Building a 6-Figure Business Online: 5 Lessons we learnt

Lesson 1: Say Yes

Richard Branson famously said, “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you’re not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later.”

When we first got started in business, we had zero confidence and zero skills to offer anyone, let alone the online business community. Our skills from corporate were definitely not transferable to what we wanted to do today. But every single service that we offer today, we learned as a result of saying yes to multiple opportunities and learning how to do them later.

For example, saying yes to documenting our travels allowed us to learn a very valuable skill called video editing. Saying yes to helping a client manage their social media channels allowed us to understand how social media management works. Saying yes to helping a client with their book layout taught us, well, forced us to actually learn how to use Adobe InDesign. Those are just some of the examples where we said yes to opportunities and figured out how to do it later, which allowed us to acquire a new skill.

Were we scared to take on some projects? Of course, we were. But we figured that if we couldn’t figure out how to get the end result or deliver the result to the client, we could either subcontract someone else that had the expertise to do the work for us or we could refund the client’s money. Of course, both scenarios weren’t the most ideal. However, this took a lot of pressure off us in the beginning, which allowed us to say yes to a lot more opportunities that came our way.

What this taught us was that we didn’t need to have everything figured out in the beginning. All we needed to do was have the courage to say yes and the willingness to learn. And the best part of it is that we actually learned everything for free on YouTube. And I’ll be happy to tell you that up until today, not once have we needed to refund a client’s money because they weren’t happy with our work or hire someone to come and save us.

Lesson 2: Choose the Right Path

In the early days, our first goal was to replace our corporate income so that we could start traveling around the world. But what we didn’t realize was that it was extremely critical for us to actually choose the right services to offer our clients.

There are two categories of services that you can offer.

The first category is what I call freedom limitation services. These are services that require you to be in endless meetings to deliver the end product to the client. These services include virtual assistant, project management and event management.

The second category is what I call freedom services. This type of service allows you to work flexibly on your own terms. These services include web design, video editing, social media management, social media advertising and graphic design.

Of course, there’s pros and cons to both categories. I guess it just depends on what type of person you are and what type of services you prefer to deliver.

For me, I’m introverted, so I prefer not to be in meetings all day. I’d prefer the client just to send me work, give me a deadline, and then I get it done. Whereas Tamz is more extroverted than me. So for her, being in meetings is not really an issue. She loves talking to people. She loves adding value that way. And she’s able to build a much deeper relationship with her clients than I am able to do.

But if your goal is to maximize travel and freedom, then this lesson becomes extremely important for you. We had to learn the hard way during our three-month trip around Europe. I remember the day we were visiting Fisherman’s Bastion in Budapest. Because Tamz had a meeting in the middle of the day, I had to carry her laptop throughout the whole day. The worst part was that her meeting went over time and by the time she was done, she didn’t get to really enjoy Fisherman’s Bastion. She didn’t get to walk around at all. This is what I mean by the limitations of the services that Tamz offers. If you want to maximize freedom and travel, sometimes you can’t move a meeting to a more convenient time.

The reason we could handle it back then was probably because we had a lot fewer clients. The last few trips to Asia, we didn’t have that many interruptions.

which I feel having only 1 or 2 clients in the freedom limitation services category, is the perfect balance for travel enthusiasts like us.

Lesson 3: Focus on Increasing Your Average Order Value

Whenever we are setting new revenue goals in our business, we usually default to two methods to reach them.

The first one is the most obvious one: increase the number of clients.

The second one is to increase the average order value per client.

My favorite is the second option because when clients already love the work that we do and they trust us, it is a lot easier for us to upsell them on a new service that we’re able to offer them. At the same time, most of the clients that we currently work with almost always need another service that we are able to provide. For them, It’s a lot easier to pass on the work to us instead of trying to find five different vendors to help them with five different tasks.

For example, if you’re a business coach, you’d probably need assistance with website updates, social media management, maybe video editing for your YouTube channel or courses you want to launch, graphic design for any events or banners you want to create, content creation, and the list goes on. This is why the compound effect of the first lesson was so critical for our business growth in the beginning. Because every time we learned a new skill, we’d be able to offer that to our current existing clients. We were able to increase our revenue by over 600% without needing to onboard new clients.

