A Realistic Timeline of Growing a Business from $0 to $50k/mo

Today I want to talk about a realistic timeline by which you can grow a business from zero to $50,000 per month. And I'm qualified to teach this because we currently make high seven figures and we have 28 people who are working for us right now. I've built a high selling cold email course of all time. I've built five software apps in regards to cold email and I run a consulting business to do that. So I want to take you through a timeline by which how you can get up to levels like that and two important notes I want to relay to you is that it is way simpler than you think it is, but it's way more work than you think it is much simpler than what you think. Way more work than what you think. Let's start this off from 0 to 1 clients and the fundamentals by which you need to operate in order to go from precisely zero. People paying you money on the Internet, having one singular person who pays you to facilitate some action for them. Right? So we are going to operate under the assumption here that you are running some kind of like marketing agency, B2B Company, SMMA, and that it's a service business. You are doing some action for somebody and they are paying you for this. You're not a product business. Your service business. The first client is the single hardest client to get. It's very easy to understand why this is, and it is because you have zero evidence when you're trying to get money from another human. What they are more interested in is de risking because it hurts to lose $100 more than it feels good to gain $100. So when you're trying to sell people something, they are more interested in making sure they don't lose money than they are interested in making sure they make a lot of money. So what you need to be doing is optimizing at all times. You need to be optimizing for de risking for other people. And when you have zero clients, you've never done this before, ever. You have zero case studies, zero testimonials, zero people to vouch for you. It is this. Getting your first client in this situation is the hardest single client you will ever have to get in your entire life. Because there's no evidence. And evidence testimonials, case studies are 80% of the equation of getting somebody to actually pay. So with that said, there's two things that you need to be doing here. One is that you need to be doing the thing you're selling. Let me give you a for instance. Let's Say that you're going to take a typical service that a lot of people do in the beginning. They want to manage somebody's email list. I want to be a copywriter. I want to go send emails for somebody. You need to be running your own email list. You have to be doing this. It's completely unreasonable by which you wouldn't be doing this. Another example of this is I get a lot of people that come to me, they say, hey, can I edit your YouTube videos? Like, I know how to. I know how to get you a lot of subscribers on YouTube. If you know how to get a lot of subscribers on YouTube, why do you not have a lot of subscribers on YouTube? And even absolute bare minimum, why do you not even have just one singular video? I get roughly 5 to 10 cold outreach messages per day of people trying to sell me something. And they're almost always beginners. And 99.99% of the time they don't even do the thing that they're selling. You'll get people coming to, hey, do you want me to do your YouTube videos for you and get you to a hundred thousand subscribers? It's like, dude, you didn't even have a singular YouTube video yourself. Even if you didn't have a lot of subscribers, and even if you just didn't have like a lot of views, I wouldn't care because I'd still go to your videos and look at the editing style and the way by which the video you made was presented. And that would be just a form of competence. Look, you displaying to somebody that, yes, this is what you would get working with me, you have to be doing this. So a way to do this to facilitate showing people what they get when you have zero clients is giving free work. And I've said this a lot of times to people who don't have clients. And this is typically what I'll get when I tell someone to do free work. They'll say, well, I'm not going to do all this work for free. And it's like, what do you mean you're not going to do all this work for free? No, you're not even doing it for money. Like, you have to do it for free. I did it for free. I worked with so many people for free. So let me give you, for instance, let's say that you're trying to sell email marketing to somebody. You want to write emails to their list. And let's say it's like an E commerce brand. How do you do email marketing for E commerce brand? They probably use Klaviyo and they probably like nice, nice designed emails. They want them to look pretty. So don't you think it would be a good idea for you to go find 100e commerce brands that you would love to work with? This is called a Dream 100 strategy. You go subscribe to their email list and then you see the kinds of stuff that they're sending and the frequency by which you're sending. You take one of their emails, you redesign it all with the new design, a new copy, you take the file and you just give it to the owner. You say, hey, I've been on your email list for a while. I like what you guys are doing, I like your products. I wanted to send this over for you as a free redesign of