How to Price a Service Business So It Actually Makes Money | Ep 1002

Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Joey Goone runs Utopia Experience, a St. Louis event planning company that grew its average deal from $34K to $44K in a year. But his prices are made up line by line, and margins are thin. Plus, he converts leads 10 times more than his two full-time salespeople. In this episode of Scale or Fail, Alex helps Joey fix his offer, turn B2B conferences into lead gen, and frame every sales call with a VSL to optimize conversions. More Value: Book Your Spot at the 2-Day, Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/ Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  I'm gonna help a complete stranger build a $5 million per year business in 90 days, step by step. And at the end of the 90 days, we're gonna check in and show you exactly what happened. This is Joey. Enjoy. Joey, what's up? All right, tell me about the business.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yes, um, so my name is Joey Goon. My business is Utopia Experience. We are an event planning company out of St. Louis, Missouri. Is it fail? I am with 400 of my closest friends.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  So last year, the average deal size for event planning was 34,000. This year, trailing 12 months is 44,000. Audio visual average spend is between 20 and 150K per event. Video production is more of a pass through to just make it easy for clients.

• 0:41Alex Hormozi?

  Got it. Okay, what's holding you back right now?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I'm just not really sure what the strategy is that we should pursue when it comes to the acquisition channel.

• 0:47Alex Hormozi?

  So why do you think this can scale?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I'm just like in awe. I love you so much.

• 0:54Alex Hormozi?

  It's mutual, man.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Why do I think this can scale? So before I came here, I actually flew here from my sister's wedding in Mexico. I asked 100 people on that trip with us, it's like the entire wedding party, what's one thing in your life that you can never have enough of? And I thought I'd get some silly answers because people are drunk, doing whatever in the pool. And I thought I was gonna get sex or money. And I got some of that. But mostly what people told me was some version of connection, community, tribe, family, belonging. And that's the industry that we're in. So our industry, what we're selling, is fundamentally what people need. It is a human need. It's wired into our primal DNA. And so that's why I think it could scale. And the market cap on events right now is 1.5 trillion. It's projected to hit 3.5 trillion by 2033.

• 1:42Alex Hormozi?

  Amazing.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  So those numbers back up our industry. I'm so convicted on my quest that I'm going to persevere. I've been resilient since I was a nine-year-old kid. I know this business is gonna grow. With your help, I'm ready to scale it.

• 1:58Alex Hormozi?

  Sweet. Walk me through how your pricing process works. Because it's very, it's very like make believe, right?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, abstract.

• 2:05Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, so, yeah. And since you have a margin issue, I think it's a margin issue, how does, how do these numbers get pulled out of thin air? Because right now, it sounds like they just say, we want X, Y, and Z, and then you create some line items, and then make up numbers on those line items, and then come up with a number at the bottom, and then send it to them? Like, I come to you and I say, I'm doing an acquisition.com event, right? We're gonna do a 1,000-person event here in Vegas, and we want full AV and some onsite support. What, like, when you hear that, what actually goes through your head?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  What's included in every package is a $15,000 overall retainer to retain our services. So that's the first thing.

• 2:41Alex Hormozi?

  Like a one-time upfront fee that gets added on to the other make-believe prices?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And then after that, it's, you know, sponsor management, that's about 15K. Then there's vendor management. Vendor management is like managing all the contractors. So it's the photo booth, the video production team, all of those elements that, you know, sort of come into the event. It's the venue procurement strategy. So if you guys, if you're taking your team to some other place outside of Vegas, you need a hotel, which hotel are you gonna work with? How are you gonna get people to and from the airport?

• 3:14Alex Hormozi?

  And so you'll bill for the logistics of managing that as well, if it's part of the scope of work or whatever?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Right. That's 7,500.

• 3:20Alex Hormozi?

  Is there anything about headcount?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  That's the thing. So we learned a lesson, we put the guardrails up. And so now we're actually deploying like tiered structures, where if you have over a certain number of attendees, or over a certain amount of vendors or sponsors, then there's a tier that where you pay more based on the number of people that you have.

