This year my agency has grown tremendously and I have been able to optimize my margins down to where I am able to take 50-65% of our revenue, mainly due to our service being fully digital. We are in the visual effects industry and have several contracts with labels with music videos and tour visuals, we also do a lot of commercial advertising, billboards, and various product campaigns that need CGI work.
Our advertising has been a combination of word-of-mouth, organic growth, and mass cold emailing by a team on Fiverr, so our advertising costs are next to nothing at this point. That being said, the growth has taken me by surprise, and I have been rocking with the boat trying to optimize our process and hire management and directorial roles for our projects in order to automate things out of my hands.
That being said, I currently take home about 500K a year before tax; our grown trajectory is looking like 50% this next year as well. I’m completely focused on scale and building the team so that we can take on more contracts.
I’ve never dealt with a job that pays like this, so I am looking for seasoned veterans to provide some advice for me in this situation. My plan is to reinvest a large amount of my income into the business in order to scale stronger, as I can live personally off of about 55k a year. I want to diversify my money so that I don’t have to worry again, however, I have a very high risk tolerance and have no interest in putting my money toward something that doesn’t beat out in inflation, or many of the classic safe bets.
I would like to continue to build companies as that is where my skills lie however, I am coming here for advice on building a strong financial foundation first.
Posted by Drdrakewilliam
4 Comments
Wow, with $500k per year, you could probably just move to a low cost-of-living country and retire early.
Invest in my business ideas 😈
Just put it in a brokerage account into broad market ETF’s like VTI. You can easily sell and transfer it back to your company if you need cash or funding for growth, but in the meantime it will grow with the markets. Also see /r/personalfinance for general investment tips.
The thing about classic safe bets is that in the long term they exceed most things due to lower rate of failure – on average.
But you could take the opposite approach and invest it in big bets. Like hire a senior big gun and get bigger deals/contracts.
You sound like you have accomplished much: how did you get into this business? How did you decide to abandon employment? Biggest challenge?