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The $100 MBA Show
Exactly How To Become A Millionaire (Step-By-Step Guide)
00:30:03
You’re doing everything “right” on paper. Trying new strategies, following what successful people are doing, staying busy day in and day out. But when you really step back, it feels like you’re not actually getting closer to becoming a millionaire, just stuck in a loop of effort without real breakthrough.
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Most people that want to become millionaires are focusing on the wrong thing. They focus on tactics. They think it's a particular investment, a side hustle that they need to work on. The morning routine, the productivity tips. I get it. Tactics feel actionable. But here's what nobody's telling you. Tactics. Without the right framework to execute those tactics are a waste of time and money. I know this because I spent years doing exactly that, trying to find the hack. I built a web design agency out of necessity. When I quit my teaching job at 32 and moved to New York City with nothing, I made money with this business. Good money, actually. But it never actually was going to make me a millionaire. Not because I wasn't working hard enough. It's because the framework was wrong. The business model was wrong, the thinking behind it was wrong. And it took me years and one significant mindset shift to figure out what actually needed to change. But by the end of this episode, you'll have the exact steps you need to take to become a millionaire and the framework that changed everything for me. Three parts in order, because a sequence matters as much as the content. And I'm gonna show you step by step. Let's go. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no fluff, practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Part one, the economics. This is the most important insight I can give you and this is why I'm giving it to you off the top. When you're building wealth as an entrepreneur, you can't ignore this. All businesses are not created equal. And the business model you choose, the fundamental structure of how you make money, that's what a business model is. Determines your ceiling before you even make a single dollar. I'm going to say that again. I need to make sure this is cemented in your brain. The fundamental structure of the business, what the business allows you to do, the profit margins, everything determines the ceiling, determines how much money can actually make with this business before you even start. When I started my web design agency, I was solving an immediate problem. I needed income, okay? And there's nothing wrong with doing this. And I'm glad that I did this. Cause I learned some hard lessons. And the agency delivered for me. The first month, I had three clients at $1,500 each, which allowed me to have $4,500 of revenue from those three clients. I had just enough to pay my rent and pay my groceries. Again, I'm living in New York City. Second month, I raised my prices to $2,000. I got two clients, 4,000. Bit of a dip, but I'm raising my prices. Third month, I raised it to 5,000. I got four clients. Now I was making $20,000, $28,000 in 90 days from a standing star. By any reasonable measure. That was success, right? I had a successful start. But here's what I understood. Eventually, that business had a fundamental economic problem, right? Had an economics problem that I didn't see. Every dollar I made required my direct time and skill, right? It required me to be involved. There was no leverage. There was no product that being sold while I sleep, right? There was no customer that paid me more than once. There was no system that could deliver the result without me being in the room. This is a problem, right? Which meant I had a ceiling, okay? A very specific ceiling. And that ceiling was defined by how many hours I had available and how much I could actually charge per hour. That's it. No matter how hard I worked, I could not get past that ceiling. This is a trap that keeps most entrepreneurs comfortable, but not wealthy. You're not going to become a millionaire like this. They build a business that funds their life and their lifestyle and that pays the bills that gives them the freedom they want when they quit their job. And they mistake that comfort for success. And I say comfort, but really what you're doing is you're buying yourself a job. You're becoming self employed. In my opinion, this is not true entrepreneurial success. Because now instead of having some boss controlling their ceiling and not giving them a promotion, the ceiling is built into the business itself. You created that. That's what's so crazy about it, right? The shift that changed my trajectory was a single decision. A. A decision that really shaped everything. After that, I stopped building a business designed to fund my life. I know that sounds a little bit weird because this is what's being touted on Instagram and on TikTok and on all social media. You know, the dream life and the hammock on the beach and lifestyle business. Because when I stopped building a lifestyle business, I Had to start building a business designed to scale. Those are not the same thing. A lifestyle business minimizes risk, minimizes headaches, minimizes dealing with people and training people and giving up trust or giving up power to other people in your business. That means, you know, empowering people to make decisions and not you. And most entrepreneurs never make the switch because they just feel like that's just too hard to deal with. But I'm gonna convince you today that it's worth making that switch. Just building a business to, to scale rather than building a lifestyle business. It's worth that switch if you want to be a millionaire. If you don't want to be a millionaire, that's fine. Be a lifestyle business and that's okay. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to be rich, if you want to be wealthy, if you want to have millions and millions and millions, that is not going to happen if you don't build to scale. So what does that mean, to build to scale? Well, economics for scale are different. A business with the right economics for scale has three characteristics that I need to share with you. The first one is high margins, not revenue margins. One of the things I always say is margins are not the most important thing. They are everything. What do I mean by margins? Well, the percentage of every dollar you keep after covering all costs, after paying all the bills in your business, how much money is left? That's your margin. A service based business, trading time for money, might have margins of 30 to 40% if you're lucky. A software business, a business that I ran for 10 years and then we eventually got acquired by proprofs, is incredibly high margins. A digital product or a subscription is also a very high margin. So these run at 60, 70, 80, even 90% margins. And the bigger you grow, the more customers you have, the bigger the margins. That difference is not cosmetic, it's not insignificant. It's a difference between a business that can compound year after year and one that just can't. High margins means every unit of growth translate directly into wealth. What do I mean by this? Okay, this sounds very fancy, so let me break it down. Any unit of growth, meaning if, for example, every time you get more people on your email list, let's say for example, you get another hundred people joining your email list this week. That means you know that when that happens, you get more sales. Well, if your margins are really good, that means you're gonna get more profit. That means any measure of growth, more emails, more people watching your YouTube videos, more people Subscribing to your podcast. Any measure, any way your business is growing, any lever that's being pulled, that means more money in your pocket. Low margins, on the other hand, feels like you're running faster and faster just to stay in the same place because you don't have any compounding. Because when your margins are thin, you're just basically treading water. Now I'm all riled up about margins, which is the first characteristics of a high growth business that's going to allow you to become a millionaire. But let's talk about the second. Reoccurring revenue. A business where customers pay you once is a business where you start from zero every month. It's so demotivating because you work so hard to get a customer in the first place. To acquire a customer, you might spend time and money and energy to make that happen. And then you can't utilize the that energy and that investment more than once. When you have a reoccurring business where a customer pays you monthly or annually, the business baseline grows every time you add a customer and you retain an existing one. Meaning that, say, for example, I have five customers paying meet me monthly. I worked really hard to get those five customers this month. Next month I get 10 more customers. Do I have 10 customers now? No, I have 15 now paying me monthly. Guess what, the month after that, it's a little bit slower. And I only get four customers paying me monthly. Am I having a tough time paying my bills because I only have four customers? No, because I have 19 customers now paying me monthly. The compound effect of getting more customers and keeping more customers for longer turns into a year that is worth a decade. I know this firsthand from webinar in Asia, my webinar company, because we had monthly and annual plans every time we acquired new customers every month we just added more profit and more money and we can reinvest. I literally could predict when I can make my next hire. I can make two more hires next month because I know that we're going to acquire X amount of customers, which is going to increase X amount of cash flow and we're going to have an X amount of profit so that I can be able to reinvest in the business. It was beautiful. And I want that for you. The third characteristic of a business that's going to make you a millionaire is something that no one talks about, which is leverage. Something working when you're not. You need to multiply yourself. And the way you do that is you use leverage. And forms of leverage are like things like Code, content, systems, media, people, these are all ways to leverage your efforts. Something that delivers value to customers without you requiring direct time. And in that moment, now with Webinar Ninja, my software company, which is one of my biggest successes, we built a multimillion dollar company with over 30,000 users and eventually got acquired for life changing money that had all three. And it's not by mistake, right? It was planned. Why? Because my whole goal was to build a high value company that one day would be acquired. And that's what happened. It had high margins, it had reoccurring monthly subscriptions and the software that worked 24 hours a day whether I was awake or not. People can sign up and use my software anytime, get on trial and pay for it and give me money without me being involved at all. I could be on holiday, I could be sleeping, I could be, you know, visiting a friend. The point here is, is that I don't need to be involved because I have code working for you. I had forms of leverage. I had a team working for me, I had media working for me, I had, you know, different podcasts and interviews I was doing and we had a lots of videos that we'd put out. We had so many ways we were leveraging the business. But one of the things I want to stress here is that this is a good example of economics for scale. Before you think about any wealth building tactics, ask yourself this question, does my business have economics for scale? Does it have the three characteristics that Omer just mentioned? If the answer's no, don't panic. The first move is not to rush to the latest marketing strategy or trend. No, the first move is to fix your, your model and make sure you have those three characteristics. I can stop the episode right now and this would make you successful enough to get out of the lifestyle rat race. But I want you to go beyond that. I want you to think bigger. And this is why I got to talk about something that