Podcast Transcript

[00:05:53] Sean Steele: Welcome back everybody to the ScaleHQ Podcast. Welcome to our regular listeners, and to anybody joining us for the first time, we are thrilled to have you and you are in luck because my guest this week is Ben Handler, Co-Founder and former CEO of Cohen Handler, one of Australia's best known and largest buyers agencies, which Ben you exited from in 2018, if I'm correct. And you are the current Founder and CEO of the Buyer’s Agent Institute, but because we're Australian and we always like to shorten things, we'll call it BAI. It's a very education thing to, you know, we'd love acronyms in education, but your Australia's most successful, well, your business is the Australia's most successful training provider to help people who want to turn buying property into a career. how are you today, mate? You well?

[00:06:35] Ben Handler: Feeling good. Feeling good.

[00:06:38] Sean Steele: Excellent. Well, if my dates are right, then BAI is about  five and a half years old in this chapter two. Is it gone fast or has it gone slow?

[00:06:49] Ben Handler: Just over five years. It's a bit of both.

[00:06:54] Sean Steele: Bit of both.

[00:6:55] Ben Handler: Yeah. It's gone quick, but it also does feel like, I think initially the growth trajectory for me, you know, like as those ambitious entrepreneurs, you set some initial targets when you start the business and I didn't hit those. And so, I think it's also feels a bit slow in that regards.

[00:07:16] Sean Steele: Yeah, actually, we have a birthday book in our house. And so, every year, every member of our family, we did on behalf of the kids when they were small, we write down our goals and who we were with and what we've done in the last 12 months. And it's amazing, but it's like the book, you know, if there was ever a fire in our house, it's the book that you would go and get for passports and the birthday book, that's it, and it's fascinating looking, being able to look back 20 years at, what goals you had, what you thought you were going to be doing, what you thought you're going to be focusing on. Things change, feels like it's incremental, but it's massive over time. Well, Ben, I've got some questions for you because, I mean, I've known, I don't know whether you know this, but I've known about BAI for quite a few years, because I've obviously been building and scaling education businesses since 2006. And I noticed with keen interest when somebody entered into a niche education business that was helping people transition into buyer's agents, because I love people who really get a kind of niche education model right. And I'm also a bit of a property investment nerd. So, I've spent lots of time with buyer’s agents over the last 10 or 15 years, all of who you probably know, from the industry. And then you and I were introduced by mutual friend back in… Oh, maybe even like a year ago or sometime earlier in 2023, we caught up in Barn. That was amazing. And I just loved hearing about the way you'd built your business and some of the stuff that you learned along the way. So, today is for me, how do I extract some of that gold for the seven figure Founders that are really trying to build a great business? How does that sound as a setup?

[00:08:39] Ben Handler: Pretty good.

[00:08:40] Sean Steele: Well, together with Simon Cohen, your partner and co-Founder and Cohen Handler, who's now probably getting pretty famous and maybe a little cocky because the Lux Listings show he's got going on Channel 9, is growing quickly. My wife watches that. It's pretty funny. But you guys amassed 3 billion worth of residential and commercial property purchases in the nine years you had together, which is pretty amazing. And I'm keen mostly to talk today about Buyer’s Aging Institute, but I did have a couple of questions for you on the Cohen Handler journey, if I may. And the first one was about what did you learn about what to do or what not to do to actually make a business partnership work as co-Founders?

[00:09:21] Ben Handler: What did I learn what not to do? Is this like post, like retrospectively looking back?

[00:09:29] Sean Steele: Yeah. Looking back, you know, what did you figure out and made a partnership work and were the things that you had to figure out that you should not do that actually make it work, if that makes sense.

[00:09:39] Ben Handler: I think firstly partnerships are, business partnerships. in the sense of it's like a partnership with your life partner. And by saying that, you get to know each other at a very deep level, you see each other's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, strengths, you see each other grow and you work through very difficult times, difficult decision making, you make really good decisions. And I think that when you have the right partner, it can be something really, really special. And I was listening to a podcast about two months ago with Daniel Elk from Spotify, and he was talking about how instrumental it was for him having his partner, who was non-operational, his co-Founder, I forget his name, and he, and he was saying that when you can wear the load, like where that load of serious stress, serious turmoil, and you don't have to wear it a hundred percent yourself and you can share that burden with someone else. He was saying that it's very profound. And so, I think that, if you can find that, that partnership, that's right. Not just finding a partner just because you're lonely or you're bored, or… If you can find the right person, because when you get it wrong, as you know, like if you look at just divorces that go like, it's not nice. And so, I think that, what I learned was that the power of just collaborating with someone, and building something with someone was really nice, rather than just building something myself, which I've done with BAI now, building it with someone is more exciting, like sharing the journey with someone. Obviously you've got your coaches and your mentors that you share it with, but sharing it with someone from ideation through the growth trajectories is nice. So yeah, I mean, I know I've kind of taken a long winded answer, but I think to summarise, like you want to be really careful of who you select to work and spend your life with. A lot of your time, it's either going to be sleeping or working. So, I think that selection process is really important. And I think you also need to know when to walk away when it's not working, and how to obviously try and repair it if it's not working, because like you go to a counsellor with a life partner to repair, you obviously want to understand and identify if it's not working, how you can repair it, and if you can't repair it, how you then exit.

