scale up Your profits and attain time freedom so You can pursue Your life passions.
Does This Sound Like You?
- Are you having trouble getting more sales, and your cash flow is tight as a result?
- Or are you having problems hiring staff, and that’s causing you headaches and costing a lot of time?
- Maybe you’re also finding yourself spending all day tied to your business, and you can’t find time for your family, your hobbies, much less yourself.
I Help Online Entrepreneurs Scale Quickly
My expertise is in scaling online businesses quickly and making things efficient.
I’ve been running successful businesses since 2002. Focusing on the right systems has enabled me to get time freedom and remove myself from the day-to-day operations of the business.
In 2017, a buyer was interested in Vodien, and I exited for $30 million (8.4x EBITDA). It fetched such a high value, partly because of how incredibly systemised everything was. In addition, Vodien was completely bootstrapped, and had a profit margin of 36%.
Since my business exit, I have been travelling the world, going where I want, when I want.
I fell in love with snowboarding, so I regularly spend 1-2 months snowboarding. Then I faced the question of what to do in the summer months, so I tried wakeboarding, wakesurfing, surfing, kitesurfing, and so on.
Don’t get me wrong, not all I do is always go-go-go activities. I like chilling out too. I went to Manhattan to catch the cast of Queer Eye; here you see me with Tan France. I took road trips with friends where we hung out with wallabies. I also love places like Bali, because the sense of freedom you get when you ride your motorbike around and visit places is just indescribable.
But after travelling for 1.5 years, I realised that while it was a fantastic lifestyle, it’s incomplete.
I want to teach what I know to people just like myself, and show them how to get the lifestyle that I have. And maybe we can all go snowboarding, or book out a castle in Europe together.
The Journey To Freedom
I sure as heck didn’t start out this way. I was from a broke family. Not only was money tight, we were even in debt. When I started Vodien at 17 years old, all I wanted to do was to make money to survive.
Somehow along the way, I managed to get things to work through an expensive process of trial and error. It was only several months and even years into the business that I realised that actual businesses REALLY loved us and relied upon us.
The journey wasn’t a straight upwards trajectory. I made so many mistakes, and spent so much time and money, but the important thing was that I learnt from all these mistakes.
Slowly, the business began to find our way. I didn’t know how to hire at the start. Then I found the system to hire multiple A-star players that stayed with us from day 1, and many more who joined us in our journey along the way.
I didn’t know how to grow from a 5-figure business to a 6-figure business, much less anymore than that. Then I discovered the systems needed to ensure that our team worked as one, and worked together towards our goals, and that allowed us to scale fast.
When I reflected on what we did, I realised we had done certain things that enabled us to succeed. The key was to expand and leverage on these things to scale up the business. There are thousands of lessons that I’ve learnt from my journey, but here’s 3 of them.
Secret Lesson #1: How To Develop A Hot Product And Attract The Fanatical Clients Who Crave It
Looking back, it was lucky but also so important that we were customers of the web hosting industry before. This allowed us to experience first-hand what the pains of the industry were. The number 1 pain of the web hosting industry back then was horrible customer service.
I knew, because I started off as a web designer, and I offered web hosting as well, but I was actually a reseller for some other company. The problem with this was that customers would always face problems.
Sometimes the web hosting service would go down, but because I was just a reseller, I had to forward their concerns to the actual web hosting company, and I’d be helpless.
Sometimes the company didn’t respond until hours later, sometimes the company couldn’t fix the problem, sometimes the company was utterly uncontactable.
So when I started Vodien, that’s what I focused on, and that taught me such an important lesson on getting the right product-market fit. This one concept allowed me to scale the company because fundamentally, Vodien was in such a strong position of value to our customers.
If you’re running your business right now, you need to take a step back, and really think about what your customers’ pain points are. Once you do that, think about whether you’re really solving them.
When you do, that’s how you truly differentiate your business, and give your business a real reason to exist.
Secret Lesson #2: The Exact System That I Used To Dominate My Highly-Competitive Industry
The next big lesson that I learnt was that of efficiency. I’m someone who appreciates efficency. Why do something unless there’s a real reason to do so. Why do something if there’s a better way to do it. That’s why I believe in the process of Optimise, Automate, Eliminate.
One of the largest projects that we did in Vodien is what we call Doctor. Doctor was a platform which had the goal of standardising the customer support experience that our customers got from us.
Because we ran such a big customer support team, depending on who the customer got when they contacted us, they would get slightly different levels of support.
With Doctor, it would diagnose, identify, and troubleshoot issues automatically. When the customer called us, our customer support agents had to only put in their domain name, and all this would be done automatically. This automated a lot of the work that our staff needed to do, and removed a lot of the human errors, making the process a lot more efficient.
Think about what processes you or your staff are working on. It could be something simple, such as logging on to a system every day to get reports or to pull data. Use tools to automate that process, or hire a developer to create a tool for you for that process. It’ll be a one-time cost that will save you countless man-hours every single day.
Secret Lesson #3: How To Attract And Build A Team Of Superstars To Hyper-Scale Your Business
One of the problems that I had as a first-time entrepreneur was not knowing how to build up a team. School sure as heck didn’t teach me this.
I remember the first time I hired an employee, it was nerve-racking. I had to ask my business friends for their employment agreements to use as a sample. I didn’t even know how to approach my employee.
He worked for us for three months and was doing really good work so I decided to confirm his employment after the completion of his probation period.
I remember my co-founder and I sitting down together with him in the open, and discussing his salary and package details in the open. It was such a face-palm moment, but that was the level of knowledge we had regarding employment.
Since then we’ve improved vastly, tweaking and refining our employment interview process to filter out unsuitable candidates and focusing on A-star players for our team. This single hiring process allowed for us to grow to 150 staff and allowed everyone to work well with each other.
I found that the biggest change happened when we ripped apart our hiring methodology and focused on the right questions to ask our candidates. This has shed light on who they really are, and allowed us to hire only the best to join our team.
Do the same for your hiring methodologies now, and ensure that you focus on the questions that truly matter. I found that what worked for me was not the stuff that I found on Google, so don’t be afraid to be different.
Get Time and Financial Freedom
These are just 3 of the many expensive business lessons that I have experienced. Mastering these lessons enabled me to enjoy time and financial freedom, and ultimately exit my business completely.
I’ve gotten the Lamborghini and the fancy watches. But they didn’t make me happy. I’ve since sold them off, and nowadays, I spend my time traveling the world, going where I please, when I want to.
I love processes and systems and I have become very good at scaling businesses.
I’ve spent years and a fortune learning how to expand teams, enter new markets, find the right pricing models, and solidifying my company’s value proposition. The list goes on and on.
If you find yourself running in circles and going nowhere, I’ll help you find the way so that you can start breaking out and achieving freedom.
I want to build up a community of people who appreciate the kind of systems thinking that I enjoy, want to scale up their businesses, and attain the time and financial freedom to pursue the kind of lifestyle that I have. If you fall into that category, I’m looking for people to mentor.
I don’t do this for any entrepreneur, and it’s only for people who recognise the value that I can bring to you. If this is you, send in an application below and let’s see if there’s a fit.