How to Scale Your Business To Millions of Profitable Revenue Without A Crazy Workload?
Sell Services Like Products
+
Systemize & Automate
Sales And Delivery Workflows
+
Scale Teams With Global Freelancers
*Read on, I'll share the detailled numbers later on this page.
**I use the word "agency" as short synonym for "service-based and people intense business" 😉
The 6 building blocks
You need
"Productized services"
and stop doing everything individually
...to get happy clients, happy team members and no escalations
You need a
"B2B Sales Funnel"
to systematically win new clients online
... selling services like products makes automating your sales processes A LOT easier.
You need a
"Quality Standard"
to get reliable results from your team
...onboard people fast online and measure performance with KPIs
You need a
"Digital Leadership System"
as virtual office with KPI based workflows
...to get full transparency over results and progress for you and your team without bad surprises
You need
"Self-Managing Teams"
that care about business results
...and get work done profitably and reliable without you being involved in every part
You need
"On-Demand Talent"
instead of a static, local workforce
...and always have the required flexibility in skills, availability and costs (NO fixed cost risks)
These 2 global megatrends are your biggest opportunity
Remote work opens the door to global talent and global clients
Digitization empowers you to systemize and automate a lot of work
Combining these 2 megatrends will help you build or transform your service-based business into a scalable, systemized business. Access to global talent, systemized work, automated sales funnels and proven systems to delegate any work and lead your team are the key to
scale your business with success.
Let’s get into it!
This setup can literally boost the profitability, flexibility and the growth potential of your business and get you A LOT MORE FREE TIME!
Just calculate yourself how much (revenue and profit)-potential your business would have if you could:
- start projects 80% faster with real experts for all required skills
- don’t have to pay for under-utilized employees that have no billable work
- win clients predictably online without relying on recommendations and on plain hope
- say “goodbye” to staff shortages and have skilled talent on-demand
- decrease costs when revenues decrease and still stay profitable
- Grow flexibly with new projects without growing new fixed costs
6 Main Results
You’ll always have the right experts to deliver your services, no how much your clients request.
Become 100% independent from local staff shortages (while keeping your local team motivated if you have one)
Make your business knowledge persistent digitally so it won’t leave when people leave
Increase your revenue without increasing the risk of new fixed costs
Boost your profits in times of rapid growth and stay profitable when revenues decrease
Reduce your workload and your stress as you can focus on building your business, not doing all the work yourself and handle all decisions and escalations.
THE SCALABLE BUSINESS
STARTER PACK
Scalable business deep-dive training (Video + Slides)
Look over my shoulder in this video and see how I’ve built and lead my business with 158 freelancers, 12 employees doing ~4 Mio EUR annual revenue, how self-managing teams work, how my digital leadership system looks like and a lot more. In this video you’ll gain insights into the exact setup of a scalable service-business.
Click to see all detailsYou can cherry-pick what’s most valuable to you or clone the whole proven setup and apply it to your business and start scaling. This setup reduced my workload from over 14 hours per day to 2-4 hours per day and increased our profitability, our team happiness and our service portfolio tremendously while giving more value to our clients and more autonomy to our teams! In this video you’ll learn how to:
👉1) Fix the “Core-Bug” in the service-provider business model
👉2) Build and lead autonomous and self-driven teams
👉3) Get independent from a few important employees and clients
👉4) Decide when to hire employees and when to get freelancers
👉5) Apply the core leadership principles of a scalable service-business
👉6) Get reliable results while working with global freelancers
👉7) Keep your employees aligned, happy and engaged
👉8) Use OKRs and learn when to use KPIs for performance tracking and alignment
👉9) Build a reliable system with quality standards and solid processes
👉10) Align sales and marketing teams to become your growth engine and measure their performance
👉11) +BONUS: Learn how I led my teams with transparent and self-determined salaries and get access to my open salary framework with all details described
Productized service blueprint training
In this training, you’ll understand how to productize your services as a fundamental basis to build automated sales funnels and to get reliable results from your team, even from freelancers you’ve never worked with before. Your productized service offers build the basis to get stability, quality and reliability of operations to your business.
Quality standard blueprint training
Quality standards for your service offers are the key element to deliver reliable results for your clients and high profits for your business. They are the basis to onboard talent fast and build self-managing teams that take ownership for results for your clients and for your business.
Blueprint to scale your teams with freelancers
This is the blueprint of a team and organizational structure that is built to scale your internal services and your external (client-facing) services with freelancers. You’ll understand how you get reliable results from freelancers and full transparency about results and progress.
Self-managing teams as business in your business (squads)
You’ll understand the exact roles and the entire team setup of client-facing teams that take ownership for client satisfaction and the profitability of contracts. Squads act like a business in your business and they are the blueprint to DELEGATE BY RESULTS to your team of employees and freelancers.
You’ll also learn how you align your teams with KPIs and keep everyone focused on results, not tasks.
B2B automated sales funnel blueprint
In this training, you’ll understand exactly how you can win leads and clients per autopilot. This funnel is built for B2B service providers and agencies that have sales cycles of 1-24 months. You’ll get to know all components of the funnel, which content pieces you need, they work and how the entire funnel works to attract, nurture and win clients for your business.
Build a B2B sales machine with freelancers (Video + Slides)
I’ll show you in this online-training how I built my virtual marketing and sales team using global freelancers to grow my business to more than 4.000.000 EUR revenue per year.
Click to see all details✅ Setting proper goals for your sales and marketing team
✅ How to build a marketing strategy
✅ Identify your perfect client
✅ Focus on products or services?
