It’s been some time since I had time to sit down and think deeply about where I am currently at and where I want to go with my life. As I’m currently traveling (right now I am in Malaysia looking at the Petronas Twin Towers) and have a bit more time on my hands, I figured this is an ideal opportunity to reflect. 

I must say that even though I tend to compare myself to others and never feel like my achievements are worthy enough, I am in a quite fortunate position. When I was 17, I started my first business–an educational agency that sends students from Czechia and Slovakia to high schools in Denmark. I always knew that I wanted to start my own business and as I studied in Denmark myself, this was the lowest hanging fruit. It took almost 5 years, but I got to a point of making approximately $40,000 a year in net income which is a decent amount for a 22-year old coming from Eastern Europe. However, I want to grow more. I know I am definitely not where I would like to settle in terms of my goals. 

A bit more about my current income streams

As of now, I have one income stream that generates most of my income and that is the educational agency. A bulk of that money comes from the “consulting fees” that I charge to my clients. There’s a small part of that which came from organizing related events, but these are negligible in the grand scheme of things. 

One thing that I struggle with is the long cycle. The whole consulting fee is structured in a success fee way–meaning clients only pay when their kids are successfully placed in one of the schools. This has been great for the sales element, but at the same time it brings quite a bit of unpredictability (the average cycle from starting to work with the client to securing the money is around 4 months). 

Furthermore, I am still not sure whether this current success is a product of me having tangible skills I am able to monetize or just plain luck. Reflecting on this, I would say this comes from two places. Firstly, even through efforts to track my lead journey better, I am still not completely sure where most of my traffic is coming from. Secondly, I would say historically I’ve been more or less inconsistent with my efforts and work output. I always worked in a burst–I have periods when I give the business my all for a few weeks and achieve massive progress alternating with periods of barely putting-in any work. I am not completely sure where this comes from but it’s definitely a factor that plays a role in my worries about sustaining my income. 

The second source of my income is an automation agency Leadbine that I run. It’s a skill I picked up while working on my own business. It’s something that I see a great potential–especially since for my education agency, I am hitting a bottleneck in terms of the number of places international schools in Denmark have and I can't scale it much further without pivoting to offering other countries.

So far, I can't call my automation agency a real business. I get some income from it (at this point usually under $1,000 a month) but I am still struggling with figuring out the proper monetization model. That being said, I see it as a progression forward. Apart from the scalability issues I mentioned, there are two main things that are drawing me to this idea: 

1. I have the opportunity to target clients anywhere in the world + there is virtually unlimited amount of clients I can target. This gives me endless opportunities. 
2. It allows me to see different types of businesses and their operations. This has already proven to be incredibly helpful in understanding how bigger businesses operate and I believe it will be extremely valuable in my future journey (keep in mind I’m 22 so still in the beginning of my career) 

Where does this take me? 

It would be naive to think I can simply abandon my education agency. It is something that is keeping me fed after all. Therefore, my plan is to maintain it at a current level and collect about the same amount of money as last year. I want to focus the rest of my time on Leadbine. This is a very realistic goal. It should not take me more than 20 hours a week of focus. 

How would I like my current business journey to unfold? 

I will split these according to the two categories: 

Educational Agency

Get to $50,000 in net income this year. This is realistic and it’s basically just maintenance. However, going towards this progress will allow me to not be stressed about my financial situation and take more risks with Leadbine. 

Right now, it's the beginning of August. If I want to feel safe about my income, I should aim to get at least 20 clients by the end of September. This gives me almost exactly 2 months. Given the fact that I already have 3 clients signed, I need to get 17 more. Divided by 8 weeks, this gives me approximately 2.1 clients I need to get a week to hit this goal. 

Let’s break that down even further. The current sales process is lead
-> qualification phone call -> online meeting -> close. Checking my data, the current close rate for the online meetings is around 76%. Decent. This may be given the fact that I heavily qualify upfront with the phone calls. When I look at my total leads, last year this was around 250 leads. Out of that, approximately 40 closed. That means that the lead to client ratio is around 16%. Not that great anymore. Some of them were lost. Arguably, I think my inconsistency played the biggest role. Sometimes I take forever to follow-up with leads. I know, completely stupid. Some of them, however, were not qualified (e.g. their children were too young) and they moved to the pipeline for next years. If I were to estimate the actual lead to client ratio excluding the families with children that are too young, this would hover at around 30%. Better.

