Scale your business by building systems and teams that generate more money AND time for you.
Build a high converting sales process to win clients systematically and per autopilot
We help you build a systematic sales process with automated lead funnels to attract more clients that really want to work with you. We help you implement the strategy down to your sales script and with your strategy well prepared, you can delegate the campaign setup and management to skilled freelancers to get results without being involved in all the details 🙂
We’ll also show you how you can easily sell services like products (“productize”) with high profits, without expensive salespeople and without wasting time and money blindly on random ads and channels that don’t convert.
Build your virtual “assembly-line” and deliver “productized” services with high efficiency
We help you productize your service offers for internal and external clients so that they provide a high value for your clients and are easy and profitably to deliver without high failures and without doing everything individually all the time with growing stress and shrinking efficiency.
We help you build “virtual assembly lines”, roles for execution and a KPI-based monitoring system. These systems work in a way that you get reliable results even from freelancers you’ve never worked with before and they make your knowledge persistent as a real asset of your business. This will get you a lot of free time, independence from individuals, and the quality you want without you being involved in everything.
Build your on-demand workforce with a talent pool of reliable freelancers
We’ll help you build a global talent pool of tried and tested freelancers you can rely on. Instead of competing for talent against large cooperations with much higher budgets or depending on “most important key employees” that can demand everything from you as you lack alternatives, we make flexibility in skills and costs your competitive advantage and build an “On-demand workforce” with you.
The world will become your talent pool and you’ll say “goodbye” to staff shortages forever!
Build and lead self-managing teams that run&grow the business for you
We’ll help you set up proper role definitions to hire people that take full ownership for business results while you get full transparency over results and progress using a digital leadership system as your virtual office.
We help you build self-managing teams for single digital projects or “Squads” that act like “a business in your business” and manage an entire portfolio of clients.
Based on this team setup and with the underlying digital leadership system you’ll become a result-focused leader supporting your team to deliver results instead of standing between them with high dependencies on yourself and the highest workload.
This means less workload, less stress and teams that run and grow the business independently from you.
You chose which system you want to deploy in your business and we walk you through the implementation with hands-on support as you want it - NO GUESSWORK!
Scenarios where the scalable business setup was THE KEY to profitability
Scenario 1: How my business saved over 150.000 EUR in the first year and over 220.000 EUR in the second year
If you already have a business with full-time employees or if you plan to build a business, what I share here can save you a lot of money and avoid huge financial losses in times of unpredictable revenues:
Till the end of 2017 I ran my business “Bright Solutions” with 43 employees. We had fixed costs of ~250.000 EUR per month.
Fixed costs were mostly salaries.
We could grow in 2016 and 2017 by over 60% as we were lucky (it was really just by luck as we had no systematic way to win new clients, just living from recommendations and offline channels) and we won 3 new projects.
I spent a lot of money to find new employees which took me 3-6 months (and honestly I had to hire some “lower-end-performers” just to get the projects staffed). The project delay was also expensive – but we need more staff to get the projects done – and this took time.
Having ~250.000 EUR fixed costs per month means that we always needed to “hunt” new big projects to get enough revenue in order to pay our fixed costs.
At the beginning of 2018, these new projects were completed and revenues decreased (we just delivered support but no ongoing development) and we couldn’t find new big enough projects fast enough.
We still had these huge fixed costs and not enough revenue. That caused a loss of 20.000 EUR – 30.000 EUR per month in 2018!
In June 2018 I started to rebuild my business according to the model I share on this page with you. From then I only had 12 employees (yes, that was hard, I need to let over 30 people go!). From this time I grew only with freelancers – up to 4.000.000 EUR per year. Meanwhile, we have +150 freelancers and costs and skills scale up and down with the demand of our projects.
I was able to reduce my business’s loss from August 2018 and from this time one we were already slightly profitable again. That saved us from losing more money. In 2019 we won new projects and we got profitable again, we made over 30.000 EUR profits per month as we got the right teams fast as projects came in!
In summer 2019 project revenue went down due to the holiday season (as every year). This time: No problem (no loss of money) as we could decrease our costs and adjust them to the existing revenue.
Reducing costs means staying profitable even with low revenues, without firing people, and as a result we avoided a huge loss every month which otherwise would have eaten our hard-earned profits of the previous months. And once revenues went up again, we could find skilled experts fast enough.
That saved us roughly 150.000 EUR in 2018 and over 220.000 EUR in 2019.
With active freelancer sourcing and an existing pool of over 150 tested freelancers, we can always staff projects with freelancers we need in 2-3 weeks instead of 3-6 months.
