SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How To Run 4 Businesses, Pay Yourself Dividends, Next Warren Buffet? EP 258: Alex Steele
05 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
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Top Tribe, you're listening to episode 258, and coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Charlie Mulligan. He sells craft beer on demand, did a quarter of a million in sales in 2015, and will do two million in sales in 2016. Top Tribe, good morning. Our guest this morning is Adam Steele, and he says this about himself. He says, marginally successful, we'll see.
He's a serial entrepreneur living in Vancouver, Canada. He's built and run three companies and working on number four. When he's not working, well, he's working. He's an internet marketer by trade, and he loves what he does. Launching YouTube channel right now, and is excited about getting in front, obviously, of more folks. All right, Adam, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I hope.
All right, let's do this. So first things first, you said you're on company number four. What happened to the first three? First three are still all very well and living and growing. Number four is is sort of just another pet project. They're all kind of pet projects. They're all, you know, much more than pet projects. But, you know, each one is just sort of.
I get to a point where things get a little bit on the stale side and then I need another one. So, I mean, let's just be honest. Are you just like ADD and you do something, you build it from scratch and then you kind of get bored and pass it off to co-founders and move on?
Yeah, not so much co-founders, but rather we get things to where they're processed to a point where my involvement is is very little. And then my daily tasks decrease, decrease and decrease. And then I find myself just kind of running around online, not doing a heck of a lot. And then that's usually when the next thing happens.
So which of those first three, before we talk about your current one, which of those first three were most successful in terms of revenue in a given year? Definitely the magistrate, the digital marketing company. However, if we were to measure it on, I like to measure it less on revenue and more on involvement. Loganics, which is essentially it's a outsourcing company.
So companies like the magistrate would come to Loganics and say, hey, I'm really good at sales, but I really suck at fulfillment. I can't build links for my life. I I can't do content. I can't do X, Y, and Z. However, that's what my clients are expecting. Can you be the monkeys in the background taking care of this stuff while I pretend that I took care of it?
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Chapter 2: What insights does Adam Steele share about his entrepreneurial journey?
Loganics.net. All right. So, how do you make money from this? Just walk me through. It's just the packages? Yeah. Yeah, sure. So basically, SEO is fueled by a number of things or good rankings, I guess, in Google are fueled by a number of things. One of those things is links. And so what we do is we build links or we acquire links or that sort of thing for for groups. So we
In the example of Loganics, in the example of our most popular product, which is citations, we go out and we submit your business to directories, business directories like Yelp, like super pages, like yellow pages, like all those different ones. And that is a deliverable for a client of someone else's. What year did you found Loganics in?
It was founded under a different name originally and then rebranded two years ago. It's six years old. Six years old. And it looks like I'm reading off your website. Almost a quarter of a million citations built, 73 countries worked in, and over 3,000 clients served. In 2015, what was total revenue for the business? Um...
think it does right now it does about 60 a month so and 60k per month yeah i would say last year was more in the um in the 40 45 range okay so call it did half a million last year this year it's on track to do 750 750 000. Yeah, I would say that's probably pretty accurate. Okay, so this is where I want to go, Adam, because I think this is fascinating. You're not involved in this anymore, right?
You know what? My involvement is support at this time. So if somebody had a support query, I like to jump in and answer them.
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Chapter 3: How does Adam manage multiple businesses simultaneously?
So who's making the engine run? I mean, who else is on the team? The engine is run by a little bit of automation, a lot of good systems, but then also by the blood, sweat and tears of my local search manager, John, who runs a team of I think it's upwards of 50 people now in the Philippines. Okay. So help us understand.
I mean, this sounds like it's a high, high margin business on $500,000 in revenue in 2015 after expenses, you know, to your Philippines, to your, your search engine guy, what's left on net margin. Well, about 25% is cost, 75% roughly. I would just keep in mind that we've never had 75% because we spend tremendously on resources.
So coming up with resources and new tools for clients and building out dashboards. So you're looking at engineering cost, right? tons of engineering costs. So at best, we're probably taking home probably 30, 40% after all those extra little things that we're building. Okay, Top Tribe, do not forget your chance to win $100 right here on the podcast every Monday. It's very simple.
