The Million-Dollar Dog

My dog Ruger couldn't get up.

He couldn't walk.

And it took me right back to when my dog Mylo started to decline a couple of years ago.

The wobble. The struggle to get up. The coughing.

By the end, I was saving him from choking to death every time he ate and carrying him outside to help him pee and poop.

I thought I could save him. But it was his time.

So when Ruger struggled to head up the stairs to my bedroom, I said, "Shit, here we go again."

And my brain went to that place. The vet visit. The sales pitch. The thousand-dollar bill.

It's why I always say I have a million-dollar dog.

The Crisis Echo

That same day, one of my private clients sent me a message.

His lead cost was high. His opt-in rate was abysmal.

He's been burned by marketers and consultants who promised him the world and just wasted his money. Hundreds of thousands burned.

And when his media buyer sent him the stats, I knew exactly what he was experiencing.

It doesn't matter if it's your dog, your business, or a life emergency.

Our brain goes to that place. We experience it all over again.

The Bloat Spiral

The first instinct is always to do more.

Fire and hire more people. Build more funnels. Buy more software. Create more price points. Build more offers. More live events.

And you end up with too many chefs in the kitchen.

You end up spread so thin your business and life become extremely inefficient.

When a business can't scale, there's almost always cost, time, and energy bloat.

It comes down to efficiency.

For example a car that burns more gas than it should to get somewhere has an efficiency problem.

Adding more things to the car, more gas and putting more people in it will never make it more efficient. Finding the true problem and solving the root cause will.

The Veterinarian Problem

One of the contributors to this problem is the "veterinarian."

All the content, gurus, consultants, and marketers who are immediately in your ear when you have a problem. All your friends want to chime in too.

They immediately go into all these grim scenarios and selling you on multiple drugs, but can't answer logical questions about them. It's always just a great pitch that sounds logical on the surface.

They're all going to sell you some version of something they don't even actually understand themselves.

How can this be? well.. anyone who’s doing anything for alot of people will have some kind of success rate. If they’re the best known or most convenient people are going to have success with them.

No body talks about the advice they gave or things they sold to people that was a complete mismatch.

I could drive across town and take the exact opposite advice from someone else and it be true for someone.

This is why I always look for root cause and bypass bias.

When I finally figured out what was wrong with my dog, it wasn't a death sentence. It wasn't cancer.

Years ago, before we rescued him, he broke his leg. It's come with some consequences later in life.

The Real Problem Is Almost Never What You Think

Most things in business aren't broken legs.

They're imaginary, intangible things in our mind brought up from the past, false perception, and straight-up make-believe.

My client thought his lead cost was bad. But before we ran this strategy, he was getting cheap, unqualified leads. People he couldn't even close.

I've seen people go to the extreme where they start partnering with credit companies and creating low-ticket offers just to convert unqualified people because they think their lead cost should be lower.

But the game has changed. It's more about signal and resonance than it is cheap leads.

If you sell something expensive, you're looking for a high close rate with your ideal customer. Not a flood of cheap leads.

When we dug in more, he's actually paying a lot less now for qualified leads than he was before. He just wasn't measuring that. He was measuring overall cost.

Next, he was stressed about the opt-in rate. But after digging, I found out there were multiple forms of traffic going to that page, including cold and old leads from an old list. Mostly unqualified.

So it only makes sense why that would happen.

What most people do in this situation is they react. They make the system more complex, more bloated, and less efficient.

My clients are brilliant people who have already had lots of success. They just have too many voices in their ear sometimes and no way to see the real problem.

How to Protect What Actually Matters

This is why I teach my clients three major things:

1. Ideal Identity + Customer First

Every day you optimize for things you don't want or care about, the more it compounds. Cheaper leads, unqualified leads, people you don't want to work with… you just create more problems. The ad AI optimizes for those people, and you just revive an old world and paradigm that never served you.

The type of leads you're getting is always a sign of what's really happening underneath because advertising and marketing is just a signal. I know, sounds woo-woo, but it's not. It's science.

2. Inevitable Profit Model

From click to close and all the steps in between, how do your numbers work out in a scenario where you're doing 2-3x returns on ad spend vs. cash collected?

In some models a 1.5 or even a loss makes sense for the front end offer. The bigger the competitor the more they’re willing to take a loss up front and win on market share, contract and lifetime value.

As a rule of thumb with a high-ticket offer I like to start at 2-3x return. If you can’t survive on that, you have serious bloat going on in your biz and you may not have a backend where customers stay with you for years.

Take the numbers and work them backward every single step in between, and that builds a target model.

Before they buy, they have to show up for an appointment.

Before they show up they have to book the appointment. so on and so forth.

Document the %’s and costs in a perfect or working month (or some version of that) from cold traffic or marketing.

Every month, week, and day, you compare target vs. actual.

Then solve for the 1-2 constraints based on the theory of why those 1-2 major numbers are off track.

In my client's case, he's 1-2 sales call shows from smashing his goal every month. That's it. So the only thing we implemented on that front was fixing the elements of influence in his marketing AFTER they book a call.

3. CLMS (Closed Loop Management System)

Whether you like it or not, you will have to manage your marketing to some degree.

The way most reports and communication happen, they're a frenzy of calls, texts, and solving a heap of the wrong problems.

Solving the wrong problems in 2026 is what will crush most businesses. Especially anyone who has had success. Here's why:

It's the difference between falling off a stepladder and falling off a 20-foot ladder with cinder blocks tied to your feet.

When you're already successful, the stakes are higher. Overhead is higher. Your competitors are bigger. With the mix of AI and the speed of technology, it's so easy to solve problems until you completely run out of money. You have AI, software, consultants, and everything at your fingertips. I've seen this happen more times than I'd like with people who ignored my advice.

CLMS cuts out all of the communication overhead, and you have a system where the 1-2 constraints + a very clear plan is communicated. And it's done in a way where all of your back-and-forth questions are answered before you even think to ask about it.

Focus Is What Protects What You've Built

When all of this is put together, it takes you from in the weeds, stressed out, burning time and energy, and pontificating on things that shouldn't even exist…

To influencing, facilitating, and casting the vision. Participating in things that are more meaningful and have a bigger impact on your team, family, customer, and growth.

The fastest racecars have the least parts.

Ruger's doing fine now. It wasn't the worst-case scenario my brain jumped to.

But that vet visit reminded me why I built my business the way I do. To protect what matters. To have the clarity to see the real problem instead of reacting to symptoms.

Your business is the same way.

—Lance C. Greenberg

PS: If you want help solving your lead quality and scaling issues.. or you’re just not sure which problem to solve yet, you can apply for a meeting with me @ www.Lancecgreenberg.com