My new funnel made $100K in the first hour

Hey everybody, welcome to the Unscheduled CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Courtney, and this week we launched our biggest funnel ever. If you don't know, you know, if this is your first episode and you're kind of... you know, don't really know about what I do or who I am or what my companies do. Well, I run three companies. One is called facilitator.com. And this week we launched a new funnel for that company.

And this is like the first funnel. Well, let's skip to the end point. The funnel launch was extremely successful. It is maybe four day. I'm recording this about four days after the launch. And so far, the front end of the funnel has made 210. Sorry, I just ate food. So I'm burping a little bit here. It's made about 210,000 euro.

which is great. But the main point of this funnel is to generate call bookings with people who would be a good match for potential other things we sell at facilitator.com. Higher ticket things, for example, like our workshop or master program or our full stack facilitator in-person training or even large scale corporate training. And so.

How many call bookings have we generated since the launch on Wednesday night? We have generated more than 120 call bookings, which is insane, which is like hard to sustain. Obviously, the three sales guys. have a lot to do every single day. They're obviously working today. I'm recording this on Sunday. They are fully booked from like 9am until 8pm. And then the American crew takes over. So we almost have like the full 9 a.m. till midnight or 2 a.m. covered with just calls.

These are discovery calls. Not every single call turns into a sale. That's not even expected. In fact, the expected close rate is around 25%. What this means in practice is that we have turned on a new, fresh call booking generation machine.

And the launch that I did on Wednesday, the launch that we did on Wednesday, I don't know if any of you guys saw it. It was super fun. It was a really fun webinar. You can't watch it now because it's done. It's just a one-off live event. But you can right now go and see the funnel if you go to book.facilitator.com. And if you...

have not already gone through the funnel, you can funnel hack it for yourself, meaning you can go through and screenshot it, but you have to buy the stuff. Like, actually... Ideally, only do it if you're not going to ask for refunds because that's kind of shitty. You go through, buy all the stuff and then do a chargeback, which we get like an extra fine for. So please don't do that.

You can just click through the funnel and not buy the stuff. That's fine. And also don't book a call, please, unless you actually intend to, like, you know. look at the reasons for booking the calls that we present, and please don't book a call unless you actually have a need to book a call. Okay, so this funnel, the funnel type is...

I guess it's the closest thing if you would want to like Google the type of funnel it is. It's called a book funnel. But it's not exactly a book funnel. I mean, we have our own like, you know, we launched a book funnel in 2020. It was the Workshoper Master book. This book is called Strategy Signal. And it's one of those things I've been showing people. A lot of people have been reaching out to me in the last few days.

Because they've seen the book Funnel and they're like, I don't get it. It's not really obvious what's happening in this funnel. It's the most complicated funnel I've ever worked on. It's like the most... It's honestly probably the most work I've done in years, just in terms of pure actual stuff to do. Pure, like...

load of tasks. And I think it was probably the biggest project. I was talking to Tim from AJ and Smart and I was like, when's the last time you were part of a project this big at AJ and Smart? And he said, no, this is the biggest. This is the biggest, most ambitious project he's worked in at AJ and Smart. I think it is too. I think it's the biggest project I've worked on.

And however, if you click, if you go to the funnel and click through it, you're going to be like, huh? It's just like four, it's a four page website. Why would this be so much work? That's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of funnels. Nobody just clicking through the thing will have a fucking clue what is actually happening, why it works, all of the craziness that goes into it, all of the craziness happening behind the scenes.

is very, very hard to replicate. I mean, we've had these funnels. We've been using funnels since 2016 or something. People try to replicate them all the time. They try to, you know, they click through, they try to replicate them. And for some, and of course, they can visually replicate the thing. They can like logically replicate it. then it just doesn't work. It doesn't make money. And for years, we've been struggling. We barely even know all of the things that go into it until...

You know, we run this business now called Partners. It's ajsmart.com forward slash partners. I guess if you're listening to this podcast, you know about it. But what we do with Partners is we team up, we partner up with other businesses. And we help them. So if they have a great product, but they're only okay at selling it, or they want to like dramatically improve their sales, increase their sales, we basically supercharge their business.

with funnels. So we advise them on different types of funnels and help them. In some cases, we actually build the funnels for them. Not in like an agency way. But, you know, we work, we directly work with them to create the funnels, to create the hook, to create the angles, to create the narrative, like a funnel we've realized, especially in working now. We've been running partners for 12 months.

