196: Why Your Offer Sucks (And How to Fix It) with Jake Setterlun – 8FE

How do you make an offer so irresistible that you don’t even need a sales team to sell it?

Jake Setterlun is 29, runs four different companies, and somehow manages to make offer-building look easy. He started out doing Facebook ads for real estate agents, but everything changed when he figured out what makes an offer irresistible. That insight led to The Offer Code, his “Purple Ocean” framework, and multiple agencies doing seven and eight figures.

In this episode, we get into how Jake thinks about creating offers that do the selling for you, why most agency owners are still stuck in 2018, and what it really takes to use AI in a way that actually boosts conversions. He also breaks down how he tests new offers, the biggest mistake he made while scaling, and how he rebuilt after stepping away too soon.

If you’re an agency owner, or honestly, anyone selling something online… this one’s going to hurt a little. But it’s worth it.

Tune in to learn how to make your offer the only one your customer wants to buy.

Inspiring Quotes

• “You always need to have one specific thing that’s unique to you that nobody else can copy.” – Jake Setterlun  
• “We want the offer to sell the client, not the sales team.” – Jake Setterlun 
• “Pick something and stick with it.” – Jake Setterlun 
• “If you’re not getting any leads, it means your offer sucks.” – Jake Setterlun 
• “We want the offer to be a no brainer offer.” – Jake Setterlun 
• “You have to be the best bridge from where your client is to where they want to be.” – Jake Setterlun

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:47 From concept to money 
• 02:33 Biggest business mistakes in the agency space 
• 06:48 How to get into the agency space 
• 08:47 Jake’s offer code 
• 15:24 Creating the offer 
• 20:12 Changing the game with AI 
• 34:25 Biggest mistakes when implementing AI 
• 37:08 Testing offers 
• 38:54 Traffic sources and marketing strategies 
• 49:36 LinkedIn’s role in the ad ecosystem 
• 53:09 Biggest mistake in the last 5 years 
• 57:02 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs 
• 58:03 Outro 

Jake Setterlun 0:00
If you’re not getting any yeses, if you’re not getting any leads, if you’re not getting any appointments, it means your offer sucks. And it doesn’t take a genius to make a little chat GBT agent or develop some script inside of GHL. It’s not hard to make Facebook ads and learn that skill set. What does take time, and is something that is going to allow you to charge more faster, is product development and offer development. We want the offer to sell the client. We don’t want to have to have the best salespeople in the world and using a big guarantee to sell. We really want the offer to just be a no brainer offer.

Brad Weimert 0:35
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Jake sutterlin, you are 29 and you are doing very well in the agency, agency space right now you’ve got four different businesses that I know of, linked ads, several agency portfolios. You wrote a book called the offer code Inc, 5000 tons of beautiful awards behind you right now. Two of them are Click Funnels, two comma x Awards, which are $10 million funnels that you built, but you also had ups and downs through the journey. And I want to talk about a lot of that stuff through that journey. Let’s, let’s start with, how quickly have you taken concept to lots of money, either for yourself or another business, and what was it?

Jake Setterlun 1:56
You know, our recent, most recent company, started back in February, took six months to do a million dollars, which isn’t, you know, ridiculous, big business scheme, but for the agency space like that’s obviously, you know, something we’re proud of. But you know, over the years, it’s something that it took us honing in a specific formula on what allowed us to really take something that is an idea, take it to market, sell a lot of it very quickly. You know, that’s really light out my whole career to that point. You know, trial and error in terms of putting together offers, marketing, building out teams, etc.

Brad Weimert 2:33
You mentioned sort of framework and structure and a system that you have in place right now. I think one of the things that’s challenging in business and marketing now is things are moving really, really quickly. And so there’s a question of, when you lean into new stuff and when you lean on the stable tried and true things, what’s a business belief that you think agency owners or business owners in general are just getting totally wrong right now?

Jake Setterlun 2:56
For sure, I think there’s a lot. There’s definitely two things. One of the big overarching things you mentioned the market moving so fast is it really is, and you have this, this weird separation before you could sell agency services for 1000 $2,000 and it was this nice middle ground between low ticket and high ticket. Now you don’t have that anymore, because, you know, everybody like us, marketers are in everything. They’ve taken that mid ticket and they’ve said, Hey, I’m going to charge you a couple 100 bucks, or, Hey, here’s the system. It’s 10 bucks a month for my community. And now we have this big separation where it’s all either low ticket or tie ticket. So definitely staying ahead of the curve, looking at trends, and consistently developing new products and new things that can add in to your specific offer. That’s one of one of the big pieces, but then also is, you know, implementing that into an offer that actually speaks to your specific customer. I work with agency owners coaches, kind of like online businesses on a day to day basis, in addition to, you know, launching our own that I’m partnered in. And the biggest thing is always offer. People will put together. They’ll come to me and be like, okay, you know, what’s your offer? And it’s like, oh, we do Facebook ads and we give people a GHL account. It’s like, okay, cool. So does 1000 other people in the market doing the exact same thing? I don’t care if you’re niche down to roofing, like, what separates you. So a big thing for us is you always need to have one specific thing that’s unique to you that nobody else can copy. Even if they go to somebody else, they’re not going to get what that unique thing is. But then that unique thing is what’s like actually getting somebody the result and the success. So, you know, really quickly to sum that up is for one of our agencies that does advertising for insurance. Our specific unique mechanism is we what we call policy seeker, identification technology. It’s a fancy word to say Facebook targeting and data that we’ve collected over the years, but that’s our unique selling point where, hey, I don’t care if you go try some. Else, but they don’t have our data. They don’t have our targeting technology. So having that is definitely one of the biggest things that people make a mistake, you know, in the agency space, just online space in general, but then that obviously, and continuing to develop your product and improve and kind of stay up with trends in market, one

Brad Weimert 5:19
of the things that I think is interesting about agencies that actually perform, which is an important distinction, is the exposure to a variety of different types of businesses, or just the velocity of businesses, right? How many you get to do in a short period of time? What do you think the dumbest thing is that online marketers are still doing today.

