Raw Talk, 46 Minutes

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Adam Young 00:02

Cool. Are we recording now?

Ryan Clogg 00:04

We are.

Adam Young 00:06

Awesome, man. So I randomly hit you up on Twitter because our friends were talking to each other and I thought it would be cool to hop on in Zoom and talk about what you do, see if we can pull some value out. I really love all the books in your background. I'm curious, is this Ty Lopez style where you may have not read them or have you read all

Ryan Clogg 00:27

These things? No, no, no. In fact, the joke is I've read 80% of them and then the bottom ones, I've had these, I started this when I was 16, I'm 28 now, but I literally have moved all over the US and I've brought them every time and it's the hardest part of moving. So I bring them and they just keep stacking. But the bottom 20% is the classic Amazon grab it, send it to the door, add it to the shelf, and it has just died there. So my consumption of books has dramatically decreased. I'm so much more audible in podcasts now, so much more, which is like I'm not a huge fan of actually. I think I should get back into it because I've learned a lot from those.

Adam Young 01:03

Yeah, it's funny you say that. I spent all of my 20s reading physical books and a good portion of my 30s. And I also have moved around. I moved around generally every year for over a decade, different cities. And same problem, moving the books. And I did it for a long time. When I moved to Miami, I got rid of all of them except my old psychology books. So my bookshelf is all psychology books from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, the source material that everyone- Exactly the

Ryan Clogg 01:36

Original. Yeah, exactly. I think I've got an OG think you grow rich.

Adam Young 01:42

Hell yes.

Ryan Clogg 01:43

I have a OGOG, which is hilarious because I actually, I opened it the other day and my first thing in a business was trying to do private equity style stuff. I dropped out of college. I went to ASU. And the bookmark I had in here was from a jeweler in Newport because I moved to Newport and tried to figure that out. I had no idea what I was doing. It was like true ignorance is bliss. We were trying to, what I now know is a roll-up. We were trying to roll up a bunch of alternative fitness locations, physical locations. We got 14 under LOI, we rented a Tahoe, drove around the US, hit everyone on LinkedIn, got franchisor approval, did all this stuff. And at the end, I was going to make a deal closing fee as an independent sponsor. So it was me, a business partner and an attorney.

It was us three because he obviously, a lot of legal work. And I wanted to buy an AP at the end of it. And it is AP Royal Oak Black Dial Auto. And it's like the tax, it's them financing it. It's like a full breakdown. And I found it the other day when I grabbed this book and it's hilarious, but it's just like, just funny stuff like that.

Adam Young 02:41

Wait a second. Financing it? Tell me you didn't finance the watch.

Ryan Clogg 02:44

I didn't finance this. No, no. I'm saying when I was 18 years old trying to do this, I did that. No, no, no. I did not finance this. But it's funny. It's like the watch

Adam Young 02:53

I wanted. Make this as an idea.

Ryan Clogg 02:54

Yeah. Do not

Adam Young 02:55

Find it. Not finance, watch it.

Ryan Clogg 02:56

Yeah, just funny. So back to the psychology part of it and all that, it's like those are the core books in here. Anything skill oriented or ... Yeah, I mean, all of that is either I've learned through courses. I'm a course junkie. I have paid for Guru course, mastermind, everything you can imagine, and either then taking pieces and parts of that, and then really learned it by applying it and learning by breaking things and running it active. But yeah, so skills there, mindset frameworks, all that kind of stuff, books

Adam Young 03:26

That have carried through. That's super cool. My backstory is a little crazy, but at one point I had started my first physical business and I'm turning 41 in a couple weeks. So when I started, we didn't have iPhones, we didn't have eBay even. We didn't have anything. And I ended up going all the way down to North Carolina. I found a warehouse that had store returned liquidations, and they were aggregating all the store returns from Harbor Freight tools and selling them as salvaged by the truckload. So full 53-foot semi full of tools. It's like 65,000 pounds of truckload. It's crazy. And then eBay started and I bought a truckload, risked everything I had, got it up to Michigan and started selling it on eBay and then got crushed when they implemented feedback. So the feedback system was new and there were no rules and they were trigger happy and all this crazy stuff.

And so that business failed miserably. I lost

Ryan Clogg 04:37

Everything that happened. Where in

Adam Young 04:37

Michigan? Metro Detroit.

Ryan Clogg 04:39

Okay. Yeah, that's where I am right now.

Adam Young 04:42

Oh, cool. Really? That's where you ended up where?

Ryan Clogg 04:45

Yeah. Well, okay. So yeah, long story, but that's where I'm from initially is around Ann Arbor, call it in that area. And then went to Arizona for college that I was there for a semester, lived in my dorm for a year, bounced around the Newport thing, Chicago, whatever. And then last three were in Puerto Rico. And then when I ended the Puerto Rico gig, I was like fam, friends, girlfriend thing, go back to Michigan for now. And now I got to figure out where to go because it's cold. I haven't done a winter for

Adam Young 05:10

Too long. What's the actual city you're in?

Ryan Clogg 05:12

Right now, Novi.

