In this methodical episode, Bradley Rausch, Owner of bradleyrausch.com, shares how to turn your happy clients into a high-margin growth engine instead of staying trapped on the front-end hamster wheel. If you have clients, a team, and solid reviews but your growth has flattened despite chasing more leads, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why focusing on quality of revenue through referrals and upsells can multiply profit per client without more volume

- How to implement the four sales framework to maximize lifetime value from onboarding to ascension

- How to train your client success team to sell advocacy and upsells while maintaining quality experience

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 3 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Bradley Rausch is a client experience architect, strategic advisor, and the go-to “backend profit” partner for founder-led coaching and group programs. With six years of experience, he’s helped dozens of founders turn chaotic growth into durable, higher-margin revenue without sacrificing their values. From first-72-hour onboarding systems to referrals, testimonials, and ascension playbooks, Bradley and his team help founders turn each great client into 1.5–2x more profit and build businesses that feel lighter as they scale.

Want to learn more about Bradley Rausch's work at bradleyrausch.com? Check out his website at https://www.bradleyrausch.com/

Connect with Bradley through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradley-rausch/

Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again

to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host, Scott Retzheimer, and I want to talk

to those founders out there who look like they've actually made

it work. You've got clients, you've got a team that's helping

you out, your clients are happy, nobody's complaining. The

reviews are good, yet somewhere along the way the growth started

to flatten out, and you can't quite put a finger on why. So,

you do what every founder does, you go get more, more leads,

more ads, more closes, more volume, but somehow it just

doesn't change a thing. So, the question that I have for you,

and the question we're going to explore today is, what if what

if your happy clients are the very thing that's quietly and

effectively killing your growth. Well, here to help us explore

this rather interesting question is Bradley Roush. He's a client

experience architect, strategic advisor, and the go to backend

profit partner for founder led coaching groups and programs,

with six years of experience, he's helped dozens of founders

turn chaotic growth into durable high margin revenue without

sacrificing their values, from first 72 hour onboarding systems

to referrals, testimonials, and ascension playbooks, Bradley and

his team help founders turn each great client into one and a half

or two times more profit and build businesses that feel

lighter as they scale. Bradley, welcome to the show. Glad to

have you here. Really looking forward to this conversation.

And as I was getting ready for this episode, this question just

kind of started jumping out at me and seemed like you'd be the

guy to help us out, so what's the problem with these

founder-centric businesses that have really happy clients,

what's going on there mechanically? Why is that a

problem?

Well, I love that you say founder, and of course the

podcast being focused on founders, and super honored to

be here. The idea of a founder-led business, there

comes with so much leverage, which I'm sure you talk about in

a lot of different capacities, but specifically from a

retention, upsell, profit perspective, people are coming

in with so much more trust, so much more due diligence, usually

done on the founder and the brand, and they're coming in

guns blazing, ready to go, the lifetime value inherently of

clients and a founder-led business is usually already

higher than just a corporatized, you know, systematized from the

from a 90 30,000 foot view business, but with that being

said, a lot of times people are not capitalizing on that full

opportunity, and in fact are kind of doing the exact

opposite, which is always I like to call this the hamster wheel

of founder-led businesses, which is always needing more clients

on the front end to build revenue, but then you're losing

clients in the back end, and then to make up for that lost

potential revenue, you go out and find more clients, and then

the history, the process repeats itself over and over, so it's

just this hamster wheel that it's really, really difficult to

get off, and it doesn't help, of course, that you know, the I

could go on a tirade, I won't, but the industry in general of

online business, you know, high ticket space, coaching,

consulting, SaaS, you name it, is so focused on get more leads,

get more sales, get more stuff, get more front end, more

clients, more influence, and the question I always pose is, just

what if you could have half the amount of clients but make four

times the amount of revenue and profit per client, meaning you

work half as much and make twice as you work half as much and you

make, make twice as much. So I would say the biggest thing that

gets in our way is two things: one is a narrative that we think

that more again, more growth equals more volume and more,

more quantity, but I talk about quality of revenue a lot, and

it's just a concept that I don't say nobody's ever thought of

before, but usually a lot of the people I speak with have not

really, really dialed in, and you know, when you look at, for

instance, like the total value of a client that you bring in.

