What's the best advice to give a solopreneur building their first million dollars in revenue? Here we go.
What we do is we take your annual goal. We just divide it by 10. Just divide it by 10. Okay? And that would mean that you need to do a $100,000 a month. Okay? We divide that also by the number of clients you can serve.
The lower, the better.
But, also, it means the higher ticket. So if you serve two clients, that means you have to generate business that's, like, $50,000 per engagement,
which for some might be a lot of money. For some, it's not a lot at all. We don't want this to be a 100 because you cannot turn over that many clients in a month.
So the the beautiful number is somewhere between zero and probably five.
More than five, I think your offer is not high enough. Yeah? So we're gonna pick an easy number. We're gonna pick four because that gives me 25 k. Now you have to design an offer where your perceived value is much greater than 25.
So you have to make a list based on a profile. So I do I build an avatar of a certain type of person who has a big, big problem,
and they desire a solution where paying $25,000
would give them great joy. It would make them super happy. And so you have to design the offer. And there's lots of things you can design the offer. I'm gonna tell you to read the book, $100,000,000
offers by Hormozi.
It takes you through the process in painstaking detail,
and you can do that. Okay? One thing I know, which I never thought about before, is how do you make it easier? How do you make it faster?
And how do you reduce
perceived risk?
And it's perception.
And perception is great because you can change perception,
whereas faster is not so, uh, easy to to change that. It's either faster or it's not. K?
We have mistakenly thought to ourselves if we're in the service space that we sell time,
but what we do is we're really selling the result.
So people want the result faster,
so do anything you can to do it faster.
And what I've learned also is if you can take the big result, sometimes which takes a lot of time, especially if it's a $25,000
engagement, figure out what the smallest win is and put that up front so they feel like progress is being made. That will increase the perception
of the result. I would say that for the million dollars, we're gonna have to do the rules of one, like one offer, one profile, one promotion, one channel.
That's what we gotta do. Hyper hyper focus. I don't know if you can do this as a solopreneur, but this is the blueprint. If you do high level coaching, you can do this by as one person, but I would say you're probably doing too much by yourself. My rule of thumb is if you can pay someone less money than it costs you to do it yourself, pay them because what you get is what you value the most, which is your free time.
Now what solopreneurs do is they're control freaks,
and sometimes rightfully so. You're always the best at doing something the fastest possible way.
So the expression is you can run fast by yourself, but you can run far with people,
and I would rather run far. So delegate as much as you can to someone. The way that you do that is just look at where you spend the most time doing something that someone else can do. That's your first hire. How did you break through that $1,000,000 revenue to $5,000,000 and above in your production business? Okay, Joshua. That's a good question. So when you work with a $10,000 client, it makes approaching a $20,000 client a lot easier.
And so you just keep trading up. And you go to 40 k, and you just keep trading up. And I don't know what the limit of on trading up is, but you just keep doing it. You leverage
one project, one relationship for a slightly better one. Now the Alexander the Great, is that the Gordian knot? He just goes straight and just solves the problem chops. And this is what my friend told me. He says, basically, in every industry, there's the top dog. Work with the top dog. All the little dogs follow.
Right? So on a different talk I give, we wind up working with Coldplay. At that time, the world's biggest band. Maybe Beyonce and Coldplay, and then, basically, everyone is gonna work with you after that.
Right? If you work with Google, all the tech companies fall in line if you work with Apple. So you can go that route and it's a shortcut, but depending on where you are, that could be impossible.
So I have another way of doing this. If you wanna work with Nike, you're not gonna get them to say yes.
But there are people that Nike work with
in their supply chain that might say yes. So Nike has suppliers and distributors. Right? Everyone needs stuff and someone to sell it for them. So in America, we have a place like Foot Locker, Champs,
Eastbay.
Nike also buys things from other companies.
I don't know if they technically do, but other people buy
their soles
from Vibram. Vibram is a smaller company. Vibram supplies things. They might make things with Gore Tex waterproofing.
Right? They might get their shoelaces or there might be a smaller company that designs all their boxes or some of their boxes or some of their t shirts.
Those companies are way more accessible than Nike is.
Here's the cool part.