Adam Young 05:13

Oh, cool. Very cool. Yeah. I grew up in Rochester Hills and before I moved to Miami, I was in Lake Angeles, if you're

Ryan Clogg 05:21

Familiar. Yeah, it's hilarious.

Adam Young 05:24

Wild. And by the way, please escape.

Ryan Clogg 05:27

Yeah. Oh, no, no. I'm telling you, this was my first winter because I got back end of 2024 calendar year to finish out my days and then did a winter here and was like ... I mean, I'm still doing a winter here. It's April. And I'm like, yeah, I'm good. I'm good on this. So Scottsdale probably. I have family and friends there and there's a lot of networks, so I think that's a spot.

Adam Young 05:47

Yeah, that's good. So I mean, I picked Miami because my business partner was there. It was a random choice.

Ryan Clogg 05:52

Miami's great. I just feel like it's a little too ... It's busy. It's busy. There's a lot of party availability, not like there's not in Scottsdale, but that kind of stuff. And I had that part of my life and I exited it whatever, 10, 12 months ago and I'm like, I need to stay far away from that. I ripped hard and I'm done doing that. Well, that's good. Miami just ... Yeah.

Adam Young 06:13

Yeah. I mean, look, on the Miami thing, I went there, but I'm older. And first of all, if you're not really successful, do not move to Miami because you need a six-figure burn budget just to go out to eat

And stupid. But I have hundreds of clients there and I didn't know that. Yeah, for sure. And so my friend's circle is customers. I generally meet people like I meet you. I don't go out to real world meet people generally. It's through friends with friends. And so when I got there, I just started hanging out with my friends and I have a Miami no new friends rule. I don't seek out people there and I don't drink at all. And so the party scene just kind of ... I like the music, so I go out for that, but it doesn't affect me. But yeah, if you just got done with that, do not move there

Ryan Clogg 07:06

Because it's hugging crazy. No, I mean, I was going to say, yeah, it's just done. There's APs lost because of that. In Miami specific, there's just rough times. Just a bad person overall. You could just classify me as a bucket for a group of years there. But no, I have a buddy that's from here that's a little bit younger than you, but he has a physical e-com business where they have a China manufacturing setup and all this, and it's like aftermarket parts, and they're based out of here, but he spent six months in Miami and just loves it. It's like the people, the connects, he just lives that life. So he kind of does the, whatever they call it, snowbirding. But I don't know. Sounds like a lot to me. I like one place, one spot, one thing for that at least, and then pop around when you want to have fun.

Adam Young 07:50

It's tough in the summer there. I moved in the summer. It's like living in boiling

Ryan Clogg 07:54

Water. 120 are easy.

Adam Young 07:55

It's like living

Ryan Clogg 07:55

In boiling water.

Adam Young 07:57

So last year I took my girl to La Jolla, and then we went to Huntington Beach, and then I had a bunch of trade shows. And so we kind of escaped the summer, and this year we're going to escape the summer too. But healthy lifestyle-wise, it's really an amazing place. It's most fit city in the country. When I moved back to Michigan, I gained a whole shitload of weight, as you can imagine. And then- Stay

Ryan Clogg 08:20

Locked inside.

Adam Young 08:21

Yeah. Went to Miami, lost nearly 40 pounds, and then I'm back up 15, and so it's been a good influence on me. Anyways, real quick, when I was 20 and that business failed- Oh

Ryan Clogg 08:36

Yeah, sorry, we derailed. That was my bad. We're in Michigan.

Adam Young 08:41

Yeah. The truckload business failed miserably, and I had to move back into my parents' basement. I lost everything. I lost my friends because they worked for me. By the way, don't ever hire friends, Twitter space, just don't do it.

Ryan Clogg 08:53

Yeah. All of this is targeted to Twitter, by the way. All of this content is strictly for Twitter. Yeah.

Adam Young 08:58

Yeah. So don't hire your friends. Don't buy inventory on credit cards when you have no money. It's not smart. Don't go celebrate your first win by blowing all your cash and wins are partying with your friends. All bad things. Yeah. And so I moved back into my parents' basement and I effectively was lost and just had no idea what I was going to do, had 40 or $50,000 in credit card debt and investor debt. And I was just ruined as a kid. And it was reading that really, really changed my life. First, I started reading about leadership, which made me realize that I sucked and needed to be much better about considering other people and serving them. And then I started reading about marketing and internet marketing and read a lot of books on that. And then that's what really pushed me to focus on marketing on the internet, which I discovered affiliate marketing.

And I went from negative $50,000 to essentially millionaire in a very short period of time and never turned back. But it was books that saved my life. And I think it's really cool that you read a lot, and I know that most successful people that I know read a ton, and it's just a super powerful thing. Speaking of which, buy my book, it's great. Yeah,

Ryan Clogg 10:20

I do. Wait, is this you? This is you. Is this

Adam Young 10:23

You? Yeah.

