How to Price a Service Business So It Actually Makes Money | Ep 1002

0:00 I'm gonna help a complete stranger build a $5 million per year business in 90 days, step by step. And at the end of the 90 days, we're gonna check in and show you exactly what happened. This is Joey. Enjoy. Joey, what's up? Hey. Alright, tell me about the business. Yes, so my name is Joey Goon. My business is Utopia Experience.

0:17 We are an event planning company out of St. Louis, Missouri. In sale or fail, I am with 400 of my closest friends. So last year, the average deal size for event planning was $34,000. This year, trailing 12 months is $44,000. Audio-visual average spend is between $20,000 and $150,000 per event. Video production is more of a pass-through to just make it easy for clients.

0:41 Got it. Okay. What's holding you back right now? I'm just not really sure what the strategy is that we should pursue when it comes to the acquisition channel. So why do you think this can scale? That's a great question. I'm just like in awe. I love you so much. It's mutual, man. Um... Why do I think this can scale?

0:59 So before I came here, I actually flew here from my sister's wedding in Mexico. I asked 100 people on that trip with us. It's like the entire wedding party. What's one thing in your life that you can never have enough of? And I thought I'd get some silly answers because people are drunk, doing whatever in the pool.

1:13 And I thought I was going to get sex or money. And I got some of that. But mostly what people told me was some version of... connection, community, tribe, family, belonging. And that's the industry that we're in. So our industry, what we're selling is fundamentally what people need. It is a human need.

1:33 It's wired into our primal DNA. And so that's why I think it could scale. And the market cap on events right now is 1.5 trillion. It's projected to hit 3.5 trillion by 2033. Amazing. So those numbers back up our industry. I'm so convicted on my quest that I'm going to persevere. I've been resilient since I was a nine-year-old kid.

1:54 I know this business is going to grow. With your help, I'm ready to scale it. Sweet. Walk me through how your pricing process works, because it's very, it's very like make believe, right? Yeah. Yeah. So abstract. Yeah. So yeah. And since you have a margin issue, I think it's a margin issue. How does, how do these numbers get pulled out of thin air?

2:13 Because right now it sounds like they just say, we want X, Y, and Z, and then you create some line items and then make up numbers on those line items and then come up with a number at the bottom and then send it to them. Like I come to you and I say, I'm doing an acquisition.com event, right? We're going to do a thousand person event here in Vegas and we want full AV and some on-site support.

2:32 What goes, like when you hear that, what actually goes through your head? What's included in every package is a $15,000 overall retainer to retain our services. So that's the first thing. Like a one-time upfront fee that gets added on to the other make-believe prices. Exactly. Got it. Okay. And then after that, it's, you know, sponsor management.

2:51 That's about $15,000. Then there's vendor management. Vendor management is like managing all the contractors. Right. So it's the photo booth, the video production team, all of those elements that, you know, sort of come into the event. It's the venue procurement strategy. So if you guys, if you're taking your team to some other place outside of Vegas, you need a hotel.

3:11 Which hotel are you going to work with? How are you going to get people to and from the airport? And so you'll bill for the logistics of managing that as well if it's part of the scope of work or whatever. Right. That's $7,500. Is there anything about headcount? That's the thing. So we learned the lesson, we put the guardrails up.

3:25 And so now we're actually deploying like tiered structures where if you have over a certain number of attendees or over a certain amount of vendors or sponsors, then there's a tier that where you pay more based on the number of people that you have. Got it. Okay. I think I know what to do. So you want to hop on the side?

3:41 Sure. So there's a demand engine issue for sure, but I think that part of it is because you're mispriced. And so the pricing has to do with the offer. And so we kind of have to start with the offer and then fix price and then go sales motion and then go demand increase. Does that make sense? Got it. Okay, we gotta fix the thing we're selling.

4:05 Once we fix the thing we're selling, we'll fix how we're selling it. And then if we're selling it well, we can price it the way we wanna price it. Okay, so- I can't believe I'm sitting next to you right now. You're good. It's mutual. Okay. So the first thing that has to happen is you have to cost out what true costs are for different levels of delivery.

