I'm going to go from bankruptcy/£240,000 personal debt to a life of freedom using Facebook ads.

[Paul David]

Update:

Over the past two months nothing really has changed and i know the exact reason why. It's simply down to taking the wrong action and wanting instant gratification.

Looking back on why i'm in the position I am at the moment there is a recurring theme of not taking action each day on things that move the needle. In order to grow my Agency i need to get more clients, to get more clients I haven't done any sales outreach since the first week in December. Equals - no new clients.

I get up everything morning feeling the exact same way, tired and dreading groundhog day. My diet is terrible (I don't eat veg because i don't like it) and procrastinate doing things that don't bring in more sales. I read, work on my program for ads and then come up with all sorts of objections my potential clients are going to say about it.

My goal was to be a millionaire by the time I was 30, i'm 40 in July and i'm bankrupt and slowing eating myself to death every single day with my diet. Eating poorly to cheer myself up.

I don't look forward to anything other than eating and drinking. I drive my kids to school every day in the cold UK weather hating every single minute of it, wishing I was living in Spain in the Sun. I've become a negative, glass half empty type of person riddled with stress and anxiety. I know i'm killing myself slowly.

I'm 2 months behind on my car payments, my Dad isn't happy with me because i've borrowed money on this credit card and missed payments and my Wife made an off the cuff remark to my Son the other day how useless i am at making money.

I set goals and punish myself because i continually fail at them. All because i want instant gratification. I want that fast food now because i'm feeling stressed. I'm not getting up at 6am to do my workout because it's cold and i'd rather stay in bed.

I've thought i'd already had my F**K YOU moment but this feels different this time. I read a book last week called The Slight Edge which puts into perspective perfectly how the small decisions over time affect where you end up.

Today i'm creating a system to get me out of this shit both mentally, physically and financially and i'm going to stick with it through hell or high water. The system will work, what won't is if i decide i don't want to follow through it depending on how i'm feeling on any given day. To quote a passage from the slight edge book:

"Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do; they put the slight edge to work for them, rather than against them, every day. They refuse to let themselves be swayed by their feelings, moods or attitudes; they rule their lives by their philosophies and do whatever it takes to get the job done, whether they feel like it or not."

 

[Paul David]

Honestly what are you doing?

You're focus is wishy washy to the max. Seriously you've listed about 10 things you want to focus on, eating healthy, going to the gym, becoming a taxi driver, Facebook ads, e-commerce brand etc etc etc

Mate just pick one thing and do that. If it's selling Facebook ads then do that. Go get clients like you were.

First things first, i do not want to become a taxi driver. That's more of a necessity to bring in some extra income whilst my agency grows.

My e-commerce towel brand I don't have any capital to grow it therefore it's something i've had to move on from.

My main focus is fixing my mindset, eating and becoming more healthy and growing my agency. Which all 3 work together.

You're right though, focusing on getting more clients is what i'm going with 80% of my time.

 

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[Kevin88660]

Absolutely correct. I wouldn't pay myself that much anyway because the chances are that anything I earn over £2.5-3k a month and I'd have to pay the rest back towards my creditors for a period of up to 3 years.

Good progress! Everytime I See fellow business people facing massive difficulty and not losing belief in themselves it resonates with what everyone of us went through.

I sincerely wish you all the best!

 

[StrikingViper69]

How is this working? Are you operating from a LTD? I thought you weren't allowed to be a director of an LTD for a set amount of time after going bankrupt...

 

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[Kevin88660]

I think everyone I know has given up on me becoming a financial success........including my Wife.

However, I'll never give up on myself. There's been so many false dawns and broken promises over the last few years I can understand why. Now I'm using their doubts to fuel my fire making me more determined than ever to succeed.

My wife and one of my closest friend earn what (they call) great money, working for someone else. Their great money is around £4500 take home every month. I don't class that as great money at all. Earning £4500 a month for the next 30 years trading 5 days a week in exchange for 2 is my idea of hell. And I'm still saying that whilst having just filed for bankruptcy without any incoming coming in now.

My wife and friend have both worked their way up to £4500 by doing their jobs for nearly 20 years. 40 hours a week in my wife's case and my friend used to work weekends also just to get that amount. In two months time, I'll be earning more than both of them combined and possibly 4 times as much. It will have taken me 2 months (excluding lockdown time) of planning and execution to earn that.

