He Signed 108 Clients in a Single Month

Full transcript of Josh Nelson’s interview with Brady Sticker of Church Candy. Lightly edited for readability.

Josh Nelson: All right. Hello and welcome. I am joined live today with Brady Sticker, who has accomplished a feat, I don't think I've ever seen any other independent agency owner accomplish. Not only has he grown to multiple seven figures serving the church niche, but literally last month in his agency, he closed or enrolled or signed up 108 clients in a single month, more than what most agencies might aspire to in an entire year. And so I wanted to have Brady on just to kind of pick his brain and hear how he did it, how he made it happen. So Brady, first of all, congratulations on that amazing outcome. Talk to us a little bit about how you brought that into existence.

Brady Sticker: Yeah, man. Yeah. So I wanna just start by like giving all the glory to not myself. I don't think it was anything special that I did. I can share some tactics with you, but I 100% believe that God opened up the doors for us to be able to do this. Wonderful. Josh, I've got some of my team members texting. Where is this being streamed? How are they… How can they watch this?

Josh Nelson: It's on YouTube right now, as well as the Digital Marketing Agency Success Facebook group. But if you look it up on Seven Figure Agency, on YouTube, you'll, you'll find the live stream right there.

Brady Sticker: Got it. Got it. All right. I just texted them they'll hop on. But yeah, man. So for context, our niche is churches. So we help churches get new guests with Facebook and Instagram ads. This all started because I was a pastor. I was a youth pastor at a church, and I don't know if any of you guys know this, youth pastors do not get paid very much. And so my day job, I was working for my dad's agency, Cairo Candy Marketing. A lot of you guys know Billy Sticker. So my dad started Cairo Candy back when I was in high school, and I was employee number one whenever I moved to Bible college. And so I kinda just thought, "Okay, cool. I will go be a youth pastor, and then my day job, I will work at Cairo Candy 'cause I'll have some flexibility with my schedule." And while I was at Bible college, I just felt the Lord put on my heart like, "Hey, everything that I'm doing for these chiropractors, the local church needs that." And so that's kinda how Church Candy started. I started helping my church that I was on staff at as a youth pastor, and then my pastor started connecting me with all of these other, church planters and pastors in other cities and saying, "Hey, check out what my, what my youth pastor's doing. Let's, g- see if you can… He can help you as well." And that was back in 2021. So I started an agency side hustle back in 2021. In 2022, I was like, "All right. Let's, let's make this thing full-time, full-time-ish. More like take it seriously." so I jumped in, bought churchcandy.com, and really just started to scale the business. And so fast-forward a few years, I've got a full sales team. We've been building the Church Candy brand for years. We have an email list of like 15,000 people. And basically what… It was kind of the perfect storm because it was the month before Easter, so a lot of people know like, okay, Easter, it's kind of a big deal for churches. Like this week my team hardly gets any meetings booked because all of our clients are just like slammed, really busy prepping for Easter Sunday. Mm. So for us, we knew, okay, the month before Easter we gotta do something big. And our structure for the way it works is we have one offer, Facebook and Instagram ads for churches, and then there's a SaaS component as well that, the SaaS church funnels. It's a separate LLC. It's a separate, whole separate thing. But basically they're paying $750 a month for us to run their ads, and then they get access to a GoHighLevel subaccount, that's branded as software called Church Funnels. Now, with that, they normally have to pay, a onboarding fee or set up fee their first month, which kinda helps with our margins 'cause we have a full-time team member that does onboarding for us. We… It helps cover the sales team's commission and just, it's more expensive for their first month. Well, we decided for the month of March, hey, we're gonna waive that for anyone. So it's essentially an extra 500 bucks. So we just put out and said, "Hey, if you wanna get started in March, you can save $500 on your first month. Click below to schedule a call." We updated all of our ads with that call to action. We sent out several emails. Because we had been doing so many sales calls over the years, we had a list of like 1,500 leads that had had a sales call with us- Mm… That never signed up. And so what we should have done, Josh, is dripped a text to them. But you know visionaries. We're like, "No, let's just send it all now." That was a mistake. Definitely drip your texts whenever it's like that because the copy was great. The te- the… It was ama- it was like, "Hey, Josh. Brady here from Church Candy. I've got a handful of spots, for a $500 off your first month. I wanna make sure it's for churches that can handle new guests. Would Seven Figure Agency be a good fit for this?" And the response rate on that was like- Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh my gosh. And so luckily we have a full-time SDR that was able to go through all of those messages in HighLevel to respond to people and get them scheduled for a meeting and, yeah. And so some of the questions I saw was like, "Oh, what was the Facebook ad angle? Like, what were your hooks you used? Or what does the funnel look like?" And it's not that we used a special Facebook ad or a special hook. It was the right offer to the right audience and trust and authority that was built over time. Mm. Because all these people that signed up, they didn't just hear about Church Candy that week or that month. No I will go to church conferences now and have people stop me going, "Brady, how close are you guys to hitting a million?" Mm. Because our big mission as a company is we wanna connect a million people to a local church. Mm. And I have people stop me at these church conferences a- and like people are– Josh, people are asking me for pictures. Yeah? Like, like they wanna take pictures with me. Like, okay. Like… And that all happens because we've built this brand as a company. And man, we've just seen so much favor from the Lord and open doors that has led to this. But I think it's the right offer to the right audience at the right time.

Josh Nelson: So good. So a lot of this was like a database reactivation play, unconverted opportunities, a built pent-up authority with the right offer coming right into a peak season for these churches. Amazing. Would love to unpack a little bit how you developed that authority. I know over the years you've done a lot of short-form video, you've done a lot of speaking, you've done a lot of stuff. Like how did you build that authority for the agencies that are, that are listening?

Brady Sticker: It's a couple things. Number one are, books. Mm. So I have two books that I've written. This one, "The Plan Your Visit Playbook," and the second one, "Launch Big." The reason I've done two is 'cause we essentially have two audiences. Mm. I would never recommend an agency to work with startups, like people just getting started. But in the church world, there is a process called church planting- Mm… Where it's less of a startup and think of it more like a franchise, to where they have funding, they have like full SOPs, and there are these church planters that have hundreds of thousands of dollars raised, and they're going to start a new church in a new city, and they need marketing, right? And so that's where the "Launch Big" came in, 'cause we work with a lot of these church planters. So this is digital marketing for church planters starting at day one. This one I need to redo mainly this b- this looks more like a lead magnet than an actual book cover. So I wanna, I need to redo this.

