From $0 to $7k MRR (in One Year) Through Web Design and Local SEO with Sam Sarsten

0:00I went to him and I said you know hey for $400 a month I'll do your SEO like I was just I was making these numbers up like I was trying to I was just trying to figure it out right and I want to be really honest about this for the people that are offering local SEO like you're G to have to the first couple it's gonna might be a little sketchy but that's okay um and so and he said like uh maybe and then I said well I'll give you three months for two months so if you give me $800 right now because I was looking at

0:28you know people on YouTube that were talking about sales was like if you do it right now we'll make that price happen he said I need to think about it and I said okay because I've always been really bad at sales uh but he thought about it for a week and actually a contact Farm submission came through on the website that he did or that we did and uh so he was like you know what I see the value in this let's try it out and the crazy part was when I was there in his shop uh that day he had one project and it was just him and three

0:52months later when I went back to his shop it was full and he had a helper working for him and he's still a client to this day welcome to the web design business podcast with your host Josh Hall helping you build a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love oh my gosh friends what what a chat we're about to dive into in this one web designers often ask me how long will it take to get to six figures and there's all sorts of different metrics for quote unquote success in web design but I think most commonly if you're living in the states or the UK or you're a western

1:34resident six figures is what it's going to take to be able to provide enough support for you and your family whatever that looks like so I often get the questions how how long will that take and it is a hard question to answer because there's so many variables when it comes to being able to get to six figures especially within a year it may depend on your background your time your availability your area of focus your expertise whether you're adverse to risk um just there's so many factors but it can be done and I am so excited to bring on somebody who has taken his business

2:07from zero to well beyond six figures in less than a year in fact Sam sarsden my guest in this podcast who is one of our most engaged members of my community web designer Pro who I've been able to see literally jump in before he had a paying client and now a year later is now bringing in get this cuz I checked in with him on this today at the time of recording this he is now bringing in over $7,000 in monthly recurring Revenue he right now has $7,150 in monthly recurring revenue mrr and that's not even including his other onetime services repeat work and hourly work so it can be done and in this

2:52episode Sam share is exactly how he did it we cover what the heck Sam was thinking in quitting his full-time job when he had zero paying clients what gave him the confidence to do that and start getting clients and start getting cash flow how he fell in love with one area of web design which was local SEO and how he made that his primary service and then subsequently how he began to offer that to build this recurring income we even get into some coaching into this later on because now Sam actually has some challenges and some pain points with such fast growth so all of that is covered and much more it was

3:27a real honor to have Sam on here as such engaged member of pro and just a personal honor for me to see what he's done in this year of business and he's just a shining example that you can do it now it's not to say that it's been a perfect uh you know unicorn rainbow Adventure there have been bumps in the roads but it can be done and Sam is a true entrepreneur and really I'm so excited about what he's done and what he's doing because Sam and I have actually partnered up more moving forward because he's really diving deeper into SEO and local SEO and

3:59teaching it it's an area that I cover a little bit in web designer Pro we talk a lot about SEO but Sam has gone even further into teaching local SEO so there's going to be some links and resources at the show notes for this episode make sure you don't miss them go to Josh hall.co 342 there we're going to have links to his agency website and his brand new local SEO Academy which is a wonderful offshoot of web designer Pro because a lot of Pros don't want to go too far into SEO but if you do even if you're not a member of webd designer Pro

4:30yet you can go to local SEO academy.co Josh and Sam has put a special offer together just for you just by being a listener of this podcast when you're a member of my community web designer Pro you'll always have an offer to join Sam's local SEO Academy but even as just a listener right now you can go there and get the special offer just for you all the show notes are going to be over at Josh hall.co 342 all right long intro but really important because it set the foundation for Sam who now you can hear his whole journey on going from0 to $7,000 Plus in monthly recurring

5:10Revenue awesome dude well like my shirt says Sam we're about to do some partying man I wore my party time shirt we're recording around July 4th you are wearing the true party shirt your web designer Pro shirt which is looking Killer looks good I love the baseball style too yeah right I feel like we need a pro softball team it'd be kind of hard to do cuz we're spread all over the world but weet C USA yeah we'll meet up for a summer pro softball league um speaking of a pro I you may have the most epic first year in business and like within a year Sam you have become

5:53100% like a web designer Pro so first off publicly I want to say dude I'm super proud to see your progress and everything you've done so far I know we're going to dive into everything you've done in this first wild year business but dude how's it feel oh man um unreal I think is the right word to describe it yeah I don't know like I can't express enough gratitude to um put into words where I was to where I am now so yeah all glory to Josh as I like to say um let's briefly talk about where you're at now and then let's backtrack where is your specifically where is your

6:35your Mr your monthly recurring Revenue today we're recording on what is it today the 9th July 9th uh where is your Mr today yeah I would say pretty consistently throughout 2023 uh whatever year this is 2024 um it's been over six figures except for uh one month and so uh that's and which is crazy to think um so that's pretty much been the recurring uh Mark and so I'd like to get that a little bit higher but uh that's that's good for right now so on track for for six figures is are you at the six to seven range on average like six 7,000 a month is that right yeah I mean the I've

7:17seen little spikes because of the way that I've been doing the SEO pricing has been more on the Sprint model and so you see like a big spike at the start and so when I get those spikes um I've had months over 10,000 uh and then uh but like the the the cap is usually between five and six or I should say the mm the mrr gotcha gotcha that's important distinction too for folks especially those who do have recurring plans like you do your big focus is on local SEO and recurring SEO which we'll dive into here um for everyone who's not prepared for that yes that's what happens like I

7:52think you had an 11,000 month to kick off this year if I remember right and then yeah you have some that's like four or 5,000 but the average is more for you around the 6K range which is on the doorstep of six figure like you know $100,000 that's just over 8,000 So within a year dude you are on track for six figures so that's incredible I love hearing that the average so far this year is is creeping up to the you know five six $7,000 months where were you at the start of this though take us back it's it's May 1 last year was your go

8:27live date right your your all in date yeah May 1st was the Allin date uh and so yeah May 1st 2023 uh we had zero paid clients that's not true I actually looked back and you know did my taxes and stuff and I had my score Mentor uh score is a you know nonprofit where they'll give you a business Mentor from the SBA highly recommend if that's in your area uh my score Mentor paid $300 for Google business profile optimization and one of my first clients paid like $5 to my stripe account to make sure worked uh that was one of my friends for a testimonial account or a testimonial

9:03website and uh so yeah so before May 1st we were at about $35 uh in revenue for then can designs uh so that was pretty that was a pretty scary place to leave my full-time job at yeah yeah you went head first head first into uh I mean you joined Pro prior to that and you told me you were thinking about going going full-time here soon and you just went for it the thing about you that I wasn't worried about though is that I could tell you had already done a lot of hard work up to that point to kind of build the foundation of your

9:37business so so many things we could dive into here but what what was your Runway like going because I don't always recommend diving head first with no clients full-time to quit a job uh obviously you're in a place where you don't have a family yet so you you have a little bit of flexibility and freedom financially I'm sure you would be down with eating noodles for a few months if you needed to like where what was your Runway what would have been uh I guess the sucin question is like how long did you have before you needed to start making money right yeah I had a

10:12couple wise advisers tell me that I should have an escape plan right they're like if this doesn't work out what are you going to do and so obviously part of that is having the runway and that was part of the advice that I got from taking the Josh Hall courses right is have a Runway don't just take the leap and I think that's one of the harder parts for people when they want to take the leap is when you have mouses to feed and you have other people to count on you it makes it a lot harder and so it's you know a blessing and a curse if you

10:44will but a blessing in this situation that I I don't have any mouthe to feed I don't even have to pay for loaves Kibbles over here and so you know like uh so that was a little bit easier but to answer your question I had uh you know I did the math and I said okay to pay all my bills and to eat off a Top Ramen like we did back in college um I I figured out what that number was I saved up three months and I put that in my checking account and then I saved up another three months and I had that in

11:10my savings account and so that was my plan I was like all right so I have six months of like very lean not even really business expenses and I set aside probably around uh initially $1,000 and and then it became like two and I think I all in all I ever invested in the business invest did was 3,000 and I paid myself back that um and so that was it so that was you know 6 months of not a whole lot and six months didn't look like a lot trust me um so you know if any emergencies would have come up or anything like that we we'd be having a

