So, let me give you the backstory behind the Facebook Ad series. When I first set up my first training business Transforming People Academy, first we set up in the West of Ireland , in 2005 and I didn’t know anything about marketing. I didn’t know anything by advertising and I had to figure it out myself from basic research, trial and terror. And what I did is I figured out how Google ads worked back then cause that’s all there was back then was Google ads, or there was go to shows, health shows, coffee mornings, things like that, BNI. And that was fine. And then about 2010 I got more into high end software development, freelance contracting, working for banks and insurance companies and stuff like that. So I kind of left the whole marketing advertising world behind and the world moved on.
And over the next, between 2007 and 2014 over that seven year period, the whole landscape changed. And we had Twitter, we had YouTube got really big. They got bought by Google. Facebook appeared out of nowhere and there were a few others that kind of came and went. And LinkedIn started to become the CV website. This is where you put your CV basically if you’re looking for contracts, which I did use LinkedIn, I got some good contracts from that. But then in 2014 when I was relaunching my coaching business, I had done a bit of coaching, but just local advertising to health stores and health centres and stuff like that. Do you know the usual flyers? You put your flyers in there and you restock your flyers every week. So I said, I really want to find the right people to work with and I’ve got to figure out this Facebook ads thing.
So Facebook, Facebook ads was just something I was becoming aware of. But the problem was when I got into Google ads, there wasn’t a lot to learn. When I got into Facebook ads. It was just a mountain of different options and ways of doing things and different approaches. And at that time you could, there wasn’t stories at that stage and there wasn’t Instagram, but there was, you know, there is a right hand corner ads and there was ads in your feed. And then there was different types of promotions and there’s boost posts and there was conversion posts and the campaigns and it literally was just too much there for me to get my head around it. And I really, really got totally overloaded and I literally felt like I was pulling my hair out and I said, there has to be a better way. There has to be better way of doing this.
So what I ended up doing is I took some of my money from freelancing and I invested quite a lot of money in getting trained by some of the top people on the internet around how to use Facebook ads and they spend tens of thousands of pounds learning how to do that. And the advantage was it probably saved me about four or five years of literally trial and terror. Cause I remember looking at working out all the features of the Google ad side of things. And it did take me about a year to figure it out. I didn’t have a year. I knew I’d be out of business if I waited a year to figure out Google ads, sorry, Facebook ads. But I learned lot more as well. I learnt a lot of the mindset and thinking around, not the mechanics of the Facebook ads, but the message of the Facebook ads and how to, how to craft your message so that the right people get attracted to you and the wrong people, the people you don’t want to work with.
They kind of go away. So that was a really interesting journey over a couple of years from this, I suppose they kicked it off by 2011. I started doing some masterclasses up to about 2014 when I relaunched our coaching business and, and it worked really well. We were, I was selling coaching for about 1600 pounds at the time. And it meant that when I run ads, I got clients and then turn off ads and I didn’t need anymore. We didn’t need to run ads cause I had clients that kept me going. And then 2017 we actually relaunched Transforming People Academy. We worked at a whole new level then cause we’re looking at doing it at scale. So when our students became nlp practitioners, coaches, therapists hypnotherapists when they start launching their business, I used to have an open section. So in our trainings back then I’d have 36 modules to teaching in 37 hours.
It was pretty intensive and I had one free slot and if we ran over, I didn’t have that free slot. But if we did run to time, I had a one hour segment where I could say, okay guys we can talk anything, what you want me to cover. And every single time it was marketing. It was like, how do I actually get clients now that I know how to do these life changing sort of amazing content, how do I get clients in the room? And of course it started off with what I had done. Like flyers, go to shows, go to coffee mornings, BNI, that sort of stuff. But the problem is that doesn’t work. And it’s very, very slow. It doesn’t work long term because it’s very sort of, it’s based on luck. You have to be lucky to find the right people.
So I started talking about Facebook ads and realized how much I learned over the previous 10 years about Facebook ads and what a mind field it was. So when I sat down is, what I did is I decided to sit down and actually step through one campaign. So I think I was February of last year. So I literally set up a new Facebook ad account and I went through the process of creating a span new account, how you set it up, why you set up, what you do in order to navigate the 10,000 different ways you could do it, and just follow one path that worked that I’d been using for the previous 18 months to get it to create our, our own six figure business and to scale that so that our students could do the same. And as literally was step by step, part by part how to do it.
And I’m actually really proud of it because what I’ve realized since is that I only show one way. I only show one path and the path works. And yes, there’s a million different ways you can use Facebook ads. There’s more like highfalutin and complex ways nowadays, but this path works and there’s only one path, which means you don’t have to worry about getting it wrong. There’s only one path. You just follow the steps, you trust the system, you follow the system, and then you get the results and that’s where it came from. So the Facebook ads here is literally is the exact process that I use. I litearlly turned the camera on, just like now and then I record my screen and show people exactly what I did from very first beginning, setting up the account right down to run an event where we made 30 grand at that event, all from Facebook ads. I think our spend was about, I can’t remember, it was about five, 600 pounds in total. So to get a 30,000 pound return on a 600 pound spend is, well, it’s kind of crazy, but it shows you the power of Facebook ads, and that’s why we did it.