24 Business Lessons I Learned Making $50,000/mo

Hey, hope you're having an amazing day. My name is Jim, and in today's video, we will be talking about the 24 business lessons that I've learned making $50,000 per month. And on the left side, you see a screenshot where I made $57,000 in a single month. And the reason I have that there is kind of just to start with, just some proof, right? Because obviously anyone online can make any claims, but that's just a screenshot of my Stripe payment processor on of me making $57,000 in a single month with my own lead generation agency. So in today's video, I'll be talking about the 24 business lessons that I've learned while doing this. And the reason why I picked 24, the number 24 is because today I'm filming this on July 2nd. Tomorrow on July 3rd is actually my birthday, and I'm turning 24 years old. So I figured there's no better time to film 24 business lessons to those of you who actually care and. And to those of you who want to learn from me. So jumping into it, the first lesson that I learned is that the first client that you sign will be the most difficult that you sign ever, right? And everything literally compounds after that. So going from 0 to $10,000 per month or 0 to 3,000, $5,000 per month is significantly harder than going from 10k to 50k per month. I know for me, it took me roughly almost a year to go from. No, it took me 60 days to go from 0 to 10k. It took me around a year to go from 10k to 50k. But in between then, I was making between 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars per month. And not even. The numbers aside, numbers aside, it was more so the things that I was doing, it was definitely most challenging to get my business off the ground because obviously, when I was first starting, I literally didn't know what I was doing. I have no proof, I have no case studies, I have no testimonials. And I was kind of just pitching business owners and kind of being like, hey, I could help you do this and that and that. Just trust me, right? And everyone who's watching this video, you're watching this video and you're in that stage where you're first starting out. That's exactly what you'll be doing as well. And everything gets significantly easier after you get that first client, that second client, that third client, because now you have proof that what you're selling works, and you're proving to yourself as well. That you can actually do it and that you can make money online. So the first lesson is the first client, the first thousand dollars is just by far the hardest thing to ever do in this business. And everything else compounds literally after that. Lesson two is when people say that building a successful business is hard or was hard, it means that they continue going no matter what terrible thing happened. So the biggest thing that happens is when people start a business, everything looks all good, rainbows and sunshines. And the second things get hard. That's where 99% of people quit. And anytime anything goes bad, that's where 99% of people quit. So whenever people say building a business is hard, what they mean? The hard part is getting through those challenges where 99% of people quit. Because when everything is going well in your business, when you're making money, you're booking a lot of sales calls, you're getting great results for your clients. Yeah, obviously nothing is hard. But what becomes hard is when things go wrong. Right? When your team members quit, when your client decides to leave or they fire you, or you're struggling to book sales calls, or you're not getting clients, or those are the moments where 99% of people quit. And the people who stick through it and make it through those are the people who will win. And when they look back to those moments, that's what they mean when they say business is hard. Lesson three, 90% of sales related problems can literally be solved by selling to people with more money. Because the largest objection people can have on any sales call is, I need to think about it. Oh, this is too expensive. Yada, yada, yada. But if you're selling to someone with just more money. So if you're selling to business owners who actually have money, 90% of your problems will literally go away. Because you know logistically they can afford your services. If you're pitching your lead Generation services for $2,500, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. If you're pitching it to a business owner who's making $50,000 per month or $100,000 per month, they pay more in structures. I pay more than $3,000 a month in stripe payment processing fees just to process the payments so I could logistically afford a service. Now, the only reason why I wouldn't buy a service is because it doesn't make sense for me or I don't believe the person who I'm buying it from. I don't need the service, all of these other things. But if you sell to people with more money, 90% of your problems will literally be solved because you're selling to someone who could logistically afford your services. You just have to convince them that, that they need your service and you're the right person to do that for them. Now, the fourth lesson is it's way more difficult to get people on a sales call than it is to close them on that sales call. So the hardest part is just getting that conversation because people are busy. Time is, you know, as people say, time is worth more than money. So if you're pitching to business owners, people who are just extremely