Watch Me Live Scale This $1.5M/Mo Business In 92 Mins
A live business breakdown of a $32K tax-strategy firm that sells to millionaires and lets 97% of the people it pays to reach walk out the door.
Posted
6 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
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18.6K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A high-ticket business that only chases new leads runs a buy-or-die culture, and the fastest path from $1.5M to $5M a month is building cleanup funnels for the 97% of paid attention that never converted.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You sell a $10K+ service through VSL call funnels, challenges or webinars and your sales team only works fresh leads.
You run paid ads at six figures a month and judge campaigns by cost per lead instead of cost per qualified lead.
You're the face of your brand and you're weighing whether to put another person, or an AI clone, in your ads.
You keep losing prospects who like your advice but won't leave an existing provider like a CPA, agency or coach.
You run challenges and suspect the people you most want to buy are dropping off before pitch day.
SKIP IF…
You're pre-revenue or not yet buying traffic. The advice assumes thousands of paid clicks a month to clean up.
You want tax advice. The tax strategies mentioned are examples of content hooks, not guidance for your situation.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
A tax-strategy firm doing $1.5M to $1.7M a month has been pouring money into new-lead acquisition while thousands of interested prospects click, leave and never hear from it again. The host calls this a buy-or-die culture and lays out the fix: cleanup funnels for unconverted traffic, starting with a lead magnet that asks for taxable income and liquidity and returns the strategies that apply, plus a dedicated cleaner role on the sales team for leads past their first week. He adds a live weekly webinar that reveals price, single-strategy qualifier ads, an AI agent writing personalized follow-up emails, and a bolt-on offer for prospects who won't leave their CPA. Stack these chunks and $5M a month is realistic at a 3x to 5x return.
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Guest averages $1.5M to $1.7M a month, with the last 30 days near $3M off a three-day challenge. Host explains why five-day challenges lose the richest attendees.
01:44 – 02:41
02 · The offers and pricing
One core product: a $12K 90-day tax plan that upgrades for another $20K or $500 a month, and a $32K flagship sold through a 20 to 25 minute VSL.
02:41 – 05:20
03 · Why challenges dropped to 20% of revenue
Revenue moved from 50/50 challenge versus VSL to 80/20 VSL so clients trickle in for the tax team. Last year's challenge was capped at 50 buyers at $50K.
05:20 – 06:47
04 · The $2M March challenge
2,500 tickets and $600K of ad spend produced $2M instead of the expected $5M because the ideal buyers weren't there on pitch day.
06:47 – 11:32
05 · What a tax strategist does
The guest projects income before year end and matches 160 to 200 strategies to it. The host recounts bouncing off a great whiteboard ad because it led to a challenge, and pitches printing the full tax code as an ad prop.
11:32 – 17:34
06 · Taking your face out of the business
A past client's business only sold because of the founder's endorsement; no other face worked. The guest's lieutenant ran his own VSL at a $7K CAC before show-ups collapsed. AI cloning could make the founder a licensable asset at exit.
17:34 – 19:59
07 · Test the messenger, not the message
A member fixed face fatigue by running his exact winning script through AI UGC creators. The guest's test failed because the new face also got a new script.
19:59 – 26:10
08 · Cost per qualified lead math
VSL ROAS sits at 3.08x with an $8,673 cost per deal; the latest ICP-only challenge hit 6.7x. A webinar client's $10 leads were donkeys, and income-qualifier ads at $30 to $40 actually beat the old cost per qualified lead.
26:10 – 33:11
09 · Buy or die culture
The guest walks through a year of overstaffing and a mass-market book funnel. The host defines buy-or-die and tells how one past call clip won back a $6M-a-month member.
33:11 – 36:25
10 · The 10,000 people visualized
A crowd visualizer shows 10,000 clicks as a stadium. With 390 buyers, 9,700 people walked into the store and left, and nobody followed up.
36:25 – 42:20
11 · The landscaper story
Two creators educated and nurtured the host about lawn care but sold only a digital book; a third company with a clear service ad got the money. Awareness, nurture and conversion all have to be covered.
42:20 – 52:39
12 · Cleanup lead magnet ideas
Fragments of an AI product became lead magnets. For tax, two inputs (taxable income and liquidity) can return applicable strategies plus a book-a-call button, tested first on retargeting traffic.
52:39 – 57:16
13 · Timing and staying top of mind
A screen vendor won a second order purely by emailing regularly. Tax buyers need strategies months ahead so they can prepare the liquidity, not in December.
57:16 – 1:02:10
14 · Making their CPA look bad
Most prospects forward the content to their existing CPA. Hit them often enough with strategy, cost and timing that the CPA visibly falls short, then make the call to action.
1:02:10 – 1:04:16
15 · The chunk method to $5M
Reach $5M a month by stacking VSL, challenge, referral and lead-magnet funnels at 3x to 5x each. Every single tax strategy can become its own do-you-qualify ad.
1:04:16 – 1:08:23
16 · Webinar funnels
Start with one live cold-traffic webinar a week, expect 3x to 5x, then automate at a fixed time like 7pm EST and expect about one point less ROAS. Reveal the price on the webinar.
1:08:23 – 1:12:41
17 · An AI version of the expert
An AI clone fits as a drop sell for people who can't afford the service. It's lower priority than cleanup while the main offer has no cap.
1:12:41 – 1:16:30
18 · Narrative violations
Past failed tests harden into stories that block a fair retest. Both the weak challenge and the failed messenger test had clear, fixable causes.
1:16:30 – 1:21:01
19 · The cleaner role
After a set number of days, leads move to a separate sales department that works colder prospects with education assets. Ex door-to-door sellers thrive here.
1:21:01 – 1:26:03
20 · Offer for people who keep their CPA
Prospects loyal to their CPA get a bolt-on offer that equips that CPA with the strategies, pitched at the end of the main offer and later as its own front-end funnel.
1:26:03 – 1:31:19
21 · AI agent follow-up explained
An AI agent with CRM access, a voice guide and a content library sends each contact three personalized value emails a week and a tailored paid offer every two weeks.
1:31:19 – 1:32:23
22 · Ripening green fruit
The guest lists his action items and closes on a mentor's idea: obsess over prospects who aren't ready yet instead of only harvesting ripe buyers.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Three-day challenges beat five-day ones because the highest earners drop off by day two or three and never hear a day-four offer.
A challenge that sold 2,500 tickets on $600K of ad spend made $2M, while one that sold 390 tickets on $190K made roughly $1.2M at a 6.7x return.
Ticket volume is a vanity metric for challenges; who is still in the room on pitch day decides the revenue.
Great messaging paired with a funnel the buyer has no time for is funnel incongruency, and it hands the sale to a competitor.
When you test a new face in your ads, keep the winning script word for word; change the message and the messenger together and you learn nothing.
A $10 lead that is mostly unqualified can cost more per qualified lead than a $40 to $60 lead from an ad that calls out income up front.
A buy-or-die culture forms when salespeople are so flooded with new leads that anyone not ready to buy this week is never contacted again.
If 10,000 people walked into your store and 9,700 left, you'd fix it immediately; paid traffic deserves the same reaction.
Prospects get educated by one creator, nurtured by a second and converted by a third, and only the third gets paid.
The cheapest audience to convert is the one that already clicked your ad and left without buying.
A lead magnet that asks two questions, taxable income and liquidity, can replace a sales call as the first step for a millionaire buyer.
Build a new offer as a retargeting cleanup funnel first, and promote it to a front-end funnel only after it proves its return.
Almost every million-dollar-month business the host awarded in 2026 was running a webinar funnel.
Expect an automated webinar to return about one full point of ROAS less than the same webinar run live.
Revealing price before the sales call trades call volume for buyers, and rich audiences resent having their time wasted.
A past failed test often becomes a story that stops you from retesting the idea properly.
Leads older than a few days belong to a separate cleaner role staffed by persistent sellers, ideally ex door-to-door reps.
Clients who love their CPA but want your strategies are a separate offer: a bolt-on that equips their existing provider.
An AI agent with CRM access can send every contact three personalized value emails a week and a tailored pitch every two weeks.
Takeaway
Clean up the traffic you already paid for
WHAT TO LEARN
Most of the revenue a scaling high-ticket business is missing sits with people who clicked and left, so build systems, offers and roles that keep working them.
01Cold open and the numbers
Shorten multi-day launch events to three days, because the busiest, highest-earning buyers stop attending before a day-four pitch.
02The offers and pricing
Sell one core offer with a lower-priced entry tier that upgrades, and let your sales team onboard through a single long-form sales video.
03Why challenges dropped to 20% of revenue
Shift revenue toward evergreen funnels when bursts of new clients overload the team that delivers the service.
If a launch is capped at a fixed number of buyers and sells out on day one, your team size is limiting revenue, not demand.
04The $2M March challenge
Judge a launch by who is in the room on pitch day, not by ticket count; more tickets from the wrong buyers produced less revenue.
05What a tax strategist does
Match the funnel to the buyer's time: a busy wealthy prospect who loves your ad will still bounce off a multi-day event.
A demonstrative prop, like the physical stack of rules you master, can turn a strong expert claim into a far stronger ad.
06Taking your face out of the business
Before removing yourself from ads, check whether buyers want the offer itself or your endorsement of it; some offers die without the founder.
Treat an AI clone of yourself as a licensable asset that can raise exit value rather than as a dependency buyers will discount.
07Test the messenger, not the message
When a new face replaces you in ads, copy the proven script exactly so the only thing you're testing is the messenger.
Fatigue in a founder-led ad account can often be fixed by running the same message through new creators, including AI ones.
08Cost per qualified lead math
Calculate cost per qualified lead before panicking about a higher cost per lead from ads that filter by income up front.
Ask your media buyer for the qualified-lead math on past campaigns; it often shows filtered campaigns were already the better deal.
09Buy or die culture
Assign someone to follow up with leads older than the sales cycle, or every lead that doesn't buy this week is lost for good.
One well-chosen piece of past content, resurfaced at the right time, can win back a customer who left.
10The 10,000 people visualized
Count the people who clicked and didn't buy each month and plan a funnel for them, the way a store would react to 9,700 people leaving empty-handed.
Retarget non-buyers with a different funnel type in rotation: if they skipped the call funnel, show them a challenge or a lead magnet.
11The landscaper story
Cover awareness, nurture and conversion in your content, or competitors will convert the demand your content created.
Offer a clear way to hire you; prospects who only see a book or a course for sale will buy the service from someone else.
12Cleanup lead magnet ideas
Build a short questionnaire that returns a personalized plan, using the two or three inputs that decide what applies to the buyer.
Launch a new lead magnet as retargeting for people who already clicked, then move it to the front end once its return is proven.
Turn tools you already give paying customers into free lead magnets instead of keeping them locked inside a VIP tier.
13Timing and staying top of mind
Regular, simple emails keep you top of mind so you're the first call when a past buyer needs the product again.
Tell buyers what to prepare months before a seasonal deadline, including the cash and time needed, instead of surprising them at the last minute.
14Making their CPA look bad
Assume prospects will forward your advice to their current provider, and publish often enough that the gap between you and that provider becomes obvious.
Pair educational content with a direct call to action so awareness and nurture don't stop short of conversion.
15The chunk method to $5M
Reach an ambitious revenue goal by stacking several funnels that each contribute a slice instead of forcing one funnel to do it all.
Turn each individual tip you teach into its own do-you-qualify ad and lead magnet; AI makes these fast to produce.
16Webinar funnels
Start webinars live once a week to cold traffic, aim for a 3x to 5x return, and add sessions before automating.
When you automate a proven webinar, run it at a fixed evening time and expect roughly one point less ROAS than live.
Reveal price and handle objections before the sales call so your team talks to fewer, better-qualified buyers.
17An AI version of the expert
Position a cheaper AI version of your expertise as a drop sell for people who want your take but can't afford the full service.
Prioritize offers that convert existing unconverted traffic before building new products for a market you haven't saturated.
18Narrative violations
When a past test failed, find the specific cause before letting the story of that failure shape the next attempt.