Josh Nelson: Juice it up, juice it up a little bit.

Brady Sticker: Yeah. But, so it started with the books and in all the content I would make, just have a call to action to get the books. I think, especially me, I'm 26 years old, and I started when I was 21, 22. And so with that, it's– I know some people, like agency owners, get imposter syndrome, right? It's like, I don't know if… Like, am I, like, am I the right person to even be talking about this? Well, we had kind of a case study from my church. I've been doing digital marketing for years with my dad's business, and so I knew what I was talking about, but having a physical book really helped with that. All of our content, I was able to plug the book. And then starting a podcast. You know, there's another guy in the church world, he runs an agency, but not like digital marketing. They– it's actually cool. They'll take a church's live stream- Mm… From like their sermons, and then they chop it up into reels for them. So like that's their agency model. He crushed it. He's a good friend of mine now, but he's someone that like I used to listen to his podcast whenever I was, still a youth pastor 'cause he would always talk about content and things for churches. And I was like, "Man, I would love to get him as a guest on my podcast." I would love for him to be the first guest. So I shoot him a cold DM on Instagram. I was like, "Hey man, starting a podcast. We've got this company." At the time I maybe had like 15 clients. And when you're running a like low ticket, high volume, agency model, 15 clients is not a lot. Mm. Yeah. It, it's not like I was charging 2K or 3K for these, for these guys. Well, I told him, sent him an Instagram DM saying, "Hey, I'm starting a podcast. I'd, I'd love for you to be on it." And he goes, "Hey, Brady, I would love to be on. Let's do this. I'll be your 10th guest, or after you have 10 guests, then I'll be on." Because I'm sure he probably gets hit up all the time to be guests on podcasts and like what are the stats where like 98% of podcasts don't get past 10 episodes? Yep. So I'm glad that he kinda gave me that goal because, man, I hustled and grinded and I… A- and over the next like, you know, 10 weeks, I found these guests. I did the podcast. You can go back on my YouTube channel and the, the quality was not good, man. The content wasn't, wasn't great. Wasn't great compared to what we do now. But it was motivation for me just to start. And that was so pivotal because I'll have people now bring up podcast episodes I did years ago- Mm-hmm… And I'm like, "Ugh, I'm glad you liked it. Probably need to delete that and re-record the content." but it just showed that we went and did that. And now, him and I, his name is also Brady, him and I are good friends. I was texting him this morning. I flew up to Canada, and we did like an in-person podcast together. But- So good… Him setting that goal for me of like, "Hey, I'll be your 10th guest." So any agency owners out there, I'll be your 10th guest on your podcast.

Josh Nelson: Yeah. Get 10, get 10 episodes out, I'll be number 11 for you.

Brady Sticker: But for me, like that was huge 'cause it was motivation to like go crank out these episodes. Mm. And today we've kinda gone all in on our podcast. Have I even told you about this, Josh, what we're doing?

Josh Nelson: No, I'd love to hear it.

Brady Sticker: So I would travel a lot for work, speaking at different events and sponsoring, setting up stuff, and I've got young kids. And I mean, my kids are younger than yours, Josh. I've got a f- my son just turned four. We had his birthday party on Saturday, and my daughter's one. Yeah. And it's, it's kinda tough when you have young kids like this- Yeah… To travel that much because they're so dependent on mom and dad. And they are my first ministry. They're my first business is my family- Mm-hmm… Not the Church Candy or the ministry stuff I do at church. And so I wanna be present dad. I don't wanna Be gone that much. And so I basically convinced my wife to let us convert one of our guest bedrooms into a podcast studio. Nice. And so now we have, in fact, I can pull it up and kind of show you here. So we probably dropped about $10,000 into podcast gear, equipment, renovating this room. You cannot. And so now we run in-person, interviews, and we'll fly our clients out, and this is a great play for agent- That's at your house?

Josh Nelson: It looks… That's a beautiful shot with the wood paneling behind you. Yeah, that's nice.

Brady Sticker: It, it was great. It– And I paid a guy on my team, basically gave him the company credit card and I was like, "Here's your budget. You gotta get the gear, you gotta do the set design." and what's cool too is like if we ever move or if we wanna move into a commercial space, the majority of the investment was the gear, and then like those w- those wall panels, they just come off and we can move them to a different set. Hmm. But this is great for us now to where I will pay for a client- You come, you come to me and I'll be with my family and I'll- You come to us… Spend quality time with you and… Right. Yes. And what's awesome about it is I've never had a client that we've flown out to be on the podcast cancel. Hmm. Granted, we just started this year, but I'm flying them out. I'm– I need to check with our team, but I think we're putting them like in first class flights- Hmm… To Houston, putting them in a nice hotel. They're– We have like a gift basket waiting for them in the hotel. We have like… We don't just give them like an Uber gift card. We like have a transportation service, so like a guy in a black suit holding up an iPad with their name on it when they get to the airport. Nice. Take them to the hotel and pick them up from the hotel the next morning, take them to my house. I take them to lunch, and I try to take them to a good restaurant here in Houston, some good Tex-Mex or barbecue. So just try to really just show them a good time. And that the podcast is great content because it's them just telling their story. Mm-hmm. And we try to integrate how Church Candy fits in there without it being too salesy. Like we don't just make it an infomercial about us. Right. But I mean, Josh, kind of… You kind of do something similar with 7FA where it's like, hey, even me right now, like I'll, I'll sit here and tell my story and I'll also say the reason we were able to have 108 clients is because 7 Figure Agency gave us a lot of tools to be able to onboard and to be able to serve those clients and the community there. And so there's a little shameless plug for 7FA. There's our plug.

Josh Nelson: Yeah, there's our plug. Thanks. Yeah, yeah.

Brady Sticker: Josh, why didn't you fly me out? How come I'm not in Miami right now?

Josh Nelson: Exactly. You know, I'm getting off cheap here.

Brady Sticker: Yeah. Next time, Josh, you can, you can fly out here and we can do the podcast in person in my studio. But- Yeah… The content play has been huge for us. And like we have podcast episodes that have like 10,000 views, 5,000 views on YouTube- Hmm…

Josh Nelson: That have, for us, popped off and really just, gotten a lot of traction.

