Transcription
Hey, so I'm making this video to talk about how I went from zero to a million dollars a month in 12 months.
The company I started, what I did, and why.
Halfway through that one year, getting to the million-dollar-a-month mark, we almost lost the business. I almost went bankrupt and had nothing.
I'll explain how we kind of pulled out of that.
Here are my standard credentials that everyone asks for: I'm in my airplane hangar. There's the airplane, there's the turbos, the Porsche, and the TRX truck. I've got motorcycles in front of me, and the Tesla's in the other garage if you care about that stuff.
If you don't and if you're just here for the business, let's talk business.
While I technically did have my first full month in business in January of last year, we closed out this January of this year at a million dollars. It was technically $1,500,000 that we closed the end of the month out.
Today is February 1, the very first day of the next month. I woke up at 3:00 a.m. this morning really excited to do the accounting and see where exactly the numbers fell. I wanted to double-check everything, run through all of the stats myself to make sure we actually did it.
But really, we started this business about a year and a half ago. We started in July, and for about half a year, July through December, we just built the product and built the company.
We're a marketing company. We help people build their brand on social media. I spent months working with myself, my wife, and my COO, who came with me from the last business that I started and closed until around November.
So, a few months' worth of work, absolutely no paycheck, no guarantee of income, no idea if this was even going to work. Then I soft-launched the company in November, made a few sales just to test and see how that was going to work out.
I launched it to my existing audience of a couple million followers. I made a YouTube video and got like $60,000 from that one YouTube video, but only got a couple thousand views. It was a B2B audience, so I made about $60,000 from that video, testing the product and kind of launching it to the audience at first.
Then the very next month, December, we started running ads to the company. I think we spent like $15,000 to $20,000 in ads. It wasn't really anything substantial, and we did, I think it was like $8,000 in revenue.
But it was just me selling. I was validating the offer. I was making sure everything looked good, sounded good. I was taking all the sales calls myself.
Maybe I'll throw up a calendar of what a week in that time period in the business looked like. It was really, really crazy. I was slammed, like 10 to 12 hours a day on back-to-back, non-stop calls.
It was really tough, but I wanted to validate the offer, make sure that everything worked well before we properly launched the business, properly went to market, which was in January of last year, 2024.
That's when I first brought on salespeople. That's when we first had our first full month running ads and our first full month properly selling the offer and working with clients full-time.
In that month, I think we did $120,000. January, our first full month, was $120,000. The very next month, we did, I think it was $320,000. Then the month after that, we did $500,000.
So we ramped really quickly, but again, it's because I spent July through December testing the product, validating it, working with a few clients, really going through the entire process, making basically no money from July to December.
So when we launched in January, we could do $100,000 in January, $320,000 in February, and $500,000 in the month of March per month.
Then we stayed around the $500,000 mark for a few months, trying to scale the team, brought on salespeople, brought on fulfillment, and all kinds of support.
But the product-market fit wasn't as good as I thought it was, and so we got stuck at that $500,000 month mark for a few months.
Then the receivables kept stacking up. I could see that, you know, on paper, we were making money, but in reality, the cash flow was just really week to week, day to day even sometimes.
It was really tough, and I didn't really understand why I couldn't just put more into the business and scale with ads, like spend more on ads to make more money.
That is a process that I'm very familiar with now, but it wasn't quite working. It wasn't working until I looked at where the revenue was coming from.
Of course, we had revenue attribution. We saw that some revenue was coming from social media, which makes sense. I teach people how to grow businesses with social media, so we had that part of our revenue.
Then we also had part of our revenue coming from paid ads, which technically is also social media. But if you have a company and you've worked with a warm audience that knows, likes, and trusts you, and a cold audience that has never seen your face before, you know that those are two very different demographics.
I was spending more and more money on ads, getting more of this colder audience, and wondering why they didn't convert. I didn't understand that our revenue at the time was coming from paid ads.
It wasn't coming from this cold audience that we were marketing to. It was mostly coming from my organic audience. I had a couple million followers, and even though those followers were a different demographic, different interests, I had a large following in the financial space.
I was teaching people how to invest in real estate, which is a very different demographic than business owners and people looking to market their business on social media.
There was some overlap, or at least I had the skill set to be able to market to any kind of demographic. I understood social media, I understood what to do there.
So I was doing that, and that was actually responsible for hundreds of thousands. We found out hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in revenue, basically clients that I didn't have to pay to acquire because I just post videos like this.
Then they see the video and they come to us, like, "How do I make videos like you? What exactly do you do to build up your business to be able to get clients for free on social media?"
