You are Tired of Your Job, You Want to Leave, and Start a Business - Be an Entrepreneur. Is it the right choice?
Ex: Dropshipping Store OR Social Media Agency, You have seen videos of people talking about how he/she invested $1000 and made $10,000 in 30 days or 60 days?
Firstly, DON’T leave the job until you have experienced some sort of proof of concept. I learned it the hard way and I’ll never advocate someone to do it the same way I did.
It’s important to note that the journey to running a successful business & profiting is not always as glamorous as most Youtubers make it seem.
Thinking of all the money & time I have lost along the way in my journey, if I were to redo those initial steps before executing something just because I was caught up with the fancy upside, I’d do it this way. It also comes from asking 3 questions Alex Hormozi referred to which I once noted down:
- What’s the upside of this opportunity?
Possibly making $10,000 with proof of concept & a replicable process to continue to earn. I get to leave my job & work on something I love doing. But will it actually be as enjoyable as some people make it sound?
- What’s the downside of the opportunity?
Given that I leave the job to start the business, I would probably have to invest 60+ hours of my time per week (Might not be 30 or 60 days) but for several months, do all the marketing, sales, product fulfillment + customer complaints/refunds + would need capital of $10K-30K upfront (costs that I don’t foresee) but $2000 is the only amount I have in my bank & I thought it was enough as I saw people talking about in videos.
I may not have prior experience in building a business from scratch that makes $10K per month so unless I copy-paste a strategy & systems from someone who went the exact same path I did, it’s highly unlikely I would achieve this.
Further Am I willing to take the hit of any issues of refunds, money being withheld by payment facilitators for a certain period of time if it happens? Most likely to happen in Dropshipping.
If this doesn’t work, i’m going to be broke and live having to burrow money
- Can I live assuming the downside is going to happen?
So am I willing to risk my job, the exhausting amount of hours it takes, lose all the funding in savings, go through all the stress & mental breakdowns that may happen in the hope of the excitement of building a business that does over $10K per month that has less than 50% chances of working?
I will NOT.
However, that leads me to think of all the factors that will cause the downfall and look into ways of decreasing the chances of failing.
I only have $2000 in my bank account in savings & I have a sales job and my idea is to build a business that does over $10K per month.
Since I only have $2K in savings, I’ll try to keep a safety margin of at least $5000 in savings before trying to invest any into the business. I’ll work to make about another 8K-10K on top of the $2K.
I’ll first look into what components are needed to run a business that does $10K per month & the areas I can personally give my input.
Small Note before proceeding:
If you don’t know who I am, I’m Dan & I have been in sales & marketing for over 9 years now. My main record has been as a Sales manager where I led a small team to do over a Quarter Million Dollars in Gross Profit Annually, low ticket sales so high volume.
I have spent the recent years diving mostly into marketing & have my fair share of experiences running and failing in business. Now I focus on networking with people as I love connecting with successful people, learning from them & providing them with gold nuggets where I can. I have a small network as of now and looking to grow it this year onwards.
I share content because I love doing that, I had been putting it off for a long time but I just wanna do it now. I share anything from running a business, recruiting & growing successful employees, buying & building businesses (something I have a growing interest in recently) & insights from chats I have with successful people within my network.
Also doing these helps me come up with different ideas & strategies. My only hope is that you find a few gold nuggets, at least 1 from what I share.
If it’s an SMMA business I’m doing, If I’m looking to provide a service offer and I’m looking to charge $1000 per month recurring revenue, I need to have 10 clients to make $10K/month.
How much of work would it take to get 10 clients? My conversion rate will be higher but assume I take 10%, I need to pitch 100 prospects to get 10 clients to pay me.
You can either do Cold outreach to get the 10 clients or run ads to get them which is faster and may cost you between $15-$30 per lead depending on your niche. This also means the cost may come up to around $1500-$3000 for 100 leads. The $10,000 from $1000 you saw in this youtuber’s video could be after multiple testing ad creatives & Targeting which they spent more than $1000 initially & they tend to not mention that in the video most of the time.
I also need to fulfill to the best possible quality for these 10 clients. So I can get referrals and retain clients for long as I want.
Maybe these 10 clients require different customizations to their work which means I’d have to spend a lot of time customizing. So to lower this headache, I’d find the type of clients that I can fulfill on with similar templates that require minimal tweaks. So it gives the room to scale the business faster.
If it’s an SMMA, there is a process for running & measuring ad results — If you want to be the BEST at what you do, the devil is in the details. Creating top-performing ad creatives & testing them(cost of time & money) with different targeting, understanding how to scale vertically/horizontally, dealing with Ad account bans, especially FB/Instagram ads, and how many employees are needed to fulfill work worth of $10K/month. If I don’t have the skills to fulfill it myself, then I have to hire good employees to fulfill them. Handling 10 clients with communication back and forth while fulfilling their requirements is not Easy Stuff.
It’s EASY to sell something that sounds great to a client, BUT it’s HARD to fulfill that great thing you are selling most of the time. It takes a lot of work in most cases.
To get an understanding of all the different variables that are at play I’d either hire a coach that already does what I want to do OR I’d find a sales job at a Social Media Agency & figure out how much effort it takes for marketing, sales & all the different fulfillment variables that are at play. I even have a higher chance of raising money for the business because commissions are really good in SMMA sales jobs.
A plus point will be to figure out an area that you are passionate about as well because there will be times when you don’t have the excitement as you used to have prior starting the journey and having little things that you enjoy doing within your process can help massively.
There is always going to be a learning curve and unless you copy-paste the same strategy as someone who has done the exact same thing, you are going to run into many downfalls.
So another question is, how much of a capacity are you at, or willing to endure the pain of the hit that’s going to come your way?
On the other hand, (an area I’m still studying) I might even buy a business with the help of 80–90% finance with a downpayment of $5K-$10K since this business will have a proven establishment over a few years, a client base, a team & with cashflow. But it’s not easy as it sounds, it’s alot of paperwork, doing due diligence, the search for a business to buy within the requirements, specially SMMA would probably be a tough one.
In my experience and what I see, despite the catchy titles & heart-grabbing fancy headliners that talk about how you can invest $1000 — $2000 and make $10K in 30 days or 60 days?
Just know that these people have had several failures prior to figuring out how to do what they do, but very rarely they talk about the failures on public because it’s not very fancy as it sounds.
I hope this was helpful. Follow me If you found it helpful. Thank you :)