If I want to close 17 clients in two months, I need to have at least 23 sales meetings. To have those, I need to (conservatively) get approximately 106 leads. Now I would hope that we can improve this number a bit by reactivating old leads, but let’s be conservative with these numbers. Organically (without any ads) I get around 7 leads a month. This gives me 14 leads for the two months I have to achieve this goal. Not enough. 

This means that I need to generate approximately 92 leads in the upcoming two months. That is not a small feat, but I hope it should be doable with investing sufficient money into marketing. I will choose Facebook Ads -> Funnel which seemed to work pretty well. 

Now let’s talk numbers in terms of my time investment. To close these 17 clients, I need to do 23 sales meetings and 106 conversations with leads. The sales meeting takes 60 minutes on average. That’s 1380 minutes over the next two months. Apart from that, I need to conduct 106 qualification phone calls. These take 15 minutes on average. Given the fact I need 106 of these, this comes down to 1590 minutes. After adding this up, I arrive at 2970 minutes of work that I need to put in. That’s ~50 hours over the next two months. Not bad given the fact that the expected value of the 20 contracts is around $25,000. 

I also need to add the financial investment. So far, my average cost per lead is approximately $2.5 per lead. However, this is not very accurate as I have the leads from ads + word of mouth mixed up. I think realistically I can expect something like $7 dollars per lead. Given the fact that I need to generate 92 leads from ads, this comes down to $644 dollars in ad spend investment. 

Great, now I have a pretty clear path to achieve my goal. I will allocate further time for breaking this down in the next part of this journal. 

Sidenote: I currently get on average a whopping $230 dollars from one lead! Following-up with my leads is therefore the highest ROI activity I can do and I should follow-up way faster. It is completely stupid not to. 

Leadbine

The biggest bottleneck here is definitely my ability to get clients. I don’t have a straight path for getting clients. So far, some of them came from my youtube and others from word of mouth. However, no reliable system to get clients at scale is in place. This means it's difficult for me to estimate what is the input needed to achieve my desired outputs. 

Let’s define those. I would like to scale this to $10,000 a month in revenue in the next two months. Now this is not a small challenge, however I feel that it’s not completely unrealistic. Right now, I charge hourly prices at $40 dollars an hour. Right now, I know that I am not putting-in nearly as many billable hours as I could even with my current clients. There are projects that they want to work on and things that we can push forward. If I put-in 100 billable hours a month (pretty realistic, approximately 3 hours a day as I don't take weekends off anyways) I should already get to $4,000 a month in revenue. 

That’s still $6,000 dollars short of my goal, but it makes me feel like this is something that is doable. My goal is to figure out how to bridge that gap. 

Let’s stick to the idea of putting-in a maximum of 100 hours of work per month into this. That means that in order to reach my desired goal, I need to make at least $100 dollars an hour. There are only two ways to get there: either raise my hourly rate or create a productized offer that’s priced on value which effectively takes me to the $100 dollars per hour mark. 

That is not a small amount of money. I will need to offer more than just building skills. What I will need to do is show the clients the direct ROI of the systems I build for them. There are fundamentally two ways to do that: either save the clients tons of time or generate additional revenue that is directly attributable to my systems.

I would expect that the growth systems will be fundamentally easier to sell, but more difficult to deliver and vice-versa. I will keep pondering about the right move here.

What is more pressing here is the distribution. The only way to get to the desired level is to get more clients. With more clients, I can slowly start picking the ones I can provide the most value to (and therefore get the biggest cut off that value in absolute terms). As I still lack a winning offer, ads are out of question. That only really leaves me outbound, which is something I already knew. And something I honestly hate. However, I believe it is the straightest line path to hitting my goal. 