• 3:37Alex Hormozi?

  Got it. Okay, I think I know what to do. So you wanna hop on the side?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Check.

• 3:44Alex Hormozi?

  So, um, there's a dimension issue for sure. But I think that part of it is because you're mispriced. And so the pricing has to do with the offer. And so we kind of have to start with the offer, and then fixed price, and then go sales motion, and then go demand increase. Does that make sense?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 4:03Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, we gotta fix the thing we're selling. Once we fix the thing we're selling, we'll fix how we're selling it. And then, uh, if we're selling it well, we can price it the way we wanna price it. Okay.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  So can't believe I'm sitting next to you right now.

• 4:15Alex Hormozi?

  It's mutual. Um, okay, so the first thing that has to happen is you have to cost out what true costs are for different levels of delivery. And then whenever you have that price, I want you to five or 10x that cost. And then that's what your price is. And so you'll probably have to create, um, like a dynamic sheet, which you could either code with AI really easily, or just have like an if then type Excel sheet, either way would work. But as you're going through it with a customer, it should basically pop out what that price for that thing's gonna be, and it's all dynamic. So have headcount of the event. And then from there, we're gonna have our, uh, variable costs, which are what are the costs that scale with headcount. So we have

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Like sponsors, vendors.

• 5:02Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, exactly. So these are, these are the costs that scale with this and are gonna be proportional.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:06Alex Hormozi?

  And then we're gonna have our fixed costs, which is gonna be Amber can only, she's, it's one quarter of Amber. So it's like, great, that's gonna be 15K is one quarter of Amber, because she can only handle four. And then what other fixed costs do we have that are probably gonna be more fixed payroll stuff versus kind of the other costs that are associated that are gonna be more like the AV related or whatever? Does that track?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 5:27Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. So once you have this, it's like, you're going to have a sheet that has a cost number that comes to the bottom. You're not gonna show that to them. And then at that point, you know that your range is gonna be five to 10x this number. And that, to me, would be like, how rich is the person I'm talking to? I'm like, I'm just being real. Like, bigger company, like, if you, if you, if you get, if you get lawn care in one of the top 10 zip codes in the United States, and you have the exact same amount of grass, and you have it in a really poor part of the United States, the price difference between that lawn care, as somebody who knows,

• 6:00Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 6:00Alex Hormozi?

  It's two to three X difference, and I just call it a zip code tax, right? This is the privilege I get to have is to pay more for the exact same thing.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I love that. Can I just say to all the future clients out there that you're gonna pay, you're gonna make, it's gonna be a great price. Whatever you pay is gonna be, you know?

• 6:14Alex Hormozi?

  You're fine. Um, at the end of the day, everyone else is doing this too. They're just not being organized about it. Um, so that's number one, is that we need to have standardized pricing, so that you can actually get your sales guys to be able to quote without having this super long delay in the process. And so at the end of the year, you know, like, how much money do we make? We should know exactly how much money we're making on every event.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Sure. This, yeah, this, this seems like a programmable AI thing that can be done in a couple hours.

• 6:39Alex Hormozi?

  Yes. Now, to make this kind of offer better, so this gives us our cost basis. What I wanna do is add, um, basically a price lock guarantee, which is like, as long as you don't change anything about this, this is gonna be the price. And, uh, we give a, you know, 10% discount, uh, if you pre-put all ahead. That way you can pull cash forward. Because right now, I'm sure you're getting paid some now, some in the middle, some at the end, or something like that. Does that sound true?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and something that, um, that I'm going through is I've never been through a lawsuit, suing a client right now who didn't pay us, and now we're having to hunt down that money, and, uh,

• 7:18Alex Hormozi?

  Do they have money?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Nope, they just filed for

• 7:20Alex Hormozi?

  There's no point in suing.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, voluntary bankruptcy.

• 7:22Alex Hormozi?

