Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Albarran.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Alex. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My name is Alex Albarran and I’m the founder of Dream Client Academy. We’re a consulting & marketing firm based in Hollywood, Florida. Growing up, I had a natural tendency to be entrepreneurial. I was flipping shoes, strollers, video game consoles, trading cards & anything I could get my hands on all throughout middle & high school. However, this was enabled 100% by my father instilling professionalism, attention to detail and a strong work ethic in me since I was very young. When I graduated high school, I launched a healthy meal delivery/catering company (called “Slim Pickins Meals”) from my parent’s home kitchen. This was my first “real” business operation where I learned about things like payroll, overhead, COGS, delegation, marketing/sales KPIs, + much more.
I eventually moved into a commercial kitchen space as I outgrew my parent’s home kitchen (and they wanted their kitchen back on the weekends). While I was running that company, I started helping other business owners in my network run social media advertising campaigns as I had built up a solid knowledge base from managing advertising campaigns for my own company. It started out as very part-time but organically grew to the point where my consulting business was generating more profit than my catering company. I then eventually decided to shut down the catering company so I could focus on growing my consulting company full-time.
I came to this decision in part because of the low-overhead business model that the consulting company offered, the improved work/life balance, my strengths as an entrepreneur aligned more with this business, and the fact that the consulting company gave me a better opportunity to scale my income faster.
Once I launched the consulting company full-time, I fully-funded the startup expenses/business account from my personal savings as well as the revenue it was already generating.
My first few consulting clients came from my network & relationships; however, finding clients outside of that proved to be difficult for the first few months. This was mainly due to my relative inexperience with selling B2B services, and a non-existent sales/marketing engine.
Slowly but surely, I started to figure out the business development side of the company. After our 1st year in business, I started to see the consistent revenue-growth that I was looking for.
We saw success with the service-based business vertical at first. However, we saw the most growth with that sector after developing a high level of clarity on our messaging towards that vertical, our key offer(s), that sectors pain points, and developing a structured outreach campaign towards that audience.
At the time of this writing (February 2020), we’ve grown to do $31k/month in revenue. We’ve generated a positive ROI for companies across many industries, including accounting services, digital marketing, legal services, consulting, health & wellness, financial services, professional coaching, live events, luxury real estate, + more. We see consistent growth in key areas, such as.
-Roughly $100k in new deals for Q1 of 2020.
-Return on ad spend is at 7X.
-New testimonials/case studies coming from clients multiple times per week.
I’ve been the only full-time member of the company up to this point (with part-time contractors). Moving into 2020, I’ll be pushing to scale DCA to high six figures in yearly revenue, improve our client-retention, build out our social proof base while adding full-time members to the team so I can leverage my time and accelerate our growth.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I was handling EVERYTHING by myself at first, including sales, business development, client-fulfillment, billing, content marketing, etc… While this limited my ability to grow at first (as there’s only so much one person can do), it gave me an understanding of how each key sub-system of the business worked which has helped me greatly in terms of being able to clearly communicate what I expect from my team members.
The entire first full-time year of being in business is when I was figuring out all of the foundational aspects of the company. From what verticals/niches we should work with, how to structure our offers, how to generate new business, what services we should offer etc…
Since I didn’t have any formal experience working at an agency, I had to learn about all of these different aspects of the business through trial-and-error as well as self-education (podcasts, books, etc…).
Our initial offers/packages were vastly-underpriced, which also limited our growth potential/ceiling. Think about it like this, if you’d like to grow a consulting business to $15k per month in revenue, would you rather have:
-Roughly 37-38 Clients @ $400/Per Month Each Client
-Roughly 7-8 Clients @ $2,000/Per Month Each Client
Keep in mind that the higher-paying clients are also (usually) easier to work with as they don’t expect you to deliver unreasonable results instantly. Throughout the launch of this business, the most valuable lesson that I learned was that “revenue is more important than likes.” I initially spent too much time focusing on our website, logo, content, social media strategy etc… without spending enough time on the business development/sales aspect of the business. This limited our growth in the beginning, and once I started to focus my energy on building a sales/marketing machine, I saw consistent revenue growth.
Dream Client Academy – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Dream Client Academy is a company dedicated to unlocking rapid growth for entrepreneurs, funded startups and small & medium-sized businesses.
We do this through:
– Training/Consulting: Our Dream Client Academy Gold Program is a “done-with-you” intensive that helps client-businesses develop an online client-acquisition system to grow its business predictably.
– Marketing & Paid Media Services: We help SMB’s who are looking for completely “done-for-you” marketing & paid media services. Our team will come in and optimize your digital marketing campaign strategy & execution.
I’m most proud of the results we’ve been able to generate for our clients. Theirs truly no better feeling than delivering life-changing results for our client’s businesses.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
For me personally, I define success as waking up with a smile on my face, making a positive impact on others and being truly excited to go to work every day.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dreamclientacademy.org/
- Email: Connect@alexalbarran.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexalbarran_/
- Other: Dream Client Academy
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