Episode 165: Cracking The 8-Figure Code: How To Scale Your Business With Jason Wojo

Ever dream of taking your seven-figure business to eight figures and beyond? This episode features Jason Wojo, founder of Wojo Media, a company that helps service businesses, coaches, consultants, brick and mortar and e-commerce stores scale their revenue with paid traffic. Jason shares his inspiring journey of transforming his business from a one-man operation making a million dollars a year to an eight-figure business with over 50 team members. He dives deep into the secrets of finding product-market fit, building a dream team, and the crucial shift from technician to leader. This episode is packed with actionable advice for any business owner who wants to scale their business beyond the seven-figure mark.

What the podcast will teach you:

The importance of finding product-market fit
The value of building a strong personal brand
How to leverage networking to attract the right clients and team members
The importance of delegation
Why you should play to your zone of genius and surround yourself with people who can fill in your skill gaps.

Resources:

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Welcome everyone to this week’s episode. As you know, every week I bring business owners who have been there and done that when it comes to the seven-figure growth journey. They’ve gone to eight figures or more. Today is no exception. I have Jason Wojo with me. His company is called Wojo Media. He’s the founder. It’s not been around a long time, but they’ve grown quickly. I’m excited to have Jason here sharing his real in-the-trenches lessons learned from growing his business through that seven-figure range to eight figures plus. Welcome, Jason, to the show. We’re excited to have you.

Thanks, Brett. I appreciate it.

Wojo Media

How long has your business been around? Give a little context for what you guys do at Wojo Media so our audience knows who we’re talking with today.

Wojo Media has been live for six years now. I started it when I got right out of high school. I’m very young. We work with service businesses, coaches, consultants, brick and mortar and e-commerce stores. We help them scale their revenue with paid traffic. We help them harness the right KPIs, the right funnels, and the right sales process to be able to scale and harness their numbers for increased margin and scalability. We help them harness all their sales systems.

You’re helping them drive that traffic so they can grow their business, but you go beyond just driving the traffic, you help them with sales training and all that stuff to be able to grow their business.

It’s an all-around ecosystem because business owners are under this misconception about paid traffic. They think that they can just run a bunch of ads and get a bunch of leads and they make more money when I can give you a bunch of leads, but can you close them? Even if you close them, can you service them? Even if you can service them, can you keep them? Even if you can keep them, can you ascend them? All these things are in the backend that business owners don’t think about because paid ads are sexy. It’s this “click and publish and make money” niche where it’s not really about that.

That’s the tip of the spear maybe, but there’s a lot of work behind that. Six years, very young, and coming right out of high school doing this, and here you have an eight-figure business. Why don’t you share how many people you guys have now and then we’ll talk about some of the growth you’ve experienced and the lessons you’ve learned.

We have about 52 team members and six of those are sales. Three of those are people who work in my event side of the business. If we were to segment between the two, there are about 42 on Wojo media and about 10 on Scale Your Ads.

Growth Challenges

It’s quite a growth curve and with that, quite a learning curve. Let’s rewind a little bit. When you were just breaking that million dollar mark, maybe you had 6, 8, 10 people, I don’t know how many people you had at that point. You had a growing team and you had to go from knowing all things like ad spend, lead gen, sales, and all that kind of stuff to now I got to figure out how to build a business with these people. We have to keep adding people. How does that work? Take us back to then if you can, and talk to us about some of your challenges as you were growing through that phase.

Hitting a million dollars in a year was what I call a proof of concept. It means that people want what you’re selling and you’re solving some type of problem at scale. The biggest piece from going from 7 to 8 was finding product market fit. Is my product or my service able to service even more people at scale to where I can service more dynamic issues in the market? That’s where we saw that we were getting a lot more lead-gen business owners than e-commerce.

Elite Entrepreneurs Podcast | Jason Wojo | 8-Figure Business

8-Figure Business: Hitting a million dollars in a year was just a proof of concept. It means that people want what you’re selling and you’re solving some type of problem at scale.

