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A Cold Day In Hell
Yesterday I shared with you one of my most intimate stories. Click here if you didn’t get a chance to read it.
The birth of my first born son changed me in ways that still echo in the decisions I make to this day.
It represented a major push for me to really take on the challenge of making a full time living from home.
Over my son’s first year, I took on a 48 hour straight weekend-only job as part of my commitment to myself to be at home for as much of my sons life as possible.
During the week I dedicated myself to learning about online marketing and sales.
I’d had plenty of business training and marketing training up to this point in my life and even had a successful portrait photography business and built a pretty good team in a network marketing company.
But nothing I had learned taught me a business model that would allow me the freedom to be at home when and how I wanted to be and give me the upside potential I was looking for.
So, I dived in and started learning about Attraction Marketing from Mike Dillard, Mass Control from Frank Kern, Magnetic Marketing from Dan Kennedy, & Preeminence from Jay Abraham. That was just the start.
Within a year I had learned so much I was itching to take action on it in some way, but was still too scared to really start my own online business, so I did the next best thing…
I started a marketing consulting firm and applied all the knowledge I had to other people’s brick and mortar businesses in my city.
It was a great gig and got me home pretty much full time.
I was a success and as far as I was concerned it would be a cold day in hell before I ever went back to a traditional job.
Boy was I wrong.
You see, my practice may have been getting me a client or two a month, but I still hadn’t learned how to value my time or skills and was way under-charging and thus didn’t have the cash flow to market properly.
I still hadn’t learned the value of productizing my knowledge so I was constantly on the hunt for the next client. I had no ability to scale.
When I moved my wife and kids back to my home town to be closer to family it was like a nail in the coffin of my marketing practice. My self-employed business didn’t really survive the move.
I was able to get a few more clients, but not really enough to pay for my lifestyle. I came to the realization that I just wasn’t going to be able to provide for my family the way I needed to with what was essentially a work from home job.
I had hit a wall.
I just didn’t know how to turn my work from home job into a scalable work from anywhere business that was built on systems and automation.
I shivered a little, because it was cold in my own personal little hell as I admitted to myself that I needed to go and get a job.
But it would take a blizzard for me to give up my work from home conditions or go and flip burgers.
I knew I had a valuable set of skills.
So I set out to take a position as a marketing head for a company that would let me work remotely.
Using every ounce of marketing know-how I possessed up to that point, I went out and found exactly that.
A little more than four weeks later I had a six figure, work from home position as a director of marketing for one of the largest solar providers in our region.
I was given a $25,000 per month marketing budget. Which was huge compared to what I had been used to working with from my small time clients.
Over the next year and and half I learned and grew and built systems that allowed that company to pull in over $3,600 per lead that I produced and helped them close over 25 million in sales.
It was fun. But it wasn’t mine, the bureaucracy was infuriating, and my upside potential would likely never be much more than the fairly decent income my 12-16 hours days were making me.
Most people would have considered me lucky. I was making great money. Working from home most days. My parents no longer thought I was crazy because I had a “real” job.
Then, about 6 months into this, it hit me…
I had an epiphany that ultimately lead me to quit while I was at the top of my game.
Come to find out, hitting that wall was probably the best thing that ever happened to me and my future business.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the epiphany and what’s it’s done for my life.
Have a great day and remember to never give up. Your success is just around the corner.
Sincerly,
Richard “Quitting At The Top” Matthews