There are three outbound sources I want to utilize:

1. Upwork - Unsexy, but a good source of possible clients as it aggregates people who are already looking for an automation expert
2. Cold Email - Also pretty unsexy (and from the few trials I ran, pretty difficult) but something that is the most scalable out of them all. Currently, I have around 45 warmed up inboxes which gives me a decent outreach volume
3. Personalized Looms (sent through LinkedIn and emails). Unscalable, but the response rates are way higher than from plain emails. 

Upwork

The first platform that I want to utilize is Upwork. There are two limitations on my volume with Upwork. Firstly, it’s the amount of opportunities in the automation field. I would say currently there are around 50 new opportunities a day that would make sense for me. Okay, not bad. Definitely not a bottleneck now so moving on. The second factor is price. Upwork applications have gotten expensive. Like really expensive. The average job post in my field receives around 40-60 applications. If I want to have any decent chance of my proposal even being seen, I need to get my proposal boosted. In total, this comes down to approximately $10 dollars for one application. If I were to apply to 3 jobs a day, this already brings the total monthly cost to $900 dollars. The question is how much money would I be able to generate from this investment. To be determined.

That brings me to my second thought: with the cost of applications being so high, I should really optimize my profile so I am not wasting precious money. When looking at my profile, there are few things that I would like to change:

1. The color of my profile picture and introduction video. This is used to stand out. However, I am currently using yellow and I noticed that a lot of people watching Nick Saraev (the same niche) are using the same color. Change this to something else, maybe green or orange. 
2. Add portfolio items: upwork is saying that freelancers with portfolios have a 9x higher success rate with applications. Not sure if this is completely accurate, but worth a shot. Add 3 new portfolio pieces based on previous projects. 
3. Optimize for reviews. Currently, I only have 1 review on upwork. I’ve been looking at higher paying jobs, but now I am realizing that it is stupid. The reviews are the #1 reason why people decide to go for a certain freelancer. I need to farm these reviews like crazy. My goal for the next week or two should be to apply for very simple jobs, undercut offers and get at least 10 reviews. 

To get there, let’s try applying to 3 smaller jobs a day. The costs are a bit lower–usually around $4 per application so it should be doable without me going broke. I should also talk to the friend that I am already working for and ask them to have our next project on Upwork so they can also give me a review. 

After optimizing my profile and getting reviews, I can start applying to bigger jobs. I think I will still try to apply for 3 jobs a day and watch my success rate closely to determine if the economics make sense. It probably should, otherwise people would stop using Upwork, but we will see when I get some results for myself. Moving on. 

Cold Email

This one is the most difficult to get right. At least for me. However, it is the only method out of the three I outlined above that scales disproportionately to my time. Both with upwork and loom outreach that I will talk about in a bit, I am limited with the time I put in. With cold email, the limit is mainly the number of inboxes which is a problem easily solvable with money. 

Right now, I have 45 inboxes capable of sending 1350 emails a day. Given the fact that I’ve been (and for now intend to continue) running two-step sequences, this means I can reach 675 new contacts every day. This comes down to 4725 a week (if I send emails also during the weekends). 

I have no realistic benchmark regarding the number of positive replies I will be able to generate. I believe that I should be able to generate at least 1 positive reply a week from this volume, even when I’m really bad. Let’s say half of my positive replies convert to meeting. That’s two meetings a month. If 25% of my meetings close (I think this is a realistic number for cold outreach) I can expect 1 new client in the next two months. 

That sucks. Let’s see the actual results, but if I want to be able to scale this, I will either need to improve my positive reply rate by improving the copy or increase my volume. To be determined. Regarding the copy. I think in total, I sent emails to around 2-3 thousand contacts at this point. That sample size is not big enough to reach any meaningful conclusion, but so far it feels like emails that I didn’t personalize performed contrary to popular advice better than the personalized one. Interesting. Either my personalization was really bad (which is possible) or the prospects actually preferred the non-personalized email. I will watch this closely over the coming weeks. 

Okay. The plan is to fully utilize my current inboxes. I should dedicate some time now to improving copy and offer. Afterwards, I need to scrape a new batch of leads for next week (currently I am using Apollo but I would also like to try Vayne.io) and start the campaigns.

