The progress of Visionz

[tjark]

@tjark - what were your total stats for 2022?

It would be cool to see a full breakdown.

Hey Rob, thanks for your reply.

What kind of stats do you mean? Like our revenue, sales calls, closes and offers for the whole year?

 

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[Fox]

Hey Rob, thanks for your reply.

What kind of stats do you mean? Like our revenue, sales calls, closes and offers for the whole year?

Ya just how much you did in sales overall (if you feel like sharing) and anything else relevant.

Just that you had the monthly breakdowns but no yearly one - it would be cool to see.

 

[tjark]

Ya just how much you did in sales overall (if you feel like sharing) and anything else relevant.

Just that you had the monthly breakdowns but no yearly one - it would be cool to see.

Okay, I just looked up the stats for last year:

We made 116.857,52€ (note: dots and commas are reversed when dealing with euro) in sales. We paid out 2500€ per month to each of us since April. So our highest cost are ourselves with roughly 50000 for the year. The rest of the costs were pretty low. We invested in a sales trainer / coach, who had cost us 9000€ for three months, but he was worth his money.

Profit after all costs is around 30k for last year. We will use this money to fuel our GmbH (similar to the LLC in the US) and grow our business. You need 25k to start this kind of legal form in Germany.

This will help us with hiring and reduce personal risks and save us taxes in the long run. Personal taxes are pretty high in Germany (up to 47%) and you have to tax all your revenue without a GmbH.

With a GmbH, you can keep money in the business and "only" tax it with roughly 30%. This will accelerate growth, because we can reinvest more.

 

[tjark]

Update January 2022:

Last month was solid. We were slightly behind our goals, but it goes forward in a steady pace and therefore I dont want to be too negative about it.

The biggest problem at the moment is stress and the hard work schedule. I sleep really bad at night and that is lowering my productivity. If anyone has experience with this kind of issue, please share it.

But lets look into last month:

The goals were:
- 5 new clients
- Make the 3 sales with our new sales system
- 3 new ecom clients

5 new clients
We got 3 new clients and closed 12800€ with those 3 deals. Not five, but a step forward. One of them is a relatively big name in our region and the owner is a nice guy, who knows a lot of people. If we can deliver good work, there might be many more deals to get from this contact.

12800€ is slightly less than what we thought we would need, but we had much lower costs. We actually made more revenue than planned.

Make the 3 sales with our new sales system
Again 0. This is hard, but it's the truth. We dumped like 5k into this and haven't got anything out of it. We change the approach from now on.

3 new ecom clients
Of the 3 new clients, two are ecom clients. Thats also slightly behind our goals, but still a win for me personally, because I closed both of those deals. Slowly getting better at sales.

What are the goals for Februar?
I will keep the goals as the same as last month.
- 5 new clients
- Make the 3 sales with our new sales system
- 3 new ecom clients


Best
-Tjark

 

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[tjark]

Update February 2022:

Made around 10k in revenue this month and I got my sleep together again. I read a book about sleep, that was really helpful. It's called "Die Tiefschlafformel". It's a German book, what you might have guessed by the name. I don't know if it is available in English, too. Translated, it means something like "the deep sleep formula" and it was a game changer for me. My sleep isn't perfect right now, but I'm able to get at least 6.5 to 7 hours of good sleep per night. That's a whole different thing compared to 4 to 5 hours of shitty sleep while waking up every hour.
The three main takeaways out of the book for me were:
- Wake up (and stand up!) at the same time every day, no matter how bad you slept. (It's hard at the beginning, but it really helps after a few days)
- Do not eat or drink 3 hours before going to bed
- Use earplugs and a sleep mask at night

I needed to reduce my work hours to get my sleep together again. I am starting to work more again and see how much I can do, without ruining my sleep. At the moment, I am a lot more productive with 8 hours than I was with 10-12 hours per day, while having shitty sleep.

In the past, I was always praising hard work and wanted to do as many hours as I could, but I understand now, that you can do it short term for a month or two, but prolonged imbalance is not a good thing. "Just putting the hours in" might not work, if it ruins your productivity while doing it. Also, active relaxation is really important if you have high amount of pressure.

But let's switch back to the monthly report and look at the stats:

The goals were:
- 5 new clients
- Make the 3 sales with our new sales system
- 3 new ecom clients

Let's be honest. This month wasn't a good sales month. We made good profit from ongoing projects, but we have zero projects for this month.

I am currently asking myself if an agency business model is the business model, we want to do long term. @Fox always talked about, how a web design business can fuel your long term business plans, and maybe it is the right time to use the knowledge and experience to start something more scalable and less time dependent. We are working on our own online shop. We gained a lot of experience in ecom in the last year, and it might be a good thing to scale on the site till it surpasses the agency.

