Behind The Revenue

Chad Kodary (00:01.39)
Hey, what's going on everybody? We are on another episode of behind the revenue. Uh, got a good friend on this time. It's Joel or a way, um, Joel, I'm, I've been following you now for quite a while. I know we, we we've done, uh, I think you're at an event that we did together in the past. So we've had a couple of acquaintances where we've gotten together. We've talked about business. We've talked about marketing. Um, I know that you're doing a lot of stuff in your business right now, just for context, for the viewers.

Just tell us a little bit about kind of what you're doing right now and a little bit more about your business.

Joel Erway (00:34.276)
Yeah, great question. So really the core focus of what we do is we help design a variety of customer acquisition strategies for our clients. We got in the game exclusively doing webinars, then we've since evolved from webinars to do all sorts of other types of customer acquisition strategies. But yeah, in a nutshell, that's our specialty.

Chad Kodary (01:00.878)
So let's peel the onion back a little bit. When you say customer acquisition strategies, give me some examples of some of the things that you're doing for some of your customers.

Joel Erway (01:08.452)
Yep. So, you know, primarily the people that I serve, they're in the online education space. So course creators, you know, coaches, those are the two primary avatars that we speak to. And so, you know, in that world, you've got the course creators who really primarily want to sell, you know, lower ticket products and you've got the coaches and, you know, the agencies that want to sell higher ticket products. And so we serve that mix and, um,

You know, a lot of what we've done in the past has helped people drive, you know, appointments to, to their calendar, like design offers that get people to raise their hand for premium mid ticket, high ticket offers. So that's one area of our business. But we also focus on like the course creators, right? Cause a lot of course creators really don't want to get on the phone. They want to teach, they want to educate, they want to help, they want to serve. And so they want to set up, you know, some form of.

automated or semi -automated sales system where they can, you know, sell one to many. And so that's our specialty. It's kind of where webinars came in back in the day. Like we started with webinars, then went to appointment funnels. Now we've kind of swung the pendulum back to, you know, other types of one to many sales systems that, you know, people can leverage, you know, without needing to get on the phone.

Chad Kodary (02:33.454)
So are you running the entire kind of front end and maybe back? Like, are you building the funnel? Are you writing all the email copy? You're writing the sales copy, creating the VSL. Like what, how, how deep are you running the ads? Um, talk to me a little bit about that. I'm actually curious about that.

Joel Erway (02:49.412)
Yeah, so we shut our agency down last year. So we don't really do any, you know, private client work anymore. A lot of it is teaching, education, coaching programs, courses, et cetera. You know, if people join my email list, they'll see that I do tons and tons of live workshops. And that's the primary mode in which I love to deliver my premium content. So I'll do a one day workshop or a two day workshop or a four day workshop teaching one very specific.

Chad Kodary (03:01.858)
Gotcha.

Joel Erway (03:19.374)
specific action item, right? And they're usually paid. And so I'll run these paid workshops, people join live, and they also get access to the recordings. But that's how I deliver my content right now is primarily through live paid workshops.

Chad Kodary (03:35.854)
Gotcha. And are you running these workshops to a warm audience? Are you running paid ads to cold traffic and running workshops that way? How, like, how are you getting customers for, for this model?

Joel Erway (03:41.506)
Mm -hmm.

Joel Erway (03:47.524)
Yeah. So I call it the workshop model. And this is probably the most, um, uh, well -received, uh, topic that I've launched in the past couple of years. And so really what we do is I have a prerecorded workshop. I call it the power offer workshop, which teaches people a very specific script that helps them, you know, they can run ads to it. They can run it to warm, cold, anywhere, uh, a very specific, specific lead generation script that helps them get more.

booked appointments. So we've been running cold traffic, paid ads to that for four years now. And we've generated out of something like 7 ,000 customers with that. So that is one of our primary front end customer acquisition tools. So people will see that they'll buy it and then they'll get added to my list. And so that's the first part of the workshop of, you know, kind of like acquiring the customers, building the list. The second part of the workshop, 27 bucks. Yep.

Chad Kodary (04:40.622)
Is that a low ticket? Just to add some context. Is that $27? Okay, that's what I was going to. Okay.

Joel Erway (04:45.028)
Yeah, we have a couple of other options too, like the, um, but yes, 27 bucks anyway. So that builds the list. Yes. Yep. Yep. So we've been running ads that for about four years and, um, now, um, now that they're on my list, what I do is I like once a week or, you know, I will say not once a week, but like once or twice a month, I will promote to them a live paid workshop.

Chad Kodary (04:50.798)
So you're currently running ads to that. That's how, that's how people are finding out about who you are. Got you. Okay.

Joel Erway (05:13.508)
on a variety of different topics, right? It's not just one specific type of work. I've probably done 10 different varieties of workshops and they're all, for the most part, live unless I'm selling the recordings later on, but for this conversation's purposes, they're live. So I'll run a live paid workshop once or twice a month, promote that to my list. And on that workshop, some people will raise their hands and say, hey, I wanna learn more. Now you can look at a variety of different, like the challenge model,

Um, the webinar model, like those are all models that are designed for Ascension and for sales. Like the reason why I love the workshop model is because it's not sales focused, like it's service focused. Like there's no, like the way that I ascend people, um, is like, there's no secret formula. There was no secret pitch. There's no, like, you know, you look at some people who do like three day live workshops, every freaking

hour of every second of every day is planned is like, no, this is what we talk about here. This is what you like. So you put them through a process and it's like, that's not how, you know, 90 % of the world operates, right? If you've got a sales background, awesome, go do that. Like that makes you, you're comfortable in that element. That's great. But the, like the strong majority of my audience, they're not that, you know, they're, they're teachers at heart. They're, they're product owners, they're, they're experts and they just want to serve more people. And so,

Chad Kodary (06:11.502)
They're pitching.

