The-J
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I've got a good amount of experience in sales and marketing, so I was thinking an agency, but I'm not sure I'll be able to make as good of an offer as there's so much competition.
Everyone seems to think this. That's why there are so many agencies. Thing is, agencies are a service business. They're a way for companies to reduce marketing costs. That's why they exist.
The flip side of agencies, which is another reason there are so many, is that you don't need many clients to do well. Some boutique agencies make well over $100k/mo in profit with a very small client list.
Be proud that you saved $60k at 17. That's unusual.
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As far as which one you should pick, it matters a lot less than you think it does. But let's grade what you were doing:
- Copywriting: Selling time for money. At best you get a rev share from successful web pages. Most won't agree to this. Hiring copywriters to take on the work is hard. Lots of people think they're good copywriters but they're not. Training a copywriter is also hard, because a copywriter needs to understand a lot more than just human psychology to be a good copywriter. If you can crack this like Agora did, you could make millions, but you won't make millions doing copy for people. Think owning loads of web properties that generate cash.
- Appointment setting: Easy to train, pretty valuable, but lots of competition. You could hire employees for pretty cheap, train them up, and scale by just getting more clients. Hire $15/hour labor and sell it for $100. You beat the competition by being specialized. If you ran the #1 dental marketing agency appointment setting company, how well do you think you could do?
- Home services: We've got several people here that are succeeding with home services. Again, same model: it's labor arbitrage. You get $100/hour work and pay a guy $15/hour to do it. Simple, simple, simple. Competition is less of a threat since it's inherently harder to scale, so the business attracts sole prop type guys who just want to earn enough to make a living. But scaling isn't impossible.
- Solar panels: Another simple business that can scale really well. I don't know enough about this business though. Seems similar to selling HVAC: would do well door-to-door or with direct mail. Lots of competition. The main point is scaling a sales team that can do DTD for you. If you can do that, you can do well: just scale up by territory. Similar to home services except the numbers are bigger.
- Marketing agency: an insane amount of competition, a super low barrier to entry, and most of your competition sucks a$$. But the reason they suck is because everyone does the same thing: hire freelancers off Upwork to take care of the work & focus on sales at the expense of client performance. Or they care mostly about client performance but don't trust people to actually do the work, so they never do any sales or scale up at all, it just ends up being a living for them.
Also, ignore YouTube and TikTok money gurus. They'll make any business seem like it's the best thing since sliced bread.