That's exactly what I was doing for our clients. It's exactly what I was doing for myself, and yet I failed to understand that that was responsible for so much of our revenue.
So when I tried to increase the ad spend, when I tried to increase how many customers I was getting from paid ads, I would pump the ad spend higher and higher, and the income wouldn't increase.
I didn't understand that I was missing this separation in these two audiences.
What happened was I started spending more and more on paid ads, trying to increase our revenue, trying to get us out of this hole that I was digging ourselves into.
I didn't realize that by spending more on ads, the ads got less efficient, and we got worse quality leads from paid ads.
This whole time, our business was kept afloat by my organic audience, which was driving hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue to our business for most of those months last year.
Well, it varied, but total across the year, it was like 60% of our revenue came from organic social media videos that cost me nothing to post. Customers that cost us nothing to get.
Really crazy, and yet I was prioritizing this whole other thing, which was just losing me money, which was ads on Meta and Google.
Once I finally understood that split, it was in July of last year, so like halfway through the year. I understood, "Holy crap, I'm actually making a ton of money from organic social media. We should really reevaluate the ads."
I had a decision to make: I could reevaluate the ads, I could just kill the ads, and keep a business that's running solely on organic social media, making me anywhere between $100,000 and $300,000 a month with insanely high profit margins.
It was like 85% profit margins. I could do that, and I could coast. I could do a couple hundred thousand a month, easy peasy, no problem. I was already doing that, and I wouldn't have to have the complexity of managing a massive team doing this whole thing with ads and paying to acquire customers.
I could coast, I could have it easy, but I wanted to do the hard thing. I wanted to build a massive business.
It's crazy to say, you know, if you're not in this position yet, but like $100,000 a month, $200,000 a month isn't enough. I've had that before, and I really saw that a lot of people in the space are doing a million a month, 2 million a month, 4 million a month.
A couple doing like $8 million a month. Those are big companies, and that's what I wanted to build. I wanted to build a really big company. I wanted to help a lot of people.
I wanted to be successful in that financial way far beyond what most people think is reasonable.
By the way, if you're hearing these numbers and you're like, "Ah, that's not even real," I totally get it. I didn't think that was real either until I met quite a few big people in the space that were doing literally a thousand times more than I ever thought was possible.
Then, of course, once I started doing it myself, I realized, "Oh yeah, those guys are really doing it like that."
For the couple of guys that are watching, my friends or people that I know on social media that are doing $5 million, $6 million a month, you're probably thinking, "Oh, I thought he was doing more already."
I just figured it out. I've been a little behind, but the year is trending to where hopefully I'll be able to catch up with you guys soon.
I'll talk about some forecasts and projections for what we're doing in the next few months as well.
Basically, I had this crossroads of like I could either coast $100,000 to $200,000 a month basically on autopilot, making free videos like this and just having this little easy business, or I could really scale this thing.
To really scale this thing, what I had to do was actually improve the company. I had to improve the offer, find better customers, get better deliverables, and charge more for them.
That takes time; that's difficult. So I basically paused what I was doing here on YouTube. I haven't made a video in a really long time because I wanted to focus on what I thought was the most important use of my time: improving our offer, improving our customer acquisition process, improving deliverables, improving fulfillment, improving everything about the business.
So that I could go to market again and go after these customers that are harder to get and actually win them and be able to profit more from it.
The distinction there is really important because you probably know tons of content creators, influencers, whatever on social media that are widely known as gurus or scam artists that have that easy business.
You know, they post on social media or they got someone to post for them. They do a couple hundred, they have the nice cars, they maybe have the jet, whatever.
That's a really easy business to run, but it's because they're selling to their audience. Every time they build trust with their audience, they liquidate that brand equity by selling to them.
While they never fully liquidate their brand equity, sometimes, you know, you might still see them as someone who is authentic or good or real in the space. They liquidate enough to be able to pay for their lifestyle.
The people that got liquidated, the people that paid tens of thousands of dollars for their mentorship or their course or whatever, have a bad taste in their mouth.
It's absolutely not the direction that I wanted to go with what we do. Not that that's what we were doing, but I wanted to do really the exact opposite and have a traditional business, have a regular marketing agency that is successful whether or not people know me.
You know, whether or not they know, like, and trust me, I'm going to be able to sell to this person because my deliverables are amazing, our track record is incredible, our client results are nuts.
The entire process of getting a client, introducing them to what we do, proving our worth, and then being able to win them as clients works whether people know, like, and trust me or not.
Instead of having this business that relies on word of mouth and referrals, I wanted to have a business that was good enough to be successful to where I could buy my customers.
