§ 01 · The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The number that breaks everything is almost never the one you are looking at. In a 69-minute live review, a $500K/month AI automation business is stripped down to its funnel math — and the number that surfaces first is so small the host says "wow" out loud: a 1.5% opt-in rate that nobody had thought to check.
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:00
01 · Cold open / tease
Pre-roll cut showing the whiteboard and setting up the review format.
01:00 – 06:00
02 · Business overview
Cameron introduces himself: 20 years old, two offers (AI consulting + marketing agency), $500K–$700K/month, goal of $1M/month this month that didn't land.
06:00 – 10:00
03 · Revenue composition
60–70% recurring/back-end (renewals, payment plans, upsells); 30–40% front-end new cash. AI offer $400K, agency $200K. Whiteboard: Cameron Business Review.
10:00 – 14:00
04 · Margins and revenue goal
30% margins this month vs. 58% last month. Long-term goal vague beyond $1M. Jeremy's Grand Theft Auto analogy for how money unlocks possibility.
14:00 – 20:00
05 · Acquisition sources breakdown
30% paid ads, 30% referral (inc. friends/family), 20% YouTube, 20% other organic (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram). Mix is heavily diversified.
20:00 – 30:00
06 · AI audit offer structure
$1K paid audit → 3-day window → $15K–$50K custom build (90-day delivery) → fractional AI dept ($2K–$4K/mo) or placement upsell ($6K/mo). Jeremy probes margins, expectation-setting on ongoing LLM costs.
30:00 – 38:00
07 · Sales metrics and constraints
11 paid audits this month from ads; 7 full builds closed (65%). $330 cost per call. 40% show rate. 17% first-call close rate. 90% 2nd-call booking. 81% 2nd-call show rate. Sales cycle avg 15 days.
38:00 – 48:00
08 · Ad spend and ROAS analysis
$90K spent; $93K front-end new cash; 1.3 ROAS. $10K cost to acquire a full build. Net ROAS around breakeven after commissions. Jeremy identifies front-end economics as unsustainable at scale.
48:00 – 54:00
09 · Opt-in rate problem
Live reveal: 1.5% opt-in rate. Jeremy diagnoses as root cause — not show rate, not close rate. Math: getting to 6% doubles results twice over. No CPMs, no link CTR tracked. Opt-in page likely unjustified.
54:00 – 62:00
10 · Messaging — aware vs. unaware
Google Trends live pull: 'AI agent' is still a niche term. Two campaigns needed: aware (use 'agent' language) and unaware (use 'AI' only, payroll savings / productivity angles). Concept-first targeting post-Andromeda.
62:00 – 66:00
11 · Funnel strategy and split testing
Three unaware ad concepts (payroll savings, productivity boost, revenue increase) feed one unaware page. Aware ads feed separate page. Back-end nurture, VSL, and sales team scripts all need congruency by audience type.
66:00 – 69:34
12 · Bottleneck analysis and hiring
Chad ramming concept. Proactive vs. reactive time (Cameron at 5–10 min/day vs. Jeremy's recommended 1–2 hrs). Hire someone to watch analytics. Closer scaling plan needed. 90-day fulfillment: could it be 30? Final encouragement + Inner Circle pitch.
Named ideas worth stealing.
23:20
model
Aware vs. Unaware Split-Funnel
- Aware campaign: uses 'agent' language, assumes implementation need
- Unaware campaign: uses 'AI' only, payroll savings / productivity / revenue angles
- Each gets own VSL, landing page, nurture sequence, and sales script
Two parallel Meta campaigns targeting the same broad audience but using concept-appropriate messaging. The creative concept — not the audience setting — self-selects who sees it.
Steal for Any high-ticket offer in a market where awareness levels vary widely across your lead pool
25:20
concept
Concept-First Targeting (post-Andromeda)
Since Meta's Andromeda update, the algorithm determines audience from the creative content itself. What the ad says is what determines who sees it — audience segments are replaced by concept angles within broad targeting.
Steal for Meta ad strategy for any offer with multiple buyer personas
46:40
model
Bottleneck Waterfall Analysis
- CPM
- Link CTR
- Opt-in Rate
- Application Rate
- Scheduler Rate
- Show Rate (1st call)
- Close Rate (audit)
- 2nd Call Booking Rate
- 2nd Call Show Rate
- Close Rate (full build)
- LTV / Upsell Rate
Map every funnel step. Fix the highest-leverage broken stat closest to the top — improvements compound through every step below.
Steal for Any paid funnel audit; most powerful when combined with a live spreadsheet
66:50
model
Proactive Time Audit
- Daily proactive block: 1–2 hours minimum
- Reactive time: everything responding to what surfaces
- The audit: what am I personally doing that a hire could own?
As revenue scales, reactive demands grow faster than proactive capacity unless deliberate time is protected. The audit asks: what am I still doing that no longer matches my hourly value?
Steal for Any operator scaling past $200K/month who feels consumed by daily fires
Lines you could clip.
00:48
"I would love to see the opt-in rate. It's 1.5%. Wow."
43:10
"You're willfully blindfolded on a lot of this. It's not like you're technically blind."
55:00
"If you took that opt-in rate to 6% and everything else held the same, you double everything twice over."
62:20
"The ad concept is what determines what audience it reaches — not the audience you picked."
68:58
"Everything you want is on the other side of exposure to people who've already done the thing you want to do."
Things they pointed at.
51:40toolCortana (attribution platform)
51:40toolSendBlue
51:40toolKit (email platform)
Word for word.
00:00I would love to see the opt in rate. It's percent.
00:03When they make serious leaps in revenue that are wise is they look at what they previously were putting time and attention to that caused the jump, and then they say, what is the next jump gonna require of me?
00:18That was really fucking helpful. That that is exactly what I needed. Yeah.
00:22And every time that I catch myself slowing down a little bit or trying to take some proactive thinking time, I would think like aggressive action, make a mess, other people on the team can clean it, that's what they're paid to do. How much proactive time in the day do you actually claim right now? Proactive would be
00:41Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another business review. Keep in mind, this is pretty much just what we're doing on a one on one call in our Jeremy's Inner Circle offer. Today, we've got Jeremy's Inner Circle member Cameron England here with us.
00:52We're gonna be jumping into what's going on in his business, what are the revenue constraints, what are the skill levers, and what he can do leaving here today is gonna make him a lot more money than what he does now. So without further ado, let's jump straight into it. Ken, you wanna introduce yourself to the people?
01:06Yep. So my name is Cameron England. I'm 20 years old.
01:09We have two core different offers. Last month, we did around $700. This month, we're gonna do about 500.
01:15It's been a slower month, but I'm very clear, at least I think, on what our constraints are, and I'll be curious to see what your thoughts are on them and if I'm on the right track in terms of the actions that I'm taking or if there's things that I'm doing that maybe are misaligned and I'm avoiding something I don't know.
01:29Is the majority of that transactional or recurring? Majority of I would honestly say it's a hybrid of both. So this is the thing.
01:35We have What's the ratio of one of the Yeah. So I would say when you say trans transactional, would payment plans fall under that bucket as well? Well, I mean, it's tech it's technically recurring because, I mean, they're they're paying more than once, so it can come in the next month.
01:47But I would say, like, if if we're factoring in transact or MRR also being like payment plans and people paying those off in upsells and renewals Yeah. Then, like, 60% to 70% is gonna be back end.
01:59The 30 to 40 is front end. Okay. Wow.
02:01So so you got 60% coming from recurring? Yes. Upsells, renewals, payment plans being paid off.
02:08Now by recurring, I mean, literally money that comes in every month. So, like, when you say back end, the back end offers are Yeah. Recurring offers or transactions?
02:15We've been really focusing on our back end client success team being able to renew, upsell, cross sell, payment plan collection rate. So, yeah, like, this month, for example,
02:25we have our marketing agency that's done around 200, which I don't really wanna focus on that because it's not my main focus. And then our consulting and AI offer has done around 400 so far, and we've got some payment plans that are due and things like that. From that,
02:37on the new cash side, how much from the from the AI offer, you said? From the AI offer, we did around 400. K.
02:42Yeah. About 400. And with that being said, out of that, 120 k of that was front end new cash.
02:48The remaining was renewals, upsells, and payment plans. Out of that 400 for the AI offer? Yeah.
02:52Well, okay. And then when you look at this, uh, what's the current margins? Like, what do you actually net net all this?
02:57Yeah. So I can tell you that last month let me just pull up the specifics. This month so far has definitely been lower because of the profitability on our ads, which I can break down, which is I believe is our number one constraint.
03:07K. This month, we're at, like, 30%. Last month, we were at let me just pull this up.
03:12We were at a 58% margin, which is where we wanted to be. So we did a split last month. We did 700.
03:18Out of that, 500 was coaching and AI offer combined. We segment that into, like, two different buckets under the same business, and then the agency did 200.
03:27But out of the 500, we did 260 or, like, 270
03:32in nets. So around, like, 50 to 58% margin.
03:35Okay. Understood. And what's the revenue goal?
03:37The revenue goal is a million dollars a month. That's, like, the immediate goal. Now our projection was to hit that this month, but we had some fuckery that came our way that we didn't really expect.
03:45The ads weren't as profitable as what I modeled out financially, which is the reason that we didn't get there this month. What's the long term goal?
03:52The long term goal you know, I I would be lying if I said I had, like, an actual answer for that that I've mapped out. I mean, of course, the goalposts are always gonna move 1,000,000, then 5,000,000 a month. Long term goal, I don't a 100% know right now.
