greyhat
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- Feb 8, 2015
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Hey there. Nice to 'meet you'! My name is Edward and I am 28 years old. I am a web developer by trade. I started learning when I left school and have been fully self employed for around 5 years. It is in the past two years when my entrepeneurial career has started to take shape. I'll keep it short and sweet but of you want to know more then please ask!
2 years ago I met my business partner (K for this post, his background was as a successful nightclub promoter, he is 25) and we started a social media agency. We started off in a 200sq ft office with no money and all of the furniture on credit cards! It's fair to say we were on borrowed time. Within the first month we had a handful of social media clients and we were covering all of our excpenses. I was still doing websites at this stage and K was still running the odd event. Anyway things were going Ok and we employed an apprentice to handle some of the work Within the first 3 months there was myself, K and two full time apprentices managing social media account for local businesses. We moved in to a bigger 400 sqft office next door and everything was good. We were still not making much from the company ourselves apart from the odd expense but we were moving in the right direction.
After a while we became stuck in a bit of a rut. It was very hard to attract new business. We had some success with adwords and referals etc and even some leads from the website which we had been working on with SEO and such. However we ultimately realised that social media management (we were just doing management at this stage not advertising) is really only effective as a standalone service for bigger companies that have an existing presence. By managing their facebook and such you are saving them time and doing a better job (we hope!). For the small businesses that we had as clients and were targeting the results were underwhelming. So the clients that we did manage to attract soon left. All part of the learning curve I suppouse! In hindsight we were new and charging a low fee for management. When we take on work such as this now the budget is 5 / 10 x as much and includes advertisisng / strategies and such.
In the meantime........ we had begun work on an e-commerce website. I wont go in to details other than we mainly used Facebook ads to drive traffic. It soon became apparent that we were making more in our sleep from the e-commerce website than we were making ina month of meetings and p*ssing around with clients! The decision was made to ditch the social media and focus on the e-commerce website. As MJ DeMarco would put it - we were creating a legacy rather than working and we were seeing the benefit. That was around a year ago. The past year has easily been the most successful, productive and educational year of my career so far. We ended up in a city centre 1000sq ft building with office and warehouse space and our own city parking spaces (which is probably my favourite part!) The website went from 0 to touching £250K turnover in just over a year. We have been running the e-commerce website and are now in the final stages negotiating a deal with our supplier to buy 50% of the business. We move in with them, get products cheaper, and get a team of businessmen (and women!) on board with a vast amount more experience then ourselves. K and I are both very happy with this situation.
Mistakes were made along the way as you can expect but more importantly valuable lessons were learned!
Which leads me to where I am now. As I am sure is the case with a lot of you I have been working tirelessley for the past few years trying to establish this business. Now we have sold a stake that means two things for me. I will have some capital behind me. I wont need to build websites to supplement my income. Which is what leads me here. With all this time and money on my hands I am not one to rest on my laurels I am going to use it to my advantage! I will still be working full time 9-5 on the website for the foreseeable future and I am still as passionate about it as I ever have been but for somebody that has worked day and night for the past two years.. that will be like my warm up and i'm itching to go!
look forward to speaking to you all soon.
Edward.
2 years ago I met my business partner (K for this post, his background was as a successful nightclub promoter, he is 25) and we started a social media agency. We started off in a 200sq ft office with no money and all of the furniture on credit cards! It's fair to say we were on borrowed time. Within the first month we had a handful of social media clients and we were covering all of our excpenses. I was still doing websites at this stage and K was still running the odd event. Anyway things were going Ok and we employed an apprentice to handle some of the work Within the first 3 months there was myself, K and two full time apprentices managing social media account for local businesses. We moved in to a bigger 400 sqft office next door and everything was good. We were still not making much from the company ourselves apart from the odd expense but we were moving in the right direction.
After a while we became stuck in a bit of a rut. It was very hard to attract new business. We had some success with adwords and referals etc and even some leads from the website which we had been working on with SEO and such. However we ultimately realised that social media management (we were just doing management at this stage not advertising) is really only effective as a standalone service for bigger companies that have an existing presence. By managing their facebook and such you are saving them time and doing a better job (we hope!). For the small businesses that we had as clients and were targeting the results were underwhelming. So the clients that we did manage to attract soon left. All part of the learning curve I suppouse! In hindsight we were new and charging a low fee for management. When we take on work such as this now the budget is 5 / 10 x as much and includes advertisisng / strategies and such.
In the meantime........ we had begun work on an e-commerce website. I wont go in to details other than we mainly used Facebook ads to drive traffic. It soon became apparent that we were making more in our sleep from the e-commerce website than we were making ina month of meetings and p*ssing around with clients! The decision was made to ditch the social media and focus on the e-commerce website. As MJ DeMarco would put it - we were creating a legacy rather than working and we were seeing the benefit. That was around a year ago. The past year has easily been the most successful, productive and educational year of my career so far. We ended up in a city centre 1000sq ft building with office and warehouse space and our own city parking spaces (which is probably my favourite part!) The website went from 0 to touching £250K turnover in just over a year. We have been running the e-commerce website and are now in the final stages negotiating a deal with our supplier to buy 50% of the business. We move in with them, get products cheaper, and get a team of businessmen (and women!) on board with a vast amount more experience then ourselves. K and I are both very happy with this situation.
Mistakes were made along the way as you can expect but more importantly valuable lessons were learned!
Which leads me to where I am now. As I am sure is the case with a lot of you I have been working tirelessley for the past few years trying to establish this business. Now we have sold a stake that means two things for me. I will have some capital behind me. I wont need to build websites to supplement my income. Which is what leads me here. With all this time and money on my hands I am not one to rest on my laurels I am going to use it to my advantage! I will still be working full time 9-5 on the website for the foreseeable future and I am still as passionate about it as I ever have been but for somebody that has worked day and night for the past two years.. that will be like my warm up and i'm itching to go!
look forward to speaking to you all soon.
Edward.
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I am sure we could make social media pay if we wanted. To be honest I want to move away from any client work now and work on my own projetcs.
