Week 8 Newsletter Update

Jan 31, 2023

Time to read: 2 minutes

First of all, thank you for being here. I've been blown away at the response of people wanting to follow me on this journey, I'm so grateful.

I wrote a post in detail of my journey and why I decided to build in public. You can read it here.

I'd love to hear from you. Many of you reach out hoping to some day do the same, I want to support you. Email me what's helpful to see, learn, etc.

Financials

Jan Expenses: ~$400
Signed this week: $0
New Pipeline Added this week: $24,000
Feb Contracted: $25,750 (this is likely going up... ;-)
March Contracted: $24,875

Highlights

Spend a decent amount of time building systems to scale for my existing customers. This includes building templates for cold calling, cadences and frameworks around playbooks that could be solid starting points for each customer

Lowlights

I kicked off my first ever simple marketing campaign. I know little to nothing about how to do this in Kajabi. But I'm learning. Of course, I sent like 3 links that were broken, so if you got it, forgive me. Thanks to those who emailed me to let me know!!!
I'm at an interesting stage where I'm feeling less 'frantic' energy around finding new business. This is great, but why is it a lowlight? Well, I now find myself having to figure out how to use my time more effectively. Much like my clients going from the stage of 'we need to set more meetings and get revenue' to 'ok, we have plenty of meetings, let's start to scale'. I'm learning WHAT to focus on each day. This is definitely a learning curve as I sit in my office at home...alone... with very few people to bounce ideas off of over the age of 8. ;-) Long story short, I was not very productive with my time and am working on focused efforts on the right activities.

Learnings this week

Back to the basics

It's easy to get distracted and less focused on the daily inputs that matter and that have helped to drive to where I am today. I'm going to get back to managing my inputs consistently and get less distracted on things that don't matter much

Winning Case Studies

I'm realizing more and more the importance of creating huge wins with my customers in the quickest way possible. This is often easy to do as there are some obvious gaps I can recognize as soon as I join a company part time. I'm working on building a better system around this. What I mean is knowing more clearly when to expect these lightbulb moments with customers and leverage those into good case studies.
Now that I'm less concerned about 'new business' I've allowed myself to slow down and spend more time with each customer I have to create the best possible experience. I'm excited to spend the next few months really heads down with the customers I have and hope to come out the other side with more "X company went from $100k - $500k in a few months.

The big picture

Making money is a game to me. It kinda always has been. I could easily get lost in this trap of more and more revenue each month but ultimately it defeats the purpose of why I didn't go back to a full time job; to spend more thoughtful, engaging and emotional time with my wife and kids. So far this journey has allowed me to be at more soccer practices, school events, weekly date nights, etc than I had previously. Above all, the emotional connection I can have with my family is 10x what it used to be when I was in a W2 role. I always felt a responsibility to be 'online' 24/7. Literally. Now, I don't have any shame for shutting off when I want to.

Revenue Channels:

Partnerships

Live event
- Doing a live event in SLC in a few weeks. I'm using this as a launch for my course as well. Should be a decent crowd that comes out. More importantly, I just enjoy getting to meet people in the area face to face. If you're in the SLC area, love to see you out 2/15 at noon.
Substack
- High likelihood I'm going to build a deep dive version of this journey on Substack with a paywall. Honestly, I'm my deepest of hearts (not sure what that actually means) my greatest desire would be to help more individuals loosen the dependency upon their employers for steady income. I believe the next few years 'side hustles' will become the norm of most in our sphere of 'tech'. I have gotten asked by SO many people to go to lunch and learn more details on how I'm building this that I need to figure out how to take a more 1:many approach. This is my best option. I'll be sharing every detail of how I'm scaling including pricing, implementation, contract templates, sales process, etc. Should be a good time.
Online Course
- Sold my first course. Nothing crazy. Pretty fun to get a notification that someone actually bought.
Affiliates
- Received a $1,100 referral fee for an exec search firm I've formed a partnership with

Ideation:

So much I can unpack here. I'll just list a few...
- I'm a content driven business. I need to spend more time here. How do I continue to build my reach? Here's all the ideas I'm throwing around. If any of these stand out or are interesting, shoot me a note.
  - Podcast
  - Community of people that want to build their side hustle and eventually go full time
  - Podcast #2 including all the content from above ^
  - Tik tok? Not exactly sure what, but feeling draw here?
  - Youtube shorts
Course Collaboration
- Considering some collaboration on courses and selling them together on my website. I can drive a decent amount of traffic, just hoping to partner with others potentially to build courses and share revenue. Still flushing this out but it's an interesting approach

Goals:

Execute back on my daily inputs (connect with 30 founders a day, engage with 20 pieces of content a day, write 3 pieces of content a day, ask for 1 referral a day)
Daily prep - write down 2 MITs each evening to execute on the next day. Schedule time and execute
Write first 5 posts on Substack

I get requests all the time for cool companies to join. If you are interested in hearing updates on up-coming startups, fill out this form and I'll keep you in the loop!

Lastly, if you want to check out previous weeks updates you can visit the blog here.

That's all for now!

Three huge asks:

If you're not following me on Linkedin, please do it here.
If you know any early stage founders hoping to build a sales team, shoot me an email ([email protected]). If they sign up, I'll send you a nice referral fee and give them $1,000 off.
I want to hear from you. What do you want to see here? I'm hoping to build this 100% publicly so nothing is off limits. What's helpful? Please email me and let me know what you'd like to hear about and what you're hoping to learn!

Thanks for all the love and support!