Scaling Was Impossible Until I Learned This

0:00 We're going to talk about why your business caps out, plateaus, doesn't make as much money as you want it to, as fast as you want it to. And this is going to be relevant for agency owners, B2B offer owners, info or coaching, or literally any digital service in any capacity. If you don't know anything about this, you should just go to my channel and honestly watch like 15 to 20 of the videos. But my name is Daniel Fazio. I run two companies, Client Ascension and List. List Client Ascension is a coaching/ consulting company. Right now, as I'm filming this, we do anywhere from 1.2 to $1.4 $4 million per month. Hopefully, we can get it up higher sooner. And here's what we're going to cover inside of this video. One is visualizing contingency systems. Two, what stalling actually is. And three, hiring and automation. Okay, so let's starts with contingency systems. So, in one of my previous videos, I talked about how the

0:46 fulfillment of an agency or some kind of digital services company, it kind of looks like a manufacturing facility. Now, let me visualize this again for you. So in your fulfillment you have step number one and then you have step number two and then you have step number three then four then five and what happens is that all these steps are contingent upon the previous one. So the completion of step two is contingent upon the completion of step one and step three is contingent upon step two such as also the nature of four and five. The input for each sequential next box is contingent upon the completion of the previous box. That's what the input of it is. So just to give you an actual concrete example to make sure you understand this, I'll just use a cold email lead generation agency as an example. So step one would be getting and registering the domains and then you

1:32 would need to spin up the inboxes under those domains. Then you would need to get lead lists built. Then you need to write scripts. Then you would need to send the emails and then this would have more. Then you would have inbox management. So in order for inbox management to occur, leads list must be generated via the sending of emails in the first place. So step six is contingent upon the completion of step five. And in order for emails to be sent, scripts must have been loaded up into the sending campaign. So step five is contingent upon the completion of step four. And in order for scripts to be written to be sent to leads, lead lists have to have been generated. You get the point. Like in order to proceed to the next step, the input of that step is contingent upon the completion of the previous step. So this does not just apply to fulfillment. This applies to every single aspect of your business no matter what. Like for instance, it also applies to marketing. Like let me give you one example. I'm making a YouTube

2:18 video right now which generates me traffic and a lot of you guys go end up joining my AI assisted agency program or Olympia. Let me show you what this YouTube system looks like. It's one. So first step is generating outline of a video which then becomes the filming of the video which then is editing which then leads to posting and all of these are contingent upon the previous step. It's sequential. It can be systematized. SOPs can be generated around this. Then for instance sales calls themselves have a series of contingency system. You need the actual calendar booking then you have the pre-all stuff that occurs then you have the actual call then you can have proposals or just giving them an offer on the phone and then there's onboarding. Again these are all contingency systems which also means that all of these subsections of your business are contingent upon themselves.

3:06 So now for instance we have marketing itself. So the generation of leads and traffic in the first place leads to the activity of sales being able to be conducted at all which then allows for the fulfillment systems to be conducted at all. All of these again are contingent upon one another. So you have to imagine that marketing is comprised among its own contingency systems and then sales is comprised of its own contingency systems. And then we take fulfillment over here and bring it all the way up that is comprised of its own contingency systems. It's a system of systems. Everything is systematic. It all plays into each other. Now, let's talk about what stalling actually is. So, like your business is capped out. Like, you can't sign more clients. You literally don't even know why can't you make more money? Why can't the thing grow anymore? Like, we're going to talk about why this is. So, one of the things

3:51 we talked about on one of my previous videos is the skills that you would need to grow an agency or any form of a digital services business at all. So, these are the four skills I spoke about. One is lead genen, which is this the same as marketing in this context. Two is sales. Three is fulfillment/client management. And four is hiring. If you can master these skills, the probability that you make a substantial amount of money increases dramatically. Hiring is the ability to create orchestration. I'm actually going to put hiring/automation here. So hiring/automation is the ability to create what I call orchestration around each of these. So if we go back up to these, you have your sales system here, you have your marketing system here, you have your fulfillment system over here. It's all a series of contingency systems. What orchestration is is your ability to deploy humans or automation to ensure

