In this episode of The Constraint Call™, Ravi diagnoses the growth ceiling for Boris Posykalyuk, founder of a coaching program that helps videographers and video agencies pivot to ROI-based offers.
Boris has been generating $200K–$300K/month using DM ads with a $2,000 CAC and an $18K lifetime value, but stalled out trying to simultaneously change his avatar, add a VSL funnel, and pursue enterprise-level agencies.
Ravi’s diagnosis is straightforward: Boris has a great unit economics story and is solving too many problems at once instead of scaling what already works.
The conversation covers five high-leverage moves: committing a fixed percentage of last month’s revenue to ad spend each month, building a two-tier sales calendar so the best closers take the best leads, skipping the double-booking system in favor of hiring a third closer, creating a seven-day propaganda pipeline of retargeting content to increase pre-call consumption, and implementing a daily scorecard to replace reactive Slack management with metric-driven leadership.
Ravi’s core point throughout: most businesses at this stage don’t die of starvation. They die of indigestion from changing too much at once.
Transcript
BORIS POSYKALYUK: What we do is help videographers, established videographers, and content agencies pivot their offer. Instead of selling just content, they sell an ROI-based offer that combines content with a local ad strategy to help businesses grow. This lets them retain clients while fixing their acquisition. Once they fix their offer, they can scale ad spend and acquire clients predictably.
RAVI ABUVALA: You mentioned a couple of different avatars. Is there one that floats to the top, or is it a blend?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: That’s something I’d love to discuss. We started going after videographers, then established videographers, and now we’re moving up market to video agencies. The ideal client isn’t someone who just bought a camera. It’s someone who’s learned to delegate editing and a few other pieces of running the business. They just need to dial in their offer and acquisition and scale to $50K-plus a month.
RAVI ABUVALA: In your own words, what do you think the primary constraint is right now?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: Dialing in messaging to attract a more sophisticated buyer who understands what we can do for them. I had a limiting belief that videographers are a larger TAM, so I should stick with them. But after helping over 250, our best clients are established video agencies. I keep asking myself why I don’t just narrow down, even though the TAM is smaller. The limiting belief around reducing TAM, and not knowing how to speak to the more sophisticated buyer, is what’s holding us back.
RAVI ABUVALA: Those are mechanisms to solve what you think the constraint is. What is the constraint as a KPI? Low return on ad spend, not enough units, not enough booked calls?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: One is cash collected rate. Average is about 40%, which isn’t bad. But we’ve noticed that with a specific demographic, the rate is higher. The other is scaling ads with the new messaging. It’s a big pivot we just implemented and we’re still getting tire kickers who aren’t ideal. For what we’re spending, the quality should be better.
RAVI ABUVALA: Cash collected 40%. Give me the price point and length of the program.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: We have two. A four-month offer at $9,000 and a year-long offer at $15,000.
RAVI ABUVALA: Do you pitch both on the first call, or do you decide beforehand?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: The closer typically pitches both. But if someone’s on the lower end, we don’t pitch the second one because we’re not sure we want to work with them long term. And when people hear $15,000, they tend to pull back.
RAVI ABUVALA: Of the clients you have coming in, what’s the split between the four-month and the twelve-month?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: About 80% on the four-month, maybe 75%.
RAVI ABUVALA: Do you then ascend the four-month to the twelve-month? Any backend?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: Yes. We have an ascension program and about 50% of clients ascend. We actually increased the ascension price to $18K for twelve months.
RAVI ABUVALA: So if your four-month is $9K and 50% ascend to $18K, the LTV is $18K over roughly sixteen months. And you’re collecting the majority of that?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: Yes. We have a good system in place. A lot of clients come in inspired, they see results in the first days, close a deal, get ROI in month one, and that lets us collect the rest right away.
RAVI ABUVALA: What are you doing in cash monthly, what’s your CAC, and do you know your cost to deliver?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: CAC is about $2,000 for the year so far. We’re spending $30K to $50K a month on ads, though we’ve slowed down recently. My creative director was here redoing our ads to speak to a more sophisticated buyer, so we pulled back. We’re doing $200K to $300K collected per month. We keep hitting that ceiling and going back down. The goal is to crack $500K.
RAVI ABUVALA: What’s your LTGP? High margins or a lot of hard costs?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: We have two client success managers and software costs. I don’t know the exact number, but margins are probably above 80%.
RAVI ABUVALA: So if your CAC is $2,000 and your LTV is $18K, why not go crazy with ads? What’s stopping you from just cranking spend?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: That’s a good point. I think the mistake I made was slowing down on the lower-tier clients and going all-in on the higher-tier shift without proof of concept. I had that realization this week. We went from 12-13 booked calls a day to 7-8.