04:03Like, I don't have that big North Star vision of, like, I wanna change the world yet. I'm kinda just, like, figuring it out as I go along. I feel like the more money I make, the more time I'll have to be able to think about something like that.
04:13Yeah. I always compare making more money to you ever played Grand Theft Auto? Mhmm.
04:16You know how when you first start the game, like, all the map is grayed out and you can't see anything and so you go explore that area? Yeah. You unlock more options and possibilities the more you explore.
04:24Money's pretty similar. The more money that you make, the more possibilities you unlock. There'll be things just as you experience right now that you spend money on that used to never even be something you could think with due to not having the money to So think with you're not wrong in thinking that.
04:36Okay. And then let me be extremely clear on this. The acquisition source is all through paid ads, or is it coming from anywhere else?
04:43It's it's a mix. So I can tell you that out of license and scale, which is our main offer, the 500 that we did last month, the revenue composition was split heavily. So we had out of that, 30% came from paid ads, 25% was referrals,
04:5720% was YouTube, 10% was, like, close friends all of a sudden coming in and paying, so I would argue that is also, like, referral. So how much How much referral?
05:06Referral, we made $75,000. So to be clear, 30% paid ads, 20% from YouTube. What's the percentage of referral?
05:14Referral is 20%, around 20 to 25. You said the friends and family thing you're gonna blend with referrals? Yeah.
05:19Oh, okay. More like 30% then. Okay.
05:22And then that leaves you with another 20%? Yeah. The other 20% is, like, a mix of everything.
05:26Instagram, it just says organic, LinkedIn,
05:30Twitter. So just other organic People that came from the Jeremy's inner circle as an example. So even still, that is, like, referrals.
05:36Okay. So you're pretty split now across the It's heavily split. I mean Okay.
05:40And this and this client acquisition is specifically for the AI model? Yes. Yes.
05:43Okay. Got it. And can you break down what that AI offer is?
05:46Yeah. So our offer is we come into the business, we do an audit, and say, here's the three to five opportunities that you for the audit, or is that the lead menu? So we recently changed our sales process to help with the profitability,
05:58which hasn't really paid us dividends yet. What we used to do is we'd them on a call, we'd just say, hey. We're gonna do an audit.
06:04We're gonna build out five AI agents that have the biggest financial impact on the business. It's gonna be 15. Now what we realized is the biggest objection we were getting is, like, I can't put a pin in what that actually means.
06:16What quantifiably that actually means, five agents. So what we decided to do is we changed to a two call process.
06:22We charge 1 k for an audit. We have an AI specialist on our team go in and put together a game plan of everything we'll build. The prices associated with that, and then it's custom pricing now ranging between 15 to $50 depending on their revenue level, the complexity of the build, the whole nine yards.
06:37Okay. You got anybody pay for that yet? Yes.
06:40Yeah. Okay. Understood.
06:41So it goes traffic source to the very first step no matter what is a paid audit? Yes. Okay.
06:46And then what happens? And then on the paid audit, our goal is to present the audit to them. We present the final price to them, and then we try and close them.
06:54Big challenge with this offer we found is close rate and sales cycle duration. Our average sales cycle duration right now is around fifteen days. What are you attempting to close them on?
07:03We're attempting to close them on the full build. So the way that offer works is of the the age paid audit costs 15 to 50 k. The paid audit is 1 k.
07:12Got it. And we say that audit price rolls into the final price. But this is a way for you to have, like, a very minimal commitment to get a full audit of the business to tell you exactly what to build.
07:22We'll show you the demos. Best case, you have us build it out if it makes sense. Worst case, you take that audit and you can bigger figure it out in house, in which we usually know that if they try and do that, they're gonna get stuck, they're gonna eventually come back to us, so we keep following up.
07:35Makes sense. And then what happens after that? After that, we enroll them.
07:39We start building out the agents. We have a ninety day time frame where we say those agents are gonna be built within that ninety day window. So they get assigned an account manager who works with them, who configures everything, who makes sure it's right.
07:52At the end of the ninety days, our goal is to then upsell. And because this offer is very new, we haven't had anybody get to the full end. We're now starting to approach that sixty to ninety day term where we're gonna start pushing people to upsell.
08:04The upsell is gonna be one of two paths. If they don't have a lot of demand for things they need to build, we'll just be like their fractional AI department. We'll charge them 2 to $4 a month, and we'll basically have a monthly sprint process on what we're gonna build, what we're gonna maintain.
08:18We build it. The other option is if we figure that they need a lot, is we'll just place an AI specialist in their business and comanage them. We haven't I haven't that?
08:27Yeah. So my actually, I've got the client here. Placement offer?
08:31Yeah. Exactly. So my thought process with this was we're gonna have some people that just wanna bring this in house, and we can use the marketing angle that we actually just stole from Daniel Iles, which is like, you hire us, you fire us.
08:42And that's the angle I'm taking where we don't want to be an agency that you depend on forever. We want you to hire us, then you fire us. We place somebody in house.
08:49But the angle we're gonna go for is offer. Yeah. But we actually
08:53are gonna co manage that person and cover their payroll and then charge an upcharge, which makes us really sticky. So maybe we come into their Slack, we build out, like, the end of day Slack channels.
09:03I get it. We have project management. What are gonna charge with?
09:05We're gonna charge let me just pull this up quickly. We have it on here. There we go.
09:09So for the fractional management where we don't place someone in house, I was planning on charging 2 to $3 a month. For us bringing someone in house, so we place somebody for them.
09:18We charge them 6 k a month. We try and get that specialist for 3 to $4 a month, and then we have the margin on that. Got it.
09:26Okay. Sounds good.
09:28And to be clear, you've gotten as far as getting people to pay the audits. How many people you've gotten to pay an audit? Okay.
09:35I can tell you this month so far k. We've had I'm gonna tell you just from ads because we have it segmented, but I'll tell you how many we've got from ads because we have the full financial model for that. 11 people pay for a deposit
09:47for an audit. So 11 people pay for the audit from just ads. Out of those so far, we've had seven full builds close.
09:55How long does the audit take? The audit takes usually, what we do is we have a three day window. We have the first sales call close on the audit.
10:02Three days later, we do the second call where we present the audit. The audit doesn't take us that long because we've got a lot of data now on what people need, and there's a lot of commonalities. Got it.
10:11And then so so you've had 11 people pay to do the audit, and seven of those people have closed? Yeah. Because they've been on the seven people that have closed?
10:18The AOV on the seven people that have closed, I'm gonna okay. Like, I'd say, like, 60% upfront cash is pretty standard.
10:25So 60% of that will collect in the front around 8 k on the front end. Are we talking about just front end cash collected? Yeah.
10:31So most of these people are essentially closing for the 15 k offer. Are they doing a payment plan of only closed on the 15 k. Okay.
10:38And the average upfront cash is 8 k. Okay. And just question on the technical side of things here.
10:43When you're placing agents in these people's businesses, what model are you using to build out that agent? Honestly, my partner has 30% equity.
10:51He does all the fulfillment. Okay. So, like, he's way more ask that question is is you're you're setting the expectation with the client.
10:57I assume that they have ongoing monthly cost to maintain their agents. Right? Yeah.
11:01Okay. Just I was gonna say be very careful in how you sell it. Mhmm.
11:05Make sure you set that expectation if you aren't already. As an example, we have a 25 k offer where we essentially build out a clone of somebody so they can have their own version of a Jeremy AI. Jeremy AI's been awesome.
11:16By the way, we just cleared 70 k a month on it. Nice. Long story short, we charge 25 k a year for the build out, and then we give them 7,000,000,000 credits.
11:24But we tell somebody based on how many people they've got that they're onboarding and based on usage, how many credits they're probable to actually use and anticipate to pay throughout the year. Jeremy AI has a little under 400 people.
11:36They abuse the fuck out of that thing with all kinds of agentic requests because we've made it agentic now. I used about 1,400,000,000 over two weeks.
11:45It's about $750 per billion tokens with the model that we have it plugged into currently. We charge that same amount to the people that use a clone with us.
11:54It's gonna cost me roughly 3 ks per month for 4,000,000,000 credits. So it's like if I bought my own service, I wouldn't just say, hey, it's 25 ks for a year. It's 25 k for a year plus based on your usage, you're probably to spend about 3 k a month just with your current users, and that'll go up.
12:11That's a good point. I know there is there's one model that we're using for lower level things, which usually for a lot of the recurring based tasks, I think we're using this model called, like, zed 5.1 or something like that, which is, like, one very minute level below Claude Opus 4.7
12:26Okay. But it's a fraction of the cost. So it's, like, $200 a month.
12:29So we're setting the expectation on that, but for the more demanding things, we definitely need to have a better process with setting expectations on costs and averages based on what they're building specifically. And then the other the other thing I'd ask in this regard is are you setting the expectation that these costs are probable to go up through time as the current models are all subsidized by We're actually setting the expectation it's projected to go down Because the way that we see it is the better the LLMs get, China always finds a way to model that, and then they should significantly cheaper cheaper model.
12:56Yeah. And that's what we set the expectation on, like, look, if you have something really demanding that you wanna use Like, super cutting edge. Yeah.
13:03Like, And you wanna use an expensive model, it's gonna cost a lot more. Yeah. But 99%
13:07of the time for the use cases people want, we can use a Chinese model that can achieve 90% of the equivalent result that this one would for a fraction of the cost. Yeah. Got it.
