I Gained 5,000,000+ Followers with this Secret Method

I'm about to teach you a rarely used method that I used to grow my audience by five million people in under 24 months. And the crazy thing is, is 24 months ago, I had less than 10,000 followers, and I knew nothing about YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, any of these other platforms. And the reason that I was able to catapult to, you know, a top 1% creator in that 24 month period is using this method that for some reason no one really talks about. Whenever I enter a new space, whether it's trying to learn a new skill, a new platform, a new anything, I realized there's a massive amount of skill deficiency that I have to overcome as fast as humanly possible. And so, I can either deploy time, or I can deploy money to save myself time. So within the world of organic content, I was like, who can I pay to shortcut my path to getting to where they are? So on one hand, I could go to like celebrities, and I did go to some of them, and they would give me their strategies, but it was like very personalized and tailored to them, and I didn't think it would apply to like how I run acquisition.com in my daily life. On the other hand, there was like the coaches, gurus, etc that I could go to, and I didn't want to do that because they might be using something that worked like five years ago, which honestly I see all the time. They're like, guys, you've got to do hashtags on YouTube videos. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, that's not true. And the third option, which I ultimately went with, are advertising agencies. And what an agency is, it's just a business that sells services of advertising on your behalf. I can pay someone to run ads for me. I can pay someone to cut, edit, and distribute content on my behalf. So what I want to do is help you decide whether or not you should use an agency, and avoid what I call the agency trap. There's different tiers of agencies. There's the guys who just make stuff, and then there's the people who are real pros. Contextually here, for one brand on one platform, a small one might cost three-ish, maybe five thousand a month. The more advanced ones are usually in the fifteen to thirty thousand dollars a month. So it's significantly more money. So here's how I use agencies now, and how you can too. Phase one is, I get what I would consider a basic agency. So long from getting into YouTube, the first step I did was I hired a three to five thousand dollar a month agency, and they just got me to commit to doing three videos a week. They just trimmed it, which means you take out the oohs and ahhs, put an intro and a thumbnail. The main objective of that first phase was just to get the basics down, forcing me to create content on a regular cadence. Once I had more context, because I've spent three, six months working with them, seeing what the audience likes, then I'm like, okay, now I want to learn everything. So I go from beginner of learning the basics and doing the fundamentals, to how do the top creators create on this platform. No business owner should change their business for one client. And so it makes sense for both me and the small agency, or for you and a small agency, to part ways at some point when your demands for what you want exceed their capacity. So then I work with the much better, more advanced agency who works with the top creators, to learn all of the more nuanced pieces of the platform. So rather than agree to their initial terms, which is basically pay us as long as humanly possible and we hope you pay until you die, this is exactly what I say. The other round. I want to do what you do in my business, but I don't know how. I'd like to work with you for six months so I can learn how you do it. Plus, I'll pay extra for you to break down why you make the decisions you do and the steps you take to make them. Then, after I get a good idea of how it all works, I'll start training my team on it. And once they can do it well enough, I'd like to change to a lower cost consulting agreement. This way, you can still help us if we run into problems. Are you opposed to this? When you start that way, I like it because you're starting with very clear intentions. And you're saying, hey, I'm going to commit to six months. This is what I want from you. And I'm also saying I'm going to continue to pay you after the engagement's over for a much higher leverage, much more profitable consulting engagement. So that's what a lot of agencies would ultimately want. And if I need to pay a little bit more than the agency fee up front, then I'm willing to do that. I also understand that as I start to train my team on it internally, there will be a period of time where I'm paying both them and my team. So you're paying twice. The thing is, is that when you do that, you're actually building the enterprise value of your business and you're building the asset that you own rather than being reliant on somebody else who eventually could, if you wanted to, cut you off and then you'd be dead in the water. Or what more realistically happens is they gouge you and they continue to raise their price because they can see how much money you're making from the thing. With that new agency, we ran the same play. Hey, we want to learn from you. We want to understand why you're picking these things. We understand the decision-making process, etc. I start documenting what they're doing into our processes internally. We want to start co-creating. So they're making stuff for us and we're making stuff for us. And eventually our stuff for us starts to be as good and