Building A Ghostwriting Agency To $180k/mo (My Story)

This is the dashboard I used to scale my Ghostwriting Agency to $180,000 per month. And this is me giving a talk at a $20 million house in Hollywood Hills about how I did it. But my ghostwriting journey didn't start here. Actually, it started here, in a studio apartment in Chicago entrepreneur life, literally sitting on a moving box conference call on you, about to head off on a five day journey to Los Angeles. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the five stages of building my ghostwriting agency to 180,000 doll and show you the difference between stage four, running an agency doing around 120,000 per month. Stage three, an agency doing around 60,000 per month. Stage two, an agency doing 30,000 per month. And stage one, not knowing what the hell you're doing and just trying to make your first 10k, which is where I started. When I was 26, I quit my 9 to 5 job to go all in on freelance writing. Horrible decision. I spent probably the entire first month trying to find clients on upwork, getting paid like $25 to write articles for travel websites and random companies, watching my bank account just go down and down and down. Until one day I had a brilliant idea. I had been writing on this website called Quora. And in a desperate attempt to pay my bills, I started mentioning in my Quora answers, by the way, if you want to start writing on Quora, let me know and I'm happy to help. And then it was the weirdest thing. All of a sudden, money started just raining down from the sky, Some kind of crazy money rain. I bought myself this bright yellow Ferrari. I got my mom a yacht. And every morning, I would wake up to the sound of applause from literally all 5.35 billion people on the Internet. Because that's how you think it works, right? Yeah. No, that's not what happened. What happened was I had an anxiety attack because I had about 60 days of Runway left before I was completely out of money. I think I maybe had $3,000 saved up at the time. My monthly rent was like 1200 bucks per month. And then after groceries and a train pass, yeah, less than 60 days of Runway. So what I did is I started sending email. Every single person I'd ever met, trying to see if they needed a writer or knew someone who needed a writer. And then one morning, one of those outreach emails came back around. An Internet friend of mine, someone I'd met on Quora, had never met in real life, introduced me to one of his clients who wanted to turn Content from his new book into articles. Couple fun facts about this guy. 60 year old entrepreneur had built a family business to several hundred million in revenue and ended up selling the business for over a billion dollars. We got on the phone, I educated him about this new writing platform called Quora. And knowing he sold his company for a billion dollars, I decided to shoot for the moon and charge him. You'll never believe it. $100 per article, sitting right here at my $15 desk from Goodwill. After I sent him the article, he was actually the one who said to me, wow, it's like you're my own personal ghostwriter. That was the first time I'd ever heard that word. I didn't know anything about ghostwriting. I just knew I'd stumbled into something big. One client led to two, two clients led to four. Until all of a sudden, through a combination of referrals and my own writing on qu nearly a dozen clients. I was ghostwriting articles in airports, I was ghostwriting articles in cabs. I was even ghostwriting articles on vacation with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. This is a picture of me back in 2016, ghostwriting articles in our hotel room in Cartagena, Colombia, before dinner. She wasn't happy. Fun fact. This was actually the same hotel we just got married at, eight years later. Anyways, I was ghostwriting two, three, sometimes four articles per day, writing for over a dozen different clients. I was working hard, but this is how I made my first 10 grand per month. And at the time, I felt rich. Once you know the basics of ghostwriting, client management, cold outreach, it's pretty easy to get to 10k per month. Which is exactly what I teach ghostwriters how to do in our premium ghostwriting Academy. But stage two and how I went from 10k per month to 30k per month. You need to do three things differently. I call it the three Ps packaging, pricing and positioning. Here's what I changed that got me from 10k per month to 30k per month. Month. First, packaging. I stopped selling articles for $100 a pop. And instead I started selling a monthly package of 12 articles for a $3,000 retainer pricing. By moving to a retainer model, I was able to get my profit per article up from $100 to about $250, so almost tripling profitability and positioning. Lastly, you can do this on your own. But I decided to team up with one of my best friends. His name is Drew, and position our offer under an agency. And we made our niche ghostwriting specifically for Founders and sales C level executives. So packaging, pricing, positioning, and sitting in his one bedroom apartment in Atlanta, we came up with the name for our agency. We called it Digital Press, which became the first ghostwriting agency for founders and executives. I always get this question. We split the business 50 50. He was going to talk to the clients and handle sales, I was going to handle all the ghostwriting. And this is how we scaled to 30 grand per month in less than two months. It happened very quickly. Now the difference between sales stage two, where you're doing around 30 grand per month, and stage three, where you're doing around 60 grand per month, it all comes down to one thing. Cold outreach. To be honest, you can get to 10k per month, 20k per month, even 30k per month, just leveraging people in your network, asking for introductions, asking clients for referrals, upselling clients on other services. But if you want to get above 30k per month, you need to become a cold outreach expert. We had a bunch of of savvy strategies and I teach all of them in our premium ghost trading academy. But one that really crushed it for us was to use Crunchbase. So if you don't know what Crunchbase is, it's basically a big directory for startups. You can see which companies have raised money from who and when when they close their funding round. So what we would do is look for companies that had just closed a huge round of funding and then reach out to them and say