Joel Erway (06:38.532)
The reality is that you've got roughly 10 % of your audience who's always willing to ascend no matter what you do. Like as long as you're providing goodwill and value, like you're always gonna have 10 to 20 % of your audience who's like ready to take the next step if you are just competent and you're actually delivering good value to them. And so I kind of use that as my rule of thumb.

for everything that I do with the workshop model. You know, I'm, I'm fortunate right now. I've been in this game for a long time where I have a list large enough where I don't even need to sell back end services on those workshops. And 95 % of the time I don't like it's just, you know, I'm selling $95 workshops to my audience. And that's enough for me to show up live for a day or two and deliver value. People are awesome. It provides tons of engagement. Like you get that community feel cause everybody sees each other. They're talking to each other and um,

and it works out well.

Chad Kodary (07:34.062)
How many people usually show up live to that webinar? How many people usually show up live not to the webinar, not to the workshop? Sorry.

Joel Erway (07:37.25)
What's up?

Yeah, you'll get like 60%, depending on the topic, you'll get like 60 % to show up live. And, you know, I let them all know on the sales page that they get access to the recordings too, because we get a lot of people who buy and they don't have any intention of showing up live, but they still want the content. And so, you know, they get the recordings too. So it's, it's a drastically different model than what most people who follow other sales models do. Like they'll, they'll sell a workshop, but they won't give them access to the recording because they want more people to show up live. And I'm not here to throw stones at anyone or to say,

Chad Kodary (07:56.718)
Gotcha.

Chad Kodary (08:02.102)
Yeah.

Joel Erway (08:10.148)
There's nothing right or wrong. It's just the audience that I serve. They're mostly people who are not, who don't have a sales background. And so I found, because I've taught sales and marketing now for 10 years, trying to put a square peg in a round hole is extremely difficult. Trying to put someone who's not a salesperson into a sales model and try to convince them or teach them how to sell, like how to be a salesperson is infinitely more difficult than just letting them be in their element.

showing them like, okay, here's what you can realistically expect. No, you might not get 50 % conversion upsells on the backend and turn this into a multimillion dollar event, but you can rest easy. You can teach as much as you possibly can and you can have the goodwill and be comfortable and still convert 10 to 20 % of your audience. And my audience loved that. It was refreshing for them to hear.

Chad Kodary (09:03.79)
Yeah, I like that. And when you're doing these workshops, are we talking like a hundred people are on 500 people? Like how many people actually register for this?

Joel Erway (09:10.956)
Yeah. When I taught the workshop model, we had like 450 people who registered. Yeah. All paying, you know, $97 plus, you know, we've got bumps and upsells and stuff like that. But yeah, it was, you know, on average it's like 200 for me. Right. But I don't run it. Just, just to be clear, I don't run ads to the premium workshops. Right. I'm acquiring customers for my low ticket, building that list. And then I'm promoting my premium live workshops.

Chad Kodary (09:28.002)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (09:32.782)
Yeah.

Joel Erway (09:39.556)
to that audience. So everything that I do on a premium workshop, all that ticket revenue, that's pure, you know, that's pure profit for me.

Chad Kodary (09:46.446)
Yeah. Yeah. Cause all your front end costs are hopefully getting liquidated on that $27 product that you have. I'm at, I want to, it seems like everybody, we have the same trend, every podcast. I start getting fascinated, uh, uh, with certain topics. And this is one, because we're doing this right now in dash clicks. Um, and I'm going to, I will shamelessly ask questions because I think the viewers have had the same questions that I probably have like right now, right now in dash clicks. Um,

Joel Erway (09:50.756)
Yep. 100%.

Chad Kodary (10:16.046)
um we we used to well over one we used to do

weekly webinars that were free once a week, I used to jump on for one hour, do a live webinar about a specific topic that needs to hop off. When I first started Dash Clicks, I did one every week for 52 weeks straight. I set like a goal for myself. So for one year straight, I did a webinar every single week. And with the first webinar I did, there was like 10 people that showed all the way up until, you if you're doing this every single week, people just continuously show up, right? Cause they want that content. So we used to get about between, you know, on average of about 500 people live. Uh,

on a webinar, um, when we were doing this pretty consistently. Um, we stopped doing that for about, uh, two years, I would say, right. Um, just cause I didn't have the time to do it. Um, and then recently I was like, you know what? Screw it. I want to try to see if I can do it again, but I can't do it once a week. Cause it's just, it's too much for me. Like it's too overwhelming for me. Cause people think, Oh, I'll just, I'll just do a live webinar. I don't jump on a dual. It's like, they don't understand like there's planning. There's there's slide decks. There's a bunch of stuff that I, that I use. Right. Um, in fact,

Joel Erway (11:07.884)
Mm -hmm.

Joel Erway (11:15.204)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (11:19.636)
In fact, I used to do them in our studio. And just recently, I, one of my goals that I set for myself this year is every time I jump into the studio, it ends up taking five times longer to do anything.

So I literally just, I literally bought this backdrop right here. I attached a mic. I put my headset on. I'm like, I'm doing everything in my office so I can come in and out of these things fairly quickly and get back to what I have, you know, on track for my schedule. Right. Um, the reason why I'm asking this and I'm giving you the context for it is because now I'm like, okay, I want to do this every two weeks. I did a webinar like almost two weeks ago, right. Or maybe a week ago. Um, we had, this is the first one I did in like a couple of years, right. Um, all I did was I just shot an email.

Joel Erway (11:45.524)
Yep.

Chad Kodary (12:02.208)
last out to our list. Uh, we had, um, I actually have the stats here because I want to give you the stats. I'm curious to see what you would do in this situation. Uh, we had 203 people register. We had a hundred people attend 49 .26 % attendance rate. Um, we had a 6 % close rate, um, on our offer. It like a $600 offer or something like that. And my, in my mind, I was like, okay, I'll just, I'll do this maybe every two weeks.

Joel Erway (12:26.756)
objectives, needs, and opportunities, right? And these are free webinars. So the problem with free is people, I feel like, they're not like when something's free, it's like, I don't care and see a lot of work, but if too, I'm not gonna go there for a moment.

