203. How To Go From $0 to A Multi-Million Dollar Business

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift alongside Ms. Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collectiveship. We're here to bring you world class crypto research strategies and insights to help you crush this crypto bull market. Plus get an exclusive behind the scenes look as we scale Australia's leading crypto research company. If you are listening to this on your phone, would really, really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend. As we're going through this, if anything resonates, we'd love for you to share around how we grow the podcast. And today we're talking about starting your own business. How to start, what are some sort of key lessons, tips, insights that Bergs and I have to help you on your journey in creating whatever venture side hustle, online business, personal brand, whatever. You know, we've got a fair bit of experience in this now and I actually coach what's called the accelerator program in the entrepreneurs organization that I'm a part of. So essentially businesses from I think quarter of a million revenue up to a million in revenue and I coach them every month. I've got a group of eight people I catch up with every month. It's volunteer role and I just share my experiences, kind of like a mentor, I guess, you know, to try and help me get to the next stage. And by, by no means am I an expert. I always say I know a little bit about a lot. I've got a few war stories and learning through experiences is the best way to learn in my opinion. Someone can tell you what to do, but how do they know what accreditation they have? Have they ever done it before? Learning through experiences and experience shares is some of the most powerful ways to learn in my opinion. So we're going to give you some insights today on, you know, just some lessons and tips. If you want to grow your own.

Thing, this is definitely the one to listen to. And Ben, when I heard you were coaching an accountability group and mentoring them, I was like, oh mate, they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Jesus Christ. But then he told me it was in the 250 to a million range. And you are perfect for that because you've been through it, you've been a member of ao, you've had all of their and we are now a lot more than that. And that is the perfect area where I think you really excelled and learned all of those painful lessons around. You made every mistake in the book as every business Owner does and AO was there to help you and learn from those experiences. And mate, maybe just take us through. First of all, what is that EO accountability group experience look like? Like how many people are there, kind of what sort of businesses? And then maybe we can talk about some of the challenges they have.

Yeah, so the, the businesses are all sorts. There's a app developer, there's a golf cart seat cover maker, there's a agency, creative agency, there's an accountant.

Tennis coach, you know, all sorts of different stuff.

And at that size, from 250k to 1 million, it's either just you, you and another person or you and a few contractors.

Yeah, pretty much. And I think that's where I really cut my teeth in business was like when you're on your own figuring it out, going, how do I make money? You know, I spent a lot of time there, you know, I arguably probably better at that 0 to 1 than, than 1 to n. I agree because that's, that's, you really need that entrepreneurial figure out sort of, you know, mentality and I'm pretty good at that. But also it is a very, very shit difficult period of business. It's fucking sucks because you're not making money, nothing's working, you want to give up all the time and you're like, why the am I doing this?

You have to build something that people want. You have to figure out a market opportunity, you have to learn marketing, you have to sell, you then have to scale your time because it's just you working in the business. Plus you have to administer all of the business, finding the right people to work in it, but also the right advisors too. So man, what are some of the challenges that these people are having? And you can cast your mind back and reflect on collective shift as well.

I think like when you're first starting out, you're not necessarily making enough revenue to afford to do it full time. So I think a lot of people are still working a full time job while trying to balance their, their business. And like when do you make the leap because you want to kind of keep the business as, as, as healthy as possible. Like you don't want to be extracting too much money out of the business, you know, too early, otherwise you're never going to get anywhere, you're never going to be able to invest enough. So I think like trying to, you know, keep a job or keep an income so you're not putting too much pressure on yourself is important. But then also you still got to find the time to do to do the business. So trying to balance that is super important.

And then also trying to figure out what your superpower is. So one of the things I always give my experience share on to our. To our people in our group that I coach is that, you know, you want to be across. You want to know the basics of everything. Some of the mistakes I've made in the past is not knowing anything about something and hiring someone to do the job. And if you as the founder, don't know what good looks like, well, then you have no way of figuring out whether or not they're doing a good job. Marketing, number one. And sales that I made a mistake in the past, didn't know how to sell the product, didn't know what it should look like, how to brand it, hired someone to do that disaster shit show. As a founder, you are the one that needs to figure out how to sell it, who to sell it to, and for what price, and then you can outsource, but you have to do the work first.

