Good morning. It is Matt here. In today’s newsletter, we are going over some of the things I learned working with businesses doing hundreds of millions per year (with a couple doing over a billion). I hope it is an interesting read for you.

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I worked as a lead generation consultant with more nine and ten figure businesses in 2025 than I did in all other years of my life combined.

And I spent many hours throughout the year trying to come up with theories and frameworks as to what they have in common.

Today, I am going to go over:

I am not going to name any of these companies, as I have agreed not to, and additionally, not naming them will allow me to go into much more specific detail instead of surface level garbage.

So, let’s get started and break it into three parts, starting with the high level theoretical lessons.

The first lesson that I think everyone should take away is choosing their industry and their products wisely, or in the event that you’re an agency owner, choosing your niche wisely, as this is probably the most important factor in determining how successful you will be.

Perhaps my favorite individual example to illustrate this point is to do with one of these clients who is multi billion dollars per year in both revenue and market cap.

They sell insurance, primarily home and auto.

I think this is a great example of your industry and service determining how far you will go. Consider the following:

In the United States, you are legally mandated to have auto insurance if you have a vehicle.

There are other advantages in this industry, but that alone is good enough to illustrate my point, and I have a lot to go over so I want to keep it moving.

Imagine how much SEO or how many email marketing services you’d sell if every person in the United States was legally required to buy those from someone.

It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Of course it does, but a common theme with all of these nine and ten figure clients I worked with this year is that in almost every case, people HAD to buy their product or service from someone. What they offer is just a NORMAL and in many cases REQUIRED part of everyday life if they are B2C, or just NORMAL and in many cases REQUIRED to do business if they are B2B, where they do not have to focus as much on marketing and acquiring customers because people are far more forced to seek out a solution in comparison to most people in my consulting program who provide a niche B2B marketing service.

So, what should you do about this?

I am not sure. I don’t usually recommend just throwing your successful business out and starting a Fortune 500 insurance company. It is not helpful advice.

However, I would recommend Bob Proctor’s classic advice to you more as an intellectual test:

Your income will be directly proportionate to three things:

Most people in online marketing and lead generation usually don’t do these three things well. The average out of 10 would be less than a five on each.

Moving on from this first point, what is another thing I learned?

The next thing I want to talk about is their offers, services and products they sell.

One thing EVERY single one of these had in common is their offer was either cheap (relatively speaking) and mass market, or it was extremely expensive and high lifetime value, and as far as I can tell, almost nothing in between.

On one side you have the auto insurance of the world, which costs maybe $2,500 per year on average. That is what I consider cheap and mass market in this.

On the other hand, you have things like senior living and B2B SaaS in the health care and financial sector which both run up over $100,000+ per year per client on average, and then hardware and manufacturing on the extremes which run up millions per client (although a lot fewer total clients).

There is nothing in the middle. The middle in anything is where you get destroyed.

What is my takeaway and lesson here?

I think that if you really want to succeed, you need to sell (or serve clients who sell) an absolute shitload of $2,500–5,000 per year products/services. A little ecommerce product that has a $100–400 LTV does not count here and is a terrible business.

Or, you need to sell things that equal hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lifetime value.

Anything in between is not ideal and will not lead to a ton of money. This is doubly true if you are a service provider to niches that are in the middle. Terrible.

What about the final thing I learned?

This final thing was about being in it for the long run.

All 12 of these clients I worked with are over 10 years old, with most of them being at least 30 years old.

I think there are two lessons in there:

The first is about, in general, choosing a business that you can be in for a long time and is not a trend that is destined to fail long-term like “AI automation agency” which is solely reliant on a trend. These things always seem great and for the few who hit it hard and make a bunch of money before cashing out, it is, but for most, absolutely not. They just switch offers every six months or a year and never do anything good.

The second thing is related to the first but different. It is just the reality that it takes a long time to build a big business, no matter how smart, how well funded, or how ambitious you are.

I know tons of people who switch their business every few months. They’ve done sometimes 20+ things since I’ve known them in the past five years. All are failures financially.

So, what is the actionable advice?

So, that wraps up the three high-level lessons I learned. All these clients had these in common.

What about the more tactical stuff? On a personal level, this was encouraging to me because I do all of these things myself already (or am on track), so it was good to see.

The first is that they really, really, REALLY track every single useful metric you could possibly think of, and can pull up anything you need in less than 30 seconds and it will be accurate.

When you join Lead Generation Academy, in the onboarding process, you clone all of my metrics tracking systems and fill them out. 95%+ of people who join do not track all of their metrics, and of the 5% that do, most are not accurate.

You do this for two main reasons:

How would one improve cost per booked call if they do not track it?

Likewise, it is easy to ignore your lack of lead flow when you don’t track anything. When you do, and you see you have zero ad spend, don’t post any content, or send any cold emails, you can no longer ignore the truth as to why you have no meetings.

All of their clients tracked their metrics differently and called them different things a lot of the time. They also had different metrics that applied specifically to their business.

But, I think there are a few baseline metrics that every business has to track.

What are they?

If you have just these six, you can extrapolate them to any goal you want in my opinion. The other 10,000 metrics you COULD track pale in comparison to the value of these six.

After the importance of metrics, what are some other things I learned?

The next thing is how well they plan and use their project management systems.

I only have visibility into the lead generation side of things, but all twelve of these clients plan their lead generation and marketing activities a year or more in advance.

Then, they reverse engineer and break it down quarter by quarter, month by month, week by week, and ultimately, day by day.

11 of the 12 clients used the OKR method that I believe was popularized by Google.

In this method, there are objectives, key results and assignments.

Objectives are the big, long-term goals.

Key results are something like micro goals. A good way to describe them is that if these five key results were true, then the objective would also be true/complete.

