Hey, welcome back to the podcast. So I just got the A.J. and Smart Q1 results back, meaning I now know how much money A.J. and Smart made in January, February, March. If you don't run a business, we a lot of businesses sort of count things by the quarter, because I don't know, sometimes you'll have an invoice, like you'll make a sale in January, but maybe
the invoice doesn't come in until February. And so for us at A.J. and Smart, it makes sense to count by the months just to kind of see how things are going, but quarterly is for us the best way to compare to the previous years and just see how things are going. And just looking at the numbers, it's clear to me, or basically looking at the numbers has done two things for me. One, it's shown me what works and what doesn't work in the current strategy
at A.J. and Smart. And two, it also gives me like a little topic to talk about that I've been talking about with Laura pretty much for the last two weeks when we're thinking about okay, what makes people or companies successful and what makes people or companies unsuccessful. And again, I'm talking about small businesses here. I do not think this necessarily applies
to corporates or anything like that. So looking at the results, the Q1 results 2024 versus 2023, what's clear to me is what works for A.J. and Smart and what doesn't work for A.J. and Smart. What works for us is focusing more on one off thing. I'll just kind of list out the things that work really well for us. What works really well for us is live events, meaning live streams, live trainings, webinars. What works really well for us is launching
new things. So you know, three weeks ago we launched full stack facilitator in person training that brought in a significant amount of revenue in Q1. So that's launching a new thing, creating excitement around a new thing. That works really well. And what also works for us is being clever about how to reengage old leads through live events. So last night, for example, my sister Rebecca ran a live event, which was for everybody who basically
looked at our sales video on facilitator.com, but didn't book a call. By the way, like those people are usually like lost forever. But last night we decided to do Laura decided to run Laura and Dom at A.J. and Smart decided to run a live event. And this live event got 47 call bookings. And just doing the math out of 47 call bookings will get 20 to 25% of those will be closes. Actually, it can't really do that math. It would be to 8, 10, approximately
10. Is that right? So if 10% of let's say it's 50, so that would be 5, 20% would be 10. Yeah. So approximately 10 people will close out of that. And well, you kind of you can figure out the cost of A.J. and smarts products and figure out how much revenue that will be, but that's essentially 100,000 euro worth of revenue, which we wouldn't have pulled in at all. I'm sitting here on the balcony. It's very beautiful today. That's 100K of
revenue that we wouldn't have pulled in at all. Had we not done that. So what's working really well for A.J. and Smart are the things that have worked for us in the past, which are live, just running these live trainings, live events, things where people feel like, you know, they actually want to turn up to them because they're live. They're happening once. They're not recorded. And that's what we're going to do more and more of. So live
events and launching. So what doesn't work for us? What doesn't work for A.J. and Smart? It doesn't mean it's not going to work for you. What doesn't work for us is this concept of continuity, this concept of having people on retainers or having customers on long-term plans with us. So last year, we launched something called inner circle mentorship. We actually
tried a few versions of it before we settled on what we wanted to settle on. And the idea initially in November was that we would have this monthly plan where people could pay monthly to be part of a paid community after they'd already bought the program. So this was after there. So if someone buys workshop or master, which is one of our most premium programs, they used to get either three or six or 12 months access to that pro through the community
and coaching calls, depending on how much they paid for it. And then after that point, they had the opportunity to pay monthly and stay in the service. And our idea was we're going to like put all of our efforts into this and just try to keep people retained so that every month we can have a predictable revenue. And the problem with that is that AJ and smart is just not a company like the people running AJ and smart, essentially
the leadership at AJ and smart, which is me and Laura. We are obviously not interested enough and not excited enough about subscription services to really be very skilled at keeping these things go. So what happened very quickly was that the energy and ideas and creativity and execution behind it was just not very good. And so already by the end of January, we stopped offering a monthly payment because it was also like a lot of invoice management
with people, a lot of individual reach out for very little money. I mean, the renewal rate is okay, but it's not like in any way worth keeping something like that is so complicated and having a monthly recurring revenue system. You know, the amount of emails and the amount of invoicing and the amount of complication you have to do, you have to deal with as a small business and the amount of paperwork for people to renew monthly versus just having
