How I Grew To $200k/month in One Year

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Hey everybody. Brian Daniel Moran here and this is Freedom Fast Lane. Hey, before we kick things off, I just want to let you know that you look fantastic today. I mean really, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. You look hot. Today we're going to be going on an adventure. It's the adventure of taking a company from the idea phase from 0 to $200,000 per month and beyond. I just posted the most recent income report@freedomfastlane.com it was the May 2014 income report and one of my businesses did over $200,000 in sales in the month of May alone. And that gets a lot of attention. It looks really cool on paper and I want to go through exactly what it took to take that company from 0 to 200,000 dol dollars in sales per month. And just based on projections, that company is probably going to do over $2 million in sales this year. And that already is the biggest business I've ever had. And it's just getting started. This is the one year anniversary this week of taking our first sale in that business. So this week, as of the time of this recording, the anniversary of the the first sale that we took in that business. We took our first sale June 5th of 2013 and today it does over $200,000 in sales per month. And I want to tell you exactly how we did that because a lot of you who listen to Freedom Fast Lane, and I know this about you because I've spoken with a lot of you, I've polled, you have thought about being an entrepreneur, have had a lot of business ideas and something just hasn't clicked. And I want you to look ahead because I've got a little crystal ball here. I'm a year ahead of you as far as new businesses go. And I want you to look into the crystal ball and see that it's possible for you to have a million dollar business or at least a full time income in business one year from now. Because it's not only possible, it's quite achievable. I know many, many, many, many, many, many people. That wasn't enough many's I'd add some more many's Many, many, many, many, many people who have done it and have done it within about a year's time, sometimes less. So I'm gonna go through what we did to get to the level that we're at because look, I made a ton of mistakes along the way and I have been an entrepreneur for myself for eight years. I've been a full time entrepreneur the entire Time. And I've made tons of mistakes. And hopefully through this podcast, you'll be able to see what we did wrong and what we did right. For you to be able to duplicate success for yourself. I need you to realize that a year ago, it was a little bit over a year ago that I'd made a decision that I was gonna make a change in my life. Because up until that point, I had been very heavily involved in the Internet marketing space and teaching people how to make money online. And I hated every minute of that. I never wanted to be one of those guys. I never thought that that would be my full time thing. And yet it did well. And people respected me as an authority on this topic so much that I kept doing it, but I never really. I never wanted to do that. So I decided to make a change. And I experienced a lot of failure in that. In between time, I tried to start businesses and I lost $100,000 in less than a year. Actually, in about six to eight months, I lost $100,000. Cash in my bank account gone. Snap your fingers, it's erased. I don't have it anymore. I told somebody, well, at least I had $100,000 to lose. I don't need more, though. And that was hard. Have you ever lost $100,000? But it was. I've had better days than when I realized I was out of cash in that business and that I had to make another pivot. Because at first I decided I was going to make a pivot to try and grow a really successful business. I put $100,000 into it, lost it all, and then was like, oh, well, now I got to start all over again. And that time I did it right. And I tell you all this because a year ago, I was upset and $100,000 poorer than I had previously been. And I was like, I was starting all over. And I want you to know, I tell you all this because I have found that failure is a great predictor of success. And it was said to me, and I didn't know if it was true or not, but I found it to be true for me that oftentimes the greatest successes come right after the biggest failures. I found this to be true for myself as well, because this business that I have built, the businesses that I have built in the last year have been the most successful and the most rewarding of any of the businesses that I have ever built. And I'm having more fun and working less in these businesses as a result of the lessons that I learned from Failing so massively. So if you have failed in your life, good news, you're probably in a better position for success than you ever have been if you're willing to keep going. Now, some people aren't willing to keep going, some people don't want to experience that anymore. So they do something that they think is safer. And that's fine for some people. For the people who listen to freedom fast lane, that's usually not the case. But failure is a great predictor of success. If you have failed a lot, you're probably closer to success than you've ever been. If you've never failed before, you're probably the furthest away from success or everything that you touch turns to gold, which was my career until about two years ago and then I started failing miserably. And I've learned a lot from those and now have really successful businesses. So this is what we did. If you're taking notes, I have four major points, four major things that we did very well that made a big difference between going from zero to a two million dollar, actually a two million dollar plus business in a year. And the first one, step number one, is that we selected a very profitable industry. We decided to go into the men's health and fitness world, which is a growing trend. We see more and more men paying very close attention and men who spend money.

