Episode 105: What Does Next Level in Business Actually Mean?

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Hey everyone, this is Julie, and today I would like to talk about what the word or the phrase next level actually means. I am so tired of this phrase, I'm going to take your business to the next level. I'm just ready to go to the next level. Like, what does the next level actually mean? So I want to dive into this a little bit. And as a child of the 80s and 90s, I was a Mario lover. That sounds weird, but I was. I loved playing Mario. But the funny thing about my Mario skills is that they suck. And I wasn't very good at playing the original Mario. And for any of you guys who remember the original Mario, they gave you like three lives. There were not a lot of 1 ups. Like, it was easy to die and then you'd have to start all the way at the beginning unless you got through, like, these certain milestones. The newer games realized that we all hated it and they made it easier. But the original one, the original Nintendo Super Mario Brothers, was really hard. So I just got into the habit of playing level one and maybe level two. And I just loved playing these levels over and over and over and over again.

I didn't want to go to the.

Next level and at all.

I didn't because I knew the next.

Level would be harder. I would die and the boss would kill me. And so I just got really, really good at the level that I was on. And maybe this is a sign that, you know, I'm not a true entrepreneur because I, you know, stayed at the same level, but I also understood the ramifications of the next level. So when we talk about this word in business, people are usually referring to the next level of revenue, right? Like, okay, my business makes $100,000 a year. I want to make a million dollars a year. So that's the next level. Now, depending on how you measure business growth, that might be 10 levels away or it might be one level away. I find that some people in the Internet Marketing space who don't actually know business all that well think that's the next level when there's like unlimited amount of levels in between 100,000 and a million dollars a year. But I digress. So let's just for the sake of argument say that the next level means a million dollars instead of 100,000. We talk about the revenue as next level, but what we never talk about or hardly talk about is all of these things that come with that revenue. So I did a Post Back on November 28, I wrote an email, I actually got some flack for it because people taking aim at me, which is fine, but I was trying to explain sort of the next level bananas of doubling a business once it's past the million dollar mark. So typically in a business growth pattern, you want to grow 15% a year, 20% a year, et cetera. Now in the land of tech and Internet and stuff like that, we see businesses that grow 100% a year or 1,000%, whatever. It's just like crazy numbers that don't make any sen. And so when we at Funnel gorgeous went from 1 million to 2 million, it doesn't sound like a big next level, but it was actually 10 times hundred times more significant to go from 1 million to 2 million than it would be to go from 100,000 to a million just because the denominator is bigger. And so it's like exponential growth, right? And so I knew that hitting 2 million we probably would not get to 4 million because again that's doubling our business, but at double the exponential value.

Of the year before.

So as I've been watching our numbers and feeling the growing pains of a very quickly expanding business, realizing somewhere in September, October that 4 million was going to be our revenue goal, that we did in fact double the business. And wanting to explain that getting to that next level was actually quite difficult and pretty messy. And so I started to say like, okay, you want to say let's take your business to the next level. That means going from a team of two or a team of six to a team of 15, right? And in our case we actually grew to a team of 20. And then we had to, you know, get rid of some people not because we didn't like them, but just because we hadn't, we, we had like over hired right in that growth. And that's very common. You grow fast, you hire fast, and then you gotta like scale back. She's like, well actually this isn't really making us a ton of money. We had to spend Months and thousands of dollars rolling out a very exciting employee handbook and a performance review process. And how are we gonna pay out bonuses on a yearly basis? And how are we gonna give out raises? And what is our strategy for raises? And our maternity policy and health insurance and retirement? Are we offering them or not? And like all of this stuff. So that's what next level meant. Next level also meant registering in new states for taxes, which was super fun. Right now we are registered in three of the worst states. California, Connecticut and New York. So that's fun. Starting to pay six figures in salaries.

To team members, five figure software costs.

Basically planning events with giant budgets that are pretty risky. We're planning an event with a $300,000 budget, you know, $70,000 in refunds, 83,000 in processing fees for credit cards, and just ungodly amounts of taxes and just expenses rolling out the door. So the next time you say, I want to go to the next level, yes, you are saying I want more revenue, but you're also saying, I want a harder boss. Like back to the Mario analogy. I want a bigger bowser, I want a trickier piranha plant. Like that's what you're saying. So sometimes, sometimes it makes sense to step back for a second and ask yourself, what is your actual goal with your business, for your life? And this is sort of a side note, but I partnered with Aryeh Scheinven in a course called Future Fun. Funnel Gorgeous is the. It's hosted by Funnel Gorgeous. And this is really that question of like understanding what you want out of life, what, what it costs to live, how you see your lifestyle, coming up with those numbers, understanding what you're actually working towards, because you may be like 7 year old Julie and you may realize, actually what I want is a million dollar business.

I don't want to go beyond level three.

Like, I like level three. I'm gonna get really good at level three. I'm gonna fight that bowser over and over and over again until I can do it with my eyes closed. And I'm gonna have a great life and I'm not gonna try to go to level five. So anyway, that's sort of my little rant soapbox on decoding what next level actually means. Talk to you soon.

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