4:27 And then whenever you have that price, I want you to 5 or 10x that cost. and then that's what your price is. Okay. And so you'll probably have to create like a dynamic sheet, which you could either code with AI really easily or just have like an if than type Excel sheet. Either way would work. But as you're going through it with a customer, it should basically pop out what that price for that thing's going to be, and it's all dynamic.

4:49 So have head count of the event, And then from there, we're going to have our variable costs, which are what are the costs that scale with headcount. So we have- Like sponsors, vendors. Yeah, exactly. So these are the costs that scale with this and are going to be proportional. Sure. And then we're going to have our fixed costs.

5:08 which is going to be Amber can only, it's one quarter of Amber. So it's like, great, that's going to be 15K is one quarter of Amber because she can only handle four. And then what other fixed costs do we have that are probably going to be more fixed payroll stuff versus kind of the other costs that are associated that are going to be more like the AV related or whatever?

5:26 Got it. Is that track? Yeah, for sure. Okay. So once you have this, it's like you're going to have a sheet that has a cost number that comes to the bottom. You're not going to show that to them. And then at that point, you know that your range is going to be five to 10X. this number. And that to me would be like, how rich is the person I'm talking to?

5:45 I'm like, I'm just being real. Yeah. Like bigger company. Like if you, if you, if you get, if you get lawn care, in one of the top 10 zip codes in the United States, and you have the exact same amount of graphs, and you have it in a really poor part of the United States, the price difference between that lawn care, as somebody who knows, it's a 2 to 3x difference, and I just call it a zip code tax, right?

6:03 This is the privilege I get to have, is to pay more for the exact same thing. I love that zip code tax. Can I just say to all the future clients out there that, You're going to pay. You're going to make it's going to be a great price. It's going to be, you know, you're fine. At the end of the day, everyone else is doing this, too.

6:17 They're just not being organized about it. So that's number one is that we need to have standardized pricing so that you can actually get your sales guys to be able to quote without having this super long delay in the process. And so the end of the year, you know, like, how much money do we make? We should know exactly which money we're making on every event.

6:33 Sure. This seems like a programmable AI thing that can be done in a couple hours. Yes. Now, to make this kind of offer better, so this gives us our cost basis. What I want to do is add basically a price lock guarantee, which is like, as long as you don't change anything about this, this is going to be the price.

6:54 And we give a 10% discount if you prepaid all ahead. That way you can pull cash forward. Because right now I'm sure you're getting paid some now, some in the middle, some at the end, or something like that. Does that sound true? Yeah, and something that I'm going through is I've never been through a lawsuit suing a client right now who didn't pay us, and now we're having to hunt down the money.

7:18 Do they have money? Nope, they just filed for voluntary bankruptcy. There's no point in suing. Yeah, just save your dollars, call it a cost of business. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, just let me save you some time. Let me save you some money and some headache. It's not your account of the money, so there's no point.

7:31 navigating that. So like getting it all up front helps us avoid having to chase it later. 100%. Yeah. There's also the value of money today. If you have a year from now, you just stuck that money into a bond or whatever, you know what I mean? Or the stock market. Well, the stock market is probably not the best way to put it, but something that's, you know, a fixed income asset, you'd be able to make the money back, but you also get the value of speed of money today.

7:51 And most businesses have higher returns on capital than the stock market does, especially small businesses. And so you're going to get better returns on that. So it makes sense to at least give 10 or 20% to pull it up. Now we've already built this padding in, so we're fine. Now I want to also create a separate opportunity, which is on the events that are B2B.

8:08 Now that's not gonna be a lot of them, but the ones where the audience is the customer, I want to have a separate approach to it. So this is our standard way of billing. If someone is B2B, they're basically throwing an event for you. Okay? Yeah. Not actually, but like they have a, you have to take, not that you wouldn't take extra care with a normal event, but if there's ever been a time to blow people's socks off and have an amazingly run event, this would be the time to do it.

8:37 Sure. Because everybody in the audience is a potential customer. It's the franchisor associations where you've got 1,500 of them in the audience that are all doing conferences. Love it. So with these people, it's like number one is, or rather, A, I would say we want to get the booth for ourselves in there because they're going to have a booth.

