“I started building websites for people and I was able to make enough to pay a really small wage, but I was never able to grow it really significantly. Year seven, I wasn’t making any more profit than I was making in year one.
It just basically comes back to a fundamental problem of the business relying too much on you and you not having that consistency, reliability of income, and that scalability of something. If you think about a software startup, they’re just infinitely scalable. They can just keep growing, sign up more customers. It’s just a technical problem that needs to be solved.
I wanted to bring the aspects of the software scalability into the services area, which is what I did with WP Curve. Before I saw some success with that,
I tried everything else you can possibly think of with the agency to make it work. It just kept running into brick walls.
I think you need to be a little bit ruthless to run an agency well.
What I always struggled with was how do I come up with a reasonable price and a reasonable level of service and a reasonable amount of availability?
How available do I have to be to a client who’s paying me $10,000 for a big project? Do I have to give up my Christmas holiday, which I did twice, for this client? Eventually, do I fire this client?
You could just be a ruthless person. Or you could hire someone. You can have really strict rules. The way I dealt with it is just by having a really simple service. With WP Curve, I didn’t have to have any of those conversations because we’ve got a very clear offering and it’s either a yes or a no generally”.
This is just one of the brilliant entrepreneurial stories shared in “Mindset, Marketing & Money”. Get your copy of my new book via Amazon UK here today! (Amazon US here).