Yeah. So.

We just. At the time that I've been at Collective Shift, we've had marketing people, we've had tons of agencies, we've had contractors. Do you remember that stupid marketing guy that was on a walking treadmill and he was just useless promises, the world did nothing. And then we're just like, mate, you're fired. He's like, yeah, whatever. Just keeps walking on the treadmill and talking like he's got. He had no idea. And a lot of these marketing agencies are quite terrible. So just to flesh out what Ben said there, you need to. As a founder, you need to be able to know how to sell your product, who to sell it to. Yeah. You can get some contractors to kind of, you know, help you out and do some grunt work, but you need to get it to the stage where it's an F1 car. And then you need to hand that off and teach the process and the system to other people and get them to run it. But if you can't sell your own product and market it and get reliable sales, someone else ain't going to figure that out for you.

Yeah, yeah, Bang on. And because you, the founder, know the product, the problem you're trying to solve, and who to solve it. Talk like two. It wasn't until I really was able to get on the sales calls, figure out the product, figure out the problems that our customers had, and then be able to sell it. And then you can sort of offset that. So that's one area. Facebook ads, for example, is Another one. Like a lot of e commerce companies, a lot of online businesses require an ads. If you don't know, if you're not a technical person, if you don't know how to do ads, that's okay. But you need to know some of the metrics before hiring in a contractor to do it. What are your, you know, your CPRs, your CPMs, you know, you click through rates, conversion rates, LTV, lifetime value. Like, you need to know these metrics so you can then assess someone's ability to do a job in that role. And if you don't know, well, then they're going to take you for a ride. And so many, so many business owners, including myself, went through the agency, get fucked by them. You hire a contractor, they don't know what they're doing. They're just charging you a retainer. They're not even looking at what they're doing. And you jump in there and you're like, I don't know what I'm doing. And that's okay. You don't necessarily need to know how to execute the ads or create the thing, but you need to know enough to figure out if they're doing a good enough job or not.

Yeah, and you can learn as you go. And don't get locked into retainers, especially when you're early stage. If someone comes to you and they're like, oh, we'll just have an ad budget, we'll run some ads, we'll do this, we'll see what happens. If they're not giving you defined metrics of, we're doing a $5,000 test. This is where we're running it. These are our metrics. This is the data we're collecting, this is how we're collecting it, and this is the experiment we think will work. Whether the experiment works or not is neither here nor there. But you need to run something that you think has the highest chance of success and then measure against it. And it's about doing really quick tests with small amounts of money in order to get a result. If things start working, you start to feed it and go from there. None of this, or you give us 10 or 20 or 30 grand a month. We kind of do a few things for you here and there, and we'll see the result at the end. Absolute nonsense. You want to move fast. You want it to be really defined, have a hypothesis, go run the experiment and then get the metrics and the result.

Yeah, yeah, bang on. And then you want to be focusing your time on what your superpower Is. And this is the. This is the thing I always say to my accelerator group is like, bro, why, why are you spending eight hours a week trying to figure out Facebook ads or like, trying to figure out how to reconcile zero, like outsource that. I know you don't have a lot of money, but you're going to make a lot more return by focusing on your superpower. So for me, my business is creating content. The more content I can create, I go into an Instagram reel that gets 100,000 views. That's going to make us a lot more money than me trying to figure out how to reconcile transactions or getting an operations lane where I'm going to break something. Where Bergs lives. Right. I focus on the things that only I can do in the business, you.

Know, and don't come to my house.

So figure out what your superpower is. What is the thing that you can do that no one else can in your business and do as much as you can on that.

So business owners fall into the trap of they have to do everything. But really what you have to do is know yourself and what is your highest utility in the business. And as uncomfortable as it may feel, those other things need to be given to other people or outsourced or. Or just not done. It's okay. Things can be on fire for a little while and you can get to them next month. You don't have to do everything absolutely on time. Work out whether it's smoke or a control burn or a bushfire. If it's a bushfire, it'll probably need your attention. But work out what your highest utility is at the business. And generally that'll be defining strategic direction in your business, talking about your company awareness, brand building and selling, and also like, you know, building your product, whatever that may be, depending on the business that you have. Focus on those areas and then you can start to worry about cash flow. Worry about, you know, execution.

