Drew Carrell

Sure. I'm going to just straight out be controversial. And that's fine. Bring, bring on the haters in the comments. We were too focused on VAs and cheap labor. That was our problem with our other agency. It was, how do we get an $800 Filipino or, whatever, right? Some cheap labor.

And not that like I'm against it and totally, we definitely have VAs now, but what we weren't looking at and what we weren't concerned about was what is the culture of our company? Do people want to be in our company? Because if people don't want to work in your company, nobody wants to work with your fucking company. And we'd lost that.

We had this team of VAs and Slack and we'd roll in at 10 a.m. and blow up. Ah, this person didn't do this. And like that one's fired and let's hire another one. And it was just like we were managing through a spreadsheet and we're making some money. So we thought that we were the shit. But when we transitioned over this, we realized it was just all relationship.

Like I was working in what would be the equivalent of Whole Foods up in Canada. So it was pretty intensive. And It wasn't long until I learned that what I loved was the data and making data-driven decisions. And that kind of brought me into this media buying world, which at the time I was completely ignorant of.

And so when we made that first hire, like we hired Adam before we were making money. But we knew it was just kind of perchance Adam came in front of us. But Adam's like he's he's the wood archetype. If you're big on Tony, like he's he's the people person. He's a community person. Like he was the best salesperson in the world because he would go spend four hours with somebody in a hotel lobby.

asking them about their company, asking about their family, asking them about their friends. And it was just like, wow, like what an interesting shift from what we were used to, which is like a webinar sale or a hard sale, right? And so we asked Adam who the next hire should be. And then we brought that person on and then we brought on another group of people. And they were all...

mostly were North American and people that we could go see. I could fly out and visit and see and be with. And then the Slack grew organically. I don't know anybody who's listening. I'm sure most of you have Slack channels for your companies. It's amazing when my wife is also part of our company. I'll go upstairs to her office and I can see in her Slack.

She's like six channels that I don't even know about, man. They have this right now. They have like this hollow or this Christmas bake off channel. And there's like, there's gotta be six people in the channel. And they're like showing what they bake today and this and that there's, there's a support team of which I'm not even on calls in. They're all dressed up for Halloween on the 31st.

And there's all these pictures going through. It's like, my company has now grown bigger than me.

and organically because people love to be in the company and because of that we just naturally attract more clients like it only takes a little while of you being in our ecosystem before the team rubs off on you and you're just like i gotta go call danny again or like i'm having a hard time converting these leads it's not oh shitty leads although let's go dispute them it's i need to jump on a call with katie our head of support and just kind of see what she's seeing and and we'll we'll happily do that so for us it was people and then when the

Go ahead. I don't want to cut you off because you're in a thought. Go ahead. And when we kind of got to a critical mass where I was getting a little stressed and Kyle was getting stressed, you know, we didn't know what to do. Like we knew what to do, but we'd never done it, which was hire a C-suite employee. And we hired our first COO only six months ago, seven months ago.

Um, and that's astronomical, right? That's going to take us. He's with, without him, we probably only would have done 12 million this year because of him. We'll do 50 million. Now we'll do 40 million next year. Um, and quality of life is completely different, right? Like I now get to fly around to masterminds.

I get to hang out with you and, and, and the guys in exotic locations, you know, once every six months and really get to build my, my mental game. Um, because that's where it's at, at this point, you know, it's grit and grind in the beginning and it's just all mental at the end.

But once I started seeing ad accounts and seeing how companies were scaling with digital marketing and things like that, I just knew that that's where I needed to be. I was on fire. I remember watching the very first YouTube video. So... I transitioned out of retail into media buying.

And, and I can check out, like I can check out for three months. And when I come back, revenue will be up. Conversions will be up. Like everything will be up. And I couldn't do that. If, even if I was talented enough to have a complete VA team and everything is systematized, I have to show up every morning to manage that. And, and, Maybe I got to hire a manager, but the manager's a VA.