[00:12:20] Sean Steele: Do you think, and is that something that you think you should almost agree early on, or is it something that you think, you just figure out as you go in terms of like, how are we actually going to deal with disagreements? What if we get to a point where we can't find our way through? Like, would you recommend people kind of pre think about what the mechanism is going to be like - Okay, well, if we get to a point where we can't agree on X, Y, Z, we're actually going to get a coach or a mediator or a facilitator. Like, you know, would you try to agree that stuff up front or do you think actually that's nice, but actually you'd still just have to figure it out as you go?

[00:12:50] Ben Handler: When I started CH, I was in my early 20s, and so I didn't have the awareness to potentially engage with an upfront conversation like that, to understand how if we hit these issues, like...

[00:13:02] Sean Steele: What are we going to do about it?

[00:13:02] Ben Handler: What are the protocols? What's the procedure? What's the process? So I definitely agree that should be done. I think communication is one of the biggest problems just generally in life, like breakdown of communication, I think it's what causes a lot of the problems. And so effectively, the more you can open up that chain of communication with your co-Founder, even your senior leadership, your team, just in general, and you can allow people to embrace humility, to embrace transparency, and you can build those protocols in. I think it's just going to breed all around success.

[00:13:39] Sean Steele: Yeah. It feels like it almost like a kind of help. Yeah, because especially if people are growing, as you grow through those periods, you're also growing individually, your values are changing, your priorities are changing. Maybe your vision for what you want for your life is changing and those things can really set a business on two different trajectories and all of a sudden it create tension and all the rest. Well, yeah, I appreciate that. And I really want to talk about BAI. So, given the success you both had, what drove you to exit and then build BAI and was there like a moment where you were just absolutely certain that it was the right thing to do. And what was that?

[00:14:12] Ben Handler: I wasn't planning on exiting Cohen Handler until I started BAI. So, our relationship with my previous co-Founder did start to deteriorate. And in saying that though, I wasn't thinking straight away of exit. However, I started BAI, started to build that one to many model, understood that I could create more impact, create more scale, started to appreciate the model more as well, just the flexibility it provided, rather than having offices and all these staff members and...I realised that I could cut out a lot of layers and run a super profitable business. So, it was at that point when I got a taste of that, I was like, ‘Hey, I want to focus my energy on this.’ We agreed to separate and we exited, you know, me out of CH and I was really excited to then just continue working on BAI, but what was interesting, I tell people this is because I'm obviously, as you know, I'm in the career space and the biz-ops space and I'm helping people transition into becoming a buyer's agent, which is effectively a new career. Some do a part-time, they mitigate risk, but some go in full-time. Where I'm going is, when I was getting out of CH, BAI was generating revenue. So, it was an operational new business. It was generating revenue could have been between 20 to 30K a month at that stage after a few months or four or five months. And I was so nervous and fearful jumping into a new operation, like I was exiting out of a company, I was moving into an operational business that was generating revenue that was profitable. And I was already like potentially, at times doubting myself around my ability to really execute in this space. And so why I'm sharing the story is because when I understand people are changing careers, I understand especially when they're starting a new business, how challenging it is. Because I was moving into a profitable operational business and exiting a company and I was still like fearing change.

[00:16:39] Sean Steele: Yep. A hundred percent. Yeah. It's a big leap, isn't it? Especially if someone decides to do a complete cutover and they're going to have a whole long period with no income and try to build something up from scratch. So, when you go into a new venture, having succeeded in a previous one, there's always principles that helped you succeed the first time that you probably take forward and want to prioritise in the second one. But there's probably also things that you realise that you actually need to unlearn in the second one from the first one. What are the things that you sort of prioritised off the back of the first one? And were there some things that you had to unlearn? And if so, what were they?

