How to Vet Agencies or Marketers Before Hiring So They Don’t Waste Your Ad Budget

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Well, another agency or marketer messed me over and ruined my ability to scale.

The reality is that 34% of advertising agencies fail within their first 5 years, and agencies with poor planning, lack of staff training, and failure to understand client problems contribute to widespread client dissatisfaction—making it critical that you learn to vet properly.

It’s what so many of you out there sound like, acting like it’s these agencies and marketers that you hire. You turn no accountability or point of blame fingers back at yourself as the business owner in these deals.

And that’s why you keep continuously getting burned by agencies and marketers that you hire because you have no idea what you’re doing in marketing.

So that ultimately leads you to just getting burnt by absolute terrible marketers and agency owners that you work with that you don’t know how to vet.

You don’t actually know who you’re looking for. You don’t know the characteristics in these agencies or marketers that you need to have a keen eye for.

You don’t know how to go into it knowing the plans that they propose making sense or just straight up leading you into the slaughter house, meaning your dollars being cremated.

You have to understand that the responsibility of you getting burned by these agency owners and marketers that you’ve worked with up to this point does also fall on you.

But don’t you worry, I’m going to hold your hand to glory here. I’m going to make you by the end of this understand fully how to vet, how to make sure you’re actually working with the right people, what working with the right people really looks like, what should they present, how should they show you a plan that leads you turning your money into more money at a very high level of certainty.

What do you do as a backup in the instance it doesn’t work out? What are the deal points and principles entering into this whole thing that make sense? What are the incentives that you should give the counterparty that make the most sense and a few more little tips and tidbits.

I am Jeremy Haynes. All we talk about on this platform is hitting million dollar months. And this topic is no different.

This, if not out of all the topics we could cover, is one of the most important ones that you could understand as the business owner. How to work with marketers, how to work with agency owners properly, and how to stop getting burned by them.

So it’s a true honor to be able to help you here today.

For those who don’t know or who are new, all we talk about around here is scaling to million dollar months. We’ve currently helped forty one different businesses get there. And we’ve helped sustain many of those businesses at that level and go beyond it.

Whether you’re here making a couple hundred grand or the minimum of a hundred thousand a month and trying to get to your first million a month or whether you’re at that million a month trying to hit the next million a month, I got you.

We don’t make any income claims around here. By no means are we representing with any of the information talked about here or anywhere else for that matter.

All we’re doing is handing down the lessons from those currently forty one different businesses that we’ve helped been there done that with and handing them down to you.

You can do whatever you want with the information, but taking the information and acting as though it’s an income claim, you can’t do that.

For those that are already following along, welcome back. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you here today. You’re going to love this one.

If your business is already generating $100k+ per month, My Inner Circle is where you break through to the next level. Inside, I’ll help you identify and solve the bottlenecks holding you back so you can scale faster and with more clarity.

Why You Must Build Financial Model With Three Scenarios Before Spending One Dollar on Ads

So first things first, you have to go into it having a plan of action that is mathematically backed and quantified into a financial model to know what the probabilities of success and failure are and what the KPIs need to be for each step of the specific marketing plan that you are going to execute with that agency and marketer.

You have to know those things going into the deal.

Most people, and this is what is most shocking to me, they do little to no financial modeling. The business owners don’t do financial modeling. And the agency owners that you hire don’t do any financial modeling.

It is insane. Over the years of mentoring a little over four thousand agency owners, how many times I have to reiterate such a base level lesson of make sure you always go into the deal doing math.

Model it out before you do it. Because if you do it without the modeling, you’re going to learn the lessons that the model would have exposed to you before you risked any of your dollars.

You would have gone into it knowing what the KPIs need to be, how hard and high up those KPIs can fluctuate or how low they can go before it makes no more financial sense to continue operating with that model and therefore you need to pivot to something else.

You have to go into it with the clarity of the math. You have to know. If you don’t, you’re just taking an unnecessary uncalculated risk.

So a lot of the times, here’s one big mistake that a lot of business owners make. They will go into it just saying, “I have X amount of dollar budget for you to spend on ads.”

And even worse, they say, “I’d love for you to spend it on this.”

If you knew what you were doing, you’d already be doing it. The common misconception or the counterargument to that is, “Well, no, no, I do know what I need to be doing. I just don’t have the time to do it.”