8:55 Number two is you want to have the opportunity to do some sort of speaking at the event. And it can be like a 15-minute slot. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It's just like, hey, if you guys have been loving this event, we're Utopia. We put this whole thing on and we do this all the time for people like you.

9:09 And so you put a little bit of razzle-dazzle of like, this is what makes shitty events, this is what makes great events. and say, hey, if you want these slides, you can give them to your event planner, just QR code on the screen. And I'll send them to you. So you can just actually come into this as like, I probably think it was like 20 mistakes that people who are buying event planning make.

9:28 And so I just go through all of the mistakes that people make. And with each of them, proof of one person underneath of them saying that you're awesome at that thing. and say, hey, if you want the slides, go grab them. But the main sex appeal is that after they kind of opt in to grab them, the opt-in says, do you run events?

9:43 Like, do you host events and how many per year? And then that way that just becomes a lead list for you. So you're not pitching. It's just like, hey, the CTA is do you want the slides, which makes it much easier for you to do for the customer. Now, when you have those B2B conferences... I would do whatever it took to get those ones because it's basically them fronting all the cost of getting 500 or 1,000 of your ICP in the stadium.

10:06 And it's like if you can't close 10% of that room, then there's other issues, right? Even if you closed 1% of the room, you get 15, it'd be a 50% increase in your business if you're just from one event. Right. And you do more than that per year. Yeah. So that's why I see this as super material. Like you should be very willing to like, we have this nice high anchor so that we can say, Oh, well, you know, I just quoted you 90, but if five sponsors, right.

10:29 Do you have any issues with having a sixth? I'll pay you for the booth. I'll pay your sponsor fees, 5,000 a booth. I'll pay you 5,000. It's at 95 now. How's that? Oh, great. Right. So it's like we can just start chipping away at it. And if you'll let me just do an intermission, I'm talking 10 minutes.

10:42 I'll just talk about how events work. I'm sure we can see we can frame it as value additive. I'll knock another five minutes off. Right. Love it. I'm going to get my sales team on the phone tomorrow to start calling these different associations. And so the last one is just one list email. So basically just say, hey, I don't want to like get your email list.

10:58 That's that's your own thing. But if after the event, I could say, hey, if you had a great time at the event, if I can just say like basically solicit them and then I'll happily pay you a fee on anybody who decides to book through us and that can further bring this number down. And I would say typically we're going to get, you know, one percent of people.

11:12 Sure. This is kind of the the offer pieces. And then this can hopefully fix pricing and also the instant quote issue that you have. Okay. Now, the second part is sales motion. So you're converting 10 times more than your sales team, which is a problem, right? Because you're doing like, if you work leads part-time, you are getting more than two guys full-time.

11:38 Right. Yeah. Okay. So it just means you're doing things they're not doing. So we just have to figure out what those things are. So have you audited any of their DM conversations that they're having? I've had one meeting with my sales team. I have a follow up one meeting just on this specifically. I have a follow up meeting with them next week to just audit all of their communication and just figure out like, great, like, don't say that, say this.

12:00 Yeah. So what I want you to do is basically as soon as you kick off, because the issue that you have is you're obviously demand constrained. So instead of weekly, like you should be meeting with them every single day to drive and then do end of day. Because right now this like you need to drive this.

12:14 Yeah. Like first thing in the morning, what's your plan? How many touch points you're going to do? Great. Like walk me through the leads that you're working. What kind of prep have you done for those those calls and those reach outs? We can personalize them. And then end of day, how the conversations go?

12:27 Where are we at with pipeline? Like we just need to drive this. From a role-playing perspective, the way that, like, don't do this, do that, you have to then give them the opportunity to try in front of you. Now, part of this is going to be the actual sales, but right now, are they just mostly setting for you to close, or are they setting for themselves to close?

12:43 Yeah, they're kind of, they're end-to-end. Yeah. Do I need to restructure that? I'd rather have them just set appointments for you because your sales volume is like two a week, right? It's not a huge, or one a week. If you had two guys just setting appointments for you, the likelihood that you'll close them is significantly higher.