13:15Makes sense. And then to be clear, very very curious on this in terms of your traffic source. No matter where they originate from, paid ads, YouTube, referrals, or these other organic channels, which are a pretty even mix across all of them, do these people come to you in understanding of what an agent is, or do they have really no fucking clue?
13:32It's it's such a variety because we've casted this is the first time, and I know we had this conversation in the the last, uh, time that I spoke with you about this. There is such a mix from organic. If I get somebody that comes to me directly, they are aware of what this is.
13:46But with paid ads, we're getting such a mix of people that know it, don't know it. I remember when you had a you had a call where you audited my funnel inside of the inner circle, and you mentioned this where on our funnel, it was like, give me seven days and we'll install an AI agent. We actually changed the messaging on our funnel and our VSL completely, so it's now we'll build out an agentic team that can replace manual labor costs, and so it's more like non agentic friendly for people that don't understand what that language means.
14:13Yeah. And you could see I mean, this is what I had showed you on that call that you're referring to. I pulled up Google Trends.
14:18The blue line represents AI as a search term, and the red line represents AI agent as a search term. Yeah.
14:24And people still have no fucking clue what an AI agent is. You may be wise to expand that headline out a little bit further and just avoid the word agentic and just use the word AI or artificial intelligence just based on where the market's currently at. It depends on who you wanna appeal to though.
14:37Because if you wanna appeal to the person who is actually aware of it, obviously you'd wanna use the words that they're aware Yeah. If you wanted to and this would be a great split test, by the way, Kim. You would wanna drive traffic to a different page for the people that aren't aware of what an AI agent is, but are aware of what AI is as a whole.
14:50Does that make sense? So just to recap, I would have, say, ads for an in market demographic using the terminology I know. If people understand this, they're solution aware.
14:59They're already using Claw and OpenClaw, and then we have a different funnel for that and different VSL compared to the people that are an out of market demographic that aren't solution aware but are problem aware. So aware ads would lead to an aware page.
15:11Right? And then your unaware ads would lead to an unaware page. Yep.
15:15That simple. And when you look at that in practice, it's really easy to execute just what you are saying inside of your ads or what you're saying organically
15:25would change the messaging that you have on one page versus the other based on the origination of where the click came from. Does that make sense to you? So you can do this organically as well, of course, but mainly, you'd wanna test this from a paid advertising perspective.
15:38Mhmm. Some people, as an example, when they're running their ads now, I saw it visualized quite well recently with some circles and a square for how it looked. They represented the audience inside of a little square like this, and they say that, you know, hey.
15:52How it used to work is you would have an audience, and, you know, in those audiences, like, let's say this is audience type one and this is audience type two, you would try to push, you know, as many ads as you could think of towards that demographic. And, you know, simply put, these represent all the different ad angles that you could otherwise shoot with.
16:11Whereas, what it works with now is kind of the exact opposite. Whereas instead of leading with the audiences,
16:18you're leading with what this person who visualized this and by the way, I apologize. I don't know who this person is. I don't remember who to give credit to, but I do remember visually seeing this somewhere online, so this isn't my original thought in terms of how this is visualized.
16:30What they do now is is they say the ad concept is then what determines what audience it reaches, and this is very true. This has been true since Andromeda had come out that what you say inside of your creatives
16:44is what's gonna determine who you target. Even since broad targeting's been a thing for us a few years prior to Andromeda, this has really been the case. Take this same concept and just apply it to messaging in terms of how you can think about it in a very literal way.
16:57You would say, okay. I'm gonna have a specific and you if you're running ABO as an example, this could all still be within the same campaign, assuming they're optimized for the same outcome.
17:06But you could also create separate campaigns if you're gonna run traffic to a different URL on the ad level within the campaign. You might have two different campaigns. Campaign one is for an unaware audience.
17:15Campaign two is for your aware audience. However many ad sets you end up having within that, ABO or CBO,
17:22the ads should all be centric within that ad set or within that campaign to aware audiences. Okay?
17:30Meaning you use the terms like agents, you assume they already know what you're talking about, you assume they just want somebody to implement form and that they don't have the time to do it themselves. Whereas in campaign two, again, no matter how many ad sets there are, no matter how many ads there are and what structure you choose to use, all of the ads within that specific set of ad sets in campaign two for your unaware audience would be things that don't use the word agent, and just use the word AI.
17:51Assume that they're familiar with that AI can replace people, or AI can produce additional revenue, or AI can make their people more productive no matter what angle you take. Separate out the ads that you put in each ad set by the concept of it. In that example, I gave you three different concepts for an unaware audience.
18:08People who are aware of AI, and it can save them money on payroll costs. Right.
18:13So you'd have a bunch of ads that relate to payroll inside of that ad set. Then you duplicate that ad set, same exact broad audience in this example, let's say, but the ads for that unaware audience are gonna be for the people who want productivity boosts of their current people. They don't wanna cut people, and that's what you'd say in the ads.
18:27Don't You don't wanna wanna cut your people, but you wanna make them far more productive than they ever had before. And then in audience type number three, again, let's assume a broad audience, but let's also assume they're unaware. I would just take another angle for whether it's one ad or fucking 30 ads Yeah.
18:39That ad set that are all aligned in concept to one another. Does that make sense to you? Yep.
18:44Okay. Very good. And you would have as well, you'd have completely different VSLs, but you have different, like, nurture sequences in everything.
18:50Well, this and this depends on the the level of, I suppose that you could say, ambition you have Yeah. And time that you have I think that in actually this execute on this.
19:00Yeah. Because, yes, ideally, when you talk about congruency,
19:04ideally it's congruent not just on front end, but also on back end technically. Yeah. And let me be explicitly clear with what I mean.
19:11My ads would talk specifically about that. My page would talk specifically about that. My back end selling systems would assume that everybody is on that same wavelength of however I brought them in is what they know, and I need to increase their awareness relative to what they know.
19:24Treat it like look. If I already am a fucking nerded out person with this AI stuff, and I've kept up with it this entire time, and I'm fully aware and already abusing these systems, but I just want somebody else to come in as an implementer and expand those systems into my team, don't wanna be talked to you like I don't know what they are.
19:40Yep. So that would assume that your back end selling systems would also need to change. Mhmm.
19:43That would assume your email sequences would need to change, and that would assume your salespeople need to know to talk to them like that as well. Does that make sense to you? It's like literally across the board in the entire funnel, you'd wanna have congruency to that specific audience type.
19:54Now that's easier said in words than it is executed in the actual trenches of the actions themselves. It's
20:02a lot of additional effort, and so the main thing that I encourage you to do, like I just did, I would simplify it all to unaware versus aware Mhmm. Because that's just two different types of funnels. That's two different types of ways to talk about the sales team and what they need to discuss with leads as two different types of sales assets as two different type you know you know, it's not a lot Yeah.
20:20From that perspective. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.
20:22I think that's the easiest way. Two different buckets of campaigns, aware, unaware, funnels, VSLs, back end. Yeah.
20:28All of that three examples I gave for the unaware audience of, like, a productivity boost, payroll savings, or just additional revenue I can produce from AI? Yeah.
20:36I would not make, like, three separate pages for each one of those with three separate BSLs. I'd make three separate types of ads. I would absolutely do that.
20:43But I'd push them onto a similar page. It just assumes they're unaware of what agents are, and that I need to increase their awareness of it, and that I'd touch on all three of those points of those are the main angles I'm gonna Yeah. Discuss.
20:51You understand? Yeah. Okay.
20:53Very good. Okay. Back to my point.
20:54Okay. So from the paid advertising side of things, 30% of the traffic currently comes from paid ads.
21:00Now this would be my bet. My bet would be that that can become an overwhelming majority of your percentage here soon enough if you spend more money. How much money are you spending, and what's the return look like on the traffic channel right now?
21:10And I wanna preface that by saying as well, obviously, sometimes attribution can be a little fuzzy where people will see an ad, that'll make them aware of me, and then they'll go to a YouTube video, and then attribute them on last attribution source. It's a fucking mess. As as as you spend a ton more money on paid advertising, especially once you get into, like, the couple $100 a month range of paid advertising, There's a there's a common quote that we'll use with clients, which is when you spend more here, every other channel's gonna benefit.
21:33Yeah. And it's gonna be tough to determine where every single thing originated from, but what you can assume with damn your absolute certainty is what you just said. Yeah.
21:42Well, it definitely makes together and, you know, at the end of the day, you're still wanna gotta wanna judge it Yeah. Based on a combination of reports. So you got first click, you got last click, and you got what's called scientific, which is kind of like a weighted average of
21:55which specific traffic source had the most weight in the process of converting somebody. Don't just stick to one or the other. Try to literally look at all three types of reports.
22:04It'll dramatically change the answer of what ROAS is per channel, but have something that you use to feel confident in to be able to continue spending more money, especially if it's benefiting all channels and you know that with certainty.
22:15Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay.
22:16So first of all, what traffic channel are you using? Yeah. Meta.
22:19Paid ads. This month so far, we've spent 71 k Okay. On that funnel.
22:24What do you set to spend each month? The spend our spend last month was around $50, and that was the first month or $40.
22:32That was the first month that we launched ads for this offer. I was just like, let me just set a test budget. Let's just see what happens.
22:38I think on the front end, we were at, like, a breakeven. We were very profitable factoring in organic people that became aware of us after seeing ads as well, though. So, you know, first touch, last touch, so on and so forth.
22:48This month, we were going to spend, like, 160 k. I was like, to my whole team, we're gonna hit 1,000,000 a month this month. I don't care what we need to do.
