SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ep 486: Agency Hits $2M In Revenue, 49 Employees, $36k ACV with RapidBoostMarketing CEO Ali Salman
22 Nov 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What is Rapid Boost Marketing and who do they serve?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner is Charlie Daggs. Okay, he was a middle manager at a manufacturing company. He wants to break free and he won the $100 I give out every Monday.
Chapter 3: How has Rapid Boost Marketing achieved over $2 million in revenue?
For your chance to win, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. So many people tell me they love my email marketing and I use a tool to do this email marketing in a way that is so powerful and it works so much. I was shocked when Clay at Leadpages announced that he acquired the tool. It's called Drip.
I'll tell you how I use Drip and why I use it. It's more powerful than Infusionsoft, but as light as a feather to actually use. If you want to get six days of it free right now, go to NathanLyka.com forward slash Drip. Again, NathanLyka.com forward slash Drip. I'll tell you how I use it and why later on in the episode.
Chapter 4: What is the average contract size and duration for clients?
Nathan Latke here, and this is episode 486. And coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Dan Golden. His agency did $8 million in revenue last year with a 12% target net margin. His company is called BeFoundOnline.com. Top the tribe. Good morning. Nathan Latke here.
And our guest this morning is Ali Salman, who heads Rapid Boost Marketing, where they exclusively work with professional service providers.
Chapter 5: How does Rapid Boost Marketing generate leads for clients?
Rapid Boost has grown to over $2 million in the last two years in annual sales with a goal of
25 million by 2020 they have generated over 120 000 ideal client inquiries for service firms and practices in the last 12 months ali are you ready to take us to the top i am nathan thank you for having me on the show of course so it sounds like your business model you're you're an agency right absolutely absolutely okay so tell us quickly what does the agency do and how do you generate revenue what's your average contract size
So basically our average contract size goes anywhere from $1,500 upwards of $5,000 to $6,000. Majority of our clients are anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000. And basically what they pay us for, they are all lawyers, dentists, accountants, construction firms, architects, anyone who's providing service to local, location-specific business.
We help them with the lead generation and of course using social search and all the other online channels. That's how we leverage that. And that's how we have the agency.
And if we look back at 2015, what was total revenue?
In 2015, we did over $800,000. At the end of 2016, we will be in more than $2 million.
That's great. And so you have clients paying you on average two to three K per contract. Is that a monthly retainer or is that just the total contract?
Correct. It's a monthly retainer. Our average client stays with us around 18 months to 20 months. We have clients more than that. Our agency just has been there for two and a half years.
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Chapter 6: What services does Rapid Boost Marketing provide to local businesses?
We don't have this average, but yes, it's a monthly retainer. Correct.
So if I took 18 months, time is about two grand. Is it fair to say the average customer is paying you 36 grand over their life?
Correct, absolutely. And we have some customers, let's say we have a law firm, right? Their average retainer is around $5,000. So we are moving towards more and more higher paying and higher retainer clients. And that's just the progress, right? A lot of our clients, when we started, they were all $1,000 clients, majority of them.
And how many customers, unique customers are you working with currently?
Currently, we are working with around 72 customers. And on average, we are signing up anywhere from four customers to 10 customers a month.
Okay, great. And so we kind of went right to the numbers. But tell us more. So first off, the website, so people can check this out. It's Rapid Boost Marketing. We'll link to it in the show notes. But what exactly are you delivering for people, Ali?
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Chapter 7: What is the structure of the team at Rapid Boost Marketing?
When they pay you, what do they get?
So basically, we know that every business owner, especially if they're local, they need local SEO, search engine optimization. That's our core part of the offering. Of course, content is a huge part right now. And then social plugs it in. And then we do some marketing automation, which is the emails, landing pages, and drip campaigns.
But 90% of our work focuses on like a search engine and social. That's right. That's how we find them ideal clients.
Okay. So tell me an example for like a lawyer that lives in Cincinnati. I sign up with you. What do I get?
Yeah. So basically like, you know, you're a divorce lawyer, you know, that your average case size or every retainer is anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 depending on your, on your firm. Our, our job is that like, you know, to get you, let's say you need five new files a month, which translates into 30 or $40,000 in your revenue. We help you generate $40,000 of revenue. You pay us,
anywhere from $3,000 upwards of $5,000, of course, depending on your local market, how competitive you are. Like in New York and Seattle areas, we will have to charge more to make sure we can achieve those results. In a smaller town, absolutely, that can be done for relatively less money. But definitely, bottom line is, if a lawyer comes to us and say, hey, you know what, guys?
they take this four thousand dollars what we have to do the cost per acquisition has to be very low for him so he can justify our services now for a law firm of course if average return is five or ten thousand dollars they can spend anywhere from 200 to 300 upwards of 500 to get a file and that's what we help them do that
and what is the so is that included like in the spend so what i mean by that is if someone pays you three grand per month um are you spending two grand of that on the ads to get them the leads or do you get to keep all that money
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Chapter 8: What challenges has Rapid Boost Marketing faced in scaling?
Correct. Absolutely. So, so our, our approach is a little bit different. Our packages, we just have four packages and all of them include the paid media spent and the 30% of every package goes towards paid media, which is doing some retargeting or some adverts. Correct. Yeah.
Got it. Okay. So if you do 800 grand in sales this year, we can assume two thirds of that's going to spend.
Oh, one code actually is going to the 30% of the correct. Okay.
Yeah.
And then majority of it, like, you know, our, uh, our main focus, we tell the clients is around content and around search engine optimization, which is like in a longer term, it's more beneficial.
And what is the, uh, how many current team members do you have?
So we have like the model, Nathan, we run is like, we have like 12 people in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada. We have four people in Calgary. It's like, it's pretty frozen cities right now. And all of our production team is in either Philippines or India. So total, I have 49 people. But in North America, we have like around 16 and rest of them are in Philippines and India.
And if you just add up all of your monthly headcount expenses, what does that come out to be about?
Good question. We tend to our monthly headcount expense anywhere from not more than 50% of the cost of our business. We say that bottom line, after everything, we should be saving anywhere from 25 to 30%.
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