Chad Kodary (12:29.742)
Right. Um, and these are free webinars. Now the problem with free is people, I feel like they're not like when something's free, it's like, I don't care to show up one or two. I'm not, I don't really care to implement it because if it's free and I didn't pay for it, then whatever. Right. So it's like, you get, and you get like a different audience on the free stuff instead of doing this strategy for free. Should I maybe just add a price tag on it and do the same exact thing?

Joel Erway (12:46.26)
Yep.

Chad Kodary (12:58.446)
But just make it paid and add like a $97, you know, paid and just call it a workshop. Cause really the content is kind of similar. It's like a mini workshop is really what I'm doing on a specific topic. Right. So just changing the context of the, the name and doing it this way. And then the goal is eventually is to ascend people up into other products and dash clicks, right.

Joel Erway (13:07.522)
Mm -hmm.

Joel Erway (13:19.204)
So what is the end goal with each webinar?

Chad Kodary (13:22.99)
Great question. Originally it was my goal for the first, uh, uh, two months that I wanted to do. So I wanted to do, uh, four of them, right to each month. My goal is not to really sell anything. Uh, and then the marketer that I am at the end of the first, the end of the first webinar, I ascended people up into a previous 50 % off dash like software that we had. So it wasn't, it wasn't like a hardcore CTA or anything like that. It was like, Hey, by the way, I'm just going to open up this landing page. Whoever bought our new year's, uh, offer for 50%.

percent off of our software. It's open the links below. That's kind of what that was. It wasn't, I wasn't like selling a coaching program or anything like that. Right. The end goal is obviously to make sales is to get people ascend it up either one into our dash flux software to into using our white label fulfillment services at dash flex or three into our high ticket coaching program, which is six K for agencies, six K for the year. So that's basically, that's what we want to do either. Cause

We have a very weird dynamic in dash like how people come to us. There's three ways really that they enter our world. And I'm going to tell you for context. So you can understand why we're, why we're not just like, okay, we'll do webinars. And then we push all of our traffic into the coaching program, right. Um, which is normal. And that's usually what a lot of people do. Um, a lot of people will come to us for fulfillment and then we cross sell them into software or education or vice versa. They'll come in through the software and they're like, Oh my God, you guys do fulfillment. Great. Right. And we're.

We're just like cross -selling between those three products. And in the back end of our company, it's like, we, we treat them as like these three mini businesses that are all operating that are cross -selling between each other all the time. Right. So when I come onto a webinar, I might have people that are legitimately not interested in coaching at all, but they're really here because they want to use our software. They want to use our fulfillment. Right. So it's like, I try to find like this happy medium in between, like where I should send people to. So the goal was to have, you know, maybe different offers kind of rotating in between. Um,

The coaching program being one of those offers for sure.

Joel Erway (15:19.748)
Yeah. So, I mean, if I were you, I would, I would definitely try the paid workshop because there's, there's a couple, there's a couple just universal truths. This is outside of webinars and workshops and anything. Um, every audience craves variety. If they're beat over the head with a free webinar every single week, like you'll get the people, the groupies who just show up. It like, okay, cool. Someone's going to talk to me for an hour as background noise and they'll just show up with no intention of buying. And it's just like on their calendar. Right. So.

variety is the spice of life and it's no more true, or it's more true than anything in business. So what I mean by that is like throwing different new things at them will usually only yield good results, especially if you're open to trying new strategies. So I would totally try a paid workshop because it will pique people's interest and get them...

Chad Kodary (16:08.876)
Yeah.

Joel Erway (16:15.62)
you know, get them excited about, okay, cool. Like, hey, what are we going to learn here? And I would, I would use a workshop for each silo of your business. So run a paid workshop for your software users and either do that with the intention of like kind of cross -selling them. It's like, Hey, when software users, you know, use our fulfillment services, this is what happens. And, you know, so like the workshop can be something tailored around that. You do want the workshop to be actionable, right? You want them to get some sort of result. And so.

Um, like because you have software, I think that you're in a very unique situation because software is awesome. Like a lot of my clients and customers don't have software. So it's like, I'm trying to create more value out of thin air and like, you know, it's just, it's, it can be really, really challenging with the information space. But, um, yeah, I would try, you know, paid workshops and you know, if you're, whether it's sending them into coaching or cross -selling them into your other, into your other silos, I think it's an awesome opportunity to.

Chad Kodary (16:57.196)
Yeah, I get it.

Joel Erway (17:14.852)
Um, to do so, I will tell you there's nothing beats a paid customer. So someone who pays to show up. So like they are way more committed than a freebie seeker who is, um, just signing up just because they, they like webinars. They'd like the community feel. And that's a huge reason why people would sign up for webinars. They like either number one, talking shit to people on the webinar or number two, just like, like they just love the community feel. They like to prove it. Is this webinar live? Blah, blah, blah. Like, but nothing beats a paid.

Chad Kodary (17:19.918)
100%.

Chad Kodary (17:37.198)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (17:42.574)
Yeah, I get that in the comments all the time.

Joel Erway (17:44.292)
a paid workshop. And yeah.

Chad Kodary (17:47.054)
I'm going to have to try that. So you, let's kind of continue on your job. I more questions, but I want to continue on your journey. So you have a low ticket offer that your drive just to bring back the context, low ticket offer $27. It's your power offer, which I'm familiar with. Um, you're driving traffic to that specific offer. Um, and then from there, they're basically getting added onto your email list. And then every couple of weeks or so you'll just blast your email list with an offer to join.

a paid, uh, workshop, which is, you know, 95 bucks or whatever it is, 97 bucks, call it whatever it is. And then from there, you get them on, you have a couple hundred people that join. How many people are usually in, are you usually just sending them straight up into the next product, which is I'm assuming your coaching program, your high ticket offer.

Joel Erway (18:16.61)
Mm -hmm.

Joel Erway (18:28.932)
I don't have a high ticket offer anymore. My entire business run low -sig it. Yeah, so I'm not in, where my life is right now is pure lifestyle mode, right? So when I shut down the agency, I shut down pretty much all of my premium programs, right? Because I wanted to, I wanted to design it in a way, and this is not to say that you can't design, you know, a lifestyle business with,

Chad Kodary (18:30.798)
Oh wow. Wow.