[00:17:23] Ben Handler: I think looking back when I started BAI, obviously it's a very different model. You know, it's a product we're providing. It can be run remotely. And so what I had to unlearn was I came from offices, people bums on seats, wanting to look at everyone in the office, not expecting everyone to be there, but, you know, I wanted to see head count always. And I didn't quite understand the ability of, you know, we were providing a service as well. And so, the service can typically take up to six months from signing on a client to buying a property, can be shorter obviously or longer. And so, I had to like just unlearn around the ability to, starting to, I guess, navigate with a new model where it can be a transaction instantaneously, and you bring them into your ecosystem. Obviously, you've got other functions that look after these people, but it didn't require a lot of people, doesn't require a lot of headcount. We don't need to all be in an office. We all run remotely anyway, there is no office, and the ability of when a client does come into our orbit, I was so used to someone coming in at this high touch of, you know, as a buyer's agent, you're in contact with them every day. You are dealing with them every day, typically, or every few days you're in communication. And I had to let go, like we're not in communication with these people. They come into a system and they get fed through and there's no reason to contact them and they don't need to speak to me. And so, one of the biggest things I had to unlearn to answer the question though, is when I was at CH, I used to give my time out to a lot of people, clients would always, if they wanted to work with me, that obviously that worked with me, et cetera. I was always available, put it that way, I was available in terms of my phone numbers on the website, it's real estate. You can contact that person. When I got into education, I realised that I had to be uncontactable, because if you're too contactable at the beginning, it's very hard then to provide backend products to then upsell people into. So, if people can just contact you, it makes it a lot more difficult when you do provide something on your back end for them, because they've already got access to you. So, that was probably one of the biggest things.

[00:19:55] Sean Steele: And did that also make you, because if you think about, I imagine one of the un-learnings there potentially is that, in a model where you've got a higher degree of confidence that you're going to deliver a great service because you're in contact with the person and because you can sort of control that interaction, if you like, like, you know how often you can get in touch with them. You've got all the rapport and everything that gets built and that's part of the service. Whereas this is like - Oh no, actually, the product and all the things around the product that provide the support have to stand on their own two feet, so we actually have to make sure those are right because we're not going to be able to influence their experience outside those pieces. That's really interesting. So, what have you learned then? I mean, you've now built a successful education business, and so it's not just the curriculum. It's not just a course in terms of those self-paced elements, you have other live interactive pieces. What have you learned about, how to take somebody from A to B, because ultimately, you know, from my experience in education, nobody wants to do the course, like there's no course that you've ever enrolled in that you actually want to do the learning. You want to be on the other side of the learning, doing the thing that the learning is going to teach you. Like you just would love to skip over the course bit because it's usually long. It's hard. It's often expensive. It's time consuming, takes away from your family, takes away from your work and all the rest. And so, whilst the content, if the content is enjoyable, that's a bonus, but actually you want the outcome that's on the other side of the content. So, what have you learned about how to get people to the outcome they want in the most efficient way? Like, tell me about what you've kind of learned in that process.

[00:21:30] Ben Handler: So initially when I built BAI and I built out the product, I didn't really have much visibility around what's the best outcome for the user. And what I mean by that is I wasn't taking into consideration who's more visual, who's more audio, who would like to take assessments, who's more theory based, who's maybe above 50 and who's maybe between 20 and 30. So, I wasn't really thinking about learning style. So, initially I built the product, you can say very startup mode, which still was relatively, I would say very effective in the sense of I've got really good results, but basically I was talking over documents. Some of the documents, the videos could have been an hour long, which I realised was too long. So, the course delivery for me, wasn't well thought out from the beginning. Okay. Typical entrepreneur style. However, I was getting really fucking good results, like phenomenal results, but there was obviously a lot of people dropping off. And I think, you know, what I started to unpack is it's important to get people from A to Z. Like it's important to get people to complete the program. And then I started to research and realised that program completion is a big issue, in education a lot of people don't get through. And so fast forward, we're rebuilding out the program. It's being designed in a really structured way to get people to complete the program, to cater for all different age groups, personality types, and learning styles, and it's not going to be run by me. And that was a really cool process to go through. And then obviously in addition to what you asked, like building out a student success team to really measure what's going on in terms of usage, in terms of how many people are completing when they're dropping off and then how you can support that student to drive them to get through the program. So, that's actually a big metric that we're going to be measuring our student success on, is student completion.

