Intro + My "business" is just a 20k/mo job

[@cjohnyrun]

I started a business 4 years ago. Reading Fastlane was a big part of it.

I tried scaling a few things, selling courses and memberships (I've got a decent-sized online following). I have a blog that did pretty well, YouTube vids, etc. I always sold some, but never had those $40k launches the gurus talked about.

Eventually, I morphed. I moved into the "consulting" world, which lets me work for high-end clients and charge a lot. It's been good in some ways. I've had 30k months, traveled the world, and bought a house.

But I woke up a few months ago and realized I've just built another full-time job, with way too much focus on 1 a high-paying client who could end my contract tomorrow (no control).

Oh yeah, and I hired a coach 2 years ago. And wouldn't you know it, turns out I'm special little guy who needs to "follow my passion" and "be true to my calling"? (Can we talk about how the coaching industry peddles the Bullshits please?). It led me down a year-long waste of time. And left me back where I started.

Anyway, heading out on vacation 2 weeks back, and I was about to read Tony's "Money, master the game" (JFK there's a theme here. how many people almost read this book?). Long story short, I saw MJs book on my Kindle and bought Unscripted and read it instead. It was exactly what I needed to hear.

Here's where I'm at. As a consultant, I have enough time to work on something else. (An escape plan). I can think of three options:

1. Scale my consulting (SEO marketing) into a full-blown agency. Use my high-ticket (and well-known) client to get more, and learn to do this with a team.
2. Build something off my email list. I have 2,800 people on it, and I've been sending out emails again. I asked if anyone wants to learn to build a consulting business, and I have like 15 interviews next week with potential students. If I can see a good case here, I'd spin it into a course + mastermind teaching people to do what I did and get to those $20k months.
3. Something with my content. My blog, Youtube, etc., were making $2,500/mo once. It's not a ton, but I never went hard on it. I'm exploring if there's something there. I'm basically making my clients millions driving traffic to their content--I could be driving it to mine.

That's all for now. But I'm really looking forward to being in this community and learning.

And thanks to MJ, because honestly, your books hold up. I've been led astray by so many dumb business books that could have been blog posts, and yours are always packed with enough knowledge/kicks in the a$$ to teach me a ton.

I love to meet people, so reach out if you're interested. And if anyone has built a marketing agency, I'd love to connect and learn (happy to pay you for your time).

 

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[JayODC]

Yes i hear you on that, I also went down the Tony rabbit hole, only to figure out that the product was in fact me!

Have you put any of your ideas through the CENTS framework and what are your goals?

 

[Vamsi Interviews]

I'd be interested in hearing more about how you grew your follower and content base to generate $2.5k/mo. I'm 1.5 years into my Youtube journey and that level of revenue would basically free me up to work on it full-time, so that's something I would love to learn how to do.

Capitalizing on your email list seems compelling to me. Alex Hormozi has talked about how you can go very far with just a small number of people on a mailing list, if your niche is specific enough. He talks about a registered dietician who turned 5,800 Instagram followers into over $1m/yr in profit. Her niche is super specific, since she's a registered dietician who teaches other registered dieticians how to bill insurance companies. Her value proposition is also very clear, since it's a direct ROI for her clients.

How specific is your audience? 15 out of 2,800 is not bad, especially if you can then grow from there using client testimonials and their success stories, eventually building stuff that takes less of your attention (e.g. courses).

Edit: I've also hired various people to help me with "SEO" for my Youtube channel but none of them were able to deliver any results. From chatting with various people in the industry, my understanding was that good content that people like to watch trumps SEO to a massive degree, and SEO's impact overall is relatively low compared to other mediums like blogging or marketplace websites.