Chad Kodary (18:42.19)
of the...

Joel Erway (18:57.988)
premium programs, and you absolutely can. For me right now, I'm in a transition, I'm in a stage of discovery, like, okay, try to figure out what's next. I get opportunities presented to me all the time. And so I wanna sit and be able to analyze those opportunities from a place of just pure calm and pure unobstructed, I don't have any other priorities.

so I can analyze the best opportunities for the next stage of my life and my business. And I found while running the agency, and I loved all my clients, that was a big distraction for me and that prevented me from really having white space on my calendar. Because there was always a client who needed to talk to me. And so there's always fires that start. And so it took a while to shut that down, but we ended up shutting that down at the end of last year. And I just don't have a huge...

Chad Kodary (19:25.902)
I love that.

Chad Kodary (19:42.99)
always.

Chad Kodary (19:53.902)
Good for you by the way it takes to guess it good for you. It takes big balls to shut a working system down. People, people would never.

Joel Erway (19:55.556)
What's that?

Joel Erway (20:00.772)
It, I should have done it about three years ago because I've wanted to do it for a long time. But like, Oh no, you know, we'll keep, you know, we'll keep doing it. And then actually the start of last year, I said, you know what? Um, I'm either going to grow this really, really big or I'm going to shut it down. And so I decided to go all in last year and invest in team, invest in resources. We hired. How many people do we hire? We hired a COO, um, you know, very expensive CEO. I hired.

consultants because we want to build big formal systems and team members and the whole nine yards. And it just wasn't for me. You know, it's that's that's not my personality type of being a CEO of being a manager and really need that if you are going to be managing a big team. And so I lost a lot of joy in my business last year. And so but I wanted to give it a shot. And so I did. Didn't work out. So, you know, lesson learned. So I shut it down. And the past like

four or five months have been very enjoyable, running this workshop model, which allows me to just make all my revenue. Like we basically, yeah, it's.

Chad Kodary (21:08.462)
Dude, yeah, it's twice a month. You put in a couple hours a day or two, like.

Joel Erway (21:14.98)
Yeah, you know, there, I did run a premium. So for the workshop that I taught the workshop model on, I did offer a six week sprint on the backend of that. And that was all sold. Um, actually as soon as they bought the ticket, I had a quick sales page and this is what I advise people to do a quick sales page. There's no more than like two or 300 words saying, Hey, this is what we're going to learn in the workshop. You're going to learn everything you need on the workshop. For those of you who want to go further.

I want my help for six weeks. I'm going to have this offer. The price is, you know, $49 .95 or what was it? It was, I think $39 .95. If you are interested, you'll probably know right now whether or not you're interested. I'm not asking for a yes or no. All I'm asking for is a maybe. If you put down a hundred dollar deposit right now, I'll give you a thousand dollar discount and you can make your final decision at the end of the workshop. So you're not committed, but you're just saying you're just like, yeah, it's it was awesome. Like,

Chad Kodary (22:06.062)
So you're actually pre -selling. It's genius.

Joel Erway (22:11.652)
Yeah, it works incredibly well. Yeah. So after they bought the work, after they exactly this, this is like, so in funnel speak, this OTO one, right? So they buy my workshop ticket. They get this, this message that says, Hey, if you are interested, just put down a hundred dollar deposit and I'll give you a thousand dollar discount. You know, just for saying, maybe you're not even fully committing yet at the end of the workshop, I'll follow up with you to see if you actually want to move forward with it or not.

Chad Kodary (22:14.958)
This is on the confirmation page of the webinar of the the.

Yeah. Yeah.

Genius.

Joel Erway (22:41.732)
And if you say yes, awesome, you're locked in at this price. If you want to go through the workshop and you don't want to put a deposit down right now, the offer will still be valid, but you're going to be paying an extra thousand dollars. So, and we had people take both options.

Chad Kodary (22:54.382)
You can't, you see, you can't even do that. You can't do that with free. You'll scare people away from you for chilling up. But if they've already purchased from you, they spent the a hundred dollars to get on there. Like, okay, well it is what it is.

Joel Erway (23:04.676)
Yeah, you know, it's funny because you and I have grown up, grown up, but like we've been in this funnel world, in this marketing world for so long that it's like, part of me thinks that we've been taught, like, I don't wanna say it's the wrong way, but we've been taught a very ass backwards way of selling. It's not ass backwards, but it's just like, it's a weird way of selling. And if you are a salesperson, fine.

Like, or if you're like a bonafide marketer, fine. But that is a very small percentage of people who are starting an online business or who are running any business. And especially in the info product space, because the majority of those people are educators, right? And they just want to build aside, you know, a legitimate business. And it's like, you know, who in their right mind

dubbed like the perfect webinar as like the only way to do a webinar with like three secrets, right? It's a great framework, but like, for God's sake, like there are people who have been doing sales presentations for freaking hundreds of years. And so people get so pigeonholed into just one, one way of thinking. And it's like, you know, there's, there's something to be said where you don't want to over, like if you, if you do want to assign people.

You definitely don't want to overteach because you can confuse people. That's absolutely true. But I also think that the opposite side of the pendulum is equally valid where like if you overthink this thing and you're going to scare that you're just going to scare the living daylights out of yourself and you're going to wonder if like every word that you were saying while you're giving a presentation is right or wrong or moving them away from the sail or closer to the sail and you're just going to give yourself a heart attack. That happened to me the first time I did a live event. I followed an Ascension framework and I

damn near had a heart attack because these people paid $5 ,000 to fly into little Lewiston, New York and you know, North Bumblefuck, Buffalo. And yeah, it's just like I gave myself a heart attack the night before because I'm like, I'm supposed to send these people like I just want to deliver value. And so it's yeah.

Chad Kodary (25:09.262)
Yep. You don't want to say too much. I've been there. We, the, the workshops that you do, you said they were like one, two day workshops.

