I spent 10 hours with Alex Hormozi and this article outlines everything I learned

I recently got back from spending a couple of days with Alex Hormozi and learned a lot.

For those who don't know me, I am the CEO and Co-Founder of the largest power washing brand in the world, Rolling Suds. In the last 18 months, we have grown from 1 corporate location to ~200 locations in 27 states.

My goal with this article is to share everything I learned from my time with Alex so you can get value from it. It's a ~10min read but that's because I got so much value from the day. Hope you do as well. Let's get into it.

Spending time with Alex was a surreal experience for me because of how long I have been following him and the inspiration he has been in my journey as an entrepreneur.

I went into the day with very little expectations but knew that whatever the strategies he proposed would be good ones to bring back to my team and franchisees.

Here’s some more context about the event:

In June of 2024, I was invited to go to a workshop at his headquarters in Vegas to learn about the Value Acceleration Method (VAM) and how they grow companies in their portfolio. While I was there, we were invited to another workshop called a Level 3 VAM day which is much more intimate with only a few other founders and Alex Hormozi.

This workshop is a much smaller group of founders who are in the room with Alex all day talking specifically about their business. Alex and the team do pre-work on the businesses so the day can be tactical. Here are the types of businesses that were there with me:

1)????? An online LinkedIn coaching business for professionals in the Netherlands

2)????? A lawn care business that does pest, mosquito, lawn treatments and termites

3)????? A wholesale real estate business

4)????? A weight loss online coaching business

5)????? A business that fixes the backend infrastructure of businesses doing between $5M - $200M in revenue to help increase their bottom line

6)????? A boutique accounting firm for painting companies

7)????? A construction company that builds awnings and carports

8)????? Rolling Suds, the biggest power-washing brand in the world

Each of the founders had unique constraints within their businesses and were there so they could work individually with Alex to solve them. It was super cool to see him go individually one by one around the room and help each of us to increase enterprise value.

Before I go into what each of the businesses and what I learned from each one of their conversations, I want to start with mine and give some context around the pre-work that I did with one of his team members.

Here are the two metrics that Alex and his team hyper-focus on: “Cost to Acquire a Customer” (or CAC for short) and “Lifetime Value of the Customer” (or LTV for short). The cost to acquire a customer is simple, it’s the number of customers you get divided by the advertising dollars spent to acquire those customers.

The lifetime value of the customer is how much revenue is generated from each customer over the life of their interaction with this business.

Now, this metric is a little trickier, especially with a startup because you don’t have a lot of data yet, which is the situation I am in with Rolling Suds . It also gets complicated when you have a few different types of customers. More on this later.

Once you have the CAC and LTV, you can get the LTV to CAC ratio (LTV:CAC), which shows you how efficiently your business makes money.?

For example, if it costs you $100 to acquire a customer and the LTV of the customer is $500, then your LTV to CAC ratio is 5:1 because you can put $1 in and get $5 out. For the businesses they invest in, they are looking for at least the opportunity to get to a 30:1 LTV:CAC ratio.

Most times, businesses have multiple acquisition channels and that’s where the LTV:CAC ratio varies. The goal is to find the one with the highest LTV:CAC ratio and push all resources to that channel.

What Alex and his team live by is the concept of: “more, better, new”.

If a business is doing something well, can you do more of it? If you can’t do more of it, can you do it better?

And once you have done the most of something in the best way possible, then a business can look to do something new.

Many business owners want to jump to the shiniest newest thing whenever they see it, which Alex refers to as “The Woman in the Red Dress”.

Just do the things that work and keep doing that repeatedly, then do it better, then keep doing it until you can’t anymore.

Getting back to my business specifically, I essentially have two businesses with 3 core buckets of customers.

1)????? The franchisor business where my customers are my franchisees

2)????? The corporate franchise location where my customers are residential and commercial property owners (these are also the customers of our franchisees)

When I launched Rolling Suds, it was for the express purpose of building a franchise company that supports, trains, and launches franchise locations across the country. I raised capital so I could provide support to franchisees.

As I built the business, I realized I could provide additional support to franchisees by building a training center in Nashville and running corporate-owned units, basically putting trucks on the road to service residential and commercial customers in the Nashville area.

This location would prove as a testing ground for different strategies and whatever ends up working in Nashville, I can teach to the rest of the franchise system and standardize it. This also creates more enterprise value for the franchise business and eventually adds cash flow to help support franchisees.

