Alex Ramirez - Finding Freedom Through Ads

Welcome to the Real People Real Business Show, where we're talking with business owners who are in the trenches. Everyday people who are working hard and have relevant and inspiring stories that you can relate to. Everyone we speak to is actively building and growing their business and is here to share their experience, lessons, wisdom and guidance, so you can be inspired to take action towards your own goals. Today I'm so excited to welcome Alex Ramirez. Alex is the owner and founder of the Facebook Ad Freedom Agency dedicated to helping coaches scale their businesses and create freedom through Facebook and Instagram ads. Aside from being a successful business owner, she's also the host of her own YouTube channel and a mother of two who loves a good Netflix binge and dismantling the hustle culture. Yes! Over the course of nearly five years, a VA business, a trip down Fiverr and starting her own ad agency, she's now generating multiple six figures

freedom for her family and her clients. I love this Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Of course, I'm excited to get into this with you guys and get to know more about you and seeing how I can help.

Amazing. Okay. So tell me the story. So you kind of, you started out as a VA, you had a VA business. Like how did you get from to now?

Yeah, so it's it's it's I mean, I could probably summarize it pretty quickly. So first started out with my husband was in the air force and then he ended up getting medically retired of the air force. And so I had to figure out what what I was going to do next, because he was getting medically retired, which, and because the reason why was because he has blood clots over his body. So yeah, it's, that's a whole nother story, by the way, we can talk about that later, but anyways so with that being said, he wouldn't be able to have a job after the air force. So I had to figure way to make money. And first I kind of started out with, you know, maybe I'll start up college again. So I started doing that a little bit into medical administration, and then what I did there is my mom saw that I was struggling financially. And my mom was actually a computer programmer for a very long time, but also did a lot of administration stuff for even coaches like business coaches and stuff. And so she was like telling me just to kind of dip my toe into the VA world. And then I started out working with some Beachbody coaches cause I was a Beachbody coach beforehand. So I knew a couple of people. So started a VA business for that, and then eventually started getting into life coaches, business coaches of my clients, all that kind of good stuff. And then as a VA is, and as anybody who's been a VA. I, I actually have been, you know, I was able to kind of do lots of launches as clients opt-ins funnels and even ads. And so I was able to kind of like, see a little bit of a passion and and the expertise that I had inside of marketing, but also advertising as well. So that's how my, my role kind of went.

So you kind of skipped over a whole bunch of stuff.

I know I wanted to summarize it as much as possible.

I wanna like dive a little deeper into you were a VA and then you transitioned into Facebook ads and that's kind of like what you focus on now. So tell me a little bit about that transition. Cause I know the VA world very, very well, and I am curious because I watch our students in the Horkey HandBook program make those shifts over time into that kind of specialization. So, so dig a little deeper into that and tell me how you got there.

Yeah, I mean, it kind of just started with one client wanting me to do ads for them and that's, and I, and I also, I was trying to figure them out for my own VA business as well. I wanted to see if I could get some clients off of ads, you know, even for just a little bit of $5 a day, if that was possible. It didn't really know obviously what I was doing back then, but it did get me to understand more of the techie side as far as Facebook ads. And then, but also I kind of knew a lot of marketing as well, as far as being a virtual assistant. And so that helped me in terms of the advertising. But most of the reason why my clients wanted me to do their ads for them was because they didn't want to deal with the techie part. And that was more of my role was the tech VA for a lot of my clients. But yeah, it was mostly just starting with a client, wanted me to do it, run their ads for them. And I just kind of learned through kind of just teaching myself. Eventually I started. I eventually bought a program from Amanda Bond who is amazing Facebook ad expert. And yeah, and I joined one of her programs and that also taught me a lot as well, too, in terms of like how to, how to actually have a system in which how you create the ads and what you're doing with the ads and how to take people from being a complete stranger and turn them into clients. So, you know, learning from that, but also learning from myself to.

So you're operating fully independently now, totally focused on ads clients. And one of the things that you and I talked about is that people kind of dive into ads, prematurely thinking that it's going to be kind of that quick route to clients and money. But tell me a little bit more about what you know there.

Okay. Yeah. And it's tough to say prematurely, and because I've had clients who we get great results when they, like when they first start their business that still happens. But I do also get clients who also have been in business for nine plus years and we start ads and it just doesn't work. And I think it mostly just comes down to mindset. If you do not have the, the mindset to say, yeah, I'm here for sustainability of my business, not for overnight success in terms of my ads. That's the mindset you need to have. So if you're coming in like to invest when it comes to ads or like with an ad agency to do it for you, and if you come with their, come with them with lots of like, energy, that does not feel good. And it's negative because you're thinking that you might not make your money back or whatever. You're trying to get overnight success when it comes to ads. It's not going to work like that. Ads are there just to bring more traffic to your stuff, but it's also for sustainability. You need to be running your ads for longer than just five days.

