My first successful business ~$40k/month in revenue. What I learned along the way. Stay on the simple path.

I wanted to share my journey of building an IT automations company from scratch to where we're now generating roughly ~$40k/month in revenue (most of that isn’t recurring). The road has been full of challenges and learnings, and I hope my story can inspire others on their entrepreneurial path.

A little over a year ago, I started Cerum Solutions, a company focused on technical consultation and implementation across all industries. Our goal was simple: to help businesses identify inefficiencies in their operations and build custom technical automations to enhance their workflows. This included everything from CRM automations, backend internal tools, AI chatbots, KPI dashboards, reporting and analytics, to ERP implementations.

We first started around the AI hype (chatbots, etc) building products (mostly mvp’s) but it was to operationally demanding and we later saw there were a lot more underserved areas in a companies operation's that were just low-hanging fruits, much simpler value adds to companies and easier to scope out. As an example,  rather than building a whole new product for a client that involved a lot of operational roles (product designers, qa testers, full stack developers), it was easier to focus on automating one simple thing for an organization, say helping them create dashboards in their salesforce admin. The client’s/customers we deal with are much happier and more willing to spend $$$ as they can justify it spending x to get result y.

We had on/off months at first so I was always hesitant to bring on a new hire, as in this business margins are everything. Sometimes I was even doing the technical projects myself and wearing all the hats but then realized that this business couldn’t operate without me and almost got burnt out lol.

When I made the decision to make my first hire so I could focus more on growth (sales & marketing) that’s when everything else changed. I couldn’t afford the cost of a US based dev so I had to look elsewhere such as on upwork. My first 2 hires I got burned as they didn’t know what they were doing (and I didn’t know how to hire). Then I stumbled upon a dev from the philippines. It took him a week to get ramped up but once he did it I never looked back, he even started taking initiative and leading client/customer calls himself. (he’s still with me today).

Out of this business, I learned how important it was to delegate & create teams/SOPs to focus on other more important “rain-making” activities like creating content, webinars, and focusing on sales led approach (before I really thought I could do all just to increase my margins). I also realized how hard it was to hire good talent at affordable prices.

Alot of outsourcing/placement firms I first went through claimed outsourcing pricing (like ~$4k /month) but just added a margin on top of that. Instead my partner and I found a way to go direct on local job boards and find great technical talent at transparent costs, like for $1,500/month full-time) also having boots on ground, basically cutting out the sometimes 3 middleman. (A new business was born from this)

But long-story short I think looking in un-sexy area’s with a newer approach for lead-gen (like content marketing) is the way to go. Especially if it's your first business, service based is a great start imo. It also allows you to have the high seat and solve real-world problems for businesses/individuals, and more often than not, new ideas will be born just naturally.

Anyway, I hope this was helpful and i’m happy to answer any questions for y'all in the comments below.