In this methodical episode, Bradley Rausch, Owner of bradleyrausch.com, shares how to turn your happy clients into a high-margin growth engine instead of staying trapped on the front-end hamster wheel. If you have clients, a team, and solid reviews but your growth has flattened despite chasing more leads, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– How to train your client success team to sell advocacy and upsells while maintaining quality experience
– Why focusing on quality of revenue through referrals and upsells can multiply profit per client without more volume
– How to implement the four sales framework to maximize lifetime value from onboarding to ascension
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a founder. I’m your host, Scott Retzheimer, and I want to talk to those founders out there who look like they’ve actually made it work. You’ve got clients, you’ve got a team that’s helping you out, your clients are happy, nobody’s complaining. The reviews are good, yet somewhere along the way the growth started to flatten out, and you can’t quite put a finger on why. So, you do what every founder does, you go get more, more leads, more ads, more closes, more volume, but somehow it just doesn’t change a thing. So, the question that I have for you, and the question we’re going to explore today is, what if what if your happy clients are the very thing that’s quietly and effectively killing your growth.
Well, here to help us explore this rather interesting question is Bradley Roush. He’s a client experience architect, strategic advisor, and the go to backend profit partner for founder led coaching groups and programs, with six years of experience, he’s helped dozens of founders turn chaotic growth into durable high margin revenue without sacrificing their values, from first 72 hour onboarding systems to referrals, testimonials, and ascension playbooks, Bradley and his team help founders turn each great client into one and a half or two times more profit and build businesses that feel lighter as they scale. Bradley, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Really looking forward to this conversation. And as I was getting ready for this episode, this question just kind of started jumping out at me and seemed like you’d be the guy to help us out, so what’s the problem with these founder-centric businesses that have really happy clients, what’s going on there mechanically? Why is that a problem?
Bradley Rausch
Well, I love that you say founder, and of course the podcast being focused on founders, and super honored to be here. The idea of a founder-led business, there comes with so much leverage, which I’m sure you talk about in a lot of different capacities, but specifically from a retention, upsell, profit perspective, people are coming in with so much more trust, so much more due diligence, usually done on the founder and the brand, and they’re coming in guns blazing, ready to go, the lifetime value inherently of clients and a founder-led business is usually already higher than just a corporatized, you know, systematized from the from a 90 30,000 foot view business, but with that being said, a lot of times people are not capitalizing on that full opportunity, and in fact are kind of doing the exact opposite, which is always I like to call this the hamster wheel of founder-led businesses, which is always needing more clients on the front end to build revenue, but then you’re losing clients in the back end, and then to make up for that lost potential revenue, you go out and find more clients, and then the history, the process repeats itself over and over, so it’s just this hamster wheel that it’s really, really difficult to get off, and it doesn’t help, of course, that you know, the I could go on a tirade, I won’t, but the industry in general of online business, you know, high ticket space, coaching, consulting, SaaS, you name it, is so focused on get more leads, get more sales, get more stuff, get more front end, more clients, more influence, and the question I always pose is, just what if you could have half the amount of clients but make four times the amount of revenue and profit per client, meaning you work half as much and make twice as you work half as much and you make, make twice as much.
So I would say the biggest thing that gets in our way is two things: one is a narrative that we think that more again, more growth equals more volume and more, more quantity, but I talk about quality of revenue a lot, and it’s just a concept that I don’t say nobody’s ever thought of before, but usually a lot of the people I speak with have not really, really dialed in, and you know, when you look at, for instance, like the total value of a client that you bring in. Most people would just consider that to be, well, they paid me, you know, 10k for six months of coaching, or 10k for b saas for 12 months, something, you know, something like that. Usually, those are two pretty common examples, and you know, if you were to go to somebody and ask, well, cool, what’s the total value of that client to your business, they would say, well, the 10k minus, you know, any cost it takes to fulfill them, and of course, any anything it took to acquire the customer on the front end. I would challenge that, and I would say, well, out of every – I usually use the ratio – out of every 10 clients, how many are sending you a referral that closes with zero, could zero customer acquisition costs? How many are sending you, or, sorry, how many are continuing past the initial six or 12 month container that they were sold into. How many out of every 10 clients are upselling or ascending? I like to say into another offer. Usually those numbers are zero or next to zero, but if you can even just move those up, just one for each of those categories. Usually the total client value you’re adding anywhere between 30 to 50% for every single client you bring in and. Can factor that into the front end, of course, and can say then across the board. Well, then, if I bring in one referral, the closest of zero customer acquisition costs, for example, all of my clients become $1,000 more valuable to the business because that 10k spread over the 10 clients.
