We were lucky to catch up with Alex Lathery recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alex, appreciate you joining us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of entrepreneurship is the kind of crazy stuff we have to deal with as business owners. Sometimes it’s crazy positive sometimes it’s crazy negative, but crazy experiences unite entrepreneurs regardless of industry. Can you share a crazy story with our readers?

I first started this business at the end of my last college internship, July of 2021. I had always been interested in entrepreneurship and I’m a builder at heart. So I set about taking this small hobby of learning web design and development and turning it into a business I could learn from. I started refining my skills, doing outreach daily trying to find a couple of clients to get experience with. 4 months go by and I’ve had 3 free clients I did work for and also 2 other clients who I got paid (very little) to work with.

I felt like I was making great progress from where I started out, and just being able to grow my skills every day and actually get paid from them was insanely gratifying. It was in that 4th month where everything would change. By then I had been slowly growing my audience on Twitter, interacting with people in my niche of business (home services companies), and showcasing the work I was doing. One day, almost as if it was completely random, a large account sent me a DM saying they liked my work and wanted to jump on a call to discuss a project they had. I was ecstatic. I ended up designing and building out a website for their new cleaning company that hit $12,000 in revenue in their first month of launch, with help from the website.

But this is just the start of how crazy things got for me. After connecting with this account, I came into contact with their business coach who was helping them expand some of their expertise into offerings online that would leverage their Twitter accounts. This coach and I got on a call together, he outlined his offer of what he does with coaching, and I ended up paying him $2,000 for 12 weeks of coaching. It’s important to note that at this time I think after my expenses I had made a grand total of $500 from 4-5 months of work.

We started working together at the start of December, dialing in things related to my business, the service offering, and setting up a sales outline for me to use in prospecting calls. All while I was dialing things in inside of the business, this larger account who I did work for was really excited about his website. He began to tell all of his followers to come to me for anything related to web design and development.

The combination of his support, my new content strategy to start leveraging my own following, and the new systems in place to allow my business to scale all led to me having my biggest month ever in January as a business owner. The January revenue for my business was just over the $18,000 mark. To put this in perspective, this was over 3 times what I would make at my full-time engineering job and a ROI of 9x in just 1 month of working with my business coach.

I almost couldn’t believe that it was happening. My beliefs of what were possible were completely shattered as I just kept watching the number go higher and higher throughout January. My original goal when working with my business coach was just to be able to match what I would make from my 9-5. Not exceed it by 3x.

This influx of clients gave me invaluable experience, testimonials, and it allowed me to morph my freelance business into a much more mature business that I’m iterating and growing every day now. I ended up completing 35 client sites in just 90 days from January to April, and have learned more in those 90 days than I learned in 5 years of college.

Alex, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a 23 year old mechanical engineer who has a background in consumer goods research and development engineering. I have always had a tinker’s mind, and have been passionate about learning, entrepreneurship, and just building skills for as long as I can remember.

I got into the web design industry at the start of COVID. I wanted to improve my coding abilities with all the extra time indoors. I spent 1-2 months going through free online programming tutorials related to web development, and then at the end of my final internship in college I decided to pivot and turn those skills into a business by learning a web development software called Webflow.

My company, Blue Collar Builds has served over 40 clients, primarily small businesses. We have unique expertise in crafting sites for the home services industry, including: landscapers, junk removal, house cleaning, exterior cleaning services, and some of the trade skills (plumbing, HVAC). There are two core details that set us apart from other competition. We design and build some of the best looking websites in this space as each website is individually designed by us, and is not a template that is outdated or generic. The other part where we shine is that we offer a very unique insight and expertise in putting together tech stacks for these types of businesses. We have specific knowledge as to what softwares work well for each type of business and we help integrate those within our client’s sites.

I want our clients to see our brand as the premium option for the small business space. We are designing and building top-notch websites at prices that aren’t going to put your business under. We’ve taken a ton of time and effort to get systems in place to make this feasible on our end as a business and we want to continue to elevate the quality of service each client gets and to help small business owners navigate an increasingly complex world of technology.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

It’s almost funny looking back at my social media strategy. We tend to think that things are much more complex than they are, or that there is some crazy trick to growing a presence. The truth, as I’ve seen it, is that growing on social media is about a few things: creating content so people see you and what you have to offer, and providing value.

That’s it. All of my social media strategy is related to being entertaining, providing an immense amount of free value to my audience, and making sure I post enough to stay relevant in the minds of the customers we help.

My advice to beginners is to just start showcasing your work and providing value by talking about the skills you have that may benefit your ideal customer. When I first started out it was really just me talking about websites, web design, web development and showing examples of the work I was doing. The growth came naturally over a long enough time horizon. You just have to stick it out through the early phases when growth will be slow and you’ll feel like you’re talking to an empty audience.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

From day one of this business my focus has been on mastering my craft and skills as a web designer and developer. Because of this, I’ve been able to best serve the clients I’ve had.

In almost every project we take on, we overdeliver. In some projects, we overdeliver so much just out of passion for growing our skills and creating a better product that things weren’t profitable. Maybe it’s not the most elegant way to grow a business, but it’s done wonders in terms of building the brand ROI.

One of my favorite business mentors, Alex Hormozi, likes to say that branding achieves a higher return on investment than something like direct response marketing. This has always been my play (not because I was a genius, but I more or less just fell into this). I’ve tried to make sure that Blue Collar Builds puts out bigger and better work every single day.

I guarantee every client that works with us has a positive experience, and for those that don’t I offer a full refund of their money (of which I’ve never had to give).

Being consistent, increasing our skills, and treating each new client as a relationship rather than a transaction is how we built our reputation and how we will continue to do business as we grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: bluecollarbuilds.tech
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alathery/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/home