I Work a Few Hours a Day. This $297/Mo Business Model Is Why

0:00I've made $5,000 this morning, and I haven't even had a shower yet. I've also got a cold, thanks to my kids bringing home every germ possible from school, and I'm wearing a pair of dirty sweatpants, which you can't see from there. So, you're welcome. Basically, by most traditional means of human flourishing, this morning is not going particularly well. And yet, I still made $5,000 this morning, just like I'm going to make $5,000 tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, working only a few hours a day. And it has nothing to do with me being smarter than anyone else. Trust me, I'm not. I've spent an embarrassing

0:31percentage of my adult life standing in front of an open refrigerator hoping new information would present itself. About 99% of making $5,000 this morning came down to choosing the right business model. And I'm telling you this because if you've been working hard at this for a while now, buying the courses, watching the videos, giving up your evenings and weekends, and yet you still don't have your first client, there's a really good chance that the problem is not you. The problem is that you've just been rowing the wrong boat. Because if you're in the wrong boat, rowing twice as hard doesn't solve the problem. It just gets you to the wrong place faster,

1:05but with shoulder pain. But let me explain what I mean by that, because I stole this directly from Warren Buffett, which feels about the safest possible person to steal a business idea from. Back in the 1980s, Buffett wrote a letter to his shareholders, and in this letter he said, "How well you do in business depends far more on, and I'm quoting him directly here, what business boat you get into than on how effectively you row." He even said that if you find yourself in a boat that keeps leaking, you're better off putting your energy into changing boats than into patching the leaks. I mean, think about what that means for a second. A

1:36boat that's already headed where you want to go is going to beat a harder rower in the wrong boat every single time. And Buffett's point is actually great news, because it means the answer probably isn't more effort. You've already got the effort. The answer is a better boat. So, in this short video, I'm going to show you the boat that I picked, the three questions I used to test any business model, the one simple strategy I'd start with, and the software I use to run the entire business model. So, you can stop guessing and put your effort into

2:05something that actually pays you back. Now, I want to be straight with you first here because making $5,000 before breakfast is what this business model looks like more than 10 years in. Month one looks a lot smaller. Month one looks like one client paying you $297 a month, but it's the exact same boat. You just start a little closer to the dock. So, here's the business model. For a decade now, I've helped local service businesses get more customers. I'm talking about plumbers, roofers, electricians, landscapers, that kind of thing. And I help those local service businesses using what can only be described as some of the most basic

2:40online marketing strategies you've ever heard of. Now, over the past 10-plus years, I built three different seven-figure agencies, worked with over 1,500 small businesses, and run thousands of campaigns. And today, I do it all as a one-person agency with zero employees. So, this isn't something that I just read about somewhere. This is what I actually do every single day. So, how do you know whether you've picked the right boat? Well, over the years, I've narrowed it down to three simple questions. And I call them the boat

3:05test. It's very original, I know. Anyway, you can use these same three questions to test pretty much any business idea that you're considering. The first question is, can you clearly see the problem that you're getting paid to solve? And with local service businesses, you can. You can open Google Maps tonight, right now, if you want. Type in roofers or plumbers or electricians plus the name of your city, and you can scroll down the list. And you're going to find some business there with a great star rating, but hardly any reviews sitting right underneath a competitor who's got a whole lot more of them. That business is losing jobs to

3:37the guy above him. And it's got nothing to do with who does better work. He's just been up a roof all day, and he hasn't had the time to ask anybody for a review. He's thinking about roofing and probably how not to fall off of a roof. He's not standing up there developing a comprehensive reputation management strategy. And let's say that just one

3:55roofing job is worth $5,000 to him. Well, if you help him win just one extra job, that pays for well over a year of your service. So, for him, this is a pretty easy decision. Now, compare that to most of the other business models that beginners typically get sold. Well, you first have to convince somebody that they even have a problem. Here, the problem is sitting right there on Google Maps. All you have to do is just point it out. The second question is, does the client keep paying you every month? A lot of online business models pay you once, just one time, where you say build

4:25somebody a website or you help design them a logo. You get paid, but then next month you're right back at zero and looking for the next customer. With this model, the client that you land in January is still paying you in June. So, your monthly income doesn't reset to zero every single month. Let's say you get 10 clients at 297 a month. Well, that's $2,970 coming in every month before you found a single new client. And that's really the whole secret behind my morning. I didn't do $5,000 worth of work today. I did the work a long time ago, which is one of the rare occasions where past Adam has

4:58actually done present Adam a favor. Usually, past Adam just saves me passwords I can't remember and purchases I have to explain to my wife, but this work just keeps paying. And the third question is, can software do most of the work for you? Once a client is set up, looking after that client will probably take you 15 to 20 minutes most months. I usually just say 30 minutes a month though because I'd rather overestimate the time than make this sound easier than it actually is. So, even at 30 minutes each, 10 clients is about 5 hours a month, and 5 hours a month is how the sweatpants go from a wardrobe

