Meet Mike Arce of Loud Rumor in Scottsdale

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Arce.

Mike, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
When I was 28, I was working as a sales manager in an entirely different industry and making pretty good money. I had just married my wife, bought a new house and found out we were pregnant. She was working at a company she’s been at for several years and everything was going great.

Later that year, the economy continued to get worse and my income dropped from about $8,500/mo. to $2,500/mo. This was still ok with my wife making $2,500/mo., but the day after she shared with her boss that she was pregnant, they did “cut-backs”. She was the only one cut back.

She did get another job as she wasn’t showing yet, and everything was going great. 45 days later she shared she was pregnant, and they too did cut backs. It was a tough time for our family as we were only generating about $1,800/mo. take-home income and our bills after cutting all expenses were close to $3k, and we had a baby on the way.

We started this business, as nobody was hiring or doing well at the time. That business is Loud Rumor. My wife made an average (not exaggerating) 230 cold calls per day while 5 months pregnant. She did that for 5 weeks and set enough appointments for me to make enough sales to quit my job and join her full-time at Loud Rumor.

At first it was just a web design company. It then added services, many of which we don’t do anymore (such as web design funny enough). We evolved along the way as I hired business coaches, mentors, and began to read a lot about what it really meant to run a business.

We grew to $500k in revenue by 2013. However, in 2014 and 2015, we were still only at $500k.

At that point, we made some adjustments and niched in two ways: Who we worked with and what we offered.

In the beginning of 2016, we became an agency for fitness studios and we cut many of the services we provided and stuck with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and AdWords advertising. Everything else is pure content and education on how they can be better fitness studio owners. I’m confident in saying we’ve produced more content in the last 2.5 years than anyone has done for the industry in history.

In 2016, our company broke $1M in revenue and 2017 we did over $2.1M in revenue. This year our company plans to grow again as we focus on building a community within the industry.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The biggest challenge is that I never really ran a business like this in the past and I didn’t know how to do anything (money management, leadership, systems/processes, marketing). I really only knew how to sell, and even that is questionable when I look back at it today.

Even today, I struggle with people management and culture development, as I noticed the challenges that rise with having more and more employees and types of personalities in the office.

We almost closed our doors once and many times I asked why I do this.

Loud Rumor – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We are a fitness studio sales and advertising agency. We not only have options where we can run ads for them, but also teach them how to do it themselves. We also have a tremendous amount of content out there to help them with all the other skills needed to be a successful business owner.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Knowing what you REALLY want to do in life (and not what you think you need to do to make others impressed with you). Whether it’s traveling to certain places, spending more time with family freely, having a certain type of house, whatever. Then achieving that goal. It’s important that you really understand what YOU want. Because if you just get what you think would make others impressed with you, you’ll chase that feeling again and always be empty.

As for the company… growth. If you’re good at what you do, you will continue to grow. If not, you may have a strong salesforce that pushes you forward for a while, attrition eventually catches up and you’ll find yourself on a treadmill.

Contact Info:

• Website: LoudRumor.com
• Phone: 480-567-9794
• Email: kelsey@loudrumor.com
• Instagram: @mikearcelive
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikearcelive/
• Twitter: @mikearcelive
• Other: https://www.youtube.com/mikearcelive

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