If you plan to grow, no matter how many employees you already have or if you are alone. MAKE SURE you grow with stable fixed costs to avoid the same rollercoaster and stay profitable in any market situation.
I can’t tell this often enough with this experience.
Scenario 2: How a 2-employee business made 750.000 EUR revenue with 140.000 EUR profit
The business “Comm-Press” which was the first business that adopted this model in 2019 (currently selling under the brand “Bright Solutions Hamburg” but still as a separate legal entity), was specialized in “Web development with the CMS Drupal”. They had about 45.000 EUR fixed costs per month. In the huge CMS market, the number of Drupal projects decreased and so did the project-based revenue of Comm-Press. In 2017 they made a loss of -30.000 EUR and in 2018 about -100.000 EUR.
The CEO Ralf Hendel had to let employees go to save his business.
As the volume of Drupal projects still decreased and Ralf had no perspective on how to grow his business further.
In 2018 he adopted the scalable business model and from this time on, he could upsell all other technologies his clients needed, he was even able to sell marketing services to new clients and to his existing clients.
He built a digital leadership system and his employees hired global freelancers to deliver projects to his clients.
Using a B2B sales funnel brought warm new leads in every week.
With this system, he was able to grow his revenues from ~350.000 per year with a loss of -110.000 EUR per year to ~750.000 EUR per year with a profit of 140.000 EUR per year.
That changed the game completely and all this with only 2 employees, 24 freelancers and almost NO FIXED COSTS.
Scenario 3: The Corona crash - how our revenues melted down by -30% and our business is still profitable
During Corona, many projects were stopped. In my business “Bright Solutions” one of our biggest client stopped the project with us. This meant: -30% less revenue from one week to another which was about 60.000 EUR less revenue per month. IF we still had 43 employees and +250.000 EUR fixed costs per month WOW!! I would have no idea how this would have ended.
Thanks to our setup according to the scalable business model we could decrease our project-related costs accordingly. Of course, this meant less profit BUT it didn’t mean that our fixed costs eat up all our profits and that we have to operate on a monthly loss.
Even with -30% revenue in 2020 during the Corona Lockdown we still had good profitability of about 10% EBIT. That is the power of a scalable business with virtual teams of global freelancers. I’m really grateful and I’m more than happy to share this with you!
What other clients say
My biggest problem was that there were so many mistakes in execution. Not a single project went without mistakes. The same mistakes always came back and I had +55 hours of work per week. I had to put my nose in every work.
If you have better people and better business, it is a big game changer!
Number of failures decreased by 90%, things get done with minimal input from me and I have much less stress over the day. And now my calendar has a lot of free space so that he can focus on strategy work.
It is a huge change!
Now with your framework and the steps you walk me through, I have scalable systems.
I said to my wife, after I bought the program, this will be our “ticket” to freedom! If I apply everything that this person says in my business, we will become free and with a successful business. Now I’m on the road to that.
I think the things you do, the level of structure, SOPs, how to create processes, how to go about systematizing and getting people in, is very thorough and we can see that this was created from experience. Also, when we ask questions, we also get specific answers, so we see that you have actually done it, that’s great. I think it’s extraordinary and a really great program!
Before I met you and Flash Hub, I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over a two-year period to find experts that would grow my business to the next level. But I didn’t find them.
Right from the beginning, I started to receive more value from you than you told me you would give me, and you continue to do that. I don’t know how you do it. I’ve been with you for about a year now and you just continue to open new doors for me and help my business grow and help me grow as a business owner.
Flash Hub itself is a great source of knowledge, and meeting others with similar problems is great since we progress together and we exchange information along the way.
All the assets that are shared, the videos, documents, blueprints are just brilliant and fantastic, thank you very much for that!
You, as a person, are very inspiring. You inspired me, not just changed the way I work, I now have the idea of a new product that I’m planning to build within the next couple of years. That’s great!
You get the full picture, and not only story-wise, you get documents and videos you can walk along and always go back to. The other thing is that hearing an answer or even a question from a like-minded person in a group is great and helpful. You also shed light on some issues that might not be so obvious.
You’ve been providing me with gold nuggets, left and right!
I’m familiar with a lot of the methodologies that you draw on, but kind of presenting it the way that you did and really tying all components into a holistic organizational framework was very useful. So just, all in all, great stuff, really good!
I now have clarity on how I want my company to operate, and this helps me to give clear leadership to everyone. On a product basis, everything is how you need it and how you want it. It’s a very trustworthy space, people are open to share their opinions and their thoughts, and over time I feel that there is a friendship developing between the people. I think this is great! If you ask me about the product quality, I think it’s great, you can say it’s definitely worth what you are paying for.