Retest a failed idea with full commitment if the earlier attempt changed two variables at once; it never really counted.
19The cleaner role
Move leads to a dedicated cleanup salesperson after a fixed number of days, so original reps keep their calendars on fresh leads.
Hire cleanup sellers from tougher sales jobs like door to door, and arm them with education assets and lead magnets.
20Offer for people who keep their CPA
Create a separate offer for prospects loyal to an existing provider that equips that provider instead of replacing them.
Pitch the loyal-to-their-provider offer at the end of your main pitch first, then give it its own front-end funnel once it works.
21AI agent follow-up explained
Give an AI agent access to your CRM, a voice guide and your content library to send personalized follow-up based on each contact's activity.
Keep automated follow-up mostly value: several useful emails a week, with a targeted paid offer only every couple of weeks.
22Ripening green fruit
Spend as much effort developing prospects who aren't ready yet as you spend closing the ones who already are.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
VSL call funnel
A funnel where an ad leads to a video sales letter, and the video's call to action is booking a sales call rather than buying online.
Challenge funnel
A paid multi-day live event, usually three to five days, where the host teaches and pitches a high-ticket offer near the end.
ICP
Ideal customer profile. The specific type of buyer a business is built to serve, defined by traits like income, business type and needs.
ROAS
Return on ad spend. Revenue collected divided by ad dollars spent, so a 3x ROAS means three dollars back for every dollar of ads.
CAC
Customer acquisition cost. Total marketing and sales spend divided by the number of new customers it produced.
Cost per qualified lead
Ad spend divided by only the leads that fit your buyer criteria, rather than every lead that opted in. It exposes cheap leads that are mostly unbuyable.
Buy-or-die culture
A sales operation where leads either buy quickly or are abandoned, because no system or person is assigned to follow up with older prospects.
Cleaner role
A sales position that takes over leads once the original salesperson's follow-up window has passed and works them with education, offers and persistence.
Chunk method
Reaching a big revenue target by stacking several funnels and offers that each contribute a slice, instead of scaling one funnel to cover it all.
Drop sell
A cheaper offer presented to prospects who don't qualify for, or can't afford, the main offer, so they still buy something.
Setter
A salesperson who contacts and qualifies leads, then books them onto a closer's calendar for the actual sales conversation.
Enrolled agent
A tax practitioner licensed by the IRS to represent taxpayers. Unlike a CPA, the credential is focused entirely on tax.
Agent harness
Software that wraps an AI model and gives it tools and permissions, such as access to a CRM or email, so it can carry out tasks on its own.
Augusta Rule
A US tax provision that lets a homeowner rent their home for up to 14 days a year without reporting the rental income, often used by renting to one's own business.
QBI deduction
The qualified business income deduction, which lets eligible pass-through business owners deduct up to 20 percent of that income.
memorable metaphor, closes the episode→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 06:47denseCurrent numbers and offer structure
06:47 – 19:59steadyPersonal brand, face fatigue and messenger tests
19:59 – 26:10denseQualified lead math and ICP targeting
26:10 – 42:20denseBuy-or-die culture and unconverted traffic
42:20 – 1:02:10denseCleanup funnels, lead magnets and timing
1:02:10 – 1:12:41denseChunk method, webinars and AI drop sell
1:12:41 – 1:32:23denseNarratives, cleaner role, CPA bolt-on, AI follow-up
The Script
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That March challenge humbled me. Two million humbled me. And I was like, holy shit.
So they end up developing a buy or die culture where a lead comes in and they either buy or because there's no systems for cleanup, they die. And that like hurt me more or less from an ego perspective than anything else because I want to win. The important thing is, Carlton, did you duplicate the message that worked to the T when you had your boy try it?
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Business Breakdown. Today, we've got Carlton Dennis with us. Welcome in, Carlton.
Thank you. What are you making each month right now? We're averaging about 1 .5 to about 1 .7 a month right now.
Got it. What was the most recent 30 days? Most recent 30 days, about 3 mil.
Got it. So well above that. Yeah.
And when you say average, I assume that means you had some kind of like lump sum funnel or something that kicked you up to 3 mil for that particular month? Yeah. We did a five -day or actually a three -day challenge.
We switched up to three -day challenges. Right after we did the first three day with you last August, which was a successful challenge. Smart play.
Five days for challenge funnels. Unbelievably long and inefficient. Three days is the pocket.
Yeah. And then when I started really looking at the type of person that we sell, the seven figure earner jumps off of the challenge by day two, day three. So if I'm doing a five day challenge, I'm offering the offer on day four.
They're not even hearing the offer. One of my favorite authors, his name's Richard Bandler. And Richard writes some of the best books I've ever read in my life.
And Richard does events. up in orlando occasionally or sometimes in different parts of the world usually around march i'd love to go to one of his events every one of them is like five days long and therefore i've never been to a richard bandler event oh there it is yeah too rich to be there for five days dude okay so three mil And then to be clear, what is making up this money?
Like what are the offers that are producing this? To be honest with you, we really sell one offer. I mean, it's rare if we drop down and sell our low ticket offer.
We have a 12K and a $32 ,000 offer. The 12K tax plan is just a 90 -day activation, gets them in the door, gets them access to our team. We build out a tax plan for them.
And then after those 90 days, if they want to implement the strategies with us, they can pay their additional 20K. Or they could pay $500 a month and keep their Slack channel and keep access to their tax pro. Most people want to upgrade.
The 32K is our flagship offer. It's been 32K for the last three years. That is what my sales team will engage and onboard people through our VSL.
VSL is about a 20 to 25 minute video. And that's what's been converting at the best this year for us. To be honest with you, between last year to this year, you know, I'd say we were probably 50 -50 on Rev between like, you know.
challenge is bringing in 50 % of our top line rev and then the other 50 % coming from VSL. Whereas about like 80 % of the revs coming in from VSL, I'd say about 20 % of the revs coming in from the challenge. VSL call funnel on the front end or VSL call funnel on the back end for the upsell?
VSL call funnel on the front end. Got it. So it was 50 -50 and now it's 80 -20.
Yeah, now it's 80 -20. What do you think caused that shift? We...
We decided that this year wasn't going to be about spending money on Carlton's face to continue to scale. And so instead of me having to focus so much on challenges, the goal was how can we leverage a different funnel? We felt like the economics of having a tax advisory business, it didn't make sense to have so many clients on board sporadically all at one time and have your tax pros have to manage.
such huge expectations from all these people yeah versus kind of having people kind of trickle in naturally into the tax and accounting business so it changed the economics of how we've been able to serve people and um we also wanted to focus more on the retention side of it instead of just trying to get somebody a tax plan and get them out the door yeah got it okay that makes a lot of sense because at the end of the day if i remember correctly One thing that, for all those who don't know, Carlton here is a Jeremy's Inner Circle member, so I'm aware of some of the information that I'm about to discuss.
The challenge funnel model that you had, you had actually said you had a limit on the quantity of people that you were willing to sell to, which is both good because it's a real scarcity reason to actually have like a quantity of people that you're going to sell to and nothing above that. Correct. But I remember thinking at that time when you had brought that up to us, I was like, there's a lot more demand there than what you're able to actually sell into when you do a challenge model.
So it almost appeared as though you had like to a degree overscaled your challenge model beyond the actual demand level that you could satisfy. I would imagine that that's another very rational reason to not have to go as hard on challenge funnels and to have a more, to your point, like consistent customer flow that doesn't bring in like a high quantity of lump sum customers you have to deliver for at once.
Yeah, if you remember last year, we had to cap our last challenge at 50 people and that like hurt. Me of more or less from an ego perspective than anything else because I want to win right what 50 people at 50k Is what it was 50 people at 50k. Yeah at 2 .5 mil Yeah.
2 .5 million. And we hit that the first day. I was going to say, I remember thinking it was, it was very, very quick.
Yeah. We got all 50, we got 53 deposits the first day. And then the next day we're like, okay, like what are you going to do?
Yeah. And I got to talk, I got to go back and I had to talk to all my tax pros and tell them, I was like, Hey guys, I'm going to go back out there and swing for another five to 10 more people. And that's what we did.
And ultimately I'm glad I did because you know, when people get through the funnel, sometimes it doesn't end up working out for some people. So we really did leave with about total of 49 people. But like, I just remember looking back at that and being like, I never want to be in a position where I can't sell the amount of people I want to sell in because I didn't build out my team correctly and successfully to allow for me to have these big launch events.
And so when we came into the challenge in March, we sold more tickets for that challenge in March than we've ever sold. We sold 2 ,500 tickets and I spent $600 ,000 on that challenge. The difference though with that challenge is we only ended up doing 2 million on that challenge.
And you know what I started realizing, Jeremy? is it's not just about how many tickets I'm selling for these challenges. It's who I'm really selling to.
Yeah, of course. Well, bro, I was never focused on ICP. I was only focused on just selling tickets because the aura of Carlton Dennis, the brand would just get the people in the door and then, you know, cream rises to the top.
We would just convert the people that made sense to convert. Yeah. But this was the first challenge where I was like, damn, we're about to go do five million.
And we didn't actually end up doing five million because. the economics of who we were selling to were off. The people that we wanted to actually sell to weren't even there to hear the offer on the day in which I dropped the offer.
Yeah. Yeah. So I know a $2 million challenge to people are like, Oh my God, that's $2 million challenge.
But like when I've been in this space for over three years, bro, that's exactly how you should be thinking. Yeah. When I was in, I've been in this space for over three years doing challenges.
I had every expectation that I was going to do 5 million on that challenge. Don't let poor people define your thinking about. shooting.
Oh yeah. Complaining about $2 million. It should, it should have been five, you know, and that deficiency caused them.
It makes a lot of sense. The VSO call funnel, does it bring in more of the right type of person? It does.
That would make a lot of sense to me given the offer that you have. My sales team forced me to redo the VSO. When you say, when you say you do like a 90 day tax, but I don't think, I don't think people really understand what you actually do.
Yeah. You're not really like a CPA that just does like regular. people taxes you know can you articulate yourself no i'm an enrolled agent yeah so i'm an enrolled agent and i'm a tax strategist which means that Most people who have a CPA are working with someone that's just going to file their tax returns and report things after the year is already over.
I'm projecting out your income before December 31st and backing into the tax code. I'm leveraging anywhere from about 160 upwards to 200 strategies, matching them up with your income and your liquidity. And then we deploy a plan that actually reduces your liability.
I can get that plan administered within about the first 30 to 45 days of being introduced to somebody. And then after that, the responsibility becomes on the customer if they decide that they wanna implement those strategies themselves, or work with me and my team on making sure that we can deliver the implementation side of it.
Whether it's investing in real estate, oil and gas, placing your children on payroll, setting up a different corporation, someone has to do the heavy lifting for that, and that's what we get ourselves involved in. Makes a lot of sense. You were the person that I used back in the day as a reference, I didn't know it was you at the time, where I got hit by an ad, the ad was very simple, I think you were in front of a whiteboard of some kind and you articulated yourself as, You're a rich person.
You can't just have a CPA and a bookkeeper anymore. You're getting burnt every year on overpaying an excessive amount for your taxes because you're missing the one key thing that all rich people actually have, tax strategy. You need a tax strategist to be able to exploit the IRS code.
Have you ever seen the IRS code? And then I don't think that you visualized it. It would have been epic if you would have somehow visualized like how much is actually in the tax code that you claimed you understood thoroughly.
and were able to therefore exploit for rich folks. And when I clicked to your page, you know what funnel it was? What?
Challenge funnel. You know what I didn't convert on? Challenge funnel.
Challenge funnel. Because I said, I don't got time for that shit. That's right.
Because at the time, that was the only funnel we had at that time that you saw that ad. And I used it as an example in some kind of marketing lesson that I then later shared with somewhere. I don't remember where.
I shared the lesson. I was like, yeah, this guy had the most dialed in messaging ever, but he had funnel incongruency is what I call it. Where I said the messaging attracted the right type of person, but the funnel made no sense for me.
I didn't have time. I just literally didn't have time to do it. But this is good.
