Paid Before the Work Starts: Troy Dean's Discovery Method

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the High Ticket AI Systems podcast. Everyone, please welcome the winner now, Mr. Troy Dean Troy. How you doing today, my friend?

Troy Dean:0:07
Thanks for having me, man. It's a pleasure to be here. really appreciate reaching out. don't get to do this very often, so I'm glad we can make it work.

Jordan:0:13
Yes sir, you know from my perspective it's really interesting because I've seen your ads all over the place on Instagram, Facebook, etc. And to see you on the podcast screen here for me is like super fucking badass. So just want to take that really quick. Absolutely, for everyone that does not know the name or maybe even the company name just yet, can you please explain at a higher level what you guys do?

Troy Dean:0:27
Thanks man. Thanks.

Troy Dean:0:36
So Agency Mavericks is a business coaching consulting company that specializes in just helping web design, SEO and marketing agencies, digital agency owners. We help them with processes, workflows, templates, training, some done for you services.

Jordan:0:56
What would the done for you services look like on that side?

Troy Dean:1:00
Yeah. So we've just rolled out, it's fairly new. We've just rolled out a done for you content service. So producing thought leadership content, blog posts, social media posts, where we'll probably be doing video by the end of the year to help, you know, it's like we think of ourselves as the mechanic that fixes the broken down car in the mechanics front yard, right? Like we just, agency owners don't have time to do their own content. So we're doing it for them. And really it's come about because I've spent the last 15 years telling agents and is what they need to do. And I'm sick of the sound of my own voice. Uh, and I realized that agents and just don't have fucking time. just don't not like I have time. Like they, know they want to, they don't have time. And when they do have time, the last thing I want to do is sit down and write a blog post because you know, or I'm just going to produce AI slop. And so it just doesn't get done. It just ends up in the two hard basket. And so with the clients that we work with one-on-one, we've just started rolling out a done for you content service and the feedback so far has been amazing. Uh, we've automated. probably 95 % of it, there's still a little bit of human interaction. And know, transparently, six months ago, we couldn't have done this because the AI technology didn't exist. Whereas now it's like, it's just too easy, you know what I mean, to not do it. And we're a content machine, so we do it for ourselves, we may as do it for our clients and plug them into the system.

Jordan:2:20
Yeah, I think with, I mean, I use cloud code every day. think the fact that it can automate a lot of those manual tasks. mean, sure. Using LLMs or AI to create content was there, but not to the level of how it is now, like you're saying. Like it might be AI slop. I don't think it is on my own website, but like every morning at 8 a.m., like a new blog gets written and on the back of cloud code. You know what I mean? Now that can happen.

Troy Dean:2:24
Mm-hmm.

Troy Dean:2:33
Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.

Troy Dean:2:44
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep.

Jordan:2:49
With your, I guess your different service offerings, is it like a tier system? Is it like a package level that they can enroll in? Or I guess how does that work?

Troy Dean:2:57
Yeah, we have a, a four month engagement upfront. And so most agencies come to us with, you know, a range of problems. Um, we, also we don't do our best work with, and I mean this for, for, for respect, but we don't do our best work with the agency owners who are just starting out and need their first client. Right. That's not really our, our sweet spot. Our sweet spot is kind of an agency that's already doing 25, 30 grand a month consistently up to sort of three to four mil. That's our sweet spot. Anything bigger than that too. And.

You know, they become a bit of a pain in the ass and they generally kind of leave the nest and, and go elsewhere, or they become our mentors or our coaches, which has happened quite a lot. so agencies will come to us with a, you know, usually. You know, a lot of agents owners end up in business by accident, right? Like they're good at doing a thing. They're good at running ads. They're good at building websites. They're good at doing SEO, but they have no fucking idea how to run a business. Right. And so they come to us and they're a bit unstructured and they're kind of running around like a headless chook.

And they need to hire someone or they need to grow their recurring revenue. They're still kind of project to project. And so we plugged them into a bunch of systems. We diagnose what they're, what the low hanging fruit is. We get them a quick win in that first three to four months, and then they ascend into the 12 month program. So the first four months is exactly the same. It's just a, let's get you some wins and let's get to know each other and build enough trust and add enough value so that you can then. ascend into what we call Mavericks Club, which is our 12 months commitment. And we've got agency owners that have been in that thing for four or five years.

Jordan:4:22
That's awesome. What type of systems do you typically install into these agencies? Paid media systems. You can elaborate. Yeah.

Troy Dean:4:30
Yeah. So, so we don't, we don't teach our agency owners how to do their job, right? the sort of the difference with us is like, we don't teach them how to run ads. don't teach them how to build websites. We don't teach them how to write copy. We don't teach them how to do branding. We teach them is the core philosophy or the core pillars, if you like, is the first thing we do is we teach them how to sell and deliver paid discovery workshops. Most agents, owners waste a lot of time with unqualified prospects. They're still running proposals or they're trying to. do a free strategy session and close them on that, on that strategy call. And if they don't close, they go into a follow-up sequence and becomes a long sales cycle. And there's a lot of follow-up and the agency owner doesn't have a lot of control because they're waiting for the prospect to make a decision. And the reality is everyone's been burned by an agency. so prospects are really skeptical and there's not a lot of trust in the marketplace. so in 2018, 2019, I sort of codified my own paid discovery process.

