I Built 3 Businesses That Pay Me While I Sleep

In that company alone, we've helped over 1,700 agencies now get to 6 figures or 7 figures. I have a head of department that runs the business day to day. I did that from day one where I was not involved in anything. Hello everyone, sun is shining here today. So I'm at my office here in Newcastle and today we're going to be heading out in the Rolls and I'm going to be sharing how I built 3 7-figure companies that actually pay me while I sleep. So let's get in the car and get going. I have 3 7-figure companies and none of them depend on me day to day for the revenue to come in. The sales come in The delivery still happens and the team still operates. So today I'm going to walk you through exactly how I've built 3 7-figure companies from scratch that actually pay me while I sleep. When I first started my first business, a recruitment company, everything depended on me at the start for sure. So what it was like was very stressful. I was working 60, 70 hours a week. And then the first aha moment for me was reading the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss many years ago. Of like hiring Filipinos, VAs. And that sort of like, that book with a systems book, which was Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited, those two books really changed the fundamentals of like how I seen a business model and how you can have systems and offshore together. And now obviously there's AI, but back then there wasn't. Those two shifts like really helped me feel like we didn't have to build a business that was just full fully dependent on me as a founder. Because the early days, like the first 6 months, I just realized like I was waking up and everything depended on me— client outreach, winning the client, pitching the client, managing the client, managing the fulfillment, having to do the fulfillment myself, hiring the team, everything. And that breaking point was— it happened really early on for me, which I'm very thankful of. Once I read those 2 books and then hired my first VA and started building out SOPs— and I remember doing these in a Trello board at the time— like, it was just a big shift that I managed to get like the first 10 hours a week bought back of my time. And then I was just hooked on the fact of like, how do we dial in more processes? How can I actually delegate more? So let me walk you through the 3 companies that I have and what does each one do. So my main business is the Agency Blueprint. So that's been going, I think, nearly 7 years now. And that is an education and business mentorship program. And basically what we do is we help agency owners go from low 6 figures 7 figures in their agency by implementing a proven blueprint and systems in their business so they can get client attraction dialed in and candidate fulfillment and actually founder freedom. So I put in all of our processes, our full team implements a client and candidate attraction system is all leveraged on AI and Claude and how they install a remote team so they can actually have a repeatable process. So in that company alone, we've helped over 1,700 agencies now get to 6 figures or 7 figures. So that's in the recruitment staffing industry. And that business has been, like I said, that's been the one that's really generated me the most profits, if I'm honest. My first business I ever started is a company called Ronald James, which is a recruitment agency based in the UK. So that specializes in digital and technology recruitment roles. And now my, my brother Dan runs that day to day. So I brought him in very early in that stage when I first founded the company over a decade ago. And yeah, that still does 7 figures a year in the business. And we have a hybrid role with that. We have an office, which you'll see me record some videos in. And then we have a bit of an offshore team there. And then the third company is RemoteAssistance.ai. So that's where we place offshore remote assistants in South Africa. So we have a full recruitment program and training program there where we actually find, hire, and train your remote assistant, embed them in your business within 3 to 4 months where they're fully trained. And that business does 7 figures a year and very lean model. And that came off the back of 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, and the systems mindset with Michael Gerber. So that is a recruitment agency in itself, but also training. So if you think about, I've got 2 recruitment companies and 1 sort of training company, and everything is an ecosystem within all of them. So I keep the recruitment agency, Ronald James Blackwellwell, to one, prove I've still got a 7-figure business that actually does what I teach. So I only teach in the Agency Blueprint everything I actually do in my companies. And then obviously the training program is on anything new and advanced, and we test that in my current agency and in the clients' agencies. Of what's working and leveraging it, particularly around AI. We do a lot of heavy AI stuff in Claude and build on Claude. We build out like your IP and brain as a founder into Claude and then manage with an offshore remote assistant. So all 3 of those companies blend each other very well. And in each of those companies, they were all started from scratch by myself. Each of them had different areas that were hard for me to remove. So the first business was a recruitment agency, Ronald James. I was very dial in on the client acquisition. So I'd go out and meet clients. I won over 170 clients in that business. A lot of the clients that we have now, years later, are still ones that I won, ironically, many years ago. So I built on the pitch decks, the Dream 100, the strategy. So the hardest thing for me to remove then was not delivery or marketing, it was the sales element. The second business that was hard for me to remove was the Agency Blueprint, because I was the mentor, I was the person that everyone wanted. So back when I first founded that, that was like course material online. So you get our pre-recorded content that people will consume. And then you do Zoom format Q&As. And then I would do in-person masterminds. And then actually, I started on doing one-on-one calls. So that was hard to scale myself on off until we went in a group format. And then I managed to hire coaches and experts and had people that came from my program, got to 7 figures, and then I got them to be coaches to coach the new people coming through. So within that time, eventually the hardest thing to remove was me just helping do the delivery because everyone wanted my time. So actually, like leveling up our coaches and our customer success people and actually the actual system that we do done for you. So we actually do done for you installations now into these recruitment agencies. That was a lot easier for me to delegate. So that was the one again, like once I built it up to 7 figures, then we hit 8 figures in the year as a group of companies. I managed to delegate myself out and then the third company, Remote Assistance, I did that from day one where I was not involved in anything. I wasn't involved