📈 2024 Revenue Update

Before we dive in, the Remote Entrepreneur newsletter has rebranded to Business Blitz!

Stay on the lookout for all things Business Blitz moving forward!

The vast majority of my entrepreneurial experience is from building my startup, Greenbox Storage.

I post about our successes, failures, and everything in between often on my social media accounts, but not as much on my newsletter.

In week’s Blitz, I hope to provide you value through the lens of my startup.

My hope is that you look at how my business is performing while brainstorming how you can improve yours.

In 2023, Greenbox Storage hit $518,000 in revenue (up from $270,000 in 2022).

Going into the year, we had massive ambitions. We originally set a revenue target of $1M, then I decided I wanted to grow faster.

We upped our revenue target to $1.5M.

Our average revenue per customer in 2023 was $611.

This meant we needed 2,454 customers to hit our $1.5M goal.

Greenbox Storage is a seasonal business.

We looked at order velocity from 2023 and created a model for how many orders we’d need to hit by which dates to be on track for our 2024 goal.

We were on track up through April 4th, then we fell behind.

After the busy season came to a close, we ended up with ~1,100 storage orders.

This was a big miss, but the original goal was very aggressive.

All in all, I project finishing the year with revenue between $800k-$1M (we added a shipping offering this year which isn’t included in 1,100).

Not what we wanted, but still solid growth from 2023.

Why did we miss our target?

There were two main reasons:

Our sales / marketing wasn’t good enough.

We hired a Marketing Manager and some sales reps, but we didn’t have the proper systems / processes in place for them to thrive. A lot of our offseason will be focused on building the tools necessary for them to succeed in 2025.

Our recruiting wasn’t good enough.

Here is our branch count by year:

2022: 6 branches

2023: 18 branches

2024: 23 branches

We were pickier with our expansion this year.

We put a major emphasis on launching branches that had high demand for our service.

We were also pickier with our hiring.

So here’s our plan for 2024.

Our very-early 2025 revenue target is $2m.

In order to hit this mark, we are focusing on building a killer HQ team.

We’re planning to hire killer sales reps and discussing options for our marketing strategy.

For recruiting on-campus employees, we are going to start earlier and allocate a sizable budget (something we haven’t done in the past).

In order to fund our rapid growth targets, we’re considering raising outside capital.

Our last capital raise was in 2022.

We raised $100,000 for 20% equity stake in the company (which we parlayed into a home-run acquisition you can read about here).

It’s a tough decision when deciding to raise capital. We have a solid growth rate now, but we’re hungry to grow faster.

We could keep our equity and grow slower, or sell some equity and grow faster.

It’s the old adage. Do you want a big piece of a small pie, or small piece of a big pie.

Anyway, I’ll keep you updated on how our 2024 numbers turn out, if we decide to raise capital or not, and how our team is growing later this year.

Hopefully reading about our 2024 performance gave you some ideas about how you can grow your company faster!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. The Startup Toolkit: This comprehensive course provides you step-by-step directions for how to launch and grow your startup. Through trial and error, I’ve developed these methods to grow my startup to $1M+ revenue.

2. 1-on-1 Startup Consulting: Serious about launching / growing your startup? Get the personalized help you need.

3. Promote your business to 1,400+ subscribers by sponsoring my newsletter.

Cheers,

Collin Rutherford

PS. Dentists, SMH.