Most all my resources are going toward supporting and training franchisees but there is an opportunity to de-risk the franchise business by building out multiple corporate owned locations for 3 reasons:

1)????? We can keep the entire economic benefit of the business. Instead of making 8-10% off topline revenue, we keep the entire net earnings of the business

2)????? Whatever we do well in the corporate units, we can teach the rest of the franchisees

3)????? If we have a franchisee who wants to exit, we could convert it to a corporate location

Often in a franchise, the bottom 20% of your system takes up 80% of your corporate staff’s time, and that is simply just not fair to the rest of the franchisees who may be executing the model more effectively.

The downside to building corporate locations is that it is very costly because there are huge capex costs to building out a corporate unit including grand opening marketing costs and infrastructure that would need to be separate from the franchise side of the business.

This is where I saw an opportunity to learn from Alex, Leila, and the entire team at Acquisition.com. My background is in building and operating a franchisor, but they have a TON of experience with opening and owning brick-and-mortar businesses across the country.

One of their core concepts is “Nail it and scale it” which is exactly what it sounds like. Figure out one location by tweaking and iterating processes until you get it right, then start opening locations across the country in every market once you get it down.

Level 3 VAM Day: August 7th, 2024

I started the morning with a gym workout at the hotel and arrived at the Acquisition.com headquarters before the day started at 8am. I walked into the boardroom and one of those Remarkable digital paper pads was in front of each seat (nice touch). I grabbed the seat closest to the front of the room.

Alex walked in and sat in the front right next to me. He said, “How’s everyone doing today? I’m two Red Bulls in and ready to rock.” To which everyone laughed and got excited. He had a 3-ring binder with each of our names on an individual tab with each of our pictures and his own handwritten notes in the margins. He went around the room and knew everyone’s name, business, and industry. It was clear that he had done his homework.

In true Hormozi fashion, there were two easels with paper and a black marker placed behind him so we could get to work, just like in the content he posts online.

He went on to explain the format for the day. He said, “We will go around the room and spend as much time as we need to for each of your businesses trying to figure out the things to do. By the time we are done, I will tell you exactly what I would do if I owned 100% of your business today to increase its value, sound good?”

We all nodded and said yes with excitement.

“Cool”, Alex says. “Let’s get started.”

Directly across the table from me was Michele, the founder of a LinkedIn coaching business for B2B professionals in the Netherlands.

Michele sells coaching programs to help B2B professionals get more leads from LinkedIn. He had a smaller offer and then an upsell for a bigger package. After multiple iterations and discussions of upsell strategies, they landed on a plan for his business to increase the number of people who would likely choose the upsell and a distribution that would more than cover his costs to deliver the service.

One of the upsells we learned about was called, “The Rollover Upsell” which is when you tell someone they only have to put a small amount down on a smaller thing but can roll that deposit into a larger thing in the future, making the larger thing seem less expensive when presenting the upsell.

This strategy works particularly well when you do the Layaway strategy first, which is when you ask for a smaller amount down to “reserve your spot” and the rest of the payment just needs to be paid before delivery of the service.

For example, you have an offer that costs 15k but you only ask your customer for 2500 down now. But the rollover upsell is the 25k thing, but you can roll the 2500 into that.

Alex was able to come up with a strategy that would dramatically increase the size of Michele’s business, and he had complete clarity on what he needed to do next.

Then we moved on to Rick, who owned a lawncare business doing about 4.3M a year. He had an original location in Georgia and another in Florida. He had a business that provided pest control, termite control, lawn treatments, and mosquito control. His core offer was $19 a month for only two of those services and he was trying to figure out how to cashflow his business better.

Alex asked what he would charge customers for each of those services and wanted to know if there was a way to get a pre-payment for all of them to cover a year of services. There are two ways to give pre-pay incentives:

1)????? Guarantees

2)????? Bonuses

In this business, one of the suggested guarantees would be “No weeds guaranteed or your money back”.

A bonus would be, “pre-pay for 12 months and get a year of pest control for free”

Or another one that was suggested was a price lock – "we won’t go up more than X% or Y$ per year”

Here are the annual charges to the customer for his services:

Termite: $396

Pest: $388

Lawn: $945

Mosquito: $900

Total: $2,629

The suggestion that Alex had was to make the offer for all of those services up front at a certain price, but have the price be discounted if they pay for a full year up front. Then to lead with that offer for every customer. He called this the “Mother of All Bundles” or MOAB for short.

We learned about the “anchor upsell” which is basically anchoring them to a higher price and then discounting it. For example, “This package comes to a total of $3,000 for everything but if you pay today for a year in advance today, it’s $1,997. As an additional bonus is each year, we promise not to increase it by more than 5%.”