And I've run many business masterminds before this, so I have a lot of experience trying to teach it to people. And the thing that I've realized that's one of the hardest things to replicate is, I don't know if you've ever seen the show Mad Men. Which is like these guys running an agency and there's this main character, Don Draper, who's like a sexy womanizer, alcoholic.

ad agency man um and it's kind of based in the 60s or something i can't remember anyway the whole kind of uh theme of at least season one of that is like there's a client and don draper is this crazy you know, special genius person who can come up with these hooks that, you know, like these slogans, these hooks, these narratives, these stories that nobody else can come up with. And the client is like, oh my God, that's it.

And I never really thought about this, but when we are coming up with funnels, when we're helping a company build their funnels or when we were creating this new strategy signal funnel. The funnel itself, the technical parts of the funnel are extremely important. The execution part is extremely difficult and extremely important. It is absolutely crazy. Like, you know, writing the copy.

linking everything together, coming up with the products that are in the funnel in a way that it leads people to want to book a call, etc, etc, etc. And then everything that's said on the call, the whole thing is a massive like...

symphony of different interconnected things that all have to work at the same time for it to work. The thing that's very difficult to replicate, which we've realized that we're helping our clients with, is this hook. Is this narrative. It's this like... we're looking at your product. So I'm talking to a client and I'm looking at their product and I'm listening to them talk about the thing they're trying to sell or the things they're trying to sell. And at a certain moment,

Usually, you know, we do this kickoff. It's called a two-day growth jam. You can see it on the AJ Smart Partners website. You can see kind of how we offer this. We hang out with them for two days. And at a certain point, something fucking clicks. And part of my job in these sessions... I'm doing it with Laura and Laura is also part of this. But part of what my job is, is to figure out this fucking hook, this thing that we're going to build everything around. And often it's like, uh...

It's kind of a narrative, it's a story, it's a thing, and then that boils down to, it could be like a book, the name of the book that brings people into the thing, or the name of the training, or the name, whatever. And these hooks are kind of like, they're one of these things where we're like, you know, if we want to scale up partners, maybe ChatGPT can do it or whatever. But it's something that comes from...

It's kind of like this thing that's very hard to scale because it's very subjective. It's very much based on, for example, when I'm doing it. It's based on all my weird influences like video games and running different businesses and music and all of these different things kind of come together. Sci-fi, whatever. And they create this...

mix of things that helped me create these hooks. And if you're wondering, what do you mean hook and like, what's an exact example? Well, look at book.facilitator.com. There's a book on there called Strategy Signal. Why the fuck did we decide to do a funnel with a book called Strategy Signal? Why? Why does that even make sense? Well, we're working our way. For me, what I'm trying to think is, okay.

We would like to have more call bookings with consultants that already make money, that already do well and just want to build facilitation into what they're doing. Well, okay. I mean, what? do those people do? And of course, I could sit down and do chat GBT and blah, blah, blah. But I'm just thinking about myself. I mean, that's me. I'm a consultant as well. While I'm looking at, okay, these people are often frustrated by...

being stuck in execution work. They're like... used by their clients as an extra pair of hands and that doesn't really feel good and eventually the client doesn't feel like you're special anymore and you're just getting given tasks and those kind when you're in that position you're just not able to really raise your day rate

Because the client is like, well, you're just an extra pair of hands and I could just get a different extra pair of hands. And so for me, how did I do this in my own career? Well, I moved away from execution. which was literally me sitting and doing UX work. And I moved towards strategic work where I would essentially run strategy and kickoff workshops with clients. And so I would be at the table when they're making their decisions.

And being part of the strategy part of a project, for me, made me more money, but mainly it made me more satisfied. And so for me, when I came to the team to present this... new funnel that I wanted to create with them. Actually, the initial thing I came to them with was a book called How to Run Strategy Workshops, like very, very blunt.