12:58 And you're also the business owner and you can kind of flex on some of these things a little bit better. I would rather you do that because you're closing 40% of sales, right, that you talk to. Yeah. I mean, if you have four appointments a week, like, that's not going to really change anything. But all of a sudden, you double your business.

13:11 If you have eight appointments a week, you quadruple your business. And that's still not a lot of work. So just have them be like SDRs, BDRs, book in my calendar completely full. And you can still give them a commission on the thing that they bring in. But you're like, listen, you'll make more money if I'm selling than you are.

13:27 So do this for now. And then I think that'll allow you to stay closer to it so that you can document the process better and your feedback loops will be faster. Because you're like, hey, I got nothing on my calendar today. What the hell is going on? in a nice way. Sure. Right? Does that feel okay? Yeah.

13:39 Okay. Weekly, I would go deep with one of them, or not one of them, with each of them one-on-one. The way that we structure these is basically go personal. You say, hey, how you doing? Hey, if your mom just died, then let's talk about that. Make sure you're good because you're not thinking about your KPIs or quotas if you just got dumped or whatever.

13:55 The next is, assuming they don't have any personal calamities, we say, okay, we focus on short-term stuff. You're messing this up in the intro. You're messing this up in this part of the scripting. If they're crushing their KPIs, say, hey, long term, what are your goals here? Why don't you shout out some of my sales calls so that you can maybe pick up some of this other stuff?

14:11 It's basically giving them growth opportunities. But that's the progression that we do with weekly one-on-ones. And in here, it's all role-playing. Like forever, just like you train sales to role-playing. Because you have to get them to try so that you can correct them and have more feedback loops. Just think how many feedback loops do I have?

14:29 These people is the only way they learn. Just like saying it at them will do literally nothing. Like, my brother and I have been consuming your content for five years, him longer than me. I had a call with my brother last week, and he's like, the hormosy in me is telling you that you're not doing this.

14:44 So I started booking daily check-ins with my team. Oh, good. Good. Now, I want to give you something that I think is super, super high leverage, which is an idea that I had while you were talking, which is when you open up the call... after you say, hey, how's it going, whatever, and you set the agenda for the call, what's the first question you ask them?

15:03 Why'd you book this call today? Why not six months from now? Why not six months ago? Okay, so you're clarifying whether they're there, you're on the C part. What I wanna do, there's one question I wanna ask in the earlier part of the process, which is how many events per year you do? Because I want automatically, as soon as they can say, well, we do three events a year, now I just took our average ticket from 80K and made it 240K, because now I'm trying to bid for all three.

15:27 And then what we can do is say, hey, why don't we do off like I'll commit to all three for you. We'll do the first one. And assuming the first one goes great, we'll book the other two at the same rate. That way we can start like trying to increase average ticket and then get into these kind of like very recurring relationships.

15:41 Do you like that question? Because I think that will have a very big effect. I just want to make sure that that gets added into the script. Okay. One more thing we got to add. So in your existing sales process, the way you were doing it, you'd reach out to them, you'd qualify the lead, and then you'd set an appointment, correct?

15:55 Yes. Okay. Before they, and on that appointment, you then basically collect all this information, and then you'd say, let me get back to you, and then you'd set a follow-up appointment, and then you would try and close them on the next call, correct? Yeah, go through the proposal with them live, because then you can actually kind of work through those questions and handle the objections.

16:09 Yes. So I want you to add a video sales letter before the call. Okay. Okay. just recorded it. So before you ever talk to a customer, you should have a video sales letter. Now, if you have two conversations, there's two VSLs. You said this happened before the call? Okay. Yeah. And when someone hops on the call, if they have it like the first question, now inside of the VSL, I can walk you out of structure, but if you already did it, then we can leave it.

16:33 I like having a little nugget in there, which is having one CTA that's like, hey, by the way, text me your head count, text me the date of the event that you want to do, text me the week or text me the season, whatever it is. We just want to have something. So we have some indication they actually watched it and then also engages them with us.