22:55We're gonna make it. But the economics just didn't make sense for us to do that, and I didn't wanna financially fuck myself for the sake of hitting a top line number that didn't make sense. So So what are you gonna finish at this month?
23:05Let's Yeah. In terms of how much we're gonna spend. Yeah.
23:07We're gonna spend around $90. Okay. And what's the ROAS on that right now?
23:11Yeah. So we spent 70 k. The front end ROAS is a 1.3.
23:14Okay. So front end So we spent 70 k, and out of that, in new cash,
23:20we've made 93 k. Okay. Got it.
23:22And you have a little bit of a problem right now, which is your front end ROAS is cutting the teeth here. I mean, you're Yes.
23:30Has to be unprofitable. And that's not even factoring in closer commissions, set of commissions, any of that stuff. Yeah.
23:35It's just ROAS. Yeah. It's it's your return on ad spend.
23:37That's not your net. To be clear, do you know your net ROAS? I mean, it's probably somewhere on here.
23:43I could assume it's probably like a straight flat breakeven. Okay.
23:47Understood. And you should do that end of the month. So let's look at this.
23:50What type of funnel are you currently running right now? Call funnel. VSL,
23:53direct to application, and then book a call. Okay.
23:57So do you have your cost per call currently? And if you had a cost per qualified call?
24:02Yes. So let me just pull up our ad tracking platform because I think mine in here is a little bit inaccurate. I can tell you that guesstimation based on our data let me just show you for the month.
24:12Yeah. Not That's good. You're gonna rinse me for now, Austin.
24:16Okay. This month, cost per call Well, I mean, by the way, just imagine you're spending, like, half $1,000,000 a month instead of, you know, 70 and How would you feel if your guesstimation
24:26No. No. No.
24:27Yeah. I agree. I agree.
24:28As precise as you can. We're at a $330 cost per call.
24:31Okay. And my bet would be is because you're probably leaning into the messaging of anticipating people actually know what you're talking about. I I would bet you're Yes.
24:41Communicating in a very heavy way, talking towards aware audiences. Yeah. And as we saw, nobody has any idea what the fuck you're actually talking about.
24:48Mhmm. That makes sense? Yeah.
24:49So it's a very small demographic of people that you're currently appealing to. My bet would be that you can push that down a lot. Campaign structure wise, is this a cost cap campaign, or is it auto bidding?
24:58We've got our marketing guy doing it. I'm pretty sure it's a cost cap campaign. Okay.
25:03Understood. Pretty sure. And do you know your your stats here?
25:06So as an example, might I see things like CPMs or link click through rate No idea. Data? No idea.
25:10Okay. Understood. I know the the high level, like, cost per call, show rate, all that stuff.
25:15I do not know that stuff. Okay. So ideally, you can find out CPMs and link click through rate because that'll be a big part of what makes up that cost per call.
25:22You're driving traffic to a page with no opt in, or does it have an opt in? It has an opt in. Okay.
25:26Understood. Do you know the opt in rate? No.
25:29So we have an opt in page to a call funnel. We don't know the opt in rate to that. We don't know the link click through rate.
25:34We don't know our CPMs. This page that they see after the opt in, is it traditional, like headline BSL application?
25:43Yeah. Or is it go straight to scheduler after the opt in? So we did have straight to, hey.
25:48Get your AI ROI audit. That's the framing where we do, like, an automated audit using AI. They fill out the Typeform.
25:54We did have the Calendly embedded on the Typeform. We just changed it to be on a separate page. The reason we did that is attribution purposes.
26:00We got told with the attribution platform we're using that we're never gonna have a 100% accuracy if we have Calendly and Typeform combined no matter even if it would marginally increase our lead to booking rate, so we just changed it. So after the opt in on the Typeform, go to a separate page of the Calendly. Okay.
26:15Understood. So it goes to application and then scheduler? Yeah.
26:18Okay. So then you have your application, the scheduler rate that you'd actually wanna find out as well. Do you know that?
26:24Yeah. I know what that one is. That one's around 8080%.
26:27So this is the amount of people that apply and then schedule successfully. Yeah. So you only have about a 20% drop off rate currently.
26:32Okay. That's not that bad. And by the way, 16% is, like, best case scenario from what we've seen when you when you have, like, a different tech stack.
26:40We've seen it to be an average when it's a separate application and scheduler of about 50. Are you using an integrated application and scheduler for your software stack, or is your application on one URL and your scheduler's on a separate URL? They're on separate URLs.
26:52Okay. So you're actually very, very good in that sense that traditionally, that's about a 50% drop off. Mhmm.
26:57So you're seeing about 20, which is pretty good. Okay. One call close, you said it's technically a two call close.
27:02It's think it's two, but it's not like a setting call. Yeah. But what you're really closing people on is the audit.
27:07Yeah. And then and then you're blending what they spend on that second call if they upsell. Yeah.
27:12Okay. Understood. So what is the first call close?
27:15First call close rate is our biggest constraint. Right now, it's 17%. Okay.
27:19What's the show rate to the first The show rate is 40%, so they are our two biggest constraints. Okay. So here we've got a 40%
27:27rate. Between the application and the scheduler, we're only seeing about a 20% drop rate, which is pretty good. Your
27:34first call is where you're closing them on the audit. Correct.
27:39And you're only getting 17%. Yeah. And this just for context, this is all just ads.
27:44I'm not factoring in organic resecables. Course, you should. And
27:48then you have, from there, this what what are you technically justified as? Do you justify it as, like, a second call booking rate?
27:55Yeah. Yeah. We're calling it, like, an onboarding slash second sales call, like, hybrid.
27:59How many other people book the second call out of those who call? All of them.
28:03So all of them will book the call bar, like, maybe actually, you know what? Maybe, like, ninety percent because one in ten will get drop off where they just disappear. Okay.
28:12But we try and push them and book that call on the first sales call. Yeah. I mean, look, 90%, I wouldn't expect it to be a 100.
28:18That's pretty good. Yeah. Your your second call show rate, do you know if it's Show rate is 81%
28:23to that call. Oh, you expect that to be a little higher. You would.
28:26You would. Honestly, I think this He is says eighty? Eighty if that's a 100% right.
28:30I don't think we've had a single person no show. I would put a 100%, and this is just a prime example of how our data should be better than it currently is.
28:37Okay. And, I mean, if people can't recognize, you obviously move pretty fast. Mhmm.
28:41So you can see, you know, in the process of moving fast, which is good There there's shit falling through cracks. Of stuff that it is right. Like, we we slung $50 into this with nothing, and now I'm, like, playing catch up this month.
28:53I'm like, we need everything clean up. Sense. I mean, you're advertising.
28:56You're creating this semi Yeah. Reactive position for yourself, but it's not bad. And then what's the closing rate to the people who show up to the second call?
29:03Yeah. So this one is where it gets a little bit sticky because we only recently pivoted to this.
29:09Now that being said, because the sales cycle's longer, majority of people do not close on that call. Okay. So we have very limited data on that.
29:17Like, from what I have here We closed seven people? Yeah. We've closed seven people on a full build.
29:23We had and I was looking at last month's stats before. We've had, this month so far, 13 deposits sold from ads. Out of those, seven have closed on the audit.
29:31So you could argue 65 to 70%. But the biggest challenges are sales cycle duration.
29:39Average sales cycle duration is, like, fifteen days. And as of right now, as an example, we've still got, and this is combined across paid
29:48and organic, 13 audits that are just in the abyss right now that are being followed up with. If we had even 50% of those over the line, we would be so profitable.
29:59It would be unreal. I would just triple the spend overnight if we could close even half of those. Got it.
30:04Do you have a front end profitability range you wanna be at? I if we're at a two to even if we're at 2.5, I think that would be a good range to be in. At minimum, a 2.5,
30:13I'd be in a really good spot to go. Let's just continue scaling the spend. I don't have any LTV data right now because it's so early.
30:20I anticipate our LTV is gonna be really good after the ninety days because it's a very sticky service, but I don't know yet. So if we were at, like, a two x, 2.5, I think we'd be in a really good spot. Okay.
30:30And do you and so you're convinced right now you have an average of a fifteen day sales cycle? Yes. I know.
30:35100%. We've got Understood. And are you able to tolerate front end cash for that fifteen day period of time throughout a month?
30:41I mean, right now, you're scaling your spend. It sounds like month over month. Yeah.
30:43I mean, like, don't get me wrong. We're still profitable. It's just we have to have a really good back end essential process, and we don't really know the economics on that yet.
30:51Got it. So is Chad ramming it in the meantime? Chad ramming it.
30:54Yeah. Okay. Makes sense.
30:55And do you have any idea of what back end Roaz is, or this is where it gets choppy because this is all new?
31:02Old new. Okay. Got it.
31:03So we have other channel shows, or we have a known unknown. We know we don't know it for Yeah. How long it's gonna take to get whatever the other ROAS is for our total return over what period of time.
31:14Those are the two things we don't know. Yeah. Okay.
31:16Understood. So few things. Number one,
31:18definitely get clarity on what your CPMs are. Definitely get clarity on what your link click through rate is. In addition to that, get clarity on what your opt in rate is.
31:25Because for all you know, you might have a 5% opt in rate right now, and technically, if you quadrupled
31:31that to 20%, that would actually achieve your ROAS, and every other step behind it could stay the exact same. Yeah.
31:37Right? And so you might have a bottleneck far earlier in your process. You might have a point 2% link click through rate right now and have dog shit ads that are getting $400 CPMs, and again, you have no idea.