Totally. And I know that we've really kind of dove into ads this year and you know, really starting to learn a lot about what makes an ad strategy successful. And it really is a longterm play. Isn't it? It's not like a overnight success type type strategy, is it?

No, not, not at all, but some people think it is. Some people think that they need to jump into it. And then hopefully like, you know, I will never run ads again. If, if I don't make X amount of money back and I'm like, stop, like let's see ads run and do its thing and you need, and if, especially if you're pushing it towards like an evergreen funnel of some kinds, you need to take the time to get to the results that you need and that you're desiring.

So who are the best candidates to get the most out of ads as a marketing strategy?

Well, I mean, are you talking about like niche you talking about like, if they're coaches or like course creators, I mean, I feel like anybody like any business, whether that's B to C or B to B, it, it all works. You know what I mean?

What are the conditions ?Like it doesn't always work. And what are the conditions for the people that are successful? Like what, what do they have to have in place in order to really benefit from ads?

Yeah. Well, I would definitely say that you need to know there's some foundational aspects that I look for in a client before I hire them. So the first things first is you need to know how to sell. And I think what we're talking about before was like, you need to start doing the uncomfortable stuff inside of your business before you can start running ads. So the uncomfortable things is learning how to sell, get on those sales calls. I know that people are trying to tell you to like, do, do it all the DMS, or like to, you know, to do get rid of sales calls altogether or all these types of things. Get on the dang sales call and learn how to have a conversation, how to make a sale on camera, face to face. How do I do that? Or, you know, and then when you get to the realm of uncomfortability, as far as live video, you need to do those things because when you're trying to sell with a webinar or a challenge, and you're trying to do a six figure launch with that, or I don't know, 50 K launch or, or even 10 K 5k, whatever, if you don't know how to sell on camera, it's not going to work for you. That's bottom line. So sometimes we got into uncomfortability kind of stuff inside of our business before we start getting more volume with the ad. Cause you don't want to spend a whole bunch of money in the ads and then you don't make any money back. So you have to have those financial aspects. So I'd definitely say one of them is to learn how to sell. The other thing too is knowing your ideal client from a to Z. You have to know that person because the copy that you're going to write, the graphic that you're going to create that's going to attract the right person. And also a little bit of your targeting as well. In terms of your ads manager, you have to know that person all the way through. What are their pain points, what are their happy points? What does this person want? What is the person struggling with every single day? What is, what, what can you do to help them? You know, so you have to know that ideal client before you can start running ads, but third as well too, it's like, you have to have that mindset so that, you know, like we just talked about before. So those are the three foundational aspects that I'm tending to look for in clients.

So they need to, they need to have something in place already. So it's someone brand new to business, right? Just starting out. Can they benefit from ads?

You can totally I would say this comes down to what are my goals for my business. If you are just starting out, like I said, you need to be doing the uncomfortable things. You need to be creating those foundational aspects before you start running huge types of app. Like you don't want to spend tons and tons of money in your ads and not make it back. So if you're going to run ads in the start of your business, that is fine, but you still need to have the second and third thing in the foundational aspects that you need to have. The fact that like, you know, your ideal client and your mindset needs to be really good about sustainability inside your business, not overnight success. So a lot of the times when we're working with a new, like a client that has started like a business, absolutely new, most times, what we'll do is we will just set up a lead generation campaign. And that is just so that we can start growing your list. So we're not necessarily focused on sales, although you can add sales to that, like quote-unquote funnel basically, but that's not the main thing that we're focused on. We're mostly focused on growing your ideal, I mean growing your email list with your ideal client.

And I think a lot of people think about ads as like I'm advertising a service and you should buy it. But ads are actually probably more primarily used for lead generation for awareness for, because, you know, we don't buy things from people we don't know. And so expecting that we're going to run ads and they're going to go directly to sales is, I mean, maybe, but you got to have that, you'd have to have a pretty clear offer and be able to establish that trust with your client pretty darn quickly, or maybe it's a real low priced offer. But I think that, you know, from my experience anyway ads can be really useful if they are, if the expectation is that they are building awareness, right?

Yeah. I mean, I would say the, the two exceptions from that though, I would say is the low ticket type of offer. And so anything that's below, I don't know, like 50 bucks can be really super good. I would say also for any like done for you service. So for example, like mine it's very black and white in terms of, do you want it or you don't want it right. So I can run my ads right now. It's just a brand video that tells them about my done for you, advertise in the agency and it pushes to a landing page that talks about our agency and what we do for our clients are process, but it's a very clear offer that I know sell. And I know I'm going to get clients into very easily, because like I said, it's a very black and white. Yes, you're going to buy it or no, you're not going to buy it. That's literally what it is. And they get to get on a sales call with me. So I'm still doing sales calls. You can do it too.

