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Excerpt
How do you track your progress?
In growing the business, there are a lot of ways to track your milestones. It could be your monthly recurring revenue. So that’s definitely one of the things that I track, how much revenue do we have every month coming in. Since we’re a service business and our contracts are at least a year and we’re paid every month by our clients, so if our monthly recurring revenue is growing, that is one of the best ways to measure if we’re growing as a company.
Another way to measure if you’re growing as a company or a business is your people. Are you growing in the number of people you have in your team? So it used to be just one person working in SEO Hacker. That’s me. And then, I would hire freelancers during that time. Because I couldn’t afford an office, I couldn’t afford full-time people, I couldn’t afford utilities during that time, so I don’t hire freelance people. I would do the work a hundred percent and then it became too heavy for me. I couldn’t do all the work anymore because the client base was growing. You know, it was being blessed. It was growing. I suddenly decided maybe it’s time to get my first office. My first office wasn’t big. It was actually super smaller. The rent is P10,000 a month for that space, but it was a good cozy office. You know, I still remember it and I was able to hire my first people because of that office.
We operated there for a while. We grew as a team. I had to rent out my next office, which is a bigger office. Actually, it’s one house. It’s a residential house and that’s where we worked for a time again. And then we grew and grew again. Kept on hiring people because the work became more, we’re getting more clients, more inquiries, and we had to move to another residential office, which is bigger. This is way bigger.
And it took a number of years where, when we stayed there and then finally we move to where we are now. The third floor of the building that we’re renting out along Aguirre in BF Parañaque. But yeah, we moved there in 2017. So it was actually seven years of work before we were able to get through our first commercial office in a building. Everything that we were renting out was residential.
Humble beginnings, because I didn’t have venture capital. My parents didn’t back me up. They didn’t give me money to start the business or grow it. So it was all, “Oh, we made profits then we invest, made profits, reinvest, made profits, reinvest, save, save, save”. And we’re able to finally renovate and rent out the commercial office. And then, we rented out the second floor as well. So we’re renting out two floors of the office. That’s because we’ve grown to 50 people and that’s a lot of people already.
It’s beyond my wildest dreams. I thought I would have like 10 people, 12 people, and I’d be happy with that. And I was happy with that. It’s just that we have a lot more work that’s given to us by God, you know, and we have to do it. So we have to get more people. So definitely a growing team, that’s another way to track progress. There are more ways to track it, like your voice or market share, but that’s tougher to track. It’s easier for you to track if your monthly recurring revenue is growing, or your annual recurring revenue is growing and if your team is growing. Those are two things that you can use to track your progress.