This episode is a bit different. A little over a year ago, I listened to a podcast between Jonathan and Jason Fried, the co-founder of Basecamp/37signals. I had known Jonathan for a while, and I’m a big fan of Jason Fried, but the episode was very different — it was almost like a therapy session. Jonathan had reached out to Jason for some general business and life advice, and instead of keeping it private, he decided to publish it. At the time, I got a ton of value out of it.
So in almost a “déjà vu” moment, I’m doing something similar here, but with the roles reversed: Jonathan giving the advice, instead of asking it. We recorded this a couple weeks ago when I was trying to figure out where to take Project 33. Given that Jonathan had built a large agency but then also pivoted into other, more scalable offers (he’s the CEO of AJ&Smart and facilitator.com), he felt like the perfect person to ask for advice.
And if you’ve seen any of my recent stuff on LinkedIn, you might’ve seen that I pivoted the podcast and launched my advisory firm Thormeier.co. A good chunk of that was kicked off and inspired by this conversation.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
Why I’m the one getting coached this time
Four ways to get a dream out of your system and “the tiniest announceable version”
The agency/offer ladder: from DIY (do it yourself), to DWY (done with you), to DFY (done for you)
25% close rate: anything higher means you’re too cheap
“If you have to sit down and do 10 hours of work to be successful, then you’re just doing stupid shit”
How to make a 500-listener podcast worth $100k
Show Notes:
Connect with Jonathan
Jonathan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/
AJ&Smart: https://ajsmart.com/
Facilitator.com: https://facilitator.com/
The Unscheduled CEO podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com/
Connect with Finn:
Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn advisory: https://thormeier.co/
Mentioned in the episode:
Nat Eliason’s essay on de-atomization: https://www.nateliason.com/blog/de-atomization-is-the-secret-to-happiness
Built to Sell by John Warrillow: https://builttosell.com/
Sprint by Jake Knapp: https://www.character.vc/sprint
Skool: https://www.skool.com/
Full Transcript:
Finn Thormeier: All right. I’m here with Jonathan Courtney, who is the CEO of AJ&Smart and host of the unscheduled CEO podcast. AJ and Smart is a portfolio of a bunch of companies. There’s facilitator.com, which is facilitation.com. You guys do in-person as well as virtual workshops. You have a course, world-renowned, I would say, studio. There’s AJ and Smart Studio, which is a product design and strategy studio with clients like Google, N26, and IKEA. And then there’s AJ and Smart Partners. Where you guys build funnels for companies that have generated over 30 million for partners. The reason why I wanted to have you on is I’ve been aware of you for a very long time. Like I think all the way back when I think you guys were working with Iman Gadji or something and he was pushing you guys very hard as a case study or something like that.
Jonathan Courtney: Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: I think that’s how I got aware of you first and then And then yeah, just over the years and I wanted to have you on because Or talk to you, and I don’t know into what kind of podcast this will turn, but I listened to your therapy session with Jason Fried like last year. I looked it up. It wasn’t like in March. Yeah, I listened to that back then and it really resonated with me. And then recently you’ve been popping up on my LinkedIn and it just feels like you’ve been having... More fun with LinkedIn. And then I also checked out AJ and Smart and I saw like the, I watched the 35 minute video where you announced kind of the future of AJ and Smart and facilitator.com.
Jonathan Courtney: That’s still on the website. I think so. Yeah. Nice. That’s good.
Finn Thormeier: I found it there.
Jonathan Courtney: Yes, it is. It’s still there. Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: Which is also a great video. It was really well made.
Jonathan Courtney: Thank you very much. And thanks to Eli at AJ and Smart for editing it and shooting it.
Finn Thormeier: So well done. And so you ran and partly still run an agency. I run an agency. It looks like over the years you went through many kind of iteration and modes. And I mean, you talk about in that video about how you struggled with on the one side, you want to be very creative and you used to make movies in the past and make music, but it almost felt like The less creative you were, the better the business was doing. And the more creative you allowed yourself to be, the less well the company was doing. And so you made some changes. And I guess I would like, if you’re open to this, almost use this as like the reverse Jason Fried call.
Jonathan Courtney: Sure. I don’t remember the Jason Fried call exactly, so as long as I don’t have to remember what
Finn Thormeier: happened. I want to just get your thoughts on a bunch of things because I think you’ve already played through this game through a bunch of versions and I’m trying to think through some stuff right now. I run an agency. We’re a small agency. We used to be me and nine people at some point. Right now we’re me and two and a half people. Lots of AI involved too. Been running this kind of as an agency for the last six years. We’re doing about a million. We’re doing LinkedIn for CEOs. So basically like a ghostwriting agencies for founders, CEOs, executives, mostly B2B tech. And it’s been amazing. It pays my bills and all of that and more than that. But it’s not what I want my legacy to be. I kind of fell into this LinkedIn and personal branding thing and it’s opened lots of doors and I don’t want to wake up in 10 years and still run a LinkedIn agency. I want to build a village. That’s what I really want to do, but that’s not necessarily a business.
Jonathan Courtney: A physical village?
Finn Thormeier: Yes. Well, it doesn’t have to be like a village, village meaning like in the middle of nowhere. It could be like within a neighborhood of an existing city, for example. Okay. But like an actual physical thing with people. I can go into that at length, but And so I’m trying to figure out what’s the path for me to not kill this amazing business that still teaches me a lot of things, but at the same time don’t neglect the dreams of the future and how can I have fun with this while I’m doing it. Not feel like it’s draining all of kind of, as you say, it’s draining all of my creativity where I feel like it’s just actually it’s harder to, you know, spend a day being creative about this new thing that I want to do because you’re so in the business. There’s always stuff. There’s always things to do. There’s more meetings there. So.
Jonathan Courtney: It’s easier just to run your business than to do the thing you’re excited about doing because it’s just, you know what to do. You just open your emails, you open Slack, you have stuff to do. Yeah. Easier, basically. Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: And so, like, I also listened to your podcast from, I think, last week where you talk about Done For You, Done With You, DIY. I’m aware of that concept also for a while, Sam Ovens and Niemangadji and And there’s been many points where I was like, should I just do the course? But then also I think like many people, I cringe at the idea of a course. And I know that’s kind of my own self-limiting belief. And what you said really resonated in that episode, but yet I’m still kind of struggling with like just doing it, even though it makes sense to me on a theoretical level. So maybe I’ll stop talking here for now. I really didn’t plan. Fully through how this episode could go, but I don’t know if you have some thoughts or questions at this point.
