Brad Weimert and Los Silva discuss ecommerce strategies and how to grow your online business
Last Updated: 2020-07-13
Our CEO Brad Weimert sits down with Los Silva and to eCommerce solutions that have worked for them and what you can do to grow your online business, eCommerce is the best option now a days, you can see customers looking for coupons at https://www.raise.com/coupons/walmart every day in order to use the eCommerce platforms. This interview was filled with tons of extremely useful information including the use of Sharp Commerce for guidance as well as the creation of a logo with the help from https://www.graphicsprings.com/category/real-estate-mortgage to set your brand apart. You do not want to miss out. Read below or check out the full interview linked above. Enjoy!
*Transcribed by a robot*
Brad Weimert
Love it. Los Silva. I appreciate you jumping on today, man.
Los Silva
Thanks for having me, man. I’m excited.
Brad Weimert
Yeah, me too, man. It’s been entirely too long since we’ve seen each other in person. But that’s sort of the nature of the beast these days, I suppose.
Los Silva
Yeah, man. It’s it’s a pain. But you know, at least we got this and we text each other all the time. So it’s all good.
Brad Weimert
That is the truth. Well, look, man, I want to give a little bit of context for who you are, what you do, and then just jump into stuff. We met many years ago through mutual friends, through events ultimately. But I met you at a time when you had walked away from a multimillion dollar company that you built. And then quite literally just started from scratch and built another one to the same size and beyond, which in and of itself is kind of a crazy story. Specifically, because you just wipe your hands of it and said, You know what, it’s not worth the stress. I’m just going to go do it again.
Los Silva
Yeah.
Brad Weimert
Can you give a kind of the short version of that? Because I think that’s pretty badass.
Los Silva
Yeah, man, so it wasn’t so much on purpose. It was just more that I’m arrogant. And, you know, like we had, we had multiple businesses were doing a couple million dollars a year. So it wasn’t like nuts. But we had a digital business where we like taught people stuff and an ecommerce business where we did the things we taught. As things were growing, we started to get multiple offices here in the West Coast and all these things. We also inquired on switching to a business internet connection. We visited https://eatelbusiness.com/business-phone/ and it kind of took off from there. And I kind of took over the digital side of stuff. And, we knew we wanted to embrace digital transformation, so there’s setting up the more eComm side of stuff and kind of just inadvertently built two other businesses were like, Hey, we don’t want to do this together anymore. And it started, you know, it’s like you break up with a wife or something. I’ve never had a divorce, but this feels just like that, right? Like you know it’s happening. And when you get on the conversation, you’re like, Alright, so how are we going to split the kids right? Like what assets are going here and here? He was just like, I knida feel like I built it out. And I was like, Okay, I don’t see that seeing as the employees are here and like, you know, whatever. And I just knew that this is going to end in some like, like, when I was a younger guy, I, you know, had a crazy girlfriend and she spray paint in my car one time. And I was like, you know, this is like, this is going to get my car spray painted. But instead of like my car, it’s going to be my reputation. And I was like, I said to myself, I was like, You know what, dude, I’m going to give you everything. And I’m going to say this to myself. And I’m going to just go start something from scratch, and I hope that you do well, because I’m going to pass you nonetheless. And you know, we did that. And it sucked, bro. To be super honest with you. Like it was ballsy at the time because I was like mad. But I should have tried to make a deal because like I didn’t have anything and when you lose your list and you lose everything you start from scratch, it’s not just that and then you lose your energy. And I was going upstairs to my house because I got rid of the office and I was just, you know, had a few other guys still stay with me. They were like what Worked for free. We know you’ll figure it out. And they came in for a few months. You know, and I was going to the bar and drinking with them. I was like, I don’t know what to do you guys want to get lunch? Yeah, and lunch returned to drinking for a few hours being like, I don’t know what the hell we’re gonna do guys like I honestly at this point really feel like you shouldn’t even be at my house anymore. I’m like, not doing a good job here. And they were the ones who were like, dude, figure it out, call someone go speak. And, you know, I got friends and I speak. So I was like, that’s a good idea. I’ll just go do that. started speaking. You know, some people are like, hey, do you do consulting? And at the time, I was like, Yeah, I do, actually, whatever. And we grew that into an agency. And you know, that kind of got momentum. We built a seven figure agency in three months. And that was cool. And then we started getting a lot of deals coming through. And