How I'm Building a $100,000,000 Business

Today I'm going to talk about how we are building a path to $100 million in revenue a year bootstrapped. My name is Eric Siu and I am the founder of a holding company called Leveling Up and I'm here to level up the world. So let's jump into it. So when we think about the different businesses that we have, we have an ad agency which is called Single Grain and within the agency we've actually acquired other agencies, company called Northcutt, another one would be called BraveOne, and then we're looking at acquiring others. As well. We also have a SaaS product which is called ClickFlow, and ClickFlow is content marketing and SEO software, which I'll come back to in a second. And I'll actually write all these out too on my little iPad over here. So we have Single Grain, so that is the agency side of things, right? Then we have the software which is ClickFlow, and then we also have our education products, so that's part of Leveling Up, okay? And then leveling up, we'll come back to the whole holding company thing in a little bit. But that's education. And we also have Marketing School, which is where I'm partnered with another marketer named Neil Patel. And so that one is, we have kind of events and ads. That's kind of how that one looks. And there's an element of education, obviously, it's called Marketing School. We are also looking at buying other businesses too, right? So Let's just call it M&A over here, and I'll come back to that in a second, okay? Now, combine what we have right now, we have a healthy 8-figure business, and we're continuing to look to ramp. And for ClickFlow, we did crowdfund about a couple hundred thousand dollars or so. But other than that, everything's been bootstrapped. And just keep in mind again, I bought Single Grain for $2, and we're able to kind of turn the company around, and there was a lot of work to get there. Yeah, we're able to do it. And then the entire thesis the whole time was to figure out if we could turn that company around, could we take the cash flows and invest into more exponential or more durable sources of revenue? And largely we've been able to do that. So the vision has been able to happen. And, you know, over the years we've created other media properties. We've released a book called Leveling Up as well, which is kind of my philosophy. So everything is building around this whole leveling up philosophy, right? So earlier I talked about leveling up the world and that's a very broad mission. that I'll never be able to accomplish in my life, but that's something that can live on without me, right? And so if everything lives within the Leveling Up organization here, it's a lot easier because we use the businesses as our canvas to kind of point to people and say, hey, look, this is how we're leveling up the world. This is how we're proving that we can do it. And we've done it so many times and you can too, right? The book is basically the philosophy on playing the game of life and mastering the game of life. When you look at life as a game, it becomes more fun. You know, business is a good way to acquire the resources that you need to make the biggest impact that you'd like on the world. I'm not saying everyone needs to start a business. I'm just saying that's how we're doing it. And if you look at the most successful people in the world, they have businesses or they're, they're investing, right? Or they take in the revenues from the business and they continue to invest. They're not saving by any means, right? Which is what we've been taught by our parents, right? To continue to save money, work, you know, work and then get pension at the very end and then live off of Social Security. So that to me at least is not the way. The goal of leveling up is to get 1% better every single day. When we think about what we've been doing, so again, bought the agency for $2. It was a failing company and we were able to turn it around. And, you know, we took the cash flows from that business and now we're buying other agencies. And the reason why we're buying other agencies right now is not because we want to build this large agency conglomerate, but what we want to do is we want to buy capabilities that can help our internal companies long-term. And also the agency serves as a university for us. The way I look at it is we get to learn the newest trends when it comes to kind of what's going on with digital. We get to test out these trends too, and we get to work with the best clients in the world. So the Ubers, the Amazons, the Airbnbs of the world. And so it's kind of our university. It's our experimental lab as well. And we can also train up leaders from there. The long-term vision here is also to be able to train up leaders. We have marketing school, right? There's leveling up school. And we eventually want to have CEO school too. We want to have management schools. So we want to train people up on our own terms, right? And a lot of companies out there in the world, they have their own university programs for internal purposes. Sure, you know, we'll roll it out to people that work for us, but also we want to roll it out to other people around the world. We kind of want to make it accessible to more people because they need these. So there's the educational aspect. And we can also generate more revenue that way. More revenue, more resources. We can hire more people. We can reinvest in our people. We can— reinvest into the company or invest into R&D. So we're just looking at winning the game of resource allocation here, right? If you look at a game like StarCraft or any strategy game, it's really about resource management. And that's what business is. That's what life is. It's fun to look at it in that lens too, right? So right now what we're looking at doing, this is recorded as of September of 2021. We are looking at acquiring other agencies because we need more capabilities around analytics. We need more capabilities around creative. We need maybe more capabilities around engineering as well and product, right? And so it's what's been good for us too is when we look at acquiring these other