Jake Setterlun 5:41
I think it’s at least from my my opinion. I think it’s two things, and I kind of touched on this before, is just selling the traditional old, you know, hey, we can get you more reviews. Or what do you do? Oh, we’re an SEO company. We do social media posting again, like not taking that 10 steps further and developing something unique, that’s definitely a big mistake. But another thing, and it’s not even in today’s market, it’s since I started, because that’s what I was taught, is charging way too fucking much money. Getting into market and saying, hey, you know, I’m new, trust me, without any results. And they’re like, Hey, I should be getting paid 2000 3000 $5,000 a month. You know, I know there’s back and forth on that in the industry of what people say they should be getting paid, type of thing, but I’m one of those that you need to get to that point where you can, you know, earn the ability to actually charge that amount. But the people just starting out, like, charge a couple $100 you know, really work with clients, give away your time to build skills, build knowledge, because in return, that’s going to pay you tenfold. Yeah, that’s

Brad Weimert 6:48
tough for a brand new entrepreneur. I think that, I mean a lot of the time you know that I’d say the traditional wisdom is work for free for somebody that you can learn from, build the skill set until you can do it on your own. But especially in the world that we live in today, when you see people spin things up quickly and make a shitload of money fast, people aren’t patient at all. How do you think that new entrepreneurs should start if they want to get into the agency space? And you know, 200 bucks or 300 bucks a month from a client isn’t going to pay the

Jake Setterlun 7:20
bills for them. Yeah, it really comes down to depth of product, kind of, again, going back to offer, the deeper you can go, the better solution you can, like, develop and implement. And it doesn’t take a genius to, you know, make a little chat GBT agent or develop some script inside of GHL, you know, kind of like what I mentioned before, building those skills, it doesn’t take long. It’s not hard to make Facebook ads and learn that skill set. What does take time, and is something that is going to allow you to charge, you know, more faster, again, is product development and offer development. So, you know, an example that we just launched for our insurance Insurance Agency is an AI agency that what we’re calling is a policy consultant AI agent, where, instead of saying, Oh, we have an AI agency that calls your leads and qualifies them, we have a policy consultant agent that I’ll call the leads up and then actually have an educated conversation about what policy is right for them, and then it passes them on to the agent. So that unique solution right there. There’s very, very few, if any, individuals offering that on market. So that’s going to allow us to charge more because nobody else is doing it, but it’s a very good product fit with what agents actually need and want. So if you can understand that and develop something that speaks directly to what they want, it’s going to allow you to charge more faster, for sure.

Brad Weimert 8:47
Love that. So you wrote a book called the offer code, which dives into this stuff in 2025 what makes an irresistible offer, and like, what are the components that are completely non negotiable? And how do you think about structuring offers today?

Jake Setterlun 9:02
Two things. So I have the offer code, which is offer structure. And when I think of offer structure, I’m thinking like, what does it actually look like on paper when I’m not only communicating it to a customer, but I’m also pitching it to a customer, because it’s got to make sense when I’m pitching it as well. But then I also have something called the purple ocean offer that we’ve developed. So those two things, right there are the two non negotiables and offer code, to give you kind of a picture is you have a bridge. One side, you have where your customer currently is, and you have where your customer wants to be their desired state, and your offer is the bridge to get to the other side. Now you have to think about, you know, it’s a canyon. There’s multiple bridges, and your competitors all have different bridges that your customer could walk over to get to that desired state. You have to have the best Bridge, which means that’s your offer. So you need to reduce risk. It’s the most stable bridge out there, and it might have some benefit of you. While they’re going over the bridge, you know, every five feet, somebody hands them 10 bucks or something like, you know, I’m just just picturing this in your head, where you have to, you know, versus your competitors, you have to structure an offer. That makes sense. It’s the shortest bridge to get to the other side, but the clients also want to walk that bridge. So is that done for you? Done with you? And our biggest thing is, when we look at an offer, it’s, you know, we do X, Y and Z, and this is our system, and this is how we’re able to do this. And then you have your offer stack. And your offer stack is usually four to five steps of your offer. So, you know, again, I’ll keep using the insurance example with with Facebook ads for insurance agents. Our offer stack is step one, the in market, policy, seeker technology, so we’re able to identify who’s in the market. Step two is omni channel marketing. So now that we’ve identified those people, we’re going to place ads in front of those people we’ve identified as wanting a policy. Step three is qualification policy, you know, consulting and qualifications. So we’re going to understand what they need, where they’re at, making sure that they can actually afford the insurance policy that you know they want. And then step five is deal coordination. So we’re going to set up an appointment with you, and that one through four is a very easy, transformational system for a customer to actually understand. Coming into to our business and our offer, they see, like, Okay, this makes sense. Like, logically makes sense that this would actually help me close more deals. So that’s a non negotiable for us, that it’s not just the offer that has to be good, it’s the the actual offer stack has to be transformational. And then I mentioned the, you know, purple ocean spin, which has to do more with that unique mechanism of having something that’s different. You know, the idea between or with a purple ocean offer is that you have a red ocean, you have a blue ocean. Well, what’s in the middle of those? It’s a purple ocean. So you take a red ocean offer, you have a proven market, something that, you know, is red hot, but there’s a lot of blood in the water, a lot of competition. So all I need to do is put a tweak a blue ocean spin on a red ocean offer, and I’m going to stick out and people are going to buy it. But if I just do a blue ocean, which is, you know, kind of the traditional term, a lot of times, it can be way too unique, and then you have to sell people on the idea of that actual offer, like if it’s going to work, let alone working with you, whereas a purple ocean offer, it’s a spin on a red ocean. So they’re already sold on what I’m selling them, which is Facebook ads. I just have to have that little bit of a spin, which is that policy, seeker, identification technology. So those two things, like a structured offer and then a unique mechanism, are the two biggest things, non negotiables for us.