Because I thought, let's go with a very, very blunt angle. And actually, the first two weeks we were working on this funnel, the book was called How to Run a Strategy Workshop. And it was really just this step-by-step guide. But... As Laura and I were putting together the story for the book, the first couple of chapters before the instructional elements of it,

we realized this is not just about how to run a strategy workshop. It's the entire mindset around moving away from execution, moving away from commoditization, and moving towards things that are hard for AI to replace, etc., etc. And then we thought, okay, it needs a more, you know, it needs a more interesting name. It needs a book, a name that's less like a leaflet or a guide and more like a real book and strategy signal.

is actually already the name of one of our workshops at AJ It's Smart. And we like how it sounds. And I asked Tim to mock it up onto the book cover that was called How to Run a Strategy Workshop. And when I saw it, I was like, fuck, that's actually it. That's it. That strategy signal is it. That's the angle we're going with. And so the hook of this funnel, the hook, the angle was...

okay, we've got the same product at the end of this thing, which is, you know, Workshopper Master and Facilitator Pro, which is our $6,800 product. Euro dollar, actually, I can't remember. And I think it's 7,000 euro. So it's like 6,000, whatever, $7,400. Can't remember. Anyway, same product at the end, you know, same, it's always upgrading. So it's the same.

name of the product is the same type of product but the front end is now taking a different angle it's a new hook it's a new way to bring people into the funnel and this is one of the things that when people are trying to build a funnel they usually fucking suck at or they usually really struggle with they cannot come up with this angle they cannot come up with this um

like enticing way to bring people in the front door they usually make some shitty guide that nobody wants and you know some lead magnet that nobody cares about um and this is the this is This is the thing that we've realized that we're very good at when we're working with clients is if we're helping a company run a Black Friday campaign, what they normally would do is, it's Black Friday!

30% off, whereas we are saying, please don't do this. We need an angle. We need a narrative. We need a story for this. And the result of that is just way more sales.

I mean, part of it as well is just the sequencing of how a funnel works. You know, a lot of people, they will just, let's say they create a lead magnet. Let's say I gave someone... Let's say I gave a facilitation company this exact funnel and said, here you go, you can do this now. But...

They didn't know how to do the email campaign. They didn't know how to do the webinar. They didn't know how to do the follow up emails. There's like something around one, I think 180 different combinations of emails that you can get once you're in this funnel. It's hyper complex and it's a lot of different narratives depending on where the user is in the funnel. So yeah, this funnel that you're seeing, maybe you're clicking through it right now. Again, book. By the way, I don't care.

If you're listening to this and you're thinking this is a sales pitch, I do not care if you buy anything in that funnel at all. I do not care. This funnel is designed for cold Facebook traffic. It's not designed for you.

The idea is that it's a self-liquidating funnel. So if you click through it, you'll see you can buy lots of stuff and upgrade your order. You can spend... Right now, as I record this on Sunday, you can spend up to $650 in the funnel. And as of probably when you hear this, you'll only be able to spend around $300 because we're removing the physical edition of the book.

That was just a special thing for the Wednesday till Sunday. So by the way, if you're wondering like, hey, where's the physical edition? It doesn't exist anymore. Doing physical editions is a nightmare. That was just for some fun. That was just one of those things where I was like, honestly, this looks too good. Like, I like how it looks. And I want to, you know, I want to give the people who are kind of like me who want physical books a way to have one. But yeah, as of Monday.

I would assume if we're quick enough at changing the funnel, there will be no physical addition possible. So the idea with a self-liquidating funnel is that if it costs us, you know, $400. I think it costs us like $450 or something to get somebody on a call with us. So by the way, for our 7,000 euro product, it costs us around $400.

I could be wrong. It's a bit variable, right? Right now, we just pay that up front. We just pay it because the ROI is good enough. We make more money in the end than we spend.

