Handshakin in 2018
It is an exciting year for us going into 2018. I've been working on Handshakin' for over 3.25 years now and we finally have a proven business model and very clear path to reach our goals. Here's a quick history in case you missed it. Dec 2014: I launched the Handshakin Video Series to interview top personal brands to learn how networking played into their success. Lost money this year, which was fine, I was financing this after getting out of real estate and had a cushion. Making money was not the first thing on my mind, although today bottom line, metrics, and growth absolutely are the first thing I'm thinking about. Otherwise, business isn't sustainable. Dec 2015: We had started accepting a few online marketing clients. Mostly we were building personal websites, writing blogs, and a lot of social media automation. We were making a little bit of money, but still were trying to figure out our core value. Here's an example of a basic personal website and blog we built for Kyle Matthews. Dec 2016: We started experimenting with 'small websites' as an effort to test our chops at local SEO, a new service we had not offered. Turns out our small websites, such as Tallahassee Concrete Work, began getting 50-60 phone calls per month, which is easily worth $60-100k to a concrete contractor in Fort Collins. Throughout the next year, we launched 39 other small websites, and on average, 8.5 out of every 10 that we launch, begin to rank on google, and receive a lot of phone calls. But, I purchased a piece or real estate instead of investing in this new effort. This slowed us down for a year, and was not profitable. More lessons on that in this blog post. December 2017 - March 2018: I have listed my house for sale and already received an offer I'm happy with. Finally, I am getting my cash back out to invest a portion back into Handshakin'. A valuable lesson from the non-profitable venture of the house was that I should invest in what I'm working on full-time, not something that won't get my full-time attention. Thanks to the upcoming sale of the house, I will have access to my cash again, and have less distractions on my plate outside of Handshakin's core focus, and I couldn't be more excited to meet my team in person, and hopefully meet some future Handshakin team members in Philippines! The rest of 2018: Our primary focus for the rest of 2018, is launching an additional 43 websites. We have 40 live today, and need another 85% of 43 new websites rented on average for $500/mo. We will continue to maintain our existing clients, but are not in hot pursuit of new clients at this point because our strategy includes owning the online assets that generate leads for your business. The great news is that we take the initial website, and none of our future clients pay us until AFTER we already send them leads for a week. It's a good feeling knowing that every single future client Handshakin serves is receiving real leads, and we don't have to sell them on the hope of receiving leads :) Sound interesting? Contact me directly here. |
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