Consulting.com Revenue Streamlining

Sam Ovens shares how he transformed his company Consulting.com after realizing it had become too complex and inefficient.

"The peak was around 2017 or 2018, and it was doing 36 million a year in revenue, but profit-wise it was probably only 5 million. Most of it was expenses. We had about 50 people and were spending 2 million a month on ads. Everything was breaking.

I was reading this book on my honeymoon in Tulum called 'Lean Thinking' - apparently Jeff Bezos's favorite book. They talk about how you should optimize a business based on value the way a customer experiences it. You should analyze the headcount, how many people are actually contributing to customer value, your money flows, and your time and attention.

I realized all of our time, money, attention, and headcount was on ads, and customers did not think ads were valuable - in fact, it actually pissed them off. I went back after that vacation and realized I had to start again. I started restructuring the company, focusing on organic content because customers find that valuable - like a good YouTube channel, good email newsletter. If we do that well, we don't need ads.

I wanted everyone on the team to be contributing value to the customer - doing support or account management for mastermind clients, being customer-facing in some way. All of my time and attention should be thinking about customers' problems instead of advertising problems. With that mental model, I just started restructuring the whole company."