be stupid
my business changed forever the day i was told to be stupid.
"i'd gotten too smart"
i was intrigued by the ridiculousness of the advice.
i was more than 2 years into my business and was in stalemate, unable to grow past a few thousand dollars a month.
when i first started my simple website rental business, thats all that it was.
simple.
pick a city & niche. build a website. rank it. rent it.
stupid, right?
i followed these simple steps and within a few months had my first deal.
$700 per month for an ugly little towing website in huntsville, alabama (see screenshot below)
i had no experience building websites or doing anything online.
heck i didn't even know what a domain was. (the name for the www. part)
i was stupid.
a month after my first deal i landed another deal following the same steps. this time a crawlspace encapsulation website.
$1000 up front and then $100 per lead. oh, and as a cherry on top, he bought my lunch at texas roadhouse.
being stupid meant i was being simple. i wasn't overcomplicating what was already proven to work.
i had followed a simple process that had materialized into a $700/month deal.
why hadn't i just focused on doing that 100 times?
i had gotten too smart.
i looked at my business. i was offering 5 different services now including SEO, social media management, consulting & more.
being "smart" and assuming that adding more services to my business would equate to more money, had done the exact opposite
he was right. it was time to get stupid. time to simplify.
and "get stupid" i did
i got rid of every single service i was offering other than simple website rentals.
i decided to focus on one niche (tree service
i decide to go even further and simplify my deal structure and only accept flat fee deals. (where the business got all the leads for a flat amount each month)
i got REAL stupid i'll tell ya.
8 months later my website rental business was pumping out $100K/month (gross).
if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
what you can do today
go simplify your business. if you aren't in business yet, simplify your life. go look at the time in your life when you were having the most success. that time when everything was clicking and it felt like the world was at your fingertips.
ask yourself "what was i doing then, that i'm not doing now?"
more importantly ask yourself "what things am i doing now, that i wasn't doing then?"
if you're in the website rental business, get rid of every service you offer that isn't you building and renting simple websites.
focus on 1 niche
offer only 1 deal structure (flat fee).
use only 1 sales process (i use results in advance)
i mean it
you wanna make real money in this business?
be stupid. be simple.
-nick
