[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host, Josh Thomas. You can find me on all social media t literally. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals, build stronger relationships and scale your business faster. Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Conversational funnels. We book 121 qualified sales calls in 10 days without any ad spend, without any cold outreach, and without endless social posting. We found a new way to close deals in 2025 that does not rely on any of those tired old methods that we've all grown accustomed to. To learn more, download the free step by step
[email protected] Once again, that's conversationalfunnels.com Today's guest is Jake Setterlin. He is 28 years old from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He got started in business when he was 19. In college, figuring out what to do with his life. He's had a few successes and many failures along the way. From failed companies to scaling to million dollar months and then losing it all and building it back up again.
Jake brings a diverse angle to the general chat about business and starting from nothing. Jake, welcome to Big Ticket Pros. What is the best piece of advice that you would give to somebody just starting out in your industry or just starting out again?
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Absolutely, Josh, thank you so much for having me. So the biggest thing I tell people whenever I talk to somebody starting out and we went through it, I went through it personally and it is kind of twofold, but stick to one niche, niche down. The riches are in the niches. So find your industry and stick to it until it works because I guarantee you it will work. You just have to figure out the right offer and then focus on revenue producing activities. Don't try to, you know, build out your SOPs and your back end system and your first employee that you're going to hire. Focus on setting meetings, getting in front of people, perfecting your offer and an offer that that industry likes and then the rest kind of falls into place.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I've, I've run into so many situations where I myself have been guilty of this and many other people that I run into. It's like I, I've got to build my machine. It's got to be the perfect machine, you know, like. But what about clients? They'll come later.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: How do we break that cycle in focusing on getting in front of people that can give US money so that we can continue this thing.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. I, I think the biggest thing is, like, really disassociating because I'm a systems guy. I, I come from that background. I partnered with an individual, thankfully, that he was the sales guy. But we would spend hours talking literally on the offer. You know, how can we tweak this? You know, I heard this on my sales call. You know, okay, let's add this into the system. Let's take this out. So, you know, focus on cold calls. Reach out to people with, you know, email, Facebook, dm. If you have a little bit of money to spend, run, you know, some ads and then just perfect that offer and really kind of understand what does this niche actually need? What does this industry actually need, and what are they going to bite at? Because people will just talk and talk and talk all day, and you'll learn a lot, you know, from the people that you're talking to. So. Yeah, that's.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Yeah, and, and that's. That's one of the things that is.
Has been very fascinating to me. I ran into a. A guy who wanted to get into the like, like the Christian entrepreneur niche. Now, this is something I know nothing about. Right. So, but guys trying to break into the niche. I'm like, all right, I'll figure it out. So I started asking him questions. I'm like, what do you. What. What do you. What do you guys want? And he's like, well, I don't know. I think they want, you know, this, this, and this. And my first question was, well, have you asked them?
And he was like, no, it's like, go ask them. You know, they will tell you exactly what you what. What they want to buy from you, but you have to ask them 100 and so what are some of those? And in your journey, as you've been figuring things out, what are some of those kind of secrets that you've learned to. To really figure out quickly, what is it that somebody wants? What is it that somebody's willing to pay for? Is there. Is there like a shortcut or some, Some words, secret hacks that you have for that?