the option for someone to renew for another year is just not worth it. So we've decided we're just allowing people to renew for another year instead of having this monthly option because it just doesn't actually make us really much money and it's really not worth the hassle of dealing with it. And so what we realized is just this idea of maintenance, yet this idea of long term subscriptions or retention retaining clients is just not in
the DNA of A.J. and smart. It's just not what we're very good at is coming up with a concept launching a new thing, creating a lot of energy around it. And then essentially either launching that or putting that into different campaigns a couple of times per year or having one core product like workshop or master which has ads running to it which people buy and pay one time. And then that's it. They just pay and then we try to sell them something
else another time. It sounds like not a great business model because then you have to use energy and creativity every time to make more money. But actually we make more money when we do that. And we often say this is like more the Russell Brunson approach. Russell Brunson is the guy who runs click funnels. He writes a lot of marketing books. He's a
very hyperactive kind of ADD type character. He's just kind of wild, very energetic. And we say that sometimes we say we're embodying Russell Brunson when we're in a more chaotic phase where we're launching a lot of stuff. And then sometimes after we've launched a lot of stuff and there's a lot of mess and there's a lot of broken shit, then we embody Sam Evans. Sam Evans is the guy who used to run consulting.com and now runs school
who is our mentor for three years. Now we're embodying Sam Evans and we need to go into Zen mode and we need to tidy things up. And when we have that sort of rhythm, we tend to make the most money. So we'll go crazy for a few months or even a few years just trying loads of shit that's completely inconsistent all over the place. And then we'll start tidying up the bits that we think make the most sense. But when we make basically, well,
no money, we still make multiples of millions of revenue and profit. But when we make less money is when we get stuck in the Zen phase, in the sort of maintenance phase, looking for easy ways to make money, we start to stagnate. And so I'm looking at quarter one this year. Last year, you know, last year 2023, one of the reasons, so the enterprise part of the business was kind of doing shitty in Q1 2023. But the online coaching and training
part of the business was doing well. And one of the reasons is because we launched full stack facilitator in February 2023 and full stack facilitator was a new online course. And that did really, really well. I think we pulled in a half a million in March or February last year. And the best thing that happened this quarter again, it was launching full stack facilitator. So I'm looking at the numbers, I'm looking at the trends and
oh, sorry, my food is arriving. I need to walk to the door and let this guy in. This is in case this is your first time listening to this podcast, I do not edit anything at all. There's no editing. It's just a start to finish me talking, walking around my apartment. It used to be, it's always been unedited, but it gets like more and more low five every week. So, yeah, when I look at the numbers, when I, instead of just thinking about like
the, the like pontificating about how do we make this business? Like, how do we change lives? How do we make it super consistent and really, you know, build this, instead of doing that, which is really like strategizing and just talking about stuff, it seems that just doing stuff, actually taking action, even if that action is sort of not really consistent with the rest of what we're doing, we make more money. And unfortunately, or fortunately,
when you're running a small business, that's what you need to do. We don't have investors. We can't fuck around for five years, just kind of playing with ideas. Wait a second, I got to open the door here. Hello, thank you, Sen. Sen, take off. All right, my burrito has arrived. You can't just, I mean, start-ups. This is also another
thing, by the way. If you're taking it, you got to really be careful who you're taking advice from, because if you're taking advice from someone who doesn't ever need to fucking give a shit about making money. So for example, any startup founder, it's not necessarily about making money for them. I know a lot of startup founders, no problem. Or I don't want to shit on them because they're also doing something very special. It's
just very different to a small business. They don't necessarily need to think about money for years. In fact, I have very good friends running startups who've been unprofitable for like five, six, seven years. Profitability is not the goal. Growth is the goal often for them. Selling to a competitor is often the goal for them, especially in Germany, one of the, especially in Europe, one of the biggest things that startups want to do
is just get sold to an American startup, which is interesting. So for us at A.J. and Smart, making advice from people who are either already so rich, it doesn't matter anymore. And it's just about zen or thinking, you know, listening to Elon Musk or something talking about building SpaceX. This stuff's all really cool, but it's not like the reality of the day today of running a small business where we literally have to sell stuff to make money.