11:43much different podcast episode but luckily uh that didn't happen and I I did have to dip into that savings at some point so um it's very important to make sure you have that Runway built because you probably you're you're definitely going to need it and you're probably going to need that extra chunk too that's Wise counsil from you within one year Sam is to have three months of like active uh money that way like you know pretty much you're going to be using that three months regardless of how much you make in your business and then the fall back the fall back three months very very wise counsel for those who are

12:16getting ready to make the leap what did your business offers look like at that point this is going to refresh my memory obviously I know in depth but you know for those listening I'm sure everyone's curious like where was your business at at that point what what what did your offers look like and your price points look like yeah well I mean for me it's always just been do what Josh says and so you know I'd followed the the web design business course to a te I had my Sops even in the early days it was all in base camp exactly copied um had my 17 hats contract all that good

12:54stuff and so uh you know you always talk about build maintain grow uh and you know even back then even a year ago you were recommending like the grow service is probably the thing you grow into right you might not have that service right away and so I was like okay I'm G to build websites and I'm going to maintain websites and you know the dream I think that gets sold by people that are much uh more clickbaity on YouTube is that check it out man all you got to do is get all these clients and get them on maintenance plans and then you're G to be fine and you know you're more

13:27realistic about it like hey it's gonna you're not going to get 20 clients overnight and then you'll have enough recurring revenue from your maintenance plans to survive and like even really is 20 clients enough to do that and so you know that was it was nice that you kept like giving us this reality checks and it was nice too uh around the time I joined Pro I sat down with some people in Bend where I'm located here in Bend Oregon and they said I said you have any advice for somebody's just getting started and they said don't charge anything less than $3,500 for a website and that blew my mind I was like really

13:59um but the more I listen to you you were saying like don't charge anything less than 2500 across the country you know no matter where you're at and you know Bend some more affluent touristy type Town um and so uh to be able to hear that 3 sorry 3500 in Ben is 2500 in Ohio yes exactly yeah yeah whatever your dinners are uh in Ohio add $10 and that's what it is in Ben um and so um so yeah it was good to have that advice because it kind of gave me that frame of reference of like okay like I know I'm going to have to um you

14:33know be a little leaner in the early days right but that's the target I should be getting to as soon as possible and so I totally just followed your advice of like hey find a couple friends find some people in your circle do some testimonial sites and so I whipped out a couple you know none that I would s embarrass to point back to so you know we can always go back to my friend's backflow site which I think was one of my first uh websites uh that was brought up in Pro and uh you know um and so did a couple of those and then you know my

15:00biggest mistake which you talk about and it was just one of the few times I listened to Josh and one of the times I should have listened to Josh was that a lead is not a client and so I thought I'd landed a really big lead in the middle of February uh I was having kind of a rough time at work it was totally unrelated to my job it was just a specific task at hand and it was like that it was that thing that like flipped the switch of like I want to make this happen way faster um and so I thought I had that client and so that's when I put

15:26in my two months notice at my job because I was like the office manager and like the office everything so I knew it' take a long time to train somebody plus I figured it give me enough time to land a couple clients uh get a couple websites signed up and yeah between February 28th and May 1st we got zero clients signed up and that lead did not materialize into a client and so that was kind of the jumping out of the airplane and hoping for the best at that point but uh but yeah the initial Services was just websites and maintenance packages and I knew that I'd

15:56have to hustle uh and so may first that's what I decided to do yeah so for context you joined Pro January 26th of 2023 you were building your business up it's not like you launch it's not like you quit your job and then started to learn web design like you were already ready to you launch your business then um but very very important point a Le lead is not a client because I can't tell you I'm sure everyone has this story where you're like oh I got this they said they verbally said we're going to move forward this is like a five or $1,000 project we're in and then you

16:30make a big change and oh shoot actually they got cold feet or they had to run it up the ladder and the person ahead of them didn't approve it whatever whatever the fact may be blessing and disguise for you you were head you were thrown head first into this so you had your your offers prices nailed down um I want to get into SEO because that became pretty quick for you but I have to ask now how did you get your first client yeah did get the first two paid clients in that first month and thank God because I don't know where we'd be otherwise uh

17:06the first client was actually my former employer and so I know you talk about that and uh Eric dingler I've been listening to his new podcast and he's got some acronym for it I can't remember what it is but it's like the people in your circle so we'll have to uh hit up Eric later to remember it's something funny but it's not catchy enough to stick in my brain but it's basically people always got like Eric always has a new framework Eric is the CEO of my Agency for anyone who's not familiar uh yeah every time I talk to him he's like I got this new fstep framework I'm like

17:34Eric I'm losing track of all your Frameworks man which framework is this yeah no but it's basically talking about like your circle right start with your personal Circle then your social medias and kind of Branch out from there and just let people know you talk about this just making a hey I'm open for business post even if you've been open for business for a while it doesn't hurt to remind people like hey I'm I'm out here doing the thing and so you know uh my former employer definitely needed a website at point it was hacked and redirecting to a a website that was selling little blue pills and so that

18:03was one of my first projects for him I did it for free uh that was my first time working with a hacked website so that was fun that was very early chat GPT helped me find the PHP files that were the culprit so that was cool and uh yeah anyway um and so your first site was Viagra Viagra project yeah that was it yeah no uh so yeah so luckily his site their site needed a really big uh rehaul I think the last time it had been refreshed was in like 2018 and it wasn't responsive or anything like that and so it was kind of it was an easy win but

18:32also he's a very staunch business owner and so he was the one that talked me down and this was another time where I didn't listen to joshu where I was like he's not going to go higher than 2500 and you were like this is you know you you got to stick to your gun sometimes but then I also like looked at my bank account and said I need to make some money and so you know I think that was this is one of the few times that I didn't listen to Josh and I said I'm going to do it for $2,500 even though it's probably like a four or $5,000

18:57website but it was the first one I got paid for and uh and it's been a good one cuz one I think it looks good and two it's a bigger company in town it's probably actually the biggest company I've worked with and so it's nice to be able to point to that people know it in this area so that was it was sometimes you got to think about all of the factors right you don't want to do stuff for free all the time but uh and then it was just nice to get that money and as much as I want web designers to Branch out of their comfort zone with with

19:23confident pricing I also understand if it's early on you just need to get paid cool the the one aspect is like do I just don't want people to make like two cents per hour which can happen sometimes if you get a $10,000 project and you charge you know 1,500 for it but I think you're in a good position and you know that client is going to lead to other businesses well I do want to double click into this first client this paid project though because that is an it could be potentially a very awkward one your former employer so was he cool with you leaving like obviously you did

19:56a really good job of not burning that bridge if he is going to pay you to for your new Endeavor it's pretty cool yeah I think that was kind of a dicey Road and like we had talked about it at one point before I put in the notice I was like you know I'm starting to learn how to do websites so maybe someday I can do yours I mean I can't do it for free but you know we could probably do it for a good price um and so we had over the time where I was training my replacement we talked about different ways he's like

20:19well maybe you could do it at your hourly rate and I said I don't think that would be the best way to do it I should definitely run it through my business and all that stuff I have the LLC registered and all that and so um but then they they also had like kind of an allegiance to this other web designer in town who owns an agency but he was also really busy and really expensive and so that was kind of my in and so basically when I was coming back at like 4,000 he's like well for another thousand I could just go to the agency

20:43so maybe you know if this is one of your first websites and so that was that was a fair uh rebuttal and so but yeah I think one if there's I've learned a lot of lessons in life and one of them is you know try not to burn Bridges and uh you know that employer he was probably shouldn't have hired me for that job at the time did and I I worked my my rear off for him uh and I you know I wish I could have worked there longer because it was a good job all the guys there were really uh it was a really

21:09cool place to work but it just wasn't going to be what got me to where I wanted to be and so I was really grateful to be able to have the time to train my replacement who's still there today and then to still be able to hold a relationship with him and uh we run into each other sometimes Redmond's a small town and I do a lot of networking there and uh you know he was like kind of uh sponsoring one of the chamber events kind of was like one of the co-sponsors and he was there and so we were talking a little bit he's like

21:34looks like business is going all right and I was like yeah and so I think he was he's happy to see that you know because he he really wants to see us succeed other entrepreneurs succeed so uh so it's been it's been cool I'm sure everyone's screaming at the at their headphones like what was your job was it EMT is that right that was a long time ago I was actually an office manager uh yeah so it was like a it's like a coffee delivery company and so we they coffee out to the businesses uh bottled water other things like that for State supplies and so uh it's been around for

