From Freelancer to Business Owner: How I Took Over a $2.8 Million Per Year Business

Written by Michael Alexis

In 2015, Museum Hack hired me to take on some new marketing projects and initiatives. In five years we grew the business from $600,000 in annual revenue to $2.8 million. And then I bought the company.

Museum Hack’s founder, Nick Gray, has shared his side of the growth story and sale with Wake Forest, but I’ve never shared mine. In this article, I’ll outline what I learned about entrepreneurship, money, negotiating, team building and more.

Let’s get to it.

How I Got Started with Entrepreneurship

Technically I’m a lawyer, but I was never a particularly happy one.

I graduated from law school and joined a big firm. I had an idealized notion that lawyers make a lot of money and that my education and profession would “open doors.” Some lawyers achieve both of these goals, and it is usually with considerable personal sacrifice.

A legal education affects you as an entrepreneur. 

1. You are able to confidently do much of your own legal work like reviewing contracts and registering trademarks. This skill can expedite your efforts, and also save you significant money you would otherwise pay in legal fees. If you have an opportunity to co-found a business with a lawyer, then consider those benefits.
2. You become a risk mitigator. Lawyers are trained to mitigate risk for all possible scenarios, even those that are unlikely to actually occur. This risk-mitigation is often at odds with being an entrepreneur where taking on risk contributes to your success. I considered myself to be entrepreneurial, but the reality was I was lacking in this major area, so it would be more accurate to say I had “entrepreneurial ideas.”

After a year with the big firm and a year with my own practice, both of which I didn’t find fulfilling, it was an easy decision to leave the profession and join the startup world. This transition was quick because I had paid my way through school doing freelance marketing projects, and was avidly learning about business via sites like Mixergy. I got back in touch with clients, and eventually one of them introduced me to Nick at Museum Hack.

Growing Museum Hack From $600,000 to $2,800,000

When I first joined Museum Hack, Nick had a long list of marketing projects he wanted me to tackle. This lengthy to-do list is a reality in many businesses, and especially startups where you may go weeks or even months without having the right person to delegate to.

I quickly worked through the list, and then started tackling other initiatives. For example, I had learned the basics of web development doing personal projects, so I started the slow process of updating Museum Hack’s website. I rewrote copy, coded new landing pages, optimized images, and ran tests and experiments to increase our conversion rates (the percentage of people that visit our website and take a specific action like buying a ticket). 

Another important initiative was launching side projects. For example, we launched Team Building NYC as a side-project to generate business for our department that runs team building activities in NYC, and similar projects for San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC and other cities. Another project was Museum Jobs and Library Jobs, which quickly became popular job boards for workers in those industries and a source of leads for our training and workshops business.

We also developed our own in-house PR techniques that landed Museum Hack in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other major media. Successful media features are like adding fuel to a startup’s growth fire, and you will be able to grow much faster with the sales, connections and serendipitous opportunities that come from PR. 

One of my favorite techniques for landing press is the PR Video Hustle, where you record a custom, 1-minute, selfie-style video and send it to journalists. This video is as simple as saying, “Hi NAME, I’m Michael from Museum Hack, we do XYZ. Would love to have you on a tour, no strings” with some more details about the experience. The reason the PR Video Hustle is so effective is because most people just spam-email journalists. When you take the time to make a custom video, journalists respond well to it.

With these initiatives and other marketing efforts, the results came quickly. We expanded the business into three areas:

1. Public and private museum tours. We went from running a handful of renegade museum tours in NYC and Washington DC to multiple tours each day in those cities plus Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. We also had a growing interest in private tours and led experiences for bachelorette parties, birthdays and marriage proposals.
2. We built systems around corporate team building activities for clients like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Chipotle. These clients send groups of employees to the museum with us as a way to reward those employees and help them bond as a team.
3. As we became known in the museum world, institutions around the world started reaching out for advice and training. Our first workshop was with the National Museum in Norway, and we’ve privately consulted with some of the world’s most prestigious institutions since.