And so I still got to manage that. It's like, no, I have people whose only filter is, is this in the company's best interest? If they can answer that question as a yes, they're allowed to make any decision. Our customer support team is allowed to make any decision up to $25,000 so long as they can answer a question yes to that.

And so because of it, I don't need to have an SOP if somebody says this. SOP if somebody says this. SOP if somebody says this. We have SOPs. But most of our SOPs are about, here's your box. go operate in your box. And what I want is people who just love to have autonomy with, with some guidelines.

in retrospect, I'd want to say I wanted to do it sooner, but I never, we never would have because of the P&L, right? Like we just never had space to do it where we just kind of, we had a bit of space enough that we were like, all right, let's do this. And like, to your point, I remember talking to my business partner. I was actually in San Diego with Kent when we like made decisions.

And then, you know, we went through some different models and some struggles, ended up landing, discovering the real estate investing industry, which was funny to us because we thought that it was just a bunch of crooked realtors trying to like sell people's deeds to their houses.

So I'm like doing a consult with Kent, going back to the hotel room and talking to my business partner about this hire. And of course, what I'm learning from Kent, I remember saying to my business partner, because he was like, oh, he wants to talk tomorrow. I'm like, oh shit, I'm with Kent. And he's like, well, I can take the call. But like, how do you feel about this? I'm like, plain and simple.

If you think that dude's smarter than me, it's a hire. If you think I'm smarter than him, don't. Like, cause I don't need another one of me. I'm I've I'm capped. Like I got us here. Like I need, I need the next iteration of me and let's bring him on and he can start telling me what to do.

Yeah, I'll preface this with this concept that I think a lot of people miss as well. People like we've trained ourselves and we've trained people over the last, say, 10 or 15 years to think that value comes from content. And that like, if I'm going to spend 10 grand on something, it'd better have 60 hours of training and four handhold sessions. And like, somebody's going to come brush my dog.

And like, I get all this shit. And it's like, when you get over that, You know, whether that be because you got successful or you got smart. When you come over that, what you realize is that it's never about volume. It's always like you just need to hear the right thing at the right time. I remember I had the privilege of speaking with one of my favorite authors a while ago.

And he was like, and I asked him like, how do you come out with so many books over and over again? He's just like, Drew, have you read my books? He's like, they're literally the same thing. He's like, I'm just rewriting the same book over and over again. I have three points that you need to understand. And I know it'll probably take you about 20 years to get all three of them.

So I just need to keep coming out with content to keep reminding you that these are the points. So when I think of masterminds and being in the right room, What I like is that I'm paying to come above the bullshit, right? Like I'm paying to get into a room with people who have moved past the toys and the flashy and the shiny. And they're like, I have a problem. I will pay...

But once we kind of learned what was going on there, it was very obvious to us the industry was kind of prehistoric in terms of how they were marketing and how they were scaling their companies. So we knew there was this huge opportunity to marry digital marketing with investors. And so that's what we did. And we passionately dove into that. We cut off everything else.

$100,000 if you in 30 seconds can solve it for me, right? Now people are at that level. When you ascend to that, you are now just looking at result. So the preceding lesson that I'm making here is that most people need to understand that you are not missing out on a whole bunch of stuff you need to learn. It's probably one little thing.

It's one little tiny thing where you're just like slightly focused or you have a limiting belief about something, not like you have a limiting belief about money. It's probably you have a limiting belief about hiring somebody that's smarter than you because you're afraid they're going to take over your company, right? That was mine.

And so I only needed one person to look me square in the eyes and go, is your Stripe password connected or password protected? I'm like, yeah, of course. Stripe be my payment processor. And he goes... So what the fuck are you worried about? What's he going to do? Screw up? Fire him if he screws up and hire the next guy. And like, that's all I need to hear.

