In 2012, I lived with my (now ex) in-laws, in their upstairs extra bedroom. I had no money to my name. I was recovering from two huge financial losses in an extremely short amount of time. I had lost about $30,000 in PPC ads, on top of losing my financial license.

From 2008-2011 I made multiple six figures, and in 2012 I was flat broke. 

Since I had lost my financial license, I wasn’t able to go get a job in my field of expertise. Since I had lost my life savings, I had no money to invest in any kind of major PPC ad campaigns. I was f*cked. Thank God my in-laws kept food in the pantry, or I would have starved.

Can you imagine how humbling this experience was? I was once one of the top mortgage guys in the country. Earned 7 figures in my career. Had the respect. The money. The power. And now I lived with someone else’s parents. If it weren’t for the fact that I have Jax, I would have probably just gave up. instead, I knew I had to make some moves so I could better provide for my family.

In early 2013 I borrowed some money from a few folks and flew out to Las Vegas for a few days to meet up with Kevin Nations. While at Kevin’s house, I met another guy named AJ Roberts. AJ was the world’s strongest man at one time. No shit! He’s a big ass dude. AJ calls me over to the table and asks me if I have ever ran Facebook ads before. I told him my story and he goes on to tell me about Facebook ads. 

After a few minutes of talking, AJ grabs my laptop and looks into my YouTube channel. From there he downloaded one of my old videos onto my desktop. He proceeded to upload that video to Facebook and show me how to run an ad to it. I was embarrassed to tell him my ad spend budget was $25. It was literally all I had. If Facebook billing hit my credit card before I made it home, I was not going to be able to check out of my hotel. 

I was naturally scared as hell. The last time I had done any PPC, it was on Google and I lost over $30k. Scared was a gross understatement. I was not only scared of losing my money, I was scared of losing my pride in front of a group of high power entrepreneurs. Maybe I had made a mistake by flying there…

AJ finished up my ad and promoted it. I still remember wincing when he hit the “place order” button. My ass literally puckered. I knew at that moment, I might not make it home. 

After he placed the ad, that was it. No climax. No dramatic music. Nothing. We just had to wait for Facebook to approve the ad. Truthfully, I wanted them to deny it so I had a reason not to spend the money. The universe was with/against me that day, depending on how you look at it. 

Kevin took us to lunch at the Anthem Country Club and I’ll never forget. About an hour and a half after we placed the ad, my phone started to light up. Within 20 minutes I had 5 or 6 leads in my phone. Fully filled out surveys with prospect’s income, issue and incentive to move forward. 

As soon as we finished lunch and made our way back to Kevin’s house, I went outside and made a call to one of the leads. Thirty minutes later, I had $1000 in my pay pal account. I went on to call the next lead, no answer. The one after that, I made another $1000 on! I now had $2000 more to my name than I had to my name in the last 90 days. GAME TIME!

That shit had me fired up. I added $200 to my ad spend, making the ad spend now $225/day. Each day I would make 5 sales, then add more of my money into places that needed it.  

My first expense was an assistant. I needed someone who could do the tedious things for me, while I handled the big shit. It was a stretch for me to make this expense. I value people, so I don’t want to be cheap with them. Between ad spend and the cost of labor, my bills just went up significantly. So did my income. 

After having an assistant for about a year, and it just being me and her working, I became exhausted. It was getting damn near impossible for me to make ALL of the sales, content, keeping the books, and all that. It was time to hire again. Hiring is always a risk so I was a little scared.

I had hired in the past and most times it didn’t work out. Matter of fact, I had to fire my first assistant and hire the one I’m referencing in this post. My next hire had to be someone who could sell. It had to be someone good too. After all, this salesperson would be representing a sales organization. My sales organization!

It was hard as hell to turn my leads over to someone else. As expected, I had to hire and fire several people before I found the right person for the job. It was frustrating as hell. As soon as I found and trained the right one, I was able to scale my ad budget to match.

Now that I had an admin on staff, a salesperson and me, my machine was starting to form. I went from having roller coaster months. Meaning making good money one month, then BS money the next. To slowly ascending and growing each month. Slowly but surely I was starting to scale this thing. 

My next three hires were more salespeople. As expected, at this point, it took me hiring and firing about 8 people to get the three I needed. 

At this point, my ad budget had to increase to meet the demand of the sales team. I had to push my ads up to around $750/day. That meant I had to insure that my sales team could sell enough to cover ads, commission and admin costs. It was again, scary as hell to turn it over to other people. Once I got the machine dialed in though, we started taking off like a rocket.

Our months went from slowly growing to rapid momentum. I’ve been able to run even more ads, contract more sales help and even hire tech and video crews on full time. I’m now running ads on over 15 different platforms in 8 different countries. 

Nothing happens over night and it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine along the way, but I did slowly, but surely scale my business from $25 start up, to multiple seven figures in less than 3 years. It was all done from balancing an advertising investment against human capital. As I got more people on board to help, I ramped up the ads to match the labor demand. I’ve kept carefully balancing this for three years now.

It doesn’t take a lot of money to get started as an entrepreneur, but it does take skill, confidence, discipline, and advertising. If you’re new to the ad game, click the Phone Funnels banner below and you can see first hand how it’s done. There’s no reason you can’t scale your business, it’s just a matter of you getting serious about what matters most. Turning ad dollars into profit.