You know what? The sales calls, it's not just about learning how to sell, but the sales calls also let you understand your client a whole lot better. And that is the, that is the key to success with running ads.

And convert better because sales calls convert so much more.

Oh, for sure. I can, I can close pretty much every sales call I get on. Right. Because you get to have a conversation. It's not sustainable. If you're trying to, to If you're trying to sell it at scale, but certainly like we just did that for a launch where we're selling a $500 product. Right. We, we opened up our sales calls for the last day and you know what, they aren't even sales calls. What they are is just like pushing people over the edge. Right. They're already there. They're already signed up because they want to buy, they just want you to tell them to do it. Right. For the most part, it's just helping them make a decision. But, but certainly for higher ticket items, like learning

I'd say most of my sales calls are for me.

Yeah. Right.

Made sure that it's getting the right person into my agency. Cause I, what I don't mind to do is I don't want to let go of clients. I don't want to do that whatsoever. And so with that being said, I like to see, I only like to bring on clients that I can make sure that I can get results for.

Yeah. And, and somebody buying something that's a higher ticket. They're going to buy based on how you make. Right. Not on like all the features and benefits of whatever it is that you're offering. It's do they feel confident? Do they feel well taken care of, do they feel safe with you? Do they feel inspired? And there's no better way to do that than with a sales call, but in, when we're talking about growing and selling at scale, this is where ads become really interesting. And my curiosity here is like how much has video entered that space?

I feel like video is doing so much more better, but I feel like video has done so much better anywhere, you know, especially as social media, right. We're in the Tik Tok space, we're in the, you know in, in the space of like doing reels and, you know, an Instagram is moving away from the photo space. Now that was their initial brand. I mean, like that's even their logo is the camera. Right. And, but now the video is a hundred percent better now. Like they, that's what they want to push up in the algorithm. And the same thing kind of does for free Facebook ads as well too. It's a video does really super well.

Yeah and are you, are you trying to implement that as a strategy with most of your clients now? Or does it kind of depend on what they're selling?

Really depends on what they're selling. I would say, I mean, it also depends in terms of video. It also just really depends on what your end goal is. And so a lot of the clients that have higher ticket programs, so 10 K plus, and they're pushing, they're not like pushing a webinar, they're not pushing a challenge to kind of just like trying to push it towards an application or whatever it is. Right. Then we'll do videos. But other times we're mostly doing graphics. I mean, cause unless you have a branded video versus just a, if you did a selfie, selfies don't work as much. I would say graphics work better than selfie videos. Selfie videos for Instagram story ads do really well though. So yeah, it really just depends. Cause there's so many different like variations and it doesn't, that's why doesn't hurt to test a few different things. Obviously, if you have a small budget, don't test too much, but it is good to test like video versus graphic and seeing what's going to work specifically for your consumer.

So when you're working with your clients, I mean, just knowing the work we've done with our ads manager and she's amazing. Are you doing a lot of consulting on strategy to, are, are you just, yeah. Like, are they looking to you to tell them what they need to do or are they kind of coming already with something?

I mean, most times clients come to me that they are like, they already have something in mind. But I mean, some of the clients, they need a little bit of direction in terms of, you know, how do I turn these people that are just kind of looking at my ads and how do I turn them into higher ticket clients. Right. So, yeah, I think that. It's it's all depends on each client, I swear. Everything that I'm going to say is almost dependent on each and every client, but yeah, I think that, yeah.

So you're kind of your scope of, of work has kind of changed a lot in the last couple of years with the introduction and the, you know, the, the growth of Instagram ads and Facebook ads, and they're all sort of interrelated. Now that Instagram owns the platform or sorry, Facebook platform. So tell me a little bit more about how that has evolved for you and is that exciting for you? Has that made it more complex? Like how are you working with all these different platforms?

Yeah, so, I mean, the cool thing is that Facebook made it really easy in terms of how to set up an Instagram ad. And so that's really easy that that helps out a lot. That it's all on one platform, because then you can choose whether you want it on Instagram or you can choose not to have it on Instagram and same thing for Facebook. If you wanted to just find Instagram, that is an option for you. And yeah, I like that factor. I mean, if all platforms can kind of do that, that'd be great, but I don't think that's going to happen. Yeah. I love it. I love that factor.

It allows you to be more creative. And do you think it allows you to to increase the success or the likelihood of success?

Oh, 100% because more people are going to be able to see it. Cause I mean, I even have some clients that tell me that they get clients off of Instagram that don't even own a Facebook. And it's like, is that possible? I don't know. I, I didn't, I figured everybody almost has a Facebook who just have an Instagram or just have a Facebook. And so. Yeah, it's a, it's a great thing to have because then you can, you know, try different, you have more reach, you can have more volume.

