Codie SanchezFounder @ Contrarian Thinking

The Journey to $10 Million

14 Jun 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:47

Codie Sanchez outlines a four-stage framework for scaling a business to $10M+ revenue: (1) founder does everything (up to ~$500k), (2) hire generalists (first $1M), (3) hire specialists alongside generalists (to about $5M), and (4) fully specialist team by ~$10M — summed as the “515 theory,” i.e., the business must restructure roughly every 5x increase in revenue.

Chapters

There's four stages you have to go to if you want to get a business to $10 million plus in revenue. First stage is you do everything. The janitor, you're the CEO, you're all of it. This is usually up to your first 500k in revenue. Second stage is generalists. You hire your first generalists and they do just about everything. That's your first million dollars in revenue. Then you start hiring specialists plus generalists who are real experts at one thing. The specialists start to replace some of the generalists. That's usually up to about five mil. And then when you get to about $10 million, everybody's a specialist. You have in a specialist in marketing, you're having a specialist in oper. This is the fun stage where you get to just run the business and other people actually operate the business. I call this the 515 theory. The idea that at every 5 to 1 in revenue level increase, your business has to change completely.