ladies and gentlemen this video is not clickbait on the six year anniversary of signing my first client back in august of 2016 i'm shutting my agency down six years of blood sweat and tears a six year journey that took me from a broke high school student to a multi-millionaire and most importantly accomplished the outcome that i had from the beginning which was take care of me and my mom and then eventually retire her [Music] there's a few things i want to talk about in this video first i need to talk about sort of where i'm at in my career and how my different businesses slot into my vision second i'll explain why i'm actually making the sacrifice and what goal it is contributing towards and lastly i will explain why i'm still more than knowledgeable after six years to help people start and scale their agency but also the outside experts that i've brought into my e-learning company great agency over the space of the year to sort of fill in in the gaps where i'm just not as sharp as i used to be now i could have quietly shut down my agency and sort of continued on as if nothing had happened but in the spirit of the last six years sharing my agency journey and my journey as i said from broke to multi-millionaire here on youtube i just thought i'd be transparent and give you guys a full update so let's start off with the first point which is kind of where i'm at with my career and how my different businesses slot into it in order to explain this i need to use a concept that i've used in the past which is market timing and career timing now market timing is basically how good of an opportunity something is considering sort of the market conditions for example you could have been an incredible entrepreneur but if in the year 2020 you start a newspaper company as in like a physical newspaper company you probably wouldn't have done very well whereas if you were that same entrepreneur in terms of the skill set in the 1980s you know you could have been a multi-multi-multi-millionaire you know who knows even maybe a billionaire so when it comes to that front which is market timing starting and running an online boutique marketing agency is in its absolute prime when it comes to market timing because now the world is catching up to the things that i was doing back in 2018 and you know these are really a few key pillars that i introduced all the way at the beginning of 2018 and that's really when i went from making a you know a cute few hundred thousand dollars a year to a million plus and really it's three pillars which is an all remote team which i've had from basically day one this means that you can look all across the globe and hire the best talent and you get to pay them 10 to 20 which you would have to pay someone in the us because quite frankly it's just living costs right like you could be paying them 20 of what you're paying someone in california and they're living three times the quality of life because of basically just currency conversions and stuff like that and the best part is you're changing all these people's lives because you're paying them most of the time double what they would be making locally but now they're making that with you but you also have the benefit of paying them as i said 20 which you would have to pay someone in london paris new york so that is pillar number one pillar number two is the ability to sign clients globally you know i was doing zoom calls i made the decision summer of 2019 i'm going to do no more physical meetings when it comes to signing a client it will all be via zoom it didn't matter if you know back the time i was living in london didn't matter if someone was also based in london i would only do zoom exclusively and the last pillar specialize and focus in on one niche and one service now when i was making 80 000 a month profit at the age of 18 back in you know 2018 and i was using these core pillars i was really swimming upstream like i was working against wahura's industry norms and industry standards but with everything that went on in 2020 the world changing your clients will expect that you have no office they'll expect that you're signing clients internationally they'll expect that you have a global workforce and obviously everything's done on zoom now and it's for that reason that my style of teaching starting an online boutique agency works better now than it ever has and you know that really showed it in 2021 where at my agency ig media we had our best year and we also had our best single month at 160 000 dollars in profit by the way when i speak in these numbers i don't ever talk about revenue only profit because really that's the only thing that matters at a cash flow focused agency so the time to start an online boutique marketing agency has never been better but here is where we get into career timing see what gets you from one point to the next won't get you from that to the other between the space of 2016 to 2021 i use my agency to go from zero to eight figures after tax now i need to focus on the next phase of my career which is going to nine and multi nine figures as i said in that five year span between 2016 to 2021 i produced millions in cash flow from my agency and i always had a philosophy which was invest anywhere from 50 to 80 as i made more money basically that percentage would go higher so i took all that money and i basically invested along the way as a lot of you guys know i made a lot of money with crypto i very publicly put a million dollars from my agency business bank account in december of 2020 and publicly on youtube six months later i posted my seven million dollar uh crypto portfolio and then five days later it was worth 3. 5 million and next peak we had i learned my lessons and basically learned that i needed to take more profits so between that you guys also know that i invest a lot in watches and i've made quite a lot of money there as well as a few other miscellaneous investments so as i said between the millions that the agency produced in cash flow over the year i was able to then invest it and multiply it because here's the thing a lean boutique online marketing agency is the best way to make 500k to 1. 5 million a year in profit full stop i know because i have five businesses like i have businesses in e-commerce sas uh e-learning um agents like i can speak from experience here and the best part is it's the most hands-off after two years if you did what i did which was find an incredible cmo shout out danny basically after two years you get a cmo you give them profit share like i did with danny and this person's you know really incentivized to run the company grow it et cetera et cetera and that is all great the fact that i was basically able to use my agency to in five years go from zero to ten million that's great but that's not gonna get me to a hundred to five hundred million and that's really the goal so you need to understand that each business has its pros and cons when it comes to career timing and quite frankly i'm at a stage where i am good for money i never really need to work for money ever again and i know that a lot of people will be very happy in my situation and basically like dude you won the game at 22.
