Hey ,

Today I’m going to walk you through the exact method I used to grow my first agency from £0 - £500k ARR in just 10 months.

My total startup costs? Less than £50.

Starting From Zero

Disclaimer, the exact method and tactics I used don’t work nearly as well as they did six years ago, but don’t worry, that’s the point of Lee’s List - to update you each month on the latest marketing tactics that are working for my businesses and my 200+ clients.

Anyway, back to the story..

In 2017, I quit my gig as a freelance marketer, sold my zorbing business for £9,000 (more on that later) and set off for Australia to retire on my life savings. Unfortunately, £9k doesn’t get you too far in Australia, especially after I spent £5k of it traveling Europe on the way there.

Even more unfortunately (or maybe fortunately in hindsight), I had already used my working visa the year before so I had no way to earn money. With my back against the wall and savings running dry, I was searching frantically for a way to make money online when I remembered a Facebook post I had seen months before, that mentioned something about being able to scrape the emails of your LinkedIn connections.

I had recently been running a cold email campaign for a freelance client, so I decided to explore. After spending £15 on a Linked Helper license, I managed to invite 500 Australian business owners to connect on LinkedIn, and I scraped the email addresses of the 100 or so that accepted. I emailed them all, telling them about the growth hack I’d discovered, and I asked them if they’d pay me £99 /week to do it for their business. Three people asked me to call them, all three signed up. I was in business.

Growth

Within 7 days of the idea, I was doing £15k ARR. 30 days in I was doing £50k ARR (double my highest ever annual salary at that point), and within three months I was doing £100k ARR, working 20 hours a week in my underwear.

After hiring my smartest friend, my girlfriend and my smartest friend’s girlfriend (no joke), we scaled the business to £500k ARR in just 10 months. Today that business does over £2m ARR and has generated over £1B in sales pipeline for 2,000+ companies in 20+ countries.

That one simple growth hack not only gave me my first really successful business, it became my superpower and allowed me to grow other businesses that I have started, bought and invested in.

Alas, after six years, thousands of copycats have emerged, and cold email has a pretty bad rep. Nonetheless, it remains one of the most effective lead generation channels for the majority of B2B companies - provided that you do it right.

Average demo rates in 2018 were 3%, meaning for every 100 people we emailed, 3 would book a demo. Today, that rate stands at around 0.5%.

Over the past couple of years, we have diversified our marketing channels to include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google Ads, among others. Each month, I’ll be showing you exactly how we use those channels to generate sales calls for our team and for our clients.

The cold email method we use today is a world away from the one we used in 2017, because we’ve had to adapt to the ever-changing limits and restrictions imposed by LinkedIn and the ESPs (email service providers).

Next month I’ll show exactly how we run our cold email campaigns today. I’ll show you under the hood, and share the tactics that other agency owners don’t want you to know.

Thanks for reading.

If you want to hear more from me, follow me on Twitter.

If you have any questions or feedback, simply reply to this email. I read every reply.

Lee