Well, that’s nonsense. Because if you did, you’d likely hire a more cost-effective payroll position. Train them up to do it yourself and have somebody that long-term is going to be in-house only focused on you and your business and not turn around and focus on all these other businesses as they scale up their business.

If you actually knew what you were doing, you’d be doing it.

You need to work with an agency and a marketer that can take the things like your budget recommendations and the potential funnels or conversion mechanisms that you want to drive traffic to and take those things and yeah, they might be the things that you drive the traffic to ultimately.

That might be the budget that you end up using, but the financial model will reveal whether that’s the case.

Walk Through Call Funnel Math From Opt In to Application to Qualified Call to Close Rate

I have so many instances where a client will be like, “Yeah, so I’m thinking that we spend like twenty thousand dollars on this.” And I’m like, “Okay, so you’re already running traffic to that?” And they’re like, “Yeah, like we’ve only spent five thousand dollars, but the return on ad spend was good.”

And I’m like, “Okay, cool. So tell me about the statistics.”

And we’ll go through, let’s say it’s a call funnel. And we’ll start off with, “Okay, so first of all, do you have an opt-in on the call funnel?” And hopefully the answer is no. But if they say yes, that adds a step of friction that we want to make sure we model out.

We want to then ask, “Okay, do you have an application integrated with a scheduler or do you have a separate application and a separate scheduler? And if so, what’s your cost per application?”

What’s your application conversion rate against those opt-ins? What’s the quantity of people that applied that then book a call? Therefore, what’s your call cost?

How many of those calls are being qualified? Is there conditional logic? What’s the cost per qualified call? What’s the cost per unqualified call?

Then we get to the point, is it a one call close or a two call close? What’s the first call show rate? If there’s two calls, what’s the second call booking rate? What’s the second call show rate?

And from there, we also then have to obviously factor in close rate and our average order value.

And a lot of the times, and this is also kind of funny, even for people that do lightly do math, they always, and I’m not sure why, but this happens so often, always say the amount of revenue that they get per sale instead of the amount that they actually cash collect.

You always want to base the math off of what you cash collect.

You can add a second little row down below that one that says revenue and you could have separate return on ad spend numbers and timelines associated with those longer duration timelines that expose how long it takes to capture that revenue.

But what you want to base real time return on ad spend on is on cash collected. How much cash do you actually get today? Because that is what’s going to dictate whether you comfortably cover your credit card billing cycle and that upcoming agency owner or marketer’s fee that they hit you with.

That has to be factored into the equation.

From there, you got gross return on ad spend. You obviously want to then deduct the advertising cost, the fee that the agency or marketer charges you, the sales commissions, and the cost of goods sold.

Once all these things are factored in plus whatever else you want to factor in, you have net return on ad spend that you’re then going to be able to generate.

And that number and that return on ad spend that you get on the net side of things obviously dictates ahead of time whether everything is actually worth doing or not.

Why Your Five Thousand Dollar Test Budget Statistics Will Not Hold at One Hundred Thousand Monthly Spend

And a lot of times when you plug in like let’s use that hypothetical scenario of the client saying, “Hey, I got twenty thousand dollars to gamble. Here you go.” It might not be enough. It might not be enough, especially when you look at their current statistics fluctuating against them a little bit.

All the time I get people that come to us, whether they’re new inner circle members, whether they’re new master internet marketing members, which you can check out information for available below.

In addition to that, sometimes we even see this with clients where they’ve spent so little money on the thing that they want to market that when they plug a hundred thousand dollars a month in expenses against it and ad spend and they take the same number that they have at five thousand for their KPIs and act like that’s going to be the number at scale at a hundred thousand dollars a month in spend as an example or several hundred thousand a month.

And that’s just not the case. That’s so rarely ever the case. So rarely does your cost per result just stay the same going from five thousand in a month to several hundred thousand in a month.

It’s just not how it works. Your organic audience, yeah, that’s great. You got a seventy eighty percent show rate. What’s that look like when you go into ice cold traffic who has no idea who you are where you’re only going to be able to do that to get the level of spend that you need to hit million dollar months.

It’s like you’re in a position where you have to then do what’s called scenario modeling.