22:04a long time in the area and supplies yeah a lot of like companies big and small so it's pretty cool to well that's a gold as you probably know I think that's like the a gold uh in with tons of other businesses too you do their website and if they're if they're serving hundreds of businesses in that area and they're looking at their website and connected with them that's a gold mine it's a referral that was another one of the reasons where I was like well maybe that hasn't turned any business yet but who knows the the little then can designs at the bottom of their website to this day so who knows

22:33what that might turn into down the road it will yeah and and maybe a little proactive approach we could talk about this in Pro too maybe we could do a hot seat here soon talking about how to like talk to that employer or maybe some some beneficial things for him um just to get you in front of them or even maybe hosting some sort of workshop for their clients or something there's a lot of things you could do to to potentially I hate to say milk that network but milk of the network yeah right we'll find a better term for it uh what was your main

23:02marketing strategy apart from that you had that you know the previous employer about what were were you doing in-person networking were you doing online strategies at this point I I'd love to transition to SEO because that's what you're known for right now um but yeah what what was your marketing strategies yeah uh I think my first marketing strategy was to just make a website and hope that people would show up and uh turns out that doesn't work very well but I think a lot of people do that especially in this connect age you just think all right I have a website and now I'm going to get business uh and it tet

23:35for local SEO which we'll talk about later yeah which I was not doing yet uh um and so you know the first one of the first things I did which is kind of funny uh was uh I I started to do some content on YouTube but it was totally just like guessing like I had no idea what I was doing it was just random content sometimes I look back and just watch those videos to cringe at it um but uh you know I'll never take them down because they're just sentimental to me um but uh I I didn't understand how the game worked and it was like just

24:04watching like the 10 views and the like 12 subscribers and most of them were were my family um I was just like what am I doing like I had I had no strategy that was really it and so when I when I got out uh to going all in in in May so I registered the business in January that's when we joined Pro that month and then uh went all in in May and so the initial strategy was inperson net because that's what I I listened I was like all right all glory to Josh what does he say and you said inperson networking single category networking

24:34referral groups are really big and so I started to show up to any networking event I could find and then uh towards the end of May I started to check out like the BN in my area and the bnii like groups um and that was actually how I got my second client was just visiting a BNI group doing a onetoone and then they were like I need a website and I was like 3500 and they're like yes and I was like oh it's working um and so uh yeah and that's been one of my best clients uh to the state she's said Doula I never thought I would make a website for

25:03somebody that catches babies for a living that's her word it's not mine um but uh yeah she's been an amazing client and so I I I seriously consider joining the BNI group but in this area to get started it's $100 and at that time when I looked at my Runway I was like I can't swing that right now and so uh but I continued to show up the things there's a couple different groups uh in this area there's the chamber in Redmond um and so um yeah I was just trying to selectively uh do that and just get out there uh because I've really learned and

25:35you know trial by fire fire is that you have to get exposure in the early days people don't even know you exist and so you know it's not that people don't know what then can designs is and what it does but people don't know who Sam is and so they're like they're they don't even know you how are they going to learn to like you how are they going to learn to trust you how are they going to learn to want to buy from you um and so that was those were lessons that were hard-learned um and so the first couple paid clients you know besides that one I

26:02ended up getting a couple landing pages um trying to remember how the heck I got them uh I think I did get uh the next thing so as I was struggling to get clients the next thing I decided to work on was my own SEO um because why not right uh it's supposed to get you all this business if you do it right and so one of the first things I did before I even really knew how to do local SEO was I stole the Via Forge strategy as I like to call it from inside a pro and so in Josh's SEO course which you haven't

26:31taken it that should be the first SEO course you take um it he you know you have this example and I believe it was your SEO power partner from back in the day right uh he's a colleague of mine I have a different I had a different partner actually work with on SEO but he he was a colleague and I was like dude because I was asking him how are you because he didn't do any in-person networking and he he a multi6 figure business and I was like how are you getting clients and he's like SEO and I was like what tell me more more and he

26:59literally showed me what I show in my SEO course which is exactly how he created these local landing pages for SEO which quote unquote aren't supposed to be what Google likes nowadays it still freaking works it still does to this day and it's 2024 and so yeah that was one of the first things I did and actually I want to say one of my first landing page clients is in madress which is kind of a smaller town up to the North like an hour away and I think he's Googled madress web design and I was ranking first for that I wasn't ranking even in the top 30 for Bend web design

27:31but I was ranking first for madress web design and so I think that's how he got to the site um and so that was really cool to like get that early dopamine hit of like oh SEO can work uh and the other thing I was also learning too was going yeah real quick on that how long did it take between you making that location specific page to them reaching out to you um it was probably a couple months and honestly that's the only I've ever gotten from the madress page um not a lot of people search for madress web design I found out but it was CRA one

28:04thing I'll say is crazy uh is you know that page is there and continues to be in first this day it took me probably less than an hour to make the page it started ranking within a week and it sits there to this day so like and you know that's like one of the little lessons about local SEO like some of these wins can be really easy and even though you might not get a ton of results from it right away it's always sitting out there so if another person from madress needs a website it's still the first result so that's awesome sorry I didn't mean to

28:33D I was just curious about the window between you creating that location page and then getting a lead from it yeah no you're good yeah but that was that uh obviously just the like I need to do more SEO right but also like going out to the networking events and listening to people talk because they'd be like what do you do i''d be like web designer Pro over here but you know you say I build websites for small businesses and they're like yeah everybody does that but how do I rank hire on Google that seemed to be the follow-up question and also my very first business card which I

29:02don't have with me today that would be a fun visual aid but I put SEO actually as my uh grow service um and so uh even though I wasn't ready to offer it yet and so oftentimes I'd hand people a business card and they're like oh you do SEO and I'd be like uh well kind of I do it like in the website build um but you know really it's something you should do ongoing but I'm just not really at the point where I should be selling that to people and and like a lot of people would honestly be like hey when you're ready let me know and like I should have

29:31kept a log of those people but I didn't and so uh but yeah that was I started that was me like doing my first uh what do they call it uh you know you're asking people the questions the something marketing um where you're uh but anyway I was I was figuring out from the people from the actual conversations we were having that people cared about SEO and so I was like I should probably learn more about that and so you know a lot of people that do web design are probably familiar with the feast or famine that occurs between projects right you know you you get a project

30:03everything's good life is great and then there's that downturn in between clients right and then you get the next project and like ah sweet right and maybe it's even just the blips between the payments right the initial payment and the on delivery payment sometimes that can be a just a painful point where you're like I'm not getting any money right now and so uh I looked at Pro and I was looking like who's rocking it in Pro and there's people like April Ray that does email marketing uh and some other people that have grow services and I was like these are the people that appear to have

30:34six-figure businesses appear to be rocking it appear to have team members and I was like I think that's the missing piece I have to pick a grow Service uh and it was actually an that encouraged me to do um to look into Google Business profiles and so then I worked on my Google business profile and that made it show up on the first page which was still like 20th uh but that was just another quick win of like this stuff works you I just need to figure it out and so then I was like so every time I get in the famine stage after you know

31:03I got done with the like lying in the fetal position on the floor and chewing my nails I I get up out of that place of fear that I normally sit in a lot longer and I'd be like let's go learn something about SEO today and um that's just kind of how it started it's beautiful oh yeah I was joking about drum lessons on your business card I didn't know if you had any you know you don't want to follow don't want to follow my path exactly although although something quirky and funny like that could leaded projects too so yeah no drum lessons on there are

31:31you are you do you play guitar what's your what's your M uh Music musician uh instrument of choice um I used to play the violin when I was a kid actually there we go yeah I was getting pretty Advanced and then one day I asked my mom if I still needed to play and she's like you don't have to and I was like I'm done local SEO and violin training there we go it's a new passion pro project for you um but that is cool I think what hit on there in all seriousness Sam is that you were actively in person talking to real people real business owners because they

32:05will tell you what they're looking for and by golly I love that you had an interest in SEO a lot of people don't and that's where you know yeah you got to look do something else to help grow put in your growth service so for you I love that you that was the very that was the common Trend that they would be interested in a website and then inevitably ask for SEO so you went through the SEO course you started doing local SEO at that point I think we did a hot seat back then about your packages right I'm trying to remember now at that point

32:38when you were taking SEO more seriously like what was your first SEO offer your official offer package yeah so I've been kind of being really mindful about thinking about this as I talk to more and more people about it and uh you know your first client is always you when it comes to local SEO so definitely do that and so as I was doing as I was taking different courses and things like that and it's hard to find good courses out there some of them will give you like a blip like here's the theoretical and it's like okay I've learned about a 301 redirect enough like somebody tell me how to

