#290 Jordan Platten - Are Agencies Dying in 2025?

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(00:00) Why Most Agencies Fail
(06:26) The Psychology of Client Retention 
(12:17) How to Manage Client Expectations and Build Trust
(18:46) The Ethics of Selling 
(25:52) Building Vision-Driven Client Journeys
(32:29) How to Build Scalable Systems
(39:46) Why Retention Is the Real Path to $1M/Month
(44:41) Jordan Platten’s Thought on AI 
(52:28) The Risk of Not Owning Your Tech
(56:27) The Future of Online Business
(01:04:29) Will AI Replace Humans?
(01:10:32) Funnels That Actually Work Now
(01:14:48) The Reality of Coaching in the AI Era
(01:18:02) The Profit vs. Growth Dilemma 
(01:23:10) How to Build a Profitable Brand 
(01:28:22) The Biggest Leverage in Business
(01:33:58) Jordan Platten’s Business Mindset
(01:39:26) The Power of Infinite Leverage
(01:45:40) The Biggest Issue with Founders 
(01:51:57) Life After Making Millions
(01:56:08) Legacy vs. Lifestyle
(01:59:34) Jordan Platten’s 3-Year Vision

Chapters

• 0:00 The Future of Agency Business
• 12:01 Communication as the Key to Agency Success
• 35:35 Client Acquisition vs Retention Strategies
• 58:38 Building Trust Through Expectation Setting
• 1:18:51 Navigating the Ethics of Online Business
• 1:41:22 AI's Impact on Agency Evolution
• 1:54:35 Three Crucial Lessons from a Decade in Business
• 1:55:46 The Importance of Mentorship and Learning

Transcript

Jordan Platten: 0:00

setting very clear expectations and actually pushing clients away and saying, just so you know, these are the things that we can do, but these are the things we can't do and this is what we aren't going to do for you and what you have to do. Those conversations. Actually, the only skill deficiency I believe that would cause you to fail an agency is communication. If you can't communicate with people, both clients and team, if you can't motivate a team and have them want to give their time, or if you can't build great relationships with your clients, then you're going to fail. If you can build a successful agency, any other business you touch, you'll be successful in Our agency is dying in 2025.

Darren Lee: 0:35

With AI automating everything, outreach burning out and clients demanding more for less, most agencies are stuck in the past, but Jordan Platten isn't. He's one of the OGs of the agency space scaled to 100k plus and coached thousands of founders to do the same. In this episode, we break down what actually works in acquiring clients, sales and delivery right now, today, including how AI can replace your entire team, why cold outreach is dying and the real reason your agency might be failing. This episode is how to future-proof your entire team, why cold outreach is dying and the real reason your agency might be failing. This episode is how to future-proof your entire business. Do you think building an agency is still a viable business model right now, in 2025?

Jordan Platten: 1:16

I think, for as long as we have online business agency will always be arguably the best business model for people to start with no experience why is that?

Jordan Platten: 1:27

because the barrier to entry is so low, because it's a simple service exchange which and it teaches just fundamental good practice of business I still I say this all the time like if you can build a successful agency, any other business you touch within reason once you learn the model you'll be successful in, Because you have to manage sales, you have to manage clients, you have to manage team and when one of those things break, the other thing breaks and there's so many moving parts and it takes so much resilience and failure that even outside of it just being a good vehicle to make money, it's just the perfect vehicle to prime you with the grit that is required to actually be successful I would say it's almost harder than other things.

Jordan Platten: 2:09

It's one of the hardest mod. It's and that's the yin, the yang, right. It's because it's so easy to start and because the barrier to entry is so low. It's that much harder in order to get to a certain level of scale, like I truly believe that an agency beyond like 200k a month, 300k a month, it starts to become like it's diminishing returns as far as like the, the, the, the stress is concerned, and there are other models that are more suitable at that point.

Darren Lee: 2:36

So it's kind of like a gateway business you know, but at the same time it's not necessarily like it's for anyone. Does that make sense? You, if you started that and you were going from zero, you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily able to keep going up without anything's breaking, like things will inherently break over and over again oh yeah, and the minute you think that one thing is fixed, then something else breaks, and so on.

Jordan Platten: 2:57

But that's why it is so good, because you are forced to continually adapt and it just teaches good business practice.

Jordan Platten: 3:06

I mean, you'll probably be the same. You have friends in, let's say, e-com, and I have a great friend who built a very successful e-com brand and he got it to multi-millions on a monthly basis. But that business, when I have a conversation with him about his level of experience when it comes to building a business of depth, when it comes to managing loads of clients, managing loads of team, it's such, it's so much more of a simple model when we're talking about the drop shipping guys and cryptocurrency and so on, and those people quite often will struggle when they go to start another business because of the lack of no other way of putting it. Depth of business acumen you have to have to when it comes to running an agency. So normally the guys that run an agency and come from there first and then go into something like ecom or then go into something like sass or info or so on, are usually primed to succeed at a better rate why do you think, uh like a lot of agencies actually fail?

Jordan Platten: 4:02

though a lack of resilience is the number one thing. There's no doubt not skill um skill, do you say?

Darren Lee: 4:07

yeah. Would you think it's more like resiliency, or do you think it's more like a skill deficiency?

Jordan Platten: 4:13

the only skill deficiency I believe that would cause you to fail an agency is communication. If you're a shit communicator because you're an egomaniac, if you can't communicate with people, both clients and team, if you can't motivate a team and have them want to give their time and dedicate their life to you or that portion of their life, or if you can't build great relationships with your clients, then you're going to fail. But the marketing piece, the delivery piece, that's something that anybody can learn over a period of time.

Darren Lee: 4:44

Just want to take one quick break to ask you one question have you been enjoying these episodes? Because, if you have, I'd really appreciate if you subscribe to the channel so that more people can see these episodes and be influenced to build an online business this year. Thank you, dude, I have such a funny story for you on this. So I worked with a mentor on, like, how to understand your clients, so, like, what's their personality type, what's their personality trait, and like, who they kind of are. And there's like a grid, right, if you imagine x and y axis and you put ego on one side and you put, let's say, insecurity on the other axis, and then you start to position your clients who are high ego, decisiveness, low ego, indecisive, and then you find almost the, the modular between it. The reason why you do that is so that you know how to communicate to them, and what I had found was clients that were high ego I would often clash with, because I would be like, oh, we need to do xyz, and they would say, well, I need to do xyz, and it would be a conflict of interest.

Darren Lee: 5:44

And there was two things I did from there. Can you imagine, can you guess, what I did, I know so one. It was either learn and learn to become more empathetic, sympathetic, like more understanding, which I went on to do, or second was hire someone to do the communication. So my good mate Tom came in as like head of client success. Purely because those like I wouldn't even say difficult clients, but clients that are similar line to me in terms of, like our energy, I was not the best person to be positioned there and it took me three, four years to realize that skill and it was so interesting man. And my mate Tom was a teacher in Wales, so he understands how to work with difficult people and I think it's a very important thing because I looked it out myself and I was like I'm just not the best person at this.

Jordan Platten: 6:32

That's interesting and I feel that I think a lot of agency owners struggle with that, which is why they then struggle to because people aren't. There are many agencies that can deliver a good service in whatever service that they are in, but what people buy when they're working with an agency is someone they can trust in a good relationship. That's why they stay for a long time and that's why churn will stay low. There are that there's not a shortage of agencies, have client acquisition on lock and they can get new clients, but actually be able to retain the client and then get the thing that really helps you excel, which is get referrals and all of that Like that's a completely different story.

Darren Lee: 7:07

Let's double tap on that, right, because everyone is selling acquisition, but no one is teaching retention. But you and I watch your videos and like the focus that you put on retention in terms of reporting, being there with a client, by the way, if you're teaching, if you're doing coaching, this is equally the same, like how many touch points do you have effectively to get them the result, but then also to show them that you care? So you mentioned in one of your videos about that, how it's okay absolutely articulating the value, but then there's also a second effect here which is improving the relationship, like how do you?

Darren Lee: 7:38

think about that process.

Jordan Platten: 7:39

Yeah, it's interesting and I'm glad you picked up on that. I mean we literally award agencies for consistently generating exceptional results. Most people award agencies in the, I suppose, agency education space for making 100k, getting revenue levels and so on. But we know and we recognize very early that it was all about results. If you can't get results, then you're not going to be able to retain clients, and actually we've got a lot of people that have come to a certain point of ascension in their agency. The ultimate place that most agencies find themselves in is they don't actually need any client acquisition systems beyond a certain point because referrals just build a life of their own and so then it just comes about, you know, creating free lead magnets, giving value and so on, and then the agency just just I think. I think client acquisition strategies, outbound and paid within the agency model, broadly speaking, are a weapon for momentum and then when you gain the momentum as if your service is great and your ability to build a relationship is great then you will drive the business forward through that and um like, even for us in the agency, because obviously we still own affluent agency and we work with direct to consumer e-commerce brands, but we also have. We have like an info division. We actually just started a little lead gen department as well and content, so we've expanded over time.

Jordan Platten: 8:54

But what we do is we make sure that all of our key clients we'll take them out for dinner, we'll fly out to them, we'll build a good relationship with them. We try, and actually from the very early days we did this, and I don't know whether it was just because we were young and almost a little bit naive, I suppose, but we weren't. We had no business experience like many of us. We weren't surrounded by business owners, we didn't have any corporate mentality, and so it was always a very, very personal relationship with all the clients that we built. So so we've always gone the extra mile to make sure that our clients become our friends.

Jordan Platten: 9:24

And then there's that whole other layer where the clients know that you're doing everything that you possibly can to make them successful, and even if things aren't going perfect because they don't always go perfect they then at least trust you as a human and know you're on their side. And I think that's one thing that many agencies miss. Many agencies will over-promise to the client of a certain result. They don't bring the client in on the result itself, so they actually take ownership over too much of the result because there's so many variables.

Jordan Platten: 9:55

Like an ad agency, you're an ad agency but the client doesn't have a content creation capacity or the desire to create content, and so you can't put new creative iteration into the ad account. You're never going to get anywhere, it's not going to perform. Many agencies at that point won't address that to the client, won't be, will be afraid to have those difficult conversations that do strengthen the relationship, that do say hey, I'm trying to do my piece right here, but this is what you need to do and this is your piece of the puzzle and I'm here doing everything possibly can, but I need you to work with me on this and this is the way it's going to go. And that vulnerability, I suppose, is what strengthens relationships and we are unafraid to have, very matter of fact, vulnerable conversations that most agencies will think will increase churn, but in nine times out of 10 will decrease churn because they just know that you're in it with them and they're responsible just as much as you are it's a partnership.

Darren Lee: 10:49

I've had that exact same scenario like literally word for word example this week, which was I I categorize it like under the theory of constraints right. So let's say you want to get more sales or you want more coaching clients and you want to get them successful well, you need more sales, but to get more sales. Or you want more coaching clients and you want to get them successful Well, you need more sales. But to get more sales, you need more leads, and to get more leads, you need to create content. So a client wasn't able to create the content for us to be able to create YouTube videos, podcasts and so on to create the lead flow. And then the feedback was we're not getting leads. And I said, look, dude, like whatever that we have under the theory of constraints, we need to fix this issue up here, which is the content gap. Here's how we can do it and here's a seven page report on like the roadmap that we can put together. But we need to do two things One, identify that as the biggest constraint, and only when we've identified that's the biggest constraint, we can agree on the roadmap to solve it. And, as you said, like they're the tough decisions.

Darren Lee: 11:45

So you might be familiar with Sahil Bloom, so Sahil's a good friend of mine. He's a very famous line in his new book, which is every unresolved conversation and every different conversation carries a debt and that debt only increases through time until you have to pay it off and it actually increases in severity. But you have to pay it off and it actually increases in severity, but you have to pay it at some point. And it's just such a good reminder that you know you can try everything but you need to face those conversations. I think again to your point. That's what strengthens relationships 100.

Jordan Platten: 12:17

I couldn't agree more like ultimately, agencies are a relationship game and this is something you mentioned off camera with an agency, the minute there's an element of done for you. This is very different to info. When there's an element of done for you, the expectations are all of a sudden huge. It doesn't. You could be doing one. Let's say there's a scale of one to ten and you are doing you're done for you covers four out of ten, so there's six. Whatever that hypothetical thing is that someone else has to do, there's a there's a big gap. More that hypothetical thing is that someone else has to do there's a there's a big gap, more than than than the majority that someone else has to do. But just because you are contributing that 40% to the macro, you're at the expectation that you are the person that's going to be responsible for the overall success of the. Whatever the thing is you're trying to achieve is massive, whereas info because there it's, it's kind of I'm going to teach you, you're going to do it yourself that expectation people blame themselves if they're not successful. They will. They will take more ownership over that. The minute it's an agency based relationship, there's so much more pressure on the agency to be the sole entity responsible for the success of whatever you're trying to achieve. I just I think that people want someone else to blame for reality and I think that we don't have that problem. Most agencies have that problem because they fail to set very clear expectations from day one, because they're so obsessed with getting the sale and making the money that they think those expectations with getting the sale and making the money that they think those expectations will put the client off and, ironically, setting very clear expectations and actually pushing clients away and saying, just so, you know, these are the things that we can do, but these are the things we can't do and this is what we aren't going to do for you and what you have to do. Those conversations actually increase close rate because we are in this.

Jordan Platten: 14:08

You know everyone's talking about this like trust epidemic that we're in.

Jordan Platten: 14:11

I feel that completely and I've seen that and observed that across the industry over 10 years of being in the industry.

Jordan Platten: 14:16

We are definitely at an all-time low when it comes to trust and what most people do when there's a trust problem is they do the opposite of what needs to happen and they're just like, oh, we will guarantee this thing and we've got this risk reversal and we've got this, and they just go more, more, more, more of this over from the thing that feeds the trust crisis, whereas the smart guys are like now these are the things that can't happen and if you want that, then we're not the people for you.

