48: How Smart Founders Build Repeatable Growth with Jamie Shanks

How do you build multiple successful agencies, recover from failure, and keep scaling without burning out?

In this episode, Joe speaks with Jamie Shanks, founder and CEO of Get Levrg, and a three-time agency founder who has built businesses in sales training, technology, and outsourced revenue operations. Jamie shares the entrepreneurial mindset that has driven him through wins, setbacks, and multiple reinventions. He explains why founders must learn to enjoy the climb rather than chase a final destination, and why resilience often matters more than strategy alone.

Jamie also breaks down the practical systems behind scaling revenue. He explains his “lighthouse and tugboat” framework for balancing inbound authority-building with outbound prospecting, how Sales for Life grew rapidly by leveraging partnerships and repeatable campaigns, and why many founders make the mistake of buying tools before defining principles and process.

The conversation also explores recurring revenue, founder-led sales, outsourcing, and cash flow discipline. Jamie offers candid lessons from mistakes made in earlier ventures, including project-based revenue dependency and poor payment terms, and explains how he rebuilt Get Levrg using a stronger economic model from day one.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:20 Three Agencies Journey

03:11 Fear and Motivation

06:52 Social Selling Breakthrough

07:24 Sphere of Influence Playbook

11:23 Principles Process Platforms

15:30 Outsourcing Done Right

20:49 Relationship Signal Intelligence

23:51 Exiting Founder Led Sales

31:21 Hard Lessons and Cash Flow

Follow Jamie on LinkedIn: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamestshanks 

Get Levrg Website:

https://getlevrg.com 

Prof. Joe O'Mahoney helps boutique consultancies scale and exit. 

Follow Joe on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeomahoney/

Follow Joe on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/joeomahoney

Visit Joe’s Website:
https://www.equitysherpa.com

Transcript

Welcome And Jamie’s Background

Joe 0:00

Welcome to the Consulting Growth Podcast. I'm Professor Joe O'Marni, CEO of Equity Sherpa. We help owners of consultancies quadruple the equity value of their firms over a two to four year period. If you'd like to know how we do this, visit equitySherpa.com. Welcome back to the Consultancy Growth Podcast. I'm Professor Joe O'Marny. I have the absolute pleasure this week of being joined by Jamie Shanks. And Jamie has had a very interesting and varied life, but I think there's a huge amount that we can learn from Jamie, partly on business development and sales, but also partly the entrepreneur's journey. Now, Jamie, before we get stuck into the questions, I will only make a disaster of introducing you. So do introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you got to CEO and founder of Get Leverage.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Fantastic. So as mentioned, I'm the CEO of Get Leverage, which essentially takes on sales and marketing tasks from our small to medium customers. We call it doing the$5 an hour tasks so that they can focus on$500 an hour value creation. And our global delivery operations center is in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We're a team of$115, and we're growing at 10% compounded a month. So it's quite a ride. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. So I've owned three agencies. My first agency was a global sales training company that I invented and pioneered a sales methodology called social selling. That was a hit. Agency number two was a tech-enabled service that took the foundations of our learning model and tried to turn it into a technology. That was, and I used baseball analogies, although I I recognize that you're in the UK.

Joe 1:50

Some of the terminology, but go on.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

It was fantastic. Second agency was like getting uh a pitch to the face, didn't work out. And then agency three, I'm up at the plate right now, and I'm smelling a home run on my plate. So that's that's me.

Joe 2:10

They do they do say that you know you learn from the failures, and every time you get a bit better.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Um that is very true.

Joe 2:16

Obviously, it would be nice if various politicians left uh left the global economy alone so that we could uh have a smooth run there as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Exactly.

Motivation And The Endless Mountain

Joe 2:28

Listen, um, okay, so great. I mean, most founders I come across, um they'll do one, and whether it's successful or not, uh often they'll just be so exhausted afterwards that they will they might try a second one, um, but they certainly pull back from a third. Now, we had a little chat earlier about um my proclivities for getting a bit too stressed when there's too much work on, and uh you said you were almost diametrically uh opposite in in that respect. How do you keep the energy motivation uh levels up to keep going through that entrepreneurial journey three times, let alone once?