Paying attention to this topic, to their, their longevity, their health and their fitness. This is a growing industry and it's one where people spend a lot of money. But more importantly, it was something that I had dabbled in as an affiliate years ago. So it was, and I used to say as an affiliate, it was my favorite niche market when I was doing affiliate marketing exclusively and that's all I was doing. I loved men's health. That always did well for me when I was an affiliate marketer. So when I was looking at rolling out my own products, it was natural for me to think about what kind of products can I roll out in that industry. So if you have experience in an industry that is growing, that that is a clear indicator of something that you should go into for your first business or your next business. So step one is looking at a profitable industry. When I'm coaching new entrepreneurs, especially with people who are in my Amazon classes or people who are paying me for consulting, I often tell them to look at an industry before they look at a product. So when you're looking at choosing what you're going to sell, I always say look at the industry before the product because products go out of style. Products change, products get duplicated. But industries buy multiple products. They have target markets. They have people who pay for advertising. You are not developing a product that serves a specific person. You are serving an industry. You're serving a selection of people who hopefully will buy multiple products from you or put money in your bank account in multiple different ways. It's not just about having one product. It's about serving an industry. So select a profitable, growing industry before you choose a product. And that was very clear. We did that right? That was the first thing we did. The second thing that we did well was I got myself a very good partner. Now, I have had many partnerships in the past, and most of them have been total, epic failures. The reason for that, the reason that they failed was because we were either A way too similar, or B, there were not clearly defined roles between myself and my partner. I learned this the hard way after a lot of failed partnerships. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they partner with people who are just like them, and then they don't have clear defined roles for who is in charge of what. If you partner with someone who is just like you, one of you is unnecessary. If you're doing the same things, then one of you is unnecessary. And I am so guilty of this because I'm an entrepreneur. I know a lot of entrepreneurs. People who are entrepreneurs tend to be wired fairly similarly. We have a lot of ideas. We take fast action, and we complete nothing. We get nothing, all the way complete. As a result, when I would form partnerships, I'd be sitting around having coffee or a beer with somebody, and we're like, hey, that's a great idea. You want to do it? Yeah, let's do it. Let's take fast action. In two weeks, we're bored. Two weeks later, we have all these ideas, but no one's getting anything done. I have lost many, many thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars on single projects just because I partnered with somebody who was an idea person like me. And neither of us got anything done. So pick your partners very carefully. If someone is just like you, they probably are not a good person to go into business with. They probably be a great mastermind partner or somebody for you to get together with regularly. But it's not a good idea to partner with that person. The second thing, as far as partnerships go, is getting clearly defined roles for you and your partner. What are you doing on a regular basis? That is your responsibility. And what is your partner getting done? That is his or her responsibility. And if they're similar, change it fast. They should be very different. It should be very clear that you're in charge of something and your partner is in charge of something. And when you get together, you report on results. It is not about getting together and talking about what needs to get done and dividing it. It is getting together and talking about results. I've completed this because I knew it was my responsibility because it fell under my umbrella. And you got this done because you knew it was your responsibility because it fell under your umbrella of what needed to get done. If you don't have those clearly defined roles, you are. First of all, you will have to convene on every tiny decision that gets made. And that is the most frustrating thing in the world when you have to convene with a partner on every little decision. Pick your department. Pick your partner's department and make your own decisions and report back. Only convene on things that are really necessary. For example, my partner on this business, Matt and I, we get together and we approve each other's spending. Hey, is it okay if I spend money on this? Is it okay if I spend money on this? Is it okay if we do this? We make major decisions together, but we also have very clearly defined roles where he makes decisions and I make decisions and we get together and we report them. That's a partnership. And he and I have very different roles. I'm idea, I come up with ideas. I take fast action. I've got a marketing background. Matt is a very analytical thinker. He is much less of a risk taker than me. So we balance each other out. We usually make good decisions when we disagree and then we work them out. We come to the middle a little bit and we're not stepping on each other's toes. As far as decisions go, it's been a very healthy partnership. So one way that you can identify if somebody is a good partner and I do this with everyone is take a Colby exam. K o L B E.org Kolbe is that right? Maybe it's dot com. It's the