Jonathan Courtney: Well, I think the thing you’re saying is a very common challenge. Can I ask you how old you are, if you wouldn’t mind? 29. 29, okay. So you’re 10 years younger than me. Well, do you mind if I ask you, do you have kids?
Finn Thormeier: Yes, one daughter.
Jonathan Courtney: One daughter, same. Okay. Did anything change in your business of how you think about your business when you had your daughter?
Finn Thormeier: I definitely have less time to work on the business because I do like spending time with family. I think the whole idea around the village kind of started forming partly as a result of prioritizing other things in life.
Jonathan Courtney: Was that triggered by anything? What would the village thing, why do you want to work on that?
Finn Thormeier: There’s a couple elements to it. One is, last summer, I live in Berlin, we live now in Prenzlauer Berg. We moved here a year and a half ago last year. Um, and, and I know people in Berlin, but I don’t get to spend a lot of time with friends. Um, partly because I’m one of the only people in my friend group who has a child and that makes it very difficult to meet up with other people. And you know, Berlin is very big and widespread. So like you sometimes often still spend 45 minutes riding the tram just to get to someone else in a different neighborhood. Like it’s not spontaneous.
Jonathan Courtney: I don’t leave my neighborhood.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And so last year, a couple, two, three friends of mine moved close to where I live. And that was incredible because they also work with me at my company. And so we co-worked together. We did things spontaneously. We would, you know, go play pool in the evening or something like that. And so I just realized that that was a lot of fun. And so my thing is like, I think my quality of life, the biggest lever I have for raising the quality of my life is how many of my close friends and family live within walking distance from me. Like literally walking distance. I leave the house on fit and walk there in five minutes. Right now I have zero within walking distance because for different reasons they all moved away again. So I want to recreate that. The second thing is like, I just crave, I think we live in a unique point in history where you used to have to make the decision between either you wanted to build something and have an impact and build a career, build a business, build something. Then you had to move to one of the big cities, one of the hubs, right? LA, SF, New York, Berlin, London. Or you said, I wanted to be in nature. I want to walk barefoot. I want to be in touch with animals and small, tight community. Then you could move to the countryside, but then you’re kind of limited with that. I think now you could do both. You could have a village in the middle of Portugal, attract a bunch of builders and digital nomads and people who want to build things online. And everyone can have ambitious things that they want to build and create and put out into the world. And at the same time, you’re in The middle of nature and you can walk out barefoot and you have animals there.
Jonathan Courtney: Have you seen what Peter Levels has set up in Portugal?
Finn Thormeier: I know of him. I didn’t see that he’d set something up in Portugal.
Jonathan Courtney: There’s a couple of ways to think about the thing you’re talking about, and I’ll touch on the Peter Levels thing. First of all, you know about this concept of atomization and de-atomization. There’s an article that I really would recommend you read. It’s written by a guy called Nat Eliasson, and I think it’s called, what’s it called? Nat Eliasson atomization. I ended up doing an episode on this. It’s called deatomization is the secret to happiness. And the concept is that a lot of the things we do in life today are all living within their own little bubbles. So work happens here. Socialization is planned and has to happen here. I go on a, you know, dates happen here, holidays happen here. When I want to work out, I go over to this place and all of these things are separate and isolated from each other and don’t cross over. And when humans feel good, it’s usually when these things are blended into each other. What you’re talking about, being able to walk to people on foot. Now, And the act of just living life is you working out. So you go meet your friends and you go play football. Right, yeah, yeah. You don’t have to go, hey, let’s go to the gym. No, you don’t have to do this. You just go and hang out with your friends and then it’s happening. It’s all blended. So this is the idea of deatomization. And the idea that this Nat Eliasson guy has is that the more The internet gets really amazing. All of these things happen, all of these AI tools, the more isolated we’re getting. And by the way, the remote workification of everything just caused a major fuck up. I mean, I am a CEO of a company. I allow everyone to work from home. We have a big office here in Kreuzberg. And even I’m infected by it now because I’m like, it’s more convenient. I just got a bigger plate. And it’s not good for me and it’s not good for any of the employees, but it’s cheaper and it’s more convenient. So we used to have three offices, now we have one office. And it’s really hard to fight against the tide of convenience. So it’s like, do I want to be convenient and kind of numb and unhappy? Or do I want to have, you know, I don’t want to have to go all the way to the office and hang out with people and feel better. And so there’s a couple of like converging things causing this. I would say there’s a few ways you can approach this that might not be what you’ve thought of yet.
Finn Thormeier: Can I add the last missing piece where maybe that gives you more context? So those two things, I think I could see that just as I run my business and at the same time, I try to just get my friends to move here or I move to a village or something like that. It’s more like a, you know, just how people have their job and then they just decide to move to a different city. Like those things, where I see almost like My calling in it is that I follow Naval and one of the things that Naval talks about is basically like what are the things that feel like work to others, that looks like work to others but feels like fun to you. Yeah. Yeah. And in my free time when I’m not working, I read books that most people, when I tell them I read these books, they’re like, why would you read those things in your free time? Like I read very dense things around philosophy and politics and economy, economics. And recently, or two years ago, Balaji, the ex-CTO of Coinbase, he’s big in the crypto space.
Jonathan Courtney: Is that up like an island or this new- Yeah, he talks about
Finn Thormeier: network state. And it’s basically this idea that you should bring back entrepreneurship to country building and that we want to have a path for people to be able to basically start their own country. And the village is kind of like the proto- Country for me. And for me, it’s just like, I think it’s one of the highest impact things you can do to contribute to that idea. It would allow me to actually nerd out on, you know, culture and politics and philosophy and what values and, you know, do you have a religion or no religion? Which religion? Do you borrow from a bunch of them, right? There’s so many things you have to think through or just be like, I could see myself just doing this for 50 years and at least feel like even if I just make a small dent in it, it would feel like I did something with my life, you know? And so that’s where it feels like it’s not just like, let me do the business here and then just move to a village and have this life and get some friends there, because that’s the kind of MVP, let’s say, of that idea. But the real long-term idea is to contribute to that.