Yeah. I will tell you, my kids will never have Facebook profiles. They have no interest in it whatsoever. They've all got, they both got Instagram accounts and of course TikTok and Snapchat, but they will, they have no, no interests.

It's for old people I heard

or isn't it funny because when we first, you know, I'm old, but when, when Facebook first came out, I was like, what is this?

We were into MySpace!

I know. And it's a platform now, but now we have this, all of these like micro content platforms that are, that are emerging. Right. Okay. So tell me, so let's shift gears a little bit. Your self-proclaimed position on online business is like the anti hustle culture, which I love. And if you've, if you've spent any time with my content, you'll know that I, I, I have no tolerance for it. Right. And but interestingly ads are often the conversation for the hustle culture, for the, you know, like quick, quick, quick, and instant results and you and I both know that that's not necessarily true.

Yeah. No, definitely not true.

So tell me a little bit more about your position on, on anti hustle.

I mean, I, I'm the first one to tell you that I'm lazy. Like, if there's any point in time that I can be lazy, I'm there. But I think that's why a lot of my clients like me to be. When I actually have to do work, I do it quickly. It gets done like in a snap versus a lot of other people. Like it takes them a very long time to get something done, which is perfectly fine. It's just fine. But I'm a very quick person while I'm doing the work that I need to do. Because other than that, I, after I'm done, I want to go sit down and relax. Like I just, I just want to spend time with my family. I want to go places, my family, like, I want to have memories of my family, like my kids. I want to spend time with my husband. You know family is my, is my top priority in my business. And, and life obviously, too. And so I, I like to design my business around my life is what I like to do. I think that's the most important thing because at the end of the day, the reason why I chose this business was so that one, I can make money, but also two, so that I can create a business around my life. Like that's the reason why I created it was I wanted more freedom. I wanted to be able to make money while you know, making memories. Like I wanted to do these certain things in my life and business. And so freedom became a variant. That's why we're called the freedom ad agency, because freedom is a very big importance for us. And so the anti hustle, right? I, I don't like hustling. I, and I, I know that most of my clients don't like to hustle and the hassle means, cause I mean, there's some clients who likes to do this, right? There's some people who love the hustle and that's perfectly really fine. If you like to go on live every single day on your Instagram. Great. That's perfect for you. You know, if you'd like to post everyday, you like you like creating content, you know, you like doing these certain things inside of your business to grow. That's great and wonderful. And you could do that for your business, but I think there is. That if people, including myself that don't want to do that still are wanting and worthy of having a great business.

And, and that's like a hundred percent of my clients, right. They, they, none of them want, and, and I, you know, we have to really define what we call hustle culture, right? Like that's the, everything has to be fast, instant results. And go, go, go, go, go, go, go and work all day and night. And nobody wants that. Nobody I know wants that. So where's it coming from and what what's its future? Like, I think it's dead.

I think it's dying. I think it's certainly dying. I still think there are some people who are keeping it alive for sure. I definitely think that it started with our millennial, like, or like my millennial generation. Like I think it would be like it definitely started in that realm. We're going to blame, you know, blame my parents because they're the, they're the ones that raisedme. I mean, cause I think it comes from like the baby boomer generation that very much taught their kids and this is nothing wrong. I mean, we're all gonna have a generation, like the millennials are gonna be generation of putting their kids on tablets. Right. And like the baby boomers also have a con. So I feel like any generation has certain things that they do. Right. That's really fine. But I just think the baby boomers tended to tell us, like you have to work hard in order to play hard. Right? Like we've always been kind of taught that like work hard, hard, hard, hard, hard work yourself to the ground. And then maybe you can play a little bit right after. I'm kind of trying to get out of that. You know, I want to be able to have a business that, you know, gives me the income that I want, but also allows me to have that freedom.

Yeah. I think there's a big part of that though that has been about convincing ourselves we have permission to do that because I know it's true. And I know that there's diminishing returns. I used to be that person, like the group in the ITindustry. And, you know, with technology startups, I went through the.com boom and bust and, and the culture was work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work work all the time. It was like a badge of honor. I remember working seven days a week in the startup world and basically sleeping at my desk. And if you weren't there seven days a week, you were shunned. And that is like, It's not healthy, it's it doesn't move the business forward more. You can have a really effective business without having to kill yourself. And we have a, had to learn that dialogue. Right. We've had to unlearn that idea that we should be busy. Right. And if we're busy, then we're doing something good. And if we're good and we're hard workers, then we deserve our results.