It used to be an insane ROI. It used to be like we would make 12 times the amount we spent. For every $1, we would make $12, which was amazing. It's not like this anymore. It's more like double now. So for every one... dollar we spend we make two this funnel the goal is to reduce the ad costs because people are going to spend some money in the funnel

It also helps us to have a better system for qualifying people in the funnel, because if people buy stuff in the funnel, then we have a better signal that these people are the types of people who spend on educational things. And then it's... probably more worthwhile jumping on a call with them than accidentally being on a call with someone who's like, you know, spends two weeks thinking about whether they should spend $12 on a book or something. So this funnel, ideally...

liquidates the ad costs. I mean, it probably won't do one-to-one, meaning that we have free ads. And it's probably not going to be profitable in itself, meaning that this funnel alone makes the money. That's not the goal. But if we can bring the price of our ads, the price of bringing a qualified person on a call down from, let's say, $450 to like $200, then guess what? We can spend a lot more money on ads.

and therefore we can increase our revenue a lot more. And even if the profit margin stays the same, we're overall making a lot more money. And so that's what this funnel is about. It is about building a self-liquidating funnel that liquidates some of its Facebook costs so that we can spend a lot more money on ads. Because I don't know if you know this statement or this quote from Dan Kennedy.

And what he says is, the person who can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. So basically, if you're in competition with somebody, they can spend a hundred. but you can spend a thousand to acquire the same person profitably, then you're more likely to get that customer because they're going to see your ad. They're going to see your stuff more regularly anyway.

And the other company doesn't have that ability. So having a self-liquidating funnel is a very powerful way to be able to spend a lot of money on ads without having to worry about fucking yourself up by going unprofitable.

So yeah, that's the goal of that funnel. We did launch it to our warm audience on Wednesday. The goal of that was just like... test the funnel out to the max, see all the broken parts. And there was lots of broken parts. By the way, one of the biggest thing that surprised us, which broke everything. was that if people pay with Apple Pay, and maybe many of you who are listening to this right now had this issue, if they pay with Apple Pay,

their stuff that they bought from us automatically gets sent their Apple Pay email address. Because we just, because Apple obviously doesn't allow us to see what that email address is. and we don't know where it's being sent to. And so then lots of people, by the way, especially if you're selling a cheap thing, so the book is only $6.99.

The angriest people are the people who buy the cheapest stuff. If we have an issue when someone is buying a $7,000 product from us, they're so nice, they're so understanding. When we sell a fucking e-book for $6.99 and someone doesn't get it within the next 15 minutes, they freak the fuck out. Fair enough. It's just one of those things that happens. And it's obviously, it means...

We need to fix that before turning on the ads because especially when people are cold and don't know your brand, they can be even more fucking crazy and angry.

And like keep doing chargebacks on Stripe and all of that kind of stuff. So we want to have all of these issues ironed out. So the Apple Pay issue is a pain in the ass.

We had this other issue where if someone had in the past at any point ever unsubscribed from the AJ and Smart Newsletter, then they actually could not receive the stuff from us. But because of the GDPR rules, we cannot... re-enroll them into our newsletter in this funnel without making too many steps and so yeah we've we've solved these things now but just letting you know we had you know thousands of people coming through the funnel

And they well and truly stress tested it. And none of the places where I thought the funnel was going to break it broke. None of the things that broke, I had expected at all. And they did not come up in our tests. We just didn't realize it. So that was fun over this weekend. I'm still working on that today.

And thank you to Ryan from AJ and Smart for helping us figure this out and dealing with all the people. And by the way, most people are actually nice about it. Most people are like, hey, I didn't get my thing. And then we reply to them. Some people are like very shitty about it. And what I say to Ryan, I'm like, if someone's shitty about it, please just give them a full refund of everything immediately without asking for anything.

give them their shit, but then also remove them from all of our lists so we don't have to deal with them again. Like if someone is being shitty now because of a $6.99 book... they're just going to be a nightmare to deal with if they buy some of our most expensive stuff and I end up in a room with them training them. I don't want to interact with these angry online people in real life. So, yeah, we're very, like...

instant refund, no questions asked, still give them the stuff, but remove from the list. That's our, that's my approach. But yeah, obviously, in the end, we do have to fix the problems. I mean, these are actual bugs in our system, and it is our responsibility to solve it. But at the same time, don't be a shithead. Okay, so the funnel...

is now live. Tomorrow I am going to be swapping out the checkout bumps. They are the thing that you can add to your order right when you order the book. Right now you can do the physical book and something called a video guide. And tomorrow we're adding, removing the physical book and adding something else.

