The other options people weigh before working with us, and how Jay answers each one.
Should I use an agency or should I get somebody to do this for me? So, this is a great question. And what I would say is, at the beginning, no. And at the end, no as well. And here's why. If you think about an online digital business like this, the acquisition of new clients is essentially the heart of the business. And most coaches don't realize this, but when they get into the coaching game, they're really in the client acquisition game, because it's the number one determining factor of their success.
Especially at the start, before they have a big recurring client base, acquisition is everything. So to take the most important element of the growth of your business, and ultimately your destiny in this space, and put it into the hands of somebody else, is kind of crazy. And I used to have a marketing agency. I understand how the agency game works. And typically what happens is you get sold by the business owner, like me, and then you get put off into the hands of a junior marketer who's probably 19 and has run a handful of funnels before and doesn't have any real expertise.
And so you get deprioritized. You're just a little part of their business when what they're doing for you is the most important part of your business. So I don't recommend agencies at all because you're outsourcing the most valuable part of your business. And as you scale, for sure, you don't want to be running your ads forever. I don't run my own ads. I've got an amazing team that help me with that.
But they're in-house, and so they're a huge part of our business. They're dedicated to this business as a priority, and I'm still involved in the process and the big decisions that are being made in the ad account because they are so pivotal. So I don't recommend agencies. I don't think I've heard more horror stories about any other industry for coaches than agencies who promise things they just do not have the capacity to fulfill on.
And so I recommend empowering yourself as an individual at becoming great at marketing, at becoming great at sales in a leveraged way. It's what our system provides is, and so that you never have to worry about where clients are coming from again. Once you understand marketing and sales as two essential pillars of your coaching business, then you will be able to scale your education business to whatever level of ambition that you have, and you be in the driver's seat.
For you to be the author of your fate and not the victim of an agency when they have staffing changes or algorithm changes, or you just get deprioritized, or they get lazy, which happens eventually to every single client of an agency.
So how are we different from different book publishing programs? So I've been a part of a bunch of different publishing groups over the years and had some great friends in the industry. And there's nobody like what we do because everyone is sort of focused on book publishing itself. It's in the industry of book writing, getting it out on Amazon, getting it in bookstores. We spent close to six figures a few years ago going through one of the biggest publishers in New York, six figures to get the book out there, and we got it in all the bookshops, in the airports around the world.
It's still out there to this day, and it was a great personal brand exercise, exciting to be on these lists and all of that. But at the end of the day, that book has driven close to zero revenue on the back end for that business. And so book publishing is essentially just a brand-building play. But if nobody ever sees that book, it is worthless or useless into actually growing and building a sustainable business.
What you don't need is a book. What you need is a consistent flow of clients and customers, and the book is a vehicle to do that. But if you don't have the back-end selling systems, the advertising systems attached, well, then your book is just, you're writing it for yourself. And hey, writing a book is an amazing journey to go on. But we're here to build businesses. We're here to actually serve people.
We're here for people to read those books so we can actually create the change that we're here to create. So 99.99% of book publishing is interested in books themselves, where we are primarily focused on using books as a vehicle in order to scale businesses. And there's nobody out there that has brought those two worlds together like us at this scale, at this quality, and the consistency in which we do that
So a lot of people ask if they should write their book themselves, and I would say definitely. You're the only one who can truly write your book. But what it means to write your book yourself is kind of shrouded in a lot of mystery and what I would say is misconceptions about how the publishing industry has worked for the last 100 years. So if we look at the greatest books of the last century, the great men and women who wrote these books were not sitting in a cabin all alone.
Some people definitely did it that way, but the vast majority of the biggest names in the education space, in the personal development space, had teams, editorial teams, publishing teams, researchers, ghostwriters, who were all working on this book with them, and that's how they were able to create such high-quality output. It also ended up restricting creative freedom and all sorts of things like that, and it's the reason why a lot of traditionally published books these days all feel the same, because they're created by these editorial teams.
But that is another subject. But what it means is that this super leveraged way of creating a book by leveraging a great team to help, which is always required, is now available to the everyday person. You don't need to invest six figures in a big publishing house to help you assemble a team to write your book. We now have AI, which works in a very similar way.
We're not getting AI to write our books for us, but we're using it as we would use a ghostwriter, going through long interviews, having conversations, and then using the contents of them to form and forge a powerful book that is much better than what we could write with a pen and paper in a cabin in the woods. And so it's a really inspiring time for authorship because a lot of the things that sort of barriers towards entry, unless you had great resources, have now been removed.