And like, I would have paid my entire mastermind fee for that one moment. And so if that's what you're thinking of when you go into these situations and into these masterminds and into these higher end groups, then like life is good, right? You're going there. I went there to make friends, right? Like I remember joining... boardroom.

And then my first event after my first event, texting Kent and going, I need the next level, right? Because there's a level and I need there because I could see you talking with Kent and Casey talking with Kent and all these guys. And like, you guys were just like a different level of mindset than me. And I knew I needed in there.

I knew I wasn't going to get a whole bunch of shit from you guys in terms of content, but I knew just being in your presence, going on trips with you guys, understanding how you guys got to certain

points of of your business that i'll find a thread i'll find that one thing even if it's literally one thing once a year it's worth every membership you have ever paid um just to have that so i think it's profoundly impactful i think there is absolutely nothing that could replace a community environment like a paid mastermind also like i'm just not a fan of like spammy facebook groups

Um, but like to pay and get into the room with people who are bigger and better than you will grow you exponentially. It will in at any level, right? If you've never started a business, go find a mastermind of entrepreneurs, like put your first 20 grand into that or 10 grand, whatever it is, because you will just spend three months absorbing how people think. And then.

You can go find a course if you need to understand the mechanics of how to run a Facebook ad or you need to get your realtor license or whatever it is. But like that shit's the secondary stuff. That's the mechanics.

If your mind's not right and you're not with the right people and the people are surrounding you are not supporting you in your goals and they're only dragging you down like my family does. Right. I need to make sure that I'm up leveling the people I spend the most time with. And that's I do that through masterminds.

We had some other businesses at that time as well. We sold one. We shut down another. And we're like, this is where we got to go. We got to go deep. So we ended up, through some iterations, of course, landing on this paper lead model. So what we learned was real estate investors need to be real estate investors. And they need to be great at that and great at sales.

And I remember too, I remember talking with Billy Jean and this is really early in my career. And so I was like looking up to this man as an idol in marketing at the time. And now of course, and he said, he wanted to tell us all a story or whatever it was. He's like, I just paid 18 grand for a mastermind last weekend. It was 18 grand for the two days.

And he goes, the one person on my team goes, well, what do you get for 18 grand? And he goes, I looked at that person and go, it's not what they're going to give me for the 18 grand. It's what am I going to take from that mastermind for the $18,000 I spent? And that was a shift for me right there. It was like, fucking right. It's not up to them to make you successful.

It's up to you to make you successful. They're giving you a forum. You go pick the fruit, right? If you're just going to stand there and hope that apples are going to fall into your basket, you're fucked, right? Like go. look for what's prime, spend your time, be detailed, be methodic, and just be there and take it in and understand that it's going to be one big shift.

It's going to be one big shift. It's not going to be a notebook of fucking tactical, how to spam YouTube to make money idea. Yeah.

And they kept getting lost in the world of marketing. So our resolve to that was... Don't worry about landing pages. Don't worry about ad accounts. Don't worry about anything. We'll just connect through CRM. We will run nationwide advertising and we'll only give you the leads that you want in your area. And it's really just kicked off 2,500 clients later. We're, we're doing awesome.

Sure. I think I know for me personally, the definition of wealth has been the hardest thing for me.

so the concept of waking up to wealth or the concept of being wealthy um and all of these things has just been so cluttered in my life right like i think of wealthy is 10 million dollars in the bank right like that's i literally i have a notebook and some we could talk about offline but like i have a notebook from 10 years ago and i wrote that like my by the time i'm 40 i want to be on stages making 10 million dollars a year

Now I'm 38 and maybe that could be a reality by the time I'm 40, but I don't think that that's what wealth is anymore. For me, waking up to wealth means waking up to what wealth means. What wealth means to me absolutely includes financial security, which is that whatever that number is, it's very different. It used to be a number in a bank account. Now for me, it's assets.

