So people hear $1M a month and they assume there was some secret. A crazy funnel, some genius closer, an ad that went viral. I mean, that just wasn’t my experience at all.
What got me there was pretty boring. An offer people wanted to stay in, a way to get customers I could predict, fulfillment that kept people paying, and a team that could carry the stuff I couldn’t. I got on the whiteboard for this one and put up my actual offers, prices and ad numbers, so you can see what it looked like.
The offers, in the order they happened
My first business was an online fitness offer. Nutrition, training, accountability, that type of stuff. I sold it at $3,200 for four months, so like 800 bucks a month, and got that business to around $150K a month.
Then trainers started asking me how to make more money, because trainers and gyms just don’t make a lot. So I started coaching fitness pros at about $10K for four months. I was 25, there were like 15 people willing to pay me 10 grand, and I was like, holy s**t. If I could go back maybe I wouldn’t have done it. But that’s usually how a business starts. Nobody sits down and plans it out, there’s an opportunity and people keep asking, so you do it.
Then people outside fitness kept asking if I could help them too. So the next year I opened it up to general online business at $16K plus. After that we added done for you offers like Elite Closers and Elite Ads, a white label software at 97 bucks a month, one on one with me at $100K to $200K a year, and an upsell at $48K for 12 months.
That upsell is the part people miss.
Where the recurring money came from
At the peak we were bringing in about 100 clients a month on the $16K offer. Most people don’t pay in full though, so we collected about 8 grand up front on average. That’s about $800K, and that money mostly pays for ad spend, the team, acquisition costs, all that stuff.
Out of those 100, about 30% would ascend to the $48K program. Once that had been running for a full 12 months, that piece alone was $1.4M a month in recurring revenue. Add six or so people in my inner circle at around $200K a year, plus the software, and we were well over $1M a month in recurring.
So where you make your big money is the back end. Upsells, continuing services. The front end pays the bills. That’s why in my companies now I’m trying to bring clients on for at least 2 years. I don’t want people who come in and leave right away.
The ad math behind it
Our biggest months took about $500K in ad spend. About $300K went to high ticket and about $200K went to low ticket.
The high ticket funnel was simple. Ad to DM to an optin to a VSL, then a place to book a call. Because we ran Messenger ads, we had people pushing from the DMs on top of the emails and texts. That got us about 15,000 leads, calls at around $300 each, and about 100 customers.
The low ticket side was a $47, $197, $497 funnel, and we tried to get a $250 average order value. The goal there is just to collect at least half the spend back up front, then ascend some of those buyers into the bigger stuff to get a 4x.
Break $1M into numbers you can actually hit
A million a month sounds impossible when you stare at it. So don’t stare at it, break it down. Let’s say you sell a $10K offer. A million divided by 10K is 100 clients.
Now work backwards. Let’s say every $3,000 you spend gets you a sale, that’s your CAC. It takes about 10 calls to get a sale because of cancels and no shows, so your calls need to cost $300. It takes about 10 leads to get a call, so leads need to be around 30 bucks. And 100 clients times $3,000 is $300K in spend. That’s the whole plan right there.
Then you check those against what’s normal. For me a CAC of 3 to 5 grand is fine. Cost per call for B2C, I’d want 150 to 300 bucks max, B2B maybe 300 to 400 max. Leads I’d want at 20 to 25 bucks max. So in that example the lead cost is the problem, and what I’d do is fix the headline on the page or fix the ad. Start at the top and work down. If the cost per sale is off, look at the cost per call, then look at the leads.
Churn will eat your growth
New sales and growth aren’t the same thing. If you add $100K in new recurring this month but lose $80K from clients leaving, you didn’t grow $100K. You grew $20K.
And with high ticket you won’t keep everyone. If you charge 16K and upsell 48K, that’s more than a lot of people make in a year. Information businesses lose people eventually, no matter how good the information is. So what we did was build the client path tight. Close, then a 40 question intake form, then an onboarding call.
On top of that we had one on one calls as needed, group calls, in person events, and a curriculum. The curriculum matters more than you’d think, because an account manager with 60 clients pinging them 24/7 gets overwhelmed fast. You push people to the curriculum instead.
The team is where it broke
At $100K a month I had two setters, one VA and two coaches, and I was still taking every sales call myself. You don’t need a lot of hands in the cookie jar at that level. Getting there is mostly about how good you are at doing the work.
Past that it’s building the team. I went as high as 100 plus staff. Ben ran marketing as my CMO. My brother Benson ran about five fulfillment coaches and never gave me an issue, he cared about people and got great results. I was still kind of the sales manager part time with four or five closers under me, doing one call review a day.
Ops was where it broke, and honestly that was on me. Around 60 staff I handed off hiring, and by the time we hit 100, I want to say like half the people that got hired were idiots. A bad manager doesn’t mean one person not doing their job, it means maybe 10. And at that size I didn’t talk to probably 80% of the company, so I’d only find out something was broken after the ripple hit the top.
Hire sevens and get them to 10. A three takes you 10 times the effort and ends up a six.
What I’d do if I started over
Same order. Find a painful problem people will pay to solve and build an offer that gets results so clients want to stay. Build one predictable way to get customers and know what a customer costs, how well sales closes, how fast you get your money back and what that customer is worth. Get obsessed with fulfillment. Write down what works and hire people who own each part so the company doesn’t need me touching everything. Then find the biggest bottleneck, fix it, and go find the next one.
The skills that get you to $100K a month aren’t the skills that get you to a million. Early on it runs on your own output. Later it’s how well you hire, spend money, know your numbers and make decisions. There’s no one moment where it all changes. You just keep fixing the next thing.
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