How I Made $10K in a Summer Off (Before I Had a Team or a Budget)

How I Made $10K in a Summer Off (Before I Had a Team or a Budget)

I need to take you back to the summer of 2018.

My legal templates business had been running for just over a year. I’d just launched something called the Ultimate Bundle® (no registered trademark back then). I was making anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000 a month selling individual contracts and two or three Bundles, and even though my expenses were low, I knew I couldn’t live off that forever once you factored in taxes, expenses, savings, and actually paying myself.

And I wanted to take the summer off.

I know. I know. But hear me out.

I’d spent the two years since leaving my career as a lawyer hustling constantly. My dad had suddenly lost a lot of weight and had strange bruising on his arms. I kept asking him to go to the doctor. He kept telling me I was nuts. Even if I was being an overprotective daughter, I wanted to spend that summer with him.

Isn’t that the whole point of having your own business? It’s literally why I walked away from what everyone else considered a safe career.

But I still needed to make money. I was newly married. We’d just bought our first house. I have expensive taste in coffee. So here’s exactly what I focused on that summer to keep bringing in cash with no team behind me.

1. My Email List

I had 929 email subscribers and 1,012 Instagram followers at the time. I chose to focus on my email list.

I didn’t need thousands of people to buy. Even a handful would make a real difference. So I put my energy into writing emails that were actually valuable, about my subscribers, and focused on their needs. I included links to purchase my product in every one, which they could buy whether I was at my desk or not.

2. An Out of Office Message With FAQs

With no team and no ability to imagine ever being in a position to hire, I set up an out of office email autoresponder with answers to the questions I got most often. I linked directly to the product, blog post, or page they needed.

I made several sales from this strategy alone, which taught me something important: I didn’t need to spend nearly as much time on sales calls as I thought I did.

3. Nurture What You Already Have

Instead of chasing new customers, I poured more into the ones I already had.

I emailed current customers asking if they had referrals to send my way. I sent DMs to business coaches asking if they’d share about my legal templates. I checked in to see if anyone needed anything else from me.

That strategy alone generated $10,000 over the summer.

4. Intentional Content

I pre-wrote and planned every piece of content for July and August before I stepped back. Every single piece had one clear call to action: either a direct link to my products or an invitation to join my email list, where I’d email them about my products anyway.

I’d accidentally created my first flywheel.

What Happened on August 16, 2018

It’s around 2:30 in the afternoon on a Thursday. I’m wrapping up and getting ready to head “back to the office” come September.

I take a sales call with a former Coca-Cola executive in Atlanta who wants to start a health coaching business.

My dad keeps calling.

I send it to voicemail. He calls again. And again.

I rush off the call.

“I have to go to the hospital,” he says.

I rush him there. Doctors run every test imaginable. We wait in the ER sharing a bag of Utz from the vending machine. A young doctor walks in, completely expressionless.

“Mr. Foss,” he says, “when’s the last time you’ve been to the doctor? Because you have a blood malignancy.”

There’s this brief moment where only I understand what that means, because my mom went to medical school when I was a baby and treated me like her study buddy. My dad doesn’t know yet.

My world tunnels into a pin-sized black hole.

I run out of the room and collapse in the hallway, making sounds I’d only ever heard from animals at the Philadelphia Zoo.

Thank god I took this summer off, I thought, pounding the hospital floor.

Thank god I created this business and actually enjoyed the benefits of it, I thought as someone offered me a chair.

I had no idea how much I was about to learn about growing a business on so little time and even less sleep. I had no idea I’d build it into a multi-7-figure business the same year he was diagnosed. I had no idea what was coming.

But I did it.

What This Means for You

I know it’s not 2018. But if you’re trying to figure out how to step away, take a vacation, or just breathe for a few weeks without your business falling apart, I want you to know it’s possible before you have a full team, before you can afford ads, and before anyone can say “must be nice.”

Those four strategies, a focused email list, a smart out of office setup, nurturing existing relationships, and intentional content with one clear call to action, are still what I come back to today.

If you want to hear more about how I prep to take time off, what to focus on and what to drop, and how to still make money when you’re out of office, listen to this week’s episode of On Your Terms®. I also share how I once took the entire month of May off without telling a soul and still made multi-6-figures in the business.

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