What assets do I own that would make me secure if a I don't know. The world collapses tomorrow. The economy all fucks up. I lose my company. Am I still going to be financially secure? Right. But wealthy also means do I get to make every dance recital for my four year old? Right. That was not in the description 10 years ago when I didn't have a kid. Right.

Wealth also also means did I intentionally, intentionally show presence to my wife this week? That wasn't an inscription 10 years ago. Believe you me, it was something else I was more concerned about with the women 10 years ago. My definition of wealth enriches, I think, every single day.

So to me, wake up to wealth really means wake up, internalize what is actually important to you in your life, and go live it today. I don't need $10 million to be financially secure in the bank account. I need to have a company that I trust, love, and I think is growing. That company could be 100 grand a year or 100 million a year. And my security level is the same.

So that's an interesting shift for me. So I have that, right? I have the capacity to show presence to my wife today, whether I will or not is another question. I have the ability to cancel my podcast tomorrow and go to a dance recital. I'll do the podcast tomorrow in this one case, but I get that choice.

And to me, that's what being wealthy is, is to have choice in my day, have freedom of time, and just be able to choose the things and spend the time and focus on the things I want. So yeah, I think that's what I would say wake up to wealth means to me.

Go to leadzolo.com. Very, very simple. We do the highest motivated off-market leads. We are the only company in the United States that does our own internal media buying. Quite happy to talk to you about where our ads are and where they show and quite happy to compare that to anybody else you'd like. But very simply, go to leadzolo.com, book a call.

You'll jump on a call with somebody on our team and they're literally just there to answer your questions. We have no interest in selling anybody anything they don't need. So yeah, jump on a call and our team will be happy to talk to you about where you're at in your journey, if leads are right for you at this time or not. And yeah, that'd be the best way to do it.

We're having a lot of fun nationwide advertising. Like I said, we're cracking into TV now looking at radio for 2025. It's going to be, it's going to be a lot of fun.

Absolutely. Pleasure is mine.

Yeah. So that company is called LeadZolo. And we are... 100% focused on highly motivated off-market leads for real estate investors. So all of our advertising is 100% would you like a cash offer on your home to sell it quicker rather than listed on the market? So that's the angle that we drive for.

There's definitely more applications to these leads, but that's definitely our focus is for the investors.

Yeah, it was interesting. So prior to this, we had just a YouTube ad agency and it was the retainer model style agency. So you pay me five grand a month, I'll manage $10,000 of ad spend. And it was, we were doing it for people with webinar funnels. So basically people had coaching programs or product that they'd sell off a webinar. So we'd create the ads to opt into the free webinar.

They would then host the webinars and then convert people off the back of it. And it was interesting. It's kind of a fad. I know people don't want to say that right now, but at the end of the day, like if you're following ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson, what he's doing is amazing and exciting, all these funnels and webinars and stuff, but it's super fatty. And when I say that, what I mean is,

it's really kind of hard to model a company who does that, who has done that for a long time with a lot of success, right? Like you and I could name the two big ones off the top of our heads, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone. They're doing very well with the model, but even them, they're both kind of

new into it right so it's it's not proven but it's very exciting so when we're running this agency for people with webinar funnels what we found was there was a lot of longevity there was a lot of people looking for a quick buck they had products that really only kind of helped current trends and there was no like sustainability uh to these businesses so they're like coming and going and coming and going and for us it was like we want an industry that

is here. That's going to be around for a long time. I want to sit back like Bezos and go, I don't care what's going to change in the next 10 years. What is going to be true in the next 10 years? And so for us, real estate is going to be happening in 10 years. We know that. We know what's going to be happening in 20, 30, 50, 100 years.

It might look dramatically different as we learned with what's happened to realtors recently, but it's still going to be there. So for us, it was this, how do we churn out of what's kind of fun, but we could kind of see it tailing off into something that we could just focus on and build a legacy through. And so we knew real estate was the option for that. So when we started looking over here,

It was interesting for us to see, you know, we were talking to some people that we got introduced to that were doing multiple six figures a month. And we're asking them, like, how are you doing that? And they were like, I don't know, we pulled data. I got some kids in my basement that are cold calling people. I'm... I have my I have three girls in the apartment. This is a true story.