4:40 maximum high volume throughput of each of those orchestration systems and the business orchestration itself. So like this is the orchestration of the business and then these are the orchestrations of the subsections of the business. This is fulfillment right here. This is marketing right here. This is sales right here. Again those are all contingent upon one another. Orchestration is your ability to create systematic production among each of these subsections of the business via either hiring and managing humans to conduct the activities inside of those systems or employing automation to the highest degree that is reasonable. So what it literally means is like let me just take some random contingency system right here. It doesn't matter what this is associated with. All we know is that this is just some system in your business. It could be marketing. It could be sales. It can be filament. It doesn't matter. There's something going

5:25 on here. What is your business stalling? It's any system whether it's sales, marketing, fulfillment, it doesn't matter. There's inside of one of these contingency systems, there is a blockage. Something is being blocked. The throughput of these two, as an example, is not a high enough volume to warrant growth to occur. What are all of the reasons that a business could possibly stall? You're saying to me, Daniel, my business is stalling. It's not making as much money as it can. Like, what does that like mathematically mean? how like what are you saying? And the answer is either in your fulfillment you can't fulfill enough clients therefore like there's some block in the fulfillment system or inside of your sales you're getting a bunch of sales calls but you can't close them for some reason. Again that would be there's a block in the system or second you're

6:12 trying to get more leads but you can't generate more leads which means there's a block in the system. That's what stalling is. There's just some block somewhere in one of your contingency systems. What that means is that once there's a block at any singular point in the entirety of the business anywhere, imagine all of your business and like how many boxes there could be across Legion of Marketing, Sales, and Fulfillment. There could legitimately be like 50 plus different boxes, each of which are contingent upon the completion of the previous box. If there's a block in any one of them, the whole system stalls. Imagine you're driving a car or like a wagon or something and like the wheel is comprised. It has the little like spoke [ __ ] thing. Let me just draw it. So you have a wheel in the center and then there's like little supporting [ __ ] column beam fuckeries right here like that. And then what you

6:58 do is you put a stick inside of one. You just put a [ __ ] stick in it and then across to the other wheel. It just blocks the wheel. Your system has been blocked. That's what stalling is. And you have to identify what exactly is the box in one of my contingency systems that is blocked right now. And if you just solve that right there via either hiring or automation, then you can solve your business problem and you can continue to grow. It's really that simple. Generally, how does a business fail? And it's for one of two reasons. Failing to create systems, like for instance, if you have a fulfillment system to fulfill for clients, your business will fail if you don't figure out how to systematize it. If you don't make a system around it where it's very simple and easy to understand, your business is going to fail. Such as also the nature of marketing. Such as also the nature of sales. If your client

7:44 acquisition system is you just flailing around doing random [ __ ] all the time trying to figure out how to get clients off the whim, you're never going to grow your business. It needs to be a concrete system that is continuously executed. Which brings me to number two, which is failing to create orchestration around the system. Let's say for instance, you join one of my programs or some [ __ ] like that. Like we teach people how to get clients all sorts of different ways. content and all the subsections of content, outreach, all the different ways that you can do outreach, and then ads and all the different ways that you can do ads. Now, let's say you're starting out, you're below 10K a month or something like that, and we're recommending that you do outreach. Okay, so we give you all of our outreach systems. That's effectively us saying, "Hey, here's the contingency system. Here's all the boxes. Okay, you joined in and we're telling you to do dream 100 outreach." We give you all the

8:30 boxes and how to do that. We give you tutorials and guides on how to do every single section of this. So it's like here's how you do and step one of the process is you do this and step two is you do this and step three is you do this then four is this and then five is this and we give you tutorials of the whole thing. So we provided you a system. Now where is the activity of you taking responsibility of your business and ensuring it actually like conducts itself. It's over here number two it's creating orchestration around the system like I can't work your business for you. So like you need to use labor which is either you or other people or automation which can be AI and you can use AI but AI can't do 100% of stuff. You use labor and automation. If you determine that box one over here has to be labor. This one can be AI. This one can be labor. This one can be AI and then this one can

9:15 be labor. You were able to cut out a pretty substantial portion of replacing box two and box four with AI instead of labor. But now you do step one. You get AI to do step two. You do this for a week and then you decide over here in step I don't like doing step three. I don't want to do it anymore. And you stop doing it. What does that mean? It means that the whole [ __ ] business falls apart. The entire thing crumbles to ash. All of it. The sales step crumbles to ash. The fulfillment system crumbles to ash. Everything is just completely annihilated because you decided that you just want to stop doing step three because it's a contingency system. And in order for step four to occur, step three must occur first. You get what I mean by this? Now, the proper thing to do is to ask the question, can I replace step three with AI or automation? And that answer may be no. It could be yes. If it is yes, you should do it. But the answer may be no. And then if you don't want to personally be doing step three all the time, then