something like, hey, congrats on raising your series A. Want to send some of that money our way? Just kidding. Our outreach message was really good because it spoke directly to the marketing problems. And if we could get them on the phone out of every 10 calls, we would close half of them. And this strategy is how we ended up generating millions of dollars in revenue. Now, what is running a 60 grand per month agency actually look like? So our org chart looked like this. Me and my co founder Drew were responsible for the business as a whole. He focused on cold outreach and sales and training our one salesperson, while I focused on building my personal brand, speaking and writing online. So we both had cold and warm leads. We had a head of HR ahead of ops who handled payroll, accounts receivable, time off requests, and all things internal organization. And then she helped us manage two teams. And each team was made up of a ghostwriter and an account manager. And each team was responsible for anywhere from 8 to 12 different clients. Everyone was full time. We paid everyone above market salaries. And this is how we scaled to 60k. Per month, with both me and Drew completely out of the work, making around 200k per year. Looking back, this was the sweet spot of our business. It was super profitable. We were spending literally $0 on marketing because we had mastered our cold outreach strategy. We had a small team of six people who we loved to work with. And Drew and I were completely out of the day to day work. He didn't have to talk to clients, we had account managers for that. And I didn't have to do any of the ghostwriting anymore because we had hired ghostwriters and we were both making 20k per month and really just responsible for the business as a whole. Literal heaven. We had no idea how good we had it. Instead, because we had gotten to this level so quickly, we got here in like five or six months. We made the mistake of thinking we could just keep growing forever. So instead of stopping here, which is what we should have done, we thought like most first time founders, the whole point of the game was to just keep scaling as quickly as possible. So that's what we did. And in the end, this probably ended up costing both me and Drew around a million bucks each. We went from stage three doing around 60k per month to stage four doing over 120,000 per month very quickly. So in a matter of eight months, we grew from six full time team members to almost triple that, around 18 full time team members. This was in 2018, right as crypto markets were booming. At that time, over 30% of our clients were actually crypto companies that had raised huge amounts of money and they all needed help with marketing and positioning their founders as industry thought leaders. There was a point where we were actually hiring two full time team members per month, every month for six months in a row. And this is where things started taking a turn for the worse. I was traveling every single month, sometimes twice a month, to see clients all over the us. I was speaking at conferences to get in front of potential clients. I worked on every vacation my now wife forced me to take. Looking back, they weren't even close to vacations and I was still writing on Quora, still maintaining my column with Inc. Magazine, and just trying to generate new leads for the business. Our agency was growing so fast and I was pushing myself so hard that I actually ended up in the hospital with shingles. And still we didn't slow down. I remember interviewing potential employees, taking client calls, and jumping into ghostwrite pieces for our most demanding clients while on painkillers, sitting up in bed for almost a month. It was brutal. But Top line revenue is going up. And as a 27 year old first time founder, responsible for 18 full time team members and their livelihoods, I thought this is what entrepreneurship is all about. Which is a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Stage 5 and how we went from 120,000 per month to 180,000 per month, per month happened even faster. So in mid 2018, early 2019, we reached a point where we were closing two or three new clients every single week. Each one paying us anywhere from three to five thousand per month for two to four thought leadership articles. So you know, we were increasing the prices and we were decreasing the workload. I literally started looking at mansions to buy in Hollywood Hills. I kept looking at our business dashboard climbed higher and higher and I thought, wow, by the end of this year, I'm going to be a millionaire. Since demand didn't seem to be slowing down, we thought we would just keep growing like this forever. And this is where we made a crucial error. Instead of pulling money out of the business, what Drew and I did is we cut our salaries to 100k per year. So less than half of what we were making at earlier stages, all so we could reinvest in even more growth. Then we started hiring writers and account managers early so we could train them because we thought clients were just going to keep walking through the the door. At our Height, we had 23 full time employees and over 80 concurrent clients all over the US, all over the world, doing more than 180,000 per month in revenue. And our ghostwriting agency, Digital Press was producing as many articles as Inc. Magazine or Forbes every single month, we thought we were headed for the moon. And then the crypto companies ran out of money and overnight we lost 30% of our clients. But because we had just hired all these new people and didn't want to fire them only to have to rehire more people later because we thought we're just going to keep growing. Drew and I decided to cut our salaries again to keep everyone on payroll while the business recovered. Never make that mistake. That only made the problem worse. We were already stressed about the future of the business and feeling responsible for all of these people. But when we cut our salaries again, we became the lowest paid people in the business, which put even more stress on our personal finances. So all of a sudden, despite being the founders of a multi million dollar agency, we were worried about paying our own rent. And that was the beginning of the end, near the end of 2019. So this is our third year in business. My Wife got laid off and she wanted to use her severance to do some traveling. And she suggested we spend a month in Mexico. I could work remotely during