RAVI ABUVALA: That’s extremely common. I do the same thing. My buddy Cole says most businesses die of indigestion, not starvation. We’re changing too much of what’s already working. Have you tried cranking ad spend to $100K a month to see what happens to CAC?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: We’ve only spent up to $60K. And this month, on top of changing the avatar, we also added a VSL funnel. So we changed messaging, changed the funnel, and changed the target all at once. We closed a couple of deals through the VSL but we’re still getting unqualified people coming in.
RAVI ABUVALA: If I were you, instead of adjusting messaging, avatar, and funnel all at once, I’d put 80% of my daily budget toward scaling the DM ads. Period. The system that works is what got you to $300K a month.
Here’s what changed how we approached ad spend: instead of scaling when ads look profitable, I look at last month’s P&L and commit to spending 20% of that on ads the following month. So if you collected $250K, you’re spending $50K next month. It’s not a max spend, it’s a minimum. That changes everything. It forces you to generate new creatives, face your numbers, and stop being passive about growth.
Our media buyer has a minimum daily spend he has to hit, not a cap. That creates urgency. When you’re burning through cash daily, you take the business seriously.
Even if your CAC goes from $2,000 to $3,000, but you double your budget and double your results, that’s a massive win. So step one: set the DM ad budget and scale it daily regardless of what else you’re tinkering with.
Then, with the 20% of your time and budget, take the same messaging from DM ads and transfer it to a VSL funnel. Don’t change the avatar, don’t change the messaging. Just move it to VSL and see if it converts. I’d bet it will, because the mechanics are almost identical.
Once the VSL is working, you can use variable headlines to test different entry points without duplicating funnels. That’s where you introduce different avatars as a test. But it’s all the same VSL.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: That makes sense. So you’re saying: scale what’s working, copy it to VSL, then test new avatars from there?
RAVI ABUVALA: Exactly. And on the avatar question: most people assume ideal avatar means the enterprise-level client. But in reality, there are almost always one or two characteristics that tell you someone is qualified beyond just revenue. You said something about having an editing team. That might be your real filter. Go back through your last 30 to 50 clients and find the commonality. Maybe it’s just having one editor on staff. That becomes a qualifying question in the application.
And here’s the other thing: even if you decide you want five-plus editors only, you still close the one-to-three editor people while you build toward that. Cutting off a whole band of people from paid ads tanks your CAC. It makes scaling much harder. Our offer is “get more revenue from the leads you’re already generating.” It’s not “attract only the perfect person.” It’s “make the most money from every click.”
What I’d focus on instead of changing who you’re attracting is building a tier structure inside your current funnel. Look at your book-to-close rate. If one group closes at 3%, another at 8-10%, and another at 15%, that determines what happens to them. The 3% group gets auto-DQ’d to your YouTube channel or a low-ticket offer. The 8-10% group goes to your second-tier sales reps and gets pitched the four-month program. The 15% group goes to your best closers and gets pitched the twelve-month.
And I’d stop giving options on the call. Prescribe a solution. Don’t say here are two programs. Say based on what you’ve told me, here’s exactly what you need and why.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: That makes sense. So keep the bread and butter, add the tier structure, and don’t cut off the 80% that’s producing the revenue.
RAVI ABUVALA: Correct. And if your goal is $500K in two or three months, I’d put money on you getting there just by increasing ad spend. You might need to switch to a VSL funnel to break through the ceiling DM ads typically hit around $250K to $300K, but the path is clear: more of what works, then optimize.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: What about a conditioned pixel? We’ve processed 270 transactions and have zero pixel conditioning. We’re running purely on interest and lookalike audiences.
RAVI ABUVALA: Joel’s right that messaging matters more than the pixel, but I wouldn’t ignore pixel conditioning. We started conditioning our pixel toward a higher-end avatar, specifically excluding people below $50K a month, and over four or five months, we saw a meaningful shift in quality. Everyone spending $200K to $300K a month says the same thing. The pixel matters.
The caveat is: even a perfectly conditioned pixel won’t overcome bad messaging. Get the messaging right first. But start firing the pixel now. When people book through your DM flow, are they booking manually or through a link?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: We’re sending them our Calendly link on Instagram.
RAVI ABUVALA: Then start pixeling those booking pages and thank you pages. Set up a lead event on the booking page and a schedule event on the thank you page. You can start conditioning the pixel immediately. You don’t have to wait.
And on targeting: almost every time I go deep into a client’s ad account, open targeting beats interest-based and lookalike. Probably 70% of the time. When you narrow targeting too much, CPMs go way up. If your CPM is high, every downstream number gets worse. Let the creative call out the right person and let Meta find them.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: Got it. Open targeting, conditioned pixel, scale the DM spend. What about sales capacity? Last time we pushed to $60K in spend, both closers’ calendars filled out and we still don’t have a third closer. Every slot is worth a potential $9K to $15K. Should we be double booking?