10:00 what you need to do is go hire somebody to conduct step three. That is orchestration. You must orchestrate the system. That is making sure it gets done. That's what consistency is. It's you have a system that works to some degree. It may work amazing. It may work like to a mediocre degree, but if it's working, if it spits out more money, if it's more efficient than what it cost, then you should continue to do it. And if you fail to keep that system running, it literally means that you just start not making money. It's that simple. It's never been more complicated than this. Therefore, like what you need to learn how to do is how to hire people and how to automate everything you can. Let's talk about both of these. Hiring and automation. We'll talk about hiring first. And there's two types of people you can hire. So, one is just a task doer. They just do the task. They're

10:47 kind of a mechanical person. Like, I'm not saying this in like a dickish way. It's just all they're capable of doing. That's just one type of person. And then you have people with what's called agency. The word agency. So what does this mean? They have the trait of what I also like to call figure it the [ __ ] out ability. What does that mean? It means that they're able to just figure things out. For instance, say somebody who's building a framer landing page using web flow or some stuff like that. You want a button to make like a popup come up with some like animation that's in the pop-up and like a countdown timer in the popup and this thing that and you want a timer in here that automatically counts down to this time and then once the timer runs out, it's going to redirect the page to this page over here, but you don't know how to do that. Like you personally don't know how to do that. So if you were to give this to person over here number one, and you didn't tell them how to do that, they wouldn't know

11:33 how to do that because they don't have the trait of agency or figure it the [ __ ] out ability. They don't know how to figure things out independently. Like they literally lack the ability to figure things out themselves. They lack any form of investigative ability to do anything. They can only do what is specifically instructed to them. Almost like a [ __ ] computer. They literally don't have a brain. And then over here, this person, if you told them to do that, they would just figure it out. They'd go on Google. They go on YouTube. They'd ask AI. They would play with it. They would just figure it out. That's generally the kind of people you want to work for you. Now, there's a saying from Bill Gates where he says, "If I want something done, I'm gonna ask the laziest person to do it." And like, that's what he's referring to. He doesn't actually mean people who are lazy. He means somebody who has figure it the [ __ ] out ability. That's what he

12:20 means. He means that somebody who has figure it the [ __ ] out ability and also is lazy cuz they're going to figure out how to automate the [ __ ] that can be automated. Again, they're a good orchestrator. This person is a good orchestrator. They can figure out how to create systems via either through automation or hiring to make it so that there is less manual labor involved. That's what figure it the [ __ ] out ability is. They just know how to figure things out without precise instruction. That's it. When you're hiring people, you want to hire for the ability of what you need done. Let's say for instance that you run a content agency where you do editing, you do scripting and editing for client videos like YouTube videos and whatnot. In your contingency system for fulfillment, you might have one over here might be like ideiation and then

13:06 you probably have scripts over here and then over here you have editing and over here you have thumbnails. You get the point. It's another ideation thing. It's another contingency system. Over here what you're trying to hire for right now at this particular moment is editing over here. What you want to do in an application is test people for their ability to edit. Now, there's certain things like what your application would have is an editing test because you're not trying to hire this person. Like, this is not the kind of person who would have to be somebody with figure it the [ __ ] out ability because they need the skill of editing. So, it makes sense that in your application you would just give them some kind of like 20 to 40 second raw snippet of video and tell them to edit this and tell them like edit this for maximum retention or something like that or edit this in a style that you would see like this person and they just go [ __ ] do it. That's like what the application would

13:51 be. However, if you were hiring somebody who was like a manager of all of these people and this manager is in charge of one, client communication, two hiring the people in the pod, and then three, performance of the videos delivered to the clients. That's the kind of person who you'd want to have agency or figure it the [ __ ] out ability because these activities are not easily put into boxes. They're the orchestrator of boxes. People who have agency or figure the [ __ ] out ability, they're just high IQ people. They generally know that they're valuable. They generally know that they're not [ __ ] They therefore cost more money. They're worth more money. So, you can't put people with agency or figure it the [ __ ] out ability into little boxes like that. You can't do that. You have to put them into a role where it makes sense for them to actually conduct orchestration at all.