Jonathan Courtney: Right. Okay. Yeah. I don’t ever have this sense personally of this legacy thing. I don’t have any, that’s just not something I ever care about. I’m very focused on what’ll keep me entertained and what makes me feel good. And I don’t mean like that just means I discard everyone else’s emotions. I just think that’s a core when it comes to business for me with longevity. And being able to actually do things over a long period of time, I’m always just thinking, well, is this something I actually would like to do? And in five years, do I think I would still like it? So just to kind of clarify that if I’m giving you my thoughts, I actually don’t care about the legacy thing for myself at all. I couldn’t care less about that ever. And so I never do anything with that in mind. So I think that there’s a couple of ways. Basically, you need to get this out of your system. You need to clean this out of you or else it’s going to irritate you forever. And I think one of the things I’ve also said is I don’t want to be one of those guys in his 50s being like, I could have been in that band. I could have done this thing. And to get it out of your system, I think there’s maybe three or four approaches and there’s nothing else and you have to kind of choose a path. One is that you just sort of wait around until the moment presents itself. You keep running your current business, you keep reading on the side, you keep doing all of that kind of stuff. And then maybe you happen to bump into someone and that like moment It appears and you’re like, this is the thing, this is when I should push for it. And I’ll come back to like, I ran this, I started running these creative retreats because I couldn’t find that for myself and I started doing it. But first I talked about it for years. So the first thing is you just sort of do what you’re doing now, I guess in a way it’s the, let’s just see what sort of, you know, happens. The second thing you can do, which is not a lot of people talk about this, is you just try to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. You figure out what the number is and you figure out what the number for you where you say, well, if that was in my bank account, then I don’t give a fuck anymore and I’m just going to feel safe to try this. And then you rejig your business to be that money focused. It’s like, how does this just generate as much revenue as humanly possible so that I personally have so much financial security that I don’t have to think about this anymore? If it fails, it fails. I don’t care because I’m financially secure. So this is kind of what, you know, if you think about levels, Peter levels, you know, just get extremely rich, have like a net worth of, you know, 20 something million, whatever. Then you’re like, okay, I’m just going to buy a huge house or like, you know, even the proto version of this is you could buy a whole entire building. And then you could be this sort of center of gravity for people who you want to spend time around. And I see people do this relatively successfully where they accumulate so much wealth that they are the center of gravity of their social pool because everyone’s like, yeah, I want to live better. That I want to be around where this person’s doing stuff because it’s just they’ve got so much cool shit going on. It just seems like a perfect utopia for me and obviously just make sure it doesn’t turn into a cult. That could be your Or that could be another. I don’t know if you know the singer, this ginger guy, what’s his name? Red-haired guy. The big one? Yeah. And Mark Zuckerberg did this too. He just bought every house around his house. And now all his friends live in this area around him. Option two is get ludicrously wealthy. And then you have a path to it. And I guess option three is you have to stop what you’re doing, completely shut it all down, and you have to pursue it 100%. And I think that’s probably the hardest one to do because then you really have to commit to it. All of that being said, I actually think option four is the best option, which is what is the tiniest version of this experiment that could exist and that could be announced. So I’ll just give you an example of that. So I was talking about this, all of my grand plans to do these crazy retreats that are basically going to be like festivals, you know, like Fusion Festival is happening this weekend, kind of like that, but for just an unplugged retreat. And I was hanging around with a friend of mine. And he was like, Jonathan Courtney, because I was trying to find one for myself. I was trying to go to one. He’s like, Jonathan Courtney, you’re not going to find one. And so you have to make one. But I don’t want to do a big fucking event like this. I don’t want to be an event planner. And I also, I don’t know if I want to commit all of my time and money to this. And he was just like, yeah, because you’re just thinking about it way too big. Like, what if it’s just 10 people, they’re just your friends, you do a week, you just book an Airbnb. Okay, maybe it costs you 10,000, 12,000 euros or something. And you just do that. And everyone can chip in or whatever. And I was like, fuck, yeah, that’s right, I’ll just do that. And that turned into a 90,000 euro event because it just scaled off, which I ran in February, an hour and a half north of Berlin. And so that, in which we rented an entire Pretty much an entire, what looks like an entire village. We rented a farmland with lots of houses on it and everything which you can rent for like 30 people. And that was my first experience of this thing that I was trying to create, which was what if there was just no internet, no digital devices, only art, supplies, and books for an entire week. And also nobody knows where they’re being taken to.
Finn Thormeier: What was that Foundland called? I’m just curious.
Jonathan Courtney: I’ll tell you privately not on this call because the location of these events are supposed to be secret. Okay. But yeah, you can rent it. You can do 100-person weddings there, huge events, but we rented the entire location just for the 30 or so people we had. Which meant it felt abandoned. It felt like just for us. It was really interesting. And so one of the things you can consider is, is there, because the village thing is so big that you can almost constantly make excuses to yourself as to why this is not the right time to do it. You know, kids are a great excuse for this, for people dragging things out forever. But maybe there is a shortcut to experiencing So I think I’m
Finn Thormeier: already somewhat on that path. My 30th birthday is coming up in August and I’m currently looking to basically do some version of what you just said, rent a big ass house somewhere. Cool with a lake and a big garden and get a bunch of my friends and family to just join me there for a week. Yeah, that’s great. And it’s working-ish. I try to block every Friday. I call it Village Day, that every Friday I’m not allowed to work on the agency and I only do things Village. I’ve so far had one. The last two I skipped because my wife was traveling and I was alone with the little ones. I was like, there’s no way I can do this. I just need the extra time for the agency. That’s working, I don’t know, mediocrely.