5:30failure to a legitimate business strategy. Now, I keep calling the strategies that I'm using here basic, which probably has you wondering, I mean, if they're so basic, then why would anybody pay for them? And the answer is that the business owner doesn't want clever. They don't want creative. What he wants is for his phone to ring. He doesn't wake up hoping somebody will revolutionize his funnel architecture. He wants a customer to call and say, "Can you come fix my roof?" This is something that us as marketers occasionally forget, because we occasionally enjoy marketing a whole lot more than normal people do. Anyway, the business owner already knows that he

6:03should be asking his customers for reviews. Most business owners do. The hard part is remembering to do it after every single job. Forever. Well, he's also running a crew and driving a truck and answering his phone. I mean, that is an unreasonable amount of faith to place in human memory. I can walk upstairs and forget why I went upstairs. So, I'm not about to build a business model that depends on a roofer remembering 400 review requests a year. So, a basic thing that happens every single time is worth a whole lot more to him than a clever or creative thing that just happens once. And simple is better for

6:36you, too. A simple service is easy to explain in one sentence. It's also easy to deliver, and it's really hard to mess up. You don't need to be a marketing expert. You only need to know one step more than the business owner about one specific problem. Here's how I think about it, though. Making money should feel boring. I know that's disappointing, because the internet has spent 20 years convincing us that a business isn't legitimate unless it involves six monitors and a Lamborghini and somebody pointing at a graph, but boring is great. Boring means that you know what happens next. Boring means the same problem, the same service, the same

7:10payment over and over again. So, what's the one strategy I'd start with? Well, I'd start with Google reviews. I use what I call the review engine, and all it does is three simple things. After every job, it sends the customer a message asking for a review. If they don't leave one, it follows up on its own. And when a review does come in, it writes a reply. And the software does all of this without forgetting, without procrastinating, or without deciding that asking for reviews is something that it's definitely going to start doing on Monday. That's it. That's the service. And every customer gets the same request and the same link. Because

7:44picking and choosing who gets asked for a review, that's called review gating, and it's against Google's terms, which means we don't do it. Entrepreneurship is already complicated enough without voluntarily adding argue with Google to the business plan. And you charge $297 a month to set it up and keep it running. And before you start worrying about how you'd ever sell that, you don't need to cold call anyone, and you don't even need to get on a sales call. All you need to do is just send one short message that says what you noticed on their Google listing and then offers them a free report showing a few simple

8:15fixes. And it ends with a question, "Would it be all right if I sent it over?" If they say yes, you send the report and then the report does most of the selling for you. If on the other hand they don't reply, that's totally okay. You don't need emotional closure from a roofer that you've never met. The relationship lasted only one email. We can recover. And all of that brings me to the software. Because I don't build these systems by hand. I've got a link in the description below this video where you can grab an extended 30-day free trial of HighLevel, which is the software I use to run my entire

8:43one-person agency with zero employees. And when you start through my link, you're also going to unlock my complete agency OS, which has over $15,000 in pre-built funnels, and follow-up automations, and client outreach scripts, and sales scripts, and a 30-day HighLevel quick start, all installed into your account with just one click. There's private community access as well and a whole lot more, and the link's in the description below. So the review engine I just walked you through is already built. You're not starting from a blank screen because blank screens are where perfectly good ideas go to become 11 hours of YouTube tutorials and absolutely no clients. Instead, you copy

9:16it into your account on day one and then into each client's account after that. And the software math is pretty simple. The plan I'd recommend is the $297 a month unlimited plan, which gives you unlimited client accounts. That means your very first client covers your entire software cost. And every client after that is nearly pure profit. Texts, calls, and AI usage add small costs as you grow, so you build those into your price. All of this means that your very first client basically pays for all of your software, which is my favorite kind of software bill. Somebody else's. So,

9:45let's get back to Buffett for a second. If you've been rowing hard, feeling like you're getting nowhere, I really don't think that you need to row harder. I think you need to get into a boat where the problem is easy to see, the money comes in every month, and the software does most of the work for you. The

9:59one-person agency model is that boat. It's been my boat for over 10 years now, and it's the only reason that a guy with a cold and dirty sweatpants gets to have a morning like this one. Warren Buffett, now I appreciate, would probably be horrified by what I've done with his metaphor, but financially it's worked out pretty well. So, here's exactly what I do right now. Grab the extended 30-day free trial through the link in the description below. Open up Google Maps and find one local business in your city with a great rating, but hardly any

10:26reviews. That is your starting point. But, here's the thing. Everything I just showed you today is just one piece of how a one-person agency actually works. If you want the full picture, how to pick your niche, how to price your services, how to put every system together, I've put together a complete free masterclass that I've got linked up right here that's going to walk you

10:43through the entire thing step-by-step. So, feel free to tap or click that now. I'll see you in there in just a second.