Even though I’m at the very beginning, I made this experience with you, and with the class, but especially with you, that you are giving me the right feedback at the right time if I am off the track, then you are asking the right questions to push me back. That’s giving me confidence that I can do it, because I’m not alone and I know that you have the will to help me to make me successful.
It’s invaluable to be in a group of like-minded peers that are looking to actively change business for the better and adopt a more systemized way of working.
What gets measured gets done and Flash Hub helps you to recognize what you should be measuring. What you have articulated is something that’s capable of transforming small businesses and you have created a social context in terms of a group of peers with an experienced mentor in a context of trust is the ingredient to being confident that the framework is in the right direction.
It helps me by providing clear and systemized steps to go towards my goal, and I really liked the way the information was presented! These templates and all materials are really helpful.
Another thing I really love is regular video meetings where we can meet all together and get the experience not only from Manuel but also from other participants as well. The whole structure, how it’s organized, it’s really helpful and very useful.
(Marketing Services)
(Growth hacking agency)
“ I never want to go back to the old way of leading a business with only a local team. With Flash Hub finally our business scales, performance increased tremendously, our business is more profitable than before and can deliver full service to our customers. Flash Hub helped us as a strong partner to succeed.”
Bright Solutions Hamburg GmbH
“Hi Manuel,
My business is 11 years old, I have 8 employees and I have almost always worked with freelancers too.
But all your support, forced me to put my nose into my own sh** and consider :
1) that my way of doing things has limits (that part I already noticed, but ignored with the bad excuse : « I don’t have time and things are going well for us »)
2) It can change (that is the new part).
For now, I’m feeling a bit brainwashed (or « flashed », Men in Black way of being flashed^^) and I need some time to « structure » all that in my head, on our tools, in the brains of our team etc. but I’m convinced I’ll be very soon able to :
1) Reduce my stress and the stress of my employees
2) Work more on the business than in the business in order to improve the system
3) Have a better life (if I manage to work less then 65 hours a week I’ll consider that as a great result)
4) Scale my agency
Thank you again Manuel and have a great day!
À bientôt !”
The Systems You'll Implement Got
Awarded By The
European Commission
In 2018 the European Commission awarded this system with the Seal of Excellence to certify it as a concept that offers a high value for many other service providers and agencies.
This system was awarded as a “High Quality” approach in a “Highly competitive evaluation process” by independent experts from all over Europe. Due to its first use in IT and digital marketing projects in 2018, this award was focused on IT projects. In the meantime, we have seamlessly transferred the system to all types of digital work and improved it continuously.
About
Manuel Pistner
Know-how from business owner to business owner
My name is Manuel Pistner. My experience in numbers:
- Business owner and entrepreneur since 2006
- Runs 3 businesses with +4 Million EUR annual revenue
- Founder of the agency “Bright Solutions”
- Current team of 158 freelancers in 67 countries
- Founder of Flash Hub with over 700 clients
- TEDx speaker 2019
- Entrepreneur of the year 2015
- “Seal of Excellence” 2018 from the European Commission
- Married father of one amazing son
You'll take the shortcut and avoid the same CRASH that I had in 2018 while figuring out everything myself with frustrating and expensive experiments.
Desperately trying to get all the work done, I hired talent too fast when we won new clients. As winning and keeping skilled talent was so hard, I tried to outsource to offshoring and nearshoring providers to scale. But as my business had no structure to lead all these people properly and get me and my clients reliable results, it almost crashed against the wall with 43 employees and a huge project crash in 2018. THAT CHANGED THE GAME COMPLETELY!
- My team is empowered to grow my business without me
- As my teams performed much better, my workload went down from 10-14 hours per day to 2-3 hours per day!
- My business’ profitability (EBIT) increased from 4% to 18% of revenue
- Our revenues increased by almost 90%
- My dependency on few big customers and few important employees flew away.
- Bonus: With access to global talent we hire new experts in 5-14 days instead of 3-6 months – Staff shortages are gone, FOREVER!
- Bonus: Our costs structure scales with our revenues, especially during the lockdown, when revenue was down 30% and more, my business was still profitable
We could even
grow our team profitably by
400% in only 6 months!
See how I was trapping in the business owner hamster wheel till the 06.06.2018 and how I almost crashed my entire business with expensive experiments with offshoring and nearshoring and blind trust in account managers with the HOPE to find other agencies that help me scale….I found out why this crashed and I found a solution. They all have the same problems…Flash hub was born.