We have to sell our services. We have to sell our products to make money. So when I look at A.J. and Smart, it sounds like a, you know, small thing, but you know, I'm sitting down with Laura and we're looking at these numbers and I just sent her a message, hey, Laura, like look, look at these numbers. These numbers just clearly show that this journey to have a great brand and to have an amazing, like beautiful YouTube channel and all of this
stuff. It doesn't work as well as just launching shit. It doesn't work as well as what we've just done with full stack facilitator or what we did last year with facilitation fundamentals. That just makes more money and that's actually what a business is here to do. We are here. What we do is measured by how much money we make, how long we can survive as a company is measured by how much money we make. And when we don't make money, we also can't give
people raises. We also just might not last very long if there's a bump in the road. So looking at what we're doing, and A.J. and Smart is going to be less strategy, less big picture for the short term and just actually launching the things we're talking about and just trying stuff out and not overthinking. Oh, does this fit into the big strategy of A.J. Smart? Who gives a shit? Let's just see what happens. Let's just test it out and let's
just get things out there. So you're going to see a lot more activity over the next months. More like A.J. and Smart 2019, 2020 when a lot more was going on. You know, we were launching books. We were launching courses all over the place. We were busy. I was traveling the entire time to the US. We were just a busy company and we're going back to that. We've
already been moving into that mode. Lauren, I have realized that the calm chill zen, let's just tweak thing mode can't just be the main thing because we still make money, but we stagnate. So the energy that needs to come back into A.J. and Smart is a more, we're taking action. We're getting stuff out there. We're launching. We're shipping stuff. We're not talking about stuff. And you know, 2023 was a lot of talking about stuff that was very
exciting, but did not make us money. This is the problem. Okay. So how can you apply this to yourself? And I'm thinking a lot about, I always think about how can I help other entrepreneurs? And it comes down to a couple of things. I think not one of the number one reasons entrepreneurs that I meet who are not successful or unsuccessful, the number one reason, the number one reason is they don't take any action. They talk about stuff.
I talked about this last week about how to improve that, but one of the real, if you want to, if you, if I would, if I met you, I could ask you a couple of questions and I can tell if you're going to be successful or not as an entrepreneur. And one of the main things I'm trying to figure out is, do you just talk about shit, but never do it? Or do you have any sense of urgency at all to get things done? Urgency is such a clear thing for
me. Urgency in action. If I wanted to figure out, like, if I met an entrepreneur, if I wanted to figure out like the attributes that I'm looking for, it would be a sense of urgency, a bias towards taking action. And probably the third thing would be like enthusiasm. You don't want someone who's just like super cynical and negative about everything. They're on, they're probably going to question themselves so much that they'll never get anything done.
And there is this with urgency, let me give you an example. Last year, A.J. and Smart was a less urgent company. We had less urgency. Because, and a lot of it comes from the top, right? I didn't have a lot of urgency. I didn't feel the sense of urgency that I'm currently feeling and I'm currently feeling that sense of urgency because I can A.J. and Smart didn't have, you know, we were so used to having our best year ever, every year and then 2023,
we didn't have our best year ever. And if you know anything about business, you'll know that generally when a company stagnates, it starts to go backwards. It never really stays in a, in a, in a constant state. Like you can't like, if A.J. and Smart made 3 million last year to make that same 3 million this year, you still have to basically try to grow. If we would just use the same strategies this year as last year, that 3 million would be
2 million. You just always lose momentum. There's this sense of entropy and running a business. But anyway, urgency, you know, last year at A.J. and Smart, the thing, the type of things that would happen would be, I would get excited. I would say, you know what, let's, let's do another book. The book funnel was the most successful marketing thing we've ever done. And within like two weeks of it, I would lose, you know, basically what would happen
is I would book a meeting one month in advance, which is very not like me. And then we would say, let's have a look at the book then. Let's, let's kick off the book funnel. And by the time four weeks passed, I would doubt myself in the meantime and doubt that idea was good and start thinking of all the logistics of running a book funnel, which is one of the hardest funnels to create. Even though it was our most successful funnel. And eventually
I'm like, you know what, let's not do the book funnel. Let's just update workshop or master our main product a little bit and just see what happens there. This year, it's very different. It go, it went from me on a Friday. I think I think it was this short. It went from me on a Friday chatting to Laura about let's do an in-person event to, I think no, it was like on a Monday talking about the idea of doing an in-person event on a Wednesday
talking to her mentor about the pricing of the event. And on the following Monday already sitting with the team and creating the landing page. So if the usual A.J. and smart, you know, one to two week turnaround for product. And then, you know, within the same month already selling this event and already being able to make hundreds of thousands of euro from
that idea. Instead of me having the idea me talking to Laura, us getting discouraged, us saying let's talk about it in two months and then getting around to it and already being bored of the idea. The thing is you have to, you have to get ahead of your tendency. I have to get ahead of my tendency to lose excitement about something. And if you lose excitement about something, if you start questioning yourself, you're just not going to do it.