Assignments are individual tasks that need to be done to make the key results and objectives true.

There is one objective.

There are five key results.

There could be a million assignments.

Every assignment was assigned. Every assignment had training, description, due date. To my great surprise, everyone was held accountable to a large degree across all 12 companies. I’ll talk more about that later.

Overall, I think the OKR method is one of the best ways to do project management and if you were to do this faithfully for a year, assign every task, and hold everyone accountable, you could probably 100x your progress.

So, what is the final piece of tactical advice we can learn from?

This final piece of advice was not universal, but for the clients that I thought were the best and growing the fastest, all four of them did this to a large degree.

This piece of advice was to only give each employee one priority and responsibility, and that’s it. Nothing else.

I read something about Peter Thiel doing this at PayPal. He would refuse to talk about anything else with each person other than their responsibility.

I actually had one Vice President at one of these four clients literally explain this to me, when I went to him for advice/feedback about why his and almost all big corporations seem overstaffed with most people doing an hour or two of real work per day.

He told me that they literally hire every person to do one thing, and it is well within their plans and margins to not have that person do anything else, and as long as that one thing gets done, it’s fine.

I took many lessons away from that, and here are the action steps I took:

This setup has been far superior to everything I’ve tried in the past.

So, those are the three pieces of tactical advice and now I’m going to wrap it up with three things that were unexpected and did not match the expectations I had going in. Some of these will be good and some will be bad.

The first was that there were far more A Players in all these companies than I expected. I had a negative perception of corporate people before going in and viewed the average person as more or less an idiot.

While this remains true for the average corporate employee, I found there were huge numbers of A Players, far more than I’ve ever seen in any online business or ecommerce store or SaaS.

I thought to myself, why is this? I asked ChatGPT too.

Through self-reflection, AI and Alex Hormozi videos, I came to the conclusion that all of these industries are so much bigger with so much more money, it is simply possible to pay more people, more money.

The “pie” is big enough to include everyone and as such, better people are attracted to it.

This is not the case with most online businesses who rely heavily on outsourced overseas labor. Most agencies never pay people more than $60k per year, and while there are thousands of employees at these companies making $60k per year too, there are also some making $500k, $1 million, $2 million and even more.

This goes back to one of my points earlier about choosing your business well.

The next thing that was super surprising to me but makes sense now is that almost every high-level person I work with at these companies, which is usually the CRO, CMO, head of demand generation, or in a couple cases, the CEO, all “know” what to do and we saw eye to eye on almost everything in terms of marketing and lead generation.

I did not expect this at all. I envisioned these companies as being led by ignorant boomers who are far behind the times who barely know how to export a PDF.

I am actually very, very pleased to say I was completely wrong on this.

I consider every single one of them to be based chads, especially one female CEO. She is the most based person I’ve ever seen.

I have learned that there are many, many reasons that huge companies tend to have such bad marketing.

The main ones are:

Talking to and working with all of these people is very enjoyable with very good conversations in comparison to the norm, but action doesn’t happen a lot of the time or very quickly because of the factors I just talked about.

Almost all of them are weighed down, especially the ones who are publicly traded.

In regard to two of these CEOs, they say almost every time I see them their greatest regret was going public and having investors and a board they have to appease.

Considering 8 of the 12 are private companies, and the other two who are public were not around when their company went public, I’d bet more of them would feel the same way.

What is the lesson here?

I think the main one that is applicable to all is make sure you build your company and company culture the right way (how you want it) from the beginning because if you are in the 0.1% that get to a high level, it becomes harder and harder to change.

Probably not applicable advice to most, but important nonetheless.

And what is the final thing that didn’t match expectations?

How little they used AI in general but how successfully they used it when they did use it.

I like to read a lot of business and political news. It’s probably a huge waste of time and detrimental to my mental and spiritual well-being, but I see stories all the time about (insert everyone is going to be replaced by AI) narratives.

Seeing how the large companies employ such a vast majority of people, especially the type of jobs that I’d consider prime to be replaced through AI, I thought I’d see a ton of that.

I was very surprised to learn that in general, I did not see that at all. In fact, I saw very little of anything in terms of general AI use or even automation.

Most people will just use the chatbots for basic stuff and that’s about it. In comparison to the things that I automate on a day-to-day level, there was almost nothing. That surprised me.

However, what shocked me (not just surprised), was how well and to the extent they had custom built AI to fulfill a certain purpose.

Two examples come to mind that I can share.

A lot of the financial companies in this batch of 12 companies have custom built AI tools to instantly sort through credit reports and bank statements 10x more accurately and infinitely faster than having a human do it.

One of the senior living companies has an AI that uses your publicly available information to predict when you and/or your older parents will be at the age to move into a senior living facility and then activates you for outreach through direct mail, email, cold call, etc. at that time.

(It should be noted that these are both things that these companies publicly promote to their investors and on their online presence. I am not revealing any secrets and never would.)

While reviewing the AI stuff at many of these companies, it confirmed what I already thought, which is that generally speaking, AI is going to be useless for most people. Just like in the .com era/bubble, almost all this garbage will fail but the tools that fulfill an ultra specific purpose will become huge.

Most of these tools in my view will be about improving speed and accuracy of something that humans currently do. The rest will be all the other use cases.

As far as what this means for you, I think a lot of time should be spent building custom, specific-purpose built AI tools in-house, with the primary purpose of saving time.

Think of it instead of delegating to a person, you delegate it to AI.

So, nine lessons or things that I learned. 2025 was a productive year for me in all ways and I hope it was for you too.

If you want me to help you with your lead generation in 2026, book a call at Lead Generation Academy and I’ll see if you qualify.

https://leadgenerationacademy.ai