The Big Reveal – From Zero to $410,000 in Five Months

Raul: Hello, Raul and Cristi here and in this video we want to share our experience with working with Max. And basically, today we are in the 5th of June and from the beginning of the year until now in five months we closed $410,000.

Cristi: Quite a lot of money.

Raul: Quite a lot of money.

The Mission – Transforming Romanian IT Developers

Raul: Okay so what we are actually doing, we are helping experienced IT developers from Romania transition from the nine to five job from the local market into the global market to work as a freelancer and basically get paid twice or three times as much, or even four times as much depending on the case. Having more freedom in their lives and getting the chance to build the resources to start their own businesses later on and of course get to travel if they want. Now we are in Milano and yeah we are shooting this video here and it’s been quite a while right. So let’s go back at the beginning to see why we decided to start working with Max and yeah how’s that been?

Cristi: Yeah basically me and Cristi both of us were freelancing, IT freelancer freelancing in the past, Cristi was working for Google and Facebook. He also had this corporate experience and we knew that we have this skill like we knew that we can help other people to move into freelancing, but guess what? No one really took us seriously like I had a lot of friends from college that were programmers and they could do freelancing easily, but they didn’t take me seriously even if I told them okay this is so fun and you can make so much money and have more flexibility travel the world and enjoy life as a programmer.

Raul: Yeah so for us we experienced, we had a chance to experience this world to experience the abundance that freelancing offers this world, but it seemed that nobody in Romania knew about this and all the people that were doing freelancing were not really talking about it because they were busy like making money. And there was a huge mindset gap there and a huge value gap.

Cristi: A value gap exactly and programmers in Romania were getting paid like very low rates compared with what the programmer in America would get in the United States would get or a programmer in Western Europe. So we felt that we had to do something that is somebody has to do that and then we started working on this.

Finding Max – The Mentorship That Changed Everything

Raul: Basically we schedule a call with Max, we talk with this team and we ask them exactly this okay, how can we show these people how to do freelancing? So we had to know how to help people transition into freelancing, but we didn’t know how to structure this and how to pass that information in a clear and efficient way to our clients and of course how to monetize that. So how we can create a business around us so that we can help even more clients on the long run, have more impact, and of course have the financial reward for ourselves as well.

Cristi: Yeah because it’s one thing to know it yourself. Like, yeah, we both did freelancing in the past, but it’s a different and completely other thing to teach it to others. Like it’s next level and you have to do it properly. You have to teach them properly so they will get results. They will be happy with your service and yeah they will be willing to pay for your service.

Raul: So we kind of started a bit on our own and we realized that hey this can go very wrong. Like if we don’t have a proper mentor alongside with us to tell us, because we had a lot of decisions to take like every little small decision that you take can influence a business in a very dramatic way. So you need to have somebody with experience there that has had multiple clients, multiple online coaching businesses, to tell you hey this is correct. This is not correct. And a lot of times it was confirmed that our intuition was completely wrong like we wanted to go on one path and it turned out that it was a very bad idea.

Cristi: Yeah and in the past I also worked with some business mentors from our country from Romania, but it’s like they didn’t offer the level of support that Max offers. Like they have daily calls with mentors for different aspects of the business from sales, lead generation, to mindset and any aspect that you might need in a business and I’ve never seen this level of support in any of the mentorship that I’ve been in the past.

Raul: Yeah so it’s not like a magic pill. So for sure we don’t want to say that it’s not like you get into this mentoring thing and all of a sudden overnight you get to this success. We are already two years in the process two years since we are working on this. Results come but you have to put in the work like you really have to put in the work there’s no shortcut here of course there is a shortcut because you put in the work in the right direction and with the proper guidance, but there’s no shortcut in putting in the work. You have to work there you have to work your ass off and we did put this work in and we are happy with the place we are in now and what what’s coming up next.

Key Lessons – Avoiding Major Business Pitfalls

Raul: So basically Max helped us avoid major pitfalls in business.

Cristi: Yeah so for instance, one of the major pitfalls and the mindset issues that we have had is like try to help everyone, try to help everyone transition into freelancing. And there is this temptation like there are other graphic designers, for instance, or I don’t know, music creators and hey why not help everybody? And we soon figure out that this would damage the value that we can bring to our specific target, our specific niche. Now we even restricted that we don’t help every IT developer there. We just focus on small portions of IT developers. So in this way we offer super high quality value for that specific needs because we know every detail, every detail that there is to know about it.

Raul: Yeah at the beginning is to help everyone because the market is larger and you think okay we have more clients we help everyone but the results won’t be the same.

Cristi: Another thing was like to select our clients, select the clients to work with and not just go hey let’s make as much money as possible by getting everyone.

Raul: Getting everyone yeah because personality matters as well in a collaboration in the mentoring process. So we wanted to select only the best people that we can work with people that are first and foremost civilized.

Cristi: Yeah and they are really to quit up there he goes to work with us.

Raul: Exactly they really want our help not they don’t come with arrogance or with a lot of like conditions into our collaboration.

Cristi: And maybe the most important thing later in the process in the scaling process was to help us build a team because we made a lot of good money me and Cristi but like it was hard for us to give up some of the responsibilities to other people.

