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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2545 The Fastest Way to Make a Million Dollars
00:20:43
Are you ready to hit that million-dollar mark in your business? Are you ready to catapult your revenue to millionaire status? If so, today's lesson is exactly what you need.
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- [00:00]
LinkedIn Representative
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- [00:31]
Ramp Representative
Got a 7am Meeting on a Monday expensing breakfast because it's in policy wasting all afternoon submitting an expense report for that breakfast. If your company used Ramp, you could submit expenses with just a text.
- [00:51]
Omar Zenhom
Yay.
- [00:53]
Ramp Representative
Free your team from expense reports today. Switch your business to ramp.com hey everyone.
- [01:09]
Omar Zenhom
Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm Omar Zenholm and in today's lesson, you will learn the fastest way to make a million dollars. Now let's get something clear first. What do I mean by a million dollars? Are we talking about just a million dollars cumulatively or a million dollars a year? Are we talking revenue? Are we talking profit? So for today's lesson, we're going to be talking about how to make a million dollars a year in revenue. Because if you're hitting a million dollars a year in revenue, you have a viable business. You have a business that's providing something that people want enough for you to make that kind of money and it has potential to grow beyond that. And this is what I've seen with many businesses that I've mentored and many entrepreneurs I've worked with that once you hit the million dollar revenue mark, sky's the limit. You really can go beyond that and you have something that's really got product market fit. So I'm gonna walk you through five things I think are most important to get you to a million dollar business as soon as possible. And these are things that worked for me. In my experience it took me some time to get there and once I got there, I look back and I thought, man, I worked on a lot of things that really didn't matter. But these five things I'm going to share with you today really do matter and really make all the difference to helping you get to that million dollar mark. But before that quick stat that might surprise you. Did you know that the average self made millionaire about 12 to 20 years to make their first million? That's according to a study by the Ramsey Solutions Group. Think about that. 12 to 20 years. Are you Willing to put in the work, even if it's minimum 12 years to get to that point. So it's not an overnight thing. It's not something that happens in a matter of days or weeks. It takes a lot of years because it takes years to become the person you need to become, to pull that off, to be able to provide that kind of value to the world, to make that kind of revenue. So today we're going to be focusing on some things I think that will fast track that a little bit based on what I've learned through my own experiences through building businesses, whether it's on the side when I first got started or full time with my software business or this business, the hundred dollar mba. I'm gonna show you what works, what doesn't and what to focus on so that you can fast track your way to a million dollars a year in revenue. Let's start with the first one which is build a scalable business. Let me define that. Too many people think they can become wealthy or millionaires or making, you know, multi million dol every single year. Being a solopreneur or being a freelancer, it's very hard for you to do this when you're exchanging time for money. You really need to build something that scales, that you can be able to produce once and then sell over and over again regardless if you're working or not, regardless if you're around or not. A good example of this is like a product or a service that other people are providing. You know, if you have an agency for example, that's providing services, this is a good example. So one of the easiest ways to do this is through technology. You know, building a software like I did webinar Ninja or building an online course that can be sold regardless if you're working or not. It could be sold on your website, online or providing some sort of service like say marketing services or website design. And you have a team of people that are doing this for you that can scale. So a scalable business is something that I really recommend. Uh, this kind of is a no brainer, but a lot of people think they can just kind of get started as a freelancer or a solopreneur and they can get there. It's much harder to do that when you're trying to, you know, swap time for money. And what you want to do here is get out of that equation and start scaling with other forms of leverage like we talked about before, like labor, like capital, like technology, like media. For example, when I was running my software company, Webinar ninja I that I started and grew for 10 years with my team and my co founder Nicole, and eventually exited. Every day I would wake up in the morning when I was working on the software and I would see sales from customers, you know, buying my software when I was sleeping. Because we built the product, it serves our customers. Customers, they use it, they could buy, they could check out anytime online. Super simple. It takes some time to invest to build an asset like that, but then it reaps its benefits, it reaps the rewards as you start improving it, growing it, and start selling it over and over and over 24, seven around the world because of the beauty of the Internet. So I really got a good taste of how amazing SaaS businesses or software as a service businesses are. And it's not the only way. I mean, but it's a, an example. You could sell courses, you could sell, you know, consulting, like I mentioned, that is outsourced from other people, services, anything