What’s it like to scale your business to $100,000 a month in less than 2 years?

In this episode of the Bean Ninjas Podcast, Davis Nguyen of My Consulting Offer generously shares his experience and insights on scaling his business to $100,000 per month while working on it part time at the start.

Davis shares the framework he used and how he succeeded in reaching his goal. If you are a business owner wanting to scale your business, you shouldn’t miss this episode because there’s so much to gain from his knowledge.

In this episode, we discuss:

[02:15 ] Davis’ entrepreneurial story and an overview on his business.

[07:06 ] His reason behind pursuing management consulting after university.

[10:40 ] His thought process about moving to the education business.

[14:09 ] The framework he uses to decide what to sell in his business.

[20:18 ] The price point of his initial sales.

[21:09 ] Next steps after selling his products

[23:34 ] Deciding to scale his business and getting a company name, website, etc.

[26:55 ] Having contractors in his business and the tasks they handled.

[30:23 ] The framework he uses and how he looks for personnel to work for him.

[35:55 ] The status of the business when it scaled to $100,000 / month in 2019 versus today.

[39:26 ] Their future plans for the business.

[42:57 ] The importance of having a “why”.

Transcription

How to create a $100K per month side business in less than 2 years with Davis Nguyen of My Consulting Offer

Announcer Welcome to the Bean Ninjas Podcast, where you get an all-access pass to see what happens behind the closed doors of a fast-growing global bookkeeping and financial reporting business.

Meryl:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Bean Ninjas Podcast. Today, we’re chatting with Davis Nguyen about how he has created a $100,000 a month business and how he did this in less than two years. And from that period, he was working full-time.

There’s some really interesting parts to Davis’ story and I like the way that he was able to validate his idea in a weekend. And the way that he started his business without a website or a Facebook page or even a company name, specifically for the first year of his business. So he was being really careful about where he spent his limited resource of time. And he was forced to do that because he was working full-time, and he was just working on this business on the weekends.

And towards the end of the podcast, we’ve talked about Davis’ why; so the reason that he is in this business and what he wants to achieve from it. And I think he articulated this really well, and it might not be what you think. So listen in and I’m sure there’ll be some actionable takeaways from Davis’ story.

Hey Davis. Welcome to the Bean Ninjas Podcast.

Davis:

Thanks for having me, especially on your birthday, too.

Meryl:

Yeah. We planned this well in advance. And yeah, it’s fun to be talking to you and we were chatting prior to recording, and I was mentioning that the DCx Gold Coast event, which I talk about the DC community quite a bit on this podcast. And that’s actually kicking off today as well. So excited to be celebrating not only with my local friends but also some friends that have flown in for the event.

Davis:

I’m excited for it.

Meryl:

So we met at DC BKK, the event in Bangkok, in October. And I think we met at a group meet-up that was around the topic of online courses. And during the course of that meet-up, I heard about a presentation that you will deliver that people were raving about. And in that presentation, you were talking about how you had built a side hustle to $100K a month within the space of two years.

And so, I really wanted to get you on to the podcast to talk about how you went about doing that. So before we jump into that, could you give just a little bit of background about who you are and also what your business is.

Davis:

Absolutely. So I’ll give a background about my entrepreneurship, and then, we’ll talk about my business itself. So I guess I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. So my grandma immigrated; well, it’s kind of like the one, which is a political refugee from Vietnam. So they escaped the Vietnam war after it ended, and they pretty much had to escape through any means that they could to land into the United States.

And so, when they landed, my grandma didn’t speak English. They came with my uncles and my mom. No one spoke English, so they had to take a lot of service-type jobs that they’re working in, for example, airport airlines. They were working at, let’s say, restaurants; whatever they could to make minimum wage.

But eventually, my family decided, “Well, we have a family of five to feed. We probably should start a business.” And pretty much, that’s how the entrepreneurs started in my family. It’s like, no one at that time went to college, and they were just like, “Well, let’s just put together a business.” The business is just very simple. We’re just a brick and mortar store about how to do nails.

But I learned a lot from my grandma watching her become an entrepreneur because she had to go to the struggle of being in a new market [Inaudible 00:04:01 ], being a first-time entrepreneur, not being educated, not knowing how she was going to make money tomorrow, figuring out the sales, the marketing, the retention; all of that.

And so, I really looked up to my grandma. And so, I joke about this, but a lot of Asian parents will say, “Oh, you should be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer.” My grandma grew up saying, “Oh, that’s boring. You should be an entrepreneur.” So that’s how the entrepreneurial bug gotten me.

And then, so I grew up, my family; the businesses are doing okay now. But when we were growing up, they were pretty struggling. And so, to make ends meet, I would also take a lot of odd jobs. So for example, in high school, I would clean tables. In college, I played poker to pay money for my mom to take care of her.

And so, I always had this entrepreneurial bug, but I just never knew how to capitalize on it. So I actually started a bunch of businesses since I was as young as 18. And I will tell you like all seven of them failed except for one. And then, so my track record as an entrepreneur is actually pretty poor. So it’s pretty surprising that my latest business worked, but I’ll summarize it.

But I ended up going to college, every tech that will talk about college. But I ended up working for a company called Bain & Company after I graduated in 2015. And so, Bain & Company is one of the big management consulting companies in the world. And I’ll tell you in fact to what we do.

But for anyone who’s not aware, management consultants are basically like SWAT teams for business. So if you have a problem you can’t solve, you hire a consulting firm to come in and they consult for you on, in this case, business and management.

And so, I worked there for two years before leaving to work out in an education company down in Los Angeles. So they were a startup in the education space. So I took a pay cut to do that. And for a while, we weren’t actually profitable.

So eventually, we would grow, and I will tackle some of the topics that I learned so much from them that within a scale of a year, this business is a startup in L.A.. We went from non-profitable, making 6 figures to making like over 8 figures and we were profitable. So I learned a lot during my time there helping them scale to that massive scale within a year.

But while they were not profitable and I was still helping my mom and supporting my parents back home, I decided to start a small business on the weekend. So the business is called My Consulting Offer. Actually, for the first year, we actually didn’t have a name. So I think there’s a lot of things I don’t think we needed and the name wasn’t one of them.

And it was just in my living room, in my bedroom on the weekend; Saturday and Sunday. It was basic; very simple, which was I wanted to help university students and recent graduates get jobs in management consulting. So the same job I had when I left university myself.

And it was very simple; as in the business was just two things, which is, one, how do I help people get the interview? So helping them with their CVs, their resumes, their cover letters. And then, helping them pass the interviews. So basically being a mock interviewer for them, talking about the areas they needed to work on, their questions, how they presented themselves; stuff like that.

And that was pretty much the business was help people get interviews in management consulting, help them pass the interviews. And at the time, the average success rate in the industry was about 2%. We were getting over, roughly, when I first started, roughly about 95% to 100% that first year. So that’s pretty much how the business started. It was just in my living room, and we did that for a while before I went full-time.

Meryl:

That’s, I think, an incredible story. I actually have so many questions to ask you just from what you’ve talked about then. Before we dive into how you grew My Consulting Offer, I’ve got a couple of questions for you just going back to some of the decisions you made before that.

So you grew up in an entrepreneurial family and you made the decision to go