When I was 26 I quit my 9 to-5 job to go Origin Story all in on freelance writing, horrible decisions . I spent probably the entire first month trying to find clients on upwork getting paid like $25 to write articles for travel websites and other random companies. Watching my bank account just go down and down and down until one day I had a brilliant idea .I had been writing on this website called quora and in a desperate attempt to pay my bills I started mentioning in my quora answers by the way if you want to start writing on quora let me know and I’m happy to help, and then it was the weirdest thing all of a sudden money started just raining down from the sky some kind of crazy money raid I bought myself.A Bright yellow Ferrari I got my mom a yacht and every morning I would wake up to the sound of Applause from literally all 5.35 billion people on the internet cause that’s how you think it works. Right? yeah no that’s not what happened .What happened was I had an anxiety attack because I had about 60 days of Runway left before I was completely out of money. I think I maybe had $33,000 saved up at the time my monthly rent was like 1,200 bucks per month and then after groceries and a train pass yeah less than 60 days a Runway. So what I did is I started sending emails to every single person I’d ever met trying to see if they needed a writer or knew someone who needed a writer and then one morning one of those Outreach emails came back around an internet friend of mine. Someone I’d met on quora had never met in real life introduced me to one of his clients who wanted to turn content from his new book into articles. Couple fun facts about this guy 60-year-old entrepreneur had built a family business to several hundred million in revenue and ended up selling the business for over a billion dollars we got on the phone. I educated him about this new writing platform called quora and knowing he had sold his company for a billion dollars. I decided to shoot for the moon and charge him.You’ll never believe it $100 per article sitting right here at my $15 desk from Goodwill. After I sent him the article he was actually the one who said to me wow it’s like you’re my own personal ghostWriter. That was the first time I’d ever heard that word. I didn’t know anything about ghost writing. I just knew I’d stumbled into something big one client led to two two clients led to four until all of a sudden through a combination of referrals and my own writing on quora. I had nearly a dozen clients .I was Ghostwriting articles in airports. I was Ghostwriting articles in cabs .I was even ghostwriting articles on vacation.Anyways I was ghost writing to two three sometimes four articles per day writing for over a dozen different clients. I was working hard but this is how I made my first 10 grand per month. At the time I felt Rich.
Stage 2 – $30k/month
Once you know the basics of ghost writing client management .Cold Outreach it’s pretty easy to get to 10K per month which is exactly what I teach Ghostwriters ,how to do in our premium ghost Writing Academy but stage two and how I went from 10K per month to 30k per month you need to do three things differently I call it the three PS packaging pricing and positioning here’s what I changed that got me from 10K per month to 30k per month first packaging. I stopped selling articles for $100 a pop and instead I started selling a monthly package of 12 articles for a $3,000 retainer pricing by moving to a retainer model. I was able to get my profit per article up from $100 to about $250 so almost tripling profitability and positioning lastly you can do this on your own . But I decided to to team up with one of my best friends his name is Drew and position our offer under an agency and we made our Niche ghost writing specifically for Founders and sea level Executives so packaging pricing positioning and sitting in his one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta we came up with the name for our agency we called it Digital Press which became the first ghostwriting Agency for Founders and Executives . I always get this question we split the business 50/50 he was going to talk to the clients and handle sales.I was going to handle all the ghostwriting and this is how we scaled to 30 grand per month in less than 2 months. It happened very quickly now the difference between stage two and Three – $60k/month.
