Raphael Gordon

We're officially 1 Month Away from Q4 💸💸 So I thought I’d share what the last 30 days looked, like for our clients… @grant1garcia got a 13k view video after 3 months of not posting + printed over $20K off of it @sanjay1223 first video with us ranked 1/10 Connor’s first ever video on YouTube did 1K views

So what would I tell myself 6 months ago? 1. Have the hard conversation the moment you feel something is wrong. Not when it's impossible to avoid. 2. And surround yourself with people who tell you what you need to hear. I'm 19 and this has cost me multiple relationships and a fuckload of money. But I'm grateful for this lesson and I can only hope that it helps you to avoid same mistake I did when growing your business.

It was painful. And It been super messy, between financial threats, inflated sums of money he claims I owe him, him messaging previous clients to get my attention and relentless follow-ups It’d be an understatement to call it a rough breakup and even more of an understatement to say we're working through it. But it was the right call. Right decisions usually feel exactly like this. And I'm making this tweet to look back at it 6 months from now when the agency is doing better than it’s ever done.

After sitting with that painful truth, I decided to end the partnership. But I was still fearful, so instead of dealing with it upfront, I slowly started detaching from it. I can argue I did that because the first conversation I had with him about ending the partnership resulted in me backing out Or because payroll was due the next week, deliverables weren’t met by him and I couldn’t risk the clients work getting nuked Either way, I know it wasn’t entirely right of me to end things the way in which I did, but at the time I felt there was no choice.

October rolled around and Jay and Yoosuf sat me down and finally made me see it clearly. That's when Jay gave me the knife analogy. What they made me realize is that I'd confused tolerance for stability. I was so used to the problem that it had stopped feeling like one. I'd built my whole routine around working around this thing instead of just fixing it. The knife was in my stomach, I'd made peace with it, and I thought that was fine. It wasn't. That's not surviving, that's just dying slowly. That's when I realized I hadn't been staying out of loyalty. I had been staying out of fear.

August 7th. I finally got on a call and told him I was ending things. He got emotional. Said he was getting married in a few months. Said he'd spoken to people who told him he should expose us for being late on payroll month over month and walk away, that everyone should see what we were doing, but he chose to stay. And now we were doing this to him. And this is really where I fucked up the most. I backed out. Instead of ending it, I told him we'd find a way to make it work and make sure he was looked after. I was trying to do the right thing by him. It was the wrong call. I let emotion override logic, and that ended up costing everyone.

The issues wasn’t necessarily that payroll was increasing rapidly and was staying at that rate despite the business doing good or bad It was that it felt more like an expense, rather than an investment Because: Clients flagged that work was too slow. Quality was inconsistent. Deadlines were missed. Relationships I had spent years building started breaking down. Over the last 6 months of that partnership, I’ve processed close to $100,000 to him. And we were losing clients because of it, ones we should have kept for years.

So here’s the thing, when we started, we made an agreement: payroll would never go above $20,000. Every month after March was a record month. And every month, payroll grew. He was hiring without my input. I'd find out when the number hit. HR departments, accounting teams, office boys, people to run personal errands. Things that make no sense for an online content agency. July was our actual best month. We cash collected close to $60,000. Payroll was damn near $30,000. That’s a 50% increase. Now in theory 50% margin doesn’t sound too bad right? Well we did the math. For every $10,000 we grew, we were losing $15,000 in payroll. We were shrinking while growing.

Fast forward to March 2026 was a record month. We cash collected close to $45,000. I was proud of it. But I had barely netted $5K, I had NOTHING to show for the fact that I was halfway to $100K So I sat down, ran the numbers because realistically $40K doesn’t just vanish and I noticed $39,000 from the business had gone towards payroll throughout that month Quick pause for everyone reading this: You might be asking yourself “what kind of retard allows almost 100% of his margin on payroll” Just wait it gets worse because I had just brought on two people to work within the agency, Jay and Yoosuf. Jay had completely overhauled our sales process and was closing prospects I never would have closed on my own. Yoosuf had taken over operations, which was my old partners job so why did I have to bring Yoosuf in? Well, before the record month this year, we had another record month last October and a month after that had probably the worst 3 months I’ve ever experienced in business Genuinely thought I’d have to go get a job at Mcdonalds. And part of the reason for that was because I had to bury myself in operations which stopped me from focusing on what I actually do best, getting new clients and making sure they get results. So without Jay & Yoosuf God only knows where the business would be at today. The issue is I still couldn't pay them properly. That was the moment I knew something needed to be said, and something needed to be changed as well. And I said nothing.