Build Conservative, Mild, and Ambitious Scenario Models to See How Bad KPIs Can Flex Before Breaking

So you have that original financial model and you’re going to triplicate it. You’re going to add at least three or four options to this and you’re going to see a worst, mild and ambitious use case scenario for these three sets of statistics.

And your ambitious, I don’t want you to go truly crazy over the top ambitious. Your conservative should be truly and accurately very conservative. Kind of the messed up scenario is what the conservative should be.

How bad, literally if each statistic was as worse as it could possibly be. What is that set of KPIs? That’s what the conservative model should be.

Too many times do people conservatively guess on these statistics and KPIs and then they don’t actually ever realize how far the KPIs can flex against them before they snap and break. And that’s what the conservative scenario is for.

The mild scenario can be what most of you likely are going to model out as conservative. Try to be more middle of the road, but still biasing towards the conservative side in your mild scenario.

The ambitious, same kind of logic. It shouldn’t be to the farthest end of the spectrum of how great everything can go. It should be like, hey, if one of these stats was messed up, but the rest were arguably good, what would that look like?

So moral of the story is what you then get is a very clear picture before you even engage.

Real Client Example How Thirty Thousand Dollar Budget Gets Split Between Webinar and Call Funnel

I just did a call with a person, longtime person that we’ve known, wants to engage us as a marketing agency. Person at one point was doing like a million plus a month. I think he got it all the way up to one point four million a month is what he was saying his highlights were.

And he’s just doing a bunch of old school stuff, things that are no longer working and he hasn’t adapted and his team’s really maxed out.

And long story short, he wanted to engage with us to bring in the best. And so we immediately just financial model out some options.

He has about thirty thousand dollars in a budget that he’s willing to test because his revenue had dropped dramatically. It had gone from that one point four to like mid-range couple hundred grand a month.

And he was running really close to his base where he had to be at just to cover all his expenses and his life. So again, not a ton of money to gamble. Pretty much just moving over his existing advertising budget into us.

And when we looked at it, we had said, here’s really two plans that we can do from here. And this is really what you want to look for when you’re vetting out a deal, when you’re in the engagement part of the process.

And by the way, this can happen at any point in the deal. And I’ll give an example of that here shortly after I finish this one, where you have a plan and you obviously want to stick to a plan and have some backup plans.

So for this specific person, he was running a call funnel and his cost per call had just ballooned to almost two X the cost that it previously was.

And we had just recently we had saw a very similar situation with a new inner circle member doing about two point five million a month already spending upwards of twelve thousand a day and every dollar above eight thousand a day in spend just spun the wheels and increased his cost dramatically.

And so in both of these scenarios, especially with the person who’s going to engage with us as a client with our agency in this case, I just say I’m like, well, let’s go to the model and let’s look at what’s going to happen if we can bring it down.

And when you looked at all the data, and this is the other main thing that’s very important to understand, we go into the account, we listen to what the client says.

And sometimes there’s a wide discrepancy between what client feedback is, you as the business owner saying, and what the actual data says.

So we look at both. We don’t just want to take the client’s word for it. We literally want to go look at it and see for ourselves because sometimes there can be a wide discrepancy and we want to clear that up if that’s the case right away.

But when we go look at the data in this case the client’s accurate cost per call ballooned and we’re kind of salivating looking at the account. There were so many things that could be done that could drive up the revenue of this business and lower that cost per call back to where it was.

Absolutely. Undoubtedly a lot of best practices and as a matter of fact a lot of the other statistics throughout that specific call funnel also had a lot of leverage. Everything but the show rate.

The person’s show rate was upwards of seventy two percent. So no need to focus on that. Let’s focus elsewhere right now, specifically on this cost per call bottleneck.

We then have a plan. We then financially model out what it would look like in those three scenarios.

When to Add Webinar Component to Generate House Money for Call Funnel in First Thirty Days

And I just simply say I’m like, I mean, with what we charge you and with the amount that we need to make, I wonder what a webinar would look like. Are you open to doing a webinar?

And this specific person, I mean, he is phenomenal at anything live, whether it’s an in-person event, a virtual event, a challenge funnel, a webinar. This person crushes with that kind of stuff. It’s a skill set form, a strength.

And so thinking about that, I was like, what if we took that same thirty thousand and what if we spent it in the first week and a half? We had the sales people focus on people that are already in the pipeline and kind of reviving dead leads that might be sitting there.