Bradley Rausch
So, just kind of as an example, there, so I would say it’s really, really this attitude towards the front end and the growth that is possible there, and I’m not dissing front end, I’m not saying don’t, I’m just saying at some point you need to, you need to focus your, you need to focus your attention in other places, otherwise, again, it’s just going to be this hamster wheel that, yeah, just is really hard to get off as you grow.
Scott Ritzheimer
One of the challenges related to this, and maybe even on the flip side of it, is you see this, I see this a lot in professional services, and maybe you see something similar, but there are a lot of folks who come because they want to work with you, but if you’re trying to scale beyond just your own 24 hours in a day, hopefully a lot less if you sleep, there can be this frustration of no one does it like me, the client really wants to work with me if I, if I’m not there, this whole thing’s gonna fall apart. How do you use, how do founders need to think differently about that problem to start overcoming it?
Bradley Rausch
Love, love, love, love that question. There’s a client centric answer, and then a founder-centric answer. The client-centric answer from pure strategy is I always like to say, what are the things I can highlight about my team or the people that I am, you know, quote unquote passing them off to that I can say, ‘Listen, I’m passing you off to Sally. Sally’s gonna be working with you for the next six months, 12 months, whatever, in this capacity. Listen, you’re actually in better hands with Sally, because Sally’s way better at x, y, and z than I am. I mean, listen, I know I’m super honored you came in, because you saw me on social, or you saw me on ads, whatever. Sally’s actually the goat. Sally’s fantastic, you gotta, you know what I mean. So, you, and of course, you’re not, you’re not dissing yourself in the process, but you know, you’re amping up your team, you’re giving the credibility, you’re passing off your credibility to other people, and of course, you can, you know, do that at scale with things like, you know, very like internal onboarding VSLs.
I always, I always love to say one of the biggest things I preach is, you know, people oftentimes stop selling after the close, but you know, for a quote unquote client success person, not a lot of people say this in my space, but you actually need to keep selling the entire time, that’s what a big part of my IP is based on, so that’s kind of the client centric part, on the founder-centric part, it really comes back to you, kind of alluded to this, is like if you don’t offload the responsibility or the narrative that someone else can help you, you will always be capped. There’s never going to be anything that you know past your 20, you won’t get more than 20-four hours a day, and so it almost becomes a well, not almost. It is a feature, not a bug of the business, and of your, of your scalability. And I think a lot of people look at it as, oh, it’s a bug, it’s a problem that I can’t give more. It’s a problem that I have so many clients coming in, and I want to grow the, I want to grow how much I’m making per client, and how much I’m charging, and my ability to work with them all, but the frame needs to be completely, I think, 180 into that is a feature of growth, and then finding solutions for that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the things that I think is a legitimate concern, but is part of a deeper problem is that founders have a tendency to have success excelling what they can do, but there’s only one of them, and so they’ll hand it off to someone, and either by virtue of the fact that it’s just not them, or more likely that they haven’t done the right vetting or training of their employees. Sure, there can be a pretty big drop off in, in, in customer quality. How do you, how do you help them address that? Because, again, there’s just not more of them to scale to go around. How do you help them create that same quality experience without having to drive it all themselves.
Bradley Rausch
Yeah, so what I find again is that if you can, from the very beginning, essentially just hype up, and that sounds very woo woo, but I genuinely mean it, hype up, give, give credibility to, you know, your team, that is really, really great. But then, of course, the thing you’re alluding to is, well, then how do you keep that growing, or how do you keep that moving at scale through the entire client journey, not just this initial period of like excitement. So, as I said, the everything that I do is really based around this IP is called the for sales framework, and so it’s based on this idea that everybody focuses on the first sale, which is enrollment, moment of payment, but there’s actually three other sales that need three other quote unquote sales throughout the client journey, or revenue opportunities. I’ll say that require at scale just as much attention and frameworks and scripting, and you know actual strategy to put into place with your team and with how you’re, how you’re filling on your clients, whether it’s a team, whether it’s a system, AI, whatever it is, so I. Four sales are first is enrolling, of course, moment of payment. Second is onboarding, so the first 72 hours, as I like to say, after a client enrolls. The third is advocacy, so that either is in the form of testimonial, referral, or ideally both. And fourth is ascension, or your upsells.
