His Boring Business = $1.7 Million Annual Revenue

David C. Baker is the founder of Punctuation, tag line…

The leading authority on positioning, reinventing, and selling firms in the creative and digital space

David runs Punctuation with his son Jonathan.

💬 In a recent interview, he reveals…

There’s two of us. It’s a $1.7 million business, hardly any overhead at all.

📧 Apparently it’s David’s email list that powers the business…

I feel like I could rebuild anything I wanted if I had that. I guess that’s because I have this relationship with these, at the moment, it’s 13,000 people that get a weekly email from me.

Whatever I wanted to do, I could do it as long as I could tell those people what I’m doing…

it’s also the one thing that I’ve been doing for almost 30 years, even before there were email service providers, is doing that weekly email.

David’s approach…

Let’s say I go to a website, and something intrigues me, and I kind of want to read this .pdf they’re promising me.

But I know that nine times out of 10, I’m gonna be disappointed, and that I’m going to be dropped into some stream, or they’ll try to convert me to something else.

It just annoys me! So I just don’t do that to people.

🐌 And he likes to take it slow…

I’ve been doing it for many years. I love helping people. I’m going to keep giving away what I hope is useful content.

And if you need to talk with me next week, or 10 years from now, that’s totally fine. I want to wait until you really need me.

He adds… 

If you look at the growth of my email list, it seems somewhat like a failure, as it’s been around for two and a half, three decades, and it’s only 13,000. But it’s more about the quality of the list than it is the quantity.

Only 13,000 people, but through the relationships he’s built with his subscribers, the business does $1.7 million in annual revenue 🤯

Goes to show that you don’t need a big audience to earn big money.

Especially if you’re focused on providing value and willing to play the long game.

Wrapping it up with a fitting quote from Mark Manson, via one of David’s articles 👇

The older I get, the more I realize that success at most things isn’t about finding the one trick or secret nobody knows about. It’s consistently doing the boring, mundane things everyone knows about but is too unfocused/undisciplined to do. Get good at boring.