33:10actually how do I actually rank higher for local SEO um but you know if you go out there and you grab like all the free resources on YouTube and pay for a couple courses you can kind of uh scrap together something um and so that's kind of what I was doing and every time I learned a new lesson I was like okay let's apply it to then can site and it was really cool to start to see the results materialize uh and like what got me to the point where I felt comfortable enough to offer it as a service was then can designs was starting to rank in the

33:39map pack uh for its Google business profile on this side of town it's very proximity based um and then it was also on the first page for Bend web design which was the keyword that I'd always been targeting um I finally made it to the first page and I was like oh okay I think I think I can finally do this and I'd also done it for those first couple clients the the coffee company the Doula I wasn't doing ongoing SEO but I was really dialing in the website based mostly based off of your SEO course and you know the Doula was second for Ben Doula the coffee place was really high

34:11for their keywords and so I was like okay so like this stuff works and I just have to get over the Imposter syndrome and offer it and so I decided to I had a really good lead come in from the networking group in Redmond that I ended up joining later on because they were cheaper but they're still really great they're great people I would there this morning anyway um had a good lead come through talk to the G and she was basically cool with like $500 a month and I was like okay I could that sounds like an okay starting place and so uh and her whole thing was she she has a

34:42she's a florist in redbond she was ranking third in the M pack and she wanted to be first um and so I was like okay like uh and this is where I came up with my little slogan that I say in every lead call I say well look I can't promise that I can get you to rank first but I do promise that I will work my ass off for you and she said that sounds good enough for me and so you know she was the first client and then that same week I reached out to the cabinet maker that I was working with and he his whole

35:09situation was he relocated from a different state that we don't like to talk about bend a lot whoops I hit the mic um and uh California anyway and so he moved to bend and he had no SEO obviously because we had to reesh his website and move it to bend and he was initially showing up like 30 something for like Custom Cabinets and I could see he had all these opportunities for his other services and down the road but he needed he would really need ongoing SEO and so I went to him and I said you know hey for $400 a month I'll do your SEO

35:41like I was just I was making these numbers up like I was trying to I was just trying to figure it out right and I want to be really honest about this for the people that are offering local SEO like you're G to have to the first couple it's G to might be a little sketchy but that's okay um and so and he said like uh maybe and then I said well I'll give you three months for two months so if you give me $800 right now because I was looking at you know people on YouTube that were talking about sales I like if you do it right now we'll make

36:07that price happen he said I need to think about it and I said okay because I've always been really bad at sales uh but he thought about it for a week and actually a contact form submission came through on the website that he did or that we did and uh so he was like you know what I see the value in this let's try it out and the crazy part was when I was there in his shop uh that day he had one project and it was just him and and 3 months later when I went back to his shop it was full and he had a helper

36:32working for him and he's still a client to this day uh and that Flores is first in the M pack right now so um so that was those two you know that g that got me over the impost syndrome that I can charge money and it also like showed me that uh whatever I'm doing is working like keep doing it refine the systems get it dialed in and push forward and around that time I started to learn about SEO Sprints shout out to Ryan Stewart blueprint training if you want to start a seven figureure SEO agency he's a pretty good resource to check out but the thing that I noticed was that a

37:09lot of people like I'm not trying to get to Seven figures I'm trying to get to my first six figures and then the second six figures right and I think a lot of people are in that spot and so I was finding a lot of the stuff that he was teaching good but it was at like a higher level that I wasn't quite ready to get to um and so I was trying to figure out how to like trans that to to small businesses uh that needed local SEO so first off Sam are those two stories on your website the florist and the cabinet maker uh the cabinet maker

37:41one I believe is on there I just updated my actually Michelle helped me update my SEO page I have a cool story about that if you want I don't know if we want to talk about here but we I need to talk about in Pro more people need to sign up for copy boost oh nice for Michelle service yeah she's our resident SEO GR um okay I just asked that because those are two great results based success stories for you that were right up front I think something you did smart too was to give yourself a bit of a three-month window anyone who does any amount of SEO

38:13will knows or will quickly find out that that is not something that's an overnight success like right website design you could there's a before and after switch there's there's before and then there's after once the py goes live SEO though as you've rightly already articulated it takes a little bit of time sometimes not that much time though it could be a couple weeks for a location page like you talked about um so I love that that worked out in fact I don't know you tell me is it worthwhile considering like quarterly packages for SEO especially for those starting out what do you think about that yeah um I

38:51have a lot of conflicting thoughts in my mind right now because if you would have asked me two months ago I would say that uh contracts are bad idea and they're they're scammy and they encourage you to be complacent and so you should uh try to just get people to stick with you based on results um however uh I I'm a person that likes to admit when I'm wrong and I think that that's uh shortsighted thought I think that that's an okay package to have but I do think that SEO tends to work better if we can all work together for a long time and so

39:21I think having that option to have either uh a short-term contract or a long-term contract is actually good idea and right now what I've settled on is leading with a 12-month uh commitment and then if they're not interested in that I kind of default back to the old Sprint model where I'm like okay you have to pay more up front because we're going to do a lot of heavy lifting in the early days and then the price tapers down over time um but you can you can pull the rip cord at any time if you don't feel this is uh if if you don't want to invest in this anymore but the

39:49problem I was having with that is that people were leaving is people would they'd start to either one that they didn't quite see any results after the first month that's because that's not how a seal works right right um um and so they they would leave after the first month um or we'd be clicking along and they're getting some business and now because they had business they looked at the other expenses that they hadn't been able to pay for and they're like I want to pause and go get my van wrapped or I want to pause I'm gonna go do this and I'm like uh but that's not how it works

40:20but that's how it was set up so they had that right um and so that's kind of why I'm changing gears a little bit here uh you know you got to learn right you got I I often I used to use the analogy that I'm walking across a bridge right now but I'm putting down the boards with each step uh but it's really more like flying in an airplane that we're building in the air and it's like every day the plane could crash but um it's a hell of a ride in the meantime well SEO is tricky because and I think I talked about this in the SEO course but there's

40:50just so many variables that you can't really control like you like an SEO situation for B Oregon is very different than Columbus Ohio like there's a lot I don't know what this population difference is but it's probably way more in Columbus and it's it's a whole different situation so like the same SEO local SEO plan that you may offer is probably going to be different in Columbus and it would be very different in Chicago or very different in La like it would be very different depending on those different variables I think that's what's tricky about it either way though regardless it makes sense that a 12month

41:25commitment would be the ideal thing because that's going to give you also time to Pivot and change potentially quarterly to to see a a strategy play out um I would think at the very least doing 90day sprints and I don't know I don't know Ryan Stewart's uh program but I would think like a 90day deal would be the bare minimum to to get going on and then maybe go month to month after that imagine that would be a good place to start and then maybe if somebody goes 12month commitment then that's where there's a lot more value added bonuses maybe strategy involved with that I don't know maybe that could be something

42:04different but so I'm uh I got I couldn't keep track of what you're doing now Sam are you doing 12month commitments now and moving forward or are you doing monthly or quarterly yeah so I think to kind of complete the story so you know we get the first couple clients uh and then I was like okay let's get this let's get this dialed in and so I started offer SEO Sprints and the way I was doing it was there would be a foundation Sprint which is really like Disaster Recovery Google business profile optimization finding all the keywords that we need and it's really the strategy phase I

42:40also try to look for some easy wins I was learning especially after those first couple clients I did it with is if you can't show those early wins then they might not want to stick around and so I really tried to find like internally I'm looking at like five things and I might highlight two of them at the end like see how we got you from sth to 4th know that's not exactly what we want but that was a nice little boost right um so now like imagine what can happen over time um and so that's that first phase which is usually like a month and then the growth Sprint is

43:08where we build out the content which sometimes a full website refresh sometimes it's just building out a couple service Pages or location Pages it just kind of depends on where the client's at and then the last phase what is what I like to call this is different than what Ryan Stewart does is the the SEO care plan uh where you focus on ongoing Google business profile profile management onpage SEO optimization over time and then off-page SEO opportunities uh those dirty dirty backlinks um and so uh those are the three things that matter for local SEO that's what I found out and so like the goal is to get down

