I'm going to go from bankruptcy/£240,000 personal debt to a life of freedom using Facebook ads.

[Paul David]

Nice thread, good luck mate.

I'm sorry but I think I didn't get quite well what you doing right now. You went from an ecommerce (laptops batteries/chargers) and now you're running a digital marketing agency focused on FB ads? Is that right? How do you look for new clients?

Good luck man, specially in the UK. Damn,I lived in Lodon for 3 years, one word: EXPENSIVE

at the same time, so much money flowing, it's ridiculous. You dont understand how people manage to live in such wealth although at the same time it's so hard to earn good money. Definetly a place of opportunities, good luck mate

Yes it's been a journey.

I get clients quite easy as it's a pay per show model. The clients don't pay me until the customers I refer arrive.

London is very expensive. I live 4 hours drive away from there where it's so bad!

 

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[Paul David]

Short Update:

Replaced the VA who quit with another one is absolutely great. Really impressed with her in the short time she's started.

I've put 8 clients live using the system, they began yesterday. So far we've booked 9 appointments.

Will update at the end of the month with P&L figures!

 

[Simon Angel]

Good to hear you've gained some traction, keep it up man. Pay per show is ingenious.

 

[Paul David]

Good to hear you've gained some traction, keep it up man. Pay per show is ingenious.

Thanks. Still very early days, probably going to only put 10-12 clients live for the first month. I want to see what the profit is looking like at the end of the month. Iron out any issues that happen and then I can scale knowing it's worthwhile. Any problems with these clients will be duplicated with anymore so I think it's a sensible choice.

 

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[Paul David]

So the figures are in from the end of the first week.

£2460 in referrals from an ad spend of £450.00

2 more clients going live next week also.

It's nice to be able to put what I've developed into play and actually see some financial results from it.

One of my clients emailed me and said they'd upsold the first client I referred to a package of £520 !! They paid me £60 for the referral.

 

[RazorCut]

That is excellent news Paul. And a great return for your first client. Will make a great testimonial.

Onwards and upwards

 

[Paul David]

Monthly Update:

It's been almost a month since my first 10 clients went live. It's been a massive learning curve and I'm so glad I didn't put all 28 clients I have live at once.

Apart from a couple of issues with my accounting software my automations are working extremely well. All appointments are accounted for and very little of time is taken up with the side of the business.

At the moment I had £8900 worth of appointments booked for the month. £6500 has already been paid to me and the rest of the clients are due in this week. Ad spend for the clients will be around £2700. And I've probably spent around £1000 on VA's and other business expenses.

So profit for the month before tax it's looking at around £5200. It would have been a lot more but we had around 40 appointment cancellations and 15 no shows which I don't get paid for (£3300). This did annoy me but as @RazorCut kindly pointed out, it's part of the business model and to be expected.

I was nearly driving a taxi a month or two ago and I'd probably have to work 80 hours a week to get anywhere near that amount, at the moment I can work 1 hour a day if I wanted (not that i do!) so I'm very pleased about that.

Over the next month, I'm going to put more clients live and I'm also introducing a messenger bot which will also improve our booking rates and save a lot of time and money.

After months of earning nothing and having eventually filed for bankruptcy I'm happy with the first month. Target is still £20k profit per month so I just need to gradually keep adding new clients now and also ensuring the current clients are getting regular booked appointments.

 

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[Bigguns50]

Just read through your thread. Congratulations on pushing through all your challenges ! Fantastic progress ! One suggestion. Put this

ensuring the current clients are getting regular booked appointments.

before the profit target. If you do this, you will blow by your financial target. IMO

 

[Paul David]

Over the past 2 weeks I've had some issues that I needed to take care of before onboarding anymore clients.

Issues such as:

- My VA's cancelling the wrong appointments
- My VA's not taking action on the CRM so leads are getting follow up messages whey they shouldn't be
- My VA's not cancelling appointments then the lead doesn't arrive and they get added to a no show follow up which is then incorrect
- Clinic owner not marking any clients as no show on our CRM (she did it on hers by mistake) so complained when £360 came out of her bank.
- Clinic owner complaining that two no shows happened on Saturday which is her busiest weekend
- Clinic owner marked a lead as no show but this was her second appointment not first (I think she was trying to get out of paying me the show up fee for original appointments but I caught her out!)

Having too many leads cancelling appointments with less than 48 hours notice which is annoying. I'm going to look at introducing a deposit policy.

I've lost 2 clients so far, the one who wasn't happy with the no shows (who was a nightmare to work with anyway) and another who's saying he's not getting a ROI. Which I find strange.

I'll be onboarding more clients over the next few weeks which will hopefully increase the revenue and profits however I'll tweak the process so that some of the issues above aren't replicated again.

