Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Lathery.
Hi Alex, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My story is a wild one. I never set out to be a business owner, yet over the last 2 years and some change, I’ve been able to:
- Completely pay off all of my and my wife’s student debt.
- Allow my dad to retire early from the police department after 25 years of service to come to work with me full-time.
- Allow my wife to be a stay-at-home mom to our new addition to the family (10 weeks old as of writing!).
- Hire my brother as our bookkeeper to help him earn some extra cash on the side as he works a full-time job and is studying to be a pastor.
- Build a small but mighty network of friends and followers on X who are pursuing or are seasoned entrepreneurs (5,000+).
- Build over 200 websites in nearly every local business industry you can think of.
- Become a Webflow Professional Partner (my website building tool of choice).
That list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s what I’m most proud of. All of that started with a single realization – everything I’ve ever worked for in my corporate aspirations can be wiped away in a single moment, and I have no control over that. I had this epiphany as I was in the middle of my final internship, working for my dream company and trying to land my dream job. The pool of eligible full-time hires was top-notch, and I was told I had to demonstrate I deserved the spot.
No problem. But there was a problem. Precisely, one person who hadn’t been exposed to my work was casting doubt and wanted to see me demonstrate “technical rigor. “Could this one guy ruin everything I’ve worked for? Could his vote be the deciding factor on whether I would get the job of my dreams? It lit me up. Everyone else had complete confidence in my skills and wanted to hire me, but the process is the process. I was determined to get the job but also to make sure I was never left with only one option again.
How? By taking a small hobby of programming and turning it into a business. I had spent the last 3 months before this learning web development – HTML, CSS, and JS through free online courses. I took that knowledge, pivoted to a website-building platform (Webflow), and decided to go freelance. Fast forward 6 months, many free projects, and a total revenue generated of $600 (just enough to cover the costs of startup costs of the business), I took a small bet on myself. I paid for the Pro plan of Webflow, which was ~$500 at the time.
My logic? “If I can’t make $500 over the next 365 days, I must be seriously unlucky or just plain bad at what I do. “So I leaped. The following month, I landed the most significant client I’d ever landed after an interaction on Twitter. Those guys are still great friends to this day, and we still collaborate. After landing that project, I decided to take another bet on myself, this one more aggressive. I hired a business coach for $2,000. He helped me take what I was doing as a freelancer and morph it into a proper agency-like business. I didn’t have a team, but he helped me learn sales, develop SOPs and a solid offer, and teach me how to market myself better on social media.
The results? In just 1 month of working with him, and about 1 month after landing the client mentioned before, my business exploded. I made ~4X what my W2 full-time income would have been for that month. And as you can imagine, I had no idea what to think about the whole thing. The entire situation was like a blur to me. Watching numbers go up so high on a screen that if you had asked me if it was possible just one month prior, I would have laughed at you. I never set out to build a business like that. I only wanted to generate up to as much as my W2 income as a safety net to give me options. But it was a big blessing, spawning the many achievements and privileges I mentioned above. Today, the dream continues. I want to continue to provide my family with the lifestyle we always hoped for. I want to continue to build the best websites in “boring” industries. I want to continue to learn. I have a lot planned for Blue Collar Builds and myself as an entrepreneur, and although it’s not always fun, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. You can say I’m hooked.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The biggest struggles are all internal. The nature of marketing yourself on social media is interacting with the best of the best. Entrepreneurs doing 10X, 100X, 1,000X what you’re doing. All of that can create a lot of discouragement, pressure, and expectations you set for yourself. My biggest challenge has been to ignore those feelings as much as possible. If you don’t, it can creep into every aspect of your day-to-day life and cast a grey cloud over things. I remind myself that people online usually put up an image that’s not entirely accurate and that most of the people you see have been in the game longer than you. Outside of that, transitioning from purely a freelancer to more of an agency was tough. Managing quality when you’re not doing all the work anymore, realizing that you need to charge more for projects when you’ve got someone to pay every month, learning to delegate and lead others. These are just a few of the struggles I’m learning daily.
Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Blue Collar Builds started as my freelancer brand and has morphed into a complete web design, web development, and local SEO agency. We specialize in helping local service-based businesses generate and convert leads. We build toby websites and implement funnels to transform and dominate the local search results and SEO. Mostly, we are known for designing and building modern websites in industries where most of the competition could be more exciting, unoptimized, and just plain wrong. I always envisioned bringing startup-quality designs and modern tech/software integrations into industries 10-20 years behind the tech world. That, in a nutshell, is what sets us apart. In a world of “full-service” digital marketing agencies that dominate the local business market, we look to help our clients generate and convert leads better than those agencies can and have a website and brand they are proud of. We also exclusively focus on helping out businesses in the local service-based industries. Think plumbing, electricians, HVAC, cleaning companies, and more. When people think about Blue Collar Builds, I want them to think of the possibility of building something that stands out in an industry with many disruption opportunities.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from growing up.
My favorite childhood memory isn’t just one memory, but all of the time we would spend at my grandparent’s house. We have a tight-knit family, and my grandparents have a great place. We would go over nearly every Sunday for a big family dinner, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. I remember swimming in their pool, playing basketball in the driveway, football in the yard. Most of my best memories come from this place, and I feel so lucky to have had a family that still gets together the old-fashioned way.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bluecollarbuilds.tech/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alathery/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alex.lat.77/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-lathery-66651923b/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexLathery
