How to create a million-dollar business

Laura Belgray is a copywriter specializing in writing advertising content for businesses.

This shift resulted the pressures of a freelancer, as well as her willingness to widen operations.

Shift of operations

Laura Belgray has worked as a copywriter in entrepreneurs’ unique voices in New York City. Many businesses invited her to speak about copywriting at a live event.

Laura Belgray was really thrilled when raising her rates to $1,450 an hour as a copywriter. The former TV promo writer had increased her prices gradually $250 an hour to $500, then $750 and later, $950. “They were willing to pay if it will make them money, which good copy does,” she says. 

At first, she was delighted that her business was taking off. However, she felt overwhelmed as she looked at her calendar. To free up some time for herself and her husband, Belgray decided to block off Mondays and Fridays, scheduling her meetings the other days of the week. Then, she raised her prices, she began toying with ing her availability for appointments to Wednesdays alone.

However, she got anxious when she thought of the appointments with her customers. She turned to her business coach for ideas on how she could replace her income while giving up one-on-one client meetings. Following his advice and trying some experiments of her own, she created one-woman- company, helping her overpass $1 million in revenue in her business operations and stop one-on-one meetings with her clients. 

In fact, Belgray is part of a fast-evolving trend: the growth of million-dollar, one-person businesses. 

Turning knowledge into products 

One of her business coach’s most important advices was to sell her “mini-courses” in the form of PDF products as developed since 2016. She had been selling her “60 Minute Makeovers Copywriting Mini-Course” at $99 and “About Page and Professional Bio Builder” at $199 on her website.

In addition, she has offered an email copywriting course, featured by more than 100 pages of before-and-after makeovers. This course is very attractive, bringing in $250,000 in revenue. “It took much time to create this course, but it was time I felt like putting in”, she says. 

Her business coach also advised her to put her copywriting skills to work on her own behalf by marketing more to her email list and on social media. She did that in 2017 and 2018 and doubled her revenue her products.

 Shrimp Club, a 6-month mentoring session for 20 members, membership fee is 15,000 USD.

Working with many clients at a time

Despite that success, Belgray wasn’t able to replace all of her previous income through product sales. So she took another strategy: launching Shrimp Club. It is a six-month live mentoring program for 20 members, who get access to her advice on two calls a week. She offers them live Q&As, where she gives answers to questions they submit ahead of time. Current members pay $15,000 for this program. 

Although many people think this program is a group of copywriters, Belgray keeps unpredictable by including both professional copywriters and people other fields, such as entrepreneurs, food bloggers, therapists or graphic designers.  

Don’t do it all yourself

Although her company hasn’t any employees, she outsourced administrative and strategic work to Sandra Booker. At first, Sandra Booker just helped her move around my client bookings. However, Booker quickly transitioned acting as a virtual assistant to taking on other work, like customer service and email marketing tasks- freeing up the time Belgray needed to reach her maximum revenue.

Give it time

Belgray likes to celebrate the fact that she hit $1 million in revenue at age 50. “It’s better when you wait,” she says.

Her advice to those who are looking to shift to a less stressful business model while improving their revenue: How to add new products and programs. “It’s going to be really hard to make money if you do one-on-one work,” she says.