Arena Case Study: Lessons From a 77% Revenue Nosedive

Three years ago I was invited to lunch in a small cafe in Mexico City with a bunch of entrepreneurs. There were probably about a dozen of us there and one guy stood out to me.

He was one of those people who you can't help but instantaneously like. A gem of a person who's as genuine as they come.

Fast forward to this past summer his company took a 77% nose dive in revenue... So he decided to reach out about our Arena Mindset Accelerator.

And while I usually share more tangible wins like people 4Xing their business or exiting, the post Julio wrote about his process and internal growth is so powerful, raw and full of lessons that I couldn't help but share it with you guys.

Enjoy:

The past ~6 years have been a wild ride.

In 2018, my business partner Bruno and I started selling courses to help people land jobs at consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG.

From 2018 to 2022, we grew our revenue from $100K to mid six figures, without a team, without ads, and with only a handful of YouTube videos and new courses.

With all the tax breaks we got in Brazil from being an exporter of intellectual services, most of our revenues went straight into profits.?

So suddenly I was making what looked, to me, like a lot of money.

I hate to admit, it went to my head. I started to feel like a business god.

I felt entitled to give advice to anyone, toyed with the idea of starting more companies, and even invested in a startup.

To be fair, it wasn’t all bad—even though the investment flopped, I made friends in the DC community that I might have otherwise missed out on.

But it came at a cost: my work ethic went down the drain.

The problem wasn’t about clocking in the hours...

• I dodged some needed hard conversations with my business partner, and our relationship took a beating because of it.
• We never created a system to hold ourselves accountable, so projects, deadlines, and commitments ran circles around us.
• I didn’t sharpen the instinct to nip unprofitable projects at the bud, so we bled time and effort every week.
• We played it safe when we should have been bold. (Our competitors didn't make this mistake, and this would come back to bite us in the ass later.)

And at that time, deep down I knew something was wrong.?

I had started looking to start new businesses. I even took a programming course.?

Don't get me wrong, it's cool to start a new business. But in hindsight, I was actually just trying to run away from my current way of working because I knew something was broken.

And I thought I had to escape this business to fix things. But the truth is, this poor work ethic would follow me around if I didn't solve it from within.

Anyway…

Around the end of 2022, the nosedive started. Slowly, then suddenly.

We went from $30K months, to $15K months, to $7K months. Ouch.

As Warren Buffet (might have) said, “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who's been swimming naked.”

At first I ignored it, convinced I was on the right path. Ignore the noise, stay focused, they say. (But that only works if you have the right focus.)

When I couldn't ignore it anymore, I started blaming everything and everyone (and anything and anyone).

• The market was tanking (consulting firms were hiring less, so candidates were preparing less, so they were buying less courses)
• Our competitors were eating us alive (selling their courses dirt cheap to universities - so students would get them for free and not have to buy from us)
• Friends and family kept wanting to hang out
• Travel kept "coming up"

And the thing is, all of it was true...

The market did tank, the competitors did pounce, and (thankfully), friends and family did want my time.

At that moment, I was hitting rock bottom.

I was even seriously considering canceling my trip to DCBKK this year.

I told myself it was because of money, But the truth is, deep down, I was embarrassed to share my past 12 months' trajectory with the friends I meet there every year.

It was at that moment that I got a HARD shakedown from my girlfriend.?

She had been watching the decline, and had some tough love to give.

I'll spare you the details, and get right to the conclusions:

The truth is, there's always something going on. The market is always changing, friends will be friends, rent is due, maintenance for stuff is due...

But what I was really doing was removing myself from this equation. Where was my agency?

What would I DO to sell while the market changed? To counter the competitors' moves, or to be ahead of them? To say "no" to hangouts when I should work?

Where was I in all this? What will I do?

Suddenly, the fog started to clear up, and I started to see… I decided things had to change, and I had to be in control.?

(But things would still get a lot harder before they started getting better…)

My first actions were...

• Running a diagnostics of what was happening to my business (my business partner did the same thing, and we got to opposite answers, so we agreed to work on both fronts)
• Joining a mindset coaching program called The Arena, with fellow DCer Itamar Marani (which made all the difference, by the way)

As I began working on the new challenge, I realized there were deeper, more personal obstacles.

For example, the hard part about selling to universities was actually not selling to universities (getting their emails, doing the right pitch, setting the right price, etc).

The hard part was actually overcoming the fears and insecurities that kept me from taking that route for so long.

How do I explain this? So, this B2B-sales path has a lot of uncertainty to me. A lot of things I don't know.

And each time I tried to move towards that uncertainty, I'd stop myself.

While exploring those difficult moments later in The Arena discussions, I discovered that deep down, there was a part of me—a sort of inner child—that had been subtly sabotaging my efforts every day.

And that had been sabotaging me for years.

_______________________

In that exploration, I had to go deep inside my past and my emotions. And what I found changed everything.

I found an inner child that had grown used to getting perfect scores in school, and praises in everything he did.

But as a result, he became terrified of anything that didn’t guarantee an A+ result.

And every time I had the chance to do anything that wouldn't guarantee me a 100% score and immediate praise, I ran away from it.

Whenever an opportunity had any inherent instability, newness or uncertainty around it, that emotional part of me would find a way to justify avoiding it.?

Looking back, I can see dozens of instances.

But the truth is, in real life, outside of school, getting Cs or even Ds in uncertain situations may make you millions, while getting As in certain situations will get you just slightly above average pay.

Think starting a scrappy business in AI with 100s of bugs, vs working your ass off as a waiter or a bartender.

Non-linear returns live necessarily in areas with high uncertainty.

Well, this was also true in my business. For example, why wasn't I selling to universities yet??