You just subscribe to the show on iTunes. And then once you've done that, text me to prove that you've done it. My number is 703-431-2709. Subscribe now and text me to enter. 703-431-2709. Okay, top tribe, I have to tell you, many people go, Nathan, you came out of nowhere. Your website's growing so fast. How'd you do it? The answer is simple. So I use HostGator.
I don't know if you guys know that, but I use HostGator. And the reason I do, they have like about 4,500 free templates I can use because I don't code. They've got a great e-commerce plugin. And guys, I bug the heck out of their support. They've got 24-7 support. which I love. So what I've done is I've worked with him. You guys know I make great deals.
If you go to hostgator.com forward slash Nathan, you can sign up, get your own domain for 30% off and a 45 day money back guarantee. Okay. Again, I make great deals for you guys. Go to hostgator.com forward slash Nathan to grab that now.
Okay, so call it, you're taking, you know, there's 60 to 70K of cash, you know, new cash made that year after all the R&D, after all the expenses, things like that. Something like that. And is that going, I mean, are you CEO of this business? To help us understand as an entrepreneur with multiple business lines, is that cash going directly to you personally, which you then reinvest elsewhere?
I mean, how's that cash treated? Yeah, and that's, it's kind of, it's been... It's been a, it's a, it's a good thing and it's a bad thing. My, I have this very bad habit of taking all the cash from my companies and pouring it into company four and company five and all that.
I don't, you know, there's, um, I can't remember who says it, but they, Hey, that's what Warren Buffett did in the early days. So I want to say Tony Robbins says you got to pay yourself first. and that is something i fail miserably at okay wait let's dig there adam what are your personal like add up your rent your food all that what what are your personal expenses every month
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Chapter 4: How does Adam measure success across his businesses?
Oh, interesting. From the individual companies under Magistrate or from Magistrate? From Magistrate itself. And why don't you have full control over magistrate? Can't you just increase your salary? I could if I wanted to. So what's the advantage? Is there a tax advantage of getting paid? Oh, interesting. I need to research that. OK, cool. Real quick, just so people want to.
It's going to be I mean, I'm in Canada, right? So it's going to be a little bit different, perhaps if you're in the United States or in some other country. So tell us real quick, just list off the other two companies besides Logan X that are under the magistrate. Yeah. So there's this magistrate, there's organics and there's local PBN.
And then there is unnamed local PBN is another sort of fulfillment agency. So local PBN dot com. And what we do is we we recover websites that were previously dropped or expired, but still remain in the web's archive.
so basically uh you forget to let's say you go out of business your dental practice goes out of business and two years down the line i'm digging through um domains and looking at how many links point to different domains and different other metrics and i find this dental domain and it's looks gold it's got lots of good backlinks it's got a really nice website i will
By that domain, I'll have all those backlinks because those links are still coming into that website, even though that website isn't there anymore. And I will also download the previous website from the web archive or more specifically Wayback Machine or Archive.org. So that's local PBN. And just give us let's just go through these real quick because I want to focus on the magistrate.
So local PBN, how much did that do in 2015? Um, it was started in November, I want to say, and it did about 15 K total. Total. Okay. And then what's the third one? The fourth one. Well, hold on. I have Loganics, local PBN. You said there's a third one under the magistrate. And then number four that I'm building is unnamed. And it is... Wait, is it actually unnamed or it's called unnamed?
Oh, it's totally unnamed. Oh, it really is unnamed. It doesn't have a name. It doesn't have a name yet. What's it do? It's basically now having dug through all this data to find these domains that have expired. We now have a lot of data on our hands and I'm talking about like 20 million websites or 20 million domains. They're who is information and a bunch of other different data points.
And what we reckon is there's probably a number of people out there, groups out there that might be interested in having a look at some of that information, possibly licensing that information. And we intend to grow that data. And hopefully, like I said, sell it, license it, something like that.
Well, hey, Adam, we'll link to all of and top tribal link to all of these websites that Adam is working on in the show notes at Nathan Latka dot com forward slash the top two five eight eight again forward slash the top two five eight.
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