✅ How to standardize and systemize your sales processes
✅ How to build and scale your marketing and sales team using reliable, talented tried-and-true freelancers
✅ Tools, workflows, roles, and the exact setup of a marketing and sales team
Discounted template pack
During the checkout, you can get access to the tool- and template-pack including
B2B sales funnel calculator
Business model calculator
5 templates to find and assess freelancers and delegate work
Now, start to scale your service business or agency with higher profits and more time for yourself.
€€€ - See how this business setup created stable profits in any market situation
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 agency “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 agency’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 software development agency “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 amount of Drupal projects decreased and so did the project 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 agency is still profitable
During Corona, many projects were stopped. In my agency “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!
This Works For service-providers with 0 to 200 employees.
See what other business owners say
(Marketing Agency)
(Agency)
(Medical industry)
(TradingID, Marketing)
See what more clients say...
From the Academy to the Challenge to the consulting support, everything has really helped me. With you, I have laid the foundation for developing my business step by step. Crazy- in the meantime we are 5 more people!
Idee & Liebe - Marketing und Vertriebs UG
“ I never want to go back to the old way of leading a digital agency with only a local team. With Flash Hub finally our agency 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 with virtual teams.”
Bright Solutions Hamburg GmbH
Honestly, THIS 👇 REALLY MADE ME PROUD!
“Hi Manuel,
You told us that we should reach out for any question…
The fact is, I don’t have any for the moment 🙂 (but that will certainly come).
My business is 11 years old, I have 8 employees and I have almost always worked with freelancers too.
But all your videos, academy, documentations and now the challenge, 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 business
Thank you again Manuel and have a great day!
À bientôt !”
This System 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 based companies.
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.
How A Virtual Freelancer Team Saved My Entire Business From A BIG CRASH !
Triggered by a huge project crash in my agency in 2018 where I almost had to pay over 500.000 EUR contract penalties to one of my clients, I’ve transformed my local business of 43 local full time employees into a global virtual team with over 150 freelancers lead by 12 employees. THAT CHANGED THE GAME COMPLETELY!
Here are the 8 main results I got from the system that I’ve figured out:
- I can deliver all services my clients request simply by hiring the right freelancers when I need them
- My agency’s profitability (EBIT) increased from 4% to 18% of revenue
- Our revenues increased by almost 90% as we could deliver more services
- My dependency on few big customers and few important employees flew away
- Our team is much happier and more satisfied, less stressed
- As my teams performed much better, even my workload went down from 10-14 hour workdays to 2-5 hours per day!
- Bonus: With access to global talent we hire new experts in 3-5 days instead of 3-6 months – Staff shortages are gone, FOREVER!
- Bonus: Our costs structure scales with our revenues, especially during Corona, when revenue was down 30% and more, my agency was still profitable
We could even
grow our team
400% in only 6 months!
You can skip all that horrible experience and I will guide you to implement the proper system right from the beginning – which took me more than 2.5 years of trial and error, a big crash and a 400.000 EUR bank credit.
You can take the fast lane without all these expensive failures I had to make to learn it without a guide.
P.S. No, you don’t have to fire 20 people as I did. That was driven by my plain frustration, a big crash and breaking free from the wrong people I had to hire under high pressure of new projects with hard deadlines.
What clients ask me often....
“Manuel, you say that you run a profitable agency with +4.000.000 EUR annual turnover.
If that is true and your business is really profitable with the numbers you share on this page
WHY do you offer this service instead of
- spending your time elsewhere?
- focussing on your business to grow it further?
- keeping your system as a unique selling point instead of sharing it?”
The answer to all these questions is this:
- I love to see other people being successful and I saw how this setup changed the life for myself and for other business owners that applied it. That makes me incredibly proud and happy.
- Many service providers want to reinvent their strategy to get ready for the “new normal” but have no proven strategy.
- Many struggle with further profitable growth.
- Many suffer from the impact of Corona and need a transformation.
- My team grows my business independently from myself, that’s why I have the time.
I went through a very hard time with my business in 2018 (see my TEDx talk on this page).
I almost lost my entire business growing with only a local team, high fixed costs and unpredictable revenue.
And I had nobody who could help me in this existential situation. Feeling helpless is the worst feeling I know.
Looking back, I now know why all this happened and I worked hard on a strategy to fix it FOREVER!
And it worked far better than I could ever imagine.
I can’t tell you enough how this changed my life, my company and my perspective of the future. I’m really grateful that I found this.
And it makes me so happy and proud to support other business leaders to achieve the same. That is a much much more fulfilling feeling than earning more money, working less or just keeping the whole system only for myself.
That is my true motivation and passion. That is my answer to “WHY Flash Hub”.
Why I know this?
Because I did all that myself. Multiple times. And for clients.
My name is Manuel Pistner. My experience in numbers:
- Business owner and entrepreneur since 2006
- Built 6 own businesses (2 agencies) – sold one while currently leading 3 by myself
- Current team of over 150 freelancers in 67 countries
- Built and lead the agency “Bright Solutions” with 4 Mio annual revenue
- Hired more then 800 freelancers online
- Working with global freelancers since 2012
- Built more then 50 virtual teams of freelancers
- 200.000 hours of work per year with freelancer teams
My Personal Guarantee
With the Starter Pack you get the whole knowledge and a deep dive into all building blocks of this strategy that helped me scale my agency to 4 Mio annual revenue and 150 global freelancers and leading this business with just 2-3 hours per day. You get access for just 47 EUR +VAT one-time payment AND all your money back if you really see no value.
If you don’t feel that the offer presented on this page is worth at least the price you pay, send me an email within 30 days of getting access to the videos and I’ll refund your full price without any discussion.
Fair enough?