We had to start making better product-market fit and service market fit for lead gen business owners, which we then started acquiring sales training and building that department now. We’re recouping more graphic design on that side, more automation and API, webhooks, and all those things that were happening. The biggest thing with us was in the beginning, we had about four people when we did a million dollars. It was because I was selling all these bigger one-on-one consulting packages and that’s what allowed me to go to a million a year.

Probably what wind up happening was that I couldn’t service all those people on my own so I had to then start building a DFY section. We figured that Done For You was more beneficial and attracted better people who didn’t just want to hear me tell them what to do instead of doing it for them. Done For You expanded the horizon for us and allowed us to market to more business owners because we couldn’t just solve their problems. We could solve a lot more people’s problems, and also, Done For You gets more referrals.

Coaching is cool but you’re not going to get a lot of referrals from DIY. It’s not just that sexy anymore. We were looking at that sales journey and that customer journey of like, “How could we squeeze more money out of the job?” Not just our ad spend but our customers who were excited and happy about the services. That’s where things revolve for us. Building out Done For You required teams. It required strategy leads, marketing managers, account managers, copywriters, developers, media buyers, and assistant managers. This whole hierarchy happened too.

Just to branch off that, it was how do I replace myself and when we do create this product that is market fit, how do I put the right team together to make that work? The thing that I’m messed up on in the beginning when people are hitting $1 million to $3 million a year. Three million is where most of the break point happens and the break point is usually in people, and business owners are struggling to give away their systems and they didn’t do it in the beginning.

My biggest mistake when I was trying to scale was I never recorded or did Google Docs on the things that I was doing. I never did an SOP before. I never thought that was important. I would hire somebody and be like, “Just do it, figure it out.” That didn’t work. That’s my big piece of advice so far. If you’re someone who’s making $1 million, $2 million, or $3 million a year, and maybe you have under 15 staff, I would take a step back and scale down. Don’t run a lot of ads right now. Don’t try to do a lot of acquisition and cement who your actual leadership roles are, what their duties and responsibilities are, and how you relay that to new people. When you think about going to seven figures, people are building marketing funnels. How do I get more leads? How do I get more acquisition?

Now that we’re at eight figures, we built a hiring funnel. We built a funnel to spend money on so we could pay people more. It’s a complete switch. That hiring funnel was hands down the hardest thing we ever had to build. Getting leads in the door is the easiest thing, but getting new people in your ecosystem and giving them SOPs, training them, and giving them up to speed is probably the hardest thing because you’re not just building a team where you’re building morals. You have ethics, you have goals, you have to make sure that they’re getting paid what they want and also you have to make sure that they’re incentivized to grow and they can see the new roles in the company. Many things have happened from crossing that $3 million year mark.

8-Figure Business: Getting leads in the door is the easiest thing, but getting new people in your ecosystem and giving them SOPs, training them, and getting them up to speed is probably the hardest thing.

I love the way you described that because you went from talking all about client journey, product-market fit, or service-market fit. You were a technician who was figuring all of that out. As you realize, the only way to grow is by adding a bunch of people. You saw that sticking point that usually happens somewhere between $1 million and $3 million. You are certainly not going to get way past $3 million if you haven’t figured out. You went to the employee journey now instead, or the team member journey or however you want to talk about that.

That transition sticks with a lot of people. They hit the ceiling and they’re like, “I cannot do it all anymore. If I want to grow, I’m going to have to do that with people and I’m not sure I can figure that out.” I hear a lot of people say, “I don’t know how to be a leader or I’ve never done this,” but they didn’t know how to do consistent lead generation before either and they figured that out.

They didn’t know how to write good copy for prospective clients, but they figured that out. Now, we’re changing it. We’re changing it to let’s write great copy to prospective team members that match who we are, our purpose, our values, and our work ethic. All of that needs to be in the copy that we’re writing to in this funnel for new team members. You subscribed to that very well. Thank you for doing that. It was awesome.

