Scott’s Story
Where do I begin? Well I went to college and all that jazz… But I started my career selling vacation packages over the phone. The goal was to convince a total stranger to buy a deeply discounted Florida/Bahama vacation with the cruise for $500. It was done in exchange to get a timeshare tour out of them. We had to close the sale by pulling a credit card over the phone. It was quite a rush asking a total stranger for money and getting them to give me their credit card. I was instantly hooked on the psychology of it all. How can someone who has no idea who I am, talk to me for 20 min. and pay me $500 on a credit card? I worked for different companies selling vacation packages graduating high school and all through college. After I got my degree in business management information systems I worked a series of telemarketing jobs trying to find my way in the world.
We love living in Florida!
It is paradise in FL about 7 months out of the year. In this pic my wife and I are getting ready to eat by the gulf of Mexico.
After working two jobs for some time, I was able to land a manager position for a unique business that advertise timeshares for sale on the Internet. The job did not pay much but it let me be a manager of a business and be involved in sales over the phone. I started out making about $450 a week to manage the call room + commission learning this new business.
After a few years of working at this company I could see that I was never going to achieve financial freedom or reach my true potential working for someone else. So I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2004. My first business was advertising timeshares for sale by owner on the Internet. It started out as just me, then I opened up offices and had as much as 20 employees working under me at one point. I went on to own for different businesses for this… Some made as much as a half million dollars and had real potential to go to seven figures. The money was really good but I did not enjoy the business. I’ll never forget how stressed out I was with 20 employees working from 8:30 AM till sometimes 10 o’clock at night. I went to go see a doctor for a physical and told him how much I hate my work but that the money I make is really good. He told me for my health I should look towards getting into something else. So I did and in 2009 I bought a book, “How to Start a Home-Based Web Design Business.”
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My first customer was a neighbor who paid $250 to have me build a website. I built for a website using what I learned from the book with a Frontpage editor. She was very pleased and it felt great. So I decided to go all in on my new web design business in 2009. I made very little money the first year… like less than $15,000 I think. It was a real struggle to pay bills. Google ads were still in their infancy and I knew very little about them. I loaned $5000 from my mom to invest in Google ads for my business. I had no idea how to set up a campaign and blew through that money in less than a week. I was so disappointed in myself and felt like such a failure. All I got out of that money was three leads. I really fucked up.
So I started doing things the hard way. I printed up business cards and started driving all over town in multiple cities walking into local businesses and asking to drop off card with the business owner. I was able to land a couple of high ticket clients that way… a $5000 e-commerce website, $3000 trophy company website and maybe a couple other websites for 1000 bucks or so. The big problem was my sales were so inconsistent. I would land to clients for the month… Then no clients for the next 6 to 8 weeks. I was doing all the web design myself and then when I would finish I would go back to prospecting for leads.
That’s when I learned of a recurring payment model with search engine optimization. Basically I found out that clients valued rankings on the Internet and traffic more than actual websites. Another bonus is that they would pay a monthly retainer for this type of work. So I joined some forums and bought a book called “Building Findable Websites.” The book taught me the basics about search engine optimization and back in 2009 it did not take much to rank a website on the front page of Google.
So with this new business model I was able to bring in some clients and get them good results. Some of which are still with me until this day over a decade later. I was growing my business up into the range of about $50,000 a year at this point. This type of income went on for the next five years.
It’s important to note that during this time I didn’t seek any business mentorship. How I learned was by surfing through forums, reading an occasional book and just trying to see what competitors were doing.
In 2015, I stumbled upon text messaging. I realized that many business owners carry their cell phones because when I would buy leads sometimes the phone number in the lead would be to yourself. These were my favorite weeds because I did not have to jump through hoops with the gatekeeper/receptionist to get to the business owner. So I thought to myself, “if I can get a lot more leads like this I would save time by getting in direct contact with the business owner.”
The problem was there was no easy way for me to find cell phone numbers of business owners that I wanted to talk to. It was all by trial and error. So I did a lot of research and finally found an automated solution to finding business owner cell phones in virtually any niche. My next problem was that I was still manually sending them text messages. To overcome that issue, I spent the next year doing some trial and error with different service providers but said they offer text messaging. None of them offered a cold outreach solution that would reach the masses.