This is good to see you doing call funnels now. That ad is our number one ad still, which is now our ad for the VSL. And all I've been trying to do is do variations of it.
But that one just hit. Visibly, how large is the tax code? Like if you could print every page of it, would it fill the room?
Or is it just like a large book? I thought about actually physically printing out the entire tax code. It would probably fill up 11 to 12 different boxes.
of like just straight papers. Can I just tell a random side note? You've never done that?
No, I've considered doing that for an ad. I've considered actually doing it. Go to FedEx Kinkos.
We AI created, but it doesn't look the same. FedEx Kinkos, print out the tax code wherever you physically are most commonly filming ads. Yeah.
Rinse rip some ads with it show people that it's the actual tax code Demonstrate that it's not just a bunch of paper stacked on top of each other and then it'd be even funnier if out of the entire tax code You also printed like very specific pages in your and then go up attack exactly were like you're like this is the IRS tax code I just want to ask you a simple question.
Do you think your CPA and your bookkeeper are exploiting all the opportunities in here to the fullest extent to help you lower your overall tax liability? Probably not. My name's Carlton Dennis.
I'm a tax strategist and I'm going to show you five key tax strategies that I bet your people aren't implementing right now. Here's number one. And you physically like pick up one of the pieces of paper and you explain what it is in a really simple way or maybe simple it down to like three.
You could probably exploit that little. set up so many different ways for so many cool ads. I've never seen anything like that before.
I haven't seen anybody do it either. I bet that would rip. I bet that would rip.
Guess who's going to get that done? Yeah, I hope you. Me?
Me? You ever heard Michael Jackson talk about Prince? Not in a good sense.
Do they like each other? I know. Michael Jackson, he said, quote, God gives me ideas for songs.
And I immediately go to the studio and I record the songs because if I do not, God will give the idea to Prince. Facts. Make sure you do some of that.
You know what's funny is. This skill that people think that I have of being so great at tax strategy, what they're really not understanding is I'm just faster than everybody, bro. I'm just faster than you.
I'm going to take this idea and my team is not going to be able to breathe until this gets done. That's just the level that I operate at. And I think people think that it's just having this dense level of knowledge or experience that I worked in my mother's tax and accounting office.
I swear to God, it's none of that. I'm just willing to implement shit way faster than people, bro. Yeah, smart play.
Okay, back to you. So right now, there was one thing that you talked about, which I just want to dig into real quick before we continue. When you say that you don't want to put your face to it anymore and you're trying to be less involved in it, I've had over a decade career helping high ticket product and service based businesses.
And a good chunk of those had been some kind of personal brand. And anytime ever, no exaggeration, literally ever, I've had a single client say that within a good year or two, they die. They die completely.
because they actually execute on that. Like they take themselves completely out of the business. They take their face completely off the funnels.
You know, funny enough, there's a guy that we've had as a client. I won't give too much details because I'd imagine it'd be easier to identify who it is. And I'm not trying to like be a dickhead to this guy.
He has a book where he teaches people how to get out of their business. And he came to us as a marketing agency and he was like, hey, I want your guys' help on this business that I've got. we're like yeah sure like dude we'd love to help yeah we get into the to the business and the first rule is is you can't use this guy's face at all and i'm like okay but you guys are dying right now like this this business that you are running like every stat i'm looking at every funnel i'm looking at every single indication that could possibly be looked at as an indication of what's going on and what we could do to turn this thing around is screaming that this guy needs to be back involved yes and they were like well you know try to do it without him and you know i appreciate constraints so I didn't bitch about it.
I started to try to do exactly that. We rotated through an abundant amount of ideas, both in messaging angles, random like pay per video creators that we could use for UGC. At that time, AI videos weren't at the peak of where they are now.
So it wouldn't have been as accessible as a tactic. Didn't matter what face that we possibly used or what demographic of person we used or whether we used no person at all, nothing came remotely close to converting. And it was one of the more interesting lessons that I've been exposed to in my career, Carlton, which was nobody gave a fuck about that offer at all that that guy sold.
They only cared about it because of that guy endorsing the offer as a good idea. And it required a leader to back the mechanism that he was selling to get people to do it. And when he took his face off of it, the mechanism was excessively unappealing by itself.
What made the mechanism appealing was a leader. Now in your offer specifically, I don't know if that lessons to the T applicable, but God forbid you experienced some level of contraction. I want you to remember that.
And I'll happily tell you more about it off camera in terms of who it was and all that fun stuff. I'm sure you'll find value in that. But my point is, have you seen any level of contraction yet so far since you've specifically engaged in that?
So let me be specific. I removed myself in regards of doing challenges so regularly. So I've only done three challenges.
Normally I do about five or six a year. Okay. So three challenges this year.
And I'm no longer a part of the fulfillment in the tax planning side. So I haven't had any clients really over the past year in the fulfillment side. But the VSL is still me.
The ads are still me. The only thing I've changed is adding another faced to the ads. So I have one of my high level tax pros.
His name is Kyle. He's a president of my company. he speaks and communicates tax pretty well so he will do ads to my vsl what we just launched last month was his own vsl so his ads to his vsl to our 32k offer the very first time we got somebody to convert was at a seven thousand dollar cac our price is 32k so we thought it was pretty good but then all of a sudden his just funnel just spiked and then all of a sudden his Client stopped or his customer stopped showing up to the appointments.
And so we kind of turned that off for right now Yeah, so I'm kind of at a standstill on like do I continue down this road of trying out different personalities on the front end to you know Reduce ad fatigue or Carlton fatigue over time. I'm willing to continue to do ads, you know I view myself as the talent you put me on the football field like I'm gonna perform and I'm willing to perform but like From an enterprise value, I look at my business and I look at how I'm packaging tax alchemy.
And is it important for me to package it with Carlton Dennis being the primary way of how we acquire customers? Let me ask you a very important future -pacing question relative to your enterprise value. Do you not believe in the power of being able to clone yourself with AI for the enterprise that you eventually sell it to?
I do, but I think - They'll be able to license you. So when somebody comes along and says, I want to buy Carlton's firm here that he's created, And they say, oh, well, it's completely contingent upon Carlton being in the ads or like Carlton being a character here or there.
I mean, you realize like without exaggeration, we're probably less than, I mean, it might even be a month from now, dude. I'd be like less than a year at best where your ability and my ability to genuinely clone ourselves and have these people have literally not a fucking clue that it's even happening. It's going to be there in the blink of an eye.
And then do you think that'll actually be a problem? I actually think that it creates more. of an exit value for us when we can include a license to continue using us in the things that we eventually sell to others i don't look at it as a deficiency at all i look at it prior to ai as a deficiency just like everybody's already been conditioned to think i actually look at it like we may get more money from being able to sell us and a license of us alongside of the enterprise that we created interesting yeah something to think with but i haven't thought about that no so You tried a few different things.
You're not seeing contraction yet. You're not technically taking yourself out of the business. There is positive stories, by the way.
There's another Inner Circle member. His name's Nicholas. Nicholas has an offer where he was the face and he believed that his face had fatigued.
And so he saw like a slight increase in his cost of acquiring customers. And when he specifically started to exploit the exact same message, just in the form of AI UGC creators, everything dropped back down to costs prior to his face fatigue. And everything ended up working out better for him.
So the important thing is, Carlton, did you duplicate the message that worked to the T when you had your boy try it? Probably not, no. I had him create ads.
I did not duplicate the message. No. No, I had him.
I had the team. I had my person who creates ads work with him on crafting his message for his ads. Yeah.
Now, I want to remind you of something, okay? You are great. Like, you got the power of the tongue, right?
Charismatic leader, confident and certain. And the people, especially when it comes to navigating this text code, they're looking for certainty and direction, okay? And you provide that in the way that you communicate.
But you can't undermine. outside of the character that the message like what you actually said is equally as powerful if you can put it into somebody else that can also communicate it with certainty yes and give people direction and how it's communicated yes so whenever you try that test again do not vary the message yes you are varying the messenger as the test in what you are trying there.
Yep. Your goal should be exclusively to repeat the same message and test the messenger. Do you understand?
Yep. I totally get it. Okay.
Very good. Yep. All right.
Well, anyway, so VSL call funnel wise, what's the ROAS at? Our VSL ROAS is at a 3 .08. Our cost per deal is at 8 ,673.
Do you know the... Do you know the AOV on that funnel, the average order value? That would assume that you're getting about like a 24 -ish, almost 25K cash collected upfront if you're at a 3 .08X?
Yeah. Okay. I would imagine that.
Okay. And then what's your challenge funnel look like in comparison? Challenge funnel.
So on our March and August challenge, the blended ROAS was 2 .75. the march and august and october challenge from 2025 the row as was 5 .74 and then the october one that i just did was a 6 .7 challenge a 6 .7 x row s and i only spent i only spent 190 grand on this october challenge but again i targeted just the icp and so my cost per ticket just went up dramatically but i sold 60 less tickets and then got a 6 .7 x -ray so i'm kind of feeling bullish on my next challenge i uh i'll give it to you in the form of a recent lesson i i just shared with somebody they had a webinar and they were optimizing around getting as low of a cost per lead as possible on the webinar and their cost per lead on the webinar at the lowest was maybe like 10 ish dollars yeah and that was real good to them and they did that webinar and they report back to us right after they're done and they go it's nothing but donkeys in this entire webinar like it was the worst of the worst
And, you know, we've gone back and we looked at the messaging and there was definitely some stuff you could look at in the messaging and say, yeah, I mean, this wasn't dialed in towards the best person. I mean, we probably could have done a little better job at calling out the right person. Yes.
So that's what we do the next time around. We film some ads that say income qualifiers right at the beginning of the ad and are much more direct towards the specific ICP. The costs go up to about $40 to $60 a lead.
Like, We're going to spend the same dollars and get so much. We're going to get a huge drop in the quantity of people coming in.
Yes. We're going to be fucked. And I told him, I was like, this is the same cost per qualified lead as what we were getting prior.
And they were like, no way. And I go, okay, out of the total quantity of people that opted in last time for only $10 cost per lead, the quantity of the people that were qualified out of that. mathematically put the cost per qualified lead at about $40 to $60.
I said, now in the ads manager that you're simply only allowing qualified people to come in and that you're only appealing to qualified people. Believe it or not, this campaign actually dropped into the 30s for their cost per lead on the new one that was just for qualified folks. I was like, you're actually beating it.
The cost per lead. Yes. That you previously had for a cost per qualified lead.
You just have the illusion that it's a higher cost per lead because you've never actually done the math on what a qualified cost per lead actually costs. So technically, you might have that illusion as well in your challenge funnel model where historically you've been able to get a cost per lead for cheaper. Yes.
But your new cost per lead only having qualified people factored into it has likely been. potentially better in this most recent period of time since you're only optimizing around it, only allowing that type of person to come through. So make sure you do that math or have your media buyer do that math if you haven't already.
It's very revealing and give you a lot more confidence in scaling that up. The biggest lesson I had to learn too was building a business to support not having the economics correct. So you asked me like, okay, you aren't relying on challenges as much.
I would have probably blown up challenges. More had I done the ICP work that I was supposed to do what I mean by that is coming out of last last year's challenge in October I was capped at 50 people that 50k offer. I did 2 .5 million I was rolling into that next March challenge spending 600 700 almost 700 K with the anticipation of possibly gonna do 5 million and Then didn't end up doing 5 million did 2 million But the amount of staff I went and staffed up for in anticipation for the amount of clientele I was expected to have, I just went bonkers on staffing up.
And then I rolled into a book challenge or a book funnel instead of doing a challenge inside of June. So I went and buried some cash into that. And then I got around to then getting to my August challenge.
And tax planning is kind of slow in those summer months, like June, July is like when normal tax planning firms don't really rip as much. We still have really great months. So I had to restructure my business all year just to be able to get to a place where I was able to now have a challenge like this, where I'm specifically talking to the person.
And now that I was able to spend, you know, about 190K, 200K on this challenge. I'm positioned to now, based off of my new understanding, to go scale this back up. But I have freaking wounds, bro, from like, you know, having to go try new things.