And by the way, of course, there's always reasons to question yourself. If you have an idea like I'm going to do an event, if you start already thinking about how complicated it's going to be to run it, then you're unlikely to actually start to do it. An entrepreneur needs to have a little bit of this sense of urgency. You need to be a little bit naive
going into things. The more you know about how bad something can go or how complicated something can be, the less likely you're going to do it, less likely it is you're going to do it. And so there is this sense that speed is pretty important. Urgency is pretty important. Action taking is pretty important. I see people in my community in the inner
circle mentorship community. And you know, the difference between the people who are successful and not successful, the difference between the people who are posting, you know, you'll have someone join workshop or master and after two months, they're like, I just ran a workshop. I charge $15,000 and it's with this cool company. And then you'll have someone who's been in there for an entire year who then asks for a refund who hasn't done anything
who just likes to talk about what they're going to do. They like to talk. They like to buy courses. They like to read. They like to pontificate. They like to like visualize their fucking potential future. They like, they want to like perfect their slogan. They want to perfect their niche. They want to figure out like the visual style of their fucking LinkedIn. This is just all bullshit. This is all procrastination. This is all a waste of time. Business is
not about playing business. Business is not a game that you're playing. Business is about can you turn what can you make more? Can you make more money than a cost to run what you're doing? Can you actually make money? That's what business is. It's not it's not this weird game. And I will say if you're listening to this, there's a couple of things I've also noticed. And this this can also I'm going to bring this back to where I've made my
mistakes with a Jane smart. The people who are the most impossible, the most impossible to help with their entrepreneurship entrepreneurship journey, especially when it's a small business, are the people who have absolutely no financial pressure to do anything at all. And I totally understand it. If I had no financial, if I had had no financial pressure in my early 20s, maybe I would also be just chill and like traveling to hanging out and baldy all the
time. And complaining about the fact that I'm my entrepreneur journey isn't isn't going well. I have I'm sorry to all my friends who ask me for advice who spend all their time in in Thailand and Bali. I love you, but yeah, you're not serious about your business. I think I think a lot of that is just it most of the time I see in this situation that the
difference between me and other small business owners where it's working. And then the people where it's not working is sometimes just their parents kind of support them or their partners financially supporting them. That's often the reason they don't really have to make money. And of course, then they're also the people when I give them advice, they're like, yeah, but dude, everything's not about making money, man. Like yeah, I know, but actually for me,
I do need to make money or else I will not have a place to live. There's a very big difference between someone like me where I am the provider of my entire, you know, wider family setup. I am the first person to make money in my in my family essentially. And there's a very big difference if you're like, you know, the, I don't know, third generation of a family
that's already making money and supporting you through college, whatever like. It's very hard for me to give any sense of urgency to somebody whose parents bought them an apartment. You know, it's by the way, these are also the people who complain to me about talking too much about money. It's like their parents have bought them an apartment, pay their bills
essentially. Then they're asking me for advice on becoming an entrepreneur and I'm thinking kind of hard to give you any sense of urgency when the truth is you don't have any sense of urgency. You're actually looking for a purpose in your life, but it's kind of hard to have a purpose. It's it's it's hard. It's going to be very difficult for you to have this because the second it gets difficult, you're just going to shut down the company
because you don't actually need to go through all this shit. Whereas I do need to go through all this shit. At least I did need to go through all this shit. And that's the point. As A.J. and Smart became more and more successful and I became less in need of A.J. and Smart
supplying my cash flow. The my approach to the business became more like theoretical and more about thinking about the big picture and where are we going to go and what are we going to do and what's you know what's the brand and how is it all consistent instead of like just how do you make money as a company. And so I'm right back in the trenches again. Learning about the latest webinar techniques, learning about the latest lead generation,
lead reengagement techniques. I'm literally Laura and Dom at A.J. and Smart are getting like plied with different videos and courses and things that I'm buying. I'm currently going down a pretty deep rabbit hole with a guy called Dan Henry. Kind of like you'll consider him as sleazy sales guy but he has some great great ideas, great tactics for email all that kind of stuff. So yeah urgency really. If you don't have a sense of urgency
about what you're doing. If you don't have a sense that you need to do it right now, and it's going to be hard for you to succeed. It is going to be difficult. And I talked about how to cultivate this before. If you already have, so if you already have like enough money to survive and you don't really need to make money and what you do already provides enough. The only honestly the only thing I can come up with and if you don't subscribe