Yeah.

Worry about people coming into your business.

Yeah. And in the early stage, I would say in my experience, selling and sales is the most important skill you can have. I didn't have this skill when I first started and still don't. And we'll.

Just give you a shit. You have built that up over a series of years, mate. And you are very good salesman. I've got to say that.

Need it. Right. And I didn't have that when I first started. And when you have a cash problem and you don't have money coming in, how do you get money coming in? You have to sell your and if you don't know how to sell your, you're not going to make money. At the end of the day, nothing matters. No one gives a about your logo, your website, your bullshit Instagram that no one's looking at. Can you sell your product? That is the most important thing because if you can't sell, you're not gonna have any money. You need cash in the door. And I read a book, I can't remember what it's called. It's a great book.

Anyway, I'll try and try to remember it. But it was all about like cash is king. Selling is the most important part of any business, especially when you're starting up. So I would urge you to get on sales calls, learn how to do it, talk to people. I had a huge leg up because we raised money and I had no idea what I was doing when I first started. But when you raise money, you're selling, you know, hundreds of thousands or you know, a million dollar investment. You need to know how to sell and, and, and that's what really helped throughout what we have now we have a sales team and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, hugely important.

Yeah, you're right, Ben. You need to know where your well is before you get thirsty. And you need to put yourself continually in uncomfortable situations. If you've got a to do list, do the one that sucks the most because that's probably the one you need to do and you've been avoiding. Yeah, and not being a salesperson and then doing sales, it feels a bit, you know, foreign, a bit gross. It's very difficult. But it is a skill that you can learn and you will master over time. Like all of these things are learnable, they're teachable. You can go to that website like Ben does, Clarity FM and a few other ones where you can pay money to get a world class coach to coach you on your individual problems. And then you can go out and practice it that week and come back the next week and get some more feedback.

It's a great, a great segue into the next part is getting a mentor or an advisor. Like I had no idea what I was doing, still don't really know what I'm doing. Like, you know, growing a business, you need to get smart people in that you can consult, learn from that, have done the thing, you know, and I think that's why I do what I do now with the accelerator group, because I've done a lot of what they're trying to do so I can share my experiences, try and Find somebody, some person online, whoever, a coach, mentor, advisor. I've had like six or seven at once on different things, whether it be, you know, marketing, fundraising, sales, performance coach, CEO, coach, you know, like, learn from as many people as you can. Take all of that and then implement it with your business. And you're going to get so much faster and further, faster results and trying to figure it out on your own. Like, don't reinvent the wheel.

Business is a very hard and lonely journey. The ups and downs, there's huge swings, they happen very rapidly. One day you'd be on top of the world, next day you're like, oh shit, someone left. Or we lost this contract. And you need to work on your resilience, but you need to work on yourself as well. And Ben, you said that you continually want to grow because you don't want the business to outpace you.

Yeah. And that's, that's been a big thing from the start. Listening to podcasts, I join eo, I go to learning days, I go on annual trips to personal development. I cut, you know, my monthly group that I catch up with, reading books, watching YouTube videos. Like, I'm constantly just consuming as much content as I can to. Like you said, Berg, like I've always said, I need to be three steps ahead of the growth of this company. Otherwise, if the. Otherwise we won't grow.

You even did a finance course. And like we said before, finance is not your area of expertise and it's not an area you're going to spend oodles of time. You got people for that, but you need to have at least a level of knowledge to be able to interact with the reports and everything that you get to inform the strategic decisions that you make across the company.

Yeah, and I, and I hated it, but I really am glad I did it because now I can ask the right questions. I can have more sophisticated conversations with Bergs or our CFO to ask the right questions and make sure we're heading in the right direction. So, you know, you don't need to know everything, but you should. You should know the basics of most of things.

And at the end of the day, it's not about the business, it's about you. It's about the lifestyle you want to, how you want to grow as a person, the things that you want to implement, how you want to live your life, the skills you want to have, the values that you have and drive through your business and affect the community and the world. It's about you. It's not about the Nuts and bolts of the business. And the more that you can understand yourself, the more you have your North Star and be able to live your life through your business.

