Sometimes start-ups are fucking hard. This quarter one of my companies didn't grow and it feels like shit.
Here's what happened (revenue, cost, etc.):
This is my "building in public" update for Leverage Assistants. This is where I prostrate myself naked to you all and give you my intimate numbers like revenue, costs, etc. My hope: you'll find it useful and share.
🎯 What is Leverage? A reminder
Leverage is a staffing company for executive assistants. We help high growth start-ups work with 1% executive assistants from South Africa and the Philippines. We then train founders to delegate more effectively.
What happened this month
— This month, we hit 350,000 USD in ARR. This is not a big growth from last quarter’s 320,000 USD.
— Our costs are not massive, probably closer to $175,000 per a year right now. We are throwing off some cash - but not a lot. This is RAMEN profitable.
What did we do?
— This quarter we added 10+ new clients to Leverage. That's good!
— But we also had churn. Some assistants just weren't a good fit. Some clients weren't ready to work with assistants.
Banging my head against the wall
— Right now, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to hire and train great people (not always easy).
— Even more important, I'm realizing my product is two-fold. One side is assistants - but the other side is prepping founders to work with them. I'm not as good at helping founders as I am hiring great people.
Now I'm left wondering - shit. Should I keep trying to grow? Or should I spend more time iterating on the product?
IN other words, should you get good before getting big? Or should you get big to try to get good?
— My DNA as a founder is all about growth. Outreach, numbers, get BIG (or at least bigger). Usually, my belief is that the bigger you get, the more you learn, the better you'll get. Big --> Good.
More specifically the framework is this: Big --> more iterations --> improvement
There's a tipping point though in quality.
— Getting big helps you learn. But, if you're not good, you'll never get big. It's one of those damn cycles.
— I think the truth is there is a tipping point. If you're not at the tipping point, you can't scale up and learn. But, if you're already there, then the best way to learn is to scale.
-- Leverage is almost there, I can feel it. But, I think we need one or two more iterations before we really hit the tipping point.
What’s next?
— The goal is 500,000 of ARR by February 1. (This would give us $200,000+ of profit per a year.)
— To do that, we need to learn a bit more about training founders to use assistants. That's probably the biggest unlock we need right now.
P.S. If these updates are useful, please share or comment!
Enterprise Architect, Microsoft Teams Phone Expert, Microsoft MVP, & Event Management
2moI love invoicing. It's my 2nd best activity. The best is receiving the money 🤑. Without money you don't have a business and therefore your other processes don't matter. Find a way to make money in any which way you can first. Then worry about other processes once you've taken care of your cashflow.