From $0 to 19k/mo with a Web Design Agency: (My story)

so I wanted to show you my stripe account a few months back when we're at zero and this is last month when we made about $24,000 in profit so this is story of how web design completely changed my life as a broke aspiring entrepreneur and the six lessons that I learned along the way so my story started when I was about to graduate college and I got a single job offer to work at an accounting firm as a junior associate I had to take the offer but I just couldn't believe that after 4 years of

hard work all I was going to be making was $338,800 a year so I was essentially broke so after I started working there I knew I had to find a way out and I thought entrepreneurship was the only way and so I went on YouTube and I started looking for side hustles businesses that I could start and I came across this guy called Sebastian jgu and at the time he was talking about Drop Shipping and this was back in 2021 and I thought this idea was brilliant so I started my store I watched a couple

videos on YouTube on how to run Facebook ads and I started a store for pet clothing I was spending I believe $10 to $15 a day on ads and I just thought how hard can this be but a few days later I got no sales and I had spent all my savings and I just had to find another way of making money I didn't want to give up so I thought why don't I just sell products on Facebook marketplace where I don't need to run ads I already get the free Impressions from Facebook and so

I ordered a bunch of products from AliExpress it was iPhone cases and I got $11,000 worth of stock shipped to my house I listed all that stuff on Facebook Marketplace but what I realized is nobody wanted to buy those stuff from a random dude on Facebook Marketplace and I couldn't get a single sale after a few months of just looking at the stock in my house I decided to just throw it out in the garbage and start a new business now it's summer of 2021 and I was back on YouTube trying to find a new

business model that I could run and I stumbl across this guy running a cleaning business and he was talking about how easy it was to run that business and he was making about $62,000 a month so first year was $96,000 this year I think we're on track to do close to a million like shy of a million like 900 something thousand so immediately I thought this was an awesome idea how hard can it be again they made it sound so easy so simple you could hire a cleaner they can take care of all the cleaning

you can just run the business I thought this is awesome I failed selling products but it might be easier to selling services so I set up my website and I watched a couple videos on YouTube on how to run Google ads and I started running Google ads to my surprise a few days later I got my first ever client I remember this vividly because it was the first time I had ever made any money with my businesses it was for $257 to clean a house so I was like awesome I spent $100 on Google ads

and I have $157 worth of profit but what I hadn't accounted for was the cleaner and so I immediately started looking for people to clean the house and the problem was nobody wanted to clean that house for $157 so I made a huge mistake I had no idea how to price this cleaning jobs and I had to do the cleaning myself and so this completely sucked this was when reality hit me that it wasn't as easy as this guy made it to sound on YouTube it was much harder getting cleaners was really hard and then

the margins were very very low 6 weeks later we ended up making about $2,100 of Revenue but we didn't make any profit and so at that point I just had to shut down the business margins were very slim and running this business just sucked I was okay at running the Google ads which was surprising like I was kind of breaking even with the Google ads as a complete beginner but I just didn't like the cleaning business at all and I just wanted to quit so again back at zero back at square one and we had

to start over at this point it's about late 2022 and I was back on YouTube watching videos trying to find side hustles and I stumble across this guy called Eman gaji at the time he was running his Ecom Ad Agency and I believe he said he was running at like 90% profit margin and I thought this was awesome high-profit margin business he's not selling products he's selling a service which at the time we found much easier than to sell physical products and so I took all my savings and I bought his course for $1,500 I

consumed the content very quickly and I wanted to do exactly what he was doing which was running the ads for e-commerce Brands so I wanted to learn the actual Service delivery before I offered it to clients and so I thought why don't I just set up a quick Shopify store and start running Tik to ads if I can make it work then I can sell this service to other businesses so I started running the Tik Tok ads for this Apple watch stand product that was kind of cool and I was spending about $25 a day

on ads after spending all the money that I had left on the ads which was was about $500 we only ended up making two sales for $1 199.99 each and so I was like this is stupid I can't keep running the ads I have no more money left and to sell $40 worth of product I had to spend $500 worth of ads and so I just had to stop once again but I didn't want to quit just yet because at the time there was also other videos talking about other type of agencies you could run

and so one of them was Legion for local businesses so booking appointments for local businesses so my brother and I started cold calling local chiropractors in our area and offering the appointment services to my surprise a few weeks later my brother ended up signing our first client ever it was for $11,000 a month and we promised 10 booked appointments in 30 days or money back guaranteed so even though this was a huge breakthrough in our journey I was a bit happy about signing the client but more than that I was just anxious and I just

had this fear and anxiety of how are we actually going to deliver those 10 booked appointments I had no idea if we could actually do it we just give it a try and somehow we ended up getting like 11 appointments that month and we ended up fulfilling on our guarantee for the first time behind the scenes though this was one of the most stressful months of my entire life running the ads was very stressful making sure they were profitable getting the leads and calling them instantly and trying to book appointment with strangers was very hard

