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It's time for an execution thread.
Background:
I'm British but wanted to move to the US. While waiting for the paperwork for my green card to be prepared, I decided to enter on an E-2 (Investor/Business Owner Visa). This meant I needed to buy a business or start a new one.
I took $400k-ish in cash and bought a long-established direct mailing company in South Florida. $650k revenue, $325k profit. Easy deal.
My first day 'with the keys' was March 3rd. I had a week of normal trading and then coronavirus hit. Revenue is hugely down. Hasn't really recovered yet at all.
To labor the issue further, the seller of the business had an unpaid/defaulted loan secured on the assets of the business that was undeclared. Luckily it was only an asset sale, but there's still the question of whether I might need to pay out. It also turns out there's about 400k in annual expenses that were undeclared. In theory this makes the business non-profitable from day one. Attorneys, accountants, nobody picked up on this. It's almost impossible to tell though, as Coronavirus has skewed all of my figures. That's now in the hands of lawyers who are waiting for the courts to reopen for jury trials.
Now:
Either way, it's time to scale the business. I'd already made a lot of changes that are looking good for the business. Months of the stress of this had destroyed my energy a bit. I'd lost motivation and ideas. On Saturday, I was at @Kung Fu Steve's session and got a lot of good ideas. This thread is about committing myself to those and committing myself to doubling my top line.
At the moment 75% of our business comes from commercial printers who subcontract mailing out to us.
I've managed to increase the amount of 'direct' customers we have and offer to do more printing for them. We now print and mail for a huge department of the FL government which represents a lot of our top line currently.
The plan:
-Expand and begin to offer a '360' marketing concept. Offer digital, print, and traditional. Having a facility with printers and a team will hopefully make us seem a bit trustworthy than a lot of these 'digital' agencies. There's so much you can do in the crossover between print and digital and it's impossible to take advantage of that if you work with two separate companies.
-Establish partnerships with other business in the purchasing chain to secure more business.
In real terms:
-I'm undecided on how much I'm going to post here. It will be at least once a week but I might update more regularly.
- Finish all the services pages on the newly designed website (I seem to be able to rank no.1 within a few days of creating a new page so this will be a good way for increased lead gen)
- Reach out to other service businesses that may be able to refer work to us for a kickback. I'm going to start with app developers. We'll offer 'app launch marketing' services and get app developers to recommend us to their clients.
- Build a few introductory packages. No businesses in this industry list their prices on their websites and that might scare off some smaller customers. A 1000 postcards designed, printed, mailed package might resonate well.
- Build a package combining different strands of marketing for a monthly fee. Think FB ads, 1000 postcards, and a radio ad for a single monthly fee or something similar.
- Convince some of our close partners that white-label our services to push our new offerings to their clients.
Hold me accountable.
Background:
I'm British but wanted to move to the US. While waiting for the paperwork for my green card to be prepared, I decided to enter on an E-2 (Investor/Business Owner Visa). This meant I needed to buy a business or start a new one.
I took $400k-ish in cash and bought a long-established direct mailing company in South Florida. $650k revenue, $325k profit. Easy deal.
My first day 'with the keys' was March 3rd. I had a week of normal trading and then coronavirus hit. Revenue is hugely down. Hasn't really recovered yet at all.
To labor the issue further, the seller of the business had an unpaid/defaulted loan secured on the assets of the business that was undeclared. Luckily it was only an asset sale, but there's still the question of whether I might need to pay out. It also turns out there's about 400k in annual expenses that were undeclared. In theory this makes the business non-profitable from day one. Attorneys, accountants, nobody picked up on this. It's almost impossible to tell though, as Coronavirus has skewed all of my figures. That's now in the hands of lawyers who are waiting for the courts to reopen for jury trials.
Now:
Either way, it's time to scale the business. I'd already made a lot of changes that are looking good for the business. Months of the stress of this had destroyed my energy a bit. I'd lost motivation and ideas. On Saturday, I was at @Kung Fu Steve's session and got a lot of good ideas. This thread is about committing myself to those and committing myself to doubling my top line.
At the moment 75% of our business comes from commercial printers who subcontract mailing out to us.
I've managed to increase the amount of 'direct' customers we have and offer to do more printing for them. We now print and mail for a huge department of the FL government which represents a lot of our top line currently.
The plan:
-Expand and begin to offer a '360' marketing concept. Offer digital, print, and traditional. Having a facility with printers and a team will hopefully make us seem a bit trustworthy than a lot of these 'digital' agencies. There's so much you can do in the crossover between print and digital and it's impossible to take advantage of that if you work with two separate companies.
-Establish partnerships with other business in the purchasing chain to secure more business.
In real terms:
-I'm undecided on how much I'm going to post here. It will be at least once a week but I might update more regularly.
- Finish all the services pages on the newly designed website (I seem to be able to rank no.1 within a few days of creating a new page so this will be a good way for increased lead gen)
- Reach out to other service businesses that may be able to refer work to us for a kickback. I'm going to start with app developers. We'll offer 'app launch marketing' services and get app developers to recommend us to their clients.
- Build a few introductory packages. No businesses in this industry list their prices on their websites and that might scare off some smaller customers. A 1000 postcards designed, printed, mailed package might resonate well.
- Build a package combining different strands of marketing for a monthly fee. Think FB ads, 1000 postcards, and a radio ad for a single monthly fee or something similar.
- Convince some of our close partners that white-label our services to push our new offerings to their clients.
Hold me accountable.
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