Would you like to know what I do if I had to start my business from scratch?
I've had my business for 10 years now and I'm in a pretty good place. And I
feel I've learned a lot because I've made a ton of mistakes. Well in this
video, I'm going to break it down in just a few minutes of exactly what I do if I
went back and did it all over again so that I could get here a lot faster.
Okay, right at the beginning I want to say, I would do the same thing that I've
done. Now, I it took me 10 years to get to this point. So, there's some things
that I would be able to skip. And so what I'm going to do is first of all tell you
exactly what I've created because I would make sure I would create the exact
same thing. Then I'm going to share with you some of the things that I did that I
would make sure to not do if I were do to do this all over again.
Kind of like the mistakes that I would avoid if I were you. So, is that fair
enough? So, let me start with... What I've created is I have a company that
provides a service that other people fulfill for me. And that... That's pretty
cool. And that is pretty huge So, if I can explain what I mean there, people hire me
to produce their YouTube channels. But I don't produce them. I'm the strategy guy
and I put in some time towards the channel. But the majority of the time,
although long hours are put in by my filming team, my editing team, my YouTube
team, my design team, thumbnail team, they do all the work. And that is so awesome.
Because I can just go out and speak and people want to hire me. They say "How do I
work with you?" They pay me and I hook them up with my team. So, I want to go
step by step and let you know how I created this, okay? Because the goal is
you want to be able to have a service that you can sell for a very high price.
And yet have someone else fulfill on it. My recommendation and where I found
success is that in order to charge a high price, you've got to deliver
extremely high value. If people are going to pay me 6 figures to produce their
YouTube channel for a year, they better get seven figures of results, okay? Now,
this is a topic for another conversation. But know that I do get those results for
my clients. But it takes 12 to 24 months to get to that point. So, they're making a
big investment. They're getting a much bigger return. You've got to have that
same thing. You can't just provide a service that doesn't lead them to
getting more value than what they're paying for it. Okay, here's the next step.
Give away your service for free in the beginning.
Like seriously. That's crazy, right? I couldn't give away my service because I
didn't have a track record. I had proven my strategy in small scale. And now, I
wanted to take it full-scale, large scale and produce a whole YouTube channel with
with this focus on this strategy. And I could not even sell my service at cost
where I wouldn't get... Wasn't going to make any profit at all, I couldn't sell it. So,
I approached a few people and I said, "I will give you my service for free. We'll
be partners on this channel. We'll share future profits." I had one person take me
up first. And we started producing that channel. And today, that channel is
bringing in $600,000 per month. I now have a track record of
success, don't I? I went 2 and a half years without making a dime on this
channel. 2 and a half years. A lot of work. And I just believed in the future. I
believed in my strategy so much. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to do
what it takes to give yourself some credibility? To give yourself a track
record? Once you have a track record, you've been doing all this work for free
up to this point, right? But once you have a track record, people will now hire you.
And you can charge what your services worth and you can hire other people to
do that work. That's what I've done. I've hired other people to do the filming, to
do the editing of this service that really has a huge track record and will
really get them great results. So, to say that another way, I still provide the
expertise but my team puts in the long hours and my client, they get the results.
Okay, so what lessons have I learned? What mistakes have I made along this 10-year
journey? I would avoid business loans. See, I got a loan because I thought, "Well, I've
got a successful company" at a point right I had this financial rollercoaster
and I was at one of these points of somewhat success. And I thought, "I just
need to put money into marketing now." So, I got a significant loan --business loan
and I put it all into marketing and it didn't result in anything. And so now, I
had a big chunk of debt. And so, I would say don't do that. Don't
go into debt for marketing. See, I didn't have a sales funnel. Yeah, if I would have
done some marketing and put that traffic into a sales funnel that was working but
I didn't I didn't have anything like that in place. Everything I was doing was
manual. And nothing that that was really automated or scalable through
advertising or marketing. Another thing that held me back from becoming
successful or financially stable a lot sooner is this thermostat. I had this
financial thermostat that I could not break through. Like even though I had the
potential or I had the ideas or I had the sales numbers or the leads coming in,
right here was comfortable. And if I started making more revenue than that, I
would just relax. The stress was gone and so I'd ease off and then it would this
temperature would settle back down. But if it started getting down here, I
started getting uncomfortable again. So, I'd kick it into gear, I'd make more
phone calls, I'd put on a different event. And I'd get sales coming up to here. And
so, I stated that same financial thermostat for years. And so, if I were to
go back, I would find a way to break through that financial thermostat. I mean,
I'm in a different mental place now. I have 10 times my income from that point.
And I've got big plans of where I'm going from here. I'm hoping that there's
a lesson in there for you that you can apply to find out. Do whatever you can to
break through any financial thermostat like that. Okay, a third big mistake that
I made is early on, I put all my energy into these free channels that I created
for a couple of my clients. And I didn't even create the Nate Woodbury channel. I
mean it existed but I wasn't doing the same things on my channel that I was
doing for my clients. So, it's not that I wasn't practicing what I preach because I
was doing it. I was producing all these channels and I was following all my
rules on my clients channels. But I didn't follow the rules. I didn't produce
regular content on my own channel for several years. And that's a big mistake.
I wish I would have done that. I'm obviously doing it now. And
I'm in a really good place. I'm not complaining but that is one thing that
is a mistake that I would definitely go back and start from the beginning. Now,
some of the things that I've shared in this video relate to another video that
I recommend that you watch. It's how to start a video editing business. And so
that's the video that I recommend that you watch next. I'll put it on the screen.