How to Become a Successful Business Owner in 2024

Over the course of the last few years, I've come to realize certain things about business and the things that a business has to have in order to be successful. And in this video, what I'm going to do is break down the things that I think you need as a business owner or as a sales rep or as an entrepreneur or whatever in order to set yourself up for success. And without these things, I feel like you're operating in a very nebulous zone that creates lots of ups and downs and lots of inconsistencies in business and revenue. It's one of the main reasons why people get stuck at different revenue points.

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So I'm going to break it down step by step, exactly what I think you need, and then from there provide some resources as to how you can start to put those things in place. The first thing which is enormously overlooked by nearly every entrepreneur that I meet, especially young ones, is what is the business supposed to do for you? And it's the thing that I fell prey to, I think most egregiously was that my constant thought was, what can I do for the business? Like what revenue numbers and what growth numbers does the business need to hit in order to sort of have the level of financial success that I wanted the business to have. But that's not really what a business is there for. A business is there to provide for the owners and for the people within it, and it's there to solve a problem, for the prospects to fulfill an emotional need and do so at a profit. And there is no point running a giant business that, that makes no profit. It's an enormous waste of time for everybody. And so the first thing you need to do is go, what is the actual intent? Now the sort of wrong thinking is like, well, what is the intent forever? It's like that's not the case. What is the intent for the next little bit? Now, I'm a big believer that you will be a lot better in business if you have some money. If you have a seven figure bank account, you make far better decisions in business than if you're broke. Now, you can argue that all you want, but the reality is that the reason why generals in a war zone or in a bunker. In a bunker, in a bunker, is because they have to be safe. Now why do they have to be safe? It's because their decision making cannot be manipulated by immediate danger. So if you require your business for money, if you need like your business to survive and you need to make a certain amount, then at the end of the day the decisions that you make will be driven by that fact. And it's very difficult to remove yourself from that perspective. It's very hard. So what you have to do in the beginning is figure out like, what is the point of this business and how do I get to a point of safety? Now maybe you don't want to do that. Hey, that's a choice that you can make, but I don't think it's the right one. But I'm not the guru of all things anyway, so you need to figure out what is the point of the business for the next little bit. Because you don't have to plan 10 years out, right? You don't have to like plan the entire strategy all the way out that far. What you can do is go, okay, for the next 18 months, my goal is to be able to pull out a million dollars in net into my bank account after tax. It's like, okay, now we have a plan. What does the business need to generate in order to get me $1 million net after tax income from it in the next 18 months? Okay, so now we have a very, very concrete goal and a particular way of running the business which is designed around a desired outcome that's meaningful to you and put you in a position to where, hey, maybe you don't need to take any wages for the next 12 months after that. Maybe you have a good investment strategy that gets you a solid 9%, which means that you're making, what's that, $90,000 a year for free essentially, right? Especially if you're doing some sort of cash flowing exercise or whatever.

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And so that puts you in a very interesting position to where you don't 100% need the business for money. So now your decisions are going to be far more long term. And a business that can make long term decisions that obviously don't massively negatively affect short term cash flow are going to be the ones that stay the course of time. Because you're not just constantly looking for that next funnel. The next funnel, the next funnel. So many people in the coaching consultant realm especially, right, get so fixated on like, what's the funnel that gets me from here to here? It's like, it's not the answer, guys. It's not like a marketing campaign, right? It's not opening up a much wider range of services. Like if you have a good product, like, it's probably a case of like, the decisions that you're making are just short term and so like you're not able to actually capitalize on long term stuff. An example of that would be brand advertising.