busy, it's just significantly harder to get on a sales call. And what you will find is most people who you do get on a sales call, you, they're there for a reason. The reason why they're taking 30 minutes out of the day to talk with you over a zoom call or a Google Meets call is because they have a problem and they think that you can help them, right? In fact, they're actually hoping that you can help them, right? They go to that sales conversation praying that you have the solution to whatever is the largest problem for whatever service that you're selling. So you need to understand that it's just way harder to get people on a sales call, generate those leads than it is to actually make money and close people while you have them on that zoom call. Now lesson five is most people fail because they refuse to go all in on their business and make things happen. Because what I see happens to a lot of people is a lot of people say they want to make 5,000amonth, they want to make 10,000amonth, they want to make all of this money and do all of these things, go on vacations, have the freedom, the time freedom, all of those things. But, but when it comes time to actually putting in the work and making that happen, they just kind of go ghost and they disappear, right? They start all motivated and again, right? The second things get hard, they just disappear, right? Because it's just way easier for them to go back to whatever they were doing before, right? So most people feel in business not because of the strategies or not because of all these other things, but it's more so because they just haven't mentally committed to, to the process. They're not ready to burn off bridges and go 100% all in into whatever it is that they're doing and whatever venture it is that they're doing. Lesson 6. You're only focused while you're going from zero to $10,000 per month should Be focusing on signing clients. So focus on generating traffic and generating as much eyeballs as humanly possible onto your offer, onto your business, and onto what you sell. If you're spending all of your time focusing on signing clients, taking sales calls, you will get to $10,000 per month. The math, just maths, right? There's no situation where you're spending all of your time generating traffic. You're sending a lot of cold emails, cold DMs, talking to a lot of people, and you don't make money, right? If you're talking to 100 people, you're going to get at least one person or two people to pay you money for your service, right? No matter how bad it is that you're selling, that no matter how bad at it, that you are at sales as a skill, you will close people. If we're talking to 100 people, 1,000 people in a single month, right? It's just impossible not to. Lesson seven is 90% of business problems can be solved by generating more traffic onto your offer. And what is that you do? So this goes hand in hand with the previous lesson. But again, right again, if you just focus all of your time on getting as many people to know about who you are, you will make money. It's impossible not to. Quite literally impossible. Lesson eight, if you are afraid of client fulfillment, you will end up sabotaging your own sales calls. Because I see this all the time as well, especially with people who sell services, right? Most people are very hesitant and scared of jumping on sales calls when they haven't dialed in, dialed in their client fulfillment process. So what happens is when they're actually taking that sales call, they subconsciously just bomb that sales call, right? They say the wrong things. They're sabotaging themselves because they feel like even if they close a person, they wouldn't be able to deliver results for that client. But that's a completely wrong way to look at this and a completely wrong perspective. Because at the end of the day, the very first client that you sign, the second client you sign, the third client you sign, it will be a learning curve. Obviously, if you've delivered your service 100 times to 100 different people, the 100th client will get exceptional results. Because you dialed everything in, you know exactly what you're doing. But why would you expect you to have everything figured out the first time you sell your service, the second time you sell your service, the third time you sell your service? It's just not possible, right? Every single product is worse. The first iteration, the first time they sell that product. The first iPhone was the worst iPhone that Apple has ever released. And now the iPhone 15 is arguably the best iPhone they have ever released because it took them 15 years and 15 product generations to to refine that product. And the same exact same thing happens with your own service. So don't be afraid of selling your service because at the end of the day, you need to get your reps in in order to actually get good at delivering your service is a constant loop. Lesson nine, it is significantly easier to deliver great results to a client who pays more money. And this kind of sounds like common sense, but. But the client who is paying you $3,000 will almost always get significantly better results than the client who pays you $500. And the reason why is because a couple of reasons actually. Right. A good reason would be if they can afford to pay you $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, there's a very strong chance that their business is making money. Meaning they have a strong offer, they have case studies, the product market fit, people