The biggest thing too is business owners who want to become leaders. They sit behind the computer and have a marketing funnel because it’s easy to do acquisitions. It’s easy to sit there and be like, “Let’s write copy, let’s do a funnel, let’s run an ad. Cool, we’re getting leads. Okay, sales team, how are you guys doing? What are the KPIs? Are you guys driving revenue? What’s the cost per show?” It’s all this stuff, but becoming a leader is a whole different animal. That’s a skillset that I had to pay tons of money to learn because they didn’t realize that those things mattered.

Most entrepreneurs, when they first start, they’re all introverts because they don’t like the corporate world. We don’t like all that stuff. All that stuff is fuzz to us. Being an introvert causes us to have to grow out of our shell. It was so hard for me to be in a room, speak with tonality, get people to be a part of our mission statement, our core values, and all these things. That was so difficult. The biggest thing that helped us out though was me having a brand.

Some people out there might be introverts and they want to hide behind the camera. The only piece of advice that I can give you is that if you want to be a leader, you have to do a couple of things. Number one is you have to be this personal brand person that attracts the right clients and a level of leadership into your business. That’s what I did. I’m not very good in the whole leadership sector, but I’m good at magnetizing the right people because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. If you cannot show them that, then they’re going to find somewhere else where someone else was able to develop that ecosystem for them to grow.

We have a good brand. I have over a million followers on Instagram. We were able to attract the right people. I also built an event business. I was like, “How do I get more people to be not so virtual anymore, but also attracted to what we’re doing at a personal level? Let’s run events. Let’s invite the team members in. Let’s have a fun weekend. Let’s build team-building activities.”

We built the event business. We have events every single weekend across the entire United States. We’re on a huge tour right now and it’s building team culture. The team is excited about it. They get to see me in person, we get to have dinner together, we get to do team activities, go out on a boat, take a walk, and stuff like that. It’s things that allow me to get out of my comfort zone. That’s the best loophole that I had to build leadership inside of the company for sure.

Leadership Roles

I like the way you’re describing how your leadership transition was required if you wanted to keep growing. You talked about a couple of different roles. One is what you characterize as the leadership piece, which is maybe the internally focused like, “How do I lead these people?” You talked also about magnetism and how to create this branding thing externally to attract not only the right clients but also the right team members to the ecosystem that you’re creating.

I want to tease that part a little bit more because some people might listen to that and say, “I’m not going to get a million followers on Instagram. I’m not good at, nor do I care about that whole branding thing that Jason is talking about. Can I even do this?” What I’d like to at least offer up as a possibility is that you can be great at what you’re great at. There are different styles of leadership, but you do need to learn what needs to happen, and then you surround yourself with others who can help you make that happen.

If Jason weren’t good at branding and he was good at more of the internal leadership stuff, he would get a good marketing leader, a good branding person, and help him do that, but Jason happens to be great at that stuff. He shared with me before we started that you recently hired a key leadership role. Do you want to talk about that?

I recently hired a CEO to take over all ops and decision-making and also the hiring process because the problem that I was having was that I am so good at marketing and funnels and trying to find people. What I wasn’t good at was people in general. I wasn’t clear like I love podcasts, but you have to know your zone of genius. My zone of genius was building funnels and getting clients. That’s my thing. Leave me in a room all day and I’ll grow your business like you’ve never seen before. If you put me in a funnel where I have to hire people and talk to them, I’d rather not. I’m not good at that. Where do you see yourself in the next six years? Obviously, making more money, but I didn’t see that people cared more about money.

I didn’t realize those things because I’m so young. It’s tough. I was like, “I have to find somebody good at ops, who understands hierarchy, who understands motivating team members, who understands team. That was something that I had to replace. Now, my time is so freed up man. That’s the thing too though if you are not a good leader, unfortunately, for your margins, you get to spend more money to find people with those skillsets.

If you’re not this omnipresent person who has the leadership, who can do HR, who is very good at not just people pleasing but overall the motives of people, you’re unfortunate enough to spend more money on payroll to find those key roles. That’s why you see a lot of businesses doubling up on partners and inviting people to buy in and they run to private equity to have the funds and then the scale of people. These are things that are happening in the space.

