201: How 8-Figure Founders Break the 7-Figure Ceiling (Tactics from Past Guests)

As an entrepreneur, once you hit 7-figures, the game changes. Scaling isn’t just about more revenue, it’s about smarter systems, better people, and the mindset required to lead at the next level.

In this special compilation episode of Beyond a Million, I’ve pulled together powerful clips from past guests — 8- and 9-figure founders who share the unfiltered lessons behind building and scaling successful companies.

Whether you’re a founder, CEO, or investor scaling your business beyond 7-figures, these are proven tactics that actually move the needle.

Mic Drop Moments

• “The acceptance of mediocrity is a cancer in most organizations, that keeps them as organizations mediocre at best.” – Michael Erath

• “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.” – Jake Setterlun

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:27 Jake Setterlun: If You’re Not Getting Leads, Your Offer Sucks
• 01:05 Michael Erath: Mediocrity Is a Cancer in Business
• 02:05 Chandler Bolt: Scare Away the Wrong Hires
• 03:07 Stela Roznovan: The 3 Fundamentals of Sales
• 06:50 Allan Dib: The Best Marketers Leverage Tech, Not Tools
• 07:33 Corey Lilburn: How a Singing Telegram Closed a Deal
• 09:39 Patrick Dillon: Using AI to Conduct 300 Interviews
• 11:08 Andy Kolodgie: Why Sustainability Beats Growth
• 13:42 Patrick Riddle: Low-Ticket Offers That Actually Convert
• 15:29 Mike Koenigs: The $1,000 Cup of Coffee Offer

Brad Weimert: So what does it take to actually scale once you’re beyond a million? I have asked hundreds of founders that question. What you’re about to hear are people who have built multi-million dollar companies and nearly lost it all. These are the clips that they didn’t intend to share, but did anyway.

Patrick Riddle: Then at a certain point, I think adding just a simple low ticket info product to test on the front end. Our front end offers start at $97, it’s kind of our bread and butter price point. But selling the info product for more like $27 or $17 or even $7 or $3, that’s a lot easier conversion.

What converts great is just sell them what you’ve already sold ’em in a different format. 

So they’ve already purchased for us an educational course where they get in-depth video modules, all kind of resources. But then for our order bumps, we call it an executive guidebook. It’s basically just cliff notes of the video training. 

We go from $97 to $27 is our normal order form bump price.

Brad Weimert: What’s the take rate on that?

Patrick Riddle: 65%.

Brad Weimert: Damn.

Patrick Riddle: Really high. 

Brad Weimert: But you do multiple order bumps, right?

Patrick Riddle: Just one, uh, offer on the order form. And then after they purchase, that’s when we have our core kind of upsell offer for some kind of recurring revenue offer, product or service. And our, our typical, when people say “no” to that first offer, we typically then downsell the exact same thing, half the price upfront, and we just take away a bonus,

so that if somebody’s just stuck on the price a little bit, but they still want the core thing, you know, they can get access to it.

we sell the educational course front end, your order form bumps, the kind of cliff notes executive guidebook, then we’re offering typically a software. 

Brad Weimert: And the software has bonuses with it?

Patrick Riddle: Yes.

Brad Weimert: Got it. 

Patrick Riddle: Yeah, and if someone says no to that software plus bonus offer, then we just take away a bonus, cut the price in half and offer it to ’em again. 

Jake Setterlun: 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 ChatGPT agent or develop some script inside a GHL.

It’s not hard to make Facebook ads and learn that skillset. What does take time and is something that is gonna allow you to charge, more faster, is product development and offer development. 

We want the offer to sell the client.

We don’t wanna have to have the best salespeople in the world,

using a big guarantee to sell. We really want the offer to just be a no-brainer offer. 

Allan Dib: Lean down. What are the two or three things that we really wanna do?

The best marketers in the world were just really, really lean and then just going really deep by adding technology, by how can we do it faster? Can we do it cheaper? Can we do it easier? 

I’m not just adding tools for tool’s sake.

I want the tool to either do one of two things:

give me massive leverage or I wanna remove friction from the customer journey.

We look at the customer journey and where are all those touch points, where there’s potential leakages. Where is a customer having to make a decision that where maybe if we used a technology tool, they didn’t have to, or they could get a result quicker or better or easier if we use a technology tool.

So we never want technology to kind of be in the way. We wanna make sure it’s reducing friction, giving us leverage. That’s its two jobs.

Chandler Bolt: As a hiring manager or CEO, you’re the final filter.

I’ll probe in with a bunch of tough questions, but then we will just get to the part of the interview where I’m like, all right, cool. This is the part of the interview where I try to scare you away.