  There's no point in suing, yeah. Just save your, save your dollars, call it a cost of business.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 7:26Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, just, let me, let me save you some time. Let me save you some money and some headache. It's not your crack at the money, so there's no point.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Navigating that, so like, getting it all upfront, uh, helps us avoid having to chase it later.

• 7:35Alex Hormozi?

  100%.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:36Alex Hormozi?

  There's also the value of money today. If you, if you have a event a year from now, you just suck that money into a bond or whatever, you know what I mean? Or the stock market, well, the stock market is probably not the best way to put it, but, uh, something that's, you know, a fixed income asset, you'd be able to make, make the money back, but you also get the value of speed of money today. And most businesses have higher returns on capital than the stock market does, especially small businesses. And so you're gonna get better returns on that. So it makes sense to at least give 10 or 20% to pull it up. Now, we've already built this padding in, so we're fine.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:02Alex Hormozi?

  Now, I wanna also create a separate opportunity, which is on the events that are B2B. Now, there's not gonna be a lot of them. But the ones where the audience is the customer, I wanna have a separate approach to it. So this is our standard way of billing. If someone is B2B, they're basically throwing an event for you. Okay?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:23Alex Hormozi?

  Not actually, but like, they have, uh, you have to take, not that you wouldn't take extra care with a normal event, but if there's ever been a time to blow people's socks off and have an amazingly run event, this will be the time to do it.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:37Alex Hormozi?

  Because everybody in the audience is a potential customer.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  It's the franchisor associations, where you've got 1,500 of them in the audience that are all doing conferences.

• 8:45Alex Hormozi?

  Love it. So with these people, it's like, number one is, or rather, A, I would say, uh, we wanna get the booth for ourselves in there, because they're gonna have, you know, a booth. Number two is you wanna have the opportunity to do some sort of speaking at the event. And it can be like a 15-minute slot. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It's just like, hey, if you guys have been loving this event, we're, uh, we're Utopia. We put this whole thing on, and we do this all the time for people like you. And so you put a little bit of razzle-dazzle of like, this is what makes shitty events, this is what makes great events, and say, hey, if you want these slides, you can give them to your event planner, just QR code on the screen, and I'll, I'll send them to you. So you can just actually come into this as like, I probably think it was like, 20 mistakes that, uh, people who are buying event planning make. And so I would just go through all of the mistakes

• 9:30Alex Hormozi?

  that people make, and with each of them, proof of one person underneath of them saying that you're awesome at that thing. And say, hey, if you want the slides, go grab them. But the main sex appeal is that after they kind of opt in to grab them, the opt-in says, do you run events? Like, do you host events and how many per year? And then that way, that just becomes a lead list for you. So you're not pitching. It's just like, hey, the, the CTAs, do you want the slides? Which makes it much easier for you to do for the, the, the customer. Now, when you have those B2B conferences, I would do whatever it took to, to get those ones, because it's basically them fronting all the cost of getting 500 or 1,000 of your ICP in the stadium. And it's like, if you can't close 10% of that room, then there's other issues, right?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:11Alex Hormozi?

  Even if you closed 1% of the room, you get 15, it'd be a 50% increase in your, in your business, if you're just from one event, right? And you do more than that per year.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:18Alex Hormozi?

  So that's why I see this as super material, like, you should be very willing to, like, we have this nice high anchor so that we can say, oh, well, you know, I just quoted you 90, but you have five sponsors, right? Do you have any issues with having a sixth? I'll pay you for the booth. I'll pay, your sponsor fee is 5,000 a booth. I'll pay 5,000. It's at 95 now. How's that? Oh, great. Right? So it's like, we can just start chipping away at it. And if you'll let me just do an intermission, I'm talking 10 minutes, I'll just talk about how events work. I'm sure we can see, we can frame it as value additive. I'll knock another 5,000 off, right?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Love it. I'm gonna get my sales team on the phone tomorrow to start calling these different associations.

• 10:52Alex Hormozi?

