Expert Business Roadmap The Shortest and Fastest Path to $1 Million in Revenue
Taking a business from zero to six figures and beyond is like climbing a mountain. You can t go straight to the top. You need to go step by step. And each level is progressively harder than the previous one. The higher you go, the thinner the air gets, and the more tired you are. You need new skills and strategies to keep going higher. It s the same thing in business. Each stage of business growth has its own set of problems you must solve before you can move to the next level of revenue. And if you want to reach the six- or seven-figure levels, you can follow one of two paths: You can take the long path, which can take you several years to complete. This is the path of trial-and-error, of figuring things out as you go along. You may luck out and transition from one stage of growth to another without much effort. Or more likely, you could hit a plateau and languish there, wondering why what s been working is not enough to get you to the next level. Entrepreneurs tend to think growing their business is only about developing specific skills. If you believe this, then you ll find yourself on a treadmill, running endlessly after the one thing you think you need and never getting off. Or you can take the short path. And that involves recognizing what stage of business growth you re in and making the specific high-quality decisions avoid the steep routes for that stage. This brief report describes the short path and the milestones you can expect on this route. Based on our experience working with 75 entrepreneurs in our ACES program and from Mirasee s own trajectory since 2009, the different stages of business growth are: <$25K (PRE-REVENUE) $25K $75K $90K $220K $300K $600K $750K $1.5M (There are gaps between the ranges because once you solve a problem for the current stage, you tend to move to the next level, so you don t spend long between stages.) At each stage, you need to figure out a different core challenge. The solution to the problems in the previous stage won t help you get to the next stage. That s why you can get stuck at a particular stage for a long time. 2
Stages of Business Growth Here are the key problems for each stage and what it takes to climb to the next one: Pre-Revenue: <$25K/year Where You Are Ground zero. You may have made some money, or you may still be at the idea stage. Either way, you don t have a clear picture yet of what exactly you re selling. As a result, you provide a lot of custom packages. Your offer keeps changing whenever you talk to someone. You re still figuring out what you want to do that people actually want to buy from you. What It Feels Like Everything is uncertain. Everything is up in the air. You could still turn your back on this business and get a real job. Depending on how long you ve been at this stage, you may feel either hopeful or frustrated that it s taking so long. You re very much in the experimenting to see what will work for me phase. The Problem Product-market fit. You haven t figured out what your offer is that people want to buy. That s the foundation of your business, and you haven t zeroed in on it yet. The Solution Rapid prototyping and selling. Pilot various service or product offerings. Find out what your prospects want to buy from you that you can deliver at scale. Everything else is a distraction at this stage. 3
$25K-$75K/year Where You Are You ve figured out what people want (whether it s a product or service, or both), and you ve been able to sell it. But sales often come in fits and starts. Your revenues are sporadic and unreliable. What It Feels Like Again, depending on how long you ve been at it, you re either hopeful or frustrated. You ve probably started dedicating enough time to your business that you can no longer sustain a full-time job and work on your business on the side. But revenue is both modest (after taking out business expenses, you have very little left) and either sporadic or cyclical. You constantly feel strapped for time and money, and you might be bringing in enough top-line revenue to feel that it shouldn t be this tough. The Problem Consistent marketing. You have an offer people want, but you don t have a consistent and reliable way of reaching customers and making sales. In other words, you don t have lead generation or conversion processes in place. The Solution Investing in lead generation and conversion processes. This is tough, because you re probably strapped for time and money. For the first time, you need to step up and treat your business as more than a hobby (contrary to how you might have been thinking about it so far). This means investing for where you want to be rather than for where you are. Now s the time to invest based on the return you want to see not based on the money you feel you can afford to spend. You can t get over this hump until you figure out consistent marketing that sets you up to get to the next stage 4
$90K-$220K/year and $300K-$600K/year Where You Are With a sellable offer and consistent marketing in place, you re poised to make multiple six figures in revenue. A common mistake is to think that all you need to accomplish this is to get more customers and, therefore, the solution is to double down on marketing. We ve all heard enough Groupon disaster stories to know this isn t true. On this level, you experience two different constraints. Whichever one you solve first will give you a jump on the next stage. What It Feels Like You want to invest more in your business. Yet, you may still feel like you can t afford to invest substantially. And so you may feel trapped. You may have a crisis of confidence because you thought you were delivering on your core competency, but you seem to be getting sloppy because you re having a hard time serving your customers. You feel like there aren t enough hours in the day. You want your business to grow, but your capacity is maxed out. You feel like your customers aren t as happy as they used to be and it looks to them like you re dropping the ball. On the flip side, your capacity may be bigger than the number of customers you, in fact, have. This leaves you feeling frustrated and perplexed. Why aren t you getting more out of your marketing efforts? You know your business could be so much bigger, but for whatever reason, your marketing efforts aren t bringing enough buyers for you to reach your income goals. 5
The Problems Capacity constraints. So far, you may have been doing everything on your own. Maybe you have an assistant or a VA helping a little, but your individual capacity has become a constraint on what the business can accomplish. Depending on how far the consistent marketing will go, you may reach a point where you can t fulfill all the sales until you can figure out the execution. But you re waiting to grow more before you get more good help. Maybe you ve hired people but either you haven t found the right people, or you haven t been willing to spend enough. And so, the people you ve hired haven t been great. Marketing constraints. The other possibility is that you can serve more customers, but the marketing you ve been doing consistently isn t delivering more prospects. You ve plateaued because you haven t been able to get more potential customers and convert them into buyers. Your marketing is consistent, but you haven t scaled it. When your revenue is between $100K to $1 million, growth is about moving the needle on the challenge of scaling up capacity and marketing. Whichever you figure out first will propel you to the next revenue level. The Solutions Execution systems. Setting up systems to execute on your offer will enable you to serve many more customers the volume you need to level up to $100K and more. Scalable marketing. To make sales at this level and higher, your marketing reach and conversion need to increase by at least an order of magnitude. 6
$750K-$1.5M/year Where You Are You haven t built an organization. Your business follows a hub-and-spokes model, where you are the business owner and everyone revolves around you. But that s manageable only up to a certain point. The number of people involved is more than you can keep track of or manage, and balls are starting to get dropped. What It Feels Like Hectic and exhausting. You re holding it all together with duct tape and both hands. You feel like people aren t stepping up as much as you need them to. You re probably making really good money at this point, but you might be starting to wonder if it s worth it. It feels like your business is bursting at the seams. You re pushing on both your execution system and scalable marketing in parallel, and it s simply too much. The Problem Complexity. The complexity of running your business has grown past what can be managed by a single person. You need a team and formal structures to keep your business running smoothly at the million-dollar level and beyond. The Solution Team and culture. Turn your business into an actual organization: build a team of employees and set up management structures and operational processes. All this results in the need to establish the culture in your organization. 7
Your Next Step Those, in broad strokes, are what you can expect on your journey from having a startup to a multi-million dollar business. I can only explain so much about the process in this short report. If you re interested in diving deeper into this topic, I invite you to join me at LIFT (lift.live/2018). I will go into more detail about each level, the main challenge in each, and the solutions that will propel you to the next stage. As always, if you have any questions about this material, reach out to me at support@mirasee.com Danny Iny Founder & CEO Mirasee 8