Raul: Yeah we reach a plateau because you can do only as much as you can do in two persons right there out of tests to do a lot of things to to be done so at some point you really need a team and to manage a team is like a completely different game and we for sure we needed help in there like how to structure team properly how to manage people how to set up the processes and this is still ongoing work is not like finished and I don’t think it will ever be finished but if we wouldn’t have had this help here and if Max wouldn’t have been there this would have been a complete failure for us.

Cristi: Yeah and basically building a team is not an easy task because you you have to take responsibility for these people like you you start from zero expenses per month or close to zero expenses to I don’t know over 10k expenses for example and you just have to to take this possibility that from now on you have to do sales more yeah like you you cannot go in in a holiday if you if you don’t have the team properly set up and all these minor I don’t know mindset changes that okay yeah if you want to help more clients and you won’t have only two three clients four clients per month you have to build a big team like you have to have a team of people because me and Chris this time is limited yeah and if you really want to have an impact in this world and have helped a lot of people with with our skill set then we have to rely on more on people and we have to train those people we have to pay those people and like we have to grow with them so in this process like at first we joined the mid-tier process the mid-tier program of Max but with building the team we had to join the top tier which is the seven-figure business consulting and in the seven-figure business consulting they basically give you their entire team like their sales guy their their setters their marketing guys their lead generation guys and they are in a symbiosis with your team it’s like if you start the movie spider-man it’s like Max’s team is like venom he just gets all over all over your team and like raises yeah grows them basically so we get mentors for our team member as well so our team members get to grow as well working with us so they also get paid working with us as well but they also get to grow and learn from the best so they learn from these people that are way better than we are to what they do um so and this basically a lot of our time to grow faster in the business because if we had to manage like micromanager our team members we didn’t know how to do it because we don’t have so much experience with manage management yet and we would waste a lot of time.

Raul: Exactly exactly so yeah those are the major people by the way we are in milan right now uh this is the gallery you can see here all the fancy stores yeah uh we are just here on a weekend trip and having uh some fun we are going to leave it on yeah we’re going to leave it on we want to uh take to buy max a gift yeah for helping us so max you we owe you one so we’re gonna this will surprise for you so hopefully you you won’t see this video until the gift arrives to you yeah yeah let’s go.

Raul: All right max so we bought you a gift here is it uh it will get to you in a couple of uh weeks i guess i’m not sure anyway enjoy it hopefully uh it will fit you uh there’s a pair of shoes in there so yeah let’s go go back to where we are now and what are our plans for the future.

The Bigger Picture – Impact Beyond Money

Cristi: Yeah so at the moment we helped more than 100 developers to move into freelancing and we really want to go big with this one like we want to change the entire IT industry in Romania and show people that this is possible and that yeah they can have control over their work and for this we build a team we have now 12 people I think in the team.

Raul: Yeah we’re still expanding and yeah we also as a person we grow in the management field like we we start to mentor our team basically and yeah give better feedback for our clients better value for our clients we are already working on an advanced program to get them to the next level as freelancers and we are very excited for the future so it’s important to note here that yeah our lives are better now we do make money but apart from these shiny numbers that you might see and you think uh there’s a lot of money and stuff it’s important to note here that for every dollar that we get from our clients our clients get that dollar back every month for the rest of their career sometimes they double or triple that dollar every month remember this every month they get this money for the rest of their career so the return of investment uh that our clients have working with us is simply huge is like the best investment they can make in their careers as a programmer or iot professional so we are so humble about that we get to work with amazing people we get to have a big impact into their lives into their family lives and more than that more than that it’s a macro impact that we have on the society in romania these people are people that want to build things they need the resources they want to build businesses they want to change things around them and they lack the money and time to do it so now with our help they work hard and get more money for their work and then they start building businesses they start creating a new workplaces in our country and the romania i don’t know about your country but romania is the country that really needs uh entrepreneurs really needs people that can change things and that can uh build things around and uh this is like throwing the stone into a lake and you know you have that the ripple effect and uh it’s so so fulfilling to be part of that of this impact like apart from dumani this is like maybe maybe i i think for me this was the main motivation like it uh we get to have like astonishing impact into the romanian society you don’t only change these people’s lives you also change the society around them.

Cristi: Yeah and not to say that we also created uh places to work here in romania and we train our people and we we grow together and now we are in milano here part of our team is here with us so we have kind of a cool experience together um yeah it’s it’s simply another level a level that we wouldn’t have had as a freelancer or as the job there are great experience there as well but there’s more to life and we we want to embrace as much as possible because there’s only one life here so our time here is limited.

Raul: Yeah so we are enjoying it and uh we we are glad that we work with max max thank you for all your help change our life and not only our life but our clients life.

Cristi: Exactly and uh also your team as well uh nikita and uh max and nico nico and uh hopefully i’m not forgetting anybody here but yeah thank you guys you’re awesome hopefully we’ll get to meet each other soon in person uh yeah and uh gg gg keep up the good work all right oh also we bought this weekend we bought some rollies and they are pretty cool cool all right uh towards a better word i don’t know if i should we should say something like but i guess it’s our mission for for everybody like it’s our mission to leave something behind so yeah we get to make money you bring that into the sword you are paying for that uh you make sure you are paid correctly for that uh but it’s also important to to make sure that you leave something behind and we are so proud of what we are doing and yeah.