1.    Going solo - An entrepreneur’s journey

2.   The 11 systems that run your business

3.   Growing with the D.A.D Formula

4.   Learning to delegate: The 10 roles

5.   Digital marketing support at hand

6.   How to scale up sustainably without burnout

7.   How to maximize your output with your dream team

8.  Conclusion

Like most talented entrepreneurs, I have a cherished dream. I want a hundred thousand people to live a life of freedom by using the power of the internet. I was all charged up. I wanted to do it all. 

At first, I thought I was the only person who could do all the work efficiently; I wanted control over everything. Some of you may be like one man or one woman army, trying to do everything yourself. It's good to start like that but not so good to scale because you will burn out. As an entrepreneur or startup business, you are likely a hard-working, never-give-up kind of person who wants every facet of your business to be perfect. Because of those qualities, we tend to take on more than we can handle. However, there will come a time when business is booming, built and it’s time to think about outsourcing. 

Yes, I managed my company’s day-to-day business and built my company’s business satisfactorily. Still, I realized that although I wanted my business to grow, I had no time left in my day to make it happen. 

My hook is how to build a business without any office or employees; I started that way. I did a business without any office, and I continue to just work from my home office: no real estate and stuff like that. And I implemented all the things myself first in the first phase. 

Gradually I started adding more members to my team. Right now, I only have a few people on the payroll in my company. At the same time, I wanted my business to grow, and to do that; I had to let go and start delegating.  Letting go paid off for me. Your business grows in various stages. The starting stage will be the grinding phase, where you have to put in the energy, the effort to create something substantial, to create something solid, and for that, you've got to do some research. You've got to find out what your market needs, what exactly is the problem you're solving? What is your niche? 

How do you design the curriculum? How do you record videos? So there's going to be a lot of work that you've got to put in initially; when you start on your business, there's no shortcut to this game. And when I got started, it was the same thing. I could not see results for a very long period until I had something substantial enough to sell. 

Take the analogy of a rocket ship that is taking off. When it blasts off there's a lot of resistance from the force of gravity below, and as it's taking off, so much fuel is burned to get that thrust. Once the rocket moves into orbit, things get smoother. So even in this business, your first phase or your launching stage is where you need to put in the work; there's no shortcut to this game. 

The way I see it is when it comes to growing a business, you can spend more time or you can spend more money. As you're creating money. Initially, when you're starting you may need to spend more time doing all the things manually, but as you're making money, you need to start reinvesting it back into methods that can save you time. 

I came to realize that delegating specific tasks to subject-matter experts was the best tactical solution. I could reduce my overhead expenses while successfully scaling up.

Have you ever thought about looking at your business like an organism, like a human body for that matter? I look at it that way, and ever since I launched my business in the last three years, it's grown well because I take care of it like a living thing. 

For example, when you start a business, you have a big idea, right? And then the idea manifests into you setting up the company. It's a lot like giving birth to a child. You plant the seed, and that seed grows into a fetus, and the fetus grows for a few months, and then the child, your business, is born.

But once the child is born, that is not the end of the whole process; it’s just the beginning. Most people we know have a business idea, and they start a company and feel that they’ve accomplished a lot. But when the newborn baby enters the world, it needs so much care. 

If you look at your business in the same way as a human body, it has many different systems. As the baby grows, its nervous system gets developed. The respiratory system, digestive system, cardiovascular, immune system, excretory system, reproductive system, muscular system develop in turn. 

In a knowledge business like ours, there are 11 systems. If your respiratory system is doing well, but your digestive system is not, you've got to work on that. All the systems need to run perfectly well for the entire organism to be healthy. You cannot say one thing is not as important as the other.  They simply have different equally essential functions to play.

In the knowledge-sharing business, this is one of your critical systems. What are you doing to go out there and to get more visible in the marketplace? You need a method to share deeper information with your audience so they get some value, some insights, and you establish a deeper connection with them. It’s a value exchange that happens. The audience will engage, comment, and a  bond is created. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and podcasts are the many subdivisions in the content marketing system, and you need to create a plan around how you want to approach content marketing. You want to give it a boost. 

In a knowledge base, you need to have a Facebook ad account and a Google ad account to start running ads; these are like the top two ad accounts, but many other ad platforms also. 

How are you going to be attracting that lead? You need to have a funnel. You have to build a system. You need to understand the entry point of the funnel. Is it going to be a PDF lead magnet or a webinar lead magnet, or are you going to be capturing leads by doing a free consultation, offering a free consultation, or a free ebook? Funnels have different sub-segments; you need a lead capture page and a thank you page, the pixels, the tracking, and everything else. 

How will you manage the leads that come into your system? It could be an email marketing system where you're going to be handling all the leads coming in. You're going to tag them based on what actions they take or what stage of the customer journey they are in. 

You may be using Zoom. You may be using Demio, which I recommend as an excellent marketing and sales-oriented webinar system. You can do a 14 day free trial on sidz.co/demio and see how it goes. Zoom is a great platform, but for marketing and for building your landing pages and sending autoresponders, Demio is an all-in-one solution, 

Once you have maxed out Demio and are doing well, you can graduate into WebinarJam and other tools, so your webinars sales system has its processes. 

You could have a system like Stripe or PayPal. If you're in India RazorPay, all of these are payment gateway solutions. Now you can do a lot more with this. I have my own custom-built WordPress-based payment collection pages, which integrate all these payment processes. 