Think about it this way: let’s say you learned a new skill called Facebook advertising and you wanted to help your 10 clients increase their leads. Let’s say you offer it to 10 of these clients and only five of them say they want to work with you on it. Out of those five, you charge them $1,000 per month for helping them run and manage their ads. That’s an extra $5,000 on top of what you are already earning with them just from learning a new skill. That’s what I mean by the compound effect, the more skill sets you learn and the bigger your client base grows, the more revenue you start earning without even needing to onboard new clients.

However, as great as it was for us to increase our revenue without increasing our client base, this also came with some risks. That’s why if you don’t balance Lesson 3 with Lesson 4, you might just run into problems down the road.

Lesson 4: Diversify for Freedom

When a client starts to account for more than 15% of your revenue, it starts to actually put your freedom at risk. Here’s an example to illustrate my point.

Let’s say your business generates $10,000 per month and your lifestyle costs you $6,000 per month. You have client A that pays you $8,000 per month and clients B and C that pay you $1,000 each. When you look at that equation, which client would you be most worried to lose? It’s obvious, right? It’s client A. Because if you lost client A, you would have to decrease your lifestyle dramatically to account for the 80% loss in revenue from your business. In this situation, to avoid losing client A, you, as well as myself, would probably do anything legal to keep that client. And therein lies the problem. Client A can pretty much tell us to jump, and we’d have to say, “How high?”

This is what happened in the early stages of our business. We had a few clients that accounted for a vast amount of our revenue. So every time we traveled, we’d always have to be up at crazy hours to meet deadlines to keep our clients happy so we could continue traveling. That’s what I mean by balancing Lesson 3 and Lesson 4. We had to figure out a way to increase the number of clients and the average order value, but at the same time, if the average order value of one client starts becoming too big, we then start increasing more clients. The reason we do that is so we don’t feel trapped like in the above example I shared.

The other benefit of this is that you’re able to start choosing the projects you actually want to work on instead of just working on projects because you want to earn the income. From our experience, we found that when most of our clients are at around a 15% threshold, it gives us the peace of mind that if we had to lose the clients today, it wouldn’t affect our lifestyle. At the same time, we’d be able to make up that difference quite easily.

Lesson 5: Systemize to Go Part-Time

This lesson is the secret to how we went from working eight to 10 hours a day down to three to four hours a day for Tamz and around two hours a day for me, while still increasing our revenue.

Side note: Outside of working with our clients or on our business, we spend a huge amount of time on other things like YouTube. So yes, if you don’t have anything else that you want to do outside of working on client work or building a business, you can definitely build this business past six figures by working three to four hours a day while exploring the world.

When we looked at our schedules, we realized that most of our time was spent in meetings with clients going through project requirements. At this stage, we weren’t really sure what to do because, without meeting with the clients, how would we know what we needed to do? That’s just how the industry works, right?

The more clients you get the less time you would naturally have. WRONG! That was a false belief we were telling ourselves!

Luckily, during that period, I was going through a course that focused on systemizing and training your clients. The concept was so simple that we didn’t know if it would even work, but since we had nothing to lose, we tried it anyway, and to our surprise, it worked. We decreased our hours by more than 50%.

Here’s the concept: train your clients to only email you or add project requirements in a project management tool like Asana or Trello. This way, you spend no time in meetings and only time on client deliverables. I know, you’re probably thinking, is that it? Yup, that’s it.

Conclusion

These five lessons are more than business strategies; they’re stepping stones to how we managed to build our online business while traveling around the world. Start by saying ‘yes’ to opportunities, then use your growing skills to enhance your service offerings and increase your client value. Diversify your client base to protect your income and systemize your processes to reclaim your time.

Follow these steps, and you’ll not only build a successful online business but also enjoy the freedom that comes with it. Take the first step today and transform your business into a source of both income and independence.