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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2551 Why It’s So Hard To Go From Six to Seven Figures. How To Break Through.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. Today we're going to tackle a question I get asked all the time that's why is it so hard to go from six to seven figures? I recently spoke about this topic at a conference I just attended in Bangkok. I was speaking at this conference and I actually was asked to do an additional session for a smaller group that's in an incubator and this was kind of the topic. How did I in my businesses break from six figures into seven figures? There seems to be some sort of ceiling around that point where it's like really hard to break through to seven figures. And I'll explain why in today's lesson and how to break through. I thought to myself, you know, I'm sharing this advice, what worked for me to the smaller group, why don't I just share this with everybody and that way you can benefit if you're trying to break through to seven figures, here's something I learned the hard way. Growing from six to seven figures isn't just about working harder. It's about evolving. As a business owner. This was very hard for me to understand and to practice because I grew up in an immigrant household. My parents were immigrants from Egypt, moved to the US and working hard was like an ethos. It was like our way of life. Like you have to work hard and working hard was the answer to everything, right? You're not getting the results you want in school. Work harder, right? And that's true to a certain point, which is usually around six figures, mid six figures. And what I learned is that what got me to six figures 200 300, $500,000 a year in revenue is not going to get me to seven figures. So in today's lesson, I got your back. I'm going to show you how I did it more than once in my businesses. Breaking through from six to seven figures. And there's a cheat sheet that goes along with today's episode. If you want to download it, go to 100- MBA-NET-WORKSHEETS. You can find that link in the description below if you're on YouTube. But this is going to help you take action. Download the cheat sheet so that you can be able to follow along in preparation of today's episode. In the research I found, I found a statistic that was pretty shocking. Did you know that fewer than 10% of small businesses ever make it to seven figures? That's according to the U.S. small Business Administration. It takes a shift in mindset, in strategy to break through to seven figures, to million dollars beyond in revenue. It's not so simple as just like working harder. It's not so simple as just like, hey, let me just, you know, grind it out longer hours. No, you have to change your strategy, your approach. Today I'm going to show you exactly what I'm talking about. We're going to explore what's holding you back and how to overcome it. The first step is to shift from an operator to a CEO mindset. Why does this matter? Okay, at six figures, you're often deeply involved in every effort aspect of your business. You are overseeing the work of others on your team. You are approving a lot of things, if not all things. But to hit seven figures, you have to change that. You need to step back and think like a CEO, focusing more on strategy and growth and less on the actual execution. This means you have to be okay with things not being exactly the way you do it, exactly the way you see it. You need to understand that no one's going to do it like you. You are right 100%. A lot of people don't like to delegate because they're like, oh, you know, it's not going to be done like me. It's true. But you got to be okay with 80% at least of the way. I learned this from Carl Taylor, a friend of mine, who has a great agency called Automation Agency. And he really encouraged me to just make sure that when you delegate, just get up to 80% at least. And that's worth your while. Because if you have three people doing work that's on your plate and they're getting it up to 80%, or more, then that's better than you doing all the work 100%. Because you don't have time to focus on the growth of your business, on the strategy of your business. You need to delegate the day to day tasks, allowing you to concentrate on expanding your product line, on growing your partnerships, on expanding new markets and the things that are actually going to bring in the money and grow your business. Now we're going to get really practical. I'm going to give you an action step and give you something to do right now so you could start thinking this way and start working this way. You're going to make a list of everything you do daily. Okay? Everything you do. And this might take you more than a day or two. It might take you a week. Because as you're working throughout the week, you're going to jot things down in your notebook. When I did this exercise, I ended up with a notebook of about 350 things I do. I know it sounds crazy, but that's before I started delegating. And I'm sure you're probably going to experience something similar now. Once you write down all the things that you do in your business, okay, you're going to assign it a value. You're going to categorize the items on the list by $10 tasks, $1,000 tasks, and $10,000 tasks. That's the category. You're going to assign each task. You can make a note right next to each task. $10, 1,000, 10,000. What does this mean? Well, it means how much revenue does that task actually bring into the business? For example, one of my $10,000 tasks that were on my list was running my weekly webinar to grow my company, Webinar Ninja. I did this for 10 years before we got acquired by Proprofs and totally changed my life, that acquisition. But the point here is that when I ran that webinar, I got $10,000 worth of lifetime value from my customers. I got sales