After somebody has bought a product, they need a members’ area. I use a system called Teachable. You can go to sidz.com/teachable and check it out. It's a very, very fantastic tool, and all my courses are sitting on this. It costs $119 per month, and you can have unlimited courses, unlimited students, unlimited certifications, quizzes. 

Whenever an action occurs, somebody buys a product; all the access levels are given through Zapier. I would look at Zapier like an integrator for all the parts of all the other systems, the way in our body, the nervous system connects the entire human body. In the same way, the automation systems will work in a similar function. 

You could use various dashboards and reporting systems depending on what you want to measure. You can have a basic dashboard on Google Drive, Google spreadsheets to track all your business numbers, which can be automated and connected to Zapier, or you could have dedicated dashboards. 

For example, I have my dedicated Facebook ads dashboard, my dedicated Google ads dashboard, my social media dashboards. I can see what exactly is happening in my business.  I have separate dashboards on my payment processors. I can see things like the sales for a week or sales for a month. The refund rate. How many people are upgrading from one product to the next? I have a single dashboard with a single line where I can get real-time data on every aspect of my business in terms of traffic leads and sales at multiple levels, profitability, and even ROAS, which is the return on ad spends. If you're a member of my community, you could use that same dashboard. If you're not yet a member, I recommend upgrading yourself because it simplifies things for you. You don't have to see every single data point. The purpose of data is to help you make better decisions 

I have my social network, and I also have a lot of tracking, tagging, and data aggregation. 

Do you have a system to really nurture and grow your tribes? I have my own dedicated social network, which is one of the systems. A facilitator looks at all my private networks and ensures that the meetups and vigilance is maintained within the community to prevent any spamming inside our group. 

Look after your business as you do your human body, with systems such as content management, advertising, lead generation, funnel building, webinars, scaling system, learning management, payment gateway, automation, reporting, and customer management system, and you will have a healthy thriving entity. 

Now let’s move to the next level of thinking. The purpose is to help you understand how to use this knowledge, to be able to improve your system, and to consult a specialist to be able to identify where the health issue lies. In case your business is not doing too well, you need to look at your business from this angle to identify which area is not working well for you. As I mentioned earlier, each of the 11 systems needs to be functioning well for the overall business to thrive. 

Now, every single system will have an input, a process, and an output. For example, in our human body, we have our input in terms of food, we have the digestive process, and the output is the energy generated. Now, even in a knowledge business, you can visualize your entire thing into the same IPO model input, process, output. If your content marketing is not working, you've got to look at the input you're giving it. Are you coming up with perfect ideas?

For example, I spent a lot of time researching and coming up with ideas for podcasts because I wanted the output to be impactful. I know it's going to make a difference in your life. All my podcasts are straight to the point, and many of the concepts are very well researched. I want my learning to be top-notch so that I can process that for my content marketing process, so the output can be great quality podcasts, ebooks, and videos. 

My main goal is to educate, engage, and also empower people. The outcome will be that those who resonate with the message will end up buying my products. If you want to be a part of my community, you can go to sidz.co/join. 

For your advertising system, the kind of copy that you're writing is input. What is the process? Facebook or Google will review that and see whether your ad is compliant with their policies and whether there is good customer feedback. The output is more whether your ad costs will go up or go down. It works the same way for lead generation; the outcome is whether they become a lead or not. 

The funnel building system, again, evaluate how smooth the input is, the process. The output you get is their email information. In a webinar's sales system, the valuable information you provide is the input. The process is their experience, and the outcome is whether they buy your product at the end of the webinar. 

You can visualize every single aspect of your knowledge business, by applying the IPO model and if the output is not at a desirable level in your business right now, your first step is to identify where by the problem is and check the input process output.

So looking at your business, like a doctor taking action with speed, identifying what is at issue, and then it's effortless. You'll get the answers very quickly. Once you have the understanding, you'll know exactly what buttons to push for you to solve the problem. And once you see the root level cause of a problem, then you'll never make that mistake again. 

For example, in my first six years, I ran my marketing agency with 35 employees. We had some good months, but overall it was not as profitable as we wanted because there were many leaks, so many human components in the system that we could not control. 

It’s because I went through that experience, when I built my business in the digital space, as a digital coach, I was smarter.  I knew the sickness I had in the previous version of my entrepreneurial journey and I was determined not to make that same mistake the second time. 

When you start thinking about sustainability and wish to simplify your processes, try the DAD formula: Delete, automate and delegate. To keep you focused during the earliest stages of entrepreneurship and to sustain your growth, you need to leverage outsourcing to your advantage. Outsourcing allows you to focus on core business competencies, team management and help you achieve growth.

That's why I made my digital coaching business profitable right from month number one. I realized I did not want full-time employees. Like Uber and Airbnb, I wanted to leverage other people’s time — people who have the skills to do specialized tasks and who like flexibility in their lives.

All of us know that there are only 24 hours in a day. But if you are always busy, then there's a problem. There's some problem with the system. There's some problem in the overall functioning of all the components. 

I implemented all the things myself first in the first phase.  Now, just to give all of you an idea of the first 12 months of my business, I've done all of this stuff myself. I've run my own Facebook ads. I've run my own Google ads. I've run my own content. The stage is a grinding phase when you need to do some intense research and development. Gradually, I came to realize that it made sense to become more productive by outsourcing. 