And then the world went into lockdown in 2020. And so I started teaching it to our agencies and it really took off. So the first thing we do is we get them selling paid discovery workshops. And what that does is shortens the sales cycle, allows them to onboard clients faster. They get paid to come up with a strategy. They get paid to scope out the plan and then upgrade that client from what we call a digital roadmap into what we call a growth plan, which the people listening to this would understand that as a retainer. We just don't use the word retainer because a retainer is kind of a time for money model, which we don't love. And so we repackage that into a growth plan. And so that's the first thing we do is install that system into the agency, hand them over the keys and show them how to use it. The agencies that follow this process are upgrading their paid discovery clients at an average of 85 % into growth plans, right? And so then typically what happens is they then have a capacity problem. And so we have a very agency specific recruitment and team process that we install. So first thing we do is we help them with their org chart, figure out who's missing on the team. We write job score cards for every role in the agency. That's another done for you service that we offer. We then write the job ad for them. We show them where to place the job ad. We'll write the interview questions for them. We hold the agency owner's hand every step of the way to make sure they hire the right person next. And then on the back of that is we've got a whole bunch of SOPs that we'll plug them into to make sure they're managing their team. Again,

Troy Dean:6:57
Not SOPs for building websites or doing CRO or auditing an ad account, SOPs for running the operations of the agency, SOPs for weekly WIP meetings, SOPs for client onboarding, SOPs for team onboarding. So we're kind of like the SWAT team that work behind the scenes in the background in the agency. So the agency can just focus on doing really good work for their clients.

Jordan:7:20
Yeah, I think without the levers that you were installing, it's not a real business, you know? It's more so of a hobby. Go for it.

Troy Dean:7:25
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's what it's, you know, like, I mean, it's where, where I started out is I was a freelancer building websites and then I realized I needed to hire someone to, hired a few people and then I had no idea how to manage them. Right. And you know, like just ended up in business by accident. And so the, these are kind of the, it's kind these are the, I've developed the playbooks that I wish I had when I started in, when I started in 2008. Right. So I, I'm a dinosaur man. And

Jordan:7:53
it's out.

Troy Dean:7:53
I wish this shit existed when I started because it would have just saved me a lot of time. yeah, so that, that kind of partnered with the one-on-one accountability and the one-on-one mentoring that we give them. That's kind of like, we think of it as the fast track, just to hear, plug into this and get moving.

Jordan:7:57
Look, for sure, for sure.

Jordan:8:10
I have so many questions that I want to ask. One is definitely scaling up a coaching consultant firm from an account manager perspective. But before we dive into that, Troy, I really would love to uncover more of the paid discovery that you're doing, because that's unheard of in space. I mean, you hear about BSL call funnels. I ran those successfully. You may or may not run those right now. That is like my bread and butter. Love that shit.

Troy Dean:8:17
Mm-hmm.

Troy Dean:8:30
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jordan:8:35
But you're kind of flipping the model on its head, right? You are essentially saying, you know, pay me XYZ dollars. I will show you, pull back the curtain and install it on your behalf. And if you want a longer engagement, have, have a growth plan for you. What exactly is that pay discovery looking like for a typical paid ads agency?

Troy Dean:8:36
Mm-hmm.

Troy Dean:8:47
Yeah. Yeah.

Troy Dean:8:56
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the thing, what you have to remember first of all, is that clients come to us with a bunch of symptoms, right? And it's like going to the doctor and saying, Hey, you know, I think I've got, you know, fucking leg cancer and my leg's going to fall off. And the doctor says, how did you figure that out? well I asked Google and then also asked chat GPT and also perplexity told me the same thing. So it must be true. And the doctor rolls up your leg and says, Yeah, you've been bitten by a march fly, like put this cream on, it'll be gone in 24 hours. And so the point is the, the, the, the client has symptoms, but they don't understand the root cause, right? And if we just treat the sim, this is why clients churn by the way, this is why like the average, you know, life expectancy of a agency clients about six months globally, because all you're doing is putting a bandaid on the symptom. You're not actually treating the root cause and how can you treat the root cause because You don't have time to figure that out because a client comes to you with an ad account that's not performing. They want more ROAS. You get in there, they hire you. Then you try and diagnose it. Then you realize that the ad account's not the problem. It's the sales team on the client side that's the problem. No one's following up the leads. You realize that their offer is shit. You realize I've got all these bad reviews. You uncover all this stuff. That means I can't actually do my job here. There's no way I can get you more ROAS because there's all these fundamental structural things broken in your business. that have nothing to do with me. And so paid discovery turns you into a general practitioner. It turns you into a family doctor. It's like, you can't go and see a family doctor for free, right? It's gonna cost you money. Even in countries that have like Medicare, it's still gonna cost you a little bit of money to go and see a family doctor, get a diagnosis, get a prescription. Then it's gonna cost you more money to go to the pharmacy and get the medicine or go to a specialist and get more specialist advice. And so our job as an agency owner is to sit with a client, This is the classic line that I've been saying since 2018 that all of our agencies regurgitate now is your job during a paid discovery session is to be the journalist, not the genius. So you don't need to solve any problems. You don't need to give any advice. All you need to do is collect information in that session, then come back to the studio, put together a plan, which these days with AI is like really fucking easy to put together a world-class roadmap.