your email. Feel free to use it. I think it will convert better, I think it will get more sales for you. If you're interested, I'm starting up a business to do this for E commerce brands. I'd love to have a conversation around this if you think this is valuable. And then what happens is one of two things going to happen. You're either going to use the thing or they're not going to use the thing. If they don't use the thing it's because it wasn't good. It just wasn't. Now I get this all the time. People will come to me and they'll try to pitch something like this to me and what they have given me like the free piece of work they gave me isn't good. So what you should do on the second follow up is send them a very honest message and say hey, just following up on this. Are you not using this because you haven't seen the message or is it because it wasn't good? And now you will have accomplished two things here by doing this. One is you will have a follow up and just get back in front of them. And two, if your stuff isn't good, they will tell you it's not good to which then your action forward, what you need to do after that is learn how to actually be good and make better email. So zero to one client. It's the hardest possible client you could get. And if you have zero evidence at all, no case studies, no testimonials, you should absolutely be doing free work. You give examples of free work to people, you start a conversation with them and if you want to get paid from them, do it on a performance basis. I'll make all of this for you. You try it out. If it works better than what you currently have. I'll just take percent of the increase. And now the function as to why you did this. The whole reason for this right here is to get one case study, one, one testimonial. That's what you're trying to do. Because now that we're going into this one to five clients section that I'm going to talk about, what you're doing here is taking the work you're doing from clients. You're making walkthroughs, checklists, case studies, explanations of things you've done, and you're turning it into what are called sales assets. But what is a sales asset? Sales asset would be a YouTube video, like a tutorial video, or a walkthrough video, or a case study video, or a document. And what you can do with these sales assets is go onto something like Twitter or something like LinkedIn and you do this thing where you tell people, I just made this client $37,000 by sending three emails to their list. If you want to see the exact emails I wrote, the exact strategy behind it, and the exact promotion we did, comment, send below this tweet and I'll DM it to you. And you can use a tool like hypefury or Tweet Hunter to automate this process. And then what that does is in order to get this document, people have to comment on it. And because somebody commented on it, it amplifies the Tweet or the LinkedIn post even farther. And it's this upward spiral loop. And you do this continuously, over and over and over again. And then the sales asset, you deliver them is actually linked to a YouTube video. And the YouTube video is the sales asset. You've SEO optimized the YouTube video around whatever keyword you're targeting. If it was klaviyo email, more you want to make sure you're putting like klaviyo email marketing, shopify E Commerce, and then people will just stumble upon this somehow. On YouTube specifically, it just happens. And now what you need to understand about these sales assets is they function for two reasons. They function for traffic generation, pushing traffic in the first place, and traffic conversion. Let me explain something to you. If you are sending cold emails, we're going to take two people who are sending cold emails with the same exact offer to the same exact audience, with the same exact script, using the same exact list, everything. You have the same exact landing page design. You have the same exact video sales letter on your page. But one of you has five YouTube videos. 100% of the time. The person with the YouTube videos wins all of the business. And I don't mean they get like a little bit more business, I mean they get all of the business. Because let me explain something to you very clearly like this. You are cold emailing somebody like a random person on the Internet, 100% cold traffic. They have no clue who you are. They want to see who you are. They are going to Google your name. And what's very nice about YouTube is it's an asset that Google owns. So if you're on YouTube and you have YouTube videos under your name, you're probably going to rank on Google when someone types in your name. And that's what you're trying to facilitate. You have to have this. You get your first client by getting free work, by giving free work in 100% risk free offers. Once you've got that client, you get the client results. This is required. You have to get the client results. And by getting them results, you are developing a process by which you become the person who capable of delivering results. So now that you are the person capable of delivering results, you can turn that into sales assets, walkthroughs, checklists, guides, tutorials, case studies. And you make these sales assets continuously on the Internet and you post them, you drive traffic to them over and over and over and over again, which gets more traffic. And because you have the sales assets, the traffic converts higher, which