SPEAKER_00 3:11

I think everybody's motivated by different things. Um, and if I had Freud sitting next to me, uh he might say that um I was as a child, as a kid in school, I was always told I wasn't good enough, wasn't smart enough. So that might be part A. Okay. So I'm trying to prove something to everybody. Maybe it's to also prove it to myself. But be honest, I've always been motivated by fear, and fear is an engine that never stops. And so I've had some great successes, some great failures, but I'm 47 years old now. I feel like a 27-year-old. Maybe it's because I keep myself very wow. Do you have kids? I have a 13-year-old and 11-year-old. Bloody hell, man. Well done. Yeah, so I really do have the energy of somebody much younger than me. Wow, and again, I don't know if it is I am managed by fear, but the I wake up every day. Um, and here's the thing about entrepreneurship. The thing about entrepreneurship is you are climbing a mountain, and then you will get to the top of the mountain, and you will realize you're in a mountain range, and that range never ends. Yep. And so it took me a long time to understand that you actually need to enjoy the climbing of mountain because there actually is no destination. You will just go from one mountain to up to the next range and the next range. I'm a uh a huge backcountry skier, and there's a type of skiing called tour skiing. So you literally skin up to the top and you get to the top, and you realize there is no top, and it teaches you that you actually have to enjoy the act of building and the act of the suck. If you enjoy that, then you're ready for entrepreneurship.

Joe 5:06

That's that's such a good way of putting it. There's always a big amount in you've got to enjoy the journey. And I think I think a lot of people, and I potentially put myself in this category, often say to ourselves, once we get to X, and that might be a number, it might be um an achievement, it might be external recognition, then we'll be happy. But then you achieve that, and then you go, Oh, I there's still this thing inside of me that that isn't quite there, so I need to go on and do something else. Um this is quite deep for a uh for a Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon here, but I'm guessing Tuesday morning over there. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Yeah, and the reality is um, again, I've been wise enough three agencies later to realize that the appetite is insatiable, and actually you'll never be fulfilled. I think there is a type of entrepreneur, and I've met many of them, and I now recognize I'm one of those. No matter what I accomplish, I will want more. Sure. Um, and so I better embrace the act of eating rather than the act of uh fulfillment because I'll just be a glutton forever.

Social Selling And Sphere Of Influence

Joe 6:20

Yep. Good with metaphors, by the way. I'm I I once worked for um um one of the billionaire in Hong Kong. He's one of the top 10 richest people in the world, uh, a guy called Lee Kashing. And he was 74 when I was working for him, and he was still going 10 years later. And I said to him, Are you ever gonna stop to enjoy your money? And he said, I'm enjoying, I'm enjoying it. Um, so it's not it's not that you know, in other words, it wasn't the money he was doing it for, it was the journey, which I I I took a lot from. Um, let's talk a little bit about sales for life. Um, now you trained um over a quarter of a million professionals, incredibly um successful um clients like Microsoft and Oracle. Um what what what was the key to success there? What was the moment where you really realized you'd built something that you could you could sell on that had value outside of you and a few key people?

SPEAKER_00 7:23

The world uh was starting at that time to recognize that social media would be a powerful medium of communication, but nobody had ever used social media to turn it into sales processes that could be repeatable for business development. And that's what social selling was. And there was a sales play that I didn't invent anything because it had been used in the analog world forever, but I just digitized it and built a workflow around it, called it the sphere of influence. And it was a very simple concept. You take one of your happy, successful customers, you take a sheet of paper, and you write their name in the center of the sheet of paper. So imagine I'm drinking out of a Yeti water bottle right now. I put Yeti, the logo of Yeti at the center of a sheet of paper, and I draw a circle around it. And I ask myself a fundamental question. If I were to tell that story of Yeti to other people, who would actually care? Well, what happens is most sellers, you know, their company has McDonald's as a customer or might have British Airways or whatever the company is, and they think that if I just tell that McDonald's story to everybody, they'll all care. And that's just not true. The concept of the sphere of influence is what I would do is take that story of Yeti and I would reverse engineer one degree of separation around that story. A really powerful example of that are what about the past employees of Yeti that up and leave and they go to other businesses. And when they go to other businesses, they think about the people, the process, and the technology that they used at Yeti that made them successful. And so all you're doing is telling that story to those people. So you tell the story to past employees of Yeti, vendors and suppliers to Yeti, competitors to Yeti, because they're the very first people that would pick up the phone, respond to your email, respond to your LinkedIn message, and say, Oh, you work with them? Yeah, I know exactly what it's like to succeed and fail there, because we're within one degree of separation of that story. So basically, I taught customers how to spider web their stories into take one customer and turn it into five to ten prospects you want to target. And it spiraled from there into all kinds of different workflows. But it worked almost immediately upon me building this training methodology, and that's why it scaled very quickly. And you know, we jumped from the day I started my first customer was September of 2012 with a little local Toronto-based market research company. And one year later, I was building the global curriculum for Oracle and Microsoft. Wow, wow, and like a light bulb went off. Like this is clear, like I've jumped many levels here. Yeah.

