CASE STUDY

“I got to the point in my business where I thought: I don't know where I'm going with all of this. I have all these offers, I have these people on my list, I have these services and everything just kind of felt like a jumbled mess.”

That’s the overwhelm that was drowning Chris Orzechowski when we first met in 2023.

Chris is best known as an email marketing expert, but has worn many hats over the years:

• Wrestler
• Teacher
• Author  
• Digital course creator
• Family man and father

In addition to his education products, Chris' also offered a client services side where he and his team helped e-commerce brands grow their revenue through expert email copy and email automation.

“Basically, I help people scale their revenue and profitability with email marketing and retention marketing. “I’ve sold $100m+ worth of products using email."

After 11 years in business, The Email Copywriter seemed to be booming.

And it was—on the surface:

• $1 million annual revenue
• Large team
• Courses were selling well
• Clients were hiring

But underneath?

None of that worked unless Chris did -- 24/7!

So, let’s drill down into the key problems Chris faced and why he came to me.

The Business

Most businesses start off dead simple.

That’s because they have to be simple to work -- you can’t handle ‘complicated’ at the start of the journey.

But, as Chris explained, as the business grows, suddenly things aren’t simple anymore.

“As you start growing, there’s all these extra layers and you start complicating everything."

Imagine you’re running a marathon and when you get to the finish line, your coach says, ‘Great! Now we’re going to run another marathon … and another.’

“That’s what I felt like building my business up to that point. Every day, every week, every month, everything’s a sprint. We were making stuff happen, getting stuff done, but so much of it was falling onto me. And I realised, if I get hit by a bus or don’t want to work for a week, then everything stops.

In spite of his team, Chris was involved all the deliverables himself — development, marketing, sales and everything else that would come it.

He started to ask himself the big question: Can I sustain this year on year with the weight of the business on my shoulders?

Energy

But that wasn't all...

As happens to so many business owners, Chris had started to fall out of love with what he was teaching.

He'd been teaching email copywriting for 11 years and had reached the point where he was tired of answering the same questions over and over. 

“I felt like I've written books on this. I've created courses. I've written 150 articles. There's no secrets left.”

He was running out of steam, and he knew it.

Life

And then there's life...

Chris' first son was born in 2020, and his second in 2022.

When we had just one child, it wasn’t too bad. Obviously, I had less time and less sleep, but I was still able to kind of hustle through everything. When number two came along, everything fell out the window. I felt like I could barely work at all when he was young.

Life had changed with the birth of his sons and now, Chris needed to spend more time with his family, rather than using all his energy running the business.

Chris was looking for support to make the necessary changes in his business.

He explains:

“I’m working as hard as I can. But how can I continue to scale? There are courses and masterminds, but they don't seem to help people with my kind of business. When I found you and read your case study — all 118 pages — I felt like I’d been looking for you forever.

The part that most caught his attention?

You built a multi-7-figure online education business working six days a month... I was like, ‘That's my man. He’s done it in a different domain, but he understands the fundamentals. That’s the guy I want to learn from.’

However, there was one other piece that was even more important.

As we discussed his business, Chris realised:

I’d be very happy making the same revenue but getting my life back.

Sometimes, all entrepreneurs want is to keep scaling.

Other times, what they really want is to get their life back -- freedom to step away from their business from time to time and watch their kids grow up.

For Chris, understanding that he valued lifestyle more than endless scale opened an important realisation:

It's not actually growing revenue that matters.

The Work

Let's summarise:

• Chris' business was turning over $1m, but was overwhelming and draining
• Business relied on his constant involvement
• Complexity and chaos made further growth impossible
• Birth of his two sons shifted his priorities to family over work
• He thought he wanted more revenue, but realised profit and free time were more important 

The goal became to simplify and streamline the business, in order to radically increase two things:

1. Net profit
2. Free time 

We can do these two things by simplifying. 

In turn, simplifying allows for further scale in the business.  

Here's what we did:

1. Repositioning

Much of The Email Copywriter’s initial success had come from teaching copywriters.

But when Chris and I drilled down into his business, it was clear that most of his profit was coming from larger companies, particularly e-commerce and digital businesses with big email databases.

This led to a choice:

a) Continue to service copywriters with low ticket offers
b) Focus on high-ticket offers to large companies

In the first scenario, the only way to scale is with increased volume. (i.e. ever more traffic)

In the second scenario, he could grow revenue significantly with the people already in his audience, and it's a much simpler business.

Added bonus: 

Working with these larger companies was the energetic shift that Chris was looking for in the next phase of his business.

The choice was simple. 

In line with this, we also started repositioning his overall content and messaging to speak directly to larger businesses, in order to attract more of the people he needed in order to grow.

From the outside, this kind of shift can seem simple.

But it's incredibly hard to do by yourself, when you're so close to everything that's going on in your day-to-day.

Get it right, however, and it lays the groundwork for the next 10 years of your business.