Brady Sticker: And so it's, it's about building a brand, right? It's not about one specific Facebook ad that we ran. Now, we also spend 10 to $20,000 a month on Facebook ads- Hmm… To fill up our sales team's calendar. Yeah. Like positioning-wise, you've, you've, you've run out all of the plays so well.

Josh Nelson: Publishing the book, doing the podcast, speaking at industry events and conferences, and in a relatively short window of time, at 26, have positioned yourself as the celebrity expert marketer in the, in the church space, which is amazing. You did something really interesting in April or in March that led to this influx in new clients, and you kind of brought the entire community along with you, everybody that followed you on social media. Yeah. You set a big goal. You put some stakes behind it. You created some energy around it. Talk to us about that, 'cause I think that's an under- Yeah.

Brady Sticker: I haven't even shared the-… Told story of this whole process. Yeah. So we've never gotten close to 100 new clients in a month before.

Josh Nelson: What was the previous record?

Brady Sticker: The previous goal was 60, and I was like, "How can we beat that 60 goal?" Wow. And so I kind of took a play out of the Grant Cardone 10X principle. Yeah. It's like, look, set your goal higher, do the work like you're trying to hit a higher goal, and then you'll reach your original KPI that you're trying to hit, right? Mm-hmm. So it's like, how can we get to 70 new clients? Well, so I told my team, and not just my sales team, I told everyone. I was like, "Hey, here's some benchmarks for us. If we can get to 50 clients in a month, we have our staff retreat coming up in July." So all of our team, most of our team works in Texas, and they're all remote. So I said, "Hey, we're gonna have our staff retreat in July. If we get to 50 clients, instead of,…" Or no, 50 clients was karaoke. They kept saying they wanted to do karaoke. And like, sure, we could just go to Amazon, get a $20 little mic and do things on YouTube, but I was like, let's… What if we like rented like a professional karaoke DJ and like m- like bring out all the stops for that celebration? Do it up. Fifty clients, we'll do karaoke at our staff retreat. Seventy-five clients, instead of box lunches from like Chick-fil-A or Jason's Deli, we'll do, bring in a hibachi chef and bring in hibachi. Keep in mind, this is like between all of our team and spouses, like for 50 people, so that, it's gonna be- Big. Yeah… A little pricey. Yeah. So hibachi was if we got 75. And then I said, "If we, if we hit 100 new clients, I will let you guys tattoo. We'll bring a tattoo artist to the s-staff retreat, and you guys can tattoo whatever you want on me." Now, I'm gonna be honest, I didn't realistically think that they were gonna- That was sort of unexpected, unpossible- Yeah. Like I was like-… That was like-… This would be crazy. They're– Like I didn't think they were gonna do it, and then they did Now, there were, there were a good handful of clients that were returning, and that's easy, like d- clients that had canceled. Right. The win-backs. And we always wanna lo- love them out the door.

Josh Nelson: Mm. And we have a lot of them that they cancel and then they– but they keep paying, for the SaaS.

Brady Sticker: Mm. And so that relationship's still there, and we had like over a dozen of those guys sign up, which really helped us get over that 100 hump. But yeah, man, the setting the goals were huge and, I wanna talk about a, a little bit Matt Platt. He's been a huge inspiration for me. Like- Mm… I just wanna let any agency owner know out there, I don't have like any special skills. I feel like sometimes I don't know what I'm talking about. But I think something I'm really good at is seeing other people, like Matt Platt, for example. Mm-hmm. Maybe he's watching. If not, we'll send him a clip. Yeah. He's someone where sometimes I hear him talk and I'm like, "Man, this guy, like he's a genius." Hearing what he's done with, his media company, like sending a van to people's- Mm-hmm… Restaurants, like, dude, that's so innovative. And then sometimes I hear him talk and I think, "This guy's an absolute goofball." Like-… And I love Matt Platt, but I would, I would tell that to his face. Yeah. And so I see what he's done with his business and I'm like, "Okay, this guy's kind of a goofball. Like, he's a genius, but like if he can do that, then I can, then I can do it." Yeah. Right? A- and I, and I see these guys, that were in the Titans group or I, I remember when the Titans group s-started, I was like maybe at 100K MRR, and I was like, "It's gonna be me.

Josh Nelson: It's not gonna be long." Get your Titans sweater.

Brady Sticker: Give it a little bit. I know. I gotta… I've got my Titans y- I normally drink the Titans, Yeti. That's like my daily, but today- Nice… It was dirty, so I'm using Stanley today. But, yeah. So just seeing other agency owners and it's like, well, if they can do it, I can do it. Mm. And that was a big thing for me. And so whenever I was first getting started, I was the one taking all the sales calls. And I set a goal of, okay, I want– we wanna get to 200 clients by the end of the year. And so I basically wrote sticky notes. Okay, December, 200 clients. Well, and then I did the math to where it's like, okay, well then that means in November I would have to have 180 clients, and in October I would need to have… So I basically set benchmark goals of- You just engineered it… Where I would need to be at that time. And then I did the math like, okay, if I'm closing 30% of my sales calls and I'm taking this many calls a day, I was like, well, I'm not gonna have time to do anything else. I'm gonna have to be on sales calls Monday through Friday from 9:00 to 5:00, maybe one-hour break to like eat or breathe, answering emails between that. There's no way I can just do that by myself. So, basically what I did was realized I've gotta hire someone else to help me. And so I brought on a guy, he's not working with us anymore, but he's, he's a good friend of mine. His name's Thomas. And I basically had him shadow my sales calls and then let him start leading the sales calls, and then he started closing people while I would just like be on there and watch. And now I was like, "All right, dude, you can just take it and run with it." And so whenever I– it's, man, it's such a good feeling whenever a new client would sign up- Mm… And I didn't talk to them. Yeah. Like that first time that happened is like, oh wow. Like this is so cool. And so freeing me up to do other things in the business, work with our fulfillment team and, s-stepping into more of a visionary role and getting myself out of sales, 'cause I realized I was the bottleneck in our business. If it was gonna grow, then it would have to be through me and I, I– there's only so much time in the day. Mm. And then we got to where our ads were crushing it for us, and Thomas' sales calendar filled up, and I was like, "Hey, we gotta bring someone else on." So we bring on, Chris, I think s-started taking some sales calls, and we get him trained up. And now, Chris' calendar's filling up, so let's bring someone else on. So Abraham comes on and basically it was figuring out, okay, get a new salesperson on. Get it, get our ads performing to where it's filling up their calendar. Once they s-stay at around 90% capacity, bring someone else on. And we just kept doing that, and today we have four closers that work with us. And now the problem is, okay, how are we gonna make sure all of their calendars stay full? Mm-hmm. And so that, those are things that we're working on. It was easy last month when we had that big push. Now all of my clients, everyone in my niche, they're not taking their calls. They're all busy. They're all busy doing other things. They're all busy. And so my sales team's like, what? So anyways, that's kind of what we did, is we just realized it was just volume. It wasn't like, oh, we added Google Ads and then that was the thing that brought this. No, it was just math. Like- Mm… Okay, set a goal. How many conversations is it gonna take to get that goal? How many– What's your close percentage gonna have to be? And so we just kind of set a goal and then work backwards of like, how do we have to structure the business? How do we have to set everything up to hit that goal? And so now the hard part, and I was talking to my wife about this last night. The hard thing that keeps me up at night is, all right, I got four sales guys. Gotta keep them busy. We gotta eat. Yeah. We gotta keep them busy. And so those are the things we're going through now and we're putting a lot of money into ads and trying some new funnel tactics and things to keep their calendars full.

