You’re Stuck at the Same Income Level Every Year

Today, I will help you break your financial ceiling as a business owner and a freelancer. Let me break the ice. Did you ever think about your cup size? I'm talking about your financial cup size. This is the number one reason why most entrepreneurs are stuck at the same income level and never able to break through. I will share with you the journey on how you could actually do it. In the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship and financial success, maintaining your drive and keeping your discipline along with motivation is really challenging. It's a journey that often pushes individuals to their limits while they actually strive to achieve their financial success. Now, I went from setting a 6-figure yearly business goal in my business to actually hitting a multi-million-dollar run rate as an agency owner. First of all, let me introduce myself. Hi guys, my name is Nikhil Sai. I'm the founder and CEO at funnelingmedia.com. We are a full-service digital marketing agency. I started as a 19-year-old broke dropout, built a million-dollar marketing agency in 2 years, Helping my clients do over $500 million in verified results. Been on the stage as the youngest $100 million award winner on the most prestigious marketing stage, verified by Russell Brunson at Funnel Hacking Live, as a 21-year-old. Now, let's get back to the context of the video—understanding your cup size. This is very crucial. At the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I was brimming with endless motivation to start making money. However, as I reached certain levels, different milestones in my financial success, I noticed a very weird mixture of comfort and discomfort. In 2020, my cup size was set at $10,000 initially in the first few months. When I made $10,000, it was really tough for me to push further that mark over. Then I broke it because I added more expenses to my life to make it $30,000. Then in 2021, I aimed to $50,000 because again, you need to increase your cup size. And then in 2022, I've aimed for 6 figures a month. Now there is a fascinating fact here. 52% of people who actually have a specific revenue goal are most likely to achieve it than people who don't even think about their revenue goals in the first place. So if you want to increase the probability of you hitting your revenue goal, start getting clear on your goal. Now pause the video and think for a moment. What is your current cup size? How does your sense of purpose align with your financial goals? Share your thoughts in the comment section. Where do you think you're consistently getting comfortable at a revenue standpoint? For me, in my initial days, that was $10,000. So pause this video right now and comment down below. And here is how you could come back to understand your cup size. What has been the average ceiling you're hitting in your revenue in the past 6 months? Most likely your cup size. When are you getting comfortable? When your bank balance or cash flow hits a certain goal. That's your cup size as of now. Believe it or not, that is the truth because numbers don't lie. Let's talk about the journey of expanding your cup size financially. It's not a one-time accomplishment. It's a continuous journey to increase your cup size time to time. You need to create more reasons to make more money. It definitely involves a lot of stuff like creating your purpose, understanding the impact you're creating onto the world, and learning about how you could challenge yourself and level up overall. It's always you versus you, Kim. In my life, it was me versus me. Once I hit the 5-figure goal, I was like, how can I hit the 6? How can I hit the 7? Now I'm on my way to challenge myself to hit an 8-figure revenue. If you're optimistic and believe in your revenue goals, you are 32% more likely to actually achieve it. Number 1 thing you need to understand when you're expanding your cup size is resilience and risk-taking. As you progress in your journey as an entrepreneur or a freelancer, you really come to the conclusion that you cannot be doing everything simply. That's just not possible. You really need to be the visionary and you need to find an operator who could take your vision and convert into tasks. Then you need the doers who actually get those tasks done. So this is a 3-way cycle. You create the vision, the operator creates the to-do list, and the doers actually get the stuff done. Now, I personally struggle with this a lot. I was the best funnel designing person. I was the best funnel designer in the world in my own terms. I was very emotional to actually delegate those tasks. But the reason I actually went from 5-figure months to 6-figure months, now we are running a multi-million dollar marketing agency, is only because I was able to give away the control to people who are better than me and believe in their expertise and their alignment to the commitments we have for our clients. The next thing which does help you increasing your financial cup size is focus on time management, investing your time in the most essential task. This is really coming down to avoiding yourself getting too thin by doing everything yourself or trying to operate everything yourself by actually coming back to delegating the right thing and focusing on the most important thing you could actually be doing, attacking in your business. In my business, That is definitely content creation and building, closing enterprise-level deals and actually doing my podcast. Then maybe training my sales team and actually doing the sales and client success and whatnot. If you understand the leverage formula, it's 4 C's. It's connection, capital, or content. And when I'm doing something important, I try to do the most leveraged activity, which are few tasks which I can do once, which could actually compound on the longer time period, like hiring a good teammate, or raising money to actually do something in my company or helping my client or raising money or putting the money into work like investing. Focus on managing your time effectively. If you follow the 4C principle, you would be able to manage your time most effectively