Brad Weimert 12:44
So for context, for anybody that doesn’t know, blue ocean is a famous book marketing concept, which is a completely open marketplace where you can sell a totally new product and nobody’s really competing because it’s brand new. So you’ve got tons of space there, but part of that is that you have a huge education curve often, because nobody’s there yet nobody’s looking for it, and a red ocean is, as you said, super competitive, but there’s tons of demand. So everybody’s aware, but because everybody’s aware, there’s tons of demand. So the idea here is taking a market where there’s lots of demand, where people are already familiar, they already are expecting something, and enhancing it with some brand new concept that is going to allow you to stand out in the marketplace. And that’s the idea of the purple ocean offer. Exactly. Yep. Love that so famously in the last few years, Alex hormozi wrote a book called 100 million dollar offers. How does his structure and framework differ or compliment yours?

Jake Setterlun 13:42
No, it’s so funny about that. And there were definitely something you

Unknown Speaker 13:44
get asked it all the time. I’m sure

Jake Setterlun 13:47
that too, especially with the new books coming out. But so that book came out about two years after our like, kind of hitting, hitting, I don’t want to say, like, some luck or like a gold mine. But we hit success with our offer. I started with an individual I met in a Facebook group. We were doing Facebook ads for real estate agents. Struggled for about two years until we hit this offer that just hit it was doing really well, and looking back, it’s like, okay, it checked the box of an offer, the offer code check the box of a purple ocean offer. And about two years after that, having that success, hermosi launched his book, and we got it, and we’re like, oh, this is gonna be great. We read it, and we’re like, damn. Like, we kind of checked all the boxes. So it was kind of like one of those things that naturally we came to that, like that idea of of $100 million offer, we just kind of did it on our own, not to toot our own horn horn. But I’d say the way that, like our offer code currently differs is we focus a lot less on guarantee, where he focus a lot on like the guarantee and. And stuff like that, where I’m more concerned about how is a client actually going to perceive my offer? Because the way that I teach in a big core business belief for our business is we want the offer to sell the client. We don’t want to have to have the best sales people in the world that are just the sharpest and, you know, using a big guarantee to sell. We really want the offer to just be a no brainer offer.

Brad Weimert 15:24
How do you think about starting the process of thinking about creating an offer? So I think one of the things for new entrepreneurs, but quite honestly, lots of existing entrepreneurs that are doing well, like there are people doing millions a year, and they’re in a good market, and they’ve got good sales people, and so they never really had to define a really good offer. And so they’ve got a mediocre offer, but they’ve got good sales people, right? Or they’ve got a killer market and kind of mediocre sales people and a mediocre offer, but the market’s so good that it’s selling anyway, if somebody wants to retool their offer in some of that’s like, how you present it, and some of it’s the product itself that you’re selling. But how do you think about sort of creating the offer, and what steps do you take to define a killer offer,

Jake Setterlun 16:09
for sure? So the first thing that I’ll do is, on paper, I’m going to write down my skill set, so like, whatever we’re doing, like whatever, whatever I’m good at. So if it’s Facebook ads, if it’s AI agents, if it’s copywriting, whatever that might be. From there, I’m going to look at what I call proximity to proof. But basically means, like, what industry do I actually have this like, proximity to that? I’ve actually proven that I can do a good job in that industry, or I’ve worked in that industry, I have something that I can relate back to him. So for me, let’s just say, hypothetically, if I worked in the roofing industry for five years, and then I was like, Hey, I’m done with this. I’m going to start an advertising agency. I might go out there and say, Okay, I know. I know Facebook ads. I have this experience, this industry, knowledge of roofing. I’m going to do Facebook ads for roofing companies. That, to me, is a good starting point. So write that down. I do Facebook ads for roofing companies. Then what I’m going to want to do is write down my offer stack, which is that that five step, four step, I like four pieces to what does that actually look like in terms of the transformation for the client? What am I delivering? So, yes, I do Facebook ads, but what does it look like for the customer? What does the process look process look like? You could have a step one, as you know, first thing we’re going to do is a, you know, business consultation. So I’m going to understand what your offer is. You could say step two is creative development, where we take you know, pieces of that consultation, and now we make creatives to advertise whatever offer that you have, and then step three might be media buying and performance optimization for lead generation or something like that. And that step three is that third piece of the system. And then step four might be retargeting or something like that. So I’m putting together the transformational step one, step two, step three, step four, and then from there, I’m going to really want to kind of take it through this assembly line of all these other checks. So is it productized? Could I sign up 100 clients tomorrow and put a team together and they just crank out the work? Or is there something in there that’s going to rely on me? And if it’s not productized, if it’s not something that I can build a team around, and it just kind of relies on my knowledge. Then, okay, I need to go back and I need to, like, rework that offer. I need to make it so it’s not so reliant on me that, you know, we could just bring on customer after customer. Another thing, obviously I hit down on niching, down the purple ocean offer aspect to it, do I have something unique? So, you know, maybe we have a creative engine. So step two, instead of creative development, maybe we have an AI creative agent that goes out there, analyzes all of our competitors, all of all the clients, competitors, and just spits out all of these different creative, creative angles, etc, and that’s unique to us. That’s an AI agent we developed. So there’s that. And then lastly, what, what I like to do, it’s an exercise I do with a lot of people, is like, do competitor research. And the number one is, do I have some kind of guarantee that’s better going back to $100 million offers, like, that’s definitely valid. But then also, what is the timeframe of result, and then also what’s my pricing, and if I can beat my competitors in every single one of those categories. Now I have a no brainer offer. So it’s really step one, mapping it out. You know, on paper, write it down and have something unique. But then also look at your competitors and strive to have either the most deliverables, deliver the most value for the least amount of money with the best guarantee in the best timeframe, and obviously ethically so that you can actually deliver and have a thriving business. But if you can hit on all of those things, then like you’re doing good.

Brad Weimert 19:58
And so the idea with the offer stat. Back is articulating the emotional and practical journey that a person is going to go through to get the result

Unknown Speaker 20:08
Exactly, exactly awesome.

Brad Weimert 20:12
One of the things that I’ve heard you talk about quite a bit, even in the last you know, 20 minutes here, is the application of AI. And you throw in these and then I have an agent do this. AI is a also, let me for anybody that doesn’t know, GHL is high level. Go high level is the website. The company name is high level, but everybody calls them go high level because the websites go high level anyway. So it’s a CRM and marketing automation platform that tons of agency owners use for a lot of reasons, one of them being that you can white label it and resell it to other people and create a residual income from doing that. So interesting platform that a ton of marketers are using today and a ton of agencies are using, I’ve heard you talk about the application of AI. Can you tell me how you’re using AI in your business today? Like no bullshit, real examples, not a hypothetical, of how it has transformed the operations of the business and also marketing for you today.

