How to Scale From £20k/m to £100k+/m

If I was stuck at $20K to $30K a month and I wanted to break through this $100K a month barrier, one of the most common things that I see with most business owners is their ability to change who they are. So a lot of it comes down to mindset. So when you're making $20K to $30K a month, you're doing well. Okay, so you're making some good profit because most of your profit margins should be around about 60%, 70%. But a lot of the business owners have this limited belief that they have this fear that when the next month comes around, are they still going to make money? Do they have to reinvest all of those profits and hire a team? And a lot of the barriers come down to not being confident to hire the right people and have been burnt in the past by hiring employees that were overpaid, very expensive, and really burned a hole in their profits. So one of the common objections I see all of the time is, James, I've tried to hire before, just didn't work. So the first thing that you need to do is make sure that you're hiring correctly. And the most easiest way that I would do that is hiring a remote offshore team. So I've got a lot of employees in South Africa and have helped thousands of businesses now embed offshore teams. And the benefits of that is you have a big margin for error because the wages are at least 70% cheaper than the US and the UK, and you get good quality work done. So the first thing I would do, I would start leveraging a lot of the tasks and a lot of the repeatable processes into a remote team. Now there's a few steps to do that as well, because the next step you want to make sure that is that you've got your compartments of like the different areas. So you've got your marketing, you've got operations, you've got sales, you've got finance, you've got maybe some logistics in there, like an executive assistant style role. So you would start off firstly by leveraging an executive assistant. That's always going to be your key hire so they can buy back at least 10 to 15, 20 hours of a business owner's time. Once that business owner's got that time back, they've got freedom in their mind to think more clearly and start to work on the business, not in it. And that way you can start to look at other areas of what you can start to delegate. So I would say the first thing holding business owners back is definitely going to be this limited belief factor. And this ties into, you call it a Polaris Star. So what is the long-term vision that you have for your life and your business? Because when you start making $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 a month, it's a lot of money. And I always talk around once you get your first $100,000 in your bank account, that's probably the most exciting type of money that you get in the bank account. You feel rich, you feel like you retire for a year. I remember doing that many years ago. But then it's a lot different when you get a million $1 million or £1 million in the physical bank account, you can start to be a lot more free with your money. You can start to hire and fire and burn through some cash to try and get things right. But the barrier is getting to the million. To get to the million, you need a team, okay? So you need a team. And a lot of people just get stuck trying to do everything themselves. So the next thing is gonna be working on the mindset in terms of this limited belief. And then secondly is hiring, but having the right process to hire. Having the right system in place for each department to make the hire, and then also the onboarding of that hire. So in one of my companies, RemoteAssistance.ai, we do all of that heavy lifting for the companies we work with, where we actually do the finding and hiring of the employee. We actually do the onboarding and we actually put them through an intense training program for 3-4 months so they get embedded into that company's routine, the culture, and the expectations of what they have to do in the role. And that really takes a lot of weight away from the business owner because I've seen a lot of friction with most entrepreneurs is they just don't have the time to manage someone initially and onboard them. So when you use a company service where they do that for you, that is a lot easier. So that's one hack that I would do. Or you make sure that you spend the next 2 or 3 months when you make that hire, that you make sure that they are onboarded correctly. They've got constant communication with you. We use Slack. to communicate in Zoom. I would make sure that I would catch up with them every single day. And then once you hire your first one, it's easier to get your second and third, uh, team member in because that first employee, if you onboard them correctly, they can start doing a lot of the onboarding for the second and third employee. Okay, so they could go into a team leader management role. So that normally works well. So that's the first layer of if you wanted to get from $20K-$30K to $100K a month. And then once you get those 2 or 3 remote team members in, and the key reason why you need 2 or 3 at is because the first hire is most likely not going to work out. So I've, in my business career, I've probably hired and fired almost 100 employees now. And one thing I would realize is that sometimes people on paper look good and you get a good instinct, then all of a sudden they leave after 2 or 3 months and you go through the