Newsletter #0017

Happy Sunday!

What an exhausting week. This week I hosted out Tree Biz Bootcamp here in DFW. There were about 18 of us and it started on Wednesday night with axe throwing and drinks. We had class and a ton of food on Thursday and Friday and it culminated with Hutchin’s BBQ at my house just last night. And yesterday was my birthday!

If there was a week I’d skip my newsletter, it’d be this week. Not gonna happen, folks.

I had an absolute blast meeting fellow Twitter bros in person. Everyone learned of the bootcamp from Twitter, and people flew from all over the country to be here. It was incredibly humbling to be entrusted with so much time and money, and I don’t take that lightly.

I thought I’d be doing a disservice by not opening the books on this business so everyone could learn. This was the closest I've ever come to selling a course, so I wanted to be sure it was done right. I have no desire to be a sleazy guru, so I had en ensure I overdelivered on value. The attendees will be the judge of that, but so far the feedback has been great, with everyone rating it an average of 9.2/10.

Let’s dive in to the numbers and then I’ll quickly talk about how anyone could profit from this type of business.

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When we decided to expand Fast Tree Care to more territories, I started putting together a training for our next batch of operators, so I posted about it offhand.

I soon got a couple DMs asking if they could attend, which led me to think “Hmm…could I charge for this?”

A week later, the landing page was up, the Tweet was posted and our first few attendees had booked. We’re in business!

The 3 goals for the bootcamp attendees were these:

1. Leave excited

2. Feel prepared

3. Take action

Some had no intention of starting a business, some were looking to buy a business, but all came to learn new startup skills.

I feel that we crushed these goals. Anyway, here’s how the financials broke down:

1. Revenue- $62,484 - This was from 11 paying in-person attendees and 4 paying virtual attendees. The other attendees didn’t pay because they are opening territories for us. There were a few discounts given out for referring others which cut into top line a bit.

2. Venue cost - $1,800. $100/hour for 18 hours across 9 days. It was a really nice coworking space and it worked perfectly for what we needed. No complaints, other than the TV turning off by itself for some reason.

3. Videographer and editing - $3,500. This will go to the virtual attendees once the editing is done, and we’ll attempt to sell the virtual copy on an ongoing basis.

4. Stripe fees - $1,875 - Ouch.

5. Landing page monthly fees - $396 - $99/month for 4 months. Leadpages.

6. Landing page design - $600. I paid a guy to do it but I didn’t like the result so I ended up doing it all myself back in October.

7. Food - $5,728. Oh, food. I wanted to go hard on food. Here’s how it broke down.

   1. Bob’s Steak & Chophouse - $3,496. That’s for 15 people and very little alcohol. We ate…kind of a lot. The average steak was about $100 and we had many appetizers, salads and dessert. No regrets. This is my favorite steakhouse BTW.

   2. Ali Baba - $529 - This is my favorite lunch place.

   3. Torchy’s Tacos - $213 - Not my favorite taco but great for breakfast.

   4. McAlester’s Deli for breakfast - $221 - This was the worst meal of the week IMO. We had a hard time finding good catered breakfast options.

   5. Salata for lunch - $347 - I was too full from Bob’s to eat a bite. It looked good though.

   6. Hutchin’s BBQ - $459. Worth every penny.

   7. Drinks - $211

   8. Snacks - $252

8. Axe throwing - $906. This provided drinks and entertainment for about 14 of us for 2 hours. It was a lot of fun, and I learned I’m very mediocre at axe throwing.

9. Swag - $700 - We had shirts, branded axes, tumblers and moleskin notebooks engraved with their names.

10. Speakers - $1,000. I paid my two friends to speak about accounting and marketing. It’s not guaranteed that they’ll get any customers from this, so I wanted to ensure that they got paid something for their time and driving. Friends don’t let friends work for free.

11. James and Matthew - $1,000, $500 each. They both work for me in the tree biz on salary, but this was above and beyond what they’re normally asked to do, so I gave them $500 each for their time training on Thursday, and they did an incredible job.

12. Matthew’s flight from Utah to attend and teach - $324

13. Equivalent labor cost from my rockstar employee and wife - $965, or about 35 hours worth in total.

14. Jon Moore - $400 - He works for me with automations but his presentation was above and beyond as well, so I sent him $400. He did a great job as well.

15. Other 3 speakers - $0 - They all own companies that should benefit monetarily from presenting so we just swapped favors. If they don’t end up getting business I’ll Venmo them something fair.

In total we had $62,484 in revenue, $19,170 in costs and walked away with a profit of $43,314.

100% of the cash went into the Cofounders business account that I share 50/50 with my partner, and will be used to fund other projects, such as our healthcare AI startup. We won’t be pulling any out.

It took about 90 hours of my time time from start to finish, so not a super great hourly rate with all things considered, but also not terrible. The hardest part was being “on” for such long stretches of time. Social events drain me of energy, despite how gracious and awesome the attendees were.

Is This a Good Business?

It depends. We will attempt to push paid ads to the virtual, professionally filmed and edited version and sell those on an ongoing basis. I’ll update you all on how that goes.

An extrovert would love it. I’d much rather meet all of these same people casually and get to know them, without any pressure to perform or teach.

We’re also considering increasing the virtual price to $10 - $30k and pairing it with ongoing training and support, much like a home service franchise would do, except much cheaper. There is precedent for this price point for a lesser quality product, but time will tell if it actually sells.

I think replacing the in person bootcamp with a 6-week virtual version, where everyone meets once to twice per week might be ideal. In fact, I may try that soon with MH/RV park investing or finding and contacting off market assets.

How can you profit from this?

Teach what you know. Alternatively, extract knowledge from friends and help them teach what they know.

You don’t need an audience, you just need to learn Meta ads.

Let’s say your friend is a dentist and he is a whiz at hiring. Help him craft a training for dental hiring so you can package it into a bootcamp and market it to other dentists.

Split the revenue 50/50.

One post in a dentist FB group could fill the class. It is astounding how many businesses have been built up around dentists, but that’s a deep dive for another day.

Online education is a 185B industry, and growing like crazy, while traditional college is shrinking in popularity.

Everyone has something to teach.

What Am I Working on Lately?

I have a zillion emails to catch up on, so that’s what tomorrow will bring.

I’m working with an awesome guy on a stealth project that just brought in some revenue, so that’s been exciting.

We’re moving to a 2x bigger warehouse for Texas Snax to accommodate recent growth.

I hired a CEO at Mining Syndicate and he’s doing an incredible job.

Twitter growth has been going well lately, and I’m hoping to hit 125k followers this year.

Thanks for your time and I hope you’re having a great weekend.

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com