Trying to get to a million $ ASAP. Worried employee will start own business!

jonnylugs

New member
I am at a crossroads...

I run an online affiliate marketing business.

There are certain tactics that work very well, sort of loopholes and untapped angles and niches.

I want to scale, hire and build out a team of 5-10 to run a division of my business that I have been managing that takes me 10-30 hours a week. Last year I was very hands-on with this division, I spent 35K and revenue was 165K (130K profit). Right now I do about 20K/mo. revenue with this division, lets call it "Division Z."

I think I could scale to a million+ a year in revenue with a team of team of 5-10. Right now I manage 2 workers with Division Z. I have 1 other division of the business right now and I would like to spearhead and open more to scale. Build an empire!

Right now I do all of the critical work and I am that glue that holds Division Z. I could still hire but compartmentalize every task independently to keep workers in the dark of how it all comes together, keeping me as the glue and taking a decent amount of my time.

But what would be nice would be to hire a PM (project manager) from the Balkans (Serbia, Croatia) for around $2,500-3,500/mo. USD to do the hiring, team QA, firing, analytics/metrics, team meetings, operations, troubleshooting etc.

A PM would be very nice. But there is not a very big barrier to entry for Division Z. For $500+ a month they could start doing it themselves on the side and build up.

Usually when you tell someone of a great way to make money they rarely do it. I have done this where I show someone exactly how to make easy money and they just don't do it. But with this, I am employing them fulltime and they will learn everything.

Division Z is not a huge ocean, it is not like a client agency business where if the employee copies your SOP's and operations and goes and gets their own clients (or steals yours) it doesn't matter because there are a zillion clients in the world to go sell to. Another competitor would matter with Division Z.

Option A - compartmentalize every task independently, keep workers tasks separate so no one understands the whole picture. Less risk, more time for me manage

Option B - hire project manager, tell them how everything works. Takes this mostly off my plate but possible risk of them doing it for themselves. More time to scale the business and take my self out of the day to day of Division Z.
 
@jonnylugs Option B

I stopped worrying about employee competitors 100 employees ago. How niche is your industry that it cant support more than one $1M company?

People only leave once they feel they dont have room to grow. And they almost always just get another job. Lets be real, you have to be insane to start your own business
 
@sallian hey thanks a lot great advice

How niche is your industry that it cant support more than one $1M company?

it is a big industry (SEO affiliate marketing) it is just that this Division Z is based on a strategy that consists of a pretty narrow traffic tactic.
 
@jonnylugs I built my business off a very aggressive and very specific marketing tactic. Every employee knew exactly what it was, and none of them left to start a competitor.

The main thing that prevents people from starting businesses isnt a lack of ideas or strategies, its the fact that they never actually got off their ass and started a business.

I generally take the approach of honesty and openness is the best approach with employees. I also dont like working, so I have delegated everything off to other employees, you want your employees to be better at your job than you so you have to teach them to do what you do. Its scary, you have to give up control. As soon as you hit $1M, you'll aim for $10M (literally, your goal will change the exact day you hit your current goal). So there si a level of inevitability of giving up control. Are you going to do it now, or at the $7M revenue mark? You'll have to do it eventually.

Take everything I say with a grain of salt. A lot of people here disagree with what I say lol.

And congrats on the business! It took me three years before I generated $130k profit, youre hauling ass
 
@sallian
The main thing that prevents people from starting businesses isnt a lack of ideas or strategies, its the fact that they never actually got off their ass and started a business.

Ohh yes I can agree to this. People afraid that someone will steal their actually working ideas away but they overestimated those people's motivation
 

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