Yeah, no, exactly. And then also comes from also, I think that's bro marketing world, you know, it's like the millennial bro marketing, right. I think is where it's more, it's definitely coming from, you know. I would even say there's a point in time in, in, in, in my own business, but also when I had my Beachbody business to where I was kind of shamed in a way for not working harder. Right. In the beginning, and then after so many times of being shamed by a mentor, you tend to kind of shame yourself after that. And so I had to, like you said, I had to unlearn that for myself to be like, okay, it's okay if you relax. Right. It's okay. If you take a day off from your business a little bit and go do what you want to do, be it Disneyland with the kids or whatever, you know, I think, yeah. I think the millennial bro marketer is definitely intended to like grow that huge, you know, situation as far as hustle, hustle, hustle. And it's not cool anymore.

And I think one of the things that is emerging too, is this new found enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and the understanding that it's absolutely possible to do for pretty much anyone, right? And that you don't have to be this extroverted salesperson. You don't have to get a bunch of funding to start a business. You can start on your own. And that, that Renaissance is I think, driving a lot of people to enter the entrepreneurship world. And that means they're not all going to be the hustle culture people there. They're the ones who are like, I just want to make like enough of a living to be able to be with my family all the time and to be able to have choice in my schedule. And I'm not trying to. You know, rule the world with my Lamborghinis and my dominance. So I think that that whole dialogue is, is starting to tire. Right. And maybe there's always going to be, you know, Gary's disciples. And actually I have I have thoughts on Gary too. I actually don't, he's sort of the, the king of the hustle culture, but he's actually like, that's just naturally how he is. Like, he's just this crappy like energy person, but I think a lot of his disciples have taken that on and been like, oh, hustle, hustle, hustle. And he's the one who's like, just like, I just want to keep doing stuff. Like, I'm just interested in all the stuff he's just like, always on, but he's, I think he's the first person who will say, don't kill yourself over this. Right. So it's no,

yeah. I just think that there's a lot of people who take his, like what he does and just says, oh, I got to do exactly like Gary's doing. It's like, maybe you're not meant for that, bud. That not many people have as much energy as Gary does.

So, so let's, let's talk a little bit more about your business. So you are serving coaches and mostly solo entrepreneurs. How are you finding clients? Like what is your own sales and marketing strategy?

I'm going to tell you a secret: Facebook ads. Facebook ads a hundred percent. My own ads are actually really getting me like 50 K a month, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less, depending on what I put my ad budget on that particular month. I'm like how many sales calls I want to take on how many, you know, you know, what whom how many people are going to see it so on and so forth. So I, I would say it took me a long time to figure out for myself being for my own business, someone who knows how to run ads, it took me a while to even figure out my own strategy that was going to work specifically for me. And that's when I came upon funnel that we were talking about before, where it's like, it goes from a brand video with my ad and it pushes towards, and it would just talk like the ad probably just talks about my agency, what we've done for our clients. So it's just towards the landing page that talks more about our agency, what our process looks like, some testimonials, all of that. And then they get to book a call with me and in, but also, so I don't get on too many calls. It also has an application that people fill out that kind of allows people to filter themselves out, to not schedule that call with me, you know? So that allows me to get on less calls, but I not, I, you know, I'm able to get higher quality calls that I can convert more instead of getting on more sales calls. But yeah, I mean, basic ads is my definite first one, I would say second is referral.

Yeah, absolutely. And how, how long does it take to have and I think this is a really good piece of information for most people. How long does it take to get a an effective performing ads funnel in place?

So if we're talking about an automated funnel, so if you came up with an automated challenge, if we came up with automated funnel, I would say a hundred percent, the ads are never the problem. A hundred percent. Most times ads do great for a lot of our clients who have automated funnels. The biggest problem is the actual funnel. And so we always have to like, that's way different for each client, because what I was trying to try to go at the, basically the timeline is going to be different for every single person we have to figure out what's the one thing inside of this funnel, that's going to make it work. And so sometimes it has to do with a simple headline or putting a little bit of urgency inside of the email. Or changing the subject lines inside of the emails or changing, you know, the way the video looks or we recording the video for the webinar or whatever needs to happen. It's like the small little detailed type of stuff that you have to figure out inside of the funnel that's going to make it work and going to make it convert to the, to the point that you want it to work. So, yeah, timeline-wise, it depends on each person, but I would say on average, it's around two to three months before you start like actually breaking even with your funnel, but also once you start to break, even then you start to figure out what's the average amount. As far as when I put a dollar in how much I'm making back with my ads. And once you figure out what the average is for yourself, you can either optimize that to make a profit by higher, or if your proper mandarins are pretty good, you know, like 30 to 50% or. Then you can obviously move to the next step of scaling them and that means increasing your assets.

