Client Portal

How Delegating Improved Our Productivity And Grew The Business To $14K/Month

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Laura Elizabeth

Founder, Client Portal

$11K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Client Portal

client-portal.io

from England, United Kingdom

started November 2016

$11,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Laura recommends to grow your business!

Badass: Making Users Awesome Kathy Sierra

Virtual Freedom: How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy Mo... Chris Ducker

Want more updates on Client Portal? Check out these stories:

1. How I Built A $7K/Month WordPress Plugin Because I Needed The Product (2019) ➜

2. How SEO Helped My Business Grow From $7K To $11K Monthly Revenue In One Year (2020) ➜

This is a follow up story for Client Portal. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 5 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hey, I'm Laura and I'm the founder of the Client Portal. Client Portal is a super simple way for freelancers and agencies to store their clients' deliverables in WordPress.

Client Portal currently makes around $14,000 a month in revenue. And over the last year, I've barely worked on it at all, yet it has still grown. Today I am going to talk about how that happened, why it happened, and where I'm going to go from here.

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Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

The business has grown slowly but steadily which, considering what I've had going on this year, is something that I'm pretty happy with.

Over the last six months, my husband and I sold our house in the USA, moved halfway across the world (in the middle of the pandemic), and had a baby. So to say we've been busy is an understatement.

Fortunately Client Portal has not only been chugging away with minimal input from me but it's grown by about $3k/mo. Most likely due to the rising number of people now becoming freelancers since COVID-19.

Three months ago we hired a full-time nanny which has enabled us to get back to work. But even with the extra help, I started to feel the pressure to make my first full-time hire. I felt like I was treading water — doing enough to stay afloat but not moving anywhere.

That, compounded with the fact that my repetitive strain injury in my arm suddenly became unbearable, drastically reduced the amount of work I could get done in a day.

For a while, I was feeling pretty low. I thought this could be the end of my business. But I had a chat with one of my good friends, Austin Church, who said to me, "what if instead of being the worst thing that could happen to your business, you could turn it into the best thing that could happen to your business. Maybe it's time you finally hire someone full-time and start the next stage of growth".

A lightbulb went off in my head. Maybe this wasn't the end, maybe it was an opportunity in disguise. So I did two things:

I figured out a system that will allow me to dictate everything from emails to blog articles (what you're reading right now has been spoken by me into a microphone rather than typed)
I started the process of hiring a full-time virtual assistant who could help me edit, format, and publish my dictated words, handle customer support, and do various other tasks to help keep my business running.

This has been my full-time focus for the last month or so.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

I've learned that as an entrepreneur, you don't have to do everything yourself. If you feel stuck in your business with not enough hours in the day it might be time to get some help.

Pick one marketing channel and focus on it exclusively.

I also learned that hiring somebody full-time doesn't have to cost as much as you might think. I used John Jonas's website onlinejobs.ph to find my virtual assistant from the Philippines, where the cost of living it's much lower than here in the UK. I knew I couldn't afford to hire a full-time employee close to home, so going abroad was the best option for me and I couldn't be happier with the decision.

Another thing I've learned is how productive you can be when you suddenly find yourself with less time to spare. Having a baby has drastically reduced the amount of time I can spend working on my business and my hobbies (even with a full-time nanny). But the benefit of having less time is that I've made every hour count.

I'm much more productive now during the time that I can work. I'm getting more* *done than when I had oodles of free time. And I've heard this time and time again from many people: when you have less time, it forces you to prioritize what matters to you. And if something matters to you, you will find a way to fit it into your day.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

My plan for the next year is to set my business up so anyone else could come in and run it if they needed to. That means having clear SOPs for customer support and having a well-defined roadmap for producing content, launches, sales, and promotions.

Instead of just winging it, I’m going to turn my business into something more systematized to expand my team even more over the next few years.

For a while, this is going to feel slow and frustrating. There's a lot of mess that I need to clean up and a lot of decisions that need to be made. Will my business grow within the next year? I don't know. But I hope that once I have these systems and processes in place I can start being more strategic with how I grow my business, reporting on which campaigns work and which don't rather than relying on vague feelings as to how something went.

I'm excited about the future — slightly overwhelmed — but cautiously optimistic that I can keep it running and growing, for a long time regardless of what life throws at me.

Have you read any good books in the last year?

Virtual Freedom – Chris Ducker - I read this book about eight years ago. Before I was ready to hire somebody. But I revisited it this year as I prepared to make my first full-time hire. It opened my eyes to the potential of having a virtual team and gave me some great pointers on how to write a good job posting, how to interview, and red flags to look out for.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Pick one marketing channel and focus on it exclusively. Many people (myself included) get excited about the potential of things like Facebook ads, content writing, podcasting, and so on. They try to implement all of them in their business at the same time. But not only is this going to be hard and overwhelming, but it also makes it virtually impossible to know what's working and what isn't.

So focus on one thing at a time. Don't be afraid to hire someone on a consulting basis to give you a roadmap (it costs money, but it will save you time and give you a clear direction). Then work on it solely for a few months and report on its success before you decide whether to carry on or move on to something different.