Business Lessons from a Tough Month

Lessons from a Tough Month at Paired

My company Paired had a negative month in October, and I wanted to talk about some of the takeaways and lessons from a particularly stressful time in the growth of that business.

So if you’ve been following my Paired updates, you’ll know that generally the business has been great. The fulfillment side is dialed, and our incredible testimonials from clients mean that we can actually recruit really, really well. 

On the client acquisition side, this is currently where we are struggling a bit. We have organic running smoothly, bringing in a solid amount of our business. This comes from social media, YouTube, and our network. 

Our referral business is also strong and brings us great leads each month.

Now, the reason why Paired lost money last month was mainly for 2 reasons: delayed invoicing and increased marketing costs.

When a client hires someone, it usually takes a few weeks to pay. Some people haven’t paid us in months (we’re working to get outstanding invoices handled). So while we closed a solid number of roles in October, we didn’t collect as much as we wanted to.

Now, let’s talk about the increased marketing costs… one thing we’ve been trying to crush is paid ads. Yes, running ads on Facebook… something I never thought I’d do. But, I realized that if we want to scale and grow beyond a certain point, we absolutely need to do ads. Because the goal is to be able to set up a system where if we put in $1 in ad spend, we get $X in revenue. 

So far, our ads have not been profitable. We’ve been testing a bunch which means we are burning money. And it’s crazy because the performance of ads varies so much.

The creatives you use as well as the landing page both are incredibly important, and we’ve seen some creatives just perform atrociously whereas some perform much much better. So internally, our team has been scrambling to figure out this leakage of money. If we can solve this problem, our business will grow exponentially. But in the meantime, it does hurt to see so much wasted ad spend 🙁

These are growing pains that every company needs to go through if they want to scale beyond organic, slow growth.

Okay, so here are some takeaways from the month about business in general (and my media business):

• We’re growing different divisions within my media company. And we are rebranding to a better name! Goal is to build a media conglomerate in the education and lead gen space.
  

• I decided to shut down a couple projects we had invested time/money into. Focusing on better stuff.
  

• Brought on a couple new important hires to the media business - a full-time head of finance and GHL specialist. Both overseas positions.
  

• Realized I was blindly delegating too much stuff without following up properly and overseeing progress. Getting better at being more involved in operations.
  

• Realized I need to focus more on two things besides the above: filming and writing. For YouTube and for my newsletter and LinkedIn page. Two of the highest ROI activities I’ve been slacking on.

Overall, October was a memorable month. I also moved into 2 new houses and am splitting time between Los Angeles and Orange County! It was absolutely crazy and I am so glad that we’re mostly settled in by now.

Have a great rest of your week!

- Charlie

I Make $300,000/Month with 50 YouTube Channels

Asking IRONMAN Athletes What They Do For a Living!