16:48 So that's good. Increased the show. But beyond that, when you start the call, um, you'll find out quickly, like, did you, did you watch the video? If the answer is yes, great. If the answer is no, then we say, hey, no worries. This will save us like 30 minutes on the call, seven minutes. Play this now.

17:06 I'm going to grab a cup of coffee. You want a cup of coffee? Ha ha, it's Zoom. Okay. And I'll be right back. And so then they watch it. And then that way they're fresh and primed and the whole conversation has already been framed. And you've been edified and all that kind of jazz. Yeah. Yeah. Because this is also what helps you scale sales once you stop being the person selling.

17:22 Because we want to do as much of the lifting as we can for the salespeople, including you. Because what this will do is it'll also shore the amount of calls you have to have. So if you're currently doing two, if we do a VSL, and then we can do an instant quote, we might be able to change to a one call close.

17:34 Got it. And even worst case scenario, even if you like having the two call, which I'm not against two calls at certain price points. Sometimes people just want to have, like, it gives the approximation of knowing someone. We can still have our instant quote. And then rather than saying, let's meet in five days, you can say, I'll have this to you by what time tomorrow works best for you.

17:53 I'll work on this until then. Because there's also a speed element of like, if it takes you a week to get me a quote, I'm like, man, how long is it like? Is this what it's going to be like working with these people? If it's like, this is priority for me, we'll get this done. You know, I'll get this term by in a day.

18:06 And how's first thing tomorrow morning? It's like that speed, I can almost guarantee you will increase close rates. Cool? Got it. Okay. Okay. Ah, this is another little nuggy. So after the events that you hold, what happens? So the event's done. Yep. Now what? Within, usually within two days of landing back in St. Louis, we send a follow-up email to the hosts.

18:28 We get them on an event debrief call. That's where we're going through what worked, what do we want to see improved, and when's the event date for next year. Let's get it booked. Okay. Love that. Just add a VSL beforehand. Really? Yeah. Okay. For every conversation you have with the customer. frame it.

18:42 Okay. And so for here, it's like... Different VSL? It'll be the same. The structure will be the same. You want different examples. And the objections are going to be the ones that happen after someone has an event and is thinking about booking the next one, not before they book their first event. So the objections will be different.

18:58 Okay. So they'll be like, is it going to be the same price? We'll say, well, it depends on... So you're just going to go through what the FAQs normally would be, and then just answer them ahead of time before the call. And that way you can spend the whole call actually closing rather than just transferring information and yapping at them.

19:10 Got it. But that'll frame the call. So that basically it's like, so, you know, you just went through your first event with us. Hopefully it was amazing. Don't worry. We're going through the thing. Like everything, like we, perfection is our standard. And so nothing's ever perfect and we always want to get better.

19:24 And that's how we've continued to grow as a company. That being said, there's some questions that people have, which is like building logistics. What happens with other future events? When am I going to get my video stuff? Like all the questions that people normally have. And then included in that would be, okay, how does working with, like, basically, what do we go from here?

19:41 What's the next step? And I'd say, so what we're going to do on the call is also just book, figure out what the next event is so that we can get even more advanced prep. Because basically, the more prep we have, the better the event is. And so, right. And so I would just say like, so I can tell you that even if there was somebody who is better than us at this, which there aren't any, of course, if you book with us now, we will be better than somebody who is better than us.

20:01 And so you get better value by booking now. It's a great frame. Yeah. Damaging admission. So now we can talk about the... Like, what is the order of operations? Does that work? Yeah. Okay. So, number one, we need to create the auto quote generator, which shouldn't take you that long to build. But you just have to think through what are the costs, what are the variables, what are the fixed costs, and then how does it depend by headcount?

20:27 Great. Now we have at least our cost basis, and then that gives us our range for our pricing, right? Uh, second, uh, you'll add in kind of the, uh, referral slash promotion incentives to this so that you can put your discounts in so that you can get, you can basically solicit more business from them.

20:48 That's the list and the speaking and the survey close of like, Hey, get my slides and you can sort from there to get new leads. Yep. Okay. Got it. Third element is we need to do daily sales training. Implement VSLs times three because you have three kind of touch points. You have call one, call two, and then post call, right?