I have three girls in the apartment building. I put up like a sign in the mail room of their apartment building saying anybody who wants to make some extra cash, call the number. So they had three girls who were handwriting letters. Hey, I want to buy your house for cash. And then they were mailing them and like they were doing multiple six figures a month. And we were just like, holy shit.

Sorry, I don't know if I can say that.

Cool. Yeah, so for us, it was just like, holy shit. If these guys are able to find gold in the Yukon with sticks and rocks, imagine if we walked in and showed them what a bulldozer was or an actual shovel was. What are they going to be able to do then? And we were really ratified in our very first case study of the whole thing when we had an investor come to us.

Again, that was when I thought he was a crooked realtor, but that's besides the point. We ran a bunch of ads for him. We spent 20 grand. where it was coming to like the meeting with the client and we're just like, we're 20 grand in the hole. We'd only gotten like a hundred leads. So we were like, it was costing us 200 bucks a lead. And at the time it was crazy to us.

Cause we're getting like $4 leads for Tony Robbins webinar. Right. So we're just like, we sit down, like we figured this is the, you're getting your ass fired meeting. And the guy's just like, I made a quarter million dollars last month off the leads you guys sent me. Can we 10 exit this month? And we're just like, what is going on?

So that's when we knew like that, that was literally the moment I looked at my partner and I was like, we're stopping consulting immediately. We're going to sell the YouTube ad agency and we're going all in, like we're going all in. And that, and that was it.

Yeah. I think to clarify. Yeah. It's not, I, we certainly didn't sell ad like that day. It took us a year. And, and honestly, our first like year with lead dollar, we didn't make a dollar. So like we're pulling salaries from this other agency.

So it was like, it was this moment like where we knew we needed out of it, but it was kind of paying the bills and like the 15 hours a week that we're putting into it. It doesn't sound like a lot, but absolutely it was a lot of energy. But it was that moment. I remember when we sold like, Um, we sold and then I was immediately fired by the new owner, which of course was kind of the point.

And I remember like sitting back and like deleting my, the meetings off my calendar. And I was just like, man, we, we got lead Zolo per month to what our last company was doing per year. in the course of a year. Now imagine if I'm essentially doubling my focus on that opportunity. That was when Deep Knot Wide was born in our vocabulary, in our Slack channel. We even have an emote for it now.

Thanks for the opportunity, man. I really appreciate it. And it's absolutely my pleasure to sponsor such an awesome podcast. I've been listening to it a lot the last couple of weeks. So cool. Appreciate that, brother.

When somebody's talking and proliferating and ideas are getting woo-woo, we have an emote that's just like, boom, Deep Knot Wide. Right. As in like you're getting you're getting out there again. And we love it. We love ideas. But like stop getting out there, like go deep, not wide.

There's not a single context that either one of us could dream up or somebody could call in and bring up that you and I both know that the answer is not going to be, oh, you should expand. It'll be you need to go deeper in what you're already in. Um, so yeah, I, I totally agree. I think that people are missing that there's too much YouTube shit out there.

There's too many coaches trying to sell you on the next cool thing. Like you want to go, you know, mentally masturbate to YouTube, go watch some Hermosi shit and he'll just tell you you're not working hard enough. And that's all you need to hear. Um, I think, I think that that's, that that's the key. And I think that that's, that's the era we're in right now is that there's so much distraction.

Um, like I even, I have a personal coaching client right now and like I spent my entire last call with him yesterday, literally telling him to stop, like just focus on what we talked about in the last month. And that's what he needed. And he'll make an extra million bucks just from that conversation.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll paint it just a little picture quickly. And this is not to be braggadocious, right? Like you've had millions of people on this podcast who are way more successful than me. But in our first year of LeadZolo, our revenue is $100,000. This year, which is our third year, this is only our third year, we'll do $18 million. So it's a game of delayed gratification.