Alex discussed using the negatives and the positives to sell it like this:

“Well, we’re going to get you set up for your lawn treatments, and we want to make sure that you can stay outside and enjoy the lawn, so we’ll take care of pests and mosquitoes so when you have people over, they aren’t getting attacked by bugs. And we need to make sure your house doesn’t fall so we’ll take care of the termites as well. Does that sound good?”

Using the positives (enjoying the house outside with your guests) coupled with the negatives (your guests getting bugs in their face or the house falling down) to sell the customer. As Alex says, “Sell the vacation not the trip.”

He also taught us about down selling. Let’s say the customer in the above situation only wants Lawn and Pest, Alex says you must ask, “You don’t want anything else, right?” because that makes the customer lock into the selections they’ve already made, rather than allowing them to back down even further.

We moved on to Oscar’s business, which was a wholesale real estate business where he uses oversees call center agents to get and sell real estate contracts.

His main constraint was he wanted to build a sellable asset but real estate wholesaling in general is a one-time sale, so there is no long-term value of the customer. The business must keep getting new customers every time to make more money.

Alex said, “Yeah but you are not in the real estate business, you are in a sales business.”

He said, “You either have a business that people never stop buying from you, or a business where people never stop selling for you.”

In this case, Oscar needs to build a business where he creates an engine where people never stop selling for him.

Oscar had two main acquisition channels:

1)????? Cold calling

2)????? Drive for dollars

Alex asked what the cost to acquire a customer (CAC) was for each of them along with the lifetime value of the customer (LTV)

We learned that the LTV to CAC ratio on the second acquisition channel was 50 to 1. This means that for every 1 dollar put into that channel, he got $50 out.

Alex said, “The drive for dollars thing is the asset you are building. If I bought 100% of your business today, I would put all of my focus toward doing as much of that as possible.”

Alex was impressed. Oscar had his marching orders.

The “step 2” portion is to run paid ads geared toward real estate investors. Ideally, he creates a sales engine so large that he can’t even service the contracts himself so he can just call investors and split the deal with them.

Alex told him to ONLY focus on the drive for dollars thing for now though.

Next up was Mason’s business. Mason does online fitness and health coaching with his fiancé.

Alex said there are really two things that separate the good online fitness businesses from the rest:

1)????? Some type of celebrity/high ticket offer

2)????? Some sort of medical angle

Celebrity/high ticket angle is not super scalable, but the pseudo-medical angle is and that is what Mason’s business does.

The whole discussion was around customer acquisition, and we talked about different platforms and the positives and negatives.

He said something is going on right now where the value of the customers varies greatly per social channel. For example, 500 podcast listeners would be more valuable than 100,000 TikTok customers.

The worst platform right now from a monetization standpoint is TikTok.

It’s important to take these things into consideration when you are figuring out where to allocate resources.

Alex suggested that Mason focus on doubling down on lead generation but from different sources outside organic influencer content, which was where Mason and his wife got most of their leadflow from. Here are the 3 types of lead sources he suggested:

1)????? Retargeting

This is fascinating and applies to any business that has a following on any platform. Alex said the following you have is actually probably close to 5 times larger because of the people who watch your stuff but have not hit subscribe yet.

He said paid ads + organic is a money glitch right now. Meaning you can provide a ton of value on your individual social channels and then run paid ads to target your customers. The paid ads do the “asking” so you can just give, give, give, and give.

You want to own all the keywords surrounding your business to do this.

To create a compelling ad:

You want your avatar to be the one getting the dream outcome in the ad. If your avatar is a male from 45 – 55 who wants to lose weight, an actor looking like that should be in the copy and the video to attract the right audience.

2)????? YouTube Community

This was interesting because I did not know what YouTube Community was. YT community is where you see written text and posts in between the videos.

Alex suggested making great written content twice a week and posting it on YouTube as a written post and he will get a big audience.

There is a demand for it and little supply because all the creators on YT are primarily making video content.

3)????? YouTube Integration

Integration is writing the same text in the description of every YT video. It does not make a difference in engagement.

The first line in the description should be a CTA for your core offer and the second line should be the website for them to learn more. Underneath that, a user would have to click a button to expand, and a lot of people don’t do that.

He also suggested doing a “pinned comment” for every video to boost engagement.

His final suggestion to Mason was if he wanted to be able to charge more, he could find a doctor who would “bless” his metabolic makeover approach.

He would have to give the doctor some equity, but this would allow him to anchor to a much higher price point for each customer because it becomes pseudo-medical.

Finally, Mason mentioned he has a Facebook group that his customers can continue to be a part of at no cost. The Facebook group isn’t helpful at all to anyone, and Alex suggested building a community like the one he owns, Skool.