Ryan Clogg 10:25

Yeah. Okay. So no, when I moved to Puerto Rico, that was the only time I moved somewhere and didn't bring everything. Because when I first got down there, I was like, I'm committing to three years, but I still don't kind of know yet. I'm going to get a rental, then I'll buy because of all 0%, 4% game and you have to buy to get that one, whatever. So I didn't bring all the books, but I would buy them randomly and it would take two weeks to get a book anywhere or anything shipped depending on what you're buying in Puerto Rico. But yeah, this was one of the five or 10 books that I bought over that time because again, my reading and physical books has gone like this. So over that last three years, it's only been a handful of books. But yeah, I read this and what I actually did, which is hilarious, I started to read this and was like, I skimmed it.

And the reason I skimmed it is because prior to that, I sat in a cigar lounge and watched for two days the entire YouTube version. Yeah. So when I read this, I was like, not to say I already know it, but it was very framework driven on ... Or you used a lot of the same stories and paths and stuff. And I had literally just watched that

Because I worked in A2Z, the entire thing.

Adam Young 11:32

That's so crazy, bro, that you and I have never met. You have my book on your shelf and you watched that crazy YouTube thing that I did, that was like six years ago. How

Ryan Clogg 11:42

Many hours is that?

Adam Young 11:43

It's 25.

Ryan Clogg 11:44

Yeah, no, I watched the entire thing.

Adam Young 11:46

Yeah. And I did it in a couple weeks and did it all off of those slides, no single take, no edits, no anything, just brain dump. And that was crazy how that changed our business, by the way. When I released that, it was like, I think we had five people, including me and my business partner and-

Ryan Clogg 12:10

Five team?

Adam Young 12:11

Yeah, total. And we were losing money a lot because our engineers are ad tech engineers from California, so they don't make 50K. And now we have over a hundred people. And I think a lot of it comes from giving away that knowledge and that course. And it's so cool to hear people actually watch it. I need to do another one.

Ryan Clogg 12:38

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I obviously, that's how I record all the stuff I make now is that raw version. I don't have scripts. I don't have anything. Yes, you eventually yap and ramble and go in directions maybe that weren't expected, but as long as you know it or you know, they're valuable. I think it's helpful to do that and I think it's cleaner cut that way versus some chopped and perfect dialed in thing. There's a time and place for both. There's a time and place. But yeah, no, so I was in PR and I was going to a cigar lounge every single day and just post it up. I would go gym, shower, walk, and that would be my walk. And then I would sit in a scar lounge. And I have two buddies down there. I had very, very limited friends.

I was super ... I mean, even to this day, I live in this cave. I do this, and this is the first time I'm posting on X and YouTube and trying to make friends in the space more so because I was like, I don't have a lot of mutual interests with a lot of normal people or you know what I mean? Yeah, the average person wants to do things with sports and this and that. And it's just not where I sit and understanding. I just don't. And all the power to them is just not where my interest lies. So I was like, "What if I did it the other way around and just tried to find friends this way?" And 30 days in, it is clearly working, which I'm happy about. But the one friend I had down there that actually was down there before I got down there and digitally, him and another guy do a ton through Ringba.

And so they're like ACA, Medicare, debt, big, big lead gen guys, just two guy lean team, and they're rock stars. They've taught me everything I know about the space, they've taught me. And I'll build a bunch of tech stuff. So I've been in your platform to do tons of different tech. I do their posts from this to that and storing stuff in Airtable and passing back conversions and RedTrack back and forth. I've set a ton of stuff up in the platform for that, but I've never direct run my own. I've scaled some or ran some of theirs that I've been on. We basically can spend as much as possible on this. We just need more eyes on ad accounts. And I'm like, "Yeah, cool. I'll do it for a month." It's like I've done that, but that's the only thing I've ever directly done in your guys' platform.

Adam Young 14:42

Wild. Also, by the way, everybody, this was not- Sponsored.

Ryan Clogg 14:45

This is sponsored.

Adam Young 14:47

This is sponsored. I did not know that he had my fuck watch my course work with my customers. I don't know who the Puerto Rico people are.

Ryan Clogg 14:53

Yeah, no, he told me to talk about paper call masterclass book, his YouTube series and talk about a software. I don't know. It was weird.

Adam Young 15:02

Actually, I don't sell anything anymore, Ryan. You don't

Ryan Clogg 15:06

Need to.

Adam Young 15:07

I don't purposely push that. Well, what I want to do and what's important to me is helping other people be successful. And so that's why I started tweeting. I know that my personality is a little bit crazier, more intense than most and raw, and I don't care.That's authentic to me, but I really like the deliver value and that just draws people in and they can see what we're doing. Ringba's big enough that they can go, "Oh, who's this Adam guy? Go find information and figure it out at this point." So I don't generally like to sell or push it. I'm kind of like a mascot at this point, but like you, same thing, I started tweeting because one of my friends was tweeting and I thought it was funny, Jason, Applebaum, who've known for over a decade. And I don't know, I just wanted to start to publicly engage.

And I tried to do this on Instagram a couple years ago and I have 7,000 followers. They're all industry or something, but I can't drop knowledge on Instagram. Yeah, it's hard. What am I going to do? Yeah,

Ryan Clogg 16:10

It's hard.

Adam Young 16:11

I just post pictures and shit. It doesn't do anything. So I really like how X does that. Anyways, I wanted to ask you about what you're doing. That was the whole point of this because-

Ryan Clogg 16:22

No, no, this is just open forum. We're just here.