want what they sell. But if another client is paying you $500 because that's the most they can afford to, there's a very strong chance they're just not making that much money. Meaning their business is likely not as developed or not as structured or just not as strong as a business as the same client who could pay you three, four, five thousand dollars a month. Now the other reason is people who pay more money, they're way more committed in the process. If you're selling a done for you service, yes, on one hand, you're basically doing 99% of everything of your service, delivering the service for your client. So, but you still need your client to be on board with the process, to be committed to trust the process. And usually clients who pay more money, they're just way more committed than the client who pays less. So make sure you're selling to people with more money and charging more money as a result. Now lesson 10 is there are really only four main problems, or shall I say four main pillars to any business. They are marketing, sales, service and operations. And, and if you want to make money selling to other businesses, pick one of these four pillars and sell a solution around these pillars, right? So if you're going to help people with marketing and generating leads, pick marketing, right? If you're helping people close deals because you're really good at sales, then pick sales. Or if you really know what you're doing, if you're a cold email expert, then work with businesses to help them build cold emails. Now, I will say that the most value type valuable type of solutions that you could sell covers more than one of these pillars. So for example, you're selling cold email lead generation as a service, you're technically covering the pillars around in marketing and sales as well. So you're covering two things, which makes your service just way more valuable. And as a result, you're able to charge way more money. Now, lesson 11 is creating content is the secret to getting successful online business quickly. Even if you barely get any views. Because what will happen is the second you decide to make content on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on whatever platform you choose, what will happen is your traffic will increase because you're getting more eyeballs onto what you're doing. Whether that's organically or with ads. Your response rates will increase whenever you're messaging people, whether that's on cold emails or cold DMs, or making YouTube videos or call to actions. Your response rates will increase because people trust you more. And your close rates will increase because people will jump onto sales calls already knowing what you do and believing that you're the man already or the woman, the person to help them with whatever it is that they need to do. So creating content is the most important thing. We live in a time in 2024 where the market has just changed. It's very, very challenging. I don't want to say it's impossible, but it's very, very challenging to succeed and make money in online business without showing face and creating content. That's just the reality of 2024. If you want to succeed with online business, you have to be ready to make content online. Lesson 12 is everything is a skill issue. So think about it like this. Anything you're struggling with, it just means you're not that good. You have a skill that you need to continue developing and continue refining if you want to succeed, whether that's making more money or getting more clients or whatever the case is. Think about it like this. If you are more skilled at cold emails, so if you're just better at writing cold emails, you'd get more replies. If you were more skilled at sales, meaning you're just better at sales, you'd close more deals. And if you were more skilled at your service, you would be able to charge more money because you're helping your clients make more money as a return. So everything is literally a skill issue. Lesson 13 is never stop client acquisition. Understand that cash flow is the backbone to any successful business. So one of the largest mistakes that I made when I started my business, I think it was after I hit my first 20k month, I actually turned off my cold email campaigns. And that was one of the biggest mistakes that I have ever made. Because what happened, my thought process was alright, now I have a bunch of clients. I should probably spend all my time just delivering service and making sure my clients get the best results humanly possible. And I turned off my cold emails because obviously I started the business by myself. I don't have a co founder, I don't have any of that, any of those things. So I turned up my cold email acquisitions and what happened was my leads started drying up and I wasn't able to grow my business. I was more so just maintaining my business. But if you want to grow your business, you need to make sure that you're constantly keeping your client acquisition channels always on. Now lesson 14 is if you refuse to show your face on camera and create content, everything you do will be 99% more more hard. The market has changed. It goes hand in hand with the content thing that we talked about, I think three or four lessons earlier. But you just have to be creating content. If you want to succeed and you like money and you want to do it in a relatively short period of time, you need to create content, right? And if you don't want to do it, then business is just not for you. Suck it