15 Building In Public: Investing & getting out of our own way.

GM and happy Friday!! What a day to be alive.

Welcome to building in public where we rant about all the things we’ve f*cked up in the past… (so you don’t have to).  

I came to a painful realization about Elevate Financial three weeks ago. It was a big wake-up call....

I’ve been pulling in the same revenue and profit for nearly 1.5 years now…

Yikes.

Pretty sh*t growth if you ask me.

It’s extremely consistent, and usually ebbs and flows by ~$2,500 monthly. It’s definitely not a bad thing, but it’s not a great thing either.

I’m kinda stuck in this position.

It’s been 1.5 years and I haven’t grown. I haven’t enhanced the brand. I haven’t added (net) new clients. And I haven’t really done much (if anything) on the business development side.

I was kinda pissed at myself. I wanna go bigger… but how?

I thought I was doing all the right things. But there was one major constraint.

ME.

I am literally the bottleneck stopping Elevate Financial from growing rapidly. I think there can be a few reasons as to why this is happening. Here they are:

First, I got addicted to chasing money. If I saw a high-value contract pop-up I’d be all over it. It didn’t matter if it was outside my niche. I did it. This makes it hard to scale because there is no consistent offering. It’s just random jobs thrown together under the umbrella of Elevate Financial.

Second, I didn’t reinvest anything back into the business… Like legit zero. I’ve never spent a dime on advertising. And my profit margin is ~90-95%. This is f*cking awesome in the short-term, but long-term it doesn’t really work…

If I wanna go from $20-25k/mo. to $50k/mo. and beyond, I need to spend some money. I need to invest in marketing and lead generation. And most importantly, I need to invest in myself and people.

People… I haven’t given people enough bandwidth to run with a client or project. And it’s the main reason for my lack of growth. As that cheesy saying goes:

If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together.

Yeah, well it’s true.

So, I decided to change things up on June 12th.

I basically made a decision that Sunday, and have been attacking it ever since. I'm an obsessed dog with a bone at this point.

But what a damn difference this has made. So far, I’ve added three new clients and two more in the pipeline (hoping to close both soon).

And here’s what I’m doing.

1/ I’ve totally refined the offering and website. It’s coherent, clean, and uncomplicated. It highlights the only services I’ll offer. (It’s not live yet, but it’s close).

2/ I’m not worrying about personal distributions for Q3. I’m focusing on investing money into lead generation and marketing. I recently engaged DoneMaker to perform outbound lead generation and manage Google ad spend. Hence why I needed a revamped landing page/website to convert on inbound leads.

3/ People. I’ve been working with one person closely for ~8 months, but finally bringing them more into the fold. He’s bright, easy to work with, and exactly the kind of person I wanna grow with.

Plus, this week I hired my first virtual assistant. She will manage many of the day-to-day and tedious tasks, allowing me to focus more on growing the business.

I’ve also gotten super loud on social media. LinkedIn has been my sounding board lately.

And guess what? It works. It’s still the best lead generation system out there for B2B businesses. I’ve started posting much more consistently with a narrower niche. And the results speak for themselves:

I’ve also added 500 followers in three weeks. Yes, it’s a vanity metric. But it still matters.

All this is great, but it's nothing without switching up the most important part... Mindset.

We need a long-term mindset for everything.

I’m great at looking at investments in the stock market over a long time horizon. And I understand the benefits of exercise for longevity.

But for some reason with my business I got caught up in short-term bullshit.

Not anymore.

I’m finally building a base to launch off of.

And damn, it feels good.

Here’s something I wrote out and keep at the top of my Notion page:

None of these tasks are ever complete. There’s no finish line or summit. It’s a process with no end, similar to a shark swimming. Instead of chasing a finish line, let’s accept we’ll always be swimming… That we’re always going to do hard things and CHOOSE type 2 fun. Stop gazing at the summit above and embrace the climb in front of you.

Have a hell of a weekend!