You work with Vibram. You work with Gore Tex or one of the designers of the agencies.
You are just now a half step away from Nike, and it's much easier for you to get a call with Nike when you're designing things or producing things for some of their suppliers. I think it's an effective strategy.
What you're trying to do is you're going for the moonshot, but go to the mountaintop. Right? And then when you get to the mountaintop, go to Everest. And then there, it's, like, not that far away to get to the moon. And so you do this trade up idea. Okay? And how you can also do this is you call your existing clients. Maybe they're down here,
and you say, hey. Do you know anyone that works over here? I'd love
to help those people. A lot of competition. It's pretty cool. K? There's this book written by Phil m Jones. It's called exactly what to say. It is probably the best version I've ever read about how to ask for a referral. It's genius.
It's right at the end of the book. It goes through lots of philosophies. This book is super easy to read because it's like 48 type.
Very, very easy to read. I would highly encourage you to read it. I'll give you some really short butchered version of it. Right?
When a client says thank you to you, his theory is people only say thank you where they feel a genuine need to express
appreciation.
You've done something great, and they wanna balance the scale by saying thank you. When they say thank you, you must ask for the referral right then and there. If you don't, you've missed the opportunity. So when they're like, Joshua, love what you did or this x y z. You did a great job. Thank you. Then you say, you wouldn't happen to know one or two people
who could benefit from x, what you do, would you? And you say, don't worry. I don't need their name and information right now.
Like, yeah, I might. And then you say, well, when you said yes, who were you thinking about? Oh,
James and Jenny. You're fantastic. You're like, can I ask you for one more favor? They're like, yes. So that James and Jenny know who I am when I reach out, could you call them in advance
and do a soft introduction for us?
Like, of course. Like, would it be alright with you if I follow-up with you, say, in a week to see if he did that?
Yes. Of course.
This is the formula.
And then in a week, you reach out and said, oh, Mary, it's me, Joshua.
Um, I'm betting that you probably didn't have a chance to speak to James or Jenny.
And then they say, you're right. I'm gonna call them right now. Or they say, nope. I did it. You're like, fantastic. I'll follow-up with them right now.
So the reason why you do that is because people are lying to you, so you already give them a way out. I bet you're so busy. You didn't have time to call James and Jenny.
Like, I haven't. So you remove the shame and the guilt,
but then they they fix that by calling them then and there.
So that's in the back of the book. If you can work with that,
you don't need to read the book. I wanna know from your personal experience as well, your tipping point from that, like, 800 k, 900 k, 1,000,000 revenue a year,
and then that year that you broke through, and I hit 2 mil, 3 mil, 4 mil. What was that like? I'm curious. Okay. You have to keep time in context in here. It's, like, in the nineties. Right? Late nineties.
I think I broke a million dollars in the second year of business.
I didn't even feel like it was hard. That's why I tell everybody in the world, like, making a million dollars is not hard. Making the other part is harder. And then it got to 2,000,000, and that didn't feel that hard either. So generally speaking, the budgets we were seeing were about $200,000
Getting past $200,000 per engagement was hard.
Okay? So the 200 k, for some reason, I don't know why it just worked out to be 200 k. Later on, I find out we can win these probably 75% of the time. I know I'm even trying. It's weird. 250 k? Can't win these. Uh, we dropped down to 20% close rate. And I'm like, what is wrong with me? I just can't do it now. I have performance anxiety. I don't know. There's a ceiling. I can't break through. And it's not until I met my business coach, he's like, you know what? The game that you're playing is the minor leagues. This is the minors. This is the majors, and it's a big step up in professional sports. You know what I say in the minors and the majors? They're not that good. So this is a feeder network for the very top to go play here. The reason why he said is because when they get the budget at a certain point, they can pretty much hire anybody in the country.
And when they go beyond that, they can hire anybody in the world. And so your competition got from regional to national to international.
And he says, you bring in a regional game to fight in a national game. And we see this in basketball. We see this in football. We see it in soccer. You're pretty good for a local town person, but not in the national market. He goes, you have to be a different person. So the breakthrough for me, believe it or not, was in the design work. I learned how to have a sales conversation.