gets you another client to which then you can turn what you do for them into more sales assets. You see this loop, this is the same thing over and over and over again. So you're in the one to five clients phase and you're developing sales assets. So the next thing you need to be doing in the one to five clients phase is you need to be documenting your processes. So just before I said that you were developing a process, you're becoming the person capable of delivering results. Which means, and I'm telling you to make sales assets. That's around checklists and tutorials. These checklists and tutorials also work as internal documents of how to replicate what it is exactly you're doing. You were making what are called SOPs, standard operating procedures. Essentially what you were making is assets to where you could take some random human, inject them into your business and have them facilitate these processes in, in SOPs to which they could take some client, you sign and get that client results and take them from A to B, from point 1 to 2, from point A to Z. You have a process. It's the same thing over and over. And over again. And now what is happening during this phase, during this one to five clients phase, is that you're getting more evidence that you are in fact the person capable of doing this. That is an inherent de risking for people because people follow the herd. So what happens with this? When you have more evidence, you can get way ballsier with the way you charge. You don't have to do 100% performance based and you only get paid after the money money is made. You could start charging money up front. And the reason you can charge money up front is because they're more confident in your ability because you have indisputable evidence that you are the person capable of doing this. You see how this works? I remember when I was first starting this and I was always so confused about like, how do you get people to pay you this much money? And I was like, and it was like, is someone hiding this like special trick I have to do? And it's like in my head I just like inherently knew. I'm like, no, it has to be that, like it's just the evidence and like you're probably thinking the same thing. And I'm here to like, like affirm to you that yes, what you think is obvious is actually the case. But no one's just saying this to you. That actually is how you do it. Like you just have to do it for free and then get evidence, and then use the evidence to get more people to pay you and you can get ballsier, ballsier and charge more and more money. Now something I want to explain to you, a big mistake I see people do is let's say that they're charging like $2,000 per month for their service, they're making their clients like 8 grand charge client 2000, you make them about 8 grand on average, that's a 4 times return. And now a big mistake that people will make during this is they will want to raise their prices higher. They want to be, I want to charge 4k a month. Now I'm making my clients aka a month, I want to charge them 4k. However, what's happening here is that you're getting into the area where you're pricing and your offer and your value proposition based on the evidence you have is no longer a no brainer. Right? Inherently, if you charge someone 2000 to make them 8000, it's a four times return. Otherwise on their end, it's a 25% cost on their margin for the business. If you start trying to charge 4,000, that 25% goes to 50%. But let's say the cost of their fulfillment is 30%. So you're making more money than that. So that doesn't make sense. So if you want to go from charging 2,000amonth to charging 4,000amonth, you got to be able to make your clients double. You got to make your clients 16 grand. If you want to charge 4,000 because you have to, it has to be a no brainer. So this was always confused, like how do you get people to, how do you get someone to pay you 5,000, 000? I was always confused by this when I was, when I was much younger. And the answer is very simple. It's you make them 25k. If you want to charge someone 10k, you got to make them 40k. If you want to charge Someone 50k, you got to make them 200k. That's how this works. And now what's happening here in this one to five client range, when I'm telling you to gradually increase your prices, the only way this works is by two things. One, you're learning how to make your clients more money in the first place because you're just becoming better at what you do. And then two, you start selling to larger businesses. Because when you sell to a larger business there's more leverage and they can handle more stuff. And the best way for me to help you understand this is let's take that, that email marketing example. You were making a client $8,000 per month on their email list that has 3,000 people. What do you think you can make a client who has an email list of 20,000? It's a lot more, right? Because there's just simply more people. This is another topic I'm not recommending you go start a business where you write emails for people's list. It's actually one of the hardest things to sell. And this gets into the difference between traffic generation and traffic conversion offers, which I'll make another video on. But the concept remains. So we're going talk about five to 20 clients here. I'm going to recap what we've just said so far. So 0 to 1 clients, it's the first client is the single hardest one that