MBA1887 Why Time Is On Your Side + Free Ride Friday

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives it to you straight every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today is Free Ride Friday. On Fridays we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won't tune in to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. And in today's episode you will learn why. Time is on your side. I see so many entrepreneurs in a rush to scale and grow their business and they often get frustrated when it doesn't happen overnight. I'm here to tell you that growing slowly is actually not a bad thing. It's actually a good thing for you and your business. The longer you're in business, the better. This is what I mean by time is on your side. Many entrepreneurs actually think it's a negative when they look back and say, man, I've been building this business for five years and yeah, I'm profitable, but I'm not exploding many times. Explosive growth is not a good thing for businesses. It actually causes a lot of businesses to implode. So in today's lesson I'm going to explain why slow steady growth is actually a very smart way to grow a business. I'm going to give you real life examples and some real good reminders that you can remind yourself when you get frustrated that you know your business is not blowing up in a matter of weeks or months. I'll also get into what are some signs that you're on the right track and not growing too slowly. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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The big news a few weeks ago in the tech Startup World was Mailchimp's acquisition. Intuit acquired Mailchimp, the email marketing provider, for 12 billion. Now a lot of people look at Mailchimp and think, man, they probably just grew tremendously fast at an incredible rate. And that's why their valuation was 12 billion. As Dwight Schrute would say on the office false. Mailchimp was founded in 2001. That's 20 years ago. And Mailchimp's founders started it with their own capital, totally bootstrapped business. And until today, before they were acquired by intuit, they were 100% founder owned. If you do a little Google search on mailchimp's growth, you'll see that it took so much time for them to get traction and start to see some rapid growth. In fact, it took eight years before they started to see some exponential growth from 2001 to 2009. They're really just trying to find their footing, learn what the audience needs, refine their product, and if you looked at a chart, their growth was very steady for the last 20 years. There are a few blips, but for the most part it was just a steady curve up. And this is what they don't talk about in the media. Okay, this part of the story is not a Sexy story because $12 billion sounds so much more attractive, right, as a headline. But it didn't happen overnight. It took two decades to build that kind of value in their company. How many of us have been building and running our business for 20 years now? The reason why I say time is on your side is because mailchimp use time to their advantage. The longer they're around, the more aware people are of their brand, the more they become the household name for email marketing. Yes, they had a lot of strategies, like having a freemium level where you can sign up for free. And yes, they had an easy use product with a friendly brand. But with time, there's repetition. There's more chances for people to see your ads, to see your marketing, to see your website, to see your social media profiles. And one of the things I learned is that if you can stay in business long enough, you become a market leader. The Internet rewards age because the Internet is so young. Anybody who's been around for a decade has an advantage because they have an advantage in SEO, not only just in Google, but also in YouTube or social and just people talking about your brand for the last 10 years. So I wanted to do today's episode because I wanted to remind us all that we need to have a little bit of patience as entrepreneurs. We want to grow, we want to be successful, and we want it now. But what I found was very helpful is to have stepping stones or milestones of success so that we do feel successful. But at the same time, understand that the big, big success, like Mailchimp's acquisition for 12 billion doesn't just happen every day. It's an accumulation of small wins. So what I recommend is you plan out what are some small wins you can achieve every month, Just one win every month, whether it's improving your product, whether it's increasing your user base or your audience, your email list, whether it's getting a mention on a blog or in a podcast, these little wins add up over the years and become a force to be reckoned with. And if we go Back to the Mailchimp story, one of the things I learned from the CEO of Mailchimp, Ben Chestnut, is throughout the 20 years they've been in business, they've had a lot of ups and downs. They had a lot of failures, they had disasters. But one of the things he says that really has helped them just sustain themselves, grow and become the company they become is this idea of experimentation. And one of the areas he's Always loved experimenting in is pricing. Many of us are scared to change our pricing, but they've actually changed their pricing so many times over the last 20 years, in just the first 10 years of business, they changed their pricing. They experimented with different prices over half a dozen times, but along the way, they documented everything they learned along the way from people downgrading when prices got decreased, to their overall profitability when they increased prices, to how many refunds were given, to what price actually makes them the most money. The point here is, is that just because you're in business and you're ambitious and you want to grow means that it's going to be smooth sailing. You're going to have problems, you're going to have challenges, you're going to have hiccups. But the point here is just to see it as an experiment, see it as a learning experience where you can say, hey, what did I learn from this? How can I apply to the next move I make in my business? And this is why time is on your side. The more time you have, the more time you're in your business. The, the more data you have to pull out of the experiments you're having or conducting in your business, the more ammo you have to do a better job to build a better business, to build a better product. Now, having said all this, let's put some parameters around it. Obviously, when you start a business, you want to make sure that you get to what's called escape velocity as fast as possible. Meaning you get to the point where you can pay all your bills to sustain the business and pay yourself. This means your business is working. That means that you can continue to do this business for the rest of your life. And any growth is gravy, right? Any kind of growth is profit. Once you get to this point, I prefer to try to have a maintenance of a minimum growth goal every month. Now, this growth goal can change as your growth changes. But to start, 3 to 5% growth is a good goal month over month. Meaning, let's say you made $10,000 in your business. 3% would be 10,300. 5% would be 10,500. You might be thinking, Omar, that's a pretty modest goal. $500 extra. At 5% growth month over month, that's not that much extra revenue. Yes, for the first month, but this will compound. You'll have 5% of 10,500 the next month, and then your next goal will be 5% of that. Now you need to track your growth, because if you find yourself doing like five months in a row, 10% growth, then maybe 5% is too low for you and you need to up the ante. But 5% is a barometer. But 3 to 5% is a great way to start and then you can move up from there. Sometime back I did a must read episode on Simple Numbers, a great book on how to set your profitability goals. So that's a great reference to use when you're setting up these goals. And from there, grow at your own pace. Take your time. Don't try to rush things. If you feel like you have external pressure from peers, from friends, from social, whatever it is, that's not a good enough reason to go faster. Growing too fast often results to spending too much money, not being fiscally responsible. When things are growing slowly, you're able to monitor them and keep a close eye on what's going right and what's going wrong.

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To wrap up today's lesson, one of my favorite quotes by Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, is it's easy to have a startup. What you really want is a stay up a business that stays in business for as long as possible, for as long as you'd like it to be in business. So if you have a business that pays your bills that has slow, steady growth, keep it going, be patient and look at examples like mailchimp to know. Hey, when I'm ready to hang them up and I have decades under my belt with my business, I will have accumulated a great valuable asset. And along the way, you've learned so much and had great experiences growing your business. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, let me know. Leave us a rating and review. But today's episode's not over because it's Free Ride Friday. Every Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away Easy Course, our course on how to build an online course in 30 days. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride and The winner is mitmit L. Mintmit L is the handle on Apple Podcasts. Mitmit says. Love your podcast. Five stars. Love love love this podcast and the host. Thank you so much for this. Thank you so much for the kind words mit. Thank you for the review. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to Easy course. If you want to win a free ride to one of our programs, go ahead and leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Until you win a free ride, just listen on a Friday to see if you won. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. But before I go, I want to leave you with this I'm sure you've heard the saying business is a marathon, not a sprint. But in my opinion, yes, it is a marathon. But within that marathon there are small little sprints. You're always going to have times in your business or seasons in your business where you're going 110%. You're sprinting to get to a certain goal, to get to a certain win, and then you slow down and then you go a little fast again. And that's okay because you understand that you can't sprint constantly. That's not sustainable for you or your team. So it's okay to sprint at times, knowing that after this sprint there'll be a chance to slow things down a little bit. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. Until then, take care.

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Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number, $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.