Jonathan Courtney: It’s hard to set aside time for things that are not Extremely real. Like, as soon as I announced this retreat to my audience, you know what I did is I just booked the place. You had to. And it cost 90,000 euros. And so then I was like, I actually have to do this now or else I will be so embarrassed and so fucking disgraced. Yeah. That for me helps me... I realized I can’t make things real unless they are actually real, and so I have to manufacture. Because if you’re an entrepreneur, that’s also what we thrive on, sort of real stakes. The stakes have to feel very real.
Finn Thormeier: So it’s almost like just announcing like, hey, next year we’re going to do a month here and just burning my boats to some extent.
Jonathan Courtney: There needs to be a possibility that you can really be embarrassed. I think what happens a lot of people when they have these dreams is that it’s used as a thing to talk about something I’ll do in the future, which also makes you focus on things you don’t care about in the present. The future thing also never really happens. It’s like me with my music, I was like, I’m going to get back to being a musician as soon as AJ and Smart hits this point, or I’m going to get back to movies. But then that just also... It’s just not true because if I would want to really do it, I would just do it. The temptation is not high enough to actually pursue it. And for me, I then have to test, okay, I need to get this out of my head. I need to stop thinking about it so I know whether or not I actually give a shit. And now I’ve done actually that event. And now I’m like, yeah, I don’t know if I need to do that again, actually, even though it was the center of my entire attention for like five years. I loved it. I don’t know if I want to do it again. I don’t know if I want to be the person running that. Yeah. And yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s really one thing Americans are good at that we as Europeans are not good at is they have the balls to just fucking keep trying stuff. And you know, if you rarely talk to an American entrepreneur, when I’m talking to an American entrepreneur and I’m like, ah, I have this, they’re just like, then why the fuck don’t you do it? And I’m like, oh, but yeah, you don’t understand. I have a business. I have a kid. And they’re like, yeah, but you just, why are you still talking to me about this? And in the meantime, they’ve done like 10 versions of these things and like three failed, but they don’t care because they have more of this kind of boldness. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, yeah.
Finn Thormeier: If hypothetically someone were interested in the second path, which is get as rich as possible as quickly as possible, how would you approach that in my situation?
Jonathan Courtney: Well, first of all, you do have to actually kind of decide that you want that. So you have to decide, okay, I...
Finn Thormeier: Did you ever decide that? I mean, you never talk about money, but I assume from everything I see, you must be... You could probably retire.
Jonathan Courtney: I don’t know. I mean, I spend a lot of money, so if I would live a more reasonable lifestyle, I could have retired. Yeah, that’s the annoying thing about the AJ and Smart numbers being public because I remember I had an event like last year and someone was like, oh, I heard you guys made six million last year. And I’m like, how the fuck do you know this? Looked it up on the Internet. Fuck. So. This is hard for me to talk about accurately because I started the company so long ago that I’m sometimes putting together the narrative in a way that might not be accurate. I’ll just try to be as accurate as possible. I just mean like I don’t remember 100% what 26-year-old Jonathan Courtney was thinking. Well, so first of all, I’m not that connected with money in terms of I don’t keep checking my bank account. I’ve never have. I don’t know much about investing. I don’t... I never was good at budgeting or any of these things. When the company and AJ and Smart, even in our best times, at the end of the year, I’m like, so how did we do? Even on our 6.5 million year, Kyle, my finance guy, is like, yeah, we made like 4 million profit or something. I’m like, cool. I just move on to continuing running the business. So I don’t have a strong hyperfixation on the topic of money. However, what I will say is I do use it as a sort of like a, or my brain definitely uses it I’ve seen it as a sort of like feeling of whether I’m winning or not winning. And that actually does seem to matter to me even though I wouldn’t like to admit it. It does definitely matter to me. So numbers going up absolutely affects my mood and excitement about work. And so I think what happened to me is about six years into running AJ and Smart, we were sort of stagnant maybe around Again, it could be 1.5 or 2 million. I can’t remember. It’s stagnant around that number with maybe a 15 to 20% profit margin. And I just started like, honestly, I started reading some books like Built to Sell was a really good one that kind of clicked in my mind. I started, I read... I was listening to a lot of Tim Ferriss’ podcasts. I heard like Derek Sivers who sold his company for like, I don’t know, 5 million. Then I started traveling. I just had this in my mind where I’m like, if I just spend more time in the US, I’ll be connected with people who are just more in the world that I want to be in. And they were often just a lot more wealthy than me. Their businesses were often doing a lot better than mine. Honestly, it just slowly and quietly raised the stakes for me. An example of that, I flew to San Francisco. I had the opportunity to meet. Do you know this design sprint thing? We used to talk about the design sprint a lot.
Finn Thormeier: I’m aware that you guys did that. I’m not in that world too much.