Jordan Platten: 14:47

And actually, you know, just at the start of the call they say well, just so you know, we will only say yes to working with you and make an offer to you if we genuinely believe that we can help you, and if we don't, then we can just part ways from this and you can take some value away from this. Those people that are willing to have those conversations are the ones that are closing right now, whereas most people are feeding into the problem with the thing that got us here in the first place, which is massive over promising across a whole industry.

Darren Lee: 15:04

It's very interesting, right, because if you say you're going to do more, that's output related, but then this also ignores the fact about the outcome. People are promising, right, like how the fuck can you guarantee an outcome when you're looking blind at something from just a 30 minute call, like it's just irrational. You know and I say this a lot with a lot of the it depends on the framing. For us, it's like hey, we'll help you grow your YouTube channel and your podcast and everything, but we're doing it with the intention of getting good leads, not becoming famous. Does that make sense? We need to set that expectation, which is and it's also who you're for, right, we are for business owners. We're actually not for creators, and it's a very clear line that we actually try, said because, like I'm actually not, you're going viral guy, you know, I'm more like, yeah, we'll optimize it for the business. That's as far as we can go, and then we'll help you with all the other shit too. So it's a very interesting dilemma, right? Um, do you think? Uh, guarantees are bullshit?

Jordan Platten: 15:57

I don't think guarantees are bullshit. No, I think that for most people, they're a band-aid to a much bigger problem. It's like, uh, people think that for most people, they're a band-aid to a much bigger problem. It's like, uh, people think that they can create a guarantee. People put so much emphasis on, on on the offer, um, being the, the, the guarantee, the tangible result that you were promising people, um, and not enough emphasis on actually improving their ability to get to that driven result. It's like what are the words that I can say to make people think, oh shit, I need this thing, rather than like actually taking a step back and being like what's realistic? What can I actually achieve? What can I do? And if I'm not happy with where I am, because I think actually you know most people in agency info any business with these, where they've, you know they've read $100 million offers back to front. Most people, if they actually did a success rate test on their guarantees, I think would be shocked at how many or how few people actually meet the guarantees because of this huge list of contingencies that they have to meet to get them.

Jordan Platten: 17:02

I remember I was the first person at least that I knew of when I did it when I launched and you can still see this video on YouTube. When I first launched the Affluent Academy and I rebranded from the social media marketing school it must be like five years ago now I, from my knowledge, launched the first ever guarantee in the online education space and the guarantee would be laughed at now. It was one client in 30 days guaranteed. You will sign your first client in 30 days guaranteed as an agency owner. Back then I was so proud of that and I was like this is the first piece of momentum that people are going to gain.

Jordan Platten: 17:33

If you promised one client in 30 days, right now, people will be like what the hell is that? Because meanwhile you've got other people like you're going to get 20 clients in 30 days. You're going to get, you know, quadruple your revenue in three months, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Because we've just got into this rat race. So guarantees are bullshit from that perspective, because the world hasn't changed since I did that. That was just what I truly believed was realistic for someone who hadn't had a business before that could start a business based on. You know the average that I'd seen across all the clients that I worked with and I think that's an interesting form. It's like we've got lost in trying to one-up each other it's like lost in the sauce, right?

Darren Lee: 18:11

it's just that that's kind of where the online business space and why I respect you so much is like it's always one person over the other. You know it's. How can this person just outdo another person? And that's not even to do with the results, man, it's just to do with the marketing on the front end. Have you kind of felt that yourself, even personally, because you've had the agency for so long, you've had the coaching and like there's only so many results. That's even possible for just a fucking person, right? Whereas if we're in the space where everyone's like trying to outshine each other, how has that kind of impacted you, even like personally?

Jordan Platten: 18:45

it's something that I found very frustrating over the years because it's a uh, you know, you hear that that saying, if you can't beat them, join them. And has the business over the years been impacted by other people with bigger, bolder claims and progressively and that increasing? Yes, there's no doubt about that and actually I will. I will always stand by this. I'm a. I'm a person of ethics and I and always ethics over money. I've been in business for long enough to not have to worry about money at all and I've got great cash flow in the businesses there.

Jordan Platten: 19:19

I undoubtedly would be two to five times richer than I am today if I dropped my ethics and played the game that everybody else played, and that's a frustrating place to be because you're always going to be cross-analyzed with the people that were prepared to do that and people always remember people for the great things that they did, and we live in an era that glamorizes money over ethics and will place that in a higher place in society and so on, and I think that is a shame. It's something that maybe used to have of me, but I couldn't give a shit about. Now I think actually it's now come to the place where I feel quite smug in the fact that I've been able to retain that and say that I never fell victim to that. But I've definitely observed over the years us trying to compete with people that are prepared to do and say anything just to make money, just to get that little edge.

Darren Lee: 20:29

So, before you came, myself and Lara were looking at some videos of ranking SMA gurus and you were the most ethical on top from some video reviews. Good Guys I put you on A to F category and you were a for uh. Most of them, a lot of guys, were 16 years old, probably a job with beforehand.

Jordan Platten: 20:48

I will. I'm glad, I mean, I think, I think, like I think that you could argue well why. Why does it all matter if you were working towards the same thing, which is like making a great deal of cash? But, um, to me, I know that I will look back on this period of my life and be very glad that I did, and I will be. Why would I act in a way that goes against the way that I would want to raise my children and the way that I would want other people to be around me, and I'll be very glad that I stuck to those principles be around me and I'll be very glad that I stuck to those principles.

Darren Lee: 21:28

So, as I said to you before, like I'm in a lot of the big programs and shit with like some big influencers and stuff and myself and some other guys who are there made an observation of their business. A lot of these guys have got like 500k on, 600k on yeah, for different industries, maybe could be info and they got there with literally no background in business. It's fucking crazy, dude. Like a lot of guys have no sales team, no tracking, no customer success, nothing. And then the feedback was we were at dinner about a week ago. A lot of guys were at my mastermind. They were talking about this and they're like how?

Darren Lee: 21:57

And my hypothesis was I said, behind closed doors on those sales calls, you know that they're guaranteeing everything their dream, outcoming absolutely everything. You know it's like a 19 year old high ticket closer that's in shanggu and he's saying yeah, yeah, no worries, yeah, you can retire, mom, get to 10k a month, you can have my rolex when you get there too. Like you know, that's happening so much that that's the reason why like programs have a bad name, agencies have a bad name, whatever insert fucking any business model. Um, that was my hypothesis from it, because a lot of people they're not business owners, a lot of them aren't and they're not like someone like you who's done so many years of this right content, sales, marketing, delivery like the full spectrum, like end to end of a business, over and over again. A lot of them just have attention from TikTok or whatever and then run that into programs.

Darren Lee: 22:48

Even that fucking ice guy Ashton whatever his name was apparently the whole idea behind his personal brand program. Apparently it was all just bullshit. It was just like average basic bullshit advice. Did he care about the client success in there? No, it was shit, dude. He was too busy running with fucking dogs on the road right. And there's like this balance we talked about this before hit recording which is like how much time do I give into my business and over delivering and, you know, over coaching and all this kind of stuff, versus like doing the stuff that got people to get there in the first place.

Jordan Platten: 23:19

It's a very interesting dilemma right it is, and I think you have to if you are the kind of person that wants that, has principle and believes we all know the way things should be based on what is morally correct. Many we all know, regardless whether you choose to turn a blind eye and you pretend to the outside world that your line is here and other people are here because they're scared or some bullshit thing that you're saying, we all know what is right. And to me, if you are the kind of person that does have that principle and you want to hold yourself to an ethical high standard, you have to accept that the world will always glamorize even the people that don't have that, and so you have to do it for yourself. It has to be about what you believe to be true and it has to be for you as an individual, and I just think success tastes a little bit sweeter when you know you've done it the right way.

Darren Lee: 24:15

Yeah, and, as you said, right, the, the metric that you're optimizing for. It's funny, right I all. I often heard this phrase, which is, like, stripe screenshots only impress people that are impressed by stripe. Stripe screenshots, you know, and it's the same approach like, your customers are a reflection of you, the clients that you have in your agency plus in your coaching. They've come because they want to be their mini use. They're going through that cycle of becoming you and you probably hear that yourself, or a lot of people resonate with your story when you were getting started.

Darren Lee: 24:43

But I think it's a big difference here between like, who's an actual business owner in a space and then who's just like I call it a wi-fi cowboy. Like who's an actual cowboy. And if I was to look at like who's like a proper business owner, you know surge, obviously you know surge. Well, serge kateri, if you speak to surge, he just thinks differently. He just looks at a problem and he would just say something and he'd be like yeah, you do it that way for this way, because of this reason, because I also watched some fucking six hour VC talk on AI startups in this way and it's like he's clearly not an online business, bro, and he's actually more like an actual entrepreneur and you can just see that right.

Darren Lee: 25:20

You can see that in trades and I think if you get into something with that approach, then you'll crush it, because then you'll know what you need to do morally and then also like tactically at the same time. So anything else on the retention piece this is so interesting, like if we were to separate this conversation in terms of acquisition retention. We started with retention. What else have you been able to do in your business to be able to over deliver and get amazing results for people and almost manage a downside when things aren't good?

Jordan Platten: 25:50

I think you have to own as much of the problem as possible. Um, and so certainly in the agency getting involved, I mean we just started off just as like a meta ad agency and then we fought only more of the problem, meant, okay, now let's start doing email and doing this and start doing that, like all these different service stacks, and actually thought owning more of the problem meant, okay, now let's start doing email and it's doing this and it's not doing that like all these different service stacks, and actually it's more of owning more of the problem from and it's it's actually acting as if we are the business owner ourselves and being a partner inside of the company. So when we are working with, let's say, a direct to consumer e-commerce brand, we're getting involved in the financials on a much deeper level than just the ads that we're running. We're getting involved in conversations on their contribution, margin and the product and manufacturing and so on, and so that, from a logical standpoint, is one way to deepen the relationship with clients is like, just own more of the problem. Like, think about the things that they are thinking about that keep them up at night, that make them stress. So if your service does go well, if your ads do start running, what are the other problems that could arise inside? Like we mentioned earlier, you solve sales and then teams are problems, have team, and then you know clients are an issue, and so on and so forth. So if you, through repetition of working with an industry for a long time, you start to understand the patterns of problems that will arise when you solve one thing, and so preempting that and getting involved in that gives you a lot of longevity because it means you're just, you're ultimately multiple steps ahead.

Jordan Platten: 27:16

Giving people future when you work with them is another big one. So working in phases so you might have like, for example, when we're working with an agency owner, there'll be like 10 phases of growth and agencies will come to us at different phases, but they'll always know okay, we're working on this one phase right now, we're going to get you to this stage and we need to achieve this, this, this and this in order to ascend you there. But then they know that there are multiple other phases ahead of them and having those kind of frames for agency and for whatever that may be having future, pacing the situation that they are in right now gives people future and means that there's always something else to work towards, and that's not just a good tactic from the perspective of you're obviously going to retain more people if they have future, but it also means that you're never running before you can walk with a client based on their situation. So defining the situation that they're in in business makes it much easier for them to understand where they're at as well.

Darren Lee: 28:10

And again, just like that whole authority piece and increases I think I've only really learned that from the coaching, which was that obviously people can't just jump in because magically have all their answers solved and I think, if anything, it's critically located. I think I'm doing that more on the on the coaching side versus on the agency side, because the agency side for us a lot of it is BAU. It's like, yes, we need to get better numbers, get better results, but it's like a system that's like always running Right, um, and we often get handed what we're handed. This with this piece of content we got to make, do what we need to do. But I think I completely agree with you. I think, even critically, looking and reflecting on my own scenario, it's like if we can not only take care of their marketing but then also the sales side, that would make us insanely more valuable, and then also even how they deliver their own services, you know, their own uh, coaching and consulting and everything like how, and we do that to be fair. But I just mean like a phased approach, because I always compare that to our higher ticket program.

Darren Lee: 29:07

It's leads, leads, sales delivery, lead, sales delivery. And then someone will come to us and they'll either have a delivery problem easy fix, a sales problem, easy fix. Or leads problem, easy fix. For content, does that make sense? So everything is a fucking framework. Right, russell brunson was correct like name a framework, put a framework on it. But I think that allows people to tactically look at something and you might find this quite interesting too. I learned it from jeremy pogue of a podcast with him on tuesday, which is, you know, you almost want to give someone a map and then show them in the map, like in the lucid chart, where are they? And then on a sales call you can say, okay, you're here, stage two. We actually need to bring you back to stage one. Here's stage four. And then that map is transferable to 100 clients 100 customers, whatever that may be.

Jordan Platten: 29:53

That's exactly what I'm referring to. With the phases, many people will think that they're further along in their growth journey than they actually are, and when you're the person to educate them that they're actually closer to this point and like. I don't want people to misunderstand this, because what this isn't about is about like mastering manipulation and keeping people for a longer time. What this is about is demonstrating your knowledge and authority on a certain field through hyper understanding of where someone actually is, more than their own understanding, because most people think they're bigger, better, more established, more skillful, more worthy of success and where they should be than they are, and so bringing people back to a reality point and you being the person that allowed them to understand that in a diplomatic, rational and logical way, where you've got all these other people that you have helped to send through. That is a big power play and allows people to trust in that.

Jordan Platten: 30:51

It's like when you bring team members into the business. Team members have to be sold on a vision. They have to know where they're going inside of the company at least senior team members or the guys that you just bring an A player in and you know they're not going to be satisfied in that role for a long time. So they have to have some kind of a future, and I think that's one thing that most people lack in an agency is they will sign up a client for a very transactional thing we're going to run your ads, we're going to generate you leads, you're going to get X amount money per month. And then they do it for six months and they wonder why the client gets itchy feet and gets sold by someone else who promised them this other thing that's more shiny, and so on.