OPTION 1: £4500 a month - 5 working days a week for the next 30 years after spending 20 years climbing the corporate ladder to get to this point

OR

OPTION 2 £20,000 a month - 2 hours work a day (and only if I choose to) with an unlimited ceiling over the coming years after spending 3 months to get this point.

I'll take my option 2 all day long. I've been through everything as an entrepreneur - anxiety, ridicule, physically assaulted (when i had a shop), insomnia, financial ruin, suicidal thoughts yet I still continue to push forward so when someone asks me how did I manage to earn so much money so quickly the answer will not be that it only took a few months planning, the answer will be the 20 years of shit I've gone through what people with these "great paying £4500 a month jobs" would never do.

In the early days 1990s..other business men ridiculed Jack Ma as a con artist who talked about changing the world with “some links in the calculator box” (internet).

I am a free thinker but over the years I believe that there Seems to be a spiritual dimension related hard work and persistence. People who were hardworking are more likely to be successful not just because of the mathematical laws of trying harder and cumulative compounded power of efforts, but things will seem to be easier somehow. There seems always be a mini breakthrough immediately after giving a maximum effort towards What seems to be An impossible obstacle.

 

[Paul David]

I had my bankruptcy interview today and I certainly wasn't looking forward to it.

Hopefully, there will be no long term restrictions like extensions to the bankruptcy term of 1 year or a property transfer I did 18 months ago.

I've not done anything misleading or fraudulent so I shouldn't have anything to worry about. One of my creditors actually asked the trustee to look into my Father's house thinking it may be mine because we have same name. Nice try!

The trustee said because I'm not currently earning he will contact me again in two months to see if there's any excess income to pay towards the creditors. There won't be.

 

[Paul David]

Good on you man, you genuinely seem like a nice guy and I'm sure that you have what it takes to make it.
Also about the taxi license I'm very fascinated, to get it in Italy you have to spend 180/200k which is insane if you think about it, I envy you so much having the freedom to do such things without the country punishing you for taking action!
How much have you made until now with your agency?

thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my posts.

Here in the U.K. you can get a taxi licence relatively cheap. Unfortunately due to Covid 19 it’s quiet.

With my agency from December to March I made around £10k, but then lockdown happened. Since then I’ve made a lot of progress with my offering and hopefully my clients will be able to open first week in July.

I’ve got another 4 weeks to get as many on board as possible!

 

[Bobby_italy]

thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my posts.

Here in the U.K. you can get a taxi licence relatively cheap. Unfortunately due to Covid 19 it’s quiet.

With my agency from December to March I made around £10k, but then lockdown happened. Since then I’ve made a lot of progress with my offering and hopefully my clients will be able to open first week in July.

I’ve got another 4 weeks to get as many on board as possible!

Good, I'm getting around 1/2 calls a day from digital marketing agencies and I'm so pissed off, I started not listening and telling them off the bat "Sorry I don't need your services have a nice day" if they keep pushing I hang up.
To me they feel like a scam right now, in my sector it's very difficult to get leads and once you get them it's very difficult to convert, YES I do need their help but not in the way they propose it, like they propose making a good website and then running ads on specific keywords, guess what I can do that too, if they sent me an email with 4 companies in my niche and some example of the work they provided to them I would drop anywhere from 2 to 5k without hesitation(after veryfing), because honestly in real life it's not uncommon we pay 1k for a job we get for the person who introduced us, usually between 2 and 5% of the total job.
That means that if a serious agency got me 4 jobs in a year for a total revenue of 160k they would get anywhere from 3 to 8k €, BUT I wouldn't care how much they spend on ads or my website or whatever, that's the whole point.
Also 4 jobs in a year on automated ads etc.. in my opinion are not impossible, I've been debating making a post about this old school company for quite some time but never pulled the trigger because it's boring and not what the forum is used to.

 

[Paul David]

I noticed you often mention of pricing per hour, here's a book that could potentially lead to a lightbulb moment for you: https://www.freshbooks.com/fbstatic...te-assets/other/Breaking-the-Time-Barrier.pdf

If you've never read it before, I'd really recommend it. It's a really short read too.

Great suggestion thanks. I think i've definitely undervalued what i'm offered to the guy paying me hourly. I just however needed to earn "some" income this month as all my clients are still closed with lockdown.