Jonathan Courtney: So I read a book. I really loved it. I was like, holy shit, this book is really clicking with me from How to Run an Agency. And I contacted the guy. He was based in San Francisco, a guy called Jake. I hung out with him. And he was like, how much do you guys charge for running these things for clients? And I was like, oh, like... You know, 16 to 25,000 euro or something like that. And he was like, oh, yeah, like in Silicon Valley, if you charge anything less than 35, people won’t take you seriously. And I was like, oh, OK, so 35 is the next, you know, the next client who contacted us. And they’re like, yeah, fine. And so immediately I started to realize, oh, like there’s a lot more. There’s a lot more playroom with numbers than I thought there was. And then I started traveling back and forth more and more to the US. And every time I would go there, I would just get more of this entrepreneurial, explosive kind of energy. And you mentioned Iman Gaji. So what happened there was very interesting and I’m sure this was a turning point. I never want to pretend that I am the reason why we succeeded 100% because like meeting him definitely changed a lot of stuff in my brain. What happened there was like I was on Instagram because we were doing a lot of Instagram content back in the day. I got an Instagram ad from this guy who says, I can get you more call bookings or something. I can’t remember exactly what it was and he had a free discovery call. I jumped on the discovery call the same day, had a call with Iman. He was 17 or something. And he was just very good at selling his product. And he charged us, I think, and it’s probably cheap now. I guess he doesn’t even do this anymore. But he charged us £25,000 to spend two days at the AJ and Smart Office to show us how to Do a funnel or something. And it was then when I realized, okay, if I’m paying him $25,000 and he’s 17, and I’m 26 at the time or something, I’m like, why does he have this much leverage and why don’t I? So I think I was always thinking about how is it that this person gets this much for two days and it takes me Three weeks to make the same amount of money. So I was always looking for that, these leverage points, like how can I do less, you know, the four hour work week concept. And then it was him who showed us a funnel. And so when it came around, I think a year later or something to the time where I wanted to do a course, and the interesting thing is we didn’t come at a course from the course world thing. We came at making a course because our clients, which are large corporates, wanted to have videos of our training. So we came at it from that perspective and we were about to launch it from that perspective. But then Iman was like, Oh, you know, like a business like yours could make millions with a course like this selling to actual individuals. And we paid him €5,000 for a call to do a phone call. Because I was like, dude, can I just ask you some questions? And he was like, yeah, like 5,000 euro. And he was like, yeah, you put the course on this platform called Teachable. You like do a webinar, blah, blah, blah. And he told me about Sam Ovens, who I didn’t know about. And yeah, that kind of brought me into this world of like, I guess it’s called like Course Bros. But the funny thing is like, we were selling something that was very unrelated to what everyone else was selling. Everyone else was selling sort of like marketing courses. And we were selling facilitation training essentially to corporates. But the techniques and tactics there were fascinating to me. And what I was really fascinated about, which I’d never experienced before, was we ran a webinar. And in that webinar, which is just a live like one and a half hour thing, we made 18,000 euro. And back in those days, that would have taken like five or six calls with a client to close a deal like that. And we’re like, whoa, okay, like 18 individual people bought this thing for a thousand euro and we don’t even have a list yet. We’ve never run ads yet. This is just some, we made a Facebook group and tested that out. And so we, I think at that point I started to think, okay, there’s definitely a Money to be made here. It’s very interesting. This is a very interesting potential good way to have better cash flow for our business. And yeah, it’s a very long roundabout way of saying I do. I do care about money. I do focus on that as a measurement of is something working or is something not. But also for me, it’s like if it’s not going up, then it feels like kind of pointless to work on something. And so I’m not saying that that’s a good way to think, by the way, for your audience. I know some especially fucking Europeans get weird about that shit. No, it’s not all about money. The funny thing is about the Europeans who get pissed off about this shit are the people who have all the money from their parents anyway, so they don’t need to ever worry about it. It’s not all about money, bro. Let’s hang out in the forest, bro. Yeah, your parents are giving you like two million, you know, just your little trust fund. Shut the fuck up. I’m from Ireland. We don’t have that shit. Oh, yeah. I think the money thing is a focus for me. And that... From that point, I’m always looking for ways to increase the leverage and how can I do one hour of work for what normally it used to take me a month for the same amount of money so that all of the rest of the time I can just do all my weird stuff. I guess that’s the way I’m always thinking
Finn Thormeier: about it. Okay so I’m just trying to think through do I on the path of let’s say gaining more leverage both have more optionality in the future as well as let’s say free up time to dedicate towards getting started on the village idea or really putting stuff down there would you tell me To start selling the done with you thing, which right now, like we’ve been kind of gradually going out market. I’d say we used to be working with very early stage startups and just work with the founder. And now more and more, we’re getting companies that are not enterprise, but they’re doing 10, 20, 50 million in revenue. And we’re working with multiple executives at that company to kind of done for you, interview them, create LinkedIn content for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I’ve thought about this idea of like, do I just offer companies to train their in-house content or brand team on how to activate their executives and how to, you know, build out their LinkedIn and do all of that? Is that just something that you feel like is a no brainer for what I’m doing or?
Jonathan Courtney: So generally, I just think every agency should have the following business model, as you already saw on my podcast, but for your audience who don’t know about it, at the very top is your most expensive thing, the most hands-on thing, which is your done-for-you package, which for you guys is Managing and, I guess, growing people’s LinkedIn profiles as a ghostwriter, managing the whole thing, growing it for them. I guess, is it so that they get more leads or why is it? Is it for authority?
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, well, pipeline, they mostly sell into enterprise. So we then run ads with it. We connect it to a clay table. We pull up people who engage with their content. Got it.
Jonathan Courtney: You help them get more B2B leads for themselves. That should be for the people who want to pay you the most. And ideally that should be at a price range where only 25% of those leads actually close. Meaning every 10 people you talk to, only two and a half of them should be actually up for it. It should be so expensive that anything more than 25% close rate means you’re not expensive enough. Sometimes when I’m chatting to an agency owner and they’re like, oh my God, 80% of the deals are closing. I’m like, Well, first of all, you probably don’t have enough calls coming in to even, it sounds like then you’re just doing two calls a week or one call a week or something. And then they’re so qualified, it’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of them are We’ll close and that’s, well, it’s not scalable. So then the second thing is the done with you option where someone calls. So let’s say the same person who you’re doing, let’s just say you’re doing some guy called Dave’s LinkedIn account, right? He calls, you say, well, we charge, I don’t know, 25K a year for this service. And he’s like, oh man, yeah, that’s a bit too much. And then you can say, well, We also have a service that is a lot lower, a lot cheaper if you’re willing to put in a little bit of work. And that is we have this closed private community with weekly coaching calls. And so I’m going to talk a little bit about this. I’m going to talk a little bit about this. I’m going to talk a little bit about this. They build up their LinkedIn profiles and you can essentially be part of this private thing for and we charge, for example, we charge between five and six thousand eight hundred euro for this package. That for us is our are done with you, one of our main done with you packages. And so it’s that the key here is you’re moving your one to one client to a one to many client. And in that group, you could have 30 people paying.
Finn Thormeier: And are you selling this to the same audience, meaning the corporates? Or is it that naturally you attract kind of like a lower market audience?
