I'm Scaling To $83K/Month in 2025 (Copy My Plan)

I'm the marketing guy behind a business that went from zero to $3 million a year in just three years. And in 2024 I essentially rebuilt my own business entirely from scratch. For context, I've been running marketing for a tax firm based out of Chicago for the past three years. And in 2022 I started offering those marketing services to other businesses as well. And headed into 2024 I was profiting like I don't know, 10 to maybe 15k a month and I was feeling pretty good about the business but that, that went to zero for the first half of 2024. I actually had a couple of negative months in that time there. Through the year we rebuilt the business and by Q4 I got to a really good like sustainable point again where we're profiting 10 to 15 to even up to 20k a month. Right now we've got really good product market fit and we've now got a plan to 2 or 3x this business over the course of the next 12 months. So in this video I'm going to be sharing with you my plan to scale my service based business marketing firm to a million dollar run rate by the end of the year. All right, let's pull up this whiteboard here. Let's find our starting point. So as of December 2024 we have one client at a 10 and a half percent rev share where we make about 10k a month from this one client. We have seven clients on our roster at 3k a month which totals obviously 21k a month. And so our total revenue is about $31,000 per month. So our expenses on that are right around like, I think like 12k basically. And so between me and my Partner Krist, take $18,000 home, which is awesome. Now I want to give you context on our model because that's going to be really important to understand this scaling blueprint. Right. So our model is kind of a combination of a one time, one and done kind of build out and a monthly service. So a lot of you watching, maybe you have a one time service where it's like you sell a yearly tax package for 5 or 10k for the year. Some of you watching might have a monthly service where it's a monthly, you know, monthly advisory service or maybe maybe like a higher level there's a CFO service or a high level marketing service you offer. But this is kind of the best of both worlds in my opinion because we're able to get that upfront cash for the first few months of work with each client. And through that we can kind of use that period to like vet each individual client and figure out if there's somebody we actually want to work with long term. So I really like this model personally and it's been working really well for us so far basically since middle of last year when we started adopting it. And so kind of our plan I've got divided into basically Q1 through Q4. And so we've got kind of different levels of growth that we're looking to achieve throughout this time. But starting out with Q1, basically we're just looking to do two new clients for one time build outs each month. So six total across Q1. I'm actually expecting this will probably be more of like an exponential growth curve where maybe it's only one in January and then maybe it's two in February and then maybe it's three in March. And that would be totally okay if that's what happens. But basically the goal is to get two people per month on average through our one time build out projects at 8k each, which is what we charge. So basically adding 16k each month in just one time projects that we're taking on. I really like this because we've got a really great system down for this intro. Offer this one time funnel build out. And for context, basically what we're doing is we're building out all of the infrastructure that you need, no matter what type of marketing you want to run. So whether you want to do organic content on Instagram or TikTok or insert platform of choice, YouTube would be another great example. Or whether you want to do a paid strategy like running Facebook ads or something like that, you still need a backend that can actually take those leads and nurture them and warm them up and you know, give them the information that they're looking for about you in order to get them to actually like contact you right in order to book a call. And so this one time build out basically does that. And so then at that, at the end of that period where you've got this infrastructure built out now you're ready to go run ads or you're ready to get your organic strategy pumping, or kind of whichever approach you'd like to take, you've got the back end for it. And so you can just like hit the ground running now. So these are kind of the numbers we're looking at. Monthly recurring revenue isn't really going to grow during this time because it takes about eight to 10 weeks to actually build out this, this infrastructure for clients and so if you think like, okay, the people going through this in January, they're only going to actually start converting potentially into monthly clients starting in March. And so that's where I'm kind of expecting we're going to actually bring on some more monthly clients starting in March here. So maybe, you know, one of the people we do a build out for starting in January, we finish it up by March and we convert them into a monthly client for ads management or for an organic strategy that we run for them. And we usually charge about 3k a month depending on the service we're offering. So we can, we can kind of expect we're going to start to see monthly recurring revenue start to increase in March. And so just kind of what it's going to take from a scaling perspective, we have the team in place for this, we have the systems and the ops in place for this. And so really it's just a matter of marketing and sales. Right? And so I'm thinking it's going to take probably about $3,000 a month in ad spend that's going to generate us statistically in the past we usually get calls booked for about $150 per call. And so that's 20 sales calls. And so if we can convert 10 to 20% of those per month, then we're looking really, really good. So obviously 10% would just get us our two one time build outs. If we convert 20% of calls, then we actually start to build out a wait list which would be really great. And so kind of like best case scenario, what I'm hoping for is we can start to build up a wait list where maybe we get three people signing up in January and so the third one we take a deposit and they start in February, and then maybe February we sell another