How I Started My Business (Part 2)

Here’s the story of my second year running my current business, 2015:

(Yesterday I told you about 2014, read up if you’re interested in finding out what happened.)

In that year, the new mission of DBH became “Help 100 people reach 7 figures”.

At the start of 2015, I was doing big launches on social media to attract new members into the Daily Business Hustle mastermind.

I was still doing all the sales calls myself and about ⅓ of the group coaching sessions.

The purpose of the calls was to teach students skills they’d be able to use to build any successful business they wanted.

Students were very reluctant to do cold calls however.

It felt like we were forcing them to do stuff they didn’t truly want to do.

Members were mostly very young and VERY inexperienced.

Some were what you’d call deviants, in the sense that they were only interested in business to fund a life of travel to Asia for various reasons we don’t need to talk about in this post. 😉

Around May or June, I was brainstorming with @Mario Tomic on how to improve close rates on the phone.

He had improved my original sales process from 2014.

This updated sales process, which had 5 steps, turned out to be superior to the original.

Afterwards, the 5 step sales process turned into the still-in-use 7 steps DBH sales process, which has now been used to close millions of dollars in sales.

At a certain point, I noticed that students were really struggling to get good results within 3 months or less.

My initial reasoning behind building DBH was to focus on student results.

I decided to help students build inbound sales funnels so that they could get results faster.

We tried and mostly failed for 3-4 months. Success would come later that year.

For my own funnel, I then started experimenting with webinars and cheap front end info products.

These were moderately successful.

At the same time, I had a team of 7 people help me grow our free community facebook group to 8000+ members.

In 2015, this became one of the most popular business groups on facebook.

I kept doing what works: more content, better content and more sales calls.

I worked so many hours I ended up in the hospital once.

Meanwhile, my friends and I were traveling all around the world, we ended up living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Finland, Iceland and Canada, all in 2015.

At a certain point, I figured out a new funnel for students to use.

Suddenly, we saw student success rates grow beyond 80%.

This is when I finally stopped doing all sales calls myself.

DBH closed off 2015 with great student results – a thriving growing community and many new instructors and success stories. The business’s revenue had grown by more than 100% compared to the year before.

But 2016 had a slightly different theme… more about that tomorrow.

– Aleksander Vitkin