Troy Dean:11:15
put together a plan and then go back and present it to the client and say, hey, if we were to work together over the next 12 months, here's everything we would do and here's why. And we're confident that this is the right plan for you to achieve your goals, right? The first three months is definitely gonna look like this. After that, we're not sure cause shit happens and things change, but this is loosely the plan for the next 12 months. First 90 days is locked in. Here you go, it's yours. You've paid for it, you own it. You can go do it yourself. You can shop it around. or you can hire us to do it for you. But at least now everyone is on the same page.

Jordan:11:46
I like that. What do you typically encourage your clients or even yourself to charge for that pay discovery?

Troy Dean:11:52
Yeah, so it's the obvious question. It's a good question. We have seven figure agencies that charge 500 bucks for paid discovery, right? And convert like 95 % of them into an ongoing client. We have Shopify agencies charge seven and a half grand for paid discovery, right? So sucky answer is it depends, my answer is it just shouldn't, you just don't go broke doing paid discovery, right? So if you need like,

Jordan:12:10
Really.

Troy Dean:12:18
I would sell it for enough that your client's got skin in the game that they turn up, they take it seriously, they pay attention, right? And then they do something with the information you give them, but not too much that you're getting pushback from the market. So the sweet spot for most of our agencies seems to be around about the 1500 to three grand mark for a paid discovery session. There's a lot of deliverables on the backend that we help our agencies deliver. So it's not just like a zoom call. There's lots of deliverables that the client gets. And then As I said, you know, they're upgrading at an average of 85 % into a growth plan.

Jordan:12:52
That's interesting. It definitely like a low ticket. I wouldn't even call it low ticket, like low ticket to higher, high ticket to higher ticket.

Troy Dean:12:58
Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan:13:03
to your clients that have incorporated the paid discovery are they running ads to this paid discovery or are they doing outbound because it's cheaper to run outbound

Troy Dean:13:15
Hmm. So tip. So a lot of our, a lot of our agencies have inbound, right? So most of the agencies that we work with will just, you know, by virtue of the fact that they're a little bit more mature, they're a bit more established. When I say mature, I don't mean age. mean, they've just been around a bit longer, right? So they've been in business a bit longer. They've got some content, right? They've got a blog, they've got a presence on social media. They've got a LinkedIn following. They might have a YouTube channel. Some of them have got a podcast. And so they're getting inbound, but if they're running ads.

At the moment, what we're finding working is typically running ads to either a free interactive lead magnet, like a custom GPT or a free kind of diagnostic tool that is personalized. We do fairly well with Score app. So we use Score app to put together our score card, which does pretty well for us. We also have some custom GPTs or just running. And then what happens is when someone opts in for that is doing outbound, picking up the phone, calling them, sending them a text. getting them on the line to see if they know how to use the thing they just opted in for, and then pitching them a paid discovery. So that's one campaign. The other campaign that is working is running ads to a free thing, right? Not a fucking PDF, but like a free interactive tool, and then getting them to book in a call to get the results. So, hey, you've been through the game plan, jump on a quick call, we'll present the findings to you. we'll show you how to use it. And this solves one specific thing. So it might be like a custom GPT that helps them, you know, understand whether or not they should be doing, you know, campaign budget or ad set budget optimization, for example. And then they get on a call, you explain the difference, you explain why they should be doing CBO. And then on that call, you qualify them. If they're a good fit, you then pitch them paid discovery, right? So I don't know many, like the reality is no client wants to pay. for paid discovery. that's why we don't call it paid discovery. We call it a roadmap. What they want and what they will pay for is a plan. Cause that's, cause no one has a plan. Right? He, he's the thing I want people to understand. If your prospects, the people you're talking to in the marketplace, if they had a plan and it was working, they would have no reason to talk to you. Right? So no one's got a fucking plan, man. The reason clients pay us money is not to run our ad, not to run their ad account.

Jordan:15:27
Right?

Troy Dean:15:35
Right. Well, I'm running my ad account now completely from Slack using AI, right? Like you, like you do not, they're not paying you to log in to the beautifully designed, well-engineered Facebook ad manager that Zuckerberg has given us, right? They're paying you to come up with a plan to help them achieve their goals. Everything you do for them along the way is just a vehicle that helps them get closer to the whole. Right. So, and no one's got a fucking plan. So I actually think the most valuable thing you can do for your clients is sell them. and deliver a plan. The problem is they just don't want that on the front end. So, you know, the old marketing speak, you got to, you got to give them what they want in order to sell them what they need. So I wouldn't lead with, Hey, you know, come and pay me 12 and a bucks and I'll give you a plan because that's probably not going to fly.

Jordan:16:13
Yeah.

Jordan:16:20
Right, right. Love all the fucking gems you're dropping, my friend. If you don't mind going into it at a high level, how one would conduct that paid discovery.

Troy Dean:16:31
Yeah, sure. So I mean, this is easy for me because we've got a whole turnkey system for it. And so the first thing you have to understand is there's a match between what you do, the services you offer. So the first thing that we get our agencies to do is map out the services you offer. And then they used to do this the old way before AI, but then just use AI to analyze your client. It's very easy to analyze their website and their social media presence and then work and then have your kind of what we call your signature system loaded up into the AI. So your AI tool knows exactly what you do. They analyze the client and they go, right, here's what the client's missing and here's how you can help them. Here are the questions that we're gonna ask in the paid discovery session. The purpose of the paid discovery session, which as again, we call in our world, it's a digital roadmap. You might call it a search roadmap. You might call it a paid acquisition roadmap. You call it whatever you fuck I'm on a content roadmap. doesn't matter.