So when you're starting, you may not have the financial resources to outsource it to so many different people. When you come into my community, when you get started on the journey with me, the first thing I tell my students is, do everything on their own. Except for design. Design is something where if you tried to learn Photoshop and stuff, it’s just going to take you a lot of time. Better to give it to an expert to do it for you. 

Deciding which tasks to outsource is a process that forces you to list out the tasks that are best performed by you and which ones should have less of a priority when it comes to your time. 

My lead generation is happening 24x7,  my sales are happening 24 x7, my customer management is happening 24x7, and I mentioned I only focus on three to four things; that’s it. I don't want to do anything else. I do a video or I don't do a video, that's perfectly fine. Our business is still going to grow on the other side. Why? Because I have all these paid channels that are building, and the pay channels are working because I have a product to sell. And not just any product; I have a product that has more than 2000 plus reviews on Trustpilot with a 4.9-star rating. Check out that Trustpilot link, and you'll be able to see all the reviews of my page, students who are benefiting from my courses. 

So when you're going to be launching on this journey, first, build that base for yourself, then start growing your influence. Later, you can begin to put money into advertising and so on because you're starting to create a cash flow in your business. The reason I call it the freedom business model is that our money works hard for us; for every rupee I put into Facebook ads, I'm able to pull out between five to six rupees in terms of returns.

And I'm not just in this as just a transactional business; it’s in the relationship business and I have multiple income streams built into my ecosystem.

Would you like to know how I've structured my team in my digital business that's helping me scale my business? I want to share the top 10 roles that I have in my team that are helping me grow. 

I can honestly say the first 18 months of my business were not the freedom business model. Even though I created the freedom business model, I had to go through that grind to understand the pieces that complete the puzzle, the jigsaw puzzle. I don't want to have too many people on payroll because I've been through the journey of 35 people on the payroll. And it has been inefficient sometimes. And sometimes, you've got to fill that role because you have hired them. I don't want that anymore. I only wish to have two people on my payroll, two good managers who can work with virtual teams, and everything else has been systemized. 

My mentor said that only when you fall in love with the process of who you're going to become on your journey towards the destination, to that extent. you're going to be growing. So I'll repeat that. It is not about the destination. It is not about the goal. It is about who you are. 

It's about falling in love with the process of who you're going to become on this journey. So I fell in love with the process of ads. I'm in love with the process of answering all the emails. I fell in love with the process of managing my internal community, I love the process of editing my videos. Once I fell in love with the process, I could outsource that process in the next phase. 

When you begin to outsource work to freelancers you’ll have more time to focus on the bigger picture in your specific industry. Outsourcing ensures that your business gets an expert to complete specific tasks instead of someone from the company taking on responsibilities outside their knowledge base. 

So the first phase of your journey is where you do everything yourself, except design, where your website can be designed. Your logos can be designed by a graphic designer. Your box images can be created and basically to bring out a perfect flavor of your brand online. Even photoshoot and stuff, get it done by an expert. Do not prematurely outsource any of your activities unless you have some hands-on experience. When you have hands-on experience, you'd be able to guide the people who will be running that project for you in a better way. 

Why spend days or weeks working on tasks that are simply frustrating for you? Would it not be better to outsource those things to someone who has a track record of delivering superb results?  And I like to get the teams to do stuff. will save you both time and money. outsource your content, editing, video editing, outsource your external communication, because when you have these core five roles, especially in the knowledge business, it'll give you much better scalability and leverage than you can ever think of.

Right now, I'm living the freedom business model at this point since I have the cash flow and by doing this, I'm able to maximize my profits also. I can focus my areas on the high-impact activities and delegate those things which are taking a lot of my time. 

If you feel there is a pain area, you can outsource it. You can delegate it; you can automate it. You can get somebody else to do it. The key to productivity is to find out which are high-impact activities and focus only on that, and delegate the rest. By delegating certain tasks like content creation, social media management, or payroll to subject-matter experts, you can focus more on strategy, fundraising and networking. When you’re launching your business, you need to embrace the benefits of outsourcing and use them to your advantage to propel your business to new heights. 

I am so grateful for every single team member that has helped me scale my business from scratch to a multi-million dollar business with very minimal overheads. 

General Manager Operations: And the most important role is for me. I have a general manager of operations. Now, this is someone who's full-time in my company and does what I used to be doing when I started my business. The role of the general manager is to ensure he takes care of at least 50% to 60% of the workload. So what does this role exactly entail? One of his roles is to ensure that all my emails are answered before 9:00 PM every night. 

So I have a zero mailbox before 9:00 PM. I only have one email that I respond to for all my customers. This person's role is to ensure that every single email is replied to. The emails that he cannot reply to he puts in my mailbox and I respond to that email personally. I have very few points of communication when it comes to emails. 

The second role is to ensure that all the refunds and the course access levels go smoothly. Sometimes what happens is people buy my course, but then they're not able to access the product. A lot of communication happens over there to give them the access levels and some people who want refunds and stuff. 

I also have an affiliate system and he manages this affiliate as well. So the general manager role is a full-time role that is important as this is somebody who's looking into all the different things that are happening in the community. 

The way that I hired this person is I sent a message to my own community members saying, I'm looking for this role and I was delighted to get one of my own students to fill this position right away. You know, when you are able to get one of your own students or somebody that you already know, who understands your mission, who understands your vision, and then you get them on, in this role, they'll do a much better job than just going through some different networks and stuff like that. 