And that led us to the conclusion, well, maybe a webinar would be good.

So what we do is we do the same exact logic of financial modeling and planning and looking at data with past webinars, plugging in that financial model and just trying to see in a conservative, mild and ambitious scenario what would that look like?

And here’s the thing, coincidentally looked really good but very similar to the call return.

So then the question became well here’s the thing, do we want to make the first thirty days bigger by doing a webinar for the first week and a half and then for the remaining two and a half weeks in that first thirty days we just spend on the call funnel and we use the house money that we generated from the webinar.

Some of it of course we want the client to always pocket money and profit. We take some of that money that was generated and we roll it right into the call funnel and therefore we conclude to yeah a higher amount of spend over the thirty days but far more revenue being generated and both conservative estimates looked really good.

And so as a plan going into it that gave us a lot of confidence and certainty that that would be a great approach.

Otherwise we might have just gone into the deal blind like almost all business owners allow agency owners and marketers to do. That’s what generally happens on these calls and why people end up getting burned.

They are oblivious to what even makes sense.

Why Clients Who Understand Marketing Themselves Never Get Burned by Bad Agency Owners

This particular client example, I brought it up for a very specific reason. This person himself is a phenomenal marketer. He’s a phenomenal business owner. Every single thing that I’m talking to him about, he understands in depth, in depth he gets it.

He’s one of those people that actually gets it and doesn’t have the time to do it himself. And also knows because he gets it that his current team’s just maxed out and doesn’t have the ability to solve the problem.

So he’s willing to spend the dollars necessary to solve the issue elsewhere.

And he also knows, as I’m sure you do too, following my information and consuming this with me today, that yes, I have great information, but I’m also a great executor.

So when we come into this person’s business, and we scale it, it’s not going to be a surprise to anybody because both him and I were on the same page.

And this is what’s really important to understand. Both parties agree that the plan makes sense.

This is where most of you get it wrong. Most of you think you have a plan and in reality you just have a plan to get burned but you don’t know it because you aren’t aware.

You aren’t skilled as a marketer. You aren’t clear on the math. You don’t even know the data in some instances.

Most of you who are reading this, I presume that to a degree you got your thumb on the pulse of your business. I assume that you’re smart. I assume that you’re the person that I’m trying to talk to, which is at a couple hundred thousand a month.

You know the game, but you don’t know all of it yet. And that’s why you’re here trying to learn more.

And for those of you who are serious about learning more and want to take the next step above and beyond all the value you get, check out the information available. I have an inner circle program where you’ve got to be making at least one hundred thousand a month.

I had a person join in there just the other day doing two and a half million a month joining into it. A month before that we had someone doing one point six million a month join in.

Most people to be fair are around two to three hundred thousand a month. We now have seventeen people in the group that make more than a million dollars a month already or that have gotten there while they’ve been a part of the group.

We don’t make income claims and tell you you’re going to hit a million dollars a month joining into it, but it’s a great place to be if you’re wealthy trying to get substantially wealthier. I’ll tell you that.

And there’s plenty of great things that come with it. And I would encourage and implore you if you are somebody that’s serious about growth and you understand the gap between the lack of knowledge you have now and the knowledge that you need and closing that gap leading to the extra revenue that you believe to be real for you, check it out. Apply.

At the least go explore it. Makes a lot of sense for me to push you to do that because I’ve seen firsthand all the results that people joining into that group generate. It’s phenomenal.

And you’ll also find plenty of examples, a wide range of examples of what types of results and what the experiences have been of both long-term members and new members alike.

There’s also, for those of you who aren’t making one hundred thousand a month yet and still want my help, information for the master internet marketing program, which is also phenomenal. It’s super in-depth. Seven weeks of classes.

We have an upcoming live cohort at the end of the summer coming up. It’s going to be phenomenal.

It’s very important you understand this. Each one of those seven weeks of classes is a three to five hour class. You’ll find information for the first week of that class, specifically the first three to five hour live class, not the homework library or anything else that you can get access to.

Again, at no cost, just to check out if you’d like my learning style and whether you’re actually going to appreciate how in-depth the classes truly are.

Each class covers a different topic, extensive homework libraries in between each live class, worksheets during the live class to help with retention.