43:41to that and my plan was always like if we could get the price down to lower than the agencies in town people will be happy but there's a lot of heavy lifting especially the content creation along the way to get there so we have to charge a little bit more and so um and those clients are you know what's gotten me to the point that I'm at today but I've also realized like for this to be sustainable it kind of needs to be more productized and needs to be easier to pitch because I've had a couple leads get confused as I'm explaining that I see the perplexed face on uh that Josh

44:10has over here for the podcast listeners um and so nowadays it's it's very simple SEO TLC plan if you have a website that's in like good shape like maybe it was recently refreshed and you know you're just you need help ranking higher right um that plan is $999 a month and it's 12 months um and then like if you end up needing a couple Pages built out no problem whatever the page builder is I'll figure it out um and then the other plan is I like to call it the SEO TLC plus plan uh where you also need a website um and so it's like you haven't

44:46had your website refreshed in a while or maybe you need one from scratch a lot of businesses that are just starting out aren't ready to invest in SEO yet but usually it's a site needs to be refreshed or they're working with an agency and they left them with this like kind of a clunker and so uh we'll get the website refreshed and that one's $12.99 a month and so uh and if anybody in the process maybe like I'll just say this because you know this is a web design business podcast like if anybody is not a good fit I'll I'll weed them out along the way like if they don't

45:14need local SEO I'll let them know that like this these are local SEO packages you need National SEO if they end up needing like a really custom solution for a website i' be like look you don't actually qualify for this plan because you're going to need this this and this but here's what I can do instead and so you know that was kind of part of Michelle's uh encouragement was to weed out after the fact and so trying to just keep it really simple on the website here by the way TLC for I don't think we cover what TLC is that is kind of your little framework traffic leads and

45:43clients which is great to pref preface all that because that shows people that well SEO what does what is SEO ranking like what do those rankings get you clients but you need the traffic first and you need to have a solid platform AKA website with the correct lead generator pages and everything and then you get them to pay you um I knew we were going to get into some coaching here Sam because here's my one caveat with your current situation bearing in mind that first of all again to reiterate you have done an incredible job up to this point you are knocking on the door of six figures in Mr at six to

46:217,000 per month on average the thing I'm I would encourage you to think think about though is that these plans are still so close together like 99.99 and $1299 is almost the same price bucket um now over the span of a year that does look different I'll I'll give you that because what's right what's 1300 in a year hold on$ 12.99 156 15 yeah 156 so that's still you know up significantly from 12,000 a year however it's still pretty darn close what would your thought be to have a doubled tier a doubled price like what could you do to have a 999999 month monthly tier and then

47:09a1999 monthly tier how does that strike you um I feel like it would almost be I don't know I I thought a lot about this and I think the price for the SEO plan could potentially go down a little bit but it's hard because I I'm trying to like pre-plan you know I've been reading like things like emyth and I've I've taken your scaling course and I got like the or chart built out and it's like you know looking at the right on the wall like $1,000 per month is a is a version of the plan that makes sense six months down the road one year down the road and

47:45so maybe I could scale that back a little bit but the thing is like right now the only difference between the two plans is building out a full website and $3,600 maybe isn't the best price for a website but I've got some good systems and team members in place where we can do it pretty lean and so that's one of the reasons why that was the main reason why there's that price uh differential but yeah I think yeah yeah that's what like it's kind of interesting because I feel because if the top tier currently for you is really mixing in a oneoff project which is a new web design I

48:20would almost say like just have your local SEO Plan B just one plan right now which would just be a thousand a month and then offer new website designs like in order to qualify for that they need to have a site that has certain things in place and if they're not ready for that then we could build your new site maybe for the oneoff fee but then we initiate your local SEO immediately upon completion um that's kind of the way I would I would think about that but as you just mentioned there may be like a productize version I wonder if in a world where could you have like a $4.99

48:55or 5.99 Foundation SEO that's ongoing and then more of the $9.99 that's your your standard and then a two to 3,000 a month that is you know your top tier for local SEO one thing that I've done because I've really been looking in that like value proposition ladder escalator model uh if you actually switch over the web design page I just revamped that one too uh so I've been looking at uh subscription based web design uh is kind of being the entry point so if there's a business that's either either just getting started out or they're having trouble with cash flow because that's been the biggest push back I've gotten

49:31from people when I come to them and say website's going to be $5,000 they're just like I don't have $5,000 right now um and uh so but I've noticed that when I ask people for $500 a month they're they're like here you go uh and so I think I'm I'm looking at that as a way to kind of build up the the client base because we all know it's easier to sell to people that you've already sold to and so that's kind of a a shift that I'm willing to try uh so that's kind of an experiment so I have two tiers where basically one's a landing page uh for a

50:03pretty low price and then the other one is like the fiveish page build uh that pretty much equates to fiveish thousand at the end of the year and it includes like what would be the equivalent of a basic maintenance plan as well okay so you have the starter plan that's $249 a month currently and then The Proven Plan IO that proven winner that's wi $449 might as well make that one $4.99 man I know there's there's another company in town that has $4.99 that's the only reason why it's $449 oh okay so you're doing okay so you're just slightly undercutting you're the Price Is Right guy who's like uh

50:379.98 yeah 9.98 I'm all right with it all right um oh that makes sense that makes sense and the cool thing is for you I feel like you don't really have anything to lose because you are focused on the local SEO plan so if that works that's awesome that where that that does get muddy is if someone's like well I'm already paying you two 449 what's the 9.99 thing that's and I'm curious to see how this plays out for you because I know that could get a little a little muddy again we're we're dealing with like one-off projects and well what you're really dealing with is ongoing recurring work

51:11like local wo that includes on-site work and content and off-site work and then payment plans for a one-off project that's where this gets a little that's where get a little bit dicey and confusing for the upgrading somebody from a website package to SEO package is going to be that'll that will be a bridge I cross and obviously I will put the boards down as I walk across them as I mentioned earlier that'll be a great that'll be a great podcast round two to see how you roll that out yeah but but I I will say so the spoiler alert from the success story so uh Michelle helped me

51:46with that uh updating that page recently uh just a couple weeks ago was the week before the 4th of July and I I launched the site the page on Monday night and the one of the reasons why I wanted to revamp the page is we're already ranking first for SEO borgan uh if you want to see how I do that you can go watch a video series on YouTube about it but anyway um the I hadn't gotten any clients from it and I I thought maybe it's the the copy on the website and so I decided to reach out to Michelle and do her copy boost package and uh and it

52:18was amazing but she was like Hey if you're gonna put the price in on here do do it like this and obviously I'm still kind of refining it but I put it up there and the next day literally Tuesday I got a text from somebody and they're like hey I can't none of the times on your cly work uh can we just talk over email or the phone and by the end of the week I closed that client for a property management company in town and so uh you know it was they got on there they saw 999 they said 999 does not scare us um

52:46and so and then they signed up and their their website's good enough where we can we can work with that and so that was the first 12-month commitment 9999 a month plan real quick what was the uh the YouTube video series on is it the one to three months how to rank your website yeah that's the on that's kind of the that's a good one because that's like the conclusion to the series and it seeds out to the other ones um but yeah um this the series was called uh steal my local SEO strategy and so I started when I was still ranking like 30th for

53:14SEO Bend orgon I had no idea if I was going to get myself to rank first I was like we'll see what happens and so I was pretty uh actually made myself ranked down at first which is kind of funny if you watch the whole series I was in like the 50s and 60s at one point I was panicking I was like oh I'm going to look like an idiot on YouTube but um I still probably look like an idiot on YouTube but I did get myself drank first so that was pretty cool D no it's awes I love seeing your YouTube channel your progression it's going to be yeah in a

53:38few years dude look how far you've come in one year with your YouTube channel holy cow in a few years my gosh it's GNA be it's GNA be nuts um okay cool cool cool I'm gonna make sure we link that to the the show notes as well because you're really what you've done in this first year is you have you first off just as a quick recap just to put us where we are on this foundation for you you learned web design you built your business around my recommendation of the build support grow model you chose growth Services as an local SEO primarily local SEO started getting

54:14results and then you created packages and ongoing packages that have shifted over time but you're really refining that and nailing that into to what's working for you and now you're finding that the website package are are you know they can conflict and work together with Theo packages so there's a lot of different ways to go about ongoing and recurring services for growth with SEO along with one-off services so by golly if the subscription model works for you awesome if it's kind of a Down sell or a starter point then it's an upgrade whatever whatever is working is cool I think what's interesting about where you're at now and what is very very