Yeah, and I'm going to be tweaking this a lot based on the conversion rates. The conversion rates right now are really excellent, but it's a warm conversion rate, like it's a warm audience, they do know us. So I'm expecting some massive conversion rate drops. starting from next week, once we turn on the Facebook ads, and then I'm going to have to do a lot more optimization.

The cool thing is we're launching so many funnels at the same time. Like right now, you know, this is our funnel launch. We are working on like three partners deals or three partners projects at the moment. We're going to be launching their funnels. We've already launched two partner funnels, maybe three partner funnels. And so what's really cool is I'm just getting to learn so much about what is working, what is not working.

Because I think like often when people ask me or when like our previous funnel, the one that was making us like 450k per month for a very, very long time. was like this evergreen VSL funnel. It's called Video Sales Letter Funnel. That thing ran so well for so long that I could no longer really answer people's questions when they were like, does do facebook ads still work i'm like well it's working for us on this one funnel like so good we don't even have to touch it um

And like, you know, people are like, oh, does it only work for your company or what? And, you know, the cool thing now is that we're getting to see these types of campaigns or like we have an internal funnel. Laura and I call it.

our magic funnel, which is basically our step-by-step system for launching something and turning it into like an evergreen funnel. And we're kind of like... Maybe this only works at AJ and Smart. Maybe this is something that's like truly unique to our business and what we sell. But no, it's been working for everybody, which is amazing, which is really cool.

We use the MagicFunnel structure for the ClickBook launch in January. That's one of the ones I can publicly say, but we also use it for like every client. So yeah.

This is, by the way, every one of you who's coming to summer camp in August, I'm obviously going to show you our magic funnel. I'll show you exactly. By then, I'll have run... so many cold ads into this new book funnel that i can show you the exact results um i think what i'm going to do at this event as well is i'm going to just have my like a big screen

And I'm going to be logged into my ClickFunnels account. And I'm just going to show you. I'm going to show you my ClickFunnels account. And I'm going to show you my ConvertKit account. It's called KitNow. So you can see the full like. full thing set up you can see exactly how it works um and i think day one we're going to talk about offers like how to come up with the offer how to come up with the hook and all that kind of stuff and i think day two i'm going to show you guys like here's

Here's the actual way that we sit down and build a funnel. And here's the inside. Here's the data from this exact funnel. Because I think sometimes you can't really, if you don't have a comparison or an industry standard. you know, seeing our one can help. And the cool thing about this being an in-person event is that there won't be any video footage of me showing this so I can show it to you in person. Yeah, so if you're summer camp, by the way.

If you don't know about it, ajsmart.com forward slash summer camp. It is sold out right now. There's a waiting list. You can get on that waiting list. And basically what happens is when we have time. uh laura and the team they look at the waiting list they look at how many tickets we've sold uh they look and see if there's anybody who's changed there like what happens basically is you know 25 people book tickets right at the start

And then like four of them are like, well, I can't do it because actually I have this coming up or I have a wedding on this time and whatever. And so there's all like, I think there's always some. people canceling their tickets up until the month before. And so that's why we have a waiting list. So if you go to ajsmart.com, ajsmart.com forward slash summer camp, that's where you can...

come hang out with me in Berlin at the AJN Smart Office and I'll show you everything you ever could ever want to know about funnels. By the way, please don't come to this if you don't believe in funnels in the first, like on the site. I clearly state who should come and who should not come. But I'm not running this event to convince you funnels work. I really am not interested in doing that. So if you ask me, hey, will this work for my business?

Please don't. Please don't come. Think about that before you come to it. I'm not trying to sell funnels to anybody. I'm just showing you how our ones work and showing you... what's working right now, what's working well right now. If you don't already believe that, very, very not interested in convincing you. So that's just an important disclaimer.

This also includes anybody who's bought a ticket as well already. If you're coming to this expecting me to like sell you on the idea of using funnels, please, please refund. I have zero interest in doing this. Summer camp for me is supposed to be fun for me. Of course, valuable for you, but I'm doing it for fun. It's not like this thing makes a lot of money. I think the tickets are $6,800 or $8,600, euro, something like that. You can see how well I remember the pricing of stuff.