Josh Nelson: S-so good. And you, like you've, you're… I, I think everyone listening should be inspired by what Brady's accomplished and think bigger, right? If you're thinking five clients a month right now- Could you be thinking 20? If you're thinking 20 clients a month right now, could you think 50, right? And Brady thought bigger. He took action bigger. He hired bigger. He just went bigger in all of the areas within the agency and accomplished magic. I wanna go back to one other thing, you know, just on the, you set the big goals, you got the team excited about those goals and kind of what the celebration was, but there was another piece to it, which is like you publicly proclaimed the goal is 100 clients, and you put it on social media, and you kept beating that drum, and there was some big stakes. Everyone wants to hear about the stakes and kind of like- Yeah. So just talk about, talk to us about that a little bit.

Brady Sticker: Yeah. So being in the church niche, tattoos can be a hot topic. Some people don't like tattoos. Most of our clients, they're fine with it. It's not a big deal. So I decided, you know what? I'm gonna post about it and publicly throw out, like call my shot. And part of it was like, oh, maybe like I'm friends with a lot of pastors, maybe that would kind of give them some motivation. Like, oh, well, I was thinking about signing up with Church Candy now maybe let me look into this. Let's help, let's, help push them over the 100, right? Yeah. So I told them, I was like, "Hey, you can give me a, any tattoo if you get to 100 clients." and then they got to 30 in like the first week.

Josh Nelson: So- They get a little scared, sort of sweat a little bit?

Brady Sticker: Yeah. Well, I mean, what it was is we had all these leads that like were kind of on the fence, and we just hit them with a offer that they would've felt stupid saying no to take a page out of Hermosa's book. And so now I'm thinking, okay, like talking about Matt Plapp. He was like, "How come they just now signed up? Like you had 1,500 leads of people you talked to. What made them, what made them sign up now?" so now I'm like talking to my sales team like, "Yeah, how come we waited until now? Like, what, what do we need to work with with our offers to get these guys signed up sooner rather than later?" But yeah, so we set that goal for the 100 clients, and I'll let my team pick out a tattoo. So they were sending some crazy suggesti- suggestions in our Slack channel or- Yeah, there's a, there's a bunch of chatter here.

Josh Nelson: We'll get right back to the content, but, Corey saying, you know, tattoo suggestions, give them to me. Let's see. Brandon's saying I think it's your, Brandon is saying neck tattoo. Let's see. That's my brother. Yeah. Crosses behind the ears, says Corey. That's a lot of fun. Yeah. I'm gonna, pull up some of the…

Brady Sticker: So they s- in our, we actually use Discord, not Slack, but they were sending out some crazy tattoo suggestions. Like here's-… Like here's a full chest of an angel and- All right. No way… The devil's hiding.

Josh Nelson: That's, that's a lot. That's bold.

Brady Sticker: Here's some, this might get the live stream taken down. Like a, that's like an, a nipple and- Oh, around the…

Josh Nelson: Okay, great. Nice.

Brady Sticker: And so it's Pac-Man eating a nip. So some just like really goofy, tattoo suggestions. So here's what I did, is I told the team, I was like, "Hey, whatever design you land on…" 'Cause some of them aren't bad. Like some of them was like, "Oh, what if we took one of our core values, mission over method, and just did simple text?" And I was like, "Yeah, this I can get behind this. Like that's not that bad." Yeah. That's, that's good. Yeah.

Josh Nelson: It can be a battle verse for you, right.

Brady Sticker: Yeah. I was like, "Whatever you guys decide, if anyone else wants to get that tattoo design, we'll pay for it." Hmm. So now a lot of my team, they're like, "Oh yeah, free tattoo. Let's go." Good news is they're not gonna pick a stupid design. Yeah, 'cause they're involved. It's not, "Let me put it on my body, so we're gonna keep it, we're gonna keep it above board." Yeah. So now they're gonna find something cool that… So, but one of the stipulations at the beginning was my wife has the final say on the design- Okay. Smart… The placement and the size.

Josh Nelson: Yeah. There you go.

Brady Sticker: So I knew it wasn't gonna be like anything on my face or- Right… Anything crazy like that.

Josh Nelson: So, okay. So I think the big takeaway here on thinking bigger, setting a big goal. A lot of us set a goal and we put it in a, in a notebook somewhere, and we keep it to ourselves. There's power in calling your shot, getting the team involved. "Hey, I've got a big goal. Let's, let's all rally behind making this happen." But then having the audacity to publicly proclaim that, right? And to put yourself out there with that kind of conviction, not many people would do that, and I think there's a lot of power to that. I think they're, they're like… Talk to us a little bit if you have any thoughts on why that worked and how that created inspiration for you, your clients, and everybody that saw it kind of rallied behind, you know, this whole thing you did.