Principles Before Process Before Platforms

Joe 10:20

So listen, okay, right. So I get I get the good concept. I've never worked with a firm that scaled that fast. And I've worked with, you know, multi-billion pound startups. So twice already, you've mentioned um processes. So how do you once you realize you've got a product that has something to it, how do you start to build processes? And this this I think will be of great interest to many founders who are listening to this, because they often challenge, you know, they they'll they'll have themselves and they'll have some partners, then they'll have some people, and then they'll get to 30 people, and they say, well, we probably need a CRM. But you know, in kind of talking, maybe getting to 50, 60, 70 people before they start to think about process efficiency, scaling, etc. Sometimes 100 people. How do you go about that? What practical steps did you take to systematize what you were doing so that it was scalable?

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Okay. So I'm a big believer in something I call three Ps. So, first thing is uh where most people gravitate towards is platforms or tools. They think I've got a sales problem, I'm going to buy the next hot widget or boobob that's going to solve that problem. It's actually the reverse. It goes principles, then it goes process, then it goes platforms. So a principle as an example, a great set of principles is that from a business development standpoint, you need a lighthouse and a tugboat. You need a lighthouse. That means I need to create and attract people towards me as a principle. And at the same time, I'm going to plant the trees of a tugboat. I'm going to pull people towards me. That's an outbound business development motion. Process. I am going to, as an example, develop one experimental campaign for my lighthouse and one for my tugboat platform. I'm for my lighthouse, I'm going to launch a podcast. And for my tugboat, I'm going to do a campaign on LinkedIn that invites people to, I'm just making this up, to a break regional breakfast as I do a tour around the UK from city to city. That's connecting the dots between principles, process, platforms. So what did we do at Sales for Life? At Sales for Life, we uh our lighthouse was that we ran a webinar every two weeks, and we ran a virtual summit every three to four months. And so what we were doing is we would build this giant database and the webinars we called Operation Landgrab. What we would do was invite famous uh sales training businesses. We would invite sales consulting firms, we would invite uh high-powered chief revenue officers who had great social networks, and they would be the guests on the panel of our webinars, and we'd be using their social network, who they would share our story about the upcoming webinar every two weeks for years and years. We built a multi-hundred thousand-person database in the sales community by using other people's social. So that was our lighthouse strategy, and our tugboat strategy was we were using our own methodology. Every time we won a customer, we literally had our entire office was white ball, uh whiteboard walled painted. And we would win a customer, we would draw their name on the on the whiteboarded walls, draw a circle around it, and spider web off all the connective companies around them. And then we would outbound prospect those five to ten companies. We would win one of those, circle that one, right? Draw 10 spiderwebs off of it. We got to 600 customers, and so it was nothing more than leaning in on a few campaign bets, but was planting trees between lighthouses and tugboats. So that was that's the principle. The process was we were going to draw out standard operating procedures and workflows for one of each, and from a platform standpoint, the platform of the webinar might have been as an example, like we're using Zoom here, and the platform for outbound was going to be LinkedIn. Nothing more stri, nothing more than that. It's just that I think that the average chief revenue officer founder who tries to jump into doing more sales, they're like, We need to improve. Let's go buy an Zoom info or gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're buying like a tool to find data, but you don't even know what the strategy is.

Offshore Delivery Without Losing Quality

Joe 15:19

Yeah, yeah, great. Great. There's so much, so much value in in those metaphors and story. That's fantastic. Okay. I want to move on because there's a lot a lot I want to ask you, but you you wrote the book um Outsourced a Profits. Um and in it you argue, and this kind of links to what you're doing now, that founders are paying five to ten times more parole than necessary. Um, now the the outsourced model um or the offshore model is one that a lot of CEOs have been bitten with because they see the numbers and they think, oh, you know, we can this is something that we can save some money on, and very often the quality um isn't there, but the quality clearly is there with what you're doing. So, how have you managed to maintain that quality um in in get leverage?

SPEAKER_00 16:16

So I'll talk about it at a principles level uh and then also an important process level. From a principal standpoint, we knew that we needed to build a full agency top to bottom, as if it was sitting on uh you know Madison Avenue in New York or sitting on Bond Road or whatever in London. It had to be a full proper agency that meant a chief operating officer, head of service delivery, a quality assurance team, uh, product innovators. And when we deploy talent to the customer, there would be a customer success manager who would just be there listening. Then there was project managers who organized pods of people that did the work. And so it was not unfortunately, most founders, as they jumped into offshoring, they would go on to upwork. Can you build me a PowerPoint slide?