And so I'm glad I did. And I'm glad I learned the valuable lesson of like - Cost of learning a lesson. Had cost of learning a lesson, right?
You thought what you knew - about your challenges last year was going to work this year. You thought the attention and your organic and everything was just going to sell people and you didn't have the data of really who was showing up.
You didn't have the income qualifications of who was showing up. You didn't know whether or not they show up better from a webinar, whether they show up better from a sales funnel page. You don't know whether it was your ads talking specifically to the millionaires.
You didn't do the homework on who is actually buying your product, not refunding your product, finding value with your product. and are those the people who are actually showing up on the challenge? Are they making it to the pitch day?
Are they making it to day three? Are they falling off at day three and your sales team has to go follow up with them? And you didn't even know that that was actually so much follow up that they had to do.
This taught me so much, brother, because I was just relying on skill, it felt like, a little bit. And that March challenge humbled me. Two million humbled me.
And I was like, holy shit. And the decision was already made. I can't go recoup.
I'm going into the book. And so we went and did the book. Realized, okay, the book taught me, was I actually talking to my damn ICT when I dropped the damn book?
Wouldn't have bought the book. See? Then I was like, okay, our millionaires are going to buy this goddamn book.
And so I'm like, I was already committed to the book. Going back to 2025 for 2026, I'm going to drop it right around my birthday time. So I'm realizing all these expenses that I'm incurring, building up this huge staff, which I realized I don't even need a huge staff anymore to execute like this.
And then doing this book funnel that's for the masses when really my ICP is probably not going to listen to the book. They're going to listen to a fucking audio book if anything. I had to go learn all of that.
You know what I mean? To then turn around and do what I did in my August challenge. you know, having 60 % of the people in my August challenge being under 300K for a 32K offer because they came in from the damn book challenge or the book funnel to then turning around and only selling 500, no, 390 tickets to this event and converting at about 1 .2 million on this one, spending only 200K.
Have you ever heard of the idea of essentially a buy or die culture? Buy or die culture? No, sorry, no.
So when you... see a sales team out there. This happens very frequently, much more frequently than what I like to see.
They will run something like a call funnel. They'll run something like a challenge funnel. And their salespeople get so maxed out on the amount of new opportunities that come in.
that statistically it's like near impossible for them to be able to follow up with the people that they just talked to like yesterday or the day before. And so what ends up happening is, is the business ends up just steamrolling forward with like the idea of exclusively putting attention on new people. And they end up losing a tremendous amount of opportunities from the past people that were already there.
should have had some level of attention put into them that had already had money spent to get them into the ecosystem and get the awareness established and there's already communication lines established with these people to be able to follow back up with again them again in a cost -effective way but the business never thinks about this so they end up developing a buyer die culture where a lead comes in and they either buy or because there's no systems for cleanup they die and I want to I want to just give you some perspective real quick so I have Jeremy's inner circle members names Brooke okay Brooke does more than $6 million a month, okay?
Brooke, at the time when he joined the Inner Circle, if I'm not mistaken, he was at around $2 million a month. He got to $5 million a month while being a part of the group. I got a trophy for him.
He never came and he got it. He lived in Dubai at the time and this is when Dubai got hit with some missiles. And, you know, Brooke's got a family, young kids.
He had to flee and, you know, he bunkered down. I don't remember the specific area he went to, somewhere in Europe. And, you know, he decided at that time, he's like, you know, I'm going to drop out.
I'm just not going to leave. I'm not going to come to Masterminds. I'm not going to like really do anything.
Brooke would really only use the group for like an occasional one -on -one call with me when like something was really going on that he needed. And, you know, he was a great member. But I remember when he dropped, I thought that's a very reasonable thing.
You know, like the guy was getting mistled and he was just concerned for his safety. Very fair thing. So anyway, as time went on, probably about a year later, Brooke had ended up joining back in.
And when he joined back in, I asked him, I said, what did it, Brooke? What made you join back in? And he goes, one thing, Jeremy, and one thing alone.
I'm in that million dollar a month chat that you have that's exclusive for the million dollar a month earners. And there's a guy in there who spent a million dollars on paid ads in a month that made 2 .7 million running follower ads. where you said that he was running them from his phone and you said he did a weekly call on it.
And you also said when somebody had asked him a question that they just had to go watch the call, that was for his own efficiency for why that call was shot. So he didn't have to sit there and answer everybody's questions every time that somebody would inevitably ask. He goes, I just want to watch the call.
And to be honest with you, I missed doing one -on -one calls with you too. He's like, but the main driver was, I just literally wanted to watch that one call. And as soon as he joins back in right away, books a one -on -one call with me.
It's a very good one -on -one call for him too. he's in a position where he needed what we had talked about i'll leave that for what that conversation was yeah but um i'll tell you this the idea of the buyer die culture just took one thing to get back in front of him to make him say i'm gonna buy and i want to do this again and i think there's not a single thing i've ever got from you because i i technically opted into one of your funnels i've never gotten like a random text strategy from you i've never gotten a simple thing that says ask your tax guys if they're doing this i've never gotten anything that makes me feel like it's called value driven follow -up you know i saw a clip the other day it was on instagram it might have been an ai dude i'm honestly not sure but it was an older guy and his um his content had said something about a strategy i'd never heard before related to trusts and i don't remember it well enough to sit here and articulate it to you but i remember watching the video structures i thought to myself when i watched the video i was like
It makes so much sense. And all I did is I took the video. I saved it, first of all.
Second thing I did is I took it and I sent it to my text guy. Yep. And I was like, are we doing this?
And he said no. And then I went back to that guy's page. I clicked on their bio to like see if there was a link that like book a call or whatever it was that the guy was selling.
And all he had was some random physical book he was trying to sell. And so again, I was like, I don't wanna do that. I'd rather just hire you to do whatever you're talking about.
That makes way more sense. I imagine that that guy has the opportunity to do it for you, but it's probably buried behind the book. And he led with the book and he only led with the book.
You have two funnels right now. You got your call funnel and you got your challenge funnel. When you look at the people that are already aware of you and you think to yourself, how?
could I effectively get the people already aware of me to come back and convert? It always juices your ROAS because it's always a more cost -effective audience to reach again, especially depending on the mechanism for how you reach them. You might be able to reach them via an email.
You might be able to reach them via a setter. You might be able to reach them via a cost -effective remarketing ad. Cost -effective because it's a small targeted audience and it has a high probability to be high ROAS.
And you consider Like I clicked on that guy's page and I saw the book and I've not seen a single remarketing ad since that would just leverage basic if this, then that logic. If they click to my page and they don't convert, then let's hit them with some remarketing ads.
Give them some different reasons to come back and buy the book. And if they don't convert after like what, 14 days, then let's assume they're not going to buy the book, but there's clearly some interest there. So let's hit them with a different funnel.
Let's hit them with a call funnel. If they don't respond to the call funnel for the next X amount of days, then let's rotate a challenge funnel in front of them. If they don't respond to the challenge funnel, then let's rotate this in front of them instead.
And along the way, Carlton, this is very important. Along the way. If I just get hit with some content from that guy that just continues to show me that this motherfucker's dialed in and knows what he's talking about, just keeps giving me tips, keeps making me question.
Your original ad that I saw way back in the day, that is literally what made me go hire other people. And I gave them money instead of you because you didn't give me a preferred mechanism to buy. It's the only reason somebody else got my money instead of you.
When they saved me the first year, they saved me 832 grand in taxes. That's a good tax. The second year, they saved me like almost 500K.
I love these guys. To be clear though, and I can't stress this enough, you didn't have the if this, then that follow -up sequence here. And so as you're steamrolling ahead, I want you to really be cognizant of avoiding a buy or die culture where the only focal point that you carry is on the new customer acquisition of that very specific funnel.
I want you to remember, every time you go spend 700 grand or 100 grand, in terms of impressions, In terms of people that clicked that were remaining unconverted, I put it in perspective like this for people. Sometimes I said, look, man, if you and I ran a store, right?
Let's say that we ran an Apple store together, okay? And let's use the example that we had. How many people you think you got to click to your page for a hundred thousand something dollars in that most recent challenge funnel call?
Thousands, bro. Let's use the example of just, let's say 10K. Yeah.
Right. Have you ever visualized 10 ,000 people? It's like a stadium.
Maybe like the YouTube theater in LA. Watch this. So this is one of my favorite things to do.
It's a crowd -sized visualizer from this company called Limelink. And if you look at this, this is one of my favorite things to do. Like if I get a reel as an example, it only gets like 3 ,000 people.
I'm like, that's sick. Makes me remember how many people it actually is. That's about 10 ,000 people right there.
Right? Now, if you look at this, Carlton, I just want you to picture your ad right in the middle there instead of the tennis court. I want you to picture 10 ,000 people walking into your and I's Apple store.
Okay? Yep. And I want you to picture, how many people did you get to buy the challenge?
We sold 390 tickets. So you converted, let's say 390 out of 10 ,000 people in this example. That means we pretty much had 9 ,700 that left.
They walked in our store and they left. If you and I ran an Apple store and 10 ,000 people walked in, or let's say you and I ran a gas station. Yes.
Let's say we had 10 ,000 cars drive through our little corner lot that we had and only 300 of them gave us money. Yes. You and I would be tweaking the fuck out.
Yes. We would be like, what are we doing wrong? Yes.
How in the world am I getting 10 ,000 people to walk in my door and leave and only getting 300 to give me money? Yep. We wouldn't just focus on the 300.
No. We'd put focus on the 9 ,700 that we could follow up with. Yes.
And see if we can do something with them. Yes. I walked in your store and I left.
I never saw from you again. Yeah. I never saw an ad for something else.
I never saw content from you that strategically reached me again. And I was, Carl, you started my buying journey. Yes.
I'm gonna tell you something that happens. I was just, one of the Jeremy's Inner Circle members in the group's name is Matt. Matt does a hundred plus million dollars a year as an agency.
One of Matt's key things that he constantly tells me for how he gets a lot of value out of me, he goes, Jeremy, I sell to an enterprise level business in Australia. He goes, they usually spend like five to $10 million with me. He goes, your content ad strategies are insane.
All I do is I just sell these guys your content ad strategies. He goes, I just take these big businesses that are doing more like traditional media and implement your content ad strategies. He goes, that's like my whole thing.
This guy does a hundred plus million dollars a year in cash flows and marketing agents. It makes me question my whole life every time I talk to him. Matt tells me, he goes, I'm sitting here and like, you know, anytime, anytime anybody gets in front of me and this guy flew out from Australia in this case, like come to one of our masterminds.
And this is the first time I've seen this guy in a year, you know? So I really want to make sure I spend a couple of minutes with him and like really give him a good wow factor. And I realized exactly what he needs to know.
It's the same thing I'm about to tell you. I say, you know, the way content works nowadays, Matt, it's very different than you think. I go, watch this.
So all those content ad strategies you've been ripping that you've been doing so good with. I said, it happens organically now too. He's like, what do you mean?
I go, it's a combination of paid and organic. The algorithm's more dialed in than it's ever been at getting somebody the perfect set of scrolls to go through that complement and build on top of what they've demonstrated interest in. You showed me an ad that I paid more attention to than a regular ad that told me that I needed a tax strategist instead of a CPA and a bookkeeper.
I clicked to your page and I left. That signal that I gave to Facebook in this case, when I went back to the newsfeed, do you know the next things I saw? Tax strategists.
I saw content from tax strategists that nurtured me and converted me eventually. And you weren't a part of that mix. Your content awareness.
nurture, and conversion. This was before I hammered them strategies, right? That's right.
Yeah. You didn't have any content. Oh, you got me right.
I mean, can we at least say that this was before you spanked me into shape? Watch this. It's a combination.
So I told Matt, I said, I just recently, and by the way, the awareness, nurture, conversion thing, one of our other Inner Circle members named Jeremy Moser, we just did an entire organic masterclass together where we go through that. And that was his words and the three steps he did. He says, so anyway, I'm talking to Matt and I go, you know, Matt, I just bought this house.
