How did I go from job to business and what did I learn during this process? What did I do wrong? Would I change anything if I had my time again?
For me the biggest driver of my net worth to date has been my business which is a digital marketing agency.
I thought some people may be interested in how I started the business, quit my 9-5 job and then grew the business and helped me build my networth over 7 figures. These lessons apply to anyone even if you’re in a job or a different business.
Pretty much all my investments were paid for using money I generated through my marketing agency.
Hope you enjoy the story and if you have any questions please let me know.
Cheers,
Ray
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Transcription:
But the real question that people should be asking is, “Why you are only making 500 bucks a week?” But what can we do to increase your income? Good day there, Ray Corcoran here. In this week’s video, I’m going to be talking about how I started my digital marketing agency. The reason I’m going to be explaining that, is to kind of give people a glimpse into how you go from being in a job, all the way to owning a business and transforming your income along the way. I was in a corporate job many, many years ago, doing sort of marketing roles and business analyst roles and early on doing call centre roles. But after a while, I kind of realised that I didn’t want to do that sort of stuff. And I wanted to make a lot more money. And I naturally started looking at a business as sort of my way out. So that’s what we’re going to cover in this video.
As always, if you are interested in learning about how to make more money, invest your money and save money, please consider subscribing. And if you liked the video, please give it a like. The first question is really, why start a business? And I’ve touched on this in another video that I’ve done. One of the big drivers was I went to a bookstore many, many years ago and one of the books in there was talking about how people become millionaires. They said that a major driver of people building a lot of wealth was starting a business. And it was a high percentage of American self-made millionaires. After seeing this, it kind of got me thinking, “Well, it seems like most people, not all, but most people are making a lot of money through business.”
And obviously because of business, you can make uncapped amounts of money, control your own destiny, so to speak. I was very interested in this and I knew that I wanted to do something around this. And I realised that in my day job, in my corporate job, there was only so much money I was ever going to make. And even if I did all the right things and kissed certain people’s butts, it was only so much money I was ever going to make. It would’ve been decent money, like good money, but it would have taken me many, many more years, kind of a very gradual increase in salary and kind of felt like there must be a faster way. For me it was business. And in this video, I’m going to be talking about the steps I went from being in a job and then starting a business with no business experience whatsoever and just a desire to really change my income.
So the first thing I really needed to do was decide, was what type of business. To do that I looked at well, what skills do I have? What kind of stuff could I do for other people? And at the time I had taught myself how to build websites. Back in the day, I would self teach myself how to do HTML code and building very basic websites. While, I found it interesting, it wasn’t something I was overly passionate about. But I kind of just tinkered around and I liked doing it. It ended up coming in handy because the web becoming a bigger and bigger thing, I realised lots of people had businesses and they wanted to get online, so to speak and build a website. So kind of saw that, while I was in my day job, I was kind of just getting de-motivated. I felt like I could be making more money. I felt like the promotional path for me was going to be very, very slow. I kind of just realised that I needed to make a change and start, scheming on outside of my job to build something externally.
I decided to start a web design business. Wasn’t very sophisticated at the start. I put the word out to family and friends that, “Hey, I can build websites, tell everybody you know.” I posted on social media and told people. Built a very basic and little bit ugly website of my own. You know, the reality of it is websites, especially back then weren’t very fancy. So you didn’t need to build a very fancy website. And it was still very, very useful for the business owner because most people didn’t know how to build websites, let alone ones that were somewhat decent.
I started doing that. A friend introduced me to WordPress and taught me basically how you could build a website and sell it for say $2,000. And it might cost you a couple of hundred dollars in costs to buy the theme and to buy some basic bits and pieces. It would just take a bunch of your time to sort of help set that theme up and customise the website to the client’s needs. So after I heard that, I was very excited. I was very interested in that cause I was like, “Well, if I can turn around a few websites per month, I can make several thousand dollars a month and I can do it totally separate to my job.”