some people couldn’t afford it. And you know, one of the guy… we had influencers at that time, like six years ago, seven years ago, people were coming to us with a common influencer. I don’t have any money, but why don’t you take half my business. I didn’t want to do that. Because we were charging, you know, a fair amount at the time to just do the work. And I was like, I don’t I don’t know, man. But let me try it, right. We tried it with one person. And it worked a little. And then we had one day I remember, we all live close to each other so we were at the gym. And we looked at the stripe, dude, we’re at 16 grand. And I was like, What? Like, yeah, like this offer? Just it’s it’s night. It’s like seven in the morning. And I was like, What is going on? And so I was like, Alright, that’s, that’s started scaling started getting a little bit more confidence. I was like, Alright, let’s take another influencer on and then let’s, we just kept doing that. And for a while we flipped the model. And so rather than doing agency work, I was like, I’ll just partner with influencers and scale it. And that worked. Well, you know, we went from seven figures to multiple seven figures to eight figures off just one brand to building you know, I ended up building like seven, seven figure businesses and an eight figure business. What I didn’t know is you know, once I wanted to build like this portfolio of brands and Sell them. And like I was just trying to think a little bigger. And that just doesn’t work with influencers, right? Because they want to get paid. And you know, when you when you start building e commerce stuff cost the goods cogs, shipping fulfillment, new needs new products, supplies, like you want to keep some money in the account. So you can build brand, right and like build something that you can get a multiple for. So I ended up selling a lot of those brands, either back to the influencers, or to smaller companies that were or bigger companies that were trying to take them on. And I kind of went back to listen, I’m not going to work with influencers anymore. So what we do now is we kind of have three phases. We do coaching and consulting for people that just can’t afford our services than we do services. And we still have this section where if it’s the right fit, we will now we vet it for six months. It’s kinda like a full date before we get married. For six months, we have to go through the initial phase, then there’s a profit share phase, then we decide if it stays in profit share with like, some sort Phantom equity or if I fully come Come on in as some sort of partner. And you know, we’ve been doing that for a few years now. It’s growing and scaling. We again have multiple companies that were a part of during the seven and eight figures. And I love that better because I get to tinker. And I get to play around and stuff. And I still, everyone’s like, how come you’re doing so many things to me? I’m running an agency. I just split the way that this agency works differently, right. So if I take a brand on, it’s our brand, it’s still you still take them on as an agency. So I’m just changing the way the deep steel flows go. And allows me to work with people who actually want to work long term with rather than just you know, sometimes it happens, we get caught up in numbers. That definitely happened to me. I did a lot of work past few years just to be hitting the eight figure number. I didn’t care about it was vanity. It wasn’t you know, gross profit is vanity. You know, net is sanity. And so we flipped a few things to make it more sane for us. And here we are, man.
Brad Weimert
Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, there were a couple a couple big things that I think one, like you pointed out, starting over sucks, and certainly can feel deflating. I think that what’s valuable for and one of the reasons I wanted to start there is because what’s valuable for people to recognize is that being able to do that is a huge deal. And, you know, the when you look at entrepreneurship and building businesses, the people that have done it once, okay, if you’ve done it twice more credibility, and if you’ve done it a bunch of times, it’s a totally different beast, right? You figured out a formula to make it work. And so from an agency perspective, when we talk about marketing and figuring out the formulas that work in marketing, I have watched you build companies from, you know, 30 4050 grand a month to several hundred grand a month or a million a month, inside of a few months, and I’ve seen you do more than a couple times, which is a huge deal. And that’s one of the reasons that I want to talk because it, you know, we, we get solicited by agencies, you know, multiple times a month to do some sort of partnership deal, because we have a bunch of merchants coming to us a bunch of businesses that come to us. Yeah. But, but you’re the one that I want to talk to you because the proofs in the pudding right now, yeah, for sure. And the other is that you take you have taken equity in deals that you work in. And I like that model a lot. Because it shows that you’re, you know, you put your money where your mouth is, right, you can talk a big game, but if it’s actually Hey, look, we need upside in order to be involved here. That’s powerful.
