He Was Scared to Quit His Job, Now He's a Successful Business Owner

I came off of my worst month ever in business. Client payment messed up several thousand less than normal. And then the following month i3x what the previous month was. I put in the work necessary to allow things like that to happen.

We're back with a student Spotlight interview. This one is super unique. Corey's been in Client Ascension just for three months and he's already crushing it. There's really no reason to wait to do this. Let's hop on it and talk about what's working for you right now. If you could just share with the audience who you are and what you're currently working on.

My name is Corey Carlson. I've always had a background in creative work in one way or another, whether it's photography, video editing. When I really started to dig into wanting to run my own business, I knew it would be in that route. Had a little bit of a background in product photography for the past couple years and quit my job about 10 months ago. Transitioned that into my current offer which is more of a productized service. So I do unlimited social media posts and ad creatives for direct to consumer companies to sell physical products.

What was the tougher decision? Quitting your job or joining Client Ascension?

Client Ascension was so easy to do. I did that in no time. But quitting my job was something that was like I was building up to it for a while. It's a big leap. I have bills and all these things and like I didn't have a crazy amount of money saved up. I just kind of battled myself when I made the decision.

The reason I asked is because Client Ascension, it's like not a cheap thing at that time. You're all in. Joining Client Essential is like the next obvious thing to do between quitting your job, enjoying Client Ascension, there's obviously some time there for you to work on your agency. What was that like? Because you're probably very much like on your own unless you have business partner or an.

Yeah, I'm on my own for, for what I'm doing, at least for now. But basically what stemmed into me being able to quit the job. I work product photography for a pretty big candy company. People watching or you might have heard of it. It's called Sour Str. It kind of fell into my lap in a way because they have a really, really big following and for the size of the company, the team is super, super small and tight knit. Someone reached out to the page and basically asked who does like the social media content and who does all the design work. And the girl that runs the social media page was like, I know he's trying to do his own thing, let me just send him over his info and got to talk. And I ended up landing a client. At the time, I didn't have an offer. We grew. We went from like a system where it was like pay per deliverable and that was like too unpredictable. And I grew a pretty good relationship with the guy that I signed and I told him how I want to quit my job. We continue to work together. I want to like kind of a retainer type of thing. That person ended up getting me another referral, another company there. So I had two clients under contract at the time and those combined were paying just a little bit more than my full time job was paying me. So I was like, all right, let me not jump the gun and quit yet, because I could but like something falls through and I screw on myself. But so I rolled with that for a few months, told my boss, gave him like a couple months heads up and then rest was history.

One of the things that could be really helpful is I was in a similar spot. It wasn't a big decision for me because I was in college, it was a part time. But I quit my job. And the reason I quit is because I knew the skill sets and what I was doing at the job could apply to something I wanted to go out and do on my own. So it sounds like you took your skill sets and experience at this job and created an agency around it. Is that accurate?

Pretty accurate. It's just everything there was very photography intensive. But I didn't really like the time consuming thing of having to be at a physical location to take photos. So I tried to pull that away from my offer as much as I could. Because I stack multiple clients. I didn't want to be stuck eventually because I'm looking long term. I don't want to have 10 clients that I'm constantly doing photo shoots for because that's all it extremely time intensive. So I figured graphic design side of things. I'm very good at making product images with basically just Photoshop and a PNG image. And I got a system that works pretty good for that. So I kind of honed in my skills from my job for sure and I just kind of crafted it over the past couple years.

How'd you even hear about client ascension? And how do you have so much conviction that this was something that you needed to jump in on?

The cold email wizard, Daniel Fazia. Just to give a little backstory, I knew that it was going to Be some sort of like a mentorship program. I've always wanted to be in something like that. As soon as I went to his page and like was watching the VSL first or second time I went to the landing page, I just booked a call and then just signed up right away I was like, I need to just make the jump to take this next step.

