The Client Who Asked Me to Turn the Marketing Off

Michael Trenz had me on Entrepreneur in Action for a long conversation that went in every direction — how the businesses got built, where I came from, and a competitive jump rope career I don't usually bring up.

But the part I'd point anyone to is a phone call we kept getting.

"Can you turn the marketing off?"

On the agency side we'd had enough small businesses ask for a cheaper package that we finally built one. We started running campaigns for them.

Two weeks in, several of them called and asked us to switch it off.

Not because it wasn't working. The leads were landing, they'd been delighted a week earlier, everything looked healthy from our end. But they were suddenly picking up bad reviews. Their Google rating was sliding. Facebook too. They wanted to stop, deal with the customers they already had, and fix some things before turning it back on.

The first time you hear that it sounds like a strange problem. By the fourth time it's a pattern, and the pattern is this: they didn't need more customers. They needed a business capable of absorbing them.

When I hand you a hundred new customers who are excited to work with you, I'm not adding to your business. I'm pressure-testing it. Every gap in your fulfilment, every undocumented process, every thing that only works because you personally do it — all of it lights up at once.

Our first response was to put a minimum in place. If you're not at a certain size, you're probably not a fit for the agency. That solved our problem and excluded an enormous number of people who genuinely needed help and weren't making $200,000 a month.

So we built the other thing instead. Launch Ignition exists to close those gaps before the marketing gets turned on, so that growth doesn't break you.

Both companies came from problems I had

Launch Ignition started as a side project. Five or six people, mostly friends and friends of friends who were serious about it. First year it did somewhere around $56,000. Since then about 110 people have been through it — all of them by referral, because I never marketed it.

Ignite Funnels came from an accountant.

He asked how much I thought I was spending on software subscriptions. I guessed a couple of thousand a month. It was closer to five. He pointed out that's sixty thousand a year, six hundred thousand over a decade, and that for that money I could build the thing myself.

He was right. So we did, and then it became a business.

There's a shape to this that I've stopped noticing: something annoys me, it becomes a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet becomes a process, the process becomes software, and eventually someone asks how we did it and it becomes a product. Every single thing we sell started as us solving our own problem badly and then fixing it.

How I actually got to 10x

Early on I was promoting events and needed flyers. I'd always ordered two hundred, because that's what the company I'd worked for ordered. This time I asked what a thousand cost. The printer mentioned they had a deal on two thousand.

I did the arithmetic — a hundred flyers a day would take most of a month, and there were two of us — and bought them anyway. Then I went and found people to help me move them.

Same with social media. We were posting and it wasn't reaching enough people, so I started inviting people out for a drink on the condition that they posted about the event. Ten or twelve of those and suddenly I'm reaching their networks instead of just mine.

I didn't have a framework for it. I just didn't know what would work, so I multiplied everything and watched which parts moved. That's still how we approach it, for us and for clients.

Will beats skill

Michael asked how I choose who to build with. Almost everything I'm good at, I taught myself, so I've never weighted pedigree or formal training heavily. What I look for is heart.

There's phenomenal skill and there's phenomenal will, and I'll take average skill with phenomenal will every time. Think about music. There are far better musicians playing in bad bars than there are on the charts. The difference usually isn't talent — it's the person who showed up for the eightieth day running to get someone to listen to the demo, or who booked eight cities and slept in the van.

The people I've made the most money with, and kept longest, are the ones who were simply sold out to the thing we were doing.

Where the drive came from

Michael asked about my background, so here's the short version.

My father struggled with addiction for most of my childhood. He'd had a full basketball scholarship to Rice before that, and it took the career with it. My mother kept him at a distance and never once spoke badly of him to me, which I understand better now than I did then. When I was thirteen she made him sit down and explain it to me himself. He did, and it was clearly difficult for him.

He died a couple of months later, at the start of my freshman year of high school.

That conversation is probably the reason I'm here. I went to school in an area where drugs were freely available at parties, and I'd just had a first-hand account of exactly where that road ends. It was never a question for me after that. If he paid for that lesson so I didn't have to, that's a real thing he gave me.

A few months into my freshman year of college, my only remaining support fell away. I needed a job, somewhere to stay, and a way to feed myself at seventeen or eighteen. Survival beat higher education, so I dropped out and took whatever work I could get.

One of those jobs was the graveyard shift at a gym, which turned into a sales role. That's where I learned to work out properly, and more importantly where I learned to sell — building rapport, running discovery, presenting a solution, handling objections, closing. Selling a gym membership and selling a six-figure campaign are the same conversation at different stakes.

Another was promotions for a nightclub company, which became small concerts, then bigger ones, then festivals. The through line was always the same: generate interest, build desire, get people to actually show up and pay. That is still precisely what I do.

Watch the full conversation

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Episode 20: Homeless to Millionaire. Entrepreneur in Action with Michael Trenz, December 2024. Runtime 80 minutes — the longest conversation I've done.

If more customers would currently break your business rather than grow it, that's the problem worth solving first. That's what Ignite Funnels is for.