nobody talks about. When it comes to wealth and the conversation of wealth, the economics alone are actually not enough. They're going to get you to a certain level, but at some level you're going to need something else. I've met plenty of entrepreneurs who, who understood the economics. They're really good at it, who built high margin businesses with reoccurring revenue and leveraged their businesses with all these different forms of leverage and they still didn't make it where they wanted to go. They still didn't have a multimillion dollar business. Why? Because they were optimizing for a Number. Listen, I know what it's like to chase money because I didn't grow up with money. My parents were immigrants from Egypt. My grandmother migrated from Egypt. My with six kids. She was a widow. She had nothing. She sacrificed everything to give her family a great life as much as possible. So I know what it's like to grow up in an environment where you don't have much and you're hungry to stop being poor. Right? You want to never worry about money. But the problem is that when you chase a number, there's only so much you can do. There's only how far you can go. You're going to get to a ceiling where the number is just not enough. You need to work towards a mission. What I found is that optimizing for a number, even a large number, like I want to make, you know, a hundred million dollars, a billion dollars, does not produce the kind of sustained, obsessive, creative effort that you'll need to actually get you there. Okay? The number alone is not going to help you be motivated and get up when times are tough. You need a moonshot. Something that is not about the money. It took me so long to get this, and I hope that you get this today because it's going to save you a lot of heartache, because I had a lot of heartache. To get to this point, you need to build something larger than you, something that requires you to think about, if I scale this business, how much reach can I have? How many people can I affect? You have to have a mission that motivates you beyond paying the bills. For me, that moonshot was helping people become financially free by growing their business with the power of webinars. And that's why I built Webinar Ninja. This is why I do this podcast, by the way, is because I want to help people never have to worry about money. Why? Because that's a painful problem. I understand. Just like I mentioned, I didn't come from money. So for me, I want to help as many people possible get out of the rat race of paying their bills, help them build financial wealth that is only going to serve themselves. They're going to serve their family generational wealth. I do this for myself. I do this for the family around me. Why? Because I'm probably the first millionaire in my family. And it's kind of a proud moment, but it's also a bit of a responsibility. I know something I experienced something that maybe the rest of my family and family members haven't. So I want to not only give this to People around me, but everybody I ever interact with, anybody I can reach through this podcast, through my products. That's my moonshot, right? That has some meaning, that has emotion behind it, that's gonna get me going when I don't feel like it. That's not a revenue goal. It's not a lifestyle goal. It's not me trying to buy the latest car or the biggest house or the fancy vacation. It's a mission. Ask yourself this question. Why do people do incredible things and money's not involved? Why do people defend their country? Why do they go to war, right? It's not for the pay. It's because they have a mission. They have something that is, they're driven to do. By having a mission, it forces you to think bigger than your current situation. And I was starting at business. It wasn't growing, and my competition was closing in and costs were rising, and it felt like I was stalled. But the mission kept me building, it kept me going because I knew I was helping people. I knew that I was helping people through my products, through my services, through. Through this podcast. And it wasn't because of the number I was chasing. The funny thing is, is that the money will come, right? It will take care of itself if the mission is strong enough. And guess what I found out is that when you have revenue goals, those goals are constantly being met or being surpassed, right? Maybe you're saying, I want to make a million dollars in profit next year, and you hit that goal, then what? You start making a new goal, right? It sounds familiar, right? And a new goal, and that gets boring after a while. But when you have a mission, a big, big goal in terms of impacting other people, that is going to be there for you. And that doesn't get boring if there's a fire inside you, if it really means something to you. So find that mission, that means something to you. If you want to know what that is, ask yourself this question. What change do you want to make in the world? For me, it wasn't like curing hunger or solving malaria or whatever it might be. That was not the thing I really understood. What I understood is just like, average, you know, being middle class or lower middle class and not really being ahead on your promises in your life. Ask yourself, whose life does your business make genuinely better? And by the way, this could be something like making people laugh, giving some levity in somebody's tough time in life, and you're giving them some relief. That's a form of charity. That's unbelievable. Ask yourself, what would you keep building even if revenue plateaued, right? Even if you're not making any more money than you are right now, Right. Would you keep doing this? That answer is your fuel. Without fuel, the best vehicle in the world goes nowhere. Hey, if this episode's giving you a framework you haven't heard before, I want you to subscribe to the show. Not only because you're going to get more amazing episodes that's going to help you grow your business, but because I have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. It's all about how Netflix grew to a $366 billion beast.