to I need to follow my passion. If you want to follow your passion fine. But if your idea is that you'd love to have your own business and your own independence, bought like you're working at a company and making plenty of money. I mean realistically you do have to quit. You just have to like you have to you have to burn the bridges. You have to burn the boats, whatever it is. And if you just have your partner paying for everything for
you, I don't know. That's going to be difficult because if you can always back out, there's I mean, if I could always back out, A.J. and Smart is fucking hard to run. If I could always back out and I'd be fine financially, I probably would have backed out last year when it was super stressful or two years ago when I was going through loads of personal shit, but still had to run the business. But because I literally can't and that's what I see with
a lot of entrepreneurs, they need to make money. Money is actually an important element to what they do. Making money is an important element. So yeah, if you're listening to this podcast and money is not even remotely a problem for you, you have to also it's probably also good to admit that. It's like, well, I got an inheritance for my parents. I can probably go on 10 years, it up, making any money. And actually the reason I wanted to be
an entrepreneur is because I need to feel a sense of purpose. Yeah, I don't know. I really genuinely don't know what to do about that. That's not like my ballpark. I'm realizing, I'm realizing with my coaching clients that this is not my ballpark. I don't know how to solve people's purpose, blissness problems if they've shit tons of cash. The only thing I did like what my mentor said to me, which I actually think is really smart, but it's
controversial. So I won't say which mentor. He said, Jonathan, you just need to increase. Like you're you need to increase your lifestyle costs as in like you need to you need to basically live the life that you want to live before you're even earning the amount of money that can provide for it. So meaning moving into an apartment that's just quite a bit more
than I would have been comfortable with flying business class. These types of things can help you to feel a sense of urgency, but also they really like, I'll give you one actually clear example. I joined Sam ovens mastermind, which was 36,000 euro per year. I don't know, I think it was 2019 36,000 plus you have to fly to LA and like twice per year or four times per year. Can't remember. We didn't do that all the time, obviously, but this was like
a 50 to 60,000 euro investment. Then I started working with Brian Franklin, 3600 per hour. That's like over the year, guys, I ended up spending like 380 or 360,000 euro on mentorship. What happens is you start to become the type of person who does those things. You start to surround yourself with other people in Sam ovens mastermind who are just ahead of you who are just doing better than you. And this makes it so much easier to grow into that,
so much easier. It starts to happen automatically. The urgency builds up the desire to have some of the lifestyle things that I'll give you an example. I have a strong desire to be healthy and to eat healthy food and to have access to maybe healthcare things that are difficult to access without being able to earn a lot of money. And so these things, just by meeting other people who have access to these things. I remember a friend of mine, I won't say his
name. He said, he was like, oh, Jonathan, you have to work with this doctor. He's like amazing. He'll do all your blood tests. He'll basically keep you alive. He's this longevity doctor really famous. And I was like, oh my God, I really want to do that. Sounds amazing. Like someone who's basically going to make sure I don't die. This appeals to me, whatever, if it doesn't appeal to you who cares. And so I was like, yeah, that's amazing. Put
me in touch with him. So like, how much does it cost? And he was like, so the first appointment is $450,000. This is basically where you do blood tests. You do an MRI. You do everything. And then it's $250,000 per year to do like four checkups or something. And I was like, oh, okay. This is an example of something I have not been able to afford. This would destroy me financially. But it's something that I now see as a target for
myself. I'd love to be able to do that. I hate the idea that there's people who are going to be healthier and live longer just because they make some more fucking money. You know, you could say it's unfair. But at the same time, yeah, it's unfair, but there's really
nothing I can do about it besides try to earn as much money as possible. So yeah, this is a pretty, this is one of these conversations where when I'm, when I'm saying these things, I feel a bit worried about someone clipping it and trying to use it against me and say that I'm an asshole or whatever. But that's always, that always means it's actually going
to be an enjoyable podcast to listen to. Have a great day, everyone. Hey, if you're, if you like this podcast, the only thing I'm asking, the gentleman's agreement here, the only thing I'm asking for is that you subscribe. So hit the subscribe button and whichever podcast app you're listening to this in. Hey, can you let me know in the comments? So if you go, if you go to how to business dot sub sack, dot com and go to the latest podcast,
you can leave a comment. Can you let me know in the comments where you listen to this podcast? And the only thing I ask, so I ask you a few things, tell someone about the podcast, tell someone about this episode. If you liked it, if you could share it, that does help. More people listening to this podcast feeds my ego. No, well, yes, it actually does feed my ego. But the main thing is it makes it feel like there's a point of me creating it.
Because just like anything else, when something stagnates, it kind of goes backwards and it starts to become less interesting. So straight up, I would love more people to listen to this podcast. Maybe I'd even start to get it on a more regular schedule. If I had the feeling more people were listening, then I would feel a bit more pressure and urgency to create it. So please give it a subscribe in the podcast app, share it if you can. That's what I'm
looking for. I'm looking to grow it a little bit. Thanks, everyone. Have a really nice day. Bye.