What are the goals for March?
- Win 3 new clients
- Found the GmbH


Best
-Tjark

 

[Fox]

Update February 2022:

Made around 10k in revenue this month and I got my sleep together again. I read a book about sleep, that was really helpful. It's called "Die Tiefschlafformel". It's a German book, what you might have guessed by the name. I don't know if it is available in English, too. Translated, it means something like "the deep sleep formula" and it was a game changer for me. My sleep isn't perfect right now, but I'm able to get at least 6.5 to 7 hours of good sleep per night. That's a whole different thing compared to 4 to 5 hours of shitty sleep while waking up every hour.
The three main takeaways out of the book for me were:
- Wake up (and stand up!) at the same time every day, no matter how bad you slept. (It's hard at the beginning, but it really helps after a few days)
- Do not eat or drink 3 hours before going to bed
- Use earplugs and a sleep mask at night

I needed to reduce my work hours to get my sleep together again. I am starting to work more again and see how much I can do, without ruining my sleep. At the moment, I am a lot more productive with 8 hours than I was with 10-12 hours per day, while having shitty sleep.

In the past, I was always praising hard work and wanted to do as many hours as I could, but I understand now, that you can do it short term for a month or two, but prolonged imbalance is not a good thing. "Just putting the hours in" might not work, if it ruins your productivity while doing it. Also, active relaxation is really important if you have high amount of pressure.

But let's switch back to the monthly report and look at the stats:

The goals were:
- 5 new clients
- Make the 3 sales with our new sales system
- 3 new ecom clients

Let's be honest. This month wasn't a good sales month. We made good profit from ongoing projects, but we have zero projects for this month.

I am currently asking myself if an agency business model is the business model, we want to do long term. @Fox always talked about, how a web design business can fuel your long term business plans, and maybe it is the right time to use the knowledge and experience to start something more scalable and less time dependent. We are working on our own online shop. We gained a lot of experience in ecom in the last year, and it might be a good thing to scale on the site till it surpasses the agency.

What are the goals for March?
- Win 3 new clients
- Found the GmbH


Best
-Tjark

You have the skills and mindset down. You could be using what you already have to build something massive!

I think it's a good idea to consider it more for sure.

 

[tjark]

Update March 2022:

Sorry guys. I forgot about the monthly update. I thought about it on March 30th, but forgot about it afterwards. I scheduled an event in my calendar on every first of a month to remember it in the future.

All in all, March was a pretty good month. We made more than 15k, which is great, and therefore we reached our revenue goal for Q1 of 40k.

The goals were:
- Win 3 new clients
- Found the GmbH

Win 3 new clients
We got one new website project for an ophthalmologist. He has called us and asked if we could do a new website and a bit of SEO for him. He isn't our target customer as he is not in e-commerce, but of course I take it.

We haven't got any more projects, but there are some in the pipeline. An ongoing customer just asked us if we could help him with another project, and we will charge more from another client from the next month ongoing. There are some other things, that might become projects in the near future.

But one client is less than 3, so we failed this goal.

Found the GmbH
- We got a step further, but the GmbH isn't ready. It just takes a lot of time. Looks like we have to change to another tax consultant to get it done.


What are the goals for April?
- Hire someone to get a bit of help with our daily work to have more time for projects, strategy and sales
- 15k revenue
- Win 3 new clients.

Best
-Tjark

 

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[tjark]

Update April 2022:

Guys, I got big news! But I have to give a bit of context to explain. 2017 I finished my Abitur (German university entrance qualification) and went to Oldenburg for college as a dual student. Dual student is a German education system that combines college and work. You go to university and between your semesters you work in your partner company.

It's a pretty cool system, and I loved college, but hated working at my employer. My employer was a big German energy company, and it was the perfect place to die inside. I sat there all day and had nothing to do. That brought me to entrepreneurship and in 2018 I started my first online business with a friend from work. It was only dropshipping, but my first experience in entrepreneurship.

After some months, I decided to quit my job and finish college outside the dual system in Hildesheim. My friend also quit and went to Hamburg to found an online marketing agency with two others. I visited them once in autumn of 2018 in their first office. Since then, they grew big time. Now they have a company with 30 employees and a couple of millions in revenue each year. They almost completely automated their company and are now on the search for new opportunities.

This week I called with his co-founder and we talked about a potential partnership. We agreed to give them a share of our company and they will therefore help us to scale it up.

This was a big decision, but I trust them, and we thought a long time on how to find someone, who could help us with growing our business.

The kick-off is on the 9th of May in Hamburg. I am really looking forward to this!

This was a bit of a different update this month, but I wanted to share this with you guys. But nonetheless, let's have a quick look at the goals:

What were the goals for April?
- Hire someone to get a bit of help with our daily work to have more time for projects, strategy and sales
- 15k revenue
- Win 3 new clients.

What are the goals for May?
- 20k revenue
- Win 3 new clients
- Finish our new website for our new positioning