Brad Weimert: Oh, nice.

Chandler Bolt: This is gonna be the hardest job you’ve ever had.

Are you in for that? This is extremely fast paced. Are you in for that? We need people who are very autonomous. Have you ever done that? You’re gonna come to me asking me how I would do stuff, and I’m gonna say, I hired you ’cause you’re really good at this thing. Figure it out. Like, this is what this is literally why you’re here.

Don’t ask me. This is your job. And so just like really probing into that stuff with people I’ve, uh, said, Hey, here’s all my red flags. Here’s what I really like about you, but here’s a few things that are pretty concerning. Can you speak to that? And then I try to just go to my managers or whoever else is maybe in the interview and say, all right, you got any red flags or concerns you want them to address?

So kind of giving them permission to bring up the thing and just really get it all out in the open.

Challenge people put ’em in the boiling pot. Can they handle it? If they can’t, it’s probably not gonna work out.

Patrick Dillon: So we actually have an AI platform, we’ve gone through several now, that publishes the job post, accepts all candidate applications and resumes.

It itself actually goes out and schedules. So, the first interview conducts all of them simultaneously. So, like in two or three days, it’ll conduct 200 or 300 interviews for a position.

Brad Weimert: What does that look like when you say it conducts the interview? What’s the mechanism? 

Patrick Dillon: The AI agent itself reaches out to the candidate schedules a time to talk, conducts an AI interview with a fake person, right. Then based on customer parameters, it puts ’em into a spreadsheet with a recording and scores them on the likelihood of success in that position. And then it helps us weed down, you know, 300, 400.

We’ve had like 900 applicants for some positions. So it’ll, it’ll like weed that all down to something that we can actually work with. So maybe it gets it down to 40 candidates, or we can really quickly go through and listen to the recordings at like top speed. And, you know, we’re playing with the platform based back and forth a lot.

We’ve gone through, I think this is the third platform we’ve used like this. I mean, there’s like funny stuff that happened in the beginning where like the AI agent just like stops talking, the candidate’s like, what’s going on? Is it over? You know? So it was like, it’s getting to a point where, um, it’s indispensable for us because we have so many…

We would have to have a team of like three to five full-time in the HR department to handle the volume of people that wanna work here now.

So, it’s just made a big difference.

Michael Erath: I think as humans, we often are reluctant to have difficult conversations around performance when it’s not meeting expectations because those are not easy and comfortable conversations. And so we, we rather avoid them. And in essence, we tolerate the mediocrity.

You will never build anything elite if you don’t have very high standards, very high expectations and live up to them yourself, but also require those around you to live up to those same standards.

If that’s the kind of organization you want, you want something truly elite that can become a category of one in its space, you have to be willing to coach people and invest time and supporting people who prove to be coachable. But you also have to have systemized within your business how you expunge people who prove to not be coachable, who won’t take feedback and who don’t maybe have the aptitude to level up into what you need from them.

The acceptance of mediocrity is a cancer in most organizations, that keeps them as organizations mediocre at best.

Mike Koenigs: I’ll tell you something, it’s the best marketing campaign I’ve ever created that also is therapeutic. And I’m gonna give credit where credit is due. Um, Joe Polish interviewed a guy named Ron Lynch.

Brad Weimert: Oh, I know Ron very well. 

Mike Koenigs: Okay. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Ron has been on the show and he is a good friend. 

Mike Koenigs: Great. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. 

Mike Koenigs: So, Ron gets kudos for this. 

Joe and Ron were having a conversation and, and people always go to Ron. They say, well, can I pick your brain? You go, yeah, for a thousand bucks you go out and take me up for a cup of coffee. It’s not about the money, but if I just sit down with you, you’re not gonna write it down.

You’re not gonna take this thing seriously. I’m gonna give you a whole bunch of nuggets, or you’re gonna do nothing with it at list this way. And Joe’s got a great saying, if you don’t pay, you don’t pay attention.

So I was at a another strategic coach meeting and the product I sell right now is, you know.

Somewhere around $200,000 to work with me when I build these businesses and brands. And, um, it’s expensive and I have the mechanism I forgetting clients like that, they usually have to consume my content, see podcasts, get to meet me, get to know who I am and know this isn’t that I’m not completely bad.

Shit. Crazy. Right? Well, and uh, it’s all right. It’s all right. I can live with it. But I, I was telling Joe and another guy who is at my table, the problem I have, which is I have a long tail sales process and it requires a lot of dancing Bear and Joe said we had to do the a thousand dollars cup of coffee.