that is a digital product, a book. All these things are things that you create once or provide and then you can provide without your input. So start asking yourself, how can I leverage my skills to create something that doesn't require me to trade time for money? Focus on building a scalable product or service on a platform that can allow you to grow. And essentially what happens here is you become a creator, you become a manager, you become a recruiter because you're hiring people to produce this stuff for you eventually. So that way you have to actually be there to make it happen. So number one is build a scalable business. This doesn't require you to trade time for money. Number two, focus on high profit margins. I can't tell you how much this is not talked about. And a lot of people don't talk about profit margins. Profit margins are going to allow you to keep more of what you are getting in terms of revenue because your expenses are far less than your revenue. Now, the reason why profit margins are so important is because you could take those profits and reinvest in your business and grow it faster. So for example, let's say I made $10,000 in revenue in a month and my expenses are only $2,000. That means I made a profit of $8,000. I could take that $8,000, reinvest it into my business to get me another additional $10,000 in revenue. So next month I'm making $20,000 in revenue. So you get the point. The point here is, is that it's hard for you to really scale and grow and get to that million dollar mark if you don't have high profit margins in your business. I'm a big believer in marketing and investing in marketing. It's a great way for you to get known and get enough customers to get through your doors so that you can get to that point of that million dollar mark. High revenue businesses with low profit margins will keep you stuck in the cycle of working hard without seeing any substantial financial gains. The key is to focus on businesses with high profit margins where your costs are low but the value that you offer is high so you can charge a good amount of money and keep those margin margins fat. The highest profit margin type businesses are any kind of business that doesn't cost you so much money to produce or to sell every single time. Like I mentioned, ebooks, courses, a software. These are high profit margin businesses because you create them once, of course, you have to maintain them, you have to update them. But every time you sell it to a customer, there's no cost involved. You already paid for that cost because you created that software, created the book or the course. So, so basically let's say for example, you create a course and you sell it over and over. Every time you sell it to a customer, you're just selling a login really to get access to that course. And it's really not going to cost you much more if you have one customer or a hundred customers. So this is a really scalable type of business that of course has high profit margins because you're not shelling out cash every single time you need to supply. That of course has high profit margins because you're not pulling out cash in your pocket every time you need to serve a customer. You know, one of the businesses that, that have low profit margins that are very popular these days is E Commerce. You know, E Commerce is a tough, tough business. I know I had my own clothing line for a good number of years. The reason why I don't have it anymore is because the profit margins are really sad. They make you cry every day. You know, because every time you sell a product to a customer, it costs you money because you gotta ship it to the customer. You gotta actually create the product that costs you money. That individual product, that shirt or whatever it might be and then that has a cost and then you gotta to sell to the customer. There's so much cost involved. Every single time you sell to a customer, your margins are quite thin, let alone, you know, your team expenses, you know, the website hosting, all this other stuff that you have to pay for to keep that Business alive. So the point here is, is that if you create something and then you can sell to a customer over and over again, or many customers, and it doesn't cost you much more to sell to one customer versus a hundred customers. This is a high profit margin business. So whatever you're doing right now, if it's not a high profit margin business, ask yourself what can do to make it a high profit margin business? Can you make it into a product? Can you take that service and make it into a product? Can you transform it into some sort of service that is fulfilled by other people? Can you create a digital tool or sort of course or guide around that topic so that you don't have to put in the work and the time every single time you need to serve a customer. Ask yourself these questions. It'll get you thinking how to get a little bit more profitable. Number three, super important, niching down by using your unique skills and experiences. So many people forget that you have experience in life. You have skills and you kind of sometimes neglect these skills. For example, I was an educator, a high school university teacher in the classroom for over a decade, right? When I transitioned out of my full time job into full time entrepreneurship, I didn't just neglect my teaching career. This is all I have. These are the skills I have. This is my experience. I'm gonna use everything to my advantage to try to win at this thing called business. Okay, so what you wanna do here is you wanna niche down, meaning you don't wanna serve everybody. You wanna actually serve a sub market using your skills and experiences. For example, I started a software company called the Webinar Ninja. It's all about webinars. And webinars are about basically teaching online. It's sharing what you know to build trust and make sales. Right? So I used my skills as a teacher to show how this product really works