CareerPioneer

From Finance To Career Coach: How I Built A $72K/Year Business [50% QoQ Growth]

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Bob Gardner

Founder, CareerPioneer

$6K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

CareerPioneer

careerpioneer.io

from Seattle

started April 2021

$6,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

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Calendly

Google Meet

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Stripe

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Squarespace

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hi there! I’m Bob Gardner & I run a company called CareerPioneer, where we help everyday people land incredible jobs they love & build careers they dream of.

At CareerPioneer, we offer two main “services”:

(1) Our “Flagship” offering is our “Land your Dream Job” program.

In short, this program helps folks starting at the “Ideal” job exploration stage & we help them navigate every step through receiving, negotiating, and accepting great job offers!

This program is usually completed through 6-7 one-on-one coaching sessions + post-session exercises. Clients normally complete the program & have job offers in 4-8 weeks!

(2) Our second offering is our “Dream Career” Coaching service.

This offering is longer-term and involves recurring coaching sessions focused specifically on helping folks accomplish whatever their top career goals are.

Think of this as “executive coaching”, except it’s for everyone (not just executives). This coaching is usually focused on helping folks get promotions, grow & succeed within their existing roles, navigate a variety of workplace issues & challenges, and generally help them feel better, happier, and more confident in their day-to-day work.

What’s so exciting about this is not only that I get to spend every day helping people be happier and more successful in their careers & lives - but also that I get paid to do what I love!

Since starting my business last year, I’ve:

Grew QoQ Revenue an average of 50% in the first year of operation
Increased average deal size by 300% ($1 to $3k) in the first 6 months of operation
Executed marketing campaign w/ $0 budget which led to consistent 20% MoM lead pipeline growth

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

My backstory begins like any average person! I grew up in a middle-class family in suburban, upstate NY. My parents were/are average folks, working hard at regular jobs in Government & Education. I went to college, heading south to Florida to get away from the cold NY winters and to study Architecture.

After more than a few classes and some less than ideal feedback, I decided that Architecture wasn’t the career for me - instead switching to Finance, because in my own young & misled words “I want to make lots of money”. It turned out that finance wasn’t such a great career option, especially since I graduated college just after the 2008/2009 financial crisis kicked in, ha!

Luckily, however, after immense effort & struggle - I was able to land an “Investment Guidance” position with a large mutual fund company. I quickly learned I hated the work & the long hours…back to the drawing board. I eventually decided to go back to school & got a graduate degree in “Technology Entrepreneurship”.

The Thing was, I had NO “Tech” or “Startup” experience - but I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I cold-called and cold-emailed every single “startup” in my city, offering up my “I’ll work for free as an intern, just to get experience” pitch.

I must have received 50 or 60 “No’s” - which surprised me, as I thought free labor was a pretty good pitch I eventually hit successfully with a small, very early-stage sales-tech startup & landed an intern job.

You will (likely) have many failures as you get rolling. DO NOT take them personally - instead, learn from them, use them to hone your strategy, and get even better.

I took that job & ran with it, getting promoted over time from intern to VP, while helping the company grow from 4 to 50 employees and building my team. Sadly my beloved startup eventually went out of business - but luckily, this time I realized I had “experience” to sell myself. So I went back to my previous strategy of cold-calling / cold-emailing and landed my next job, significantly increasing my pay, at a highly successful startup on the west coast.

I continued over the next few years to use my cold outreach + persistence & grit style to land a variety of great offers & jobs, w/ other Top-Tier startups and “Big Tech” Titans like Amazon & Google.

The idea for CareerPioneer finally came to me, after getting burnt out with 60+ hour days at a fast-growing startup I was working at, I knew I needed to make a change. I asked myself “What am I great at & also love doing?”

The answer came to me immediately: “Landing great & Hard-to-get Jobs”. I realized I had not only landed every great job I had to date in my career, but I had accomplished this WITHOUT EVER applying online & WITHOUT a fancy degree or impressive resume.

Shortly after, I quit my stressful tech startup job & launched CareerPioneer. Since then I’ve built out two separate product offerings, and have coached dozens of clients to land the incredible jobs they only dreamed of before.

I gained the skills necessary to build CareerPioneer successfully through a few mediums. #1 was through the efforts that had landed me great top-tier jobs via my no-application strategy over the past 10 years. #2 was via experiences participating in hiring & interviewing at multiple companies, in particular Amazon.

Amazon by far has one of the most rigorous, but also effective recruiting & interview processes around - my learnings from participating in these processes proved invaluable. #3 I’ve been lucky enough through my career to find a few AMAZING mentors who helped me hone my skills.

One was a lifetime salesperson & highly successful entrepreneur - he taught me how to sell like no other (and in my business, I teach candidates to effectively “sell” themselves to hiring teams). The other was an incredible recruiter and entrepreneur, who taught me how to optimize yourself and your impact through every part of a hiring process.

Finally, when it came to validating my idea for my “service”, I realized I had actually been teaching my strategies & knowledge to countless friends, colleagues, & connections for more than a few years pro bono with no agenda - I just thought I was helping folks.

When I realized I had not only “done this” successfully for myself multiple times, but also for probably 25+ others casually - I knew I had something great on my hands. From there, I spent time documenting out my program with the free time I had since quitting my last startup, built my website, and started marketing & doing outreach.