Actually it was the other guy who said, I right now I’d pay you 2,500 bucks for an hour of your time and, but I’m not gonna write out a six figure check ’cause I don’t know what I’m gonna get. Yeah. And Joe said, why don’t you do the a thousand dollars cup of coffee? I’m like, what the hell’s that? And he said, I did this interview with Ron Lynch and he said, let me get Eunice to send you the, the, uh, interview.

So. Within 10 minutes, I had the interview, I transcribed it and I looked at the transcript and I used chat, GPT, and I made the campaign, which now is my a thousand dollars cup of coffee campaign. Oh, beautiful. So I had it launched in 48 hours and it produced, I’ll say, multiple six figures in business.

Crazy. Two weeks. And here’s the answer to your question about the the salvation. So the a thousand dollars cup of coffee is a way for someone else to put skin in the game, show up at a meeting with expectations that I’m actually going to give them a transformation guaranteed. If I can’t do it, I give them their money back right away.

But when I come to the meeting, I have built an AI tool that does deep research on the prospect. It learns everything about you, looks at your backstory, it determines your better moving future based upon some of Dan’s mindsets. And, um, it estimates your personality profile in eight. Levels. So your Kolby score, your Myers-Briggs, your Enneagram, love this.

And then I run a, a Chris Voss influence filter on the top 10 tips to make a connection and create influence in our conversation. And then I also have it load up with my offer and look at their business and their history, how we can best collaborate. So what I do then is I just say at the very beginning of the meeting, I show them the report and I say, I’m gonna give you this report.

We’re done. I’m gonna ask you seven questions. And uh, my goal is to give you an 11 experience on a scale of one to 10. Help you create a better future for yourself, a better business, and a better personal future. So let’s go. So in 30 minutes they’ve got the map. And then the second part is, would you like to know how we can do it together?

And I walk them through a customer journey that converts better than anything I’ve ever done on, I mean, we’re talking one call to. Deep rapport and trust. And I think the answer to all of this is if you can show someone a logical pro progression from where they are, help them see their past with clarity and give them a better future, and show them a pathway and a map to get there, they will trust you to deliver.

Brad Weimert: I would assume then you’re prompting them to give you as much data as possible on the front end.

Mike Koenigs: Fill out a form. Yeah. It’s one, it’s one form. Mm-hmm. And now what I do, um, I, I simplify it even more. I ask ’em, you can just, uh, read these questions and send me an order file with the audio and I use, um, voice recognition, what kinds of questions. Because ultimately the questions, the purpose of the questions is to allow the robots to dig in and do deep research on them in the background, right? So, um, I’m gonna give you the questions and I’ll pre, pre-frame that by one of my other books is called Punch the Elephant. It’s my sales book.

Brad Weimert: Seems dangerous.

Mike Koenigs: Yeah. If you’re gonna walk in, there’s gonna be you and an elephant in the room. You better knock that bastard out as soon as you walk in the door or have knocked out when you walk in the door. And that’s the whole thing is what’s the biggest objection that someone’s gonna have? That’s the elephant. The elephant in the room.

Brad Weimert: Nice.

Mike Koenigs: And there’s a secondary elephant, which is eels kill deals. So it’s not just the elephant, but it’s he or she who influences the elephant. Mm. Has twice the force. So it’s the, and it’s the silent one. Mm. It might be the spouse or the business partner who’s not there during the first conversation.

You gotta knock both of ’em out. Yeah. So the questions, um, are r and I asked this, I should have asked you this at the very beginning, is, Hey Brad, if at the end of this interview today you feel like you have an 11 experience on a scale one to 10, what kind of value can I deliver to your audience that they would say that was the best interview you’ve done so far on the show?

Brad Weimert: And that would be the prompt for me.

Mike Koenigs: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: And so you’re asking them that on the front end?

Mike Koenigs: Yeah. Yeah. What would make this experience, this conversation, 11, on a scale of one to 10, what would you like to walk away with, know, or understand?

Brad Weimert: Got it. And that’s the first question.

Mike Koenigs: That’s the first question.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. Okay.

Mike Koenigs: Yep. And then I ask a variation of, um, what’s known as the Dan Sullivan question. The Dan Sullivan question, also called the R factor is if you and I were to sit and meet here three years from today, what will have happened personally and professionally for you to be happy with your progress?

Brad Weimert: Hmm. That is a big ass question.

Mike Koenigs: It is. Yeah. So now you’re projecting into your better future self or what you think it might be, and then it’s uh, um, what dangers are preventing you from getting there? What have you tried and failed at? How much does it cost you in time, money, resources, energy, relationships. And then opportunities. So if this problem were alleviated, what kind of opportunities could you take advantage of that you can’t right now? What do you wish you could do that you can’t, but you lack the resources, capabilities, or knowledge? So I would, I would assume, I’m thinking that in this context, because they put a thousand bucks in for an hour.