And we're only allowing 25 people to come to it. And that's three days of my time. And as you can see on AJ and Smart Partners' website, We are currently selling two-day workshops for 100k just to one individual client. So this summer camp thing, the reason I do it is not for making shit tons of money. The reason I do it is because I really love talking about funnels with people.

and it's like i did it in la last year um and that was just super fun i also just met some really interesting entrepreneurs who i'm still like talking to today um it's just a it's just a cool way to meet other interested and interesting entrepreneurs. Okay. So yeah, I mean, what else is there to say? I actually had a different idea about what this podcast is going to be about.

But a lot of people have been asking me to talk about that funnel and how did it do. And so I just wanted to do this really quickly. The funnel went really well. I'm very happy with it. It is the first project that I've jumped in on and fully led from start to finish in a while at AJ and Smart. You know, I led the facilitator.com AJ and Smart rebrand last September. But this was the first full funnel build that I've done for us since 2020. The last full funnel build.

that I was part of was the Workshoper Master VSL funnel, which I'm very... which I mean, I'm very grateful that that thing has worked for so long. I mean, that was one of those ones where we were like, oh, maybe this will work for six months. Maybe then it will stop working. It worked for four and a half years. It's only stopped working now. And it's still, as in...

It still works, but the call volume is too low. Like we have three full-time sales guys and the call volume, they're just not having their calendars booked every day. And they want that. And so this new funnel has booked them out solid for two weeks now. To the point where, I mean, another reason I'm delaying the cold ads is just that there would be no one to take calls because they're...

fully, fully booked out, which is fucking so cool. Okay, so the other thing I did want to talk about, but I think this is enough. Maybe I'll talk about it next week is...

The, well, one, like, I mean, this podcast is called The Unscheduled CEO. If any of you have been listening since the beginning or gone back to the old episodes, you'll know the whole idea of this is that I... The whole idea behind the name is I don't want to be anywhere at any specific time for anybody. I'm building this business so I can be unscheduled. I don't want anybody telling me, hey, you have to be here at this time. You have to be on this call.

All of this stuff is just stuff I don't want in my life. I don't want it. Yet, I just led the most brutally difficult and hands-on and time intensive funnel launch at AJ and smart that we've had our facilitator.com, um, which required me to work on it for. in between my Japan trip and my San Francisco trip, basically every single day and night for about eight weeks.

which required me to do something at specific times and, you know, basically have my entire days blocked for weeks. I think it's something I'll talk about in a different episode, but I just want to acknowledge the... Paradox of that, the fact that clearly I am now very hands-on at AJ and Smart, whereas when I started this podcast, I was sort of like, almost like a...

I was in this phase where I was almost like an external board member or something. I was also a bit kind of sick of the company. I was also kind of confused about what my role was at the company. And I think, I mean, I haven't listened back to the podcast, but I think that I was basically confused about what the fuck I was supposed to be doing at AJ and Smart for about four years. So...

Before I started the unscheduled CEO, I was also confused about what my role was. And it's especially confusing when the numbers are good, like one of our best years ever was 2023. And that was when I started to kind of step back and I was like, huh, maybe this just all works without me now. And now I'm like extremely back in, couldn't be more back in. Maybe more back in than I've been in almost a decade or something. Maybe since 2019. Yeah, maybe six years. And I'm really enjoying it.

Even just a couple of weeks ago, you heard me on an episode with Jason Freed where I was unmotivated and he was like, you should take a sabbatical. And then I didn't take a sabbatical. There's some method to the madness going on behind the scenes here. I will talk about it on upcoming episodes. There's a lot of... I want to do an episode on the theme.

that's coming to my mind is when things in the business are not going that good, like as in there's stagnation and it's not growing and... Like lots of little projects that we're trying and lots of experiments are just not working and I'm starting to get demotivated. There's like a weird hack that I figured out to get me and the team. all excited enough and all energized enough to actually just keep going to the point where we start growing again. And know that hack is not cocaine or meth.

Although I cannot say that the ADHD medication that I started taking recently isn't helping in some way. But yeah, there's another thing. It's basically, whenever the company is not doing well, one of the... One of the most simple questions I can ask myself to figure out how do we get back on track or how do we get that momentum again where we're winning, where we all feel like we're winning every month instead of like this kind of like, oh, man, that didn't work. Fuck.

