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Know, Like, Trust - the Credit Brothers' Seven Figure Strategy

(7 minute read) Money and trust compounds + the favored credit cards of these points-hacking experts

Author

Avi Gandhi
June 30, 2023

The Credit Brothers

Profits allow us to invest in other areas.

Josh and Chris Steil are The Credit Brothers on social media, experts on credit, credit cards, and all things related.

Together, they built a seven-figure services business, a six-figure membership business, and four other emerging revenue streams - well before they hit 1M total followers.

Let’s get into it!

Links

The Business

Breakdown

Observations

As far as we're concerned, we drive leads, get people on the calendar, and that's it. Everything else is taken care of from there.

Josh and Chris make most of their revenue from services.

These services are composed of two offerings:

  1. Credit Repair - Josh and Chris help individuals and businesses repair their credit.

  2. Small Business Financing - This is a new service where they help small business owners source and procure capital.

The Credit Brothers claim 30% margin on the credit repair business, since they’re paying a team. They have close to 100% margin on their other revenue streams.

Is that lower margin worth it?

Less margin = more passivity.

Chris and Josh did everything to get their Credit Repair business going.

Then they hired and taught other people how to do it, reducing their margin but freeing up their time to grow new revenue streams.

But why bother with that other, lower-revenue stuff?

Money compounds.

Every dollar that comes in can be reinvested to generate even more revenue.

Also:

Small offerings build trust.

The Credit Brothers operate their business by the funnel mantra:

Know, Like, Trust.

Every interaction is a step in the process:

  1. Know them from your TikTok feed

  2. Like them after watching videos on their page

  3. Trust them after getting a credit card they recommend

  4. Trust them more after buying their travel hacking course

  5. Spend thousands on membership or services

Like money, trust compounds.

The Stack

Website, Hosting, SMS, Email, Scheduling, Storefront - Go High Level

Rather than having to subscribe to Active Campaign, ClickFunnels, and all these other services which start to add up, we found GoHighLevel to be the best all-in-one solution.

Go High Level is an all-in-one funnel designed specifically for services businesses (“agencies”).

A unique feature is that it includes SMS marketing alongside the more standard features, like website, email, and storefront.

Before Go High Level, they used Community SMS for years, until a unilateral price increase.

I’m sorry, $0.04 per message segment? It would have been around $4,000 a month. It was just not worth it, man, just not worth it…We moved everything over to GoHighLevel because their cost per segment is like 75% less.

Many Creator Economy companies seem to be trying to increase prices to grow profits, and it’s backfiring on a lot of companies.

I don’t think it’s a good business solution for SMS marketing because it's just too expensive.

Invoices - Invoiced.com

Payment Processing - Stripe + NMI + Venmo/Zelle/Cash App

An interesting bit of trivia on payment processing in the credit space:

Our main payment processor, however, is NMI, which is a high-risk merchant provider.

Because we sell high-risk services like credit repair or even business funding, we can't use Stripe. They would shut down our account and hold all our money….

As a result, their stack is built around compatibility with NMI.

Link in Bio - Beacons

I think Chris liked their aesthetic, and we thought, 'Cool, we'll use Beacons.'

Since then, we've met the founders and have come to like the platform itself.

Now, we're not going to switch from Beacons.

It seems Know, Like, Trust goes both ways!

Membership - Podia with Payments through Stripe, Venmo, Zelle, Cash App

It’s been the best thing that has not been a service, by far…They know us, they like us, and they trust us…So, they're like, 'I just want to join because I want to be closer to you guys.'

The Credit Brothers’ membership is around 250 members paying $1000-$1500.

Members get access to Chris and Josh, all their digital products, live Zoom calls, and whatever new stuff they come out with in the future.

Podia also enables them to let their members benefit financially from signing other members, as affiliates of the membership.

Given the price of membership, the reward for signing up a friend must be pretty meaningful.

Affiliates - IdentityIQ (direct) + Confidential Credit Card Affiliate Platform

The Credit Brothers have two sources of affiliate revenue.

IdentityIQ is a credit monitoring service that they trust. All of their credit repair customers have to sign up for it, keeping the customer experience consistent.

The other enables them to monetize credit card sign ups; however, they asked to keep it confidential due to uncertainty about the terms of service.

Instead, here’s how the credit card affiliate chain works:

Several affiliate services for credit cards are powered by CreditCards.com, who has direct relationships with the various card providers.

Those services, like Red Ventures, Mile Value, and others, deal with publishers like The Credit Brothers.

Each has their own complicated set of rules for publishers.

The worthwhile tradeoff is that credit card affiliate fees can be pretty high.

Project Management - Monday.com + Zapier connecting everything in

I know our average commission on a sale, the expected margin on any given sale, and our projected earnings for the year based on what's happened so far.

The Credit Brothers are the first Creators I’ve ever met who built out a bona-fide dashboard to track their business.

They used Monday.com, and Zapier to tie all their revenue sources into it.

Here’s an example screenshot:

Why is this useful?

So for example, it’ll tell us we've only generated 10 leads, so we’ll put up a story post and we'll just see that go from 10 to 20 leads.

By keeping an eye on their sales trends, they can make decisions to impact their business in real time.

Credit Cards - Chase Ink Unlimited + Marriott Bonvoy

The Creators who are experts on credit cards are about to tell you what credit card to get for your business. Listen up.

I just opened my third Chase Ink Unlimited account and achieved the sign-up bonus, which was 80,000 points. That's fantastic.

We also have a fondness for Marriott…I have Titanium Elite, their second-best status, so I earn around 21 points per dollar spent with their credit card. The result is a tremendous amount of Marriott points when we stay at Marriott.

If I were to name the two credit cards we use most frequently, they would be the Chase Ink Unlimited and the Marriott Bonvoy Business credit card.

Accounting - Quickbooks + Accounting firm

Communication - Slack

Representation - None

I represent Chris, he represents me.

Josh Steil

Content Production - Viral Edits

I must say we collaborate with the best short-form content team money can buy. These guys are incredibly talented. They work with the biggest names in the short-form space like Jordan Peterson, Alex Mosey, Grant Cardone, and the CEO of Cuts.

Operations - Internal Team

  • 10 total on operations

  • 3 on Sales

The guys make a strong effort to maintain employee retention, offering perks like a team outing to the Super Bowl.

The cost to hire someone…what they say in the interview vs on the resume vs their aptitude to actually do it…are all completely different things….

It’s a big priority that the people that we have, stay. It would really royally suck if they left.

Thanks for reading!

My mission is to enable millions of people to benefit from the emergence of the Creator Economy.

Follow me on LinkedIn for actionable insights from my travels through the Creator Economy.

Feel free to reach out - [email protected].

See you next week!

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