My First $2800 Client - Digital Agency Progress

[DrunkFish]

Hey all. So i've posted here and there on this forum and decided to revisit.

As a recap from my old posts,
--i made a relatively successful youtube channel that's lead to tons of adventures and opportunities,
--i've had small roles in a major show, and a less major movie that recently came out,
--and along the way i've traveled a ton and tried businesses here and there.
--Public spoke in front of a MAJOR if not the biggest prosthetic company in iceland and later in front of a CEO program locally of high school students
--Oh and I became a real estate agent for a year and did one deal and then exited when i started this venture. Ha.

This thread is a progress thread on my main gig now - my agency. So I've started a digital marketing agency. I freelanced copywriting for a bit but was busy with all the other stuff i just listed. While i was a real estate agent, i realized i was really obsessed with digital marketing. My friend and I were talking about working together to provide this service, so i decided f it. I'm gonna do it. I know it very well and i've been doing it forever and I love it.

So, month after that I'm getting new legs made (double amputee) and I mentioned how I am doing social media services with a friend. My prosthetist (guy who makes my legs) mentions they've been wanting to do more with their social media so I should talk to the owner.

Well one day I'm in the shop with them (we're semi close at this point but i havent met the owner) and im taking a picture with my DSLR and tripod for my facebook because i wanted a good picture rather than a shitty iphone 6s pic of getting new legs. I was just stopping by to take the picture, total spur of the moment "im fed up with my shitty iphone 6s pics and want something cool" move LMAO.

That's when the owner walks in and all of a sudden my credibility shoots through the roof.

"Hey -owner- this is Alex! the guy that won the contest for x company and is going to x country, who was in the tv show, who was in atlanta for that movie, who does social media!"

So im literally sitting there with my "professional" looking camera setup and just bombarded with credibility so that's when i mention to the owner that the prosthetist mentioned they wanted social media. Basically he says yeah come up with a proposal and schedule an appointment.

So i whip up a proposal in WPS (free version of MS Office basically) and a week and half later I walk into a conference room with 6 of the admins/owners and present my stuff. It was semi easy since they simply wanted social media and I like 'public' speaking.

First month is a bit extra for start up fees. It felt pretty crazy to have a business write me a $2800 check. But that's when a realized, even though i just basically doubled my bank at that time, i didnt care literally at all about money.

So this will be a progress thread for this.

Currently:
No LLC. No office. No employees/contractors.

Goal:
1: Working on another client, 95% probability but could still fall though. They met with a few other agencies/seo peeps and they said they liked me the best and i made the most sense. They will be hitting me back up on tuesday with their own 'custom' package and ill price it and hopefully we agree. This is above simple social media so i will be hiring a small team to take it on that I found on UpWork.

So if i remember, Jan 2nd I'll have an update on the potential second client. It will likely be for around the same price as the first client even though it's more services. I'd rather go cheaper since it's my first time doing it and using this team.

2: I need to make my biz legal! The thing is, since i do various other things as well as plan on doing real estate in my future, im wondering if i should do like "drunkfish LLC. DBA Digital Agency" and then later on put a drunkfish real estate LLC. UNDER that main LLC? I also model/act on occassion so i could have them make it out to the main drunkfish LLC. for example? OR should i make Digital Agency it's own LLC under my main LLC? No idea. But I want to figure this out asap.

3: Remake the website in wordpress. I use squarespace and its super limited in comparison to WP... its just going to be a pain in the a$$ and also i hardly use the website. Word of mouth has been keeping me busy at this rate but I know having a kickass website will be much better.

4: At some point i definitely need to make our own social media pages hahaha I literally have not had time/dont have the resources to manage all of it at once/not necessary until I can hire someone to take it on.

ULTIMATE GOAL:
Cool company, cool office space near me, 10-30 employees... and just keeping growing. Then fund my real estate investments.
ALT GOAL:
Get a few clients, at least $2500 MRR with a fully outsourced team running smoothly and use my team to create my own infoproducts as well as market them. Then use money for RE investments and keep growing those business's as well.