I'd had a ton of chances to do this in the past. Top MBAs kept reaching out to me to buy our courses. But I feared making mistakes (charging $20 when I could charge $40, or asking for $35 and scaring them off when they only had $25...), and turned them down, or just ignored the emails.

I realized that if I wanted to take control of my work and my life, I had to start reasoning with this inner child daily.?

That it was a battle I had to learn how to win if I wanted better results.

I had to tell him that it was okay to take risks, to fail, and to learn from those failures.?

And after doing that, I felt free to go do the things that scared me the most...

• Setting a price while having no idea how much the client might be willing to pay.?
• Making a sales deck that will look laughable even a couple of weeks from now.
• Blanking out in the middle of a sales call, not knowing what to say next.

I suddenly felt free - like I could do almost anything.

_______________________

But that wasn't the only internal challenge I faced. As I dug deeper, I found another self-sabotaging habit — one rooted in overconfidence.

I would log into important calls without preparation, skip taking notes during/after critical conversations, and generally rely on my wits to get me through any situation.?

On the surface, this seemed like me being confident, but in reality, it was a defense mechanism.

By not preparing, I could always fall back on the excuse that if I failed, it wasn’t because I wasn’t good enough. It was because I hadn’t really tried.?

It was just a trick to hold the illusion of being a super capable genius, without ever really testing me.

But of course, this was actually holding me back, day after day.?

It’s another example of the internal battle of wanting to feel good about ourselves?vs. good about the results we achieve.?

And I could only have meaningful success if I confronted this arrogance, and recognized it for the fear of failure it truly was.

Once I did that, I could actually start taking shit seriously. Without the safety net of self-sabotage.

_______________________

And so, I started to do things differently...

• Competitors were selling to universities? I went on to create a B2B front for the business, selling to universities just like them
• Money was short? Started doing coaching again to make a buck

Now, things are starting to pick up…

It's actually not a 100% turnaround. Concretely, uncertainty still lingers:

• The average ticket on B2B is still ~20% of what I estimated
• Consulting firms are far from the hiring ideal
• We launched a new B2C course, and the launch went well (kudos to Bruno, the greatest copywriter in the Case Prep space)

But the important thing is, now I wake up every day feeling like I'm the one steering the boat.?

Not because the external problems have disappeared or because I beat them entirely. It's because I took control of how I respond to them. Now, I’m able to constantly win this internal battle

Honestly, this business could roll downhill and burn to ashes. Having learned these lessons, I feel like I can handle it, and pick myself up afterwards.

I'm sharing them here because they might be what you need to learn as well.

1. Never allow yourself to lose agency.

No matter how chaotic the world around you gets, as long as you keep control of your actions and decisions, you’ll be able to navigate through it. It’s not about always winning; it’s about staying in the fight and continuously moving forward.

The world around me will do whatever it wants, it'll throw me around. Competitors will try to take my business, customers want more value for less dough, people I care about want my time, attention, money...

That's how it will always be.

If they're doing that, it's not their fault. But it is up to me to move and get what I want.

It's even OK to be losing, as long as I'm keeping my head up, doing my best, coming up with a strategy, and choosing to fight.

1. Getting terrible scores in the right challenges is 100X more valuable than getting perfect scores in the wrong challenges

Life isn't school. And this kid from within needs to learn that "not trying when you don't know you'll get 100%" is actually a FAILING strategy now.?

It worked in the past, sure. But today, choosing the right challenge and doing your best, even if you get a terrible "grade", is the best strategy.?

Even if you shouldn't be chasing praise, this is how you get success (and paradoxically enough, also praise).

1. You've gotta take shit seriously

Success isn’t just about being smart—it’s about consistently showing up prepared, doing the work, and holding yourself accountable. If you don’t take the important things seriously, no amount of intelligence will make up for it.?

So…

• Prepare for every meeting.?
• Take diligent notes.?
• Do your research and know your data.?
• Hold yourself accountable, and hold others to the same standard.?

_______________________

So, why am I writing all of this?

I hope that my rough ride can be a lesson and make someone else's road less bumpy.

If I had read all of this back in 2022, while riding my highs, I don't think I'd have given it much thought. But by the middle of the descent, maybe even the beginning, it might have saved me quite some sleepless nights and new white hairs.

My own lessons above might be a bit too specific to myself to be useful to someone else, so I tried to carve out messages that might be useful to someone else who might need them.

They ended up sounding super tacky, and could easily be on the cover of an airport bookstore business book. But I think they're still useful and meaningful. Here you go:

(1) Your Inner Child Can Be a Little Shit: That part of me that needs constant praise and perfect scores? Turns out it was sabotaging my adult self at every turn.?

Recognizing and dealing with your psychological baggage isn't just therapist talk – it's critical for business success. Everyone's gotta deal with those inner brats at some point, you included.?

(I thought shrooms were the way to go for this, but apparently what worked for me was a former special forces business coach. Go figure…)

(2) Agency Isn't Given, It's Taken: Nobody's going to hand you control of your situation. You have to seize it, even when everything's going to hell. It's not about "responding to challenges" – it's about grabbing the wheel when the car's on fire.

To anyone riding on a success high right now: Stay hungry & Stay humble.?

And to those hitting rock bottom: There's no shame in being there, but there's no glory in staying there either.

The revenue nosedive sucked. It still sucks. But I enjoy the clarity this fall has brought me.?

Because now, whatever comes next, I'm ready for it – bullshit-free.

So what's next for Julio? Winning. He's conquered that part of himself that was holding him back and he's already well on his way.

And if you resonate with what he wrote and want my personal help to uncover and remove obstacles (that perhaps you're also not fully aware of) that are keeping you stuck and not achieving what you know you're capable of, apply here and we'll take it from there!

Who dares wins,

Itamar