Most people would just consider that to be, well, they paid me,

you know, 10k for six months of coaching, or 10k for b saas for

12 months, something, you know, something like that. Usually,

those are two pretty common examples, and you know, if you

were to go to somebody and ask, well, cool, what's the total

value of that client to your business, they would say, well,

the 10k minus, you know, any cost it takes to fulfill them,

and of course, any anything it took to acquire the customer on

the front end. I would challenge that, and I would say, well, out

of every - I usually use the ratio - out of every 10 clients,

how many are sending you a referral that closes with zero,

could zero customer acquisition costs? How many are sending you,

or, sorry, how many are continuing past the initial six

or 12 month container that they were sold into. How many out of

every 10 clients are upselling or ascending? I like to say into

another offer. Usually those numbers are zero or next to

zero, but if you can even just move those up, just one for each

of those categories. Usually the total client value you're adding

anywhere between 30 to 50% for every single client you bring in

and. Can factor that into the front end, of course, and can

say then across the board. Well, then, if I bring in one

referral, the closest of zero customer acquisition costs, for

example, all of my clients become $1,000 more valuable to

the business because that 10k spread over the 10 clients.

So, just kind of as an example, there, so I would say it's

really, really this attitude towards the front end and the

growth that is possible there, and I'm not dissing front end,

I'm not saying don't, I'm just saying at some point you need

to, you need to focus your, you need to focus your attention in

other places, otherwise, again, it's just going to be this

hamster wheel that, yeah, just is really hard to get off as you

grow.

One of the challenges related to this, and

maybe even on the flip side of it, is you see this, I see this

a lot in professional services, and maybe you see something

similar, but there are a lot of folks who come because they want

to work with you, but if you're trying to scale beyond just your

own 24 hours in a day, hopefully a lot less if you sleep, there

can be this frustration of no one does it like me, the client

really wants to work with me if I, if I'm not there, this whole

thing's gonna fall apart. How do you use, how do founders need to

think differently about that problem to start overcoming it?

Love, love, love, love that question. There's a client

centric answer, and then a founder-centric answer. The

client-centric answer from pure strategy is I always like to

say, what are the things I can highlight about my team or the

people that I am, you know, quote unquote passing them off

to that I can say, 'Listen, I'm passing you off to Sally.

Sally's gonna be working with you for the next six months, 12

months, whatever, in this capacity. Listen, you're

actually in better hands with Sally, because Sally's way

better at x, y, and z than I am. I mean, listen, I know I'm super

honored you came in, because you saw me on social, or you saw me

on ads, whatever. Sally's actually the goat. Sally's

fantastic, you gotta, you know what I mean. So, you, and of

course, you're not, you're not dissing yourself in the process,

but you know, you're amping up your team, you're giving the

credibility, you're passing off your credibility to other

people, and of course, you can, you know, do that at scale with

things like, you know, very like internal onboarding VSLs. I

always, I always love to say one of the biggest things I preach

is, you know, people oftentimes stop selling after the close,

but you know, for a quote unquote client success person,

not a lot of people say this in my space, but you actually need

to keep selling the entire time, that's what a big part of my IP

is based on, so that's kind of the client centric part, on the

founder-centric part, it really comes back to you, kind of

alluded to this, is like if you don't offload the responsibility

or the narrative that someone else can help you, you will

always be capped. There's never going to be anything that you

know past your 20, you won't get more than 20-four hours a day,

and so it almost becomes a well, not almost. It is a feature, not

a bug of the business, and of your, of your scalability. And I

think a lot of people look at it as, oh, it's a bug, it's a

problem that I can't give more. It's a problem that I have so

many clients coming in, and I want to grow the, I want to grow

how much I'm making per client, and how much I'm charging, and

my ability to work with them all, but the frame needs to be

completely, I think, 180 into that is a feature of growth, and

then finding solutions for that.

Yeah, one of the things that I think is a

legitimate concern, but is part of a deeper problem is that

founders have a tendency to have success excelling what they can

do, but there's only one of them, and so they'll hand it off

to someone, and either by virtue of the fact that it's just not

them, or more likely that they haven't done the right vetting

or training of their employees. Sure, there can be a pretty big

drop off in, in, in customer quality. How do you, how do you

help them address that? Because, again, there's just not more of

them to scale to go around. How do you help them create that

same quality experience without having to drive it all

themselves.