by doing most leveraged activities in your business. Let's talk about this. Connection, finding the best clients, best teammates to work with, best business partners and whatnot. Mentors, including mentors and coaches. So if you do that, that could get you so much more leverage in the longer run. Capital— if you raise money or invest in things where you could get compounding returns, that's an amazing thing to do, which will actually let your business grow so that you can actually focus on the most important thing. These are the leveraged activities. The code— if you can create a software or have somebody else do that, which is coming back to the connections who can actually build the code, that can work on a scale. Software has more leverage when you're actually making an exit. Because it's a sellable business. Now the last thing is content, which is what I'm exactly doing. If you're not making your content, I'll tell you, you're crazy. If you're a digital business, you should be doing content because this is a piece of content which I could create, which I could send to all of my potential clients in the future to build trust. It takes 7 hours of content consumption before somebody becomes a client. That's the typical high-ticket funnel right now. So the more your clients watch your content, the more likely they can actually become your client. So what are you doing? This freaking video and go shoot content, which actually is not— okay, coming back, you need to find strong reasons and purpose to actually increase your financial cup size. When I was actually trying to increase my cup size to that 6-figure a month, you know, it was really, really tough. I mean, I'm being vulnerable here. When being a person who is living in India and having clients who are enterprise level, you know, having a 6-figure yearly retainers with us, I was super comfortable, like super, super comfortable. Imagine this, India is a 5 times smaller economy compared to US. So if I'm making $100,000 sitting in India, that's like making $500,000 in US because I could buy as much as I will be able to buy if I'm in US. So, you know, having that drive, especially at a monetary perspective, is really tough. So I need to find bigger reasons. Now, I've done a dumb mistake here, by the way. Which is creating a different startup, which was a confusion from my original one where there was a lot of contradictions. I felt like life shouldn't be so much easy, so I created a different company, which is again a whole different story. Comment down below if you want to learn what happened there. But overall, I lost half a million dollars of my own cash. I burned it. I'm not considering the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of growing my own company, Punily Media, was millions, if not tens. But just at an attention perspective and my own cash, which I have burned, was close to half a million dollars, which I never recommend anybody do. If you have one business, if you can put your heart and soul into it, do it. Do not create a different business. That's a whole different topic again. But once I actually had that huge expense, I know that a 6-figure bill is coming every month when I'm running another software company. I needed the money, so I actually worked for it in my funneling media company to get that cash. And that's when I first time increased my cup size. So I went from multi, multi, multi 5-figure months to 6-figure months because I had a strong enough reason to invest in a different company because the expenses were— that actually increased my cup size. But then once I can achieve it, I can repeat it. That's how we are able to maintain our momentum. Now coming back, I hope this simple video helped you understand your cup size. And again, look at your balance sheet, look at your banking statement, and where you're actually getting super lazy. It's more likely when you're sitting on cash or when you're receiving a specific amount of monthly recurring revenue or even monthly cash flow, which is actually keeping you comfortable. And this is the reality. Confront the truth. You need to realize that if you are hitting $15,000, $30,000, $100,000, you're getting comfortable because now you could actually look at it objectively and solve for it. Now, here's one thing which can probably help you to increase that ceiling. You need to do something called a zero-sum financial calculation, which means you need to basically divide and allocate capital which you have access to into multiple things where you cannot be taking the money off or sit comfortably with. That will allow you to be hungry enough. So it could be investing in real estate, investing in your own company, investing into ads, investing in resources which can compound, investing in crypto, whatever. I'm not giving you financial advice here, but you get the point. Do not sit on cash. If you sit on cash, it's much easier to become lazy. So I hope you now know the reason why you are actually getting stuck at a specific revenue goal every single time or a revenue mark. It is because that is your cup size. Realize it, objectify it, create a zero-sum math, and let the capital out so that you could actually be more hungry. Create better reasons, better purpose, better impactful vision you are actually working towards so that you have more reasons to wake up and get the stuff done. The work simply needs doing. Do it anyways regardless of emotions, situations, and desires. Once again, this is me, Nikhil Sai, 19-year-old dropout turned millionaire in just 2 years running my own marketing agency while helping my clients do over $500 million in verified results. I hope this video helps you out. Share this people who you know are specifically at a specific financial mark so that they can get unstuck. My goal with these videos is to basically give everything away, all the mistakes I've done, all the good things I've done, so that you can actually run with the stuff and take more massive action and grow your business for the better world. So I hope this video helps. Thanks so much for watching. Comment down if you have any specific suggestions for the next topics. Bye for now.