It’s also a phenomenal place for those who are making serious money to train their staff. We have many different business owners that have fleets of marketers and just people in their business in general along with themselves that for a very cost effective approach with us in a non-recurring way, just a transaction will get you the training and the help that your organization needs.

I again I’d really encourage you check those out.

Why You Keep Getting Burned Because You Cannot Vet Plans That Make Sense vs. Plans That Fail

So you keep getting burned because you can’t close that gap because you don’t know better. And as a result, you have these conversations with agency owners and marketers and you both just kind of guess.

You’re just because you’re not doing math because you don’t have a financial model. You’re just kind of shooting in the dark just saying, “Yeah, I mean, this kind of seems like it could work. I guess it makes sense. Let’s try it out.”

And then you end up getting absolutely burnt.

And then you start blaming other people instead of blaming yourself and closing that education gap.

So it’s very important to understand my clients who have made the most money, it’s not like they’re well-versed in sitting in the ads manager. Sometimes they are, sometimes the best ones are, but it’s more so the fact they just understand the game and they understand the things that they must do and therefore they can hold people accountable to doing it.

That becomes their greatest role is not knowing the tactics of how to actually do it, but understanding the strategy and the bigger picture of how it’s done and what needs to be done to actually drive the result.

How to Use Bottleneck Analysis to Find Choke Points Where Your Ad Dollars Die in Funnel

Let me give you another great example of that. If you keep getting burnt by agency owners or by marketers and you’re wondering what to do if you’re already in a deal and things just aren’t really going that well for you and you could tell you’re getting teed up just to get absolutely destroyed.

Here’s a great piece of advice. Bottleneck analysis.

Bottleneck analysis is one of those fundamental things that you must know and that your marketers obviously must know and that your agency owners must know. But again, a lot of people don’t do.

It’s very simple. What you’re looking for is a contraction within the process.

So let’s just start by saying each step of your funnel is represented by one of these little lines from the lead being generated to the lead closing.

Throughout the process, there’s likely a point where there’s a choke. And as a result, nothing really flows to those subsequent steps where the money’s actually collected and people eventually get upsold because of this simple choke point right here.

And this choke point because you have no proper reporting from the agency and you don’t understand any of the analytics that you’re really looking at and you’re not really monitoring the analytics and you’re just kind of taking the agency’s word for it or the marketer’s word for it that things are going to be okay and kind of turn around.

You ultimately have no clue what and how to hold that person accountable.

To do bottleneck analysis if you knew how to do it would give you the clarity and insight to be like, “Hey, why are we not paying attention to this step right here? This step right here is clearly contracted and is acting as the choke point where all my flow that I’m putting through this funnel and all my dollars that I’m risking to bet on this thing are all contracted right here.”

“So there’s only a tiny little bit coming out the other side. Who’s putting attention on that? Who’s fixing that right now?”

Now although yes, I want to be very clear and saying, a great agency, a great marketer who’s very well trained, they would already know to do that too.

But you would have hired that agency in the first place if you would have known how to properly interview an agency or a marketer.

Interview Questions to Ask Agencies: Show Them Statistics and Ask Which Stat They Would Fix First

You could have asked them by showing them a set of statistics. As an example, let’s say you started off with a fifty five dollar CPM. Let’s say that you had a one point three seven percent link click-through rate.

Let’s say that you are running traffic to a webinar and your webinar opt-in rate is thirty two percent. Let’s say that your webinar show rate is currently eleven percent.

Let’s say that you’re running a webinar where you’re pushing people to book a call. So by the time that people reach the pitch where you actually are pitching the product, you have an eighty percent retention rate of the people who joined live to being there during the pitch.

Your conversion rate to getting people to book a call, let’s say hypothetically, is thirty percent. Your show rate to the people who booked a call is only fifty percent. And let’s use the example, the close rate is forty five percent.

If you presented each one of those statistics and you then asked that marketer or agency owner, which one of these would you put your attention on, assuming that the return on ad spend was one point three and we wanted to improve it, which one of these statistics would you likely pay attention to if these were the statistics that you analyzed and just seeing what’s their answer?

Where are they going to put their attention?

I’ll give you a great example. If you didn’t know that a one point three seven percent click-through rate, it’s not great, but a two percent click-through rate, a link click-through rate, and that’s the other difference right there.

