Last week, my to-do items were to create processes for:

1. Qualifying leads / giving feedback to VA

2. Getting owner’s contact information

3. Cold-emailing owners to start relationships

4. Following up and working leads - building the relationships!

I made progress this week, and had a couple interesting business conversations. Updates below.

I put off a CRM - but now it’s time

Building a CRM before you have leads is like buying a domain name before you have an idea.

It’s fun, but it’s a trap for people prone to shiny object syndrome (me) to also ideate and never execute!

I try to think in terms of “prove the most improbable thing that must work first,” which helps me stay focussed on the most important thing at the moment.

So, I put off any sort of CRM until this week. But now it’s time.

After debating a few tools, I landed on Streak. It allows you to manage a pipeline inside of Gmail (as a Gmail extension). To me, it’s the most simple approach.

Bonus: The pipeline visualization is great. I can quickly see how many leads I have at each stage of the process.

That screenshot is a few days old, but as you can see, I put off contacting leads en masse: I have 377 leads and have talked to ~20.

I need to talk to a LOT more owners

I’m not in a rush, but I do need to streamline my outreach. If my thesis is correct (I need to talk to hundreds of business owners to find an absolute gem) I need to have more conversations faster.

My prcoess:

🔙 It was: Find lead → Dig around their website → Track down email → Thoughtfully craft a cold email

🔜 It needs to be: Find lead → Scrape websites in bulk for contact info → Blast a cold email

With the new process, I can go from contacting a few leads a week to contacting 30 a day.

The VA team is prolific

The need for a bulk outreach campaign became evident when I realized how prolific the VA team is.

Before hiring them, I mentally earmarked 2,000 leads as our target for 3 months of work.

After 1.5 weeks of work, I’m confident we can double that (and they are, too).

I gave them a bonus incentive to hit 4,500 leads after 12 weeks.

So after I spend a week or two with Streak, I’ll set up a campaign and start emailing 30 owners a day to see who bites.

Businesses I’m looking at

I had personal conversations with two new owners this week, both of which are WAY off the beaten path.

1. A proofreading agency

2. An ecommerce store that sells custom-fit center consoles for cars

1. Proofreading agency

Proofreading sounds like the most boring business all-time, doesn’t it?

I wrote a Twitter thread on why I like the proofreading agency.

In a nutshell, this business represents the thesis I’m trying to capitalize on:

I can find established (digital) businesses owned by weary owners who stopped tapping the business’s full potential.

It’s not a great time to be a proofreading agency, because new tech (hi Chat GPT) is hurting revenue, but I see opportunity to leverage that new tech to improve margins.

Opportunity: buy at an all-time low business valuation and significantly grow margins on day 1.

2. After market car parts

This is a weird one. They sell after-market car parts.

It’s interesting for one big reason: government clients.

Maybe the most stable business of all is the business that sells to the U.S. government!

And, the owner seems motivated.

Not particularly excited about ecommerce, but this could be an exception. I’ll explore it.

Thanks for reading.

Mike

P.S. things I’m working on for the next week (for my own reference)

• Scrape websites for owner contact info

• Familiarize myself with Streak