Fifteen meetings.
No deals.
And the strange part is that the product wasn’t the problem.
The loan nobody has heard of
Sean Ingram and Patrick Ampem had an offer that sounds made up the first time you hear it.
If you hold stock, they could arrange a loan against it. No personal guarantee. No corporate guarantee. And on their version, no payments for the term of the loan.
Patrick put it simply.
"It’s like somebody giving you money to do whatever, you know, for the next two, three years."
Sean had placed quite a few of these loans while working with another firm.
On their own, they’d had fifteen meetings and closed nothing.
And the launch of their cold email campaign was fourteen days away.
The first half
The call didn’t start with any of that.
It started with feedback.
Sean and Patrick were clients of the cold email agency Andrew worked with at the time, and they were frustrated. Questions in Slack were going unanswered. They felt like they were waiting without knowing what was happening.
Andrew didn’t get defensive. He apologized, explained what the team was dealing with, and told them he wanted to hear all of it.
"I love this feedback because without it, we don’t know where we need to improve or where there’s an issue."
Patrick even had a fix. A simple tracker showing where the project stood and what came next. Andrew liked it so much he promised to take it to the team.
That was the first half of the call.
Remember it. It matters at the end.
The gate
Then the conversation turned to their own sales.
Their offer was regulated. They needed to know that a prospect was an accredited investor, and they needed a record of it.
So they had built that question into the front of everything. Their email copy. Their conversations. The disclaimer was supposed to sit right there in the first message.
Which is completely understandable.
When you’re handling something regulated, the safest-feeling move is to put the rules first.
But Andrew saw what that was doing to every conversation before it could start.
"Right now we’re just out mingling at a party and having a casual conversation with people, right? Once we get to a business setting, then we want to make sure we have all of our ducks in a row."
And then the line that landed:
"If we were standing at a party and being like, I only talk to accredited investors, nobody would talk to us."
Andrew wasn’t telling them to skip compliance.
He was telling them it had a place, and the place wasn’t the opening line.
So he showed them how to ask the qualifying question inside a normal conversation. Not are you an accredited investor. Instead, the things that make someone one. Only certain people qualify for this. Have you made over $200,000 in the last year? Because if not, this probably isn’t the right thing for you.
"You’ve got the disclaimer out of the way, but you didn’t hit them in the face with, by the way, there’s a disclaimer."
Patrick had already started to see it.
"We have to build that trust first. Sometimes we’re overthinking things."
Maybe that’s familiar.
The rule you’re most afraid of breaking ends up running the whole conversation. And the customer leaves before you ever get to the part they came for.
The side window
Then Andrew went bigger.
They weren’t putting out any content about this loan. Nobody was. Which meant they had a rare chance.
"I haven’t ever heard of this thing that you’re talking about, okay? You have the opportunity to be the thought leaders in the industry for this thing."
He pointed them at a financial educator on YouTube whose whole content strategy worked like a magic trick. He sold insurance, but barely ever talked about it. He talked about the clever thing the insurance made possible. The product stayed behind the curtain.
"You might not be selling people the loan, right? But the loan might be the product behind the curtain."
Then he got specific.
Go into the communities where people are already talking about real estate and crypto. Not to pitch. To talk about what this loan makes possible, and ask the people who know those worlds how they’d use it.
"You’re going to get people blowing that post up, and they’re all going to be asking about this little thing that you mentioned off the cuff of a loan that doesn’t have any payments."
And with the big communities, don’t knock on the front door at all. Buy the community leader’s program. Show up to their calls. Ask good questions. Let the audience come to you.
Andrew had a fresh example from that very day. A mentor he’d been trying to sell directly for months had watched one group call, and afterward wanted to sign up on the spot.
"It’s like the third door. Go around the back and through the freaking side window, because that will get you in, and you’ll be pounding down the door with these guys, or they’ll be pounding down your door, instead of you trying to pitch them."
He gave them a plan for the next two weeks. One of them takes LinkedIn. One takes Facebook. Each picks a niche. Record every conversation.
And when the cold email campaign launched, they’d already know which people bit, and which words made them bite.
"You’ll just replicate it over cold email."
The second half
Near the end, Andrew said something that tied the whole call together.
"I would normally charge $1,000 an hour to hop on a call like this. I’m not at all upset that we hopped on a free call. I got a lot of value out of the first half of this call. The least I could do is provide you value in the second half."
The first half had been Sean and Patrick telling him what wasn’t working.
The second half was Andrew returning the favor.
Patrick’s answer said a lot about how they already saw him.
"Trust me, there’s a lot. We’ve talked about you many times."
Twenty-four hours
Sean didn’t wait for the launch.
He took the approach from the call and used it.
Within 24 hours, he had booked a client meeting.
After fifteen meetings and no deals, the first new one came from changing the order of the conversation. Curiosity first. Trust next. The qualifying question in its proper place.
Sean later put the experience into words.
"Most times when you engage with people, the output you get never matches the idea in your head. With Andrew, it takes things to a whole new level you weren’t even going to go to—and might never have gotten there without him."
And Patrick:
"Andrew is the real deal—every bit, he’s over 200%. He’s a complete finisher, more of everything. We trust him, no matter what."
What this story is really about
Sean and Patrick didn’t have a product problem.
They had a sequencing problem.
They were asking the most serious question in their business before anyone had a reason to answer it.
Andrew didn’t remove the question. He moved it.
And he showed them that the most direct route to a customer isn’t always the front door. Sometimes it’s the one around the side, where people come to you because they’re curious, not because you cornered them.
That call started with two clients telling Andrew what he and his team had gotten wrong.
He listened to all of it.
Then he gave them the half of the call that got them their next meeting.