That's a tip that I want to give to those of you here who want to hire the best people on board.  I have one person who looks into my primary mailbox. I only have one email ID for my business. I have just one email ID, and see if you can get one person to reply to all the emails. 

Now, until I had 1000- 2000 customers, I was doing it myself and answering 150 emails per day sometimes. So fixing that internal communication, the mailbox is the first piece to outsource. This can also mean having a freelancer or someone you can delegate all the communication to.

Content Management: On my Facebook fan page. I have a lot of people who view and comment on posts that are posted every few hours. The best part is I'm not doing those posts. I have a dedicated resource that I've delegated this work to who posts multiple times in a day in terms of all the content and communication, including email communication. I have a full-time community manager on my team who replies to all the emails that come in. Only the ones that they cannot answer come into my mailbox, and then I answer that. So I've delegated the online communication piece; that’s why it gives so much more freedom. Without delegation, the sad truth is that we stall the growth of our companies because there is only so much time, energy, and creative focus we can provide as an individual. By outsourcing certain tasks to others, we open up more of our own resources to focus on generating income.

You can also delegate your community management if you're building your community like I have a community manager who looks into all the internal communication that's coming from the community.  I have two people in my team who are dedicated to external communication, a person who cleans up all the comments on my face, on my fan page, who replies to all the comments. Since I'm spending a lot of money on ads, there's a lot of spam comments also that happen and I need to have somebody dedicated to just cleaning up those comments. and then have an external community manager who actually goes and responds to all my Trustpilot reviews. So internal is my paid members, external other non-paid members, people who have still not come inside the community.  I have a person who responds to all my Facebook comments, my Instagram comments, my blog comments. I don't respond to that myself. I do look at all the comments, but I have somebody who comments on my behalf. More like an acknowledgment kind of comment. I acknowledge it as great, good to know, thank you for actually responding. So I have an internal community manager who does all of this stuff.  I can be project-based and have different price points for them, which gives dynamically changing. 

I get a lot of reviews on Trustpilot and on my YouTube channels. Since I have more than 300 videos on YouTube, I get a lot of comments pouring in. So someone is looking into that, and responding to that and establishing that communication, establishing a bond with those people who are in the external environment. While it is essential to understand your customer’s needs, it can sometimes take hours to sort through feedback and respond to each issue. As you can imagine, hiring a full-time customer support specialist is expensive; but outsourcing your customer support efforts will save you time and will still allow you to receive candid feedback. 

You can delegate your marketing. I have a Facebook ad team that runs all the ads right now; I used to do it myself previously. 

Video Editing: The third area that you can outsource is video editing, any kind of content editing. Even though I'm an editor myself, I'm self-taught, I've done a lot of my videos myself, even now in case there's a need. I also edit some of my videos myself, but I found somebody who I could attend to this, where I pay per project. I pay per video, nobody on payroll, no salary. 

I also have a video editing person who does all my video editing, I have outsourced video editing. I don't need to do it all the time, but whenever I have a need where I have to say, create a trailer, video, applicator, new reel, but I need something more than what I'm doing here. For the basic videos I've recorded I've added all of the ribbons on my own, I've added my own logo here and the ILH logo on the side. But I have to do something beyond that. I have an outsource editor, and we have standard rates for basic video for YouTube and Instagram reel, a trailer video.

On my Instagram channel you can check out all the latest reels that are happening over there, the testimonials of my students, and I have a lot of Hall of Fame trailers videos. I have an external video editor that does the job; there'll be some work or the other, but in some months I may not have much work. I like to keep it very, very optimized that way, rather than having somebody on payroll full-time and paying them and trying to think about what work to give them. I want to just pay them based on what work is there for that month. 

If I’m not doing a webinar live, I will give videos to them, and they would do it for me, so the entire aspect of marketing and also, content creation, content publishing, content ideation everything has been delegated into teams. What I look at the end of the month is the overall numbers, what kind of reach we have had, what kind of results we have achieved. 

Accounting: I've delegated my accounting which is an important role, I have an outsourced finance manager, more like an outsourced CFO who does all my financial data. I have some bit of automation in my accounting systems in terms of finances, but I also have a dedicated person who looks into my entire auditing. So it's a system where by the third or fourth of every month I pull out all the reports and send it out to her all my statements and by the 10th of the month, I get the GST amount that I need to pay by the 20th of every month as the GST is paid on time and all my income tax, everything. It’s been like a cycle for the last 24 months and I've delegated that particular task. I have delegated even the invoicing GST. I get so many customers who buy my products on a monthly basis so all of that has been set into a process. 

I have five different bank accounts for five different purposes, tax, wealth, charity, general operations. And I have one dedicated outsource CFO that does this. 

And of course, I have my wife who tracks all the numbers on the financial data points. So I focus on making money. She focuses on managing the money and between us, we are a team.

Advertising: Another area that you can outsource is your advertising. I used to be running my Facebook ads. Now I've given it out to an ad agency; that entire headache is taken out of my mindshare and that is giving me that space to do other things, to think about the next things and to build a new vision for my community and so on. Right now, I have Facebook and Google ads running and different teams running those ads for me. Previously, I used to run these ads myself, and now I have a team that does it so that the complete pain area has been taken away from my life. 