Adam Young 16:26

Well, I want to know though. So like I was just saying, I really like to drop value to people. I've been harassing Jason to do a course. By the way, if you're watching, you should tell Jason we should do a course on marketing or affiliate marketing. Yeah,

Ryan Clogg 16:38

Should. You guys 100% should.

Adam Young 16:40

He's like, "Oh, I don't know paper call. I don't want to talk about paper call." We don't need to. Let's just do affiliate marketing or marketing or business or whatever, Jason. So if anyone's watching this, harass Jason, tell him you want me and him to make a course. We'll give that shit away for free. I don't even care. It doesn't even need to be

Ryan Clogg 16:57

Money. 100%.

Adam Young 16:58

But I have considered doing a paid course because I learned something super valuable about courses and masterminds years ago, and that was from going to one. I'm not a course junkie like you. I never thought to buy one. But what I learned from this mastermind that I paid to go to, and I don't even do ads anymore, was I paid a lot more attention when I was there. And I really wanted to connect with people to deliver value to the group. And I made a lot of connections there. I had a great time. I'm still really good friends with the people that I met there. I don't know if you know Teddy Trong, but I met him there. And now he's a great friend and a customer, and he had never run calls before. And we just sat next to each other at this mastermind and vibed.

And next thing you know, this guy's winning $10 million GOT awards months later. It was crazy. And so by spending that money, I was mentally committed to learning and doing something. And so I did give away the course. You watched it. I think that really motivated people watch it and do something, but the fact that it was free devalues commitment from people. And so you sell information, you know a lot about this. Let's just do a case study right now. If Adam were to make a new course on paper call, what do I need to charge for that? What is the strategy around how it's built so then you can go market it? Walk me through how you would do it if you were me.

Ryan Clogg 18:37

Perfect transition. So you sang bought a course, valued it more, met people in it. So I made a video about this. I bought every Google course and then we did this. So when I exploded that deal out in California, I moved back to Michigan tail between my legs and wasn't in debt, wasn't whatever. It was all just time spent, but was not good. My dad has a big landscape snow company. I came back here. I was living in my room, my childhood room basically, so not the basement, but doing that and just trying to figure it out. And at that time was the first time I bought a course that I didn't know was a course. I didn't know anything about this industry and bought a course on Instagram shout-outs. And they were teaching to do Instagram shout-outs. You make a graphic, you pay 200 bucks, you're on some meme page or whatever, or basically non-branded page, then you pay for Linkin Bio, teaches you how to create a lander that is an opt-in connected to, I believe it was AWeber at the time that they were shilling.

And then going through AWeber and the thank you page was you literally just set the redirect as a ClickBank link. And the idea being that it was going to self-liquidate, and then you just owned this list and you could just market to them and do affiliate stuff. And that is my first ever course and all that was right there. Didn't really go anywhere with it. I did it in women's fitness, which is hilarious now, full circle. Did it in women's fitness and didn't want to write as a fake persona as some female fitness person and market to this list. So I just stopped doing it and then tried e-comm stuff, messed around, was just kind of working jobs, figuring it out. And then I bought consulting.com, which was Sam Ovens.

I bought his program, the second one. So there were three tranches. So India, now let's go deep into info here. So a lot of the time it's these Ascension style things, especially in courses. It's like do it yourself, done with you, done for you or mastermind is the core common one. So Ovens had the Accelerator, which was a direct to webinar, so direct to cart. So you'd sell it through ads directly, people could buy it on their own. That was just a course with group coaching, or not even group coaching, with coaching calls and then a community. It's like course materials, coaching calls, community. The next one up from that was teaching you how once you got all the acquisition dialed, you now couldn't fulfill on them all. So you need to learn how to productize your service, which was essentially how to become a guru and course builder.

And this was like, we say OG, but obviously it wasn't OG of marketing. He was like, OG of this age, this 2016, whatever timeframe that was. So this time he's doing 30 million a year too. He's doing crazy numbers with this. He bought consulting.com. I bought that program, very quickly learned I didn't want to be a face and be the consultant and pick a niche and do that whole thing. The I help X do buy X. Everyone's bio, that's classic from him. And in that group, a guy posted in there and I was like, oh, that name looks kind of familiar. Go to his page. And three minutes prior, he had posted like, "Hey, I have this company. I'm trying to hire someone that'll be my right hand basically. I want to teach them all things about marketing, sales and whatever of online business." I'm like, okay, apply for it, get on the phone with him, thick as thieves.

Next thing you know, 70 million later. So I end up joining that company. They're running a women's fitness app. It's low ticket doing what was more so now we're in the Brunson age of direct to cart and funnels and all of that. They were trying to run a low ticket app that was a seven-day free trial with $27 a month and then OTO of 167, 147 for lifetime access, and just get those economics to work. Basically breaking even, doing like 30K a month. And I came in and I was building sales pages and tweaking tech and just doing random stuff, making a thousand bucks every six weeks. Fast forward, COVID comes around. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. Sorry if we just got everything bricked, but come around to that and then I think that's passed. And then-

Adam Young 22:35

It's X. You can say whatever you want now.