like that's it go to bali go to cape town go travel the world medellin relax i'm just not wired like that i wish i was because my life would be a lot more peaceful but i'm not like i want that next goal and that really brings us on to the next part of the video which is why i'm actually making the sacrifice like what is the sacrifice for and to give you a very quick answer it is agency flow which is my software company i've been working on for two years with actually the husband of one of my old agency clients now we worked on it for 18 months different iterations different features etc etc i mean software is a very very difficult game so we worked on it for a long long time and it was actually in beta sort of invite only between august 2021 and then february 2022 so in that six month period and we were figuring out some more kinks etc etc anyways we launched it in february of this year so right around six months ago and it has already been appraised between 12 to 15 million dollars by some vcs we've also had a very very low eight figure offer on it which as you can tell we didn't take so yeah all of that is in six months now you guys don't really hear me talk much about agency flow here on youtube when in fact it's actually my main focus it's the thing that i spend for most of my mental capacity and most of my time on and we have 11 full-time developers of that company it is full bootstrapped fully funded ourselves and it's really really tough it's a really tough business but it's what we're doing is is incredible and the main reason i don't really talk about it here on youtube is because it's it's not very applicable to my 400 000 subscribers on here you know it is a niche software for a very specific sort of customer which is a boutique lean agency and this is exactly my audience of customers and my e-learning company grow your agency now i'll be very honest with you guys as i kind of got to that eight figure level and i was like i'm kind of good like i'm you know i'm happy i don't really need more money i need the thing that's going to take me to that next point in my career because i said look quite frankly my agency isn't going to get me there you know my e-learning company people some people are very delusional you will never ever ever sell an e-learning company because a person is a face to it right you know it's not really a company that you're gonna sell it's cute you know from your agency you might make a few million which by the way is nothing to scoff at you know from your agency you might make a few million over a few years you know uh e-learning company dummy sorry it's actually a notoriously difficult business to to sustain past the first like 18 months which is why you see so many people on youtube who have education companies that basically just fizzle out after 18 months but anyways that's a separate side topic the point is i kind of got to the end of 2021 and i was actually considering closing gya just being honest i was basically considering closing it uh similar to my agency and actually similar to another business which i'll talk about in just a second because i was like you know i money-wise i'm good and now i just i mainly need focus but i didn't because i realized it is in my best interest to cultivate as many incredible agency owners is humanly possible and the reason why is quite selfishly inevitably they're gonna use my software now if you want a perfect example of this you can look at russell brunson you know russell brunson grew i believe in six years from 2015 to 2021 roughly around those dates click funnels from zero to they actually received an offer of a billion dollars so six years self-funded zero to a billion which is basically kind of my goal maybe not a billion you know maybe like two three hundred million but you get the point and a large portion of what russell brunson will do and the reason they were so successful is he will sell you know funnel hacking secrets or like he'll sell sort of these educational stuff to get people really excited about funnels and in the same way i'm gonna continue to make youtube videos talk about the thing that i am most passionate about the thing that changed my life to try to get more and more people into agency world and not just the agency world but the way that i believe in agency should be run you know what's best for you what's best for your client what's best for your team and inevitably i keep building up all this goodwill and people use my software because they know my software is the thing that's most tailored to them so that's basically the playbook and you need to use that playbook when in my case just like russell brunson uh it's bootstrap you know you're starting it all with your own money you know you don't want to take 30 million dollars in investment uh you know for whatever percentage of your business because you know you just don't want to deal with that side of the startup world so yeah i was actually basically heavily considering closing down the education company uh last year because of how much time it takes in comparison to how much profits it made but actually this year i'll say it has been doing a lot better which is cool because we've actually also been able to do a lot more with that money in terms of customer experience i'll get on to that later but anyways to kind of paint a picture i'll give you an example let's say this year we get 5000 students into agency navigator now from those five thousand students eighty percent of those will use my software company agency flow because it's like because i mean yeah sure you could use like asana and slack and pipe drive and all these stuff that are aren't tailored specifically for agencies or you could use our software which is literally built for you like from scratch by someone who was in your position so around 80 of those 5 000 will actually use it then around 40 so half of that that 80 uh they'll be around sort of a year later six months later so at an average monthly ticket price of a hundred and thirty eight dollars because we have a ninety five dollar plan and a two four five dollar plan so the blended average between those is 138 dollars as in we took the weighted average between the 245 plan and the 95 plan it comes out to 138 dollars a month so with the increase of agency navigator students around 2000 of those after the first year will be using agency navigate you do the math 138 dollars times 2 000 that comes out to an extra 276 000 a month in monthly recurring revenue that's a total of 3. 3 million dollars extra each year in annual recurring revenue now bear in mind with agency flow our number one goal is to make basically no money or as little money as humanly possible just keep flipping that revenue over into better better developers growing out the team spreading the message etc etc like this a software company is not something you start to be ultra profitable and to take a lot of money home yourself like of course you know we still want to keep 20 margins so that way pierre can eat i can eat and sort of like we can keep continuing to think long term you know him and i still have monthly goings and expenses that you know we need to tend to but anyways at an extra annual recurring revenue of 3.