2. Expenses

“The biggest thing we did in the beginning was to hack away at the expenses, like barnacles on the bottom of a ship -- I was spending $40-50k a month on people, projects and tech."

Any 10+ year-old business has expenses that balloon over time. 

People, agencies, software... you name it. 

It's easy to feel that everyone is "necessary". 

And cutting any one single expense doesn't make much difference to the overall picture, so it's easy to ignore it.

But it weighs on you over time:

It’s demotivating when your expenses get that high and so much is weighing on you. I found myself reluctant to start new projects because so much of the revenue will be swallowed up in expenses.

The big advantage of stepping back and re-evaluating the whole business is that it shines a big, fat spotlight on everything you're spending money on that doesn't contribute to the bigger picture goals.  

I was aggressive in pointing all this out to Chris.

And to his credit he immediately recognised that so many of his costs were simply "nice to haves" that didn't make sense moving forward.

Cutting these was hard (it always is), but it freed up $10,000s /mth in cash flow.

It was life-changing when I could finally breathe again.

3. Simplified structure

Chris was carrying a lot of legacy team from when he had a bigger version of his agency, but that no longer fit in the new version of his business where he wanted to work directly with larger business.

Simply put, his team was too big for what he needed to deliver.

Many of the daily business tasks I was doing didn’t make any profit, even though doing them made me feel like things were happening.

Activity... revenue...

But no profit. 

We took a long, hard look at his team, and reimagined the structure of how he worked with clients to create a lean team that was more focused and carried fewer costs.

Chris shifted all his activity to concentrate on doing four things exceptionally well:

• Generate leads
• Capture leads
• Convert them into customers
• Sell more to loyal customers

4. Shutting things down

I shut down a programme that had made $600,000 worth of revenue over two years. I was scared to stop selling it. But I knew that the cost of continuing was to miss out on something far bigger and better down the track.

It's scary to stop doing things that bring in a lot of revenue.

But when you're honest about the time and resources it takes up, you start to become sensitive to the true cost -- everything you're missing out on!

Stopping doing things is part and parcel of creating space for a new vision to emerge. 

So, yes, you’re going to be scared, but you just have to execute and keep moving forward.

Results

When Chris first came to me, he wanted to "scale".

But we quickly realised that scaling beyond $1m would be difficult with the business in the chaotic state that it was.

At the same time, through long conversations, Chris realised that it wasn't the revenue that mattered to him -- it was other things. And these became the goal:

1. Increase net profit
2. Reduce time spend in the business

So here's where we ended up...

1. 66% reduction in working hours 

With all the simplification and streamlining of the business, Chris' time spent operating the business dropped drastically, to the point where he was working only a third of the time he was before.

Now, I can do whatever I want. If I want to walk my son to school and collect him in the afternoon and take him to the pool, I can. I’m not working on weekends, either. The biggest thing is just, I can breathe again.

2. 50% growth in profit 

Top-line revenue didn't grow in the 12 months of our work.

But profit increased by 50%. 

Working with a mentor

Chris has worked with a number of mentors and coaches over time, each with different styles and purposes.

He says that in the beginning, there’s a bit of fear when you’re contemplating big changes and wondering how they’ll work:

When you’re operating solo, it's very hard if you don't have that sounding board, you make bad decisions which cost you much more than not doing anything at all. But I trusted you totally from the beginning and part of that was I saw what you built. So I wasn't really nervous. You had the roadmap and could challenge me in my thinking. I want that mindset in my brain.

You can't read the label from inside the bottle, and that's what mentorship gives you -- the ability to look from outside.

Unlike coaching (which involves helping you find your own solutions), mentorship gives you the ability to work directly with someone who's already done what you're trying to do, and to get direct advice.

"What would YOU do here?"

Sometimes, this is a case of making specific decisions -- THIS is what we should do! 

Just as often, it's a process of avoiding bad decision.

Entrepreneurs can't help themselves and have 15 ideas an hour.

Many of these ideas are great, but it's vital not to get distracted with things that don't serve the purpose:

In the past, I would have just launched into an initiative, and maybe gotten six months into it before I realised it was a stupid idea. I should have never done this. I've said no to 20 other things that could have been good ideas too while I wasted time on this.

Chris needed someone to pump the brakes on and say Hold on, let's think about that. What's the reason you're doing this? What's the outcome you want it to be? How do we know if we're successful?

All in all, mentorship isn't just about great strategy or easy answers.

It's a process.

And the process involves helping you, the entrepreneur, create the best version of you in the world.

It feels like I’ve taken the blinkers off and realised there’s a big wide world out there that I wasn’t even seeing before. I thought I understood my business, but looking back I can see it was a mess and I wonder, what was I thinking? Now, I can create 100 things better than this.

To find out more about Chris, visit: theemailcopywriter.com

To find out about mentorship with Olly, click here.