He suggested offering “continued access” to the community as an additional bonus to charge his customers more. Alex said there are 4 ways creators are converting customers on Skool:

1)????? The onboarding call – just simply signing them up from the onboarding call

2)????? Stats from his business –

Negative: Here is how many people didn’t do (core offer) and they were unable to get (dream outcome) in (time delay) but could have with minimal (effort and sacrifice) to achieve (dream outcome)

Positive: “This is how many people followed our program (core offer) and received (dream outcome) with minimal (effort and sacrifice)”

3)????? A 5-Part Video Sales Letter (VSL

Every sales process should have a VSL early on in the process to set the standards of what to expect in the process. This helps salespeople focus individually on the candidate instead of repeating themselves over and over again.

Many Skool members just took their webinar, shortened it, and broke it up into a 5-part VSL.

4)????? Weekly webinar – signing people up after the weekly webinar

5)????? DM’s in the Skool community

The stat Alex gave, is approximately 10% of Skool communities convert into paying customers.

Before moving on to the next business, Alex wanted to cover a few more concepts that could help all of us.

Concept 1: How to get good testimonials from your customers (4 parts)

Part 1 – What was your most painful moment before you started working with us?

If you start with the negative first, it gives you what you need to create a good hook for the ad

Example hook: “We were two months away from shutting our doors”

Part 2 – Stats (negative) –

Example: “We had invested 100s of thousands of dollars and did not know if we were going to go bankrupt” or “I put my jeans on and they didn’t fit, and those were my fat jeans!”

Optional part 2a – Skepticism to belief

Example: “I never believe these high-level business coaching businesses are really going to help, but I gave it a try, and man, was I wrong!”

Step 4 - Best moment

Example: “After only a month into the program, I had made back what I invested to get started and then some!”

By putting this framework around collecting testimonials from your customers, it becomes really simple to convert them into ads to run online.

Concept 2 – The 2 most common issues with the portfolio companies that Alex invests in

1)????? Everything is either mis-priced or employees are mis-comped. The economics of what they are charging vs. what they are paying to employees is off

2)????? They have an avatar issue. Meaning, they are selling services to the wrong people.

Before doing any type of investment or growth into a business, they look at those things first.

Concept 3 – What he learned from a conversation with one of the biggest private equity firms in the world

Alex spoke with someone from Vista Private Equity, which is one of the biggest private equity firms in the world. That person asked Alex if he wanted to know what their secret was and he said, “ABSOLUTELY!” Here is the 3 step process they take after buying a business:

1)????? They build a data room and see which types of customers are most valuable

2)????? They redirect all resources and marketing efforts to acquiring and servicing those types of customers ONLY

3)????? Then 5x the business with the same resources

So now, Alex does that with every single one of his portfolio companies. He takes it one step farther though so he can better attract those customers:

4)????? Gets all the 1-2 data points that the ideal type of customer loves about the business

5)????? Those data points become part of the core offer of the business

Example from Gym Launch: “The average gym launch customer gets an extra 100k in profit annually after using us.”

Then all of the ad copy and video content is made to target the ideal customer with the data points that are most interesting for them.

Mason was fired up with all the advice Alex gave and knew exactly what to do next.

Next up, it was onto Jean-Eric’s business, which does profit margin improvement and back-end process improvement for companies doing between 5M – 200M in revenue.

Before we got into Jean-Eric’s business, Alex wanted to drive the point home of how to use testimonials to convert customers.

The process to convert customers with testimonials has 4 steps:

1)????? Ad – an ad with the testimonial for the specific avatar

2)????? Lead magnet – a free lead magnet that’s so good that the customer receives incredible value from it. The format for this landing page is:

a.????? Headline

b.???? sub-headline

c.????? image

d.???? opt-in

3)????? Video Sales Letter -> application

4)????? Book call form

By taking this approach, he can effectively use testimonials to convert more people into paying customers.

Alex knew going into this that Jean-Eric’s business was going to be the hardest, due to the complexity of delivery of the service.

Everything that Jean-Eric did was customized to the client, and he had clients from all types of industries. Some businesses needed help with data, some businesses needed help with process improvement, some people were tracking the wrong metrics and needed an overhaul, etc. Also, the service was incredibly expensive (north of 135k).

Alex asked who his favorite clients are to work with and Jean-Eric said construction companies. He said they had the least amount of price sensitivity and were generally willing to take suggestions and implement the changes.

Alex asked if Jean-Eric knew how much money he saved his average client. He also asked how much from a percentage standpoint did his average customer improve their margins by. Getting this information would allow Jean-Eric to do a “calculator sales process”. Alex used his own experience at his former company, A.L.A.N., to illustrate this point.