Los Silva
yeah, man, I love doing it with it when it’s the right one. And it’s because I mean, dude, like we’re in the business of making money, right? Like we don’t have an agency and we will never have an agency that has, you know, 100 clients. And it’s not that that’s a bad model. It’s just not our model. Because I can make a lot more transparently focusing on a few people doing it right. Then just having a fly by night turn and I mean, like everyone you send us we still work with. I mean, even you just sent us someone recently on email, bro. Like, we doubled their email within 60 days, they love us, we’re going to know more stuff, like, you know, we’re coming through, and you come through just real talk by not doing a million things, right? We do have a division that’s like our testing. If you’re coming in with something a little more new. We’re, I’m transparent to I’m like, Listen, I’m gonna test this. We, we do a month to month engagement. If we want to talk about the partnership, I’m like, Alright, that’s a minimum three months here. And then three months, if the first three months goes well, and stuff like that. And so we vet people a lot more. Just because I also don’t need to build a business where like, I’m, my business is running businesses, and I have the agency so we don’t need to be like alright, 200 people Hear, blah, blah, blah, I don’t want you know, 100 people staff, like, I love having a big office and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, I really noticed that with us if I can be super honest, which I’m, you know, bluntly honest, and we can take on the right kind of people, we can have success because we stay in the same lane of offers, right? We do a lot of e commerce and personal based brands that wants to scale up normally through a good course or some sort of high ticket coaching.
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Yeah, like that. And I want to talk expertise here. And you do have a dope office for anybody that wants to check it out. Los hustle on Instagram. You can see lots of things in the office, but it looks cool. Hopefully, I’ll check it out in person some time here. So what do you think your expertise is? You mentioned Ecomm, you mentioned brands, how what’s your method of scale there? What do you What are you good at?
Los Silva
Honestly, man, we’re good at adds at the end. It’s not just that I think we’re good at the understanding like the back end and Knowing that, you know, everyone now in their mom even has an agent, an ad agency. And that’s cool. That’s great. And you can make a lot of things work and everyone’s got new cars and screenshots. And that’s freaking cool. But the reality is that your ads aren’t even the most important thing, man, the reality is like everything past the ad, or prior to the ad is what matters, right? So your ads don’t convert, most likely, your offer probably does suck, okay? And if your ads do convert, and you want to try to keep scaling that front end, most likely you can’t because your back end is weak. Right? And that’s are actually like this big. And everyone just goes like that’s the brunt of the conversation because you want to fix something because you don’t want to like look at what’s actually broken. Right? And so it’s easier to point the blame at someone on ads, right? Rather than like, well, dude, your offer converts at point six, right? And we’ve got offers that are converting at three and 4%. We got to clean this up to get it to convert a lot of want to waste time, energy and money. I don’t know anyone in the world. who just make some sales letter for any kind of offer. And goes, here it is. Let’s just talk about like a, like a product like personal brand. And it’s just hitting three 4%. that’s those are skill numbers, right, your offer is going to suck, you’re going to have to spend some money on ads, tweak it, tweak it, tweak it. And then once it’s moving, you’re going to have to make the choice of do I want to break even here, maybe even take a financial loss. So I can get a huge back end a very big list and continue to make recurring and build that lifetime value. And if you’re not willing to have those conversations, you’re going to be stuck. Mostly you can probably hit 100 grand a month probably do that with like some broken shit all over the place. But you can’t get into the million a month without having a real process from front to back.
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, let’s talk about that. So and when you say running ads, is there a platform of preference for you? Do you stick with one do you have multiple that you run?
Los Silva
We run two. We are on Google and Facebook. And inside of that, obviously Google Shopping YouTube You know, all the Googles, and then all the Instagram and Facebook stuff, right. So like just the platforms that sell other things inside of it, we run those, we’ve tested Snapchat, don’t like it, just because we don’t do a lot of CPA stuff and that works more for like CPA stuff and we don’t do native, just frankly, it’s just not a skill set that we’ve tried to hone into because we try to hone into that side of the ads, the social ad so to speak, and then more so like email and back end.
Brad Weimert
Got it. And just for anybody that doesn’t know, CPA and native Can you define those for them?