14:38 If someone's just writing scripts or just doing editing, that's the only thing that they're involved in at all, they're not conducting orchestration. If you find someone with agency or figure the [ __ ] out of building, you have to put them in a position that conducts orchestration because they can and they cost more. You need to get more out of them. You need to use more of the leverage that they provide. If you're hiring somebody to make landing pages, so you're a funnel and ads agency and you're hiring somebody to make landing pages or design funnels or some [ __ ] like that, it makes sense to when you're hiring somebody to test them on their ability to make pages. We were hiring somebody to do framework for us and I got a really good guy for it. But I didn't just want somebody who could design a page. I specifically wanted somebody who understood a little bit about marketing tech as well. We put out an application and the test was as follows. Is I gave them a hypothetical lead magnet and I said what you need to

15:25 do is make a landing page with an opt-in. They click a button, they put in their name, email, phone number and then once they put their name, email, phone number in there, make it so that they get an email with the lead magnet and then show me how you created that automation. And then also once they put that in, it redirects to another page where they're also able to get the lead magnet. So this involved designing a page and then I also told them explain why you designed the page like you did to maximize conversions. So they had to make the page, they had to conversion optimize it and explain why it was made like that and they had to create some kind of marketing automation on the back end of it. That was my test and of the people who successfully completed the test, those were the people I spoke with. Now if I just needed somebody who could design, I wouldn't even need to get on a call with these people. But I was looking for somebody who had the

16:10 ability to orchestrate. I wanted the person I hired to understand all sorts of different kinds of marketing tech. So my guy I hired does have figure it the [ __ ] out ability. I can ask him for something and he'll figure out how to do it. He'll just do that. But if I just needed a designer, dude, just make this and like I don't need you for anything else. Then I wouldn't need somebody with figure it the [ __ ] out ability. You get what I mean? Now let's talk about automation because obviously you want to automate as much as you possibly can. This is a given. If you can automate something without a degradation of quality or consistency compared to doing it with a human, then you should automate it. So, here's just like random stuff that is automated in my business. So, optin pages, when somebody opts in, they get an email flow with a bunch of emails from me and a text flow and

16:56 they're called by setters. Like, our setters will literally call them and attempt to set them as an appointment. So, some of this is automated, but some of this is tiring. So, like automation, automation automation automation labor. And the reason why that's still labor is because AI voice setters are dog [ __ ] and they don't work. Okay. Another example of an automation system is applications. We make people apply. So we use hype form which asks them questions which gives them a lead score which will route to different pages which also routes to different email flows, text flows and meeting. Their lead score is too low, they'll be rejected from seeing a meeting. If their lead score is high enough, they'll be able to see a meeting. There's automation automation automation automation, automation. Then the meeting itself is the labor. This is orchestration of some system. So we have abandon applications. If somebody abandons the application, it sends them

17:42 an email flow, a text flow and a setter will call them. Application is abandoned. Automatically send an email flow automatically send a text flow and then use labor to call them. Okay. My email list. I send about five emails a week to my email list. I pre-write all those and I schedule them. So there's the writing and then there's the sending. I preschedule all those. This is labor. This is automation. However, this is labor with the assistance of AI. I'll use AI to help me write it. I won't just like copy paste AI [ __ ] in there, but I will use AI to help me come up with ideas. Sales call review. Every couple days, I'll take call transcripts, throw them into AI to get market feedback. I use AI so I don't have to sit here and listen to 60 different call transcripts. I could feed it all to AI and ask it like who's showing up to the call? What are the objections? Like what's different about these calls than last week? Like what is happening? Like

18:27 why aren't people closing? Why are people closing? Who's showing up? That's AI and automation I'm using for that. Let's just walk through some example orchestration systems. Okay. So, my responsibility in the business is marketing and lead genen like across client list. That's like my primary obligation is to do marketing and lead generation for these companies. I run the ads. I make a lot of content. Let's walk through that system for me personally. One example of one thing I do is the content system. Within the marketing systems, we have the content system which right now by watching this YouTube video, you are literally partaking in. Okay. So, one we have we ideate the YouTube videos. This is either done by me or it's done by my YouTube guys and they'll outline in a doc for me. And a lot of what I do, a lot of the ideas I get from this are from my coaching calls and the kinds of questions that people are asking me inside there. Okay. Step two is the filming. The actual filming of the video. I don't really script videos. I