and how it's beneficial. And I used to run webinars with my software to sell my products or services. I used my unique skills and I didn't just serve everybody. I only served other people that did this for a living, right? Coaches and creators. That was our niche for Webinar Ninja. So here's a piece of advice I wish somebody told me when I got started. I learned this the hard way, but you really want to niche down as much as possible so that you can really have a big chunk of that market. Okay, a good understanding of what I'm talking about here is what market can you dominate? Meaning you can have 50% or more of that market share. Within 12 months. Right. With, you know, reasonable amount of marketing and, you know, promotion. So that's how niche you want to go when you get started. You can always kind of expand out of that as you dominate that market. So say, for example, you want to appeal to people that want to learn how to play the piano, but there's so many people that want to play the piano. You want to niche down. What market can you dominate or be, you know, have 50% of that market share in less than 12 months or within 12 months? Let's think about that. Okay, so maybe I have some experience teaching adults. Maybe I was teaching night school or something like that. And I teach adults. So I'm going to teach adults how to play the piano. Right. Well, also I'm going to teach adults who play the piano, have never learned an instrument, music instrument. I'm also going to teach adults that play the piano, that never learn a musical instrument, that can't read music. Okay, what else? I'm going to teach adults who want to play the piano and they want to learn to play piano, but they're not trying to do it as a profession or try to become professional piano player. They want to just do it as a hobby. They want to do it, impress their family maybe at Christmas and play a tune. Right. Actually, I'm going to niche down and just teach people how to play piano Christmas songs and they're 45 and above. Right. So I'm trying to niche, niche, niche down so that when I go into this market, I can dominate and I'll be everywhere. And everybody thinks I'm the person that they need to teach from. And in their bubble, in their world, I seem like this big deal. And once I've dominated a market, have 50% market share or more, I can then expand. I can then say, okay, maybe I'll just remove one of those variables and go a little bit wider, a little bit wider, a little bit wider. And that's how you get traction and get some wins under your belt and become a market leader quickly.
- [13:50]
Home Equity Representative
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- [14:17]
Ramp Representative
That's hometap.com got a 7am meeting on a Monday, expensing breakfast because it's in policy, wasting all afternoon submitting an expense report for that breakfast. If your company used Ramp, you could submit expenses with just a text.
- [14:40]
Omar Zenhom
Yay.
- [14:42]
Ramp Representative
Free your team from expense reports today. Switch your business to ramp.com.
- [14:53]
Omar Zenhom
A business that comes to mind is a business called the still, which focuses exclusively on indoor plants for apartment dwellers. They didn't try to sell everything to everyone. They focused on a niche and became the leader in that space. So you want to narrow down your target market and focus on solving a specific problem for a specific group, using your unique skills and experiences from the past so that you can really resonate with that target audience. And a good way to kind of get started is like, what market can you get to 50% market share within 12 months, that niche down? Number four, solve a painful problem. In a growing market, the biggest businesses solve the most painful, urgent problems for their customers. Okay. The more painful it is, the better. You want to sell something that people feel like a pressing need for. Okay. And your solution will allow you to fast track your results. All right? Too many people are not attempting to build businesses that are actually solving a painful problem. When you do this, when you actually go after solving a painful problem, even if you don't solve it completely, even if you don't solve it very well, you will still attract a lot of customers that are happy to pay because they're desperate. Okay? And what I call this is like pushing a boulder down the hill rather than up the hill. Too many people are trying to build businesses that are pushing a boulder up the hill, which is incredibly painful. It's really hard to get momentum. But pushing a boulder down the hill takes minimal effort, and there's a lot of momentum. You have gravity on your side. An example of this is a company that sells these cards called Workshop Tactics. Okay, Workshop Tactics. I have their other deck of cards, also called Storyteller Tactics. But the reason why I bring this up is because now remote work is quite popular and a lot of people are working from different parts of the world. But often people or companies will bring their teams together to a team retreat. And what do you do with these team retreats? How do you actually run workshops? How do you make sure people are collaborating? How do you make sure that people are having a good time and learning about the company or expanding upon their knowledges or we're learning from each other? Well, this product is great for that, right? It shows people how to do this with a deck of cards, which is pretty cool. This is a, you know, a shameless Plug to them. But I have no affiliation with this company. But I just use their product. I love it. And we used it in our own team retreats with our companies. So these are just basically ways to collaborate and do workshops. And these cards have different themes and different things to do. But the reason why I bring it up is because this product is in a growing market. It's part of a growing market of people working remotely and