How Terry Rice built a six figure business by teaching
Sometimes being fired is a blessing in disguise.
For Terry Rice, getting fired from Facebook was one of the best things that happened to him.
Within 18 months of being fired from Facebook, Terry Rice developed a consistent six-figure business as a teacher.
Today, Terry has become prolific creator by being a contributor for Entrepreneur, an Expert-in-Residence at SPI Media, and is a Managing Director at Good People Digital.
Let’s dive into Terry’s story and the tactics for how Terry built a six figure business within 18 months.
The story of Terry Rice
The start of Terry’s consulting business
Terry started his career by working for larger brands like Adobe and Facebook. He started by being a search engine marketing consultant for Adobe and right before he started his business, he was working at Facebook and helping companies run successful ads.
When Terry was at Facebook in 2015, Facebook (now Meta) ads were still pretty new in the grand scheme of it all. It 2015, Meta ads represented just over $17 billion in revenue. In 2013, Meta ads revenue was over $131 billion in revenue. Terry got to see the start of the hockey stick growth curve for Meta that so many strive for in their startups.
As Terry has mentioned in a previous interview (this amazing documentary on Terry’s journey), he was in those roles for the wrong reasons. He was in those roles for his own ego. They were the cool brands to work for and at the time, who didn’t want to say they worked at Facebook? That was the cool thing to say.
In the middle of 2015, Terry was laid off from Facebook.
Instead of finding another corporate job with a big fancy logo, Terry decided to go down a different path: consulting.
He had the background to help companies with Facebook ads, so why not try to sell services for running Facebook ad campaigns?
The first 6 months or so don’t seem to have gone too well for his new consulting business. Initially, Terry joined the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and cold emailed 400 members from it to sell his services. Out of those 400 emails, only 1 became a client of his.
To help supplement his income from his consulting business, in December of 2015, Terry became a digital marketing instructor at General Assembly where he taught a 1 week course all about digital marketing. It covered topics like paid search, facebook ads, and analytics.
Terry was being paid to teach, but ended up gaining a lot of clients along the way as he built many more relationships with people in those classes who became clients eventually.
Within 18 months of starting his consulting business, Terry had a sustainable six-figure business.
Terry shifts from consultant to creator
In 2017, Terry is doing well in pretty much every aspect of life. His consulting business is doing well and he and his wife were expecting a baby boy, TJ. Terry’s business was doing well enough that he was planning on taking paternity leave for an entire month.
In May of 2017, TJ was born, but without a heartbeat. TJ passed away before Terry and his wife could really meet him.
That changed Terry’s perspective on life in a lot of ways, but one of the main changes is that it resulted in Terry pivoting from a consultant to a creator.
As a consultant, Terry was selling his time for money. As a creator, you might be selling services, but it’s usually not purely time for money. You can sell courses, books, and other products to make money. As Terry puts it, when you’re going through some things, you don’t have to be live as a creator. You can make a video or publish a newsletter and you can help people asynchronously.
Terry thought it was easy enough to shift from consultant to creator since he had a good consulting business going, was teaching at General Assembly, and he even worked at Facebook. Just publishing a course on how to run successful ads on Facebook should go great just based on all of that in theory.
That theory was wrong.
Terry’s Facebook ads course went nowhere. The shift to being a creator was a rough start.
In 2018, Terry has a breakthrough moment as a creator.
He was taking his daughter to a gym class in Brooklyn and runs into Jason Feifer, the Editor in Chief, at Entrepreneur magazine.
Terry just said “hey, I like your podcast” to Jason and that turned into all sorts of opportunities for Terry.
He did a few free favors, but then ended up as a contributor to Entrepreneur as a writer. That led to Terry writing over 60 articles for Entrepreneur, publishing a book with them, and even hosting a podcast for Entrepreneur.
In 2019, Terry is still teaching at General Assembly and is writing consistently for Entrepreneur. That led to General Assembly asking him to represent them as a speaker at SXSW.
That ended up leading Terry to many more paid speaking gigs and Terry’s career as a creator and a speaker was off to the races.