31:47So make sure you get those specific analytics. Your 20% drop off rate is totally fine. That's, again, above average in that regard in your favor.
31:53Now a 40% show rate to the first call, that's rather concerning. Yep. You're currently
31:59in a position here when you really look at it, where you look at cost per call and you look at your show rate, and that to me indicates that people aren't necessarily excited about this. Yep. When people
32:11are excited about an offer, the stats reflect it. Mhmm. Okay?
32:16This goes back to what I was talking about prior in terms of the messaging lessons. I deeply believe that you would have a far lower cost per call, and you'd likely even have a far greater show rate. All your stats, this is the thing with messaging and how powerful it is.
32:29You can choose to do two things in a situation like this. You can choose to optimize the specific step for the contracted stat,
32:38or you can change who you bring in to the process, and that changes every stat favorably or unfavorably relative to who you bring in.
32:47Does that make sense to you? Yeah. When you look at your show rate process and how fast you're moving on this whole thing, even your close rate mean, look.
32:55Your close rate, to be fair, is not awful. Mhmm. But when you factor in that it's only a 1 k cash collection,
33:02it's fucking awful. Yeah. And we're pulling a lot of levers to For solve call funnel, it's like 17%.
33:07I wouldn't I wouldn't be like, oh, man. That's like absolute shit or stat. But for the fact so, again, like, your your technical AOV here up until this first close rate is a one k AOV.
33:18Yep. Okay. And then when they get to the point where they close down here, this is where your AOV shoots up to, you said, eight k?
33:24Yeah. Okay. That's how much we're collecting upfront.
33:26Now, normally, I'd say
33:30an AK AOV were really not that bad. I mean, you're not a lot to bitch about there. Yeah.
33:35However, you being at 1.3 ROAS, that implies that you're acquiring customers for, like, 7,000 something dollars? Yeah.
33:43Do you know what it currently costs to acquire customers? Per full build for this month is $10 right now based on my stats. So your AOV is either higher than eight k or
33:53you are in this month seeing a higher cost than what you did prior? Okay. The AOV this month is higher.
34:00So for context, we had seven builds, five of them paid in full, two of them paid 5 k upfront. What's the AOV? Simply put, it's higher than 2.
34:08It's gotta be, like, $11. But on average over the last, like, sixty days of us running the offer, it's like, 8 k. I know last month, the upfront cash was lower than this month.
34:15Yeah. So your acquisition cost is crazy. It's fucking ridiculous.
34:19Yeah. That's excessively high. Yeah.
34:21And I I think, like and this is where it gets a little bit interesting because we went from just doing the 15 k pitches to now pitching custom. So, like, all it takes is, like, yesterday,
34:32a closer took a 1 k deposit for a 40 build. That's what they expect the price to be. All it takes is for us to close that, and then we'll be at, like, a 2.5 or three x.
34:43So that's why I'm not, like, freaking out cost of acquisition drops dramatically. And that's why I'm not freaking out too much because what I observed from last month and, again, we're we're kind of, like, going through this with a blindfold on and taking one step at a time I get it. Is because even last month, we were, like, very unprofitable.
34:58And then the last four days of the month, we collected, like, a $150 from just peak swung the whole month. And it just, like, all of a sudden, all these audits just they just paid in full at the end of the month.
35:08Yeah. Got it. Okay.
35:09So a few things. You used the blindfold analogy here of saying you're blindfolded. Let me just point something out.
35:14You're willfully blindfolded on a lot of this, though. Yeah. It's not like you're technically blind don't get me wrong.
35:19You don't have clarity yet on the known unknown, which is how long is it gonna take on average to cash collect on this whole thing? How many people on average end up paying the full balances?
35:29How much time does it take to then upsell and to send these people on these other things that you have in your chain up here of things like your fractional AI department or the placement offer, or even just finishing their payment plan on the original build out cost that they have. The one thing that we do know technically in regards to your blindfold is you have about a ninety day fulfillment window for the build out.
35:47Mhmm. So we know with certainty that if you're just now selling this this month, you won't technically see those numbers until a full three months from now. Yep.
35:55Okay. So where we do wanna absolutely take the blindfold off is in these other stats that relate to your front end. You have to know the CPMs.
36:03You have to know the link click through rate. Doesn't matter whether you're operating in the ads manager or not. You have to know those data Yeah.
36:08Know those data points. You have an unknown opt in percentage where you have an opt in page. Can I ask you, are are you sold
36:15on keeping the opt in page for some reason? Like, do you have a dialed in set of setters or something? We we do have good setters.
36:21We do. And this is the thing. Have you attributed revenue to people who have opted in and haven't applied?
36:26No. So you're just willfully driving up your cost per call for what for what re like, what's your justification in that? The way I see it is the way we frame it on the front end is that they're getting an audit when they opt in.
36:38And because we do have an abundance of good setters that I feel I can just rip through and dial and set people, it made more sense because of the framing of the funnel to do an opt in before just to see if people can pull.
36:50Have you actually looked in your CRM and just said, okay. These are people who opted in and did not apply who ended up getting a call skip.
36:57You haven't done it or you don't? No. I've never done it.
37:00So, again, like, as a willful blindfold situation, you have to note. I'm sure at this point, given you're doing 700 k in revenue, that you either have this position already in your organization, or this would be an obvious hire to make for somebody who's, like, a cleanup to your tornado.
37:14Yeah. Like, going in and cleaning the CRM and find like, figuring out the stats and stuff. Well, let me give you let me give you, like, a brief explanation.
37:20Right? If I have a marketer doing ads for me, I should know my CPMs, my link click through rate, like, demand.
37:27Mhmm. I should be able to text I should be able to text that person literally right now, and I should be able to ask them that question, and I should get an answer to that question pretty much immediately.
37:36Right? I would expect your opt in page, is it built by somebody else? Yeah.
37:41No. I built I built the funnel. So so you spent the time to build the funnel, so nobody else has responsibility over that other than you?
37:47Okay. And do you have, like, an analytics person in your business? No.
37:50Okay. And I know that you had a dashboard just recently that you built. I think it was different than, what was it, Hiros?
37:56You had essentially, like, Vidyo a drone for Hiros? TLDR, we built out a dashboard that shows us the macro level stats. The more micro level stuff, we realized that that made more sense than just using attribution tracking tool.
38:05Right now, we're using Cortana. So Cortana is an alternative to Hiros. Okay.
38:09Understood. So do you have anybody in your team that can take the responsibility for being able to tell you something like your opt in rate, or is that somebody you'd have to hire?
38:16Yeah. So the guy that runs all our marketing, our CMO, if I texted him now, he would be able to get me that data. Okay.
38:21Got it. I've just never personally looked at it, to be completely Got it.
38:25And, again, you're over here. You're Chad ramming your scale. And by the way, for all those who don't know, this is a technical term called Chad ramming.
38:32Chad ramming is a derog is it's a derivative of Chadvertising where you're in the middle of running your ads. You're running rather blind on different statistics and analytics.
38:43You have confidence in the process like any true Chad would, and so you choose to Chadram your scale. Meaning, you choose to just blindly spend more money because you're confident about the process
38:53and you believe you're gonna win. So long story short, you're currently Chad you're Chadramming your spend right now, and you're not putting much attention on these bottlenecks.
39:03Why? I think it was a case of maybe I'd been moving too fast to the point where there were certain things that I just didn't know I didn't know. So, like, from my understanding,
39:11the things that I knew we needed to fix, we had a sales manager that was managing the team who was fractional, wasn't allocating enough time to our offer, close rate was too low, closes weren't as good as I wanted them to be. I was like, I texted you about this last week.
39:24I'm like, I'm gonna step back in. So let him go. I'm now back in.
39:28I come in, I'm like, holy shit. This is like an onion I'm peeling back. The CRM's a mess.
39:32We were mid migration from GHL to Close, so I've had to spend the last three or four days paying somebody to sit with me and just build out Close, as an example, because our CRM was a shit show, and leads weren't even pulling in right. And there was all this that was a mess, but at the same time, I'm like, I don't wanna scale down the spend.
39:48I wanna keep running this thing because, well, I truly believe that right now with this AI stuff, I have to move extremely quickly because otherwise, other people are gonna take their lead in the marketplace, and I don't want that to happen. I wanna be that person regardless if we have some bumps that come up in the way.
40:03I'd rather just bite off more than I can chew and figure out how to chew it. So I thought that my two biggest constraints, fix the CRM and the sales team and the data tracking, which comes with fixing the CRM.
40:13And number two, get our show rate up. So I went through and updated all of our nurture sequences. We set up SendBlue as an example.
40:20We moved away from go high level emails to kits. So we've been rebuilding all of that that's gonna influence the show rate and the close rate. The front end Kids did it?
40:29No. It's very it's, like, still in progress. Like, this has been over the last four to seven days max that I've been doing these things.
40:35And then with the cost per call, I was looking at that, and I was like, okay. $300 for a call isn't that bad.
40:41I was actually pretty happy with that given our AOV, and I was like, what are the one to two metrics that I could influence the most that would have the biggest lift? But now from this conversation, I'm like, well, our show rate's 40%. That's not good.
40:52Could I get that up to fifty, sixty, 70? Maybe. But would an easier lift just be testing a new funnel or a new landing page that could maybe influence the cost per call to go down as an example?
41:02I didn't think about that. That was just like an unknown unknown for me. Yeah.