Yeah, so what I find again is that if you can, from

the very beginning, essentially just hype up, and that sounds

very woo woo, but I genuinely mean it, hype up, give, give

credibility to, you know, your team, that is really, really

great. But then, of course, the thing you're alluding to is,

well, then how do you keep that growing, or how do you keep that

moving at scale through the entire client journey, not just

this initial period of like excitement. So, as I said, the

everything that I do is really based around this IP is called

the for sales framework, and so it's based on this idea that

everybody focuses on the first sale, which is enrollment,

moment of payment, but there's actually three other sales that

need three other quote unquote sales throughout the client

journey, or revenue opportunities. I'll say that

require at scale just as much attention and frameworks and

scripting, and you know actual strategy to put into place with

your team and with how you're, how you're filling on your

clients, whether it's a team, whether it's a system, AI,

whatever it is, so I. Four sales are first is enrolling, of

course, moment of payment. Second is onboarding, so the

first 72 hours, as I like to say, after a client enrolls. The

third is advocacy, so that either is in the form of

testimonial, referral, or ideally both. And fourth is

ascension, or your upsells. And so to answer your question, as

far as you know, systematically how that is put in place a lot

of what I do revolves around training teams. Occasionally,

I'll work with when it's a very, very high margin, you know,

business, slightly easier to grow. It'll be a smaller team,

but most of my work revolves around at least a team of, say,

three to five minimum. My largest one I'm working with

right now is Team 12, you know, in the in the back end in CS,

and working with them through essentially we think about these

working with closers all the time and like we drill calls and

we do scripting and frameworks etc it's not very simplified

version is it's that but for for client success knowing how to

ask for a referral when to ask for a referral what language

what nuance you're looking for from the client at the right

moments to be able to know that you're most likely to get a yes

for a referral ask or for an upsell ask, or when are you

discussing that? Are you waiting until the very end? Hint, don't

please. Are you making sure that you, you, you, you see those

moments and you can guide people toward those moments, and

honestly, you can even artificially engineer those

moments to where somebody is most likely to say yes, or even

consider, you know, one of those next steps: referral,

testimonial, ascension, things like that. So

love that. For sales in a team like that,

founder-led, where do you see the division of labor, if you

will? Obviously, everyone influences all of those sales,

but who is it that you're training to do sales two, three,

and four?