And I just want my kids to be raised on nice grass, man. I just want them to be able to like lay in the grass, like fall down, you know, not get hurt. I was like, I really hate Florida grass.
I was like, almost all Florida grass is this Bermuda grass. And it's just terrible to me. Like where I grew up, I could like lay down in the grass, not be concerned about anything.
I never even thought twice about it, but I didn't know better. I was like, I just wanted really nice grass. So after I bought this house, I started looking into grass.
So I went on IG one day, I typed in grass. And the first thing I see is a piece of content from a dude who's like putting sand in his grass. And I'm like, what the fuck?
Like, what's this guy sand in his grass for? He had some specialized piece of equipment. He had like a dump truck drop off a bunch of sand.
And I'm like, again, I have no idea what's going on. I'm being brought to awareness. Yes.
Okay. I go back into the feed and I know what's going to happen now. I know I'm going to get targeted by grass.
So as I'm scrolling, the next. Grass content I see is from another guy, completely different dude, who has another specialized piece of equipment. And he cut his grass.
He had already sanded the grass, apparently. That's what he says. He goes, I'm like three months past the sand.
And he cut his grass so low. that it looked just like how a golf course would look. He's in South Florida.
And I go, oh, there it is. That's what I'm looking for. And I remember I go to this guy's profile and he had some random shit.
It was like a digital book of some kind. And I was like, I don't give a fuck about that. I'm looking for a landscaper.
I'm never gonna do my own grass. I'm looking for a landscaper to do my grass. So anyway, I tell Matt, I'm like, okay, Matt, I'm back to scrolling.
And then I get targeted by an ad that it's a South Florida landscaping company literally showed like a montage of them, like sand in the grass and cutting the grass low and like taking out the old grass, putting in new grass, articulating all the services they did. I said, that's my new landscaper, Matt.
I said, the two people that came before that, they didn't get any of my money, but they participated in the sales process. I called it socialism scrolling. I said, the first two guys, they technically got me to the point where I was aware and nurtured and ready to buy.
The landscaper is a guy who converted me and got my money. I said, do you think the landscaper even knows that the first two guys contributed to the sales cycle? He didn't.
He didn't. So I told Matt, I said, Matt, I don't know what to call it yet. I said, I'm going to call it something.
I said, I'm still in the middle of trying to understand it thoroughly myself to the degree that it actually works. So I'm going to tell you this. Here's what I do know about it.
If you don't have all those areas covered. you are going to create customers for others or you are going to be the benefactor of converting other people's customers that they created for you. I know that with certainty.
I know with certainty, I've made a lot of CPAs and accountants rich because I'm creating the awareness and then they're converting off of that awareness. You got mine richer. So the moral of the story is - They're converting off of that awareness.
If you really look at the whole system that you've got here, okay, you've got - at this point right now you've got a key thing to point out yes you got a challenge funnel yes got vso call funnel yes and you said recently you've been distributing content organics always been there and then now you said you're doing the hammer them as well so you're paying to distribute content too yeah we started hammer them probably top of the year maybe right at the end of last year okay yeah when you when you look at this whole system really think about it it's like the second guy could have got me but he only had the digital book it wasn't what i was looking for I told Matt, I was like, let me see if I can actually go into my history of what I've looked at and see if I can find this second guy.
I'm interested to see if he sells anything else. The second guy, he's just a random homeowner. He wasn't a landscaper.
He's just a random dude that just cared more about his lawn than anybody else, I guess, and was sharing that. He couldn't transact with him. And just trying to monetize the attention he was getting talking about his grass with a digital book.
I was like, that guy doesn't even know he's sitting on an entire business. You went back to check. What about the first guy?
The first guy, he was a landscaper. Yeah. He was.
And he was doing that for somebody else's property. Wow. Now, listen to this.
When I think about what you're doing here, I really see to a degree of deficiency where I'm like, all right, a VSL funnel, a challenge funnel, like what's missing? I said, we also have a referral funnel, which does about three to 400K a month right now. At least during our peak months, it does about three to 400K.
Nice. But that's just referrals. When you think of cleanup efforts, right?
Of all these people that you've generated. a good bit of attention from. What do you think in terms of how we could clean up a lot of the people that are already there?
Webinar? You could incorporate a webinar, no doubt about it. You could.
I also think, what would I want, right? And so I really want you to think of this because if you notice, if you watch this back and you listen to yourself for the self -awareness of it, you have shared a few different times throughout this story so far. That you didn't intentionally do things with your ICP in mind.
Mm -hmm Yes, I think how would what would I wanted from Carlton in that moment the ability to know how to get on a call with me? I would have or at least I wanted like an audit of some kind I would have wanted you to come in and and and I would expect Nowadays for you to have some kind of like AI tool. Yeah, of course I would I would probably look at your ads and I'd be like, oh this guy's smart.
He's he's clearly scaled up I'd expect you to have something efficient that you can tell me. I would love to either be able to, A, like upload a tax return and maybe like some bank statements or whatever the hell you'd need.
I'd love to have you make me feel safe in transferring you those documents somehow and to get like some kind of number out the other side for how fucked I was last year. A projection. I would love for you to just tell me, you paid this, you could have paid this.
And no, it wouldn't have increased your chance of getting fucked by the IRS for doing it. Yeah. And the gap that you create for me and make me aware of.
It's where the opportunity lies. Only cost me 12K to 32K to close. I would have lay up on that all day.
I would have asked you about that on a call funnel had I come through a call funnel. So if I came through a call funnel, that's what I would have talked to you about anyway. If you had a funnel on the front end.
that helped me do that right and so i'm gonna tell you something i've been doing recently i have my offer it's called jeremy ai i said cloning me and people don't necessarily understand truly what it can do yeah it's agentic it's an ai agent so it can actually do work yes it's not just it's like it's like watching your computer do work for you but it's like how jeremy would do the work on your computer for you it's insane now what we've done recently is we've taken that and we fragmented it for very specific use cases as an example i made a video here on my channel where i'm teaching people everything they need to know about webinars and i say the toughest part about mastering webinars is making the slides and knowing what to say each slide so i've taken a fragment of jeremy ai no cost to you it's a lead magnet you go fill out these questions It'll kick you out a 200 plus slide presentation.
And it gives you a presenter notes underneath each one of the slides. So you know what you're actually saying on those trigger slides. It fragmented.
And we created a Jeremy AI scaling plan version of that too, where one of the number one things we saw from people who would join in for a month and churn, they just tried to get like some kind of master plan from it. So we were like, all right, we'll make that into a lead magnet. So we fragmented Jeremy AI.
into a jeremy ai scaling plan you give us like 12 different answers more thorough you answer it the better the scaling plan is the thing kicks out this monster plan we get insane feedback from you those leads are some of the easiest to convert via my setters into jeremy ai users We fragmented it recently. We helped people create and script their confirmation page videos to help educate people as soon as they book calls or as soon as they opt into webinars or as soon as they opt into a challenge funnel, whatever, to help make them more excited and more aware and more probable to show up and buy.
And again, the hardest part of actually executing the strategy is the ideation behind what you need to actually do. So again, we made Jeremy AI, a little fragment of it, help people with that. It's just a simple lead magnet.
i just think that you scaled up pretty quickly huh oh yeah yeah oh yeah and i'm i'm sitting here and i'm trying to help you understand i feel like there's more of uh an opportunity with some funnels that you could exploit yes that are both valuable to me let me give you another let me give you another instead of just telling me based on what i paid last year versus what i could have paid at a lower level i think in addition to that funnel type i would love for you to show me because you always talk about strategies that's the one thing i always see from you yes you always make me aware of something that i was unaware of like as an example name three give me give me three strategies just right off the top private family foundation you can roll over 30 of your adjusted gross income into a pff only five percent of the charitable assets have to be donated to a 501c3 um you can do irc 181 which is the film strategy we leverage seller financing you can put money into the strategy uh take on recourse debt
and be able to offset your active forms of income that's a four to one deduction oil and gas if you invest in oil and gas with a working interest you can get an active deduction against your active w -2 or 1099 income plus it provides cash flow now when i hear that i think how do i know that it's applicable to me to do that how could you make me aware that i'm the person that should be exploiting that what would you need to know from me to know that i can do one of those things I would have to show you that someone just like you is already doing it.
No, no, no. For me specifically, what would you need to know about my situation and my financial condition to tell me that those strategies are applicable to do? Your taxable income and your liquidity.
So it's as simple as a lead magnet of you saying, what's your taxable income and what's your liquidity to then give me a customized strategy plan? Yep. You see?
Now, Carlton, as an example of a cleanup effort, You make me aware of a strategy. And then if you follow it up with something that says, hey, fill this out and I'll tell you what strategies for you are available to you and that make the most sense for you.
And then in that funnel type, you make me aware of them just like you just did there with a little bit more explanation, I assume. Yes. And then you just give me a button that says.
book a call to talk about this further. I literally built this entire software. I'm just not pushing it.
I literally only use it inside of my challenge funnel right now. See, so I originally, listen to this. So my VIP ticket buyers get the ability to do this through my challenge funnel.
And I would never do that. I would never do that. I would use what you just said if I could use it by myself as a front end thing.
I had Jeremy AI as a support product originally from my buyers of Jeremy's Inner Circle and Master Internet Marketing. When I eventually sold it as a friend end offer, I got it to a little over 300K a month since March. It's been a couple months.
I'm going to get 5 ,000 people to give me a thousand bucks a month. I'm going to make 5 million bucks a month on that offer card. I 100 % agree that you will do that.
I agree. With how fast you scaled it and the positive reviews I've seen. Thank you.
My COO loves Jeremy AI. Thank you. But listen to this.
Yeah. You can take that same thing, put it on the friend end, all of a sudden it becomes the equivalent of a call funnel. But from the perspective of a cleanup effort, right?
So listen to what I'm saying. Just as you originally have it as only for VIP users of a challenge funnel. Yes.
You can initially take it and test it in the most cost -effective way possible by just remarketing people who clicked on a challenge funnel link and didn't convert. Yes. Clicked on a VSO call funnel link and didn't convert.
And just assume they're interested. They drove onto our gas station lot and they didn't fucking stop for gas or come into our store. They walked into the Apple store.
They didn't get a phone. I need other products in there to convert more of these folks. I'm just going to start there as a cleanup effort.
I'm going to try and mitigate the idea of a buy or die culture. And then as I see one of these rip some crazy ROAS and bring me some seriously qualified people coming through, I'm going to friend end it. I'm going to add a new funnel that becomes another VSL or a challenge funnel on the friend end.
Understood. I think that would bang for you. I think so too.
And I also think it would diversify. and make it more unique. I think it would just give people an easier on -ramp of like, how do I actually know tax planning works for me?
How do I know all these strategies you talk about? Because all you do is talk about tax rates. How do I know if any of this is applicable for me?
That's what I'm saying. It's what you just said. All I do is push out so much.
And I bet people are sitting there just wondering like, okay, is he only talking to WTP? If he's only talking to business owners, who exactly is he talking to with this strategy? And I can only say so much income on the front end.
Well, if you're making over this much money, you're making over this money. How about you just... Hey, put your taxable income in your liquidity and I'll determine the strategy is applicable to you.
Exactly. LinkedIn bio. And then listen to this.
I don't know the legalities of this. So you tell me to the extent that you can do what I'm about to articulate. But if I put my taxable income in there and I also put my liquidity, I would assume that based on each strategy, you could also tell me like if I selected a certain strategy, what I'd have to put in terms of expectations, like time, you say the oil and gas thing, I think liquidity is how much.
cash does it actually take to do that? What would it look like to exploit it? But here's the most important thing.
I don't even care about that on the funnel. That's too much overwhelm. I just think to myself, okay, now this man's made me aware of all the strategies I could do.
You now know what I could do and could exploit that I'm not doing now. And then you could craft an entire... Now, this gets a little bit in the weeds, but I'm going to get in the weeds with you real quick.