So you heard about it to retargeting, and it only took you a couple of times to go to the page to just be like, all right, let's book in. What was the decision to join? Like? What were you hoping to get? It sounds like just a community similar to what the boys around you, all.

The people that are in these mentorship program, the big thing that they all talk about other than like the results that they get, is just like the community having people there that are also doing the same thing as you in one facet or another. Where if you need assistance, you need help. If you need someone to bounce ideas off of, like, there's people there for that. I really just wanted some sense of structure. I felt like I was just a freelancer for so long that just had a couple clients. Like, I didn't feel like a business owner just now these past, like month and a half, getting over that phase of like, yeah, I have multiple clients, but I still kind of feel like a freelancer in a way. But it's allowing me to like, evolve my offer, evolve my processes, to like structure it, narrow it down. I'm an agency owner, I'm a business owner, and this is how I operate. That was like a big thing for me.

You joined the program. Your biggest limiting belief is you're a freelancer. What are some of the steps you took in the program that now look back and say, yeah, I'm now a business owner. I'm starting to get this in the place where I feel like this is a business, not just a freelance thing.

I'm already transitioned towards, like, where I feel like I'm more of a business owner. But things haven't really been like fine tuned yet. A lot of that came down to not having structure in terms of the time and output that I'm doing. Because I do all the design work, I don't have any editors, I'm doing all the deliverables myself. And I would notice that it would drag into the evening. I wouldn't be getting done at the times I want to. And it basically just came down to like, setting hard parameters as if I was a business owner. Like, if I had a bunch of employees. Like, these are the office hours. This is when you do your work. And not only that was relaying that to my clients was that this is the structure that I operate on and this is the structure that will allow you to get the most out of the service. Just separating that was the big thing. And just kind of operating more on like a schedule. Like a business would. Like even brick and mortar. A company would not just, okay, I'll do these when I can. And that was like a hurdle for me.

I love that. I think one of the things that doesn't get talked about enough is being a good business owner means setting boundaries. And it's like the toughest thing, especially for a creative. Like there's no boundaries with work. Right. But you have to set these boundaries to allow the business to like actually be a business and. Yeah.

And for it to grow too. And that was another thing I was talking about. I was like, okay, I have four current clients and I have a handful of like random one off design projects that come up last month. I'm coming off of my best month ever. And I'm really thinking, okay, where are my goals at? Where do I want to go next? Can I even handle that? Because I worked a lot this month. I don't know if I could even handle another client coming on board. So I kind of pumped the brakes a little bit in terms of setting goals and I really sat back and said, okay, let me restructure my days, restructure how things work. And just from doing that, coming from an operational standpoint, I've made adjustments where I know now I can probably handle like another five or six clients. And before it was just a limiting belief of because things felt so unorganized that I couldn't handle any more work. I originally thought it was a hiring issue. I thought I needed to hire another designer, but I don't. I went through the route of trying to find vas and different editors and was interviewing people and I did all that and I came to the realization I was like, I don't need other people yet. There will be a time for that. But it's just there's always something that you can refine over time in the back end before you need to take the next step. So, like just not overthinking things higher where it hurt.

I see a lot of people early on, like they start to get stressed. Plate fills with a lot of work in their first instinct is, I need to hire you. Didn't even take a step back to look at what's happening here and think about it a little bit deeper. Yeah, hire where it hurts and delay that first hire. And it's weird for me to say because you'll hear me on other calls and interviews talk so much about how all of our success is attributed to the great team we've built. But that's over time, right? So it's three years till a team like this. There's a methodical process to follow. And I'm really happy to hear that you were able to identify that you don't need to hire. You just.

