Internal documents show classes drove most LifeSurge revenue

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 34:17

   internal life surge documents that we have been chasing for a while but finally have in our hands thanks to third-party credit processing vendor brad logan who had acquired them from life surge itself, his client, amid all these concerns he had allegedly raised over these supposed red flags. And I just want to start, I think, with a particular document that I want to draw our attention to. And this is LifeSurge's consolidated financials from 2021 to 2023, because for those who are tracking the timeline here, the very first LifeSurge event was 2021 in Tampa, headlined by Tim Tebow. And their revenue in 2021, Kira, was what? $1.97 million. But by year two, 2022, the revenue becomes? $16.6 million. Which is a pretty significant leap, I would say.

2. 35:11

   It takes us then to LifeSurg's revenue in 2023. $47.4 million. Which is more than I guessed in 2023, frankly. And it proceeds from there. Because let's go to the consolidated financial statement for the first quarter of 2024. This is when Brad Logan's relationship with LifeSurg started, why he has these documents. And... By March of 2024, they had made, Kira, $18.2 million just in that first quarter.

3. 35:47

   Which would put them on track for $72.8 million in revenue in 2024. And the thing that I think is even more interesting than that, as everyone, again, may be wondering, so wait a minute, how much of this revenue then is from the tickets? It's the admittedly quite affordable tickets to hear these celebrities like Tim Tebow on stage. And the answer, it turns out with extraordinary clarity, is not a lot.

4. 36:16

   No. In 2023, the Life Surge ticket revenue was only 9.2% of the total. And it was only 8.4% of the total revenue in 2022. And so the question we ask ourselves at this point is, so what in the f**k is LifeSurge's actual business? If the whole speaker thing is less than 10% of what they're actually getting money from, how are they getting all of this revenue? And the answer, it turns out, lies a little further down this document, because this is where LifeSurge details its revenue from what it calls base education, otherwise known as the allegedly predatory impact class programs.

5. 36:59

   Ed, please read what it shows us. So over these three years, plus the first quarter of 2024, base education accounted for no less than 78% of life surge's revenue. And so in 2023, base education accounted for 81.5% of life surge revenue, $38.7 million, which sort of backs up what our sources have been telling us from the very beginning. Right. This is a business around these classes. This is not actually a business of motivational speaking. And so this is where I also need to remind everybody for the nth time that life's disposition here has been that these one-day events are not simply lead generators for the company's actual businesses that we have been alleging in the media, these allegedly scammy impact classes, where the celebrity speakers serve as bait to generate leads, meaning people in the world of sales lingo, meaning really vulnerable Christians who will

6. 38:03

   pay for your products and services. And I say that because it brings us to yet another part of this same internal document, Kira, where Life Surge Now will show us what it costs to pay these speakers and produce these one-day events under a line on the document that is internally labeled what? It's labeled cost of lead gen, parenthesis, life surge. And underneath in 2023, you see that they spent $6.8 million in marketing costs, 5.3 million on talent costs, and 4.4 million on event costs.

7. 38:43

   That is a lot. That is a lot. But also notable is what you see when you scroll down, which is a line that reads cost of sales, parentheses, impact classes. So just to recap, LifeSurge in parentheses is labeled cost of lead gen, lead generation. The impact classes are labeled cost of sales, which indicates that internally LifeSurge perhaps sees this the way that we have been seeing it. The impact classes are the product.

8. 39:13

   The other stuff is the funnel to get people to buy the product. A product, by the way, that LifeSurg's own signed merchant application and agreement from May 2024, a separate document that we have here, describes how. Under credit card transaction profile, LifeSurg describes the average ticket size as $20,000 and the highest ticket size as... $60,000. And we see that price range again over and over in the even more granular credit card transaction data from Brad Logan and Court Compass, which we have also obtained. And I've never been so excited to look at a spreadsheet full of numbers that seem totally indecipherable, except for the fact that what they show us in detail is what you and our producer Neely both saw in person with the rush to these tables, right? There's a point of sale. And you go to

9. 40:08

   the tables full of the dozens of Clover credit card readers in between the speakers. Right. So on May 18th, 2024, 72 Clover card readers took 567 successful charges, almost all for 197, which was at that time the price of the entry-level impact classes. And 78% of those charges took place between one 30-minute period, 3 and 3.30 p.m. That is the rush that we have been reporting. And again, it's haunting to imagine it.

10. 40:46

    People are competing to make sure they get to pay LifeSurg for these classes. Limited venue size. Limited venue size.