And that’s basically what I did. So I started building these websites on the side, for family and friends. Slowly you get some referrals, it wasn’t crazy money, but it was very, very exciting to make what I would call independent money. I was making money outside of my job and nobody could stop me in terms of how much I could make. So, I could make as much or as little as I wanted, depending on how hard I wanted to work for it. And I love that aspect of it. When it came to my job, I could work a crazy week and still get paid the same amount. And I didn’t work in sales or any other job where you can get leverage. So I would just get paid for my hours every single week. And that was that. And sure, you may have the faint promise of a promotion, but as many of you know, lots of people promise promotions and they never materialise. So I was getting quite jaded in my job. My goal was, if I can build up my side income enough, then I can focus on that and then eventually kick the job off and build this web design business.
So I started to do that. I started to get some more and more jobs on the side. And a big focus, early on was trying to compress the amount of time it took me to set up a website. Because I was very inefficient at the start. Obviously it took me forever to do very basic things, but eventually as time goes on, you kind of get used to how to do things smarter. As I was doing more and more jobs, I decided to quit my job. I mentioned this in a previous video. I quit my job too early, to be honest. And I didn’t have much savings because I was overconfident and young. And yeah, I didn’t have enough work. So I quit my job, did a bunch of websites, but that didn’t really build a pipeline of work. That was a big lesson in making sure you always have new work in the pipeline.
Eventually I ran out of money and I had to go back to a job, which was embarrassing. And that was sort of my first proper foray into business. I was still doing websites on the side, while I was back in a job. What would happen is I would build the website for someone and then they would ask me, “How do I get people to the website?” And I didn’t know. So I decided to start learning and I told them that, “I’ll help you for free with trying to get people and traffic to your website. If you just give me the opportunity to try and do it. If it that works well, then you can give me a testimonial.” And eventually we started getting some results after lots of trial and error and for the business owner, they were happy because they got basically free help. After a while, I started to get a bit of a feel for like what tactics and strategies I can use to get people to a website and help them convert.
So I was learning about conversion optimization, Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing, SEO. All these sorts of marketing strategies. Fast forward more than 10 years later, it’s still what I’m doing now. And I’ve learned a lot on the way. It’s been a big learning curve, but there’s been a whole bunch of lessons that I’ve learnt off the back of that. And I kind of started with one of the first strategies. Is something that [Remake Saytee 00:06:13] talks about, is using the tuner strategy. And not tuna as in the fish, but more like a tuning up of a dial. And he says, to get started, just start by charging a little, and then charge a bit more and then a bit more and a bit more. And that’s pretty much what I did in my career and it worked fine. I was massively undercharging. But for me, I didn’t care. I was getting experience. I was getting case studies. I was getting proof of the effectiveness of my services. And that, for me, that was more important because I knew that would win me more work.
And one of the biggest lessons for me was to invest in my own education. I’ve probably spent 200, $300,000 over many years, learning about marketing and business and finance and all the different elements of business and how to grow a company. Lots and lots of books, lots of and lots of hours, learning about it. I think there’s something that in terms of takeaways, that’s probably one of the first investments you can make is the investment in yourself. And it sounds cheesy, but it is one of the best things you can do because you get paid in relation to your skills. If you don’t have skills, you don’t get paid.
How are you going to go to a business for example, and try and charge them a lot of money. If you don’t have any real skills, a lot of people try to do that, they try and cut the corner. For me, I’ve found that you’re actually good at what you do, and you can get reliable, consistent, good results for somebody. You can charge a lot and you can do it frequently and you can do it, if you have a team, you can do it to multiple businesses simultaneously. And that’s where you get big cashflow coming through.
And for me, you may notice on this channel, I talk about trying to make a lot of money because I actually feel like a lot of these channels on personal finance, they teach you how to build wealth with a low income. And I really, really disagree with that because I believe that unless you’re in a third world country and that sort of stuff, which would be genuinely challenging. You can increase your income and people act like you can’t increase your income. And they always try and talk about, well how to build wealth when only 500 bucks a week and stuff. I understand that people start from that and they’re trying to make it work. But the real question that people should be asking is, “Why you’re only making 500 bucks a week.”