Growth in each of these areas gave us more money to hire and reinvest back into the business. We doubled from $600,000 in annual revenue to $1.2 million in 2016, then doubled again, and eventually reached $2.8 million; enough to join the Inc 5000 as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in America.

How I Convinced Nick to Sell Me Museum Hack

Many entrepreneurs joke about their business being their baby, and I think it is a little more nuanced than that. Your business can be a large part of your legacy, and you may spend years or even decades building it. 

If you want to convince someone to sell you their legacy, you need three things:

1. Great timing, for example, when the business owner is already thinking about stepping away.
2. A strong incentive. This incentive is usually financial or in other words, enough money to feel like a win.
3. Complete and absolute trust. No-one is going to sell you their legacy or a meaningful business if they don’t trust you.

In my case, I was lucky to have all three. By the end of 2018, Nick and I had worked closely together for nearly four years. Our skills and strengths are complimentary. Nick has a unique ability to start projects, combining an aptitude for finding product-market fit for novel experiences with a talent for hiring. I am an obsessive optimizer and love focusing on the highest leverage opportunities, which contributes most to growing a business that already exists.

Perhaps most importantly, I didn’t offer to buy the business alone. Museum Hack’s CEO, Tasia Duske, and I acquired the business together. This partnership means I can continue to focus on my strengths in growing the business while Tasia manages operations and internal growth. If you want to purchase a business, then I would recommend approaching the ask with a partner. This team approach will help give the potential seller confidence not just in you, but in what you can achieve together.

Finally, we “sold” Nick on the future potential of the company. Tasia and I had a vision and plan to continue growing the corporate side of Museum Hack, and eventually acquired Team Building for this purpose. The Team Building parent company allows us to expand to more corporate offerings outside the museum, with the most successful to date being a facilitated guacamole competition called The Great Guac Off. This future potential is both part of Nick’s continued legacy, and also part of the financial incentive for the sale because Nick continues to hold a minority share in the business.

Some “Must-Dos” For Entrepreneurs

The following is a list of lessons and takeaways I wish I had known before I started as an entrepreneur. You can find more of these points on my personal blog where I write about life lessons.

1. Work on your projects for at least one year and ideally three. One year is enough to prove the viability of a product or business, and three years is enough for it to become successful. One exception is if you can definitively prove that a business will fail in a shorter period of time. Knowing when to cut your losses is an acquired skill, but don’t give up for other reasons like procrastinating or jumping to the next flashy thing.
2. With strong DIY skills you can do anything. Don’t know how to make a website. Learn! Never written copy? You can start. Being able to approach entrepreneurial projects with a DIY mindset will help you work through challenges as they come, and will earn you the respect of your team as you hire and delegate because they will see you can do the work too.
3. Some business waste is normal and expected. Skip trying to optimize every decision and instead be willing to invest a little extra to just “get it done” or “try it out.” It’s more important to keep moving forward, and you can often reduce costs later.
4. Your biggest breaks will come from serendipity. Your business exists in an infinitely complex world. Patterns can give you some certainty about the future, and careful planning and hustle are a powerful force, but your biggest opportunities for growth will come from serendipity. You can optimize toward serendipity by doing massive work upfront and continuing until the elements of chance can align in your favor.

As you develop as an entrepreneur, I recommend making your own list of principles. This list will be a great reference for you as you take on more complex projects and decision making.

Final Thoughts on Becoming an Entrepreneur

My path to becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t what I thought it would be, and chances are yours won’t be either. One massive change in mindset I had is going from thinking an entrepreneur has to start a business to understanding there are many ways to become a business owner. You can license a business, acquire one, franchise or other initiatives. Some people may be more successful at one route or the other, and if you continue working and experimenting then you will find yours.

Any Questions?

If you have any questions or ideas you want to share then message me via my personal site. I’ll be happy to hear from you. Please include a note about yourself and how you found me.