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The BetterLife Podcast
Are You Playing Business, Or Are You BUILDING One? (7-Figure Blueprint Series - Part 3)
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Hey everyone, I'm Brandon Turner, host of the Better Life podcast. This is episode three of the seven Figure Business Blueprint series. Been doing it for the last few weeks. Today we're talking about how to actually build a business. Like no matter what you're doing, I'm going to cover how to do it with the lean startup method, why most entrepreneurs are just plain dress up, and how to get paid before you build anything. Hey DM me the word 7 blueprint, like the number 7 blueprint on Instagram @bardybrandon for the 4th PDF summary. Now let's get to it. So my 6 year old built a website last week, totally functioning. I'm serious. He used like AI to build a app that basically gamifies his chores. So like he gets earned real world rewards. Now like if he does certain chores he can get ice cream or a date with mom or dad and all this cool stuff. It's super cool. Like how great is that? The 6 year olds out there using AI to build this cool tool. However, he's not building the business. And I mean even though it's got a logo, even though the website works, you could get it, you could use it, it's got everything. But it's not a business. He built a website. And that is the trap that most quote unquote entrepreneurs fall into these days. Welcome back to the seven Figure Business Blueprint series. My name is Brandon Turner and this is a six part series designed to give you every single thing you need to build a million dollar a year profit business. This is pillar number three, building a business that works. Now if you haven't watched the first two videos, go watch those videos, they're so good. Links are in the description and probably here and here on my screen. I think we can pop those up there. But here's where we've been so far in case you want a quick review. In pillar one we talked about the mental game, like getting fed up enough to decide and then picking one thing and then preparing for the dip. And why consistency beats intensity every time. But both are required. And in pillar two we figured out what to build by seeing problems everywhere. We talked about why boring beats flashy. How solving expensive problems for people with money is the best way to go and niching down hard matters. Now today we're talking about how to actually turn your idea that you have into a real business or at least test it. Something that can make real money. But I wanna start by telling you about a trap that catches most everyone off guard. So let's Start there with a trap. Like if you believe the people, and let's be honest, the bots on Twitter, or X, whatever they call it now. Like you'll think all that you have do to launch a million dollar. Your business is like vibe code something online and you'll just make a bunch of money. Like you've probably seen the post, right? Like screenshots of products and SaaS, tools and companies that were built in hours using some fancy AI tool. Maybe you're not on Twitter, probably good for your mental health, but here's what they're not telling you most of that stuff. Like it's making nothing, no money. Even when people say that they're making money, it's fake, they're lying. Or it's like one out of 10,000 that does that. Like you never hear about the losers. Or maybe somebody already has a big successful business or a client list and they just sold a new thing to them. Like, look, those aren't businesses. Now with the help of AI, every day hundreds of new quote unquote businesses are created, maybe thousands. I put that in air quotes because having a website is not a business. A business has customers, a business has revenue. And the barrier to looking like looking like a business has never been lower. Like vibe coding tools, like lovable or replit or whatever. Like they let you spin up a website in minutes and AI can write your copy, they can design your logo, it can generate a business plan for you. And here's the trap. All of that feels like progress, but it's not like you spend four hours building the website and you design a logo and you set up an Instagram account and you tell all your friends you feel like an entrepreneur, but you haven't talked to a single customer, you haven't made a single dollar. You've been playing business, not building one. Now that trap existed long before AI. It was business cards, it was building your brand on social media, it was signing up for some multi level marketing thing. It's the same trap, different costume. The trap is anything that feels like progress but doesn't generate revenue, it's not actually building the business. Designing logos is fun. Talking to strangers, that's uncomfortable. Building a website, super satisfying. Asking someone to buy super scary. Posting on social media gets dopamine hits. Cold calling gets rejection. Look, my nine year old daughter recently wrote and illustrated a book. She wrote it herself, used ChatGPT to illustrate it, and then we printed it on Canva. But when it came time to sell it, I told her, yeah, just call your grandparents and your relatives. No way. Dad, can you call for me? Like, she's nine. But her mentality is no different than 99% of entrepreneurs out there. It's fun to build, it's hard to sell. And the only thing that matters, though, is revenue. A customer. Someone who gave you money because you solved their problem. Everything else is cosplay. Like, my son built that tool with AI. And it's cool.
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It's helpful.
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It's helping him earn real money by doing chores and ice cream and dates and all that. But it's not a business. It's a tool. So how do you actually build a real business? So let me introduce you to a concept that made me a millionaire many times over.
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Eric Reese or Rice.
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I think it's Reese. He wrote a book called the Lean startup, like, over 20 years ago.
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If you haven't read it, read it.
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Let me give you the core idea here. Traditional business thinking goes like this. Come up with an idea, spend months planning it, launch the perfect product.