41:06So the two the two paths here are pretty simple path. One, you either specifically focus on bottlenecks in the current process,
41:13and that would be based on the belief that you're bringing in the right people to the process currently. We are getting really good leads. Yeah.
41:19It's You believe that you're getting the right people, then you would not change the messaging that you have on the front end, and then therefore attract different people. What you would attempt to do is you would attempt to do a bottleneck analysis, You would attempt to take your attention and say, out of all these specific steps that I could specifically prioritize putting attention onto, which one makes the most sense and is the highest leverage for me to currently put attention onto?
41:40So just to be clear, I would love to see the opt in rate. You know? I really would.
41:44I think that would make such a big difference to the level of enthusiasm that we're receiving right away. Also love to see actually. It's 1.5%.
41:52Wow. Is certain of that? Yes.
41:55Yes. That's insane. Okay.
41:58Now, again, I would I would therefore also still love to see the CPMs and the link click through rate of those specific ads. Yep. Um, if if he's running however many campaigns the guy's running,
42:09then anything that pushes to that specific page, go to the ad set level of that specific set of campaigns and just filter by what's the average CPM and what's the average link click through rate across all that, and let's see that because here's here's a very important thing. We've talked about this on this channel so many times, and we've talked about this in the inner circle so many times.
42:29I mean, again, I can't make you guys do what I say, but I can sure as hell advise you on what to do or not do. One thing that we've seen absolutely smoke people is having an opt in rate when they're selling to rich folks.
42:40Okay? Yeah. And the reason being is they don't look at it like they're getting an exchange.
42:45I highly doubt that they view it as, I'm opting in and I'm gonna receive this audit. And if they do believe that, it's extremely unappealing clearly.
42:54Okay? We don't have your opt in page visible right now. Mhmm.
42:57Okay? But I will say this, simply put. I would personally if I went into my CRM and I just said, everybody's opted in that has not applied,
43:06that has actually ended up getting set onto a call and buying, that means that an opt in page is justified based on what that number looks like. Yeah. And if there is no justification to that, which there's an extremely high probability there's not.
43:19Like, Cam, just to be very direct with you, the amount of times that I've told people who have an opt in page when they're selling to rich folks to go do that exact analysis where I'm like, buddy, go into your CRM, pull up the report, see if the opt in page is justified. 9.9 out of 10. It is not justified,
43:34it's easing in the Exactly. Just an unnecessary thing satisfying.
43:39I call it artificial inflation. You're artificially inflating your own cost per result for no reason. So anyway Yeah.
43:47There's a very, very high probability that this gonna be an action I'm gonna take. I need to, right after this, go in, go in and analyze all the people that didn't book right away, see if the set of booking rate is even worth Didn't apply. Yeah.
43:58That's what you wanna remember because if they opted in and applied, you setters had nothing to do with that. If they opted in and did not apply,
44:06that's where your setters would have specifically come in. Does that make sense? Yep.
44:09So that's how you judge that specific step. The only way that that step would be void in that analysis is if your setters are sending people back to the same application page and having them apply instead of vetting them on the call and then just scheduling them out. That make sense to you?
44:22Yep. Okay. Long story short, there's a very high probability that this opt in step shouldn't exist,
44:28just to be very clear with you. Then like I said, from there I'd question, well,
44:33what specifically am I doing to get such a low opt in rate in the first place? There's a few key things I want to disclose.
44:41Number one, you might have a huge congruency issue where your ads are giving the impression of one thing, and then people click to a page, and it's something totally different. That usually
44:52would again, at a 1.5% opt in rate, bro, you either have a tech issue, which is a probability I would check for just in case because it's so obscenely low, or two,
45:02people do not give a fuck about whatever's on that opt in page when they get there, which would mean you'd obviously wanna make significant changes and strides to improve that. You think a new to put this in perspective, by the way, Kim.
45:14If you got that from 1.5% to three and every stat that followed it held the same, you'd get really the efficiency in your return.
45:23If you took that 3% row that 3% opt in rate and you doubled it to 6%, which again is still an absolute shitter of an opt in rate stat, you would again double the efficiency of the return assuming every stat that follows it stays the same. Does that make sense?
45:38Yeah. I don't know why I didn't think about that. It was one of those things that I Realistically, because you're moving fast, think quite literally, you're not thinking of it.
45:45Yeah. You know? So so then look.
45:47I am all for urgency and speed. I encourage it.
45:50I have nothing to sit here and point a finger at and tell you you're doing the wrong thing with speed and urgency. Let me tell you a really important story real quick. So so back in the day,
46:00it was my last marketing job I ever had. I was working for this sales trainer, and when I was working there, he was like a tornado.
46:07Okay? He'd come in, and he'd put a huge project onto the team that I was a part of in this marketing room.
46:15And we had we had a copywriter. We had two graphic designers, two web developers, myself as the marketer,
46:23and a video guy. And then eventually, later on in my tenure there, we had a manager. And when I say put a project on us, let's use the example.
46:31It's a Monday. Right? You just showed up to work.
46:34You already had some significant thing that you're actively working on as a team, and then the boss comes in and he would say, alright guys, I had this banging idea, this is specifically what I wanna do, and the idea he's telling you is something realistically that would take a normal team two weeks. And he's like, we got until Wednesday.
46:51And you're like, alright. Two days to do this fucking monster project. And you start that monster project, you're in the middle of it, and then Tuesday comes around and he walks in again
47:00and would be like, yo, we should do you know, and then he lists another monster project, and you're like, what the fuck? And he's like, I need that one too by tomorrow. And you're like, but dude, we're in the middle of doing this.
47:10And he's like, doesn't matter. And then the COO walks in behind him and would be like, kind of like a morale tester. All right, guys.
47:17How do you think you're gonna get it done? You know? And you'd have to sit there and articulate your plan of execution.
47:22Then surprisingly, believe it or not, we would get it done every time. I don't know how, to be honest with you, but every time our potential would be well exceeding above whatever we actually thought our potential was.
47:32And we we would accomplish these things, and therefore, we would move very quickly as a unit. But what was most important to understand is we were the cleanup team and the executioner
47:42team in one. Mhmm. Okay?
47:44This guy could operate like this because he had the right people in place to be able to execute and continue managing the projects after they were already in motion.
47:56Does that make sense? Yeah. So where you're currently failing is is you're executing with the speed and urgency that you should,
48:02but you're not prioritizing dollars towards key roles in your team that are gonna ensure that these different initiatives that need done actually get done. Like, realistically, an example, somebody who sees a 1.5%
48:16opt in rate, it shouldn't reactively take you To figure that out.
48:21To say in a conversation like this, hey, what's your opt in rate? And then you're like, I don't know. And then I'm like, we'll figure it out.
48:27And then you ask, and you're like, oh, fuck. It's 1.5%. Yeah.
48:30Somebody in your team should proactively be looking at the analytics for what you're actively gonna Chad Ram spend into. Because here's my bet. Right?
48:38You're probably still gonna spend more money next month even if the states stay like this, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah.
48:42So to be clear, why isn't somebody in the organization proactively just saying, hey. This is the percentage of this stat. Now when you move at the speed you do, Kim, whether you realize it or wanna admit it or not, your attention is reactively being controlled to a large extent.
48:57You have proactive thought undoubtedly, where you know you have initiatives and actions and strategies that you wanna execute and things you wanna get done, and there's specific choke points in this very process that you sit here and you say, that's the one that matters most, and then I'm gonna put my attention on, like you most recently did.
49:12Something that pops up as the priority becomes the thing that takes your time, but does that actually mean you're proactive in thought, or does that very situation expose the reactivity you're experiencing right now? It is. Right?
49:24And then the question becomes, is the opt in rate less important just because you're reactively paying attention to something else that you currently have taking your attention and viewing it as the most important thing? No.
49:34Probably not. Right? And so all you simply have to do here is is have some because this let's be honest.
49:40If you took that opt in rate to 6% like we talked about, you double the total amount of people that come through, and if every stat that follows after that holds the same, you double the quantity of calls, you double the amount of deposits, you double the amount of audits, you double you You get what I'm saying?
49:56You double everything as a result of that twice over, why does that have to be your time and attention? Right? At 700 k a month in revenue
50:04and where are your margins? You're running at a 30 to 58% margin.
50:09Most ones we do like. That implies that even in a month like this where you're getting smoked and you're at 500 k, you're gonna net somewhere around, what, $1.75 to 200 at least?
50:18Right? And so you're telling me that let me just give you an example. If you spent $15,000
50:24a month or twenty thousand dollars a month on an all star caliber employee that's like a marketing helper that just pays attention to these bottleneck analytics,
50:34Is that not worth it? It's 100% worth it. Yeah.
50:37And so, again, you're moving so quick that the value of moving quick is you can experience more forward momentum and more revenue and more gains and more results faster, but the real
50:49con that's uncommonly discussed with moving so fast, it puts you into a hyper state of reactivity. And in your reactivity, you don't have a lot of proactive or intentional thought, even though you might think you do, and in that specific self awareness moment, that realization,
51:05that's where it becomes a priority to say, I need somebody else who can take their priority attention and proactively put it on this set of stats that I'm Chad Ram and Spending to.
51:15Does that make sense? Yeah. Because you're not.
51:17You hear me? Mhmm. Okay.
51:20So back to my point. When you hear these things like a 1.5% opt in, I can sit here and observe your body language.
51:26It makes you want to put attention on that, doesn't it? 100%. Yeah.
51:31I'm already thinking, like, the the last, like, five minutes, I've just been thinking about exactly who I'm gonna text right after this and exactly what I'm gonna do. Yeah. And, like Yeah.