I know that if I could figure that out as a result of having a really great company, all of the organic reach that I was going to have, all of the organic audience that I was bringing in, would one, have a better experience; two, be able to pay me more; and three, kind of increase this flywheel effect to be able to get me even more customers.
So I took a break. I understood that organic social media was driving me revenue. I put it on pause for a quarter, 3 to 4 months, to be able to properly build up the business.
I'm happy to say I think it worked. In November, we had a really hard month. We really scaled down a lot in October. November got very lean.
I would say tail end in November, we really figured things out with the sales process, the customer acquisition process. In December, things started to take off.
We started to very, very profitably acquire customers. I mean, the numbers are crazy. If you're in the online space, it's like what people were doing in 2016 to 2018, where customers are basically free to acquire.
Customer acquisition cost is like 10%. We figured that out in December.
So I started hiring a sales team to be able to increase customer acquisition, and we're up to, I think, eight closers now, with a couple more kind of pending that I might be bringing on later this month.
December was a really big month. We did just over $400,000. This is after being stuck at like a quarter million a month for the second half of last year.
We did $400,000 in December and then continued that momentum in January. We did a million, $1,005,000 in January.
Right now, with the existing team, existing customer acquisition cost, and deliverables and everything, we're forecasted to do like $1.8 million in February of this year.
It's only 28 days instead of 31 in the month, but $1.8 million. Then probably scale to $2.3 million or so in the month of March and then just keep going from there, seeing when stuff breaks.
It's hard to model out what customer acquisition cost is going to be once you start getting over like $10,000 a day in ad spend, but probably do three to four million by June of this year.
The biggest thing, the coolest thing, is it's not just vanity numbers. It's not a million dollars, and you receive a million dollars, and you got to pay a million dollars back out because your ad costs and your team costs are so expensive.
We did a million dollars last month on 70% profit margins, meaning my take-home on that was $700,000. I haven't been paid out on all of that yet. The numbers are still being figured out, but 70% profit margins.
Technically, it was 69%, but I don't want to lead with that number because then it sounds like I'm just making stuff up.
But yeah, 69% profit margins after paying the team. The reason we're able to have insanely high profit margins at this level of spend relative to the market that I'm in, which is a marketing agency in the online space, is because we have so many systems and processes put in place from the six months of refinement that we went through between basically June and December.
The second half of last year was spent on refinement, improving everything, automating everything, replacing every single task that could be with software and tools.
We've invested a whole bunch into AI products that help our company, improving the sales system, making it easier for everyone on the team to be really high revenue earners.
I'm not talking about paying them less; I'm talking about making their jobs more efficient. Account managers with, you know, $25,000 a month is what I paid out just today.
Sales team, $20,000. We have one guy on the team who did just a little over $300,000 in revenue last month. It was like $303,000. If you're watching this, you know who you are. Congratulations!
But that's a $30,000 a month bit of revenue, and it's not all paid out at once. But like, young kid hustler, he's been working just as hard for me basically all of last year and not properly getting compensated for because I had bad systems, because my company was inefficient, because we had all of these gaps in our processes, all of these leaky holes in our ship.
Finally, when we got it figured out, everything became easy. When we really turned up the dial on how much volume we were putting through the system with an efficient system, he went from making $6,000 to $8,000 a month max to last month doing just a little over $30,000.
It was like $30,300 as a sales rep, doing the same stuff he was doing before. You know, obviously, he got better, but he came in a year ago with no experience.
It's just a testament to how efficient you can make the system, how efficient you can make your business if you have people on your team that are doing $20,000 to $30,000 a month instead of having a bunch of low-level, low-skill people running around with their hair on fire making like $5,000 a month, which is what the system honestly was this time last year and what most people only ever build up their business to.
But again, it's not the business that I wanted to build up. Even though it would have been easy to make $100,000, make a couple hundred, I'm way more happy with the result that we have now.
Finishing January with $700,000 net and then probably doing like $1.4 million net, so doubling that in the month of February, and then probably doing $2 million net in the month of March with like $2.4 million, $2.5 million top revenue.
I think that's all I wanted to say. It was a really crazy year. I'm not going to tell the full story yet; maybe I'll explain that one day.
But man, there were some close calls. There were some weeks where I was days away from going out of business simply because I was spending money on ads, spending money on the traditional customer acquisition processes that I was taught from my mentors.
I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn what I learned. This isn't my first run of business, and I still made those mistakes when the whole time what was keeping my business afloat was organic social media, making free videos that didn't cost me anything to make.
