The Built To Scale Podcast

Most ecom founders stuck in seven or low eight figures think they need more traffic. Thomas McMahon says they're earning exactly the traffic they deserve, and the real blocker is something breaking inside the business. Thomas spent years in business development at ClickBank and now runs Happy Scaling, an advisory firm for founder led ecom and direct response brands. We get into why the hustle that...

The average email list shrinks about 22% a year, according to Nelson Aquino, and most brands are doing nothing about it. Meanwhile, they keep paying Meta and Google to reach people who already visited their website. For episode 30, I broke the format and brought on two guests: Nelson Aquino and Paul Counts, co-owners of InboxGeek. We get into why owning your audience beats renting it, how to win b...

One tweak. $60,000. In two days. Rob Schwartz, VP of Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives at ClickFunnels, breaks down the upsell most funnel builders skip, why your first funnel should be ugly, and where AI voice agents actually make money (hint: it's not closing). ================================= What you'll learn: How a $47 VIP upsell before a webinar hit a 30 to 40% take rate and turned a "...

Founders don't stall because they lack talent. They stall because they're doing everything themselves. Tim Kanter spent 10 years stuck at $275K in revenue, then built the structure that grew his agency more than 10x and got it sold. Now he embeds a full executive team inside founder-led businesses to do the same. ================================= What you'll learn: Why being able to do everything...

Alan Schulman has 40 plus years in advertising and marketing. He wrote TV spots for Leo Burnett, FCB, and McCann Erickson before becoming one of the first creatives to take digital seriously. He was the first Chief Creative Officer ever hired by a consulting firm in the US, building out Deloitte Digital from two studios to seven. ================================= 🚨 Spoiler Alert: He worked on the...

Most business owners will plan a two week vacation with more care than they plan the sale of their business, even though 100 percent of them will exit someday. Marty Fahncke has watched that gap cost owners millions of dollars. It once cost him $23.5 million of his own money, and he's spent his career since making sure other owners don't repeat it. ================================= What you'll lea...

Bigger ad spend does not mean bigger profit. For our 25th episode, Built To Scale founder and CEO Jeremy Gillespie sits down with Shmuel Herschberg to open the vault on how this agency actually scales brands, and it has almost nothing to do with the number on the ad account. ================================= What you'll learn: Why Jeremy's biggest early mistake wasn't a bad campaign, it was hiring...

Scott Rewick spent $200 a day launching a new pain relief brand and it hit $300 a day in revenue almost immediately. No 90 day break-in period. No twenty person team. Just AI agents doing the work that used to take a copywriter, designer, and engineer a month and twenty thousand dollars to produce. Scott has 25 years in direct response, now runs skcommerce.ai , testing whether AI agents can build...

Payment processing sounds boring. That's exactly why most merchants ignore it, and exactly why Maria Sparagis says it's one of the highest leverage levers in your business. Maria has spent almost 25 years in payments and founded DirectPayNet to help high risk merchants stop losing revenue to default settings, bad decline handling, and a checkout flow nobody ever tested. In this episode she breaks...

People love to buy. They hate being sold. Angelo Ferraro built his entire business on that one line, and this episode breaks down exactly how. Angelo went from engineer at BMW to running the backend machine behind some of the biggest direct response funnels in ecom, nutra, and telehealth. He explains why the price tag was never really about the number, why a phone call recovers deals that email ne...

Most media buyers think a 1.5 ROAS is a win. Tyler Ryan has seen billions of dollars of data that says it might be a slow bleed. Tyler is the founder of LTV Numbers, now rebranded as Data Driven OS, and he has analyzed over three billion dollars in direct response and ecommerce sales. Before any of that, he was an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on the team that landed the Cu...

Most people think buying a business means signing the papers, hiring a GM, and collecting checks from the beach. David Hori bought a company that got acquired by Toyota, then decided to spend his career telling people why that hands off dream is mostly a myth. ================================= Join David's "Discover A Less Stressful Way To Sell Your Business" Webinar: 🚨 SPOILER ALER! David is off...

