#1: The Day I Walked Away from $1.5M/year Profit Business to Start Over

May 12, 2025

Read Time: 3 min

The day I hit $1.5M in profit... was the day I decided to leave.

Not exactly the kind of milestone you expect to walk away from, right?

I had acquired my stake in Rampd and built it into a machine. 72% total growth over 22 months. A small team. Client results that made competitors jealous. And margins that would make most agency owners drool.

But I was quietly dying inside.

Behind the scenes, I was enjoying the kind of success most entrepreneurs chase—time freedom, a smooth-running business, and great clients.

But there was one problem: it wasn’t mine. And without true ownership, I couldn’t fully express the creative vision I knew I was capable of.

Turns out, I had become a well-paid employee.

What Most Entrepreneurs Won’t Admit

You know what’s worse than failing?

Winning at the wrong game.

I realized I had helped build a business that could help a select few at premium prices, but deep down, I knew I was meant to help the thousands still stuck in the same golden cage I felt trapped in:

• 60+ hour workweeks

• No exit plan

• No time freedom

• Just enough profit to stay stuck in the loop

I had built systems for others that created freedom, while I was still caught in the hamster wheel of my own creation.

So I burned the ships.

I sold me stake back and exited.

The Freedom Framework (And Why I’m Starting Over)

After helping 450+ entrepreneurs scale to 7 and 8 figures, and building two agencies of my own, I’ve boiled everything down into the 4 principles that actually create freedom:

1. Systemize Before You Scale

• Most entrepreneurs try to scale before they systemize

• This creates more chaos, not more profit

• The right order: Systemize → Automate → Delegate → Scale

2. Profit-First Pricing

• Your pricing model determines your freedom

• High-ticket doesn't mean high-profit if your delivery is manual

• How to structure offers that increase in profit as they increase in scale

3. Leveraged Delivery

• The counterintuitive truth: clients often get better results with less of your time

• Creating delivery systems that work without you

• How to transition clients from high-touch to high-leverage models

4. Eliminate Before You Optimize

• Most entrepreneurs try to optimize everything

• The real secret is eliminating 80% of what you do

• The three KEY questions that determine what to keep, what to kill, and what to delegate

What’s Next

This newsletter is my restart button.

I'm building my new consulting practice in public, aiming for $1M in annual profit—but this time with freedom engineered in from day one.

Each week, I’ll share:

Frameworks I'm using to build my new business

Behind-the-scenes metrics and milestones

Tools and systems I'm implementing

Mistakes I make in real time, so you don't have to

But next week, I’m pulling back the curtain on the hardest part of starting over:

That’s what I’ll show you—step by step.

See you then,

Andrew.