Los Silva
Yeah, so native advertising is, you know, big native networks like tabula, and outbrain those are going to come from, you know, mostly people that are running CPA offers, which is a lot of really strong affiliates that are just you know, it’s just the Warzone out there. People are ripping their stuff like rechanging their you know… it’s it’s just it’s not we try To deal with… not that those offers are bad, we just try to deal with offers that are a little bit more brand based. And so, you know, for us what’s really worked very well is direct to consumer ecommerce like brands. We don’t do drop shippers we work with, you know, I’m a part of a venture firm, where I analyze companies for them, they have 100 million dollar fund, they look at what works on retail, and what’s working on Amazon. And then they’re like, hey, we’ve got both of these, what does the direct to consumer look like? I build that analysis for them and see if it’s a good, good job for an acquisition. And if it is, they buy it, I get a percentage for building it or running it. And you know, those work really, really well. Those are companies that can scale to the million a month is normally the goal on direct to consumer, they have a strong average order value, their cost per acquisition on you know, the social platforms is normally you can get, you know, to get started like three times, you know, at scale, you’re hitting like a 1.3 to 1.8 depending on the margin so you can maintain Growing that, right? I want to be honest about that caveat this, a lot of people are like, oh, we’re getting 15%, you know, 15 times return on adspend we’re getting 60% return on adspend you’re not spending enough money. And you’re probably showing a retargeting ad, you know, so like anybody can do that we got a peanut butter company, got a 27.6% return on adspend we’re not spending enough money, you know, and that’s so those are the realities of those things. And then again, on the personal brand, we like to work with people that have high ticket offers in the three to 5000 range, it’s very easy to scale those big because the math makes sense where people break in that particular scenario is at scale, you are going to get shittier quality leads, and that’s just logical. And then your ascension to move them into email marketing tends to be poor. You’re blasting them with like, buy it buy it apply, rather than building kind of like what we call like to C4 method which is content conversations community, then you get conversions. Right. So those The people that we work with, and we try to stay away from all the things that we’re really not good at nor we want to become experts in, right? There’s there’s a lot of experts on outbrain and taBula in those native marketplaces, and that also normally tends to be a different style offer altogether. And we don’t run those because those tend to be offers that Instagram, Facebook and YouTube just hate.
Brad Weimert
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So let’s talk about we have, you know, easy pay direct does quite a bit from the personal brand perspective, and we kind of lump a bunch of these people into information marketing, because even if you’re selling subject matter expertise, there tends to be a brand that’s on the front end like and Tony Robbins is sort of the pinnacle of clients that’s like, you cannot extract the brand from the information and then all the way down the chain to somebody that just started a course on you know how to start a photography business or whatever, right, their face is still on it, so you’ve still got the personal brand component. The question that I have is whether it’s that or Ecomm. How does like At what point do you decide, hey, it’s time to it’s time to scale. So somebody comes to you, and they’re doing half a million a year, right? They’re doing 40, 50 grand a month in revenue. And they’ve kind of been plugging away at that number for a year or so. And they come to you and they are running ads. They’re just, you know, they’re not doing it. Or maybe they’re not, they haven’t turned it up. They haven’t figured it out. At what point what do you need to do to get them from there to a couple hundred grand a month or to really hit the gas.
Los Silva
So the first thing we do is we’ll do you know, an analysis on what assets you have what’s going on where we’ll look at all the conversions on every single side from the front end all the way to the back end. When it comes to e commerce we look at lifetime value. We look at subscription revenue, we look at new time revenue, we built cohort analysis to make sure that like certain pockets like you might have multiple VIP people inside of your analytics. We see how you’re segmenting, we’re seeing if the VIP people are buying a lot but also are they refunding more are they taking advantage Who is this person and then we kind of like lay it out like Alright, so these are the people that you have, this is how it’s going. We look at the creative A lot of times when it comes to a good offer, you know, an e commerce offer is going to convert well at like a 5% too cold. And if you’re getting ads to work, you’re probably not spending enough it might be your creative you might be a little bit scared to spend because a lot of times if you want to start spending a little more obviously your conversions are going to go down people freak out because they’re making good revenue. And so they’re like I don’t Dude, you’re we’re blowing it like we got it you know businesses business man, like we have to spend money to make money. It’s not a lazy thing. It’s not like