up, right? If you want to make six figures a year, if you want to make 10, 15, 20, 25, $50,000 a month, you need to be creating content. It's very challenging to find someone in the online business world who is making significant amount of money and they're not creating content, right? Just look around. Every single person that you find making significant amounts of money online, they are making content. If they're making content and making millions of dollars in the process, why are you not? That's a good question, right? Why are you not creating content if everyone else is? Lesson 15 is there's only two ways to learn things. The first is by banging your head against the wall and wasting six months trying a bunch of things, basically trial and error. Or the second way is you learn by working with someone who is 10 steps ahead of you. Pretty self explanatory, right? When I was first starting out, I chose the first route because I just didn't have that much money. I was in debt. I was like, all right, I have nothing else to lose. I might as well just try this on my own. Luckily for me, I Just happened. Maybe I got lucky and I just happened to do the right things and, and I saw success pretty quickly. But the vast majority of people, that's not the same story. The vast majority of people will run into a challenge, they won't know how to fix it. They'll get stuck somewhere or they'll try something and it's not going to work and it's going to fail, right? And they'll end up wasting months or maybe even years just not making any money. Now the second way is if you do have more money, you have some capital and you're ready to invest it, pay someone to work with, work with someone who, who is 5, 7, 10 steps ahead of you, who's able to give you that guidance so that you can shortcut that entire process and get the result that you're looking for in a timely manner. Because opportunity cost is a really real thing. Now lesson 16 is you will never be 100% confident that you could deliver the service for the clients that you close. You kind of just have to figure it out as you go along with the process because understand that if you don't close the client, they will go and pay someone else who decided to close them. So this again kind of goes hand in hand with the service delivery lesson, right? You will never be 100% confident. Even now, when I close clients for my own lead generation agency, I have a 95% certainty that I will get them results because I've just done it so many times and I'm really good at what I do, but I'm still not 100% certain where. I just know, guaranteed that I'll get them a specific result because there's always a lot of different variables and you will never be 100% confident, especially in the beginning when you've never done this before. If you only work with one, two or three clients, that's just the facts. But if you get hesitant and you hesitate and you don't close that client because you're not confident, you're just going to lose a sale to someone else who just decided to close that person. You have to understand this, this is a very important lesson. Lesson 17 is 80% of success with cold emails literally comes from, from your offer and the relevancy of your message. So a lot of people think you have to write something super fancy or you define some random strategy that is untapped, that's unsaturated in order to get results, or cold emails, when in reality all you need is to make sure that your messaging is relevant to whoever it is that you're reaching out to. And you're selling something that people just want. Because if you're selling something that people don't want, you could use the most advanced strategies you could use. Personalize your emails, every single sentence, every single word, but it's still not going to get you results. Those are the two things you need to focus on, offer and relevancy if you want success with cold emails. Lesson 18 is charging $3,000 for your service is really no different than charging $500, right? You're struggling to charge a high amount of money. And the reason why is because it's a mindset problem. Because you feel like $3,000 is a lot of money. And it is, right? For the average person, $3,000 is a lot of money. But you have to understand, especially if you're selling to businesses, $3,000 is really not that much. Right? Again, in my own example, right, where I'm making $50,000 per month, I pay more than $3,000 every single month to Stripe or to PayPal or to Wise, whatever my payment processor is. I spend more paying money to these platforms just to process my money, right? So $3,000 is really not that large of a number, especially if you're selling to businesses that are making money. And it's literally just a mindset thing, right? Understand that you will make more money by charging more. You end up working with better clients, and you will almost always get better results if you charge more money. Now, lesson 19 is most people give up after trying something for literally two weeks. And what happens is they then go and say, oh, this doesn't work. The strategies don't work. When reality, good things take. If you're watching this video and you're following me on YouTube, it's probably because you want to build your own business or you're interested in building your own business and making money, whether that's $1,000 a month, $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month or more. You want to improve your current life situation financially by building a business. You