eventually better than the stuff that they make for us. And it should be because I'm only one client of many to them and I'm basically renting them as fractional labor with expertise at a premium. Once your team has the same amount of expertise or more, they should be better because one, they have more time because they're going to fully allocate their time to you. And secondly, because they will always have more context on your brand than an agent will. By having more time and more context, all we have to fill is the gap of expertise. And so once we have the expertise gap, then the in-house team should be better than the advanced team. And then at that point, you decouple and you let them go. You want to make sure that you have a clear deadline for when you want to make that transition. And this is good for a couple reasons. One is because it sets expectations with them. They can also see the LTV and you can talk in terms of that. Let's say it's $6,000 a month. I'm committing to $36,000. All right. So like you're going to get that from me as long as you're not an idiot. But the real, real is that your team also knows that you're like, hey, we're one month down. We got to understand this stuff in five months. Hey, we're two months down. We got to understand this stuff in four months. And so it drives you towards the outcome of getting your team up to speed faster. Now you have that deadline, but what if your team's not as good as theirs by the time the deadline comes? Well, in my opinion, you either need to change the people or they're not teaching you everything that needs to happen. Because if they're low skilled people are doing better than your team, some who is a problem, either them or you. Let's assume that the people are right. And let me just a more complex platform, whatever. I keep going until our team matches theirs. Once our team matches theirs, then I drop it off. We downgrade it to a consulting agreement just for insurance. One or two months later, if we feel like we're not learning anything on the calls that we have from a consulting perspective, we cut it. And we do so amicably because we set that as the expectation. That's how I grew my YouTube. So now let's approach the same concept, but on different platforms. I didn't understand TikTok at all. I didn't use it. I wasn't on it. I actually had an agency reach out to me outbound, which is not common for me to accept that. But they said, listen, you do no work. So from a value perspective, the offer was you already have enough content out there. I can repurpose it and make shorts out of it. And I was like, okay, sure. If you want to do all the work and involve me at nothing and just make content for me, sounds good. And so that's what they did. And they started getting traction with the short videos and we're like, okay, this stuff works. And then for me, my director of brand actually had a super deep history on short form content. And so normally I would have had that second phase where I would go for that premium agency, but that individual worked at a premium agency. And so I actually bought the SOPs automatically and we were able to massively scale our output on short content within six or so months of working with that original agency. And again, we're on good terms with the person in the agency. If you set the expectation up front, which is I want to learn from you and I want to be transparent about my intentions. And I want to eventually bring this in house because it's my belief that my team will be able to allocate more time to my thing and understand my brand better. And if they had your skills, they will be able to do more output at higher quality than you could ever do. You have to make a margin. I don't. I'm going to cover costs and get five times more output. This is what I believe has married the best parts of agency and the best part of building an enterprise and making a valuable business and avoided the agency traps that so many people fall into myself included. So the first agency experience I ever had was actually really good. I then worked with like 10 more agencies and all of them were terrible. And this is the exact process of what happened. So reading directly from a hundred million dollar leads. Step one, they got me excited about all the new leads they would bring. Step two, I'd go through an onboarding process that felt valuable and sometimes was. Step three, they assigned their best senior rep to my account. Step four, I saw some results. Step five, they moved my senior rep to the newest customer. Step six, a junior rep starts managing my account. My results suffer. Step seven, I complained. Step eight, the senior rep would come back once in a while to make me feel better. Step nine, the results still never got back to where they were before and I'd eventually cancel. Step 10, I'd search for another agency and repeat the cycle of insanity. Step 11, for the zillionth time, start wondering why I wasn't getting results like the first time. So how do you decide if using an agency is right for you? First off, do you have more money or more time? If you don't have any money, then you got to learn it and it's going to take time. And you know what? That's part of life. Usually you master one platform, you get some success, you get a little bit cash flow, and then you can more quickly pay to learn the other ones. You pay down your ignorance less faster. If you have the money, then for me, it's always worth paying on that debt. And that process is how we approach LinkedIn, how we approach podcasts, how we approach paid ads, all of them, I run the same playbook.