Building an awesome life

[lukeymacca]

Hey Everybody,

Its time to make this happen, so here is my accountability thread.

My background story, I’m a 25 year old male living in Western Australia, married but no kids yet. I completed an electrical and instrumentation apprenticeship on the mines and climbed the ladder pretty quickly. My job pays extremely well and my employees have always been great to me. They recently paid for me to complete an MBA and more business, finance and leadership courses than I can poke a stick at. But I know its time to jump ship. I’ve always had the inner drive to go out and do my own thing, entrepreneurship and business are my passion and its time I started living it. I know there is more to life than working 9-5, I'm driven to make this life better for myself and my family!

So the plan is:
I am currently starting up an electrical and instrumentation services business, while at the beginning it is trading time for money (which is not something I wish to continue doing) the plan is to scale, expand and systemize quickly. The end goal is after 10 years to exit the business for a minimum of 4 million and retire at 35.

In addition to the services business I plan on setting up a few complementary import businesses and distributing online and through the services business:

Robotics
Electronics
Electrical and instrumentation test equipment

Currently, I am working on myself, reading more books on business, sales, leadership, personal development and psychology than every before. Getting my head in the right space. As for the businesses all the paperwork is completed on the services business just waiting for final approvals and sign offs. Hopefully will be up and running next week, will continue to work my day job until the business is earning enough to pay the mortgage. Now I have to start hustling, marketing, cold calling and building relationships with clients.

Researching the side businesses for feasibility and learning what’s involved with the importing, will be trying to tap into the wealth of knowledge on this forum for help in this area.

I have a favor to ask all of you, in my life I am not surrounded by entrepreneurs and risk takers. I’m surrounded by sidewalkers and slowlaners, so I would like for this forum to help hold me accountable and give me a kick up the arse if I am not taking enough action.

Looking forward to connecting with you all!

 

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[lukeymacca]

Progress update 1,

Well they last 2 days have been productive (in my standards). Put together 200+ business/proposed client list grouped in industry so once the licensing department finally gets back to me we can start a tailored marketing and client acquisition campaign. Will have the business website online by the end of today, (although I'm not that happy with it, I will role with it for now and get it professionally done shortly). Also have reached out to a number of previous contacts and found there may be a possibility to obtain a maintenance contract I estimate will be worth low to mid six figures, which would be a huge leg up for a business just starting up!

Book update,
Nothing to Loose - Ryan Blair
The book was an easy read but felt disjointed, no real flow. Ryan also come across as a dude with a huge ego, which i can relate too but in this book I felt it was too much.

The Motivation Manifesto - Brendon Burchard
This book, man I loved it, so energising and inspiring. Is bit repetitive but the points outlined in the book I found were worth repeating.

Next Books
Scaling up - Verne Harnish
Sell or Be Sold - Grant Cardone

 

[Spoonman]

Sounds like you've got some great forward momentum. Thanks for the book updates, there's a few you've mentioned that I haven't read yet.

have you read TMF yet?

 

[lukeymacca]

Sure have mate, its a good book. I read it and was like F*ck yes I'm not crazy! MJ managed to put my general thoughts in a book and expand on them, really opened up my eyes. I just wanna go give a copy of the book to all my friends and family and tell them to pull their heads out of their arses!

 

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[lukeymacca]

Progress update 1.5 (minor update haha)

Website is done, YEW! Still waiting on approvals from the licensing department before we can get it up and running.
In Australia as an electrician you need to be granted a contractors license before you and advertise or begin work, so currently just setting up process documents on how we want to function as a business, and a plan on how we are going to scale.

I have been in touch with a few suppliers on instrumentation test equipment on Alibaba and will order a few samples to see what the quality is like. After some research I've decided to stay away from eBay and Amazon, the target market for these products is medium to large industry and mining (B2B) and ebay and amazon would not be there best way to reach these people. We will set up a ecommerce store, market using PPC, email marketing a printed catalogues sent to all the proposed clients throughout Australia. No progress on the robotics store....

 

[lukeymacca]

Progress update 2!

Well the electrical and instrumentation services business has hit a small road bump. The paperwork I submitted for my license to operate had a small mistake in it, so this has delayed progress slightly. Lesson: Triple check everything before you submit it! So for the time being I have been writing custom introduction and sales letters/email for proposed client base and been designing flyers and sales material.

I have also ordered samples of a number of items after making a list is possible import products. My niche I have learnt is very competitive in the online commerce space, margins are weak unless you import items in the 1000s. Currently the lack of capital and warehousing space are limiting factors so instead… I did a brain dump of all the things I would use in the business, tools consumables etc and after research found a number of items suit my criteria, low MOQ and have good margins 250% – 300%. I have ordered samples and can’t wait till they arrive.

Currently reading Choose Yourself by James Altucher. Too early to review but I am enjoying it so far.

Also Moderators I would love to change the title of this thread, any chance you could help out with that?

 

[lukeymacca]

So I’ve finally got my license and we are up and running!! With a small amount of Facebook marketing we have now got a few jobs in excess of 1k which is a nice starting point. The plan is to now get out there work and build a client list, from this we will attempt to step up to the industrial/commercial market. Hopefully get an employee on part time by the end of the month so I can focus more on seeking new clients and growing the business. Happy that things are finally moving!

My first sample has arrived for the online biz; they look good excited to see how well they move. Lots more to come, after reading lots of posts on this forum I’m really excited to see what we can do in this space.

Spent more time working than reading over the last week so I’m still on Choose Yourself but have also started NLP for Dummies. Anybody here dabbled with NLP? What do you think?

Would love to chat with more people running trade or services based business so if you’re interested hit me up!

 

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[lukeymacca]

Have not forgot about you guys - just been doing less talking more listening, less teaching more learning. The last few months since my update have been a rollercoaster, and I’ve learnt a lot about myself and the business.

The work is starting to come in for the electrical business, it’s still slow (& slowlane) but I still believe that if the business is set up with the right structure and processes it will scale. Currently we are re-branding the business, the name and logo we had previously just didn’t convey what we do well. I had one proposed client ask us what we do, they said that they through our business serviced musical instruments…. Haha time to fix that.

Importing was going well, sold all the items which I ordered. Now placing orders for larger quantities, hopefully increase the margins so we start to make a nice side income.

I would love to connect with more people doing something similar, if your running a trade or services business hit me up!




Also would love to change the title of this thread, any idea on how to do that?