that were worth $10,000. So that hour of time was worth it for me to work on it because I was able to convert lots of customers. As a founder, I've done a lot of webinars. This is kind of my sweet spot. I'm very good at that now. It also could take me one hour to go back and forth with a potential guest on a podcast to make sure I have their bio and their photo and make sure they have a quality mic for the interview. That is not going to bring in $10,000. I should not be doing that. I Need to give that to somebody else who can do that for me. And I need to focus my time on only $10,000 tasks. So your mission is in the next three months, as you're shifting into more CEO thinking is to delegate or delete, get rid of completely any $10 tasks or any thousand dollar tasks even. I learned this strategy, this exercise from Dan Martell. Dan Martell was my coach when I was building my software company, Webinar Ninja. And that leads me to step number two. Invest in yourself. To reach seven figures, you need to become someone different. That's just the truth. Who you are right now has gotten you to this point, has gotten to whatever your revenue is right now. If you were the person to get to seven figures, you would have seven figures now, right? You had already hit that milestone. But who you are right now is the person that pulls off where you are right now. So if you're at, let's say $200,000 in revenue, that's who you are right now, right? In order for you to pull off and have a business that makes seven figures and beyond, you need to change. You need to become something different, right? And that's something I had to learn. I'm not good enough right now to hit seven figures. So what do I do? I got to change, I got to improve. I got to improve my skillset, my mindset. I need to grow. And if I don't accept this, if I just think who I am right now is good enough, then I'm just spinning my wheels. So for example, I wanted to grow my SaaS company to seven figures. So I hired Dan, Dan Martell. Dan was expensive for me, right? But I invested because I knew that I would get it back in tenfold because I'll be able to grow my business, right? What are you doing right now to improve who you are? To change, to become something new? The kind of person that can have a seven figure business. How much time, money are you investing in your growth? And that leads me to the action step for this step, right? Write down how much money and how much time are you willing to dedicate to your growth, to becoming something that is new and somebody that can pull this off, somebody that has the skills and the abilities and the knowledge and the experience to be able to have a seven figure business and run a seven figure business. So this might mean hiring a coach, this might mean investing in courses or books or conferences or you know, live training sessions or whatever it might be. Write it down. How much are you willing to invest in time and money because you might be embarrassed by what you write down. So for example, let's say you say every month I want to dedicate five hours to that and I'm going to dedicate $1,000. Do you think that's enough for you to actually get to seven figures is to spend $12,000 a year and five hours a month, you know, times 1260 hours a year. You think that's going to be enough? Probably not. You're going to have to increase that honest with yourself and realize that you're going to need to invest more of your assets time, money, effort in order for you to get in return a business that's seven figures.
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As entrepreneurs, when it comes to our finances, it can get confusing. It can get overwhelming. From expenses to vendor payments to reconciling accounting, it's a lot. If you're looking for a better way to simplify your finance operations, RAMP can be a complete game changer for you. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. I like the sound of that. RAMP gives finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of the month. This allows you to delegate certain tasks that require them to pay for things without you worrying about security. One of my favorite features is it RAMPS accounting software automatically collects receipts and categorizes your expenses in real time so you don't have to do it. This makes reconciling so easy you'll never have to chase down a receipt again, and your employees will no longer spend hours submitting expense reports. The time you'll save each month on employee expenses will allow you to close your books even faster. Ramp estimates eight times faster. Businesses that use ramp save an average of 5% the first year and now get $250. When you join ramp, just go to ramp.commba ramp.commba R A M P.commba cards issued by Sutton bank member FDIC terms and conditions apply. Step three is a very practical one and that's raise your prices. But there's a caveat here. Don't just raise your prices. Raise the value you offer your customers along with raising your prices. This is really important. You got to take a look at your products and services right now and ask yourself, how can I add more value to my customers? And therefore when I raise my prices, it's still a no brainer for them. What I learned is that to get to seven figures, it's not just about selling more, it's about offering more value. And if I offer more value, I can charge more. This allows me to scale my revenue without burning out, right? Without working more hours, without having to sell more units. Prime example of this is Apple. They sell more value, they have higher prices, they have higher quality products, they have exponential growth because of that, because they're thinking about how can I provide the most value for my customer? Meaning I have the best AirPods out there, I have the best smartphones out there or tablets or whatever so that people think