When I made my first sale, I thought, “WOW, this works”. And when I helped that first client land an incredible job, doubling their pay & getting everything they wanted w/ a great company, I knew I had something. Since then, I’ve been running with it and help as many folks as I can.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Since launching, a few specific things have helped attract & retain customers. It’s very possible I’m different than many other folks that you might see around - as I’ve built my business primarily on the following:

Word-of-Mouth Promotion
Referrals
Organically without Ads via posting on LinkedIn

I NEVER thought that writing on LinkedIn was something that:

I could do
That people would read
That would drive leads and bring business in for me

The below showcases my first 28 days of writing LI posts and the volume of engagement I was able to get. This might seem small, but was an incredible starting point for me to “believe” this could help me.

As of right now, I’ve mainly sold my main “high-ticket” “Land your Dream Job” program (which is a one-time purchase program). I’ve begun coaching clients in my second “General Career Coaching” offer, but that’s very nascent & I can’t speak to longer-term “client retention” as of yet. But I can say that before starting my business, I worked in Customer Success & Account Management roles being responsible specifically for client Retention & Expansion.

Find out what’s already working for the folks who are successful in your space, then copy the key elements and tailor them to your own needs + offering

This taught me the criticality of providing clients’ products & services that provide both meaningful & consistent VALUE. My plan to retain my new career coaching clients is to focus on ensuring each of my clients is getting both of those things & I’m confident this will drive a high level of client retention.

This has served me well in my career & success to date & I plan to only sharpen my focus further on this.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Right now, things are going well, but I believe there is SO MUCH more ahead!

Currently, I’m bringing in enough clients every month to continually make 100-150% of my previous & most recent tech-startup job’s compensation. But I believe this is just a starting point & have built out a financial model where I believe in the next 6-12 months I can very reasonably 4-to-5X the # of new clients I’m able to bring in each month.

To break this down - for my high-ticket price point “Flagship” offering, I’m hitting 2-3 new clients a month right now, but with the growth plans above, expect to reasonably increase this to 10-16 new clients/month within 12 months.

I’m lucky because my margins are significant - the benefit of offering a “Professional Service” business. Really, I’m exchanging my own time generating, landing, and coaching my clients - that’s my main “expense”. I spend very little <$200/month on tech, systems, and tools to support everything I’ve done to date.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Starting a business can feel like an extremely challenging & scary endeavor - but the secret is that you only need two key things to be successful. One is that you have a skill, knowledge, or some type of product/offering that people WANT and WILL pay for. The second is the ability to attract & convert clients.

I’d say for, the “product/service that people will buy” part was MUCH easier for me. I started my business based on something I had done many times, which I knew worked, and that I had already helped a variety of people do successfully.

The “generating leads” part was much harder for me, as much of my career has been in account management & customer success roles - essentially, I’ve worked with existing clients to retain and expand their existing business. I learned quickly, that it’s significantly different marketing to, attracting, and selling new clients V. making existing clients successful & getting them to spend more.

I’d give a few pieces of advice here. Find others in your space who are doing similar work. Look at what’s making them successful, ex: which content channels are they using, what types of messaging are resonating with their audiences, etc. A HUGE lesson for me:

You do NOT need to “Reinvent the wheel” with all your tactics and strategies - instead find out what’s already working for the folks who are successful in your space, then copy they key elements and tailor them to your own needs + offering (ex: whatever makes you unique). This will save you time, and a significant amount of effort, & help you get traction faster.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

My “Tech-stack” is incredibly simple & low-cost, but it works for now:

Website: Built and hosted on SquareSpace
Scheduling: Calendly(free)
Email, Calendar, Content Storage + Sharing: Google Suite (Free)
Conference Calls: Zoom (free), but switching to Google Meet(better free version)
Contracts: HelloSign
Payments: Stripe

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Tim Ferriss: Book - The Four Hour Workweek, The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast, a variety of other books.
A Variety of Consultants / Influencers (mainly in sales): Josh Braun, Jim Keenan, Justin Welsh, and lots of others.
Books: Gap Selling, Never Split the Difference, The Compound Effect, Radical Candor, Rising Strong, Leadership & Self-Deception, The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F--K, and many more.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Figure out your “Two Things” before you get started:

1. The In-Demand, Skill, Knowledge, Service (or Product) you will offer

2. Do some research and have some ideas for how you’re going to drive clients & leads → without leads & clients, your service or product doesn’t matter at all.

Listen to folks you trust, take their feedback & get their opinions, but to a certain extent, take the input you get with a grain of salt. These folks want to help & you should listen if they have some helpful input or insights - but YOU need to choose what you do with your business & if you believe in something and have validated its value & have a good idea on the “Two Things” above - then run with it!

ALWAYS be learning. You will (likely) have many “failures'' as you get rolling. DO NOT take them personally & let them get you down - instead, learn from them, use them to hone your strategy, offering, process, etc., and get ever-better. Being able to do this is paramount to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Do something you love and/or believe in. Unless you’re that incredibly rare breed of person that can just push through literally anything with no emotion (this VERY likely isn’t you) then doing something you love and believe in will help motivate you during the hard times - there will be some to many of these - so you better love and believe in what you’re selling / offering, otherwise, you’ll quickly get burned out and things may fall apart.