It was a pain area because I had to monitor and check things constantly. I was happy doing it for the first 18 months until I outsourced it. Again, don't prematurely outsource this. Take it phase by phase, go through the grinding phase. Often, entrepreneurs get stuck working in their business rather than on their business. This is the factor that slows down the speed of growth of a company.  Initially, I would post all the Facebook ads on my own, but now I have Facebook ads experts who run the ads for me. And based on the amount of money I spend on a monthly basis for my ads, even the agency fee, the expert fee goes up and down. 

I have a Google ad expert, and their role is very clear; to deliver the best cost per lead and best cost per acquisition. Everything is outsourced. When they need to, they'll give me pointers on campaign ideas and stuff. So everything's outsourced. 

Understand the underlying benefits of outsourcing, like what to outsource, and how to maximize your team’s efforts. Outsourcing is a tactical solution to reduce your company’s overhead expenses. 

Social Media: Entrepreneurs utilize social media to reach new customers while showcasing their products or services. But creating posts and building a loyal following takes time. Fortunately, outsourcing your social media efforts is one of the cheapest and easiest tasks to delegate to a reputable virtual assistant or firm. 

The individual you hire for the job should be able to schedule and create posts, but more importantly, he or she should make sure they dedicate time to responding to comments and interacting with your followers. Since social media does not require technical knowledge, it is one of the cheapest tasks for you to outsource and the easiest to find quality talent. 

Even as you begin to outsource your social media efforts, make sure you only focus on two to three platforms. Narrowing your focus will allow your paid contractor to focus, optimize and dial in on strategy. So I have a dedicated person for that and who is making all my social media posts and multiple others.

Community Management: The other area that you can outsource besides this is for your community management. So I have a community manager right now who is more like a facilitator of all the leaders of my community, just to ensure that all our community-based activities, initiatives are running on time. We have meetups happening every single day, 365 days a year and for that, I needed to have one person who can look at those who's ensuring that the campaign has followed. There's no self-promotion. Everyone is following the code of honor that we have adopted in the community, someone who's keeping an eye on all that's happening in the internal community, so like more of a community manager role. 

As you're building your business you can add on people to fill these roles: General manager, content manager, and internal community manager can be outsourced or even project-based finance manager. 

We have outsourced content writer, outsourced Facebook ads, outsourced Google ads, outsourced PR, outsourced web team. So when you are able to create a structure like this, it'll give you more freedom to build your business. I'm working with some amazing people who are doing work for me. 

Creating content remains a challenge for many entrepreneurs as it should engage your readers, and publicize your product. Best of all is to be ranked in Google. Fortunately, when partnering with a competent content marketing agency, they create content that evokes emotion and creates a buzz around your product or service. 

Having an internal content team is difficult because it requires significant capital investment, resources, and valuable time. However, I’m working with a talented content marketing expert. Now the role of this expert is to plan up different ideas on content and to keep posting on different social networks, right through the day manually. There are many automation tools that you can post and use like Buffer and many other tools that you can go and post stuff. But I make this person manually post using different hashtags and stuff. His role is to post on my Facebook page, Instagram profile, LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn groups, a YouTube community. Then there is also Twitter sometimes; I'm not so active on Twitter, but basically all the social networks, I have a person who's around the clock, making posts and repurposing content. And I also have a Telegram group, which is sidz.co/flash has a flash update group, which has over 9,000 members right now. 

And every time I make a post, a new video, or a new podcast, this person also posts that on my Telegram group. So everybody in that group gets notified and they go and access the content. So the role of the content marketing expert is to keep repurposing my existing content because a lot of content creation I'm doing myself. 

His role is to ensure that round the clock there's content happening all over the place. An interesting thing is I do not have Facebook on my phone. I do not have Instagram on my phone. I only have Telegram on my phone to send voice notes and voice messages to my community members. 

But besides that, I only have four apps on my phone. I like to be freer.

What happens when you’re brimming with great ideas that you want to share but are not as digital marketing savvy as you need to be? Simple. Just get someone else to do the heavy lifting for you! Far too many times, great business ideas fail because they only remain ideas. Now is the time to celebrate the power of the Internet and sharing economy, which allows everyone to fulfill their business growth plans. Whether you’re a business owner or a freelancer, you need help to organize your life in a way that allows you to pursue your true passion. 

I can see that there is a need for members of our community to get their platforms and systems set up. The real problem is that entrepreneurs do not have the tools that they require to launch their online business overnight. They do not have virtual teams and are overwhelmed by the whole process. I have found this enthusiastic team that takes care of my website, edits my videos, and supports my blogs.  A “Digital One-Stop-Shop” called DigitalMarket. 

Gaurav Guru, or Lazy G  as he is affectionately known, heads the team. He has 15+ years of experience in the Digital Marketing field and has built and sold digital agencies. Now he has created a unique platform to help businesses run their company remotely. Gaurav is on a mission to help 100,000 Freelancers earn Rs.100,000 per month working from home using Digital Platforms.

I have to say that the level of detail that they go into when they try and understand a customer’s requirements is commendable. They have a team of highly trained and vetted freelancers who deliver top-notch quality. Every member of this team is capable and trustworthy. 

The pandemic helped a lot of us focus on our greatest strengths. The number of new coaches shot up tremendously, and digital coaching is one of the three largest growing industries globally. But coaches need some specialized handholding, and Digital Market defined their goals to provide the tools to launch a full-stack holistic online business. 