A.L.A.N. was a software company where they worked leads for gym owners at Gym Launch and said they closed deals at somewhere around 90%. Which was insane. Here’s the method:

Calculator sales process method:

1)????? Find out how much the average customer saves or makes in totality after working with your company

2)????? Find out how much the average customer saves or makes on a percentage basis after working with your company

3)????? Create a calculator that shows if they invest a certain amount, and their company is of a certain size, they invest $X amount, they can make or save on average Y amount.

4)????? Let the calculator do the talking, and simply ask them if they like money.

5)????? Price the service to charge a percentage of the amount the calculator generates with an upfront deposit to cover the cost of acquiring that customer (CAC)

Once you have this data and this process built out, you can become unstoppable because the customer can just use “math” and “logic” to make the decision vs. letting any type of emotion interfere with the sales process.

Okay, how does this relate to Jean-Eric’s business? If he saves his clients on average 10% profit and 100k in total savings, then he can price appropriately.

Then when it comes to delivery of the service, target construction companies doing $20-$50M in revenue and maybe one other avatar.

Once you have selected the two avatars, create a checklist of everything that his team would do for each type of business owner so it’s the same “process” every time.

& finally, start to run ads with those two avatars in the video and written copy to attract more customers. He suggested outbound calling and cold email as the channel to get more customers.

Jean-Eric felt much more comfortable and knew what to do when he got back to Canada.

Before moving on to the next business, Alex wanted to address 2 concepts that he thought could be helpful to everyone in the room.

Concept 1 – 5 things that every prospective buyer is concerned about:

1)????? Specific details – “I’m not sure about x, y, z and whether it’s going to help me”

2)????? Timing – logistics – “maybe I should wait until after the busy season is over”

3)????? ROI on their investment – “how long will it take to get a return? Will I get a return?”

4)????? Afraid of making a bad decision again – “I tried something like this in the past and the company just took my money and ran”

5)????? Avoidance – “Let me think about it”

The goal is to have all the ads and sales process get in front of every potential objection from each bucket. Alex’s Director of Sales calls this “killing zombies”. You want to crush the objections before they come up.

He says do not give your pitch until you feel all the “zombies” have been killed because after you give your pitch, you lose a lot of leverage in the conversation. He doesn’t pitch unless he is 100% positive he can get the sale.

Concept 2 – Advertising and sales are functionally one and the same

The purpose of sales is to simply fill the gaps in advertising. They are both just education.

Theoretically, if a person has enough information from the advertising, they could make a decision to buy.

If a salesperson is saying the same thing repeatedly, he suggested putting that in a video sales letter (VSL) because you can have your sales team focus instead on filling the gaps in understanding vs. having to help them understand/educate their customers.

This serves two major purposes

1)????? The VSL answers all their most common questions so the salespeople can address the unique objections of that buyer

2)????? Salespeople can refer back to the video to build more trust.

Example: “Remember what Alex said in the video about timing?”

This is why advertising, if done properly is functionally the same thing as sales. It’s just education.

Concept 3 – How to issue equity to your employees

In general, equity has 4 components:

1)????? Control

2)????? Risk

3)????? Sale/Exit Value

4)????? Cashflow

Typically, employees are not going to get any form of control and they don’t want risk, so those first two are irrelevant. The second two, you can address without issuing equity. Let’s address both:

Sale/Exit Value – You can issue your employee phantom equity, meaning that if they are there at the time of a sale, they participate in exit value. Or, you can issue “profits interest” which issues them “stock” in the company at a certain valuation, and they then earn whatever the increase from the issuance to the exit.

Example: “Mr. Employee, we are giving you 1% profits interest at a $10M valuation.” If the company then grows to $100M, they would be compensated at an exit of 1% of the difference, so 1% of $90M.

Cashflow – You can give your employees a percentage of the cashflow of the business.

Example: “Mrs. Employee, if we have a 20% margin on our $1M a year business, you will get 5% of the profits.” 20% of $1M is 200k, they would receive 5%, which is $10,000.

Typically, if employees are given upside in the business in the form of sale value or cashflow from the business, they will be more likely to stay long-term.

Alex has issued true equity to employees in the past, but they were required to buy in at a certain valuation, and Alex had the option to buy them out at a pre-determined exit multiple.

Example: “Mr. Employee, this business is worth $10M and you can buy in to get 1%, which means you need to give me $100k. I have the right to buy you out at any time at whatever the valuation is at that time, times a 3x multiple. We can pay over 6 years with a seller-financed buyout at no interest.”

If the business grows to $20M, at any time Alex could buy his 1% at 3x. Which would be a 600k buyout over 6 years.

He did an interesting deal structure with a Chief Revenue Officer for one of his companies.