 

[Blackman]

Hi Paul,

Read your story on how you went from running a PC/laptop repair shop since you were 20, then moving into the e-commerce world of eBay/Amazon and now looks like you're into lead generation, which is something that I've been playing with myself since December last year.

Props to you for ploughing on and moving forward, no matter what happens.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, you're essentially running a commission-based marketing service, where you do the advertising for a chosen business and only when your referred customer makes money for them, that's when you get paid.

It all sounds well and good, except as I can see from the above, there's a lot of running around in circles trying to establish what happened to the leads and getting paid for them.

This is the reason why I've been trying to implement a more traditional approach of managing service-based clients where I charge a fixed monthly fee for my service (running Google Ads) and the client also covers the advertising spend.

In theory, it's an excellent setup, where I run ads to my own landing page, generate leads via phone calls directly to my client and he takes it from there. I don't get involved with customers, I don't care how much the clients make per job, so my only focus is on getting relevant leads.

Unfortunately, I've been struggling to secure a single client with this model, so I can't say it's been successful, considering you have 28 clients and I've got 0.

Similar to how you don't charge anything upfront, I've been running free trials for my prospects by offering them my service completely free of charge, including the ad cost, for the first 4-5 customers and then I would get in touch with the prospect and try to close them for a regular monthly package, assuming everything went well and they were satisfied with the calls.

This hasn't worked too well, as they are all happy with the leads coming in, because my lead quality is excellent and they all convert well, but clients are not too keen on paying the ad cost and my service fee on top. As a result, I feel quite burned out trying to find new clients with this method, as I keep spending money doing trials, but in the end can't take it further.

I'm also working with service-based businesses (specifically cleaning) and after reading your posts, I started thinking about how I could implement your strategy and only charge them after a job has been completed.

This immediately raises the question of trust, because your client could lie about the exact number of jobs secured from calls or about the amount charged per job. Then trying to work out a commission rate that would work for both parties sounds like another big pain in the backside.

I'm amazed at how you're running at a profit after subtracting your ad costs, but I guess if you're dealing with businesses where the average sale amount is quite high, then it might work out well, although the CPCs are also higher in such niches, so while you earn more, you also spend more on ads.

Do you think your model would be a viable option when working with cleaning companies? Quite often these are 1-2 man businesses, where there are no fancy booking management systems, so automation might be an issue....

Anyway, would be great to know what you think in general about this model that you're currently running.

 

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[Paul David]

Hi Paul,

Read your story on how you went from running a PC/laptop repair shop since you were 20, then moving into the e-commerce world of eBay/Amazon and now looks like you're into lead generation, which is something that I've been playing with myself since December last year.

Props to you for ploughing on and moving forward, no matter what happens.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, you're essentially running a commission-based marketing service, where you do the advertising for a chosen business and only when your referred customer makes money for them, that's when you get paid.

It all sounds well and good, except as I can see from the above, there's a lot of running around in circles trying to establish what happened to the leads and getting paid for them.

This is the reason why I've been trying to implement a more traditional approach of managing service-based clients where I charge a fixed monthly fee for my service (running Google Ads) and the client also covers the advertising spend.

In theory, it's an excellent setup, where I run ads to my own landing page, generate leads via phone calls directly to my client and he takes it from there. I don't get involved with customers, I don't care how much the clients make per job, so my only focus is on getting relevant leads.

Unfortunately, I've been struggling to secure a single client with this model, so I can't say it's been successful, considering you have 28 clients and I've got 0.

Similar to how you don't charge anything upfront, I've been running free trials for my prospects by offering them my service completely free of charge, including the ad cost, for the first 4-5 customers and then I would get in touch with the prospect and try to close them for a regular monthly package, assuming everything went well and they were satisfied with the calls.

This hasn't worked too well, as they are all happy with the leads coming in, because my lead quality is excellent and they all convert well, but clients are not too keen on paying the ad cost and my service fee on top. As a result, I feel quite burned out trying to find new clients with this method, as I keep spending money doing trials, but in the end can't take it further.

I'm also working with service-based businesses (specifically cleaning) and after reading your posts, I started thinking about how I could implement your strategy and only charge them after a job has been completed.

This immediately raises the question of trust, because your client could lie about the exact number of jobs secured from calls or about the amount charged per job. Then trying to work out a commission rate that would work for both parties sounds like another big pain in the backside.

I'm amazed at how you're running at a profit after subtracting your ad costs, but I guess if you're dealing with businesses where the average sale amount is quite high, then it might work out well, although the CPCs are also higher in such niches, so while you earn more, you also spend more on ads.

Do you think your model would be a viable option when working with cleaning companies? Quite often these are 1-2 man businesses, where there are no fancy booking management systems, so automation might be an issue....

Anyway, would be great to know what you think in general about this model that you're currently running.