 

[theag]

My wife and friend have both worked their way up to £4500 by doing their jobs for nearly 20 years. 40 hours a week in my wife's case and my friend used to work weekends also just to get that amount. In two months time, I'll be earning more than both of them combined and possibly 4 times as much. It will have taken me 2 months (excluding lockdown time) of planning and execution to earn that.

I lost sympathy for you at this point. It took me a long time and hard work to reach the imaginary profit numbers you are throwing around here. And I paid back my debt.

It would probably not be the worst idea to treat yourself to a big piece of humble pie.

Also not a big fan of your business ethics, with huge profits (if it works out as you plan) and bankruptcy at the same time.

Your new business sounds promising. Be careful not to underestimate the coming fallout from the lockdowns though, as you seem to be relying on offline businesses as customers, who might be on the way to bankruptcy themselves.

Good luck.

 

[LiveEntrepreneur]

Firstly I don't need your sympathy or anyone else's. I'm old enough to know that I'm the sole reason why I've ended up in the position I am.

I also wasn't saying there was anything wrong in spending 20 years of your life working your way up to £4500 a month either. I was just comparing what's possible when you create a business for yourself. You're right though those figures are imaginery until I start earning that. The same as any other business plan and the figures mooted about on them.

I don't know about you but I'm here because I want to earn enough money to create the lifestyle I want and that doesn't include working for 5 days a week in exchange for 2 days freedom of a weekend. Everybody's different though.

Kudos for paying back your debts too, I've spent the last couple of years swimming against the tide trying to pay mine back and great cost to my own sanity at times. The only reason I've eventually given in was when one creditor would not discuss a reasonable settlement figure (which I believe went against his clients wishes).

I agree with you about the fallout from lockdown, I'm also trying to create a modest income from affiliate sales of the software I've white labelled which I use for my marketing agency. Be nice for that to bring in maybe a couple of thousand dollars a month.

I will also begin driving a taxi in a couple of weeks as the bars and restaurants are now open again here in the UK if I need to bring extra income. I always thought I'd be a multi millionaire by the time I was 30 never mind bankrupt and driving a taxi at the turn of my 40th birthday next week. That's humble pie for me, believe me.

Man reading your story scares me because i can see alot of myself in you and the same goals. Since i was 18 i wanted to get rich by 30 and im not even 1% there. Only got s few years ago and the doubt of me reaching it keeps growing because ive made too many mistakes. My previous business failed after working on it for a year and all my previous projects have failed. Makes me wonder if i should keep going. But if i quit i got nothing, ill be stuck in my miserable day job.

 

[Paul David]

Man reading your story scares me because i can see alot of myself in you and the same goals. Since i was 18 i wanted to get rich by 30 and im not even 1% there. Only got s few years ago and the doubt of me reaching it keeps growing because ive made too many mistakes. My previous business failed after working on it for a year and all my previous projects have failed. Makes me wonder if i should keep going. But if i quit i got nothing, ill be stuck in my miserable day job.

Yes i do doubt myself more than I used to. What you always have to remember is that just because you've found ways that don't work doesn't mean you won't find a way that does.

There's plenty of people in my situation who would have given up, got a normal job and spent the rest of their lives working for someone else. Now I know that I feel so strongly against that even after the stress of everything I've been through.

So i've sort of found out who I am. I know I'm the person that will keep going no matter what. The only thing that's going to stop me reaching my goals and dreams now is death. I die before it happens.

 

[LiveEntrepreneur]

Yes i do doubt myself more than I used to. What you always have to remember is that just because you've found ways that don't work doesn't mean you won't find a way that does.

There's plenty of people in my situation who would have given up, got a normal job and spent the rest of their lives working for someone else. Now I know that I feel so strongly against that even after the stress of everything I've been through.

So i've sort of found out who I am. I know I'm the person that will keep going no matter what. The only thing that's going to stop me reaching my goals and dreams now is death. I die before it happens.

Yeah man, I've come to realise life is a numbers game it's like picking up a chick at a night club. Though you can increase your odds, so life is less a numbers game but will always be one regardless. Really hope you make it man, business besides coding has to be the hardest thing I've done. It takes its toll, 5 years ago starting the journey I didn't really think I'd encounter so many personal challenges.

Entrepreneurship really tests your character I think and what you're made out of. Choosing this path, we create new problems for own selves by introducing more things into our lives but I think it's the right type of problems to have.

 

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[didicoimp]

Nice thread, good luck mate.

