Climb the seven levels of advertising

1. How the ladder is built

Every level is written the same way, and both halves carry weight:

• The state — what has become true about your business by the time you are standing on that rung.
• The primary action — the one thing that level asks you to spend your effort on.

The order is part of the content. The levels run in sequence, and the fourth level in particular turns back on what came before it: it halts the climb and sends you to the product before you are allowed to keep scaling. Whether a level may be skipped is not established on this page.

Level	The state	The primary action
One	Your friends know what you sell	Warm outreach
Two	Everyone you know hears about it on repeat, and you know the inputs that produce an engaged lead on your chosen method	As much warm outreach and as much posted content as you can sustain
Three	Employees help you advertise more	Hire people to advertise profitably for you
Four	The product is good enough to produce steady referrals	Fix the product until referrals are steady, then resume scaling with a bigger team
Five	Product fixed and referrals holding, you advertise in more places, in more ways, with more people	Advertise profitably using at least two methods across multiple platforms
Six	Your executives run whole advertising departments without you	Bring in battle-tested executives and department heads to take over new channels
Seven	Not established on this page.	Not established on this page.

2. Levels one to three: everything still runs through you

Level one — your friends know what you sell. The setup on this rung is one offer, one avatar, one platform, and nothing wider. What it buys is the first engaged leads, and the rule attached to them is about timing: the arrival of engaged leads is what lets you begin making money. The primary action here is warm outreach.

One operator's own start sits on this rung: this is when they began reaching out to every person they already knew — a personal marker, not a rule about when anybody else should begin.

Level two — you say it on repeat, and you know your own inputs. Everyone you know hears about what you sell on a repeating basis, and you know the exact inputs that produce an engaged lead on whichever advertising method you have picked.

The example, with the correction attached to it. On top of warm outreach, that same operator maxed out personal work capacity on paid advertising, running case studies as the lead magnet. The correction is put as a regret: free content should have been the thing started, and posting it is what the ladder recommends you do instead.

Primary actions: as much warm outreach and as much posted content as you can sustain. The word doing the work in both is consistently — volume you can repeat, not volume you can manage once.

Level three — employees help you advertise more. The state is a particular kind of ceiling: your own advertising inputs are maxed out, but the platform is not. If you want more engaged leads from there, only one thing is left, and that is doing more.

The example. A videographer and a media buyer were hired to take most of the paid-advertising work off one person's plate.

Primary action: hire people to advertise profitably on your behalf.

3. Level four: the referral gate, and the halt it puts on scaling

The state. Your product is good enough to produce consistent referrals.

The gate. You keep building goodwill and aim at 25 percent or more of your customers arriving by referral. That figure is the only percentage the ladder attaches to any level.

What clearing it buys you. You are set up to ramp advertising again — but for that to work you have to get more serious about hiring a team.

The primary actions, in order. Focus on the product until referrals are consistent. Then go back to scaling advertising, with a bigger team than before.

The point this level exists to make. It is flagged as the key thing a lot of people miss: they keep scaling advertising and never look back at the product. What you are still selling is the beginner version, the minimum viable product, and it is probably still not good enough. It may have been the best thing you could have built at the time — which is exactly what it should have been — but the standard you hold it to should rise now. That people miss this is an impression, not a count.

The improvement loop. Work through the six steps of the referral process, then keep running that loop on the back end, so the product neither decays nor goes out of date while you keep telling more people about it. Let it decay and they will start telling people it is out of date and bad. Referrals are the measurement showing the product is still good enough as it stands, and that customers are not leaving heavily out the back. Miss that and you are on a churn treadmill that is hard to get off.

The six referral steps are SOP 284 — Earn more referrals by giving more value.

Why slowing down is worth it. Slowing down in the short term is what lets you move faster in the long term. The saying attached to it — go slow to go fast — is credited to a chief operating officer of a very large company.

Flag: the company's size is given two ways. It is a hundred-billion-dollar company at first and then, hedged, a one-billion-dollar company. The only other description given is very very big. The readings differ by a factor of a hundred, and nothing on the ladder depends on which is right. This page does not settle which reading is right.

Where most people lose it. This is where most people go wrong: they let the product slip and never really recover, because the brand and the reputation stay damaged and take far longer to repair than the slip itself took.

4. Level five: widen, and widen in that order

The state. You did not make that mistake. The product is fixed, referrals are on point and stay on point while you scale, and you advertise in more places, in more ways, with more people.

The widening, where the order is the content:

Step	What you widen
1	New audiences, still on your best platform
2	Every placement and every media type that platform supports
3	Only once the team gets consistent results — add another platform, another person who gets leads for you, or another core advertising activity, and grow the team again

Primary action. Advertise profitably using at least two methods on multiple platforms.

5. Level six: hire the people who have already done it

The state. Your executives grow departments dedicated to one advertising method or one platform, and they do it without you in the room.

What you are buying. Not potential. Experienced leaders who specialize in exactly the thing you want done — veterans, on stronger incentives, tied harder to outcomes, arriving already able to do the job. The image put on it is that you do not want somebody capable of winning a gold medal; you want somebody who has already won several, and you simply want the next one won with you.

Primary action. Get battle-tested executives and department heads to take over new advertising activities and channels.