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Insane. I'm gonna be sharing with you their CEO, Reed Hastings, secrets how he did this and how you can do it, too, even with your small business hit. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Let's go to part three of today's lesson. Part three is the execution stack. You might have the right economics, you might have that moonshot, that mission that's driving you, but now you need that third element. We need to talk about specific moves that convert those two things, the economics and the mission, into. Into actual wealth. The first move is, is that you need to build a product that the market already needs. Do not invent a market from scratch. This is incredibly difficult and is not worth you trying. The risk is too high, in my opinion. Go where people are already spending money and solve that problem better. I talk about this all the time, but this is the cheat code to building a product that people actually want to. When Nicole and I were building Webinar Ninja software company, Webinars already existed, okay? Our biggest competitor was GoToWebinar. It was actually called GoToMeeting. At the time, it wasn't like really a webinar software. It was a meeting software. But that was our biggest competitor. The market was proven. People were already doing this, okay? We didn't have to convince anyone that webinars worked. People were using the software GOTO to run webinars to sell their products and services. We just had to build a better, simpler, more complete solution for our target audience so that they feel like this is a better way to do what I'm already doing. We targeted small business owners, creators, coaches, authors, teams of five or fewer because we wanted the decision maker, the person that's deciding to buy this product, to be the user. That specific focus allowed us to build something that served them extraordinarily well. Because we were niching down, we knew exactly we're talking to and who are serving. We built a Product that they were like, hey, this was built exactly for me. Yeah, exactly. That's what we did. I want to make something clear. We weren't trying to be everything to everyone. We were the obvious choice for a specific group of the market, specific niche in the market. Find your specific someone, then become the obvious choice for them. This is the easiest way to do well in a market because you're not trying to be everything and you're being like, basically vanilla and mediocre at everything you do in your business. What you're doing is you're being excellent, the best for a group of people. The next move is knowing your numbers. I have something called Money Mondays. This is so important, I cannot tell you. Every Monday, I take five to ten minutes, no more. I open my P and L, which is a profit and loss sheet, which tells me how my business is doing financially. I look at what came in, what went out, what we sent money on, and what's the margin? How much money are we keeping? This is very simple. Most entrepreneurs have a feeling about how their business is doing and their finances. But let me tell you something. Feelings are a lie, okay? They're not the truth. You can't depend on them. Revenue feels like success. Revenue meaning how much money that's coming in, but it's not always success because you got costs, right? Really what success is, is profit, right? And when you feel busy making sales and it feels like progress, but your P and L will tell you the truth. And like what Peter Drucker says, what gets measured gets managed. So if you don't measure something, it's hard for you to know if something's wrong. You cannot build wealth from a business you don't understand financially. And I'm telling you right now, do not outsource this Money Monday exercise. This is your business and business is money, okay? So stop ignoring that, okay? Look at the money every Monday because that is going to give you the confidence to know where your business is at and what moves to make. How do you know if you can afford another hire or more marketing or whatever it might be, or an ad campaign? You gotta know your numbers. When up and coming entrepreneurs pitch me their business and they are looking for investment. They're looking for me to be on their board or whatever it might be. They give me all their ideas and why they love their product and all this stuff and all the passion. And then I ask them. So tell me a little bit about your numbers. Tell me what your MRR is. Tell me what your profit margins are. You know what is your reoccurring revenue look like? What's the lifetime value of a customer? I. I asked them these questions, the financial questions, and they don't have answers. In that moment, it's a no for me. Why not? Because not only do they not know their numbers, which is essential to business, but because they don't prioritize it. Right. I can't trust you as a founder if you don't know the numbers. It's like saying, I'm this amazing race car driver. Look at my car, look how fast it is. Look at the tires, look at the top speed. Then I say, hey, do you know how to drive? And they're like, no. What the next move is. It's a compete on what the big players, the big competition can't match. When we were going up against Gotowebinar and then eventually Zoom company with hundreds of millions of funding and global brand, everybody knows them. We were a team of around 35 people. They had thousands of people on their team. Okay? We cannot out advertise them, we cannot out distribute them. So we found the thing they structurally could not match. And for us, it was customer support. The average response time for Zoom for a support ticket was 48 hours. Ours was under 30 seconds. I'm so proud of that because that's how we stood out from the crowd and that's how we competed with the Giants. Our Customer support was 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365, no days off. Customers would tell us that our support alone was worth the subscription. Not the features, not the price, the support. Find a thing your biggest competitor cannot do well, they cannot match you on because of their size. Then do the thing so well, it becomes the reason customers choose you. We had so many customers who left us who left our service that canceled and went to on a big competitor. They say I went to Zoom, but then I came back because anytime I had a question, anytime I had a problem, anytime I didn't understand something, they took