Brady Sticker: Yeah. For, so for our team it was, it was a lot of different things. We also… I didn't wanna just do like, "Oh, hey, whoever signs up the most clients gets a bonus or anything like a spiff." We did that to where, I think Abraham signed up a certain amount of client, like, almost a third of the clients that signed up last month. And so because of that, he got like an extra $500 bonus. And then for our account manager, something we did was, "Hey, try to get your clients to send in the referrals." we created a, an affiliate payout. We, we don't have like an affiliate program, but we said, "Hey, if you refer anyone in the month of March, we'll, we'll Venmo you 100 bucks." Like kept it really simple, like we can just Venmo them from the church bank account or church bank account, Church Candy, our work bank account and pay them. And so now my assistant actually has a list of me this week to go through and Venmo all the clients that referred someone. Hmm. But I told my account managers, I was like, "Look, whoever gets their clients to refer the most people, you get a bonus too." And so then my account managers, like they had more skin in the game too to push the clients to give more referrals. And so making the public declaration, it was really just like, I wanna keep us accountable. It's kind of like when you're on a weight journey, right? And you're, you're saying, hey, like it's like the whole thing with 75 Hard. Yeah. You're posting the pictures every day to show your progress to hold it like socially accountable. Mm-hmm. And so for us- Maybe it's just because I'm a man and call it pride, and it's like, "Look, we're doing something really cool, and I wanna tell people about it." because I don't know that we like had, "Oh, oh, you know, Pastor John signed up because he heard Brady was gonna get a tattoo, so he signed up." Like, that's why. I don't think there was much of that. Right. But it at least got some people talking. And so a big thing was we set a bigger goal than what we really thought was possible, and then thought, okay, if we wanted to sign up 100 clients, how much work would we have to do? What would the, what would the tasks look like? Well, there would be, we would have to send emails every few days. We would do a reactivation campaign. We would have to up our ad spend, update our ad copy with this new offer. And so there was a lot of that in it too. We just worked harder because we had bigger goals.

Josh Nelson: So good. Love it. Su-such a great, such a great share and such a great example of what's possible when you think bigger, when you put it out there, when you reverse engineer the KPIs, reverse engineer the team requirements. I wanna open up for questions. If you're getting value from today's interview, wherever you're watching, hit the like button. If you're not subscribed, hit the subscribe button. You– we got at least 30 people on with us live. So ask your questions as you have them. I know one question that's come up at least a dozen times is how in the world do you onboard 108 clients in a month without collapsing the system? Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that, 'cause I know that's the burning question everybody has after, well, how did you get that many clients?

Brady Sticker: Yeah, for sure. So, we had to restructure things to where our client success director, her name is Elisa. She, Elisa. Her name is Elise, and she is a rock star. Mm-hmm. And she is responsible for onboarding. Now, that doesn't mean she has to be the one that takes it. She does take a lot of onboarding calls. Mm-hmm. But she's in charge of just making sure our clients, she's a client success director, so she wants them to have an amazing experience. So she's the one, like our– we send out welcome boxes. That's all automated and stuff, but like sh- she's in charge, "Hey, this person didn't get their welcome box. We gotta make sure they get that." So with that, she would take the onboarding calls, and now obviously 108 clients, that's a lot. So we brought in some contractors that, we've trained, and one of them, she actually works with us as a media buyer, and she used to do some of our onboarding calls for us. And then another one was a former employee that we ended up going separate ways, but we brought back in as a contractor, just to help with onboarding calls. And our system for these onboarding calls are simple. The onboarding calls are to get access to their Facebook and Meta things we need to help them at least start setting up their GoHighLevel subaccount. Mm-hmm. And just to set expectations or reset expectations from sales. Oftentimes at the end of the onboarding call, the goal is to get them scheduled with their account manager. So it's like, "Hey, okay, your account manager is gonna be Caleb. He has next Monday at 2:00 p.m. Are you free then to take your kickoff call with him? Awesome." So they'll get that scheduled. That way there's always like someone that is responsible for communicating with the clients, starting with a salesperson, then their on- onboarding person, then their account manager.

Josh Nelson: Love it. So it wasn't like Brady, you know, added 108 clients to the mix without having figured out in advance, do I have the capacity? How can I make sure these clients- Yeah…are well taken care of? Like, you gotta think that stuff through well in advance. And, Corey quickly from your team just coming in and saying, you know, fulfillment's under control. You got this stuff dialed in, which is, which is great. Let's see.

Brady Sticker: Yes, Corey's amazing. He is our fulfillment director, I think is his title. But he's, he's been with us– he was like one of our first five employees that we ever hired. And he's doing an incredible job leading the team. I think the big way that we were able to… That's how we onboarded the clients. Mm. But like, how do we get their ads live? How do we like- Yeah…service all of them, that volume? Well, we have, we're running the pod structure, and which this is like where I'll give a lot of credit to 7FA just for the community there, that we were able to work with, Chris Rodriguez, one of the coaches, to help us develop our pod structure. Mm. That has allowed us to take on 100 new clients, and we haven't had to hire anyone. Now, granted, we are on a wait list, and people are signing up now to start in May because we have to hire people. So we basically found our capacity. We added 100 clients. Great. Now we gotta hire people, promo- promote, and, those are things that we're working on over the next coming weeks. But, yeah, our pod structure is there's an account manager who's in charge of communication with the clients, and then underneath the account manager, there are two media buyers, both that oversee 30 to 50 client ad accounts. And because we're the, running the church niche, it's not like when I was working in chiro to where every offer was different, where it's like- Mm…okay, this chiropractor, it's a $27, exam, X-ray, and consultation. This one, it's $47, but it's for spinal decompression and this and this. This is included. Now, for us, it's like every offer is basically the same. It's, "Hey, come to church." Like the, the call to action- Mm-hmm…we use is plan your visit. Like that's what the offer is. Come to our church. It doesn't cost you anything, and God loves you, and we wanna help you find your purpose, right? Like, like that's, that's the offer, and now it's so cool. Our team's developing this thing that'll like use AI to take the Fathom recordings from the sales call and onboarding call and scan their website, and then basically take all of that data Plus our ad formats to where it's like, "Hey, have a hook. Here's how the body should be formatted. Here's the call to action, the next step." And it'll write ad copy that is using their voice and the verbiage that they use in their church, and it's just running our, in our format that we know works well. So now we're able to instantly have ads ready, or at least the ad copy ready for them to approve, and it like speaks their language. It's their voice, and it looks like we custom wrote it for them, which we kind of did, but we used AI to help us with that. Yep. Whereas before it was really our team having to manually say, "Oh, this– they said this on their website, so we'll put this here." And there's a lot of manual labor in that. So kinda used AI to help us with that process. And we're, we're just scratching the surface. The team's working on,… This is a shout-out to, Casey Richardson in Ad School, has been working with our team on the fulfillment side to kinda craft the, media buying side of things we do.