anything. It’s just life, right? Like I got a new offer that we just saw. Bought a brand and we’re starting to launch it. It’s converting at, you know, 2% on cold. And it’s a digital personal brand kind of offer for one of the guys here, because I’m starting to build faces inside of here instead of publishing more people. And now we’ve got to scale it. And I know that scaling, it’s by, like moving forward and trying to get to the thousands of dollars a day on spend, is probably going to get us to not convert, so we’re going to have to do a better job with the ads, we’re going to have to see what not the front end conversion of that pages, but what’s that back end? Are we getting 40%? on that 50% on that order bump? Are we getting 20% on you know, Oto one, and just managing to that. Those are the reasons that a lot of people don’t scale. They’ll look at something and go, Oh, my front end is doing this. Now you take it over, bro, let’s blow up. And for you to take it over and blow up. The rest of the whole business has to make money, right? It’s a business. It’s not an offer. And so if you start like that’s why I think we’re good at scaling It I’m really anal about like, I, you know, I don’t do. Like I said, like, we don’t do a lot of CPA stuff, we don’t do a lot of dropship stuff because those are offers, like we try to run people’s businesses, because then you can go, Hey, if you wait till day 43 you’re making, you know, this much money, like we have a client, which we own a percentage in. And day 37 is when we break even it sucks, but we know it. And because of that, you know, that offers. Now finally, at a point where we can scale to 5000 $6,000 a day, we’re building out a new back end so we can run another offer on the front end of that and add more revenue. So sometimes multiple offers is what we need to scale multiple pages on e commerce, multiple bundles, while you’re also driving to this and that. So it’s just it’s a whole business thing. And I think when a lot of people come to, you know, even people you send to me and they’re like, I got this offer, it’s doing this like Well, it seems like it might be even maxed out here. You might have a little bit more but what about also adding this? What are you doing on email here? There seems to be nothing else that you’re selling in the back end. You have no subscriptions, you know, in trying to be more of like a business analyst nowadays, is what really serves us for scale, rather than just getting into like, Yeah, man, you know, obviously, if the offer works and the ads work, you’re gonna scale but everything else is the most important thing for you to make sure that not just Are you scaling. But are you making money?
Brad Weimert
Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s a big thing. I often hear people talk about agencies talk about how much they’re spending on ads. And, you know, it’s an interesting thing that the longer I’m in business, the more I hear, hear people throw out their revenue numbers. And the revenue numbers don’t mean that much. relative to you know, your take home. Actually, you’ll
Los Silva
You ain’t keeping the revenue, bro.
Brad Weimert
Right. Right, exactly. Especially if it’s all paid. Right? Right. So if you’re driving with paid the margin matters, and just You said Oto one, which is one time offer for people that didn’t catch that, and an order bump. So selling something in addition, which would be the Oto in that case. So, the question is then, when you cut your losses, so like you’re trying new things, somebody comes to you and you’re like, Alright, well, let’s try this new thing. How much traffic or how much spend, do you have to get to before you’re like, Okay, this one doesn’t work. Let’s try something else.
Los Silva
I can typically man this is this is a good topic, because I can typically tell you, within like, within within 90 days, I’m like, we don’t need to do this or we need to revamp this or we need to do honestly, sometimes even sooner. A lot of times it’s the offer. When it comes to digital or e commerce. It’s the owner that says no, no, no, you suck. It’s this. It’s this. It’s like, Dude, this the clicks are good. No one’s coming to the offer and you’re not reaching them on email. Your sales process is broken. There’s So many other things we need to you know, I, I’m big on telling people we need to spend back and fix these little issues. Because that’s that’s where the problem is going to happen, right? Because at the end of the day, the reality of life and no one wants to hear this, but it’s true. We all sell the same stuff, whether it’s trinkets and trash, or it’s business opportunity seekers, or it’s how to do real estate, or it’s how to feel better, or it’s how to lose weight. No one’s coming at you with like, even Tesla just got copied by Nikola, and they don’t even have a car and they’re already like, making almost as much money as Tesla. Like, you can copy. You can copy people’s stuff now, right? Like it just is the same thing. So the problem is in the process more than the product oftentimes, or the problem is in the person more than the product A lot of times and so that’s why you know, we kind of do the month to month thing and go listen, if this is working, I want to do a review in three months, because I’m big also on cutting the losses so we can have good reputation and be like listen if this didn’t work out introduce you to other people, because it’s not it’s more so that like you are wanting to fix like that one issue that adds issue, you’re not trying to fix that your offer needs a new video sales letter or you might