21:07 We have to increase our outreach, which is going to be first. They're going to start every day by maxing out the platform limits, which means they should be doing exactly what you were doing when you were doing outreach. They should just clone exactly what you're doing. And if they're not doing that, then like either they're the wrong people or you're not good at training.

21:22 Then we want to do an AI scrape of the contacts to get numbers. And then we want to feed that into a dialer. And there's a ton of different dialer softwares out there that you can use. What would you do with the dialer? You're having it call the... We want to call the... You want to hit it from as many channels as you can.

21:44 And you're going to have more... Like, you will be limited by this more than you will be limited by this. And so call these the highest likelihood responses because it's warmer, et cetera. But these are where you're going to be able to get a lot of volume. Got it. And for Mac's platform, you're talking about something like LinkedIn.

21:58 Yeah. Like as many DMs as you can possibly send on the platform. Exactly. Got it. So is Facebook a solid channel that you think we should pursue? I think LinkedIn would probably. I would stick with LinkedIn. You've already done that there. You already have a proven process. They're not following it, but you have a proven process.

22:10 So it's like, how do we just do more of that for now? Got it. Because I need to have all these different acquisition channels. And my whole focus here was like, how do we get really narrow on the one that, like, you have the best LTVD CAC on LinkedIn. So let's do that. And let's do way more. And you already hired two guys.

22:23 So it's like, we just need to get them on ramps. And you need to do that with lots of training and making sure that they are motivated. Sure. That's basically it. And if you say this is what we're doing twice a day every day, I promise you the productivity of the team is going to go up. And since it's the constraint, it's a good use of your time.

22:37 The piece here is this pricing generator. Yeah. we should be at five to 10 X our costs for the, right. Now, obviously that's, you're going to be your estimate. You're like, we have to have five is the minimum because it might go over, right? Like you don't know, but the price lock says that we will charge this as long as you don't change anything.

22:57 If you change something, then we might have to readjust it and then we'll true up at the end. Okay. Now, the higher you go in here, the more you can say, as long as you're not changing the headcount by more than 20% between now and then, or we have to change venues or anything like that, this will be the cost no matter what.

23:14 So you can use that as a, like, if I were selling this, I would say something like, so there's two ways that this pricing works. So one way is you get nickel-nimed. The other is that we just pick a price that's within your budget. And then as long as you don't do anything crazy, that's what the price is going to be.

23:28 Which would you rather do? Right, and they're like, just tell me the price it's gonna be. It's like, great, boom, boom, and then we factor in all of the fudge factor. And so it's like, to be clear, you're not gonna change your venue and you're not gonna change your headcount by more than 20%. We agreed on that?

23:41 Okay. And like, you're not gonna all of a sudden say like, I want AV, like these are the services that you're gonna get. I'll give you fudge factor on headcount up to 20, and then you can't change the date, right? So you can't change the date, can't change the venue. And then that way, it confines the scope.

23:55 If they break that, which they might, then you have a different conversation. And I don't think I would try and jab people. I'd just be like, listen, it's going to cost me 30% more to do this. But if they're already making the decision that they need to do that, then they've decided that it's worth it.

24:05 So then if it's worth it, then it's worth paying you. Does that all make sense? It does. Okay. Would you also add in a, you know, like a multi-year kind of agreement? I mean, my goal of asking... How many events are you doing is so that I can seed off the fact that, okay, most people who are in your position are doing three events a year.

24:22 And there are all three events going to be like this. Great. I can give you a better rate if we do all three than if we just do one. And so it's like, we'll give you a 10. Again, it's like, I like this big anchor so that I can say, I'll give you 10% off on all three, but we're already way above your current price.

24:37 Sure. I'll give you 10% off on all three. If you commit to doing all three with us now. And if for some reason you want to break it because you think we suck, which is totally fine, just pay the difference on what you would have owed us. So it gives a little bit of a stick. All right. Right? And so if that 10% off is, and then it's like, we'll give you another 10% off, you prepay all three.

24:53 Some people, that may sound crazy to you, but a lot of departments and businesses work on annual budgets. And so it's like, listen, it's about to be tax season. If you want to get this off your books now, because we have one event now and two next year, prepay for the event now. And that way you don't have to pay taxes on it.