I'm sorry but I think I didn't get quite well what you doing right now. You went from an ecommerce (laptops batteries/chargers) and now you're running a digital marketing agency focused on FB ads? Is that right? How do you look for new clients?

Good luck man, specially in the UK. Damn,I lived in Lodon for 3 years, one word: EXPENSIVE

at the same time, so much money flowing, it's ridiculous. You dont understand how people manage to live in such wealth although at the same time it's so hard to earn good money. Definetly a place of opportunities, good luck mate

 

[Blackman]

Hi Paul,

Read your story on how you went from running a PC/laptop repair shop since you were 20, then moving into the e-commerce world of eBay/Amazon and now looks like you're into lead generation, which is something that I've been playing with myself since December last year.

Props to you for ploughing on and moving forward, no matter what happens.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, you're essentially running a commission-based marketing service, where you do the advertising for a chosen business and only when your referred customer makes money for them, that's when you get paid.

It all sounds well and good, except as I can see from the above, there's a lot of running around in circles trying to establish what happened to the leads and getting paid for them.

This is the reason why I've been trying to implement a more traditional approach of managing service-based clients where I charge a fixed monthly fee for my service (running Google Ads) and the client also covers the advertising spend.

In theory, it's an excellent setup, where I run ads to my own landing page, generate leads via phone calls directly to my client and he takes it from there. I don't get involved with customers, I don't care how much the clients make per job, so my only focus is on getting relevant leads.

Unfortunately, I've been struggling to secure a single client with this model, so I can't say it's been successful, considering you have 28 clients and I've got 0.

Similar to how you don't charge anything upfront, I've been running free trials for my prospects by offering them my service completely free of charge, including the ad cost, for the first 4-5 customers and then I would get in touch with the prospect and try to close them for a regular monthly package, assuming everything went well and they were satisfied with the calls.

This hasn't worked too well, as they are all happy with the leads coming in, because my lead quality is excellent and they all convert well, but clients are not too keen on paying the ad cost and my service fee on top. As a result, I feel quite burned out trying to find new clients with this method, as I keep spending money doing trials, but in the end can't take it further.

I'm also working with service-based businesses (specifically cleaning) and after reading your posts, I started thinking about how I could implement your strategy and only charge them after a job has been completed.

This immediately raises the question of trust, because your client could lie about the exact number of jobs secured from calls or about the amount charged per job. Then trying to work out a commission rate that would work for both parties sounds like another big pain in the backside.

I'm amazed at how you're running at a profit after subtracting your ad costs, but I guess if you're dealing with businesses where the average sale amount is quite high, then it might work out well, although the CPCs are also higher in such niches, so while you earn more, you also spend more on ads.

Do you think your model would be a viable option when working with cleaning companies? Quite often these are 1-2 man businesses, where there are no fancy booking management systems, so automation might be an issue....

Anyway, would be great to know what you think in general about this model that you're currently running.

 

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[Blackman]

So you work out an offer that A the customers want, whether thats 50% off something or 3 areas for x amount. and then B you work out how much it's going to cost to attract those customers, how much your client is making and you then work out a figure for your fee.

In my niche, it's a treatment so the lead needs to get at multiple sessions for best results. So my clients could have a lead come in and pay only £20 for their first session, and have to pay me £60. So they are £40 down at the point but now they've got a client who needs at least 5 more sessions at £40 each (first one is discounted) and offer them various other treatments in future. Alternatively a lead may come in and pay for all sessions in one go and get a discount. And this can be anything from £180-999. I still get my £60.

Once the lead has been into my clients, I never contact them again. The lead is their customer for life.

I'm amazed at how you're managing to make it all work with all the different packages, booking appointments, then chasing payments, etc.

From that point of view, my model is totally different and a lot more simple. My end goal is to generate a phone call and from there onward, the client can quote whatever they want for the job, schedule a date that's convenient for them and deal with a customer directly.

I take one full payment in advance for 4 weeks, which includes the ad spend and my fee, then just generate calls throughout the month until end of the agreed period. If they want to continue, we just repeat as many times as they like.

Mind you, the closest I've got to the above was securing 2 clients who agreed to pay the ad cost only, while I managed their campaigns for free. The idea was to build some trust and show them how it all works, then charge my fee for the 2nd month, but for whatever reason both of them didn't want to continue...

How do you find clients or pitch to them? Any cold calling? Or it's all through Facebook and LinkedIn messages/emails?