Is Your Offline Business As Successful as You Thought It Would Be?

Wrong place for this post. Try the offline marketing forum

It's really going to depend on your product.

I've never really been a fan of one-off products unless they are add on or upsells.

I base my business on a monthly fee. Even if they are only paying you, $30 a month, those add up over time. The trick is that you don't have to spend a lot of time (or any time for that matter) each month on their account. Perhaps they pay for access to something, or hosting etc... That will allow you to have 1000 clients and not necessarily need to spend 1000 hours servicing those accounts.

I've been maxed out like that before. I had more clients then I can handle and that client base didn't generate enough revenue to actually service each customer each month. That was an ugly time, but we managed to figure it out and keep what we could handle, restructure, and move forward in a new way.

It completely depends on the business and the person running it.

I own a service based offline business with my brother and all our sales are 1 time sales.

However, we only need 1 sale a week to net a decent monthly profit ($4,000 each). If we do 2 sales a week, I make around $8,000 / month. Our average right now is usually somewhere between that (like 6 sales / month).

The good news is, although we've both busted our rears... we've barely begun to saturate this industry. The total keywords we rank for is around 4-5% of all the keywords that exist. So we have a lot of room left for growth, very little overhead, and fairly high profit margins.

So for us, our business is more successful than we thought it would be. But we both had a lucky start. We use to work for a different company a few years ago (in the same industry). And we had a boss who was terrible with his money. He would spend $10,000-$20,000 month on marketing and would barely net a profit every month, cause he had NO IDEA how to market or track conversions.

I took over his marketing my first year, and slowly learned on my own what worked and what didn't. I must have burned through $150,000 of his money. And I made my former boss a lot of money in return. But at the same time I started funneling his money into my own online real estate. Because I realized early on that there would come a time where I could make more money if me and my brother split off and started our own business.

And thats exactly what happened. I got to burn through $150k of someone elses money to learn what works. Then I left his company, took my marketing experience with me, took my bosses best salesman (my brother)... and left him with nothing.

It probably sounds like we used him... and we did. But he used the shit out of me & my brother to build HIS BUSINESS. He did NOT do anything to build his own business. And he didn't even know how to run it. He was just a bank. My brother ran his business for him. He's the one who hired and trained salesman. He's the one who was going out on jobs making sure the crew did everything right. And I was the one doing all the marketing. Meanwhile our boss would sit back, do absolutely nothing and collect a fat fat check every month.

When we left to start our own company, I can't tell you how good that felt. Because we did SO MUCH to make that man money and he never listened to any of the advice we gave him. We wanted to build a REAL business. We wanted better contracts, educational pamphlets for customers, better equipment.... we wanted to legitimize the business. All our boss wanted was money... money he could gamble every week at AC... money to blow on a hummer for himself and a benz for his wife.... money to blow on escorts to cheat on his wife.... the guy was and still is the worst business owner I ever met in my life. This man is married with children. And he would literally take off with no warning and would fly to Texas to meet one of his girlfriends. And me and my brother would run his company when he was gone... just so he could cheat on his wife!!!

So he dug his own grave. And I have absolutely no sympathy for him anymore. Last thing we heard he's $80,000 in debt. He's got 1 salesman left who called me and my brother up 2 months ago looking for a job. He said he gets like 2 leads a month and isn't selling any work. The boss sold his hummer, sold 1 of his work vans, lost his office cause he can't afford rent, and afaic he's toast.

I have to say, it's been one of the most valuable lessons I've ever learned in my life. Because his story isn't unique. There are tons of business owners out there just like him, who have no idea how to run a business. And no matter how hard they try, they will keep making the same exact mistakes over and over year after year until reality sneaks up and bites them right in the ass.

-RS