He told me, he gave me permission
to ask the question that I was thinking. Prior to that, I would just never ask. I don't know why, but that was the unlock for me, the thing that we had worked on for the past two days because you appear to be different. If I gave you a lot of money to solve a problem in video production,
you just hire the best You would bring on the right crew. You would not cut any corner. You'd probably shoot on an Alexa and use the,
um, Zeiss lenses and have, like, a script supervisor and do storyboards and all kinds of things you need to do to create the work. So it's not a limitation on your creativity. It's a limitation on your ability to understand what the clients want,
to make them feel seen, heard, and understood. That's your limitation. How do you deal with self doubt, especially after experiencing setbacks? Bar. Belief,
action that you take, the result that you get. So when you have a setback,
like what? My business doesn't
do that well in 2024.
So you took a hit in 2024, a decline? Yeah. I lost. Percentage wise, what did you go down from? 20. 20. So you just went down 20%.
Okay. You think you're probably a lone and a loser.
Did anybody have a decline in revenue from 2023 to 2024? Raise your hand. K. I'll tell you, I lost a million dollars
in revenue. I'm not a loser. I just haven't found a way to fix this yet. Pretty confident I will. So some part of your life experiences when I have a setback,
I'm a loser.
We don't have a culture that's comfortable with failure. Right? So we interpret the failure internally versus, like, there's lots of things that I can't control.
I need to accept that part and work on the things I can control. If you were to guess, do you have an idea as to one or two things that were in your control that you could do differently? Sure. Work on that. Now I used to try and coach people
saying, well, your belief is x,
and I'll use a tool of belief and talk to change x to y. And my friends who are in therapy and coaching, like, you can't use a belief to change a belief. It's very difficult. If you're afraid of cats, I'm like, don't be afraid of cats. Like, that don't work. But what I can do is ask you to take a different action,
which will get you a different result,
which will change your belief. So you know the one or two things that you can try, y, z.
Do impact effort on those things and work on those things. Now if you want to have a greater probability of success,
find someone who's done it before and solve that problem. Pay them whatever they're worth, which is the problem here, to get you out of this, or you can go out at your own. Either is okay. If you have some money, that's where good money is spent. If you don't have any money, then you have to grind it out on your own. I'm going through that myself. I just got a really disheartening email yesterday from, uh, somebody, uh, who one of my friends, an entrepreneur. He says, uh, after eleven years in business, we forgot to tell you we're we're this is our last year in business. 2024 for a lot of people, especially in the service space, has been really funky. And I think something that might be driving some of this, I hate to say it because I'm an optimist, AI, the world is changing really fast. The last time there was a really big paradigm shift, it was called the Internet, and it wiped out a lot of people. Then there's this other
paradigm shift,
It's and called something different that most people don't talk about. It's called Apple. Apple put a lot of businesses out of business. Do you know how many technologies
or things they've displaced? Back when I was in LA, I had this thing called the Thomas Guide, spiral bound notebook that was, like, that thick so I can figure out where to go in LA. As soon as the GPS was integrated into your phone, that business was gone. And you know Garmin,
who makes GPSs,
their business suffered too.
In Nokia and Motorola Razr, they were all the hottest things. Nokia is barely a footnote today. Think about how many businesses Apple displays.
And you didn't know this, but m v three CDs, uh, LaserJet, all these things were replaced because m v threes got really easy to use on an Apple device. They crushed Creative Labs. You remember Creative Labs? They made, I think, the first m p three player. I had one of them. Dead. Every three to five years, your industry is going to be disrupted. So if you haven't disrupted yourself, you will be disrupted. I say three to five years, but I got caught blindsided because AI is making it faster. I do not know now how long the cycle is.
So I would ask each and every one of you who's in business to be actively looking to disrupt yourself.
If you don't do it, the world will. Here's the cool thing. You heard the expression fight fire with fire? Yeah. It's not always clear to me what that means. What you do is if your business is being displaced by AI, which I guarantee most of you will be, from coding to creativity to writing music, is use AI to fight itself. Say this is my business. This is what I do. This is what I charge. This is who I do it for. This is the impact I hope to create. Disrupt my own business in anticipation of the way AI is gonna disrupt me.
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