Jordan Platten: 31:28

And it's just because there's more of a vision there, like people get used to that you might have the. Your clients have a lead generation problem, let's say. But if you weren't able to help them with that sales problem that they're ultimately going to have when they get an abundance of leads, they're going to look to someone else who can solve that problem for them. And then you've just lost the ltv, your, your attention's dropped. So why wouldn't you have that and create that future for them so they can have a vision of working with you for a long time?

Darren Lee: 31:59

spark so much in my head, man, I think that's so that that was, as I said to you with our education, why we put in the second offer, why we started putting in sales reps, because people couldn't close the door, let alone a fucking six k, paid in full right, so we had to show them elegantly how to do it. But that's also a component for the agency is that can we bring those people in, leverage our partnerships and everything. So it's like different level, different devil, like you learn this shit through trial by fire and it's like all right, how can we just continuously improve that ongoing? Now my question for you in this is like how do you manage this? How do you manage all the clients you have? How do you manage their roadmaps? And even you know full transparency?

Darren Lee: 32:37

I feel like sometimes I'm not as much on the ball specifically with people's accounts because I have people who are right, but that kind of gives me a little bit of anxiety. Sometimes I'm like, oh, maybe I should be, but it's literally 24 hours in a fucking day, right, like we have 115 active clients across everything. No, no, across everything. The high ticket coaching program, which is, bear in mind, is very close proximity to me, um, and the agency is about 115 now active that are paying monthly, which is a lot, you know. So how do you do that.

Jordan Platten: 33:10

So I will not sit here and take credit for managing any of the clients inside of the agency, because Joe, my business partner in the agency, who is incredible, runs the entire business and so he's managing the clients. He's firefighting with any issue. Well, he's not managing the clients. Our client success manager will be doing that, and with account managers and so on. So that's the answer, right, yeah, you need that middle management, and then you need someone senior in the company who's going to stand in between you and middle management, ideally to be out of it. I haven't spoken to a client in the agency for years, but that's good though that literally just means that like it's working yeah, and and so that's.

Jordan Platten: 33:48

That's the situation. On the agency side. I spend a lot more time with the coaching clients and again it's the same situation. It's having a team that people can speak to. They have. It doesn't feel that manic for some reason.

Darren Lee: 34:20

Maybe we just have good systems. That's what I mean. Right, you've fixed the holes a thousand times over. So when someone says, how do I open up a Google Ads account, you have the training plus the CSM to resolve that issue.

Jordan Platten: 34:31

We do a lot of one-to-one. We have a whole client. This is one thing that we do very differently to lots of education companies is we have a whole client success team that aren't just your conventional client success managers that are just managing communication. They are one-to-one coaches who will work with people very intimately In our B2C. So getting people to start an agency even more so than in our established agency, because there's actually more one-to-one In fact, every single week they're jumping on a one-to-one call for the first 90 days Because this is something. It costs us a lot of money to develop and build that client success team.

Jordan Platten: 35:15

Let's say you were getting someone from zero to ten came up in their agency and it really just came off the back of just this little annoyance. In my mind there's always been this thing and like, no matter what niche you're in whether it's agency, it's amazon, fba, it's drop shipping, whatever I don't care who you are and what you do if you've got a biz op offer where you're helping people go from a consumer to a business owner, your actual stick rate people putting in the work and doing the thing and actually achieving the outcome that they bought in the first place is incredibly low, because most people are like, oh, that's a bit hard, I'm not going to bother doing that. And I was just like how do I solve this problem? How do I actually get? Because they have the dream. They obviously want to be successful. How do I stop people making their first couple of cold calls on their own and being like that's shit, I'm gonna go to this thing and go on to another shiny object? And so we got this client success team that we built and every single week they are working with them.

Jordan Platten: 36:00

We actually took the model from um I don't forget the name something it's a commit action. Are you familiar with commit action? It's an accountability coaching business and you essentially work with someone and they will. You'll set your goals and then they will essentially um. We model similar to this. They will essentially set your goals and every single week you will catch up with someone and they will then hold you accountable to what you said you were going to achieve last week.

Jordan Platten: 36:25

And it's it creates that. You know, when you have a personal trainer in the gym, you've got a personal trainer. You feel guilty if you're not working out in between that time. You want something to show for it. You don't want to feel like a slob and you've skipped, and so on. Just having someone there creates that pressure for you to put in the work, and so we wanted to recreate that, almost like having a personal trainer in business where every single week they've got. Okay. Last week you said you were going to do X, Y, Z, whatever. Where are you at with that stuff? Okay, we didn't achieve it. Why did we not?

Jordan Platten: 36:50

Let's coach through that process, let's review your calls and so on, and then over the first, what we have now decided is 90 days. Someone needs that Like just that's enough time for them to go through the transitional phase of like consumer to business owner. But I mean, I don't know anyone else that does that. They just let them do their thing, which is fine if you're okay with having a large amount of drop-off. But I know these people come in having big dreams and I just hate the idea that they come in and then that you one reason they're not successful is the most in no other way of putting it pathetic thing that could stand in their way, which is just not having the balls to stick at it for a long enough time and then people create the most bullshit excuses of all time, right, whether it's coaching or agency in general.

Darren Lee: 37:38

Like they'll, they'll focus on some weird external thing which is the reason why they're not getting goal, you know. So, again, that's a limiting belief that steps in their way and, dude, we have a client right now, as soon as I do a few one-to-ones of these people too, like on top of our CSMs, and this guy was super experienced, 10 years with a very senior trading company. He has like the experience out the fucking back door. But the guy was too afraid to hit record on a conversation and I literally had to sit with him on Thursday evening, laying on Thursday night, and say like look, man, you've all this information in your head is so valuable to people that are just getting into like the engineering space. You need to get that out there and no one is going to say that you're a loser and you're a beginner. If anything, he was super experienced. He's going to sit down and record it and by the end of 60 minutes he's like all right, I'm going to record three or four videos. I'm like all right, done, but it was that gap that's stopping him right. But the attentiveness that you have with the CSMs are fantastic. My mate, dakota Robertson, he's a very cool model which you might find helpful.

Darren Lee: 38:40

They have like a weekly tracker, check-in tracker. So they fill out a form like give, what's your goal, what are you focused on? What's a bottleneck? One to 10. If anyone's like below, like a four, they send the data to Airtable. Then it fires like a fucking notification as API notification and flags the client as like a risk or whatnot. And then the CSM will come in and be like all right, what's the problem here? Like what can we do? And also just people who are too lazy to do it. They also flag when people don't complete the forms. So on a Sunday, even if they don't complete it, they'll hit. Then they'll hit on Wednesday again. It's like Wednesday, monday, wednesday and then a check-in. You know. So that's the only way that you can really fucking do it right, we do a similar thing.

Jordan Platten: 39:27

We have we bought a system, we built a system, we have an air table system, but we have a notion, front end for it and we just call it our strike system. So there are things that identify if somebody is an at-risk client because they haven't turned up to a call or they haven't achieved a certain thing, and then we obviously give them that, that attention, which is you learn that from agency, right?

Darren Lee: 39:46

you learn the the problem solving model, which is like we're not getting this problem, we're not getting a solution and we're not able to solve it. For this reason, how the hell do we communicate effectively? Because I think what happened even in my scenario sometimes I would say we need to do xyz, all down here and you overwhelm someone, and then they look for that as an excuse as to why they're not doing it too right. It's interesting, as you said, like most people think they're much further along in the journey than what they truly are, and then when you get them to sit down and look at it but this has all just been retention dude and like what's ironic is I said this to will brown, I had lunch with him yesterday, uh, and I'd like to get your thoughts on this we were mapping out what a million a month would look like and I would, and I was saying that a million a month would look like and I would, and I was saying that a million a month is actually only 400K in new sales, because if your product is good, you should be making like 400K in sales, plus the backend will kick in of retainer clients plus your coaching clients all coming back in and the velocity will mean that you just need a good product and they won't even go product.

Darren Lee: 40:52

You can just get more traffic to it, like he literally asked me. He was like what's your biggest bottleneck? And I was like we just need more traffic because the products get results. You know, and it was very interesting conversation and we were trying to like map it out because, like his last company, he was pretty close to it and uh, it's not like new stuff. New clients 24, seven.

Jordan Platten: 41:13

Yeah, agree, agree. And that new stuff, new clients, 24 7. Yeah, agree, agree. And that's the part that most people have missing it's actually being as self-observant as possible. It's the thing I had that wrong for six years probably.

Darren Lee: 41:24

That was will's problem with his last business. Ask him about it. So the only difference between his last business, this business, is that he's a reoccurring in this one and and I said I was like how didn't? Because I come from the agency world. So I was like how didn't you have people on retainer or like you know an upsell or whatever? And he was he. He honestly said I didn't, I didn't think about it. I was like you had fucking 15 employees. Not one person taught of like uh, having them on like a some sort of retainer model.

Jordan Platten: 41:50

And he was like no, yeah, I, I sold, I sold about two and a half thousand people on lifetime access and, and, and it was like lifetime access to coaching calls as well.

Jordan Platten: 42:07

Um, which is which is which is manic, but I, I debate this like all the time where people brought, like all the time I just thought that was what people did and that's what I did and and we, we managed to get around it over time and people get that, still kept that, keep access to the program and they've got that. But we changed the coaching and so we got around it and we had a little bit of fallout around it, but the business just the business wouldn't exist if we continue to do that. Like you can't sign yourself away for for life. There's not enough people in the world.

Darren Lee: 42:38

It doesn't work dude, it was so funny. It's in our mastermind. Uh, the guys that had that scenario, they were giving like lifetime access and stuff, and I have a clip online you can see it which is, um, and I get your thoughts on this the duration of. Just because you're in a program longer doesn't mean you're going to get more results, because it's like the. It's like parkinson's law time will expand to how much is available. So if it's infinite, they're like ah yeah, I'll open up my google ads account next month, next month. So we had a 12-month program. We brought it down to six same price, nothing, and results stayed exact. Stayed exact, same. But the I love to get your feedback on this Um, the.

Darren Lee: 43:16

The kicker with this was, let's say, it's AK or 20 K for six months. After six months, you have an option you can ascend, you can stay in, which is like a thousand a month or 500 a month, depending on the program, or you can leave, and if you leave and you've got amazing results, fantastic, you're able to tell more people if you leave. But it was like how do we create a scenario whereby people can just naturally move between programs and they can stay in the one that they want to, if they want to stay there longer, and then they just pay. And it's like a very fair exchange you stay, you pay to stay, you ascend, perfect. If you leave, that means you've done our job and it was like okay, why don't we do this? And that was what we were asked is like why? Don't? Someone asked was like why would you do that? And I literally just said to make more money.

Jordan Platten: 43:58

Yeah, and also, but it does increase. So it's very interesting. You still on six months now, but they're both six five, so once a month rolling.

Darren Lee: 44:06

So so for the if, for the ak program it's 500 a month to stay in after six months 8K for the six months and 500 a month.

Jordan Platten: 44:13

Yeah.

Darren Lee: 44:14

Or you ascend, okay, and then you can do a payment plan for the 20K program Okay, because we have good trust. And then the other one is 20K and after six months it's a thousand to stay in and like what's so funny is because we teach whatever. And then the feedback we get on sales calls is like so after six months, I just got to give you a thousand dollars and you'll review my sales calls. I'm like, yeah, bro, yeah, it's chill. Oh, my god, I'll review them. I'll check the transcripts with ai and they're like really.

Jordan Platten: 44:39

I was like yeah yeah, okay, I mean that's a banging offer. I mean just as a caveat side note here, sales call reviews for a thousand dollars a month. It's a no-brainer. It's like the single highest leverage thing that any sales team can do and 200.

Darren Lee: 44:54

Imagine if they had 200 calls in a month and they, well, yeah, and you're doing all that with ai? No, no. They will basically like, they'll hand like a handful over and then I will look for transcripts and I'll be like, give me the transcripts, we'll put it through ai and we build out these like super autistic, like fucking different ai prompts. We'll get very, very detailed reports and then I'll go in, I'll look at the objection handling, I'll go and review them and all it's all scored. So it's logical. Plus you know the actual action. And then I can even show you we have this huge report and it's all scored down. I'll hand it back to them, we'll go through it together and then I'll also help 50 other people at some time, and it's just this massive wheel of momentum and leverage which llm handles that much volume of transcript uh chat gbt if you upload the pdf.

Jordan Platten: 45:40

Awesome the doc. Very cool, man, that's cool. I built a similar system and I I got stuck on that part and got distracted with something else, so I was gonna buy gong and stuff, right.

Darren Lee: 45:49

So I had a call with Gong it was so funny, they're minimum four people, okay and it was like 15K. It was like 15K. And I was on a call and they were like, yeah, it's 15K and you can review your sales calls, and this is just for enterprise sales, it's not for coaching. And I was like, okay, 15k for no one told for the year, for no one told for the year for a software that is not optimized for the offer that we're having. And I literally looked at a woman. I was like I'm just going to build in Chachi between 15 minutes. I was literally the logic same with even a sales, uh, the sales management. There's a very big company in the space. You work with them and I also work with them. I closed, yeah, and I the guys are here, by the way, they're racing volley I had a call with their sales team and it was like 10k and I was like, guys, I already have this shit, like I actually already have it, and I just fucking press a button, chat, gpt.

Darren Lee: 46:37

And I said it to them. I was like, here's what we have already. And uh, so that's that's interesting around ai development, which is like, how easy is it for someone who would have a quarter of a brain to build themselves? Because, like, if you know sales, hopefully I fucking know sales um, it was very easy for me to see what the problem I was trying to solve and then to use ai to do it. That's, I think that's the only risk I see.