Okay. So you're thinking like two to three months to really get the like, even with a good solid funnel, you still need to watch your data and you, and look at performing and that sort of thing. So setting the expectations with your clients, I'm imagining, you're telling them like, listen, it's going to be two or three months before we have enough really good data to be able to optimize and tweak, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, with a live launch, we can really, you know, get results pretty quickly, you know, because that's a live launch, you're doing it within a particular date and time and all that. And you need to see those results really quickly. But with an automated funnel, you have to figure out again, like where's the drop-off happening. And so I just talking to another client, I was talking to clients yesterday and we kind of looked at her staff. Because the ads again are doing great for her. She's doing like $2 a lead right now, which is super great. And then, and then we're moving to the next step of people trying to purchase the course, but the drop-off happens on people who are not watching her video for the freebie. So we had to figure out what can we do inside of this funnel to make more people watch the video, you know?

And you're using some type of tools to track and report on all of those, those activities that people are, are taking with them.

Yeah. Because our clients have like programs like Kartra or Kajabi, or like click funnels and they get to see, you know, that data.

Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So you built an agency, right? Which I'm assuming you have a team that works with.

I do.

Hey, tell me a little bit more about that process. At what point in time did you move from Alex, the ads person to starting to build a team?

Yeah, I mean, so I actually had a funnel agency a couple of years back where we didn't run the ads for clients. We just created the funnel. And that didn't work out the way that I want it to. By the way, if you guys are ever thinking about hiring agency funnel agency, don't do it. A hundred percent don't do it. It doesn't work no matter what, say that right now. You have to create your own automated funnel. Okay. I would definitely recommend that, but anyways, so I had a funnel agency. I didn't really like it the way that it was working out with them to the net. And then I was like, you know what forget done for you for the rest of my life. And I'm never doing it ever again. And I moved into doing consulting work as far as funnels and for a lot of my clients. And then after that, that's when I started, I was like, I was going to a lot of consulting clients that were working with ad agencies, other ad agencies. And it just was not working out because of communication like that communication between the client and the agency, but also the fact that like the advertising agency, wasn't really helping as terms of the marketing side for them. Like they weren't looking at the funnel to see give them feedback. And so after some time I was like, you know what, I'm part of getting this over and over again from clients. So I'm just going to create this agency. So but yeah, as soon as I turned from like figuring it out that I needed to create something there because I was tired of getting new clients over and over again, there were saying that these agencies were not looking out for them. That's why I wanted to move into the agency factor. But also when I moved from being a solopreneur into having an actual team was when I started getting too many clients. Like I think at one point I was, I had like six or so clients and I was like, I need some more people on my team.

So who was the first hire?

Oh, that's a good question. My OBM Sarah, because first things first is I needed to get my onboarding for more streamlined. I needed someone that could be able to send the contract. We sent the questionnaire and, you know, set up all of that for that for my clients that were coming in. So that I can just work on the actual, like ad part and like the work part. Like that's what I wanted to focus on to Sarah with my first. And I've worked with her for many years at this point. So I know her very well and I trust her very well. Like I trust her with my own email. And I would even trust her with my life if I could that and then after that, then I started hiring some campaign managers. I also hired a copywriter. I also hired like a graphic designer. We moved, but over time, obviously I've, I've, you know, let go of some people I've brought in different people over time to kind of figure out what's going to work for me and my business.

Right. And how many are you at now? What's the size of your team?

Oh, we're very small, surprisingly. Yeah. At least right now because we had to change a couple of things as of recently, but I have my campaign manager. I have Sarah, I have myself differently. I'm doing a couple of ad accounts, but like I said before, like I'm quick with work. So but yeah, so it's me another campaign manager, my OBM Sarah. And then we work with a copywriting agency that does all the copy. And then we work with a graphic design agency that does all the graphics. So that kind of helps streamline those things a little bit.

What's the one what's the one role or task that you would just never outsource?

That I would never outsource? I'm not a hundred percent sure. I mean, obviously content creation would be one cause nobody can, you know, record for my YouTube channel. Cause that's going to be all me it's in my name, but gosh. Yeah, that would be mine, but I mean, if, if you were asking like the people who are listening like coaches or something like that, it, you know, what they shouldn't outsource, you know, I probably would say don't, well also copywriting. And I don't like to outsource too much copywriting for myself in terms of my social media copy. So for my ad copy, I'm fine with hiring copywriters. And sometimes I'll go wait in the revise if I need to revise. But for my social media, I, I don't ever hire someone for copywriting.

And so for you, that's for you. And everybody's going to have slightly, slightly different.

I think it's really just depending on what you want to do, I guess if you don't like copywriting and figure it out, but I mean, it might not figure it out, but like I are, someone has said, if you don't feel comfortable doing it, but sometimes also you have to be in that uncomfortability as well, too. Like, especially in the beginning, like sometimes you're going to have to write a little bit the copy, then you have to figure out how to sell with copy and so that you can get the right copy for yourself. I think it's depending on each person.

