Katie is a single mom who went from $60,000 a month to $120,000 a month in 60 days. No big team. No working twice as hard. And at the start, no paid ads.
She didn’t add more calls. She actually took fewer.
Here’s exactly what we changed, step by step, and how she’s now scaling past $200,000 a month with ads.
Her edge: a real brand
Katie has an organic audience that’s unusually large compared to most of the clients I work with.
Her content is polarizing, but not because of what she claims. It’s how she says it: direct, blunt and entertaining. That’s a strength. Her audience is engaged and already responds to her.
The problem: too many calls
At $60,000 a month, Katie was drowning in sales calls. She has kids and a life outside work, and she wanted to hire a salesperson.
I pushed back, for two reasons.
- The commission math doesn’t work yet. Good reps want to make around $10,000 a month, usually on about 10% commission. At $60,000 in revenue, that’s about $6,000. That’s not enough to attract a strong closer, so she’d end up with a weak, inexperienced rep who hurts results.
- Not enough volume. Her revenue didn’t justify a sales hire yet.
Instead, I looked at her packed calendar and told her to cut about 30% of her calls.
That sounds backwards when you want more revenue. But a packed calendar full of people who can’t buy isn’t a sales problem. It’s a filtering problem, and hiring someone else to take those calls just makes it more expensive.
Step 1: Tighten the application form
Before anyone books, they fill out an application. Hers asks for contact details, Instagram handle, age, occupation and goals. It also asks how serious they are, how long they’ve struggled with the problem, and why they should be accepted.
- Occupation helps you estimate whether someone can pay.
- Seriousness and urgency questions build a little urgency on their own.
Katie had previously removed a question about price. The balance matters. A form that’s too aggressive pushes away good leads. One that’s too easy lets in bad ones. We made hers more demanding.
Step 2: Cancel the calls that won’t close
Once the stricter form was live, a lot of prospects showed their hand. They couldn’t start now. They didn’t have the money. They weren’t serious. They needed a spouse’s approval.
Katie canceled those calls.
She kept roughly the same workload, but closed far more deals, because she stopped spending time on people who were never going to buy. Revenue went from $60,000 to $120,000 a month without extra work.
Step 3: Build a vetting system in Slack
Katie had no real system for booked calls. Now my team reviews every application.
Each booking gets posted to a shared Slack channel with the applicant’s answers: monthly income, current struggles and readiness to move forward.
Setters follow up on anything questionable. If someone said they weren’t ready to move forward, they get a message asking if they have funds to invest. If they don’t plan to invest, the call doesn’t happen.
Borderline leads aren’t automatically rejected. “Iffy” can still get through. The goal is to remove the obvious no’s, not to be paranoid.
When you’re just starting, take every call so you can learn who converts. Once you see the pattern, stop taking calls from people who don’t. A closer can handle six to eight calls a day. Wasting two or three of those on people who won’t buy is expensive.
Skip this step and you get a growing team of underperforming reps, frustrated staff, and an owner stuck on calls that never close.
Step 4: Add retargeting ads
Organic growth has a ceiling, even with a big audience. The next lever is paying for attention.
Because Katie had a large audience and had never run ads, we started with retargeting, not cold traffic.
- Ads target people who’ve already engaged with her content and send them to her DMs.
- When someone responds, she sends a link to a funnel with videos and an application.
- Applicants go through the same vetting process.
We keep tweaking the funnel over time, like moving videos up or adding one at the top.
People who’ve already seen your content are far more likely to click and buy than people who’ve never heard of you. That’s why we start warm and expand to cold later.
What a brand does to ad returns
Ads typically return about 3 to 4 times what you spend. Katie’s funnel has been returning about 5 to 6 times, sometimes around 7.
That’s her organic brand doing the heavy lifting. Alex Hormozi’s retargeting ads work the same way because of his established audience. Most of my clients have no real brand, and that makes scaling much harder.
Katie is on track to pass $200,000 a month with relatively low ad spend. If she stays consistent, I think $300,000 to $400,000 a month is realistic.
The takeaway
- Don’t hire a closer before the commission math works.
- Make your application form do the filtering, and cancel calls that won’t close.
- Vet every booking with a simple system, and let setters follow up on borderline leads.
- Build a brand first, then start ads with retargeting before cold traffic.
More calls isn’t the answer. Better calls are.
Want to know if your calls, your leads or something else is capping your business? Take my free 90 Day Ceiling Plan. Answer 18 questions and get a written plan, built on your own numbers, that names the one thing holding you back and what to fix first.