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Brand advertising has no direct return. Like there's no way to calculate it, but it's something that works over the course of time. Phenomenal example is actually is what does it take to be a top 1% podcaster in the world? The answer is anywhere from 21 to 26 episodes total. If you have 30 episodes of a published podcast, you are in the top 1% of all podcasters ever. The reason being is because like podcasting and YouTube channels and like organic content is something that a long term, necessary strategy to build a brand and to build a voice online which allows your advertising to work better, allows everything to work better. It allows people to come to you. Now, it doesn't have an immediate return for most people, but it's not designed to. It's what's designed to keep working for you over time. And so for me, for my podcast, I think we're a couple of hundred episodes in. And granted I've been a little bit crap over the last few months with doing it, but it's because I've been busy because the business that I've created from it is pretty successful. And so for me it was like, I gotta do this stuff. But I was super consistent with it for a couple of years and that caused me to, to create a following of people like yourselves, whoever's watching this, who either have decided that I'm an idiot and want to troll me, which is fine, or they decided this guy knows what he's talking about. And so like, I'm not looking for a billion views or a million views. For me personally, I only need a few views. When it comes to my job and my position in the companies that I, that I run, I'm doing most of the really high level selling, whether it's large B2B accounts for seventh level or whether it's, you know, you know, larger accounts for sales sniper, I'm the one who's having that conversation. So they're coming to me as an expert and a lot of the time they've listened to a few podcasts. So I don't need this to go viral, I just need you to watch it. And once your business gets big enough to contact me and go, hey Matt, you think you could help me out? And I go, let's hop on a call. And then I sell you something and then I make money and my things are not cheap, right? If you're going to work with me, it's expensive, right? But that's A long term play. I was lucky enough to be in a position where like I started doing content very early because I saw that nobody else was doing it. And I was, I had things I wanted to say about the industry that I was in. Being the coaching, consulting, sales. A sales guy and coaching and consulting, far wider breadth than that. I was on a call with a huge Medicare company this morning and you know, I've got all kinds of weird things that we do these days, which is great. The ability to be able to do content, do it regularly and have a voice and have opinions and that kind of stuff is. And be able to speak those opinions freely and be able to, you know, put what I think out there, whether it be controversial or not. Like it gives people a good idea as to who you are and how you do business. That's what long term thinking can do. And most people just think short term. Well, how can I spend my time best to get leads today. And it's like, well, that's not really how you make good decisions. And so having money generally speaking allows people to sit back in a, in a safety zone and go, okay, what should we do? Okay, so that's that. From there. Now you have a goal and you can start creating projections. Now projections are a funny one because I think everyone does them really stupid, you know, ever. Like if you look at the larger companies, they're always really conservative with their projections. Now why are they conservative? It's because they want to show stability, especially if you're a public company. Growing 20 as a public company is not necessarily a good thing. It can actually invoke volatility in the stock price. Right? And the reason why they want stability is because they want the stock price to creep up because a lot of the executives are compensated on what stock options. Okay. So it's a very different way of thinking, a very different way of doing it. I think the CMO of Coke, his Salary is like 270 a year, but then he makes 15 million stock options. But he only makes that money if he's good at his job. Whereas like, you know, most businesses don't compensate that way because they can't. Okay, so as a business owner, what you want to do is now that you have your goal of a million dollars in net income to you, right? Which means that you have probably have to take 1.5, let's just call it that over 18 months now, it's not going to be linear. Okay. You're not going to start taking, you know, let's just say it's one point. Let's just call it $84,000 a month, right? To $2 million over two years. 8, 1.5 over 18 months. You're not going to start making that now. What if you make 10? It means that by the end of it you better be making 200, otherwise. Because the delta that you have to do is crazy. But you need to plan for that, okay? And then you might sit back and go, oof, that's a lot of growth right now that might end up making that goal of 1.5 unrealistic. Because in order to get massive growth, you need to invest in the company, right? Or maybe you invest really heavily in the first six months knowing that after that the goal is to maximize for profit, right? So these are all decisions that can be make because what you can't do consistently or plan for is to triple your income and triple the revenue, right? Because as the business expands, the costs expand, the fixed costs expand, the variable costs expand. The return of ad spend that a young business will get could be 8 to 15 to 20 times a return, right? So you spend $1,000, get 20,000 in return. Once your business matures, chances are you're going to average a 4, right? So there's different levels. Like the more you spend, you don't get all those dollars back. But there's intangible benefits to having a slightly less efficient way marketing mechanism like branding and stuff like that. Okay, but we plan for it and we want to have a really deliberate plan that makes sense, right? I was recently working with a guy who is doing about $8 million a year or something like that, and he was making about 400 personally. And I go, mate, like, what's the plan for next year? He goes, 14 million. I go, okay, why 14 million, right? Because it's 50. Whatever. Right, it's 50%. Yeah, whatever. Okay. So I was like, okay, but what do you want to make personally? He's like, a million. I was like, okay, so you want to basically double your revenue and more than double your income. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, but how? Like, where's the money that you reinvest to double the revenue? Like, where is it? It's like, oh, that's a good point. It's like, all right, well like, what's the real outcomes that you want? And the guy said, you know, I want to play more golf. He's been in business for a long time. He's like, want to play more golf, have more time with my family and make more Money. I was like, okay, well, why don't we just use that as the operate as the actual core proposition of this business? Like, and then from there we came up with a solution which was instead of making 14 million or even 8 million, it was 7.2, 7.2. And we went through all the line items of the business, right? Removed some expenses that were just ancillary, removed an entire product line that wasn't profitable or wasn't really profitable enough to make sense doing it, and focused on what's most profitable in the business, created a plan to get there. And now the dude's able to take out, you know, $80,000 a month right into his own pocket and actually work less and have a slightly smaller business, which is a hell of a lot less stressful than having a $14 million a year business. I can tell you that as someone who runs a, you know, $30 million a year plus business, like, it's an awful lot of moving parts when you have, you know, well over a million dollars a month with a fixed expenses, right, worth of, like, bills, you got to pay like, you know, $300,000 a month at a 50% net profit would pull in an awful lot of money into someone's pocket. And to replicate that, you'd have to get probably up to 1.5 million. In order to replicate a business that's going to pay you $150,000 a month into your bank account. You can do that at three or four hundred thousand dollars a month. But the bigger you climb, like, you're either not going to increase or you're going to have to decrease in order to fund the growth. Because it's very difficult to like, grow without injecting money into the business. Which is why startups, like big tech startups or whatever, like a lot of startups, they, they borrow money from VCs. Right? Now you can bootstrap it, but it's slower, okay? And so like, you have to figure out what, like, what the point of the business is. And that's where your projections are built from. So once you figure out, like, you might do three different models, that's what I always do. I always do a model of like, okay, what is the what, like, what's the YOLO plan, right? What's the double the business in 12 months plan, okay? And it's like, okay, well this is how we do it. Well, how much is that going to cost, right? Knowing that we're going to become slightly less efficient because we're growing so fast and we're injecting so much money into the business, it's like, okay, well, the OPEX might slip a bit from 32 to 35% of the revenue. The cost of goods might go from 40 to 45%. Okay, so what are we sacrificing? We're sacrificing 7% of net. Okay, that's pretty significant, right? So, you know, it's like, okay, well, that means that the owners can take out X amount. Okay, well, that's a lot less. It's like, yeah, but then the next year we can focus back on efficiency and we can, you know, go to $45 million a year and then focus on going to $47 million a year, but really efficiently, and then we can take out shitloads of profit in that year. It's like, okay, is that worth it now? It's like, okay, is there a middle ground now? Middle grounds are usually a terrible idea because they're very hard to get out of, right? Where you're like, okay, let's grow at the maximum we can whilst taking the maximum amount out. It's a difficult thing to get out of because, like, you never quite have enough cash in the business to really free yourself of sort of that cycle, right? And if you don't grow, you can kind of screw yourself. So. And like, you know, staff start leaving because they think that you're not really, you know, looking to progress them and all kinds of stuff. And then you've got the plan, which is like, let's focus on profit. Which means that your ego has to take a bit of a ride. Like, you have to go, oh, no, I don't get to post on Instagram that I went 400% up. It's like, yeah, no, you don't. But you get to be rich. It's like, oh, well, is that worth it? For some people it's not. I can tell you that after having those conversations, Right? But, you know, for some people it is. And so if that's the move, then that's the move, right? So from there, you've got your projections. Now, if you do your projections properly, it tells you an awful lot about the business, even down to what I'm doing right now. Okay? So what I'm doing right now is I'm on camera. So this had to be planned out in order to produce revenue. We need leads, right? My job is to get B2B leads, essentially. And so that's where my content comes in, right? And so, like, if we want to ramp up our B2B and we have a budget of significantly increasing B2B, then I have to significant increase my content. So what does that mean? That means that Austin, who's on here with me, who controls all of our content, shout out to Makai Media, right? Link in the description, does all of mine and Jeremy's content. We need to have a schedule now. We also need to have a budget. Because if we're gonna ramp up or ramp down or whatever it is, right? And then it's like they, like, they need to know, like, how fast we can get editing out. They need to know, like, how do we coordinate with the editors and the marketing and the sales guys to make sure that we're bringing things out at the right time, Right? Like, how much short form, how much long form can we get? How many hours do I have to book out?