Jonathan Courtney: So we have, for us, we just want to have all of the options for people to buy. And so we advertise generally to... The B2C, so individuals wanting to do something with us. And this automatically, you’ll have someone from Microsoft jumping on one of these B2C calls. And they’re like, hey, I’m personally, individually interested in learning facilitation. I want to buy your course and I want to buy blah, blah. And then we’ll say, cool. Or... How about you get nine or 10 more of your colleagues in and we can do an in-person version of this or whatever. And so we will upsell to the done for you or bigger things. But if you look at our YouTube channel, it’s always kind of advertising to individuals, We’re learning the thing because it’s very hard to advertise to corporate entities or enterprises or CEOs. And so we always advertise rather to the employee who might be working with that person who we want to sell to. And so yours is a pretty easy one, like you’re selling hands-on, Social media management services to individuals. You could just as easily give those same individuals a video onboarding with a weekly group coaching call. And say, you’re part of this program for six months. It costs $5,000. If you want to stay in after that point, it’s an extra $2,500 per six months. And then you can keep joining those coaching calls. I have two of these communities active right now. I can share my screen and show you exactly how that looks. And those for us, I mean... Those, it’s hard to say exactly now, normalized over 16 years, but I would say they’re pretty significant. Some years those have maybe been, are done with you stuff has probably been responsible for 80% of our revenue on some years. We still do large corporate deals, but now the cool thing is like we can do a 500k deal without me having to do a lot of work because I can, so for example, I have a deal, Where in September, I’m going to fly to the US, do a two-day workshop for a corporate client with 75 people in the room. That in itself brings in 200K. And that’s a large scale training, right? Instead of doing one to one. But they then buy licenses to our program for the employees who they don’t want to pay to be in the room with me. And then that can be another year’s worth of licenses being purchased. And so it just gives us, again, more options to sell more stuff.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And do you do it on school? Is that where you do the community?
Jonathan Courtney: We have the community on school, yeah. Some people use Circle. There’s a lot of other options as well. I use School just because I was in Sam Oven’s Mastermind for years and I saw him making it.
Finn Thormeier: And you went to the – because my head when I thought about let’s offer a done with you, like mid-tier offer would be to say, hey, you know, like we train you kind of like the workshop that you do where you actually – Maybe not go there in person, but virtually like it’s just you with us and we’ll just spend a month or a couple of weeks or a two day or whatever. And we just train you on everything on how it works. And that’s the done for you. But you went to weekly coaching, put them in a community, give them a course or like a setup course to get started.
Jonathan Courtney: Well, there’s a few options. Another option is an easier one. So if you go to ajandsmart.com forward slash partners, I think this is probably It’s as close to your business as we have. Is it agents? Yeah. So our main thing we offer costs. So the main thing we do with clients here is the two-day growth jam where we spend two full days with the CEO of a company, usually some of their team members. They pay us a hundred thousand euro. It’s me and Laura who both have been running AJ and Smart for years. And over those two days, we just... Figure everything out for growing your business over the next 12 months usually. And at the end of it, we have this guarantee that if you don’t feel like you’re going to be making an extra 200K after spending these days with us, we’re just not going to charge you. So that’s our done for you, extremely hands-on offer. And as you can imagine, not a lot of people can buy that. And so our done with you is group masterminds and those are in person, although I just did a virtual one like three weeks ago. They’re in person mostly and usually up to 25 to 35 people will come to it and we charge usually around 8,000 to 9,000 euro per ticket. The difference is that you’re in a group. You’re hanging out in a group and I’m helping broadly everybody. I’m answering everybody’s questions. The days are long, but I’m not sitting with you and helping you. And so that’s a really easy in-between step before you do any sort of courses because courses are annoying as fuck and they take loads of time. Basically, what I’m trying to say is One-to-one or one-to-many. It’s the same thing, but you have to just figure out how do you deliver it in a one-to-many approach. And the beauty is, as you can probably guess, you get 35 people in a room for a one-to-many thing, and then two or three of them will be like, actually, can you just do it for me? And then they want the one-to-one thing.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit reframing how I think about done for you, whether it’s done with you because the two-day, you kind of positions the two-day growth gem as the done for you because it’s one-to-one. But obviously, it’s still kind of like, hey, here’s what needs to happen. It’s not that you guys run their marketing for them as a retainer.
Jonathan Courtney: Yeah, we do not because we don’t want to is the main thing. However, we are sitting there, we’re writing the copy. We are, in some cases, creating the landing pages on the fly, making the email. We are executing as well within those two days. I’ll give you an example. Actually, let me just check if they’re on the actual website as a testimonial. Well, almost every example that’s on the website, what happened is they spent two days with us and within seven days, they’re already making double, triple, quadruple what it is they spent with us. Part of that is because we’re actually helping them make the thing as well. So I’ll sit there and write the person’s webinar, like with Alan, who’s on the website. I’ll sit there, he has his phone on record mode, and I’m like, all right, here’s what you say. And I’ll just say the whole webinar, the hook, everything. And so there is the execution element, but the minute the two days is over, it’s over.
Finn Thormeier: Right. And And to come back to, because one part of it is obviously, and I know we’re almost running out of time here, one part of it is gaining more leverage to make more money, which I am not opposed to, even though I’m German.
Jonathan Courtney: That’s also so that you don’t have to do stuff you don’t want to do. Like that’s a big part of it for me. I also don’t want to, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do someone’s marketing for them.
Finn Thormeier: Right, because then you’re in the day-to-day grind and optimizing their ad campaigns. And to you, those two days are more fun because you’re actually in person. You create things you do think. It’s one of, it’s new for you. And then the kind of, let’s say, day-to-day, okay, let’s check the ad manager every day and let’s do a webinar every week. That type of routine is not executed by you guys.
Jonathan Courtney: No, I would hate to do this.
Finn Thormeier: Interesting.
Jonathan Courtney: We have this other option which we very rarely sell where if you are making over a million per year revenue and we do the growth jam and it works out, then we might do like a 12-month advisory with you where we take a cut of your revenue, you have access to calling me, all of that stuff. But I mostly don’t like doing that. Rarely even pitch it as an option. I also just don’t like to be on anybody else’s schedule, hence unscheduled. I don’t want to do that. A lot of the leverage building is just to not have to do anything on someone else’s time.
Finn Thormeier: All right, let’s wrap it up. I have lots to think about. I took notes.
Jonathan Courtney: By the way, I’m not in a rush if you have more questions. I have to record my podcast. You have to? As in, I would like to.