My business model is pay per show - So I get paid a fixed fee as soon as the lead shows for their appointment.

There's absolutely no chance I'd ever suggest a business model whereby the success of it is based of the actions from a non employee.

My job is to attract and qualify the leads (my clients are useless at this) and once they arrive then it's my clients job to close them. I get paid regardless. I have had a couple of my clients saying the lead came in and just wanted to think about do I have still have to pay you? Or the lead came in and bought a package but then has just called me and asked for a refund, do I still pay you? The answer to both is YES!. There are numerous reasons why things like that happen, all outside my control.

When I onboard my next clients I'll re-iterate that's the case. They have to have some skin in the game at least. If they run an advertising campaign they'd have zero guarantee of getting any return or anyone through the door. My program does 3/4 of the work, if a lead has made an effort to turn up for an appointment they are obviously seriously interested in getting the service done. If a business owner cannot see a benefit in that then I won't work with them for long.

I work on a fixed fee, so even if the lead comes in and pays £520 (which happened the other day) my fee still remains the same. So it swings in roundabouts, my clients are used to looking at profit on an individual basis - ie I made x amount from this lead. The hard part is educating them to say stop looking at my leads like that. Have a look at how much you've made in total after 30 days.

Yes I believe the same model would work well for cleaning companies and that niche was something I'd considered, even as an additional stream of income.

Even when I was doing monthly retainers I'd always bundle the ad spend and my fee together. And I'd pay for the ad spend using my own American Express business card to redeem points then. Rather than saying its x amount in ad spend and my fee is the x amount. Just give them a single price. And you pay for the ad spend using that money.

I know someone who does marketing for carpet cleaners (mainly in USA), he's doing monthly retainers and he's up to $100k a month now. Either pay per booked appointment or monthly retainer would work well for that niche.

You need a specific offer on the front end - So let's use carpet cleaners as an example. You'd run an advert and offer 3 Rooms for carpet cleaning for $150 lets say. 4 Rooms for $200, 5 Rooms for $250. Then every lead that comes through choose what they want and maybe even books an appointment for the day they want. You know then your client is making at least $150 worse case scenario.

 

[Blackman]

Thanks for explaining how it works in detail, Paul.

The reason why I mentioned cleaning companies as an example, is because it's quite easy to convert leads into buyers in this market, since the sale amount is quite low, so most people are not too fussed about doing research into companies, making difficult decisions, etc.

If I refer a call to my client, then there's a 80-90% chance that the call will turn into a booking/purchase.

So just to clarify, your clients only pay you a fixed fee per showed up lead, and the ad spend is fully covered by yourself, correct?

I wonder how you came up with the fixed fee figure to charge per showed up lead? Is it based on an average sale value for a business and you must've negotiated with clients to establish that figure?

Following your carpet cleaning example, the services start from around £20-30/room, and obviously every call is different - someone could be after cleaning the single carpet in the living room and someone may want all the carpets in the whole house cleaned.

So would your fixed fee be something like £10 per job? After deducting the ad spend, surely there won't be anything left for yourself?

Just trying to see how I can apply your model in my current niche. Unfortunately, no matter how many free trials I do, guys running cleaning companies are hesitant spending money £400-500/month on advertising without knowing whether it will work for them or not.

 

[Paul David]

So just to clarify, your clients only pay you a fixed fee per showed up lead, and the ad spend is fully covered by yourself, correct?

Yes that's correct.

I wonder how you came up with the fixed fee figure to charge per showed up lead? Is it based on an average sale value for a business and you must've negotiated with clients to establish that figure?

I was already running some ad campaigns for clients on monthly retainers so I had a good idea on the price points. Yes every client knows the show up fee. It's not a negotiation, I tell them the price if they want to try it for 30 days, they can. I had one potential client saying I'll pay you £30 and if they take a package then I'll pay you £60 etc. Sorry doesn't work like that, that model simply wouldn't work. Imagine trying to scale it!

Following your carpet cleaning example, the services start from around £20-30/room, and obviously every call is different - someone could be after cleaning the single carpet in the living room and someone may want all the carpets in the whole house cleaned.

So would your fixed fee be something like £10 per job? After deducting the ad spend, surely there won't be anything left for yourself?

Using the carpet cleaning example the offer isn't for one room, the offer is 3 rooms for a set price. If you want that offer you click the book now button.

So you work out an offer that A the customers want, whether thats 50% off something or 3 areas for x amount. and then B you work out how much it's going to cost to attract those customers, how much your client is making and you then work out a figure for your fee.

In my niche, it's a treatment so the lead needs to get at multiple sessions for best results. So my clients could have a lead come in and pay only £20 for their first session, and have to pay me £60. So they are £40 down at the point but now they've got a client who needs at least 5 more sessions at £40 each (first one is discounted) and offer them various other treatments in future. Alternatively a lead may come in and pay for all sessions in one go and get a discount. And this can be anything from £180-999. I still get my £60.