  And so the last one is just, uh, one list email. So basically just say, hey, I don't wanna like, get your email list, that's, that's your own thing. But if after the event, I could say, hey, if you had a great time with the event, if I can just say, like, basically, List of them and then I'll happily pay you a fee on anybody who decides to book through us. And that can further bring this number down. And I would say typically, we're going to get, you know, 1% of people.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 11:12Alex Hormozi?

  This is kind of the, the offer pieces. And then this can hopefully fix pricing and also the instant quote issue that you have. Okay, now, the second part is sales motion. So you're converting 10 times more than your sales team, which is a problem.

• 11:33Alex Hormozi?

  Right? Because you're doing like, if you work leads part time, you were getting more than two guys full time. Right?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:39Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, so it just means you're doing things they're not doing. So we just have to figure out what those things are. So have you audited any of their DM conversations? That they're having?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  I've had one meeting with my sales team. I have a follow up, one meeting just on this specifically. I have a follow up meeting with them next week to just audit all of their communication and just figure out like, great, like, don't say that, say this.

• 12:00Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. So what I want you to do is basically as soon as you kick off, because the, the issue that you have is you're obviously demand constrained. So, instead of weekly, like, you should be meeting with them every single day to drive and then do end of day. Because right now, this, like, you need to drive this.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:15Alex Hormozi?

  Like, first thing in the morning, what's your plan? How many touchpoints you're gonna do? Great. Like, walk me through the leads that you're working. What kind of prep have you done for those, those calls and those reach outs? We can personalize them. And then end of day, how the conversations go? Where are we at with pipeline? Like, we just need to drive this. From a role playing perspective, the way that, like, don't do this, do that. You have to then give them the opportunity to try in front of you. Now, part of this is going to be the actual sales, but right now, are they just mostly setting for you to close? Or are they setting for themselves to close?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're kind of, they're end to end.

• 12:44Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Do I need to restructure that?

• 12:47Alex Hormozi?

  I'd rather have them just set appointments for you because you don't, your sales volume is like two a week, right? It's not, it's not a huge, or not, one a week. If you had two guys just setting appointments for you, the likelihood that you'll close them is significantly higher. And you're also the business owner and you can kind of flex on some of these things a little bit better. I would rather you do that because you're closing 40% of sales, right, that you talk to?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:07Alex Hormozi?

  I mean, if you have four appointments a week, like, that's not going to really change anything. But all of a sudden, you double your business. If you have eight appointments a week, you quadruple your business. So, and that's still not a lot of, like, that's not a lot of work.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  So just have them be like SDRs, BDRs, booking my calendar completely.

• 13:20Alex Hormozi?

  And you can still give them a commission on the, on the, on the thing that they bring in. But you're like, listen, you'll make more money if I'm selling than you are. So like, do this for now. And then I think that'll allow you to stay closer to it so that you can document the process better. And your feedback loops will be faster because you're like, hey, I got nothing on my calendar today. What the hell's going on? In a nice way.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:37Alex Hormozi?

  Right? Does that feel okay?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:39Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. Weekly, I would go deep with one of them, or not one of them, with each of them one on one. The way that we structure these is basically you're personal. You say, hey, how you doing? Hey, if you're, you know, your mom just died, then like, let's talk about that. Make sure you're good because you're not thinking about your KPIs or quotas, if you just got dumped or whatever. The next is assuming they don't have any, like, personal calamities. We say, okay, we're focused on short term stuff. You're messing this up in the, in the intro. You're messing this up in the, in this part of the scripting. If they're crushing their KPIs, say, hey, long term, what are your goals here? Why don't we, why don't you shadow some of my sales calls so that you can maybe pick up some of this other stuff? It's basically giving them growth opportunities. But that's the, the progression that we do with weekly one on ones. And in here, it's all role playing, like, forever. Just like, you train sales to role play.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:23Alex Hormozi?