Absolutely bang on. And that's, that's probably the last thing I wanted to add here is like something I say all the time. I find a lot of my accelerators getting the crossroads. Are they not sure what to do next? Should they grow? Should they hire, you know what to do next? Should they, you know, are they too operational? What should they do? Business, in my opinion is a vehicle to help you create the life that you want. So you need to figure out the life that you want so you can figure out what vehicle you need to get there. You know, back to the goal setting. Where do you want to be in a year's time? That fantasy story that Bergson I talk about where and what does your life look like? And then you can create the vehicle to go and achieve that.

Yeah. Have a vision board of what you want your life to be. Because you're starting a business. It's not an easy thing. You've taken on a lot of risk. You're probably going to be not have money for a while. And only 4% of businesses make it to a million dollars. And then only 4% of that 4% make it to $10 million. So you know, you're on a hard path. A lot of businesses do fail. They fail to grow. And really think about why you're doing this and the life that you want because really what you're doing is you're taking, you're putting your time and effort up front, putting in a lot more time and effort than someone would just working a nine to five. And the bet is that in four to five years you will have a fully functioning business that will cash flow, that will set you up for the rest of your life. That is the bet that you're taking. And just remember that it does take at least 5 years minimum to build a decent business. Even 5 years is quite quick.

And the first 3 years fucking suck. They suck. Like it is hard, stressful. Especially if you put money into the business like you know, or you're the sole founder or like, you know, you have a lot of financial risk. It is stressful as fuck. And like, you know, and I was, I was single, you know, you know, while building the business. If you got a mortgage and kids fuck, that's only like going to be multiplied.

Oh, bro. Let's talk about.

The last three or four years, since 2020 of collective shift and all of the hard times. Let's just like list them out. Now, when you look back, some of the things we've gone through to actually give people an idea of what it's like to run a business, because they see us on a podcast, we're all happy. Yeah, we have a winch now and then.

But mate, like, oh, there's been from legal stuff to, you know, bad.

You know, bad hires, to cutting salaries, to going part time, to putting more of your own money into being in debt to the ATO to make sure the business can survive, to nearly running out of money, to telling employees we can't pay them that week, to like, yeah.

It'S literally like, you know, we're gonna run out of payroll in, in a few weeks, like, and we're like, what do we do while Ben's away in America or Dubai running a remote company? And Ben and I like reducing our salaries significantly just so people can be paid and trying to figure out how to get customers and build a brand and having to downsize our team by half when we had really amazing people just so the business could survive.

Yeah, it's. It's not like you go and you go to work and the money just rocks up in your account every week because you did the thing. It's like, no, you do the thing and it doesn't work for six months and then you're pulling your hair out going, why the fuck does this thing not work while you're losing money and you're not getting paid.

Yeah, and it takes a long time to, you know, reduce the burn. It takes a long time to hire again and get the right person. If they don't work out, that's three months down the drain. It is, it is cr. And then changing our complete strategy to the point where we had to change the strategy of the company and what we were. So we had a cohesive story for investors and they could see where we were going. And it was basically like our last shot to make it work.

And there's a million other things that.

Went in there, but like, oh, yeah, there's a million things around. You know, legal things, tax things, employee challenges. Oh, by the way, this person who's a contractor, you should have been paying them super the whole time you got this back pay to do. Oh, now you're making money. You owe the ATLS money. Oh, now you've got to pay payroll tax. It's like, yeah, oh, oh, by the.

Way, you know, now you need insurance. Oh, by the way, now you need this license. Oh, by the way, now you. Oh, it's more GST because you're making more money. Oh, by the way, like, it just does.

By the way, the reporting that was done was on cash and not accruals. And you've got all these, sorry, accruals, not cash. You're going to run out of cash. Oh, and by the way, you got all these accruals that are sitting on your balance sheet.

Oh, by the way, now inflation's gone up and you know, your staff need more money. Oh, and by the way, like, the.

Market'S and you're barely getting any customers and all of your employees want more, want higher wages or they're going to leave. It is so, so full on. Oh, and you can't take any annual leave as well. That doesn't exist for business owners. And even if you do, you're thinking about the business. Yeah.

You're constantly stressed, Ben.

You can't take leave or sales would stop.