Ryan Clogg 22:38

Oh, true. We could just write whatever words we want. I don't know where this is

Adam Young 22:40

Going. It doesn't matter. I can't even get my trouble on X.

Ryan Clogg 22:44

And true, true. And yeah, so he's like, "How should we scale this thing to 10 million? Because we basically have done a million bucks in cash collected on this low ticket thing, but we're not making much money at all. Random 1K, 2K, 5K. I'm just building pages in tech." I'm like, "Let's do a call funnel." He's like, "All right, let's do it. " So we buy another course that's like how to set up the CRM and everything. I buy Alex Becker's course at the time, which he was selling on the deal that was really a Trojan horse for Highrose that was still scaling because he was like, basically everyone who comes in here pay me five grand, 10 grand, whatever the number was, but you all need to sign up for High Rose because we need feedback, that kind of system. So I get in there and that's the VSL script we use.

We use the CRM system over this, built it around that. And we had already had a product that was an info product to sell that was at the time we were selling it for 497 over the phone, which is hilarious on the economics now because you can't do that very easily. And then next thing, 100K a month, then 300K month, then 500, 800 million a month, doing that for a little bit. We're growing the sales team. I became an owner over this time, so now it's us three owners because the two founders who built it, the expert fitness, who's a rockstar, and then the sales marketing focus guy, as we scaled, I went tech ops systems, he went marketing sales, she went product expert. And then we changed it over from info, which we increased pricing on, but we changed it over from info to coaching.

So annual recurring coaching one-to-one with the coach, and then we went to three million a month or 3.7 a month, and then our acquisition exploded at the end of 2024. So that's where we're at now. We're kind of back in the trenches, 1.6 million last month, not good for us because we have a hundred and something employees now. We moved everyone W2. We're like a real business now.

A

Adam Young 24:28

Real business.

Ryan Clogg 24:29

Yeah, a real business now, dude. We got an HR director.

Adam Young 24:33

No, don't do that.

Ryan Clogg 24:35

We do. We do. We need it. We need it. I just don't want to run payroll. So I was doing that for too long. But yeah, so we built this thing in that way. And I always like to say this because I don't do well with the zero to one concept. I've never created anything. And I think that's what I really like about lead gen or these other models where you're scaling something that exists at some level. Somebody built the offer and then you're scaling it or generating sales for it versus creating it from zero. So these guys did create it from zero. He met her in a gym, they built it up, they came up with the branding and the name, the product market fit. I came in, we changed the model that we were using and scaled the show of it. So they created it.

I came in, helped scale it beside them, and now we have taken it to 71, almost 72 million in cash collected. And our target is there's two other guys in this space, not in the industry style that do over 10 million a month with this exact model, with this info coaching model.

Adam Young 25:34

Nice.

Ryan Clogg 25:35

So it's like, let's do it. So that's the quick info background. Now

Adam Young 25:38

How do we- Well, the question is like-

Ryan Clogg 25:40

Yeah. Well, how do you price it? What do you do it and how do you sell it?

Adam Young 25:43

Yeah. And then before we move on to that, your target is what these other people have accomplished, but the reality is your target should be much bigger than that because if someone can do $10 million a month, there's no reason why you can't do half a billion.

Ryan Clogg 25:57

Correct.

Adam Young 25:58

Yeah. So just be-

Ryan Clogg 25:59

And you've got the other guys out there, there's some ... I always like to just roadmap it like, oh, if they use this model to get to this, it's like, cool, we can use this model to get to this. And then it's like new frontier. So back to that whole, the framework's there, which obviously you are more the zero to one guy, you're more in that realm of creation and you guys with software. Mine's like, "What do you mean? I see a model. It works to 10 million. It's like run the gambit to get to 10 million." And then it's like from there we can see if it can take more or if it needs, in addition, either horizontally or vertically, what is the direction? But yeah, there are guys in fitness space, let's just say, that are doing hundreds of millions a year with high ticket backend and some supplements.

Adam Young 26:40

Yeah. The question you may want to ask yourself, if I might, is how do you do 10 times more in one third of the time? Okay, my target is 10 million a month. Well, let's just say that my target is 50 million a month instead. And how do I think about building to that from now and then how long is it going to take? And then you figure that out and then you ask yourself, how do I do it in a third of the time? And that thought exercise will just naturally expand or remove any limiting beliefs you have around a milestone like that. Not to say that the way you're thinking about it is wrong because it's not-

Ryan Clogg 27:23

Oh no, it's just a different way to think about it. I complete

Adam Young 27:25

Agree. It's just a though exercise of expansion. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs get sort of stuck in their ways. And I do too, you're trying to drive a business and you forget to take the step back and dream.

And when I moved to Miami, a friend of mine, a really good friend, his name's Sam, he owns an insurance company, called me and I was in a rough place because I moved to Miami because my ex of 12 years wanted me to sell Ringba or hire a CEO, stop traveling for work, and I said no. So she left me, which was great, in retrospect, gift and opportunity. So I land in Miami and I'm kind of in a rough spot emotionally and my friend calls me and he checks up on me regularly, but instead he goes like, "Hey, who's your biggest competitor?" And I tell him for a couple different product lines who that is. One's a public company, one's a venture-backed company worth a couple billion bucks at this point. And he's just like, "Why are you thinking so small?" And in one of the most vulnerable times in my life, he attacked and challenged my limiting beliefs when I wasn't able to defend myself.