Once the lead has been into my clients, I never contact them again. The lead is their customer for life.

 

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[Blackman]

So you work out an offer that A the customers want, whether thats 50% off something or 3 areas for x amount. and then B you work out how much it's going to cost to attract those customers, how much your client is making and you then work out a figure for your fee.

In my niche, it's a treatment so the lead needs to get at multiple sessions for best results. So my clients could have a lead come in and pay only £20 for their first session, and have to pay me £60. So they are £40 down at the point but now they've got a client who needs at least 5 more sessions at £40 each (first one is discounted) and offer them various other treatments in future. Alternatively a lead may come in and pay for all sessions in one go and get a discount. And this can be anything from £180-999. I still get my £60.

Once the lead has been into my clients, I never contact them again. The lead is their customer for life.

I'm amazed at how you're managing to make it all work with all the different packages, booking appointments, then chasing payments, etc.

From that point of view, my model is totally different and a lot more simple. My end goal is to generate a phone call and from there onward, the client can quote whatever they want for the job, schedule a date that's convenient for them and deal with a customer directly.

I take one full payment in advance for 4 weeks, which includes the ad spend and my fee, then just generate calls throughout the month until end of the agreed period. If they want to continue, we just repeat as many times as they like.

Mind you, the closest I've got to the above was securing 2 clients who agreed to pay the ad cost only, while I managed their campaigns for free. The idea was to build some trust and show them how it all works, then charge my fee for the 2nd month, but for whatever reason both of them didn't want to continue...

How do you find clients or pitch to them? Any cold calling? Or it's all through Facebook and LinkedIn messages/emails?

 

[Paul David]

I'm amazed at how you're managing to make it all work with all the different packages, booking appointments, then chasing payments, etc.

From that point of view, my model is totally different and a lot more simple. My end goal is to generate a phone call and from there onward, the client can quote whatever they want for the job, schedule a date that's convenient for them and deal with a customer directly.

I take one full payment in advance for 4 weeks, which includes the ad spend and my fee, then just generate calls throughout the month until end of the agreed period. If they want to continue, we just repeat as many times as they like.

Mind you, the closest I've got to the above was securing 2 clients who agreed to pay the ad cost only, while I managed their campaigns for free. The idea was to build some trust and show them how it all works, then charge my fee for the 2nd month, but for whatever reason both of them didn't want to continue...

How do you find clients or pitch to them? Any cold calling? Or it's all through Facebook and LinkedIn messages/emails?

What you're trying to do is what every marketer as done for years. They pay you up front and you in return promise x amount of leads.

And probably a reason why you're maybe struggling to convert clients. Every man and his dog is sending messages to the same clients. You have to do something different, think out side the box.

My model sounds complicated but it's actually very simple.

I run the same offer for every single client. I duplicate the same facebook ad and just change the radius for my targeting. I have a bot which qualifies the leads and my own team (in the Phillippines) to provide human answers if required. My clients give me access to their calendars and we book the leads in. We then book them on our internal calendar which then sends follow ups etc to the leads with appointment reminders.

Payments are all automated. As soon as we book an appointment it get's added to an invoice. If a lead cancels or the client marks them as no show they are automatically removed from the invoice. Then every Monday morning the money is taken from the clients bank. Nothing manual.

Clients I've signed up from various places. The best method I found was facebook ads. I sign clients with a 10 minute phone call. No zoom, no online presentations with slides etc. Just a phone call.

 

[Paul David]

It's been a while since I updated this thread but I'd just like to touch on something that I've struggled with for a while now. I'm always anxious or hiding/running away from business problems.

I didn't think everything I've been through over the last few years, in particular bankruptcy, had affected me this much but I've realised now that it has.

I run or shy away from business problems constantly.

I haven't checked my business bank account for 1 month as I know things aren't great and I don't want to see exactly what's in there (I done this before). I know that not checking the account is also making me anxious.

I don't want to look at how many appointments we've booked each day in case the number isn't high enough.

I panic when it's time to pay credit card bill I use for company ads.

I get a horrible feeling when I check my business messages in case a customer has cancelled their appointment (meaning I don't get paid), or a client payment has failed.

In my previous business, I used to get this feeling whenever I'd see a eBay or amazon message complaining about a failed delivery or faulty product. Or when a shipment of stock was late coming in.

The current state of lockdowns in the UK is not helping my mental health either.

I never used to have these feelings. I don't know whether I might need counselling to overcome this also, then again I probably can't afford to pay for that at the moment.

If I'm going to make 2021 better than any year I've had financially I need to overcome this asap. I know that dealing with and solving problems are part and parcel of being in business and I need to run towards these when they appear instead of going the opposite way.

 

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