companies doing team retreats, more team retreats, because they want to meet in person, whether it's like off sites every quarter or whatever it might be. And these companies and these team leaders don't know what to do, how to facilitate some of these workshops when people haven't seen each other in person that often. So good example. Solving a painful problem, because you have to get this done. You have to do workshops at a team retreat. There's no way around it, right? And at the same time, it's in a growing market. Number five, this one is huge. And it really changed a lot of my businesses big time. And that's hiring great talent, okay? One of the fastest ways to scale your business is to hire people that are smarter than you, okay? Better than you, can do whatever your business requires. Better than you, okay? A lot of us as entrepreneurs, as doers, as go getters, we have a high opinion of ourselves. And I'm here to tell you that we're not that special, okay? We learn something, we know how to do something. Other people can learn it even better, can do it even better, all right? And the best entrepreneurs I've seen are the people that build an incredible team around them with people more talented and smarter and more efficient and better than they are. And that's really what makes you a great entrepreneur, is being a great recruiter, right? The right team can help you expand quickly, more efficiently and build a better product or service for your customers and solve that painful problem better than your competition. Listen, I started a software company and I am not a coder, right? I'm a very amateur engineer developer. I can barely, you know, code an HTML, HTML, css, had a bit of php. I'm nowhere near as skilled as I need to be to build a complex software like webinar software, right? But I built a great team of engineers. I found some incredible leaders, a great CTO along the way. That helped me, a great infrastructure person, to build my infrastructure on aws. So my app scales and it's reliable on the servers. The point here is, is that, like, I didn't have all the skills I needed Right. To build a great software company. It didn't mean, oh, software company out the window. I'm not going to do it. No. I'm going to find people that can do it and I'm going to get them to be part of my team. I'm going to sell them on my vision, I'm going to tell them what I'm trying to do here, pay them well because they're talented, and then I'm going to go ahead and build that thing and scale my business. So one of the things that a lot of people do, they try to find a diamond in the rough. They try to find somebody who's inexpensive but really talented. I'm not going to say they don't exist, but they're really hard to find and, and they're probably going to elude you. You're not going to find them consistently. It's actually much better to find somebody that is expensive, right? That is talented and can get the job done. Because I found, especially when it comes to technical skills, you know, the most expensive people are 10 times more productive and talented than somebody who's just slightly less expensive or a little bit less expensive. And they can do so much more. They could build so much better software, they could build products, they could design better pages on your website, whatever it might be. The point here is, is that don't go cheap on talent. Get the as talented person that you can afford because they're going to get you that return on investment by building a great product or business or whatever you need to be able to fulfill your goals as an entrepreneur. If you don't have the money to hire somebody, think about getting a co founder that you know complements your skills. If you're good at sales and marketing but need a technical person, find a CT and they can become your business partner or vice versa, whatever it might be. Right? But in my opinion, you just can't do this alone and build a profitable scalable business without the help of others. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you're making your life harder. The fastest way to make a million dollars in revenue isn't about luck. It's about strategy. It's about building a scalable business. Focusing on high profit margins, right? Niching down, okay? And using your expertise and your experiences in serving that niche, solving real problems, real pains that people have in a growing market and hiring great talent, right? You can accelerate your journey to financial freedom and hit that million dollar revenue mark a lot faster than I did, at least by following these five that I've learned the hard way. Okay, thanks for tuning into the $100 MBA show. Hope you found this episode valuable and you're ready to implement these strategies. Don't just, you know, listen to this. It's great. Thanks for listening to the podcast or watching it on YouTube. But I want you to implement. Even if you just take one of these and implement them and start practicing them and start making a part of your daily life and part of the business you're building, implementation's where it's at. Right? That's what's really going to take you from 0 to 1. This is what's going to take you to the next level or take you wherever you want to go beyond the point you are today. Right. Don't just consume information. Implement, even if it's just one little thing. Thing. Thanks so much and I'll check you in the next episode.
- [22:49]
Narrator
And we're back, folks. It looks like Jim from sales just got in from his client lunch and he's got receipts. His next meeting is in two minutes. The team is asking, can he get through his expenses in that time? He's going for it. Is that his phone? He's snapping a pic. He's texting around. Jim is fast, but this is unheard of. That's it. He's done it.
- [23:07]
LinkedIn Representative
It's unbelievable.
- [23:09]
Ramp Representative
On ramp, expenses are faster than ever. Just submit them with a text. Switch your business to ramp.com.