Brad Weimert: They are in the, i I think the frame of the a thousand dollars cup of coffee’s awesome. Right. But because they’ve invested, they probably take that form seriously.

Mike Koenigs: Oh hell yeah. Uh, no, if they don’t fill it out, I just refund ’em immediately. I, and, and if I can’t help them, I give them back their money immediately. I take every one of these seriously. It will not, I don’t need the thousand bucks. Right? It’s a symbolic exchange of energy and uh, a bond of trust.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I really hate the way you said that, but I understand.

Mike Koenigs: I know. Well, like exchange of energy. Not in a dirty way. just a cuddly way.

Stela Roznovan: So I always teach my agents don’t sell numbers, sell stories, right? So the best thing you can do as a sales professional, I think in general is just to create a projection that the client can see themselves in. At the end of the day, like that’s really what gets somebody to understand the need, right? I mean in the sales conversation, there’s a lot of conditioning that you do throughout the whole conversation, right?

Like the sales doesn’t happen at the end, it happens throughout the entire interaction. We have to understand that first. I always say that sales is built on three principles, like any sales conversation. I teach my agents all the time. It’s authenticity, why they should buy from you, exclusivity, why they should buy this product, and urgency, why they should buy today. If you can have those three fundamentals, you can close the deal at the end. And so if somebody doesn’t really wanna talk to you or they’re not giving you anything and like you just feel like you’re talking to a wall, they probably don’t like you. You haven’t really connected with them.

You don’t know who you’re talking to, right? So that’s the authenticity. They tell you something like, oh, I’m shopping around, I wanna compare and whatever. Then you haven’t really built in the exclusivity because everybody wants to feel like they’re getting the best end of the deal. At the end of the day, like that’s really the human nature, right? And lastly, urgency. If they say, let me think about this, let me sleep on it, whatever, then you haven’t really built on the urgency. And there’s a bunch of ways to build on urgency, especially in life insurance. If you don’t have the thing, then you need the thing.

It’s like they say life insurance is like a parachute. You may not need it right now, but when you do, you better have it. So, these three fundamentals are absolutely critical in order to have a transactional outcome at the end. And so when it comes to authenticity, this is a very, very important one. And I teach my agents all the time. At the end of your interaction with your client, how much can you tell somebody else about this person? If you were to talk to a stranger, would you be able to tell the stranger who Bill is? Like who is he? What does he care about? What are his needs? Who are his family?

What does he care about? Right? Because if you can’t actually explain to somebody else who you just met with, then you talked at them, not with them. And that is the number one problem. In fact, I see this for all rookie salespeople. They just go into a presentation instead of a conversation, and they’re just like showing you a bunch of stuff on the screen and you get this and it’s this and it’s that.

And they’re not engaging with the client to the degree that they understand who the heck they’re even talking to and what that person cares about. Because it’s not about you and your product, it’s about them, right? So the best way to build value and to create a projection and the storyline is to understand who you’re actually talking to and what their needs really are.

And I know that may sound kind of cliche, but that’s really all it is in sales. You know, and, and on the reverse side, if all you’re doing is interrogating the whole time because you’re trying to get to understand who they are, whatever, then that’s not real connection either. Like they have to feel like they’re having a beer with a friend and you’re giving them, you know, aspects of yourself that they can relate to as well.

So it’s a dance, right? A sale is a dance. And when it comes to exclusivity and urgency, I mean, there’s a bunch of ways to phrase that and to build on the value and the need and the fact that this is a great program or product for different reasons. There’s like price anchoring, which is a really, you know, great technique to use where you will say, you know, a program like this, or product like this generally is within this ballpark, which is a higher price range, but because of your membership or whatever, you get it at this amount, which is a lower amount and it allows for price anchoring. Like if I went to a store and I wanted to buy a camera and they’re like, this camera is $2,000 and I had no idea how much a camera like that usually costs, then I’d be like, oh my God. Right? But if I understood that cameras like that are usually like four or five grand and it’s discounted at two grand, then I’d feel like I’m getting a deal. That’s called price anchoring.

So like if you can use techniques like that, that are like subtle, but intertwined in your ability to connect and communicate and project value and build that storyline, then you’ll always win in the end. 

Brad Weimert: So when you have multiple decision makers, how do you open the door with the right decision maker in the first place? Even if you have a referral, it might not be to the right person in the company.