So for context in case you don’t know me I run a done-for-you content agency, we help business owners grow with YouTube and short form content. I started working with him when I around 16 and the partnership was straightforward: He promised he would handle all things operationally And I would be responsible for client acquisition and client success management Sounds pretty solid right? Well For a while, it worked. We grew fast. Things were genuinely good But looking back, the cracks were always there. I just chose to continue remaining oblivious to them because the business wasn’t falling apart. (on paper at least) It was like I was putting duct tape on a sinking ship just to let it hold. The problem with that is, eventually the pressure gets to harsh and the ship collapses entirely … and that’s EXACTLY what happened

My best friend told me something in October I'll never forget. "You've had a knife in your stomach for months. You just got comfortable with the pain. But you're still dying. The question is whether you're brave enough to pull it out." He was talking about a partnership I'd been in for almost 3 years. I'm going to tell the full story, because I think this learning curve in my journey can save some of you guys from the same mistakes I made, and I wish someone had said this to me sooner.

Another Winner for client Parker Posted this vid last night and it’s already got 2k views + 1/10 on YT Studio Will def be a 10k view video overtime + print us a ton of $$ We handled the ideation, scripting, editing & thumbnail for this

one of biggest issues i see everyone in info doing on their yt channel is making videos in isolation for example when i started working with @parkerjaysmith 3 month’s ago, every video idea he was doing was random and he was just getting something out for the sake of getting it out he posted consistently for 6 months btw and was averaging 200-400 views a video the first thing we fixed when we worked together was that we didn’t just “copy outliers” or make whatever we thought was best we looked at the biz model he was running and it broke each stage into diff vids that built on top of eachother and led to the next our first video was his story video (who am i and can you trust me) our second one was explaining his biz model (here’s what i do and exactly how it works) our 3rd video was a 3rd person narrator case study breakdown of one of his students (here’s proof that this model works for other people/people just like me) our 4th video was comparing the model to other businesses & explaining why it’s better (since we edit his Ads too we knew his ICP were evaluating other biz models vs his so we positioned his as the natural next step) our first month working together we raised his view floor from 200-400 views a vid to 3,000 to 7,000 IN OUR FIRST MONTH WITH WELL OVER $30,000 CC AS WELL IN OUR FIRST MONTH if you post random ideas you’ll get random results if you strategy & structure, you’ll print

On an absolute generational run rn w @grant1garcia keep in mind btw, we just STARTED posting TWO weeks ago, after 3 MONTH’s OFF channel was literally dead and we had to kickstart everything again but that’s never a problem when you have the right strategy $48k cc first two weeks back damn near 20k views too off of 3 vids can’t wait until we hit 100k/mo all organically with the channel

Two weeks back working with Grant. —> Video 1: 13,000 views —> Video 2: 2,900 views —> Video 3: 1,900 views in 22 hours Asked him how much YouTube has made him since we started. $48,000. Not because these videos went viral. Not because he has a massive audience. But because when the system is dialed, every video compounds on the last one. and we’re only two weeks in btw only up from here 🤝

So if you sell info and you want to make more money organically Be that $30K, $50K or $100K/mo+ organically Shoot me a msg/book a call here: calendly.com/raphael-ipbn/30… Let us make you a lambo with organic content

Unlike ads, content has a ramp-up period. Every result you just saw? Those clients were already posting something before they came to us. They just had no system, no structure and no consistency. And that's exactly why they came to us But there was action. The hardest part of moving anything is the first inch All we did was install our proven system and break it. Consistency & Momentum did the rest.

If you sell info You know Q4 is the best season But most importantly You know that the first few weeks of Q1 are the easiest time to make a shit ton of money with info But here's what most agencies won't tell you: The money you make from organic content is a lagging indicator. Let me explain ->

Omar did $18K off of the first YouTube video we did for him (all within a week btw) @grant1garcia closed a 6k PIF a few hours after the 2nd video was posted @scottmfkelly did $15K off of 1 video Took @parkerjaysmith from averaging 200-400 views posting by himself for 6 months to now 3k views/video on average and he's made well over $50k from YouTube since we worked together

First video with @sanjay1223 already ripping 🕺