three. And so only one of them is able to start in February, the other two get wait listed for March. And if we can build that wait list to a couple months out, then that gets us in a position where we can really, really comfortably invest in that next round of hiring, which we'll talk about in a moment as we get into Q2 and Q3. So Q1, we're going to wrap it up. We're basically going to be at about 50k a month on average between one time projects and monthly clients through this time. And that's going to put us at a really comfortable profit margin that's going to make it really Easy to spend $3,000 a month on ads or maybe even a little bit more. And that's going to set us up really nicely as we get into Q2. So Q2, April, May and June, our goal for Q2 is actually we want to continue taking on two of these one time build outs each month, but we want to actually increase prices for this to $10,000 a piece. And so now instead of $16,000aMonth in One Time fees, we're now taking $20,000aMonth in One Time Fees, which is obviously going to be very helpful to the bottom line because it's the exact same amount of work for, you know, plus $2,000 of profit, which is cool. And the reason I think we're going to be in a comfortable place to be able to make this price increase coming into Q2 is just because Q1, like these are very conservative numbers to be able to hit our goal of two new clients a month. And I mean realistically I think it's it. I really have a hard time imagining we don't start building up a wait list here. And obviously the more demand we have for the product, either we need to increase supply or we need to do something that's going to decrease demand. And so we are going to make some hires that are going to increase supply or increase the number of clients we can service. But we, we also want to get ahead of that and make sure we're getting as much profit as possible in the front door so that we can still have healthy margins delivering that service. And so that's where doing this price increase ahead of that kind of artificially reduces demand because it's more expensive now, less people are going to say yes, which is totally fine. And the people who do say yes now we're making enough profit to where it makes a ton of sense to start hiring, which we'll talk about in a moment. And so April, May and June, I'm expecting probably each month we'll do two one time build outs at 10k a piece and we'll probably bring on one new monthly client each month during this, this quarter. So basically that's, that's assuming a 50% ascension rate from the one time build out to kind of the next level of service, which I think, you know, for a lot of businesses that would be kind of a high ascension rate and that would be kind of overly optimistic. But given the client experience that we've had, the retention we've had, the ascension rate we've had historically, I think this is probably an accurate kind of estimate of what things are going to look like. So that's Q2. Now let's talk hiring because this is important. So we're going to stay steady at the $3,000 of ad spend. If we see close rates start to dip now that we're increasing prices, we might bump ad spend a little bit just to try to get more calls booked in. So we can still close the same number of new deals per month. But again, I think these are super, super conservative numbers to be able to hit the goals we're talking about. And so I think we can probably stay steady at this $3,000 of ad spend for Q2. So 3K ad spend that's going to book us probably around 20 sales calls. Again we still convert 10 to 20% of those and the higher here that's going to be really, really important is a project manager and a copywriter now within the marketing space. This could potentially be one person or it could be two part time roles. I don't think we're going to have the volume where we need a full, full time role for this. Right now I'm essentially our project manager and my partner Kristen is essentially our copywriter. But with the level of service that our one time projects, our build out service requires, we're probably going to need more support on that front in order to scale it beyond two projects a month, which is kind of our objective moving into Q3. We can talk, talk about that in a moment. So whether it is two people, two separate people who are part time with us or whether it's one person who's full time, I think it'll be optimistic to say that that's going to be, that person is going like an absolute killer at both roles. But I think it's totally possible that they could be, you know, really good at one and adequate in the other for the time being. Right. Maybe they're a really good copywriter and they'll be good enough as a project manager for a short time. While we're just getting to the point where we have the capacity to, to hire a full time person in each role. So that's Q2. We'll be looking at coming up towards like 60,000amonth in total revenue and between, you know, 37 to 43k a month in monthly recurring revenue. And obviously this is, this is not accounting for any sort of churn. But again our churn has been so incredibly low so far on these services. I think that's probably a fair estimate until we get into Q2. But coming into Q3 now we've raised our prices on these one time projects and so, you know, our Options are we either continue at the same level, two a month at this same price, we could increase prices again or we could increase supply. So we've already increased prices and you know, obviously we want to let, we want to give a little bit of time to let this price kind of settle in and make sure it works for us. And so as we get into Q3, we're going to be talking more about how do we increase the amount of clients we service. And that's really going to come down to this project manager slash copywriter and how fast we can get them up and running. That's going to be our main bottleneck as far as I can kind of predict out into the future. Right. So what we'll be looking at is now three of these one time build outs each month at 10k each. So that gets us to 30k in one time fees, plus another monthly client each month during this period. Again we're kind of accounting for, you know, this is kind of a lower ascension rate now, now that we're doing three one time build outs each month. But that can kind of start to factor in the churn that we may start to see by this point. Most of our monthly clients