So as i said, i will try to remember to post updates and answer any questions.

 

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[DrunkFish]

Haha, so fun story. Basically i hired a "project manager" type of guy for one of my contracts. email newsletter, text, two posts a week, appt reminders, and a simple ad campaign for FB. Not my usual strategy, but i talked to him and he said he could handle it. We got everything set up and worked it all out, which took too long in the beginning tbh. So then im expecting easy from here on out since it's set up, right?

Nope.

Dude literally has delivered like 1/5 of the monthly deliverables and lies nonstop and i've been VERY pleasantly dealing with his excuses and stuff for a few months.

He will say things like "yeah ill do that on tuesday, we'll use the power editor and not just boost posts and it'll be far more effective" etc. Yeah well he won't do it, then I'll remind him a week later that he still hasn't got that started like we talked about and if theres anything i need to do for him, or whats up what do we need to work on to get things flowing smoother, etc.... he says its all good, says some excuse, and then will go and boost a text heavy post, which is horribly inefficient and a slap in the face if you know about FB ads.

I've decided to drop him. I'm now trying to bring all of this work, reorganize it all, and work it with my new assistant. Very fun. Should be a little cheaper with 10x the results though. Guess this is my first "roadbump."

 

[DrunkFish]

Boom, just landed my second client as of yesterday! This one is more involved as my first one is more social media oriented and this one is more lead gen. So this will be the first time I'm personally putting the team to the test. Scary stuff. But once this goes well, i will be in a perfect position to start going hard in getting new clients because I'll have the process down.

So far i've closed 100% of my leads

 

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[DrunkFish]

They took a long time to get the contract back, got it back a few days ago, now officially starting on my second client. If i can make this work the way i want, getting clients in the future should be a LOT quicker and easier.

 

[Smith11B]

Currently trying to think of ways to 'invest back into my business'

My website is fine for now, it's not top notch but if it didn't exist right now it wouldn't make a difference.
My strategy document is pretty well fleshed out and should serve me well.
My proposal is looking pretty good.
I have a basic legal contract as well.
I have a good logo that i use for branding.
What else should I be investing back into my biz for?
I was thinking about making a big document of all the fb ad campaign strategies just for reference/future ad guys.
Or maybe a document of all the email sequences I think are good also for reference or future email/VA's to use when making campaigns.
Maybe hire someone to help me make a bangin case study? I kinda feel like as long as i can get the data i could do that. Hm.

What do you guys think?


Still need to make my LLC, my CPA didn't get back to me but he's hepling me file it for free so I'm not complaining.. tried to do it myself and got hung up on just about every word. Haha.

When I first got started, Heres the mistake I made. I actually got to about 8 clients before the work was just too much. I didn't invest in anything, becuse I wanted to have a warchest of cash before I did.

What ended up happening is I quickly created a job for myself. and I realized this one day when my wife took a picture of me looking stressed the hell out sitting at my computer. I saw the picture and was like damn is this what I want?

So my first investment was in a sales person. Really an appointment setter, I didn't have him closing deals yet. He'd setup 3 appointments for me a day. Of course some days it didn't happen but more days than not it did. I spent my time attending the meetings, and quickly found guys I could trust that I could outsource the work to.

That's when the growth really happened. I spent time doing what made money instead of working on the projects. Of course I oversaw everything and got my hands dirty when I felt like it to keep my accumen sharp, but as I grew I hired another 2 sales people and at the moment I'm trying to replace myself as the closer. But I rather enjoy the meetings so idk.

If I were you, and you may not be ready for this yet, but my first investment would either be a salesperson or account manager/transaction coordinator. (They kind of person who handles getting the contract signed, getting the assets lined up and keeping the client happy etc.) It just depends on what you want to offload first.

 

[DrunkFish]

Second in person client has been bumpy as all hell.