Josh Nelson: So good. Love it, love it, love it. So one thing I wanted to come to, you know, 108 clients in the last month, just tremendous. Last time we did an interview, I think it was about a little over a year ago, you were down in Miami. We were in my home studio here. I think you had just crossed seven figures. So now you're way over multiple seven figures. What do you think the biggest catalyst was that helped propel you know, to, you know… A lot of people hit seven figures and they stall out for a few months, and they go up a little bit and they stall out. Like, what's been the catalyst to keep you with constant momentum?

Brady Sticker: Yeah. It might seem like constant momentum, but we-… We hit a big lull there. Yeah. You know, we grew really fast and I remember thinking like, "Man, we got it." Like when my daughter was born, which she's a year old now, and so when she was first born, I took a few weeks off of work and just to be there for my wife and spend time with the new baby. Yeah. And I remember bragging to other agency owners like, "Man, our systems are good. I can step away. I haven't opened my email. Everything's fine." Well, we are at, a baby appointment with our newborn. She's only f- not even a few weeks old, and I get a phone call that one of our account managers quit. Hmm. I was like, "Ugh. Well, we'll figure it out." And so now I'm like taking phone calls in the lobby at this new baby appointment. And still in the back of my head, I'm thinking, "Everything's fine. Everything's good." Well, then we have someone else that, that quit. And the thing was, we were growing so fast I couldn't hire quick enough- Mm-hmm… To handle the momentum. And the issue was our structure. It was we were running the model where the account managers built the ads and talked to clients. Hmm. Well, I would hire someone off the street that they knew churches, it was someone from the church world that maybe used to work for a church. They understood our prospects, but they didn't understand our processes. So I had to teach them how to run ads and how to talk to clients and do all this. Well, they have two weeks of training and I'm like, "Hey, here's 30 clients 'cause this other guy just quit, so here's all his clients." And then they get overwhelmed 'cause they've only been here for two weeks, and I feel like we've given them all this training, but they don't know what they don't know. And one little issue happens, they stress out about it. We know that like, "Oh, this happens all the time. It's easy fix. We can give this to the client. It's, it's fine. It's not a big deal." But in their mind, this is the worst thing in the world. Hmm. 'Cause they got this new job, they hardly had any training. And so because of that, we didn't, we didn't have a churn problem with our clients, we were having a churn problem with our team. Team churn. That's whenever we realized there was a problem. Hmm. And so we basically kinda pumped the brakes. I moved one of my sales guys to fulfillment, and I was like, "Hey, we're either letting you go or you can be an account manager." He's like, "I will be an account manager." So, he's awesome. He helped, he took some sales calls last month in March. We call him the Swiss Army knife. This is Chris. And so with that, we paused our momentum and rolled out EOS and switched to the pods model at the same time. Hmm. Well, in doing so, we basically had six months where we didn't really grow that much. I mean, we had slow growth, but it was pretty plateaued.

Josh Nelson: Restructuring internally to- Yeah, restructuring.

Brady Sticker: One thing that we did that was a big push la- and so this was most of 2024, we focused on our processes and really trying to just build a foundation so we can grow and have seasons like this where we bring on 100 new clients in a month. One thing that we did last year that brought on an, a lot of new clients was like we said, "Hey, we're about to raise our prices. You can get grandfathered in at the old rate, but you have to sign up before this date." We did that, and we had a big push, I think that was maybe Q3 last year. But it kinda got stagnant to where… And that's the problem with the high volume agency model that like people like me, my dad, Chris Rodriguez run, is you get to a point to where, yeah, you can have 5% churn, but that's like 30 clients canceling.

Josh Nelson: Right. Yeah.

Brady Sticker: And so you have to sign up 30 clients- Just to stay where you're at. Yep. Yeah. And so we ran into a lot of that last year. And so I just wanna say it's not all rainbows and sunshine 'cause I know it looks like it was like, oh, Brady was working for his dad just a year ago or two years ago, and now he's got this multiple seven-figure agency. Like it was not easy. Yeah. But a lot of the growth has just been staying focused. Mm. Right? One of my favorite quotes of all time is, from Steve Jobs, and he says that focus is just saying no to good ideas. Hmm. And I have to say no to some good ideas that Josh Nelson gives me And, and some of the things that are taught in Seven Figure Agency that are great ideas that I wanna do, but we've decided just to stay focused. Mm. And instead of trying to do all of the things, 'cause I know when you're first getting started, you wanna do webinars and do podcasts and do this and do that, go to the events and do all this. But once you find something that really works, I believe that, hey, go all in on that.

Josh Nelson: Yeah. Instead of trying to add all this other stuff, this is working for you. Do– How can you do more of that? Mm-hmm. How can you do that better, right? How can you increase the volume of that?