start out on six month contracts with us. And so here in December, basically everybody that we've got right now is like locked in with us till May. And so we won't start to see that churn until like late Q2, maybe early Q3. And so that's kind of fact. I come, I'm kind of just factoring that into the, the ascension rate being only one out of three now instead of one out of two. And so during this period, monthly recurring revenue is just gradually creeping up. We should hit around $52,000 a month, 50,000 somewhere around there in monthly recurring revenue as we get into Q3. And we will probably be getting close to that million dollar run rate if you factor in those one time projects again, which is really, really awesome. Now I am expecting with this increased volume of clients that we're able to service, I'm also expecting that's going to increase the number, the amount of money we have to spend on ads and the number of sales calls we're going to need to book. So we're talking probably more in the realm of like $5,000 a month of ad spend. Hopefully getting around 30 sales calls per month. Still convert 10 to 20% of those and we might be looking into hiring a closer or a setter at this point. I'm doing all of our sales right now we don't really have anybody else on the team who we can put on sales. And so, and so when we start to get into like that 30 sales calls a month territory, it's like it's still a little bit less than a full time closer would maybe want to see. But that's what, that's like seven sales calls a week, maybe eight sales calls a week. So it's like that, realistically you're starting to get into the territory where you could bring on a part time sales rep. And you know, frankly, if you're booking seven sales calls a week, it's almost better if we just bumped ad spend up by another couple thousand bucks to get it to like say 10 sales calls a week or 12 sales calls a week in order to feed that full time person. And that gets me out of that sales role. So that's where we'd probably look at hiring somebody, hiring our first sales rep. This would be probably a person who's like a closer and is going to also set their own appointments. And so that's where we might even be able to get more appointments set without increasing the amount of ad spend. Because if in between sales calls, they're just calling leads to set appointments for later on that week, then we're basically squeezing more juice out of the lemon. Right? And if you're not familiar with all this terminology, basically what we're doing is people are self booking on my sales calendar right now. And that's kind of what we're relying on. That's where we're getting that like $150 to $200 per call number from. But for every person who self books on my calendar, we could have anywhere from five to 10 people who opted in, you know, expressed interest, the lead magnet that we're offering, but they never actually booked a call. And so it's not unreasonable to say that maybe another, you know, one or two out of ten would actually book in on our calendar if we called them to actually like try to set an appointment with them. So that's what we're looking at for Q3. And again, this is kind of getting to an exciting point where we're starting to get towards that like million dollar run rate. Right. Which is a really, really cool milestone. But Q4 is where it really starts to pick up steam because now that we have a closer on deck, now that we have our project manager and our copywriter and I forgot to put this on here, but at this point this is probably where the project manager and copywriter goes into two full time roles rather than like two part time roles or one full time role or whatever. And so now we're starting to get into, you know, we'd like to see four one time build outs each month. So basically one new client a week at still $10,000 a piece. And so we're doing about 40 grand a month in just one time fees, which is absolutely incredible. We want to continue bringing on one to maybe up to two monthly clients each month. And so you'll see October, I'm kind of predicting that's still going to be low, that's still only going to be one. But as we get into November, December, now that some of these, these people from October, basically all of These people from Q3 are through our process, we're going to start to see more ascensions at this point again. And so now we might see two a month to a month. And something, something that's also really important during this period is we're going to have some of the monthly clients from Q1 and Q2 are going to, their six month initial contract is going to be up with us. And so you know, we want to go, we want to figure out like what's the next level of engagement after that? Because obviously some of them are just going to, because obviously some of them are going to churn. That's just always what happens. Right? That's the nature of doing a service. No matter how good you are, some people just aren't going to stick around. Maybe they hit the growth level they want, maybe they got the result they wanted, maybe they weren't able to get the result for some reason. This isn't where we need to get into that. But you probably understand that if you're watching this video. But the next level of engagement beyond just being a monthly client with us running ads or running organic would be more of a rev share model where we actually take a higher retainer plus a small percentage of new sales that we're helping you bring in. And so this would look like, you know, maybe we're running ads and we're running an organic strategy. And so this is kind of a like fractional CMO type of service where we're actually much more involved in your business. We're not just a vendor providing a service. We're actually kind of a fractionalized part of your team. You're obviously not at the point yet where you can hire a full on CMO and build out your own full on marketing department, but you could certainly offer up a percentage of new Sales to somebody who's willing to come in and do that for you on a fractional basis. And so that's kind of the model we're taking there. You'll notice we do have one client on a similar model to this. He's full Rev Share, which is a little bit different. I don't know that I want to do that for every deal moving forward. But you know, 5K plus 5% we might see that be like 7,000amonth for somebody, maybe up to $10,000 a month with one client. And so this