54:51common for folks who are on the doorstep of six figures is your offers tend to change to when you get to 50 and I see you're nodding your head you're probably that's probably what you're finding it's like the offers that get you to 50 to 75,000 per year are not the same offers that get you to 100 to 200,000 per year or let's just to say a quarter million because generally anything between low six figures like 100,000 to quarter million are usually the same just the scale is a little bit different so what I guess one question I have have for you at this point Sam I again kind

55:29of half coaching half uh half interview because I love picking you know picking through to see what has worked for you but I'm wondering have you written all this out on a spreadsheet like have you have you done that where you've like literally mapped out what your Revenue goal is and what your services are to sell these as almost like units yeah so uh if you had asked me this question a couple months ago I would be like what is that how do you work on your business you only work in your business right I recently read the emth for the first time and I have been

56:01the technician from day one right but also the entrepreneur and having no manager that guy's locked up in the closet over there he's not allowed to work um and so um yeah kind of like flying by the C your pants not really realizing like that's why it was hard for me to answer that monthly recurring Revenue number even though I've looked at it more now like I should have actually the average number the average uh like Revenue number not monthly recurring revenue is is actually closer to 8,000 we're pretty hit 100000 um but um the monthly recurring revenue is is defitely a lot closer to five um and so and the reason

56:35why it's hard for me to see those numbers because I haven't really looked at them until recently and the thing the the Difference Maker is that um one in the early days um and I I will tell everybody I do everything I try to do it a quarter step to early but I sometimes I'll take a full or maybe two steps too early and so as soon as the SEO started to work I I immediately started to look for subcontractors to work with for websites because I felt like even though I'd only Built you know maybe 10 or so websites at that point I felt like

57:06because Josh gave me such a good sop that I had the system dialed in and I was like now I just have to find the worker bees to help me do that and I had a couple false starts but I now have a really good uh web design team and they've built the last five or six websites and now instead of spending awesome 40 or more hours on a website like uh I spend maybe five doing like you know the the client facing stuff and then coming at the end and doing the SEO stuff um and so that's you scaled your way you scaled Sam way Sam's way fast

57:39you just went to the course for like two months ago yeah yeah I was listening to the course while I was making a lot of these decisions um and um yeah and then more recently probably this is a two steps to early moment but I I reached out to the college in town and they have internships and I was like well I don't want to do unpaid internship that feels skey but I do a paid internship but it was too late in the term but it felt like like the growth was going like this and spoiler alert it started to go flat for the people in podcast land I was

58:07going up and to the right and then I went flat um and so that's what's happened over the last quarter um but I was making decisions like we were going to continue up until the right of course that didn't happen that's the way business works right at least hasn't gone down but anyway um I ended up actually uh reaching out to somebody or well I put a posting out there and I ended up hiring kind of like an SEO assistant so he works X number of hours uh per month roughly and it's like you know on a contractor basis and basically for the first couple months he's just

58:34been learning uh training and doing things eventually doing like Google business profile posts and things like that but more recently we've started to actually dig into some of the SEO work and uh this is I feel like it's getting me to the point where uh so the nice thing is like as he's been able to take on a couple more tasks I'm able to take a step back because that's been my problem and that's the problem with like local SEO or even web design right is like you get in there and you start doing so much client work you get lost in doing all the work and then you

59:03can't really focus on your business anymore because you're surprised you got busy uh and now you're stuck working in the business instead of on the business and so even just in the last month or so I've been able to take a deep breath and look at the business and say what does this actually look like like what not like bare minimum like I can't just pay this guy and me Top Ramen w is forever if we were actually going to make enough money where we would be happy and we paid our subcontractors a fair rate and we took on this many clients what does it look like what does

59:35it look like like you said at this rate what does it look like at this rate and so you know my my stretch goal which is crazy like my gross revenue in 2023 was like $20,000 you know uh and so which was really just the back half of the year um but that's not enough to live off of you know times up by two that's like $40,000 that's not enough to live in most cities let alone Bend and it's over $20 dinners all over the place um and so uh but L my stretch goal has always been let's try to get to $10,000 per month and so it was cool to

1:00:09actually see that on one month but that's not the monthly recurring Revenue right and so that still continues to be my stretch goals can we get to 10,000 a monthly recurring revenue and you know when it's uh maintenance plans at $100 a month that's 100 clients right that's a hard number to get to if it's local SEO packages at $500 a month it's like 20 clients which um is still kind of hard to get to but you know you get their faster uh but if it's $1,000 a month then it's 10 clients that's that's doable and so and when I actually look at the vision for where I

1:00:43think this company's going to be um it needs to be more than $10,000 unfortunately Like For Better or Worse like um and so like when I look at that it almost feels like this daunting task that I'll never get to right but you know Josh Hall in you know 2010 still with drum lesson on his business card working in Dreamweaver probably didn't think that in transit Studios would come to be and build into the you know multi6 figure company that it became and he probably didn't believe that when he sold it to Eric that it would someday grown to this seven figure you know digital marketing agency but it's like

1:01:16uh you know Eric says this in his podcast which I know he stole from somebody else but I can't remember that person so I'll tribute it to Eric but he says you know you don't go into it you grow into it and so that's kind of my goals is like okay by the end of 24 I would love to get to $110,000 a month of recurring revenue and and you know so that's that's the goal uh and then which looks like you know 10ish clients uh which I have more than that but unfortunately they're not on Thousand plans but that's okay um and then you know the long-term goal is I don't know

1:01:48it's afraid to say it out loud but um I'm afraid to say it all loud uh is like $50,000 of monthly recurring Revenue because I think that's the size you got to get to to have employees and not even like real estate like I think that would be a good number to get to um and it looks like 50ish clients and that sounds like a lot but if you reverse engineer like you do like I remember one of the first things I watched which I think was the thing before I paid the $200 for the for first course I paid for a Josh Hall course was the how to make six figures a

1:02:18year as a web designer and it was the first time and I've seen videos like this before and I don't know if it was recency bias or what but you said let's reverse engineer this $100,000 divided by 12 is $833 so how do we make $8,000 a month and I was like I never really thought about it like that right um and uh so if you look at what's $50,000 a month look like if that's 50 clients how do we get to 50 clients by the end of 25 it's actually only like four clients a month which is a hell of a lot more than I'm

1:02:47getting right now but if I'm going to my networking groups in Redmond and my assistant's going to his networking group in Ben and we also start to double back down on the YouTube channel because we've gotten three clients across the country we got clients uh out from Bend all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean at then can designs and so it's like you know if we double down on that and focus on making videos not at seos and web designers like I've been doing the last couple months but aim back at small business owners again um and if we just keep showing up and and getting good results

1:03:17and you know more referrals will come in I think four clients per month is totally doable and so by the end of 25 you know maybe then can design will be uh you know creeping up uh on Eric's doorsteps trying to keep up with in transit I have like nine different tangents I want to take us on all one here first off sorry the cool thing and that's the reason I asked about the whole spreadsheet idea is like most people and myself included it's so easy to just get stuck in the weeds of your business like you said that you you're you don't even know if you're actually

1:03:50set up for success and that's why not everything is about a monetary goal but for most businesses you need to have a monetary goal because that's going to determine what you can do with your lifestyle goal like you need to know what you want to take home after expenses after taxes after hopefully having some profit in your business right and then you build from there and then you set the vision well I have to say this though Sam because you like myself and every other entrepreneur I know are very very hard on themselves and you probably feel like I should be doing so much more I should be so much

1:04:21further like yeah you know 8,000 on average with your Mr your monthly recurring and your oneoff projects is cool but it's not where you want to be but dude you have in a year and a half gone from a oh ju actually just over a year because he actually started May 1 in 2023 we're talking in July 24 in just over a year you are thinking about and planning for $50,000 a month did you ever think that would even when you started in May did you think you would be at this point I mean you have you have made the foundation for and you're actually already creeping on six

1:05:01figures whether you realize it or not here's the really cool thing dude is you have set the foundation and all of your work is going to compound very quickly here over the next the end of 2024 the back half and of 25 you have actually whether you realize it or not you've set the foundation for for a quarter Million Dollar business so with a few refinements with your team place with you freeing yourself up to Market and to do the big picture stuff and to to actually reel this in you are actually like there's almost no there you're almost Beyond looking at six figures now you're

1:05:38looking at quarter million once you are on track and things are cooking with your systems and process or quarter million that's when you get into the $50,000 a months and that's a half million dollar business over over a half million dollar business right there so I do want to just pause you and say dude like take stock and maybe I don't know maybe my coaching advice and pro for you because I'm about to send everyone uh an email on Pro and I want to hear how the first half of the year has gone um I'll tell you right now publicly like maybe just take a day off just go hike you're