The one thing that you were talking about before that was important is that after $3 million, I had to find that motive for people to be a part of, which was having a good CEO and also the events. The thing that we’re realizing now is once you get past $10 million, it’s about bolt-ons. It helps employees be more motivated. The $10 million-plus is where you now have good systems, people, and leadership, but now you need to bolt on new traffic sources and partnerships to where you can offer more services.

That’s the biggest thing that we’ve seen too. I could run an ad agency and I can get to $10 million, but what about a video agency? What about an SEO agency? What about all these things that I can bolt on that will make it more efficient, or a sales training company or whatever it looks like? You can only keep things internal for so long, or if you want to grow past $25 million, that’s where you’re going to need to have all those things in-house because you cannot just allocate the $10 million or $25 million on affiliate partners or buying bolt-ons.

That’s where you start to inject a lot of cash and you can buy companies. That’s what we’re looking at because it’s interesting. Most of the time when you go past $10 million, it’s all about data. Data pays the bills at that point and you’re leveraging data to scale. All that stuff is exciting. I think that a lot of people right now talk about eight figures, but here’s the brutal truth man. It is that some people don’t want to go there.

Most of the time when you go past 10 million, it's all about data. Data pays the bills at that point and you're just leveraging data to scale. Share on X

Some people are okay making $1 million to $3 million a year and that’s exciting because $1 million to $3 million a year, you can have decent margins, 15% to 30% maybe sometimes even 40%. You could be chilling, you could have cash collected at 1.25%, 1.4% and then you pay your taxes and you’re done. You have a great life. It’s something where you can have a very tight team culture too because sometimes we start scaling and we’re like, “I don’t get to talk to my team members as much anymore because I’m scaling so deep,” but it depends on who the person is and what they want out of it.

That’s so key. What do you want out of it? If what you want in your life isn’t served well by this business as it keeps growing as it is now, then we have to make some choices. I want to rewind a little bit one more time about the leadership thing because I think it’s key. You realized, “I’m good at making it rain. I’m good with some of this outside branding stuff, and I’m not as good with the leadership stuff. I’m not as experienced with that. I need an experienced leader to come in and help me do this part and free me up to go do a bunch of business development or new idea creation for our business, but I need some help.” You decided to bring in a CEO. Some people don’t want to give up that CEO position and that’s fine, but maybe you need to bring in somebody from the outside who’s going to help you with that branding piece.

I think the biggest thing with the CEO thing is people don’t want to give it up because it’s a cool title. They have this ego about it. They’re like, “If I give up CEO, then who am I anymore? What’s my identity? I cannot say it when I’m online, I cannot do this.” I’m not going to lie. I had a little bit of a problem with it because I was a CEO for so long. It’s an identity crisis. When you’re trying to be like, “I don’t want to be this person anymore. I have to change,” but then what you don’t realize is that all the growth and all the more important things that you’re good at are all on the end of you replacing yourself and getting into your zone of genius.

That’s what I didn’t realize. My ego was so big about being CEO. It was like, “I built this thing,” and then I realized I could not grow any further because I was not good enough. We have to realize that as business owners we’re not good at everything. We have to delegate and allocate our right time and resources and the things that we’re good at and pay for things that we’re not good at. That’s it.

We have to realize that as business owners we're not good at everything. We have to delegate and allocate our right time and resources and the things that we're good at and pay for things that we're not good at. Share on X

That’s not to say that if you’re introverted, you could never do some of the things Jason talked about externally with your branding, but it’s less likely or it might take a lot of time, energy, and expense to get there. Whereas, if you partner with somebody or hire somebody, that’s going to help you get there faster.

It is an ego thing, Jason. I love the way that you shared that. At first, that hurts to think like, “I need some help here.” You overcame that and now you guys are growing because you’re in the place where you’re amazing. That’s good. Anything else you wish you knew as you were going through that $1 million to %3 million phase or even from $3 million to $10 million that you’re like, “That was such a key lesson that I learned.”

