Why I HATE $1,000,000 businesses... (Build THIS instead)

I once gave a talk at a conference where I was speaking to million dollar business owners and I was sharing with them some strategies to be able to grow from seven figures to eight figures. Now this was a group that I had spoken to many times in the past. And all of my content up to that point had been to new entrepreneurs who were getting to their first seven figure business. For the first time, I was sharing with them how you grow past seven figures, how you go from seven figures to eight. And a young woman came up to me at the end of the conference, it was late at night and she had had a few drinks and she said, ryan, I walked out of your speech, I hated it. I wanted you to show up with the step by step process to go from 7 to 8. And what you did was like, give a lot more high level strategy. And I was like, yeah, what else? She's like, well, I built a seven figure business following your strategies like to the T. And I wanted you to give me the exact same roadmap to grow beyond seven figures. And I said, listen, you don't understand. You can three step your way to seven figures, you can't three step your way beyond it. Because once you're at seven figures, you have a new level of challenges that require you investing in the business, that require you becoming a different person, that require you casting a vision beyond yourself. And most importantly, it requires you to pivot from a business that, that is just there to make you money, to a business that is actually in service to customers.

The first reason why people get stuck in a million dollars and their business starts to suck is because they've never planned through the million. Most entrepreneurs go on this journey because they wanna make more money, they wanna have more freedom, they wanna bring something they're excited about into the world, but they've never planned what happens when once they're having a seven figure business. If you're like me and you grew up with very little, I had a single mom, we were on like reduced lunch programs at school. And by the way, most of my successful entrepreneur friends started out with nothing. So if you're scraping things together, congratulations, you are right on pace with almost all the successful people that I know. But when you've got nothing, the idea of having a seven figure business is like gloryland. It's heaven in your mind. All your problems would be solved if you had a seven figure business. Now a lot of problems are solved once you have regular good income coming in. But the truth is, if you've planned up to that Point and not through it, you're gonna get stuck. So at that time, when you've got that seven figure run rate and you're starting to feel the pressure of all these responsibilities and pressures working their way into your life, that's a really good time for you to stop and say, what do I want out of this business next? Or what do I want this business to be next? If you've only planned up to this point, then you're going to likely sabotage. At that point, you are likely not going to develop the skill set that you need to go beyond it. And I don't just mean saying what amount of money or revenue you want the business to have. I'm talking about what you want the business to be. We call that a vision. What do you want the business to become outside of what you get out of it? See, most of us start becoming entrepreneurs with selfish intent. It's how we're wired as humans. But you can only be selfish up to a certain point. You can grind your way to six or seven figures, but it's really hard to grind your way to eight figures. In order to get to eight figures or beyond, you've got to come in with a visual vision of how your company is going to impact the lives of your customers. So one of the things that you should do when you're at that sticking point is start to ask yourself, what do I want this business to become? What do I want to create? What experience do I want to have in this business? And it's going to feel out of reach when you do that. The second thing that happens right around a million dollars is entrepreneurs. Stop investing in the business. Here's what I mean. When you started your business, let's say you were selling some widget on Amazon. When you're selling that thing, you have to go into your bank account usually or take on investor dollars and spend five or ten thousand dollars to order that product and list it for sale. Well, what happens is that product picks up momentum. It starts doing 25 sales a day, or 50 sales a day, or 100 sales a day. And now that is funding the rest of the growth of the business. So your $10,000 investment has now become $200,000 a year in sales, or $500,000 a year in sales. That was a good investment. But when you hit about a million dollars, you stop doing that. The money that you have in the business is overseeing operations rather than into what I call multipliers or new opportunities, around a million dollars. You've got enough money to keep things moving, keep things going without you having to take a risk and dip into your pocket to invest in that new opportunity, that new channel, that new relationship. But that's exactly what you need to do in order to keep growth moving. So at the beginning of your business you have to invest at least like 50% of your business profits into growth. You have to into new products, into managers, or into part time employees, or you have to in order to maintain the business. But once you're at this stabilization point, it's tempting to just maximize for profit, put it in your pocket and not invest in the business. That's fine if you want to have a cash flow business so that you can move on to the next thing or just invest in stocks or, or goof off for a few years. But it is not going to help you grow from