How I built a $360k per year part-time business setting up simple postcard campaigns
By Luke Jaten • 36 year direct marketing veteran • Teacher • 30k+ students • $100m+ for clients
I never meant to build a lifestyle business.
My plan was to sell my nutrition company to a private equity firm, take a $25 million payday and go drink jalapeño margaritas on the beach…
But that’s not what happened.
Instead I stumbled into this simple part-time business by accident. And it all started with a text from a guy I hadn’t talked to for a few years.
In the summer of 2018, I had just closed the doors on my failed nutrition business. No income. Three months of savings left. No idea what I was going to do next. What happened over the following six months turned into the simplest, high profit business I’ve ever run. It’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
The text that changed everything
A few weeks into trying to figure out my next move, an old friend texted me out of the blue. He’d been through a course I created back in 2008. It was a postcard marketing course called Postcard Profits that sold over 30,000 copies before I took it off the market. He wanted to know if I could put together a direct mail campaign for his consulting business.
I said yes.
He was selling $5,000 consulting packages. We did a test mailing of 1,000 postcards. The test cost him $650 in postage and printing. In the first 10 days, he got 26 responses, signed 2 new clients, and brought in $10,000 from a $650 mailing.
To this day, he’s still mailing 2,000 to 3,000 postcards a month using the simple campaign I built for him.
That one job changed everything. I realized that setting up mail campaigns for business owners who already had proven marketing could be the perfect business.
Simple, part-time work for full-time pay… and almost nobody else was doing it.
“Last month one of my clients did $105,000 in sales from their first two mailings. The mailings cost them $3900. That’s almost 27 times return on ad spend!”
Fast forward to today.
I set up 1-3 simple campaigns a month for clients and make a fantastic income for myself working less than 6 hours a week total.
I wrote and tested a prospecting letter that I send out to 100 businesses that fit my target criteria every couple months and that gets me new clients on autopilot.
So I don’t have to worry where my next client is gonna come from.
I’ve perfected the whole thing to make me full-time pay for part-time work.
Last month my little one man agency did $37,500 in revenue. It took me about 12 hours of actual work.
What a typical week looks like
This is not the kind of business where you’re going to make millions.
But if averaging $5,000+ a week while only working a couple hours a day is appealing to you. And having lots of free time is important to you, you’re gonna love this.
Here’s what a typical week looks like for me.
Monday: Wake up and do whatever I want for the day.
Tuesday: Email my list broker to order names for a client.
Wednesday: Take 30 minutes to turn my client’s winning ad into a postcard and upload it and the list to the printer’s website.
Thursday: Take an inbound call from a new prospective client. In the afternoon send an invoice to my new client for $7500.
Friday: Wake up to a paid invoice and an email that one of my clients from last week just got their first sales from the mailing I sent for them. Take the afternoon off.
Saturday & Sunday: Take the weekend off.
Some weeks there’s a little more to do but not much.
Every couple of months I put together 100 letters to send to prospective clients to keep my pipeline full.
But the average client project takes me 3–5 hours of actual work and pays between $7,500 and $15,000.
Setting up postcard campaigns for 3 or 4 clients can make you over 20 grand a month.