The purpose of that session is to get the client to articulate to you where they wanna be in 12 months time, where they are now, and what's in the way. Like why haven't they just done this before, right? What's stopping them? And what else have they tried? So you don't need to come up with any solutions. You just ask lots of questions. We have a slide deck and workbooks that we take them through. And it's typically a couple of hours.

Once we've got all of that information, which we obviously automatically record, we just dump the transcription into our AI and it comes up with, you know, half an hour later, we've got a beautiful roadmap that we can go back and present to the client, which hits every one of their pain points because it's working off the transcript of the call.

Jordan:18:10
That's fucking genius stuff out there, my friend. I can love it. Okay. So after the pay discovery, we have, we move into the, I don't want to call it a sales call, but is that essentially the next step? Or are we attempting to close on that pay discovery?

Troy Dean:18:24
No. So the pay, so the paid discovery is we just collect the data. We deliberately then leave at least 48 hours before we go back and present what we call our recommendations. Right. And so, and the reason we do that is because, you know, if you think about trust, which if you're a business owner, like your only job is to bring strangers into your world and convert them into clients and that's trust. so the way that trust is built is through consistency of behavior. Right.

So, you if you go out with the same group of friends every weekend and everyone has a great time and everyone behaves in a certain way, and then all of a sudden one of your best friends is just like getting absolutely slaughtered on the weekend and like completely punishing himself and passing out. You're like, dude, what the fuck's going on? Like something must be up because you're behaving inconsistently with what I expect from you, right? And so the reason we leave gaps between touch points in the pay discovery process is to just keep building that trust. It's an opportunity. for us to turn up, show up, add value. And by the end of a seven to 10 day period from like selling the paid discovery, running it, going back, you know, making the recommendations, the client, we own the mind share, right? They're waking up in the middle of the night, I can't wait to get my recommendations. And they're thinking about your brand and they're thinking about the conversations you've had. And so then the recommendation session is literally, here's everything we would do. It's yours, you own this, right? Once you answer all their questions, That the great clothes that I like, I learned this from Christian Mickelson about 150 years ago, is the consultative clothes, which is like, Hey, does this seem like a good plan? And of course the client's going to say yes, because most of it is their ideas, right? And there's no surprises in what you've recommended. And when they say, yeah, this is a great plan. You say, awesome. Would you like our help implementing it? Right. Well, if they say no, go, okay, I've been paid for my time. There's the plan. Fuck off ski.

Jordan:20:22
Right.

Troy Dean:20:22
See you later. All the best, right? If you want our help, here's how it works. Right? This is what we charge. This is what we're to do for the first three months. At the end of three months, you can walk away. We tear up the contract. If you continue after three months, it's a 12 month engagement, right? Because you've just laid out a 12 month plan in front of them. So of course it's a 12 month engagement because otherwise we wouldn't bother putting together a 12 month plan.

Jordan:20:42
Right. And that was my follow up question is do you, um, is the initial plan 12 months or through and through, or is it sounds like it's three months? See, I see our successes after 90 days and then 12 months.

Troy Dean:20:53
depends on how much trust is in the relationship. So I put together a 12 month plan. And if there's not enough trust in the relationship, you can say, look, why don't we dance for three months? We'll blow you away. And then it's a 12 month engagement after that. And here's why it's a 12 month engagement, right? If you keep electing me for three months at a time, I'm forever going to be pulling a rabbit out of the hat to impress you enough to get the next three months. And in that case, I can't do any real transformational work in your business. Cause that shit takes time. So if you're not willing to commit for 12 months, Neither am I like if, if committing for 12 months after the first three months, if that freaks you out now, I'd rather not start work. I'd rather just go and find someone else, you know?

Jordan:21:33
think it's the courage to say no that makes everything so impressive.

Troy Dean:21:36
Yeah. Well, as I said in the green room, dude, I'm 52. So I just couldn't give a fuck anymore. You know what I mean? And I think, I'll say that, I say that respectfully, but it comes with age, right? Like I'm literally running out of life to waste any of my time with tie kickers who aren't fucking serious about growing their business. I just don't have time anymore. I'm literally in the back half or maybe even the back third of my life. Right. So like, I just don't fucking care anymore, you know, and also I I back myself, I'll figure it out, whatever happens, it's all good. I've been here before, I'll do it again. I don't need, I'm not desperate. I don't need the client. Right. And so, you know, if you, if you have that frame that you don't need it, you're way more likely to win it. And I'll give you a book. If you haven't, if anyone listened, this hasn't read Pitch Anything by Oren Claff, just go and read that book. It will completely change the way you approach sales and negotiation.

Jordan:22:28
Love the energy, Seriously, genuinely love the energy in them. Absolutely. Now switching over to how you run and conduct your own business. I find it to be extremely difficult to scale up account managers. How do you do it so successfully?

Troy Dean:22:31
Thanks dude.

Troy Dean:22:45
It's a fucking pain in the ass, man. It's a massive pain in the ass. Right. And so, so the first thing we do, and you know, it's peaks and troughs. Like we go through periods where we're growing and then we plateau and then we contract and then we grow again. And the first thing is like, you have to understand, uh, you know, the reason I think account managers churn is because they burn out. And I think that's because agents owners give them too many clients. So we have a cap of 30 to 35 clients.

So if an account manager is looking after, you know, 26 to 30 clients, we're like, all right, we're to need to hire another CSM pretty quickly. We call them client success managers, but also we use like most of, like most of what we do is productized. And when I say productized, it's templated. So yes, it's custom for every client, but I don't need to rein, like no one's reinventing a spreadsheet for a new client that walks in the door. Cause it's all templated.

And also a lot of it's now driven by AI. So if you need a job scorecard, one of my CSMs not sitting down and writing out a job scorecard for a project manager, they're just pulling a template up, spending 30 seconds tweaking it in AI and then handing it over to the client. So we also have some dashboards built out, which make it easier for our CSMs to manage the progress of where our clients are. And the reality is that our clients are too busy to abuse the relationship with the CSM, right?

If you're dealing with, I think if you're dealing with clients who are desperate for results, they're going to be high maintenance. And that's one thing that can burn out CSMs or account managers. If you're dealing with established business owners who, who, know, aren't that, don't, you know, like they're not, they're not going to go broke if your campaign doesn't work next week, then that eases the pressure a little bit. And so I think, you know, I don't know if I've answered your question, but there's sort of some of the key and also just hiring, just

Jordan:24:14
Yeah.

Troy Dean:24:36
having a good recruitment process. So we have a very, very detailed particular recruitment process that we go through. People have to go through three interviews before they come on board. They spend two weeks just shadowing someone else before we let them loose. And so it's a very detailed process and we're very intentional about who we bring on and try and put systems in place to make sure they don't burn out. Because if they burn out, they'll leave.

Jordan:24:59
Right. From what I gather, great recruitment process. So hire slow, I guess fire quickly. Everything is templated in a good way, in a healthy way, right? Why reinvent the wheel when you don't have to reinvent the wheel? You know what I mean? And then most important thing, don't overwork your account manager. So 30, 35 max, you're good to go. Yeah, there's some companies, they have like 50, 55 clients in their management. I'm like, dude, how the fuck do you breathe? Like that shit sounds like a lot of fucking work, you know?

Troy Dean:25:07
Mm-hmm.

Troy Dean:25:14
Yeah, yeah.

Troy Dean:25:19
Yeah. Yep.

Troy Dean:25:27
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Well, I mean, you know, I'm, won't name any names, but I've hired, mean, dude, I've been doing this a long time, as I said, and like most of the gurus that you see in your feed, I've been in their masterminds. I've been coached by them or I've hired them to run shit for me. Right. Like the biggest names that you can imagine who sprout all the shit that they sprout in their reels. And, you know, I've learned a few things over the years is don't believe everything you read. fact, believe nothing.

Jordan:25:32
Yeah.

Troy Dean:25:55
Right. Until you actually get in the trenches and work with someone because, know, it's a classic saying that you don't know anyone until you divorce them. Well, you know, you don't know whether anything is bullshit until you actually hire someone and start working with them. And so some of these companies that I've hired in the past to help us grow over the last, I don't know, we've been, we, launched the kind of the coaching thing in 2018. So I've been doing this for six and a half years. some of those guys.

We'll have account managers that have 50 or 60 clients and they turn, you turn up every month and you've got a new account manager or maybe every two months you've got a new account manager. it's like, fuck, it's just a horrible client experience. so, yeah, so we have most of our, you know, we have SEO agencies that run a 20 to 25 client limit and they'll incentivize their account managers to run a certain kind of book of revenue a month and anything over that, the account managers get a bonus. So, you know, there's structural things. And also I think,

Jordan:26:31
Right.

Troy Dean:26:49
Just having a really good culture in the company. having, like we get, give everyone an abundance day. Once a month, everyone gets a paid day off, right? To go and do whatever the fuck they want. Like go and volunteer at a charity, spend time with your kids, go and sit in a hot tub all day. I don't care. Just take a day off on me just to reset your nervous system and do something good for yourself. So try and do things like that to, you know, and we're fairly low-churn. People come here and they tend to stay for a long time.

Jordan:27:09
Thanks.

Jordan:27:15
I imagine why. Good on you though for giving that payday off. That's super fucking cool. How frequently do you meet with your team? like keeping your thumb on the pulse of the company. What does that look like for you?

Troy Dean:27:17
Yeah.

Troy Dean:27:27
It's as little as fucking possible, right? Like, I, like, I, like, I hate meetings. Right. Like I, I, and, and, and when I do meet with people, I'm on the phone and I'm generally walking, right. I'll just like, if you, yeah, apart from doing this shit, apart from like doing podcasts and stuff, if you sit me down and put me in front of a computer, my brain just goes to sleep. I'm just like, I just can't think. Right. I've got to be moving and doing something. So, we typically talk to each other, you know, daily in Slack.

I will, I mean, I can't remember the last time I was on a call with my whole team. We've got one tomorrow because I'm doing a handover of some of the new done for you services that we've built. So we have got a team meeting tomorrow, but it's, mean, I just fucking hate meetings, man. And I also, when I do, when there is a meeting scheduled, I'll always turn up 15 minutes late. Cause I know the first 15 minutes is just fluff. We're just like, everyone's just saying, hi, how you doing? And I'm like, that's great. But I can get some shit done in that 15 minutes and I don't need to do that. So I'll just drop in like.

What is, what, what does everyone need by the end of this meeting? Like I don't meet without an agenda. Like there has to be an agenda. We have to know the purpose of the meeting. Otherwise we're just hanging out, which is also fine. If you want to just hang out have a working session, let's just open zoom and let's just hang out with each other and have a working session, but let's not call it a fucking meeting. Right. Because, and if I need to disappear for half an hour, I will, and I'll come back and I'll leave zoom open and that's cool. but my team know they can ask me anything anytime. So I don't need to have a meeting.

