And then I've got Taki Moore's Austin boardroom event in the week after. So literally week, back -to -back weeks, Necker Island, then Austin.
So those are going to be two turbo, turbocharged weeks. So, okay, those are the numbers.
Okay, we're going to wrap it up. What are the opportunities? I like to keep things dumb as simple.
So the opportunities for me are... ads, and then also project completion. We have a project tracking like Claude artifact that helps us with project tracking.
And it takes all of our transcriptions from all of our weekly strategy sessions that we have with the team. And we are really bad at, we're really bad at getting projects completed. And so this is going to be the single focus for us in Q4 is setting clear deadlines, setting a clear definition of done, and then fucking sticking to it.
And then the next opportunity is going to be slowly scaling with ads. And so this is going to be the focus. Now we've got the website complete.
We've now got tracking set up. Now it's a case of like, I'm going to try and get the right traffic to those sites. And then these are the big side quests.
So Project Moneyball is hopefully the launch product. We'll see how that goes. And then Project Glassbox is all about ads.
Necker Island with Richard Branson and then Boardroom Austin at the end of November. That's it. That is my Q3 Q3 review, live review.
So hopefully that was interesting. I showed you literally under the hood that is as transparent as I can fucking be. I would love to like, if there's anything that you found was interesting, please put it in the comments.
Like I really love seeing your comments and I would love to like, if you've got any questions as well, throw them in the comments. And yeah, if you'd like my help to do this and join us and get to those hundred grand months, like we help everyone do in Scale20, I'm on that journey back up now that we've pivoted to monthly recurring, but we're definitely on track and I'm very excited for that.
So one of our key things that we do in Scale20 is we help our members build micro cult brands. If you want to know what that is and what the difference between that and a personal brand is, you go watch this video next okay that was sick i will see you in the next one
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Most operators publish the revenue number and stop there. This one publishes the bill: the month cash collection fell off a cliff, the margin he gave up on purpose, and the year his own marketing spent catching up to a decision he had already made.
Named ideas worth stealing.
02:10model
The Quarterly Mission Cycle
- Weeks 1-2: rest and recovery, foot off the gas, deliberate distance from the business
- Weeks 3-4: review and realignment, a quarterly audit to find the current constraint
- Weeks 5-12: an eight-week implementation sprint on the projects that fix it
A quarter is split into three named blocks so planning happens with perspective rather than inside exhaustion, and execution runs against a hard deadline.
Steal forany solo or small-team operating rhythm that currently has no cadence at all
09:00list
The Laws of Scaling
- No sales calls
- Dream clients only
- Four to six hours of Zoom per week maximum
- No evening work past 6pm
- Fridays are for golf
- A team of five full-time people
Six written constraints on how the business is allowed to grow, set so that success does not build what he calls golden handcuffs.
Steal forwriting the non-negotiables of a business before growth makes them impossible
10:20concept
Time Under Attention
Long-form content view hours, not view count or follower count, treated as the single metric most correlated with cash collected.
Steal forchoosing which content metric actually gets reported in a quarterly review
05:30concept
The 10 out of 10 Project
Ten lifetime-value projects identified at the start of the year, each one rated and built toward a ten out of ten, as the foundation for turning an acquisition business into a retention business.
Steal forsequencing retention work before growth work when pricing changes
40:50model
The Four Phases and Their Gates
- Launch: offer traction, ten full-price sales of the core offer plus five case study transformations
- Loaded: leads traction, ten or more new email leads per day (roughly 300 a month)
- Spinning: email foundation, short-form audience skills, lead automation
- Compounding: one qualified inbound inquiry per day (30 a month)
Named stages with explicit, countable gates so a client always knows where they are and exactly what unlocks the next stage.
Steal forany membership or coaching program where members cannot tell if they are progressing
40:00model
The Custom Game Plan
- Diagnosis from the member's own numbers and situation
- Phase assignment and the gates to clear
- A map of how the business currently gets clients and where the bottleneck sits
- Recommended cash playbooks from a nine-playbook menu
- A scoreboard and to-do list with target numbers
A first-90-days plan generated from the member's stored context, delivered in their own language, and also rendered as an audio briefing so they can hear their business described from the outside.
Steal foronboarding where everyone currently gets the same generic starting point
52:30concept
Better Project and Bigger Project
Exactly two projects run at a time. One makes the business better for existing clients (results, speed, lifetime value). One makes it bigger (reach, leads, new offers).
Steal forcutting a project list of twelve down to the two that actually move
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
50:40product
“If you want to actually find out more and you want to get the invite to work with me, the full invitation, then you just have to DM me on Instagram, 77, and I'll send you the details.”
A keyword DM rather than a booking link, consistent with the no-sales-calls rule stated earlier in the same video. It arrives after roughly fifty minutes of open financials, so the pitch reads as a footnote to the proof rather than the point of it. Two softer plugs precede it: a free email course at 1:15 and a direct invitation during the AI tooling section.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