Once the campaigns are started, I doubt that I will be doing any optimizations during the week. Especially in the beginning, I will just want to see how the campaigns are performing. What I need to do, however, is to check my Instantly mailbox every morning and reply to any new messages. Then once a week, I need to improve copy, scrape new leads and add them to campaigns.

Personalized Looms

Last one of my approaches that I want to utilize. Again, something that I have direct control over and I hope that this should get higher reply rates than cold emails. I will get the leads directly from Sales Navigator. I will also filter based on activity so I don’t waste my time on people that are not actively using LinkedIn anyways. I think I should also optimize my account for the outreach with more mentions of Leadbine and what we do. 

Realistically, I think sending one Loom will take me approximately 6 minutes. WIth that in mind, I should be able to send 15 looms a day. That gives me 105 looms a week or 420 looms a month. Not sure if this volume is a lot or too little. I will need to wait for some results with this one. 

Overall Plan

I just wrote down all the avenues that I will use to try to get clients. I am honestly not too sure about what results I can expect from it. I would like to get to $10,000 a month from this by the end of September as I mentioned. However, I am not too sure how these actions will translate to revenue. The best bet I have here is to revisit this plan every two weeks and see if I am moving in the right direction. 

Time Investment

After writing out the specific steps that I need to take to achieve my goals in terms of new clients, I would like to go over the necessary time investment to get to that level. There are two things that I need to take into consideration: 

1. My current work that I am doing for my clients
2. Outreach and getting new clients

Let’s start with the work that I am doing for my current clients. Earlier I mentioned that I would like to do approximately 100 hours of billable work a month. However, as I am traveling Asia and I want to also focus on growing the business, I don't see 100 billable hours in the first month realistic. I would like to aim for 60 hours. Then I can gradually increase it to 100 hours next month once I have a bigger option of clients to choose from and I am able to charge more than $40 dollars an hour for some of them.

Let’s break down the time investment needed then: 

1. Two hours a day of billable work  
2. Approximately 4 hours a week on setting-up cold email campaigns. Then approximately 15 minutes a day on managing replies. 
3. Approximately 30 minutes a day on Upwork applications.
4. Approximately 90 minutes a day on Loom outreach

This brings me to approximately 4.5 hours of work a day for Leadbine. This is the absolute minimum I should be putting in every day. I will probably put significantly more time into this, but this should be my minimum daily “hygiene” amount. 

After adding up numbers for my educational agency + Leadbine, I need to spend approximately 5.5 hours a day (including weekends) of focused work to have a shot at achieving my goals. That doesn't seem that difficult, but I've learned that being in the office is not the same as actually putting the work hours in. I expect this to have a medium-high difficulty to keep this consistent, especially with traveling. 

Other time commitments

I believe I've outlined most of my main time commitments for the next two months in this document. There are only few things that are not included:

1. Marketing for a British school. This is a project that we started last September, but the school has been busy with other projects since then. I need to finish this up (even though right now it’s objectively not a priority for me in terms of the growth possibilities). This should take approximately 2 hours to finalize the Ad Campaign and then maybe 30 minutes a day on further contact with the leads. Writing this out, this seems like a lot of time. Unfortunately, not much I can do about this, but should be all done by the end of September. 
2. Gym. I am trying to work-out and stay in shape. I go to the gym every 2nd day. The gym session takes approximately 90 minutes. No travel time since it is in the building.
3. Youtube Channel: something that I enjoy and believe that has a great growth potential, but honestly I don’t feel like I have much capacity for this right now. I would like to do 1 video on my Daily Update (more like weekly update) channel to document my journey. Apart from that, it will not be the focus of the next two months unless I have finished my other tasks and have free time on my hands. 

Limitations

There are two areas that I want to focus on. First is beliefs, the second is environment.

