A real estate marketing company grew to 20-30 clients, then lost 80% during COVID. The founder pivoted to a one-time-fee model instead of done-for-you services, which saved the business. Hiring and scaling operations later created quality problems that became the biggest lessons of his career.
I mean, every single one of them represents a different company, but I think, again, starting with the first one and first company, we were in real estate and we were having a little bit of success. So our offer was done-for-you advertising and marketing. We had gotten up to about 20 or 30 customers. Unfortunately, this is right when COVID was kind of starting to flourish and we lost about 80% of our customers. So we changed our offer. It was a one-time cost. We're gonna set you up this marketing system. Obviously COVID was terrible for everybody, but for us, it helped us position our product a little bit better in the industry that we were in. Again, a lot happened in between. We grew our team, we hired a sales manager, we had an outsourced support team that got too big and too crazy, and that led to our failure of quality control and stuff like that. And still is the biggest kind of piece of my entrepreneurial career.
