Many small businesses stall between $1M and $3M in revenue because owners face an impossible choice: work constantly or hire talent that eats most profits. The solution is pursuing high-margin side activities to fund better hires and buy back your time.
The $1 to $3 million per year range we have always referred to as the swamp. Why is it so difficult to get past that? I realized there's actually an answer to this. Let's assume that with your helpers and some of your admin staff and whatever, you're able to net $400,000 in profit after everything. With that $400,000, you basically have two choices, and both are hard. One is that I'm already working almost all the hours of the day. I somehow have to work more, or I have to go hire somebody who's better than the people that I've currently hired. But when you make the bet, when you're in that $1 to $3 million range, it might be a third or half of your income. To bring someone in at that level. What do you do when you're in that situation? The honest truth is that you do both. You try and do even more unscalable things that can generate high profit margin so that you can take the bet on somebody that you know you need to do to buy some more of your time back so that you can gain more leverage. Man, that sounds hard. It's like, well, welcome to business and welcome to the reason that most people don't make it past that.