And I was like, "Well, what? What? What do you mean?" He's like, "Who's the biggest ad tech company that's involved in calls? Who's the absolute biggest?" And I think about it and I'm like, "Well, Google." He's like, "Cool. So how do you beat them?" And I was like, "I'm going to have to think about that. " And he's like, "Yeah, stop thinking so small." And I was like, "Oh, fuck.

What the hell?" And what's crazy about that is in the next calendar year, I more than doubled the size of the business and added nine figures in enterprise value to what we were doing.

Ryan Clogg 29:19

Crazy.

Adam Young 29:19

Just completely changed my thought process around what we're doing more than doubled the size of the team, made a lot of investments.

Ryan Clogg 29:27

They say that, I'm trying to, I think it was a Dan Sullivan book I want to say or maybe, but Cardone's got his whole 10X thing, but it's all like the gist is if you say, okay, we want to increase by 50% this year, list out all the things we can do. And you have this list of 15 things. And then it's like, now list out, we want to do 10X, list out the things you can do. And it's like cross out, cross out, cross out. To get to 10 times the size, you're not going to incrementally do this or this or this. You're fundamentally shifting-

Adam Young 29:53

Rebuilding

Ryan Clogg 29:54

Everything. ... the belief, the action, a complete new product line, a complete new traffic source, a complete just fun Fundamentally different. And so when you say that to us, that's instantly where my mind goes. Because our constraint now, if I wanted to add a zero on a budget is apps to booking. So now you have sales team throttling and it's right there. So you would need to go direct to cart. If you're going direct to cart, what's the economic model that would work on that? Is it info? Is it Sups? Is it mid-ticket? Is it what? To be able to do that. And then you're capturing LTV with the other ones. And it's like being able to come up with that, that's an interesting question. How would we get to 50 million a month or whatever instead of 10? It's like, yeah, that's interesting.

Adam Young 30:34

And in our case, it's software. And so you can think about it from your lens, which is like, oh, how do I build the offer? How do I do the thing?

Ryan Clogg 30:41

Info, e-comm. Yeah.

Adam Young 30:44

My thought process shifted to something different and that is how do I expand the entire industry pool? And I was just like, "Ugh." And that's where the book came from. Paper call. Yeah, that's where exactly. Yeah. A lot of the teaching, and I have to get much better at that.

Ryan Clogg 31:03

That's a crazy idea. Yeah. How do I expand how many people are using PayPerCall both on the vendor and on both sides? Because then if you have X percentage of market share, you assume you increase that, but you also increase the total pie. That's interesting.

Adam Young 31:17

Yeah. My thought process is how do I make every other company in the space that sells something like I do more money? Because if I grow the entire industry, the pool gets bigger, everyone else makes more money. And I joke that I'm the best salesperson for all my competitors. I don't actually think I have competitors. Just me, I compete against me. But I literally think about myself as how do I be the best marketer for everybody else? Super interesting. Because that means that the pool has gotten so much bigger.

Ryan Clogg 31:50

What do you guys do for the other side? So the people who are buying more so, right? Because I feel like this is more so geared towards this is where the industry is going, it's expanding, it's going in this. Here's how to do it from the media buy, more on that side of things versus what do you guys do for getting it normalized that landscapers buy paper lead instead of doing-

Adam Young 32:18

Great question.

Ryan Clogg 32:18

Or do you just shift the marketers?

Adam Young 32:20

No, it's a whole crazy sort of master plan side of that. So book number two is about the buy side. It's how do small, medium, regional, and even large scale businesses take advantage of consumer initiated inbound calls, paper call. And there's a lot to it. And then what we also need to do is we need to make it easy for the smaller scale and mid-size companies to get their feet wet and to get involved, which is a really hard thing. How do you go to, I don't know, a regional landscaping company that has 12 locations and services, Metro Detroit only and get them to buy phone calls. It's a concept that's foreign to them. They may not have-

Ryan Clogg 33:03

And handle the phone calls and do all that. And then you get this call center. Yeah.

Adam Young 33:07

Exactly. And so how do you deal with that or small insurance offices, that type of thing? And so we realized that the number one question I get asked at any trade show or anywhere is, how do I find more buyers? Because a lot of marketers are not business development people. They're not like me. They're not going to go to a trade show, open up a booth, bring a sales team and hustle and get customers like that. It's just not their skillset. It wasn't mine either. I had to learn it. And so that's why we launched RingbaX, which is our programmatic call exchange on the sell side. Basically, any Ringba customer only can ping it and get a bid for their phone calls. And so with that, we are going to make a heavy push into doing the business development for these types of verticals to bring the small and regional buyers in to create a large scale national network in every single vertical for not pay-per-call network, but just network of buyers to cover all of the geographic areas.