low seven figures to mid or high seven figures or even eight figures. It's just not going to happen. It also prevents you from being able to sell the business. If your business is just operational and not investing in growth and not eliminating you from the business, your business is not sellable. The third thing that happens when you're running a low seven figure business is that you maximize your current processes. That's boring. But the truth is most entrepreneurs don't even know what their processes are when they have a seven figure business. For example, I work with a lot of e commerce sellers and e commerce sellers will sell on Amazon or Shopify or run Facebook ads and they're selling lots of products, millions of dollars worth of product. They have no idea what a customer is worth to them. They have no idea how they even acquire those customers, how people find them. They're just kind of at the mercy of the algorithms, the Facebook ad algorithm, the Amazon ranking algorithm. And so they're not actually aware of how they're having the success that they are having. And so they can't do anything to change it. One thing that I would recommend you do is sit down and take inventory of all the projects that you have going on right now and look at which ones are legitimately producing revenue and profit and then which ones are investments, meaning you're throwing money down them, but they aren't producing return yet. This is where you will find the opportunities for profit optimization. And profit optimization is important so that you can invest in the projects that do move the needle so that you can hire real help. You see, when you're at low seven figures you need help, but you don't have enough profit margin to go hire really good help, unless you don't take as much out of the business. So you have to be just as conscious of costs at this point as you were when you were getting started. Because you've got to carve out enough profit to go hire somebody who knows the ad world or the management world or your particular industry. To get you into retail or whatever it is that you want to invest in for growth, it requires you to invest in people that have real experience. Because if you are training people and helping them emerge into a role that you've never done, guess what? You're both going to fail. So at that low seven figure run rate, it's important for you to become aware of of what your most profitable processes are, where those customers are coming from, and then being able to eliminate the waste so you can invest in people that can help you grow to a much bigger level. And the final thing that happens right around seven figures is that entrepreneurs hit their limit in terms of their skillset. They have enough to be full time entrepreneurs. They have enough success and status among their friends to look close cool. And so they stop investing in their own growth. That's when they stop growing, that's when they hit plateaus. I wish it wasn't this way. But business and entrepreneurship is a reflection of yourself. And if you are not growing, the business ain't growing. And even if it does, it's not going to grow very long before you start to sabotage it. We can only grow as big as our mindsets and our skill sets will allow. So this is the time for you to start building a different network. Going to conferences, hiring mentors, joining masterminds, getting plugged into groups, meeting people that have built businesses way bigger than you, going into your industry and really understanding your industry and how your business fits into that industry. But if you're thinking about just short term cash flow, it's going to be hard for you to justify the expense of your own personal growth and the investment in your entrepreneurial journey. Don't make that mistake. You will get plateaued at low seven figures. Million dollar businesses really suck. They are constraining, they're time consuming, and they're just enough for you to be a full time entrepreneur, but not enough for you to have something that is truly a reflection of the vision that you want to bring to the store world. And it's certainly not enough for you to have a business that you can scale or sell. The way out of that is to cast a big vision that is bigger than your current capacity to invest in yourself. Your own skill sets, your own network, your own mindset. It's for you to optimize and look at your current processes so that you have the cash flow to be able to invest in other projects. And it requires you to be conscious of continuing to invest in the business at the same pace that you were when you were growing the business. When we're working with a student or a client inside of our capitalism incubator, we're starting with these points in mind from the very beginning. It's why we have our students cast visions, why we have them build relationships from the very beginning. It's why we give them the goal of an eight figure exit from the very beginning so they're thinking beyond these plateaus. So if you're starting your journey with only the seven figures in mind, or you're stuck at seven figures, it's time for you to readjust your approach. If you need some help with that, we can help you inside of our incubator. You can find out more about that in the link of in the description of this video or you can go over to capitalism.com inc. Hey, if you're stuck at seven figures with a problem that I didn't address in this video, let me know in the comments and I'll wrap with you there. And if you found value today as an entrepreneur who is building a business that you can scale and sell, make sure you're subscribed to the channel so that we can can support you on that journey. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism. Com. I'm just your average multimillionaire and I'll see you on the next video.