This episode of the My First Million podcast features hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discussing the business model and legitimacy of entrepreneur Sam Ovens. They analyze his consulting business, his transition from selling courses to launching a new platform called Skool, and the overall sustainability of his business model.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Consulting, Online Courses, Business Models, Digital Marketing, Skool, Sam Ovens
Introduction to Sam Ovens [00:12]
Sam Parr: There’s a guy named Sam Ovens. Do you know Sam Ovens?
Shaan Puri: Sam Ovens? Uh, is this the very like slick-backed hair guy? Uh, what’s his thing? Consulting.com?
Sam Parr: So he, all right. So this guy named Sam Ovens, he rubbed me the wrong way for a long time and looking back, I think I was actually wrong and he seemed like an all right guy. So he had this website called consulting.com, which if I had to put it at its worst, it was basically a course that was like $2,000 to $10,000 that taught you how to start a business. At best, it’s like it like it’s an accelerator. And the reality is it’s just like is a way to like it’s like a community and a course on starting a company.
Scaling and Revenue [00:52]
Sam Parr: And he scaled it to like 30 million in revenue. And it was just him and he hired all these people and built this office in New York and he was posting on social that they’re doing 50 or 60 million in revenue and then he vanished. And he had a YouTube video come out today that says, and he and he just says, “I’m back.” He’s like, “For the past two years, I hated life. We scaled too quickly and so we were spending like 50k a day on Facebook ads and we weren’t even making that much profit. So I decided to change everything and over the last two years, we’ve crushed it.” He goes, “For example, in January, uh this course,” he goes, “We got rid of like there was three courses, now we only sell two or one. And last month in January, we made $800,000 in revenue and our expenses, which includes payroll and buy and paid ads, was $60,000.”
The Business Model [01:38]
Sam Parr: And so basically, this guy and and then he launched this new company called Skool, which is basically like a Facebook groups alternative because when he was launching courses, he was like, these stink. So that is a different story. That’s actually cool. But this course business this guy has now, basically, let’s just times it by 10. So 8 million in revenue with $600,000 in expenses. Is that nutty or what? Is that crazy?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but it depends. Is that sustainable and also is that going to grow? So for example, I could say No, I don’t think it’s going to grow, but I think it could be sustainable.
Shaan Puri: When I did the like all-access pass, it was like I was making whatever, 50k a month off of the newsletter, a paid newsletter making 50k a month. What were my expenses? It was like, you know, $300 a month for ConvertKit, uh you know, like a VA for $500 a month, whatever. So it looked nutty, but like that’s because I had an audience so I could just sell into that. If I wanted to grow it, I would have had to like, you know, my expenses would have had to gone way up, right? You know, like so it depends. Where Yeah, maybe his ad spend is really low now. Is that because his ads are ultra efficient or is it because he had a long a big list that he sold into?
Sam Parr: No, they said that they don’t they don’t spend ads anymore, but previously they had spent millions and tens of millions of dollars of ads. So the website definitely already has Yeah. Uh traffic. Traffic. Yeah. So yes, it’s not like a So I talked to somebody who worked there um pretty early on. So they I was like, is this guy legit? They go, he’s legit. He’s good. Um they’re like he he lived in New Zealand or something like that. He’s a digital marketer. Uh then he has consulting.com, which is basically like they had a course, they had a consulting accelerator and they’re basically teaching people how to start their own business, their own consulting business. And uh they said they told me at the time that there was like $10 million of free free cash flow a year. And they said that um there there was about 30 million or something in revenue. And he said like half of that, so like 15, 16 million was coming from one product, which was a two or $3,000 course about how to start your own consulting business. And then from there, they upsell you into the $5,000 course about how to create a course. And then uh once you get to $500,000 in consulting revenue, then you get to join a mastermind that will help you get to a million dollars plus and that’ll cost you 25 or 50 grand or something like that. And so that was their, you know, that was their model. But you know, half of it was coming from that kind of like entry level two to $3,000 course um where they like kind of sell you close you on the phone to like get you to buy the course, which is Yeah, I went through the funnel to like so I got him to sell me online or to do the phone call and I was like, I want to I want to figure this out. And it’s pretty good, man. And I gave the guy a hard time because he’s just kind of weird. He just comes off serial killer. He kind of Patrick Bateman. He’s kind of like the Patrick Bateman of our of our friend Jack Smith, like the American Psycho version of our friend Jack Smith. And so he’s like just like a little off, but that’s actually really incorrect of me to say because I don’t I think he’s just an oddball, which is totally acceptable. Yeah, because I don’t know the guy. Well, yeah, and I don’t know him and I think that my judgment is just totally wrong. I think he’s an all right guy. You’re like, I think it’s wrong because it’s all based on his haircut. No, I watched a lot of this guy’s videos and I was like, something is off here. And I he was he was aggressively selling. He was it was a type of guy where he was selling like a private jet uh like a video on a private jet. Right. So that’s not wrong, but it’s it’s it’s it’s you know, your cousins with the wrong. Um and so I think that that it was just kind of odd.