Have you ever wondered how we actually developed and tested all the ideas we currently teach and post content about?

The reality is, we’ve been doing acquisition and growth for A LONG time in a lot of different niches and verticals but one thing has always been consistent - we’ve only sold B2B and we’ve only sold high ticket (either yearly SaaS deals or high ticket services). Safe to say, we’ve become incredibly good at it. 

Before being sold, Centrasyte was a Facebook ads marketing agency specifically for Shopify ecommerce stores. Courtne founded Centrasyte in February 2020 and sold it in November 2022.

At it’s peak, Centrasyte was doing $137,700 in MRR which is $1,652,400 in ARR. This revenue benchmark excludes any one time consulting sales and upsells. We consistently sold these every month with 70%+ profit margings. When this is accounted for, the business was doing more than $2M/year in top line revenue.

Here you can see a screenshot from Baremetrics, a revenue tracking software and a redacted screenshot of the purchase agreement:

In the trenches figuring out how to sell effectively

I had previous experience and case studies running FaceBook ads from my previous dropshipping stores so our first customers were people from my network who owned ecommerce stores but weren’t particularly skilled at running ads or just blatantly didn’t want to do it. I had generated a good reputation in the space so within the first week I had my first 8 customers paying $2,500/m each. That’s $20,000 MRR in 7 days - not bad. 

After these quick wins I assumed that sales would be a walk in the park and started picking out my colour R8. I was wrong. I very quickly ran out of people to pitch to in my immediate network and growth slowed. I did some basic googling and read some books on sales before I started doing outreach. I started cold messaging hundreds of people per day using automated software and I started blasting hundreds of emails a day with automated software. Within the first week, I had less than nothing to show for it. Not only had I not generated a single sale or even got a response but I had completely destroyed my email domains reputation and got my LinkedIn accouny shadowbanned ontop of being in the negative for the hundreds of dollars I had spent on lists and software. 

So began a journey of experimentation, epic failures, major wins and mastery in the process of converting cold prospects into high ticket paying customers. 

In the beginning I was doing everything myself from sales to service delivery to accounting but as I started to devise outreach protocols that atually worked it became to much for one person and I started to hire. 

At the time I was in South Africa and I saw the arbitrage opportunity in hiring South Africa talent. In South Africa the curreny (the rand) is much weaker than USD and the cost of living is drastically lower than any first world country. If I could get clients to pay me in USD and then pay my contractors in rands, I would benefit from the massive discrepancy - this was one of the key things which allowed me to maintain 70% profit margins at scale, something you definitely neeed if you are sinking all your profit into trying to solve the outreach bottleneck. 

Here are some pictures of our offices and the team we had:

A working acquisition machine

Eventually we narrowed down our target audience, perfected our messaging and finalised 2 working distribution channels which were driving our growth, namely:

1 - Outbound sales team prospecting

2 - Paid advertising

The key for us in getting this machine to work was simplifying our sales process to send all eyeballs regardless of whether they were outboud or inbound down a singular funnel we had developed and scientifically iterated through to get it to a working state.

This working funnel turned out to be a 45 minute case study:

Eventually we were able to consistently turn $1 into $3 on a daily basis. Getting eyeballs and converting eyeballs was no longer the bottleneck but a new problem emerged: Having to consistently start and stop growth due to staff constraints. 

Every time we brought on 3-5 new clients we needed to make a new hire to actually service the clients. I quickly learned my passion and skills lie in turning the growth of a business into a rocketship and not hiring or massive team management. This is ultimately why I decided to sell and move on but I carried an enormous amount of skills and experience with me which SFA has been built from with the same incredible results minus the years of failing to learn.