Joel Erway (25:18.308)
I've done, I've done anywhere from one to four days, everything between one, two, three, and four days. Um, no, like, no, they're like two hours long. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I've tried, I've also done full day workshops and those are a beast. So any one of my days, if it's a one day workshop that might go like three hours with Q and a three to four hours with Q and a, but they're true workshops. I mean, it's like, I am teaching, but I'm all, we're also.

Chad Kodary (25:24.686)
Are these like full days where you're like live on zoom for like the whole day? Okay. Okay. Cool. Okay. That makes sense.

Chad Kodary (25:34.93)
Yeah, we've done them.

Joel Erway (25:48.132)
We're getting stuff done. So like I have worksheets that I'm like, Hey, fill this out. We'll do it together. I'll take a couple of people as examples. What kind of works like people want that? Like they will pay for a quick result. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's, I love it. I really do. I mean, I, it, it, and the number one thing that I was missing in my model was the community aspect. I hate managing Facebook groups. I hate, I'm not a community builder, not a community manager, but I know the power of community. And so.

Chad Kodary (25:59.028)
It's a hundred bucks dude, yeah it's nothing.

Joel Erway (26:16.932)
I wanted to get paid for my efforts. And so that's why I landed on the paid workshop model is because we can still have that community feel once or twice a month, people are paying and you know, and they're getting that community field. So that's how I've been able to nurture a community with my email list by doing paid workshops and not having to also babysit Facebook groups and do all this other stuff that I really didn't want to do. So.

Chad Kodary (26:46.382)
So when you, when you do these workshops, are you, is there any other place to assign? You said you recently send them up to like a six week kind of like accelerator type thing. Is that what you're doing? Are you just kind of throwing people in, you know, a little bit, maybe higher ticket programs? Cause you don't have a coaching program. Usually it's like, if anybody knows like the Russell Brunson value ladder model, it's like low ticket, mid ticket and like the higher ticket. Right. Um, so do you not have a higher ticket or is it just stops at the workshop?

Joel Erway (26:54.53)
Mm -hmm.

Joel Erway (27:03.076)
Correct.

Joel Erway (27:15.076)
So I have a premium price program, a $2 ,000 program that we still sell every single month. So I wrote the book, High Ticket Courses. I gotta copy somewhere back there. But anyway, I run, so I make sales to that on a regular basis as well. So a lot of times, like, so what I tell people is you gotta have like one core methodology, right? And so if you wanna come up with ideas for your workshops, like pull out,

eight to 10 things from that core premium program and teach that on a workshop, right? So if I'm teaching a sliver on a workshop, what's a great upsell or what's a great like next step for people who want more information? Hey, you should join my, you know, my premium program. So my $2 ,000 program, there's no coaching, there's no, you know, there's no mentorship set there. And so, you know, I've done that in the past. Correct. It's not taking any more of my time. So I get a $95 sale.

Chad Kodary (28:05.782)
not taking your time which is the most important thing.

Joel Erway (28:11.908)
teach them something, get them a quick win results, like, hey, listen, if you like this, and you want more information, I've got a special deal for you to ascend into, you know, to join my premium program, high ticket courses, where we take this and we apply it to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I've done that in the past as well. Yep.

Chad Kodary (28:32.046)
I'm, I'm liking this because I, I looking at like the backend of all this stuff, cause I do a lot of the things that you're doing in the, in my mind, I'm like, this dude's running ads to a funnel and working like two days a week or two days a month is I love that.

Joel Erway (28:44.42)
Yeah, it's like two hours a week for me, really. So, I mean, there were a few months last year where I didn't even run a workshop because I'll also sell other stuff too. So, like I'll sell workshop recordings, for instance, I'll run a promo to sell workshop recordings or I'll sell another, you know, another low ticket course. But like, if I really want to get engagement into my list, I do live workshops because there's nothing that engages the list and gets people excited more than a live, a truly live.

Chad Kodary (28:49.678)
Even, yeah.

Chad Kodary (29:10.4)
Always dude.

Joel Erway (29:13.718)
workshop where I'm talking to them and building that relationship and building that bond. And so, yeah, it's been great. And so that's all I'm doing this year is the workshop model. And it truly is a lifestyle business for sure.

Chad Kodary (29:29.422)
It's, it's, it's really cool. And the, the, the workshops that you're doing, because you do them every couple of weeks and we know how hectic it can be sometimes to like build these funnels and the promotions and all that stuff. Right. As you just have like a template or something, you just dupe out and you're like, okay, this is the workshop for this.

Joel Erway (29:47.18)
Yeah. So, yeah. So because I, um, I don't run any slides for my workshops either. So I pretty much got rid of all, anything that I needed to do with a slide deck. I refused to do it in my business because slides just gave me so much anxiety. Like it's they're awful. And your audience hates them too. Your audience does not like slides. They really don't. Every time they like, they still like cohesive content, but slides put people to sleep and.

Chad Kodary (29:57.006)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (30:00.91)
It does, dude, and I hate it and I'm never doing slide decks again. Really? Okay. I whiteboard a lot.

Joel Erway (30:16.932)
Because there's nothing that really, I mean, most people, like 95 % of people do slides wrong because like slides should really just be a big idea. Like if they have to read a slide for more than like three seconds, you're doing them wrong. Yeah. And it's like, so why even do it? Yeah.

Chad Kodary (30:28.526)
That's horrible. I've seen people do that. Yeah. I use slides as like visuals a lot of the times if I want to show like a picture or a story or something like that.

Joel Erway (30:38.148)
And that's fine. Listen, like if you know, if you want to use visuals, that's awesome. But like what I've found is that if I'm not using slides at all, maybe I'll do a white board doodle. People love whiteboards or I won't even do that at all. And I'll just talk. People are far more engaged because they're waiting for what's going to happen next. And now their brain is actively listening to what's coming out of your mouth. And they're so more they are so much more engaged when.

Chad Kodary (30:50.286)
Oh, it's my favorite.