pain of onboarding them. So normally what I would recommend when you're hiring your first team members, hire at least 2. So a lot of the roles you would hire for initially might be an executive assistant or someone that can do outreach campaigns for you. A lot of our team in South Africa, we hire to do initial outreach. So that can be outreach to win more clients for client generation, or it could be on the backend, like customer success managers, fulfillment. So I would normally hire 2 because normally one will work out, one won't. If you can hire 3, it's even better because normally you would get one that is really good, One that's average and would stay around, and then the third one would probably quit after 2 or 3 months. So normally a rule of thumb is ideal scenario, hire 3. Now in terms of cost, you can hire an offshore person for between $1,500 to $2,000 a month. And a lot of these tasks in most businesses can be done at least to a standard of 70%. So I've talked about this before in other videos is don't expect someone to be able to do the job as good or better than you. Initially. One, because they're not an entrepreneur, they are not as skilled as you, but you can start to delegate one skill in one area. Over time they would get better and better. But if you're going with the expectation that 70% is way better than perfect by you because you can't do everything, that is normally a good mindset to have. So let's say for instance you've got your first 2 or 3 in. The next step from there is like getting you back into being the face and brand of your company. So most service-based business companies, you've got to be the face and brand of the business. And when I say that, you should be still winning most of the sales with big clients, or you hire a closer sales and set a team. So I've built up our setter and closer team, and again, that's a hard skill to do. So you would need to be focused on the sales. So that's when you have an internal sales team, you should be leading that sales team. So either you hand off the sales, so once you've done your first sales, like you should be doing the sales up until $20K, $30K months yourself, because you don't want to outsource that and paying 15%, 20% commissions. You want to make sure you're keeping that cash yourself. So once you've got your team, let's say 2 or 3 remote team members, you move back into sales. Your job is to kick it on to 50K a month, 60, 70, 80K a month, and then start to build a team under you. So that might be SDRs or setters, as you would call them, and then bringing on like a full-time sales closer that can start to replace you. And then once you do that, you go back into the business, operating the business as a founder CEO, where you've got the sales done by a team. So you might have an SDR and a closer. You might have on fulfillment on the backend, 2 or 3 remote team members. So that's a lean team of around about 5 to 6. And then you've got you operating the business. So that's you doing still everything, overseeing everything. So every single department, you need to be on the pulse of the business. And to get to $100K a month, that should be sufficient enough. Really, you could do that with 5 to 7 remote team members. If you're very good at what you do. The real hack is once you get 100K months is can you get to 100K months without the business being dependent on you? And when I scaled my first agency, Ronald James, which is still going over a decade later, once we were getting to 7-figure months, the big thing for me was can we get to 7-figure months without my direct involvement in any of the revenue? So it's one thing getting to 100K months in your business, but if you're still working 60 hours a week and having to do a lot of the sales or delivery, it's a lot different then getting to $100K months and you just owning the business and you're maybe showing up for some meetings and you're not having to work intensely in the business and you can take 6 weeks off and the business still makes 6 figures a month. So that's when you start going into real delegation, having proper operational systems in your business, having good frameworks and having a good business that is lean and profitable enough for you to then hire the rest of the team in order for them to do the jobs or tasks that you're doing yourself. Yourself in the business. So that's normally the hardest thing. If when you get to 100K a month, your profit margins will be higher, might be still 50-60% depending on your business model, but can you get it to 50% profit margins whilst not having to work in the business? Because then you've got time to invest that capital into other things, and that's when you can go into your second business and your third business, normally by year 3 to year 5. Depending on how well you've done in the business, you can start to use the profits and that's the cash flowing business that can then— you can invest in other companies, you can start other ventures, you can invest and deploy your capital in other areas. Okay, so that is how you go from $20K, $30K a month to $100K a month. If you comment below where you're at right now in terms of monthly revenue, because the next video I'm going to be doing is going to be how you go from $100K a month all the way to scale to 8 figures a year in your company. So hope you found this video useful. Give it a like or subscribe if you enjoyed it, and I'll catch you on the next one.