We were one week in and she was sending me long wall of text emails asking why x y z isnt happening yet, when she hadn't given me the proper info that I had already asked for multiple times to do other things, etc and kept jumping on to other things. I told her the time frames but i guess she didnt care and was very very hostile about it despite the fact i cut them a huge deal and was emailing her literally every single day. She had NO faith apparently haha. Just a mess. First client was LIGHT YEARS better and paid more at that.

Oh well, i did the best i could, explained everything clearly, and am actually moving at a good pace and providing a really awesome service especially for the price i gave them.

Definitely a horrible experience compared to my first client, but she seems to be a lot more at ease now and so things are actually getting done and working out. However, definitely had a moment of "im one email from dropping these guys" though. Hopefully it lasts.

That said, I bought a $700 course from a guy for basically a whole business strategy for digital marketing. Client acquisition, fulfilment, sales, etc. I talked him down to $350 for it in exchange for a higher quality testimonial and referrals in the future.

I'm going through the course and it's been extremely helpful so far, and really soon I will be implementing it.

So far im bringing in just above a grand a month.

My goal moving forward is 10k a month by the end of the year.

 

[DrunkFish]

Ha, Been there before. Should've reached out to me man would be glad to help. Let me know.

Pm'd you.. again lmao.

Yeah I kinda figured it was coming considering the guy was full of excuses and moved at the pace of a snail. But like i said I'm gonna be making a few more hundred a month this way and not be living with anxiety and providing a better service. Win-win. Just part of the gig.. testing out different people.

Also wanted to add, I'm so happy i started doing this honestly.

If you have the organizational and management skills, it's really not too bad to grow this to $5k+ a month which is awesome because it's remote, basically the reason I started it!

I mentioned previously this month is my first $2K+ Net profit month and it just feels dope as hell.

 

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[DrunkFish]

Still negotiating with that potential client... weekends suck haha.

Also spoke with a few more CPA's. Seems like I will make a single member LLC and claim on my own 1040 for the most simple and efficient management and flexibility for the future if i do decide to go S Corp or something.

Also I updated my original post Ultimate Goal with an Alt Goal that I'm working towards as well.

Right now I currently work with a guy who acts as a manger of sorts, who has a team. I do some of the work, all of the sales and management, and he'll handle the technical aspects with his small team. If i can make this work with a few clients and have $2k-3k, I'm going to look into making and selling info products most likely. I did this a while back but I had aboslutely zero money so basically couldn't do too much effectively.

But so with this me->manager->team setup, I'm hoping i can get it working smoothly. For in person media type stuff, I have a friend I will be hiring who has an MBA so he will do low end video and pics (which is all you need for social media and stuff with the budgets that I work with currently). I don't particularly think its a good idea to bring on an account or anything at this point in time, but possibly in the future. I've been keeping track of the money with Excel so far.

I'm also trying to read more, so Im reading the emyth currently. I have a list of some books to go through

 

[DrunkFish]

Working hard with this new client and also some good stuff with my first client.

Summary:
first client wanted whole array of pictures. of their office space, their vehicles, their team, group photos, etc. I know a local photog and i am paying him to do it and not charging anything extra for the client. I also have a testimonial video up on their homepage the SAME day that they gave me the account information for the video hosting site we're using.

second client: still working on setting stuff up. REALLY trying to 'process' shit down. working on documents to streamline the shit out of this stuff bc its a lot of energy to re-explain and re-type up stuff so im trying to make one big document to explain the workflow and overall strategy that SHOULD be applicable to 95% of my future clients.

very quick update.

 

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[johnp]

Definitely a horrible experience compared to my first client, but she seems to be a lot more at ease now and so things are actually getting done and working out. However, definitely had a moment of "im one email from dropping these guys" though. Hopefully it lasts.

Let me start by saying that I mean what i about to say in a nice way. I think what you are doing is great.

But this bad experience is your fault. (Unless your client is Batt shit crazy - which is possible).

- ALWAYS set expectations upfront. Have timelines and everything laid out.

- keep client in the loop as much as possible.

- don’t take on crazy clients. This one is hard to avoid. But it makes all the difference.