  Because you have to get, you have to get them to try and so that you can correct them and have more feedback loops. Just think, how many feedback loops do I have? These people, it's the only way they learn. Just like saying it at them will do literally nothing.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  What's, what's my, you know, my brother and I have been consuming your content for five years, him longer than me. I had a call with my brother last week and he's like, the hormosian me is telling you that you're not doing, you're not doing this. So I started booking daily check ins with my.

• 14:46Alex Hormozi?

  Oh, good, good. Now, I want to give you something that I think is be super, super high leverage. Which is an idea that I had while you were talking, which is when you open up the call, actually say, hey, how's it going, whatever, and you set the agenda for the call.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:02Alex Hormozi?

  What's the first question you ask them?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Why'd you book this call today? Why not six months from now? Why not six months ago?

• 15:07Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, so you're clarifying whether they're, you're on the C part. What I, what I want to do, there's one question I want to ask in the earlier part of the process, which is, how many events per year you do? Because I want automatically, as soon as they can say, oh, we do three events a year. Now I just took our average ticket from 80K and made it 240K because now I'm trying to bid for all three.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:27Alex Hormozi?

  And then what we can do is say, hey, why don't we do off, like, I'll commit to all three for you. We'll do the first one and assuming the first one goes great, we'll book the other two at the same rate. That way we can start like trying to increase average ticket and then get into these kind of like very recurring relationships. Do you like that question? Because I think that will have a very big effect. I just want to make sure that that gets added into the script.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:46Alex Hormozi?

  One more thing we got to add. So in your existing sales process, the way you were doing it, you'd reach out to them. You'd qualify the lead and then you'd set an appointment, correct?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:55Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. Before they, and on that appointment, you then basically collect all this information. And then you'd say, let me get back to you. And then you'd set a follow up appointment. And then you would try and close them on that call.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, go through the proposal with them live because then you can actually kind of work through those questions and handle the objections.

• 16:09Alex Hormozi?

  Yes. So I want you to add a video sales letter before the call.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Okay. I just recorded it.

• 16:17Alex Hormozi?

  So before you, like, before you ever talk to a customer, you should have a video sales letter. Now, if you have two conversations, there's two VSLs.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  You said this before the call?

• 16:24Alex Hormozi?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. And when someone hops on the call, if they have it, like, the first question, now, inside of the VSL, I can walk through how to structure, but if you already did it, then we can leave it. I like having a little nugget in there, which is having one CTA that's like, hey, by the way, text me your headcount. Text me the date of the event that you want to do. Text me the week or text me the season, whatever. We just want to have something so we have some indication they actually watched it. And then also engages them with us. So that's good. Increase the likelihood they show. But beyond that, when you start the call,

• 16:54Alex Hormozi?

  you'll find out quickly, like, did you, did you watch the video? If the answer is yes, great. If the answer is no, then we say, hey, no worries. This will save us like 30 minutes on the call, seven minutes. Play this now and we'll grab a cup of coffee. You want a cup of coffee? Ha ha, it's zoom, huh? Okay.

• 17:11Alex Hormozi?

  And I'll be right back. And so then they watch it and then that way they're fresh and primed and the whole conversation's already been framed. And you've been edified and all that kind of jazz.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:18Alex Hormozi?

  Because this is also what helps you scale sales once it, once you stop being the person selling. Because we want to do as much of the lifting as we can for the salespeople, including you. Because what this will do is it also shores the amount of calls you have to have. So if you're currently doing two, if we do a VSL and then we can do an instant quote, we might be able to change to a one call close.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 17:35Alex Hormozi?

  And even worst case scenario, even if you like having the two call, which I'm not against two calls at certain price points. Sometimes it just, people just want to, like, it gives the approximation of knowing someone. We can still have our instant quote. And then rather than saying, let's meet in five days, you can say, I'll have this to you by, what time tomorrow works best for you? I'll work on this until, until then. Because there's also a speed element of like, if it takes you a week to get me a quote, I'm like, man, how long is it like? Is this what it's going to be like working with these people? If it's like, this is priority for me, we'll get this done, you know, I'll get this turned by today. And how's first thing tomorrow morning? It's like that speed, I can almost guarantee you will increase close rates. Cool?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 18:12Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. Ah, this is another little, a little nuggy. So after the events that you hold, what happens? So the event's done.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:20Alex Hormozi?