Fast Forward to Terry’s business in 2024
Today, Terry’s business is multifaceted and is still running on the foundations he built from 2015 to 2019. He’s creating content for other brands such as Entrepreneur and LinkedIn, teaching at General Assembly and SPI Media, and is a Managing Director at Good People Digital.
Terry still sells his time for services, but caps it as a maximum and at a much higher rate than he used to in 2015. At this point in Terry’s business, his ROI on selling products and other content to brands is much higher than him selling his time.
Terry Rice’s acquisition channels to $250k in annual recurring revenue
1. Teaching
Terry shifted to teaching quickly in his business after 400 cold emails. He used teaching in a few different ways.
First, he used teaching to just pay the bills. General Assembly would pay him for teaching the courses there and this helped him get to a six-figure income relatively quickly. If you look at what Terry is up to today, he’s scaled this up in multiple ways and his content is primarily educational. There’s some entertainment or motivational value in his content, but it’s primarily for educational purposes.
Second, he used teaching as a way of gaining clients. By teaching, he would demonstrate that he’s an expert in digital marketing and would build trust with those in his courses pretty easily.
Given the people that sign up for General Assembly courses, they’re people that typically work for corporations who have larger budgets than the individuals in his courses.
As Terry learned, those individuals work on teams who could use Terry’s expertise more broadly. When chatting with Terry, he mentioned that someone from NBC was in his class and that turned into him eventually teaching an entire team at NBC about Facebook Ads.
With this, Terry is essentially taking similar content in his classes and using it with a different target audience where he charge a lot more.
Third, the more Terry teaches, the more he’s viewed as an expert in his field. Teaching is one of the best ways to learn something and the more you teach, the more people are going to see that person as an expert.
Terry taught over 100 courses in this foundational period and he would pretty much teach anywhere. He would teach at General Assembly, NYU, libraries, co-working spaces, or any local event in NYC.
In a lot ways, Terry has built a flywheel where the more he teaches, the more expertise he has or is perceived to have, the more trust people have in him grows, the more potential clients he meets increases, and as a result, he can increase revenue by teaching more or by increasing his prices for teaching.
2. Small favors for others
When Terry met Jason Feifer, he did tell Jason that he had a great podcast, but the way he really broke into Entrepreneur was by doing some free small favors for Entrepreneur.
This doesn’t mean Terry was completing hours and hours of work for Entrepreneur or others for free.
Terry mentioned it could be as simple as “hey, this is spelled wrong on your website” or engaging with someone on LinkedIn in their comments.
These thoughtful tasks are WAY better than just asking a potential customer or client “How can I be helpful to you?”. A lot of times, people don’t necessarily know what you can do for them, especially when you’re just getting to know someone.
By doing these small favors for potential customers, Terry was able to build relationships and trust first and then get a sale.
As Terry gained more trust in these relationships, he would find ways where he could increase the revenue he had with these clients. That might be by selling more content they can use or being on a retainer with them instead of just one off contracts.
3. Paid content for other audiences
This acquisition channel might feel similar to teaching but I view it as two different channels.
Terry was getting paid for delivering keynotes and he would get more clients by meeting people in the audiences of those keynotes. That’s effectively the flywheel mentioned above in teaching.
However, Terry didn’t just get in front of other audiences by teaching and keynotes only.
He would write articles, record podcast episodes, or even develop courses for conferences and other companies.
Terry mentioned that he would be paid for a keynote, but also would get paid an additional amount if he wrote an article for the same customer.
If you think about it, Terry was essentially being paid to guest post on someone else’s blog in some cases. If you’ve read the deep dive on Nathan Barry, Nathan was doing that work for free. Nathan just wanted to get in front of another audience and help his SEO.
In this case, Terry is giving a keynote which is the primary action here, but because Terry was already being paid for his services, it was an easy upsell to include in his speaking fees. It helps his revenue per customer but also increases his chances of being seen in that client’s audience.
What I find interesting in all of Terry’s acquisition strategies is that most of the time, he’s being paid to acquire customers rather than the typical method of him paying for acquiring customers. In other words, he turned a cost center into a profit center.
Another way to think about it: instead of running Facebook Ads for his own business, he taught others how to run them and was paid in multiple ways for that teaching.