Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2015; all figures, including Andreea Ayers’s annual revenue, monthly take-home income, course prices, speaking fees and working hours, are as reported at that time.
There are success stories of entrepreneurs who at some point build a million-dollar business out of nothing, and many people would like to know how they got started. That may be the case of Andreea Ayers, and this is her story of how she managed to turn $1,000 of savings into a business that brings in more than $200,000 a year. Step by step.
Ayers was an ordinary woman who at one point decided to give shape to a business idea, and that idea led her to another. This is Ayers’ story, as reported by Business Insider.
When Andreea Ayers started looking for work after moving to Colorado with her husband in 2006, she had had her first child five months earlier.
After several job interviews that went nowhere, she realised she would be better off starting her own business, which would give her some flexibility to spend time with her baby.
Ayers, 39, had always had side businesses alongside full-time jobs. So she decided the best thing was to pick one idea and devote herself to it completely.
She decided to start a T-shirt company with her savings. It was less than $1,000. “I wanted to start with $1,000 because I thought, if I lose $1,000, it’s no big deal.”
(See: How entrepreneur Sara Rotman did it)
She learned as she went which option was best: where to buy her blank T-shirts, who she was going to sell them to, what to put on them, and so on. She placed her first order of 69 T-shirts in four colours and set up a website to sell them at $28 each to “see what would happen”.
Orders started coming in during the first month, and then she had an idea. At a prenatal yoga class, she noticed her instructor was wearing a T-shirt that said “I am present”. On the bus home, she thought the shirt was so inspiring that it might make sense to sell T-shirts to yoga studios.
That weekend, she spent two days going through yoga websites and magazines to build an Excel spreadsheet of the 3,000 yoga studios in the US and their owners’ names. She spent the following week emailing every yoga studio individually.
She offered the T-shirts, which cost her less than $8 each, to the studios wholesale at $14 each. Within a week she had sold her initial order and was able not only to recover the savings she had put in, but also to make a profit and fund another order of T-shirts.
(See: How to focus your business idea so the product succeeds)
From then on the business ran smoothly, and in that first year she made close to $124,000. As the business stayed profitable and kept generating more and more, up to $160,000 a year, she was able to pay herself a salary of $3,000 a month (sometimes up to $10,000, depending on whether she had to buy inventory), until she sold the company in February 2011, just before her third child was born.
After the success of her business, she received so many emails from people asking how she had done it that she decided to set up a consulting firm in April 2011, and took on five clients at $500 a month each, teaching them how to get their businesses off the ground.
But with three small children, helping five clients was too much work for her, so she decided to launch an online course, “basically teaching them what she had learned, because they all had the same questions and the same needs”.
Seeing that the online course worked, she offered the same course to everyone at $47 a person, and about 50 people signed up. After a second course at the same price and with the same number of people, she launched a third, more complete six-week course for $800 and sold it to more than 60 people.
Since then, as well as offering courses on her website, LaunchGrowJoy.com, she regularly gives talks for which she charges between $200 and $10,000. She works about 25 hours a week and uses virtual help, including an assistant, a designer, a copywriter and a video producer.
(Read: How to bounce back after a business failure)
In recent years, her business’s annual revenue has levelled off at around $220,000 to $240,000, and she usually takes home about $10,000 a month.
Ayers’ advice to people who want to follow a similar path:
“Besides the lifestyle you want, it’s important to think about how much money you want to pay yourself and to make that a priority. There are always things to spend money on in your business, but if you can pay yourself first, it will give you the motivation you need to keep going. If you don’t, and you put in time and energy without seeing a return in terms of money, you end up burned out and your business starts to suffer, and that’s one of the worst things you can do.”
Featured image: Phil Roeder, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