  Now what?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Within, usually within two days of landing back in St. Louis, we send a follow up email to the hosts. We get them on an event debrief call. That's where we're going through what worked, what do we want to see improved? And when's the event, the event date for next year? Let's get it booked.

• 18:35Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, love that. Just add a VSL beforehand.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Really?

• 18:38Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:39Alex Hormozi?

  For every conversation you have with a customer, frame it.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:42Alex Hormozi?

  And so for here, it's like.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Different VSL?

• 18:44Alex Hormozi?

  It'll be same, the structure will be the same. You want different examples. And the, the objections are going to be the ones that happen after someone has an event and is thinking about booking the next one, not before they book their first event. So the objections will be different.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:58Alex Hormozi?

  So they'll be like, is it going to be the same price? We'll take, well, it depends on, like, so you're just going to go through what the FAQs normally would be? And then just answer them ahead of time before the call. And that way you can spend the whole call actually closing rather than just like transferring information and like yapping at them.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 19:11Alex Hormozi?

  But that'll frame the call so that basically it's like,

• 19:15Alex Hormozi?

  so, you know, you just went through your first event with us. Hopefully it was amazing. Don't worry, we're going through the, like, everything, like, we, perfection is our standard. And so nothing's ever perfect and we always want to get better. And that's how we've continued to grow as a company. That being said, there's some questions that people have, which is like billing logistics. What happens with other, other future events? When am I going to get my, my video stuff? Like, all the questions that people normally have. And then included in that would be, okay, how does, how does working with, like, basically, what do we go from here? What's the next step? And I'd say, so what we're going to do on the calls also just book, figure out what the next event is so that we can get even more advanced prep. Because basically, the more prep we have, the better the event is. And so, right. And so I would just say like, so I can tell you that even if there was somebody who is better than us at this, which there aren't any, of course,

• 19:58Alex Hormozi?

  if you book with us now, we will be better than somebody who is better than us. And so you get better value by booking now.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  It's a great frame.

• 20:04Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Damage to your mission. So now we can talk about the,

• 20:09Alex Hormozi?

  like, what is the order of operations? Does that work?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:12Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, so number one, we need to, we need to create the, call it like the auto quote generator. Which shouldn't take you that long to build, but you just have to think through what are the costs, what are the variables, what are the, what are the fixed costs? And then how does it depend by headcount? Great. Now we have our, we have at least our cost basis. And then that gives us our range for our pricing. Right. Second, you'll add in kind of the referral slash promotion incentives to this so that you can put your discounts in, so that you can get, you can basically solicit more business from them. That's the list and the speaking and the survey close of like, hey, get my slides and you can sort from there to get new leads.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:54Alex Hormozi?

  Okay.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 20:57Alex Hormozi?

  Third element is we need to do daily sales training, implement VSLs times three, because you have three kind of touchpoints. You have call one, call two, and then post-call, right? We have to increase our outreach, which is going to be first, they're going to start every day by maxing out the platform limits, which means they should be doing exactly what you were doing when you were doing outreach. They should just clone exactly what you're doing. And if they're not doing that, then like either they're the wrong people or you're not good at training. Then we want to do an AI scrape of the contacts to get numbers. And then we want to feed that into a dialer. And there's a ton of different dialer softwares out there that you can use.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  What would you do with the dialer? You're having it call the?

• 21:40Alex Hormozi?

  We want to call the, we just want to, you want to hit it from as many channels as you can. And you're going to have more, like you will be limited by this more than you will be limited by this. And so the call these like the highest likelihood responses because it's warmer, et cetera. But these are where you're going to be able to get a lot of volume.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Got it. And for Max Platform, you're talking about something like LinkedIn, like as many DMs as you can possibly send on the platform.

• 22:00Alex Hormozi?

  Exactly.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Got it. So is Facebook a solid channel that you think we should pursue?