agencies, because we've built up the podcast over the years, whether it's Leveling Up or Marketing School, the YouTube channel as an example, we've built up, you know, somewhat of a name in the marketing space, right? And we can leverage a little bit of brand equity that we have. So when we're talking to people, they know who we are. They trust us more. They look at our culture and they judge us based on the conversations that they've had with me as well. And it's easier to get a deal done because the trust has been prebuilt already and you're going to get better terms that way as well. And so that's one way we're looking at it, but also because we have a foothold when it comes to the world of software. So speaking at, you know, I've spoken at conferences like SaaStr, spoken at conferences like SaaStock. We rank well for agency type of words around SaaS, right? You know, we, we worked with a lot of SaaS clients too. Because we have kind of that foothold there, when you're— when we're niching down a little bit, we understand SaaS well. And so it makes sense for us to think about buying other SaaS companies. By the way, there's a reason why I invested into MicroAcquire, which is the Zillow of mergers and acquisitions. Because, you know, working with Andrew, I can sometimes— I can just talk to him and say, hey, like, what else are you seeing out there? I also know brokers from other companies such as FE International. I'm good friends with them as well. And so, you know, actually next week I'm going to a buying a business conference, right, where it's all owners. And so my focus for the next 12 months is to think about Think about deal flow, right? Where am I gonna get deal flow from? How am I gonna build these relationships with people? How am I gonna continue to build my audiences? Because that helps with deal flow too. It helps with recruiting. And so you can see all these pieces kind of starting to tie together. The agency is going to continue to long-term, it's gonna support what we have going on, on the, with our different business units. And we're gonna, the plan is to have different general managers or different CEOs running these different business units. For example, we have a GM for ClickFlow. We have GM for the education side of things too. And the education side is really exciting to me because if you were to strip me down to my essence, if I had no businesses, nothing right now, I would just love learning. I love teaching, right? And so the education side is very near and dear to my heart. It makes a lot of sense given what we have with Consulting School, Leveling Up School, which is— Consulting School is helping people build their agency, start or grow their agency. And then Leveling Up School is to help people start their dream business. And then we have different levels above that too. And that's also very scalable too. We talk about economies of scale here. When we also think about business, I would highly recommend reading the book Seven Powers. And that talks about the different levels of scalability that you might have with the business, different leverage points, right? So when you think about a Facebook, they have network effects. The more people use the network, the more it becomes valuable. Uber has network effects as well. Software has economies of scale. The more people are using the product, your marginal cost actually goes down. There are switching costs as well. So if you're an agency, you add in a bunch of services, it's actually harder for people to switch out of you, right? Or If you're doing such a good job, you're doing pay for performance, it's harder to switch out. So you got to think about the offer that you're putting together. And I really recommend also reading the book, $100 Million Offers by Alex Hormozi. So those are just a couple of things that you can do. I really, again, 7 Powers, look for the book summary out there. But if you look at the best businesses that are built out there, they at least have a couple of elements of the 7 Powers. Again, if you look at a Facebook, an Uber, and WhatsApp, They have those network effects, right? I also think about your counter positioning. So when you think about Airbnb versus Hilton as an example, Airbnb's kind of mission is to help people belong anywhere or belong everywhere. You can't necessarily say that with like a Hilton. You know, we look at the businesses, how we're thinking about this is we're looking at all the businesses that are very successful out there and we're looking at what fits within the 7 powers and we're also looking at bolstering our team as well. And we know this is a very long-term game. You know, we're also modeling ourselves after kind of Berkshire Hathaway, right? It's, you know, buy great businesses and hold them long-term. And sometimes a business might be trending downwards, like newspapers as an example, and you might have to get rid of that business or management might not be as good anymore. You might have to turn over management or eventually if they ran the company to the ground, you might have to get rid of the company, right? I'm the majority shareholders of all these different business units out there. We can make, we can call these shots. And as long as I, you know, look at things from a long-term lens, looking at taking care of our people, looking at taking care of the culture, looking at our overall, our mission, vision, values. All that stuff drives long-term growth. And I think it's inevitable that we get to $100 million a year. Look, it'll take time, but I mean, I'm in my mid-30s right now and I'm enjoying every single day. You know, Warren Buffett talks about tap dancing to work every single day. And I feel like I'm doing that. I get emotional when I say that, right? So if you enjoyed videos like this, I am going to create more stuff like this. Just hit the subscribe and hit the bell button and leave a comment below. If you are interested in building a $100 million business, tell us what that $100 million business is and tell us maybe why you don't want to do that, right? So that is it for this video and we will catch you in the next one.