Jake Setterlun 21:09
Yeah, it’s something that I wish I could come on here and say that like, Oh, our whole business is ran, you know, with AI and I don’t we all Yeah, 100% and, you know, Nan, such a crazy tool. And to be quite honest, it’s over my head. We have people on the on the team that, you know, played around with it and whatnot, but it’s really been, been two things on the client side, so we do a lot of marketing. So conversational AI has been huge, whether it’s voice, whether it’s SMS, being able to have that is been, you know, one of the biggest things that, obviously it helps us sell more, but it really does take a piece off the client’s back, where, obviously, if a client’s doing all the calling and the communication, they’re going to get the best results. But if I can get them 80% of those results, but it’s guaranteed and it’s consistent, then obviously we’re going to use AI for that. So that’s a big piece of the client journey.

Brad Weimert 22:04
Let’s click on that for a second. So like the you talk about texting and calling, where does that fit in? Is it client acquisition that you’re doing? Because we’ve got a couple layers. When you talk about marketing agencies, people that are listening that are not marketing agencies, frequently miss the steps of like, you’re a marketing agency, and so then you do stuff, you implement practices. If you’re doing it done for you or done with you implement those practices for your clients, who are entrepreneurs, right? So you’re putting in a marketing engine for entrepreneurs to generate leads, to try to get products sold for them, or services sold, right? Exactly. So when you talk about AI SMS or AI calls. Where exactly does that fit in for your clients?

Jake Setterlun 22:47
Yeah, so that’s that’s a piece that comes after we’ve generated the lead for them. So what we do for our clients is we’re going to set up the advertising campaigns on Facebook, a little bit of Google, little bit of YouTube where the sole purpose of those campaigns is generating name, phones and emails, and some of those people will go and they’ll book an appointment naturally with the agents. But a big thing in lead generation is nurturing, which is, you know, kind of just traditional sales, of reaching out to that lead, following up with them, and getting them booked on on a calendar. But another big thing with lead gen is that, in context, is that a lot of them are unqualified. They’re not serious. You know, a lot of people are, unfortunately, you know, financially unqualified for what a client’s standard of a good client is, which is fine, but they want a bunch of these filters, and they want this nurture, and that’s where AI comes into play. So when, when we for a client, when we generate a name, phone, email, which is a lead, a contact for them, we’re going to pass that through AI. So for AI voice, specifically, we have outbound triggers, so we actually have aI that’s hooked up to a phone number, that we have an outbound trigger go out and it does a call to the client or to the lead, excuse me. So the lead gets a call when they opt in and they put in their name, phone email that says, hey, you know, it’s aI talking. You know, this is Sarah, you know, our assistant for the longevity group. You know, I’m just calling you to see you know where you’re at in terms of looking for an insurance policy. I just got your information. Can I ask information. Can I ask you a few questions? And that that voice AI is having a conversation with that lead with the goal of, after it’s, you know, asked a couple questions, make sure they’re qualified, it books them on our client’s calendar. So, you know, that’s the deliverable for the client, is that you’re getting them booked appointments. But then we’re doing the same thing over SMS, because some people aren’t going to pick up the phone and it’s just what it is. So then what we’re going to do is have that same conversational AI workflow. That’s something that you can do in high level, where you give it say, hey, I want you to have a conversation with this lead. These are the core. Questions I want you to ask if they’re qualified, then send them this link to book an appointment. And that’s like the two biggest things in terms of what we’re using with our clients for AI

Brad Weimert 25:12
love it. So this is the stuff that it’s interesting because, like when I think about delivering valuable information to entrepreneurs, you’ve got sort of two buckets. You’ve got this evergreen, strategic business advice that’s going to be tried and true, and people are going to watch this shit 10 years from now, and still going to be applicable. Then you’ve got what we’re about to talk about, which is like the function of AI in today’s society, and how to make an impact now, which people are going to care about right now and then three months from now, the tools and tactics are all going to be different, right? Nonetheless, I think that it’s important that people sort of know where to go to execute this stuff and figure out how to do it right now. So what tools are you using for SMS, and what tools are you using for calls, and how do you train those things to effectively do what you want them to do.

Jake Setterlun 26:01
We currently use our stack is go high level, and they thankfully have built in conversational AI for texting and then inbound calls. So we have a phone number inside of there. It’s, you know, through GHL or go high level, and that they use Twilio, but it’s through them. So if somebody we get that number for the client, and if somebody calls in AI agent or AI receptionist, whatever you want to call it, and then the texting outbound all programmed inside a high level, and it’s a very simple prompt where it’s like, literally, what I was saying before is like, you’re an AI agent calling on the behalf of this company, and this person ask them These questions after that, invite them to book an appointment. And thankfully, the program, the platform, is good enough that you can say that prompt, and it automatically knows when to send the link and invite them book an appointment, etc. For the

Brad Weimert 26:53
clarity the that that appointment booking AI is not contextually trained on the specific business. It’s just, hey, book a call if you want to correct, correct, awesome.