have to understand that good things take time. If you think you could build a $10,000 per month business or a 50k per month business by, you know, just copying someone else and trying something for a week and a half, it's not going to happen, right? It takes work, it takes discipline. There's a lot of trial and error, but obviously it's not rocket science, right? It's relatively simple. As someone who has went through that entire process, it's not the hardest thing I've ever done. If you're doing the right things and you're just locked in and you're committed to figuring things out and, you know, solving your problems along the way. Now lesson 20 is service based businesses are the best businesses to start to get to your first $10,000 per month because you are offering a skill and selling it as a service, meaning your cost of delivery, your cost of the service that you're delivering is very, very low. And on top of that you're learning a high income skill that can be transferred to any other business. So one of the largest mistakes that I see people make is when they're starting from zero and they want to make money, they want to get to their first 5k per month, they 10k per month, they start really complex business models. They try building a software or they try drop shipping or Amazon FBA or building a brand, all of these other things. But you have to understand that while all of those things work and you can make a lot of money, I know people making millions of dollars in dropshipping. The problem is it's a very hard thing to start with if you are a complete beginner. If you don't have any skills, it'll be very hard for you to actually make money. And due to the fact that you probably need to invest a lot of money up front or do all of these other things, your chance of failure is catastrophic. If you fail, you will lose a lot of money in the process. So always start with a service based business because you're learning a skill, which you can learn, whether that's on YouTube or buying courses or working with someone, whatever the case is, you could learn a skill and then sell that as a service. And even down the line, you're still able to use that skill in future business ventures. Now lesson 21 is collecting proof and case studies should be your number one focus. After you get past $10,000 per month, signing clients become exponentially easier with proof. And that kind of makes sense, right? It's kind of common sense. If you have proof that your service works, you're obviously going to get more people who are interested in working with you. So from 0 to 10k, your only focus should be on signing clients from 10k and beyond. Your only focus should be upgrading your service, making it better, and collecting as much case studies and proof as humanly possible. Lesson 22 is volume negates luck, especially if you're doing cold outbound. Imagine this. If you were able to get your product or Your service in front of all 8 billion on the planet, how much money do you think you will make? Well, the answer is you will become rich. You will make so much money that you don't even know what to do with the rest. Because that's what happens when you're generating as much traffic as humanly possible onto your offer. Now, what this means when it comes to cold emails is the more people you're able to reach out to, the faster and better results you will get. The quicker it is that it'll take you to sign clients and actually make money. Because volume negates luck. Now, lesson 23 is people will hate on you all the time for no other reason other than the fact that your success is a projection of someone's insecurities and failures. So as you are going through the process of building your business and you go tell your family members or your friends, you will be met with some level of hate. Whether people start cracking jokes or side dissing you, or doing all of these other things, people will hate on you because you are a projection of what they were unable to do themselves, right? Not in a condescending way, but that's just how it works. Because people don't want to see someone else who is doing better than themselves, right? That's just the truth. And you have to understand that hate just comes with the process. And if you're not ready for it or you don't want to get hated on, then business is just not for you. And finally, lesson 24 is if you don't quit, you will succeed. Now, I know this sounds extremely cheesy, it sounds extremely corny and kind of like every single person kind of just says this. But understand that no matter how hard any situation you currently face is, if you make it through it, you now have the experience and you have now developed the skills required to make more money. That's just the truth, right? If you're stuck somewhere and you're able to get through it, it means that you just, you succeeded, right? You leveled up. You developed the skills and experience to make sure that in the future, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, it's not going to bug you anymore because you just know how to get yourself out of it. So Those were the 24 lessons. I hope you found this video valuable. If you did, make sure you drop me a like, make sure you drop me a subscribe. And if you made it all the way to the end of this video, drop me an Apple emoji Inside the comments just so I can see who actually watched through the end and who stick through the end. So drop me an apple emoji, and I'll see you in the next video. See ya.