MBA2022 Your Only Goal When Starting a Business + Free Ride Friday

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey. Welcome to the $100 RMBA Show. Your daily business workout every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder background back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away Easy course or a 30 day course on how to build your own online course. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won. It's that easy. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's lesson you will learn what is your only goal when starting a business. This should be your main focus whenever you start any business. This is the only thing you need to focus on. Reaching this goal means you can have total freedom with your business. You can run your business as long as you want and you won't die of exhaustion in the process. It's called Escape Velocity and I'll explain what it means and how to reach it no matter what kind of business you run, whether you're a service based business, a physical product business, an E commerce business, you're selling courses or ebooks, you're a software company, it doesn't matter. Reaching a skip velocity gives your business incredible power and gives you incredible peace of mind. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Traditionally, escape velocity is a term used in celestial mechanics. It's a physics term. It means reaching the minimal speed needed for free non propelled objects to escape. Gravitational pull. Basically, it's when a rocket leaves the atmosphere. You ever see footage of space launches and you see the spaceship flying through the air on earth and then it gets out of the gravitational pull and basically the rocket can stop running its thrusters. It doesn't really need that much energy anymore because there's no more gravity pulling it down. It's in space. So what's escape velocity in business? Well, it means reaching a level of growth in your business where you don't need to exert a lot of effort for your business to grow. It grows exponentially without any interference. You have systems in place. You've built a product and a reputation that just allows the business to grow. Now, just like a rocket, in the beginning of your business journey, you're going to have to exert a lot of effort to get out of Earth, to get out of the gravitational pull to leave the atmosphere. But once you reach that escape velocity, you're floating in space. Right? And the same goes with business. You want to build a business that is a quality product or service that has systems in place, that promotes itself, that markets itself, that has its own systems that will allow your business to grow on its own once it gets to a certain level. Let me give you two examples from two different worlds. The first example is a software company, ConvertKit. ConvertKit is an email marketing software that was founded in 2013 by Nathan Barry. I'm fortunate enough to call Nathan a Friend. And I've been really closely following his journey over the years. Today, convertkit does nearly $30 million a year in revenue. But in that first year, they barely made $44,000 in revenue. From a revenue standpoint, they hit escape velocity around $2 million a year. After that point, their business was growing exponentially every single month. That was around mid-2016. They had around 35,000 users at that time, and their business started to grow and grow every single month. Today, they have a little under 40,000 users. This is a concept that was coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Tipping Point, where you reach a certain point in a business, in a brand, or there's a domino effect, there's a networking effect, where people start talking about your brand, use your brand, use your product or service, and really create a lot of buzz about it. Yes, initially you had to do a lot of things to get to that point. The marketing, the website, the webinars. You're doing creating a fantastic product that is worth talking about. And this is the point. You have to grind it out and work as hard as you can to get to Escape Velocity as soon as possible. Because once you get out there with no grav holding you down, once you hit those markers for your business, and it's different for every business. For convertkit, it was $2 million or 3,500 users, their life gets a little bit easier every single day because the customers and the product itself lead the growth engine. Now, what's so great about getting to Escape Velocity? Well, it means that you can buy your time back again. You can hire more people because each month you're growing and you can afford hiring more people. It allows you to be more selective with opportunities. You have to say yes to everything. But most of all, it puts your business in a powerful position. You've created something that is organic, that grows on its own. Now you might be thinking, Omar, I don't run a software company. I run a service based company. I sell goods, I sell physical products. Well, this is absolutely true with other types of businesses. For those who don't know, my father was in the car sales business for many, many years. And one of the things he worked on for years in his dealership is this concept. He didn't call it Escape Velocity, but he understood that he had to build a business that ran itself, that marketed itself, that made sales on its own. So he trained and taught all his team members, all the salesmen and women, all on the sales floor, not to rely on trying to convert customers that just Walk in through the door. You install a system where basically all the sales came from appointments and referrals. Meaning if no customers walk in through the door, I am still going to be able to make money. I'm still going to grow the business. So most of the senior salespeople would never need to take a customer from the floor because they've built such a great reputation and a great experience. We're all there. Their appointments were by appointment, right? All their sales came from appointments that they've booked with customers, repeat customers, friends and family, or recommendations from customers. Now, what this did was actually convert more people that came through the door than before because now they're not desperate for the sale. They will just welcome them and say, hey, if you have any questions, let me know. I can also provide you with a brochure and set you up with a test drive. I'll be right here if you need me. Now, you got to remember, this is before the Internet. And basically, brochures are how people learned about all the features in a car. So how do you achieve escape velocity? Well, it starts with your product. Whatever you offer your customers in exchange for their money, whether it's a book, a course, a service, a software, or whatever, your product has to be exceptional. But most of all, it has to be reliable. It has to actually do what it says consistently. If it does that, at the very minimum, you're going to have a satisfied customer. If it does beyond that, you're going to have a raving fan customer, somebody who can't stop talking about your business and recommend you to other people. This is why I recommend always making sure your product is top quality. Now, how do you balance that with marketing your product and not spending so much time working on your product that you never sell anything? Well, the easiest way to solve this problem is, is not to try to do everything, to get specific, to minimize your scope when it comes to your product, what your product does. If your product is simple and does what it says, people will love it. Think about all the products you use, the services you use, usually the ones that you really love, really just do one thing. One of my favorite things in the world is my Kindle. My Kindle reader, where I read my books. All it does is provide a way for me to read books anywhere and have a library of books right inside my Kindle. I can't browse the Web easily. I can't watch movies. I can't play games. But, boy, do I love the Kindle because it does exactly what I want it to Do. It has incredible battery life and it's always there for me. It's reliable. That's why when anybody sees me with my Kindle and they say, hey, do you like reading from them? Like, I love it. You gotta get a Kindle. I'm not on commission here. I don't get an affiliate kickback. I. I just love it so much. I have to tell other people.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. To wrap up today's lesson, Escape Velocity is magical because it really allows your business to be autonomous. Many business owners actually get a little sad when they hit Escape Velocity because they realize their business doesn't need them as much as they used to. And now it just needs a team to support its growth. But this is the reason why you need to focus only on getting to Escape Velocity. Because it frees you up. You're no longer shackled to your business. Your business propels itself and allows you to not do the work anymore, but to lead a great team. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 VA Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow. On whatever podcast app you use, you can do it right now. That way you get access to over 2,000 episodes in our archives. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. JR Copenhagen. JR says I love it. Five stars. Thanks for this really great podcast. I love that it's short and to the point in every episode. No bs, just the facts and great advice. Keep up the good work. I hope it never stops. Well, jr, we'll be here as long as you stay here. Thanks for leaving us an amazing review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. You have won a lifetime membership to easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. Just email me at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. It's that simple. Listen in on Friday, just like today, to see if you won. Before I go, I want to leave you with this One of the easiest ways to get to Skip Velocity is to build an incredible product your customers love. And one of the best ways to do that is to constantly iterate and improve it based on user feedback. Find out how your users are using your product, how they can better use it, what are their goals and desires with your product and in their life and business so that you can incorporate great solutions. The more you do that, the more your product will be so good people can't help but talk about it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk?

Oh mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big it feels good to geico.