Business Update! Where is Scary Management 1 year down the road?

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Happy Monday, my friend! ☕️ 

Whoohoo…. December is almost here 🥳

I’m sure you are ready to go into vacation/rest mode.

Perfect time to rest, reflect and seek inspiration over the next few weeks.

So, I thought - great timing to give you some (insider) insight into our business!

The nuts and bolts of:

1. How our business works. (Business Model)

2. Where we are now and what we’ve done. (Results)

3. Where we are going to do for 2025 and beyond. (Strategy)

1. The Scary Management Business Model

What is a business anyway?

A business is about creating value.

You solve problems or meet the needs of people.

And in exchange for this value add, you get money or other benefits.

Building Authority, Relationships, and Value

How are we creating value?

How are we making money?

Well, we’re not making tons money right now - we’re playing the long game.

A 5 year horizon.

The long game means building a system for growing an engaged audience which we can monetize later:

To start building this audience (and authority), we just created and gave away a whole lot of value for free this year via our newsletter and Linkedin posts.

Free for our audience, but we literally paid to get our content out to you this year.

That’s the tools, services, our time etc.

As I said, it’s a long game.

Ok, let’s break the model down, in case you are interested in doing the same or just curious about how it’s all supposed to work:

1. Start with Social Media to build your authority and audience:
   Social platforms, especially LinkedIn, are a great place to show your expertise and connect with an audience. We basically started building trust and positioning ourselves as the go-to guys for our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) by consistently (weekly) sharing valuable insights, personal/relatable stories, and actionable advice. Who is our ideal customer? People interested in management soft skills and high EQ management.

2. Guide Your Audience to a Space You Own:
   Social media is great, but you don’t own your audience. You are just 1 ban away from serious problems for your business. That’s why we funnel our social audience to our email newsletter. It’s a platform we control. This newsletter is our community. It’s a space where we engage more deeply and personally and share exclusive content. The key is to own and nurture your audience, adding so much value, they would feel foolish not buying from you (Alex Hormozi).

3. Make Your Website a Gateway for Products and Ideas:
   From the newsletter, we guide readers to our website, which serves as both a hub for our ideas and a launchpad for our products. Our first offering, The Scary Management Comic Book (Part One), will be sold on Amazon.com using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This setup is simple, scalable, and accessible to anyone looking to create and share digital products. The idea is to put out a quality Comic book first, collect feedback, and build our product portfolio from there.

4. Execute Consistently:
   Having a system is one thing; executing it consistently is another. Social posts, newsletters, and products require focus and effort to stay aligned with your audience’s needs. Operationally, you need to tune your engine and funnels by looking at the metrics. With time being short due to my existing job, I had to figure out and prove I could execute consistently and I’m comfortable we’ve found our rhythm after posting consistently for 52 weeks… Still, there are things like content generation, SEO, email deliverability etc that we need to tune on an ongoing basis.

Looking at things from a marketing funnel perspective, we’ve implemented steps 1, 2 and 3 in the below diagram. Steps 4, 5 coming next…

Again, our focus this year has been to implement the initial business model and focus on the content library. Next, let’s dive into what we achieved this year - our results from 2024.

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2. Where We Are Now? Results from 2024.

The key goal this year was to “start the flywheel”.

1. Audience: We’ve organically grown our newsletter to over 100 subscribers with some very impressive engagement rates (58.3% open rate and click through rate of 10.1%). Our readers opening our emails, enjoying the read and giving great feedback and encouragement. There has been zero investment in paid growth, as scaling our audience was not a goal for 2024.

2. Content Arsenal: With Scary Management style and voice, we have established our unique brand of management training. We’ve turned complex ideas into engaging, bite-sized, easy-to-digest tips (yes, with memes - my sense of humour is a value-add in itself hehe). We packed our newsletters with practical advice—building a handy library of tools for anyone managing people. This library is now ready for the next phase - packaging into digital products and repurposing for other social media as we seek to scale our audience and monetize in 2025.

3. Revenue: We have made a grand total of $49.06 from the advertising opportunities we received (via the Beehiiv platform we use for our Newsletter distribution). Many thanks to everyone that supported us by checking out the Ads! For next year, the target is to have advertising revenue increase to cover our operating costs (basically the various tools/platforms we are paying for), and of course, new revenue from digital product sales. See next section for 2025 strategy and goals.

2. The Vision for 2025: Scary Management, Scaled

We’re thinking big for next year. Here’s our plans:

1. March 2025: Launch our first digital product—the Scary Management Comic - Part One. We are confident Thandi’s story will inspire, educate, and entertain managers and team members everywhere and ultimately, make the world of work better, one person at a time. Big aspirations aside, there’s still a lot of work to do on this comic though. We need to bed down the AI “engine” for our characters so we can generate the right level of consistency and emotion we envisioned. We need to flesh out the dialog and visuals so the comic is gripping and delightful. Without the use of AI, all of this would be a pipe dream, but hey, it’s 2024 and here we are - more empowered than ever in our history… As a valued newsletter reader, you can expect the first draft of the comic on Christmas Day!

2. Audience Growth (Newsletter): To be clear, the number of LinkedIn followers and likes etc is not the goal here. Newsletter subscribers and engagement are the real metrics for growth. We want to expand our community to 500 subscribers by mid-2025 and hit the ambitious target of 5,000 by year-end. There are two strategies we are implementing for this growth: 1) Expand from LinkedIn to Reddit and Twitter (X) for our content strategy. We will expand and repurpose our existing content into these platforms. 2) Paid Advertising. For the newsletter, we want to channel the advertising revenue received into paid Ads, and thus build a growth engine/flywheel. We also intend to leverage paid ads on each social media platform as well to drive new subscribers to our Newsletter.

3. Revenue Diversification: For 2025, the goal is to expand our revenue streams to Advertising + Digital Product Sales (The Comic). Beyond comics and beyond 2025, we aim to roll out Courses, eBooks, and other digital assets that align with our brand. Each product will reinforce our mission of making the world of work better by making high EQ management less scary and ubiquitous globally.

Ultimately, the goal is to monetize by creating offerings in line with Alex Hormozi’s proven wisdom:

Again, this strategy is a long game. We are building slowly and sustainably (I still have a very demanding full time IT management day job), and are learning modern digital business on the way.

That’s it guys. Hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

I’m very excited for what’s coming next year and so happy to have you on board following, cheering and learning as well.

Ultimately, you can also do what I am doing here…

I would love to hear your thoughts and questions about our business model and strategy - Just reply to this email!

I respond to every mail I receive.

I guess that’s the benefit of having a tiny but highly enagaged audience :-)

Till next week folks!

PS: We are still on track to deliver the first draft of the comic to your inbox on Christmas Day - stay tuned!