Beliefs

I would say this is something I've been consistently struggling with. One limiting belief that I have is regarding consistency. I am not sure If I will be able to stick to this plan that I just wrote down. If I don’t, the whole plan is utterly useless. I think I partially feel about it this way as my consistency was always fluctuating over time. However, I should remind myself of the times when I was consistent. For instance, I did 100 push-ups a day for more than 200 days. I just need to figure out how to keep myself consistent. One part of it will be tracking my outputs, more on that in a bit. My second limiting belief is regarding rejection. I know that I tend to tie my self-worth to outside events and opinions of people a lot. The reasons are beyond the scope of this reflection. However, it is something that I need to get rid of. I should completely detach myself from the outcome. Instead of looking at the number of successful meetings, I should just look at it as “meetings”. Or even better, I can set a goal of sending 50 looms that will be rejected. Of course I will still make them as good as possible, but I should detach myself from the outcome. 

Environment

This is definitely affected by me traveling. I love it, but the downside is constant change and additional tasks that come with it. Searching for accommodation, getting to know delivery options around you, searching for a gym and other similar problems. Furthermore, I am traveling with my girlfriend which obviously means I need to spend time on other activities than just work. 

One of the big time-wasters is food. It is something that takes up a lot of time. I am ordering takeouts a lot, but even that takes time with having to choose the food, go down to the reception to pick it up, eat it and throw away the trash. Food is something I definitely need to simplify. I don’t need a hot meal multiple times a day. I am fine with yoghurt and oats. However, I need to buy more yoghurt. Ideally, when I come to a new location, I should choose which yoghurt I like and then just buy enough of it until the end of my stay to save time. I should also buy enough coffee so that I don’t need to go anywhere to get it. 

I also like working in a proper place. I am lucky that my current place has a coworking area with decent chairs. I will not have this luxury in my next place in Vietnam, but I should always find my spot for working somewhere in the house. 

I will discuss the environment a bit more in some other posts when I will do a life-audit focused on this. For now, this is enough. 

Creating a daily routine

Great. I gained a lot of clarity on where I am currently at and what I need to do to get to the next level. Right now, I need to mend my ideas into reality.  Let’s create an ideal daily routine.

I currently wake-up at around 11AM (actually, I tend to be an early bird and would much rather prefer to wake-up at 6-7AM, but being in an Asian timezone makes waking-up late and staying-up late necessary). 

It takes me some time to wake-up properly, but I already want to use this time productively. There are few things that are high ROI that I should do first: 

1. Check Instantly/LinkedIn for replies + engage
2. Check the accounts of my current automation clients and make sure that everything is running as expected
3. Check my email and get to Inbox 0 
4. Check my calendar to make sure I am not forgetting any meetings

After that, I will crawl out of bed, take a shower and make myself look presentable. Then it’s time to focus on my outreach. This should take approximately 2 hours. After that, I should do my two hours of billable work finishing at around 4PM local time. After that, I should handle any incoming leads for my Education Agency. By 5PM, I should be done with all my non-negotiable work. The rest of my day can therefore be spent either on free time or on other work that comes up. 

Tracking

To improve the likelihood that I will achieve these goals, I've decided to put together a Life Tracking sheet where every day I track the most important metrics that should move me forward So far, I have these metrics:

1. Education Agency Current Clients Minutes
2. Education Agency: Number of New Leads  
3. Education Agency: Number of Leads Contacted  
4. Education Agency: Minutes Spent in Contact with New Leads  
5. Education Agency: Meetings Booked  
6. Education Agency: Number of Sales Meetings Conducted That Day  
7. Education Agency: Number of New Clients That Day  
8. Client 1: Billable Minutes  
9. Client 2: Billable Minutes  
10. Client 3: Billable Minutes  
11. Number of Upwork Proposals Sent  
12. Minutes Spent on Upwork Proposals  
13. Number of Personalized Looms Sent  
14. Minutes Spent Preparing Personalized Looms  
15. Cold Emails Sent  
16. Cold Email Positive Replies  

This should serve two goals. Firstly, it will give me a streak of achievement that will motivate me to further continue and not break it. Secondly, it tracks both the lead and lag indicators, so I should be able to see an estimate of where I'm going and how successfully I am moving towards my goals. 

Closing thoughts

I put together a very reasonable plan. Now it’s time to get to work and achieve these goals. It will be a great test of my capabilities. I have two months of summer to see how quickly and successfully I can move. Let’s utilize them to the fullest.