So it's super empowering, super inspiring for people who have something genuine to share, and it's really leveled the playing field when it comes to authorship
So could you just do this with ChatGPT? For sure. You can definitely get on your laptop today and get some s****y book written in an hour just by typing away the keys and have something very average, generic, and unengaging. The way that LLMs work is they revert to the mean, to the average, and the whole point of marketing is to escape mediocrity. So the very nature of the tool is designed for the exact opposite intention of what we're here to create.
And so functionally, you could write a book. Functionally, you could put together a funnel without our help for sure on the functional side, but the results would not be possible. We have an incredible team that has scaled a bunch of offers to six, seven, eight figures. We've worked on offers that have done nine figures a year. So the sort of discernment and understanding of what's required, not just to get something functionally live, but to get it to actually work and produce the results that we require, need a very particular set of discernment and experience in order to make the required changes.
Because most funnels, hey, they start all right, but it's going to be the way that we're able to interpret the data that we get to make the necessary changes to actually get the funnel to where it needs to be. So you can go out there and just get funnel live, but it's not going to work. It's our ability to take data, transform that into real actionable insights that will actually create the change and allow you to have the business that you want.
And so could you do this all yourself? For sure. Anyone can do anything on their own. I believe in you. I hope you believe in me just saying this. It's truly nothing we can't do on our own. But I guess the question a lot of the time is why would I do something on my own? Because typically, doing it on your own is the most expensive way to do something.
If I was to build a house, if I was to go and figure out how to build a house on my own, it's probably going to be the most expensive way that I can go and build a house because it would cost me so much in time because there'd be time taken away from actually income-producing activities. But also I have no knowledge about carpentry or building, and so I'm going to do everything the slowest, worst, and most expensive way, probably get ripped off a bunch of times and ultimately probably give up.
And so the reason that I always recommend people do that with a community, especially in the marketing space, is because it's going to save you so much time. You get to leverage the information of people that have got decades of experience versus you with a finite set of experience. You get to learn from not just me and the team who have spent millions of dollars on ads, done multiple eight figures online in revenue, but all the lessons that we're learning from our mentors because our mentors are playing the nine-figure game.
And so we're investing heavily there and able to pass a lot of that knowledge on. And then we also have the collective journey of all the hundreds of coaches going through our program, people that are going to be in similar niches to you that you're going to be able to walk this journey with. And so, like I said, I believe anyone can do anything alone, but the question is why?
And I don't think there's many good reasons to do this sort of journey alone. It's got a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering, a lot longer, a lot more expensive, and very, very-- I don't know anybody who has made it that way.
So why not just sell your book on Amazon? And we warn people and really discourage Amazon for the selling of books. It is a system that is not set up with you in mind. So when you sell a book, the most important part of the transaction is the details that you receive. So the phone number, their email address, because what that does is it allows you to continue to communicate with this person.
And so if you sell it on Amazon, you don't get that information, you never hear from them again, you don't know who those buyers are, and if you're relying on them just to find you and the scent, it's going to be an extremely low percentage of people who do that, and you can't build a business off the predictability of that. Another thing is you cannot add order bumps and upsells to the funnel, so you can't customize the buyer checkout experience, and so you will not be able to be profitable on ads because you won't be able to capture the value.
There's so many different reasons why, but I just do not sell on Amazon because you don't turn Amazon buyers into premium offer buyers anywhere near the rate. With our books, we aim for 3% to 6% from book buyer to $10,000 offer buyer. And on Amazon, we'd probably be lucky to see half a percent. So it completely changes the economics of what's possible with the business.
So why a book and not a course? So there's a lot of different low-ticket products out there that you could sell, and we have by far tested a bunch of different things, from courses to workshops, to magazines, a bunch of different potential low-ticket AI products and things like that. And to this day, nothing ascends like a book. Humans have a certain relationship with books. If we look back at human history, every great sort of moment of change, revolution in human development has come or been centered around a certain ideology that was written into a book.
So it's the oldest way humans really have of passing down intergenerational wisdom, except for storytelling, which would be older, but essentially the book is now that form of storytelling. And so humans have this relationship with books in the pursuit of wisdom and understanding that just brings in higher quality people. And people are used to buying books as well, so it's a very easy transaction where-- So there's, I guess, an element of simplicity around the book.
It's a familiar sort of transaction, so it's easier to sell in that regard. People know exactly what they're getting. They're aware of what a book is, but then also the quality of person that it attracts. They definitely ascend at a higher rate into premium offers than any of the other low-ticket offerings that we've previously tested and we tested vastly.
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