the week, and then on the weekends we could go exploring. I thought this was a terrible idea because not only was I struggling financially, but we had just let six employees go and I was working 12 hours a day just to keep our agency alive. But she was insistent and told me how hard I was working wasn't healthy and that it was taking a toll on our relationship. So to show her that she was a priority, I agreed to go. And that trip ended up changing the direction of my entire life. So one weekend, about three weeks into the trip, we spent two nights in this little house. I don't know if you can even call it a house. It was like a hut on Lake Bacalar, which, if you don't know, is supposed to have magical healing properties. People travel here from all over the world. And our first day here, I had the most wild, out of body experience. Completely sober, just me in the water. All of a sudden, I felt like I was finally ready to. To be honest with myself, I wasn't some Silicon Valley high growth startup founder playing for a giant exit. I was a small business owner running an unprofitable agency with no end in sight. And along the way, I had completely given up my own personal writing. I was working 12 hours a day for, at this point, less money than I was making as a copywriter. Working a 9 to 5 job, for the first time in a long time, I felt like I could see things clearly. And I. I knew it was time to get my life back. So after that trip, I came home. And as if a sign from the universe, more clients had turned. Our payroll was still too high and we were in the red. Another $20,000. So an entire month of working nonstop just to lose 20 grand. And that was the nail in the coffin for me. I told Drew I couldn't do it anymore. He felt the same way. It was the hardest decision I've ever had to make. But a month later, we let all 16 of our full time employees go in one day, we fired 70 of our clients. We kept our favorite 10 to work with. And Drew and I went right back to running our ghostwriting agency. Him talking to the clients, me doing the ghostwriting. And overnight we went right back to earning quarter million dollars each per year. Which was a painful realization. Here's a picture of us the day we scaled our agency back down. We drank a lot of tequila that night. Three years of hard work building a multimillion dollar ghostwriting agency, only to walk away with a couple thousand dollars each. Now what's the moral of the story? The moral is, once you get to around 10k per month as a ghostwriter, you have a choice. Looking back now, I call it the 10x choice. Do you want to 10x your income and build an agency or do you want to work 1/10 the amount of time and achieve maximum work life balance? Different people want different things. After we scaled our agency back down, Juror and I decided we didn't care about ramping revenue. We wanted to just optimize for work life balance, pad our personal bank accounts a little bit and rest after this journey. Which ended up being a very lucky decision because four months later Covid hit. But I still don't regret the three year journey we went on. I learned more about business in those three years than any MBA program could ever teach. I'm glad we tried to scale to the moon because now I know what what it feels like. But if I could go back, I would have stopped at stage three. Six employees, two ghostwriters, two account managers ahead of ops and a salesperson. 15 to 20 clients doing around 60k per month in revenue. Completely out of the work, just managing the team, making around 20k per month personally. And then I would improve our offer, increase our prices, upsell our favorite clients, create internal efficiencies, especially using tools we have today that we didn't have back then, like ChatGPT, spend more time building my personal brand and increasing warm lead flow, start a wait list for clients instead of hiring more team members. Right. So you want to build up demand and eventually sell digital products that are 100% margin, increasing the profitability of the agency as a whole and getting more people in our ecosystem. This hybrid approach of providing services, but also selling digital products that educate potential customers on how you do what you do is the new wave for small, highly profitable agencies. And this is the exact path we lay out for ghostwriters in our premium ghostwriting academy. From someone who's been there and done it themselves, who has Ghostwritten for over 300 different founders and executives, built the first ghostwriting agency to millions of dollars, written a book about it, and trained hundreds of other writers on how to do the same. So if you want to get into ghostwriting, you can either go on a board brutal multi year journey and try and figure it out on your own like I did, or you can get there in a couple months. We've seen people get there in a couple weeks and I can be your mentor.

Be so smooth I go riding the M Don't trigger my man cuz you know we don't play in my life Been unstable no can I was able to remember no name we were having no cable I switched on the label Some man I'm a Christian they want some attention. They create attention which I've been on physics headed to the teacher.

This has just been like an insane value blast. I wrote like 35 pages of notes, and it's just very clear for me what I'm gonna do the next six to 12 months on this.

Since joining PGM, my business is like, it's literally doubled. I send Cole a loom video every week, break down the things that happen in my business. He'll go through it and he'll be like, yeah, these are the mistakes that you're making. Here's something you can do that will be really helpful. Before PGA, I was hovering around like 10k a month. November, I'm on pace to hit 46k and I'm hoping to get to 50. So it's been 8 months. 8 months. 5x to my revenue.

Before PGA, I was doing Twitter ghost riding. I made about like 1 5k a month.

Yeah.

What do you say in America, like, you took a leap of faith. Now we're on track to make 35k this month.

Literally one month within joining, I doubled my business because I was able to just focus on the right things and get over these bumps in the road that I felt like I couldn't get past myself. If you want to scale your business, if you really want to get more clients and make more and be seen as more valuable, I can't imagine a better program to help you with that.

You know, in 10 years, this is going to be just like such gold.