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Debt-free and making six-figures a year: it’s safe to say that for 19-year-old Enhanced Home Cleaning founder Jason Shipway, school is a thing of the past. In just six months, Shipway built a residential cleaning business from the ground up – ironically after being rejected from numerous cleaning job openings. Now, his company is generating more revenue than most of the businesses he was applying to work for.
So, how was someone who dropped out of school, lacked experience, and struggled to land a job able to build a six-figure business in an industry he knew nothing about? The answer lay within a skill which they don’t teach you in school. A skill that will allow a high school dropout like Shipway to ascend to the top of the entrepreneurial world, earning more money than some of the highest-paid university graduates.
That skill is direct-response marketing.
According to industry leaders, direct-response marketing is vastly different from the typical image-based advertising that you see regularly, the key difference being its response mechanism.
Direct-response advertising aims to motivate readers into acting. This device used is commonly known as a call-to-action, which could be something as small as clicking “like” on a Facebook post, following a page, signing up to a newsletter, watching a video, or it could be a bigger call-to-action, such as asking someone to pull out their credit card to make a purchase. If you start paying close attention to the advertisements around you, the difference between traditional and direct-response marketing will become very apparent.
So, because everything is left to chance with traditional, image-based advertising, advertisers are unable to predictably scale a campaign due to its volatile nature. Contrary to conventional marketing, direct-response advertisers can predict with almost absolute certainty how an advertisement will perform, thus allowing for cheaper, quicker scaling. This is the tool small businesses and startups need to outperform their established industry leaders.
Upon taking a closer look at Enhanced Home Cleaning’s advertisements, it’s obvious why the company has experienced rapid success. As a result of his innate ability to write outstanding advertisements that encapsulate everything his prospective clients are looking for, whilst incorporating many of the core direct-response principles, Shipway’s advertisements have consistently garnered big results with a low ad-spend.
To this day, Enhanced Home Cleaning continues to dominate its local market, an accomplishment rewarding Shipway with a generous six-figure income. Despite dropping out of school and choosing not to pursue a university education, Shipway has the opportunity to live a financially-free life on his own terms, bereft of the debt and claustrophobia that comes with a college degree.
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