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah, there. And there is. And it actually goes back to. It was one of the first books I ever listened to. I went through that whole Gary Vee phase and the online books and all that stuff back when I started. And I, I forget the name, but it was literally a book about marketing and the principles of marketing. And one of the things they said is anybody can stand out in an industry. Just don't stand out Too much. Basically what it means is create a product that stands out, that has a different angle, a different tweak, but don't create something that's completely new because it becomes alien and people aren't willing to actually try it out. So I, I would do some competitive competitor research, understand what's their offer, what are they offering, and then tweak it a little bit. So, you know, for example, we started off in the real estate industry doing marketing for real estate agents. And we got in and Everybody was charging $2,000 a month and we basically said, hey, like these ads are really easy to run. Let's charge them $2,000 one time, a little subscription on the back end and then we can sign people up and basically say, hey, like pay us once. That's literally a fraction of what you're going to pay somebody else and then just pay for our, our back end system. The ads are going to run themselves and that allowed us to stand out. So, you know, don't recreate the wheel and offer some crazy thing. Tweak it a little bit, come up with a different pricing structure, a different angle. Maybe everybody's used to Facebook ads, get them into YouTube or something like that, and then, you know, go out there and get in front and then obviously adapt and change things up along the way based off the feedback that you're getting.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: That's something that I'm seeing as a growing trend, at least in the last 12 months or so, with AI coming in and making things infinitely easier to execute. There's a lot of guys that used to charge $25,000 or charging $2,500 now and making a killing because they've got those systems in place to where they can just execute and sell over and over. Can you talk a little bit about the, the shift there? Because it sounds like that's, that's really how you captured your first momentum.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that, I mean that, that's kind of, that was our secret sauce. You know, we're, we've been in the game for a long time. We're looking at exiting, so you know, definitely fully transparent on, you know, all that. But that was our secret sauces. We came into the game when everybody was charging, you know, thousands a month, lock you up in a six month contract. And the feedback we got was literally sick of being in contracts and this was back in Covid, so people didn't know what was going to go, you know, being, you know, going on the next month, two months, three months, and especially in real estate. So they were Like I don't want to be in a contract. So it's like, hey, you know, just pay us one time, you get this system forever. You know, we can always pause the little back end subscription, you can restart it, but you're always going to have access to these ads in the system that we set up for you. So.
Yeah, and obviously, you know, even with, with AI too and just pricing and everything like that, it's super interesting because from at least what I've seen personally is there's even more of a separation now because it used to be everybody's charging a monthly fee, but now I see it really, really cheap. Really like stupid cheap or it's super expensive. Like you still have the guys selling the 25, 30, 40, 50k courses, 100 year or not courses, but you know, programs done for you type of stuff. Or it's like a hundred dollars a month, you get a CRM, you have things like go high level, you know, launch your ads, whatever, join my school community. So it's really interesting where I feel like we, we've seen everything get diluted down to a couple hundred dollars a month and then you know, again you still have your, your high ticket guys. But that, that's kind of what I've seen especially with AI coming out and it being so easy to just crank.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: Clients out and, and it's almost like you, like you said at the beginning here, you, you really just got to plant your flag wherever you're going to plant it and, and keep going because they is a fortune to be made in charging somebody $2,000 a month.
But there's a totally separate fortune to be made in charging somebody $2,000 one time because it creates a different set of advantages. And so I'm just curious, like you don't have to go into the weeds on this, but how, how does, obviously that's a disruptor in somebody's mind, but economically speaking, how does that work compared to. Well, these guys are getting that same amount every month. You're getting it once. Do you just bring in that much more volume or how does that work?
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Yeah, so I mean to give you some context, our price point has hovered right around if we're discounting it, doing some kind of special $1,500 upfront and then we've gotten it up to, in some industries to $2,500. So right around that $2,000 mark and since I've started, since we've been doing this, we have signed up, just look today actually 8,000 individuals. So like to Any other, you know, company like, that's a lot of people to sign up. So it is definitely more of a volume play. We call ourselves like the hamburger stand. We don't sell steaks. It's not a $2,000 a month type of product. You know, it's volume. But if you think about it, you know, from, you know, the industries that were in real estate, mortgage insurance, some of those, you know, bigger, higher volume industries, and even if you, you looked at the smaller ones, the turn rate of that actual industry is still less than the volume of individuals that were signing up. So the turn rate in the real estate industry, there might be half a million agents out there. The turn rate's like 5, 6, 7%. So there's more new agents coming into that business than we're actually signing up on an annual basis. So we, we've had people, you know, always tell us like, hey, you gotta, you gotta charge more. You're gonna burn through an audience.
As long as you're signing up under that, that annual kind of turn rate for any industry, you know, this is, you know, it's definitely a viable, you know, business opportunity, business plan to have something that's, you know, you can still eat with your upfront fee, but then still doing volume on the subscription basis on the back end too. And that goes for anything. It doesn't even mean, you know, charging an upfront fee. You could be selling your services or some kind of community for $100, $200 a month. But again, by doing volume and really kind of mastering your client acquisition process, you're, you're able to scale to signing up hundreds of thousands of individuals.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: And I'd love to hear, because in your bio I was reading that you, you grew this great big giant business, you lost, it all started all over again. Now we don't have to go through the painful part. I don't need to know, you know, what, you know, what happened. But I am curious. You hit this pinnacle, you lose everything and you got to start over.