• 22:04Alex Hormozi?

  I think LinkedIn would help. I would stick with LinkedIn. You've already done that there. You already have a proven process. They're not following it, but you have a proven process. So it's like, how do we just do more of that for now?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 22:12Alex Hormozi?

  Because then you have all these different acquisition channels. And my whole focus here was like, how do we get really narrow on the one that like, you have the best LTV to CAC on LinkedIn. So let's do that and let's do way more. And you already hired two guys. So it's like, we should get them on ramps. And you need to do that with lots of training and making sure that they are motivated.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 22:29Alex Hormozi?

  That's basically, and if you say this is what we're doing twice a day, every day, I promise you the productivity of the team is going to go up. And since it's the constraint, it's a good use of your time. The piece here is this pricing generator, we should be at five to 10x our costs for the, right? Now, obviously that's your, going to be your estimate. You're like, we have to have five as the minimum because it might go over, right? Like you don't know. But the price lock says that we will charge this as long as you don't change anything. If you change something, then we might have to readjust it and then we'll true up at the end.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:02Alex Hormozi?

  Now, the higher you go in here, the more you can say, as long as you're not changing the headcount by more than 20% between now and then, or we have to change venues or anything like that, this will be the cost no matter what. So you can use that as a, like if I were selling this, I would say something like, so there's two ways that this pricing works. So one way is you get nickel-nimbed. The other is that we just pick a price that's within your budget. And then as long as you don't do anything crazy, that's what the price is going to be. Which one would you rather do? Right, they're like, just tell me the, just tell me the price it's going to be. It's like, great, boom, boom. And then we factor in all of the, the fudge factor. And so it's like, to be clear, you're not going to change your venue and you're not going to change your headcount by more than 20%. We agreed on that? Okay. And like, you're not going to all of a sudden say like, I want AV. Like these are the services that you're going to get.

• 23:45Alex Hormozi?

  I'll, I'll give you fudge factor on headcount up to 20. And then you can't change the, and you can't change the date, right? So like, can't change the date, can't change the venue. And then that way it, you don't, it confines the scope. If they break that, which they might, then you have a different conversation. And I don't think I would try and jab people. I just feel like, listen, it's going to cost me 30% more to do this. But if they're already making the decision that they need to do that, then they've decided that it's worth it. So then if it's worth it, then it's worth paying you.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:07Alex Hormozi?

  Does that all make sense?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  It does.

• 24:09Alex Hormozi?

  Okay.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Would you also add in a, you know, like a multi-year kind of agreement?

• 24:14Alex Hormozi?

  I mean, my goal of asking, how many events are you doing? Is so that I can seed off the fact that, okay, most people who are in your position, you're doing three events a year and there are all three events going to be like this. Great, I can give you a better rate if we do all three than if we just do one. And so it's like, we'll give you a 10, again, it's like, I like this big anchor so that I can say, I'll give you 10% off on all three, but we're already way above your current price.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 24:37Alex Hormozi?

  I'll give you 10% off on all three if you commit to doing all three with us now. And if for some reason you want to break it because you think we suck, which is totally fine, just pay the difference on, on, on what you would have owed us. So it gives a little bit of a stick.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 24:48Alex Hormozi?

  Right? And so if that 10% off is, and then it's like, we'll give you another 10% off if you prepay all three. Some people, and that, that may sound crazy to you, but a lot of departments in business work on annual budgets. And so it's like, listen, it's about to be tax season. If you want to get this off your books now, because we have one event now and two next year, prepay for the event now. And that way you can, you know, have, you don't have to pay taxes on it. Does that track? Yeah. That'll work super well Q4. Because the, oh shit, what we do, like, because a lot of people are, you know, they're looking at their Q1, Q2, sometimes, you know, depending how last minute they are, right? So Q3, Q4, you'll be getting the events for, you know, Q1, Q2, maybe Q3. And so it's like, get the cash off your books, pay your taxes now. You get a discount and you don't have to pay taxes. It's a double, it's a double way. I mean, like, why not do it?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:36Alex Hormozi?