Joel Erway (31:07.172)
there's no slides because it's like, as soon as people see slides, like a lot of people assume, you know, associate slides with like pitch decks or, you know, like sales webinars, like, oh, okay, this guy's going to pitch or whatever. Yeah. And so I'm just, you know, I'm like, I'm done with them because it cut my prep time by like 80%. Because when you, when you build slides, like you're always trying to make the perfect slide deck. It's like, ah, I got to go edit it again and change this and change this and change this. I'm like, no, I got my core ideas and I run everything off of Google doc. So.

Chad Kodary (31:14.894)
Yep, they're going to get the offer stack at the end of this.

Joel Erway (31:37.22)
I run my sales pages because I'm running internal traffic to it. So I email my sales pages at Google Doc, and then I'll just use a basic checkout form. If there's upsells, that's just run them in my funnel account. But yeah, and then most of my workshops are at Google Docs too. So I'll create an agenda with all of my notes and I'll share with my audience as soon as we log on. Like, hey, welcome to the workshop. Here's the agenda for today. Here's all my notes. So they're following along while I'm going through it.

Chad Kodary (31:37.422)
Amazing, dude.

Joel Erway (32:06.436)
And it's just easy. Like, I literally wanted to make it as stress -free as possible.

Chad Kodary (32:09.966)
this. That's what I'm trying to do this year. That's why I told you did the whole studio move. I moved everything in here like I couldn't take it. And I've been doing this for six years now. These live webinars, these big productions, these challenges, we just did a challenge, like a couple months ago, and I will I, I don't think I will ever do a challenge again. That was the second, you know, big virtual event that we did. And it was, it was like a three month production, like not full time, but like, it's just like,

I could have, I don't know, I could have done it in a Google Doc, honestly. It probably would have been the same thing, the same outcome.

Joel Erway (32:45.22)
Yeah. So I do want to make it very clear of like who my target, like I make the sound all, you know, relaxed and nonchalant. But like there are companies where webinars and challenges are great for them. Like if they are in aggressive scale mode, like, yeah, you need to be using every sales tool in your arsenal to get more customers in through the door. And I think that those models are great for them, but that

Like I hadn't come to a realization of like, what is my model? What am I looking to get out of my business and cut the fat? You know, I was sick of all the people trying to push, you know, everyone needs to hire a closer. Everyone needs to hire a setter. And like, do you realize, like the vast majority of my audience, right, they want to be solo operators. And adding a setter or a closer requires you to now manage people and like manage a critical.

employee in your business or contractor in your business that's responsible for generating revenue. Most of my people don't want to manage people. They want to be solo operators as much as they possibly can, maybe with an assistant here or there. But it was just like, man, it's not serving me. I got to kill it. And I killed so much stuff at the end of last year.

Chad Kodary (34:02.798)
Dude, I love it. Good for you, man. I want to ask another question. This was another thing that I was curious about. Like we talked about like your, the front end of your offer where, you the $27 of the power offer product, you're running ads. I'm assuming probably a funnel with, you know, some OTOs and stuff like that or bumps, whatever it is that you, um, are you, you're using that as a self liquidation.

you know, tactic to basically, you know, for those viewers for context, it's a way basically to hopefully the concept is you sell something for $27 and you get your $27 back essentially and you cover your ad spend, right? Well, it will cost you up to $27 or whatever your, your AOV is average order value, right? What's your, what, what is your AOV on that funnel on that front end funnel?

Joel Erway (34:46.98)
Yeah, it was higher when we were only going to tier one countries and that's what we were doing for probably the first three years. Last year we opened up worldwide and our, our cost per acquisition went down tremendously. Like our, when we were only going to tier one, CPA and AOV were right around like 75 to 85. Right. So that was kind of like our break even around 75 bucks and it would fluctuate here and there, but that was roughly what we were doing.

Chad Kodary (34:56.302)
Okay, wow.

Joel Erway (35:16.1)
but we couldn't really hit a very large ad spend. And we tried dozens of variations of the angle, the hook, the sales page. The reality is just the offer, the way that it's positioned right now is in a very, very competitive marketplace. So the winning hook that has beat everything else is this is the fastest way to get three to five clients a month, right? And I wanted to go as broad as possible, but what the market is telling me is it's just a very, very...

saturated and very, very competitive offers. So we haven't really been able to spend more than like a thousand to fifteen hundred bucks a day. And that was only once we went to went global. Right. Anytime I tried to spend like five hundred bucks a day to tier one, our our numbers would just go through the roof. Like it would be unprofitable. So we would float. No, I really think it's just like that angle, that hook to my audience is just very there's lots of similar offers.

Chad Kodary (36:04.526)
Is it targeting? Do you think it's like a targeting? Cause you're, are you, is your targeting tight?

Joel Erway (36:14.18)
And a lot of people just don't believe it. Right. So without me needing to like recreate a brand new sales page or hook and angle and whatnot, like I just kind of accepted like, OK, like this is going to have some limits within this market, which is fine. It is what it is. So anyway, so we were getting for a long time, I don't know, very low sales and we're from five to 10 sales a day, you know. And so we went to global and I was nervous to go global just because I didn't really know what that was going to do to the quality of my list. Like.

would they buy stuff later on, et cetera, et cetera. But what going global did and making some other changes to like retargeting and whatnot, what got us up to like 20 to 30 sales a day and cut our cost per acquisition like by a third, like literally going global reduced our CPA from like 75 to like 25 to 35 overnight. It was like, it was insane.

Chad Kodary (36:59.31)
Wow.

Chad Kodary (37:06.382)
Holy shit.

And you were still having, well, I'm assuming you said that the AOV dropped at the end when you did that.

Joel Erway (37:13.86)
Yes. So once we went global, AOV dropped to like, we were making some money. So we'd make like maybe 20%. It's like a 1 .2 ROAS. So, you know, AOV would drop to like 40 to 45. CPA would be like, I don't know, 30, 35, something like that. So that was interesting. And, you know, we are going to be running. Yes. Yep. Yep. Those are the ads that we're running right now. So we're spending right now.

Chad Kodary (37:23.65)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (37:35.918)
That's what you're doing right now. That's your current. Okay. Yeah. Using high rows or anything to track.

Joel Erway (37:44.452)
Man, screw Hyros.

