Serge Gatari on Building a 7-Figure Agency and Consulting Business at 23
Serge Gatari is a 23-year-old entrepreneur from Montreal who runs a consulting business and agency that builds client acquisition systems for high-ticket service providers. In this conversation he explains how a failed ads offer turned into an appointment setting agency and then a consulting program, how his growth team sends hundreds of DMs a day, why he treats content as a sales asset, and how a tightly managed onboarding keeps clients implementing.
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Topics covered
- From course buyer to appointment setting agency
- Fixing client offers before running outreach
- Riding market trends, like TikTok and UGC offers
- Building a growth team for high-volume outbound
- Content as a sales asset for high-ticket offers
- Onboarding and accountability to keep clients succeeding
- Setting honest expectations about the work involved
Key takeaways
- If clients can't afford your first offer, look at what's already working for you. Serge pivoted to appointment setting because his own outreach was booking calls.
- Outreach only works as well as the offer behind it, so improve the offer first.
- Being unique matters, but fast growth often comes from spotting a trend early and pushing an offer into it.
- A growth team made up of people from your own industry ramps up fast because they're prospecting people like themselves.
- For high-ticket offers, content can handle objections before the sales call.
- Fast onboarding and frequent check-ins keep clients from slipping back into old habits.
- Tell clients the truth: outreach takes volume and hard work, not a trick.
Show notes
📚 From courses to the agency model
Serge bought his first course in 2019, an Amazon FBA program, though he never tried it because he didn't have the money. He'd also bought an Airbnb course and then a dropshipping course. He calls it the usual path: Amazon, then dropshipping, then realizing both need capital, then ending up with an agency. Michael says he took a similar route, from growing Instagram pages to dropshipping to agencies.
🔄 From ads to appointment setting
Serge started with an advertising offer. After quitting his job in July 2020, he landed his first client, a coach, in September. The plan was to build a sales video and funnel and run ads, but the coach didn't have an ad budget. Since Serge's outreach had gotten that coach on a call, he offered to do the same outreach for him: done-for-you appointment setting on LinkedIn.
He noticed that he and other agencies were all struggling with appointment setting. When he offered the service to his network, he got on about 90 sales calls in 30 days. In December 2020 he went all in on appointment setting and grew from zero to about $30K a month in roughly three months.
The work was hard to control because many clients had the same course-taught offers. So he created a program that improves or replaces a client's offer before any outreach happens. Michael agrees. At DFY Meetings, the clients who do best aren't getting more attention. They just have something people really want.
“it's not that they get more attention or have some unique method it's just that they have something people really want”
Michael Gardiner, 6:13
📈 Ride the trend
Serge says being completely unique isn't the only goal. Fast growth comes from spotting a trend early and pushing an offer into it, not from copying a dropshipping product after a video about it has gone viral. He'd been helping ecommerce agency clients push TikTok offers. Over time you still need your own spin. Michael adds that TikTok UGC offers have been getting some of his clients their biggest bookings, because brands buy UGC from many creators at once, which makes it a good foot in the door.
“the goal is not necessarily to just be like completely unique because the only way you actually scale fast is by leveraging trends”
Serge Gatari, 7:37
🤝 The growth team
Serge says ads never really worked for booking his meetings. Instead he built a growth team of about six people. They don't close. They find and qualify leads, spot inefficiencies in a prospect's business, explain a better approach and offer a value call. The team works mainly on Facebook, where much of his audience is, plus some LinkedIn and other social platforms. They send roughly 750 to 1,000 DMs a day and book an average of 60 to 100 meetings a week. Each member uses their own profile.
The key difference from a generic VA or setter is that his growth team members come from the industry he sells to. They've felt the same pain his service solves, so they ramp up fast. Michael says that's what he was planning next: using more team members' profiles for outreach as he maxes out his own.
“they prospecting to people just like themselves and you know it's like trying to get a lawyer to sell to another lawyer”
Serge Gatari, 13:51
🎥 Content as a sales asset
Serge doesn't call his content a personal brand yet. He calls it sales assets. He says that without content you'll work ten times as hard to get half as much. His program costs over five figures, and some of his buyers are agency owners making under $10K a month. He says there's no way to sell to them unless they're sold before the call.
“if you're not creating content in 2022 you will never build a business that you feel like you've accomplished something great”
Serge Gatari, 15:03
He doesn't take sales calls himself, and he doesn't want his team to have to push. Instead, he says, he handled the objections across 165 videos. Content is now part of the roadmap for his clients too: a great offer, then content that communicates it, then outbound and the outbound team. He describes one client with under 500 YouTube subscribers who booked a call with a brand doing about $500K a month after the brand watched one of his videos.
🗓️ Onboarding and accountability
Serge sells a one-time program, some of it on payment plans, but he runs it as if it were recurring. He added done-for-you parts because telling people what to do isn't enough. People keep implementing when you reduce their effort and get them results quickly.
Onboarding happens within 24 hours. Then his team improves the offer, builds or helps choose the outbound team two days later, and launches campaigns. Clients send daily reports for the first 15 days, every two days until day 30, then less often as months go by, so they don't slip back into old habits.
He learned this the hard way. He says he spent $24K on an agency over 60 days and got nothing from it, because its onboarding never made him feel confident in the team.
“I think your onboarding process dictates if someone is going to stay or not”
Serge Gatari, 25:08
⚖️ Honest expectations
Serge says much of the online space sells ease, like 20 emails a day getting you to $10K a month. He tells clients the opposite: it takes hundreds of outreach attempts a day, and it's hard. His internal rule is that anyone doing fewer than 300 a day shouldn't be in business. Michael agrees that he doesn't have a trick either, just a few helpful things done consistently.
“we don't want you to think it's easy we want you to realize that it's hard”
Serge Gatari, 27:51
🔭 What's next
Serge's goal is to scale the business to eight figures in the next 15 to 24 months, and eventually to build a group of companies doing $100 million a year. He wants to be the company that makes it unreasonable for clients not to succeed, by taking care of the offer, content, outbound and more instead of just selling information.
About Serge Gatari
Serge Gatari is a 23-year-old entrepreneur based in Montreal, Canada. His consulting business and agency helps online service providers, such as agencies, coaches and consultants selling high-ticket programs, build client acquisition systems: better offers, content, outbound campaigns and outbound teams.
Serge started buying online business courses in 2019 and quit his nine-to-five in July 2020. He started with an advertising offer, moved into done-for-you appointment setting at the end of 2020, and later launched a consulting program. He says the consulting business hit its first six-figure month within five months and recently came close to $200K a month.
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