[00:23:38] Sean Steele: Awesome. And actually, one of the things that I think is fantastic and if there's anyone out there thinking about building a, because lots of the people listening today, have sufficient IP in their heads that can help somebody transform from A to B. Like they understand what the path is. They know what you need to do to get there. They may not have an education program today. And they're like, maybe that's an interesting way of them building a new business, a side business, an adjunct to their core business if they're in some kind of a service model. What some people do the opposite of, in terms of what you just talked about is, massively overrate the bells and whistles of the education program design and massively undercook the quality of the content and how efficient that content is at getting somebody from A to B. So, you know, I've been in a lot of education businesses and some people like – Hey, this much of our content is, you know, kind of, let's call it bronze standard, this is a silver, this is a gold, and this is the platinum stuff. And our goal is to get everything to platinum. And I go… At what cost? And is it going to make any difference to actually that student being able to get to A to B? Now, if it's preventing people from getting to A to B, which may not be about the way the content is designed, maybe it's actually about the student support or someone just kind of checking in on them or going, ‘Hey, you haven't logged in in the last three days, everything okay?’ Like, it could be life stuff, could be a million things. But I think people can really overdo the has to be everything gold star content, but actually forget that, you know, cause what you've done is gone. Well, I know how to get somebody from A to B and I'm just going to do it in the most simple, efficient manner, and it absolutely nailed it, and it got people there and then you discovered - Hey, okay, there's maybe some people falling off that we can do a better job of supporting, but it doesn't mean it all has to be platinum. So, I love that. One of the things that you've done in a really interesting way, and it's one of the things that I talk to Founders about in the program that I do around helping them build a three-year growth strategy and execution plan, is variable costs. Where are there fixed costs in your business that ultimately create a bit of a weight in your OPEX? And is there a way to shift some of those to variable? And one of the things I'm really impressed about the way that you built your business is you've in yourself some marketing costs. You have done a far better job than most people do. Most people would just normalise going; it's an education business, I need a full-time SEO person, a full-time paid search person, a full-time Director of marketing, or we're going to have to give it all to an agency, but we’re still going to ultimately want to control all that, most people will build a whole bunch of it, which I've done many times myself, you know, fixed cost sales resources, fixed cost marketing resources. And then we sort of build and we hope that we get enough volume to make all that work. And if we don't get enough volume and the volume's tapering off, for whatever reason, our EBITDA is suffering because we've built this pretty heavy cost sales and marketing model. But you have taken a bit of a different approach to that. Can you share what you've implemented from a sales and marketing perspective, or what you've learned about what it takes to make it work with a higher variable cost model?

[00:26:39] Ben Handler: So, let's talk about sales to begin with. So, personally, when I build businesses, I like to obviously understand what the customer's thinking, understand objections, just really getting there myself and learn myself versus just hiring, for example, the first sales person and hear it from them. So, I jumped on the phone myself. I come from a sales background, so it started off with me understanding all the problems, seeing all the opportunities, getting clear on it, and then making the first hire from there. So, that's where sales started. We've never outsourced typically our sales team to, there are companies that you can hire or you can outsource your sales reps, different functions of the sales role, whether it's an appointment setter, et cetera. But we slowly built that internally, we started off with everything that we do with sales is internal, but we just took that really slow. We just didn't make all these crazy hires. So, sales was pretty straightforward the way that we built that out. Marketing was a bit different. So, marketing, typically, you would hire like a, I don't know, depending on what you're doing, like it could be just a marketing manager, a senior marketing manager, a marketing director, whatever it is you decide with to hire for. Initially, we didn't go that route. We started to realise that paid ads was a really effective pathway for us. And so through paid ads, what we learned was that in order to hire someone who was a really true expert, for example, let's talk about Facebook. We didn't think that we're going to be able to hire a marketing person for Facebook who was going to be outstanding in our company. So, rather than hiring a marketing manager, we put that capital into an agent, like an agency, who specialised only in Facebook. Then we've got an agency who specialises only in YouTube. And then we've got an agency who only specialises in SEO and then PPC. And so, we're at a stage actually now bringing in a marketing function to manage all that. But so far today, actually, our GM and myself, like we look after that and it's been fine. And so, marketing was just a different approach, it worked for us up until a point. And I think now's the point of when we've got to start to bring it internal, but we're never going to bring like SEO internal, our paid ads internal, like that's still not the plan. The plan is to bring someone internal to take leadership with that desk, who's just basically going to project manage that on our behalf.

[00:29:31] Sean Steele: And so, which I think is really interesting, because one of the issues is how do you get, if you end up with a bunch of generalists in your team, to your point, how are they ever going to be expert in something that's changing so rapidly? Like, so you need to be with people who are the experts, which is why you've gone down a very specific agency model. How did you go about finding the best agencies because of course, you know, that's a whole world of landmines for lots of Founders who are sort of growing up and trying to figure out who they're actually going to work with, but there's certain ingredients, certain strategies that you put in place to make sure that you found the best people, and you had a higher chance of succeeding.