you will ever acquire ever in your life. So you need to do the thing you're selling and give free work to get the first client. Once you have the first client, you need to deliver results for them, turn those results into sales assets and start documenting your SOPs. And then you begin charging more money to larger businesses and you start gradually going up the ladder. This is what you do. So now we're going to talk about what you do from 5 to 20. Clients. Clients. What you need to be doing here is hiring people. Because what typically happens here, it's normally around like the 10k to 15k a month mark. It's extremely difficult to get past the 10 to 15k per month mark by yourself. And if you keep signing clients, you're gonna have an actual psychotic breakdown. It's too hard. It's way too much work. So when I tell you to go higher, so let's say they're gonna cost like 2 grand a month, and you're making 10 grand a month, what you're thinking here is, I'm about to lose 20% of my income of what I take home, of what I live off, of what I. I pay my rent with, of how I eat food. That's what you're thinking of. You make 10k, you got to hire some for 2k a month. You're like, wow, 20% of my business gone. That is the incorrect way to think of it. You need to think of it like this. Instead. From 0 to 10k, you're selling your time, of which there is a zero capital requirement for that. However, the next 10k on top of that requires some capital additional labor that you have to pay for. So the first 10k is 100% margin. The next 10k is 80% margin. Do you see what I'm doing here? And then very gradually, the margin goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down. As you get hired, it's increments. The next person you hire should get you from this level to the next level. This is how this works. You go up and then you baseline for a while, and then you go up. And this is what, like your. Your revenue graph will look like. Your monthly revenue revenue go up, and then you baseline for a while, and then you go up, and then you baseline for a while, you hit ceilings, and when you hit that ceiling, you establish a new floor where it's like a 20 to 30% range where you hang around in there. And you can only get past that ceiling with the fundamental changing of how you operate. And typically that fundamental changing is hiring somebody. Then you go to the next level, you get to the next ceiling, and you do this literally for the rest of your life. This never changes, ever. You do this forever. And now what you will be doing here is because you have been acquiring all this labor. The second thing that you will be doing in the 5 to 20 clients range is you will be selling different forms of your offer. And now what do I mean by forms? Let's say that we're going to keep this example. You do email marketing for someone up to this point, would you have been selling as a monthly recurring service to larger businesses? Right. Your minimum client makes $50,000 per month. However, 99% of businesses in existence don't make $50,000 per month. They're all poor. So this is like, this is actually something very interesting to understand because, because a lot of you guys, you might go, you might see some business, they have a nice pretty website, they got the awards, We've been in business for 10 years and a bunch of, a bunch of bullshit like that and you're gonna think like, oh, these guys make a lot of money. But as you get on a bunch of sales calls and like you've been doing this for years and you talk to so many people, most businesses make no money. They're all poor. Like all of them. There are more businesses that make $5,000 per month, that make 10,000amonth. There's more businesses that make $10,000 per month and make 20,000 per month. There's more Businesses that make 20,000 per month than make 50, then make 100, then make 200. The higher the requirement, the larger the business you want to work with, the less of them exist. So let's say you've been operating in this range. You sell, your clients typically make anywhere from like 40,000 to $100,000 per month. And there's X amount of people that exist like that on the planet. And typically those people, people pay you anywhere from like, let's say you've been selling them 3,000 to $5,000 per month services to people who make 40 to 100 grand. That's what you sell to them. Now what will happen as you have been developing these sales assets and aggregating traffic onto the Internet and having people come into you all the time and calls are getting booked, yada yada yada, 70% of them aren't even going to be at 40K. And then you're going to have like 1% of them that make like 500 grand. So would you start doing, you start selling different offer forms to those different segments of, of the market. So one different offer form of your done for you email marketing service might be, hey, I just set up a welcome flow for you and you just sell that to the lower businesses. It's like a one time service. And then the people who are way up there might need YouTube ads written for that they might need, video sales letters written for them, they might need dozens and dozens and dozens of email flows written for them. It's a lot more work. You charge a shit ton more money to facilitate that. Now you have different kinds of offers. You really shouldn't be doing this until you're at like 50k a month around there. But this is how this