Jordan Platten: 46:59

To like ai companies, yeah, is if someone has a brain to do themselves agree, agree, but uh, I think that it is less about and I want to come back to your, your point just a moment ago on like the on the month, yeah, yeah, because, well, I'll just finish that point. Actually, uh, what you've done is exactly what we did. We went from 12 months to six months and then we basically have a similar like 1k monthly rolling. So so what you're doing is exactly what we're doing and we saw and in that, in doing six months, we saw a spike in results because the pressure that people have to put. So it's a, it's a win-win for everyone, win for the clients, win for us. So, on, ai companies, um, I think that is a problem on an individual client basis, but it's not a threat to the ai company itself, because and most people will pay for convenience, and I think sass is just as much about brand and community as it is about product itself- yeah, 100.

Darren Lee: 47:50

if you think about sass, it's like running a low ticket offer, you know because of the price, you know the churn is and most people pay for convenience.

Jordan Platten: 47:57

There will always be smart people like you that will go ahead and build a solution and analyze it themselves. Until what has to happen in the AI SaaS space is these companies have to start building a moat. They have to start building their own, what I see as mid-tier proprietary tech, which will be the bridge between an LLM that they're leveraging, because LLMs even by VC firms are being viewed at. I thought and my concern with AI software was that LLMs like ChatGPT, companies that depend on them and so on the companies that depend on them will be on will. The companies that depend on them will be looked in a negative light because it's like there's so much dependency on an external software. Vc firms are looking at a company depending on ChatGPT as an econ brand is on Shopify. You know it's just a technology and it's just a given and it's, at least for now. That's just the presumed, it's just the back-end technology, which is a presumed. That's fine.

Jordan Platten: 49:00

So where do you then create more um ip? There will be a gap. I think that gap will be in creating uh uh machine learning models. So let's say you, as, let's say, a company like gong um, have um, their own system that reviews sales calls and so on. On an enterprise level, gong is a company that have followed their growth for a long time and done insanely well. For anyone that hasn't seen Gong's growth journey, it's mental. But what Gong do have is their own internal machine learning systems, which will then learn between and whether or not that's just a great sales mechanism, I don't know, know, I haven't used it that will learn between all the clients that are being used and learn on your account. So, for example, your clients have been using it for six months.

Jordan Platten: 49:38

The, the model that is critiquing the sales call, will self-learn and get better at critiquing the sales calls and therefore you'll get better output with the input that is possible for someone like yourself to build.

Jordan Platten: 49:50

But if a business owner you're doing it because you need to create the solution to sell to someone else, the business owner is doing it for themselves. It's a huge amount of work if they're then looking to make it that sophisticated. So I think the moat is created through machine learning systems and then having the data across thousands of clients to make it better, and that's what you're selling. You're selling the fact that your ai is better than everyone else's ai because everyone else's is a surface level prompt which may be great and have context and experience, but it's surface level and it doesn't have the context of all of the other, uh, all of the other thousands of clients that they have and has kind of learned over time, that's what I was concerned about with the valuation of them, because, uh, of course, it is a ton of companies that are coming out that are building their own lms and it was completely proprietary.

Darren Lee: 50:39

But the ones that are leveraging chat, gbt or fucking claude or whatever were they going to be at risk as a result? That was my only consideration, but it sounds like there's like a hybrid approach with that.

Jordan Platten: 50:51

Yeah, I don't know I mean none of us know like I don't think we can possibly predict where it's going to go, but at least at the moment it's just a presumed thing. Like I just like. What is the benefit of creating your own llm? I had a massive. I had a conversation last week with a huge company that have their own llm and they're're going to be leading the. I'm not going to mention them, but they had you'd be able to reverse engineer it. They had a $220 million investment pre-product. It's like Google, ai founders, silicon Valley. They're going to be leading the AI agent field where you put in a prompt, takes over your computer type thing, and then you will spend a whole day working on your behalf that kind of prompt. So the the evolution of a standard llm. But what is the benefit of having your own proprietary llm if you are only just simply using it as a component of your business?

Jordan Platten: 51:47

Your business is what is is the thing that you're trying to achieve with that as that, as a just a tool. It's like e-commerce brands when Shopify first came out, trying to create their own Shopify. Why do that? Your product is the product that you are selling. It's not the tech. So it's just a tech and I think only because it's new we think it's a vulnerability, but it's just going to become the tech. Eventually there will only be two or three llms that people actually use, bro, it's like uh, using chrome.

Darren Lee: 52:16

Like your website, your web app is hosted on chrome, exactly you're not building a web browser for your website exactly.

Jordan Platten: 52:23

You're not creating this web browser so you can open my website.

Darren Lee: 52:26

You're not creating happening I guess the only critique on that is just the fact that a company that's coming in to value it would think that is this something that sits on top or is it something that owns their tech? Because I think it's from the angle of do you own your tech or not? I guess do you own your proprietary tech?

Jordan Platten: 52:43

But they are buying your customers and they're buying your brand equity.

Darren Lee: 52:47

But some people buy tech, though, do you get me?

Darren Lee: 52:49

Of course, that's what I mean, and that will increase your valuation exactly so like you know, if you're like a young guy who's building like a micro sas or whatever, sometimes it could be just the tech that you have is seen as a threat to a competitor, so people just buy it. There's like, oh yeah, just like. I'm saying this because when I worked at revolute, we used to do that, man, like we would look in the market to see who would have some sort of like money, market money, uh, market fund tech, and they would just nip, nip, nip, and then we do a lot of integrations. Revolut was a very funny company to work at because they owned nothing. They were a shell. It's a shell company and they would buy data which is completely like as if from vendors. So they would go to, like, uh, morgan stanley, they'd go to MSCI, we'd buy market data. Then we'd buy currency data dude, so we'd buy like the latest currency of like fucking GBT or whatever GBP, british pound and then we just have this shell company with a bunch of tech that was integrated with it and it was very interesting to observe. Now, obviously, revolut's worth like $20 billion still. So they obviously did well.

Darren Lee: 53:52

But that was my first awakening into fuck. You don't actually need to know tech that well to build something very successful, because whenever we would look to build something, it was so interesting, I would build something very simple, dude, I'd be like a news feed for stocks and it would be like okay, I use these components. How it would look who has the data? Let's ring the japanese fucking bank. See, do they have the data? You'd ring them, find a price, you'd be on a retainer like an agency service and that was it.

Darren Lee: 54:22

Funnily, how I got into agencies was because of that. I used to be the buyer, so I would have to do proposals. It wasn't adding heavy, but it was, for the most part, proposals. We'd have to go to five different service providers. They would pitch, we'd do a demo, they would come in with their pitch and they would exactly operate like an agency. So this is a tech company selling to a tech company their data, and it would be a service provider, otherwise known as a vendor, and it would be fine. It would literally be 5k a month, 3k a month, 2k a month for a tiny piece of data and it's the same. As you said, your first thing at the start of the conversation was when you learn how to build an agency or a service providing business. It feeds into everything else. This is enterprise fucking software. We're buying at scale for tens of millions of customers and it's the same shit as running as getting a Google Ads contract over the loon.

Jordan Platten: 55:16

I think there's a huge amount of opportunity and money to be made in micro SaaS in the AI space and I think there's a three-year window for it. I think in three years' time things are going to get all kind of fucked up. I mean, I think in the short term, I think there's a lot of money to be made in those businesses, whilst things are super inflated and and vc is loving that, because those kind of companies can have like massive cash flow as well but there'll always be another thing though right, like tech is never going anywhere.

Darren Lee: 55:44

Right same with services. Right, there'll always be services just to make cash flow. But I mean like and I'm saying this from someone who came up in the fintech era um, like I don't know where, you're not familiar with it, but like the neo banks in london, I was in the investment banks when the neo banks were starting monzo n26, all this kind of shit that came, and then, like crypto came, and then, like, now it's like ai is coming. Now, of course, you want to strike while the fires are fucking hot and you don't want to sleep on it 100. But I'm saying that, like, tech is always going to be getting more advanced, and if you're not a potato, you should. You should be stamping your foot there. Do you not think there's a window? Of course, everything is cyclical.

Jordan Platten: 56:26

Yeah, but I mean just at point. Things are going to self-engineer and at that point I think, I believe that online business will roll up into big conglomerates over the next 10 years and I think that online business as we know it will cease to exist.

Darren Lee: 56:43

What Tell me.

Jordan Platten: 56:46

That's what I believe to be true.

Darren Lee: 56:47

In what way?

Jordan Platten: 56:48

I cannot see a way at the rate that AI is growing right now. Have you seen the ai 2027 prediction? I would recommend you having a look at that and, for anyone who's watching this as well, there's a few like scaremongering bits in there, but there's a prediction that is written by um, open, ai researchers, harvard university ai professors, etc. Like very credible people and just on their prediction of how quickly things are going to go and by 2027 they believe that we're going to be a place where we have superhuman um, ai, as has superhuman ability in coding in, in in workflow, in anything that we possibly do, superhuman being better than any human can do achieve right now, in any online-based web application, from a development to practically completing a task, to copywriting, whatever that may be by 2027. And then at that point, companies will inevitably have every role in the business that isn't customer-facing. Ai to some degree will be some kind of agent, because it won't make any sense not to.

Jordan Platten: 57:56

So, just as a precursor to this, go high level huge company attended our awards evening a couple of weeks ago in London. 1500 employees across that business, huge, they said their single biggest threat and the thing that they are worried about the most is young tech startups who are built using AI from the start. Because when you're a company at the size that Go High Level are now worth billions, but you've got 1,500 employees, the path that you have to go through to go from 1500 employees to rebuilding, essentially in a completely new era where other people are going to be able to build tools like GoHighLevel at so much cheaper, so much faster, and so on, it's like Slack.

Jordan Platten: 58:46

Slack is internally built by anyone Exactly, and so it will then become about brand, it will then become a community, and so on and so forth. That will be the single most important thing, like in business in general. But if, anyway, coming back to the main point, if people are, then most of their workload is. So by 2027, it's predicted that 90 of all workflows will be you'll be able to use ai for them online. So if, at that point, that's our first progression, then most we will end up eliminating the majority of the team that we have, apart from the people that have really demonstrated that they have huge intrinsic value as a human to to bring to the company. Aka, they have great ideas, they're good communicators, they're creative, exactly. Um, and so then where do we go from there? Well, that weeds out a huge part of the market because everybody's super efficient, everybody's like there's, the options are very clear, everybody's delivering a good service.

Jordan Platten: 59:39

At that point, because, unless you're a bad communicator, because everyone's going to deliver, if you're in any kind of marketing based business, if you're running ads, if you're, if you're, your content is something to be debated. Um, with enough context, ai will be better at content than we are. It'll be far better. It knows humans, it knows what makes us tick, it can cross-analyze algorithms and what makes things viral, it will be able to do that at a much faster rate. Mr Beast I saw in an interview not too long ago was talking about how they grew that channel. There was four of them, just 18 hours a day. They were just analyzing youtube channels and they were just analyzing thumbnails, analyzing titles, analyzing videos, analyzing hooks, and that is essentially what ai can do much faster. Put that in with something like quantum computing and we can't even imagine the rate at which things can be analyzed and the input from the creative with the experience to know what to look at exactly because the end, the output, is only as valuable as the input.

Jordan Platten: 1:00:32

Right and how you look at the data and how?

Darren Lee: 1:00:35

yeah the out. Yes, you have to know what good output is.

Jordan Platten: 1:00:38

You know you can't. Even ar could be the best copywriter in the world, but if you don't know what good copy is, you won't be able to judge whether or not it is actually good 100.

Darren Lee: 1:00:46

So would you say in that regard, the role of the entrepreneur in that scenario is to know how to look at the output in terms of if 19 of their workflow is going to be taken care of and if agencies which required 40 people only needs three right now. What is the role of the entrepreneur in that scenario in 2027, when ai is taken over the world?

Jordan Platten: 1:01:07

to have a deep understanding of what good is, because in the short term, like what we're seeing in info right now and in agency, you've got a huge opportunity for like 16 year old entrepreneurs with no business acumen to come in and make money. And this isn't about making money because, like, there's money to be made in the short term, but creating like a long-term business that's going to survive. That will be reserved for the people that have a depth of understanding about a certain field, because what actually is going to happen with the guys that are starting with ai now is their intelligence is going to drop, like human intelligence will drop over time because of reliance on ai to give us the. I mean we use chat gpt on a daily basis to to help us with everything right I literally rewrote my headline this morning for a vsl ad, only with chat gpt.

Darren Lee: 1:01:49

and a funny thing was I gave it to my friend Lara, who's one of the best copywriters, arguably like in the world at the moment, and she looked at the output of the five different variations and she was like pick number three. That's one of the best headlines I ever read in my life. I didn't even tell her it was video.

Jordan Platten: 1:02:03

So what happens to people that don't have your depth of experience? They just stop learning how to write good VSLs and therefore they don't then understand what a good headline is, and then over generations that drops. Anyway, that's kind of like a separate thing. I think when businesses, when everyone's delivering good results and so on, I think ultimately roll-ups will happen. We see in, the ultimate sophistication of any market is when you see the M&A really comes in and everyone starts doing roll-ups. I think agency is actually still relatively young in M&A and roll-ups we're seeing more of it. There's a company in the UK right now called Supergroup that are doing a big roll-up with lots of agencies. We're starting to see roll-up.

Jordan Platten: 1:02:38

We had a conversation off camera about in the education space and then as more people do roll-ups, as more people do M&A, those M&A companies roll up into other and eventually you just end up with a core group of conglomerates that control the market. And if everything can be automated, what is the role of people in that? So I think long term we're all going to be back into physical business. I don't see any way that that's not going to happen. That's at least the way I perceive the next 20 to 30 years to go. I think online business is going to go for a shake, shake-up that most people there will be no adjustment period and how quick that's going to happen. I think that I don't believe that any of us, at least in our lifetime, have ever witnessed anything that has came and changed our reality as quick as ai both already has and is going to. I think the rate that ai will move and grow will be far quicker than most people have the ability to adapt to 100 and it was so interesting because you'll love this.