And they are basically self-service. And then our customers can just immediately tap into that. And there's some other companies in PaperCall that do this in home services and some other verticals, and they basically had a monopoly on the space

Ryan Clogg 34:32

Because- The exchange portion?

Adam Young 34:34

Yeah, they have networks of small and regional buyers, and they take egregious rev shares, like 60%, 50%.

Ryan Clogg 34:43

If they could get it, if they're the only one to doubt, it's like-

Adam Young 34:46

Yeah, exactly. And so I'll just cop to it right now. On X, our average margin presently is, and this is a ballpark, this is six to 8% or something. We don't need crazy margin because we control all of the-, exactly. All the volume. I'm not nearly as concerned about bad traffic as anyone else because we can see it.

Ryan Clogg 35:11

Exactly. Yeah. You literally know it's ... Yeah, you see all the conversion data on it, you see the time, you see everything.

Adam Young 35:17

Exactly. And the vast majority of the X participants are RingBut customers. And so we get paid on the telco as well, and that's prepaid basically. And so our risk is much lower. So we don't need to take crazy margins like that because our core business is software. And so we're not looking to make our core business this. It's more of a way for where we can optimize it and do the business development for everyone so our customers can make the most money. And it's a crazy moat actually for our customers, because if you're not a Ring the customer, you can't sell to it. Just like, fuck everybody else. I don't care. And it doesn't matter to me that we'll make less money that way because I take sides.That's my personality. My customers

Ryan Clogg 36:02

Are

Adam Young 36:02

Who I serve.

Ryan Clogg 36:03

Yeah, exactly. And you do make more, not more, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. The exchange thing, it's a very interesting concept. They do it in info too a lot of the time now that is education-based. So you're basically like, there's one that's really good that's in sales. They have a new one that's in female sales specific, but it's basically they sell to the front. So you sell to the beginner to teach them how to do the 0 to 10K example, and you teach them how to get the skills and do the thing. And then on the backend, you B2B sell it to, you sell the person with the skills almost as recruiting. So on the back. So you get paid two times to your LTVs, and then generally there's community through it. So it's like, I teach this person how to ... They pay me two grand to learn how to do marketing tech or sales.

They're in my community. I just got paid minus my CPA or whatever, and then it's a course. And then on the back, you're selling them, who needs a marketing tech person? And then you're selling them for two grand or five grand or whatever percentage, and you just have this exchange style thing. It's super interesting. Yeah. I mean, depending on how hard you want to rip, like you said, 60% or 2K flat or whatever it is.

Adam Young 37:14

In our case, it just loses money. We have a separate engineering team and a new BizDev team on the X side. And so the only people making money with X are customers presently. Our payroll on that is millions because it's really complicated technology and we're long-term focused. We don't mind making the investment.

And so I think long-term, it's going to be incredible for our customers. I just got into a public flame war with one who doesn't like the idea that we're doing this because they think it'll negatively impact their business. And I think that that type of mindset is really an impoverished mindset. That's not the way to do it. The way to do it is to see someone who's like, wow, who's built something big and kind of crazy and go like, okay, well, how do I leverage that for my success as opposed to, oh my God, it might kill me. And I think it's hard sometimes for entrepreneurs to move out of that paranoia mindset to the abundance mindset. Yeah,

Ryan Clogg 38:25

A hundred

Adam Young 38:26

Percent. And what I have found is our largest customers and my most successful friends will literally give all their secrets away, their secrets, because it doesn't matter. The pie is so big that people can make a ton of money. In pay per call, you're talking about, I mean, we're tracking billions of dollars a quarter for Christ's sake, and over a trillion dollars in commerce happens over the phone every year in the United States. How am I going to stop anyone from making any money? That didn't work. So it's really an exciting opportunity. I think it's super, super cool just to see so many people be successful. I have a post coming up I'm going to do a POV one, but basically we've helped people make billions and billions of dollars now, and we've given away over a billion dollars worth of GoTo awards. I see you have your ClickFunnels one behind you there, which is awesome.

I copied Russell. I'm not going to lie. I have all these awards in the Miami fake penthouse. It's just- I was

Ryan Clogg 39:35

Going to say fake. You got to make sure everyone does it's fake.

Adam Young 39:37

Yes. The one I'm in right now is fake. By the way, this is a Zoom background. I am not in the penthouse at the Montage and Kapalua. Don't look at this, but we literally covered it in many versions of the awards. It's such a cool thing to see. It's a very powerful thing to see the impact

Ryan Clogg 39:59

Here. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I love those. I think they're super cool. I mean, I don't know how long this one will last behind me. We're about to get the third because each one, they're $25 million discs. It's like once you get a hundred, it's like, okay. And it was just a fun thing forever because it was like, oh, the million one was on my board, my dream board version, which really just lives on a dock or a Canva image. And then it moved to the 10 and we got that one within a year of the other one. And then we got that within a year of the other one and it was like ... So it was just a cool thing. And then would you say that's hilarious? I have the picture of the one of you guys bringing it onto the jet on my current one.