Did you even know the difference between a regular click-through rate and a link click-through rate? What’s the benchmark for a link click-through rate?

Two percent. According to industry research analyzing Facebook ad performance across multiple industries, a 2% link CTR represents solid performance, with the median CTR at 1.54% and marketing professionals considering 2-5% as the floor for good performance.

Two percent going to four percent, that’s pretty hard. I know some of the literal greatest marketers on earth that get at the best case scenario a six to eight percent and it’s a unicorn for them.

Industry data confirms that the average link click-through rate for Facebook ads across all industries is between 0.90% and 1.71%, with 2-5% considered good performance by marketing experts, making 2% a realistic benchmark to target.

Most of their great ads are doing somewhere in the one percent range maybe at best a three percent range.

And although yes, I absolutely acknowledge as a marketer there’s anomalies and there’s people who just have creative, it’s their strength, creative powers to get consistently higher click-through rates.

It’s like if your ads and the person you’re hiring is not a creative powerhouse, are you sitting down filming stuff and you have an in-house editing team? Would that be the place you put the attention?

Are the fifty five dollar CPMs expensive?

It’s like in that example, the show rate to the webinar itself being eleven percent. I like to play the doubles game when I’m doing bottleneck analysis. Which statistic is the easiest to double or the easiest to reduce in half if that answer is appropriate instead.

The eleven percent show rate going to twenty two percent, that seems very realistic.

And again, the show rate on the back end, the fifty percent show rate after somebody watched a webinar, that could be omitted as the marketer’s responsibility and be pointed at the actual person who did the webinar, failing to get them to show up based on how they framed the call.

However, again, from extreme ownership perspective, if the marketer assumed some form of responsibility and accountability over that metric too, fifty percent that’s awful for a webinar booked call show rate.

Getting that up to an eighty percent, that seems super realistic too. And if they take those numbers and plug it into a financial model, I mean, how great can it get if they did that?

Imagine that versus imagine instead they just guess.

Why Knowing Industry Benchmarks Like Two Percent Link CTR, Reveals If Agency Knows What They Are Doing

This is one of the, if you know the statistics for what the benchmarks are and what they could be, and in addition to that, if you going into it also knew what specific bottleneck was easiest to double in that example and you modeled that out and you knew the biggest impact driver.

I mean, how incredible could it be when you go to hire somebody? It’s immediately revealing whether you’re talking to a bunch of terrible people or not. You get what I’m saying?

So I’ll give you another example. We had a client just recently. It was a new client, person who wanted to come and work with us, a referral.

And he hits us up. We get on a call. We jump right into it. “Hey, what are you doing right now?” What’s your current thing?

And he’s doing high couple hundred grand a month. He’s in the seven to eight hundred thousand a month range. And again, he wanted to bring in the big dogs. He was new to this business.

And he was looking at, here’s what they’re doing, daily webinars over there.

Why Daily Webinars to Promote a Challenge Funnel Creates Insane Friction and Wastes Ad Dollars

So he starts breaking it down. He’s like, eighteen days out of the month besides these days here, weekends and these two other random days, we’re not doing the webinars, but every other day, the eighteen days, we are.

So this daily webinar pushed to a challenge ticket. So the main way they actually generate all their money is through a challenge funnel, and the challenge ticket was like three hundred bucks.

So they’re driving traffic through a webinar to buy a three hundred dollar ticket. And then they need people to show up to that at a high rate to actually then convert them on their high ticket thing.

Their high ticket product in this case was twenty thousand dollars.

So think about this high level of effort they’re exerting. And in reality, it’s like I looked at that right away and I was like, “This is an insane bottleneck.”

I told them, I was like, I just had a client that did four million dollars off a challenge. Six hundred thousand of that was from ticket sales and three point four million of that was from ten thousand dollar upsells.

And the worst thing that we did throughout the entire challenge was promote it through a webinar with fifty thousand of those ad dollars. Our cost per purchase was hundreds of dollars.

Whereas when we drove traffic straight to the sales page that we could also build for that same client with a few upsells behind it, we were one point nine X front-end return on ad spend positive on those ticket sales.

And I told him about the pricing strategy. And by the way, we have an entire piece on this platform dedicated just to that exact client that I just talked about, that challenge funnel that did four million dollars. You can go check that out after this if you’d like.

