How I would start a business (if I could start over)

This is how I'd start a business if I had to start over again. Right now I run a high seven figure consulting and software business with 28 people working for us. And if I had to do this all over again, here's exactly how I would go about the process. The first step of the process is you need to learn a high income skill. Bullshit. Now this is the typical advice that you get from people online. What they're going to tell you is that you need to go learn some skill and then you're going to take that skill and you're going to sell it as a service to other businesses. But this is flawed for a very particular reason. I'm going to explain why. Let's say you pick a random skill. And your random skill is that you're going to build websites. You're going to get really, really good doing websites. So how would you sell your website services? And the answer would be through something like advertising, cold email, cold DMs, content marketing, a bunch of mechanisms that revolve around generating traffic. However, because you ignored all of these things and the only thing you decided to learn was building a website, you have the prettiest website in the world, but nobody goes to the website, so you can't ever sell your website. You, you need to learn how to do everything. You have to have a vast array of different skills in order to run anything successful. So you can have the best website in the world. But if you have bad copywriting on your landing page, if you don't know how to get people to the landing page in the first place, and you don't know how to close sales calls, and you don't know how to hire people or create SOPs, and you don't know how to communicate with clients to give them a good experience, you're never going to run a successful business regardless of how good you are at making websites. Which what I did was this concept of a spider web. So one of the first things I had to do was in fact learn how to make a website. And what I did from here was I looked up websites versus landing pages and then I decided I needed a landing page. And I came across an article that was lead pages versus click funnels. And it was a comparison between the two. And I decided to click on click funnels and learn about that. And it led me over to a webinar. It was a nice big presentation by Russell Brunson and it was a webinar and it was an offer. You got a bunch of courses and you Got six months of click funnels. It was like a thousand dollars. So I bought it. And all those courses taught me bunch of other things in particular around copywriting and getting people to the landing page in the first place. And this led me down the road of yes, I know how to build a website now, but now I'm learning how to actually get people to the website in the first place. And it was only through that understanding and that spider webbing of what needed to happen across multiple skills that allowed me to run a successful business in the first place. So what I originally thought was going to be a web design business actually turned into an advertising business. I started running an advertising marketing agency where I would do Facebook ads for people. Then I figured ads are expensive. Let me try to see if I can generate traffic organically. Which led me to organic Instagram marketing, which is what developed into my first successful business ever. Which got me to $12,000 per month at 20 years old. But I was only able to make that business successful because I knew how to do a lot of things. And those lot of things entailed building the funnel, figuring out how to accept credit card pages on the funnel, making a video sales letter on the landing page, which entailed copywriting and then all of the other copy on the funnel, and then collecting email addresses. And then how do you take that email address and send it over to the software? And then what do you write in the emails to follow up with people? And then using organic content to get in front of people and using cold email to directly outreach to prospects. So I knew all eight of those things and it was only having a minimum viable competence around all eight of those things that allowed me to sell one of those things as a service. So it isn't always as easy as just learn a high income skill and sell the skill as a service. There's all of the peripheral things that are necessary to facilitate that in the first place. And if you neglect all of them, you can't make anything work. And now the second step of this process. Need to pick a niche. This is also bullshit. When somebody on the Internet tells you to pick a niche, you are taking this quite too literally. Because what most people do is they pick a random niche out of a hat and try to force a random high income skill onto. But then they shortly learn that they are trying to solve a problem for a niche where the problem doesn't even exist. Somebody says I want to do Facebook ads for plumbers. But then you very quickly learn that a lot of plumbers are 100% booked up for the rest of eternity and they don't actually need more leads or more sales. What they need is employees. And they would be more prone to getting a recruitment offer, can hire more plumbers to work under them, and that's what they actually need. So what you need to do is not pick a niche, but find a problem, like a real, actual pressing problem that people are having. Now, here's an extremely intelligent way that you can go about this. So right now, before this YouTube video and before the next YouTube video you have, or when you open your phone on Instagram or when you go scrolling on TikTok, you typically are ignoring these, but you shouldn't. And they're called ads. And there are a couple ads that you have been seeing constant, over and over and over and over again. Keep seeing these ads. Have you ever stopped and asked yourself, why do you keep seeing those ads? And the answer is very obvious. The person with that offer running that business is getting a return on their ad spend subsequently. Also that the offer, the thing they're selling is also working. Now, let me explain something to you. I'm currently in the market to buy a house. And I had about a month ago, absolutely no conception of what a good deal looked like. But then I started going on Zillow every single day, looking at houses. What got listed today, what got sold today, was it going to prices, what the house looks like, the area the house was? I had no idea what a good offer looks like. But now, because I've seen so many and I've been best investigated so many, I can inherently know what a good deal is. So what that means and what I'm telling you, what I'm instructing you to do and what objectively works is that you need to know what offers are selling in the market so that you know what a good offer looks like. What are they selling? Who are they selling it to? What is the structure of the offer? What is the pricing? You need to be watching the ad, you need to be clicking on the ad, you need to be opting into the ad. You need to be putting a real phone number in there so you can see what they're saying to you. You need to be putting a real email in there so you could see the emails they send you. And you need to see what they're offering you, because if they keep spending money on these ads, it obviously works. So you need to see what offers are actually selling in the market. And what this allows you to do is extract the pain points that a particular market is having. And only once you have been subjected to so many of these will you understand what a good offer is. And that is inherently what pick a niche means, is understanding the actual problems that people are having. In in particular, what people are buying. A beginner entrepreneur, their conception of making a business is make a VC backed startup and raise funding. No, don't do that. You're not trying to make the new Facebook. You're trying to make 30,000amonth or 50,000amonth over the next year and build a sustainable business that pays for your life and allows you to something where you can live off of and actually enjoy. You don't need this absolute mega moonshot. You need to find out what people are actually buying right now. You need to find the real pain points of a real market and sell a solution to them. Because you have minimum viable competence by all those things that you were learning earlier, can you take those skills and turn it into an offer that solves a real problem for a real group of people and formulate those skills into a package that takes that person from point A to point B? Will you be able to make a successful business? And then what happens from here? After you've got a client, you sold them an offer and you were able to actually take them from point A to point B. Now you get a case study and you can make sales assets around how you were able to take this person in this niche from point A to point B. And you make a YouTube video on it, you make a document on it, you put it in a video sales order and you distribute this across the Internet. And because you have proof that you were able to do this for somebody, it becomes easy, easier to sign the next client over and over and over again. And then you have a client and the client says, hey, I'm having this problem. And because that's a real market that really buys things and they just told you directly to your face, I have this real problem. Can you go and learn some other skill in order to facilitate solving that new problem for them, which allows you to get another case study that solves another problem and prospect for another person and sell them that offer to which you do the same spiraling loop? So what you're probably thinking here is, okay, I'm going to become minimally, viably competent in a vast array of things that allow me to facilitate many different forms of an offer. Two, I'm going to go figure out real problems that real markets are really having and they're really buying right now at this precise moment. Exactly. So now you're wondering how do I take those vast array of skills that I'm minimally, viably competent at and how do I formulate it into an offer and a real value proposition that I'm market would actually be interested in? And the way that you can facilitate this is by clicking on this video that's going to show up right here. This is my video on offer formulation. You're going to watch this video and that will show you how to make a value proposition and how to make an offer that people will actually buy. Go watch it, subscribe. Love you.