Helping Educational Business Owners Scale
In a Nutshell
Speaker with $250M+ aggregate revenue shares data-driven scaling advice for educational businesses: double down on local market domination (e.g., home flipping ecosystem to $100M potential) before national expansion, use COO for operations to free time for high-leverage content creation, and focus on premium pricing ($100k turnkey offers) targeting affluent avatars via ads and workshops. Key tactics include shifting motocross training to profitable 5-day camps over low-margin single days, poaching in-house brand managers for real estate coaching, and fixing financial advisor churn by refining avatars (demographics, quantifiables, behaviors), optimizing activation (e.g., Gym Launch-style sales drills), and prioritizing time-to-value. Avoid competitor pitfalls like price wars that destroy profits; scale via paid ads + organic audience pyramids, pure advertising plays, and environments like masterminds for $1M+ owners seeking 10x growth.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
I've been in business for 14 years. Last year, our companies in total did over $250 million in aggregate revenue. I co-own the platform School, which is over 22 million users. School's a platform that allows people to start and scale digital businesses. I have access to millions of data points on what makes digital businesses work and what doesn't. In this video, I'm answering questions about how to scale.
Started off flipping homes. Flipped 30-40 houses consecutively every year in the same market, revenue about $4 million. Too much competition, hard to be profitable per flip. Developed a model to convert competition to collaboration: started a contracting company, becoming the product instead of buying it. Built vertically integrated ecosystem: HVAC company, roofing company, dumpster company, contracting. Started a coaching channel to feed this ecosystem, teaching people the process. All create different revenue streams.
What's stopping scaling: got too busy too fast, owner-operator until 3 months ago. Hired a COO, transitioning operations to her. Don't know how to run a COO or transition out of the role/company.
Why are you trying to transition out of the role or out of the company?
Out of role because don't care about revenue growth, care about impact. Promise to impact at least 5 million lives before dying. Can't do that flipping homes at small scale. Company is locality-based, trapped locally: team, resources, companies there. Coaching only makes sense locally, limited market size unless dropping prices.
Need to go national to scale coaching massively, but stuck in operations. COO (Amy) helps get out to focus on next phase.
Appreciate national vision, but with ticket size and monetization, setup dominates local market. Not dominating yet, barely started. Between Fagville and Raleigh, could get to $100 million/year just in that market. Conquer city before country before world. Armies overexpand and collapse. Fortify base: 10 a month is nothing.
Recommendation: ignore national, automate or double down locally?
Can handle 20 people a week now with COO? Could 8x sales within current infrastructure, from $4M to $32M. Solves revenue, not impact.
Do you make content? No time.
Content is key: easier to make content about what you're doing and impact millions than make every American a home flipper (not achievable). About financial education, selling dream of being more. Distribute for free with leverage. Legitimate business to talk about, help others, keep growing.
Double down locally. Use COO to do operations so you do content/impact. Learn paid ads to sell 20, 50, 100/week locally.
Increase pricing or keep for feeding channels? Charge $100k and do other stuff free/at cost. Typical offer: done-with-you $15-25k, turnkey $100k.
No one in market can afford $100k. Not true. Word-of-mouth from workshops can't, but ads can. Venue holds 55, packed quarterly (every 3 months). Bring 100 in room, do 3/day, pitch, close 10-15 at lower, 3-5 at $100k. Currently see 200/year, saying market can't afford. 9% of Americans have $1M net worth (including home equity), higher than thought, just look older.
Sell motocross training, 5-day camps. Scaled single-day tour dates from 70 in 2023 to 140 in 2024 for $4M projection, but operational drag. Bottom 20 net negative, next 20 under $1k. 3 test 5-day camps net >$100k each. Plan: 25 camps this year.
One-day $300 (not enough), 5-day $1,200 (not enough). Scale 5-days, scale down single-days. Own space, one copycat on single-days. Fear if scale down single-days, copycat takes model.
Never go out of business focusing on customer.