The CRO got 30% of the delta increase of the business year over year.

If the company was valued at $10M and grew to $11M the next year, the CRO would make 30% of the revenue, so 300k.

The next year though, the business would have to grow again for a bonus to be paid out. There was not any long term benefit, but it incentivized the Chief Revenue Officer to push sales every year dramatically.

Now we were on to Daniel, who has a business that does accounting and taxes for painting companies.

Daniel had just switched from a founder-led sales team to having salespeople.

Alex discovered that he should do an immediate VSL to help salespeople close deals faster.

He suggested not ever calling certain parts of the year, the “off-season” because that’s how people will treat it. They will take the gas off the pedal.

We also discussed the idea that “measurement is an intervention”

Example: Simply telling someone to track their weight daily, will help them lose weight.”

In Daniel’s case, the painters don’t typically have a lot of sophistication in their business before they start working with him. Telling them to track their expenses will help with expense reduction and overall margin improvement.

Daniel was charging a flat monthly rate for his business and a percent of revenue ranging from 1-3% depending on which package the client chose.

Alex suggested the calculator-based sales process for Daniel as well. To do that, Daniel would need to find:

1)????? The average total # of dollars he saves his clients

2)????? The average total % of margin increase

If he can go back and collect testimonials from past or existing clients, he can include those testimonials in his advertisements to attract more customers.

Using the calculator based sale:

If you are a painter doing _____ (revenue), and have _____(% profit), our average customer increases their cashflow by _____($ dollar amount), and their profit margin by _________(average %) so if you work with us, ($X + % Margin Increase = ______).

If you choose to work with us, we will throw in a bonus of reviewing past 3 years of your taxes which saves our average client ____ (average $ amount in overpayments).

This approach allows his clients to do some simple math which will immediately show the value of services.

Note: As a general rule of thumb, Alex says that 30% of the money that a customer is going to save should go to the business that is either saving or earning them that additional money.

Then we got into customer acquisition strategies for Daniel’s business, there are two major channels where he gets his customers:

1)????? Affiliates/partners

Alex said there are two ways to effectively leverage affiliates:

a.????? Bundle your product or service in with their core offer

Example: A company that does business with a lot of painting companies would include a year free of bookkeeping with Daniel’s company in their core offer. Alex said this works especially well if you can upsell the client on something else once you get the customer sent over?

If you can get the affiliate to bundle in your service or product with theirs, it gets you infinite customers.

b.???? An upsell for the affiliate (this works less effectively than the first)

Example:? An affiliate would have a service for painting companies and if they upsell your service with theirs, they get a X% cut of the sale.

2)????? Events/conferences with cold/warm email follow-ups to the attendee list

Alex shared his event/conference strategies. There were 2 major ones:

a.????? If there is a booth, get the booth that is directly to the right of the entrance to the expo hall. He said 70% of people take a right when they walk into a room.

b.???? Have a vault and give everyone a key to the vault who opts into your newsletter or email list, or otherwise agrees to being contacted. Do a drawing at the end of the event and give the winner a year of services for free.

Follow up later with the rest of the list and offer a “2nd place” prize, which could be a “free month of service”. To get people to sign up to be contacted, you can use a catchy hook.

Alex used the example of what he used for the book launch for 100M leads, “It’s more than a gift card and less than a Tesla.”

These suggestions helped Daniel understand how he would get his business to the $20M revenue goal he set for himself.

Now we were on to Dustin’s business, which built decks and awnings.

Dustin was fed up with his business, he hated elements of his business and needed help streamlining if offer and delivery.

His constraint was that every project was unique and custom, and it was hard to scale.

Alex asked which are the two most common styles of decks/awnings he builds (and likes building). Dustin told him about two styles/decks he builds a lot of.

Alex said to restructure his offer when customers come in to push them to either, “Option A” or “Option B” and have his salespeople understand how to succinctly articulate the value statements for each option.

If consumers push for a more complicated approach, give salespeople the value detractor statements of how he’s built those types of decks/awnings before and the customers didn’t get their dream outcome.

Alex asked if Dustin was comfortable giving a guarantee. Dustin agreed but didn’t know what that could be.

Alex asked how often his team is on budget or on time. Dustin shook his head and said with the more complicated decks, it’s only about 50% of the time.

Alex asked what percentage of times he would be on budget and on time if customers only chose option a or b.

Dustin smiled and said, “100% of the time”

Alex told Dustin to increase his prices by 20% and give the guarantee, “If we are not on budget or on time, we guarantee we will give you our profit from the job back, which is 20%.”

Dustin pushed back a bit on raising his prices, understandably and Alex gave him an objection management tool.