Darren Lee: 1:03:51

When I started the agency, when I went kind of all in on it, it was like 2022. I've been doing it for before then, but this is when I like put more team onto it and everything. We had got to like 20 clients or 30 clients and I remember we were using ChatGBT in the early fucking days to help with copy, to help with transcripts, to help with short form at the time, and I remember at that point being like I would need 50 employees right now. If I didn't have this and it was me dude who was running the transcripts through ChatGPT I'd run it through, I'd see the issues, I'd see what needs to be removed, I'd see the titles I'd need like seven copywriters. That was in 2022.

Darren Lee: 1:04:30

And the whole logic, the entire time was like my mental model is like how do we get to the results faster and easier, with less of the heartache and less of the headache? It's always a mental model just for everything in life and, looking at that right now, there still is people who are just so resistant to it. But they're dumbasses. Let's be clear. Right, because why would you not do it right? It's like it's like the whole debate with like Ozembic, right, it's like, yes, the underlying behavior is that you're still a fat fuck 100%, but you can get goal this way. And I'm not necessarily far against it, but I'm saying it's an interesting observation because it's just human psychology, right, I said to you earlier about my dog.

Darren Lee: 1:05:07

My dog can jump on the table and she knows that's where the dog food, the cat food, is. Now we have an AI feeder that feeds the cat cat food when the cat's head's there. The dog has now learned that she can play off the cat for a cat to feed out the food and for her to eat it. That is the best example of evolution. It's the fucking best example. The cat will do it, the dog will do that until the cat dies 100%. And I think it's looking at you, that lens, and that's an amazing example of the right people doing it. Because I've actually had a client said to us before that we were using too much ai and I was like and my feedback was this is not process, not an outcome. My feedback was we would actually be a fool to not do that, because why else would we do it?

Jordan Platten: 1:05:51

you know from you have the ability to do so because you have the depth of experience on what good is and that's, and, and I think, I think that that's what process improvement is, by the way.

Darren Lee: 1:06:00

Yeah, you know, if you look at process, if you looked at I didn't mean to interrupt you if you looked at, like coca-cola and the conveyor belt and manufacturing, they will look at process and say, hey, we're losing x amount on efficient inefficiencies. We need to change the spark plug over there. That's, that's what process improvement is largely.

Jordan Platten: 1:06:19

Don't get me wrong in all this. This does not change the fact that, in the short term short being three to five years people like you and I 90% of people watching this right now are so early to what is going to be the greatest opportunity of many of our lifetimes.

Darren Lee: 1:06:39

I said it was the Trump administration is our last hurrah, because when it was flaky about Trump getting admitted, I was thinking that if there was a huge like mega 1930s, a colonization recession, all the service providers would get like chopped um to another. So actually let me correct so it takes it back when I started my agency was when, initially, when all the markets crashed, that was the best time for me to get into the space, because I was selling b2b into america and everyone on sales call would be like don't tell fucking that bitch britney, but I actually want to go with you. So don't tell fucking that bitch Brittany, but I actually want to go with you, so I don't need to pay for their healthcare and their days off and everything. And then I was like yeah, no problem, you can come with me, you can leave whenever you want. If I don't do a good thing, you can walk out the door. So we were selling a ton of B2B because they wanted an outsourced marketing team.

Darren Lee: 1:07:27

And then I thought in 2024, when the election was happening, if Trump doesn't get elected, maybe there's a deeper recession which would mean that coaching people would pull out on their investing in education budget. And then it didn't come to come to be Trump, got elected and then I said to my wife I was like let's just run it for four years as hard as possible, because, like those, rebalances do happen, man, and maybe a rebalance in the market, like the financial markets, is tied to a rebalance in technology. Ai increases so much, job automation becomes so much higher that unemployment skyrockets, even though GDP actually increases. Does that make sense? It's like this weird time in history whereby the market breaks from society yeah, 100.

Jordan Platten: 1:08:17

It's interesting. I was in a conversation a couple of weeks ago um and uh, it was secondhand conversation with a guy called steven bartlett who, who some people will know as a he chain and big agency, exited that. Now it's like an investor and Diary of a CEO podcast. You, of course, very familiar yourself, and he was having a conversation at an event that I attended, and that conversation was the way that they were looking at AI across the group of companies that they work with and they have launched a company-wide initiative across everyone's side of the business in which everybody now has been tasked with making themselves redundant through AI, and that doesn't mean they're not going to have a job. It means that their job as they know it right now will cease to exist and then they will evolve into something else. Whatever that is, where can we actually add value? So it's like looking at everything that I do which is mundane, where this should repeat which could be automated with today's technology, but also planning the things that will soon be able to be automated with future technology, and re-looking at the way that they fulfill their work. It's making people teams. The worst thing you could do as a company is protect your team from AI, your team now, early today, because, as I said, that adjustment period is coming. The adjustment period is going to be a shock to most companies and they're going to be like shit, what do we do? We're panicking, blah, blah, blah. Smart companies right now will be having those conversations with their team and saying just so you know, AI is coming for your job, but I'm not going to come for your job. I want you to be here because you're amazing for all these reasons, but I want you to start thinking about how you can replace yourself with AI before it replaces you without your control. And then I want you to think about where you can add value to the business outside of what you do right now, and I think that's a very valuable frame to approach this new era that people are going to come into.

Jordan Platten: 1:10:12

It used to be an info that you'd be able to create a new VSL and it'd be like that's nice, 12 months, I can just run them ads, I'll just let that run, and so on. You'd be able to create one new conversion vehicle that you've got some new ads running. You'd let them run for like three months, so on. But everything is just increasing, the rate in which we need new creatives every two weeks. Now we need to be split testing. It's so much faster. We can no longer.

Jordan Platten: 1:10:35

I remember I used to have, I used to upload this one YouTube video every year. I did upload every week, but there was one significant YouTube video that was like how to start a social media marketing agency. That video generated 90% of my revenue. It generated me millions, and then I'd create a new one the next year and a new one and I just that was my main conversion mechanism that we would never watch. Now that's like you might. You might want to do one of those like maybe every month in order to retain, like some kind of authority and get enough traffic coming into the business.

Darren Lee: 1:11:04

I've literally had to do that we always said, like the hero vs out approach. We were like, oh yeah, this is the video, that's fine. And then a month later it's like no one's fucking watching the thing. It's the main video on the channel. No one's watching. Gotta make a new one, gotta make a new one. But but again like and then you, being you and being an animal, you're like, yeah, I, we need to do this right. Like you look at it objectively and then think, okay, this is the next step. But for me, like the biggest take home for this from this is it's a consultative approach. It's just consulting, like everything is consulting and coaching. And I think, as much as people like hit on Infospace, if you're a good coach man and you can truly like mentor and guide people, it adds a lot of weight. It's almost like, as you said, the physical business component of just the human part is the most important. It's like looking at all the data, it's all sorted correctly now, because before data was unstructured but now everything is structured. So looking at it and saying, like you should do this.

Darren Lee: 1:12:00

You know, you probably know the famous it's actually a fable of the guy in the warehouse, the manufacturing plant. Oh, this is such a good story. So there's a story of this manufacturing plant and they're bleeding money, so every month they lose $50,000 and they can't figure out what's wrong. And they got these pipes going and this thing running and there's a ton of things moving and they hired this consultant and this guy comes in and he walks around and they think, yeah, it could be this and it could be that and it could be this. And then the guy walks over to this massive machine and he puts an X on the top of the machine and he says change that and all the inefficiencies will be fixed.

Darren Lee: 1:12:41

And the guy's like, thank you so much, thank you so much. And he said, yeah, I'll send you the invoice. And the next morning the boss opens up his laptop and he sees the invoice and it says fifty thousand dollars. And the guy shits his pants and rings him and he says, hey, I just got an invoice for fifty thousand dollars, what's up? And he said the x was one dollar and where to put it was forty nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars. And that's what took him 25 years to learn. And that's the whole approach, that's the consulting element in what you do, I think. Think it's super interesting, man.

Jordan Platten: 1:13:12

Yeah, it's awesome man, and I agree that being a consultant I mean it's a whole being a consultant is the result of doing something very well for a good period of time. Like I do think the best consultants are the guys that have jumped in to you had your podcast that evolved into, you know, having the agency. That evolved then into very natural. You've had a very similar journey to me in the sense that it's been a very natural evolution of what you've done. It's kind of like you've felt a fool not to make that next step because you have this opportunity that presents you.

Jordan Platten: 1:13:48

We have a world now, though, where coaches, uh, never did the thing before they started coaching. Um, I think there's always been a huge element of that, and, uh, and their testing mechanism has been whether or not the clients have got results from the advice that they gave them. So it's like, let me give them this advice. Did it work? Oh, no, it didn't. Okay, I won't say that anymore. Did it work? Yes, it did, whereas we kind of test through reality and then apply it to at least in my case, test through reality in the agency and then apply it to the clients, because I know it's already proven. So I think AI will inevitably end up reducing the ability for people to jump into the coaching space. In light of that, if, uh, if it's going to become more important that we are actually just good coaches and know what we are talking about yeah, it's just.

Darren Lee: 1:14:40

It goes back to the proof elements. I think you always have to do it for yourself before you do it for anybody else and like that's the first marker, right? I thought people like yeah, you may not have a ton of testimonials, but like did you do it for yourself?

Jordan Platten: 1:14:52

Yeah.

Darren Lee: 1:14:52

Like I literally know, like fat loss coaches who are fat. It's like, bro, like that's the thing that you sell is fat loss and you are overweight, and it's like it's a lack of awareness, like a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs, just have a lack of awareness. There's optimism and delusion, which is really, really important to be able to look at something like yeah, I think it's going to work. But if you're just actual, straight up delusional, that's a complete different issue. Man, you know, I think, uh, let's kind of go back around to even like how you, how these companies are growing right, so you've worked with, even if you look at your podcast, some of these agencies have grown scale so much, right, do you think it's realistic to run like a million a month agency realistic?

Jordan Platten: 1:15:37

sure over a long enough time frame five years probably it would take you to unless you have a really unique service to a unique marketplace. Whether you would want to is another thing entirely human man hours and managing teams of that scale. I think a business, or at least an agency, becomes a very different beast when you have to have middle management, when you have to have not just a manager but you have directors and then in between yourself. I think that is the point where things start to get very stressful for the model. I think there are better models that exist beyond that point, because if you're running an agency at a million a month unless you're working towards exit, if you're working towards an exit so there's a goal at the end of it, then great. But if you're working for cashflow, which most entrepreneurs are, at least in the first bunch of years, then there's probably better vehicles to be making a million a month on. So you definitely can.

Jordan Platten: 1:16:41

There's hundreds, probably thousands of agencies I mean probably hundreds that are at that point. But to give context to that, there's an agency who I've worked with since the birth of them. They're a UK-based e-commerce agency. They were at Xero, started in university. They now are doing 750k a month. They're going to be doing a million a month soon, but they have 100 team members across two offices Now. 100 team members a million a month. There are info businesses with 20 team members making a million a month. There are sasses making a billion a year with 20 team members making a million a month. There are sasses making a billion a year with 30 team members. You know, telegram has 33 team members. What so when you compare the models and it's whether you want to, it's not whether it's possible, it's whether you want to. You've got to really, really love it to run an agency at a million a month because team has got to be huge that's so interesting.

Darren Lee: 1:17:33

I'm even comparing it to like dan martell's coaching. So he's rough. Apparently he's doing between 20 and 30 million a month. No sales call. Sorry, 20, 30 million a year. Uh no, no sales calls, like 14 closers that are all sold by chat and then just a few csms. And I know that martel, is that martel right?

Jordan Platten: 1:17:54

how many team members?

Darren Lee: 1:17:54

sorry, total, roughly uh probably 20, yeah, around 20, 20, 30, and they're all support coaches with him and then sales. So let's see, that's it. And he has so much volume of people coming through, it's like how do we again, how do we think about solving that problem? Right, like, how do we get to that cash flow number? How do we get to that revenue number? And we discuss this in the next section, which is profitability. Right, like dude, I've seen fucking hell, I've seen some of the big agencies doing 25 million a year and I can't imagine their revenue, their prop margins, more than, like, eight percent. I would say it's literally less than that, because some of them are taking their product splits, so their profit share of the product. So they have client pays, retainer pays, their OPEX, and then they take a profit share, like 10% of profit, obviously of profit and know, and then they have staff and huge staff. It's crazy man.

Jordan Platten: 1:18:54

I think if you're running an agency at scale like a million a month, if you're doing a good job, you can still maintain a good 30% profit margin.

Jordan Platten: 1:19:03

That's not to say it will always be the case. The thing is with agency profit is it always fluctuates because you're always hiring for demand. You're always hiring in advance for demand and it's very hard to predict demand when you get to a certain point in the agency where outbound doesn't sustain you and so you just rely on an inbound and referrals. That's why most agencies, the majority of very big corporate agencies, just rely on inbound. It's only an inbound play very few of them. So since launching agency giants that the, the agency podcast and we've just been speaking to bigger, larger caliber agencies agencies have had exits for eight figures and um and and to to multinationals, I think, apart from the, the agencies that I've interviewed that have gone through my mentorship if I can't think of a single one that has an outbound account acquisition system and a single one that actually runs ads other than retargeting. Every single one of them, at beyond a certain point is referrals, which is why the retention piece is so important. Fucking hell, that's super surprising. It's interesting, isn't it?

Darren Lee: 1:20:08

yeah I.

Jordan Platten: 1:20:10

I spent 180 more, about 100, close to 150 000 pounds developing a software for agencies on an enterprise level so they could track outbound sales data, to start that podcast and realize that agencies of a certain caliber didn't do outbound, which is a big lesson, a huge lesson. I mean we built it for ourselves first, so we built it for our own agency so we could do post course reports, attribute, do all of the, you know, attribute all the data properly, and it was, it's been, it's paid dividends in that sense. But then we spend a lot of money then developing it for others, only to realize that on an enterprise level most agencies are just referrals yeah, because I even think of the big ones in the podcast space.