Competitor took top testimonials (semi-employees/evangelists from Gym Launch), ran ads for them. Offered cheaper one-on-one coaching (never did that). Feathers ruffled, went to war: relaunched to base with value stack at lower price. Reduced revenue $500k/month topline, increased costs, lost $6-7M/year profit. Sold business, never recovered. Cost ~$50M. First comment: complaint hadn't done earlier. Churn unchanged (reduced from $3k to $2.5k/month, past threshold). Competitor killed own business unprofitably. Don't copy moron, focus on customer.
Sell coaching to real estate agents, $2.5M, want to double. Ed says super famous, need brand manager (someone achieved with others). 99% scams/incompetent.
To make more money as brand promoter: advertise more. Not constrained on delivery (group coaching, could quadruple).
Pure advertising play. Paid ads: 3-5x one-time from organic baseline. Long-term: grow audience pyramid (monetize superfans, fill with new eyeballs via organic across platforms, consistent/high volume/quality).
Ads keep base same, move monetization line down. Do both: short-term ads double; 10-year both in parallel (plant seeds, ads skim top).
Poach: outreach to crushers with admired brands, offer more money. Use LinkedIn. ChatGPT search people involved. Good media people have presence.
Outsource brand manager? No, in-house. Core: attraction, conversion, delivery. Brand most important asset, don't outsource.
Currently sell in challenge (one-to-many 5-day), straight to checkout (warm). Switch to book call, single seller, recurring evergreen + challenge. Ads break straight-to-checkout for cold traffic, lower conversion, adjust funnel/sales motion.
Recruit brand manager to build base. Ads + sales motion tandem (both must be good).
Sell sales coaching/lead gen to financial advisors, $6.6M, want $20M+. Paid ads, events. VSL to phone team. Churn issue (agencies). Pivoted lead gen to sales coaching (advisors can't close), upsell lead gen.
Seen agencies pivot to sales coaching successfully?
Gym Launch: Boiler Room - trained trainers/front desk every morning, drilled/role-played in groups like own team. Break sales training into 5 parts: intro, discovery, offer, objections/looping, hot topic. Rotate to keep script crisp.
Churn: provide more value or lower price. Big head longtail good: charge upfront, low continuity (no-brainer network).
Info/coaching: separate consumables (ongoing, lower price) from one-time (higher value). Once skill acquired, what ongoing would they pay? Lead gen wanted pre-skill, stays post.
Activation issue: remote, advisors cringe at 'sales' (call 'consulting', ban 'sales'). Get better at training.
Your issue is that if someone gets activated, they stick for sure. All the effort focuses on getting them activated better and faster, which depends on two things. First, identify avatars that are better than others and only sell to those avatars, split into three buckets: demographics (what do they look like?), quantifiables (e.g., business size), and behaviors.
Segment traffic using demographics and quantifiables to target avatars with a significantly higher likelihood of converting. CAC will go up, but the stick problem gets fixed. For example, if selling to everybody who identified as a fitness person, Gym Launch would never have existed due to too many shitty customers like personal trainers with 10 clients who can't pay. Deploying resources to get them up to snuff requires customers who can pay more from the onset. Below a certain point, it needs to be DIY, which is a different business.
Scan out advisors with low likelihood of working and adjust price to accommodate a newer, better avatar. This is an avatar issue. On the back end, for activation: for people with right demographics and quantifiables, identify behaviors that caused them to activate and stick, versus what others like them did not do, then reverse engineer that into the activation process.
Question: How did you optimize time to value for your launch, and how can we do something similar? Deal cycles are long. Response: Email their list; if they make a sale in the first seven days, it's reactivation.
If you're doing a million dollars or more a year and want to get to 10 million or 100 million, join an environment to talk to other business owners and players doing those numbers. Big breakthroughs come from an open mind: 'I don't know what I don't know.' Challenges include scaling content, recruiting first salespeople, VP of sales, or director of sales—every level has more complexity.
Invitation: Visit headquarters for two days to talk to the team—director of sales, director of marketing, director of strategy, director of ops, director of investment—who run the portfolio at atacquisition.com. Bonus: Other business owners in the room doing a million dollars plus. Click 'book call' if it's a good fit.
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