Did you know 81% of people want to write a book? Yet, only 3% ever finish one. Michael Giannulis built Dictate to close that gap, not by making writing easier, but by removing writing from the process entirely. You talk, an AI named Silas asks the right questions, and a book comes out the other end in your voice. Michael spent two decades in direct response marketing before building Dictate, and t...

Most Amazon sellers who try TikTok Shop fail within 30 days. Not because they lack budget, but because they're still thinking like Amazon sellers. Can Chan has spent over a decade building an eight figure e-commerce business, first on Amazon, then as one of the first sellers on TikTok Shop when it launched in the US. In this conversation, he breaks down why the two platforms require completely dif...

Most people ask "why me?" Dr. Charles Livingston learned to ask "why not me?" That one shift turned a chiropractor into a digital marketer, and a digital marketer into the founder of one of DTC's most respected premium coffee brands. ================================= What you'll learn: How Charles validated Life Boost Coffee with affiliates before spending a single dollar on paid media Why he stil...

The affiliate marketing playbook that worked in 2022 is not just outdated. It is actively working against you. Andra Ionescu, started off as an affiliate manager at MaxWeb, and has recently been promoted to the CEO role. She has seen every side of this industry since 2012, and is here to tell you exactly what has changed and what to do about it. ================================= What you'll learn:...

Affiliates and media buyers don't build your funnel. They pour gasoline on a fire that's already burning. Francisco Bervis, Head of Marketplace at Everflow, breaks down exactly what brands need to prove before any partner will touch them, and the real math behind who gets a $400 CPA and who gets $60. ================================= What you'll learn: Why your brand needs tested creatives and a w...

Most hiring fails before a single resume is reviewed. The job description is vague. The compensation range is too low to attract the right talent. The "one role" you posted is actually three jobs crammed into one. And then you wonder why six weeks in you're starting over. Michele Lambert has been inside this problem since 2012. She has built remote teams for direct response brands, internet market...

Most marketers chase what's trending. Kristen Palmer has spent two decades identifying what never stops working. What you will learn: Why the webinar funnel is generating six and seven figure weeks in 2026 and how to build one that converts Live vs. evergreen: which price points demand which format and why cold audiences cannot handle high ticket What a real eight-figure audit actually uncovers (a...

Most supplement companies need a doctor, a media budget, and a team. Paul Lawrence built Naturecast with none of those things. What he had instead was a ruthless understanding of copy, a willingness to outlast everyone else, and a list so loyal that 40% of his recent orders came from subscribers who had been with him for five years or more. What you'll learn: How Paul reverse-engineered a predicta...

If your business is stuck in low ticket, you may be funding your own slow decline. Kyle Kostechka, former ClickBank performance marketing leader and advisor at Trident Growth, makes the case for why high ticket has shifted from "nice to have" to essential in this economy and what that means for how you buy traffic, build funnels, and think about 2026. ================================= What you'll...

A lot of companies are scaling themselves into a cash flow crisis and they have no idea it's happening. Jeremy Reeves has built five eight-figure offers and generated over $200 million in revenue, and his biggest finding is that acquisition is the least important part of the equation. What you'll learn: How to calculate your real allowable customer acquisition cost (most brands get this completely...

Most brands are sitting on a revenue stream they have never touched. The moment someone buys your front-end offer, supplement, course, or gadget, there is a window of peak intent that closes fast. Max Kramer built an entire company around owning that window for other brands, and his model converts fresh buyers into $5,000 high-ticket coaching clients before the transaction is even a memory. What y...

Most companies think they've "adopted AI." They have a Copilot license, maybe a chatbot on the website. John Munsell calls that dipping your toe in the water. Real adoption looks completely different and the gap between where most companies are and where they need to be is costing them millions. What you'll learn: Why "AI adoption" is being measured wrong and what the right metric actually is How...

Most people know what they want. The problem is they're their own biggest obstacle. Paul Hoffman has lived multiple lifetimes in one. He wrote one of the most iconic advertising jingles in history, built and lost everything, found his way back, and has since spent decades helping over 3 million people redesign their lives from the inside out. As founder of Sculpting Your Life and creator of a bina...