Corey Lilburn: I think it’s mining.

I think it’s working through what, what’s the value of the person that I was referred to? Right. Um, performing arts center, uh, was referred into the director of food and Bev, the director of food, and Bev is not a decision maker in the world who’s going to buy the, the employee benefit package. As I talked to this dude, I found out that the HR director was a big fan of Frank Sinatra.

We had to submit RFPs that were all the same. They were getting RFPs from a dozen of my competitors, and it was in a box and you couldn’t tamper them. It was, it was very rule driven, how we all had to submit our response for them. Everybody’s gonna look exactly the same in that scenario.

This broker has 27 different value added services. We have 24 different, they have 28. I mean, they’re, they’re measuring things that really are gonna look a lot alike. And so in talking to food and Bev, I find this a little nugget of information. I’m sitting around my team and we’re talking about how do we, how do we look different here?

And, uh, one of the guys on the team says, singing telegram. Well, that works great if you’re going after the performing arts center in town. So, uh, hired a guy, did a deal in a parking lot, handed him my RFPs, looked at him with his tilted Frank Sinatra hat that disheveled tie and set. Put your little ditty together.

And he literally sang a song about my agency as he presented it to the director of hr. I got a call later that day and she said, uh, I can’t give you the business for that, but you’re now a finalist, because that was totally different. And so I say that because whoever you’re getting referred into is somebody that could potentially be an influencer.

And so Director of Food and Bev became my, my mole, my my person. That when, when I knew this is what we were gonna do and how this was gonna happen, called the guy back up and I said, look, I need you to gather a whole bunch of people. Frank Sinatra’s gonna show up at X time. I did a few people in the lobby when this thing is delivered to make it look like an actual little show.

And so that, that cycle shortened because of that. So who you’re referred into can be that person that’s gonna get you into the, the right place at the right time. 

Brad Weimert: You’ve grown pretty quickly to multi eight figures. What do you say to the person that wants growth at all costs, and does it in the face of sustainability?

Andy Kolodgie: Yeah. I would say I’m sustainability at all costs over, over growth. 

I will choose not to do something until it is recurring and sustainable. I will wait because I don’t like, I really hate doing one-off transactional stuff.

I think there’s something special recurring business and that, like, it keeps people very honest. It means you have to be doing a good job constantly. You can’t fail on your promises versus a transactional business, you can get a seller to sign up for X, y, Z contract and be a terrible person, but still make a lot of money.

Brad Weimert: If you put a bad system together. It’s very evident very quickly. 

Andy Kolodgie: Yeah. 

Brad Weimert: That you just put a bad system together. If you have a bad transaction, you might have a good one next.

And it might not be clear that the pattern that you’re running is good or bad. 

Andy Kolodgie: Yeah, a hundred percent. 

Brad Weimert: But if you put the system together, it’s pretty clear if it’s good or bad. 

Andy Kolodgie: Yeah. 

Brad Weimert: So I think that that’s a really fun benefit. The question that I have around that is how do you reconcile iteration and testing against, i’m not willing to do it until I have a good system in place? 

Andy Kolodgie: We tend to just custom build a solution to make sure we could do it scalably. So the, the example I could think of right now is like we needed a call center, an inbound call center, to pick up calls in less than 10 seconds per call, 10 to 12 seconds per call. And every call center in the world promises that they can do that, and then every single one fails to deliver that. And so what we did is we built a system that calls a bunch of call centers at the same time and just sends the call to whichever call center picks up first.

And now we can see the data and we can see the stats and it’s like very crisp and very clear who’s performing, who’s not. We can cut off the low performers and we can add new high performers and stuff. And call centers go through these very interesting cyclical processes where they will, ramp up agents. So, they’ll have great call times and then they’ll try to ramp up client volume. When they ramp up client volume, quality pick up time goes really high up and then you have to, it’s like this, you know, cat and mouse game. And so we tried to avoid that part and we just tried to use as many call centers as possible so that we could flatten the curve.

To go back to the original question, it’s like, well, we’ve been wanting to take in more inbound calls for a long time, but we could not do it because we did not have a sustainable method to do that. Now, we could have just hired a bunch of agents. We could have brought call center in-house.

It’s a very painful new business that you’re starting. It’s very transactional to do that because now you’re doing a bunch of stuff to hopefully do this next thing , versus if we just build this software, it’s gonna take some time to do it, but now we can set up all the call centers in the world that we want to, and once we do it, it’s sustainable.

And there’s very low effort, very low maintenance. We don’t have to hire employees to be call agents and stuff. That for me is the example of like, I’m going for the sustainable route over the, over the transactional route.