Stage 3 – $60k/month
Where you’re doing around 30 grand per month and stage three where you’re doing around 60 Grand per month. It all comes down to one thing cold Outreach to be honest you can get to 10K per month 20K per month, even 30k per month. Just leveraging people in your network asking for introductions asking clients for referrals upselling clients on other services. But if you want to get above 30k per month you need to become a cold Outreach expert. We had a bunch of Savvy strategies and I teach all of them in our premium ghost Trading Academy. But one that really crushed it for us was to use crunch base .So if you don’t know what crunch base is, it’s basically a big directory for startups. You can see which companies have raised money from who and when they close their funding round. So what we would do is look for companies that had just closed a huge round of funding . Then reach out to them and say something like hey congrats on raising your series , want to send some of that money our way just kidding our Outreach message was really really good. Because it spoke directly to the startups marketing problems and if we could get them on the phone out of every 10 calls we would close half of them. This strategy is how we ended up generating millions of dollars in Revenue now what is running a 60 Grand per month agency. Actually look like so our org chart looked like this me and my co-founder Drew was responsible for the business as a whole. He focused on cold Outreach in sales and training our one salesperson .While I focused on building my personal brand speaking and writing online.So we both had cold and warm leads we had a head of HR a head of Ops who handled payroll accounts receivable time off requests. And all things internal organization and then she helped us manage two teams and each team was made up of a ghost writer and an account manager and each team was responsible for anywhere from 8 to 12 different clients .Everyone was full-time We paid everyone above Market salaries. This is how we scaled to 60k per month with both me and Drew completely out of the work making around 200k per year looking back. This was The Sweet Spot of our business it was super profitable. we were spending literally zero dollars on marketing because we had mastered our cold Outreach strategy .We had a small team of six people . I were completely out of the day-to-day work.Drew, he didn’t have to talk to clients we had account managers. for that and I didn’t have to do any of the ghost writing anymore because we had hired Ghost Writers and we were both making 20K per month and really just responsible for the business .As a whole, we had no idea how good we had it instead because we had gotten to this level so quickly we got here in like 5 or 6 months. We made the mistake of thinking we could just keep growing forever. So instead of stopping here which is what we should have done we thought like most first time Founders. The whole point of the game was to just keep scaling as quickly as possible.So that’s what we did and in the end this probably ended up costing both me and Drew around a million bucks each we went from stage.
Stage 4 – $120k/mo
In this stage we were doing around 60k per month to stage 4 doing over 120,000 per month very quickly so in a matter of 8 months. We Grew From six full-time team members to almost triple that around 18 full-time team members. This was in 2018 right as crypto markets were booming at that time over 30% of our clients were actually crypto companies that had raised huge amounts of money and they all needed help with marketing and positioning their Founders as industry. Thought leaders there was a point where we were actually hiring two full-time team members per month .Every month for 6 months in a row and this is where things started taking a turn for the worst. I was travelling every single month, sometimes twice a month to see clients all over the US. I was speaking at conferences to get in front of potential clients. I worked on every vacation. My wife forced me to look back. They weren’t even close to vacations and I was still writing on quora still maintaining my column with Inc magazine and just trying to generate New Leads needs for the business our agency was growing so fast . I was pushing myself so hard that I actually ended up in the hospital with shingles and still we didn’t slow down . I remember interviewing potential employees taking client calls and jumping into ghost writing pieces for our most demanding clients while on painkillers sitting up in bed for almost a month .It was brutal but Topline Revenue was going up and as a 27-year-old first-time founder responsible for 18 full-time team members and their livelihoods . I thought this is what entrepreneurship is all about which is a lesson I had to learn the hard way stage five and how we went
Stage 5 – $180k/month
From 120,000 per month to 180,000 per month happened even faster so in mid 2018 early 2019 .We reached a point where we were closing two or three new clients every single week. Each one paying us anywhere from 3 to 5,000 per month for two to four thought leadership articles. So you know we were increasing the prices and we were decreasing the workload I literally started looking at mansions to buy in Hollywood Hills. I kept looking at our business dashboard climb higher and higher . I thought wow by the end of this year I’m going to be a millionaire.Since demand didn’t seem to be slowing down we thought we would just keep growing like this forever and this is where we made a crucial error instead of pulling money out of the business. What Drew and I did is we cut our salaries to 100K per year so less than half of what we were making at earlier stages . All so we could reinvest in even more growth then we started hiring right ERS and account managers early so we could train them because we thought clients were just going to keep walking through the door at our height . We had 23 full-time employees and over 80 concurrent clients all over the us. All over the world doing more than 180,000 per month in revenue and our ghostwriting agency Digital Press was producing as many articles .As Inc magazine or Forbes every single month we thought we were headed for the moon and Disaster Strikes then the crypto companies ran out of money and overnight we lost 30% of our clients but because we had just hired all these new people and didn’t want to fire them only to have to rehire more people later cause we thought we’re just going to keep growing Drew and I decided to cut our salaries again to keep everyone on payroll while the business recovered never make that mistake .That only made the problem worse we were already stressed about the future of the business and feeling responsible for all of these people .But when we cut our salaries again we became the lowest paid people in the business which put even more stress on our personal finances. So all of a sudden despite being the founders of a multi-million dollar agency we were worried about paying our own rent and that was the beginning of
the end near the end of 2019 .