What do you wish that your clients would always do as part of the work that you're doing together? Like I think for done for you, they will often want you to them, you to just tell them right. Do these things, or we're going to do them for you, but what's the, what's the most effective thing that your clients can do to be successful. As part of the ads process.

Work on your mindset a hundred percent. That would be the biggest thing is to work on your mindset on not just ads because there, but you need, I always tell, I always tell my clients, like whenever you were doing an automated funnel or for running ads for like the live launch, whatever, I'm like, let me do my job, relax for a second and just work on your mindset. Like, I just want you to work on affirmations. I just want you to meditate every day. I want you to go exercise. I want you to go have fun with your family. Just relax, like allow, allow the ads to do its job. And just come back whenever, like for, if was like, for example, the live launch or something like that, you know, come back at some point and do that challenge or do that webinar or whatever, but come with full energy of feeling like I have amazing people inside that, that have joined this webinar and I'm going to make 10 sales or 20 sales or 50 sales or whatever known trust yourself that this is going to work the way that it needs to, and or that a way that's going to, and it's going to work out just fine. So sometimes I have to like calm down, quiet. A lot of the times, literally I'm a mindset coach. I'm a business and marketing coach and I'll tell them the advertising person. Right. So I'm in like an all-in-one for a lot of things.

Yeah. And I would expect that that's true because this is probably like, I think people still go into something like this with the expectation that this is going to take all the pressure off of them from, you know, their marketing activities. And we're going to flip a switch and everything's going to go, but I know that how long it takes for, you know, the testing and not just the ads, but the like a funnel and, and, and your offers. And even if it's like highly, highly, you know, high touch, there's still a lot of testing. There's still a lot of best guesses. There's still a lot of tweaking and it can take up to a year to really refine even just a very small, simple funnel. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm guessing that's what you wish people would know going in.

Yeah. I mean, I would definitely want people to know at the end of the day, I just need clients to understand, or even like, if you're running your own ads for yourself, if you can come in with the mindset that this is, that the advertisements there for sustainability, so that you can continue with, we get new clients all the time and it's there for consistency for you. Instead of going oh if I run my ads today, hopefully I can get three clients by tomorrow. Right, right. Not going to work like that. So instead just like, think about sustainability.

What do you recommend for those clients who are just like, not getting it?

It's hard to say because I think that within those clients, sometimes I have to just kind of go, sorry, you know, like some clients, you know, some people are just a little bit stubborn when it comes to that kind of stuff. Like they think that, that it's, it's not their mindset, but that it's a, a marketing problem and said, you know, you know, it's, it's, it's, it has to do with the ads. You know, a lot of the time there's some people who are thinking that it has everything to do with the ads and the ads problems, and that we need to target better. I'm like, no, because I just got you 400 leads. And if I would have gave it to another, if I would've gave this, these leads to another client, they would have sold it perfectly fine. You know? So there's a mindset issue.

There are a lot of moving parts, right?

Oh yeah. A hundred percent.

So what's next for you?

For me, it's hard to say, because I feel like it changes all the time and it just like every other business. I'm very multi-passionate and what I do, but I would say in this moment if, if you were to ask me that question right now it's just the scale of the agency.

And what does that look like for you?

More people on the team, obviously, you know, more campaign managers. I want to start like right now, my current team members are only contractors. I want to turn them into employees. I want this to be like a real solid business where, you know, I have like an organizational chart that shows like who's the CEO and what they're doing. And like me, and like include Sarah is and what her job is. And you know, how many campaign managers and just kind of having a real business like that. That's okay.

So real business for you looks like a team in place, processes in place, scaling up the number of clients you can serve and, you know, remaining, I'm guessing true to what's draw what drove you here in the first place?

Oh, 100%. I mean, and that's why I'm still kind of small right now because I mean, I could have. You know, hire a whole bunch of people and, and, you know, did my clients dirty in certain situations or whatever, but I stick to, I stick to my values and my morals inside of my business and, and what am I here to do? Right. I'm here to help my clients bring, freedom. And and so that's really super important for me to have certain things that are big priorities for myself and for this entire business. And so sometimes I have to let go of decisions that I've made in my business so that I can keep those morals and values.

Yeah. And that's the, that's the driving force for most people, right. Is can we, can we build this business and scale this business while still feeling comfortable and sticking to what is meaningful and important?

Yeah. Sometimes it's gonna, you know, it's not gonna, it's not gonna change for me. It's just that sometimes I have to make business decisions that hopefully get me to. But sometimes it doesn't work out in my favor and I have to, you know, scale back again and figure out what's going to, you know, what, what can I do here to find the right people who are becoming, you know, a part of my team, what do I need to do here to make sure I have the right profit margin? You know, making, making those business decisions like a business owner, but also taking decisions off of what feels good for me and aligned for my own business.