Darren Lee: 1:20:53

You know, like they're ghosts, they're just. You don't see them. They're not on social media, they don't do anything, they're just. And we, we feed into a lot of them because we buy or we'll sell services to and from them. Um, but I don't know them. I just see their fucking, I just see their domain at the bottom of emails.

Jordan Platten: 1:21:14

I'm like, all right, that's julia, yeah it's all human, it's all relationship based, it's all like your ogle v's and so on. That it's all. Agencies will develop a physical presence in a physical location so they can spend physical time with physical people, and that's how they still run, in a very traditional way that's such an interesting point, man, that's such an interesting agencies won't scale to another region because they don't have an office there if I look at lower street, which is one of the bigger podcast agencies in london, they, they're like that.

Darren Lee: 1:21:51

You don't know them at all. The founder was on my podcast years ago. They work with like sam per and stuff from the hamptons, but that's it and they're just.

Jordan Platten: 1:22:00

They're just ghosts in the background that's not to say it's the way that it's, that has to be done.

Darren Lee: 1:22:07

That's what I'm thinking I'm like I wonder how much does that restrict you? Right? Because it's kind of like you know, the guys coming to you and they probably ask you this dumb question which is, like you know, I only sell in my local town. It's like, dude, like there's all the other people in the world too that you can sell to, right, like the many people that have come into us who are not making money because they're trying to sell to like joe's barber, and I'm like could you consider just doing that in, like america, the?

Jordan Platten: 1:22:30

the thing is with. It is beyond a certain level of agency. When you're at like two, three hundred k, you only want to be bringing in clients. Minimum client value 15k a month and that's like kind of like 10 15k a month and your ltv is at least 50k. You really want in project value to be like 50, 100, 200k, 200k.

Jordan Platten: 1:22:51

So the debate is does outbound have a place when you are putting yourselves in front of people that aren't proactively looking for that? What is your success rate at the volume of outreach that you will need to do in order to get the right person at the right time, which is what really outreach is. You are getting the right person at the right time. That is feeling the pain in that very moment, which is why I always recommend, let's say, you're doing email outreach. You rotate for your leads every three months and, yes, your message has to be great. Yes, your off-the-hand has to resonate, yes, your subject line has to be good. But most of the time, truth be told, if all of those things are right and that's the baseline it's like content. You could have content. It just has to be good. That's the baseline, you know. But then your title and thumbnail is the most important thing, but only if the content is good. The email has to be written well, the subject and so on. But when it all comes back down to it, you've just hit the right person at the right time and they were feeling the pain and they resonated with you. So how many times are you going to do that and get like a 15k a month client, 20k a month client? So it's kind of diminishing returns versus sending people to events, versus going to networking events, versus getting in front and going for tenders, which is what you do when you pitch amongst another 20 agencies who are going for this.

Jordan Platten: 1:24:01

When someone said I want this thing and they're doing that, and so what I hear most very big agencies do is they'll always look for what a?

Jordan Platten: 1:24:12

I've forgotten the agency that said this on the pod, but one of the agencies had a massive exit and they said that they always look for gateway drugs, and I actually think it's Blackbeard. They're a creative agency in Manchester. They have been around for about 25 years, very well established. They always look for gateway drugs, and what they mean by that is they look for the smallest engagement possible with the biggest companies that they can find and they just want to prove themselves, because you just prove that you are who you say you are and you can do what you say you can do in this world of thousands and thousands of agencies. They do that one little project and it opens up the whole world to building bigger relationships, and that's what they're really looking for. It's like, who's looking for these projects? And can I not even just go for the big dog? Can I just do one small part of that project and then win the big contracts and it's just all.

Darren Lee: 1:24:57

Relationship plays at a certain scale it's all relationships, even even in the beginning. It still is relationships, you know, for the very for. That's why I try to bring people to bali when they get a chance and it's made huge unlocks but because it's low ticket, outbound works really well and I'm a huge advocate for outbound.

Jordan Platten: 1:25:13

I mean, you know me cold, me cold called forever door to door emails. That's, I love it, that's how you get going, like even an info outbound would be massive for people just starting, but it's. It only works when it's low ticket, and low ticket even being under 10 K a month.

Darren Lee: 1:25:29

Correct. Okay, so you've been in this space for 10 years. What's the three biggest lessons you've learned?

Jordan Platten: 1:25:39

that's a big one. The three biggest lessons I've learned? Well, well, first of all, these probably will come to me this evening and I'll be like well, those, those weren't the three biggest lessons I've learned since I've been in this space. Um, this isn't agency specific, but resilience being the single most important thing in trade of any entrepreneur. Like full stop, like it's not, resilience is the single most important thing that you could build, and whether you build that through going to the gym, whether you build that through um, through through, I'm such a huge advocate for cold calls always have been just purely from the, from the perspective of it being so shit and and and and. When you someone does it and they're like but this is terrible and there's no, I'm like that is why you have to do it like that. If you do cold calls and you just hate it to your core. That's exactly why you need to keep doing it. So, so, so, resilience being the single most important trait of any entrepreneur, just bottom line. Um, it's a good question.

Jordan Platten: 1:26:51

Opportunity is very scarce in the early stages, which is why you need to say yes to everything, and then, when you hit 10K a month, you need to get incredibly good at saying no to the majority of things. So you have to completely change your mindset. When you start getting, momentum is the hardest thing to build. When you gain momentum, you have to protect it viciously. So you have to say yes to everything to get yourself off the ground.

Jordan Platten: 1:27:14

That whole niche down thing is good advice for people who are established. If you're not well established, work with every niche. Don't offer every service. Just offer one service to start off with, but work with every single niche that you can Get a feel for what you're going to enjoy. Because the truth is one person, you can build a successful agency in the majority of niches that exist if you put enough time into them and get enough understanding of them. Most people just don't spend enough time with one niche to understand them properly. Or niching down isn't always just the niche, it can just be the one service as well. So you could just become an absolute animal with creative, for example, and work with all kinds of different niches.

Jordan Platten: 1:27:50

But but do I call it scattergun? Be scattergun to start off with just spray and pray until you start gaining momentum somewhere and then analyze what has worked and just double, triple, ten, triple down on that one thing, and then and then and then you'll snowball over time. So the mindset a lot of people get to 10k a month, not a lot of people get to 100k a month, because they're trying to apply the same logic that got them to 10k. And what happens is they get in this huge mess they've got. They're trying to scale multiple departments and the agency, they're trying to work with all these kinds of different people. So that's a big one. Um, and the third and final lesson of building an agency, or just being an entrepreneur.

Jordan Platten: 1:28:38

I think most people underestimate how limiting their ego can be when it comes to success. Most people act for ego and not for what they know is fundamentally true. They will act for validation on a market and for everyone else, to impress their mentors, to impress their peers, and they will and they will. Most people don't trust their own intuition enough and and make the wrong decisions for that reason. I think, alongside that, what comes to mind is comparison. Comparison is one of the it's just the biggest thief when it comes to success, not just the enjoyment we all hear. Comparison is the thief of joy, but I think most many entrepreneurs are at a danger of being so lost in comparison to what other people have achieved and are achieving that they get stuck in a never ending cycle of copying what other people have done, and so they just live in the shadow of others and I think, uh, and that can get you to a certain point, but it's never going to get you to ultimately, where you want to get to. And then you end up looking back at some point and being like am I really who I wanted to be when I started this journey? So I think ego gets in the way of success and you should never do something because other people are doing it or because it will impress others, and you have to stay true to who you are and what you believe. In the light of what we spoke about earlier and holding up to your morals, I think look back on everything that really propelled me forward. The biggest things came as a result of me being prepared to do something that other people hadn't done before.

Jordan Platten: 1:30:27

Two years ago, I started a new agency from scratch and I documented the whole series on YouTube. We got like a million views in a couple of months and it was a mental revenue driver for the company. It was just actually at a time where we had a bit of a decline. I was like, screw it, I'm gonna spend two, three weeks building this new agency. I started cult. I'm six years and or seven years in business. I documented myself, cold calling, I signed up clients. I just showed what was happening. It worked incredibly well. When I launched the affluent academy, I launched the first ever guarantee. The whole video was you can't guarantee, we can't guarantee success. Well, what if you could? And I looked at everybody's refund policies like we don't guarantee success, we don't go and I was like why can't we do that? And that was a huge bolster of of of revenue in the company. And so there are these moments where you'll get intuition to do something different, to stand out. Most people don't do it because it's like a new path, right.

Darren Lee: 1:31:18

It's like I often get asked like do I still need my podcast? And I do it because other people don't do it. Like there's not many entrepreneurs who can swallow their ego or whatever that term is to interview other entrepreneurs. Most people are too arrogant.

Jordan Platten: 1:31:37

That's given me the what is actually a more valuable lesson than than than two and three, which is it took me three years to off the back of ego, drop my pride and accept help from other people. I always thought that I could do it all by myself. I actually once said to someone I will never buy info. Why would I buy information from somebody else when I can learn it myself and it. And it wasn't until I went to sam ovens mastermind and I went there, attended there and I went for years.

Jordan Platten: 1:32:17

The first time I went to that event I felt like an idiot. I was like what an idiot you are that you just have. And sure, I got myself to a certain point, but it was the realization of where I could have been in that very moment if I had done that. When I first started. Like I started from scratch on my own and documented on YouTube. Sure, learned by myself, made all my own mistakes, but I never accepted help from other people. And then putting yourself out to network, to build relationship, to invest that I saw my second month of being in in sam's mastermind.

Jordan Platten: 1:32:59

I doubled my revenue and it never dropped from one piece of advice that he gave me double your price. In fact, it wasn't double your price, it was quadruple your prices. And we and I settled for triple and we were still took the same amount of clients inside of the business, just just a small reduction. But we about doubled our revenue and it didn't drop since. And it was just this mental barrier that I had. But I trusted him because he was who he was and he had achieved what he had achieved, and there was many things like that over the time those pips of advice. I actually think the culture has moved forward more now. I think most people coming into the space are very open to getting advice. So, on the off chance that there is one or two people watching this who thinks that they can do it all by themselves, don't be a fucking idiot like me, please.

Darren Lee: 1:33:49

So you might know Tim Stoddard by any chance really big in the agency space, stoddard, so a guy from America. He actually sold his agency recently enough. They got her in five and a half million a year. Uh, with his few other businesses, their seo, seo agencies for drug rehab, so they own directories too, so they have really good ip and he's awesome guy he's actually I'm actually coaching him, would you believe, in sales, which is a massive fucking imposter syndrome. Anyway, he uh, I had a conversation with him about three years ago and I was making 13k a month and he was like, oh, like, what are you doing?

Darren Lee: 1:34:21

And I was like I work 22 hours a day, dude, I'm super overwhelmed and everything. And he took a step back and he was like do you think you're better than everybody else at these roles? And I was like, no, I presume not. And he was like, well, that's, that's where you hire people. And it was such it was this one thing he said that unlocked everything. It was like, oh, I can get an operations guy, I can get this person, get this person, because these people add value, which is money, to the business, because they're good at things.

Darren Lee: 1:34:50

And it was. That was the first seed for me and then the next seed then was like the first program that I bought. It was kind of bullshit, to be honest, not gonna lie. It was like aka, but it still started. That seed of this is the gap. You know, it's typical program whereby they point out all the things to do but they don't actually help you to get there right. And I was like all right, I needed all of this stuff, this is what I need to do. Then I bought an agency program which is pretty good, but again, it was quite high level. So I think those constant reminders allowed me to actually level up. And it's so like fucking mlm being like you need to pay to be able to go to the next level, but you do need to do it, man.

Jordan Platten: 1:35:24

Why would you try and achieve something by yourself that you've never done before? If someone else has achieved it, why would you not? If you have the financial means to do so, why would you not pay to fast track that? Like that? That shift in mentality is is so profound, like if there's one thing that people can take from this and as a caveat, like, don't let it be me, don't let it be darren, unless we're the right fit. This is not a sales message at all. Do it for you with whoever makes the right fit, who is right for you, but if you're trying to achieve something that someone else has already achieved, you would be a fool not to pay to play to fast track that I remember, even quite recently, I went to will brown's latest mastermind and before I paid for it, tom, or head of client success, was like what is it you want to achieve?

Darren Lee: 1:36:13

and I mentioned two things. I was like one, I want to learn how to run ads. And then two, I want to learn how to run a mastermind funnel. And that was the first two questions I had was just two of those. We answered them all in around an hour and I had exactly what I had done.

Darren Lee: 1:36:27

I sold out our mastermind four weeks in advance to it, so four weeks beforehand, and that's that's very unheard of, because usually it's a last like week or two. That's stressful for events, man, because you don't know how much people are there. And then, with the ads, like I had just learned ads, basically, and I also met someone as well who actually ran ads, uh, and we were running very specific ads for for instagram, and that was it, and I was, I had an intention, so I wasn't just buying random shit, right. And then tom was like okay, like we'll go, and I was like all right, and then that was it, and I went and I left and that was it. And I thought, well, yesterday and he was like he's a coward ads and I was like they're working and he's like oh good that's the, that's the art.

Jordan Platten: 1:37:02

Though, is going in with an intention, because when you, at the start, have you ever attended an event and you just say you, you're like, you have the list and you're like I'm changing the business, I'm gonna launch this funnel, this funnel, I'm gonna hire this person, I'm gonna do this, and then, like, you come away and like, create a mess, so I learned this from you, so would you believe?

