Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Heiden.
Hi Alex, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
When I was a senior in high school, I realized that I was really only 4 years away from working a “real job” and being in the “real world” and I thought about it and realized working in finance (what I planned to go to school for) probably wouldn’t make me happy.
So I went down the rabbit hole of how to make money online, I started off by trying drop shipping (e-commerce) with very little success. I lost a ton of money from March to December of 2019. This was during my first semester at Saint Louis University where I was a full-time d1 student-athlete playing tennis.
I knew I had to pivot and I discovered phone sales, which is essentially selling someone else’s online course or service over the phone in exchange for a commission. I was selling $2,000-$5,000 products at 15-20% commission so I started to make good money and it clicked.
Then I had tons of clients telling me they struggle to find good sales reps like myself, so I became a recruiter, and I started training and placing sales reps in other businesses. I quickly realized the recruitment model is very inefficient, it takes forever to train salespeople, they charge too much, and the success rate with training salespeople is pretty low.
So I thought, how about I only source sales reps that are already experienced, and it was an immediate hit, all of a sudden there was 0 training time, all I had to do was introduce them to my client and they’d get going. Then I wondered how I can make the process faster, and the answer I came up with was turning it into a self-serve hiring platform, like Fiverr or Upwork, but only for commission only, and experienced sales reps.
I took the majority of my savings to pay a developer to code the platform in April 2021, at this point I was still in school, and I then made the decision to go all in and leave school two weeks before the semester ended, as I started to really have a disdain for school.
So I dumped my savings into getting it built, left school, and then we launched in July 2021, and I knew I wanted to move to Miami but I didn’t want to move alone. I asked my friend who had done sales with me what it would take for him to move to Miami with me, and he said just give me a base salary on top of my commissions and I’m there.
I said done deal, and we moved to Miami on September 28th, 2021, drastically increasing our personal and business costs. During the first month in Miami, we doubled the business, and since then we’ve scaled to over $100,000 per month in just 1 year. We’re now aiming for a quarter million per month by the end of the year.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It was incredibly difficult to build a company while a full-time d1 athlete.
My day would go from 5 am to midnight. I had to be up at 5 am for practice 6 am-8 am then I had class 9 am-1 pm then I’d have weights at 3 pm. During any breaks, I was making sales calls, binging YouTube, and doing other tasks.
The other hard part has simply been information barriers, I’m only 21 and I always say “I don’t know what I don’t know” you don’t just “know” how to build a 7-8 figure business, you have to fill the information gaps, so I’ve spent over $100,000 to learn from people ahead of me, some investments have been good, some not so much.
The other challenge has been building and managing a team, I think we’re up to 12 team members, and sourcing, recruiting, and managing top talent is not easy. A proper culture has to be implemented to keep it a winning environment
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We are known for being the first and only niche hiring platform that manually vets all of our talents.
There are two options for hiring sales talent.
1) Work with a recruiter – pay $5,000+ per sales rep, it’ll take 45-90 days, and their sales reps aren’t experienced.
2) Work with Closify – much more affordable, you can hire reps in 3-7 days, and all of our reps have manually verified experience.
There is no faster or more affordable solution. We’ve revolutionized the sales hiring space, no one will work with recruiters after learning about us.
We put a large emphasis on predictability, that’s why we source experienced reps, you don’t have a doctor operate on you that’s never done it before, then why would you hire a sales rep that hasn’t taken sales calls before?
Because that’s what you’re getting when you work with recruiters, but when you work with us, we source sales reps that have a track record in your business niche, we work with lots of online business owners like marketing agencies.
So if we recruit and vet sales reps that have sold for marketing agencies before, they’re going to be able to do it again.
We all have different ways of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
To me, success is enabling my team to live their dream life.
I’ve been blessed enough to truly be living my dream life, and I want my company to enable them to experience what I have, so I never place any ceilings on people in my company, they always have an opportunity to grow.
And I think when you do this, the people who work “for” you, have a lot more respect for you, work harder, and you truly build something special.
Everyone on my team loves our company, fully believes in it, and goes above and beyond to make us grow into a huge company having a team that supports and believes in me so much is success in my eyes.
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.tryclosify.com
- Instagram: Instagram.com/alexh459/
- Twitter: Twitter.com/alexh459
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbLGzttWgT3yk54Vh_EoGog