works. You start scaling horizontally. You're selling to different segments of the market. That's what you do. That's how you get to like a million each. And now I want to give you a realistic timeline by which this will allow. So let's go back to zero to one client. What is the typical time it takes somebody from absolute zero getting their first client? You need to be doing two things here. One is you need to be learning how to do the thing in the first place. So it's a lot of work because you don't know anything. Can you have zero clients? You think you're smart, but you're not. You don't know anything, you don't know how to do it any. And you to be learning the thing for like a thousand hours. And then in terms of prospecting, getting the client, that should be about 200 hours. And obviously this, this is gradual over time. But typically I normally see it takes someone like 90 days of like actual consistent every single day effort. Now when I say to you 90 days, what you say is, oh, that's not that bad. Three months. However, when you are an individual human experimenting every individual day of those 90 days and it seems like absolutely, absolutely nothing is working, almost all of you quit, almost every single one of you quit because it's hard. It's way simpler. Like I said earlier in the video, right at the beginning of this video, it's very simple. I told you what to do it. You need to do the thing you're selling. You need to give free work. It's very simple. It's not more complex than that. But you are unaware of how much you have to actually do that. When I tell you give free work. That's a lot of work to do to someone to do that to 100 people. And you're thinking, oh, this is going to be easy. It's not grow up from one to five clients. So zero to one is about 90 days. I'm assuming consistent effort, bare minimum, four hours a day. It's 90 days. It would be unreasonable that you don't get your first client 90 consecutive days of four hours. It would, it would be, it would Be a mathematical discrepancy. If you couldn't do that, it would be very strange if you could. One to five clients. This should take you another 90 to 120 days, three to four months to go from one client to five clients. Now, do you see how this, like, it accelerates? You see how this accelerates like that? This is compounding, when I tell you, compounding. What you're thinking of is like the stock market. Oh, I put money in here and it compounds over time. And Warren Buffett and great, greatest investor of all time, yes, that's compounding of capital. But in this particular instance, you are compounding competence. You're just becoming better at the thing because let me explain it to you like this. If I tell you to go start up a business right now, you need to learn how to buy a domain. You need to learn how to get a your name@domain.com. you need to learn how to build the website. You need to learn how to accept payment. You need to learn how to film yourself on a camera and like, embed it on a site. You need to learn how to tweet. You need to learn how to make a YouTube video. You get people in college, you got to learn how to close the calls. And then you get the client. And then you need to learn how to, like, get the client the results in the first place. This is a lot of stuff you need to do for the first time. Once you get the first client and you've done it already the second client, you don't have to do anything for the first time. You see what I mean? That's why it goes faster, because you no longer have to do anything for the first time. So one to five clients should be about another 90 to 120 days. Five to 20 clients about another three to six, six months. And all you're doing here, literally for the rest of the existence, for the rest of your life, all you're doing is collecting case studies and making more sales assets. That's all you're doing. You're building SOPs, you're hiring people, and you're going through that series of ceiling, floor, ceiling, floor, ceiling, floor, ceiling, floor. And you just do this continuously for the rest of your life. That's all you do. So I have two ways by which you can proceed forward. If you go into the description of this video, you're going to see two links. One, links to Cold Email Mastery 2.0, where we will show you how to create a business where you are sending cold emails for other people. And you make a commission off the deals they close. Close. We show you how to do everything, how to operate a cold email system and actually get the client's results. And we give you access to our clients who want to hire you in the first place. So we make it very simple for you two, as you will see. Client Ascension. Client Ascension is essentially an accelerator program for marketing agencies, B2B business owners. We show you how to create these cold email systems, these sales asset system, make a website, make a video sales order, how to prospect for clients, how to get them on a call, how to close them, how to hire people, how to make the SOPs, how to do everything from end to end. You will see an absolutely absurd amount of case studies studies on the Client Ascension page. You opt in, you put your information in there, you go to the next page. There's going to be a video that explains how our offer works. And you're going to see an absolutely absurd amount of client results. Go check that out and subscribe to me. I love you. Goodbye.