I’ve started nine businesses so far. The first one failed, but each successive company has yielded greater revenue, profits, and (mostly) happiness.
There was a particular period of time — 2002 to 2005 — that I without doubt enjoyed the higher revenues and profits. I set out to prove something to myself, and made more than I would have made if I had remained practicing law, and even more than most of the partners of the law firm I left in 1998.
But I can’t say I was happy. Turns out, how you make money matters more than how much.
Working In My Business Instead of On It
The main problem was that I was really good at bringing in clients, and really bad at creating processes to effectively manage my team and efficiently serve those clients. So, I compensated by working ridiculous hours.
As I exited those businesses and entered my next phase, I swore I would never be in that position again. Thus began a period of time where the happiness caught up with the revenue and profit (despite making more money than I had previously dreamed of).
I’ve got a whole lot of people to thank for that. But I’d have to start with Tony Clark, who was my partner in the startup company that created the first “Copyblogger” product, Teaching Sells.
It was just me, Tony, and Tony’s wife Kim. And thanks to Tony’s skill set and the processes he implemented, I was able to focus on content, marketing, and strategy — the things I’m good at. And of course “Saint Kim” handled support, which she quickly realized neither Tony or I were good at.
The moral of the story is that great marketing processes are not enough. You’ve also got to have great management processes in place as well.
How to Make Business (And Life) Better
Here’s the interesting thing — the very systems and processes that we used as a 3-person startup are the same ones that allowed us to grow into a 55-person virtual company doing 8 figures in annual revenue.
Maybe you don’t want to get that big, and I don’t blame you at all. But I would have killed to know what I know now back when I was running a tiny company with only independent contractors to manage. So, don’t make the mistake of thinking this webinar is not for you!
With that said, we’d love to have the freelancers, solopreneurs, and startup folks out there join us for a free webinar on August 25, 2015 at 1 pm Eastern / 10 am Pacific. Copyblogger Media COO Tony Clark and I will give you the exact methodologies and processes we used to turn a 3-person startup into a 55+ person virtual company doing 8 figures in annual revenue.
Here’s how to attend:
- Head over to Unemployable.com and register for your free membership.
- You’ll receive a confirmation email that contains a link you must click to confirm your membership.
- When you do that, you’ll be sent to a Welcome page. On that page is a link to the Unemployable Member area. Click that.
- Upon arrival in the Member Area, scroll down to the Webinar section.
- You’ll see a box with the webinar title and description, except there will be a blue button that says “Register Now With One Click.”
- Click.
- That’s it. 🙂
The cool thing is that once you’re a registered at Unemployable, you’ll get additional webinars, weekly audio lessons, and other cool stuff I’m working up. Hope to see you over there!
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