After you sign up with your choice of package, they start with a 15 minute 1-2-1 kick-off meeting with you where they get all the information they need to put together the branding and any tech setup strategy. You simply get to focus on your niche, hire your virtual execution team and empower yourself to accomplish real growth. 

DigitalMarket will make a customized package to enable you to accomplish your goals. You can get in touch with your dedicated account manager to define your requirements and customization options. Later you can also switch to another package based on your needs. 

Their support has made my life so much easier, and I can now focus on researching and creating content. Everything else is taken care of by this team. I like the fact that they do not work on a retainer fee. They have a one-time charge, and then you build a virtual relationship with them; it’s not transactional the way most agencies are. 

The way it works is you’re in touch with a virtual team with an Account Manager, Account Coordinator, Branding Strategist. Depending on the package, various other specialists working on specific areas will be assigned. This team-based approach to service delivery ensures timely delivery and multiple points of contact.  This team is always open and transparent about who’s doing what. In fact, they choose their partners carefully and work with them consistently to ensure a seamless experience for their clients. This way, you get the total value of every investment. 

To know more you can - Book a Call or Connect on Live Chat with Support

As most of you know, I’m on a mission to build an army of Digital Leaders, built on core principles of humanity and simplicity - by improving one's social skills, happiness, productivity, and awesomeness. We, digital masters, want to collaboratively impact 1 billion lives in India by helping business owners, solopreneurs, and marketing professionals start, scale, and move their businesses online using digital technology.

The game is all about sustainability. It's not about just launching products and just trying to make some small money here and there. If you're somebody who is struggling in the coaching business, trying many different methods to promote your products, but every time you start something, you're able to get some results and you're just spiking every month and not getting sustainable predictable sales every single month. 

Now what I'm going to share with you is based on all that I have learnt from my experience with my agency and now the Freedom Business model. I've been able to consistently grow my business from a hundred customers in my first month to currently having over 11,500 paid customers in a span of 30 months.

How has that happened? Because of consistency, it's about commitment and it's having the courage to stick to one path single-mindedly. Sometimes the winding roads seem very exciting; there are a lot of shiny objects in the space, somebody comes to the new strategy. Somebody comes to the new tool, a new method. And if you're somebody who thinks this current method that you’re following is not working, and you jump to try a new method without really perfecting the first one. You will find the same pattern is going to continue to the second method. And you abandon that. And before you know it, you look for the next method. 

It is never about the method. It's more about thinking long-term in every decision that you make. I'm going to share with you the key ways on how you can sustainably scale up your digital coaching business. When people give up too soon and think digital coaching is not really working for them, the reason is that they aren't building the best product first.

I used to manage all my WordPress websites, ClickFunnels, and landing pages. I still build new pages. I still also track a lot of things on my own and create pages on my own, but I also have a team that is managing the hosting part. Make sure the freelancers you hire regularly provide you with a one-page summary of the issues your customers have faced. This feedback will allow you to understand their needs and will provide you with information that you can use to make the customer experience better. 

If the website goes down and it kind of tweaks and edits to be done, I would have a partner program right now within my own paid member community, where people promote my products and track their commissions and send them commissions. So we have an internal, fully customized WordPress partner dashboard that we've actually built. And for that, I have an external team that is also supporting me.

Once you set up the system and have your experts in place, you'll be able to get the maximum value out of your particular team. Some business owners mistakenly fill their freelancers’ inboxes with every new idea. Doing so is highly ineffective because email overload creates confusion by diverting the freelancer’s attention from current responsibilities. This slows down production and can lead to some serious anxiety for everyone. And the interesting thing is I've not had a single team meeting in the last five to six months. For me, no news is good news. The first time I onboard somebody, I train them. I record the call and I set the process and the process has to keep running. Unless there's a major escalation, 

I don't put my head into it. And they're constantly evolving. And I have a separate tracking dashboard where I'm able to track the results of every single team member. So everybody is given the freedom to operate in their own space. Everybody's given the freedom as long as they're able to deliver the result and every person that I choose as a part of my team. They are in alignment with my bigger vision and bigger mission of reforming the education employment system to create more success stories in our own community. 

This is what I've been working on for the last three months. How do we strategically make the right moves so that the overall brand is being built?

So now I'm actually working on a lot more publishing, a lot more publications coming out on these reputed publications, like Hindustan Times and Forbes. I have ghostwriters who are going to be writing and I would give it to this ghostwriter and we would take the essence out of that. And she would actually put that in place. These days, almost any task can be outsourced, with so many qualified professionals leaving the corporate world to work as freelancers. Like I have my articles now all over the place and I'm doing it very strategically after the book launch, I've been on Your Story, Forbes. I got featured on Entrepreneur.com recently. So I'm working with a team that's actually strategizing and I'm planning something in a very, very tactical way, which I've done a lot of research on. 

There used to be a time when people would stay with a single company from initial hire to retirement. This no longer holds true for a lot of professionals. In fact, some professionals view self-employment as the only stable option in today’s economy. 

I have dedicated writers who are going to be writing for me, all from this particular team. So editing, proofreading, publishing. It is easier and more cost-effective to outsource to a provider with those specific skill sets as opposed to hiring for those roles. In particular, if your business has a short-term project that needs to be done, it is much cheaper to hire an outside company to do it for you versus hiring someone for a short time period. 

Now I just had a talk with Google. I think Google has shortlisted top a hundred influencers in India and I'm on that hot top hundred list. And just like how Instagram has stories. So Google is also launching web stories; they are just in the nascent stage right now. 