and on top of that we had to follow up with them via text and it was just a nightmare Not only was that really stressful and complicated but when we were calling the leits the leits were actually asking us specific chiropractic treatment questions that we just had had no idea about on top of that the leads were coming through at random times throughout the day and we just had no Freedom cuz as soon as the lead came through we had to call them so we essentially on call all day 30 days a month to make

sure that we could fulfill on our guarantee somehow we signed a couple more clients but this only 10x are problems more leads more calls to make more leads to follow up with more appointments to do and it was just a nightmare we're pretty much enslaved by our clients we had all this work that we had to do every day 12 hours a day for 30 days for just $11,000 a month so we pretty much had no freedom but what ended up happening is a few months later our clients weren't getting really good results and so

they ended up canceling on us and within 2 weeks we had lost over our clients once again and even though we had hit rock bottom we're back at zero after trying so many times I felt this weird relief and like happiness inside of me that we didn't have to deal with these nightmare clients and all the stress the anxiety all that to just make $1,000 a month in a weird way I was kind of happy that we had lost all of these clients not to say legion doesn't work but it just didn't work for us

but anyways this was probably the lowest point at our journey at this point we had tried so many times we had lost so much money so much time trying different models but once again we were going back to zero it's now mid 2023 and at this point I almost want to quit and give up I have no motivation and I feel like we've wasted so much time with these business models that I just don't want to keep trying again at this point my brother calls me and he convinces me to keep going he says like

I think we're pretty close we almost have this agency thing figured out we just have to change the service that we're offering and I think we might be able to make it so I trust my brother and I remember that at the time we knew how to build really good websites and I thought why don't we just start offering websites and see if we can make it happen websites is still like a high ticket item that we can sell but we don't have to be on call 24 hours a day and then our clients are

going to be happy so long as we've made our deadline and so at the time my brother bought a $100 million leads by Alex hosi and we're reading the book and and he was saying when you're just starting out offer your services to friends and family for free in return for a testimonial or a referral and so that's pretty much what we did we started offering our websites to our friends and family and we build really good websites entirely for free a few weeks later we got our first referral which was a website that we

built for $150 even though it was very cheap this $150 that we got at the time meant everything because I was ready to give up I had no hope this $150 represented hope we were able to make an awesome website our client was really happy we had no stress and then we were able to build the website in our own terms and so we kept going our next client paid us $600 our next one ,000 ,500 then 2,000 and then most recently we've been charging like $2,500 $3,000 for our websites in May 2024 is where

everything changed we hit our first $10,000 a month and I believe it was actually like $116,000 and ever since we've been building websites for local businesses and actually last month we brought in $24,000 in profit with the agency in retrospect I think the reason why web design worked for us is because one we didn't need upfront Capital to get started or we didn't need to spend any money on ads like we were doing with those other businesses where you're burning through cash every day the second reason why I think it worked is because we didn't

promise something that we couldn't deliver like with the legion businesses all that stuff with websites we knew how to build really good websites and so it was very simple for us to deliver this service third reason why I think it worked is because we didn't have to be on C 24/7 we could actually have our 925 we could work on the websites after 5:00 p.m. and we could deliver to the clients so long as we met the deadline and I think most of all I think the business model wasn't overly complicated I think when you're

just starting out taking bets that take you to zero is very dangerous if you're a beginner you want to be in a business model where if you don't send a client in a week nothing happens so you can try again and again and you won't go to zero you're not spending money on ads you're not burning through cash you're not buying inventory you're not taking these huge risks upfront that are going to take take you to zero and so that's literally how web design completely changed my life if I hadn't tried one last time I

would have quit and I wouldn't be telling you this story right now and actually something funny kind of happened a few months back somebody reached out to me on Instagram and he was telling me how he was trying to grow his agency and he had tried everything tons of Outreach and he just couldn't make it work he was ready to quit and so I immediately asked him how long have you been doing this for and he said 2 weeks and so when he said two weeks I just started laughing because he just didn't know how

much it takes to make a business work I was like if only you knew what we went through all the business models that we failed all the money we lost the time we spent you just don't know what the journey was like and I just told him like 2 weeks is just not enough time to make it work that if you saw my journey you would know how much work and time it took to make it happen and so I'm guessing if you're still watching the video at this point of the video most people already

clicked off anyways but if you're still watching it's probably because you want to start your own web design agency or you started one but you just haven't been able to make it work and so I've been thinking of starting something cool where I can coach you one-onone and help a few guys with their web design agencies and Coach you Mentor you and hopefully save you a lot of time and mistakes that I've already made with my own agency and so if that's you and you want to get coached and mentored by me click the first

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