Jake Setterlun 27:05
Okay. And then there is synth flow, which is what we use for outbound and there’s a lot of different solutions, but basically what synth flow does is that you connect that same phone number and then you’re able to do outbound calling inside of GHL. So it’s kind of like this additional add on to GHL that you can get it integrates really well with GHL. So now we have a workflow that is like an automation. And it’s a basically, Do this, do this, do this once a new lead comes in. So send a text message, outbound dial, and then those two things are triggering that specific conversation. And because synth flow integrates so well with go high level, it’s super easy for us to integrate the calendar. So when it’s talking to the client on the phone, the appointment automatically syncs with GHL. It’s booked directly in there. Like easy, good to go. Same thing with any call notes and all of that. So that’s really the offer stack. Now with synth flow, well, I should even back up a little bit from there. When our clients come on board, they go through a very intensive intake form that tells us everything about their business, the products that they offer, obviously, for insurance, there’s a lot of nuance between policies and what they can actually specifically offer. So they go through a pretty intense intake. A lot of our clients will actually do voice recordings and send us a transcript. And then we’re building out a knowledge base for those AI agents based off the intake. So we use AI for that. When we get the intake form. We feed all of that to an AI prompt that’s basically, Hey, I just gave you all this information. Following this script that we have build me out not only a prompt, but also a knowledge base for this customer with a question answer based off of this person’s business. So then we take that knowledge base, we take that prompt, we give it to synth flow, so when that outbound call goes out and the AI is talking to the client, it has context in terms of that client’s business. And it’s not always perfect. We’ve definitely stress tested the the actual prompting, the scripting, but it does have a fallback, where, if it’s like, oh, you know, I don’t know the answer to that question. It’ll specifically say that, and it’ll be like, okay, but I’ll note that. I’ll note that for Mike the client, to follow up with you, you know, with an answer for that question. Awesome.

Brad Weimert 29:34
That’s great. So I think a couple things are super important to note for everybody. One is that the ability to get up and running and have an AI chat bot to book appointments for you when you drive leads is something you can implement really quickly, and you don’t have to have in depth training for it to be functional and work. And you mentioned in the same thing of some outbound calling also you. The opportunity to set up workflows relatively easily that can train that outbound caller that sit through sim flow or some other AI voice company to have context to who they’re talking to and actually pull from that thing. And I think you can go many, many levels deeper on how to train those things effectively. But one of the, I think, one of the I know, one of the challenges for a lot of entrepreneurs right now is it’s just so much, you know, like you see all the all the announcements on AI every other week, you see, you know, 1000s of YouTube videos popping up in AI, and it’s daunting to implement it. What is the difference when you implement quickly, like the chat flows and inbound calling, or the non contextual stuff. What are you seeing as the difference in statistics for a company converting a lead or booking a lead, versus if they’re doing it manually themselves,

Jake Setterlun 30:54
for our for our clients, I should say again, like I mentioned, AI is never going to outbeat a human, at least right now, for that specific solution, a human is, if they’re on it and they’re just on their phone, 24/7, they’re always going to be better. It’s just a little bit more natural. But unfortunately, most clients aren’t on it in terms of follow up and nurture. So we saw about a three time, times percent, three times whatever booking rate, but then also higher quality leads, so more of the actual leads going to appointments. Now, obviously, that’s because of the speed to lead aspect of it, due to the AI implementation, so it was absolutely huge. But then it also had like crazy improvements on our actual sales numbers, because, I mean, we’ve been doing voice AI now for probably two years. So right when it came out, there was a company called Air AI, rest in peace kind of went up and down, but, um, they were one of the first, like, real mainstream platforms that was super easy to implement voice AI into, like GHL and to give to your clients. So when we tag that onto our offer, and we implemented it like, you know, we were, we were at a 40 to a 50% close rate on leads that were just filling out their information and coming through our funnel asking for demos, because it was such a new thing too. So it’s both like it obviously helps with the clients. We’ve seen a tremendous improvement with our client satisfaction because they’re getting more booked appointments. But then it’s also like, you know, it helps our business out too,

Brad Weimert 32:30
yeah? Air AI was actually a client of ours, so we know them. Well, yeah, yeah. So one of the things that you said that I think super important is speed to lead right and set another way that speed to touch on a brand new lead is critical. So when somebody is online and they’re filling out forms, it varies from industry to industry, but they’re very likely shopping, and I know certainly in the payment space, if somebody fills out a form in payments and they’re not up and running immediately, they’re immediately going to another provider and filling out another form. So if you don’t get somebody to pick up the phone within the first couple minutes, your likelihood of converting that is radically lower. So even if a human can outperform if a robot can get there first and be 50 to 80% or more effective, it’s way more effective net, net, because you might have lost them anyway from just not talking. Just not touching them quick

Jake Setterlun 33:23
enough, 100% The one thing I’ll touch on too with AI is that it’s unemotional. It doesn’t differ, it’s consistent. So, you know, a big thing with lead gen agencies is that, you know, you have clients that they call one lead, it sucks, and they’re like, Hey, I’m done disputing refunding, like they’re out there, out the door, because we have the voice AI calling now, it takes that emotion out. So the AI is never going to be like, Oh, the last lead I called sucked. So I’m not going to try as hard. I’m not going to call as fast, like it’s going to do the same thing over and over and over again. And that obviously improves results as well.

Speaker 2 34:02
I insert funny advertisement here, or just check out easy pay direct. It’s epd.com, forward slash, bam, and you can find out about credit card processing for your business. Lots of our guests use us for credit card processing, and

Brad Weimert 34:22
this seemed like more fun than writing a scripted ad. What mistakes do you think people are making with the implementation of AI right now in September of 2025

Jake Setterlun 34:32
I mean overarching kind of going back to offer is not offering a very specific solution to a very specific problem. And what I mean by that is, you know, I, you know, I have a community of agency owners, and I see what everybody else out there is doing, and everybody’s saying, you know, sell an AI agency, or start an AI agency and sell AI make a lot of money. And you get into the programs, you hear from these, these students that are in these. Programs, and they’re very like basic solutions. It’s, hey, you know, AI receptionist. It’s a chat widget on your website that’s AI. It’s, you know, a creative agent that makes creatives. And those are very like general solutions. But if you take it one step further, and instead of selling a, let’s say, an AI receptionist for a med spa, and you sold them a patient coordinator like that’s going to sell 10 times more than an AI receptionist, because it’s an actual, legitimate solution to a specific problem that they’re having. But it also sounds very custom to that client, instead of just selling these very general AI kind of terms. So it really does come down to offer, and then also how you’re positioning it, but then also the solution that you have, you know, just taking it three to four steps further than just some general AI thing. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 35:59
So basically, don’t be a lazy fuck.