Jordan:28:42
Right.

Troy Dean:28:51
to get people unstuck, they could just ping me in Slack if they've got any questions.

Jordan:28:55
Okay, Switching gears here. You run a fuck ton of ads. Talk to us about your media buying strategy if you're open to sharing.

Troy Dean:29:04
Sure. So which it's changing big time, man. Like, um, you know, there was a, there was a time where we were running ads straight to a book of call funnel. And, you know, like some months you would book calls for $250, $300 qualified call might be 700. You might close at 30%. So it's costing you two grand to onboard a $10,000 client. Right. there's still not fucking great margins, be honest, because what a lot of people realize, lot of people go, it's only cost me two grand at a $10,000 client. I'm like, yeah, but what's your cost of delivery? Right. Like what's your commission to the close? You just paid the close of 15%. So now you've spent three and a half to get a $10,000 client and it's going to cost you five to deliver it. So you're down to 1500 net that's 15%. That's not great margin. Right. So, and then, and then sometimes it'll cost you 800 to get a booked call and that's not even qualified. So.

Jordan:29:38
Right.

Troy Dean:29:59
I think the book of call funnel is, changing. think like the end of the day, the reality is I don't want to get on a fucking call. Right. Do you know what mean? I don't like, will, I'll click. I click on people's ads all the time. I go in, I book a call. I then email them and go, listen, I live in Australia. I have two young kids. I'm 52. I don't give a fuck about getting on a call. Just send me a doc and tell me what it is you got.

I'm ready to buy. the pricing makes sense, I'm in, right? Don't, but we have to get it a call. Well, you're lost dude. Cause I'm not getting on a fucking call. I don't have time. Right? If I go to your calendar, it's going to be four o'clock in the fucking morning when you want me to get on a call. I don't care who you are. You're not that important. My sleep is more important. You know, I young kids that keep me awake. So we don't need to get on a call. And so what we're finding now is our, our media buying, we're, this is an experiment, but our media buying strategy now is going to be more about reach and engage, well more about reach and views and then retargeting people to a carousel. The carousel will get people or a video will get people into a custom GPT or a custom kind of personalized lead magnet of some sort. And then we just want the lead. We just want the information. They'll have to go through a qualification process to get the free thing. So we know if they're an established agency owner or if they're, you know, driving for Uber, which again, all respect, there's a lot of people out there doing that, but that's just not our ICP. So. once they're qualified and they've got access to the free shit, then, we have some AI that, you know, get some on a call or we'll just do some outbound and text them and email them and see if they're a good fit. are moving towards a model where we will be completely without sales calls and it will just be a doc. here it is. This is what we've got. Go here. All your questions are answered. Click the button and buy. We onboard 12 clients a month. Once we're full, we're full.

You know, if it's not you, that's fine. We'll see you next month. Right. And so, cause I just, I live in Australia. The sales team is going to be all over the world. I'm not getting up at four o'clock in the morning to have a morning meeting with them. Right. Like that's just not happening. So in order to make that switch, it's going to take us a while because you just have to dial up your content, right? Your content has to be really good to create the demand to then send people to a doc. That's, that's the only door you can walk through to work with us. Right.

Troy Dean:32:22
And as I said, our ideal client doesn't want to get on a call because they don't have time. They're busy running an established agency with staff, with clients. They know they need help, but they haven't got time to sit on a fucking hour long sales call to have someone ask them, and how do you feel as a dad that your recurring revenue is only 10 grand a month? Do you think you'll feel better as a husband if we grow your recurring revenue? That's patronizing bullshit that we've all been taught to do, right? Like, just stop doing that, right? Like, what's your problem? Here's a solution. Here's how much it costs.

Buy it or not, I'm good either way, you know what I mean?

Jordan:32:53
I fucking love what you're saying. So whatever I ran BSL funnels in the past, I front loaded all of the information that the buyer would probably fucking want to know in between them booking the demo and the actual live sales consultation. cannot tell you how many times in the first five minutes like Jordan, I consumed all of your content. Let's rock. In the first five minutes to fucking lay down easy. I'm a fucking cashier at that point, dude. I show up to the call. They give me all their money. I'm fucking happy. But other business owners don't want to create that much content.

Troy Dean:33:16
Yeah, 100%.

Jordan:33:22
They don't want to create those, I don't know, pre-selling assets, one might say, in between the two phases that I just mentioned. You and I, very similar. I prefer not to hop on a sales call every fucking day in my life, but there's some people out there that need to see what the human being in order to drop a 10K investment.

Troy Dean:33:23
Yeah, yeah.

Troy Dean:33:29
Yeah. Yeah.

Troy Dean:33:39
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. Well, yeah. So, but what you want is you want that sales call to be about logistics and just answering their final questions, right? You don't want to get on a sales call and explain to people what you do and how you work. mean, dude, we have people booking our calendar, right? We had a prospect booking our calendar the other day. She sells fucking candles for a living. I'm like, like,

Jordan:33:43
Maybe not the ICP you're going after, but just, well, I guess it doesn't matter.

Troy Dean:34:08
What the fuck? How, like, do you not speak English? Did you not read the thing? Like we coach digital agencies and she sells fucking candles. It's like, you know, we have recruitment agencies, we have real estate agencies turn up because they can't read the word digital before the word agency. It's like, so, you know, I agree a hundred percent. The sales call should just be about, okay, you know what we do. You've seen the social proof. I don't have to convince you of anything. All I have to do is.