So I invested in several high-level programmers to put together my own solution. There was many processes and roadblocks along the way that I had not anticipated. By 2017, I had a very well oiled machine generating as much a $17,000 a month by text messaging business owners into an automated webinar. The webinar was about an hour long and gave the business owner the opportunity to purchase a product of mine for $197/month.
This worked extremely well! It was like a dream business because it was fully automated. In addition, it gave me an overabundance of leads. For all those, who did not purchase during the webinar I could at least tell us they were well-qualified leads by how long they attended my webinar for. My thinking was, as they are willing to sit through 35 to 45 min. of my presentation but did not buy… They are still in extremely hot lead to invest that much time in what I have to say.
So I began, doing follow-up calls to the hot prospects that did not purchase and sure enough… Many of them would buy for me and the only reason they didn’t purchase during the webinar is because they either got busy and had to click away or they had a few questions. But overall they were extremely responsive on the phone and glad to hear for me. It was nothing like the cold calls that I was accustomed to. These people knew who I was and as soon as I said my name they lit up. They looked to me as the expert because I presented myself that way in my training webinar for them.
From there, I brought onto employees to handle follow-up calls and start closing the sales from the webinar. I continued with this business until 2019 but I had trouble scaling it past $15-$17k/month because my margins were low and I was selling a low ticket product. I decided to pursue a different method. Instead of selling low ticket, I would do the exact opposite and sell high ticket.
This worked okay but I was averaging around the same income. What really made a significant impact for me was when I chose one niche to work with and sell them my high ticket offer. I chose to work with fence contractors. I chose this niche because there wasn’t much competition and I could see that some of them did advertise online. So I began positioning myself as an expert and catered my message only to them. This worked like a magnet to bring in customers because they felt that I was their are expert.
The best thing I could compare it to would be going to see a doctor. If you have heart trouble you would not go see a general practitioner, instead you would go and see a cardiologist. I became their cardiologist… Their specialist. The fencers knew that I understood their business better than any other marketer because I only worked with defense contractors. It gave them confidence that they were making the right decision. At the same time, I truly became an expert in marketing their niche… in fact, I was the best that. I don’t say that to be arrogant. It’s a fact and I got the testimonials to prove it. I could take on virtually any fence contractor and effectively market their business to bring in Leads through paid ads and SEO.
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cc)(The problem with the agency business is that it can have a lot of moving parts. You need to have very good systems in place to continue to scale up. I got mine up to $30,000 per month with a virtual assistant, tech guy and a couple freelance copywriters. I kept it lean, so it is an extremely profitable business. However, I wanted more. I wanted to scale even faster and with less people and less systems in place if possible.
That’s when I started getting into courses and the DWY/YDI models too. With these methods there was much less customer service and the results shifted from being my responsibility to the client’s responsibility. This was an enormous weight lifted off my shoulders and really change the game for me. I discovered that I could simply show fence contractors the proven systems to market their business and run some basic operations and they could do the work himself in-house. In many cases they got exceptional results.
For some clients, we would set up part of the work… Manage it for a short period of 30-60 days and they would take over the rest. In other cases, we would offer the client a straight “you do it” course. This would be a high ticket sale and on my end would take a fraction of time… Simply to give them a login to the portal. Now I know what you’re thinking… Yeah but do they get results? You bet! (See the proof here. ) The reason it works is because nobody is going to care about their business as much as they did. It is their baby, so if you show them the steps of what to do and how to do it they will find a way to get it done better than you ever could.
Today my focus is on helping agency owners new and well established automate their businesses using any combination of the “Done for you”, “done with you” or “you do it” business models. I show them how to get the right systems in place so they are not a slave to their business and can operate it from anywhere with the laptop. I also show them how to create a steady automated flow of leads and strategy session calls to sell their products and services. We use my secret weapon for texting, cold organic outreach, Google ads, Facebook ads in YouTube video ads.
I’m excited for your journey and dedicated to helping you succeed.
