Did you do anything to gain more control after they banned you the first time?
Unfortunately not yet. It was never my priority. I did think of some ideas, but haven’t really implemented. That’s one of my biggest problems. What I did do was add extra services and leveraged past case studies to sell higher ticket items and get back to previous revenue levels with fewer clients.
I was really hit with what basically was supposed to have been game over for the business. My own account banned, volume of outreach you could do limited to 4x less than before. I used the same strategy I used for clients to grow.
Everyone was hit hard. I had to put a lot of money back in the business to pay the 11 people involved for August/September and keep the team intact. It gave me PTSD.
So from September to December I worked really hard and we got revenue back to previous levels. And I did achieve that. December was 97% of what we did in our previous high in June. We’re in a slight downtrend now, but still around 80% of peak levels.
I’d say in the past few months I’ve worked on a lot of internal processes mainly to reduce churn and leverage a more serious understanding about who gets results and why, and have recently started pushing much more targeted marketing again. Will try for one more big swing hopefully before another consolidation phase where the control issue will need to be addressed in more depth.
It gets harder when you have a large team. Large revenue becomes “standard”. So $80K becomes like $3K when you’re alone… you dip below $3K, you enter desperation mode. The most valuable people who are most key to success usually consume a lot of resources. Which makes sense, business is a team sport. Things can also happen… last year I needed a lot of money for a family issue for example.
Right now I’m still at a phase where a control issue could wipe me out and do so in 2-3 months.
The thing with the internet is that it’s also a high-speed industry. Some business, like
real estate, take time to play out, which gives you more reaction time and reversals whether positive or negative aren’t as violent.
I wonder if @
MJ DeMarco ever ran into control issues in the lead business?
I would throw a random guess out there that MJ had a lot fewer control issues than we have because the market’s infrastructure was less consolidated in the hands of a few players back then.