And you're asking like the perfect question, in my opinion, is like, how do you know how long to hold on to before you think it's just not worth it? And again, luckily for us, you know, we had another company footing the bill. But yeah, it was tough. I remember going out. When we were first kind of interested in this, we immediately bought VIP tickets to an event. It was in Milwaukee.

I want to say, um, Tony Romero's event. And we went there and like, yeah, that was $7,500 for me. It was $7,500 for this new person we just hired. Right. We like, we haven't even really made any money yet. So I've hired him. I'm paying his salary. There's $1,500 between his ticket and mine. I had to fly from Toronto. So there's another two or three grand and say no hotel. He lived up the street.

So whatever right now, we basically made a twenty thousand dollar investment before we understood the industry. But to us, we knew that like this was it was really important for us to understand. And we we knew and we had an agreement that if at the end of this weekend, we didn't see any opportunity, we'd walk out.

Um, but we went there and as luck may have it, and I say that tongue in cheek because there's no such thing as luck, right? We all manufacture our own environment and our own situations. So we went there. I luckily, cause we're VIP, we're sitting in the front row. The MC was kind of waiting to go on. He was just shooting the shit with me. Turns out we had a common friend.

So the MC, and now again, we haven't made any money. We're 20 grand in on this very first event. The MC walks up. His opening thing to the whole event was, guys, you don't know who you'll meet in these rooms. The point of coming to these events is for all the connections you will make.

Like the one I just made with this guy up here named Drew Carroll with his company LeadZolo, who generate the hottest off-market leads through YouTube. And it was just like, that was a 30-second conversation I had with this guy. Yeah, that made for a good conference, that's for sure. Yeah. Right? So I spent the, we spent the rest of the weekend like fielding questions from people.

What was, And so, you know, that built a lot of momentum. So, yeah, the next six months we were taking on clients and we're filling out the model. We know how much is charged per lead because there's certain areas where our cost per lead was really low. So we're just trying to like make a few bucks. Right. But then we go quote another area like for 200 bucks was costing us 300 bucks.

So we went through six months of like I think we put up like 400 grand in ad spend and we got back like 320. Right. And plus payroll and plus all this other stuff. Right. So we're underwater. But we we we had that we had that moment at the beginning. Right. We knew that the interest was there. The problem wasn't that we couldn't sell our product. Problem was we didn't know how to fucking price it.

Yeah. Yeah. Not to get, just to give you the 30,000, not to get too much into the backstory right now. I come from retail, plain and simple. I used to run grocery stores. A large part of running grocery stores is logistics, like keeping shelves full, believe it or not, is a very complicated process, especially in like fresh foods.

We didn't know how to like price it and hand it to people in the way they fucking wanted it. So even when we did overcharge, which we thought were overcharging, but we weren't.

people for it then their next question is okay cool can you just put this into my crm make sure my top closer gets the best leads my worst closer gets the worst leads and i was just like can you like what is the crm and so like so so so now we have to like go through and we had to navigate all this but we we knew like we're to the point where we're gonna have to take a loan from stripe because stripe was offering us like 250k or something at the moment um

uh, at that, at that time. And so we're just like, do we pull the two, like two 50, like with two 50, how many more leads can we generate? Do you think we'll have the system cracked by then? Um, but for us, it wasn't a, it wasn't a, if we'll crack it, it was a when. So we had that to hold onto. And we've been through the monotony of 10 years. My partner owned the company for 10 years.

I was only part of it for three, but he had 10 years. He was working on that company to get it to a million dollars a year. It had 30 employees, right? It was like a net of 4%, right? So like we knew that that's not what we wanted to do. But we knew that time and persistence would get us there. So we're willing to, I was willing to take a second mortgage on the house if I had to.

It was, we were so passionate about the possibility of what we could do.