Good luck!

 

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[DrunkFish]

Closed two clients from online acquisition. For this month, I'm over $2k NET profit.

 

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[DrunkFish]

My LLC is made. EIN acquired. Bank account created. Waiting for debit card. Accountant hired for my taxes (yeah im pretty late on that)

Working on adding value to my contracts so i can go for bigger fish. Got a few stable clients going right now, if one or two happened to cancel tomorrow id hop right back into lower effort/bread and butter client acquisition but for now i want to focus on developing my bigger product and acquiring those sort of clients.

Man when i look in my bank account and see what i have from just the last few months of this, it's crazy. Im closer and closer to investing in real estate. It really adds up quick if you're not a crazy spender, which i never was. Growing up poor F*cks with your mind haha.

Ive been really working on Organization and Process.
Learning the ins and outs of my accounting and invoicing software, getting a separate business bank account, having everything going in and out of one place for money and emails, working out dates and todo lists with my team, etc. This kind of thing can take off SO much stress. Dont underestimate organizing as early on as possible.

 

[DrunkFish]

Things have been going pretty well.

Currently: Got my bank account setup, accountant doing taxes, accounting software in tune with everything, excel spreadsheet for anything that isn't coming in/out of the bank account (which is semi rare).
Have a potential upsell or two in the pipeline. Integrated some new software, hoping my VA can learn it well (it's more complicated than our old software, but cheaper and 100x more useful.)

But honestly, I have one big thing that makes my progress way slower than it should be. And it's depression.

I struggle very hard with it I've come to realize. I will be great, on task, sociable, happy one day, and literally the next day, without any change, I'll be the complete opposite. Can't focus, totally disconnected, no appetite, etc. It really takes a toll. Ive been trying to work around it.

No health insurance, so I just have to deal with it.

It's on and off on a daily basis. It's quite maddening how i can go from happy go lucky, productive, being my self to completely anti social and disconnected, like my brain is absolutely pushing me down from any positive or productive thought. For no damn reason.

On a lighter note, I did speak at a local SSM intitute for the limb loss awareness event. I made a presentation and everything. It was my 3rd time speaking. First was at a prosthetic company's HQ in Iceland to like 80+ employees, then at an entrepreneurship class at a nearby smallish town to 15 students, and then this even to probably 50 people, from local prosthetic clinics, to SSM staff, to local amputees.

I wish to continue on the speaking journey I got going, that's for sure. It's always very well received and fulfilling to me. Ironically, I haven't spoken about my little gig/company yet in any of those opportunities.

Oh, and i also went to a real estate meetup and met some cool people. Should be going to that monthly.

Goal for the future: Pitch the upsells and get an answer on those, fully integrate and get comfortable with the new software setup and get my current clients all lined up in it efficiently, and try to pitch contracts triple the price of what I offer now. Currently, with a few clients in my pocket, I'm making just about what I'd say is the absolute minimum needed to get by in my city with a paid off car, super cheap rent, and no health insurance.

 

[DrunkFish]

ANOTHA UPDATEEEEE.

I'm hiring another team member, so now it's a team of 3 including me. Moving forward I'm going to keep focused on the social media and paid ads. No longer interested in doing ongoing emails or sms or other random things that I did before. It's just kind of ANOTHER thing to keep track of. Not really worth it in the grand scheme of things.

With the new position I'm hiring, they will implement kickass copy and strategy and work in conjunction with our other team member. So that will take a load off of me and allow me to focus to get more clients. So this will basically move my job fully into sales and accounting only, instead of that + copy and strategy.

 

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[LeoistheSun]

Unsure on the names but I do know you'll want to check to see if its taken via Trademark office.

Search trademark database

And check for the names here (Domain, Social Media, Etc.)
Namechk | Username, Domain & Trademark Search

 

[DrunkFish]

Unsure on the names but I do know you'll want to check to see if its taken via Trademark office.