Adam Young 40:33

Oh, wow.cause

Ryan Clogg 40:34

I'm like, oh yeah, no, I'm for sure moving in the direction of that at some point as a side fun thing. I know so many people in the space, all of that. I think the beauty of the lead gen model is the lean, if you do it right, obviously margin, different people have different opinions on that, but lean margin, the scalability, the no face, and the exit ability. All of those things in one is just something you don't really get in info that you do. You can get in e-commerce, obviously, but in info it's not as common. One or two have actually sold in info and coaching space, like actual info and coaching of what we're calling it, like the Guru eSpace.

Hormozi sold, but theirs wasn't really guru-y. It kind of was, but it was licensing. They did a lot of different things and they did all of the process. He has a ton of videos about it, about how they had to change the business, remove the founder risk, all those pieces, everything from marketing product to whatever in order to do it. And we're in the process of that now, but at the same time, it's like just business fundamentals. We just took a massive dive in our breakeven after doing 30 million in diving margins because we went from 12 to 30. So it's like we have business fundamental things we need to get to to make sure the profit's there, just to sell in general. And then founder risk, we're adding brand faces. The product side is already out. It's all coaches, but it's just a lot of moving parts because it's like service base, but remote.

It's like remote service based, not just sell a course, not just info, money in money out and very little fulfillment. So yeah, there's a lot of layers. And the same thing, you had e-commerce with supplements. So basically the model we're looking at is info low, coaching mid to high, more coaching, like a group style, and then figuring out how to either do partnership or sell for supplement style for MRR. So you have recurring up here and you've recurring down here.

Adam Young 42:26

Yeah. Your backend.

Ryan Clogg 42:28

Yeah, exactly. And just fatten up the LTV, have multiple sources and have consistency and continuity throughout all of them, and then it is something that could be. But you hear these lead gen guys talk about it and there's, not to say names, but people who have exited things for 10 and 20 and 50 and whatever that are nice, that are nice that are in these lead gen things that I'm like, God. And I joke that that is the biggest piece of this puzzle that is like, it's kind of like the 80 / 20. It's like get your ads to work, everything kind of works, which is not necessarily true. You need to figure out your numbers. You need to understand the business. At scale, you need to run the people, you need to operate the thing. But that's the part that I don't really touch as much.

I understand what's happening in the ads, I understand what's happening in this, but did I write them? Did I do the creative? Did I scale them? No, I didn't. Business partner does that part. So there's this little bug in me that's like, I just need to do it myself on something just to feel it, just the A to Z portion, that part of it. And it's like, yeah, it's fun.

Adam Young 43:29

Well, I got to go in a minute here. There you go. I got to go feed the Gen Z girls. Girls. Well, look, I'm from Miami. You do whatever you got to do. Okay.

Ryan Clogg 43:40

Yeah, that is fair.

Adam Young 43:42

Tangent, by the way, I was handed a papaya and told, "Have you ever touch one of these before?" And I said, "No." And she grabs her phone to go look at a YouTube video and I said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Watch this. I'm just going to grab a knife and we're going to do it. " Yeah, we're just going to figure it out real time. We're going to

Ryan Clogg 44:03

Cut the fruit. Exact way to do it in 30 seconds or less.

Adam Young 44:07

She's like, "Well, I don't generally cut fruit." I'm like, "Yeah, I know, but I'm old. Watch this. " I have a photo, maybe I'll tweet it. It's just literally me cutting papaya and putting it into a container. The

Ryan Clogg 44:19

Backstory behind it. Those who know will know the backstory.

Adam Young 44:22

It's just like we don't even cut your own fruit anymore. But what you talked about there, and that's why that triggered this story is something that I have always done and I don't know if a lot of people do. And that's like at Ringba, I don't even love my title. I talk to customers all the time. I do customer support. I'll do anything. This is not my job. We'll get you fired at RingBas straight up on the spot. And I have done my best- I

Ryan Clogg 44:50

Love that. I'm still

Adam Young 44:51

Bad. Oh yeah, we don't fuck around

Ryan Clogg 44:52

Here. I steal

Adam Young 44:53

That.

We do not fuck around here. You are going to do an early team. Whatever is necessary to serve our customers, and if you will not, you are gone. There is no question about that. Our mission is to serve our customers, and that starts with me. I go to all the trade shows. I'm at the booth. I don't take meetings generally, so I can just randomly talk to customers. But my point is through my entire career, I have always spent time doing all the things so that I understand how they work. And at the beginning, I did customer support over live chat. I'll still do it now. On Christmas, I do it. So our team's

Ryan Clogg 45:33

Out. Oh, dude, I have so many. We were the first sale. We had two people on the team that were taking sales calls, but us three were also on sales calls, competing against each other for all the beginnings. And we hired and did those sales things. This Christmas, I migrated the whole site from WordPress Webflow and built a page and did it on Christmas night, solo just sitting here in the trenches and everyone's all ... It was so funny, but that had its repercussions, but-

Adam Young 45:58

All right, man. I really got to go.

Ryan Clogg 45:59

You got to go. You got to get some papayas and do some things.

Adam Young 46:02

I will post this soon when I get back. I appreciate you. It was great to meet. We'll have to hang out. Yeah,

Ryan Clogg 46:07

It's great meeting you. Cool. Talk soon.

Adam Young 46:09

Bye. Bye. All