I launched Bean Ninjas, an online bookkeeping service, 12 months ago because I wanted to have a business that provided monthly recurring income without having to work ridiculous hours. My consulting business wasn’t doing that.After launching the productized service business with my co-founder Ben McAdam we went from $0-$100k in just 8 months.Our goal is to get to $1M annual recurring revenue and create a business that can run without us so we can spend more time with our families and doing things we love.We also want to help other entrepreneurs to automate and scale their businesses so they have time for the most important things in their lives.
Some of our successes to date
1. Getting to $100k annual recurring revenue in just 8 months since launching our business.
2. After 12 months since launch we are currently at $15.2k Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and have 70 customers across the globe.
3. We’ve created a flexible work environment for 7 staff which enables them to work from anywhere in the world and to be available for their families
Whilst this all might sound amazing, getting to this point hasn’t been easy.
Some of the hurdles we’ve faced along the way
1. Kicking off the business right by defeating procrastination, avoiding perfectionism and maintaining focus on the essentials.
2. Improving customer response times. We aim for response times of less than 24 hours for all our customers
3. Decreasing churn. A key reason why customers leave is that they aren’t the right customers for your business in the first place, so we’ve had to get better at qualifying customers upfront.
3 tips for other women in business
1) Get better at saying ‘no’
Growing a business means staying laser focused on the 2-3 things most important things and saying no to everything else. Yes it might be nice to attend the networking event next week, but is it going to help you achieve your top 3 priorities? If the answer is yes then you should attend, but if not then you should politely decline the invitation. I like to please people and would often find myself saying yes to things that I later regretted. Something that helped me in this scenario is to say ‘can I get back to you about this?’ Then I would have the chance to think about the decision in the context of my goals.
2) ‘Keep your promises and own your mistakes’
It takes years to build your reputation and sometimes only minutes to damage yet. Keeping your promises, owning your mistakes and being respectful of other people’s time all contribute to building a reputation as a professional.
3) Delegate and automate
If you are repeating the same task within your business stop and question it. Can this task be automated through technology? If not, can someone else be trained to complete this task? This frees up your time to focus on the higher value tasks.
We hope you have enjoyed another in our series of Enterprising Entrepreneurs. If you would like to get our regular blog updates or to connect with these amazing women then please follow the links .
From those in Heels