I know exactly where you're going with this. You could have an AI agent sit inside of the CRM that actively gets all the data from these lead magnets that you have people giving information like their liquidity levels and their taxable income and the proposed strategies that you recommended. And that AI agent can craft individualized sequences that are custom for that person that educates them further about each one of those things.
You could also then have your setters with that same information, whether they're AI or human, actively use that information. to just continue to provide more value, more education, and more opportunities to exploit those things. Because when you think about it, if somebody literally goes to the funnel and they're obsessed with this oil and gas strategy, I'm sending them specific content relative to oil and gas so they don't book a call.
Same thing for the person that's more focused on energy structuring because they heard about a Wyoming company or Nevada trust. I'm sending them specifically more information around that. Is that what you're referring to?
I like this a lot. It's all about timing. The best deals always come down to timing.
I bought this screen here. It's a 40 something thousand dollar odd screen. It's 220 inches.
I bought one right after I came here. I think mine's a little bit sweet, right? I doubled the size of yours just so I could.
I went back home. I was like, fuck it. Jeremy has a screen.
We're fucking doubling the size of his. I think I messed with someone on your team and asked for the square footage and just doubled whatever it was. It's so good.
I think mine was like 60 grand. Yeah. So watch this.
So this screen company. they randomly just send me emails and that's all they do. Just a random email.
And it's usually just something super whack, you know, just like some random shit about screen technology, right? Nothing that I ever actually use. But at the same time, I figured at some point in my life, I may need a second screen, okay?
Now, to be clear, there's a whole bunch of different places you could buy screens from. And it's not like I had the world's greatest experience. I didn't have a bad experience buying from this company.
I thought they did fine. But again, I wasn't like over the moon about it. I would have bought a better screen from somewhere else if it was available.
I was considering getting a second location recently to literally duplicate this exact environment as a redundancy and then add two more unique film locations. I ultimately decided just to exploit my office more than what I already used. I feel like I underutilized certain spaces.
When I specifically thought about the second location, I thought of the people that I've already bought a screen from first, not because I've already bought a screen from them, but because they kept an email in front of me. There's a specific guy in that team.
His name's Carson. And Carson was the guy I reached out to immediately to coordinate how fast I could get it. I really wanted to move on the second location quite quickly.
He told me straight away how fast they could get it. They can meet my timeline, everything that I needed. It solely came down to the fact that they stayed top of mind for when I specifically in the future may need a second screen.
And in tech strategy, People think of this at different times of the year, as you're keenly aware of. Yes.
For when they specifically are looking to pay more attention versus less. I mean, who on God's green earth wants to put more of their attention on taxes? Right around tax season, when everyone thinks about taxes is like February, March, and then right now, October, November, and December is when everyone's thinking about tax.
Yeah. And to be clear, during the rest of the year, If you stay top of mind, obviously you'll increase the quantity of people that convert during those other times of year.
But some of these strategies, I think the silliest thing about my tax guys, this is the absolute silliest thing. They always wait until December to tell me some random shit that they want me to go by related to a tax strategy they want me to exploit. And I always tell them, I'm like, guys.
Why don't you tell me this like months in advance so I can prepare the liquidity for you on this random shit you want me to go buy? Because that's the thing about their tax strategy. They want me to go and spend a certain amount of money.
Correct. To avoid having to give that same amount of money or a portion of that money that is to the IRS. That's tax strategy in most cases.
I would have loved to know in like summertime. Hey, come December. We're thinking you should buy a jet.
Yeah. Or hey, come December, we're thinking you should drop some this amount of money in oil and gas. Yes.
Right. And so also understand this is like most people don't even have it in their mind, Carlton, that they need to spend a certain amount to take advantage of certain tax strategies. Correct.
I don't want to know about a tax strategy I could exploit the month I need to exploit it. I want to know. like any other rich dude that has some large liquidity event I need to prepare for ahead of time.
So realistically, I can go and earn the extra money that I want for it, first of all, and give myself a good incentive and reason to go make more money. But second of all, just so I'm prepared and it doesn't feel like I'm just reactively losing a bunch of cash. I want to know these things ahead of time.
And the one thing that you do inside all your tax strategies is you make people aware of the tax strategies, but with zero expectation of the liquidity needed or the time needed to exploit it. Do you think I'm going to go buy? some, I don't even fucking know what you're talking about when you say oil and gas.
Am I going to buy like a oil well in under a month while I'm also trying to celebrate with my newborn daughter and my wife and the family coming in? I got to go buy a fucking oil well in the same month? No.
I would have rather you told me whatever I need to do ahead of time. You see what I mean? Like zero awareness and zero expectations.
Yes. And when you come along and you educate me during those specific windows where I may need to exploit it, that's all you're doing is you're educating me on it. I would have rather you said, hey, here's the plan, here's how you need to do this and when you need to do this.
I want you to essentially understand almost every person you're gonna sell, they're already highly probable to be working with somebody. I'm gonna give you a good thing that you can likely understand from what I do. I teach people consistently new marketing strategies, new sales strategies, just some kind of scaling tactic or advice.
When I'm teaching people scaling actions, the question is, do they send it to their guy? That they already have mm -hmm, or do they say I'm not doing that. I'm just gonna go sign up for Jeremy shit right away It's a big one in my space because people will literally take my videos and Go and work on it with their CPA or send it to their CPA and their CPA will be like, oh, yeah We can do that and they'll be like why the fuck aren't we doing that and then they'll come work with me after that or their CBO like oh We can figure out and then they'll stay with their fucking CPAs.
I've had it I've had multiple clients be like, listen, I already have a CPA. I'm working with you on my tax strategy.
I would say that's 20 % of our clientele. They keep their CPAs because they love their CPAs so much, but they don't get any strategy. So they're like, dude, I'm going to hire your firm.
I'm going to pay you guys and still pay my CPA. Now, what I'm trying to make you aware of, I want you to keep your attention on this. All the people that you don't hear from, are they greater than the quantity of people that you did hear from?
Yeah, of course. How many people will take your tax strategy and just share it over that you'll never hear a word from? It's probably greater than the quantity of people that convert.
That's correct So when you think about this the question if I were you that I would try to answer and solve for is How many times and how fast can I do it? Can I make them feel like their CPA isn't doing shit and doesn't know a thing that they need to know I'd want to have as high of a frequency as possible in as short of a period of time as possible to make them feel like their person doesn't know a thing and isn't actually helping them and that therefore they need to move over to you instead.
I would think to myself, I need to do a strategy that gets these people cognizant of all things that we just described. The strategy, the potential cost that's needed to exploit the strategy, the potential time and preparation that's needed to exploit said strategy. I'd want them to share it with their CPA and I'd want them to have essentially like a revelation of, man, my CPA is an idiot.
And then I'd still want you to be in front of them with enough frequency. Remember the Jeremy Moser lesson, awareness, nurture, conversion. I'd want to make them aware.
I'd want to nurture them, but I'd also want to be hitting them with conversions of that same messaging. Your CPA has been exposed. Have you taken anything we've ever talked about to your CPA?
or you realize your CPA is not doing anything that we sit here and talk about, it's time. And I'd make a call to action. I would just consistently pepper in that specific strategy.
I'd try to think what other funnels I could use that could get me in front of people that otherwise I'm not converting. What's the selfish thing for them that they prefer that makes sense for the rich folks you're actually trying to convert? And then couple that with, I'm trying to make sure that I keep...
presence in front of folks that way by the time they're ready to hire a guy to do their grass i'm the one they hire yes you understand yes i think this could easily be instead of a 1 .5 1 .7 million month business you're selling there's very rare situation i get to actually do this carlton where i could tell somebody like you're leaving a lot of money on the table and i could say it with a lot of confidence i usually try to be very conservative in my expectations i sit with folks but you my friend are saving people money on texas Don't know a single person Maybe you do because you live in California that likes Texas or that openly says like I enjoy paying taxes and feels good about it almost everybody that I've ever met fucking hates, Texas and It's every person I've ever met at any level of my life whether it's been when I worked a job at the lowest level of my wages all the way up to where i'm at today at my highest earnings i've gotten to so far and everywhere in between they all hate texas your industry is as big as something like real estate stocks and sales as an example where the biggest people i've generally ever talked to exist you can be at a much larger level where you are now i think it's not that far away to get to realistically somewhere five plus mil a month is what i would strive for if i were you
And I would think to myself, that's going to be a drop in the bucket compared to what you could eventually grow it to if you had a better cleanup system than you do right now. And I think in having the cleanup system, I encourage that first because there's already a lot of opportunity there for people that are walking in our store and leaving.
But then I think the cleanup effort is going to expose the specific funnels that you could bring on the front end, just like what we talked about with Jeremy AI. becoming a friend and offer eventually. I think the cleanup effort comes first and then I think you get more friend and opportunities as a result of that.
And I think realistically to hit that 5 million bucks a month, I think you're gonna do what's called a chunk method to get there. Talk to me about that. Chunk method means that multiple things make it up instead of just one thing making it up.
Okay. so like having adding a new funnel into the front end you said hey you got this referral system that's got three four hundred k a month that makes it and it just started we just started in august so the point i'm trying to make is is to chunk your way to five million bucks a month means like your vsl funnel will do this yes your challenge funnel will do this yes the referral funnel does this those new lead magnets we talked about that have setters follow them up, that does this, right?
And you chunk your way up to the 5 million bucks a month. Got it. I think that's realistically what it's going to actually take to get there.
And I think there'll be a few things that vary in their ROAS. Yes. I think that at the scale that you operate at, you should be sitting around a 3X to a 5X would be what I would strive for.
I think there'll be a few that stand out that you might not be able to scale up as aggressively, but are still going to be something you look to exploit regularly. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, I mean, dude, watch how good you are at it.
Say another three. Just give another three strategies. Augusta Rule, you can rent your house to your business for up to 14 days.
A lot of business owners that have S corporations will take advantage of this by creating a bona fide contract and charging fair market value between their home and their S corporation. You can place children on payroll and pay them up to $16 ,100 without your child needing to file a tax return if you do it through an LLC instead of a corporation.
One of my favorite strategies that I like to leverage for people who are just coming into wealth is transitioning your LLC to be taxed as an S corporation and qualifying for the... QBI deduction, which is essentially a 20 % deduction on the salary wages that you don't pay yourself. It's not talked about enough.
Now, I want you to understand one more thing when it comes to the chunk method. Each one of those could technically be a piece of content that educates a person in an ad that says, press below to see if you qualify for this. And then it's just a lead magnet dedicated to that one specific strategy.
You see, so like you've got, see which strategies you qualify for collectively. And then you've got all these individual strategies that when somebody hears, they say, am I actually applicable for that? And in the age of AI, you could spin up these lead magnets in a couple minutes.
Yeah. Give them the ability to see if they qualify for it or not. Does that make sense for you?
Yep. My question to you, one of the things I'm currently not doing right now is I'm not running a webinar to my sales team's calendar. Do you think that should be another part of?
Huge, huge funnel right now. Yeah. Almost every million dollar month trophy I've given in the entire year, 2026, somebody running a webinar funnel.
There's been a few otherwise. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit more about your idea of running an automated webinar.
Do you like the idea of automated webinars? So you start with live. Of course.
You usually start with a once a week. Yeah. Cold audience optimized webinar.
That way it's not too big of a time burden. you show up it's going to be one of the highest dollar value per hour actions that you've got the good news is even if you really it up at the beginning you're not probable to lose money you're actually more probable to break even or barely profit if you really it up i've seen instances but again they're far more rare where you actually lose money An ideal webinar return, especially at scale for cold optimized traffic is about a three to five X.
So it fits right into where your ROAS is right now. Once you get it to the point where it's dialed in and good, you can choose to either add a second live webinar per week, all the way up to a third live webinar per week. But you reach a point where the consistency of it is good enough to where you schedule an automated webinar each day.
You do not, you remember the gist in time webinars? Yes, the gist. Can't do gist in time webinars anymore.
They're not working right now. Maybe they work here soon enough but for right now what works if you're gonna do it automated after you've proven it to work live is You schedule it out at a certain time of day once a day or sometimes up to twice a day at scale It's usually like a 6 to 8 p .m. EST timeframe 7 p .m.
