How I Increased Monthly Cash Flow by $42,000 in Just 65 Days (My Business Turnaround)

I genuinely thought I was going to have to start laying people off.

Instead, 65 days later, we’d added $42,000 per month in recurring revenue to my marketing agency.

Here’s the story I haven’t shared here or on LinkedIn until now.

Not because I was too busy or forgot…because I genuinely didn’t know how the story was going to end.

Earlier this year, we lost three clients within a very unfortunate short period of time. Two of them were our largest clients, and between them we lost around $40,000 per month in recurring revenue.

Some good lessons learned, but these are stories for another article. The positive here is that one of our largest clients actually outgrew us. We had grown them to a size where they needed an agency with other specialist departments we didn’t have.

They thanked me for all our hard work and for hitting some very important milestones for them, and we parted on very good terms. A real success story for them! But a big part of the problem for us.

Outsource2Us as a business was still turning over north of seven figures a year, but it was now losing money every month. A lot of money. And any small business owner knows that losing that much revenue quickly means big trouble. Behind the scenes, you’re lying awake at 2am trying to work out how long you’ve got before you have to make decisions you really don’t want to make.

And this isn’t the first time I’d been here…

…years ago, in a different business I owned, around 90% of my revenue came from one US technology company. I was giving talks to people all around the world, advising on their marketing strategies, and delivering presentations to their clients for them. Life was good…until they went bust.

Then my business went bust too.

That experience taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. Revenue concentration kills businesses; I know all too well that failing to diversify your revenue streams is a recipe for disaster.

So when we lost $40,000 a month earlier this year, those old feelings came flooding straight back. The conversations with my advisors quickly became about cash flow, business loans, reducing overheads, and whether we needed to start thinking about letting people go.

I decided none of those things were going to happen, apart from tightening all spending where I could, and I backed myself 100% to turn things around. Foolishly or not, I stood at the front of the business, publicly, and I gave it my everything.

Rather than disappear until things got better, I decided to document the entire journey online.

Every single day I picked up my phone and posted on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. I told people exactly how much revenue we’d lost, exactly what I was doing to fix it, what was working, what wasn’t working, and what I was learning along the way.

I know…it sounds crazy, and to be honest, it felt crazy too. But I knew I could do it, so in the face of all the evidence telling me not to do it, I did it anyway.

I had multiple friends reaching out, telling me to stop. Colleagues were messaging me, saying I was mad. People couldn’t understand why I’d openly tell the world my business had just taken such a massive hit and was struggling.

But in this world where AI is taking over, I know people are connecting on a human level more than ever before. I know people are sick of advertising that holds empty promises they can’t trust.

People are connecting with honesty, so that’s what I gave them. Now here’s the interesting part…

I never shared any of that journey here on my website or on LinkedIn.

I was worried current clients would see my struggles and start questioning whether we were stable, worried potential clients would think we couldn’t deliver. And if we actually were a good marketing company…and most importantly to me, I was worried they were judging me as a leader before they’d taken the time to understand the full story.

So I kept that experiment to my other social channels. Behind the scenes though, we were doing exactly what businesses should do when they’re under pressure.

There was no magical marketing hack. You need to go back to basics, tighten up operations, advertise, improve your offer, follow up relentlessly, have more sales conversations, and simply do more of the things that work.

Over.
And over.
And over again.

Then something started happening…Our marketing activities and advertising content started gaining real traction, enquiries increased, conversations turned into proposals, and proposals turned into new clients.

One became three. Three became seven. Seven became fifteen.

Sixty-five days later we’d signed 15 new clients and added $42,000 per month in recurring revenue back into the business. We didn’t just replace what we’d lost, we actually came out stronger.

So what’s the lesson?

It’s definitely not that you should jump on social media and tell everyone how much money your business is losing. I don’t think anyone should do what I did. However, I do now have a killer story I can tell for the rest of my days in business

But the lesson is much simpler…

I’m going to break it down into three steps. And if anyone wants to talk about how you can do this in your business, my DM’s are always open for a chat.

1. Make sure your business is in a position to grow. Growth always brings growing pains, but making sure you have a half-decent operational platform to launch from is a good start.
2. Next, for many of you, it’s just marketing and sales. Good marketing is simple, but it’s not easy. And I’ll break that down for everyone in future posts. And this typically comes in cycles:
   1. First, you have an awareness problem. Not enough people know about you and your services.
   2. Once you’ve built a consistent lead generation engine, your focus shifts to converting those leads through a well-designed nurture sequence and a clearly mapped customer journey.
   3. You can’t ignore sales! Awareness and leads are no good if you can’t turn your newfound awareness into sales.
3. As your business grows, new challenges emerge. Your focus should shift to improving operational efficiency, protecting your margins, measuring financial performance accurately, and ensuring growth translates into sustainable profitability.

If you’d asked me at the start of this journey how long it would take to recover, I honestly couldn’t have told you.

Maybe 30 days, maybe 300. Maybe I would’ve failed publicly and had to close the doors. These were all an option, I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen.

This is also where I have to say a massive thank you to Wasif Kasim, who’s coached and mentored me throughout this entire journey and constantly challenged me to think bigger when it would’ve been much easier to retreat. His strategic guidance and practical advice helped me achieve everything I was able to in these 65 days.

And now that this chapter is behind me, I’ll be executing everything necessary for our next phase of growth, and you’ll see me back writing blogs and on LinkedIn more regularly.

Hopefully, there’s something in there that helps another business owner who might be sitting where I was just a couple of months ago.

The best part about all of this…if I keep my foot on the accelerator with my advertising and sales, I should be able to do the same, if not more in the next 65 days. I’ll be sure to come back and tell you if I do – Damo