[00:30:10] Ben Handler: It's very challenging finding good people in the paid ad space from my experience, I think it's really challenging. Everyone over promises and under delivers, it’s very common. So, you know, after you get burnt a few times, it's getting burnt hurts in a few ways. Like the burn hurts in a few ways, but the toughest burn is the time. So, if you hire the wrong person, you typically would lose, I think around two to three months. So, you're losing a quarter, which I think is a long time to get it wrong. So, you got to be incredibly discerning, and what I started to do is I just started to be obviously more perceptive around people telling you what they can and can't do, et cetera, and just being a bit more cautious around decision making. But effectively what I started to see as a pattern though, was the really, really good people, number one, I found like they take a rev share. That was quite common. Like when I'm speaking to people who I looked up to, what I found that they all take little rev shares. Why? Because they can, they can. And if you're that good, why not? So, that's something that I found was a bit of a commonality between the minority of really good paid media experts. Second is what I used to try and qualify is you want to make sure that, to me, they're not a big agency taking on a lot of clients. That to me is a typical problem. Then they're outsourcing your media buyers in the Philippines. They're outsourcing everything. Okay. So, I like to work with a group who really focuses on a small concentration of clients. They're not really even an agency. You could call them an agency, but they're a bit more specialised in that. Thirdly is, you want to find someone who really understands your niche. So, the copywriting is incredibly important with paid ads. When you're engaging these people, your copy is really important. You want to make sure the person who's writing the copy, like understands your customer intimately. And so, where I think people go wrong is they choose people, for example, they might be for example, not in e-commerce, but then they choose a paid media specialist who's in e-commerce, just because that person is the best person in e commerce as a marketer…

[00:33:42] Sean Steele: And they're amazing at selling the features and the pricing of an envelope. But you're selling a transformational program from A to B that's emotional and about freedom and about getting out of the right race and whatever else. Yeah, it's a very different psychology. And so did you sort of really test them on that when you were scoping out who you would work with to really get some confidence that they actually understood that customer and how did you get that? Was it just through questioning? Did you ask to see all their previous stuff? Had you already seen them marketing for somebody else and then followed through somebody else's excellent marketing and discovered that these were the people that were kind of behind it? How did you find them in the first place?

[00:34:22] Ben Handler: So I think like with anything, you've got to reach out to people and ask the question, number one, like you don't just want to…you want to reach into networks of people that you like and trust and ask around, you then want to get in front of people and yeah, you want to question them. You want to, I mean, I like to talk to customers who are live working with that group, not past customers. Like I want to know customers that are currently working with them, that's a big one. So currently working with them. In terms of metrics, like looking at paid ads, it's just data. You're looking at metrics, you're looking at certain whether it's click through rate, whether it's landing page conversion rate, cost per call, cost per lead, all that stuff, right? Like, it's actually quite basic when you understand it. And so, when you do have an understanding around it, and if you don't have an understanding, you want to understand what are the key metrics that you measure on, because then you can have conversations around those data points to say - Hey, what are you doing in the industry currently now for these data points? Because obviously you want to find someone industry specific potentially, and you want to understand what they're currently doing because when you can talk to those data points and you can get an understanding of what they're doing from a performance point of view, typically that will make you confident that you're going to be able to get a result.

[00:35:50] Sean Steele: What about the, when you're using, so obviously you're just in the process of perhaps employing someone in the business or you and your GM have been doing this kind of coordination of multiple agencies. Do you ever get them working together? How did they sort of cross over when it comes to designing your sales funnels? Like, you know, does each agency push their specific channel towards a specific sales funnel that just happens to suit that channel? Or have you got multiple agencies who are working on, you know, so you've got YouTube and SEO and Facebook all actually pushing to the same sales funnel. Like, is there a requirement for them to be collaborating? How do you manage that?

[00:36:29] Ben Handler: Well, if they're all going to the same funnel, you need to obviously tag it so you can attribute where it's coming from, right? So, like, is it a Facebook? Is it a YouTube? Is it a Tik Tok? Like you want lead attribution tagging going on. So you can go to the same, like when I say the same funnel, you can take them, for example, to a dedicated landing page, which will then take that prospect or whatever you want to call them through to whatever you do, like whether it's a download of a book or whether it's a webinar. So, you can take people to a dedicated landing page that performs really well, for example, through your different channels of marketing. But ultimately, I think getting back to your question around selection as well around these people is, you want them to be very agile, for example, like if your Facebook person is running a like a campaign to let's call it a book funnel, like to download one of your books, for example, that can start to burn really quickly, whereby it goes really well, but then in like four weeks, it's gone. It's just like the market is not taking it anymore. And so, you want your individual marketing professionals to be very agile and creative around bringing to you what they believe is the best new style of like campaign funnel structure, bring to the table. Like we just did something recently for our business, for example, where we thought; okay, well, let's get someone to commit some money up front so they've invested in, so there's the vested interest into what we're doing, so we charge them a dollar to go through a mini series of trainings. We've just launched it in the last week. And so, the psychology behind that from my marketing team, external, Facebook specifically, but like, if we can get someone to invest in a dollar into the system that there's some form of investment and if they're the right fit, for example, like, you know, they're interested in exploring BAI further in this career path, the ability to then turn them into a paying customer is going to be a lot more opportunistic if they've already given us $1 versus a $0. So, we're testing that out now, but they came up with that concept. They were very agile with changing. And so, you also want to make sure that these, externals have good strategy, really important, because if you're not up skilled as a, whether you're a Founder or whoever's dealing with it and you have to ideate that, I think that's a big challenge.