Jordan:34:12
I'm sorry.

Troy Dean:34:38
Let you know that, you know, we have this great saying when you get on a sales call and someone's like, well, listen, man, you know, I live in Ireland and I just want to make sure that this is going to work in Ireland. And our response is, shit, man, I'm sorry. You know, it turns out this works everywhere in the world except Ireland for some fucking reason. It just doesn't work in Ireland. Of course it fucking works in Ireland, you idiot. Just get on board, right? Like everyone's got some hang up. It's all, just not going to work for me because I wear funny glasses and have a mohawk and I'm 52. you're right, dude. It just doesn't work for you. Right. Off you go. So.

Everyone's got that last little question that they need answered and that should be a 15 minute call, right? Which card you want to use? Yeah, you're in that time zone. Your client success manager is going to be Emmy or Yasi. You know, it's on Tuesdays. Yeah, the calls are in Zoom. That's all good. We can sort that out. Let's go. You know, I shouldn't need to explain what we do on a sales.

Jordan:35:27
I completely agree. On that specific objection or question that they ask, do you think it is a lack of trust in the program or a lack of trust in themselves to succeed?

Troy Dean:35:41
100 it's a lack of, 100 % it's a lack of trust in themselves. Right. And so again, this is what I do. Sales calls anymore. And maybe I should, because you know, my, my answer to that is, well, dude, you know, if you don't think this is going to work because of the problem exists between the keyboard and the chair, then you're probably right. It's not going to work. If you're going into this with the mindset that it's probably not going to work because of you, then it's not going to work. Right. Like as Yoda said, man,

Jordan:35:47
Yeah.

Troy Dean:36:10
the, you know, trial, don't try like just fucking do it. Like don't try, just do it and learn and get better and iterate. Right. And just be 1 % better than yesterday. But if you have some self-limiting beliefs that this isn't going to work because you're an idiot, you need to go to therapy and have that shit sorted out and then get on board. Right. Because we have enough social proof to sink the fucking Titanic again. Right. So what is the problem? The problem is not with us. The problem is with you and this happens. And so, you know, you spend a fair bit of time. not just as a coach, but as an agency owner, as any kind of consultant selling a service, you spend a fair bit of time playing therapist to your client, right? Like helping them shift their own self-limiting beliefs so that they don't get in the fucking way, right? Because the problem most of the time is the client gets in the way and just doesn't do the thing that you tell them to.

Jordan:36:57
Isn't that so interesting? Like it's nothing to do with us 100 % everything to do with them. We have to literally walk them through act like a freaking live therapist on the call to get them over the edge. But from my experience, there are let's just keep it simple. There's two types of individuals. Okay, Troy, there are individuals who will go through a program and will fucking figure out a way to win. They will take all the information, extract the information and fucking win. There's other people it's like, dude,

Troy Dean:37:06
huh. huh. huh. Yep.

Troy Dean:37:20
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yep.

Jordan:37:26
There's a fucking obstacle in the way. can't figure it out. The fucking courses in English and I don't, barely understand English. I can't figure it out, dude. Don't make every excuse to the book not to fucking win. And it's like, God, like that's why your business sucks, dude. No offense. That's why you suck.

Troy Dean:37:32
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Exactly. That's right. And so, you know what I love? I love when clients come back to me and say, Hey, you know, so we've been doing paid discovery, but we tweaked it and we augmented it and we improved it and we did all this shit and it's working really well and check out the results. I'm like, okay, these are the kinds of clients we want, right? Someone who takes it and improves on it and embellishes it and makes it better for their situation. We don't want people to come at us and go, well, I tried to sell Pay Discovery once and it didn't work. You know, I love it when people say, I've tried Facebook ads and they don't work. Right. Okay. So one of the most profitable companies on the planet and their entire business model is advertising and you're telling me that their ads don't work. So is the problem with the ads or is the problem with you or that you tried it once and it didn't work. Right. So of course it didn't work the first time you try it because the first time you try anything, you shit at it. That's how you learn.

Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. you know, we try and avoid, I mean, we're trying to do more and more like calling that out in the pre-sales content, as you mentioned before is, know, once they opt in, they book in the calendar. It's like, Hey, you need to watch this. You know, one of the challenges that we're having at the moment is we're finding that people just don't even watch the pre-sale video. Right? So we're having it transcribed and we're like, please read this email before you get on a call. Cause if you haven't read this email before you get on a call.

And we get on the call and we ask you a question and you haven't read the email, we're going to fucking cancel the call. Right. Because we're just, otherwise we're just wasting everyone's time, which again, why I want to go move to a model where there is no sales call. It's just everything is here in a doc. Yes, it's a long doc because we answer every question that you might have. If you read the doc, all of your questions will be answered and then you can decide whether or not you want to move forward. Right. And I know people that have, I know people that sell by, by doc already, and they'll tell me like, their customers will have the dock open for like six weeks in there and they're too scared to close the browser tab in case that dock goes away. And they come back six weeks later and eventually join the thing because they've had to convince themselves that they can do it.

Jordan:39:44
That's interesting. If you don't mind me asking, who does the doc? You don't have a show.