Joe 17:13

Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

They would find Johnny, wherever Johnny lives in the world, who's working from their basement, who has no attachment to the business and um has no accountability to the success or failure of the business. And then would lobin work amongst the other 17 things that he's doing.

Joe 17:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

That's that's so we are exactly like every other North American or UK agency except the delivery operations centers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. So now you've got the same rigor of using Monday.com and workflows and infrastructure. The other thing that's important from a founder's perspective is it's truly understanding the economics. And it only takes the mind of a seller, I sometimes think, to get this. Imagine you have a million-dollar business and um you're employing this team of people to do marketing for$200,000 as an example, and all of a sudden, uh yeah, and you're you're you're barely making profit, but you wish you were making 20% profit. So 20% profit on a million dollars is also$200,000. The opportunity cost of that$200,000, 20% profit. If you were at zero profit and you wanted to get to$200,000 profit, that's actually one million dollars in net new sales to get there. And so you ask yourself, the founder, are you willing to go from your million dollars of revenue to two million dollars of revenue just to make your two hundred thousand dollars in profit? Like, where is that extra doubling of your business going to come from? Yeah, and what happens is they don't look at their cost of good uh cost of customer acquisition and cost of goods sold as like a headwind and a tailwind. And when you save, if I could drop your expense from$200,000 to$20,000 and you saved$180,000, yeah. What you just did is you did two things. You either prevented yourself from trying to go win eight hundred thousand dollars more in business, or in the other way to look at it is you no longer need to plow retained earnings and profit into trying to get to that insane level of growth. And the what founders need to realize is that 80% done by other people is a hundred percent better than done by themselves, and so as a founder, it's is things going to be perfect? Probably not, but the reality is uh what is perfect worth to you?

Tracking People Moves For Account Growth

Joe 20:00

Yeah, sacrificing all of your profit or trying to double your business just to stay afloat, and and no one gets perfect anyway, no, you know, even if you've got the best staff, best qualified, you know, department. And and I guess the other thing is, and I'm not trying to sell your business, um, but uh but the other thing is is the opportunity cost of the founders' time having to coordinate all those bloody upwork and fiver people. Um and you know, uh often people will they they'll save save money, they'll find good people, but none of these people are talking to each other, so they spend all their time running between them trying to put them together and uh and it all starts to fall apart. Um good, okay, okay, thank you. Um pipeline signals monitors job challenges and human capital uh to identify sales opportunities, what you call relationship signal intelligence. Um now consulting firms and all professional services live and die by relationship. So if you're CEO of a I don't know, 100, 200 person consultancy, how would they use that to defend existing accounts or generate new business?

SPEAKER_00 21:19

Yeah, pipeline signals as a thesis, unbelievable. Uh our problem was our own execution. But here's the concept of it. We surfaced two intent signals that were really, really valuable to any organization. People are the ones that made buying decisions. So what if you just followed people around the world? So let's follow a couple people. Number one, what about, as we talked about the sphere of influence? You gave us a list of every customer of yours, and we reverse engineered everybody that left those customers and went to other businesses. Amazing. That's a great uh high intent lead. List the first people that would get your story. But the second is human capital migration. Imagine you have an account, Yeti is your active, happy customer. Now all of a sudden, we're tracking everyone that gets hired into that company and everyone that leaves that company. What happens is many times sales organizations are calling in to departments where there was a change of leadership. A key stakeholder left. Now the priority just walked out the door that you were working on. They're going to backfill it with a new leader. That leader is going to come in with new people, process, and technology. So there's both opportunities and risks at the same time. When we're tracking both sides, new leader comes in, they're more malleable to change. And that first 100 days, you can you can plant the seeds of inception. Like, hey, what's your game plan? But what if they came from a competitor? They're going to come with preconceived notions that you suck and you're not going to uh you're working together. The priority you were working on, did it just walk out the door? And now all of a sudden, is your account in jeopardy? Be and this has happened to every seller in the world. You're working with these people, you forge relationships, they quit and they leave their job. Now, all of a sudden, nobody cares about your widget, your boob, your service, your solution anymore. So that's what we were tracking is if you follow the people, you then follow the priorities around. Um so yeah, it from a concept standpoint worked really well. There's now with the advent of AI, technology has really caught up to being able to uh to deliver this intelligence at scale.