Finn Thormeier: Well, I think part of the problem for me, and it sounds like it’s a little bit similar to you, On the one hand, I’m money motivated. Like, it’s not like I’m opposed to money. I like money. I also like nice things. I like the fact that we have a nice apartment here in Berlin. All those things are expensive. On the other hand, every single time where I was like, okay, you know what? I’m just gonna fucking heads, go heads down. Just, you know, stop doing the reading and the this and the that and go play billiard with my friends. And I’m just going to lock in and just like go ham on this stuff. The second that we reach a really healthy point where I’m making, you know, after tax, I’m making really good money that’s beyond what I need. I’m just like. Oh man, but I really do want to go play billiard. And I really do want to, you know, read in the morning for an hour or an hour and a half before work. And like, it’s just like drains me if all my day is just sitting here for, you know, the eight or 10 hours and grinding away. You’re dumb.
Jonathan Courtney: You’re literally not you didn’t hear it. If you have to sit down and do 10 hours of work to be successful, then you’re just doing stupid shit like you don’t need to. I’m joking, by the way, that you’re dumb. I know you’re not. Who knows? All of all of those things that you do, you should also have time to do while you’re building your business and making it successful. I think that anyone The only people I know who are grinding that hard and are successful are Silicon Valley folk who actually need to do because they’re building crazy shit and they’re trying to win. When you’re not in a crazy zero-sum game, you’re running an agency, there’s no reason on this planet that you should be working What do you even do in 10 hours? What is there even to do? The only reason that you would fill that time is if you’re making the huge mistake of being the CEO and delivering stuff. Founder CEOs of agencies should not be delivering more than one to two days per month. And all of the rest of the time is about looking for the leverage, right? It’s like, again, if you just want to be a freelancer, that’s fine. That’s different. But if you’re running a small business and you’re looking for leverage and you want to do interesting things, then... An example, this week is our biggest week of the first half of the year. The two biggest days at AJ and Smart are Black Friday and this week. This is the summer sale. And... I have nothing to do with it because I did my like couple of hours a couple of weeks ago with my team and this now I’m sitting here chatting with you. I’m going to do my podcast afterwards. I am not sitting around executing that and I’m not talking to the clients. I’ll turn up to that two day workshop in September. I’ll get on the plane. I’ll do those things. I think that it’s often It’s a lack of looking for ways to be more leveraged. And I think that in Germany, especially people, when I’m chatting with people and they’re like, oh my God, I’m so busy, I have to do this. And I’m like, don’t you have a personal assistant? And they’re like, oh no, that’s stupid, I can do it all myself. Yeah, but this 1,500 euro per month to get a good executive assistant means that you don’t have to go and figure out the thing that broke in your apartment and now needs to be fixed and now it’s taking up your time. I think that, again, that’s why I come back to this concept of leverage. If you have to work, if the only way that you make more money is by working harder, it means that you need to tweak the system a little bit. For example, this podcast, my show, The Unscheduled CEO, I record once per week with no prep. I mean, like you’re doing here. It’s not a huge amount of prep needs to be done. I don’t know what you’re doing, how you’re monetizing this show or if you are at all. I’m not.
Finn Thormeier: I’m not.
Jonathan Courtney: So I monetize my show. So the leverage from my show is I’ll do an episode and I’m thinking the whole time, well, what’s the way for me to I actually like to do the podcast. That’s something I like doing. So I’m like, if I’m putting my time into that, well, how does that turn into a million euro in a year? How can unscheduled CEO be one million euro per year? Because then I’ll keep doing it and I like to do it. Versus And then I test things out with that. An example of that is I’m doing the podcast and then I’m like, okay, how do I just see if this thing can make 100K all in one go? And again, almost no one’s listening to my show, but I want to test it out. And so I say, hey, Next month, I’m going to be in LA. If anyone wants to learn this marketing stuff directly from me, I’m doing a little mastermind. It’s 8K per ticket. You can buy it. And then I’ll see how many people buy it. I’ll see how many people sign up for it. And so then I see, oh, okay, 20 people signed up for that. That’s based on only 500 people listening to the show. If 10,000 people are listening to the show, I could do that twice a year with 50 people coming to it. And then I’m always just thinking, How can I do the things that I enjoy doing? I like to play video games. That’s my thing, by the way. And so I want to record one hour in a day, get the episode out, and I want to not have to think about it until next week again. And I will monetize it once or twice a year and that covers the entire year of that one thing. And so, yeah, I’m always just trying to figure that out. What is the hyper leverage? And by the way, I stole this idea from other people. Maybe one of the biggest things I can recommend to you is spend time with other people who are so over the top high leverage that you feel like an idiot.
Finn Thormeier: I do feel like an idiot on this podcast.
Jonathan Courtney: But you know what? Listen, one of my mentors, a guy called Blake Lagrange, I did an episode with him. I chatted with him and he was like, he was like, all right, Jonathan Courtney, I’ll mentor you for 100K. I’m like, what? He’s like, yeah, come hang out with me for two days and it’s 100K. And I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about? And And I fucking paid for it. He managed to sell it to me. And guess what? That’s why AJ and Smart Partners two days cost 100K is because he unlocked that for me. It was extremely valuable, like the two days with him. And the fact that I paid $100K meant that I took it extremely seriously. And it was like, if you are able to find people... Who are doing things that are so high leverage that it seems actually ridiculous and it seems like not, like sometimes you hear like, oh, did you know that this famous singer, well, let’s say Ed Sheeran, you know, like he probably goes on stage for two hours and makes 30 million.
Finn Thormeier: Sure.
Jonathan Courtney: So why should we be...
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, why should I not be making 30 million in
Jonathan Courtney: two hours? It’s not about 30 million, but why should we be trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel so often and not think about... I mean, you spend all this time reading all these books, you’re collecting all this knowledge, you’re providing a service to clients that maybe makes them a lot more money than you charge them. I think sometimes it’s just about finding what’s the way, what would it look like? And this is a Tim Ferriss thing, which I think is fantastic. What would it look like if I could only work four hours per week? What are the activities that I would actually do? What would I do if I could only work four hours a week? And the weird thing about doing that experiment is that maybe that’s all you actually need to do to build something extremely leveraged.