[00:39:02] Sean Steele: Yeah, you really want someone to challenge you, right? And someone to innovate around that. Because yeah, otherwise the limitation becomes you. You become the bottleneck and you don't know what you don't know, and your business is not paid marketing, your business is the transformation of somebody who wants to become a buyer’s agent. So, yeah, I really like that. That's super interesting. And the reason I'm digging on this is because it's one of those spaces that for seven figure Founders is just, it's not well understood. It's a bit daunting for a lot of them. It's like, how am I going to build a more scalable acquisition system? Because ultimately, if they want to be eight figure businesses and to continue to scale, they're going to have to have something that is repeatable, predictable, and scalable, that they can continue to pull levers on and put fuel under that fire to keep growing. You know, if you think about the sort of Sabri Suby, you know, King Kong digital kind of model of the world. I don't know if you've read Sell Like Crazy. But, you know, one of the things that I've been reflecting on recently is how important, you mentioned the copywriting before. I think it's very easy to fall into the trap and I certainly fell into the trap, you know, at least sort of 10 years ago, of really just focusing on the commercials and the metrics and the cost per lead and all the rest, but actually not thinking enough about the creative, not thinking about enough about the copywriting, not thinking about enough of - okay, if we've got an e-book, not actually spending enough time thinking about ‘Does this e-book actually hit real pains and real problems? Does it actually add a lot of value?’ Like, is the content good enough so that if I can find an expert who understands how to optimise the system or the channel, they can do a good job because actually the content is great and the copywriting and the headline is excellent and that's the stuff that actually makes it attractive. Because it seems to be, the case that it's going to make a significantly bigger, if you don't have that in place first, then everything else is kind of a moo-point. Like if it's a pretty average bit of content, no matter, it might be free, it could be a webinar, it could be a book, it could be whatever the lead magnet is, actually you can spend a hell of a lot of money and you're still going to get a suboptimal commercial result. What have you found in that space? Because it sounds like you've had some content that you thought might make sense. It sounds like they've probably innovated and challenged and gone - okay, maybe we could try this, we could try that. What have you learned about the importance of the lead magnet, if you like, in that sales funnel, in helping you get a good outcome?

[00:41:39] Ben Handler: You've heard of Alex Hormozi?

[00:41:42] Sean Steele: Yes.

[00:41:44] Ben Handler: So, getting back to your point on value, you know, the reason why I think, obviously he is a really sharp guy and he is built some incredible businesses. So, he is a real master at his craft. However, if you actually look at what he does, because he is very much about, he has built a personal brand. He is very active online. What he does is he provides a ton of value, like ton of value. It's not just talking, I mean, you go there to learn. So, you'll listen to his podcast. You'll turn him on because you'll be like - Hey, what can I learn today from this guy? It's like going to an online university with him. And so, I think the premise around, standing out and, and cutting through and winning over those people that you want as customers is you need to provide a ton of value because there's so much information out there. You can go into Google, go to ChatGPT, you can go into you Udemy, you can find a lot of cool stuff online. And so, the question is, how do you, whether it's that lead magnet or whatever it is. How do you, obviously, resonate with your audience, like, through your personality, because I think the story is very important as well. Like, people, they can copy your website, they can copy your model, they can't copy your story and personality. Okay, and so I think it's like, how well do you leverage that as part of what you do, I think is really important. I think, you look at all the successful people, a lot of them, they've all got that story that they hold on to, and they use that as the lifeblood of what they do. So, if you, whatever you want to do, whether you've got a lead magnet, sometimes people use the lead magnet doesn't work. It might bring the prospect in, they bite, but then they look at it and they, it's like the fish that gets the hook, then they go away. So, I think there's one element of you've got to capture their attention, like whatever it is you do with your lead magnet, you've got to capture the attention of the prospect. When you capture their attention, you then got to outperform their expectations of the experience they're going to go through. And I think if you can follow that, you're going to get someone who's intrigued and curious and we'll want to come back and learn more.

[00:44:05] Sean Steele: Yep. It's such an important point. And for Founders who, you know, maybe they're exploring with different marketing experts and they're just getting bamboozled by an agency or a marketing partner who's just focused on the technology and like how we can optimise this and how we can optimise that, but they're not having that conversation with you about, is that story strong enough? Is this information that you're giving them valuable enough? Is it making people go, wow, if he gave me that much information for a dollar or for free, like imagine what else you must know, like to your point, creating that curiosity to learn more because you've actually given so much value. I think it's really under recognised as part of that process. I know I spend lots of time on sales and marketing, but do I have some other questions for you. One of the things I'm interested in, you're now really, and I actually didn't ask you upfront, maybe you can just give the audience a bit of sense of what is the scale of the business today? Like in whatever metric you'd like to use, you know, the number of, you know, customers you're enrolling or your revenue or EBITDA. Is there something that you can share just so people understand how this business has gone over the last five years?

