Bret Holmes talks email marketing and how to scale a financial subscription publishing business to over $100+ million.

What does Bret know about scaling up?

Let’s see.

He was employee #3 at MMP and was part of the team that took it to over 225m at its peak.

Over the last few years, we watched him consult with one group that exploded from 200k/month to around 50m/year

Another exploded up toward 100m.

Every time I hear he’s working with someone new it’s followed by things like “They just had their first ever 400k day.”

Or something similar.

That’s why you should watch this video – it’s the full presentation on email marketing and scaling a pub up to over 100m.

It’s from FMS London (Sigh. London. How we’ve missed you since the pandemic started).

Bret was speaking inside the British Museum and, to be honest, not a lot of publishers were there as the European market is very different than the U.S.

(We actually a lot of attendees from investment banking and financial services over there that were super interested in our space and publishing. And one billionaire, too, who joined us at the networking hour.)

One thing Bret does phenomenally well is lay out the fundamentals on building a scalable business.

Just a couple of months ago we were sitting in the ballroom of the Sagamore Pendry in Baltimore.

“At its most basic level this business is about names and mail out.

“You can’t be a 20m business unless you’re sending a certain amount of mail out.”

Bret Holmes was riffing.

One of our FinPub Accelerator members agreed to sit on the hotseat.

He wanted help.

He wasn’t growing.

His business felt stuck.

So, I gave him the chance to lay his business bare (always an act of extreme entrepreneurial vulnerability!).

And let the rest of the group give him some help.

He was lucky.

Bret Holmes, who helped build Money Map up to over 225m at it’s peak was there.

Mike Pizzo, who along with Joe Schriefer, took AF to well over 300m at it’s peak, was in the room.

And Aaron Dehoog, who first took Newsmax from 10k paid subscribers to over 400k paid subs, and then took over a small 6m publishing group and turned it into one of the strongest franchises, was there too.

Bret told him, “You can’t grow this busines if you don’t understand the basic math behind it.”

This video is one of the places where Bret lays out a lot of the math of the business.

If you’re involved in growing a publishing business or trader education business this is core knowledge.