19:14 make like outlines of videos and then it's never really a script, right? The filming of the video is contingent upon the ideation of the video. Then we have editing. I send this to my editors to edit it. I send them the video files. They edit it. Okay? And then step four is the scheduling of the video. So the video is done being editing. it's scheduled to post on YouTube. The activity of uploading that and scheduling it. And then over here are emails. A lot of what I talk about in the YouTube videos will be turned into emails. Then I'll have to write those emails. And then I'll link over to the YouTube video as well and just write emails based on the content of the YouTube videos that I posted. Okay. And then over here, I got an Instagram guy who will make Instagram posts based off the content of the emails and the YouTube videos. And then step seven, YouTube community post will make YouTube community post. also what performs good on Instagram or what performs good in email or like screenshots from inside

20:00 the community. So this is contingent upon the other things being completed first in this system over here. This is me. This is me. This is me slash YouTube team. This is me. This is YouTube team. I generally like to schedule them myself. I generally like to do the emails. And then this is my IG guy. And then this is my IG guy. So the YouTube team's doing their job and I'm doing my job. As long as everyone's doing their job, orchestration is occurring and the content system is working. Like that's it. It's just a series of contingency systems. I'll give you another example. Let's talk about the ad system. So box one is ad scripts. Either I do this when my partner's Christian does this or we have some other people on the ads team. They'll do this. Now number two is filming those ads. This is generally me or it's Christian. Okay. And then we have box three. Again, these are all

20:46 contingent upon the previous one being completed. Editing. This is the ads team that has editors. They do that. Number four, the ads are uploaded into the ads manager. This is either me or it's Christian or it's the ads team. They will do that. Number five, the ads are managed. So just the media buying, right? That is me or it's Christian or it's the ads team. As long as everybody does their job, the ads get run. The whole ad system, boom, it works. It's really that simple. So in your business, there might be some situation where you feel like, I don't know what to do today. Like I don't know what to do today. The answer is to sit and map out all of the boxes of the whole operating system of your business. Understand what the boxes actually are. And then any activity that you could possibly conduct is just completing one of the boxes. It's either doing one of the boxes yourself, hiring, engaging in the activity of sourcing and hiring and

21:32 training somebody to do some of the boxes or creating automations or using AI to automate one of the boxes. This is the only possible things that you could be doing inside of your business. Okay. So if you're interested in any of this, I have two products that may be interesting for you to buy from me. So one is AI assisted agency. So this is for people who are either just starting out making money on the internet or have made money on the internet. You've done whatever it is. I don't care what you've done trading flipping agency freelancing, development, you're in a sales role and you want to have your own business. Doesn't matter what it is. This is for you. This is if you want to start a profitable online agency and have it actually work. All right. So, we show you what to sell, who to sell it to, how to get clients, and four, how to fulfill for clients with AI. That is the first link in the description. Go.clientasscension.ai.

22:19 Then we have Olympia. This is for people who are above $30,000 per month and you want to learn how to run ads and build a sales team and sign like 20 to 40 clients a month like us. So, we help you build cold traffic optimized offer, cold traffic optimized funnel and ads, a sales team, and again, as I said, how to sign 20 to 40 clients per month like we do. And if you want to learn more about online business, making money online, how you can even do any of this stuff at all, go to my channel, just watch 15 to 20 of my videos. Go down the line, watch a bunch of them. I'll also leave a link to a playlist inside of the description if you want to go watch that. But you can listen to these while you're on a walk, you're at the gym, you're on a treadmill, you're riding a bike, you're on a long drive, you're just sitting around doing nothing. You can listen to my videos in the background. You don't always need to be visually watching them. It will be sufficient to just

23:06 listen to what I'm saying. And you'll learn a lot by doing that. So, if you got any value from this, please leave a like, comment, subscribe, take the video and send it to somebody who you think would get some value out of it. So, throw it in your Slack groups, in your Telegram groups, your WhatsApp groups, your group chat with anyone, your Discords, whatever. Throw the video in there if you got any value from it. It actually helps a lot like to send it to somebody who you think would get usefulness from this. Thanks guys. Love you. Appreciate it.