Work Update 4/23
I like sharing the raw truth of what Im working on over here.
Not many people read this blog, but I hope that one day I can look and get an unfiltered version of how I felt trying to grow a portfolio of companies.
Today I’m 26 living in NYC.
I have 3 companies I’m actively working to build.
An ecommerce brand
Atlas Self Storage
A recruiting company for US talent (DTC Hire)
There will be more… but let’s jump into things.
E-commerce Brand:
We are in team building mode here.
We hired a CEO.
Brought on a growth marketer.
Now we’re looking for a creative designer and
I’m currently working 2 hours/month on this business..
I’m starting to wonder if that’s truly enough. Sales are flat YoY and new customer acquisition is down (we can’t spend efficiently on the same CaC goal) while LTV is the main thing growing keeping the business running smoothly.
I have a feeling my day to day involvement in this business will increase in the coming months, but sales should be the biggest determinant there. Don’t want to get stuck as a $7M/year brand that I feel confident can do $10M+ with the right strategy.
Atlas Self Storage:
Actually pretty good news here, shockingly.
We are in lease up season. Have leased 25+ units in April alone so far.
Our problem property down in Rockport is finally turning the corner and beginning to get a serious amount of units to become available.
We wholesaled a deal back in January that gave us a 6 figure paycheck.
And now we have a $2M seller financed deal in Pennsylvania under contract that we are ironing out final terms with but could be the big bet we need to scale up.
Biggest issue with the business here today are personnel related. We have a few key employees that are crushing it, and now we need the bandwidth to replace or train the ones that are not.
My goals for this business are to get to $65k+ monthly rental revenue by the end of the year (I think this is very possible from the $32k we are at today) and try to gross $1M in wholesale revenue.
I kind of forgot how hard it is to start a new thing.
The other 2 companies have been running smoothly, but when you are constantly tweaking your offer, finding clients, and doing all of the work with zero employees, it gets a lot more challenging.
We just tweaked the offer again (5k/ hire and 2.5k/mo + 3k/hire if you’re hiring a lot)
I think this will be easier to sell.
Would love to scale this brand up this year and then make the following hires:
Full time recruiter
Fractional Content Marketer
Fractional Demand Gen
Service wise we’ve had a couple of really successful placements and 2 repeat clients at this point.
I have a feeling we’ll be able to scale up faster if we focus more on the business development side. But that will probably take some time this summer.
Overall, still optimistic just hoping we can grow to a steady state revenue of the business.