And that's something I don't know. Without client assession, I would have been able to sit back to like actually logically think, okay, where the bottlenecks I'm in, some of the calls, the operations calls or whatever, like the one I was in earlier today with you. I don't know if I would have had like that analytical perspective to do it if I was still a freelancer. I probably would have just said, oh, I'm not taking on any more clients. I'm just going to stay with what I have. But there's. That's what, you know, I did for me is like, I just allows me to see from a business owner's perspective. And that's one thing I realized inside of client session is I love being a business owner more than I like doing design work.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's just so much more you can do. And business owners have to be creative too. It's just in a different sense. You don't just structure the back end based on what it says in a book or based on what it says. Client ascension. You have to evolve what is your business structure actually look like? And that's when it gets really fun to take a step back. How did you manage to have your best month in business while also doing a lot of cleanup work?

I feel like it was more of the compounding effect of things of there's a lot of the back end work that needs to happen up front, especially when you're like starting a new offer, starting whatever. It was just kind of more or less being patient with it and allowing it to work. I came off of my worst month ever in business. Client payment, messed up, things like that. So, like, on paper, it was my worst month ever. And then the following month, i3x what the previous month was literally just being patient and things just started falling into place. I put in the work necessary to like allow things like that to happen. And then when that came to me, I had the systems in place to be able to take it on and I was prepared for it.

I always look at that as like it's such a blessing because two months prior you probably were like, man, I want more clients, I want more work. Like, I just want to grow. But if you had gotten it at the time, it would have screwed everything. It might not have been super ideal. The fact that you did wait is why you're able to and do something with it.

It's such a beautiful thing. It gives you like a whole nother perspective of things and good things happened in my business. It was just I didn't receive as much revenue that month, which was fine. I maintained as much of a positive like outp as I could and then it just kind of fell into place the following month.

I actually strongly believe that's why you had a bounce back month. There are guys even in Client Essential, they had their first bad month and it's like all sirens are going off. Like it's either goes back up or done forever. And yeah, yeah, if you could just look for the tiny wins because there's always wins. Like you said, you've been in the program for three months, you're already off to a fast start. But there are other people that go through programs like, and don't see results. Even Client Ascension, we've had people go through and not get the results they wanted. There's reasons for that obviously, which we could get into. But what I'm more interested in hearing from you, like, why do you believe you've had success in the program already?

As cliche as it sounds, it literally just comes down to like taking action and just doing the things that you know you're supposed to do. And that's kind of goes back to one of your other questions, like, what pushed me to join Client Ascension? It's like I didn't have the outside direction. Like I always had that frame of mind of like, I can do it myself this and that. But like when the opportunity came across and like learned from my friends and other people that are doing well in business, you need a team around you. Whether it's like a team of like people in your business or just a team of people around you that are pushing you to do the right things. So it was more or less just literally putting my head down, doing the things that are in my weekly SOPs and just getting it done. And then like things fall into place and you find errors along the way, things that aren't working out, you just readjust, talk to your coach and make the adjustments that you need. It's like literally like playing sports, practicing. It's the same thing. So I came from like a sports background, so it's like, okay, things always went well. What I did with the coach said. So, like, just do what your coach says. You can only fail if you don't do the things that are necessary. Because it works.

It's for the people that are listening to the question, hoping to hear something like some big revelation.

Yeah, yeah. I had like a short form content business kind of before this and I will eventually transition more back into that. But people always ask me about the content ideas and what do I post about. It's like you pick a few things and you just talk about it every day. Like you just need to say the same things over and over and over. Like, why would you talk about something different? Just talk about the things that work.

I always want to give it back to our audience. I think there's a lot of value they can get from just following along with your journey. And a lot of them are probably even a fit to work with you because you do some really great creative work. So where can they find you online?

So Twitter recently just got into an Instagram. They're both at Carlson Visuals.

Carlsonville.

C A R L S O N V I S U A L S On all platforms.

Good stuff.

Appreciate it, man.

Appreciate you doing this. You crush it, man. This is so much fun.

Thank you so much. Oh, and if you don't go to my social media, just go to my website, www.contentrevive.com.

Thank you again. Appreciate you keep pressing.

I appreciate it, man. It was great.