Search trademark database

And check for the names here (Domain, Social Media, Etc.)
Namechk | Username, Domain & Trademark Search

Thanks, yeah I should be good (as in i checked). It's a really dumb name. It was incredibly hard trying to name a digital agency as quite literally anything and everything that might even be remotely relevant in terms of being a name was taken. I already have two domains and facebook but i dont use them yet haha.

 

[hungryhippocampi]

Do you have to do something with "Digital Agency" in the name? How about "Media" or somethink like that? It's a creative, so take some liberty right. To get the juices flowing: how about Modern Mind Media...ModMind Media, ModMind Creative, Vaulted Media, or something along those lines?

 

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[DrunkFish]

Do you have to do something with "Digital Agency" in the name? How about "Media" or somethink like that? It's a creative, so take some liberty right. To get the juices flowing: how about Modern Mind Media...ModMind Media, ModMind Creative, Vaulted Media, or something along those lines?

Oh no I already have a name I like. It does have media/marketing/agency type thing in the name. Vaulted is cool though!

 

[DrunkFish]

Currently trying to hire more freelancers. Will be going through proposals tomorrow.

What I might do, is niche down, pick an industry or two, and create some "One size fits most" 3 tier system that I know will work and deliver and go crazy with finding leads and meeting with biz owners.

Currently its more like im adapting to whatever is coming my way, which means it's taking quite some time to create proposals but i think the other way around is better.

So if i find an SEO expert, PPC expert, and copywriter and a few other guys, I can whip together a solid package and sell it, essentially. It will most likely be altered a little bit to each company, but mostly the same, especially if i niche down.

I've had a CPA friend contact some bigger local digital agencies for market research. We'll see what the results are

If anyone has any input, let me know.

 

[Smith11B]

If you need help with PPC Let me know my man. Here's what I've done over the last 90 days. (So you don't think I'm one of those guy fresh from a fb course. ) I don't track in the fb ad manager because the pixel doesn't always fire when you make a sale. I use wicked reports instead.

Anyway, Let me know my man. Love what you're doing!

 

[GWan]

Congrats on getting your second client! Could you explain how you found your second client? Did you also get this client through your personal network like your first one or elsewhere?

 

[DrunkFish]

Congrats on getting your second client! Could you explain how you found your second client? Did you also get this client through your personal network like your first one or elsewhere?

My friends mom works at this place. My friend brought up my new venture while we were with her and she said shed pass my info to the manager. Then i sent them a proposal because they requested that before the meeting. So they liked it and scheduled a meeting and we met in person. After we met, my first client happened to actually know this owner so he put in a good word for me without me knowing.

So I've gotten 'lucky' so far, but i am prepared to cold call for more especially when i have a good case study.

 

[DrunkFish]

Currently trying to think of ways to 'invest back into my business'

My website is fine for now, it's not top notch but if it didn't exist right now it wouldn't make a difference.
My strategy document is pretty well fleshed out and should serve me well.
My proposal is looking pretty good.
I have a basic legal contract as well.
I have a good logo that i use for branding.
What else should I be investing back into my biz for?
I was thinking about making a big document of all the fb ad campaign strategies just for reference/future ad guys.
Or maybe a document of all the email sequences I think are good also for reference or future email/VA's to use when making campaigns.
Maybe hire someone to help me make a bangin case study? I kinda feel like as long as i can get the data i could do that. Hm.

What do you guys think?


Still need to make my LLC, my CPA didn't get back to me but he's hepling me file it for free so I'm not complaining.. tried to do it myself and got hung up on just about every word. Haha.

 

[Crexty]

Dude love the progress! Definitely will be checking in here often

 

[keith4444]

This is a great thread @DrunkFish good luck man!

 

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[DrunkFish]

Nice thread man! Love your name too!

Thanks! And drunkfish?? I used it in an old game and this forum and i think that's it. Just randomly chose it hah

 

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[Private Witt]

Thanks! And drunkfish?? I used it in an old game and this forum and i think that's it. Just randomly chose it hah

Yah, I used to have a few fish related Internet handles as was really into poker at one time and I was a huge fish!