The Trip That Changed My Life
Our third year in business my wife got laid off and she wanted to use her Severance to do some travelling and she suggested we spend a month in Mexico I could work remotely during the week and then on the weekends we could go exploring .I thought this was a terrible idea because not only was I struggling financially but we had just let six employees go and I was working 12 hours a day just to keep our agency alive. But she was insistent and told me how hard I was working wasn’t healthy and that it was taking a toll on our relationship. So to show her that she was a priority I agreed to go and that trip ended up changing the direction of my entire life. So one weekend about 3 weeks into the trip we spent two nights in this little house .I don’t know if you can even call it a house. It was like a Hut on Lake Bakalar . Which if you don’t know is supposed to have magical healing properties people travel here from all over the world . Our first day here I had the most wild out of Body Experience completely sober just me in the water all of a sudden I felt like I was finally ready to be honest with myself. I wasn’t some Silicon Valley high growth startup founder playing for a giant exit. I was a small business owner running an unprofitable agency with no end in sight and along the way I had completely given up my own personal writing. I was working 12 hours a day for at this point less money than I was making as a copywriter working a 9 to-5 job . The first time in a long run I felt like I could see things clearly and I knew it was time to
get my life back after that trip. We were in the red another $20,000 so an entire month of working non-stop just to lose 20 grand and that was the nail in the coffin for me. I told Drew I couldn’t do it anymore; he felt the same way; it was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. But a month later we let all 16 of our full-time employees go in one day we fired 70 of our clients we kept our favourite 10 to work with and Drew and I went right back to running our ghost writing agency him talking to the clients me doing the ghost writing. Overnight we went right back to earning A4 million each per year which was a painful realisation. Now I call it the 10x Choice do you want to 10x your income and build an agency or do you want to work on10th the amount of time and Achieve maximum work life balance Different people want different things.
What I Would Do Differently
After we scaled our agency back down .I decided we didn’t care about ramping Revenue .We wanted to justoptimize for work life balance pad our personal bank accounts a little bit and rest after this journey which ended up being a very lucky decision. Because 4 months later Co hit but I still don’t regret the three-year Journey we went on . I learned more about business in those 3 years than any MBA program could ever teach.I’m glad we tried to scale to the Moon because now I know what it feels like but if I could go back I would have stopped at stage three six employees two ghost writers two account managers a head of Ops and a salesperson 15 to 20 clients doing around 60k per month in Revenue completely out of the work just managing the team making around 20K per month personally and then I would improve our offer increase our prices upsell our favourite clients create internal efficiencies. Especially using tools we have today that we didn’t have back then like Chachi BT spend more time building my personal brand and increasing warm lead flow start a wait list for clients instead of hiring more team members right so .You want to build up demand and eventually sell digital products that are 100% margin increasing the profitability of the agency as a whole and getting more people in our ecosystem this hybrid approach of providing services but also selling digital products that educate potential customers on how you do what you do is the new wave for small highly profitable agencies and this is the exact path we lay out for Ghost Writers in our premium ghost writing Academy from someone who’s been there and done it themselves who has ghost written for over 300 different Founders and Executives built the first ghostwriting agency to millions of dollars written a book about it and trained hundreds of other writers on how to do the same so . If you want to get into ghostwriting you can either go on a brutal multi-year journey and try and figure it out on your own like I did or you can get there in a couple months we’ve seen people get there in a couple weeks and I can be your Mentor.
–Nicolas Cole