[00:45:12] Ben Handler: Yeah. The last, like each FY like businesses just thinking through is like doubling in revenue, profit margin is healthy, as even we've been growing, it's around that, like close to 40%, probably 30, between 35 and 40, business has been generating seven figures a month. And a lot of it has been through paid media. Like, I think that paid media is really powerful. If you get it right, you took, you said the words earlier, I think he's talking about predictability. I think you might've even said reliability, like it's really based on numbers, paid media. So, when you dial it in properly, it can be like a conveyor belt, but there's some negatives with it as well. Like your Facebook ad account can get shut down. Facebook just runs their AI, now AI bot. And so, you can get shut down your ad account, which is problematic if you're very heavily reliant on Facebook, YouTube's a lot more forgiving because it's Google and you don't get shut down. You've got LinkedIn, you've got TikTok. Obviously Instagram's with Facebook. You've got native advertising as well. So I think it's really exciting like how you decide you want to grow your business. I think an area for us that we're focusing on now is more outbound. So, that's obviously something that we can control. It's a strategy that we can deploy and we can run. And there's, I think that whilst paid media has been really good, you're still at the mercy of a corporation.

[00:47:08] Sean Steele: Yeah, all of a sudden, the cost per acquisition can jump pretty materially and you're kind of stuck on that wheel. So yeah, having the diversity makes sense, but also, I think it's also easy to run for diversity too quickly without actually having mastered any of those channels. And I think what you've done really well is to really kind of laser in, nail a couple of really specific channels so that you can get the scalability. And now you're diversifying, you've been diversifying sort of steadily over time, which I think has been really clever. And for those people who are listening, going - Wow, I wish I had the profit margins like that in my business. You know, it's one of the things, and I'm going to talk about this in my 100th episode, because this is episode 99. I don't know if you know that Ben, but in my 100th episode, I'm going to be reflecting on what I've learned in the last a hundred episodes. And one of the things that I've learned is the number of, you know, the business owners who my heart goes out to, who have business models where they are struggling to get to 10% EBITDA, it's like struggling, but like with big revenues, huge teams, like massive teams. And I've purchased businesses like this in previous roles, you know, massive revenues, almost no profitability, and it's just the most stressful life you can possibly have because there's no fuel on the tank. There's no hedge against revenue going up or down a bit of variability, you know, cost going up somewhere like the surprising stuff, the black swans, there's just no hedge. And to your point, if you end up with a model that you really want to build that's scalable and predictable, and if that includes something like paid media, paid search, et cetera, you actually need to have enough firepower to sometimes outbid your competitors, and if you've got low profitability, that's really hard to do and it can just be a really difficult. So, you know, I credit to you for building a business model that actually is profitable because what does that do? It allows you to scale your impact. And that is the point. If you have a great product or service that is actually delivering great value to people, then it is incumbent upon you to figure out how to scale that thing. Because if you don't, that potential customer is going to go to a weak competitor, who is got a terrible product or service, they can have an awful experience, they're not going to get the outcome they wanted, and they're going to sort of like tarnish your entire industry and people like you with their brush, and that's actually on you. It's on you for not figuring out how to actually build a scalable business model, but it's really hard to do if you start, or you're stuck in a super low profitability model because you just don't have any oxygen in the tank. Ben, I'm sorry for my little rant there, but just got me excited. One of the things I would love to, we've only got a few minutes left. I've got two questions for you. One, who have you leaned on? I mean, you've had to go into an entirely new business model. You mentioned, it sounds like you've maybe got some coaches and you've got some mentors. Like who have you leaned on when you had to go into a space that's pretty uncomfortable from a learning perspective? Like where do you find your support and your learning?

[00:50:06] Ben Handler: It's quite diverse. So, I like to reach out to people in different areas of expertise. So, I've leaned on people in marketing, just what I would consider like marketing experts just in the business landscape. I've leaned on sales experts. I've basically leaned on people who like, whether it's tech stack, people who understand tech stacks really well, like I've leaned on people who I believe understand what it is that I need, as opposed to just going to one person at all times. We've done obviously some work together, you and I, but effectively. I like to have a lot of coaches in my corner, and I like to speak to people to exchange notes as well. Like people, like obviously we connected, I think through Warren and he's obviously a pioneer in the, not a pioneer, but he is someone who has done very well in the education space. And, you know, I like to communicate with people who have run businesses in what I'm doing to just to learn. And so, I think like an athlete has a coach and has a team in their corner. I think business people need to have the same regardless of where you're up to. Like LeBron James doesn't go – Hey, coach, see you later. Like I'm too good now. I'm number one in the world. Goodbye. He probably levels up with these coaches. He's probably gone, I'd assume six, seven coaches. So, I just applied that same philosophy.