Darren Lee: 1:37:18

so? I remember when we had our first podcast, you told me that after your mastermind in mexico, you spent like three days doing nothing and letting all like the information, the data come back to you, and ever since then I've, whenever I went to mastermind, I do nothing for at least 48 hours, and then I also tell people as well to do nothing. Like so. Our mastermind was three days. The first two days I was fucking brainwashing everyone, but the last day is called integration. So I so, by the way, we do no content for three days. I don't prepare anything, right? People pay me 4k or 8k and you come and I don't. I don't show you anything, we just do one to one the entire time. What's your biggest bottleneck? What? What's your problem? What's?

Jordan Platten: 1:37:56

the issue. You rotate around the room and you do that in front of everyone, in front of everyone, and then we just have bottlenecks and what's working well and everything is leads, sales and delivery.

Darren Lee: 1:38:05

And then we just spend two days going around in circles solving problems, solving problems, solving problems for it. And then the last day is called integration. So we go back to the start and we say, all right, you have 18 priorities. What's number one to five? Okay, let's all map it out. There's a few more questions being answered. How long, like how long are we going to do this? 90 days, all right, here's the priority. That's what I was doing. So I would go to masterminds, I would record my transcripts, I'd prioritize everything and I'd order everything and I'd spend the next like three weeks implementing them, and because otherwise it's just noise. You know, it was so funny that you probably felt this too at yours.

Darren Lee: 1:38:42

I have one client, ryan, who's an amazing guy and he blew the fuck up online. But he blew up so quickly that he's like so much things going on and the only bottleneck he has which is why he came into our program was sales. It was sell by chat. It's only bottleneck. And he doesn't have a content problem, he doesn't have a delivery problem and on the first day we went around and he had an issue with sales, as we imagined.

Darren Lee: 1:39:04

But then we started going around the room and I'd be like yeah, man, you gotta do that, you gotta do this sort of people. And then we came back to him and I was like I ain't coming up for you right now. And he was like I'm gonna start a youtube channel. And I was like no, I was like you don't need a fucking youtube channel. And it was a very simple reminder to me, which is that like yes, there's great ideas in a room, but it's what's the thing that you need? And the same thing was just understanding sell by chat. And that was it. And for an entire weekend we use that as an example. Someone can easily, no fault of their own, be misguided by wrong data in a room and like that's the biggest role of uh, of a facilitator. 100.

Jordan Platten: 1:39:41

I agree, fucking crazy that that that give yourself two days not of not working after a mastermind is the biggest hack ever. I used to combine it with a psilocybin trip and and and then what it did was it would allow me to then really know what my priorities were when you have you ever you okay, so you, for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, when you take psilocybin, you kind of or enough. It feels like a hard reset, and I'm not promoting doing or not. You have to make your mind up the but it feels like a hard reset and you end up rebuild at least from my perception of rebuilding your life as you're coming back to normality and as you're doing that, you kind of choose what you are happy with and what you're not, which is why it's so good for people that are struggling, let's say mentally, because you get the chance to choose your relationship with the things that are happening as that is a certain type of psychedelic is just mushrooms, just mushrooms, okay, or truffles, depending on where you are.

Jordan Platten: 1:40:36

But yeah and um and so that experience of rebuilding your life as you're coming back to normality and you're remembering the business and oh, yes, I got this and I've got that, and so on, and yes, I just went to this mastermind, and yes, and so on. You then get to digest the things that are important to you again inside of the business and your priorities at priorities, and I that allowed me to go even deeper with that, um, that prioritization of the list that I created. But I would usually take all of the notes from the mastermind, then turn it into somewhat of an action list and then I would look at that list as I was coming back and then I'll be like, okay, that's the thing I need to focus on first that's so cool, man.

Darren Lee: 1:41:11

I can't believe I learned that from you two masterminds I've ran this year. I literally and I forgot that I got it from you. I was like telling everyone don't do anything.

Jordan Platten: 1:41:19

Don't do anything, because I'm that person that jumps in afterwards and then you fuck, you screw the team up as well, though you come home and you bulldoze the team and everyone's like what are we?

Darren Lee: 1:41:29

doing now, bro, I remember, oh, I love james kemp, but I left his mastermind and I was like we're doing weekly pricing. And then we launched weekly pricing the day later. Everyone's like why the fuck are we doing weekly pricing? I remember ltv like fell off a cliff and about six months later I was like we're not doing weekly pricing, you know, and it's just understanding. Like every information is contextual, like everything is context, you know, and I think that depends on the type of entrepreneur, too that comes to events or joins programs and so on. It's like, yes, you really have to.

Darren Lee: 1:42:02

I think that's a good part to have in your program. Is like in the beginning, is like you're going to learn a lot of shit, but we got to make sure to figure out what's most important for you in the cycle of life, in a cycle of business that you're at. You know, like we heavy push sales calls. Like like, basically, the easiest way to make money is get people on a call right. So I extremely push sales calls.

Darren Lee: 1:42:21

Like all our chats and dms that we teach is all to do with sales calls. It's just well, all we're optimizing the sales cost that's going to get results, because most guys are in their mid-20s or early 30s that join us. But if you're 45, some guys don't want to take sales calls, which is why the other programs are very appealing. But if you're 19 years old and james kemp tells me this too, who does sell by chat he's like if you're 19 years old and you're afraid to get on a call, you're gonna find it tough, bro. You know, it's all context. So by chat is very good for people who are experienced, have credibility and an audience. But if you're 19 years old, you're not gonna be selling fucking 5k programs no 100 it's all context.

Jordan Platten: 1:42:58

Man, it is, it is, and well, there are a thousand ways to grow the same business and and so it's it's. It's also deciding what path that you want to take in yourself, like it's one thing wanting to go down the organic route and build a brand and so on, it's another thing wanting to take on. I think lots of people naively jump, jump into ads, thinking it's going to be plain sailing when they're going. I actually think it's really as interesting as something I went through. But I think it's much harder to go from organic to paid than it is from paid to organic, because the business is optimized around a certain profit margin, a certain expectation on close rate.

Jordan Platten: 1:43:31

The sales team are closing warm and they suddenly have to close to cold. That's a hard journey, um, transitioning from, transitioning from warm. A sales team that have been closing my sales team were closing on warm audience for six years before they started closing on, and not everybody. Well, I actually had one person that had been there for the whole time to school, um, but uh, most of them were still optimized around warm the minute we moved to paid. It was just a completely different beast and a massive learning curve.

Darren Lee: 1:43:59

So that was the issue, though that's the issue that we're currently facing, which is, all sales calls are warm. For the most part, we've run ads. The cost per call is fucking just super high, or some shit, and we're still getting all the bookings from warm Okay, which is offsetting the ad cost, but then the ads. So I think it's like 88 of our clients are from warm, 11, 12 is from cold in a month, and then the cost per call is super high. The closed rate of the cold is like 20 versus a 46, that we're getting on warm and yeah, and, and also the optimization of the ads and the problem with that.

Jordan Platten: 1:44:40

So we went for a very similar thing ourselves. The problem with that is then, when you remove the warm guys for attribution, you realize that the cold isn't profitable on its own, which means it depends in your context.

Jordan Platten: 1:44:52

If you were to remove so, if you were to look at all your calls and your sales for that specific funnel that, because presumably you're selling that same offer via cold and paid yes, yes so then if you attribute those sales to organic as well as you can do because that's another thing if you go from organic to paid and you start attributing it's a, it's a, it's an ass, because you're trying to attribute. You've got something going on a youtube video, but then where do you attribute if they've touched the ads and so on as well. So it's like first click versus last click. But it's hard with organic. You, when you at least in my experience you remove the paid and you realize that the pay, you remove the warm and you realize that the warm is propping up the cold and then the, then the cold in isolation isn't profitable, and so then it's not scalable because beyond, the warm has only got a certain amount of traffic. When you scale ads it isn't. When you scale ads, the warm isn't moving up at the same rate that the ads is moving. You're scaling ads beyond that same, you know, disproportionately, and so eventually it will just be unprofitable because you've got this much cold and this much warm, whereas at the minute you've got this much warm and whatever, a proportionate amount of cold. You have to rebuild your sales team for cold and retrain them for cold and you have to have a very, very good incubation period.

Jordan Platten: 1:46:09

So most people don't know their sales cycle as in, from the time someone books a call to when they or there's yeah or there's two. Yeah, there's two types of sales cycle you really need to be aware of. Number one it's the from opt-in. So when they opt in, how long does it take for them to purchase? And then also from booked call to how long does it take to purchase? Most people, when you ask them, they're like, oh, it's like five days. The majority of inco guys is like 30 days plus I would say like 90.

Darren Lee: 1:46:35

Yeah, I mean, that's what we're trying to do. So, just for context, is that the guys are coming from the ads. We're trying to say that they sit in the ecosystem, which is basically a model anyway. So they're either just a follower or and that's engaged in the content it's their conversation order on the email list and we let them cook and then when they do book, then we attribute that because they came in from the ad. That's what I was thinking about. But that can be. We're giving 180 days because, like I want to see how much people get caught up, right, because, like, how many times have you seen an ad and bought something? Fucking never, bro. But you come into the ecosystem, you know, does that make sense? It?

Jordan Platten: 1:47:10

does 100. Most people let people come into the ecosystem and just are happy with just showing and throwing them on a newsletter, though, and it's like then it's being as deep as you can into that. You've got, let's say, google display ads big hack just being everywhere all over the internet so they can see you everywhere. Making sure that you've got a shitload of reviews and testimonials everywhere. Having a proper nurture email sequence when someone books a call like a 14 day nurture, like every single day, and then they go into the email list afterwards. But that 14 day nurture is what is all of the leverage I've got, what is every single piece of leverage I've got, and can I create an email about that? What is that? Whether that's reviews, whether that's testimonials, whether that's stories about yourself, whether it's founder story, whatever that may be, whether it's awards, like where, all of that, and it's those things that make a difference.

Jordan Platten: 1:48:03

But ultimately, the hardest part is training a warm sales team to go cold, because when we first did that um and yeah, when we first did that our closing team was closing at 45% on cold. Some of them were closing at 60%, or, no, sorry, 45% on warm. Some were closing at 60 percent. Oh, no, sorry, 45 on warm. Some were closing at 60 on warm on attended, which kind of indicates a price increase needed anyway. But uh, we were going from that and then on cold it was like 10, I think we were the same.

Jordan Platten: 1:48:29

Yeah, I think we're the exact same yeah, which is which is brutal and it makes it very hard to scale unless you're super high ticket and your price point is like 15k plus or like, I think, actually 12k plus. But if you're below 10k like and you can't I haven't seen anyone, at least that I know of, so correct me if I'm wrong that has scaled, and by scaled I mean like 100k a month spend on an offer below 10k to cold traffic with a booked call being the conversion mechanism, I think brook hitting is the only person that I know, but I don't know what the price point is.

Darren Lee: 1:49:11

I think, brook, they're doing like two and a half million a month and I think their price point could be like ak or something like that. Yeah, yeah, so they run a call complete pure call, traffic to a vso, to a webinar and then from the webinar then they book a call and, um, I think that's into the mastermind or some shit. That's like 15k.

Jordan Platten: 1:49:33

Then the down, sell down is like an ak I would be very interested to know whether it was self-liquidating, though, because most of those people are then profiting on ltv exactly so.

Darren Lee: 1:49:43

He has like softwares vendor relationships for suppliers, because high ticket drop shipping, um, he's like two fucking softwares and shit. I think he has two programs effectively.

Jordan Platten: 1:49:54

So yeah, that's so it's ltv so like, but the front end if the product is like 8k or something like it's, it's, it's I mean, I'm sure someone, some people do it, but it's so rad. The vehicle has to be perfect, the offer has to be perfect you know, ryan clark yeah, uh, ryan clark us right c, l, o, g, g, cl.

Darren Lee: 1:50:14

He's I met him through 8FL. Guy's a fucking killer. He's on like 70 million in sales fitness coaching for women and they have like this, you know, they have it all Like fucking lead magnet $1 product, $9 product, $37 product or some shit. He's so detailed with the numbers. It's crazy man. Man, he's kind of going viral at the moment. He's doing daily vlogs, daily uploads on youtube. They're not viral, but he's getting known on twitter and then he has youtube.

Darren Lee: 1:50:42

So that guy ryan, I don't know how I fucking I think I forgot about this, to be honest. But basically they, they have like those front end offers. It's all of ads and they're doing like 70 million. They've done 70 million total um, but that's the only example I have of like something that's like low ticket but for brooke, yes, 100, correct. Like there is that high, it's all high ticket, you know, but he's running everything cold into that. But oh, sorry, this was the point. Ah, yes, this was the point.

Darren Lee: 1:51:09

So people really fuck up ltv and what they think ltv is. Do you get me that? They have like one person that ascended into a 60K mastermind and then they're thinking that offsets everything else, like we actually have a client literally right now and I need to follow up with him Go ahead and get into the mastermind, which was like they think that their LTV is like five or 6K, but they actually have a free course into a 1K product and then a bunch of weird shit and then they have a 60k mastermind like oh yeah, yeah, it's like 5k and I'm like I don't know how true that is you know, so how much do you book calls for, like what?

Jordan Platten: 1:51:46

do I expand on that? I want, I want to hear your what your, your views are on what ltv is.

Darren Lee: 1:51:50

I want to, I want to hear your wisdom on this um, okay, well, we need to look at the, the dispersion of offers, right, and like how much people actually fit into the offers. And then also you need to see like, where are you cannibalizing that money? Right, because if we run sponsorships which is off cold fucking email, which is off inbound email, would you believe that obviously has a high revenue but that doesn't offset the coaching on the front. So we need to segment the products case by case. So you might have macro, but then you need to say see, okay, for your 5k offer, how much is it? How much is the CAC number one, which is super important, which involves the commission of the reps, the marketing expenses, all that kind of stuff.