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And that's gonna come down to, well, what does that take away from? Because I don't have infinite hours. I like my kids a lot more than I like anyone else, so I'm gonna prioritize them over other people, right? It could even come down to, I'm in my house today, but a lot of the time I'm in the studio at work. It's like, has that been cleaned? Has it been set up? How many times are the cleaners coming? If I'm filming every day, the cleaners need to come at least three times a week. If I'm filming once a week, they can come once a week, right? I have them come on the day before filming. Like, these are all things. So we can figure out everything the business requires, right? Because if you're going to triple your ad spend, what do you have to do? Probably quintuple your creative, right? So if you're shooting that much more creative, you've got to consider the editing stuff. You've got to consider how many cameras you've got. You've got to consider the sets in the background. You've got to consider the cleaning schedule of the office. You got to consider the movement schedule, the office. How many people do you have in there?

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There are a lot of things to consider. And, and so. And the script writing and everything. And so it's like all that comes down to the projections. Year, quarter, month, product by product. Then from there you can figure out the marketing requirements, the sales requirements, the customer service requirements, the operations requirements.

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Any content requirements. Okay. You can, you know, you can nail it down to travel requirements now. Okay, so now what are you going to do? Also, if we're going to triple the Amount of people we're selling and we have a service based business. When do we hire people? When does it get to the point that we need more finance people, more CX people, more sales people, more setters, more managers, right? And how much do they cost?

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So all this stuff now that you have a real plan can actually be, can actually be planned. I want you to comment down below. If you're someone who's ever reactionally hired because you like look up and all of a sudden it's like what the hell is going on? You know what I mean? So these are all things that we can plan for. So now we have our list of projects, hiring plan, you know, performance improvement plan, you have your, you know, we need to get this many more editors, we need to get this many more things, we need to get this many more sets, we've got to travel this many places, we need to get this many more this, this, many more. This, this many more this, you know, so now you have your list of projects, right? And that. And you're gonna, you know, put those projects to people who are going to complete them. So how do you keep track of that? The way you keep track of that is called a WIPS program. So you know, which is your work in progress reports, right? So wips. So how you do that is basically you have your project tracker a Gantt chart will do, right? If you don't have anything else, you can go on to Excel or Google Sheets and you can just type in G A N N T I believe it is. And then from there you'll have a nice project management Gantt chart where you have the project, the task and who's respons. And then from there like everyone has to work on timelines. Hey, you have the project of this, this is what's involved in it. This is all the tasks, These are who's doing the task, these are the due dates. And then every single week you sit down with your managers or with the people under you and you go through all their tasks and all their projects and you make sure that everyone's on timeline right now if you're sitting over a few different managers, they should also be creating projects within their department that, that aren't just handed down by you. Otherwise like what are they doing, right? Like if they're a manager they have to bring something to the table, right? And then from there what you'll also see is if everybody's just handing off their stuff to everyone else because if 100% of the projects and the tasks that are being done that I give you are just being handed to everybody else. Do I really need you? Do I, do I really? Or can I just toss those people myself and save myself, you know, 150 grand a year? So, you know, these are all reasonable things to get done once I have my whips in place. Now I get to see what everyone's doing when they're doing it. There's a high level of transparency and then from there there's a bunch of other things that you can do moving from and past that, which, you know, if you guys like this and you, you make it do well and you comment and stuff like that, I'll do another video which is like from the time you get those projects done, like, how do you ensure they're done properly and how do you ensure that they keep getting done so that you can remove yourself from the firefight, from the battle, and you can start working on the strategies to win the war?

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Because once you've removed yourself from the daily gun fighting. Pew, pew, pew, pew. Now you can start to see the entire zone and the entire, you know, the entire playground and you can start making decisions that benefit the long term vision of the business instead of just figuring out how not to get shot. All right, guys, I hope you like that. Make sure you like subscribe and notification bell all that kind of good stuff and I'll see you in the next video. Pew.