that hey, if I want the best, I'm going to go with Apple. And you're going to have to pay a premium for the best. So here's an action step for you. Identify ways to enhance your products or services. Whether it's enhancing your customer support or some sort of exclusive features or added bonuses, or increasing the value to your products in ways that are important to your customers. Right? And you can raise your prices confidently knowing that, hey guys, we're raising prices because we have improved the product drastically and giving you more value. And yes, you might lose some customers, but they will will be replaced with new customers paying you more, meaning that you will make more. Step four is something I maybe didn't value so much in the beginning, but it had tremendous value to me as we scaled. And that's to build a strong team and culture. No one scales to seven figures alone. Even if you call yourself a solopreneur, you're probably working with great designers. You're working with great freelancers, great engineers, great developers, great partners, great affiliates, whatever it might be. You're not doing this alone. When you create a strong company culture, a great brand of how you work, you attract great talent, great individuals who can carry whatever vision you have forward, whatever you want to get done, they're going to be on board because they want to work with the best. A good example is when I was building Webinar Ninja, my software company. I can't build this alone, right? I need engineers, I need designers. I need customer support agents. I need customer success people. I need salespeople, I need copywriters. I need so many people with different talents that I'm not the greatest at. I'm good at a few things, but all those other areas, I need help, right? And building a team that's aligned with our values, that really saw what we're trying to do was really important. It really changed the game for us because we're able to attract great talent, that maybe they would go somewhere else to get paid more. We were bootstrapped. We got paid them a decent salary, and we tried our best to make it a great environment, but they loved the work they were doing. They loved what they were doing for our customers. That in itself was valuable to them. And they wanted to work for us. They wanted to be a part of our team. They want to stay with us. And that was really something that I find really helped us grow in scale because we had less turnover and we attracted great talent to our company. And it really helped us grow because we had that consistency of great ideas, great work, and what we put out to customers was just high quality. And it all starts with the team, because the team is what creates your products and services and the experience your actual customers are having. The action step here is you need to start thinking strategic, strategically about when you hire. You need to hire people that are aligned with your company's values, with your values. People that would enjoy working with you and your team, that would really kind of do the same thing, would build the same kind of company if they could. And a lot of people had joined us were like, hey, I wish I started this business. I might as well just join this one, because it's fun to work here. If you want a strong team, you need to actually sell the people that you're interviewing on your company. You know, they're selling themselves to get the job, but you need to sell them on the company, too. Let them know that, hey, this is what we're building. This is the movement that we're building with our company, with our team, with our customers. This is how we're changing the world in our little way. We're changing the world. And if you want to be a part of that, come and join us. You need to kind of have that love and passion for your company when you're hiring. Because if you're not excited to work there. Why would they? You're the founder, right? Why would they want to work there if you're not that excited? So you got to be the best ambassador for your company and hire people that are just as excited to work on the work that you do. So, in conclusion, to break through to seven figures is not just about working harder. Working harder has its place, don't get me wrong. But it's about being strategic about what you're doing in your business. It's about evolving, becoming somebody new, somebody that's capable of doing what you want to do right. And that can be a little bit painful because you have to recognize that I'm not where I need to be. But that's okay. Once you get out of that uncomfortableness, you start to enjoy that growth process. So invest in yourself, increase the value you offer to your customers and increase your prices and surround yourself with the right people as you're building the team that are really driven by what you're trying to do, by your mission, by the reason why you started this business in the first place. These are the changes that will help you go beyond six figures and achieve that sustainable growth to seven figures and beyond. At least that's what worked for me. I can only share what actually worked for me in my experience in hopes that you can take what I have done and what worked for me and kind of make it your own. And don't forget, if you want to download the cheat sheet for today's episode, just go to 100mba.net worksheets or you can find that link in the description below. If you're watching on YouTube. I'm Omar Zainelman. Thanks so much for watching. If you made it to the end of the video, you're my kind of person. You're a completionist. So let's continue complete and implement what we talked about today, download the cheat sheet and get it done. Start making those changes so that you can achieve the success you know you deserve. I'll see you in the next episode.
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