Four days after leaving Volacci and with the taste of champagne in my mouth I woke up to an interesting email in my inbox. It was a lead. A business opportunity. It was from Chip. Okay, Chip’s not his real name but I’ve decided to keep his identity secret. Chip owns a small event management software company and was in the process of total site redesign. It had been a couple of years since they last updated their site and even though they were receiving a good amount of traffic from SEO they wanted more. The best part was that if this opportunity worked out it would have allowed me to bring on a buddy of mine, a freelance writer, to work on the project too. Within hours of emailing Chip back I received an RFP. The very next day I wrote up a Proposal. My first proposal. I had only previous editing proposals based on other company’s RFP’s and internal resources, never on my own.
So, after sending the proposal and a couple of emails back and forth we met for lunch. I also asked him how he found me and he said that he had seen my Ad on Google. I had completely forgotten about that. Back story, only a week prior to leaving Volacci I had setup a Google Adwords campaign and I guess he seen my ad. I didn’t think anything more about it. We were at lunch and I was going to enjoy by Sour Cream Enchiladas and learn as much as I could about their business. We discussed time lines, customers, strategy and after roughly an hour I had convinced them to have my buddy, the writer, send them over his proposal for his part of the job. As soon as I received his proposal I immediately forwarded it to Chip. A week had gone by and I hadn’t heard back from Chip. I started thinking about the Ad Chip had mentioned. I opened up my account and found I had been charged $3.32 for a click on August 30th the same day Chip had emailed me about his business. I was floored. For one, it was the only click I had received since setting up the account only 9 days before he contacted me and secondly it meant my landing page worked! I was 1 for 1.
Unfortunately, that following Sunday I received an email from Chip letting me know they wanted to try optimizing their site internally for the time being and that if there was ever a time down the road that they need someone they would be in contact. I felt miserable and had my fantasy team not done so well I would have been even more let down. But I started to think. For a little over $3 I learned a lot about doing business and about myself. For one, I’m a better salesman than I thought. In fact I was so good I was able to convince Chip to listen to what my buddying freelancer had to offer even though they had all but hired a writer. I also learned what it’s like to write a Proposal from scratch. It’s a pain in the ass to say the least. At the end of the day that $3, a little as it was, meant the world to me. It allowed me to discover new strengths and for the first time in my life I felt like I was getting closer to my dream of becoming an entrepreneur.