51:42You obviously have some split tests you need to do there. Now does any of that include your time and attention? Like, let me give you an example.
51:47Do need a film of VSL for that? I don't believe Do have to ideate on the copy at all for that? Do you have to, like, have any I I do believe so.
51:53Yes. I found that our best performing ads are always when I'm involved in them. And I I started to think like, oh, you know what?
51:59This is below my cost per hour, but then I watched a podcast with a guy, superhuman fitness, think his name is John Madsen, and still at, like, 5,000,000 a month descriptors own ads. And I'm like, that made me realize, like, the messaging and the ads and, like, understanding your ICP on a deeper level is something that's very important.
52:13By the way, we got a guy in the inner circle. His name's Adam Adam Bunnell, I think is his name. He's getting a million dollar a month trophy at this upcoming mastermind.
52:20He beat you to it, and he's competing with John in that exact niche. And he joined in.
52:26He was at, like, a low couple 100 k a month in revenue. I think he said just most recently, he had already cleared 1.6 for this month. He's on an absolute fucking tear.
52:34And here's my point. Okay?
52:36Not to not to any or share or form compare you to him, but since you brought up the Jon Matson guy, what people do when they make serious leaps in revenue that are wise is they look at what they previously were putting time and attention to that caused the jump,
52:52and then they say, what is the next jump gonna require of me? And if whatever you just did that caused the last jump to occur, something gets put on the chopping block that no longer is worth your dollar value per hour to put attention into but it still needs done, they hire a key role to put time and attention into it because it still needs done.
53:10Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah.
53:12That's the one area where you're technically failing right now is you're making your leaps and bounds upward. You joined into this group. You were at what?
53:18$202.50. And how long how long has it been? I think around eight months now.
53:23So you're making good you're making good strides around 700 ish k, you know, 500 in down a month now, but still a little bit more than double where you were at previously, almost almost above you know, almost a four x on your best months, I bet, just like what we're talking about now, there's just maybe one key hire that can put attention into these things because you can tell as we sit here and talk about this, these are extremely revenue driven things Mhmm.
53:47That dramatically increase the efficiency of the dollars you're risking. And I just wanna ask, as you sit here and kinda come to this realization, the 1.3 is an artificially lower ROAS than it should be, isn't it?
53:58Yep. How much higher could it be if somebody just put their priority attention on something as simple as just the opt in page? Let's say that it was just one person's responsibility.
54:06I mean, it could be, like, a three x. If we just had, like How many more dollars is that? So you're at you're at 90 k a month in ad spend this month.
54:13Yeah. If you managed to get a three x We'd be at 300 k in upfront cash. Pretty much.
54:17Yeah. It'd be about $2,270. Yeah.
54:20And if we did that with that back $2.70, if you if you literally got there from just doubling the opt in rate twice and keeping everything else in the back end the same, you could see that, like, one person in the organization who's responsible for that one thing is really easy to justify as a payroll position. No? Yeah.
54:34And and so I just wanna encourage one thing. It's actually a very under common under underutilized area of thinking as a business person is just a simple audit of this.
54:43Like, where we do a bottleneck analysis and we see what the status, we just ask ourselves, man, I made the page. I'm technically the one responsible for it. What else am I responsible for that makes no sense for me to be responsible for?
54:55That's what we hand off to others. Does that make sense? Mhmm.
54:58So for some reason, most people don't actually do that audit, and they end up in situations way worse than this camp,
55:05where they continue Chad ramming forward. The monster gets a lot bigger, and their problems technically reactively consume them a lot more, and then they technically have less time as they grow bigger
55:17because there's even more reactivity involved, and so they end up hiring worse people because they don't have enough time and attention to hire a good enough person, because they don't have enough time and attention to put towards hiring at all, and then they gotta hire somebody to hire, and they gotta trust that person is a good enough hire to go you see what I mean?
55:31It gets real complex the less time and attention you reactively have as you grow. Your number one thing you have to remember is you need enough proactive time in the day
55:41to do things just like this. How much proactive time in the day do you actually claim right now? Proactive would be zooming out on the business.
55:49Proactive time would mean that in a way where you don't feel anxious or pressed if you just take a moment to think a bit and you say, let me put some real like, let me just let me just spend some time to scroll through my stats, analyze my stats,
56:04and kinda think about it. Let me take some time to be able to go on a walk and not feel like some random shit is consuming me and, you know, sit here and pontificate about what I should do next. You're not lying at what I need to do.
56:15When you just look at your most recent period of time specifically, how much of your day actually goes towards it? Five to ten minutes.
56:22And then on a Sunday, thirty minutes. I'd encourage you should be at least, like, an hour or two a day, believe it or no.
56:28At your level, you should be able to comfortably take a walk, you know, a few times throughout the day in little chunks and kinda, like, debrief on things that are going on.
56:38You know? You should you should have your thumb on these stats a little better than you do now. And you're you're making some big bets.
56:44You know? You're consistently willing to risk and spend more money, which is great with the confidence and certainty that potentially ninety days from now, these people have made all their payments in full and that there's willingness to upsell. But even that, I mean, everything can be questioned and changed.
56:57Like, why does it have to be ninety days to fulfill? Why can't it be thirty days to fulfill?
57:02You know? That's an example of what I get to consider when I'm in proactive thought, whereas let me give you the comparison of how your life's gonna look like right now if you just continue the way you are.
57:11It's gonna be ninety days from now, and you're gonna you're gonna see, k. My first month stats are finally revealing themselves. How many of people are probable to upsell?
57:19How many of these people did we actively fulfill on. Right? Every single thing that relates to the question even being prompted in your brain to come up, should this have been shorter,
57:29is only gonna come up right now if something reactively leads you to that thought. Does that make sense? Because I just simply look at your data and I say,
57:37why why does it take ninety days? You know? Why does it have to be one k for an audit?
57:42Maybe people are closing at a higher rate if it was a higher AOV. Maybe maybe a 100% of people would book and a 100% of people would show up to the call if they spent more on the audit. Know, no shit.
57:53My show rate's 40%. Now think about this. You just told me that reactively right now, you're putting attention into your show rate, but after you hear your opt in rate's 1.5%,
58:02does it even make sense to put because again, what are you optimizing around? You're clearly getting very unenthusiastic people to come through the funnel, even though in your words, they're technically good leads.
58:10I bet I could get my show rate at least up 10 to 20% just based on getting a different type of more enthusiasm into my people before they even hit the point where they could show up to something. That just means I got a I got a front end mechanism issue.
58:23You know what I mean? So, anyway, I'm gonna tell you this too, and I'm not trying to make you sound like you don't know what you're talking about when I say this. I want you to take offense to this.
58:31Okay? I would question if you're articulating this in a way where people can easily understand what the fuck you're talking about.
58:38When you break this down since you're new to it too, do you even know what the fuck you're talking about to say it simpler than how you're framing it now? Because when you start yapping nonstop about AI agents and being able to maximize
58:52the productivity of each payroll position or cut payroll entirely and you start yapping about every fucking random use case you can imagine under the sun, It's it's almost like a like a schizophrenic is advertising or talking. You know? You gotta be able to take the messaging
59:07of what people are actually wanting who are closing and see a pattern amongst them. So again, since you're in a state of reactivity, I'm gonna try to lead you to a few places that I think are gonna be great for you to think.
59:19Have you saw a pattern in everybody who's closed so far for the full build out? Majority of them already was using AI.
59:26Literally, 90% was already aware using Clawd and using OpenClaw. They were using these tools, and it was just a time aspect.
59:34They couldn't do more with it. They just didn't wanna exert all the time, energy, and effort it would require for them to build them themselves.
59:41Did you take that messaging and put it on your front end? What's your front end sound like comparatively? On the funnel.
59:47On your ads and on your funnel that drive the people to there in the first On the funnel, it says we install a we install a custom AI workforce into your business to replace repetitive roles and maximize profit. And if it doesn't save you 50 k a year in payroll, you don't pay. So that person who closes, they can see that that line of messaging would make sense to what they want.
60:05We can obviously say it a little more direct and a little more simpler. What do the ads say to get them there? We've got, like, a 100 ads live right now, and they're all very diverse.
60:12The best performing ads for us right now are geared towards me just being very direct with our offer. We'll save you this in this time frame where you don't pay. Here's the three steps on exactly how our offer works, and then we go through the three steps.
60:24If that sounds interesting, book a call. Understood. The patterns that you can find in the people who are closing should be a lot of what you end up testing on the front end, and try to say it the exact way that they're saying it to you.
60:37That way it shines through, but remember, that's just one type of buyer based on this funky system that you've got now that have got that person to that point. Yeah.
60:45You obviously wanna test well beyond that too, but again, in funnels that are more congruent to that same line of messaging. Does that make sense? Yeah.
60:51I'd also then question when you talk about all these different client acquisition sources. So, like, 30% come from paid ads. That number will grow.
60:59These other numbers will naturally shrink because paid ads will be more short term and the ability to drive more. And you've got YouTube. You've got referrals, and you got the other organic channels.
61:07Let's specifically look at these other organic channels real quick, specifically YouTube and all the other ones. The fuck are you saying there? Are these all over the place?
61:16I'm literally just showing what we're building, how it works. We've got an agency that handles the LinkedIn and Twitter, I don't touch that. I just give them assets, and they use them.
61:25YouTube is usually geared towards use cases and things that we're doing internally and how it's helped us. Case studies of other businesses, we've built out agents for me getting on a case study and breaking down what they did.