Finn Thormeier: You can head out here any second you want. And I know that in the end, it’s me who needs to do that thinking. But if you were me with the things that you know now, which are limited, what would be the first thing that you would do to gain more leverage in my business, to make more while working less?
Jonathan Courtney: Honestly, I would say try to find... This sounds really stupid. Try to find an American... Business owner who’s willing to mentor for a day or something. They will show you in a day or two hours or three hours what no European can show. I think you just need to sometimes be shown how And like how unbelievably inefficient it is what we are doing. Like, you know, when I saw, when Iman Gadji came to my office and he was like, oh, you guys are like, we were 36 people at AJ and Smart running design sprint. We were 36 people, I think, making 3 million euros. And there was then a point where we were like 14 people making 6.5 million euro. So it’s a... There’s really often... Often it’s not just that you need to sell more or you need to put your prices up or whatever it is. It’s often that we’re choosing hard mode by selling very hands-on complex services. And... If you just see someone else doing something similar to you, but doing it in a much more leveraged way, it can be shocking. And like Blake, he didn’t have any social media following. I didn’t know anything about him. And he’s like, Yeah, a hundred thousand euro. I’m like, fucking hell, dude. All right. The other thing is also like, you know, there’s another thing to all of this is you want to look for people who are, who understand the value of buying a shortcut. Like if you’re trying to sell to people, if you’re trying to sell your service to people who are nitpicking and we’re like, I don’t know, maybe I could do this myself. Then it’s also more difficult than it needs to be. Often, it’s about who you’re selling to, looking for the highest leverage or the people who just really respect their time and really want someone else to do stuff for them. You don’t want to be wasting time trying to convince people who are frugal and do everything themselves already. It’s a waste of life. But if I were you, honestly, I mean, if you can... I don’t think Blake mentors anymore, unfortunately. I have a recommendation of a really good mentor, and this is not a, I don’t get something if you use this person or something, but I worked with a guy for two years. I don’t know if he does one-on-one anymore. His name is Brian Franklin. He used to be, coincidentally, the business mentor, business coach of the CEO of LinkedIn, so there’s a connection for you. And I worked with him for two full years every week. And this was someone who This was someone who changed a lot for me in terms of business growth. And he’s very good also at the personal stuff like the village thing. He actually does something like this actually in the US. I won’t talk about it in case he doesn’t want me to talk about it because I used his name. But he does something like a very large community thing. It’s funny because I remember I was... So I was at a conference in Nashville. I was having breakfast. I sat next to this guy and this guy was like, hey, were you in Sam Owens Mastermind? Really weird coincidence. And I was chatting to him and he was like, yeah, man, currently the thing that’s the biggest impact on me is that I’m working with this guy called Brian Franklin. And I asked him to connect me with him. It took a month because Brian does not respond.
Finn Thormeier: It’s Brian with a Y, right?
Jonathan Courtney: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He should have like- Yeah, I think I found him.
Finn Thormeier: Executive coach.
Jonathan Courtney: Yes, exactly. I can personally say that he was a very good coach and every session afterwards, I felt like, okay, this person is just smarter than me. This person is more leveraged than me. This person makes more money than me. This is important as well, actually. I think it’s also good if the person is just more balling out than you and basically doesn’t need it and is only doing it for fun. Brian does not need to do this, I promise you. It’s the same with Blake. That’s why he’s like 100K. If I had said 50, he would have said, yeah, I don’t care anyway because I spend time with him. This guy doesn’t need one cent more. If you can find these people who are done making money and just looking to chat to other entrepreneurs, it’s just insane value. Brian is great. Okay, I’ll check
Finn Thormeier: it out. I think there’s probably some blocker in me too because I’ve never
Jonathan Courtney: had a mentor or coach or... Dude, that’s insane. That’s insane. That is actually kind of probably...
Finn Thormeier: I mean, I follow people and I listen to people, but not like one-on-one, you know, that type of thing.
Jonathan Courtney: Can I tell you something that’s probably blocking you more than anything? Yeah. If you’ve never spent money on something like that, then... I say this to people all the time. If you don’t spend large sums of money to get a shortcut, then it’s hard for you to sell things that give a shortcut to other people for large sums of money. So it’s very easy for me. If I was your salesperson for some reason, it would be very easy for me to sell your thing because I buy that kind of thing all the time. So I’m like... When someone’s talking to me about that, it’s so clear to me that they should buy it because it’s a shortcut. Yeah, I think this might be a case of just breaking some limiting beliefs and getting into the habit of also being a buyer. So then you can see, for example, when you’re working with Brian, you’ll see he turns up to a 90-minute call. I don’t know how much he charges, but it’s a shit ton of money. And you’re going to be like... You’re going to be like, this is a week’s worth of my time to make this much money and he makes it in 90 minutes and he didn’t even prep. And he probably doesn’t even remember who I am until he gets on the call. And yet it’s really effective. And by the way, this guy, he’s a great example of someone, at least the last time I worked with him, he doesn’t even ever try to lock you into any sort of, like, you have to do six sessions with me. You just continue it if you want, you don’t if you don’t. And he said his minimum is two years with every client. And I was like... I was like, for me, I don’t think that’s really makes sense because I always outgrow. But no, two years, two and a half years, I think I worked with him and I still never really outgrew him.
Finn Thormeier: Noted. All right, let’s wrap it up here. I have a page of notes. This was really, I really appreciate you taking the time to- Yeah,
Jonathan Courtney: thank you, man. Thanks for having me on.
Finn Thormeier: Cool.
Jonathan Courtney: The Executive Brand Podcast.
Finn Thormeier: There you go. The most unusual episode.
Jonathan Courtney: What’s it usually about?
Finn Thormeier: Building an executive brand. So like I usually interview CEOs or founders or executives who have a big brand, which you have, like you do and you are kind of represent, like you’re a CEO and you have a big kind of personal brand. But we didn’t talk about how you did that.
Jonathan Courtney: Yeah, well, next time. Next time.
Finn Thormeier: All right. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Jonathan Courtney: Of course. Yeah. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. And thanks for letting me ramble and see ya. Nice.
