Expensive Lessons. Painful Mistakes.

Every Friday, we share strategies to help you grow your business and generate more leads.

This week, I share another lesson learned the hard way (running your own business will do that to you 🥲).

Hopefully these stories save you some pain and suffering in your journey.

Enjoy 👇

I was really bad at lead generation for a painfully long time.

Sure, I could generate meetings, but not at scale.

The running joke with my partners at Orbit was that I was the king of "hand-to-hand" combat. I could brute force my way to a handful of meetings with cold DMs and cold calls.

But then what? Cold call for the next 30 years? I don't think so...

We knew that if I wanted our "small business" to ever scale, we'd have to learn how to advertise, or accept a much, much slower growth rate.

And let me tell you: I did not anticipate the world of pain that was to come from this "humble desire" to "learn ads."

Overcoming ignorance always has a fee. It's either:

The second feels more expensive because it is a real, measurable sticker price.

Because the price is KNOWN, it seems pricey.

And because of our optimism and ego, we are fooled into believing that the "free" alternative will be cheaper.

I can't express how dangerous this illusion is.

Now, I'll concede:

But I was not one of those people.

Let me give you an example:

For months and months and months, I ran traffic to this this landing page.

It drove extremely low cost subs. It had a stellar opt-in rate.

But It did not book any meetings. Literally zero.

We spent thousands on this campaign.

It could not have flopped harder.

Eventually, after enough grueling iterations, we finally willed this damn-thing into a winning funnel. Fast forward to present day, and the current iteration has been tearing it up.

I stared at hopelessly at a whiteboard for months trying to go from ~1-2 meetings/week to a consistent 10+ booked.

Within a few days of launching the working variant of the funnel, I had to mute notifications from my calendar if I wanted to get any work done.

The most frustrating part? The working variant looks about 95% similar to the original.

This is why the DIY illusion fools us. On the surface, we get “close” to viable on our own. But the reality of high performance requires about 100 tiny shifts that are imperceptible to the beginner’s mind. They are only revealed by time, money, and patience.

I took two lessons from this story.

Tying it allll together…

This year, I finally learned the absurdly satisfying power of hiring competent help.

But competency isn't cheap. And for years I let fear gatekeep my access to competency.

And my pace of progress was about 1/10th of what it could've been had I gotten over this fear sooner.

So I've devised a short mantra from this experience:

These are your choices. These are your fate.

Option 1: Stay cheap. Move slow. Be stuck pricing cheap because you are demand constrained. Race to the bottom forever. Stare into the void and eat glass in the months between every precious breakthrough.

Option 2: Hire the best. Move fast. Get as many clients as you want. Afford great talent. Get incredible results for clients. Raise your prices. Race to the moon. Eat much less glass.

Some people need to feel the burn to know it’s hot. I certainly did.

It’s up to you if you wanna be smarter than me, or follow in my glass eating footsteps.

~ Happy Friday,

Louis

P.S. If you want to chat about your marketing & lead gen, here’s my calendar.