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Perfect.
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Launch big. And then hope customers show up. But that's how most businesses fail. They burn through time and money building something that ultimately nobody wants. In fact, just this morning, a buddy showed me an app that his friend had created. It's in the construction industry space, right? My buddy told me that his buddy
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has been building it for years.
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It has over $3 million in on the build and they have no customers yet. They're hoping and praying and believing it's going to attract customers because it's such a great tool.
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And maybe it will, but I would
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bet it's even more likely it won't. So the Lean Startup actually flips that script. You have a theory, a hypothesis about the customer wants. Maybe you think busy homeowners will pay 1500 bucks for a clean garage?
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That's a theory. You don't know if that's true yet.
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I don't know if that's true. We're just talking about it, right? So you test it. And not by building out a massive whole company with employees and trucks and debt and app, but by doing the smallest possible experiment.
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Post it on a local Facebook group,
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or knock on 10 doors in a nice neighborhood, or tell everyone you know
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to see if anyone bites.
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You don't have to have a truck yet. I mean, you could rent one for 50 bucks if somebody said yes. That's a lean test. And then you learn, hey, did anyone say yes? What objections did they have?
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What did you hear?
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What questions did they ask?
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And then you iterate, which means change something. And you adjust your offer, you adjust the product or whatever.
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You basically change something based on a
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new theory of what people want. And then you test it again. Theory or hypothesize. You test, you learn, you iterate.
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And that cycle should be quick, like days, not months.
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Let reality guide you instead of assumptions
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like speed of implementation.
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It beats perfection every day.
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So the entrepreneurs who launch ugly and iterate fast, they're going to crush the
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still perfect businesses that are still working on their plan.
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So here's an example of how that
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might work in that app for the construction industry that my buddy's buddy is building. Instead of spending three million bucks building software first, maybe start by asking a simpler question. Do construction companies actually want this bad enough to pay for it? Before writing a single line of code, they can go find 10 contractors and offer to solve that problem manually. Now if the app is supposed to help them track jobs or change orders or crews or materials, well then do that in a spreadsheet like a shared Google form, a group text, or even a simple dashboard built in. Airtable or lovable, charge them for it. Not someday. Now, if no one's going to pay you to solve that problem manually, then
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there's a good chance they're not going
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to pay you to solve that automatically either. But if five out of ten say
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yeah, for sure, I really need that,
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well, now you got something. Then you learn what part they actually care most about.
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And maybe they don't want the full
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all in one system that you imagined. Maybe they want, I don't know, maybe faster estimating or easier scheduling or cleaner communication with their subs. I don't know.
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That insight can save you millions of
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dollars and years of time. Because now you're not building based on your guess and what you think is right. You're building based on actual demand. Real people. That's the point of the lean startup. Don't start with code, start with a pain. Don't build the whole machine. Prove the problem first. Then build only what people are already trying to buy.
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Now related to this, here's a principle
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that sounds backwards but will save you years. Validate with money, not a thing. Like if you ask somebody, hey, would you buy this? People, especially friends, are always going to say yes. We polite and those conversations are worthless. Like they're worse than worthless. They give you false confidence. Would you buy this gives you an opinion.
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Here's my Venmo that gives you reality.
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So whenever possible, try to get people to pay you even before you build it. Pre sell it. Take A deposit or create a landing page that takes orders before you have inventory. If they say no, you just saved yourself months of building something that nobody really wants. And if they say yes, well, now you got customers waiting. And now you have the ultimate motivation to figure it out and how to deliver it quickly. Right? Money is the only vote that counts, so get your votes in early. All right, I want to move on to some maybe more, I don't know, practical business building tips and talk about something that I am super passionate about that I think everyone should do. Entrepreneur, not goal setting. You see, most people and businesses set goals like wishes. They think about bag intention and they hope that it's going to work out. But winners work backwards. I mean, let's just say you wanted $10,000 a month in profit within two years. Don't ask, what should I do today? Start with what would have to happen to be true for that to happen. Like Maybe it means 30 customers paying $500 a month or a