Right. And that's critical. And that can change over time too, which is another thing that people don't really think about, but is critical. Yeah. Okay. We're coming up on the end of time, but I, I have a question that I ask everyone and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. You know, we are real people, real business. So in your experience, what's the difference between what we hear out there in the world and what's real in terms of business.

I go back to, and I'm sure somebody, somebody, and you'll probably have seen that meme where it's like the iceberg, right. And everybody sees the top of the iceberg where it's very small at the top and that's what everybody sees. They see the success part. They see everything that's good about your business, but they don't see the below part, all the failures and the mistakes that you made, all of the heartbreaks that happened throughout your business the journey that it took for you to get there, how, how you got your hands dirty and, and, and, you know, all that hard work that nobody gets to see. Right. I think that people need to start talking about that more to be honest with with you is like, why, why are we only talking about our successes? And that's why it's really taboo for whenever I talk about when I have to get rid of a client and I refund them, right. I don't like doing that. That's not fun. I don't want to refund people. Like I don't want to do that whatsoever, but I have to do things for my business at the end of the day that although some people can see as a failure, I see it as a win because even though I just went a little bit clients the other day, I just brought on a new client that I know I'm going to get results for. So, and also I'm learning things inside of my business. When I make these failures, when I have to let go of the client, I'm learning things about who my ideal client is. So even to this day, I'm still learning things about my ideal client and the boundaries that I need to make some of my business. But yeah, I don't think anybody is talking about the below the eyes, third part where it's like all the pain and the anguish and the crying moments and, you know you know, those kind of need to talk about it for a second. It's okay. But we're all going to go through this situation and you're not alone whatsoever.

How do we keep, how do we start talking about those without, I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with them because they fear that they make them look like they're incompetent or that they don't know. But I think they're, they're, they're very relatable. Right? What, what's our best medium for having those conversations?

I mean, I wouldn't, I, some people I know, like to you, I've seen it a few times when they use a little bit of crying sessions on their Instagram stories to kind of showcase that. That's not, for me, I'll be honest. I'm not a very big fan of, of the crying selfies to talk about it, but, you know, and then you don't have to talk about it all the time either, but it, it, you know, if you have a post every once in a while, that just talks about like, Hey, today's a pretty bad day for this. Like, you know, like when Facebook shut down the other day, I could have taken it as a situation of like, okay. You know, I feel like crap, you know, because I needed to get stuff done as far as facebook ads. But like really just talking a little bit about those failures a little bit doesn't hurt your business. It's okay. Everyone deals with it, everyone. Right? You can't talk to one business owner and tell me that they've never had a crying session.

No, never. And I actually think it makes it, it actually builds more rapport with your audience. Right. And, and helps them feel something, which is like the, the key to your marketing, right?

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't make it, I wouldn't make it. Your number one marketing strategy is to do a comment, a whole bunch of vulnerability posts about how horrible your businesses, because then, then becomes like you're talking nothing but negative about your business. And you feel like it's a horrible business for you. And if it's becoming a situation like that, please get out of your business. But you can have a couple of posts every once in a while that talks about how crappy of a day it is or something like that, you know, it's okay to have those conversations.

And I don't even think it needs to be negative. It just, it could also just be like shedding light on something. That's very real and not sexy. Like I talk a lot about business in my business, not being very sexy and like, I probably will never have like those sexy business posts, but also I'm talking about things that people can relate to. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, cause that's what I mean, you become relatable in this moment. So that's why we talk about our family. We are on social media or we talk about, you know, certain situations like I've had posts about like when I go to Disneyland with the kids there, you know, how much freedom is so important to me. So they can like, in terms of you can turn some of these situations into a learning lesson for your consumer, that's reading the posts. That's also really good.

Yeah, totally. Okay. We're coming up on time. So I'm going to wrap this up, but I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Can you tell the listeners how they can find you?

Yeah. So you can find my YouTube channel can just look up Alexandra Ramirez and probably type in like Facebook ads, because I think there's another Alexandra Ramirez as like a business coach. But yeah, so you can look it up, look me up on YouTube. You could also probably find me on Instagram as well. I'm not too big over there. I'm trying, I promise. But YouTube is where, where I'm definitely at for sure.

All right. Well, we'll put the link in the show notes so everybody can find you and find all your great content. And I want to wrap up the episode and say, thank you for such an amazing conversation. It is so good to shed some kind of real light on this strategy around ads and funnels and all that sort of thing. And hear that there are some real things that go on underneath the hood that you know, can set expectations so that you're not, you're not disappointed, or you're not going into this strategy with, you know With a belief that may, may not be real. So thanks so much for being here. Go and check out Alex and her incredible work. And if you've enjoyed today's content, I would love for you to give us a review on whatever platform you're listening on. This helps us share these stories with an even bigger audience. So until next time, keep building, keep dreaming and keep being real.