Nothing's working here. And that was a bit of the feeling I had at AJ and Smart for, I don't know, probably from like December or like November last year till about March. I was like, things aren't. fucking working like we're not we're not growing we're like our last good or like our best year ever wasn't wasn't this year you know and i wasn't used to that because we grew every year all the way up until the end of 2023

And then we didn't grow in 2024. We actually went backwards. And who cares about growth, blah, blah, blah. Well, I care about it because if my company is not growing, then not only can I not pay anybody more. because it means that we're stagnating. There's this kind of saying, I can't remember who said it, but if you're not growing...

there isn't this magical middle state where the company just stays at the same level, you always go backwards. Because also inflation, right? So if we make 6 million one year, and then the next year we make 6 million again, Well, but we have the same amount of employees or maybe even more. Things get more expensive. If you think about also giving people raises and everything, that's six million.

the profitability of that $6 million is going down automatically just due to the day-to-day of inflation, people wanting to have some sort of career progression. keep the machine running. And you start going backwards very quickly. You start shrinking very quickly when you start to stagnate. So a lot of these kind of influencers out there who are like, oh, you don't have to grow, blah, blah, blah.

That's fine. However, you also have to just understand that when you don't grow, and I'm not saying like you have to fucking, oh, I just see, I see a mosquito in my bedroom. I'm standing in my bedroom here. recording this. Mosquito, you motherfucker. Did I get it? Where are you, you bastard? Alright, I can't see him. I gotta get him before tonight. Anyway, sorry. So if you're not growing...

If you're stagnating, in most cases, it means you're about to go backwards because much of the momentum, like the company's growth, like AJ and Smart, when it's growing. is usually due to good decisions and good momentum that happened a couple of months before or even six months or even a year before, right? So when you stop growing, it usually means...

that decisions that have been made like maybe six months ago or ideas are actually not really working. And if you don't take action, which often I'll wait too long and I'll wait and see. That's one of my bad, like, it's one of the things I do as a CEO that all of my coaches criticize me about. I'm a very much wait and see.

Like, I'm like, this strategy doesn't seem to be working, but what if we tweak it like this? What if we tweak it like this? And it just never fucking works. And so when you're not growing, when you're stagnating, and even as a consultant, you know, if you're making... 10k a month and then like for a while and then you start making 9k a month maybe you're like oh that's not such a big deal but you are now starting almost like a decline

because that 9K month is worth less because of inflation. And some decisions you've made mean that you're somehow being perceived as less valuable by your clients. And usually those decisions were a while ago because there's like this lagging effect on revenue. So I can't even remember how I started this bit, but I was talking about what I'm going to talk about in another episode.

But what I want to talk about is we had this problem at AJ and Smart where we were stagnating for a while. I was kind of watching it and I was like, oh, maybe we do this, maybe we do that. And then... Of course, what starts to happen is you start to decline. And when you start to decline, it takes very long to solve that because usually the solutions that bring you back to growth...

You know, you do your, you kind of start working on them, you take action, but there's this lagging effect. So it can take months before you start growing again. And so the problem we had at AJ and Smart was we started to stagnate in 2024. And in 2025, we started to shrink and... It's pretty dramatic when the expenses are as high as they are at AJ and Smart. We have, I think, our monthly costs are between $170,000 and $250,000 per month.

I know that's a big range. I'm not going to go into why, but that's the range approximately of how much it costs to run AJN Smart, mainly facilitator.com. And so if we're not making... $250k at a minimum in a month, well, you can probably guess we make minus. And when we start making minus, the minuses are not small. they are minus 70, minus $80,000, right? These are huge losses when the losses start happening. And so a big part of this...

I want to have this recorded now just because I like having these things recorded if I ever go back to it. We hit the stagnation point. We had our first signals of shrinkage, of like decline. By the way, I know my team, you're wondering, does your team listen to this? Yes. And I also tell them that this is happening. They know. So we started a bit of a decline. And that's when I was like, why is this happening? Like, it kind of kept happening in the last two years where...