And so to answer your question, as far as you know, systematically how that is put in place a lot of what I do revolves around training teams. Occasionally, I’ll work with when it’s a very, very high margin, you know, business, slightly easier to grow. It’ll be a smaller team, but most of my work revolves around at least a team of, say, three to five minimum. My largest one I’m working with right now is Team 12, you know, in the in the back end in CS, and working with them through essentially we think about these working with closers all the time and like we drill calls and we do scripting and frameworks etc it’s not very simplified version is it’s that but for for client success knowing how to ask for a referral when to ask for a referral what language what nuance you’re looking for from the client at the right moments to be able to know that you’re most likely to get a yes for a referral ask or for an upsell ask, or when are you discussing that? Are you waiting until the very end? Hint, don’t please. Are you making sure that you, you, you, you see those moments and you can guide people toward those moments, and honestly, you can even artificially engineer those moments to where somebody is most likely to say yes, or even consider, you know, one of those next steps: referral, testimonial, ascension, things like that. So
Scott Ritzheimer
love that. For sales in a team like that, founder-led, where do you see the division of labor, if you will? Obviously, everyone influences all of those sales, but who is it that you’re training to do sales two, three, and four?
Bradley Rausch
It’s usually either going to be an offer. It’s usually falls into one of two buckets. It’s either going to be an offer that is able to be fulfilled at scale by two to three, maybe, maybe more, somewhere in there, you know, single digits amount of people, because it’s a lot of it is is AI subsidized, a lot of it has to do with a one and done type of situation, right? They fulfill on the thing once, and then that’s really it. It doesn’t require any sort of long, lengthy time. The more traditional then offers a second bucket is the more traditional kind of offers of like a coaching program, six months long, a 12 month long SAS thing, you know, a service that’s going to take three months to complete, because you know you’re it’s a physical thing that you’re building, you know, whatever it might be. Those are the more traditionally, you know, as you scale, you need more team, and as you need more team, you get put risk for more bloat and for more, you know, lack of culture that kind of gets disseminated through the team.
And then, how do you set those standards, etc. So it kind of falls into one of those, one of those two buckets, and usually the I would say the differentiating factor is that as you grow in bucket one scale, bring scale will naturally bring in more profit, right, when it’s those really, really, really lean teams, but then it’s just a question of do you dump fuel on that fire or how do you make sure you can, you continue to increase those margins, maybe you stay at the same top line you’re at, but continue to increase the margins and reduce operational efficiency. So, I do a lot of work with that, but then on the other side, it’s, do you pour more fuel on the fire, or, sorry, do you pour more fuel on the fire with front end, or do you pour more fuel on the fire with your back end, and oftentimes, again, the only really quote solution to growth is more front end, more ads, more marketing, more sales, more calls, etc.
And so it’s just kind of opening up the not only the founders’ perspective to that, but also just the team culture, because people do not hire CS, and this is one of the biggest things, whenever I help with hiring conversations with either CS or salespeople, people do not hire CS for having sales experience or even just a slight interest in it, and people do not hire sales individuals who have a heart and who want to actually serve clients, and I really work to flip that script and saying listen, I’m not, I do a lot of disc testing with my clients, and or rather with the people that you know we hire that I assist with, and I don’t know if you know anything about disc, but it’s basically gives you indications in terms of how somebody likes to show up at work, what their maybe perhaps quote unquote weaknesses are, things like that. When somebody is very high D, they’re very sales, outbound driven, you know, Sharky, etc.