have to invest in that if you don’t know how to write it, or the fact that your sales process is broken and you don’t want to take your own cause anymore because you’re better than that. You know, there’s a lot of these things that are what the process is gonna like show it’s gonna show you man like all these things will show you what’s messed up. It’s kind of up to us in our ego or determination to make the choice of I think you’re right man, we need to do this. Let’s Let’s hire someone for sales that’s better than Astra let’s, let’s go pest pay, you know, a really expensive copywriter guy, see if we can get some sort of commitment from that and have success on a sales page because I wrote it myself. And I’m not a copywriter and you know, different things like that. So we try to, we try to stay on track with, you know, weekly calls and monthly meetings, but you know, If you’re spending money and you’re not getting returns, and it’s been over, you know, a month and a half, I mean that something should have already drastically had to change. And if it’s not ads, it has to be a lot of the other things, you have to look at all the variables. And if I can get one thing out, just to keep stressing This is like, there’s a lot of variables, you know, we get inundated. There’s a lot of expert marketers that are watching this because I know the relationships that you You and I have in the space, there’s a lot of people that are also beginning this journey. And they they get inundated with like money Money, Money Money, I did this I did this, and they probably did or maybe even didn’t, but the bigger thing isn’t so much the money for the day. It’s how is this growing as a company, right? Like Were there other points, right? Like if you just kept growing people and getting clients and you didn’t have a good fulfillment process and you didn’t have some good sales guys, you’re going to break the business is going to break and then you’re going to get one? Why the business break because there’s there’s other variables in the business, right? Like, I really want people to start thinking that they’re growing businesses more than offers because I mean, you and I also know a million people in this space that this year they’re like, boom, next year, they’re bam, then they’re doing this new thing and then they got another offer and they never say like, I started a company they go, I got this new offer, we’re doing this and this this, dude, your mindset is just like that of like, just trying to spark stuff like every second of the day instead of trying to fix the little things you have and make really, really long standing companies that you can even replace yourself from.
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, I think you know, that hits on something really big which so we easy pay direct definitely sees the aggressive marketers come through that just churn through offers, and they literally are offers. They’re not trying to create a business. They spin things up really quickly. They spike revenue, and honestly, we try not to work with them because they also have high chargebacks they burn. Yeah, yeah, they are a problem and then merchant And accounts become a sticking point, which is like, Look, if if merchant accounts are the center of your reality as a marketer, you’re doing it wrong, right? You need to tweak things so that people like the product, that you’re selling them enough that they don’t dispute it. Now everybody’s going to get disputes. And that’s not a universal statement. But by and large, you want people to like what you buy. But I think that one of the things that that highlights is that when you’re even if you’re building a company, and you’re very focused on that, and you know that you have all of these things to manage all the time, in inside the silo of just marketing, even if you’re a good marketer, bringing somebody in, that has done that many times over is going to give visibility to the things that have to be tweaked. And you’re looking at the broad picture as the entrepreneurs, the owner of hey, we’ve got to work on our product, we’ve got to work on our hiring on our culture which is why we will now use best background check service.
Somebody that’s good has spun up a bunch of companies over and over and over and say, okay, but the copy inside of this portion inside of the Oto, right, or the way that you’re talking in the video, or, hey, we’re missing a number in the back end, we need to sell a different product in the back end. And that’s going to help us make the numbers make sense. Whatever those things are, you may not be aware of as the entrepreneur. And so having an expert that’s focused on marketing is super valuable, I think for that reason. And, you know, my experience, at least with the, you know, I think it’s probably five to eight that we’ve seen you take really big really quickly. Certainly, that’s the case where it was like, coming into the introduction with you. They were doing half a million a year and then all of a sudden, you made the numbers work because you added something to the equation that they were not seeing that allowed them to go to three, four or 500, 6, 700 grand a month, really quickly, and that’s what it was. It was seen The thing that they couldn’t see. Yeah. So I think that that’s a really good takeaway for people. Um, you talk to me about the the difference if there is one between the audience on Facebook versus Instagram and what you’re selling to people on Instagram versus Facebook, I know you’ve worked on building your personal brand in the last several months. How do those vary?