Unknown Speaker 36:02
I mean, basically, yeah, but,

Brad Weimert 36:06
but, I mean, really, like, said another way, I think that one of the things that the one of the delusions people have right now is that AI is just going to do it for you, and we’re not there yet. And quite honestly, I don’t know if we’ll ever get there. There’s a lot of talk about sort of the as AI evolves. Yes, we have maybe AGI or a super intelligence, but we’re still going to have specialized ais that are honed in their training for specific tasks or specific knowledge. So you know, we probably aren’t going to end up with an AI that can solve all medical problems, but there might be a medical AI that’s consistently working on that and going deeper and deeper and deeper. And similarly, we are still in the phase of garbage in, garbage out. So like, if you think you can just throw something up and say, Hey, this AI is going to solve your problems for chat to your point, I think the point was, you’ve got to go deeper than that and think through how you can make this more useful. Is that, is that the summary 100% Yep, dig that. Well, back to offer here. So whatever that is, let’s say you create something that you think is great, and you go a few levels in and you have a very thoughtful offer. How do you know if it works? How do you think about testing offers today?

Jake Setterlun 37:20
I I’m obviously, you know, in a position where I understand, not a lot of people are in this position where we just go right to ads. We’re an ads, ads first organization. You know, it’s what we believe in. So we run offer on image ads. That’s what we call them, where we’re gonna go in Canva or take a bunch of graphics, square images. We’re going to slap the offer on the image, and we’re going to see if people book, and see if people are interested in a demo. Like, it’s very, very straightforward. You know, obviously, if you don’t have ad spend, you’re going to go out. You’re going to do the exact same thing with cold email, outbound prospecting, even cold calling, I feel like cold calling such a downplayed thing nowadays, where everybody’s like, Oh, I’m just gonna set up a cold email machine. It’s like, or just pick up the phone and call somebody and I guarantee you can book appointments. But if you’re not getting any yeses, if you’re not getting any leads, if you’re not getting any appointments, it means your offer sucks. It’s either not being communicated directly or properly, or it’s not unique enough. Again, going back to selling, let’s just say SEO. If I call up a business and say, Hey, I offer SEO. Are you interested in appointment, people are gonna say, shut the fuck up. Go away. But if I call them up and say, hey, you know, Mr. Med Spa owner, I have this AI patient coordinator, that will call up your patients, code them in, you know, solve X, Y and Z problem. Would you be interested in a demo? If you’re actually solving a legitimate solution, you’re going to get a lot of yeses, so that that’s really the biggest thing is get your offer in front of eyeballs and see if they say yes.

Brad Weimert 38:54
Well, let’s talk about traffic. So your response was, we’re just running traffic right away, which, by the way, makes total sense. And I think that once you’re past a certain mark, that’s a viable opportunity for everybody, right? And you can’t where you were going is to into your point. You know, if you’re under a million in revenue in most spaces, you probably don’t have enough budget to put towards things to get a meaningful sample size of whether or not an offer is going to work, and maybe millions not the right number. Some businesses have tons of margin and a million and it could work. But for you today, how do you think about different traffic sources? Is everything paid? And if so, what avenues are the right avenues, what platforms, the right platforms and or do you still work with organic? That’s a really

Jake Setterlun 39:48
good question. And if you were to ask me this two or three years ago, I would have been like, we’re all in on Facebook. We do a little bit of LinkedIn ads, but it’s, it’s mainly Facebook and Google. And LinkedIn as kind of your secondary nowadays, it’s changed so much because people want brand depth. You know, as much as, yes, you can put it together, you can have a good offer, but like, they also want to see, like, Who’s behind the business? And, you know, are they going the extra mile? Because if you’re not somebody else is in terms of content, in terms of ads, in terms of retargeting. So yes, we will always be going to meta first. We’ll be paying Zuckerberg. Usually we test around three to 5k for an offer and see what the numbers look like. Is it viable? How many leads, how many appointments, how many sales? That’s That’s what we’re looking at. What’s our margin. Can we scale it? But from there, after an offer is proven, it’s a full blown marketing I want to call it a marketing plan. But you know what we execute on in terms of what we know works. So that’s one person designated to making one YouTube video a week. That YouTube video is going to get chopped down into short form content. We’re also going to deploy LinkedIn ads. We do LinkedIn ads, image ads, but then also there’s message ads that basically mimics the connecting messaging, that kind of stuff. It just is a little bit faster doing ads. And then we also deploy cold email. We’ll take the cold email list. We’ll plug it into a retargeting audience as well, on LinkedIn, on Facebook and on Google, so we have that going as well. And then depending on how crazy we get with the business, we’ll deploy Google and YouTube, mainly retargeting, not a lot of cold on there, and then, kind of our last step is a low ticket funnel with community. Everything up to that point is leads appointments, you know, PRs, if you’re doing cold email, taking them to an appointment and demos. But the further you get with a business, you need more entry points for people to come in, and that’s going to take us into low ticket community, etc, and that, you know, again, completely different business model to what it was three years, four years, five years ago, because we could just run Facebook to the end of time and it would scale. But again, nowadays, people want different entry points. It’s a lot more expensive to run ads. It’s a lot more expensive to get people on demos. So we need different ways. I call them conversion mechanisms, to get people into what I call an ad ecosystem of retargeting, where they’re going to get our emails, they’re going to see us everywhere on social media, they’re going to view our content. And our goal is that if we scrape somebody’s email, if we get a view, if we get a click, if we get a lead, if we get an appointment, that that person gets stuck in this ecosystem, and then they’re seeing us everywhere, and they’re going to continuously stay in our in our ecosystem, join the community, whatever it might be, they’re going to continuously see our stuff until we buy and it’s a lot more focus on nurture versus just going right for the kill, booking appointments and selling deals.

Brad Weimert 43:06
Are you so you said a couple of things that I want to hit on. The first is, you’ve consistently gone back to booking an appointment. Are you specifically working with high ticket companies, or are you just doing book an appointment for basically all of your clients, or are there exceptions to

Jake Setterlun 43:22
that rule? There’s definitely exceptions for any of our done for you services, it’s always lead to appointment. It’s just what we’re good at. It’s what we know. We have some individuals that we consult with, and it’s something that we’re starting to roll out slowly for our customers, which is, hey, you should really consider having a community. You should, you know, consider having this low ticket entry point for your business because the buyers are better. It’s harder to execute, but if you can execute it again, it becomes this nurture point for for business owners to have. So 99% of what we do is lead to appointment, but it is for high ticket specifically, or I wouldn’t say for high ticket, the individuals that are in our university that we work with, it’s mainly agency coaches, high ticket, online businesses. But for our agencies, it’s really all B to B. So it’s, you know, insurance, real estate, mortgage contractors, med spas, like those type of individuals, but still adds leads appointments.

