5 things I would tell myself when I started

I’ve been running businesses since I was a kid, if I could find a way to make money, I was doing it.

When I was in high school, I use to sell paintball guns on forums and made enough to cover my fun money (since I was living at home with no expenses) that all of my work paychecks went straight to the bank.

As I got older I would venture into bigger things, trying whatever I could. If I read a story about someone building a successful business, I tried it.

Unfortunately, for most of my “career” building businesses, I had no mentor to learn from. I was on forums a bit and later I found a bit of a mentor but most of my learning was done on my own via trial and error.

Hopefully, this information will help you avoid some of my very costly mistakes.

1. Focus on growing organically

When I built Boss Personal Planner, I focused on Facebook ads for 100% of the marketing. ROAS was great, scaling well, I felt like I didn’t need anything else. Eventually, I added Google when I hired a freelancer and they suggest it and we even dabbled with Bing and Pinterest ads. After a while, the managers began struggling with the ads and failed to produce a positive ROI and I axed the paid advertising because I couldn’t afford it.

What should I have done?

Hired someone to write content (or done it myself). Between what I was spending on ads and people to manage the ads, I could have built a HUGE organic traffic machine. While ads became tricky and harder to run, I would have had SEO and organic sources that would continue to grow year after year.

If you look at it this way, if, at the beginning of 2020, I had started publishing 3 pages of content per week, that would be almost 200 indexed pages getting visitors every day.

2. Be careful with debt

I tried to grow very fast and with that, I was hiring lots of people to build and manage stuff. At first, things were no problems but as sales started to decline, the bills started to stack up and since expenses were so big, some over $10k/mo for example and I was spending 6 figures a month on ads, the debt built quickly. A huge issue with debt is it sucks up all of your cash flow so even if your business is still bringing in money, it immediately goes out to service the debt.

What should I have done?

1. Cut things off quicker. When things weren’t working and costing a lot of money, I should have put a halt to them until I could figure them out. Some things seemed “cheap” in comparison to what I was bringing in but they were still thousands per month.

2. Grown slower. Part of the problem was I was trying to grow extremely fast. I felt like things were going well and I should “scale, scale, scale.” This allowed things to get out of hand and hard to keep up. This compounded with the first issue where I was spending so much money that when the debt started to build, it built up fast.

3. You don’t need to look or feel big

I was trying to play big business and look like a multimillion-dollar company. This is unnecessary. I think sometimes, being small and looking that way is better. People appreciate a smaller team that is more effective vs some big company that gives 10 different answers, is never on the same page, and follows “policies” without thinking about the customer.

I even wasted $50k on a “professional” website build (and conversion rate optimization service) that took 6 months and was no better than what I could have done.

What should I have done?

I should have kept things pretty close to exactly what I had. My $250 Shopify theme was fine, then I should have run small A/B tests to see what changes I could and should have made.

Not hired “the best” and most expensive. Since this was my first real big business, doing 6 figures a month, I thought I should match it by hiring the best. After seeing them work, I realize I was definitely overpaying. Nothing in business is really that complicated, yes some people are better than others at things but I could have managed it myself or hired someone on Upwork.

I should have focused the money on customer support and retention.

4. Make sure you fully understand something before hiring someone

As I said before, nothing is that complicated when running a business. If you can set it up and start selling, you can figure out 95% of the stuff. Even things like ads or emails. Also, if you don’t know how things work, you can easily get taken advantage of. A lot of people provide basic service or dismal results but they’ll dress it up with fancy graphs and charts to make it look good.

What should I have done?

Documented all of my systems and created templates. Then hire a VA or someone to help consult. At one point, I hired an email agency that was $4,500 a month, ad managers with base fees of nearly $8,500…I could have had a whole team of VA’s managing everything for that.

Once the templates are created, it’s plug and play. If anything I could have hired a copywriter to create email copy and then had a VA put them together at 1/10th of the cost.

Again, I could have built teams to follow my systems for much less, and then I would have been more involved and I think they would have been more successful.

5. Set boundaries with people

This goes for people like friends, family, and especially if you have a significant other and kids. Just because you don’t have a normal boss to tell you when to clock in and out, doesn’t mean you can work when you want.

Yes, that is the theory and maybe when things are established you can do this, but while you’re building, you need to be focused.

You can’t just take time off, show up late, or leave early. You have to show up every single day and put in the work.

People in your life need to know these boundaries. It doesn’t mean you can’t make time for them, it just means you need to designate time for them and time for work.

These are just a few of the things I would do differently if I were to go back in time. Obviously, that is not possible but I’ve learned from my mistakes and am avoiding doing these things with future businesses.

Conclusion

Overall, slow and steady wins the race. While there are times you need to act fast, you need to be careful with what you do and how you grow your business.

Be quick to make money-saving moves and take your time with expenditures. Make sure you really need them and they will give you a good ROI. Or would it be better to take a cheaper route?

If you enjoyed this information and would like to see more like it, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter. I share my experiences being a solopreneur for over 10 years and have no problem sharing my mistakes so you don’t repeat them.