When I first ran paid ads for my agency back in 2021, every still image creative had to either be built by me in Canva or sent to a graphic designer at $20 to $50 a pop. Testing a batch of, say, 22 to 24 creatives could cost you close to $1,500 before you drop a penny on ads. Right now I'm spending $900 a day on my low ticket funnel and some of my best performing creatives are still images that came out of one workflow. A few agency owners we've shown it to have pulled their cheapest cost per leads ever from the same process. The best part is that the ads were created entirely by AI and cost maybe 10 to 20 cents in credits each per creative. The actual tools are simple. Claude writes the image prompt, Higgsfield produces the image. The part that makes it work is what you do before you prompt anything. Most people open an AI tool and type "give me 12 ad concepts for a roofing lead gen offer" and let it rip. What comes back is generic because the strategy was generic. The image is only ever as good as the thinking you feed it. So instead I steal formats that are already proven. I go into the ads library of the biggest B2B advertisers I can find, sort by impressions, and look for still image formats they keep running. If a format shows up over and over near the top, it's working. From doing this for a client last week across four niches (roofing, tree services, siding, tint and PPF) I landed on four formats: A phone mockup where the notifications on the screen are the client's dream outcome. For a roofer that's a $40,000 deposit hitting the bank and a text saying "new roof restoration quote." A fake news article layout with the client avatar in their work environment and a headline that matches the hooks from the video scripts. A whiteboard sketch comparing the old way against the new way, with a little diorama of a finished job sitting in front of it. Bold text on a red background. Stupidly simple and it's one of Cole Gordon's top performers. Four formats, four niches, sixteen ads. Each format is deliberately nothing like the others, and that matters. If your first batch is four colour variations of the same layout, you're not testing anything.

My client just dropped this in our slack channel: his first ever paid-in-full client. $5,500 collected upfront. 💰 And I want to break down why this matters for YOU, because pitching PIF contracts is one of the easiest, lowest-hanging-fruit ways to collect a shitload more cash without changing anything meaningful about your business. It's a big part of how I hit my first $100K+ months. Here's the story. When I hired my first closer, he was commission-only. And he quickly worked out that if he was only getting paid on cash collected from monthly retainers, it was next to impossible for him to make a healthy income. So he proposed pitching 6-month paid-in-full contracts. I was skeptical. Why would anyone pay us 6 months upfront? 🤔 Here's how we structured it. We raised our base retainer, then gave a healthy discount for paying upfront. As an example with today's numbers: one of our mid-tier services is $1,800/month. Pay upfront for 6 months and it's $8K flat, so they're pocketing a $2,800 discount. We did nothing fancy in the sales process. We literally just gave people the option. 30-40% of people took it. The first month we ran this, I was sitting around $50-60K/month in MRR. We got 4 PIFs across the line, and that alone added an extra $32K in cash collected. The same closes on normal retainers would've added maybe $5-6K that month. 🤯 Same clients. Same service. Same amount of work. We just said different words on a sales call and collected almost $40K extra in a single month. Then kept doing it, month after month, for years. Here's the point I want to drive home 👇 You almost certainly have a list of blind spots like this in your agency right now. Little shifts that make you serious extra money without adding anything significant to your workload. You just can't see them, because you don't know what you don't know. And I know exactly why most of you haven't found them. You're overwhelmed. There's so much content, so many things you could be working on, that you're stuck in analysis paralysis instead of executing on the one thing that would actually move the needle. 😵‍💫

I just got married to my beautiful wife Jasmine!!!

A well-structured video sales letter funnel was honestly one of the most important components to scaling my agency to a 7-figure run rate. I personally spent $30K-$50K over a few years working with some of the best people in the industry to perfect my own offer and funnel which was a huge reason I was able to make my agency so successful. At this point I've iterated on my funnel 15 to 20 times, and I'm telling you, this stuff can genuinely make or break whether you can be profitable scaling client acquisition through paid ads. There's an art and a science to all the little details that go into making a landing page work, and in this post I'm going to break down all of the most important things you need to implement on your opt-in page AND your thank you page to increase call volume, increase show rate, and increase the quality of leads coming through onto your calendar. Knowing these strategies is what'll let you effectively compete in the marketplace, same way it let me scale my agency in one of the most competitive niches in the world: real estate. I've proven these strategies work time and time again, evident in the hundreds of agency owners that have scaled after I've helped them install these exact same things into their business. For example, my client James recently hit $50K a month in cash collected and used these strategies to land 15 new clients per month back-to-back for the first two months of this year. My client Aaron had a single month where he brought in 22 new clients and added $50K in MRR in one month. I used these strategies to add $60K in MRR to my own agency in 90 days... Now obviously, your underlying offer and the creative execution of the ads you're running and sending traffic to this landing page are also a huge component of making this all work. But for the purpose of this post, I want to go deep into the VSL funnel strategy itself. And, instead of just describing all of this in the abstract, I'm going to make this easier for you.

I started running ads from Jan 16th and have pulled in roughly 60 leads so far. Right now I’m doing everything myself. I’m currently at a point where I’m debating whether it’s time to bring on an appointment setter. My hesitation isn’t really cost, it’s more quality and trust. Biggest concerns: - Since my ads are my face, will leads feel less connected if it’s not me reaching out initially? - I know speed-to-lead is critical but I live off my calendar and if a lead doesn’t answer the first time I call, I’ll sometimes forget to follow-up again. I’d love to hear from others on when they hired their first appointment setter? Did you find quality candidates or have to train them? Did they make a significant impact?