Kolbe index. You can Google it. K O L B E Index. The Colby Index. The Colby index will give you a score on how you get things done. It's like a Myers Briggs for entrepreneurs. There's no right or wrong answer, but it will give you an analysis of how you get things done. So my highest mark is that I'm a quick starter. I am a seven in quick start. That means that I take really fast action, but I need to surround Myself with people who actually carry the football into the end zone. I'll get things started, I'll get us to the 20 yard line. I need to surround myself with people who finish the job. I can sit in a corner and come up with an idea all day long, but actually getting it done, I'll get it started, but getting it done, not so good. Whereas my partner is really high, in fact finding. He's a researcher. So if we want to find an example of somebody who's doing something better than us, he can find all of the research, he can find all of the people who are doing it really well. And then I come to the table and I make the decision because I take really fast action on things. Then our team, the people under us, carry the ball into the end zone because neither one of us are those people. Matt is research, I am fast decision and fast action. Other people need to be implementers to drive it home. So choose your partners carefully. You should choose partners like marriages. You should choose partners like marriages. Yeah, I said that, right? And do not be quick to enter partnerships because they can absolutely ruin you if it is not the right partnership. Alright, so take the Colby exam, take the Colby index. Whenever you're thinking about a partnership or hiring someone, have very clearly defined roles and choose people who are not like you. Alright, number three. So this is all before we even took sales. What we did correctly selected a profitable industry, got really good partners, then put our products, number three, step three. We started putting our products on a very strong channel. I've talked about this in previous podcasts, but one of the shortcuts to profitability for businesses that are just starting out is putting yourself on a channel. We went with Amazon.com to start and now we're rolling out into other channels. We have retail companies that we're working with. We have our own funnel that we're building. That's a channel. So work on developing your strong channel. Where are people that buy your products hanging out and go there first? That is how you shortcut the profitability line. That is how you get profitable very quickly by identifying channels where people are already spending money. You see where most businesses get things wrong, where most new companies get things wrong is they don't identify channels and they just go after one client or one customer and they knock on doors, they try to get that, that one sale. I say go where they're all hanging out already. Where are people getting in front of your ideal customers and go there first. So for us, people were already going and buying similar products. On Amazon.com so we went there and we blew up that channel. And as a result, it opened up other opportunities for us to get in front of other channels like retail. Because we did such a great job on Amazon, other companies found us and wanted to put us in their stores. And guess what? Retail is a new channel. And so now we're focusing a lot of our energy on how do we develop that as a channel. So focus on one channel, one specific channel where people already hang out who are buying your products and maximize that. Another great example from my Internet marketing background is clickbank.com Clickbank is a place where people can put information products to sell. Affiliates will pick them up and sell them to their audiences. That's a channel. You go there, you maximize that channel, and it opens up incredible doors for you. If you have an information product, you go put it on clickbank and you get good at that channel. It's life changing, it's business changing. It opens up all kinds of doors. Right now I'm recording a podcast that I'm gonna put on itunes. Why? Because itunes is a channel and people go to itunes to listen to podcasts and find thought leaders to follow. And as a result of me maximizing the itunes channel, it'll open up a lot of entrepreneurial doors for me. That's a channel. Where are people already hanging out and go there. And step number four, it's the last one, is we focused very heavily on quality and customer service. We put quality before profitability and customer happiness above everything else. The reason for this is because we knew long term this is going to make a huge difference in our business. And that is what really caused the snowball of sales to grow. Because anybody can make something sound good. Anybody can put a great sales package on a piece of poop. Anybody can do that. Anybody can learn how to be a good copywriter and make a piece of poop sound enticing. What we wanted was to have really good sales and really good products. Because if people were excited about the product and then it met their expectations, we had something really special. And just in case someone was disappointed, we wanted to have unbelievable customer service, Meaning we just did absolutely everything we knew how to do to make the customer absurdly happy. Because if we did that, we'd have repeat customers, we would have people telling other people about our products, and we could grow that much quicker than if we were selling a piece of poop. Now, I know lots of people who have gotten rich selling pieces of poop. And by the way, I just love I'm having a lot of fun saying poop on a podcast, which is why I'm gonna keep repeating it. But I know a lot of people who have sold pieces of poop with good marketing, and they spend their lives.