Brady Sticker: And so for us, this is kind of our cycle that we've landed on. We run Facebook ads to get new clients. We get a new client, we get them results. We document their results in a testimonial video or a podcast case study, and then we do that to run Facebook ads to get new clients. Mm. And then we just repeat that process. We get new clients, get them good results, document it. Like I– We might have more testimonials than any other agency in Seven Figure Agency. Wow. But I don't, 'cause we– I mean, we probably have close to 80 testimonial videos and growing, from clients that we've worked with. And the way we do this, so here's how we're getting our testimonials for our agency clients. Number one is on Zoom calls. Mm-hmm. Train your account managers when they're on these Zoom calls, whenever a client has a win, be like, "Hey, this is awesome. We're recording this. Do you mind, like, if I ask you some questions and I'll share it with the team? 'Cause it encourages them to hear the good news of what you guys are doing and the fruit that you guys are seeing in your business. I'll share it with my team, and then I'll share it with any other, anyone else in the church niche or if any other plumbers that might be considering work with us. Are you co-cool if we do that?" Nine times out of 10 they're gonna say yes. Yep. And then just ask them questions like, "Hey, what results have you been seeing working with our agency? What's been working well for you?" That, that's worked great for us. The second thing is, which we normally do this, but this is the first year we're not. I think it works w- really well when you're first getting started out. The month before your birthday as the agency owner- Mm… Have a big push. Josh already knows where I'm going with this. Have your team reach out to clients and say, "Hey, Brady's birthday is coming, the owner of our company. Hey, Josh's birthday's coming up. We're collecting videos from all of our clients saying, 'Hey, happy birthday, Brady. Here's what I love about Seven Figure Agency,' or, 'Here's what I love about Church Candy.'" And like, share some things of what we say is what God's been doing in your church, a-and just like the results you've been seeing. 'Cause like we asked Brady what he wants for his birthday, and he just said more testimonial videos from clients we're working with. And so we do– we've done that for like three years in a row. We're not doing it this year just because I've been pushing my team to do a lot of things. We're about to have another big push for something else, and we- Mm… We have a good system for getting testimonials now, and that's what I'm gonna share with you, is the podcast. Mm. Your clients that crush it, they get some really good results, interview them on a podcast. Now, I'm a big proponent for in-person interviews- Mm… Because if I have a client that has a fancy podcast microphone like this, and he's looking at me like this, and the camera angle's coming from this way, we can cut that and use it as an ad. Yeah. And it dramatically outperforms someone looking into the camera that if I sit here and talk about how awesome Seven Figure Agency is and how amazing it's been for our agency, that's, that's great, but I'm using this fancy camera. People might not know who I am. Like, oh, did Josh just pay someone on Fiverr to make a testimonial video?

Josh Nelson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brady Sticker: Like, obviously he did it, right? But the podcast clips work so well in ads because it's what people are already used to seeing on- Yeah… On Facebook. So that's why I love, in-person podcasts. But virtual, like at least it's something, right? Don't feel like you have to do it in person to do it. Like, done is better than perfect, right? So those are my three ways for like recommending to agency owners to getting content. But now our team's so good at consistently getting on Zoom calls and us doing the podcast, I'm not doing the birthday push this year. Mm. Also because we have so many clients that have been with us so long, it's like, "Wait, I sent you a video last year for Brady's birthday too." Right. So.

Josh Nelson: I love it. So many great ideas and takeaways from that specific strategy, but the basic premise, you know, is the ultimate flywheel. Get the client, get them amazing results, document those results, and then get them to do a testimonial, whether it's on Zoom, whether it's at your office, or whether it's you like meeting up at a podcast studio somewhere. When you do that, now you've got proof. You can market that proof. And of course, when a client says something positive about you publicly, they're more anchored to your brand. They're more likely to refer you to somebody else. They're more likely to get someone to ask them, "Hey, you use Church Candy. How's that been?" "It's been great." And, and it just creates this flywheel in addition to the positioning, in addition to the authority- Yeah… In addition to the marketing that you're already doing.

Brady Sticker: Yeah, for sure, man. And so I think a lot of it comes down to, and like the advice I would give to an agency owner as like a big takeaway is focus on building your brand. Create, create the books or create a book. Mm. Give it away for free. We did the free plus shipping for years. Now we have… It's like if you can prove that you're an actual church, like I'll, I will pay you the $8 for shipping and I'll eat that cost. But that has been something that has built our list. And one of the ways we were able to get 100 clients to sign up in one month is I have a list of 15,000 prospects. Right. I got 100 of them to sign up in one month. That's a pretty small percentage. Yeah. So think, if you can build a big list, imagine how much, what percentage of that list do you need- To sign up for your agency to change your business forever. Mm. Right? And now, not all of our clients that signed up in March from the 108 were people on our list. A lot of it were people that listen to our podcast. We basically had ads in our podcast promoting Church Candy and saying, "Hey, if you sign up this month when you're listening to this, the month of March, you save 500 bucks." We had people come in from that. We drop a lot of money on Facebook and Instagram ads. I mean, we spend 10 to $20,000 a month on ads just to fill our sales teams calendar. Mm. And so build a brand. It's not just, oh, run an ad with this offer and that's how you get all these clients. No. It's we built trust and we built authority, and that was really the secret. Which is not much of a secret at all.

Josh Nelson: S- so good. So many great insights here. Br- Brady, do we have a- time for a couple questions? I do still see a couple questions- Yeah… In the feed. Guys, if you have questions, now's your chance. Here's a question from Become a Billionaire. "What does your high-level setup look like? Are clients strictly using it for GHL and ads, or are they using other functionality as well?" Yeah.

Brady Sticker: So at minimum, our clients are using GoHighLevel to follow up with their leads. So our process, we're running an ad on Facebook or Instagram promoting their church. The call to action is plan your visit to the church service. Once a lead fills that out, it's brought over to GoHighLevel. That lead gets a text saying, "Hey, this is Pastor John with Vibrant Church. What made you wanna plan a visit?" Right? And then they'll respond, and then our clients will text back and forth with them on there. We have a lot of clients that fall in love with the software, and they go all in, and we have additional training and resources for them on how to build out more automations for things they do. But the bare minimum is just to follow up with leads. I would say probably less than 20% of our clients actually do anything more with it.

Josh Nelson: Mm. Perfect. Perfect answer. You touched on this a little bit, but could you just give the CliffNotes versions? Bill Thomas is asking, "What is the offer that a, that a church can buy?" Yeah.

Brady Sticker: So normally it's, $1,300, $1,400 their first month, I think. I need to double check what the pricing is. And then 750 a month after their first month. We just waived the extra cost the first month, so it was just 750 bucks to get them on, and, that was the offer. And so I know we're low ticket. I know, oh, you need to raise your prices. We're, we're adding an SEO and, Google Ads offer this quarter. So we will be having a higher ticket option that's gonna… I think gonna be probably $1,500 a month. So it's coming. It's coming, I know. We need to raise our prices. But, for just running a f- simple Facebook ad campaign, it's very profitable for us. We can run it at scale because it's, we've simplified it, right? I've, I've always heard like, simple scales, complexity fails. Yeah. So th- this has worked great for us because we run one single offer. I was on a call with another agency owner, Christian from Dance Marketing, Dance Studio Marketing, right? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. They work with dance studios. And we were kinda talking about this, like in their onboarding and he's like, "Well, we have like four offers that work good for our clients, and so it's really just whatever they wanna run." I was like, "You need to change that. You need to have one offer for– that, meaning that you run for your clients." Mm. "Pick one offer that works really well for them and say, 'This is what we always start with. This is what we see get the, gets the best results. Let's start with this for your business, for your dance studio.' And then if we need to pivot, we've got like four or five other offers that work really well too." Mm. Because the thing is, they're hiring your agency to be the expert. And so for us, we're not just… When a church hires us, we're not just like, "Oh, hey, what do you wanna run? Do you have any events that we can promote?" It's like, "No, like here's our play. Let's run it for you." And, and that's, because of that, we're able to keep our prices low. Mm. And, and it's very profitable for us. I'm taken care of. I'm not gonna raise our prices just to raise prices. Like we're, we're good. We're gonna add a higher ticket option that, serves churches at a higher capacity with local SEO and Google Ads too. So good. Yeah.