1:06:13in the mountains over there go hiking yeah think look I really honestly Sam I want to encourage you to like look back at this first year and just look back at like that's freaking awesome what you've done like you yes you're the technician you're the solopreneur I actually think you've done it right I think you've done everything right I think before you can sit back and be the business owner and work on the business you don't do that six months in your business no you got to get your work boots on you got to freaking do some work you mentioned earlier the whole like keeping things

1:06:45realistic um unfortunately a thumbnail that says like that you're gonna have to work your ass off is it's not the the catchy uh it's not it's it's not gonna boost my online presence as much um right but I do try to as you know keep it realistic like it is going to be a lot of work it's a lot of work but so is anything that's worthwhile and you have done the work to lay the foundation for six figures now you're looking at multi6 figures so all that to say Sam I gotta really in and say dude take like take stock of how amazing you've done this

1:07:19first year youve really did an incredible job man that means a lot you know I spent the majority of last week for the Fourth of July with my family not working I worked maybe a couple hours uh that was a pretty incredible feeling and the moments that I did like internally work because I think it's hard for entrepreneurs to turn this part off which is like the that's the hardest part to clock off of right clock out of um I pointed to my brain for the people listening um the uh I was looking forward I wasn't looking back right I was like okay now that I have time and

1:07:52space to look ahead let's look at some of these things which I'd already been looking at but kind of refining actually looking at some specific numbers things like that how much money do I need to save for my taxes for the rest of the year to catch up on what I haven't saved so far anyway um don't tell my bookkeeper anyway um but I should I should do that to take a step back uh because what's happened in the last year has been pretty incredible and uh you know I recently uh had the the blessing to do a pro training uh inside a web designer Pro which is really cool and

1:08:23you know I said in there all glory to joshh but but it's true you know like uh to put a bow on the story you know two years ago today uh was around the time I started working actually as an office manager but right before that I was actually unemployed and I was on food stamps I was at kind of a rebuilding phase in my life um putting the pieces together being mindful figuring out what I wanted and I realized that my primary core value was service and I wanted to help people and I knew that I would just and but I also knew that I needed help

1:08:54to get to that point um and uh I had never uh you know during college I I felt like I was too good for food stamps but I reached out and did it because it I just needed a couple extra bucks and I found out there are actually these resources in the state of Oregon you could sign up for if you're on that program uh through WorkSource Oregon and so I actually reached out to them I was trying to refine my resume and things like that and you know they'll they'll help people at any point on their journey and so they're like oh did you know that we can actually not only can

1:09:23we help you with this job but we can help with your long-term goals and they were actually uh nice enough to not only get me things like new interview clothes which was cool but they also uh hooked me up with a couple free courses I was planning on going back to school for computer science that was the original plan uh but then after I helped somebody build a WordPress website in one weekend thanks to a Daryl Wilson uh video shout out to the party people out there um uh it it planted the seat in my mind that maybe I could do web design and I just

1:09:52happened to search for web design podcast one day as I entered in a million checks into QuickBooks which is what I did at my office job and uh you know took that uh how to make six figures in a web design free course paid the $200 for the first Josh Hall course and then I went back to those people because there was I think a Black Friday deal going on and I and they said you know your last uh offer as a part of this program is we'll do one more training for you and it was X number of dollars and the X number of dollars

1:10:20matched what the bundle was at that time and I never reached out to anybody on the internet before but but I reached out to joshh and I said uh hey uh they need the state was actually going to pay for this course but I need an invoice and Josh you know within a day wrote back and like here's the invoice and uh the the cool part is after that all got done and I started to rip through all of the Josh Hall courses at that point was I reached back out and I said hey is there any way I can get that $200 back and I wasn't sure what he would say I

1:10:48always figured like all those online course people are scammers and they're just trying to make as much money but joshu was like yeah absolutely and I took that $200 and I saved it and I said I'm going to spend this on web designer Pro when I start my business and so on New Year's Eve in 2022 I said I'm gonna do this I'm gonna follow what Josh Hall says I'm gonna start this business but I gotta actually do it and so in the first month I challenged myself to register my LLC open up a business checking account business credit card get business cards and launch my website and on February 1

1:11:19we did that uh web website review where you did my original website which you could still see to this day at old thenen can. thenand designs.com uh that was the site that you reviewed Josh and uh it felt at that point even though I knew I wasn't ready for what was ahead I knew that I could do this because I had the support of web designer Pro and uh that's the only reason I'm here today oh dude Sam you have been a testimonial King since day one but dude your story I did not know about the food stamp stuff and where you were at that point in your

1:11:55life that is amazing what first of all what an honor to be uh a source of inspiration and motivation for you at that point it man that is so so cool I so I appreciate you sharing that I think a lot of people need to know to hear about that too because it could be easy to to look at where you're at now and feel like like I'm just getting started how am I going to get to six figures or even five to $6,000 a months but um you are maybe the prime example of what it takes to get to that level in a year I

1:12:25mean not everyone needs to do it in a year either but um you're a go-getter you're you're an eagle as they used to say in my networking group we we would look for Eagles um and yeah I mean you you went all in and the cool thing is too I think something you talked about earlier is everybody has the es and flow as as an entrepreneur Peaks and valleys uh where you're like laying in the floor in a fetal position but yeah you mentioned that you got up and you just kept on going and that my friends I cannot I can't reiterate how important what you did there Sam is which is you

1:13:01just keep going you keep learning you try you implement you just go the reality is the only way you will fail as a web designer is if you quit because you could just pivot and keep learning and try a different offer go to a networking group post on social media do whatever get on upor one of the I'm working right now on on a guy a 50 step guide to getting clients there are so many ways as I'm I'm writing this guide out which is basically a book and I'm like oh my gosh this is like I never thought about how many ways I got clients but it was this method it was

1:13:40like I tried this that didn't work tried this that worked cool do that again you do that over and over next thing you know you're the next Sam so man I really really appreciate hearing your story Sam as a as a Capper on this conversation and again I just I want to reiterate I know you're hard on yourself and I can see if you know you want to hit that next step but dude just uh if I could give you any bit of encouragement in this stage of the game be proud of all the work you've done to this point and just enjoy it because you you have done

1:14:10you did what I did in like seven years in a year and a half so yeah and I think we should say like to the to the Sams and Samanthas out there that are listening to this podcast at their 9 to-5 and are trying to get to this point they're like how the heck do I get there uh and it's the same question that a lot of the pros have of like how do I get to this next step and you know the answer is one day at a time just try to take it you know the calendar set up like that for a reason take it one day at a time

1:14:38and I guarantee you once you stack Up 365 of those maybe there's 366 this year but once you do that you're going to be pretty impressed with where you're at at the end of the day but if you sit there and just keep thinking about how am I going to do this how am I going to do this how am I going to do this and you don't actually do any action you're probably going to be in the same place 365 days from now dude I just looked back I found your email I found your original email uh January 623 I'm not going to read the whole thing but in

1:15:05short it's about yeah the uh the invoice you mentioned because you had bought some courses and wanted to upgrade to the bundle uh right you know now the offer is changed because I have all the courses inside of pro right which I'm actually the next step of what I'm going to be doing with Pro is some some resources and Pathways for folks who just want to go through the courses before you come into the community so working on that right now actually but you had mentioned uh you said apolog at the end you say apologies for the lengthy message uh but thank you Josh for inspiring me as much as I love my

1:15:36current job here we go I know I'm worth more than $21 an hour I can't express how much it means to have been empowered through you uh by you and your journey $21 an hour to your your eyes are set and your goals are set for $50,000 a month so incredible dude freaking awesome freaking awesome tons of work to do but man enjoy every step of the process um so let's talk local SEO as we wrap this up you mentioned yep you did a training inside of pro here recently and I told you with your blessing I'm going to make that available publicly we do guest expert

1:16:16trainings every month inside of web deser Pro and I'm going to make yours available on YouTube so that's actually I'm going to make sure that comes out uh By the time this is out so everyone will be able to watch your pro training and you are a full-blown web preneur now as well I'm re BR my coaching tips for you are gonna have to reel you in uh but you have a kind of a passion project with local SEO now so tell us about local SEO Academy man yeah I'll try to keep it short because I know we've been talking for a while now and people want to go on