  Sure?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:36Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. And you had one question about the fact, like you speaking at events, right? Like you speak at these events. I think you should speak as many events as your family life that you feel comfortable doing. Because you being on stage will further edify you so that your LinkedIn responses go up. You'll get more inbounds. And then obviously at the events themselves, you're getting leads. So it's like, it's a triple dip. And so to the degree that you can, I would encourage you to do it.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Okay. So even with me being the bottleneck and I can only be on so many, I mean, the hourly rate, I think was like 1250 per hour.

• 26:06Alex Hormozi?

  That's because you didn't have a really good offer and a conversion process. But at a B2B event, if you have a 500-person audience, there's no world where you shouldn't be able to get 50 people or 100 people to opt in for your thing. And then of those, maybe 10 or 20% are going to be qualified leads for you. Like that's huge.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:22Alex Hormozi?

  And so you should be able to make significantly more than $1,200 an hour.

• 26:27Alex Hormozi?

  So I would encourage you to speak at B2B, but using a survey close as your primary method. But fundamentally, business as it currently stands works fine. It's not nearly as profitable as it needs to be, which means that we have to understand our costs better and price appropriately in order to have more profit. In order to solve our demand constraint, what we're doing is we're getting more people from our existing events that we're doing. We're training our sales team to be more effective. We're increasing their effectiveness with VSLs. We're increasing the overarching volume that they're doing in terms of outreach. And then you're also speaking. And this is giving you like a turbo bomb approach of like, this is the constraint is demand. And we did have a pricing issue because we don't want to jam more demand through something that's in margins. So let's fix the margins in the offer and then jam as much demand as we can.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 27:14Alex Hormozi?

  Does that feel clear?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  It does, yeah. I'm, I'm processing.

• 27:17Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, yeah, it was probably a lot.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Lot of information and also an incredible roadmap that is, that is like very followable.

• 27:24Alex Hormozi?

  Good.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  So I appreciate you.

• 27:27Alex Hormozi?

  Appreciate you, man. We're going to do some scaling roadmap. Where are to us? All right, what's your headcount?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  We have 30 total, 12 full-time.

• 27:34Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, so you're here. So if we're looking at what we're doing with sales, so we need to install a sales training system and divulge your coaching and team cadence. We're optimizing, right? Now, the ad assembly process is typically if we have a paid side. But for you, the idea is like, we're doing these events as kind of like your, like that's the thought leadership side of this. But a lot of the other stuff is happening through the sales team with increasing our outreach, right? From a product perspective, incremental product improvement across both products. So because of the customization of how you are going to break down your costs, you'll be able to get laser focused on each component of your offer. And that's really what the kind of product improvement at this level is.

• 28:17Alex Hormozi?

  Now, creating customer segmentation, so this is like what we need to do is in time, probably like a year from now, you'll start looking and say, hey, we did 100 events this year. And what's crazy is that 25 of those events were 75% of our profit. And we're like, okay, so that's the customer segment that's actually driving the most profit for us. How do we retool our messaging and our marketing and the examples that we use in our VSLs and our scripting in order to attract more of those people? Because then at that point, we could do the exact same volume as we currently did, make four times the money if we just only sold those, those customers. And then that's the process of getting really narrow so that you can then, boom.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 28:58Alex Hormozi?

  Cool. So by the way, if you want to know, have your own scaling roadmap, which has a 90-minute video. Have you gone through this?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:04Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Pretty good, right?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  It's really good. Yeah.

• 29:07Alex Hormozi?

  I made this as something that was supposed to be of paid quality. And then I was like, I should just make it for free. So I gave it away. And so if you are a business owner, you're like, where am I on this roadmap? Just fill it out and it'll tell you in a lot more detail than 30 seconds, where you're at and what you need to do to get to the next level. And the link's somewhere around here. All right. And so that was this episode of Scale or Fail. Stay tuned for the next one.