in the sales, the marketing, the fulfillment of that. I built the team out from scratch internally from day one, but I knew from all of the mistakes I made in the first two businesses and all of the lessons that I learned of how to actually build a seven-figure business from scratch without me being involved in it. So even from now, the website doesn't have my name or branding on. In terms of the marketing, it's all done by our team on a LinkedIn company page and the website, and then the lead funnel comes in from paid ads, and then the sales— team do the sales, and then our backend CSM team do the backend sales. So, and fulfillment, we have a recruitment team, and none of that is managed by me. So I have a head of department that runs the business day to day, and I might do maybe a meeting on that really once a month, and then the rest of the team are skilled enough in order to help grow that. So that's really like how I managed to manage myself out of all 3 companies. And I think once you get that skill set, then it's a lot easier over time as you build the second and third business to manage yourself out of that company. Out of my three 7-figure companies, the one that runs most independently is like the recruitment agency because my brother runs that day to day. I don't have any involvement in that. And then Remote Assistance. So like I said, those two businesses, they don't have anything that is needed from me day to day in order to run the business. That money just comes in. And what I actually do back with the time that I've bought from these companies back for myself is just very strategic. Like I spend a lot of time thinking 20 to 30 hours a week minimum, probably even more, thinking, running models in my head, looking at the growth of each business, the marketing, the sales, just diving in different pieces of the business when it's needed in terms of like what I need to work on in order to improve it. And then just having that freedom. So I just love working when I want. So there'll be times when I'll just put a few hours in on a project or something we need to build out on an offer or fulfillment or sales or hiring in the team. So a lot of it is spent on the team. But even with the team, I don't, I'm not a manager. So we don't have what we call managers in the business and all of the team are self-managing. They have their own metrics. They're mini departments. They're an entrepreneurial person in the business, if that makes sense. So the rest of the time is, yeah, just thinking and learning. So I still do a lot of personal development, even at the level I'm at now, I'm still always hungry to learn. So one of my old mentors used to talk about having a high teachability index. And what he meant by that was your willingness to learn and your willingness to change. Those are the two things. So you need to be a 10 out of 10 willingness to learn all the time. And I definitely noticed like some founders don't do that. You need to be learning at least 3, 4 hours a day, podcasts, books, whether it's over Audible or reading or learning from a mentor. And then the willingness to adapt to change. So we're in the AI era now. So I'm evolving, my businesses are evolving all the time. All of my employees know how to use AI and their job now is to have a 5x output on what their normal role will be because we can get the AI to do a lot of it. So having those two key things is like what I do day to day and enjoy my life as well. Obviously I travel between my homes in London and Spain, and I'll do a bit of traveling in Europe, and I'll just, yeah, like be able to work when I want, where I want, for sure. But because you're obsessed with the game, there's just different seasons that you go on. So the beautiful thing about when you have the businesses that can sort of manage themselves is then you can think bigger for those companies and you can get this helicopter view of the businesses and then you're spotting and smelling things that you need to dive in on. And because you've built the hardcore skills from start from scratch all the way through those revenue numbers, I know in every part of my businesses I can do one of those jobs, you know, I will know what needs to be improved. But you just need to be selective about is this going to help with profit in the business and revenue and growth? Or is it just something that's nice? Yes, you could have something perfect. It might be an SOP in a certain part of the business. When I look at it, it's like, why are we doing it that way? But then you need to pull yourself back because it might be, well, I don't need to actually spend time fixing something that is actually 8 out of 10. It might be a different area of the department that could help with more growth and more profit. That'll be worth your time more. You can trust your team to be able to fix that part and work on it. So Now it's a time I might spot something, then I'll say to someone in that department, I want this fixed. Now we need to think of a different way to keep that simpler. So within the team of companies, I don't have managers, but how does accountability work? Well, you just need to tie their outcomes with revenue-producing tasks, really. So if it's revenue-producing, brilliant, you can have metrics in there for their performance and you tie that where they can get bonuses. So they can either get more commission or they get bonuses. And that's the same with the backend team. So they're all incentivized to upsell or buy back time from me as a founder or the business. And that's really how that works in terms of accountability. And then now it's just dialing in smarter systems. So we spend a lot of time in Claude Cowork and building out frameworks on what we can optimize in the business and how we can make systems in the business more dialed in. Never has it been a better time to be able to build systems in your business now, especially with AI. And then it's all about, well, can we put that to a human offshore remote assistant in different departments? So like really streamlining something. But with AI, you need a human to operate operate. That's one thing where a lot of people go wrong, they're thinking they'll just build out AI agents. A lot of these things break and they need either your founder time to be on it all the time to fix it and think about it, or you just have like mix with like a remote assistant to be able to operate that certain department and that part of AI SOPs. That is normally the thing that is going to give you the highest leverage of your money now. So I spend a lot of time on that of like dialing in the SOPs. With AI, what can and can't be done with AI, and then how I get a human, an employee, to be able to operate it. So that's how I built 3 7-figure companies from scratch and how they all pay me while I sleep. So if you've got any questions, just drop them in the comments of what you would like to see from me next. And if you are looking to buy back some founder freedom and you want a remote assistant installed into your business in the next 7 days, feel free to book in a call below, and I'll catch you on the next one.