Pooping, developing new things that they can, they can market that, that suck. I know lots of people that do that and have been very financially successful. And they're miserable because first of all, they know they're not creating value. And second, they have to constantly be pooping in order to have something new to sell. What we decided to do was to just create something that was very long lasting, that was going to be around for years, that people were going to love, and then make sure that the customers loved it. And that has made a tremendous, tremendous difference. You see, I used to be one of those people that thought that they had to go do something big in order to get the result they wanted. And as a result, I jumped around from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing, waiting for the thing to make me successful. What I found was that it's not about finding the right thing, it's about building something sustainable. I like to say that the longer time frame you can have of success, the more successful you will be. If you can project success out 5 years, you will be more successful than if you project out success for one year. So I was jumping around with six and 12 month goals. I'm gonna go make a million dollars in the next six months so that I can retire or whatever. This was the mindset that I had. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs fall into this. And what I found was that as soon as I switched it to a three to five year goal, everything changed. All of a sudden, making a million dollars in a year became possible. Now that wasn't the goal. The goal was to build a real sustainable business in three to five years. But as a result, I had the most profitable and biggest business I've ever had in one year. The longer time frame you can have for success, the more successful you will be. I like the phrase that I heard once that poor people plan their lives day to day. Middle class people plan their month, plan their life month to month. Rich people plan their lives year to year. And really, really rich people plan their lives decade to decade. The longer vision you can have for success, the more successful you will be. So this was our timeline. This is what it looked like for the first three to six months. We were rolling around with one product at about $10,000 a month in sales, but 100% of that was going back into the business. 100% of that was going back into the business. We were taking $0 from this for six months and we were kind of chugging along, but we're building up the channel and our presence in the channel. And we knew that if we maximized our time, we maximize our exposure to a channel that in a year or two we could back off and have tremendous profits. And that worked out to be the case after six months. That that's when we rolled out product number two. That's when we felt comfortable rolling out our second product because we had maximized the exposure of our first product and it was doing $10,000 a month in sales. When we rolled out product number two, that changed everything because then this snowball really started to build. People who bought product number one and loved it and had a good customer experience said, they've got a new product, let's buy the second product. And then people who bought the new product said, we had such a good experience here, let's buy the other product. We had the existing customer base, plus we had the new blood coming on on a regular basis. And that changed everything. In fact, when we rolled out product number two, it doubled the sales of product number one because we focused so heavily on customer satisfaction that old customers came back and started buying the new product and vice versa. And the snowball started to build and build and build and build because we put in good products with an excellent customer experience on a profitable channel, and the snowball started to build. However, it wasn't until 12 months in that we finally took profits for ourselves. It was about nine months in when we hit the 100k a month, and then month 12, this month, this last month, we hit $200,000 in profits. And it's only last month that we started taking profits for ourselves. It was only a month ago that we started paying ourselves. And I think. I think that delaying that gratification of taking profit, profits for ourselves has made a huge difference in the overall trajectory of our business. And now we see it as infinite. Now we see the light and we get that this could be a 10, 20, $50 million a year company, and that's what we're after. But it takes that ability to see way out into the future and that ability to say we're going to grow something sustainable with a good customer experience and have absurdly happy customers in order to build that really, really profitable business. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to look into your crystal ball and See our life a year from now, or even better, five years from now. And if you're thinking about starting a business, start to ask these questions. Who are you serving? What are you doing to serve those customers? How are they reacting to you? Where are you creating the most value? Notice I'm not saying, how much money are you making? Because that's almost automatic. If you answer these questions, what value are you bringing to the table? And then we can look at how much money are you making? Because it's probably way more than you know it can be if you're providing an immense amount of value to the marketplace. And then your action step is chunk it down into the simplest action possible to get started. We have released new products in the last couple of months in this business, but our whole business started with one product. We knew that it would be a product line, but we started with just one. And we spent six months perfecting that. Six months perfecting that one product because we knew that once we did that, rolling out new products would be easy. I have talked to so many people, especially in this Amazon world, that are like, oh, there's such a great opportunity. I'm going to roll out 10 products at once, and I kick them in the head and I say, stop doing 10 things at once. Just do one. Because then you will have the systems in place to do 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6. But you have time. There's no urgency here. The longer vision of success you can have, the more successful you will ultimately be. So that's been the last year in this company. A year ago, having lost a tremendous amount of money and being really, really hard on myself and not being happy with where I was at and taking risks that didn't pan out, and then very slowly building a new business that a year later is insanely profitable and growing by leaps and bounds. That's how we did it. That was the timeline it took to do it. And I hope this gives you a peek into the crystal ball of what can happen if you line everything up correctly. Even if, especially if you have failed a lot, lot in the past. This is what it looks like when everything lines up with the timeline. Looks like when everything lines up, success can happen very quickly. But it comes down to, are you serving a profitable, growing industry? Are you surrounding yourself with people who can help you, whether it be partners or employees? Are you taking sales through a strong channel? And are you focusing very heavily on quality and customer service? I am surrounded by successful people. And all of them have these in place. These are the four things that when they all line up, success becomes inevitable and it happens very quickly. So if you're thinking about starting something new, answer those four questions and success will come very quickly. Hey, thanks so much for listening to Freedom Fast Lane. You, of course, can find the show notes and lots of free reports to help you get started on your journey@freedomfastlane.com and by the way, you can get all of our past shows for free by just going to itunes and subscribing, and it'll be downloaded automatically. I'd love to hear your thoughts over@freedomfastlane.com leave me a comment on this show's page and I'll see you on the next podcast.