EST is my favorite but sometimes a little bit sooner if you do a b2b audience you might even be able to get away with it in the middle of the day at like an 11 a .m. EST timeframe believe it or not and Again, if you're gonna do it automated You have to also understand one other thing.
Usually you see a slight reduction in ROAS when you automate it compared to what you do when it's live. So if you push the live ROAS, let's use the example to a four, I typically tell people in terms of an expectation, it's gonna drop by about one on your total ROAS. So it'd go from a four if it was live down to a three if it was automated.
For someone like you who joins a webinar, especially at my ticket price, I wouldn't understand why I would do a webinar and not explain the offer on the webinar. of course yeah yeah okay i just wanted to make sure that because i've done webinars before where i'm giving away value and then it's just a book a call if you're making over this amount and then we go over the offer on the actual phone call but i just feel like i'd rather have people show up to the call already with the buying intention knowing what the price is and we're handling injections from there thoughts on that Just remember, it's the same lesson I shared with you earlier today where I said if you factor in what your cost per qualified call would be in this example versus your cost per call if you just got more calls and didn't necessarily qualify, you still technically are operating at the same statistic of your cost per qualified showed up call if you actually just generate.
qualified calls instead of just a total amount of calls that's greater from not revealing price i am very pro reveal price especially when it comes to rich person audiences yeah you're really wasting their time if you don't share the details the expectations the risks everything related to time, especially. It's an easy way to frame it is, is if you're trying to create the easiest job for your salespeople possible, you would do a majority of the selling prior to handing off the lead to your sales team.
If you want the highest quality person to actually show up to those calls and likely just have a few questions, again, you would reveal the price, you would do all the selling. And the other thing that's really important to note, like you're likely a far superior salesperson than the salesperson that you've got. So if you just did a simple one -to -many sell where you really handled like all the objections, all the specific, reasons, all the framing, you would do great with that.
And I bet it would be a great funnel for you in comparison to what you've got now. I think what you just said is chunking my way to five mil. I'm not even doing a webinar funnel right now.
I'm just doing VSL and challenge. Yeah. And if you think what the intention of the chunk method to get there, like all this stuff that I'm sitting here saying would become very obvious to you.
Yeah. One last thing that I currently don't see other tax advisors doing, which I believe it's just because not too many of them have had the time to do it, is I haven't seen anyone offer an AI version of themselves in the tax space.
Where do you see value in that? I mean, obviously you have ChatGPT, you have all these GPTs. The information I can give can be very similar to some of the information you might be able to derive from GPT if it scans the tax code.
But of course, then I'm able to use recordings and life experiences, my personal touch and strategies execution in an AI model. Do you see that being, valuable long -term with the direction where AI is going to offer something like that.
Yeah. It's seemingly going to be more of a drop sell for you would be how I'd imagine this position. Of course, this would not be, yeah.
As a drop sell, the people who would buy that the most are the people who want your perspective on their tax situation that just simply can't afford your... actual service to get your perspective on their tax situation. It's a very cost -effective thing.
As an example, the Jeremy AI users that we consistently convert, there's still plenty of people that qualify for our higher tier offers that just prefer it as a mechanism to go through it that way. It's a way of getting an outcome that some people simply prefer. There's also a tremendous amount of people that buy it that are not qualified for the things that they may actually want, like my Jeremy's Inner Circle offer as an example, that are using it to help them improve their financial condition to become more qualified and become somebody that we actually would want to work with.
It's a pretty equal split, believe it or not, of both of those specific demographics. So yeah, I think as a mechanism, it makes a lot of sense. The question becomes like, how much time and attention do you want to put into marketing and on the front end?
position i'm in right now i hit a cap on my jeremy's inner circle offer so as an offer to promote it doesn't make much sense to consistently just harp on something that's already at its limit right it makes far more sense in my place to promote the hell out of jeremy ai and get that up to 5 000 people paying a thousand bucks a month i believe that to be very possible so again my point i'm trying to make to you You have an offer that is technically scalable and that doesn't have a cap to it, but you also have a tremendous amount of people that are walking into the store that simply aren't buying right now.
Yeah. That we need to find a way to exploit and convert on something. 100%.
So I think as an opportunity to offer it as like one of those things that you follow up with and convert people on or one of the things that you could drop sell to the unqualified folks that show up or come through, sure. But you may have other things that still make more sense to plug before that. You'd kind of like strip your way down to wherever that would fall in the process.
Does that make sense to you? 100%. Another question I have is, is it okay if I keep hitting you with these questions?
Yeah, of course, go ahead. Another question I have is you challenged me and I probably should have challenged my bias. I haven't thought about it the way that you thought about it is.
Me having my personal brand, I look at Ryan Serhant so much in regards to the flywheel he's created with his ecosystem. I love Serhant. But me having my personal brand from an enterprise value, someone can look at my business and underwrite my business and be like, okay, well, Carlton Dennis has drawn a lot of the client acquisition.
You remove him out of this funnel. How does this business become valuable? You introduced the idea.
Well, do you feel like AI? might be able to create the ads and clone yourself in the future. And confidently, I can say, yeah, I 100 % believe that.
But from a liability perspective, you're still betting on Carlton Dennis, the person, right? Wouldn't it be better if I was able to have Tax Alchemy, the asset, be a multi -faced business? Meaning, What I mean by that is obviously I can draw in revenue from any face on the front end speaking a similar message.
You know what I'm saying? Or you just don't feel like that's possible. Should I give up on that strategy?
At one point in this conversation, I told you very bluntly, I said, in your effort to try to take away your face and bring somebody else's face, you failed in the sense that you tried to vary two things at once. You tried to vary the messenger. and the message.
You have to repeat the same message to the T while testing a different messenger. So try to keep the best messaging like damn near to the T of what they're saying in a different messenger. And you would likely find success in doing that.
It likely wouldn't be nearly as high friction as what you perceive it to be now. By the way, one thing I just want to point out, I wrote this down. Potential narrative issue related to past wounds of being less profitable.
That was in regards to your challenge funnel. This is another example of another narrative that you're living through. Be very mindful of, look, whatever you tested in the past, it feels way more significant, and it feels like a defining moment in your story where you're like, well, this happened, so now we do this, or now we don't do this.
Most of the time, it's now we don't do this because of this in the past. These things that you've talked about, like the slightly less profitable challenge funnels, they're easily explained away, and you even easily explained them away. Yeah, 100%.
You said, yeah, I do this just because I had done target my ICP. Or even in this example, you literally sat here at one point in this conversation, and you said, Hey, man, yeah, I tried a different messenger, but I also wildly varied the message.
It was a completely different message. So all you actually did, even if you said the shit that your ad guy told you to say or told Kyle to say or whatever his name was, dude, your ad likely would have failed too with that message. Yeah, that's true.
So again, you have to understand constants and variables, but you also want to be very cognizant of narrative violations. Yeah. Okay, so when you go back and you do these things.
Don't allow the past stories that you've articulated yourself to prevent you or hold you back from actioning these things. I doubt they will. But again, most of the time when there's some kind of narrative in the past that told us, We're not going to spend on this anymore or we're going to be more cautious about this or, oh, this thing happened in the past.
So let's not go about this as hard as we did. That really shoots you in the leg right away in the secondary attempt to test it. Do you understand?
Yes, it does. Think about this. You just did a 6X with the ideal ICP on that most recent challenge.
And I'm almost more happy about that than the time I did 3 .8 million on a challenge because. I have the data now. And I didn't have data going back to that 3 .8 on who was there.
You start to kind of tell yourself, it's like, oh, I spent a lot less and that's why I made more. But the reality is, is no, dude, you just dialed in the messaging to get the right ICP through. It makes sense to try to go big again.
If you go big again and it fails, it's like, well, now you know the pocket at least is somewhere between where you previously were versus what you tried to go back to. I'm just trying to tell you, same concept with this messenger thing. definitely go back and try a different messenger.
I'm not telling you it's a bad idea. No, yeah. I'm just trying to tell you to make sure you keep the constant, the message, while the variable is the messenger.
And don't do it like a half -assed effort just because it failed in the past. Do it with a lot of confidence, knowing that you pretty much whiffed it the last time around and it didn't even count from the fact you just did it wrong last time. Does that make sense?
Yes. Yeah. It's like dating.
Imagine somebody telling you, oh yeah. I don't want to go date somebody else because this last lady I was with cheated on me. It's like, well, that's not very fair to the next lady that might be a godly woman that would never cheat on somebody.
To carry that kind of bias into the next relationship would really put you at a disadvantage. 100%. It really would.
It's the same thing here. We always carry in business these past narratives that we've lived through into our next effort, and it always puts us in a deficient place in the next level of effort we exert. You understand?
I feel like the biggest thing that I'm worried about that you mentioned, that I was unaware of is a buy or die culture, don't steamroll. I think because of the fact that I am so not afraid to spend money, and my team knows I'm not afraid to spend money, that my sales team has this, I don't want to say my sales team is very grateful, by the way, but my sales team almost knows, like, Carlton's going to get us new leads.
Like, you know what I mean? To the point where, like, I don't harp on back -end follow -up. I know we don't harp on back -end follow -up to the same capacity we harp on front -end.
Buy or die culture. And now I'm like, okay, like, I don't want to create a culture of my sales team to where like, they're just only wanting to see red blood in the water and they're not willing to go swim in water that's not bloody yet. You see what I'm saying?
It's called the cleaner role. So watch this. Cleaner role.
So you think every salesperson's job is the exact same. You need to have a different type of role within your sales team to do what I'm about to articulate. The buy or die culture.
can be readily solved for if you can quantify after X amount of days from a new lead being generated, the sales guy that originally got them has a near impossible chance of being able to follow up. They just don't follow up after X amount of days. After X amount of days happens, that lead is no longer that salesperson's.
That lead now goes to the cleaner role. This becomes an entire department at your scale, Carlton. You have multiple folks.
where their job is to exclusively work leads that were after x amount of days from the previous salesperson that owned it and now becomes theirs this type of salesperson you could look at as a setter that also is a closer their main job is to be a true dog This type of salesperson is usually very different. As an example, if you've got a type of salesperson that's getting challenge funnel leads, those are all layup deals.
Yeah, of course. If you've got salespeople that are working call funnel leads, there's likely a bit of education that that salesperson is doing. And so that's naturally going to be a better salesperson in terms of skill in most instances for how you can judge them.
The cleaner role, these will be your actual dogs. These are not layup deal closers. These are not even just salespeople that can do an education call.
These are essentially people that are calling on colder leads by default. These are essentially salespeople that have to work the leads harder. These are salespeople that are going to need more of those education assets and more lead magnets and more shit they can give people to keep interest and follow up.
These are salespeople that are working leads that don't want. to just sit there all day with a full scheduled calendar of calls. They're trying to work leads.
They're that type of salesperson. Best type of salespeople for this are usually folks that come from an even more fucked up salesperson job, like going door to door. If you take a door to door salesperson and you make them a cleaner, they'll love you forever.
That's a way better opportunity. So do I let my setters do that? Because my setters right now are like, almost like closers in a sense where their calendars are kind of full half the time.
qualifying for my closers. It's usually a new department. So it's usually, if you have some people that have extra time, sure, you could justify cleaning and you could justify that role for them.
But a lot of the times it's a new department within your sales organization that doesn't exist right now. Would this person also be able to work inside of, because right now you gave me a thought of like what strategies I'm applying. I have no one doing DM outreach at all.
We have zero DM outreach strategy right now. I mean, I'll tell my closers to go in there when they have time. And they'll respond to people inside my DMs.
But there's no one doing DM and outreach right now. Do you feel like that's a role that this person can quasi play in between? You're just saying, leave them in cleaner.
Let them be a cleaner. Hey, Jeremy, out of the 10 ,000 people that come into my gas station lot every month and fucking 9 ,700 of them drive off, if I could help convert another 1 ,000 of them, do you think it's worth the effort? Fuck yeah.
