I’ve built a strong team and leveraged systems. I started as a solo‑entrepreneur, scaling up to about $120K on my own, then realized a one‑person model was unsustainable. I shifted to a hybrid approach: about 80% of my time on agency work and 20% on R&D, personal branding, and YouTube. By delegating video outlines, editing, and other tasks to a community manager and a virtual assistant, I’ve reduced the daily workload from 3‑4 hours to roughly one hour while still growing revenue across agency retainer work, referrals, and info products.
Instead of selling custom builds or one‑off projects, switch to productized services. Create a simple, repeatable deliverable—like a basic CRM setup—so you don’t have to go through a lengthy scoping phase, learn new platforms, or do extensive revisions. You can price it lower (e.g., $2,000) and deliver more of them each month. Five $2,000 projects equal $10,000, which is double what you’d make from a single $5,000 project. The trade‑off is higher leverage: you either keep the old model and grow slowly, or you redesign your business to run on repeatable, smaller projects. That’s how many freelancers and solo agencies now hit $20‑$40k months.
If you're already at $20K monthly profit, the math works out perfectly to reach $1M revenue. Assuming $25K monthly revenue, you'd need to triple it to $75K/month to hit $1M annual run rate, which gets you close to $900K. You're doing a good job, but remember growth isn't linear—you'll hit fulfillment bottlenecks, need to dial back, improve fulfillment, then find new channels, possibly hire. As an opportunity, you should join my Make Money with Mike program for more one-on-one time; it includes a $25K/month agency program that could help. If you're already at $20K-$25K profit, you're pretty close.
My services are not $100k/month; right now the retainer is $9,400/month. The core offering is AI and automation for growth—building systems that improve top‑of‑funnel revenue. This includes lead‑generation systems, cold email, speed‑to‑lead tactics, onboarding CRMs, automated emails after sales calls, CRM logging, voice recordings, etc. We’re scaling the agency toward that $100k/month mark.
The biggest one-time contract I sold was mid $220,000 for a project I called 'Uber for lumpers'—a system connecting companies needing lumpers (people who load/unload ships) with lumper workers. My business partner and I built it, but it was a total pain and not worth the time; it was one of the first projects we sold, so I took on custom work, but I don't recommend doing custom projects more than a couple times early on because there's little ROI on your time—my hourly rate is about $50. After that, I did a proposal generator system project that paid $1,500 and took only about 5–10 minutes to fulfill (plus ~30 minutes selling and a 30‑minute kickoff call). That gave a huge return on investment and unlocked the leverage idea: I could either make $225,000 in month‑one revenue from a big custom project, or I could create templates and sell the need, then spend five minutes copying a template I already built. Regarding agency requests, I get about 10 genuine agency inquiries per month; most want to invest $15K–$20K and work with me on a three‑month subscription at $5,900/month ($17,700 up front). I haven’t finalized my agency dynamics yet. The businesses that reach out most are high‑earning industries: fintech, software, financing/investing (e.g., underwriting firms that need automated financial data and email replies), and companies installing power grids that take a cut of hundred‑million‑dollar projects. My agency currently makes about $25,000 a month; from the $128,000 profit I mentioned, that’s roughly 20% of my income. Monthly profit isn’t the only metric—enterprise value matters. Info products are hard to sell because they’re tied to me; agencies have low multiples, whereas a SaaS product can achieve much higher multiples. I’m therefore building templates and done‑for‑you services, continuing to scale the agency for enterprise value and to stay connected to what I teach, because in coaching, when a system works, people often abandon it to teach it, which makes it outdated. I want to avoid that.
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