Spend On Networking

Once you get past $1 million to $3 million, and then once you figure those things out with your systems and people, the only intrinsic thing in your business that you need to spend money on that’s not a direct ROI is networking. On top of this podcast, I probably spend $20,000 a month on events, getting on bigger podcasts, getting placements in the press, and all these things that are getting me into bigger networks like masterminds.

I’m in a couple of masterminds. When you go to events and you fly to different places and you travel and you’re in the right rooms, you’ll intrinsically find more money and you’ll be able to pull more money out of a room because of the people that you know. These podcasts and all the things that I’ve done have allowed me to connect with cool people.

Not everybody is meant to partner with somebody that they have on a podcast with, but revenue-wise in general for the last three months that I’ve been doing podcasts, speaking at keynotes and stuff, our revenues have grown by easily 20%-something. That’s just from doing all the podcasts, speaking, and networking. It’s like, “This person? Do you want them to run? I know Wojo, he runs ads.” This thing where you’re getting in more circles, two things happen.

1) Association is selling without having to sell to anybody. It’s like, “You know this person, they’re good, use them. Alright, check.” 2) All the people who are better to work with are in those circles. They have bigger budgets, they’re not headaches, they understand what it takes to run a business and overall they’re better lifetime value people. You provide them value and they provide you value and it’s a good relationship.

That was always the biggest thing for me. We’re getting all of our clients through ads and my content, but I want to be able to get clients to where if I fly to Arizona or California, I know three people there who want to have a cigar and chill out with me. I can go to Miami and chill out with them. There’s more than just money. If you look at it differently, past $3 million, you will make more if you simply focus on relationships. Sitting behind a computer doesn’t pay the bills. I don’t care who you are, but the people that you know grow your net worth a lot faster.

That whole thing about the five people you hang out with the most, that’s who you become. Well said. I’ve been calling you Jason because that’s your first name. You referred to yourself as Wojo, however, you like to be called. Your lessons in a relatively short period of time were very helpful for those who are going through that. Thank you for spending time with us today. Wojo, how do people find you? You have a million followers on Instagram, but if they want to learn more about Wojo Media or connect with you, how does that happen?

There are two options that they can take. One is they can go to www.thewojomedia.com. They can see all of our case study results, our process, and our services. They can book a free demo call there. If they want to follow me on social, they can go to @TheJasonWojo. If they want to book a demo call, they can click the link in my bio there or they can follow for more content.

It has been fun to talk with you. Thanks for being a guest today.

Thanks, buddy.

Please like, share, and do all the things to help as many seven-figure business owners here in this amazing episode, as well as all the other ones that we have, like this one with Jason, where they lay out the real things that they went through. That’s to help as many of you as possible get past those sticking points. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.

Important Links

About Jason Wojo

Jason Wojo, a self-made multi-millionaire with a net worth of $4 million thriving in the ad space currently at the age of 26, is the mastermind behind scaling 1,320+ businesses to 6 figures, and 58 businesses to 7/8 figures. His clients success came down to helping them solve 4 key parts in their business that results in Jason recently surpassing $140M generated online with paid ads: Building an irresistible offer, writing high converting sales/landing pages, having omnipresence targeting with their ad creatives that drive qualified clicks, and tracking the KPIs of the business to drive more profitable behaviors without complicating the sales process leveraging predictable numbers in their ad campaigns.

Jason Wojo is already a well-known Paid Advertiser with appearances in top media outlets worldwide, such as the 30 under 30 in NY Weekly Magazine, Forbes New York, Entrepeneur.com, LA Weekly as a Top 20 Entrepreneur To Watch Out For In 2023, Yahoo Finance as a Top 20 Instagram Account to Follow in 2020 Alongside Gary Vaynerchuk, and many other top-tier publications!

Businesses who now run paid advertisements or don’t even run paid ads at all will quickly realize that improving those 4 most crucial components of their company is just as critical as acquiring more visitors.

Want to listen to more? View all episodes here >

Cracking The 8-Figure Code: How To Scale Your Business With Jason Wojo