I run a buyers agency. When it was time to market it, I hired the experts and paid the invoices. One agency flooded us with $30 leads and a celebration email every week. I rang every single one: tyre-kickers, wrong numbers, people who’d forgotten they ever filled in a form. Another charged $45k for “prospecting” and couldn’t point to a single thing it produced.
790 leads. One client. The agencies were celebrating cost per lead. My real cost per client sat at five figures. Cheap leads are the most expensive thing you can buy.
The business I needed didn’t exist, so I built it. One team that makes the content and runs the ads, judged on one number: clients signed. My face, my phone, my ad account. Film, test, kill the losers, feed the winners, every week, until the machine worked. $130k of ads turned into $1.3 million in commission, and half our new clients now come from Meta without the referrals dropping.
Josh Meli, founder