Darren Lee: 1:52:32

Then what's the LTV to CAC? And then of that LTV, what's that general LTV? And that will mainly just be the pay in full right or the people that bounce on the split pay. So we've got to make sure that's factored in. And yes, there is an element of people that ascend up there, but unless they came through the ads we can't really factor it into LTV versus CAC. But with AI you can do this now. So the reason I'm saying this is I'm very overly indexed on what we capture, so that then I can run scripts off of chat gbt to understand exactly what it is, the numbers we truly have do you have any done for you elements like inside, like I've done for you up?

Jordan Platten: 1:53:08

in the coaching yeah, well, we just put the setters in. I see you're placing the setters and then taking a percentage of the place setting. No, there, no, or is it just a certain fee to place them?

Darren Lee: 1:53:16

We have a lot of partnerships with setter organizations.

Jordan Platten: 1:53:19

Yeah.

Darren Lee: 1:53:19

And then we shortlist them. We have the offers for our clients in the high ticket program and then we match them Lovely.

Jordan Platten: 1:53:25

It just increases results and there's a big uptake on that with the client.

Darren Lee: 1:53:28

That ascent yeah.

Jordan Platten: 1:53:40

Yes, but you have a lot of ascension from your low ticket program to your high ticket, yeah. So I actually don't think that's that common. I think that lots of people I had this conversation with sam ovens. Sam ovens's general mindset was was that? Um well, his reality was consulting accelerator. To uh, what was it quantum? No, not quantum, it was consulting accelerator. There was the mid one up level, up there was the consulting accelerator, to, to, to, whatever the mid-tier was.

Jordan Platten: 1:54:03

It was like that was there was the mid-tier and then he had the quantum, so he had the free thing. Um, people, generally speaking, don't ascend from biz op to the mid-tier. So you're kind of not on biz op, are you?

Darren Lee: 1:54:15

you're kind of you're, you're starting off and they're already established business coming into even more established business yeah, they're all making like five, ten, five, if I start, like 10k even on your low ticket, yeah, yeah because it's okay, you know so, so.

Jordan Platten: 1:54:29

so sam's reality is very similar to mine. We do get ascension from the from, from from agency launch into elite which is elite is for agencies that are already above 10K. We do have ascension. The ascension rate is low because of the drop-off from people wanting to start a business to actually materializing that. And Sam had the same thing with Consulting Accelerator, whereas it was biz op, getting people to start consulting businesses, but then the ascension from that was very low. The ascension from the mid-tier to the high ticket was high.

Jordan Platten: 1:54:59

So, for example, my ascension from elite to a session, our mastermind, is great, but from biz op to mid-tier is not. And then the reason I'm saying that is because lots of people build their business presuming that's going to be the case until they get a thousand customers and then realize that no matter what they do and bear in mind I'm doing that one-to-one coaching every week for 90 days we're doing everything we possibly can, maximum expenses in the business and effort to try and get people to ascend you get a very low ascension rate if you're in BizOp. So then you have to revisit other things that you can do to get LTV which is done-for-you offers done for you, offers, bits and bobs, upsells, additional consulting and so on. So it's. I think that's a difficult path for people that get into the biz op space trying to model of someone like yourself, because I think when you're working with businesses that are already established, that's the.

Darren Lee: 1:55:49

Well, it's funny because james kemp talks about, like, ascension is not linear. We think that it's linear and they buy this thing, then they buy next thing, next thing. But the the goal is that you just create an ecosystem of fucking offers that people can come into your world and they can pick like a la carte. So like, oh, I'm at this point, yeah, I'll go to a mastermind. Yeah, I paid a 3k, a bum, for the mastermind, so once a four, like that's the best way to do it. And it's so funny because the guys that came to our mastermind who were outside of our circle, uh, so okay, for context, people asked me after the mastermind did you get ascension from people to go into the programs? And I was like I don't pitch anyone because then it would just demoralize the whole idea of the event.

Darren Lee: 1:56:26

And it was so funny because so many guys had, uh, co-founders that weren't there. And you're like, yeah, yeah, like I'll chat to him about x and I'll come back to you on this. And I was like I'm not going to mess you. If you want to come and join the program, you can, absolutely, and we'll talk about that, but I am not going to message you because I don't want you to think that I'm here to get you to ascend Right. You just came to the mastermind, bro. You got a lot of tunnel value, it was fun and you learned a funnel from here. Yeah, a hundred percent. You can pay me 20K, but I'm not going to force you to do that.

Jordan Platten: 1:57:01

So two things on that. Number one like is your mastermind then a model that isn't then super high ticket? It's like more of a what's the general price of the mastermind.

Darren Lee: 1:57:10

Okay, so the mastermind at the event is 4K. The event, yeah, is 4k interesting, okay, but then so that was 4k, and then you have people down that who are in the incubator, that'll come they'll get 50 off.

Darren Lee: 1:57:21

Yeah, then if you want apex, I get it for free, and then in core to get it for free too, uh, and then core can be anywhere from 35 000 to 60 000 a year to agency, but as a result of that that improves ltv. And then we have another one coming in september that will brown speaking at and the guys will stay in the program until september, as in the guys will keep paying yeah and then they'll get their mastermind in september yeah you know, and like I literally showed them this as well be like this is how you keep people.

Darren Lee: 1:57:48

You want to come in september. Yes, okay, you've got to keep paying me 5k until september and then you show up in september.

Jordan Platten: 1:57:54

Yeah, you know I mean that's the. That's the best model. I've ran it the other way as well. I did. I did a 24k for the 12 months, four events in the year, so hard to manage the logistics and the and the economics of that. Doesn't help that we spent 60 grand on one of the I remember you told me dude and so, but, but that's that model is the perfect model, I actually think.

Jordan Platten: 1:58:14

Mastermind pay per event, lower ticket and then people are sent but and I used to be of the same belief and have the same mindset towards not upselling people at the event itself, until I was exposed to I've got a very good friend. His name is Adam Stott. He owns a business called Big Business Events in the UK Incredible business. They do multiple millions on a monthly basis Just insane outfit. They do multiple millions on a monthly basis Just insane outfit. And their model is they will get people to an in-person event which is like an in-person seminar. They'll have like 100 people in the room, sometimes 50 people in the room. These are workshops. It might just be a social media workshop or business. So the TAM is absolutely colossal. And then at every single event they will pitch the next event and that might be a retreat. There'll be multiple pitches absolutely colossal. And then at every single event they will pitch the next event and that might be a retreat.

Jordan Platten: 1:58:58

There'll be multiple pitches.

Darren Lee: 1:58:59

There might be a retreat, it might be another event, and because of that he's able to acquire customers for about a thousand pounds and his ltv is 33 grand, at least when I spoke to him makes sense, because it was funny was we ran our master next mastermind the day after because interest at the peak, people are following their accounts, they're sharing their story, whatever and then we run the next mastermind afterwards. Just that. What I try to do is I make everyone aware of market awareness and then we'll start like chipping it down as time goes on. You know, um, and it's just doing it again back to like an ethical way that you want to run your business. Do you get me?

Jordan Platten: 1:59:32

yeah, 100 works. It's a great model and it's the one we took a pause on, our mastermind last year. We're going to bring it back, we're going to put an event on this year and I'll follow the same model as yourself.

Darren Lee: 1:59:42

It's great, and then like what I learned from Will too. He asked him about this you'll love it, because I learned this from Will which is like, if a break for a month, the event, the approach is like look, if you keep coming, you can come to master free. You can always use these as like little fucking like cards.

Darren Lee: 2:00:00

So everyone in the in the high ticket get joins for free, so no, it's like if well, for us, yes, if you're in core and if you want to come, you can come. Right, but not everyone wants to come because like america and shit, but some guys might fly from dubai. So if you want, in september, they're all going to pay like 20 to 30 K until September and they can just call let's show.

Jordan Platten: 2:00:18

And then. But then you're absorbing the cost for the people that are there. So then it's just the people that do pay. You are then it's subsidizing the cost of the event itself. Yes, Are they? Are they? Are they built to be like profit generating events? Or is it more of a wider play for LTV, L for LTV, LTV? But you're still making a lot of money, right? So I'm still making money. It's such an enjoyable part.

Darren Lee: 2:00:39

It's enjoyable, you know, but like it was, again, it's from James Camp. He was like you don't run events to make money, you run events for LTV Right, so you think about it. Guys came, they had a great experience, they've already paid in, so they can pay their 4k, their ak, they can show up. The event, I think overall cost me like 10k in total for four days. And then we have other people then who are in our lower ticket program who pay 50. So they pay 2k to 4k, depending on the ticket size. Dude, the event makes like whatever 30, 40k or like 50 or some shit, but then it actually makes a lot more if you factor in all the people that are paying the other subscriptions. So it's like we have this subscription model of where they stay and they're paying 2k to 5k a month plus you'll have bought it does a lot of different transactions that come, yeah, together yeah so it's like it's the best of all worlds.

Darren Lee: 2:01:29

How many events.

Jordan Platten: 2:01:30

Are you running a year or plan to run a year?

Darren Lee: 2:01:32

this coming with herd in septd in September. Yeah, cool.

Jordan Platten: 2:01:36

One of my friends, Liam Ryan, owns Assets for Life the biggest animal I've ever met when it comes to events they're running. They're building a villa in Marbella at the moment. They're planning on running 36 events a year just at that one venue. It's crazy.

Darren Lee: 2:01:54

I know guys are doing that too.

Jordan Platten: 2:01:56

But that's just there. They're currently running retreats like every other week you have to be built that way.

Darren Lee: 2:02:02

I'm not built different you know what I mean the absolute animal dude, I was like I was worried about this podcast well in advance of my mastermind. So how much it takes out of me. Like monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, I was in tatters this week like I was in proper pain, man, and you wake up and your back, your eyes are sore, like your legs are sore, my feet were so sore from just being on my feet for all day, every day, um, I was burning probably like five or six thousand calories. Just mental calories too, they're burning. Um, and it takes so much out of you and you kind of have that calm down, right, because I was like we did food, all food, all foods included, all dinners are included.

Darren Lee: 2:02:39

We had a coffee shop inside. We like, literally we paid for a coffee shop that's set up inside, so we had to like take care of that. And then there was an issue with like electricity and like, does a trip wire work? Dumbest shit ever, as you know, right, just dumbest shit ever can go wrong. But if they go wrong, it's a really bad image. Right, it's not like it's not my fault. The tripwire wouldn't work, but I'm gonna get fucking.

Jordan Platten: 2:02:58

I'm responsible yeah you know so how many people are you? What's your? What's your? Do you think the ideal number is of an event that you've been?

Darren Lee: 2:03:06

so we did 20 and I felt like everyone still got a lot of one-to-one care. Yeah, um, we're gonna try to do 30 next time. Yeah, uh, and then will's. Feedback to me was like you know, anything over 25 ish. It's very tough to keep the personal.

Jordan Platten: 2:03:20

I had that experience. I think we're not doing events, though you did, you did activities right.

Darren Lee: 2:03:24

We did like uh fucking, you did like mountain biking and shit.

Darren Lee: 2:03:28

Yeah, so I did that for my first one and it was all fitness activities but it was like gym and shit. And then we scrapped it all and we just did dinners. And then I even said the will yesterday and he was like bro cut the dinners. He was like, trust me, you're like, and everyone was fucked. You know, I do like dinners, though, to be fair, I do like them and I like fucking food anyway. So I was like, ah, okay, so it was like the tree long days, tree dinners, lunches included yeah, yeah, that's what we do in london when we do a london at home mastermind format.

Jordan Platten: 2:03:58

It's the same. We've got the venue. People come for the day it's like three days and then in the evenings we'll go for dinners and then you have catered lunch. It's nice and simple. Yeah, that's a. That's a nice way to do it. It's when you do the retreats that things get that crazy enough.

Darren Lee: 2:04:10

Yeah I think, we'll probably do some more then, but like it's just, it's that really takes it out of you but people love that, though, like a lot of our clients who went to the one in january came back and they were like yeah, like I wouldn't mind, like a gym workout with everyone. And then I was like yeah, because I actually noticed that people were closer together in the last mastermind. That was only two days versus this one that was like four, but it was, you know, three plus a night before they became like a tighter knit community. I think it's because just doing hard things together, doing doing a gym workout together we did like brett work in the morning in a different area they get a different uh gym and stuff here, but, like bali's, you should do your next one of bali, man. You'll get a fucking great audience here too.

Darren Lee: 2:04:49

We've got an amazing audience right yeah, like for us, we have like 50 of people fly in, always from all around the world yeah, fly from australia, dubai, the uk, ireland, america, canada. People love to go on vacation for something that's interesting.

Jordan Platten: 2:05:04

You know what I mean how do you uh, how do you manage expectations with people that are coming with the the mentality they just want to party?

Darren Lee: 2:05:16

oh, that's not in my ethos. It's again the. Your clients are a reflection of you, right?

Darren Lee: 2:05:22

yeah, so I used to be a huge party boy yeah, I think you know that before, right, I was like a huge, like clubber, uh, but I've given up alcohol over a thousand days ago and like that attracts people who are like that, like a lot of the younger guys who are in our, in our programs, man, they are switched on, they don't drink, they don't party, they're proper autistic, they're just like all in 24 7 and that allows me to push them a little bit harder and stuff and especially the older guys. Then we have a lot of very old people that are like kind of like family people because I'm married, right, so like it attracts, that's what. That's why I share that shit about my dogs and my wife is because like I'm not a kid. Yeah, you know, like I don't act like a kid, I'm like I'm not a kid, I've been through that shit. I don't have any opportunity cost.

Darren Lee: 2:06:03

Spoke to will about this yesterday too. Me and will was in his house and I was like I just love building shit and he was like same, he's gonna want to go on vacation. I was like me, neither man. I was like I just I was like I just like fucking vsls and he was like same man, you know. So I think it's it's a stage that I'm in in my life. I'm 29, yeah you know, I have nothing but to do, but to go to the gym and build stuff.