25:08 Hmm. That track? Mm-hmm. Yeah. That'll work super well Q4. Got it. Because a lot of people, they're looking at their Q1, Q2, depending on how last minute they are. Right? So Q3, Q4, you'll be getting the events for Q1, Q2, maybe Q3. And so it's like, get the cash off your books, pay your taxes down. You get a discount, and you don't have to pay taxes.

25:32 It's a double whammy. Like, why not do it? Yeah. Joel? Joel? Yep. Okay. And you had one question about the fact, like, you speaking at events, right? Like, you speak at these events. I think you should speak as many events as your family life that you feel comfortable doing. Because you being on stage will further edify you so that your LinkedIn responses go up, you'll get more inbounds, and then obviously at the events themselves, you're getting leads.

25:55 So it's like, it's a triple dip. And so, to the degree that you can, I would encourage you to do it. Okay. So even with me being the bottleneck and I can only be on so many, I mean, the hourly rate, I think was like 1250 per hour. That's because you didn't have a really good offer in the conversion process.

26:08 But at a B2B event, if you have a 500 person audience, there's no world where you shouldn't be able to get 50 people or a hundred people to opt in for your thing. And then of those, maybe 10 or 20% are going to be qualified leads for you. It's like, that's huge. And so you should be able to make significantly more than $1,200 an hour.

26:27 So I would encourage you to speak at B2B, but using a survey close as your primary method. But fundamentally, business as it currently stands works fine. It's not nearly as profitable as it needs to be, which means that we have to understand our costs better and price appropriately in order to have more profit.

26:44 In order to solve our demand constraint, what we're doing is we're getting more people from our existing events that we're doing. We're training our sales team to be more effective. We're increasing their effectiveness with VSLs. We're increasing the overarching volume that they're doing in terms of outreach.

27:00 And then you're also speaking. And this is giving you like a turbo bomb approach of like, this is the constraint is demand. And we did have a pricing issue because we don't want to jam more demand through something that's thin margins. So let's fix the margins in the offer and then jam as much demand as we can.

27:13 I love it. Does that feel clearer? It does, yeah. Okay. I'm processing. Okay, yeah, that was probably a lot. A lot of information and also an incredible roadmap that is very followable. Good. So I appreciate you. Appreciate you, man. We're going to do some scaling roadmap. Where are to us? All right.

27:31 What's your headcount? We have 30 total, 12 full time. Okay. So you're here. So if we're looking at what we're doing sales, so we need to install sales training system, individual coaching and team cadence. We're optimizing right now. The ad assembly process is typically if we have a paid side, but for you, the idea is like, we're doing these events as kind of like your, like that's the thought leadership side of this.

27:55 But a lot of the Other stuff is happening through the sales team with increasing our outreach, right? From a product perspective, incremental product improvement across both products. So because of the customization of how you are going to break down your costs, you'll be able to get laser focused on each component of your offer.

28:14 And that's really what the kind of product improvement at this level is. Now, creating customer segmentation. So this is like what we need to do is in time, probably like a year from now, you'll start looking and say, hey, we did 100 events this year. And what's crazy is that 25 of those events were 75% of our profit.

28:33 And we're like, okay, so that's the customer segment that's actually driving the most profit for us. how do we retool our messaging and our marketing and the examples that we use in our VSLs and our scripting in order to attract more of those people? Because then at that point, we could do the exact same volume as we currently did, make four times the money if we just only sold those customers.

28:54 And then that's the process of getting really narrow so that you can then boom. Sure. Cool. So by the way, if you want to know, have your own scaling roadmap, which has a 90 minute video. Have you gone through this? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good, right? It's really good. I made this as something that was supposed to be of paid quality.

29:10 And then I was like, I should just make it for free. So I gave it away. And so if you are a business owner, you're like, where am I on this roadmap? Just fill it out and it'll tell you in a lot more detail than 30 seconds where you're at and what you need to do to get to the next level. In the link somewhere around here.

29:23 All right. And so that was this episode of Scale or Fail. Stay tuned for the next one.