Josh Nelson: The, every additional offer you add, especially as a Facebook only agency, multiplies the complexity. So keep it simple. Get your proven offer lead out of the gates with that. You touched on this one as well, but just, is the main lead source Google or Facebook Ads for you at this point?

Brady Sticker: Yeah. I would say our main lead source is probably Facebook Ads. But our number one audience is retargeting. So it's people that have consumed our content on Instagram, people that have been to our website. Mm. Like that's our best performing, audience, our retargeting audiences. So yes, it's coming from Facebook and Instagram ads. We're not running anything on Google or… We're about to start running some YouTube ads. But yeah, as of right now, Facebook and Instagram are our, those ad platforms are our best performing ones.

Josh Nelson: So good. Here's a question from Jeremy Woods. "Is your newsletter list inside of your GHL account or do you use some other external software for that?" Yep.

Brady Sticker: We are using GoHighLevel for, sending out emails to our list. We don't have like an official Church Candy newsletter that we like call it that. Mm. I just have a list and I send them emails. These days most of the emails are just whenever we put out a new podcast, we just send out an email saying, "Hey, here's some content that we cover in this podcast. Check it out," and send them to the YouTube video or Apple or Spotify link.

Josh Nelson: So good. I think those are all the questions. Guys, if you have questions when you're watching after the fact, go ahead and drop them in. I'll be looking and I'll try and see them to Brady. Brady, this has been amazing. First of all, congratulations on your success. I love the fact that all this is anchored to, you know, building the kingdom, right? At the end of the day, you wanna grow a business, you wanna make money, that's, that's great, but you're also bringing people to church, bringing people to God. I think that's the main mission for Church Candy, and it's, it's been super successful. You've shared a lot of insights on how you've grown the business, how you put the systems in place, how you landed 108 clients in one month, which is just mind-boggling. How you also made sure that all of those clients are well taken care of, onboarded. If you had one last piece of wisdom to share with the agency owners listening, what would that be?

Brady Sticker: Stay focused. Stay focused. That, it's hard to say no to good ideas, and there's things in the agency that I wanna do. And as a visionary, it's really easy for us to be like, "Oh, we gotta do this, and we gotta do this, and oh, we should do this." I've loved working with Lynn Askins and EOS every quarter. Mm-hmm. We set rocks and say, "Hey, these are the priorities for this quarter. These are the things we're gonna focus on," and go all in on that, right? If you wanna have shiny object syndrome, make content your shiny object syndrome. Mm-hmm. And it's like, I'm gonna spend all my time building o- on YouTube. Like I'm Gen Z. There was a study done and like the number one, used to be like for kids, the jobs that they wanted were like astronaut or firefighter. Now it's all content creator. You wanna be a YouTube star, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so me, I'm like, "I wanna be a YouTube star." And so I've kinda gone all in on YouTube and our podcast and stuff there. And that's me, I get to flex that visionary arm of getting to build something from scratch. So, rather than me going and starting an ad agency that got agency owners clients with Facebook ads, we do not do that. If you ask me to help you with your ads, I'm gonna say no. So, so just to quell the, quell the, influx in requests.

Josh Nelson: Yeah. Amazing. Brady, so many great insights. If somebody wanna connect with you, learn more, get to know you better, what would be the best way?

Brady Sticker: Hey, follow me on Instagram. I am almost to 42,000 followers. Wow. I'm at 41.9, 41.9 thousand. So if you guys can help me get to 42K, that would be great. But yeah, follow me on Instagram. I check the DMs there every day, so, that's the best way to message me. At, @bradysticker at Church Candy- @bradysticker.

Josh Nelson: Yep. Go give him a follow at a minimum, right? Go do something to show some love. Send a personal message. You know, Brady came on here just out of pure abundance of heart, right? Nothing to gain, just wants to share what worked for him, how he's grown his agency, and he's given his best stuff. So if you got value, send a thank you, apprec- show some love in the comments and, we will, we will wrap it up there.

Brady Sticker: Yeah. Josh, thank you so much, man. I hope, I hope I've been an inspiration to someone out there either starting an agency, wanting to start an agency or that has an agency, because there's people in the 7FA community that were that inspiration for me. So- Mm-hmm… Love to be that for someone else too.

Josh Nelson: So good, man. Keep, keep crushing it, keep the influence up, and, thanks so much for sharing. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time

Transcript of Brady Sticker’s testimonial video.

Hi, my name is Brady Sticker and I'm the founder of Church Candy Marketing. We help churches with their digital marketing, helping them get new visitors every single Sunday. When we joined Seven Figure Agency, we were right around ten thousand dollars a month in MRR, and today we just crossed a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a month in MRR. We've gotten so much value from being a part of Seven Figure Agency. What I love about it is, one, the community, being surrounded with other agency owners that are killing it in different industries.

On top of that, there's even a community for my team. They call it the A players, and so my team is able to get value from other team members of other agencies doing the same job that they have but in another niche. Yeah, it's crazy coming to these events at Seven Figure Agency because I'll be talking to someone, they just seem like a regular Joe Schmo, and then find out they're doing multiple seven figures, making what most people would love to make as a salary in a year, making that every single month.

If you're on the fence about joining Seven Figure Agency, I would highly recommend pulling the trigger. If you can come out to one of these in-person events and get a part of the community, surround yourself with like-minded agency owners that are growth-focused, that will help you grow in your agency, you can't find that anywhere else. There's a lot of fake gurus out there in the marketing agency coaching world, and I promise you, Josh Nelson is not that. He has abundance mindset, and not only that, he's still living it.

He didn't exit from his agency. He still owns a digital marketing agency, and he wants to help you grow yours too.