Los Silva
So, I’ll tell you two things. And I’ll even add Google so on Facebook and Instagram, you know, you’re going to see older people on Facebook, younger people on Instagram. If you’re running a personal brand, I really think you need to put a lot of time into your Instagram, because you get these harder to track. conversations of you running media, either to messenger or to Insta in Facebook is equivalent. Instagram is the equivalent of Google search for Facebook, right? Because people go like oh, who is this dude, and they’ll Instagram you then they’ll follow you then you know like trust them, you can retarget them send them a bunch of different things right so they’re all very congruent for e commerce they both work really really well for for higher ticket brand brands, personal brands, education, marketing type of people, we’re seeing ridiculous success on YouTube we’re seeing a more qualified person for applications way better person. And I think it’s because of the modality of engagement on Facebook. I got to be like, hey, check this out, got 10 seconds, boom, you’re out like check on my thing. YouTube forces you to make the video so the video you can’t use that quick fly by night swipe up, check this, no one cares and you’re either going to get skipped or if you’re you’re not. If you’re not, they’re going to watch your video. They’re also going to follow you which you can do the whole retargeting sequence again, but this is why content is starting to become really important in anything you do, and in all platforms, because now every one of their moms sells like I said the same thing, but with content and relationships and All of that is how people start to get to know you like you and trust you. You know, we’ve seen a lot of a lot of our higher ticket engagements people are like, dude, I’ve been following you for six months. And I remember this video. Remember making that video, right? But yeah, like Google has more qualified people. If you’re making good content, if you’re just throwing Google Ads out there, I think you’ll have a harder time to get conversions on those people, because they have nowhere to find you and engage with you again. And if you want to click or hit, I would go to Instagram and Facebook. If you want to start anything on e commerce, I would start on Instagram and Facebook because it’s gonna be more affordable, it’s an easier platform for you to learn. And just one more thing there just to like help people you know, a lot of people that come to us come to us with like a page and like a product. The first thing we do is we build bundles. So we can increase average order value for people in e commerce. And then we still have a few different upsells using the apps zipper fi, or Shogun, which are two different just page builder applications that you can use inside of that. And then for people that are, you know, trying to run more personal brand stuff, I want to try to give them as much as we can. Knowledge wise for people that are running personal brand stuff, if you’re just getting started, I would start with driving people to applications. The reason is, because webinars and small VSL, the conversion is going to be harder, you’re gonna have to get them through email marketing. And if you can’t make a really good VSL the odds are you’re not an email genius either. And so it’s better to just go like as high ticket as you can. And then just kind of keep sending some content on that and take people to Instagram or messenger and have a VA build conversations with people like that. That should get you to like your first hundred thousand a month. And once you have that, then you can try to build an offer with paid media. And the last thing I’ll say with that is just because you’re making 100,000 a month in two or three organically does not mean That you can run paid ads and it will work the same way. No one in the world knows you here. And this one is like a circle of people that know like and trust you. So this is like your best people. So if you’re crushing it, that’s cool. You’re crushing it to like a circle of friends almost. And you want to now be like, yeah, and then let me just Tony Robbins this thing and see how it works. It won’t. So the odds of you having a lack of success are pretty good, because no one knows who you are. And you’re asking for scale quick, again, because you probably saw someone miseducate you online.
Brad Weimert
Yeah. So just to clarify, when you said go big with the offer on the front end, do you mean that you’re running a webinar VSL straight to high ticket purchase?
Los Silva
We run a VSL. We call it a silo funnel. It’s just a simple inline offer that addresses the problem. Then shows them you have the solution. And the line is just like this is how we’re going to exactly show you what we did to solve for that.
Brad Weimert
I love it. Yeah
Los Silva
Yeah, because webinars take a little bit more to convert as well. People Have that attention span webinars, I think they’re great. They work. We build webinars for people even, but we build them for the back end. We don’t start with people on the front end. Because you need to be more seasoned nowadays to do the certain things. Not there’s a million ways you can make money. There’s, I think, a certain specific path, like you were saying that like I guide people through on how to make money in certain financial times that you or your business may be.
Brad Weimert
Mm hmm. Yeah. So what you do varies wildly by where you are in the lifecycle of your business, whether you’re at the half a million a year versus the 5 million a year. Cool. Well, I think that those are, there’s definitely two actionable things there. While I’ve got you, we might as well talk about, you know, the the big pink elephant in the room, which unfortunately, is not good beer in this case, but is a rabid disease and virus that’s sweeping the nation in the world. How are things different With COVID right now what’s how has advertising changed and e commerce in general changed in the days of the lockdown pandemic?