As an entrepreneur, we have limited time and money so we need to constantly think about our end business goals. Outsourcing allows you as a business entrepreneur to shift focus from peripheral activities toward serving your customers and building your brand. It also helps you prioritize business activities that lead to better monetary results that meet your business goals. Let your team focus on what they’re good at and leave the skill-driven tasks to your freelance experts. Your time can be better spent immersed in creating newer concepts to grow, so everyone is working towards a common goal. I'm creating a lot of short-form content, exclusively for Google platforms, so that's going to be coming out very soon.

I have a content team for that. So I record videos and Digital Market also has a video editing team. This outsourcing company, Digital Market, manages specific areas of expertise for me, so I can return to my desk with a clear vision of where the business is and where it needs to go in the future.

Then I also have a designer like a super expensive designer who did all our ILH logo, all our hive logos. The guy's very expensive. He's a big designer. Like just for a logo kit with a logo was $2,500. And for me, I didn't mind spending that much because I know this guy's like he's a class apart, very simplistic stuff, but it's worth being the price because I was thinking long-term like this, the Internet Lifestyle Hub logo, or the Leadership Council logo, I don't want to play the cheap game on that. I want people to really look at that in every single box design of mine and the teachable artwork was done by the same design. I've even paid up to Rs.15,000 for a thumbnail, but you don't have to do that. You don't have to go overboard like that. I decided to do it because that's the value that I have for the brand. 

So designer, sharp content, public relations, I think with this, you can really amp up your entire system 

Next, you can look at a long-term strategy. My Ultimate Guides are part of my SEO plan. So what I've basically done is I have outsourced this entire guide production with the DigitalMarket team. 

Step One: They transcribe all my content that is videos plus podcasts because I've got so much content. 

Step Two: They polish it up and they convert that into a guide. Now, this guide is a 10,000 plus word guide. Now on your own to write 10,000 words, it's going to be difficult. It's a big pain to write so many words for the guide, but with their transcriptions and editing, they create good long-form content. These are free, in-depth resources to help you build a powerful brand online. 

Step Three: You publish that on your blog like in my case, it's siddharthrajsekar.com. So if you're going to see the way that I've structured the guides, this is not a strategy which you'll need to implement right now. And within this guide, I'm linking them to the courses. I'm linking people to my videos. I've embedded a podcast inside here. I've made people register for my webinar, embedding YouTube videos inside this guide. And it's pretty long. If somebody has to really go through this guide, it'll take them at least one to two hours to go through everything. Sometimes more in some cases. So all my content pieces are put together over here. And I've given a link to all my affiliate links. 

The goal is to come to the top three ranks on every single keyword, whether it's webinars, selling automation, outsourcing, digital coaching, digital coach, all of this.

1. Digital Coach Blueprint 
11 Part Video Course 
sidz.co/blueprint

2. Digital Coach Masterclass 
Register For Live Session 
sidz.co/live 

3. Freedom Budget Blueprint 
One-Page Business Plan 
sidz.co/businessplan

4. Freedom Bundle
Join The Community
sidz.co/join

5. FourPercent
Join The Community 
sidz.co/fourpercent 

6. Consulting Accelerator
Top Notch Consultant Training 
sidz.co/consulting

7. NameCheap
Buy Your Domains Here 
sidz.co/namecheap 

8. WPX Hosting
Best WordPress Hosting 
sidz.co/wpxhosting 

9. Bluehost
WordPress Hosting
sidz.co/bluehost 

10. ConvertKit
Email Marketing System 
sidz.co/convertkit 

11. GetResponse
Email Marketing System 
sidz.co/getresponse 

12. Flodesk
Email Marketing System 
sidz.co/flowdesk

13. Demio
Webinar System
sidz.co/demio 

14. WebinarJam
Webinar System
sidz.co/webinarjam 

15. EverWebinar
Automated Webinar System 
sidz.co/everwebinar

16. Teachable
Learning Management System 
sidz.co/teachable 

17. Calendly
Appointment System 
sidz.co/calendly 

18. ClickFunnels
Funnel Building System 
sidz.co/clickfunnels 

19. ClickMagick
Link Tracking System 
sidz.co/clickmagick

20. Zapier
Automation System
sidz.co/zapier 

21. MightyNetworks
Private Network Platform 
sidz.co/mightynetworks 

22. Instamojo
Payment Gateway (India)
instamojo.com

23. Razorpay
Payment Gateway (India)
razorpay.com

24. Stripe
Payment Gateway (Global)
stripe.com

25. PayPal
Payment Gateway (Global)
paypal.com 

26. CollectChat
Website Chatbot System
sidz.co/collectchat 

27. ManyChat
Facebook ChatBot
manychat.com 

28. Vimeo Private
Video Hosting
vimeo.com 

29. Wistia Private
Video Hosting
wistia.com 

30. Digital Market
Freelance Marketplace

sidz.co/digitalmarket 

31. eCamm Live
Video Streaming
ecamm.com 

32. ScreenFlow
Video Editing Tool (Mac) 
sidz.co/screenflow 

33. Camtasia
Video Editing Tool (Windows) 
sidz.co/camtasia

34. Mindnode
Mind Mapping Tool (Mac)
mindnode.com 

35. Garageband
Audio Editing Tool (Mac)
garageband.com 

36. UseProof
Social Proof Tool
sidz.co/useproof

37. Telegram
Messenger Chat
telegram.com 

38. Mint Personal
Finance Tool
mint.com 

39. YNAB Personal
Finance Tool
ynab.com 

40. Attract IO eBook
Creation Tool
attract.io 

41. Zoom
Webinar & Meeting Tool
zoom.us 

42. Canva
Image Editing Tool
canva.com 

43. InShot
Video Editing App
inshot.com 

44. Typeform
Survey Forms
sidz.co/typeform

Disclaimer: Some of the links are my affiliate links. I make a commission if you decide to purchase them