It was so mind-bending to me. The reason I didn't believe it, the reason it didn't make sense to me, is because it seemed too crazy that I could just post videos like this, talk to other business owners for free, reach hundreds, if not thousands, of business owners that are doing, you know, six figures.
Most of them, seven figures. All of our clients are over $50,000 a month in top-line revenue. If you're working with me one-on-one, like that kind of audience, to be able to reach them for free at any time indefinitely.
Once I post this video, it's just out there, and I can continue to reach them a year from now. That video that I ended up posting, you know, when I first started the soft launch that made me $60,000, I just had a customer or client we closed in January of this year who saw that video almost a year and a half ago, and he came back around because he remembered that video.
Man, organic social media is so crazy powerful. It's the reason I do this. It's the reason why I decided to actually do this right, build out the business the way it needs to be done so that I can help thousands of people on top of the hundreds we've already worked with to be able to do this exact thing.
Sorry, my camera went off, but I was about to plug all of my stuff and what I do and how I help people.
Before that, I also wanted to mention that during that period of time where I took a break from social media, I stopped posting these videos. I stopped making short-form content.
I didn't actually stop posting short-form content; I just stopped making new videos. During that time, though, during those four months, I was still reposting my old existing library.
I had hundreds of videos made by that point promoting my business, and during that four-month period where I stopped making videos, we did a little over $600,000 from those videos.
Meaning I didn't put any effort into making any new content. I just replayed my existing library, and it generated $600,000 for me within four months.
I hope that this is just a testament to anyone that's like, "Oh man, these short-form videos aren't working. The social media is not working. I'm not making enough money fast enough."
That's totally cool. If you ever want to take a break, just keep reposting them. Have a VA just throw them back up on social media, and you'd be surprised at how the momentum continues.
It basically didn't stop for me, and I hardly heard anyone complain about, "Oh, I've seen this video already." I just reposted the existing library, leads kept coming in, revenue kept coming in.
I actually tried this before too. Back when I was a finance creator, I took a year and a half break from making new financial content, and I just reposted the existing library and still made hundreds of thousands of dollars at that point.
It's just now I have a much better customer acquisition process. I actually have a company that I can help people with instead of just hoping for inbound leads from sponsors.
I worked with some of the biggest companies in the world doing that: Amazon, PayPal, Venmo, Fidelity, Robinhood. But now, I can make my own customers, and I can promote my own stuff.
So I did that, and it was just incredible to see, with no effort whatsoever, hundreds of thousands of dollars come in based on the existing media library that I spent tons of time and effort creating in the past.
I don't even think it's tons of time; that's kind of an exaggeration too. I sat down and filmed for like an hour or two total per month.
But going forward, now that the customer acquisition process is fixed, now that the client lifecycle is good, now that the business is for the most part automated, the next biggest thing is content.
I understand that this is the way to scale to multiple millions of dollars a month and to make the most amount of money over a long-term horizon.
So I'm officially back. More videos: YouTube, long-form, Instagram, TikTok, whatever short-form. I think I'm doing something on LinkedIn pretty soon here, but be looking forward to it.
I'm really excited to get back into the game now that I have all of my ducks in a row figured out business-wise.
I'm looking forward to it, and I guess I didn't plug my stuff. If you have a business doing over $50,000 a month, you can apply to work with us one-on-one down below.
If you have a business doing over $10,000 a month, between that $10,000 to $50,000 a month range, still worth applying. But, you know, we usually like to work with businesses that are a little bit bigger.
Still worth applying, but just keep that in mind. We usually like to work with businesses over a million dollars a year. If you're not there yet, no problem.
We definitely have a lot of free materials too, so I'll leave a link down below to our school course. It's entirely free. Go through all of it; it's going to help you make a lot of money on social media.
I won the school games back in March or April of last year. It's a really, really amazing community.
If you want to work for me, I mean, we got positions open. You can apply with whatever you want, but primarily in sales.
I'm assuming a lot of the people watching this are in sales and marketing. You could apply to be an appointment setter. I'll leave the link down below.
That's exactly what the person doing $30,000 a month for me did this time last year. He applied for an appointment setter, earned his chops over the last 10 months or so, became a closer, and then just started really crushing it.
If you have a year or more of experience selling high-ticket online, go ahead and apply as a closer too. I might consider you for that.
I'll leave a link down below for it as well. I think that's all I wanted to say.
What an exciting month and what an exciting business to be running. Hope this helps motivate whoever needs motivation, and for everyone else, hope this does whatever else it needed to do.
Yeah, talk to you guys in the next one.