You can tell customers they can pick two:

Fast, good, and cheap. They can’t have all three. He said to tell the customer to pick two of what is important to them and he will tell them where the competitors are planning to cut corners.

He suggested an option-based closing tactic for Dustin’s sales team:

When do you want to start?

a)????? ASAP

b)???? Within 24 hours

c)????? Over a month from now (he said these customers never schedule)

Dustin was much happier and felt confident that his business would be more enjoyable to run after implementing some of those changes.

We were almost to me and Rolling Suds ! Mine was the last business to analyze. Before we got to my business, Alex shared another concept:

Find a way to “score” your leads and give your best salespeople the best leads.

It seems simple, but this change can dramatically increase revenue for the business.

He gave a story of when he spoke to the top timeshare sales rep in the country who worked at one of the biggest timeshare companies in the world.

This salesperson won a meeting with the CEO of the company after hitting some crazy sales goal.

He told the CEO that he was leaving money on the table by giving good leads to bad salespeople. He convinced the CEO to have his sales manager give him all the good leads because he would make him more money.

The CEO decided to take a chance and have all the best leads from his division go to him and the other top sales reps. The division 5x’d revenue in one year.

They implemented it across the entire organization and they 5x’d the company over the next 5 years.

Alex says the most expensive thing in the business is a salesperson who can’t close because good leads are deciding not to buy.

As a business owner, it’s our job to find the thing that has the highest LTV:CAC ratio and figure out how many people we can sell it to.

Okay, now it was my turn! He had done some work on the business and he looked over at me and said, “Aaron I think I am going to break some stuff with my suggestion but I hope that’s okay.”

“I love breaking stuff”, I replied. “Go for it.”

He said, “I think you need to go full commercial business instead of doing both commercial and residential with your business.”

I told him that some of our franchisees are 80-90% commercial.

He was super relieved! He wanted to make it super clear that was where the value creation was with the business.

We started talking about how we help franchisees generate customers and I told him about our B2B acquisition strategies being cold outreach, and he suggested finding other B2B vendors who handle the different channels and getting multiple vendors per channel. The channels he said to focus on:

1)????? Cold calling

2)????? LinkedIn cold messaging

3)????? Cold Email

4)????? Referral partners

He suggested having these vendors work for free in a couple of markets for a month or two to show what they can do.

He said to pit them against each other, and then partner with the ones who produce the most leads. This is something I as the CEO can focus on right away so my team can keep focusing on their day-to-day duties.

He suggested some ways to improve cash collection for commercial accounts because many of the jobs we do are requests for proposal (RFP) type jobs.

He said there are 3 methods to get cash up front:

1)????? Discount – charge the customer less if they prepay or pay sooner

2)????? Guarantee – give them some type of certainty they wouldn’t otherwise have if they didn’t pay you up front

3)????? Bonus – give them something “extra” to incentive prepayment

In our case, a discount is the easiest.

His suggestion was to have franchisees focus on pre-selling before they open even more than we already do by giving “Founder Pricing” to the first 50 customers.

We could also guarantee a certain level of cleaning for a certain time. For example, if they need spot treatment on certain areas after a storm, we guarantee we will come back any time within the first 6 months.

A bonus would be cleaning a portion of the property for free if we got a prepayment or an extra layer of sanitization that extends the life of the cleaning.

The 3rd suggestion was to have franchisees turn on their sales/leads even sooner after signing the franchise agreement.

He suggested as early as 90 days. We have a 10-week ramp-up period and our franchisees spend the last 4 weeks before training doing business development 40 hours a week. He suggested getting them out selling even sooner.

He suggested teaching franchisees how to sell and turning those leads on even sooner after they sign, which we can work toward!

1)????? B2B customer acquisition channels

2)????? Focus on upfront cash collection

3)????? Franchisees start pre-selling sooner

4)????? Teach “BAMFAM” as a way of life

BAMFAM stands for “book a meeting from a meeting”. Franchisees of Rolling Suds have a very long sales cycle sometimes with commercial customers.

BAMFAM is something we can as an organization implement ASAP.

I told him we are using a field management software and want one that has a true sales CRM built into it, and he said scrap that idea. Just have two different technologies.

Software is usually good at one or the other, so just find a sales CRM to layer on top of our field management software.

I have already been working on a BAMFAM strategy with scripts and objection management for our franchisees.

He suggested that the call center book every single appointment for franchisees, commercial and residential.

After analyzing over 1000 gyms when he was running Gym Launch, the #1 metric for determining how many sales a salesperson would get was... availability.

Simply put, the more availability slots a salesperson had on their calendar, the more volume they would do.