I won’t recommend we hire a CS person unless they’ve got a little bit of a little bit of a Heidi, because you need them to be able to go out and have those sometimes uncomfortable conversations and push the tempo and be able to close a upsell offer that’s perhaps twice as high of a margin and twice as high of a price tag as the initial offer, you need somebody with some guts there to do that, and then on the flip side with the sales, I like to make sure they have at least a little bit of so D I S C high I means you’re you’re more inbound sales, but you’re also very kind of ethics driven, ethic centered. And then high C is very procedural driven, so strategy framework like scripting. So I like to make sure they’re high I or high C before we recommend that we’re hiring a salesperson. The odds are they’re going to be at least more malleable to understanding the full perspective of the client journey, not just, hey, who has a pulse that I can close that I can take money from, which will cause a lot of problems. So,
Scott Ritzheimer
very cool. I like that. I’ve got a couple more questions for you. Want to make sure folks know how they can get in touch with you, but before we get there, the next question is this: one, I ask all my guess, but it is what is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish every founder watching or listening today knew
Bradley Rausch
that what you do in the first hours and days after you collect payment sets the tone for the entire client relationship. It’s very difficult to increase, or rather I’ll say, improve the opinion that a client has of you. If you do not intentionally systematically set it from the very beginning, oftentimes people will look at the first hours or days after somebody enrolls. That’s just this admin time, oh, book the next book, the first call, the first interaction, couple days, couple weeks out, whatever it is, right? Oh, did they sign the signing agreement? No. Usually it’s very high ticket sale, it’s very high ticket situation. The client is no more. The client is the most malleable to their opinion of you that they will ever be throughout the entire client journey. In those moments after you finally get what you want, they have, they’ve laid out all their cards on the table, they got nothing left, and so how you show up for them in that moment when that power dynamic is really, is really switched. I mean, I could, I could sit here for the next three hours and tell you all of the just the tactical, I like to say relational equity that that builds through the client journey, and so the biggest thing I would say is don’t don’t waste the opportunity to intentionally set, intentionally create your client’s emotional equity toward you.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s, it’s fascinating. I can’t remember what the stat was, I’m not even going to quote it, but some biblically high number of people have buyer’s remorse after, especially a big ticket sale, and some categorically low percentage, it was like 4% or something, actually have a plan for dealing with buyer’s remorse when it hits, and so I love this idea of engaging proactively early, I think it’s so powerful and really speaks to this, this multi sale approach, I think once you recognize that, hey, the first sale happened, sure, but it’s just there, it’s like good, good copy, you know, first sentence just sets up the second sentence. Yeah, so I love that approach, I think it’s really powerful, and yeah, could talk about that for a very long time, but there’s some folks listening who would love to implement the for sale approach in their business, they feel like they’re stuck and they’re finally seeing a light, a little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, and believe that you’re gonna be a big part in helping them get there. How can they find more out about the work you do? How can they reach out to get started?
Bradley Rausch
I post every day on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn is my LinkedIn is my jam, so I just say connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s just the LinkedIn, LinkedIn tag, Bradley, my name dash Rausch. And then my website is just my name as well, Bradley Rausch.com
Scott Ritzheimer
Beautiful, beautiful. All right, Bradley, that was awesome. Yeah, super cool content, and very simple. That’s what I love about it, is these are not hard things to put in practice. They just take a little bit of understanding and a lot of diligence. But it was a privilege having you on today. Thanks for joining us and sharing your wisdom with us. For those of you watching and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for the level you’re in right now. If you want to discover what level you’re in, take our 10 question founders evolution quiz for free foundersquiz.com that’s foundersquiz.com It’ll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, or review. It helps us reach more founders like you, and let’s be honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible guests. So, keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Contact Bradley Rausch
Bradley Rausch is a client experience architect, strategic advisor, and the go-to “backend profit” partner for founder-led coaching and group programs. With six years of experience, he’s helped dozens of founders turn chaotic growth into durable, higher-margin revenue without sacrificing their values. From first-72-hour onboarding systems to referrals, testimonials, and ascension playbooks, Bradley and his team help founders turn each great client into 1.5–2x more profit and build businesses that feel lighter as they scale.
Want to learn more about Bradley Rausch’s work at bradleyrausch.com? Check out his website at https://www.bradleyrausch.com/
Connect with Bradley through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradley-rausch/