I. And then when I do take leave, I'm just stressed because I'm not at work. Yeah.

And you're like, what's going on? Like, what's the cash position? What's happening? And, oh, by the way, we weren't reporting in the right way and all of these things have been ruined. And by the way, an employee. You told employee to do something and they did it, but you didn't set a budget. And here's a $30,000 bill for consulting.

And by the way, everyone else on Twitter seems to be winning and you're comparing yourself to others and you suck and you're a bad person and you should just quit.

Amazing fucking backup. Now it's a lot better and it's more stable. You still have a lot of challenges every single day, and it is still quite stressful, but nowhere near what it used to be. When you're trying to figure it out where it's literally the decision you make that week or month, it can make or break your business. Like, next month you might not have a business.

You need a lot of resilience and persistence. And I think.

That'S one of my superpowers over time. Like, the amount of positions we've been in where it's just like, this is. This is just so easy to give up and quit. Is.

Is.

Is like probably a bit of naivety, to be honest. But, like, I think that's why a lot of people don't make it through, because it just gets way too hard. And like, what the. Like, how many conversations have we had? Even when you've Been here even before you were here of like, I'm just like, what the am I doing? Like, this is just ridiculous. Like, what? This is just stupid.

And you would have been questioning it because you made some money in crypto and you rolled all of that up and bought a business and you could have just sailed off into the sunset with a lot of that money. You're constantly questioning the choice that you made. Plus, you took profit. So you had a massive bill to pay the tax office and have that hanging over your head and you're like, fuck, I've been doing this for so many years. When is the time going to come where I actually literally get paid?

Yep. But on the other side, if you can make it through, it's freeing. We get to work when we want, wherever we want. You know, you can earn a good, a good salary. You know, you can get to dividends and profitability if you want. You can make an impact on people's lives. We work with over a thousand people. You know, we have a great team. I have fun. What I do every day, like, it is a lot of benefits, but it's just fucking hard.

Yeah. It's an uncommon path. And for you, Ben, you're optimizing for freedom. You don't want to work for someone else. You want to build things in a company in the way that you want. I think a core thing we haven't said as well is having a business partner, you and I, and having accountability to each other, but also being able to support each other and be like, you know, are you looking after your mental health, your physical health? You seem a bit off today. What's going on? Okay. Cancel these meetings. Go do something else. Having that other person there with you.

Because if I was doing this solo, maybe I won't speak for you, but if I was doing this solo, I'd be like, fuck. Too hard. It's completely shit. And you need that other person to be in the trenches with you to help your decision making and to help support you because it is really, really tough.

And also I think you need someone to balance your negatives or the areas, your weaknesses. And that's what we're very good at. I feel as though we're polar opposites in a work sense of like what our skills are and what our, what our assets are. I think the other thing as well is what I love about business is learning. You know, I've always found when business gets boring, it's because we're not. Or I'm not learning. I'm not Growing. And that's what I love about business. I've learned so much about everything.

A thought just popped into my head. This is like maybe a hundred podcasts ago where you're like, you know what, mate? I haven't learned anything in a while. I haven't read a book for like a year.

And I think, I think you got back to like doing a few courses and reading again. And that got you back on track. Like it spark that thing within you.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I need to learn. That's why I love learning and progressing. Otherwise, I feel as I'm just plateauing and that's where I get bored. So business is great for that.

So there you go. Like, if you're. If you're in that 250 to 1 mil mark, know that it is. Is very difficult. It sucks. A lot of people don't talk about it because they've either not done it, they've failed to grow. And that's okay. If you just want to stay at 250k, 300 per year and you're a solo, great.

But yeah, do, do try and figure it out. Talk to people that are at the same level. Go to eo, hit Ben up on Twitter or something like that. Like, we've been through this thing. It is a very lonely journey.

Yeah.

And it's also difficult to find people that have been through it to share the experience and to learn from each other.

Yeah, totally agree. Awesome, man. Good podcast. Thank you so much, everyone. Again, if you like the podcast and you find this was interesting and you know, someone building a business or maybe thinking about it or they're in it, love for you to share this with them. It's how we grow the podcast. We don't do affiliates, don't do advertising or anything like that. Completely free. We just want to give you as much support and guidance as we can. So please share it around. We'd really, really appreciate it. And we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks, champions.