Brad Weimert 44:27
Got it. So for anybody that doesn’t know what the fuck we’re talking about, high ticket is just high dollar amount sale. And inside the world of marketing and online marketing and coaches and consultants and creators, it’s just very common to say high ticket, but it just means selling something that’s expensive on the note of community, on the note of community, the way that you explained that you said a low dollar amount item that you sold into or sold a community’s access for, are you selling the community as a lead magnet? Is that the idea that, like you can liquidate the cost of the ads, pay for the cost of the ads to get somebody into the community, then nurture. Them in the community to sell them something more

Jake Setterlun 45:02
expensive? Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s, like, so many different ways that you could do it. I’ve seen it done well both ways. We’ve done it well both ways, where you can, you can run an ad that’s like, hey, get my free X, Y and Z lead magnet, and then you deliver on that inside of a community. So it’s like, Hey, if you want to get the lead magnet, you have to join the community. And then once they’re there, you have their attention, you nurture. You could do the same thing, where it’s like, Hey, join my community on a free basis. And then maybe inside there’s upsells into, you know, a lead magnet, where it’s like, Hey, you join the free community, unlock this thing for $5 you know, vice versa for the the people coming in with a lead magnet into the free community, free lead magnet, free community, but then everything else is unlocked. So it’s like, hey, upgrade to, you know, get access, full access to the community, etc. The idea is definitely always liquidating ad spend, but then taking that a step further too, you could absolutely run just, Hey, join the community. It’s $17 a month. Liquidate ad spend that way. Or, hey, buy this product. It’s $17 one time, deliver it inside of a community. And then, you know, maybe again, everything is locked and you have to upgrade to $29 $47 $97 a month to get X, Y and Z out of it. So the idea is always, it’s LTV. It’s liquidating. It’s getting as much money from that low ticket. And obviously, if you have a funnel, you can do upsells, all that stuff. It’s always collecting as much money as possible. If you make a couple dollars great, if you lose a couple great, but it’s cheaper to do that. You know, if I would pay, let’s just say I’m losing 5000 or excuse me, $5 for a purchase at $27 so it cost me $32 to bring that person in the door. I’ll pay $5,000 all day to get 1000 paid members in a community that not only I can nurture, but I can invite them to book calls with us, you know, share wins, etc, they’ve already transacted with us, and it’s just a different way to do things nowadays. I touched on it before, where you have this separation in market nowadays, where you either have, like, really good high ticket people are charging a lot, or you have this low ticket because, you know information, AI, it’s so readily available, and it allows you to kind of hit on both ends where, when you’re normally doing leads appointments, it’s really only just leading into that high ticket. But there’s no nurture, you know, no nurturing those lower end people that aren’t there yet into the high ticket.

Brad Weimert 47:41
Interesting. So the community built. Building a community through ads, specifically, in a lot of ways, is an alternative to, and obviously could supplement, but an alternative to building an email list. But instead of just the email list, you have an active community that’s actually interacting in there. 1,000% Yep, love that. What is something that you were doing two years ago, traffic tactic, marketing tactic, that was killing it, that is dead or dying today.

Jake Setterlun 48:07
You know what’s crazy about that is we still run the very, very, very similar ads to what we did back in the day. I think the biggest thing because we’re variable, I mentioned the type of ads that we run with statics offer on image ads, like we’ve ran that, we run it into a funnel that we’ve we’ve had for years, where it’s just questions and a headline offer statement. We help so and so do X, Y and Z. Click down below, see if you qualify, answer a couple questions, go to an appointment like very straightforward, and that’s worked for us for the longest time, for seven or eight years. The biggest thing is, and maybe this touches on this point where it used to be that our ads would run, everybody would see them. They would die out. Take the same idea, make a different design, launch it. And that would work nowadays, the actual angle, what’s on that image. I don’t care if I make 15 different designs, I have to say something completely different to get that person to actually engage and click and book. Because the market’s changing so fast. Where, if I run something somebody else, you know, there’s 10 times competition, they’re gonna be like, oh shit, that’s working for them. We’re gonna start running that. And those actual angles, the marketing angles, burn out so much more quickly that it’s constantly thinking of different angles, not thinking of different designs for the ads. If that makes sense, yeah, totally.

Brad Weimert 49:36
How do you think about I mean, look, if you can keep doing something for a long time and it works amazing, and the the pressure to modify creatives now I hear from tons of people, and certainly that’s our experience internally as well. I want to talk about platforms real quick, because you mentioned, you know, YouTube, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. I don’t know that many people that are being effective on LinkedIn. Specifically with paid ads. How do you think about linkedin’s role in the ad ecosystem or in the content ecosystem in general?

Jake Setterlun 50:08
So so content is very interesting, because we’ve, we’ve seen that kind of like, get a little bit of a like, like, refresh, or whatever you want to call it, like, really gain a lot of traction lately, versus three years ago, when you could even argue that LinkedIn was kind of as dead as it’s been, and now you have this, this idea of how people are marketing on x, where it’s like, Hey, I’ve done X, Y and Z comment down below and get my free whatever you see, the same thing going on on LinkedIn in terms of content, and people are having a lot of success. So it’s really cool to see the platform, from a content perspective, get a lot more eyeballs, which is only going to help the individuals doing the the connecting and the messaging and that kind of stuff. But that’s also inherently going to make it a little bit harder, because, you know, if everybody’s doing the connections and the messages, it’s you know, that people are going to start to start to catch on, that you’re just trying to sell them something with that said ads that has been, I don’t want to say like a secret, because obviously other people have done that. But in our space, I remember, remember, when we were hiring media buyers for our company, I had to teach them how I was running the LinkedIn ads, because they were like, I’ve never heard of somebody being profitable with LinkedIn, and that kind of comes down to offer, but we took the exact same formula that we were doing on Facebook, which is an image, a headline, copy, click, lead form, name, phone, email, boom. Thanks for entering your info, book an appointment. There’s these message ads that you can do as well on there, which, instead of me having, I mentioned before, where you have to connect and then send a message, I can just drop a message right into their inbox with LinkedIn ads. And it really again, it all kind of ties back to offer. That’s why I’m so passionate about it, that if I know my ads are working on Facebook, I know they’re going to work on LinkedIn. I just need to make sure that I can get in front of the right front of the right customer on there. So real estate agents, people are listed as, like, I’m a real estate agent at Keller Williams. That’s my current job title. Okay, boom. I’m going to show them that ad. It gets a little bit trickier with, you know, marketing agencies, job titles that you know you can’t really specifically target. But if you can build an audience, all you have to do is put your offer in front of them, whether it’s in the messages, whether it’s in, you know, an offer on image ad, just a static image, and people will will convert.