forever. And you guys are right there in the chat, in the app, answering questions back and forth and. And some of our customer support agents would even just jump on their webinar and support them and give them like thumbs up in the comments. Move number four, Quattro. Stay in it. Past the plateau. The million dollar milestone arrived for us at webinar Ninja in 2019, five years after launch, by the way. We exited in 2024. So this was pivotal for us because we needed to just explode from that point. Those first five years, though, were not linear. Those were a period of years where we could not grow. We were just plate. Competition was closing in. Costs were starting to rise. It felt like we're fighting forces we could not see or control. Most people quit at that point, not because the business was broken, but because the gap between the effort they were putting in and the results were starting to feel really unsustainable and not worth it. What kept us going was the mission. The customers whose businesses were growing because of what we built, we couldn't let them down. The testimonials kept arriving when revenue was flat. The evidence that we had was insurmountable, that the product was working, even when the metrics that we wanted to see move wasn't moving. You gotta dig in, you gotta stay and weather the storm. The compounding effects that create real wealth are almost never visible. In the first early years. It's hard to see, like, if I double a penny every day, I really don't see the compounding. Like, day one is one cent, day two is two cents, day three is four cents. Okay, big deal. But you know how much money you have in 30 days after all that compounding? I want you to take a guess. It's over $5.3 million. You might be saying, how? How is that possible? I started with one penny, and it was two pennies in day two and four pennies in day three. Well, if you're watching on YouTube, we'll put up a chart to show you what happens in 30 days when you double a penny every single day. In the early days, it seems insignificant, seems like nothing's happening. It seems like, what's the point? But that's the power of compounding. Okay? If you're in it for long enough, you're gonna see some incredible results. Move number five, move towards the exit. Even if you never exit. I love it. In 2024, we sold our software company, Webinar Ninja to Proprofs. And the discipline of building something acquisition worthy, a business with real revenue, with real loyal customers, with strong systems built in, and an operation that didn't depend on me or Nicole as the founders being there, was the same discipline that made it genuinely an excellent business. Okay, so regardless if you want to sell your business or not or you're planning to exit, the same things you have to do to build an exitable business is the same things that build a genuinely amazing business to run. You do not need to sell your business to benefit from what I'm talking about. To have clean financials, to have documented systems, to have A team that can operate without you in the room, that can make decisions without you. Revenue that's reoccurring with low churn, with low people coming out of there. These are not just acquisition criteria for a business to acquire you. These are the characteristics of a business that generates real wealth on its own, regardless of whether you sell or not. And obviously, if you do exit, you're going to exit for some pretty, pretty big numbers because that's a high value business. You're sought after. You don't need to go and promote your business or try to, you know, approach people. People will come to you. Right? When people approached us and said, hey, we want to buy your business because of the structure of the way you're running your business and the economics of everything I talked about today. Build it like someone might buy it one day. Even if you're just starting out by yourself, right? And even if that person is you that will buy it in 10 years, metaphorically, or maybe your kids. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I want to leave you with a nice, clean framework. Here's the framework. Phase one, economics. Build a business with the right economics for scale, high margins, recurring revenue leverage. Okay? Phase two, have a mission. Find your moonshot. Something that's larger than a revenue goal, something that forces you to jump out of bed and get going on those tough days. Phase number three, execution. Build what the market already needs. Okay. Know your numbers every week. Money Mondays. Okay. Compete with those big players with the things they can't do. Okay. Stay past the plateau where when things get tough and build towards an exit. Even if you don't ever sell your business, that's the path. Not a collection of tactics, not a series of hacks. A framework with a sequence. Each phase unlocks the next. And the million, when it comes, is not a destination. It's the evidence. It's the proof that everything you built there was done right. And let's not lie, the millions are pretty nice too. Today's episode topic comes from a question from Tom. How did you become a millionaire, Omar? I'd love to know what are some of the tips or tricks you can give me so I can become a millionaire. If you got a question you want to ask like Tom just did, just go ahead and submit it over@100mba.net Q and we'll take your question and turn it into an episode. This episode gave you something tangible, something practical that you can use. That's what we're here for. Make sure you hit subscribe. But also make sure you keep learning. I have a full dedicated episode that I recently published talking about how to compete against massive companies and how to win as a bootstrap business, as a self funded business. If you want to go deep in that, go check out that episode on whatever app you're using right now. Because building a business with the right economics is only half the battle. Knowing how to win in a crowded marketplace, which is a marketplace that people want what you have is a good thing, right? But that is going to be the other half. You need to get that solved as well. So that episode shows exactly how we did it with our software company, Webinar Ninja. Go ahead and check it out. Thanks for being part of today's episode, being here, listening, learning. You're my kind of person. I'll see you in the next one. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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