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My journey started out of necessity, not ambition. I was working at a truck repair shop when management kept making these insane decisions - one after another. Me and my coworkers eventually had enough and quit. At the time, I didn't realize I was about to become an entrepreneur.
The next few weeks were a blur. I was hustling just to keep the lights on - reselling stuff on eBay, fixing phone screens, building basic websites for friends. Whatever paid the bills. One night while I was down the reddit rabbit hole, I ended up on r/Entrepreneur and saw this post about someone crushing it with their cleaning company. I remember thinking 'why not? I could do that.' I’m writing this post hoping it inspires someone reading this as it did to me back then.
Starting off was rough. I had no idea how to find cleaners, price jobs or even structure the business. The first website? Just a cookie-cutter theme that every other cleaning company was using. But it worked well enough to get us started. As we grew, I realized the website needed to be better - this wasn't just some placeholder anymore, it was an actual asset bringing in money. So I invested in a proper logo and custom site. We kept on growing but felt limited by leads we were getting as most of them were paid. The cost to acquire clients was high and we wanted to convert as many as we can - which presented its own challenges.
This prompted us to look at how to rank our website which took me on another trail I wasn’t ready to go down on. The first overseas team we worked with ranked us but for landing pages built on their website and for keywords no one was searching for! At that time I didn’t understand long tail keywords or much related to the art of sending signals to google. I soon moved on and tried my luck locally. We hired a local firm on a premium retainer basis and under a year-long contract to deliver us that sweet local organic traffic we hoped would result in bookings. A year later? Barely anything to show for it. Started investigating and found out the blog content I paid for was recycled from their other cleaning clients. The back-link strategy? Just a web of links between all their customers. I was beyond pissed when I figured it out.
At that point, I'd been burned enough that I just started learning it myself. Optimized our Google Business Profile, rebuilt the website properly, created actual useful content and a bunch of other stuff - the agencies should've been doing way back. We started to see the organic leads increase month by month and stopped relying on paid leads eventually. It took years and cost me way more than it should have, but it was worth every headache to finally have this figured out.
Perhaps it's too soon to be writing this out here because it's only just the beginning but I wanted to connect with other entrepreneurs who've been on similar journeys. The road gets lonely sometimes, and hearing other people's stories - the wins, the failures, the pivot moments - that's what keeps me going.
I’d love to read your stories about how you became or plan to become an entrepreneur. Cheers!
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