Yeah, I don't even know why you ask. Fucking gas station me out. Let's fucking load up on diesel.
Remember, we just got to find a way to be able to exploit all the opportunities that we're paying to create. Yes. Right?
I don't want to make you sound like you're not doing a great job. You are. Oh, no, no, no.
I love this. Just to be very direct. I love this.
You have to really understand, you're paying in both time, effort, dollars to create so many opportunities. Yes. And you don't just live in abundance.
You live in excess. You have such a high excess of opportunities. Your sales team has such a high excess of opportunities.
Your organization collectively has such a clear level of momentum that the idea of even just telling you, yeah, man, just put some attention on some cleanup effort here is profound to you. It really actually is. I know.
And to a business that does not have as much excessive opportunity available to them, these are natural things. for us it's different as you probably know because we're leveraging we're leveraging a brand that just blew up out of nowhere and so for my team people looked at my follow -up they'd be like this is how we have to live like and and our business doesn't have to operate that same that same way um one last thing we talked about all these other people having cpas right not all of them but a majority of my icp does already have a cpa one of the things that we've thought about is creating this community where they get access to our strategies and our resources before they engage with us for a tax plan.
Only reason why I thought about creating this community was because there's just certain people I cannot get them over the hump of like leaving their CPAs because they're just so attached to their CPA relationship. You don't have an offer for them. They're still willing to pay to get.
All my people, all my resources, all my strategies were like, I'm just not going to work with your people. I'm still going to work with my people. And it bothers the hell out of me.
And so when they're on our challenges, they're like, okay, well, how do I pay to get access to that person that Carlton brought on? How do I pay to get access to his workbooks and these strategies? And I have all the connections, all the resources.
I went and built those myself. I was like, damn, I bet people would pay just to get access just to these fucking resources separate from this, but also don't want to create something that destroys what this level of access gives as well. without charging enough for it it's about the framing yeah you don't have an offer that's perceived like it's for somebody who doesn't want to leave their cpa relationship correct it's almost like an offer for cpas yeah so you just add it to the end of the pitch you just say by the way for those of you that are sitting here saying i'm not leaving my person like i love my person i just want i just want them to be capable of being able to execute these things on my behalf we got the perfect offer for you too And then you just frame it in a way where it's like, we're going to help your CPA execute these things for you by doing this.
It's probably not an education offer for them. Probably more of an education offer for the CPA. Yeah, it is.
You're absolutely right. Yeah. And it's like a tax strategy bolt -on to an existing CPA service.
Chunk method. That's another good one. That's another good one.
Fuck yeah. I agree. I think there'll be tons of CPAs and tax professionals that are like, do I?
i just can't do this by the way those types of offers also become like offers you can plug into vsl call funnels on the front end that eventually by themselves become a scalable asset meaning have it as a separate vsl call funnel right now we're talking about in the sense of it's almost like a how you're like here at the challenge or you know you're on the phone with us already coming through our main call funnel and you're almost looking for like Hey, I'm just wondering if y 'all have anything for my CPAs.
Those are the people you're hearing from. Yes. There's a bunch of people that just frame it on the front end as leaving the store saying, well, this guy, I'm not leaving my CPAs.
He comes off like he's trying to replace mine. I'm not even going to convert. Yes.
If you had a VSL funnel on the front end or you had messaging on the front end that made it clear that you have that bolt -on service as a front end offer people can purchase, again, you'll naturally open yourself up to a whole percentage of people that aren't converting right now because they don't want to leave their people.
It's a back end. Remember what I talked about? It starts as a cleanup effort and then it eventually becomes a front end and be another one.
Yes. You know that fits so well because there's so many people that no matter how much information I put in front of them because of so many different factors. Jeremy, it could be my fucking skin tone, the fact that I don't look like I'm 50 years old.
They'll come up with every excuse as to why I'm not the qualified person in the firm that they need to work with. Even though I'm giving them information their CPA would have never fucking given them. Their eyes are open and they're still like, I'm still working with my CPA.
I trust this guy, right? Okay, well, fuck. I'll give your CPA the fucking strategies then.
I'll give you the strategies. I'll give you the resources for those strategies. I just feel like that is solving a problem just as much as me needing to do cleanup.
You're nodding your head, but I see you're thinking deeper about that. I think it makes a ton of sense. I'm just thinking about how much richer you're going to get.
Bro, I sit in the sauna and I'm just like, bro, I was literally this morning on the treadmill and they got off the treadmill. My team got off the treadmill right around mile three and I was just sitting there for the last two miles just being like. fuck, I wonder how many ideas me and Jeremy are gonna come up with.
How many are we gonna come up with today, bro? I'm like, I better have my numbers ready because if he's gonna be an idea creation, I need him more focused on ideas than whether or not my numbers are right. So I was like, let me message my team.
Let me get all the fucking numbers. So when we have this conversation today, you can just go explore of all the different ways if you are a tax strategist with a million subscribers and 700 ,000 Instagram followers and trust. how would you create and draw more revenue for this millionaire customer that is our target icp if i can put something in perspective for you i literally hired a guy that just creates one lead magnet a day just to exploit my own social media audience further with more opportunities to be able to get them in with all these little things like the equivalent of what i told you about i'm going to educate you on this specific tech strategy and i got a funnel for you to see if that's specifically applicable to you yes in my world i talk like a specific strategy and i'll make a call to action on my ig content or my twitter and i'll say we'll teach you about this and then if you want to know more about this go opt in and then we hit them with more setter information and the ai agent starts following up with them with more value yeah everything we've sat here and talked about today i exploit myself this is a great opportunity for you it's gonna be sweet yes it is yeah ai agent follow -up what does that look like so we have uh so first of all you gotta pick an ai agent so in my case i originally started with using an hermes agent for this um hermes not the not the designer store it's an mit
Agent harness that you can plug into a specific AI model like one of the major AI labs like Claude or open AI or whatever the fuck you plug it into a Chinese model if you wanted it to Agent harness just means you essentially give a Model the ability to go and execute stuff with different levels of permissions depending on what agent harness you use long story short I gave my Hermes agent the ability to access our CRM I Gave it a notion knowledge base that we created that has like how to talk in my voice every free thing we've got all of the content that we've got inside of our paid stuff so it knows what it's talking about we gave it essentially just a database of information that had access to every testimonial we've ever got it's got access to and then we gave it a job we said your job is to go into the crm every day every person in that crm needs at least three emails a week the emails are to never be broad or generalized or generic they are to be customized
based on that individual's activity with us as a business that we've tracked. The AI agent looks at each individual's opens on what they've looked at, what they've clicked on, what they've opted in for, what they haven't opened or haven't clicked on, haven't opted in for, and it either just sends them things that are applicable or similar to what they already have expressed interest in.
Or it sends them a rotating set of things that it may find them to be interested in next. And these are emails? It just does value -driven follow -up all day.
And it does that via email, yes. We get great feedback on that from the people who receive those emails because all those emails are genuinely valuable. And then in doing so, we get a lot of data about what the person's interested in.
And then once every two weeks, it makes a specific contextual call to action for something that's paid that the person may be. interested in based on what they've opened clicked on etc that's this whole job we need something in jeremy community that allows me to pay for that setup well to be fair jeremy i can do it So we eventually evolved from having Hermes as an agent do it to having Jeremy AI do it.
So you can literally go into Jeremy AI. I think I already have Jeremy AI, right? You do as an inner circle member, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. If you go into Jeremy AI, you can specifically connect it to your CRM.
Yeah. You can connect it to your database. You can literally have it do the exact same thing.
And it will create the emails and draw the emails. Oh, yeah. It'll do everything I just said.
It does all that shit. Okay. That's really cool.
I like that idea. We have some things that people do with Jeremy AI that we didn't even think of that it could do. We had a guy the other day build an entire tracking software with it.
He built an entire tracking software and dashboard for him and his clients to use. It's an agency owner. We were like, oh, that's sick.
You even think about that? I do like that. There's new stuff that we find out every day.
Fucking A, bro. Wow. This has been extremely helpful, man.
Yeah. Anything else? I hope somebody watching this can really sit back and learn the lessons from like the growth mistakes, but then also just like the opportunity that's also just sitting out there, right?
Because. What I want somebody to also understand is like some of the stuff that you and I are talking about, I'm now accustomed to know how long it's going to take before I get the gratification, like how much work is going to go into some of the stuff I have to go build now. Oh, yeah.
And like how long I need to set my expectation for the reward to pay off or some of the stuff I'm gonna have to go do now. And like the only way you know that is if you've been in the game and you've gotten wounds, you know what I mean? And you can just get lessons done quickly and learn from that quickly and try stuff.
Yeah. So. This has been extremely helpful, bro.
Tell us what you're going to go home and do. Well, first off, I need to clean up. I think we're going to set up a cleanup strategy.
I love the idea of having somebody on my team who just focuses on follow -up. I think I need to update my hammer them strategy. I think I heard you when you said you felt compelled to do something about tax strategy after watching that whiteboard ad.
but then you went to my page and then you saw a funnel to join the challenge it also said something about w2 instead of feeling like it was for business owners yeah yeah yeah specifically targeting our icp right talking to the right person those are some of the biggest things that i need to do and then obviously my email sequencing i'm excited to get the email sequencing going yeah nice very good there's quite a quite a bit of stuff in here that i'm conceptualizing and realizing that i need to do i also want to bolt on the dm and text funnel uh strategy i also want to bolt on the uh which already created the tool for the tax strategy projection.
I just wasn't using it. I don't know why I wasn't. I'm not going to get into that conversation.
So, yeah, a lot here. And then buy or die culture, assessing follow -up with my team, bro. We've gotten accustomed to just seven -day sales cycle, put money in on the front end, collect it back on the back end, and just monitoring just that, monitoring just that.
All these leads that have come in that have touched us are just dying. All these people I marketed to for a challenge that didn't buy a ticket, dying. And I've chosen not to focus on that.
And you hit on something. Dean calls it ripening green fruit. He's like, you can become so obsessed with just picking fruit that's already ripe because you're so familiar with it that you forget what ripening actually looks like and being in seasons.
And he's like, I obsess, Dean says this, I obsess over ripening green fruit. He's like, I live with the customer who hasn't bought with me yet. I live in their brains.
I'm living to serve that person. And everything I care about is that person because it's so easy for me to harvest right fruit that I want to become well known for knowing how to harvest green fruit until it becomes right. And this is a perfect example of that lesson showing itself to me right here.
Very good. Well, we'd love to have you back on in the future after you go home and apply all this stuff. And yeah, you end up doing with it.
So appreciate you, bro. And thank you guys for watching. Check out some of the other videos here on the channel.
Of course, go check out Mr. Carlton Dennis. He's got a bunch of incredible information and it's all truly very, very unique.
I've never heard any of the stuff he talks about related to tech strategy anywhere else. So give him a follow too. And most importantly, go out there and get richer.
Talk soon.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open stitches three lines together: a founder admitting a $2M launch humbled him, a warning about buy-or-die sales cultures, and a pointed question about whether he copied his winning ad word for word. Everything after that is the audit that explains all three.
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A 100-minute whiteboard walkthrough of a paid live-webinar funnel for high-ticket offers, from test budget and messaging through the close, the sales calls, and the 10-day cleanup that decides whether the money comes back.
A 107-minute whiteboard masterclass on paid-traffic call funnels: the math that sets your budget and headcount, the page and application that filter for intent, and the five systems that warm a lead up between booking and the call.
A creator who says he nets seven figures a month explains why he built his content engine around revenue instead of views, and why one channel still does 90% of the work.
A live 68-minute business audit of a trading algorithm offer — tracing how an 8x ROAS collapsed to 3x, how a lazy setter team was the real cause, and why the $250K/month webinar unlock keeps getting avoided.
Two operators at a whiteboard map organic content as a full funnel: what to post, how comments become booked calls, how to tie revenue to a single post, and how to pour fuel on the winners.
A marketing millionaire stands in front of a Miami mastermind room and dares everyone in it to admit they're lying to themselves about how hard they're trying and how much money they actually need.
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