Los Silva
There’s more people on the internet man, it’s, it’s going better for us. All of our clients right now are freaking thriving. Like I’m saying, like, we just we do like a review every day, like we talked about client wins before we start our own wins. And this month is just we’re talking in this particular side. We’re talking about July, dude, everyone’s ripping it like we’re crushing right now. It’s amazing. And it’s because we you know, unfortunately, you know, COVID is a thing. But, you know, if you’re ready to advertise right now, people are on their computers, e commerce is going up. People are, you know, losing their jobs. So if you want to teach people how to make more money, if you have a product or service that supports people making more money, from brick and mortar to online or just online, how to jump online at the beginning, those things are crushing as well. So I think it’s a Got to lose the fear of, of advertising. And this is a time to go all in. I think personally, I mean, we’ve doubled. Since COVID, we’ve doubled the agency size. We are launching a new division for coaching, which we’re actually building offices, we’re going to be building offices, it’s going to be kind of like starting off. Not local, but then we’re actually going to do the offices in Austin.
Brad Weimert
Nice.
Los Silva
I want to kind of keep this office as is and build, you know, build everything separate just because like this is just for this goal. That’s just for that goal. And we’re adding a lot more of team members that are you know, just outside of any, any space, just any Ukraine to Atlanta to whatever, right because the skill sets are there and you can acquire a lot of more better people now they want to work from home and don’t want to, you know, walk into an office, which is kind of like a new thing for us. We’re very culture based and stuff like that. So I’m testing these new things out and it’s working. So I’m stoked, man, I think I think it’s, you know, stay healthy, stay safe. You know, biohack as spread out, because he’s, he’s a master at it. That’s why I hit up for those things. But you know, it’s time to spend money on ads, it’s time to put in anything. If you can get a loan, I would get a loan for running stuff online, since there are services that offer this, like you can see in this source page online. Man, the only reason I was looking for extra loans was just to spend more money. We don’t even need it. But I was like, shit, man, if I can get more money to put out on the marketplace, it’s the best time and because there’s people that are going forward, and then there’s people that are scared. And the people that are scared are not going to be here. I don’t even think this is the bad time. I think we’re going to hit a recession. And I think that’s going to be the bad time. And if you’re not thriving now, you’re in serious trouble.
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Obviously, excluding owning a retail business at the moment.
Los Silva
Right
Brad Weimert
Right.
Los Silva
Right.
Brad Weimert
If you’re an econ, right, right. Yeah, that’s a that’s good. And I would encourage you to set up shop in Austin. It’s a good town
Los Silva
As soon as I can see human beings and jump on a flight, I’m going out there. I gotta introduce you to my partner on the coaching business. He lives in Austin so you guys can start jamming. Yeah, man, I’m excited to do something in Austin. It’s a great reason to go. It’s a quick flight for me. And just, you know, I’ve always wanted , I don’t know why. I’ve always wanted to like have multiple offices and stuff, and I didn’t want to build one in LA. It’s just too expensive.
Brad Weimert
Totally. Yeah, Austin’s great for that, man. I’m happy to happy to help however I can there.
Los Silva
Yeah, man. I appreciate it.
Brad Weimert
Well, you also you said something really good that I want to highlight which I took note on which is that you focus on your client wins before you focus on your team wins when you review things in the morning. And I think that that’s just like a, it’s hugely telling of where your focus is as as a leader as an owner and if you want to pay there also other services for online payment processing which compete with this service directly. And also just a really good reminder for anybody else. Like internally, we talked about the client experience and everything that we do, has grown to be focused around the client experience, you know, Somebody says, Well, why do I do it this way? The answer is if you think there’s a better way to do it, then give us the better way. But it has nothing to do with you. It has to do, right. how it impacts the client. Right? Yeah. And so are you doing the thing that’s going to impact the client and give them the feeling and the experience that we want them to have? Right that they expect or beyond? But I love that. Cool, man. Well, I appreciate you spending some time to talk. Where, where can people find you? If they want to learn more about Los hussle and SPG.
Los Silva
Just go to I’ll just take you to Instagram, just go to at Los hussle on Instagram, and hit me up and let’s talk happy to help and, you know, see if we can we can help anybody or just answer questions. I’m always on there. So you might if you see a thing with four questionnaires that might be a bot, but other than that, I’ll jump on and I’ll say what’s up.
Brad Weimert
Love it, man. Well, I appreciate you carving out time. Definitely stuff that our client base needs to hear. And you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a lot of supporting evidence to back it up. So I’m excited to be able to show some more people your stuff.
