For over 20 years, my wife and I had poured our lives into building an IT services business with the dream of achieving financial freedom and an early retirement at 55. But despite the long hours and constant stress, we found ourselves past 55 with few vacations under our belt and no clear path to our desired lifestyle. We were full of excuses — the small Alaskan market, hiring challenges, economic recessions. A critical financial metric revealed the harsh truth — the sum of our profit percentage and growth rate was 0.

A wake-up call came when Robin Robins pointed out my profitability problem on a call reviewing my numbers. I realized I had the Technology Marketing Toolkit at my disposal for years but hadn’t fully committed and “grabbed it like I owned it” as my uncle had pushed me to as a young deck hand. I started taking advantage of every Producers Club opportunity, like visiting Robert Herjavec’s Security Operations Center.

Implementing Robin’s pricing advice, we executed a strategic round of increases, raising some clients over 15% and providing more value justification — resulting in little churn but a 12%+ boost in our average all-in seat pricing. I also made the tough call to replace an underperforming vCIO with a top-performing ops manager to cut $100K in labor costs.

Following the Producers Club themes, I personally conducted Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with 100% of our clients, generating more referrals, projects, product sales and stickiness. For trust-based marketing, I launched a non-profit, “Cybersecure Alaska,” with a vision of making our state the cybersecurity leader — this raised my authority through speaking engagements. Insurance joint ventures were natural add-on sales from these conversations.

Adopting the TMT 5-Step Sales process transformed our lackluster closing numbers. I revamped my entire sales playbook, replaced an underperforming appointment setter with two high-performing part-timers and built a better targeted prospect list of over 1,400 companies by accessing state business license data.

The results have been remarkable. Last year, our revenue grew 32% while recurring revenue spiked 38% higher. But the biggest win — combining higher revenue with smarter labor costs facilitated an astonishing 1,100% increase in net profits. We’re now tracking over 21% projected net profits this year as I’ve finally grabbed hold of the Toolkit “like I own it” — putting us on the path to achieving those long-stalled dreams of financial freedom.

Read his full story here.