hundred jobs at $100 profit each. Well, like figure out the math. Like what does that $0.06 actually look like at the end of the day? And then ask what would I need to do for that to be true this year? And then what do I need to do that in 90 days? And what about this week? Now you're not guessing, you're reverse engineering. So I use a simple framework. It's six steps. I call it reios, but it's step one, tell the truth. Where are you actually starting from? Not where you wish you were. Where are you actually today? Be honest. Step two, define your future. Like what does winning look like three years from now? Be very specific. Dollar amount, lifestyle details, the whole picture. Step three is aligning your goals. Break that three year vision into a one year target. And then 90 day sprints and then weekly action plans. And then step four is track your inputs. So don't just track the results, track the actions that you control. How many calls did you make? How many doors did you knock? Like those inputs will actually create the outputs. Ultimately. Step five, you gotta maximize accountability. Like tell someone, join a group, hire a coach, whatever it takes to make sure you can't just quietly fade away, which is what most people people do. And step six, skip with a team. So when you have people repeat these steps with them. Get everyone aligned, everyone clear. Work backwards and then execute forwards. And remember we talked about in the first video, we don't need a giant Hail Mary every day. Think about football. The teams that win championships aren't throwing 60 yard bombs. Every play they're running the ball up the middle. 4 yards, first down, 4 more yards, 3 more yards, 2 more yards. It's boring stuff. Doesn't make the highlight real, but that's what wins games. Your business is the same way every day. Ask yourself, what is the most important thing I can do today to move this forward, to hit my week and then when I get my week goal, what do I got to, you know, am I on track to get my quarterly goal and do that main thing, that one thing before email, before social, before anything else. Get that sales call done or that piece of content done, get that improvement done. Now here's the secret. Most of your competition, they're going to quit. They're going to burn hot for three weeks and disappear. They're going to hit a rough patch and they're going to take a break that never ends. All you have to do is keep showing up. Four yards, first down, repeat. That's how you build a business. Run at Lean. Run it consistently. Now let's check in real quick on Jake. Now, if you didn't watch the other videos in the series or you just don't remember, throughout this seven figure business blueprint series, I'm wrapping every lesson up with a story of a man named Jake. He tried to build a seven figure business so he can retire his wife and increase his income and decrease his work hours and ultimately just raise some kids. In the first video, Jake finally hit the tipping point of being fed up with his inability to fully provide for his wife Maria. He absolutely committed to doing whatever it takes to get her out. In video two, Jake looked at the problems all around him and decided to solve a simple one. Cleaning and organizing garages through his new business idea, Garage Zen. Now he needs to actually build it. Not by raising a million bucks in venture capital money and spending two years building some cool app that nobody's gonna want. He's starting broke. So first he sets a goal. He wants 10,000amonth profit within the next, call it two years. And he works backwards. Well, in order to get that, he has to do 15 to 20 jobs a month. At 600 average profit. It's four to five jobs a week. If he doesn't need a Hail Mary, he needs to test whether people actually need that service. Now he's got the outcome. Let's reverse engineer it. Will people pay for what he needs to charge? So for his first test, he goes minimal. He designs some nice flyer on Google's Gemini. It's a cool AI tool. And then he prints 100 flyers at the library for 10 bucks. Junk gone. Garage cleaning, same day service. He spends Saturday putting them on the doors in a nice neighborhood. You know the kind with like two car garages and boats in the driveway. And day one, he gets nothing.
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Day two, he gets nothing.
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Day three, phone rings. Woman wants her garage cleared out before her mother in law visit. Now, Jake has never done this before. He doesn't even have a truck. He's got his buddy's pickup truck. He has no idea what to charge, so he just quotes her 800 bucks. And you know, his voice kind of cracks. She says yes without negotiating at all. Five hours later, two trips to the dump. His profit, $680. He's in business. Now, he doesn't have a guaranteed proof, but it's good evidence. And he doesn't own the truck, doesn't have a two man team of employees, doesn't have uniforms. But he doesn't need that. He needed to test his hypothesis. Upper class people with garages will pay good money to have their garages cleaned and organized. And as he gets more and more calls, he begins to test other things. Pricing. He tests a thousand bucks. He says 1200. He tests 2000. He starts to get some serious pushback at 2000. Okay, good. Now he knows. He also begins to test different flyer copies, like different language, different neighborhoods. Facebook groups versus door knocking. And within a couple months, he's done 23 jobs. He knows his average job size. He knows his best lead source. He knows his closing rate on a phone call. He didn't build a business plan. He built a real business, one small test at a time. And that's business pillar number three. Build a business that works. Now let me recap it.
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Avoid the entrepreneur's trap that revenue is all that matters.
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Use the lean startup methodology to build, which is theory, test, learn, iterate, charge before you build. Validate with money, not opinions. And then work backwards from your goal and get consistent work done. Four yards, three yards, five yards. Touchdown. But here's the thing. Building it is only 10 of it. Just because your business looks cool online and even if you have some customers, doesn't mean you can scale up. The other 90 is sales and marketing. Can you reach people about your business and get them to buy? Well, that is what we're going to cover in the next video pillar. Four, marketing, sales and funnels. And this is going to be probably the longest video in this whole series and the one that I think is, you know, one of the most important. I'm gonna share an incredibly powerful, powerful technique for 10x in your business through funnel optimization. This is where the real money is made.
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So make sure you're subscribed and following me at beardybrandon and I'll see you in the next one.