Stepping Back From Founder-Led Sales

Joe 23:44

Yeah, yeah. Yes, yeah. If we have time, we'll touch on AI later because I can imagine it's uh it's it's something you you think a lot about. Um I'm interested. Um, so on on your podcast, you talk about founders struggling to transition to not being responsible for 100% of the sales, in effect. Now I'm interested because you're you're you're charismatic, you talk well. I can imagine that you you sell very well, and in some ways, that's a great thing for you, in other ways has it been a struggle? Has it been a struggle? Because you, you know, you've clearly got a team around you, and they probably, you know, finding people like you who can sell with that personality, with that ability to talk, being charismatic isn't easy. So, how have you personally managed to pull yourself out of at least some of the sales effort?

SPEAKER_00 24:41

It is a learning journey, and then I am almost exited founder-led sales, and I'll I'll talk through the exact process of get leverage. So, get leverage has now grown to a mid-seven-figure agency very quickly. And so the time uh is for me to leave founder-led sales. So, here's the process that I went through. First thing to do is draw out the entire sales process, and we've chosen our sales process to be delivered in what's called a portfolio management uh framework, meaning that when a new lead comes in, the seller picks up the lead from sales qualified lead all the way to building consensus, delivers a proposal, works in contract, wins the deal, continues the relationship with the customer to customer retention, upsell, cross-sell, and it's a monthly recurring revenue model. So now it's for the lifetime value of the customer. So we don't we don't do the classic SaaS model, which bifurcates the account executive who wins the deal, then hands over to a customer success manager. In professional services, I'm a huge fan that people just want one relationship through the journey. So now you've drawn out early days. We chose that model right away. So now we have a portfolio model, uh portfolio management model. The next thing to do as the founder is to think about what gives you energy and what you know sucks the energy away from you. I've always been a net new sales guy. And so from that, my skill set is not based on onboarding and beyond. I just, that's not me. So what I needed to do was find talent that could take on from the moment of signature to the customer lifetime value forever. And so we started hiring account managers that knew that someday in the future they would be creeping backwards beyond, you know, from the the sale all the way earlier to sales qualified lead, but made it very clear to them you won't be hunters, you won't be trying to chase net new business. We'll build a team there, but you're going to be handed leads, and these are your this is your portfolio forever. So, step one, bring in account managers to handle the customer. Step two, develop playbooks to teach them to start chipping away. And when you look at sales, even from sales qualified lead to close one, there are many steps and processes. You break them down systematically and you say, okay, there's now 15 different things there. Let me teach you step two and step six and step nine, and we start chipping away at them until they can tackle the whole thing. And then what we've done is built an SDR team uh to do uh business development against paid media. So at that point, and then the last component is to build playbooks and systems that could track, obviously, using HubSpot, using AI, track everything that we're doing so that eventually uh next step, I as the sales leader, step after that, replace me as the sales leader.

Joe 28:02

Yeah, okay. Okay. I mean, it it it's something that I come across hell of a lot is is founders who are still, you know, they might only be responsible for you know 50%, let's say 40% of revenue. Um and and getting and the the mistake they often make is trying to find the person like them who can come in and you know have the charisma and all the rest of it. And I always say, well, those people are starting their own businesses. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

And and I'm trying to find people that want to serve the customer.

Cash Flow Mistakes And Closing Advice

Joe 28:35

Yeah. Yeah. And and so, you know, it but it takes time to build that competence. So good on you for having those results so quickly because it's no, it's no mean thing. Tell us a little bit about your client base. What size, is it a size thing? Is it a sector thing? So do you have a specific size or sector that you focus on?

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Great question. So whenever you build a sales organization, you are either an account-based model, you're geographically focused, you're vertical or industry focused, or you're market uh segment focused. We're market segment focused. So we target the founder-led company, companies between one and 500 employees, both in business to business and business to consumer. Uh, most of our customers are in North America, a few are in Europe, but the commonality, and the average customer has something like 47, 50 employees. They are all resource-starved. They're small to medium businesses that need help getting out of the day-to-day muck.

Joe 29:40

Yep. Yep. Okay. Yep. And the then the typical challenges will be that, you know, the founder or the senior team is being pulled into stuff that they really shouldn't be, that they've got a few people perhaps on Upwork or Fiverr who do a few good things, but they don't have coordination and perhaps a strategy and processes behind them.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

Correct.