would be a higher level of engagement from that. But it's, you know, you got to always provide the next step. Like you can never not have a next step for somebody unless you're okay with them just leaving. Because if you're expecting them to just stay with you on the same level of engagement forever. Well, obviously if you're, if you're good at what you do, you know, for a marketing service, if I'm good at marketing, then I'm going to help them grow to a point where they need more than what I can offer at this monthly service. And so that's really where we're trying to account for that with this Rev Share offer. And so goal here is basically to bring on one Rev Share client a month over the course of these three months. October, November, December in Q4. And I think this is actually fairly realistic because again, you know, basically people who are signed up now who are not currently on Rev Share and people from Q1 and people from Q2 are going to start to end their initial contracts with us. And so it's just kind of the natural point where we could start to have that conversation about ascending them. Right. So some notes for Q4. So I think ad spend may bump up, but it actually may be able to stay down below 7,000 just because again, we brought on that closer slash setter back here in Q3 and they're starting to set their own appointments, which is just squeezing more juice out of the lemon out of the ad spend lemon. And so if it just scales linearly, right, if we don't get any appointments set from the setting, then I'm still okay spending seven grand a month to get 40 or 50 sales calls and convert 10 or 20% of those calls. That's totally fine by me. And we're going to be getting to the point here where we've got the team built out enough to where we can actually start to scale kind of exponentially the number of one time build outs. We're doing each month. So it might be four here, just as kind of a comfortable estimate, but we might get there and like it's totally possible we could get there and be doing six one time build outs or eight one time build outs a month. Because the difference from four to eight one time build outs is way different than the difference between two and four one time build outs. Because obviously we've had to build out some level of team just to get to four. And so you know, we as the founders, me and Kristen are not stuck in the day to day on this and we can just hire people. We've got the systems, we've got the processes, we've got the sops in place to still be able to do a good job here. And I want to note too like throughout this entire process, client results are still a higher priority than meeting my goals. Because I know from personal experience in my own business in the past and with other businesses that we've worked with that haven't provided like a stellar client experience. I know that the long term play has to revolve around client experience and client satisfaction. There is no alternative for building something that's going to last five or 10 years and not just, you know, 12 to 18 months. I've seen far too many agencies and other other types of service providers scale to a million or 2 million a year very, very quickly. I mean very, very quickly. But they, they just, but they end up crashing and burning because they're really good at generating demand, they're really good at marketing and selling the service, but they're not good at delivering on it. And so they just end up creating something that's turn and burn. Your average client only stays three months and so you basically have to try to squeeze out some form of profit over that three months between when the client signs up with all these high hopes and high expectations and when they leave disappointed and they just had to cancel their service with you. So that little tangent aside, our ending point here comes to, you know, January 2026 where we're looking at we've got one client at 10.5% rev share. And you know, obviously we're going to grow him over the course of 2024. I didn't even account for that in our revenue statistics here. And so we've got one client at 10 and a half percent rev share. So he's going to be hope he should be worth even more than 15k a month. But I think this is a conservative estimation here. We'll have three clients hopefully at 5k plus 5% rev share, which we talked about before, should hopefully be something like $7000 a month. So 5k retainer and then 2000 for rev share and then we should have around 19 clients at 3k a month, which puts us at 57,000amonth in monthly recurring revenue just from our monthly clients. And so without ever doing one of these one time build out projects again, we're at $93,000 of monthly recurring revenue. Oops. And that total wasn't supposed to be on there, but copy paste error. And so this basically gives us $10,000 a month worth of wiggle room just in case we, we, you know, we fall short in one aspect or another. And I think this is like the really important thing when it comes to building out a scaling roadmap for your business. You can't just plan around best case scenario, right? You have to kind of plan for things going wrong. You have to plan for clients churning. You have to plan for marketing taking longer than you want to ramp up and actually get up to speed. You have to plan for sales converting at a lower percentage and marketing being more expensive than you want it to be. And you have to be able to model out a success story even in that circumstance when it just feels like everything is turning against you. Because if you can win in that scenario, well, it's probably not going to be that bad. And so you're going to do even better than what you expect versus. I think most people plan out, they just plan, you know, here's what the best case scenario could look like. And yeah, I'm like moderately successful here or I'm wildly successful, but they don't actually look at what could go wrong. Like what could go wrong in this plan. If my marketing is more expensive by 50%, then what happens? Am I still going to be successful here? If I convert, you know, only 10% on my sales calls instead of 20% on my sales calls, am I still going to be successful here? And if you plot out that scenario that like worst case scenario and you're still profitable and you're still in a place where you've got a business you're proud of and you're happy with, then you're absolutely going to crush it coming into 2025.