But what can we do to increase your income? Because increasing your income will change your life faster than cutting costs. Because if you’re only making a little bit of money cutting costs, it’ll make an impact and I will add up over time. But increasing your income from 500 to 700 a week is going to be a game changer for you rather than saving an extra $30 or $40 a week. For me, I know that my financial situation and building my network net worth over seven figures, has been almost, not fully due to the business, but the business has been the biggest driver of the increase in net worth. And it’s allowed me to make a lot of money in a lot shorter time. It wasn’t overnight by any means, but it happened a lot quicker. I’m not waiting till I’m 45, 50 55. Just something to think about.
The next lesson from starting my marketing agency, is backing yourself. I wouldn’t have never started that business if I didn’t have some degree of confidence in my own abilities to make it work. And I think it’s really important that you back yourself. There’s so many people that don’t have the confidence, they have the skills, but they’re not confident to back themselves. And I see that in a lot of younger people. And it’s like, if you’ve got the skills you have what you need to do really, really well and to make above average amounts of money. Think about how are you backing yourself and have a crack at it.
For a lot of people that, especially younger people, like you’ve got your whole life ahead. There’s always going to be another job you can go back. Sure, it might be stressful, it might be inconvenient, it may interrupt things. But I would rather have a full swing and it miss, then die slowly in a corporate job that you may not like. At the time I left my job, I was excited but also nervous. I didn’t know how it was going to go. I had no idea how much it would grow after that. So it’s one of those things that, just like this YouTube channel is something that I don’t know how it’s going to go. But years later I might be happy that I happy that I started it. So back yourself, have a crack at it. And basically just ignore anybody that sort of tells you otherwise.
And the next lesson I learned from starting my marketing agency and that sort of whole journey was to pick one lane and stick to it. I just picked something that I sort of liked. I didn’t love it, but it was something that I’m like, “Yeah, I could do this for a bit.” And then it kind of built into more of a passion as time went on. And you got to think about the competence, confidence loop. So the better you get at something and the more confident you get at it, and generally the more you enjoy it as well, we enjoy things that we’re better at.
For yourself, have a think about what kind of lane can you pick and stick with it. Because the people that make a lot of money in most industries, they’ve been sticking out that one thing for a long time, they haven’t been trying 50 different things at once. It’s also why I don’t really talk to people much about side hustles and little side projects and that sort of stuff. Some people would rather make a hundred dollars from 10 different things, rather than $2,000 from one thing. I’d rather spend all my time on really, really getting good at one main thing, because that’ll pay a lot more typically then just doing these little bits and bobs here and there for $20, $100, whatever. Like I don’t really rate a lot of that stuff.
The final lesson that I had from starting my marketing agency and what I learned from going through from corporate to a business and being in business for several years now. Is that at some point you got to take a risk and you’ve got to have a crack at something. I call it skipping over the good to get to great. I had an all right job. It had potential to pay a lot of money over time. And I would have got there if I just hung around and was nice to certain managers and whatever. That would have naturally happened over time. I probably wouldn’t have been happy. I probably wouldn’t have been fulfilled. I probably wouldn’t have been loving life, but I probably would’ve got there eventually. And if I’d been strict with cutting costs and all that sort of stuff, it would have financially ended up very good.
However, the situation ended up so much better like significantly better. It was way more turbulent, it was like that rather than like a nice, steady, slow increase. But the overall outcome is a lot higher. And in business there’s going to be that extra element of risk. But I would rather take on that risk and have a crack and have a shot at making bigger money, rather than saying in the safe Harbour, if you will, of a job where I’m getting paid little incremental bits over time. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to start a business, but if you want to make big money, you really got to think about how am I going to get there.
If you look at your current job and people aren’t getting paid that much, even if they’re experienced, that’s a good sign that you might not be in the right place. Could you own that business, if it’s a smaller business? Could you own a chain of those businesses potentially. You now need to think about what’s your path going to be and what are some paths where you can make a lot of money, do work that you enjoy and it’s useful to the customers.
So I hope you found that useful. It’s kind of a bit of an overview of how I transitioned from corporate into a job and how it majorly positively affected my net worth. And just also some of the lessons that I sort of learned along the way. If you have any questions, thoughts, or comments, please let me know below. If you liked the video, give it a like. If you want to subscribe, please consider, and I’ll see you on the next video. Cheers.