What, now that you've already been successful, what did you do the second time differently to grow this thing up?
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Absolutely. So we took our winning formula and it is very simple. The reason we lost it all, the reason we had the failures was we had, our, our support team was basically outsourced. So it was great in the beginning because we, again, you know, transparently we're paying about $7,000 ahead for a full time person.
They were getting paid about $2,000.
You can, you know, imagine the work ethic a US full time person in office is going to actually output for that. And we didn't have any transparency of what was going on with our clients. So, you know, that shot up. We had about 25, 30 people that were actually, you know, outsourced to this company.
You can imagine, you know, the customer feedback when you don't have transparency, what's actually going on. And things are being kind of swept under the rug. So, you know, that was really the biggest thing is when we lost it all, you know, downscaled, started losing money. We took our winning formula, which was our offer, how we do client acquisition, how we do sales, and then just basically built out from the ground up a support team that was in house, you know, full on training on ads, GHL support, all that kind of stuff, and then was able to build it back up again. So it really came down to, you know, once you have this winning framework, you're almost bulletproof because even if something happens, an industry goes kaput, whatever, you know how to make money, you know, and you have a winning offer that you can then go and take, fix any kind of parts of the machine that you need to, but always have, you know, the revenue coming in.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Yeah, smart. Yeah. The offer is really, you can have a great offer and crappy marketing and a crappy sales team and you, you'll probably still be okay. You know, like, you don't have to be a great salesman to sell crack. You know, it's like it pretty much sells itself. Actually, a former drug dealer told me that and I was asking, he did, he did like hard time in prison. And you know, I was like, well, what, you know, what kind of secrets can you tell me about, you know, your, your time on the streets and selling drugs? And he was like, I mean, as long as it's not like chopped up, it pretty much sells itself. You don't have to be a genius.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'll be honest with you, that has been one of the principles. That's a really good way to put it, that if you can, you know, somebody's getting on a call with you, they know they have to, you know, get leads, get appointments, if you can put something in front of them that is positioned better than anybody else in the market. Again, it sells themselves versus if you're matching your competitors pricing now, you have to literally sell yourself over the other, you know, the competitor versus the product just, you know, selling itself for you.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want it, I want it to be in the bag, man. It's like you, I enjoy the the science and art of sales and I'll read the books, I'll practice, I'll listen to my, you know, I'll take my critiques and coaches but man, if I can show up and just like slam dunk it, I'm going to do that 10 times out of 10. You know, I want to make it undeniable to where I don't have to do that much work so I can eat.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: Makes it easier too.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah, go ahead. No, I was just going to say like you know, from that client acquisition system standpoint too, it, it's a lot easier to pull reps and you don't have to worry so much about having a dialed in sales team like you mentioned because they can get on the phone, they can present, they don't have to be the best at closing and they could still make sales.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so tell us a little bit about who is the best fit to connect with you and where can they go to learn more.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. Just, just my name.com so jakesetterlin.com super simple.
We are you know obviously kind of getting out of the, the agency space and exiting, you know, what we currently have.
It's been a, you know, a great ride but you know, we're kind of, we're done in that space and getting more into, you know, one on one coaching and actually helping new agency owners. So Yep, just Jake Sutterland.com and our biggest thing is, you know, helping out new individuals and actually being a one on one coach with them and making sure that they're not wasting time on exactly, you know what I mentioned which is just non revenue producing activities.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Well said. Well, hey, we're going to wrap up from here. Thanks so much to our guest Jake Settlin for coming on and sharing a little bit of wisdom about what it takes to thrive in a competitive industry and making sure you have the right offer. You can learn more about what he's doing now by going to his website. Jake Sutterlin.com if you're an agency coach, professional services provider or otherwise sell expensive stuff, we'd love to have you on a future episode. You can
[email protected] and once again if you want to stack your calendar with qualified motivated prospects who want what you have, download our free blueprint at conversationalfunnels. Com. That's all for now. Now let's go get that big ticket punched. Let's see you later.