Chad Kodary (37:46.862)
Really? Why? I'm just curious because we just we just started using them like two weeks ago. So help tell me something I need to know now.

Joel Erway (37:51.14)
Oh.

Well, I also think I'm not the target market for high risk. I'm not spending enough to make it worthwhile. Right. So even like in my heyday, what was I spending 500 bucks a day, 700 bucks a day, something like that. It was not a ton. I do think that you need to be spending, you know, probably at least a thousand to 1500 bucks a day consistently, like on a low day to really get the value of high risk. I've.

I bought them three times at different stages of different offers that I was running all three times. I canceled because it was just a nightmare to get set up. Even with their like concierge set up the last time I paid for them, I paid to get them set up. It took like three weeks to get it all ironed out. It was just, it was a nightmare. So I.

Chad Kodary (38:42.382)
two weeks in and we're still setting up. I mean, our setup is also a little bit more trickier because we have the whole software side. So we're trying to track a lot of different things.

Joel Erway (38:44.898)
Yeah, I mean...

Joel Erway (38:50.948)
Yeah, so I do want to say that I think that part of the reason why I didn't have success was that I wasn't really the ideal avatar, probably not spending enough to make a tracking software work. I used Improvly, which is like 29 bucks a month, basic UTM tracking, and that gave me the best data ever. So yeah, and so anyway, now we use, you know, Facebook's Cappy with

Chad Kodary (39:13.038)
Really? Wow.

Joel Erway (39:20.076)
Zapier and that also gives us really, really good attribution. So, you know.

Chad Kodary (39:26.926)
It works dude, it's working for you, so that's good. I got another question and then I know we run out of time so we'll wrap up here but this has been a great call so far. We ran for Dashlex, we had a lower ticket product in Oracle, I think.

Joel Erway (39:28.996)
Yeah, yeah.

Chad Kodary (39:44.558)
I think I'm answering my own question, like as I'm literally about to ask it. But anyways, I'll tell it anyways for the viewers. We had a low ticket product, which was also $27. It's called the agency lawn secrets agency lawn secrets .com. It's still live. People can check it out if you want to see what it looks like in that agency launch secrets .com.

Joel Erway (40:00.004)
Agency what secrets? Launch. Okay. Yep.

Chad Kodary (40:04.116)
launch secrets. Yeah. Um, and it was basically a starter kit for marketing age. Well, it was a biz op. So it's like starter kit for people looking to start their own marketing agency, because obviously our core product is dash flex, which is a software to run your marketing agency and fulfillment for, uh, for basically you to use obviously to fulfill your.

Uh, marketing needs for your clients. And, uh, we ran that we probably spend like 40 or 50 K in ad spend, um, running that for a couple, a couple of months, maybe like three or four months. And, uh, our average cart value on that was I think like 114 or $112. Cause we had a, it was great. We had a $27 offer. I think there's a $67 order bump on that offer. And then we had OTO one and OTO two, which was.

Joel Erway (40:41.284)
That's great.

Chad Kodary (40:52.622)
We actually added a bunch of like crazy things in there with like, you know, you can pick option a or option B or, and then if you went away, like if you moved your mouse, where there was like another offer that came in. So it was like, there was a bunch of like crazy stuff that we did in there. Um, but yeah, the, the average order and it was costing us, um, it was costing them us a right around also that we were kind of like breaking even in a way. But the second, the, and I'm relating to what you said the second we tried to scale it up and we tried to go past three, four or 500 bucks a day.

Because we were trying to target a lot of people around the agency space, right? Even if they didn't know anything about the agency space, we tried like, you know, targeting like click funnels and like, you know, like all of these different demographics that at least knew what a marketing agency was, right? It wasn't like this weird thing to them, right? Um, we saw that there was like this just limited amount of people that we could show our ads to. And the second we tried to scale, it just wasn't working.

Joel Erway (41:37.284)
Yeah.

Joel Erway (41:43.586)
Mm -hmm.

Chad Kodary (41:47.534)
And we did that for a couple of months. And then what we realized was, and it's funny, cause we, at the time we were using seg metrics for attribution and tracking and stuff like that. Um, and we ran it and we were just like, okay, well we are, we're running the ads. We're breaking even or possibly losing the second we try to ramp up ad spend. Um, we did it for a couple of months and we just stopped. And then I remember in seg metrics, I was looking with our new ads guy. We were like, well, what, what are the things that we did in the past? This, by the way, is I'm talking about like a year and a half, two years ago, right?

I mean, what are the things that we did that were working and weren't working? We started going through like our, our ad account or like, well, we tried this, we tried this, we tried, you know, to relive like all of these different things. And we're like, okay, well, we had agency lawn secrets and I go into seg metrics. And I see that even like a year and a half later after running this whole agency lawn secrets campaign, we still basically pretty much broke even right on even people that were came into our world. The goal was the goal was for us to get them in at $27, you know, upsells, whatever it is.

And then hopefully they would either buy dash clicks or use our fulfillment or like they would ascend somewhere and spend money. But that was a way for us to get them into our world. And then what we realized was after running that, it was a lot of these biz op things. A lot of the times they will just buy that one thing. And if you don't have a really good backend system, they will not buy anything else. Cause it's like just this one thing that they were kind of interested in. And it's also very hard in our space for new agencies to be successful because.

Joel Erway (42:54.274)
Mm -hmm.

Chad Kodary (43:16.59)
it's so saturated and if you're not like doing it the right way, a lot of people think like they can, they can come in and start an agency and within like 30 days, that's it. They can retire and like send their kids to school. Like it doesn't work like that. It's like a real business. Right. Um, so I think for us, we just didn't do it right. Like we didn't have a proper game plan. And also we were targeting a market that was very hard to scale with ads, right.

Joel Erway (43:18.082)
Mm -hmm.