1:16:49with their lives and stop listening to us but uh now do a couple more reps at the gym or whatever you're doing right now uh but uh you know it was actually one of the members of pro I'll leave them Anonymous but they reached out to me at the start of the year when I was really starting to to cook with this local SEO stuff and they said well you teach me everything you know and I said I'm not qualified to do that and they they said something super profound something along the lines of even if you're just a couple steps ahead of me it's going to

1:17:14be worthwhile and I said I still said I don't know and they said I'll give you some money and I said okay let's do it um and so uh and as we were going through those sessions we just did like five Zoom sessions I tried to teach him in this haphazard manner everything that I knew um at up to that point they kept saying please turn this into a course please turn this into a course people are going to find Value from it and please let me have it for free when you get done with it no just kidding they didn't say that and and I had another

1:17:42person Reach Out actually from YouTube they watched my YouTube videos and they asked to be trained on Google Business profiles and I was just like damn uh and that person was an Ireland uh so that was like what I don't even know this person um and so it just kept planting these seeds and then have a small little email list and I reached out to them I said would anybody be willing to walk through a rough draft of these courses and I won't reveal that person either but they did and they spent like I I was thinking about this today when I was driving around because I was listening

1:18:06to the last couple episodes of the web design business podcast I was like I have spent hours in my car with Josh um and his guest uh over the last you know year and a half and I was like this person spent hours with me and it it was like it felt like such an honor for them to go through and there was like Loom videos it was bad I was like messing up in the middle uh and they would lead feedback they leave comments like you should have a Graphic here and you should do this and I loved how critical they were and I was just like I got to

1:18:30do this and so I said okay I'm going to make this thing called local SEO Academy I'm G to make a couple courses and this is what I'm going to do and I reached out to Josh for some coaching and of course he told me exactly what I needed to hear which is exactly what I didn't want to hear he said if you put courses out you're going to be doing support anyway and the money's in communities anyway so just make a community I was like damn you Josh I don't need another thing right now but I I've always been like I said my primary core value is

1:18:56service I love teaching I love helping people and so um I decided to just throw caution to the wind and so this is you know just kind of my my little side hustle here and so uh we soft launch with that uh Pro um that Pro training and right now we have about 15ish early adopters right now here on July 9th uh which is pretty cool um and uh so that's exactly the the spot I wanted to be at with it and so by the time this comes out uh right now we have two courses in there the GBP expert course which is going to be fully launched by the end of

1:19:30this week and then we have the big one the local SEO master class and that one is a Honker we're really just trying to edit all the videos we have them all out it's five modules it's like over it's like six to eight hours of content so it's a lot of stuff yeah um but it's good stuff and then we also have the community aspect and that's already been going really good we have our first SEO challenge going on in there right now uh and so we're trying to rank our own sites higher so I'm even trying to rank my site higher for Ben web design

1:19:53because uh I'm not ranking first that I'd like to but anyway um at this point uh when this releases we should be rolling out the final course for now uh which is called selling SEO services to clients and so that'll actually be like how do you do it hopefully it'll include my Sops which I've been refining with my assistant lately because apparently you can't just have your business live in your brain um I learned that from Josh a long time ago but of you want to keep your hair yeah yeah exactly yeah I'm I'm already cutting it close uh but anyway um so yeah so I'm hoping that course for

1:20:25local SEO will be what web what the web design business Le uh course from Josh was for me for web design um and uh so that should be coming out about now so if anybody out there is interested in local SEO uh a lot of the people on the group right now are just beginners but I really want to create a community that's a lot like Pro I I like to think of it as being complimentary to Pro it could be something that you have like you're in Pro and local SEO Academy um but it's basically a group of people that are just trying to help each other rank

1:20:52higher and try to help their clients rank higher because that is how we get results for our clients like we build them this beautiful website but if nobody's going to it that's not how they're going to get results and so and if you can get results for clients then they're going to fall in love with you and they're going to want to pay for your services ongoing and so you know if you want to be having the tough conversations of like how do I get from $10,000 a monthly recurr Revenue to $50,000 then hopefully those are the conversations we'll be having in local SEO academy uh you know

1:21:18but we're just getting started and so I'm I'm pretty sure I'm going to try to remember the link that I gave Josh I think it's local SEO acad . cojos uh and that'll be a little landing page with a deal for you so even if it's mini moons from now as long as local SEO Academy exists welcome from the future future listener uh but there will still be a deal for you even in the future uh but we'll have an extra special deal when this first comes out yeah dude I'm really excited about that for you I think uh and we'll have that Linked In the show notes by the way for everyone

1:21:48the cool thing about that is yes I do here's here's my quick thoughts on on courses and Community if you were just to do one local SEO course and I would say just do the course like if it's just a point A to point B or if it's on a tool or like a basically you know like like a topical type course then just do the course but you've got several courses and you've got people in different places of the journey where you're going to need to create pathways through those courses and then have Community Support so it's like dude yeah you might as well have that in there and

1:22:19honestly I'll tell you publicly Sam I was like should we just make local SEO academy part of pro and just have it as like its own thing but then I'm like that's going to take over like you know what I mean like everything would be about local SEO and some people may not be ready for that or or have interest in that so um I'm really excited to be you know almost like a partner for you with that just because I um I really feel like that's an area that I don't personally have interest in like going too deep on and and my SEO course as

1:22:50you've rightly said is kind of like a foundational style course but I love having those who want to go really in depth with local SEO boom head on over to Sam because now that we're both using Circle you could dip into local SEO and then dip into Pro and it's awesome so I'm really excited for you man um you glow you you grow this as a passion project on the side as you grow your Lo local SEO business and both of those feed each other you will learn somebody in local SEO is going to do something and you're be like oh my gosh I can Implement that in my business and then

1:23:23it works in your bu business they will feed each other so super excited man all right dude well everyone can go to the show notes for this episode for that special offer to check out local SEO Sam's new local SEO program we'll link to your website your YouTube all the resources we talked about the training you did inside of pro is available for all members of pro but if you are not yet a member of pro I'm going to make that public on YouTube so you can actually see a lot of these strategies we've talked about I know we probably made people a little mad because they're

1:23:55like well what was that strategy well it's you can see it you can see it now on YouTube so I'll make sure we have that link so you can see Sam's training because a lot of it is a little more visual so those are all available Sam dude less you know less than a year and a half you have done an amazing amazing thing with your business so I cannot wait to see what the rest of 2024 and 25 is going to look like so already excited for the next round I'm sure this won't be the last time man a man I appreciate it and uh yeah bottom of my heart

1:24:26deepest gratitude um you know you uh you're definitely a caregiver when it comes to your family and the the the ups and downs that you go through there but you you also have a family of like 200 other people inside a web designer Pro and you show up for us every week uh in different ways and every day sometimes and so uh just for everybody I can't speak for everybody in Pro I can only speak for myself but just thank you for everything you do and uh like like to say all glory to Josh join web designer Pro so you can you can say the same thing like what are

1:25:00you waiting for come on you're the man Sam all right dude thanks for your time today man there we are friends a an in-depth look at how it is possible to go to six figures in less than a year even if you have zero paying clients or any experience as a web designer again I I wouldn't say this is the norm Sam is an entrepreneur he's not afraid to get himself out there he did a lot of things right he focused on one area of service got serious about recurring revenue and it can be done I really hope this gives you a good example and some inspiration

1:25:33and some good takeaways on how you can add this idea to your business to get to six figures no matter where you are in your journey and again I'm so excited to partner up with Sam on this because I only go so far in teaching local SEO but because Sam is doing so well at this we've partnered up together you can go to this link local SEO academy.co Josh head there to claim a special offer to check out that Community as a listener of this podcast and when you join my community web designer Pro you'll always be able to have an inside scoop and a special offer

1:26:09to get over there but even if you're not a member of pro yet and you want to level up your local SEO game go to Josh Hall excuse me go to local SEO academy.co Jos for your special offer that link and much more including a link to his YouTube channel his website and everything we talked about here are going to be available over at Josh hall.co 342 cheers friends to local SEO if you want to go that route but even just all these takeaways that Sam dished out about how to bring your business to six figures in one year it can be done even if it's 5 years or 10 years I hope

1:26:43to be a part of your journey as well just like I was for Sam so as Sam mentioned he is a web web designer Pro which is my community you can check us out and join Sam in 22 20 plus as of right now other web designer pros at webdesigner pro.com lots of links all mentioned at Josh hall.co 342 see you over there and make sure to subscribe to get the next episode many more doozies ahead my friends cheers to building your web design business