There is so much we digital entrepreneurs wish to accomplish. There are other challenges and complications within your business. Whether it's managing teams, managing finances, managing people, internal difficulties, and then there is no work-life balance. For me, family is always first, and relationships with my wife and my parents with my children. I mean, that takes a top priority for my business any day. 

Once you’ve outsourced someone you think might be a good fit, put them to work on one small project. Using this project as a kind of trial run to figure out if you’re happy working with them and the quality of the work they present to the client. If you’re satisfied, you can continue to offer additional work. 

After all, you’re building a long-term business relationship with these freelancers, so treat them with dignity and respect. Because they aren’t employees, freelancers are often exposed to shady business practices and clients who try to take advantage of them. Exercise your human decency, and they will do the same. 

Get the members of your freelance agency team to give you feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. Don’t be afraid to ask them for ideas on how to improve – they might know of tools and techniques you don’t. 

Some marketing principles are evergreen. In a coaching business if you're building a substandard product, recording videos taken on your phone and putting it out there. Yes, you can make some sales. Customers will come in, they'll buy a product. They will see how your product is, they'll experience it. And when they see that there is no depth in the content they're going to leave some nasty reviews. So first work hard on the paid content. The first phase in your journey is to do your research and go through the grind of building a solid product. You don't have to build 30 courses in one go; get started with your first two or three pieces of paid content. So create a first-class product and back it up with excellent service.

Once it's done, then you start to create content like what I'm doing. I'm talking about videos anywhere above five minutes going in and out for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, if you can share some substantial value, that's the awesome thing to do. Now, once you are able to spend more time on creating, once you've finished your first phase, then you start to create long form content. And then if you really have the need, you do short form content short form is like Instagram reels and stories and things like that.

I have more than 300 videos on YouTube. From a YouTube analytics perspective, my average view duration is 11 minutes. That means people are engaging with me for 11 minutes. I've got somebody's attention for 11 minutes on an average on my YouTube channel, as compared to people who are having millions of views and having like one minute, two minute attention spans. 

I have more than 300 hours of paid content for my paid members at different different levels, more than 30 courses. 

In my business, the highest impact activity is getting on live videos because I'm able to reach out and connect with a lot of people. The videos that I post out there are viewed multiple times. Just the other day I went on Facebook Live and that video had around 33 000 views within 24 hours and I got some excellent traction there. Because videos are such a high-impact activity for me, this is something I cannot delegate, automate or outsource. I have to do this live. The second high impact activity is doing webinars. 

Now if you're not a part of my community and you want to connect with me live, I do a master class once in four days and I would suggest that you go to this link sidz.com/formula and register for my next live master class where I go in-depth into creating systems for your business. People like to complicate the heck out of things; for me, I like to eliminate all the fluff.  I like no bs, to the point, crisp action, taking a step-by-step kind of formula.

I will decode the entire freedom business model that I talk about and I'll also give you the formulas on how you can take your knowledge and make it into a super profitable business where you can make up to Rs. 3 lakh or even more per month by selling your knowledge in the form of courses, coaching, consulting. The third high-impact activity for me is interviewing my success stories in the Hall of Fame. 

It's a smoother journey for me now, I'm already in orbit. All I have to do is listen to my audience, understand their pain points, connect to them on a deeper level, simplify my products, improve my products, create new products to solve their problems in a more efficient way, and create more gamification engagement models within the community for my students to get results faster because my success is going to be your success. My success is going to be the students’ success. Just go to my YouTube channel and search for a snap project on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel. There's a playlist there called the Hall of Fame. Go and see over a hundred interviews we have over there. This is my recommendation to you if you're somebody who's getting overwhelmed on this journey. 

This is what you need to do. Take a course, watch all my videos, because what I share is just some straight thoughts like this. I'm not here to impress anyone with thousands of followers or likes. That's not the game. I'm not here to flash my income. The game I want to play is I want to inspire you to lead. I want to inspire you to teach. Now you may already be subscribed. If you have not subscribed, please do that. You can listen to my podcasts,  search for freedom business podcasts, either on Apple or on Spotify by downloading the Spotify app or the Apple podcast app and subscribe to it. That's the first thing I would like you to do. The second thing is I would love to hear your views. 

And you can join me live at my next webinar that's going to happen. Now, if you're somebody who is already my silver or gold member and you want to know about the next level, I would recommend that you upgrade to diamond because in my membership, I actually put people on a hot seat and I decipher all the different systems to help them get better clarity.

I want you to build your own communities because our education empowerment system is broken and the only way we can fix that is by creating a new breed of teachers. We need more teachers and you can be a digital teacher and you can teach the topics that are good. And because if you can build even a small tribe of 200-300 people who you can teach and help them solve a problem. If 100-200 of you reading this are going to do that, we're looking at 20,000 people getting impacted. Now that's going to make a big difference and create momentum in so many lives.