61:39Also, we've got some of that being against toward agencies, and then we're getting some on the consulting side for that as well.
61:46And then Instagram is really pushing people to the long form and basically just condensing everything that I say on YouTube into, like, thirty to sixty second snippets. You got a marketing agency still making 200 a month. Any of your content catered towards that demographic?
62:00Yeah. Like, 20%. 10 to 20%.
62:03So you have a set of organic channels that take place in support? The MedSpa agency. Zero.
62:09Got it. Zero. And by and by the way, that would also imply that out of this 200 k a month that currently comes from the marketing agency,
62:18that out of this 500 to 700, 200 k a month of that is a liability because you hate that revenue. Yeah. I hate it.
62:24So so that realistically means that we have to replace 200 k revenue out of the 500 to 700 because those people are probable to churn as time goes on. Not necessarily because we had a conversation When do you sell it? It's like just marketing, call center ads
62:38to MedSpas. Why don't you sell it? We've got a so we're in the process of doing that.
62:42So, like, that's why I'm not I've got a cofounder who I brought in after our conversation where you were like, just get somebody else to do it. Why would you shut it down?
62:51So I've got somebody in who had yeah. He has 30%. He runs the whole thing.
62:55I don't think about it, which is why, like, I don't like the business, but I'm not involved in it. So, like, I'm not it's not like I'm emotionally attached to, like, sinking the ship or anything. Got it.
63:02Okay. Good. So okay.
63:04Back to this. Your YouTube and your organic channels right now, this is super important to understand. Do you have a channel that supports the paid advertising
63:13with the messaging that attracts people in the paid advertising? Do you feel like they're congruent? I feel like they are.
63:18Okay. Yeah. Good.
63:19I think there's a hesitation to my answer because I haven't truly, like, gone in. We we analyze every single sales call with, pain points, buying questions. I use that to script ads.
63:30What I don't do, though, is I haven't took that and asked AI, for example, is what people are saying on these calls and the people that are buying congruent with the content I'm making? I haven't asked it that. Based off what I assume, I definitely think so, but I still need to do that cross check.
63:45Okay. Got it. I'm gonna close it out with this.
63:47Do you have a scaling plan that you've mapped out? And by scaling Like, financial model. To a degree.
63:52Yeah. A scaling plan would mean, okay. I know that I'm gonna spend this much more this next month.
63:56Let me tell you something very important. If you went to a three x, I bet you'd spend way more next month than you plan on spending. Oh, yeah.
64:02If you don't proactively hire people for your closing team at the rate in which you think you're gonna scale your paid advertising dollars,
64:11your next biggest problem is gonna be a constraint on your ability to scale the spend because you don't have enough salespeople to plug the calls into, that are well enough trained to represent your business well and actually get good closing stats, show rate stats, representing you well and just not pissing people off.
64:29To proactively hire a sales team, it's as simple as based on what I'm currently spending now, it produces this amount of calls.
64:37If I scaled by 10%, every time I scaled by 10%, I'd be at this number, and it produced this amount of calls, and with this amount of calls, need this many closers.
64:46And I get to see based on every time that I scale my spend how many closers I need on the other side of that. And I could know ahead of time, into the next month, Okay, next month I'm gonna spend this amount no matter what. This amount that I know I'm gonna spend at the base requires this amount of closers, and you can see the gap between how many you have now and how many you need.
65:02And you won't be able to continue scaling the way you are until you get a closer recruiting model in place that matches the pace in which you're scaling to spend to book more calls under your calendars. And if you are gonna go home and make your current cost per call more efficient than it currently is now, you literally
65:20have to do that, because without even spending more money, you could hit that ceiling that I just discussed. Does that make sense to you? Yeah.
65:27So you need to do a few things to be clear. You need to break down the scaling plan to determine when you need who. You need to, in addition to that, go home and aggressively take action on the bottlenecks we've just discussed, but remember, as silly as it sounds, you may not wanna pay attention
65:41to the stats that are currently shit behind this because your opt in rate is what actually needs improved, and then that could change those two follow-up stats.
65:50I would put attention on my opt in rate first at a priority level, and as a result of putting my attention here at a priority level, I can then determine if this and this need attention after. Does that make sense?
66:03Yeah. From there, I would encourage that you get clarity on CPMs and link click through rate so you can see if that's actually what causes this to be a problem. Does that make sense as well for you?
66:13Yeah. Okay. And then lastly,
66:16break down a very important stat for yourself, which is does this have to be ninety days, or could it be sooner than that? Those are the proactive things that I would actively encourage you to go and do, and outside of that, you need time and attention that goes towards proactive thought in a day instead of reactively being bullwhip around your business all the time.
66:33Does that make sense to you? Yeah. Okay.
66:35Very good. I enthusiastically look forward to bringing you back onto the channel and hearing your progress update and seeing what you do with all this. Do you have any thoughts you wanna share with everybody on all this?
66:43That was really fucking helpful. That that is exactly what I need. Yeah.
66:47Like because the I think the things that I've been because I've been trying to move so quickly, and every time that I catch myself slowing down a little bit or trying to take some proactive thinking time, I would think like, Elon Musk,
67:01aggressive action. Make a mess. Other people on the team can clean it, or that's what they're paid to do.
67:05But I think at the same time, you can't it's not like a a non a binary of, like, you're this side or this this side. You have to be dynamic.
67:13You have to be like a chameleon, and zooming out like this is probably one of the highest leverage things I can do, and I need to spend more time doing it. So I I know what I need to do. Immediate actions.
67:22Look at the funnel. Split test a different funnel. Get that opt in rate up because that's, like, the closest metric
67:28to the top of the funnel that will unlock the the rest of the funnel completely. And even if we tweak the messaging there that increases opt in rate, who says that also might increase our show rate because the positioning of the funnel is better than what it was? Because that could also be the thing that's leading to us having a lower show rate and a lower close rate because they're not getting the right people on the phone.
67:45Even if they're qualified, that doesn't mean that they're coming in with the right intention. There's a difference. So yeah.
67:50It's exactly right. Well, thank you very much for being with us. Uh, final words.
67:54You're a part of Jeremy's inner circle. You've been a part of it for a fair bit of time now. You made some good strides.
67:58Wanna talk about that at all and just tell people what you think about it as a whole? Yeah. It's been great for me.
68:03I think the biggest thing that I've taken away from it is even though in this sense I need to zoom out more, taking way more action, way more risk, getting around people that make a lot more money. I I did a piece of content on this the other day.
68:14I think it's so true, and this has been the the biggest, like, case study of that in my life, which is I think everything you want is on the other side of exposure to the people that have already done the thing you wanna do and the thing you've already done because it just becomes normal. It's like it's it's now the minimum standard when before it was something I pedestalized, and you can't get something that you put on a pedestal.
68:31So the biggest thing for me was just being around people that make so much more money than me and realizing like, oh, I can do this. Let me get around these people. Yes.
68:40The strategies and the tactics are, like, so important, but I would argue what's a million times more important is things like this, understanding just, like, how other rich people think, which isn't something you can put in a a fucking course or anything like that. It's just simply exposure to being around those people and picking up on these little things of how people think and then embodying that in your own life.
69:00So overall, couldn't recommend it enough. It's been insanely helpful to help me get to where I am, and it's gonna help me get to a million, 2,000,000, 5,000,000 a month and beyond. Thank you very much for being with us.
69:09Links for that down in the description. Gotta be rich, trying to get a hell of a lot richer if you wanna be a part of it. If you want a dense amount of marketing lessons, check out the master Internet marketing link down below.
69:17You can preview week one of that seven week class. We also just made Jeremy AI available, which is really good for anybody no matter who you are, no matter what revenue threshold you're at. It's like talking to me, but my AI clone instead with real time answers and access.
69:31Subscribe to the channel. Check out some of the other videos, and thank you so much for being
— full transcript
§ 05 · For Joe
The stat closest to the top of the funnel wins.
WHAT TO LEARN
Optimizing show rates and close rates is wasted effort when an invisible 1.5% opt-in rate is silently eliminating 98.5% of your paid traffic before a single call is booked.
- Fix the highest funnel stat first — a broken opt-in rate multiplies every downstream metric more than any close rate improvement ever will.
- An opt-in page in a high-ticket funnel is only justified if opted-in non-applicants are being converted by setters; most operators have never pulled that report.
- Messaging that assumes buyers are aware of your solution alienates everyone who has never heard the terminology, shrinking your effective audience to a tiny fraction of your paid reach.
- Since Meta's Andromeda update, the concept inside your creative determines who sees it — the right response is to structure ad sets by concept angle, not by audience parameters.
- Running aware and unaware audiences into the same funnel guarantees a compromised message for both; two campaigns with separate VSLs and back-end sequences is operationally simple at scale.
- A 40% show rate signals unenthusiastic leads arriving at the call stage — that is a front-end messaging problem, not a nurture sequence problem.
- Scaling ad spend faster than your analytics infrastructure compounds every unknown: you cannot fix what you cannot measure, and unmeasured problems grow with spend.
- At $500K/month in revenue, a single hire responsible for watching one top-of-funnel stat pays for itself many times over in prevented bad scaling decisions.
- Proactive thinking time — uninterrupted, non-reactive blocks daily — is the only mechanism that lets an operator catch the 1.5% opt-in rate before a coach has to point it out.
- The clients who are actually closing on a high-ticket AI offer are already users of the tools and want an implementer — that insight belongs in the front-end ad copy before the funnel is ever reached.