But again, back to my point. I’m articulating to this client. I’m like, dude, what you’re doing makes no sense. What makes way more sense is let’s just fix the sales page and try to spend all that money that you’re putting towards these webinars towards that challenge funnel.

Let’s try to get that cracking. And if we do, we could be front end return on ad spend positive just like we were in this other deal.

But even if we weren’t, your current cost per purchase to your challenge is five hundred dollars. So if we got your cost per purchase down to even three hundred dollars and you were just breaking even, that would cut out eighteen days worth of three hours a day webinar effort, and it would make a lot more sense with doing that instead.

And the client, you could see right away, they were like, “Dude, I’ve always been told that it makes sense to do it this way instead.”

Why Driving Traffic to Webinar Then Challenge Costs Five Hundred Dollars Per Purchase vs Driving Direct to Challenge

We had a new inner circle member join in just recently too where they were like, “Oh, this agency owner I’m working with, he contractually obligated this inner circle member to promote the challenge funnel with fifteen grand a week in spend going towards that promotion strategy of promoting it through a webinar instead of driving traffic straight to the sales page of the challenge.”

This resulted in this client having dozens of buyers for the challenge a week or two out from the challenge starting, which would have resulted if you just financially modeled out how that kind of challenge would play out with average challenge funnel statistics to be awful. A nightmare.

And again, nobody did math. Nobody realized the exceptionally high level of friction because neither one of these examples I just provided knew any better.

They didn’t even think, “Oh, I could just drive traffic straight to the sales page of the challenge.”

Instead, they just listened to some random people who told them, “Oh, yeah, you want to do it this way.”

And if you’re asking, yeah, both of the marketer and the agency owner in those two examples were fired and no longer are on those deals, rightfully so.

My point being bottleneck analysis would tell you that that entire approach of adding the webinar and all the subsequent steps of friction with it is just that, excessively high levels of friction makes no sense to do that approach.

How to Collaborate With an Agency on Financial Models

So here’s my point. When you know what to do and you have a person who knows what to do, you collaborate on what is a better thing to do and then you do math and you financially model it out and you determine, okay, does that make sense to do?

Is that going to be the thing that we commit to here? And how many dollars do we need to commit to it to get it to actually work?

That way, you’re not just guessing on budget, which a majority of people do.

This is what ultimately drives businesses who work with agencies and marketers to million dollar months. It makes it so much more real because of the logic I just articulated to you.

And of course, there’s many other steps just like everything I talk about here. I give you more value than what you’ve likely ever seen in somebody else’s paid course because I’m actually in the trenches doing this stuff.

And I can share with you ten percent of the things that I know and withhold ninety percent of the good stuff for all my paid things that you can find information for available.

And then I could blow your mind and have you realize that was nothing but true when you finally pull the trigger and join into one of my paid offers.

And at the very least, go check out some of my other content. They’re all strong regardless and you’ll still learn a lot.

And I look forward to helping you in your journey on getting wealthier. Follow along if you’re not already and I’ll see you soon.

Summary: Financial Modeling First, Bottleneck Analysis Second, Doubles Game to Find Easiest Win

You keep getting burned by agencies because you don’t know how to vet them. Not because they’re all terrible. Because you don’t know what good looks like.

Financial modeling comes first. Always. Before you spend a dollar. Before you sign a contract. Before you shake hands.

Three scenarios. Conservative, mild, ambitious. Know what happens if everything goes wrong. Know what happens if one thing goes wrong. Know what happens if most things go right.

Cash collected matters. Not revenue promises. Not projected lifetime value. Cash in bank today.

Bottleneck analysis reveals everything. The choke point is where your money dies. Find it. Fix it. Move on.

Ask the right questions. Show them statistics. Ask what they’d fix first. Their answer tells you everything.

Both parties must agree on the plan. Not you nodding along. Not them nodding along. Both actually understanding the math and agreeing it makes sense.

Most webinars are friction. Most challenge promotions are broken. Most daily anything is exhausting for no reason.

The doubles game wins. Which stat is easiest to double? Which is easiest to cut in half? That’s where you start.

You’re getting burned because you have an education gap. Close it or keep burning money. Those are your options.

Most business owners waste years figuring out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering copywriting, funnels, ads, and more. If you’re ready to invest $5k and get serious about your skills, apply here.

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