5.1 Experience over age

Years of experience count for more than years of age. The comparison given:

Candidate	What they bring
Started advertising at 15 and is ten years in, so 25 years old	Preferred, a lot of times
Forty years of advertising, but only ever reached a certain level	Probably lacks the chops, and is not nearly as close to what is current

The arithmetic holds: fifteen plus ten is twenty-five, so the two ages in that comparison agree with each other.

The opposite failure is also named: somebody out of a very large corporation who does not really remember what is new and is in practice a manager of people. Those often do not work out. So the check is that the person still has the chops; the leadership skills to grow a team can be taught afterward.

The rule that falls out of it: hire experience, not potential.

5.2 The case behind that rule

Cold outreach was attempted twice without working and succeeded on the third attempt. What differed each time was who got hired to run it.

Attempt	Who	Result
1	External to the business, with experience — a consultant	Failed
2	Internal, without experience	Failed
3	Internal, with experience	Worked

The arithmetic holds: the failures run until the attempt that worked, which is the third.

The reason attached: it is a people-heavy, operationally complex machine, so whoever manages the team matters a lot. Pick experience. They should know more about the work than you do. Stated as an opinion, not a finding: if you find yourself teaching them, you have already lost.

5.3 The test for level six

The litmus test is the interview itself. If you are not learning from the candidate during the interview, you have the wrong person. What you want is to walk out of that room feeling this person knows far more about the job than you do.

That is the only explicit test anywhere on the ladder. Level four has a number, this level has a test, and the rest have neither.

6. Level seven

Level seven's state, primary action and test are not covered on this page.

• This page gives no figure for what level seven requires.

7. The end state the ladder points at

The closing caveats come first, because they qualify everything above. It can look clean on paper and never is. Real business is messy. It takes a lot of work to find which audiences, which lead magnets, which methods and which platforms work best, and the only way to find out what works is to try — a lot of different things, a lot of different ways, for long enough to know for certain. Nobody can ever know the single best thing to do.

The one thing asserted flat against all that: the more you advertise, the more people find out about what you sell, and the more people who know about it, the more of them eventually buy.

The end state described:

• A media team putting out large volumes of free content, in every media type, on many platforms
• Offers made regularly to your warm audience, for more customers or more affiliates
• An audience hungry enough that whatever you launch is profitable immediately
• Teams running and scaling profitable paid advertising across multiple platforms
• A cold outreach team bringing you more customers than you can possibly handle
• An affiliate manager launching and integrating new affiliates every day
• More people who get leads for you, brought in by recruiters and recruiting agencies
• A product good enough that a third of your customers bring you more customers
• An executive team driving all of this growth without you
• More engaged leads than you can possibly handle

The closing note is a warning rather than a promise: none of this suits the faint-hearted, the load is heavy and the road is long.

Figure check on the referral share. The fourth level sets the gate at 25 percent or more of customers by referral; the end state puts it at a third. A third is more than 25 percent, so the end state sits above the gate rather than disagreeing with it.

8. What this page does not decide for you

• How you know you have cleared a level. The fourth level gives a number and the sixth gives a test. The other rungs give neither.
• How long a level takes. No duration is attached to any level.
• What revenue any level corresponds to. No level carries a revenue figure.
• The six steps of the referral process at level four. They are SOP 284.
• What "consistently" means. It is the load-bearing word at levels two, four and five, and no frequency, window or count is attached to it anywhere.
• What "profitably" means. Required at levels three and five; no margin, ratio or payback figure is given for it.
• How many people to hire, at level three or at any later widening.
• Whether levels can be skipped, or must be taken in order.
• Which company size is right in the go-slow-to-go-fast line. See the flag in §3.
• Everything about level seven.

9. The checklist

Question	The answer
How many levels	Seven are named
Level one	Friends know what you sell; one offer, one avatar, one platform
Level one's action	Warm outreach
Level two	Everyone you know hears it on repeat; you know your own inputs
Level two's action	As much warm outreach and posted content as you can sustain
Level three	Your inputs are maxed out, the platform is not
Level three's action	Hire people to advertise profitably for you
Level four	The product earns consistent referrals
Level four's gate	25 percent or more of customers by referral
Level four's action	Fix the product first, then scale again with a bigger team
Level five	Product fixed, referrals holding, advertising widened
Level five's order	New audiences on the best platform, then every placement and media type, then another platform or activity
Level five's action	At least two methods, multiple platforms
Level six	Executives run advertising departments without you
Level six's action	Battle-tested executives and department heads on new channels
Level six's test	You learn from them in the interview, or they are the wrong person
Level six's hiring rule	Experience, not potential
The cold outreach case	External with experience failed; internal without experience failed; internal with experience worked
Level seven	Not established on this page.
The end state's referral share	A third of customers bringing more customers
How long a level takes	This page gives no figure for it.

10. What this page does not cover

Warm outreach is SOP 17 and SOP 18, content is SOP 20 and SOP 26, cold outreach is SOP 27 and SOP 28, and paid advertising runs from SOP 35. Choosing which of those to run is SOP 12. Hiring employees to advertise for you, which is level three, is SOP 43 and SOP 44. Affiliates, which appear in the end state, are SOP 47, and agencies are SOP 45. SOP 40 takes the choice between doing more of something, doing it better, and opening something new. The daily standards that sit under every rung are SOP 52.

Pricing and pay are not covered on this page.