Troy Dean:39:48
So there's a couple of, there's a couple of guys in New Zealand. James Kemp is a guy that actually teaches this. So it's James Kemp in New Zealand does this thing called the sovereign consultant. Taki Moore also does the, sells by doc. think Dan Bolton also sells by doc. If you, in fact, if you Google, if you Google loom and offer doc, you'll find a whole bunch of dudes selling this like course on how to put together an offer doc and use a loom video to, to sell it. And again, like, Don't believe anything you read, try it yourself and actually learn. But the call then becomes about, you've read the doc, I don't have to explain any of that shit, you've just got a couple of questions that might pertain to your unique situation, happy to answer those questions, it should be a 10 minute call about logistics and then we can get started.

Jordan:40:38
There's just certain, yes, life is so much easier when people consume the fucking doc and consume the video. But the problem that I also have is motherfuckers don't fucking watch the video. They don't consume the doc and they just save all of that for the live call. Not only are you wasting my time, you're wasting your own goddamn time, Because we could have already saved this fucking bullshit earlier. How do you combat that?

Troy Dean:40:44
Yeah. Yeah.

Troy Dean:40:50
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Troy Dean:40:58
That's right. Yeah, yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's for me, it's content. It's like, so we're, know, and you don't like, you don't need to go viral. You don't need a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube and a fancy fucking plaque behind you on the wall. All you need to do is, know, what you would say on a sales call, just share all that content in your YouTube videos and your podcasts and your reels, right. And just share it out there. So like the, our best clients, when they turn up on a call with us, They're quoting our podcast back to us, right? So they're going, man, I've been watching all your videos and listening to podcasts about paid discovery and we really want to do it. We just don't know how. And so, you know, we need help. I'm like, this is a layout, dude. This is the easiest sales call ever. And so for me, everything comes back to content. All roads lead to content, right? If you're just like, you can solve most problems in your business by just hitting the publish button, right? And so, and the reason I love video,

Jordan:41:53
Hahaha

Troy Dean:41:56
is because you make a video out of this video now, which I'm actually recording locally, right? I'm just recording my bit locally. We'll get a bunch of reels. We'll get umpteen hundred blog posts. We'll get enough social content the last, next six months, right? Because I'm just teaching and sharing what I know is to be true and what I know works. And so if you can just capture that information in video, you've then got video, you've then got audio, you've then got text, you've got transcripts. you know, AI will put together the creative in the images. You've also then got an ad campaign, right? It's the highest leverage thing you can do. you know, love it when people go, I don't want to make a video because I'm self-conscious. You're already on Zoom and Fathom's already fucking recording it. So stop bitching about you don't want to make video. You're already making video, dude. You're just not publishing them, right? So just take the videos, publish them, get out of your own way, realize, you know, I'm a 52 year old man with nail polish and multicolored glasses and a mohawk, right?

Jordan:42:43
That's fine.

Troy Dean:42:53
No one gives a fuck. No one's going to pay attention to you. So don't worry about it. Just hit the publish button.

Jordan:43:00
I love it, Troy. I fucking love it. I wish we had more time. Let me ask this one question. Your philosophy for scaling up paid ads, like how many hooks do you create? What is the body? How many bodies do you create called to actions? What is the diversity there?

Troy Dean:43:14
Yeah. So at the moment, what's working is like one call to action. So post Andromeda, the kind of thing that's working at the moment is like one campaign, one ad set, one copy, like one ad written ad, like one call to action, same URL, same UTM parameters, same everything. The only thing that changes is the creative. Right. And if you're spending, say, if you're starting out with like a hundred bucks a day test, my kind of rule is like.

10 bucks per creative. if I'm spending a hundred bucks a day to test the campaign, I'll have 10 creative. Now the creative has to be really fucking different. So you might have a, you know, we shoot all the videos we shoot, we shoot in three formats, horizontal, square and vertical. Right. And so we'll have like a vertical video. We'll have a bunch of static images. We'll have screenshots of a tweet that aren't actually a tweet, but they look like a tweet. We'll have quote cards. We'll have just images of me at live events, shaking hands with customers and kissing the baby. We'll have B-roll. We'll have you know, just a whole bunch of different formats and what you're looking for, but, but we've got one angle, right? To begin with, we've got one angle and multiple creative. And what you're looking for is you're looking for the format of the creative that takes off, right? The other way you can do this is you can test same creative. So let's just say static images, but a whole bunch of different angles. And you're looking for the angle that people respond to. Now let's say you find the angle that people respond to. but all your creatives the same format, then what you do is you dig into that campaign and you create a whole bunch of different creative formats around that one angle, right? Same, you're testing creative and you find a creative format that's working, then you create similar creative format around different angles. And then it's just constantly rinsing and repeating with more creative. You need way more creative than you think to find what works and then it will work for two or three weeks and then you need to refresh your creative.

Jordan:45:10
Ain't that the fucking truth, huh? Troy, it was a pleasure having you on the show, man. I had fucking tons of fun. I was laughing my ass off the whole fucking time. Just want to say thank you again,

Troy Dean:45:21
Well, thanks for having me, Jordan. I appreciate you, man. And you should keep doing this because you're good. This just feels like a conversation, which is the way it should feel. So congratulations, man. Well done.

Jordan:45:30
Thank you. Last thing, where can they find you?

Troy Dean:45:33
yeah, agency mavericks.com, Troy at agency mavericks is my email. Hit me up on LinkedIn. yeah. Keep in touch any, any of those ways.

Jordan:45:41
Awesome audience. Till next time.