Joe 30:03

Okay, good. All right. Okay. Um, listen, the final question. Um, you I love your LinkedIn page, by the way. And by the way, any partners listening to this, I talk a lot about visible expertise. Number one, I love your setup. Number two, I love your LinkedIn page. So for if there's any partners or directors who are thinking about how they can make themselves more visible and professionally, I would number one, look at this on on video, on YouTube, but also number two, have a look at your your web page, um, your LinkedIn page. But on your LinkedIn page, I love the uh the base, the baseball metaphor, two first base hits, one bunt, three strikeouts, and at BAT big time with oh bat big time with get lever get leverage. Um I'm at that right now. Yeah, yeah, there we go. That's great. So listen, the most people don't talk about it. I mean, a bunt is a bad thing, is it?

SPEAKER_00 30:57

No, well, uh a bunt is a learning experience.

Joe 31:00

A learning experience, okay.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

You if you've ever if you watch American baseball, the bunt is the pitch comes in, you hit it only five feet in front of you, yeah. You have to run to the bag. Uh and very few times it's successful. And right, I I'm either a bunt or a pitch to the face. It was one of the two.

Joe 31:21

Okay, so t tell us about a few learnings from the things that haven't gone well. What are the key things, you know? And it's quite rare that people talk about these because normally they only talk about the successes. So I think that's a great, great thing to talk about two or three things that you have taken from some of the things where you know you you didn't get to first base, um, but you've learned things from it and you're using them now.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Most important decisions you'll ever make. Um, and I'll try and so then I'll talk maybe about three of them real quick is going to be principle number one is going to be the economic model of a positive or negative cash flow cycle. So how you collect money. Number two will be choosing a partnerships and equity distribution. And uh then number three is trying to be something that you're not. Um, I'm an agency guy of a I'm a non-technical founder, and trying to become a technologist uh wasn't wise. So, first one um is around choosing your business model. One of the worst decisions I've ever made in a very successful business, my first agency sales for life, is we did not build a recurring revenue model from day one. We got addicted to huge project-based revenue. Um, those deals when I started, we were doing$20,000 deals. Then eventually it crept up to quarter million and half million dollar deals, but it was project-based revenue. Less than 25% of our revenue would recur every year. Another 25% would we call re-okre, which means the customer would port over you know the IP from one year to the next, and they would you know renew a license, but it wasn't recurring, and then 50% was project-based. What happens is it's called the law of big numbers, and the bigger you get, the bigger the hole you have to fill when you have project-based revenue. So you compound that with um hiring talent and supporting a huge, you know, a burn rate of maybe$300,000,$500,000 a month. And if you have a few slow months, you become the bank. And the worst decision I ever made was allowing customers to pay what's called DSO, day sales outstanding, accounts receivables of we started it, it was accounts receivables of their 30 days. And then big companies would sign 45 days, 60 days, 90 days. The bigger you get, you actually become a bank. And there's a magic law number. If you aren't collecting accounts receivables in under 29 days, then what you're actually doing is going to the bank, whether it's out of your own bank account or the actual bank, borrowing money to pay payroll and your rent and everything for the end of this month, then you're going to collect money next month that paid for the services you did the month before. And so the bigger you get, your accounts receivables become a deferred liability, a debt. And I woke up one day and I was$1.1 million in debt. Yet I had a successful customer, company. Yeah. So we've got leverage. The principle that I set from day one was we were going to allow customers to only pay on credit card, and it would have a positive cash flow cycle. They had to pay before they got the service. So we started the company on a$10,000 credit card, and we used positive cash flow cycles to fuel the growth of the whole company. That's the most important decision ever made because uh now I wasn't the bank. The customers were fueling the growth. So, anyways, uh, you know, getting into details, there were other failures, but that's the biggest one is the economic model you set up your business around.

Joe 35:20

Great. And I think that's so important these days where product, AI, um, you know, data, there's so many opportunities for consultancies to do recurring revenue models and not have to send, you know, accounts receivable for 45 days.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

I would never do project-based revenue again.

Where To Find Jamie

Joe 35:39

Great lesson there. Jamie, listen, there's so much here. I'm gonna go back and listen to this, and I'm certainly gonna check out your firm because you're actually describing me as your ideal customer here. So um uh I I'm gonna check it. Thanks so much for your time. Um, and how can people find you?

SPEAKER_00 35:55

I go to get leverage, it's spelt G-E-T and then L-E-V-R-G, it's a play on words.com. Go to get leverage.com, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn and happy to have a conversation.

Joe 36:08

Thank you so much, Jamie. Take care of yourself.

SPEAKER_00 36:10

Thanks a lot.