We'd grow a bit, then we would stagnate again, and everyone's like, what the fuck's going on? How do we do this? And I had a pretty big realization. That realization was... you know i was chatting to laura we were talking about the business the future of the business we're like fucking hell this just feels unsustainable the way that this keeps happening maybe our expenses are just way too high maybe we're just not that type of

Maybe I'm just not that type of CEO who can handle a $250k per month company. But then we had another thought. We were like... what was the last thing that grew the business? Like, what were the things that were happening the last time we had this massive, like, exponential growth, you know, adding an extra million in a year, not an extra 20k or whatever?

And we realized that the last time, or the times, when we tended to grow... Oh, I see the motherfucking mosquito again. I got him. I got him. You motherfucker, you ain't gonna bite me tonight. We realized that the conditions for us growing involve me coming up with new angles, new hooks, new... funnels and being part of the of leading the funnel architecture build so not just asking the team hey can you know i think we need to increase call bookings let's give it a go

This just doesn't work. I personally need to be leading the new projects. And the funny thing is, and Laura reminded me of this. I don't know, we were chatting with a team member on Monday. And I was explaining this to that team member. And Laura was like, you know that our mentor, Brian Franklin, a really good coach, by the way. He told you four years ago, she was saying this to me, so he told me four years ago that my role at AJ and Smart should be called Special Projects. Meaning...

that I'm brought in when something new needs to be created that generates growth. And the team is essentially there to help maintain that growth, maintain that... trajectory after I give it this big push and make sure that the product quality is there and make sure that the thing runs for many years while I'm thinking of the next special project. And so when we looked back...

and how we generally grow. And I'm talking right now, you know, the facilitator.com part, but you could probably apply this generally. You can apply this generally across the whole AJ and smart machine. Is that... I personally need to get excited. I personally need to come in. It's not about me saying to the team, here's an idea and then delegating it to them. Because it just doesn't work for me and it just doesn't work in general.

I need to act like a director of a movie, almost like an auteur director, and I need to be part of every single fucking thing in the project until I can truly say, there's nothing more I can do here. This thing is working. And then I'll get off it. So for this funnel, I was the main project manager. I was the person fully responsible for every single part of it, as in I specifically said to the team, this everything that goes wrong here or right here is I'm taking that responsibility.

When we have support issues, this is my thing to solve with you guys. I'm bringing this to you guys. But I'm the center point of this project, and I'm going to essentially obsessively direct everything about it. Which is, you know, the opposite of flat hierarchies and the opposite of whatever these things are. But I think that for AJ and Smart, and I believe this will be the case going forward,

That is just how it's going to be. There's going to have to be a me, a person like me who is responsible for, hey. I've been out there meeting people, reading books, doing all of this stuff, and I have another idea. But the difference is now. I mean, it's not different to how it was before. The thing that I've remembered, and Laura also brought this to me, is that...

I need to get the thing. I need to get the thing out of infancy. Bring it to life. Literally be in ClickFunnels. Literally be in the builder. the funnel builder making the thing and understanding every single part of it until I feel this thing is now ready to sort of move into more of a maintenance mode.

And this funnel was the first one of those in a while. To be honest, I'll also tell you, it just felt good to see the numbers coming in. Nothing is more depressing than... turning on a funnel that you spent a long time working on and you like get i don't know five call bookings and make ten thousand dollars or something um

Yeah, I think this one, I guess, funnel from Wednesday to Wednesday. So from launch to one week later, I think this thing, if we include the backend sales, will probably generate like 300, 350K. which is fucking amazing. I'm happy with that. That's great. So yeah, anyway, guys, that's that book funnel launched. Very happy with it. It was completely crazy.

I hope you can learn something by funnel hacking it. Looking forward to showing some of you guys at summer camp the behind the scenes, the numbers, what's working, what's not. And hopefully by then, hopefully by August. like this shit is turned into an evergreen funnel and it's like perfect but um for now still lots to work on still lots to do for the cold version of the funnel cold version of the funnel is different to the warm version of the funnel

Also, many people do not do that. But for us, it's extremely important. They are not the same thing. And yeah, hope you guys have a great week. And that's it. Bye bye.