 

[ApparentHorizon]

Waiting for debit card

Get a CC for your biz and treat it as your Debit. IE don't spend the money just because you have whatever limit they give you.

If it gets compromised, you have a much higher chance of getting your money back, as opposed to debit.

And may CCs have reward points or even cash back.

 

[DrunkFish]

Get a CC for your biz and treat it as your Debit. IE don't spend the money just because you have whatever limit they give you.

If it gets compromised, you have a much higher chance of getting your money back, as opposed to debit.

And may CCs have reward points or even cash back.

Yeah i do that with my personal now! I will be signing up for a biz credit card pretty soon. For now im using a debit card and it ties in nicely because my accounting software tracks it. Would it track it too if i used a credit card or would i have to separately link that up? Might be a dumb question but off the top of my head im not sure.

 

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[DrunkFish]

-Long read ahead, but i would really love input via PM or on here-

So, I'm down to one client as well as another client that i reduced to a $200/mo service. So it's okay side hustle money I guess. But i want a real business.

I felt like social media itself wasn't valuable and I didn't like the subjectivity of it, and that was my main offering. So i stopped trying to get clients because of that and wanted to move forward to something of more direct value.

Maybe if i hired a sales team or something to close social media leads and pay them a % monthly for each lead closed i wouldn't have felt like it wasn't worth it/overhwlmed and could've scaled though? Is that a thing?

I ran a decently successful lead gen ad campaign on Facebook for one of the clients that I'm not with anymore, and decided that was way more valuable of a service and felt good about it because i did decently and i can graphic design ads and copywrite them very well. $150 bucks and got 8 local leads for $40 deal that could lead to hundreds/thousands of upsells. That was only the first attempt so it could've gone better if i spent another month with it and adjusted.

So i started looking into how to price, pitch, structure FB ads 'agency' / lead gen service and have been getting super overwhelmed. It seems like i don't truly know all of the little math involved, or i 'shouldn't' get started by doing xyz like i had originally thought, or getting clients might not be quick enough for the rate at how long they'd stay, etc.

Now, i have a headache with information overload, feel like i can't figure out how to make it work, and I'm right back on square one with zero clue on what to do or how to do it and literally everything online is people selling courses giving generic info, so it feels pretty hopeless and I'm income broke again. It's funny though, because if i add up all the money i made doing what i did, i could make a course on how i made "$30k" or whatever with an online side hustle, haha.

I also got the bill for my recent pair of legs that i got through insurance (when i even had insurance for that short amount of time last year) which i had thought the company covered completely. So yeah, also learned i'm thousands in debt on top of my thousands in student loans.

I even just got a job at a furniture store for selling furni, I start next week. Manager absolutely loves me, and seems like a great place to work, totally killed the intervew despite a loooong gap in my 9-5 resume.

But considering my double amputation, i can't stand for long at all, and really have no idea if i can even do this job. So I only got it for part time and I'm not even sure if i'll be able to make it through a shift, but i'm feeling incredibly desperate because my household can't afford bills, neither can i, so i'm trying literally whatever I can.

I feel like im incredibly willing to do ANYTHING (like working for absolutely nothing under a mentor, i've been researching, taking notes, trying to make sense of things, etc) to figure out how to truly structure something valuable and get something going. But it just seems like i can't make sense of it and get overwhelmed.

That month or three where i was making decent money and had a few clients and was going decently felt amazing. Absolutely the best months of my life business wise. I felt happy, got up early, had a routine, looked forward to the future, was trying to get things structured right. etc. Now i feel lost, like i'm not actually valuable at all, and generally a mess.

Maybe its just a lack of entreneurial friends? I really don't know anyone else other than my personal trainer friend that i talk to on a daily or even weekly basis about running any business.

Any words of advice are highly, highly appreciated.

On the plus side, i did start posting a bit to youtube again after 10 month hiatus because i didn't feel like i had time to be creative because I don't have income.