[00:51:45] Sean Steele: I think that's a great question for anyone listening to reflect on for themselves. Where is there a space that you actually know you need to nail and you're currently asking nobody for help, you know, reaching out to anyone, you're not looking for an expert, you're not just even having a simple coffee or resume conversation to just sniff out whether they can help you because it's pretty hard to move quickly. And that's my last question for you is just about the speed of this transition. It's hard to move quickly when you can't knock over learning barriers, you know, and every time you want to do something that you don't know how to do, and you've sort of concentrated your learning, it's like, how do I knock this like learning that I don't understand off and over as fast as I possibly can so that I can keep going and not get stuck and say, yeah, real credit to you in the way that you've done that. What would you give as your one final piece of advice to seven figure Founders, you've got a good business that's growing, like that's our audience, they’re one to 10 mil, typically, it's the first business they've probably built. I haven't made a last one they're going to build, and most of them are actually growing really nicely. But for Founders, you really want to build a high growth business. Like your business has been on a sort of a rocket ship for the last five years, what's your piece of advice for those who want to build a high growth business, not just an incremental growth business?

[00:53:01] Ben Handler: I guess rewinding, shifting gears back, like you made a comment around people who are, you know, I guess working extremely hard, generating large rev and doing very small profits, or if they're profitable or not. I guess it also depends on to answer this question. Like for those Founders, like it depends what business you're running. Like if you're running Salesforce, like Mark Benioff, he doesn't give a shit about EBITDA, like that business is going to be sold for billions and billions and billions. And I'm not sure if they've ever turned a profit ever. So, I think it also depends on what you're building like as well. And. I think for high growth, what I think, again, there's a few things I can speak to. One is you've got to hire A players. Like if you hire B players, it just fucks your growth. You hang around a B player, I've learned you become a B player like it's just what happens. So, I think the selection of the human capital that you wish to bring in is critical as you're growing because as we were growing, we made some bad hires and it just clogs the machine. It ruins it. Okay. So, I think that's one point. I think the second point, which is not in relation to the growth of your business, but I think you also need to build a life outside of your business. So, I think for Founders, the business is like a baby, and so attached to it, if it's doing well one day, we're happy. If it's not, we're not happy. And it becomes like, we've brought someone else into this life. And so, I think the clearer you are mentally, the more fulfilled you are outside of your work, I think is going to lead to better growth. So, if you get a hobby, you built in good lifestyle around family, et cetera, you're going away regularly, whatever it is to fill your tank. I think if you can focus on building your life simultaneously while you're building your business, typically we'll get a better result.

[00:55:10] Sean Steele: I love that. And we all know Founders whose business is absolutely everything. And then, yeah, to your point, and if the business it's almost a mindset of, or once I've built this business and I've succeeded, then I will build a life. It's like… Oh yeah, what if it doesn't go so well? Or what if there's a black swan on the business? You know, if it goes into turmoil, you just don't know, right? Okay. That's awesome. Thank you so much, Ben. Look, I know we need to wrap up. I just want to acknowledge the way that you have brought, you know, one of the things I love about education and I love about the way you built this business is you're actually giving people an opportunity to build a better life for themselves and their family by actually making a transition to something they care about, that they're more interested in than feeling like they're trapped in whatever model they might be in. And so, there's a big context here around freedom. So, thank you for bringing your expertise to that market, because I also know the Buyer's Agents having worked with lots of them, they actually create a lot of value for their clients, you know, mom and dad, most of the property investors in Australia are mom and dads, you know, like teachers and nurses and all sorts of stuff. And there's a couple of million of them. So, thanks for doing a great job and helping to create more value in the world from that way. If people wanted to get in touch with the business, I don't mean with you because we've just let you be uncontactable, but if they want to follow along the BAI journey, where would you send them, where would you direct them to?

[00:56:29] Ben Handler: Just www.buyersagentinstitute.com.au. I think if you go there, you probably think it's like getting smashed from our retargeting online and that would draw you into everything else. So, once we get your pixel there, then you're gone. You'll have to unsubscribe.

[00:56:44] Sean Steele: I love it. Well, you are actually in a lot of my TikTok. Well, thanks very much, Ben. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our audience, and yeah, it's been a wonderful conversation from my perspective. So, thanks again for sharing.

[00:56:57] Ben Handler: Thanks so much. Cheers, Sean.