We discussed hiring a commercial sales rep for franchisees that have more capital to burn, and he suggested they do 20-30 hours a week of self-generated lead gen. 20-30 hours a week of responding to leads and doing follow-up.

To train these reps, drill down the sales process to be in as many parts necessary and make it as simple as possible.

He stressed the importance of DRILLING your sales reps. He has his Director of Sales drill with the entire sales team every morning for his portfolio companies.

Constant role-playing, practicing their craft every single day. He said if a Sales Manager is not drilling at least a few times a week with their team, they are missing out on sales.

It made me realize that we have a lot of opportunity as it relates to sales training.

Once they have the sales scripts down and they have been tested, he has his team listen to all the best sales calls and analyze the tone.

His team will then do “tone training” with each sales script having a “tone guide” where each line in the script is a different font depending on the tone the salesperson needs to take when overcoming that objection or asking that question.

Jacob, his Director of Sales started talking about how he trains sales reps. He will tell the rep that the first time he trains them, he is going to interrupt them 40+ times and that’s completely normal, which means it’s working.

By doing it this way, he can condense months of training into just a few days.

He emphasized the 2 major duties of any Sales Manager are:

1) training

2) recruiting

Here’s the daily format he has his sales managers across their portfolio companies follow:

AM – first thing in the morning, shout out the top performers. Roleplay for an hour every morning.

PM – end of day (marketing manager is on this call)

Go over the stats of the day with the team and give feedback on the leads. Roleplay daily and talk about main concerns. The reason marketing is on this call is because they need to know what types of leads are being generated.

The Sales Manager has all the calls recorded and is constantly reviewing them to see what is working and what is not so they can teach and train more effectively.

In the evenings and mornings, they give an equal amount of kudos to the salespeople who have good show rates and close rates. The show rates increase by 10% typically just by shouting it out.

The weekly 1 on 1 with the Sales Manager should be them focusing obsessively on the 1 thing they can do in between calls to improve their process.

A trick they learned at Acquisiton.com is to create more timeslots on the calendar of the salesperson because availability is the key differentiator between high-performing sales reps and lower performers.

As an example, if your team is using a service like Calendly, they can select 15-minute booking slots that prospects can choose from, even if the salesperson is blocking out an hour after that time is booked.

This also increases show rates because it’s less likely that a prospect will choose a time that only kind of works with their schedule.

Once the appointment is booked, the best 3 times to set up reminders for the call are:

1)????? Night before

2)????? Morning of

3)????? An hour before

The 6 best lead nurture strategies are:

1)????? 3 days of constant nurture

2)????? Max availability on the calendar (15min slots)

3)????? Automation

4)????? iPhone text (this shows that it’s a real person, the sales rep cannot automate this)

5)????? Pull forward (call an interested lead and move the appointment up on the calendar if another lead is slow to respond or unwilling to confirm the appointment)

6)????? Gift card (send a $5 gift card for them to show up to the appointment)

We discussed the concept of “Customer Success.” Alex said customer success has two levers:

1)????? Did it work?

Very simply, did the thing that the customer bought work as expected.

2)????? How nice was it?

Very simply, how good was the experience with the product or service?

Note: this lever buys you more goodwill from customers because even if the customer ends up getting the result they paid for, they will always look for a better and cheaper option. If the experience is excellent, they are less likely to do that.

Customer success varies greatly depending on the type of customers. Cheaper customers want “more”, and wealthier customers just want it to work.

Alex and I talked about what my responsibility is now that I have an executive team in place. Here’s what Alex said:

1)????? He said that my responsibility is GROWTH

2)????? I am the “Chief Constraint Officer”. Meaning, I am to find the things getting in the way of growth and fix the constraints.

3)????? I will have a lot of “project work”

4)????? Resource allocation (money and people)

5)????? In general, growing the business is my job

The amount of information I gathered from that day was worth the price of admission alone. I have already brought these strategies back to my team and franchisees across the country and within just a few days, we have already seen tremendous results.

I hope you got value from this article. If you enjoyed this, I post stuff like this all the time: Aaron Harper

About Aaron Harper:

Aaron Harper is a seasoned entrepreneur and the visionary behind Rolling Suds, the world’s leading power-washing franchise. With a deep passion for business growth and innovation, Aaron has built Rolling Suds into a powerhouse, known for its commitment to franchisee success and excellence in service. His recent experiences, including meetings with industry leaders like Alex Hormozi & Codie Sanchez, have further honed his skills as an entrepreneur, which he now shares to inspire and guide others on their entrepreneurial journey. Follow Aaron as he continues to push boundaries and set new standards in franchising.

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