How To Start A Business & Hit $10 Million In 2 Years

What's up, y'? All? Here's my Texas coming out. It's a beautiful morning here in Austin, Texas, and it's a hot one. And I'm in a suit, so I might start sweating in front of you. I am walking to one of our quarterly meetings for my backroom mastermind. The backroom is where we work with entrepreneurs to get to eight figures so they can sell their business, get a fat check, invest it well, and never work again. That's my. That's my elevator pitch, when people ask me what the backroom room is. But the majority of these members were not entrepreneurs two years ago, three years ago, definitely four years ago. And what we do is we work on getting them to eight figures and beyond. So there's one guy in the group who.

Did not have the type of business he has now, even two years ago, now does about $2 million a month on the Internet, which is nuts. Selling, really, products. It's like a household goods company. There's one guy in the group who is not an entrepreneur. Three years ago, just got a letter of intent to have his business purchased for $30 million up front with an earn out of another $30 million. Absolutely insane. There's one couple that started with a $5,000 investment. Three years later, sold their business for $20 million. Anyway, it's nuts what I want to go through, and I'm going to reveal this throughout. Hopefully by the end of my walk, I'll reveal all of this. I want to break down the how. I want to share exactly how this is getting done. Because, you know, we talk a lot about the what, what to do, why you should do it. Obviously, you already know why you want to do it. But I want to go through the how, because as I have prepared what we're going to go through in this meeting, I have started to isolate the five areas of focus or the five stages of how these businesses get built so darn quickly, because that doesn't happen. In the olden days, that stuff didn't happen. Of going from zero to eight figures in two years, three years.

That boggles most business brains. So there's basically.

Five levels or five levers that need to be pulled, things that need to be dialed in if you want those type of results. And this is what we work on specifically in the back room. And what we do is we have different guests come in and talk about each stage of the process, and we work on, you know, where people are stuck and we clear those bottlenec. So it's like this. The first thing that you've got to have dialed in and this is like stage zero kind of stuff is your product. I feel like this is obvious. Not so, not so obvious, though. If you look at a lot of the messages that I get, if your product is the same as everyone else's, you are going to have a hard time getting from zero to eight figures in that time frame. Now, it doesn't mean that the product has to be vastly different. It could be simply marketed different. It could simply be repositioned in the marketplace. It can simply be a tweak on the product. It does not need to be a new invention. It does not need to be something that no one has thought of before. Most of the entrepreneurs that I'm working with in there, in this room were not selling some new invention. They were selling something that already existed, where there was existing demand and they put a tweak on it. And that tweak can be very small.

Seemingly insignificant to a lot of people. But there has to be something new, unique or exciting about it. Without that, it's going to be very, very difficult. And so many entrepreneurs get hung up on this idea of what's a good product.

And so I'll give you my short take. Look for big markets where there's a lot of buyers, where there's a lot of competition, and it's your job to do something that's different in that with the same types of products.

The next, the next area when you have your product. And by the way, it's really hard to get to this stage if your product sucks. And it's marketing, product and marketing, this is how you get to 1 million. Now, I work with a lot of Amazon sellers who, their marketing muscle is really weak and they can get away with it. And they can get away with it because there's so much demand just at Amazon that they can be crappy marketers and get to 1 million. The sweat is starting. Warned you. That's a hot one here.

They can get away with crappy marketing because Amazon is so big, but you never get to eight figures with crappy marketing. Now, you don't need to be a marketing genius with a capital J to figure out how to take this to eight figures. What I suggest is that all of your marketing go into audience building. My favorite strategy right now is running Facebook traffic to messenger, using messenger to get email addresses, and then following up with product launches to your people through messenger and Facebook, or messenger and email. That's a story for another day. But these strategies will change all the time. The beauty of this is that your competitors are so bad at this. They're so bad that if you do an ounce of it, well, an ounce of it, like you know a little bit about copy and conversion, you know a little bit about Facebook ads, you know a little bit about advertising on podcasts, you know just a little about YouTube marketing. If you do any of that even reasonably well, you win. Because it only takes a little bit of a lift for a really good product to hit that inflection point where everything changes. Hard to do with a crappy product, but if you've got a good one and you go get the audience and you put a good product in front of a ready audience, things change very, very quickly. So that's number two.

Number three is cash flow management.

Now most people overlook this, but when you are growing, you don't get to take money off the table. All of that gets rolled back into more growth, more marketing, more product, more inventory. And that's going to take management. Now most people will neglect this until they get to the stage where they need it. And so they start reacting or they stay stuck. So there's a couple things that you can have dialed in ahead of time if you want to be ahead of the curve. The best source of cash flow management the world right now I think is Amazon lending. Holy Moses. It's beautiful. It's non recourse debt. It is. It's cheap capital. It is. It comes out of future payments. It's just absolutely beautiful.

So, good morning.

So the.

Cash flow side of things can liberate you or it can free you up. Because I would rather have a small piece of a really big pie than no pie. And that is why I have changed my tune over the last few years on debt and investors. I think they can be an incredible tool to getting to the level that you want. Most people are afraid to take on debt or investors. I think they're massively overlooked. When you have the first two pieces, your product and your marketing dialed in, I have absolutely no problem taking on debt or investors in order to go faster. In fact, sometimes it's necessary. So cash flow management, staying lean and funding the growth, that's part three. And then the final piece is systems and team.

I don't, I am not a systems minded person, at least in the sense of writing documents and processes. My brain just doesn't think that way. So I give this to my team and I have my team do this.

Your team, as I have found the people that you're around consistently the People who are mentoring you, the people that you're associating with, the people that are on your either contractors, employees. If they suck, your business sucks. If you suck, your business sucks. At the end of the day, pretty much every investment comes down to people. Every business comes down to people. No amount of product marketing and cash flow management can make a sucky team really great. Be very mindful of who you surround yourself with. So if you're the entrepreneur, if you're the driver, the first person that you probably want to hire is a do everything person. An assistant, a manager, a project manager. I mean, someone who has done this before, who has built systems and processes, who has a background in customer experience. These are all things that you can hand a lot of things off to. That's your first move, even if that person is part time. Because you never grow beyond you. If you are doing everything, it's your job to, to stay in the push position, to be pushing things out the door, pushing product, to be pushing connections, to be pushing your team. These are all things that you need to be doing as a CEO, as a founder, not all of the grunt work that a $20 an hour team member or even an outsourcer could handle for you. So those are the four areas. There's one more that I consider a bonus, but again, they're product marketing, cash flow management, and team. If you do those things well or even half well.

You have a really good shot. A really good shot. And I would be willing to bet that if you're stuck or struggling, it's that you haven't dialed in one of these areas and they're kind of sequential. You can't do much marketing if you don't have a great product. And there's no real need dialing in cash flow management if you don't have something to scale. All right, so those are the four. There's one more bonus, and the bonus is locking in, or actually I should say preparing for exit and then investing the profits for cash flow, which is actually my favorite conversation. And over here, there's some of my backroom members crossing the street, about to enter into our meeting.

But when you have your exit, when you're preparing to sell, or you are taking profits off the table and you're investing them for passive cash flow, that's when you're free, that's when you can. That's when your mind's clear, that's when you're done working forever. And that's where I think most of you want to be. And that's a separate conversation. It's something that I really enjoy talking about. I wish I gave myself the opportunity to talk about it more.

And that'll probably come in the future. But that is the.

Five part process, if you will, of how so many people have hit these results so quickly. All right, I am walking into the meeting now in our offices here in Austin, so I'm gonna sign off for now. Let me know if this was helpful in the comments, and I will share more if you have questions or if you enjoyed this. Thanks for watching.