It's usually either going to be an offer. It's

usually falls into one of two buckets. It's either going to be

an offer that is able to be fulfilled at scale by two to

three, maybe, maybe more, somewhere in there, you know,

single digits amount of people, because it's a lot of it is is

AI subsidized, a lot of it has to do with a one and done type

of situation, right? They fulfill on the thing once, and

then that's really it. It doesn't require any sort of

long, lengthy time. The more traditional then offers a second

bucket is the more traditional kind of offers of like a

coaching program, six months long, a 12 month long SAS thing,

you know, a service that's going to take three months to

complete, because you know you're it's a physical thing

that you're building, you know, whatever it might be. Those are

the more traditionally, you know, as you scale, you need

more team, and as you need more team, you get put risk for more

bloat and for more, you know, lack of culture that kind of

gets disseminated through the team. And then, how do you set

those standards, etc. So it kind of falls into one of those, one

of those two buckets, and usually the I would say the

differentiating factor is that as you grow in bucket one scale,

bring scale will naturally bring in more profit, right, when it's

those really, really, really lean teams, but then it's just a

question of do you dump fuel on that fire or how do you make

sure you can, you continue to increase those margins, maybe

you stay at the same top line you're at, but continue to

increase the margins and reduce operational efficiency. So, I do

a lot of work with that, but then on the other side, it's, do

you pour more fuel on the fire, or, sorry, do you pour more fuel

on the fire with front end, or do you pour more fuel on the

fire with your back end, and oftentimes, again, the only

really quote solution to growth is more front end, more ads,

more marketing, more sales, more calls, etc. And so it's just

kind of opening up the not only the founders' perspective to

that, but also just the team culture, because people do not

hire CS, and this is one of the biggest things, whenever I help

with hiring conversations with either CS or salespeople, people

do not hire CS for having sales experience or even just a slight

interest in it, and people do not hire sales individuals who

have a heart and who want to actually serve clients, and I

really work to flip that script and saying listen, I'm not, I do

a lot of disc testing with my clients, and or rather with the

people that you know we hire that I assist with, and I don't

know if you know anything about disc, but it's basically gives

you indications in terms of how somebody likes to show up at

work, what their maybe perhaps quote unquote weaknesses are,

things like that. When somebody is very high D, they're very

sales, outbound driven, you know, Sharky, etc. I won't

recommend we hire a CS person unless they've got a little bit

of a little bit of a Heidi, because you need them to be able

to go out and have those sometimes uncomfortable

conversations and push the tempo and be able to close a upsell

offer that's perhaps twice as high of a margin and twice as

high of a price tag as the initial offer, you need somebody

with some guts there to do that, and then on the flip side with

the sales, I like to make sure they have at least a little bit

of so D I S C high I means you're you're more inbound

sales, but you're also very kind of ethics driven, ethic

centered. And then high C is very procedural driven, so

strategy framework like scripting. So I like to make

sure they're high I or high C before we recommend that we're

hiring a salesperson. The odds are they're going to be at least

more malleable to understanding the full perspective of the

client journey, not just, hey, who has a pulse that I can close

that I can take money from, which will cause a lot of

problems. So,

very cool. I like that. I've got a couple

more questions for you. Want to make sure folks know how they

can get in touch with you, but before we get there, the next

question is this: one, I ask all my guess, but it is what is the

biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's that one

thing you wish every founder watching or listening today knew

that what you do in the first hours and days after you

collect payment sets the tone for the entire client

relationship. It's very difficult to increase, or rather

I'll say, improve the opinion that a client has of you. If you

do not intentionally systematically set it from the

very beginning, oftentimes people will look at the first

hours or days after somebody enrolls. That's just this admin

time, oh, book the next book, the first call, the first

interaction, couple days, couple weeks out, whatever it is,

right? Oh, did they sign the signing agreement? No. Usually

it's very high ticket sale, it's very high ticket situation. The

client is no more. The client is the most malleable to their

opinion of you that they will ever be throughout the entire

client journey. In those moments after you finally get what you

want, they have, they've laid out all their cards on the

table, they got nothing left, and so how you show up for them

in that moment when that power dynamic is really, is really

switched. I mean, I could, I could sit here for the next

three hours and tell you all of the just the tactical, I like to

say relational equity that that builds through the client

journey, and so the biggest thing I would say is don't don't

waste the opportunity to intentionally set, intentionally

create your client's emotional equity toward you.

It's, it's fascinating. I can't remember

what the stat was, I'm not even going to quote it, but some

biblically high number of people have buyer's remorse after,

especially a big ticket sale, and some categorically low

percentage, it was like 4% or something, actually have a plan

for dealing with buyer's remorse when it hits, and so I love this

idea of engaging proactively early, I think it's so powerful

and really speaks to this, this multi sale approach, I think

once you recognize that, hey, the first sale happened, sure,

but it's just there, it's like good, good copy, you know, first

sentence just sets up the second sentence. Yeah, so I love that

approach, I think it's really powerful, and yeah, could talk

about that for a very long time, but there's some folks listening

who would love to implement the for sale approach in their

business, they feel like they're stuck and they're finally seeing

a light, a little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel,

and believe that you're gonna be a big part in helping them get

there. How can they find more out about the work you do? How

can they reach out to get started?

I post every day on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn is my

LinkedIn is my jam, so I just say connect with me on LinkedIn.

It's just the LinkedIn, LinkedIn tag, Bradley, my name dash

Rausch. And then my website is just my name as well, Bradley Rausch.com

Beautiful, beautiful. All right, Bradley,

that was awesome. Yeah, super cool content, and very simple.

That's what I love about it, is these are not hard things to put

in practice. They just take a little bit of understanding and

a lot of diligence. But it was a privilege having you on today.

Thanks for joining us and sharing your wisdom with us. For

those of you watching and listening, you know that your

time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as

much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait

to see you next time. Take care. Hey everyone, Scott Retheimer

here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and

Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what

you need for the level you're in right now. If you want to

discover what level you're in, take our 10 question founders

evolution quiz for [email protected] that's

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I'll see you in the next episode.