Brad Weimert 52:32
Do you think that does LinkedIn stand on its own from a conversion perspective, or do you need to do it in conjunction with another platform?

Jake Setterlun 52:38
That’s a great question. I would 100% not stuff. I would not go LinkedIn ads first. I would always be taking what’s proven, what’s working on a different platform, and then going to LinkedIn because it, I mean, it is twice, if not three times, as much expensive from a CPM perspective, for testing. So if, if it’s a loss, like I’m really gonna lose, like, it’s really not gonna work, and it’s gonna cost me more money than going and testing on Facebook and then taking the winners over to LinkedIn.

Brad Weimert 53:09
Got it, what’s a mistake you’ve made in the last five years and that you’d probably redo if you were to do it again today?

Jake Setterlun 53:17
There’s a lot. There’s definitely a lot. Biggest have you know, definitely been, from like a business structure perspective, is, you know, when we had our come up, and we’re doing really well, we had a lot of our business outsourced, specifically support, and with that, you lose a lot of quality control. You know, you have reputation that catches up with you. And when you’re hearing from your customers online about your business, and you’re like, what the like? I haven’t heard about any of this. That’s a serious issue. So you know that having to build that back in we tried to open up an in person office that didn’t work, didn’t fly. So, you know, as much as outsourcing, I think is great in the beginning, you know, long term, you’re always going to want to be pulling everything back in house, unless it’s like little weird things in your business, like, you know, media buyers or something like that, where you could outsource to a true agency. So that’s definitely huge. That’s a big learning lesson, but, like, really overarching that is stepping away from the business, you know, to give you some numbers, we scaled up. And, you know, the first time we hit a million dollars a month, me and my business owner were kind of coasting, you know, we’re making money. Had people in place, management, you know, all that stuff. So we’re like, oh, this is great, and that’s cool. That lasts for like, three to four months of like, you know, doing whatever you want, whenever you want, not on a lot of meetings. But it doesn’t last forever. You know, shit hits the fan. Sales stops performing. You start losing money. So it was constantly not developing the product, not. Furthering, how can we help customers? Not furthering the business, not continuing to learn and continuously moving forward? Because, unfortunately, with probably most of the listeners, you know, we’re growing these online businesses. We’re kind of like these digital cowboys that you know, we’re out there building businesses. None of us have been CEOs of Fortune, 500 companies, and just no business that you constantly need to be improving, because these businesses are a bit fragile at the end of the day, and you need to continuously solidify improve, not only you and your operations and your education, but also the product. And if you can do that and continue, continuously stay in your business, you’ll kind of miss you’ll still have issues, you’ll still have problems, but it won’t be such a detriment, which is kind of what happened to us, where we got to that point and then us trying to jump back into the business once we’ve already been out. There’s a lot, you know, a lot of problems. It’s really hard to fix those when you’ve been out of it for three, four or five months.

Brad Weimert 56:06
Yeah, I mean, I think that those are very common growing pains, and they’re specifically common growing pains for people that grow really quickly, and particularly when you grow really quickly, and you’re young, like, if you’re if this is the first go round, you grow really quickly. It’s sort of like people that have never seen in this. I mean, you’re 29 so you haven’t gone through a terrible recession, except just now, whatever recession we’re going through, right? But like, you go through something you’ve never seen, the rough stuff, all of a sudden it happens, and you’re like, Oh, fuck. I didn’t know that. This is what it was like, right? And that’s, I think everybody goes through it in entrepreneurship at some point, but I think that’s a great takeaway. And I think the outsource takeaway is good too, like you, it’s sort of the difference between, you know, effectively delegating and just telling somebody what to do and hoping it gets done for sure, for sure. And that’s the outsource model, right? It’s like, Hey, I’m just going to give this to you and then cross my fingers. That’s great. What outside of agency business in general, brand new entrepreneur starting out, what advice do you have for them?

Jake Setterlun 57:11
Pick something and stick with it, like this, shouldn’t I don’t care how, how many people tell you, Oh, it’s easy. Just, you know, do this and make a bunch of money. Is like, if you’re gonna do agency, if you’re gonna do crypto, if you’re gonna do you’re going to do day trading, if you’re going to you know, whatever you’re going to do, if you’re going to be a coach and you want to go down that route, like, pick something, get very good at what you do, and stick to it, drop shipping, e Comm, whatever it is, the worst thing you can do is just hop around trying to find that special thing that’s going to work. And it’s not out there.

Brad Weimert 57:43
I love that. I love that. Just go fucking do it and keep doing it 100% where can people find out more about you? Jake sutterlin, absolutely,

Jake Setterlun 57:51
just Jake sutterlin.com, or optimize Jake on Instagram, probably the two biggest places

Brad Weimert 57:58
take it, man. I appreciate you carving out time. Absolutely

Jake Setterlun 58:01
Brad, thank you so much.

Brad Weimert 58:03
That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Please subscribe, and most importantly, leave us a review. Takes like 30 seconds, and it makes such a big impact, it helps other people find us. Also. You might not know this, you can watch over 100 episodes of beyond a million, with guests like Grant Cardone, Wes Watson and Neil Patel at beyond a million.com.