Joel Erway (43:41.092)
Yeah, here's my thought around that. I don't think that you did it wrong. I think because I wrestled with this for a long time with my Power Offer workshop. A lot of us think that we are in larger markets than we are, right? And the reality is we're really in small markets. Unless you're going true biz op and like you are you are truly going as broad as possible and biz op is going to be like how grandma can make a thousand bucks a day or a

can make a thousand bucks a month on the side, you know, without needing to launch a website. Like that would be like true biz op, right? How anyone can make money on the side, doing this, you know, awesome make money online tactic. And that's not the agency space. If you are an aspiring agency owner, you need to have a certain, you do need to have skillsets, right? That's not the, you know, that's not your broad biz op opportunity, your Amazon Kindle.

Chad Kodary (44:32.942)
Yeah, you do.

Joel Erway (44:39.908)
publishing space, your drop shipping, right? Where, you know, you just need to be a monkey who can search and use tools and click some buttons and you can make some money. And I had to come to grips with that, with the Power Offer, because I hired lots of agencies to try and help me scale and everyone promised me, oh yeah, you know, you've got a great funnel and you know, oh, this is broad, right? Like here's how to get clients. That's about as broad as you can possibly go in our space. But the reality is, is that, you know,

This is some of the greatest data that you can acquire from an advertising platform like Facebook. It will tell you how large your market is. And for us who sell to agency owners, business owners, like it's not a large market. It really isn't. Yeah. You look at the, you look at the frequency exactly. And, or just like, look at your ad spend. Like when, when do your metrics go to shit? Right. Is it 400 bucks a day? Is it a thousand bucks a day? Right. And,

Chad Kodary (45:21.794)
You'll see it on the frequency. You'll see it.

Chad Kodary (45:32.846)
Couple hundred bucks a day, yeah.

Joel Erway (45:36.644)
You know, that's why like e -commerce companies are so wild is because they sell products to the masses that are infinitely larger than our markets. Like to them, 4 ,000 bucks a day in ads is like their test budget because they will get data immediately. They'll get buyers immediately. So one of the things that I considered was, yeah. Yeah. So like one of the things I considered was, you know, going into large markets like that and, and, and being,

Chad Kodary (45:37.102)
You're right.

Chad Kodary (45:55.854)
It's like who needs a t -shirt everyone everyone needs a t -shirt

Joel Erway (46:06.532)
I'm not shutting down my business, but that was one of the opportunities that presented itself to me. It's like getting equity in some other companies and helping them grow. Because I think it was Warren Buffett said, and I'm going to butcher his quote. It's not really a quote, but basically he said, the biggest mistake that people make is getting in the wrong ship, getting in the wrong boat. And to translate that to business, it's like getting in the wrong offer that doesn't have the potential that you want it to have.

Chad Kodary (46:10.22)
Yeah.

Joel Erway (46:36.58)
There's always ways to squeeze extra money through by selling to your existing customers or whatnot. But if you run an advertising driven business, you better make sure you've got a large market that you can advertise to. Otherwise, you're going to have a very small part of your business around advertising, or you're just going to keep beating your head against the wall wondering why you can't spend more money. The answer to staring you at the face is just don't you have a market size issue. And so I had to come to grips with that because...

I'm like, why can't I spend more than four or 500 bucks a day? Like I tested a ridiculous amount of upsells. I tested a ridiculous amount of sales pages. I tested a ridiculous amount of ads. Every single time I'd get to four or 500 bucks a day and then like the numbers would just go completely haywire. And it's just like, what's that telling me? You know? Yep.

Chad Kodary (47:23.15)
did i can relate yeah i can relate that's what happened our offer all right man i can sit here we can talk about this for fucking forever um just uh... okay we're gonna cut it uh... uh... joel uh... as always it's always a pleasure to have you on into our world into our viewers if anybody wants to get in touch with you or uh... topsy maybe what this power offer is that we've been talking about uh... where's a good place for them to go check you out

Joel Erway (47:50.596)
Yeah, best spot is powerofferworkshop .com. And I'll just say one final thing. The reason why I haven't stopped promoting that is because that's the biggest brand builder for my business. Meaning it gets everybody the best results, the fastest results with the least amount of effort, right? That's the only reason why I've kept using that as my front -end marketing tool, because it just gets incredible results. So, I mean, it's 27 bucks. We've had people build eight figure businesses off the back of that workshop because...

Chad Kodary (48:12.238)
And it's 27 bucks.

Chad Kodary (48:17.71)
That's crazy.

Joel Erway (48:19.396)
It validates offers, it validates businesses, helps you validate for the cheap, get booked appointments, shows you how to structure an offer. It's one of the best things you can invest in.

Chad Kodary (48:29.134)
We just, we just recently had somebody on the podcast. I, I want to say it was Tyler Narducci. Um, yeah. So he actually shouted you out. He's like, dude, like Joel's Joel's, you know, program or whatever it is that he took, we didn't really get into context. He was like, dude, like that's, that's what I use to basically create my whole business model. Like, and he's crushing it, man. He's doing very good.

Joel Erway (48:35.364)
Oh yeah, he was a client of mine. Yeah.

Joel Erway (48:49.892)
Yeah. He, he's doing very, very well. I love Tyler. He's a, he was a great dude. He was so nervous when he joined the program and I get it. You know, it's like part of like the problem I deal with is I deal with all startups and from, I'll throw an air quotes, mostly startups. And you know, most of those guys are cash strapped. I get it. You know, it's like, you want to invest in a coaching program. You don't have any clients yet or you have maybe a couple of referrals or whatever. Like it's, it was, it was tough. There was a lot of stress working with the clients and you know, um,

I know Tyler was nervous when he first joined and I'm like, dude, you got a killer offer. I'm like, you really do. So.

Chad Kodary (49:23.246)
It was great. We, it's funny because his podcast and I had to change the name of the podcast at the, the name of the title was, it was a full blown funnel breakdown. We literally broke down his entire client acquisition funnel from a to Z. Um, and now we know where he got it from. So great job. All right. Uh, once again, thank you so much, Joel. We appreciate you brother. And, uh, well, hopefully we'll have you on here very soon. Have a good one.

Joel Erway (49:37.346)
Mm -hmm.

Joel Erway (49:50.436)
You bet. Thanks dude.