RAVI ABUVALA: What’s your show rate?
BORIS POSYKALYUK: 72%.
RAVI ABUVALA: At 72%, you should not be doing double booking. That number is too high. If you double book at 72%, the majority of those second calls will show, and you’ll just be burning trust. Hire another salesperson.
Double booking only makes sense when you look at the data and can say conclusively that a specific type of person, based on identifiable characteristics, shows at below 50%. That requires actual analysis of your last 200 to 300 calls. Something like: people with fewer than two editors who didn’t confirm when we sent the reminder message show at 35%. Those people you might double book. But it has to be data-driven, not a blanket policy.
I’ve had clients doing half a million, a million, two million a month running double booking systems. When we looked at their last hundred or two hundred calls, removed the double booking, built a tier structure, and added salespeople, they made more money with less complexity almost every time. And the setter double booking problem is real. Once setters start covering no-shows, sets go down. They’re spending time on calls they shouldn’t be on.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: That makes a ton of sense. I’ve been trying to set this up and it’s incredibly complex just to explain to the team.
RAVI ABUVALA: It’s almost never worth it. Hire the closer.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: One more thing on content consumption. We’re getting booked calls from people who haven’t watched anything. How do you get prospects to consume content before the call so the closer’s job is easier?
RAVI ABUVALA: On average, our prospects consume 18 minutes of content before getting on a call with us, not including the VSL. A few things that move the needle:
First, use Microsoft Clarity. It records people visiting your funnel pages, shows what videos they’re watching, how long, where they drop. It tells you what’s worth keeping and what to cut. Less content pre-call is almost always better than more, but some is better than none. The right amount varies by industry.
Second, run a retargeting propaganda pipeline. We have 25 active conversion ads and 12 to 15 retargeting ads. Different formats: testimonials, direct to camera, walking, images, B-roll. The campaign structure is set so someone sees each piece once, not the same ad ten times. By the time a prospect gets on the call, even if they haven’t consumed anything through the thank you page, they’ve been hit with enough content that they understand the offer.
Third, consistent publishing. Both on YouTube and Instagram, publishing weekly tells the algorithm to serve your content to people who just visited your funnel. That’s organic consumption you’re not paying for.
The real secret is identifying the education gap. Look at your last 20 to 30 sales calls and find what the salespeople are having to explain over and over. That’s what goes on the thank you page as the primary piece of content. Everything else is secondary.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: Do you think I need to show them a mini VSL inside the DM flow before booking? We have a six-minute video and there’s a big drop-off.
RAVI ABUVALA: That’s a 20% problem, not a 100% problem. You said your constraint is not enough bookings and not enough ad spend. Removing the VSL from the DM flow might increase bookings but tank close rate. You could double the booking rate and have close rate drop 60%, and now you need twice as many salespeople to make the same money. Don’t touch it yet. Fix the constraint first.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: Last thing. I check Slack constantly. I’m in the sales channel all the time. What do you do to actually remove yourself?
RAVI ABUVALA: Build a scorecard. Pick 5 to 12 of the most important numbers in your business. For most businesses it’s something like: ad spend, number of leads, booked calls, taken calls, closed deals, cash collected, and bank balance. Have a VA pull those from yesterday every morning and post them in a dedicated Slack channel before you log in. That’s it. No fancy system. An hour of their time at $4 to $5 an hour.
Now you’re running your business based on metrics instead of reacting to every conversation. If your close rate is supposed to be 35% and it drops to 25%, you see it. You can decide whether to step in now or wait another day to see if it averages out.
Once that’s in place, mute every other channel. You’re only jumping in when a KPI is out of range for multiple consecutive days. Outside of that, let the team solve their own problems.
Here’s why that matters more than you think. If you come in and solve every problem, your team never develops the muscle to solve it themselves. If your closer needs you to figure out why a deal didn’t close, they’re not actually capable of closing at your level. Either they figure it out and you never have to solve it again, or you find out they can’t function without you, and that’s information worth having. Both outcomes are worth more than the $5,000 you might lose waiting two days.
And instead of spending that time in Slack, could you do something that generates more revenue? A YouTube video, a one-to-many play? Almost always at your level, yes.
Give every team member a KPI and make them the CEO of their own position. Set the number, track it on the scorecard, and only engage when something is clearly broken. That’s the whole system.
BORIS POSYKALYUK: I need a scorecard. That ties everything together.
RAVI ABUVALA: Keep it simple. VA pulls the numbers daily. Rolling seven-day averages alongside daily figures. That gives you both snapshots and trends. If you want to automate the management layer, you can pipe all your end-of-day channel updates into an AI summary that only flags anomalies. Most days everyone’s fine and you don’t need to see anything. The rest of the time, go learn to fly a plane.