Create an empire: How to grow your business to infinity!

Building a business is not easy. I 've scaled 3 times to 100K euros only to go back to 0 again. But while I have been working my butt off to build and scale , I have managed to correct myself in each step of the way and refine my process.

They say the 4th time is a charm, so I decided to reflect during this year & document everything in Linkedin so that everyone can learn from my entrepreneurial failures & hopefully from my eventual success.

So, let's go:

Growing from 0 to 100K in a year:

Step 1: Pick ONE service/product

Ideally pick something with the following characteristics:

• You already have experience and you have had success in it already
• You love doing it. If you don't love it, it will feel like a drag.
• There is proper demand for it - ideally in the place where you live - and you can start finding clients easily.

The key here is to pick only ONE thing and stay with it for at least 12 months.

Step 2: Pick ONE client persona (a niche)

At the beginning you will not be able to serve everyone, so you will have to choose who you are going to serve.

Picking one client persona will allow you to focus and understand your clients better.

Gradually, your services will become more specialized and more valuable for your niche. This will allow you to charge significantly more and get referrals from happy clients.

Step 3: Pick one marketing channel

You don't have all the time & resources in the world, so you need to promote yourself only in one channel.

Ideally, pick the one where your client persona is spending their time on.

Step 4: Pick one sales/conversion method:

In the beginning, it is wiser to start from your network. Tell your friends and ex colleagues about your business and ask them if they know anyone who can beneft from your services.

Word of mouth will provide you with a steady flow of leads if you do it well.

In the first 12 months I would propose doing a lot of cold calling too.

Find businesses in your area that might use your services and call them to ask if they need help.

If you sell a product in a wider market, I would recommend to start cold calling distributors or independent physical and online shops so that you can put your product in their selves.

Step 5: Do the above steps for 12 months at least.

Don't pivot to another service or business until you work on the above for at least 12 months.

If you cannot handle this financially, try to work somewhere else - part time or full time - until your business takes off.

But I think if you stick with the above you will be able to cover your basic living expenses from your business in 6 months time.

Step 6: Hiring

In the beginning you will have to do everything yourself but gradually you will need to hire people and focus only your business' growth.

You can start by hiring freelancers and delegate work to them.

Hire an accountant so that you don't have to deal with invoicing & taxes.

Hire someone to deliver the services,so that you dont get to work in the business for the whole day.

Hire a client success manager that will handle client service.

In the beginning, the best thing you can do is to set up a dedicated project team for each client.

Let's say that you are a designer and you get a new client that wants a steady flow of design services each month.

You can hire a designer that will be dedicated to this client and pay him 300 euros per month for this client.

You can hire a client success manager and you can pay him/her 300 euros per month for this client.

You can also assign the monthly cost of your accountant, VA, taxes & social security services etc to add another 300 for this client (Your accountant and your VA will probably charge you monthly and handle many clients each).

So, you have a total Cost of Goods Sold at 900 euros per month for this client.

If you charge anything between 1200 to 1500 per month then you have a profit while you do almost nothing for servicing this client.

In this model, it is important that you can charge a premium and that you can handle the costs & the quality really well.

In this scenario ,you get 1.200 euros per client per month and a net profit of 300 per client per month.

Now you just have to find 10 clients in order to reach 100K per year

So you go hard on marketing and sales.

I think this is the stage where you could find your business at 12- 16 months.

The biggest mistakes you can do at this stage are the following:

• You try to do everything yourself, you get burnt out and you lose your clients
• You lose focus and you try to add additional services. Additional services will add complexity and will require you to build additional systems. This diversification will harm the speed at which your comoany grows and will cost you money.
• You try to serve different clients. These clients will need a different set of expertise. You might have this expertise yourself but it is imperative that you get yourself immediately out of these projects, so you will need to hire a different team to handle them. Again, this diversification will harm the speed at which you grow and will cost you time and money.
• You don't collect payments properly. Building systems with people in your payroll requires constant cash flows. A bad collection system will break your business. Take the money upfront.
• You are afraid to charge more. I do this mistake all the time so I don't have a great advice on this one. I think that it has to do more with proper prospecting. If you build your authority in your niche, you will attract bigger clients that can afford to pay your proper fees. You cannot sell a 1K service to someone making 2K per month. Aim higher.

Key lessons:

Diversification is a play-safe strategy.

Growth needs focus and speed.

Delegation is the name of the game.

Sales and cash flow will be your greater enablers.

From 100K to 1 million.

At this point you need to point your attention to 3 main issues:

Operational excellence:

As you are getting bigger, you will need your teams to run super smoothly.

Ideally without you running them.

So, you need to hire a key operator for your business.

In the beginning you will need a project manager but as you grow massively you will probably need a CEO or managing director.

Brand/Authority/Key person of Influence

At this point, you must build your business or personal brand and become the go-to person and the leading figure in your niche.

People will come to you because your expertise is unmatched and it is showcased in all possible marketing channels.

You have content everywhere, people invite you to speak at events & your name becomes synonymous with the service you are offering.

You brand is the leading driver for your growth and you start expanding abroad and offering premium services to the biggest companies in your niche.

Sales excellence:

At this point you need a sales and partnership team to create leads, nurture & close them.

Piggybacking on your strong brand name your sales team will bring a constant flow of deals that will allow you to scale to 1m per year.

Key mistakes in this stage of growth:

• You hire the wrong people. At this stage, the people you hire will make or break your business. Hire A players and establish strong systems of reporting to make sure that they are delivering. If they don't deliver, replace them in less than 12 months.
• Culture. I've seen companies break because of the wrong culture. At your path to 1million, you still need to have an immense performance culture where the best people are celebrated and the underperformers are motivated to improve.
• Lose of focus. Again, I believe that this is the biggest danger. Succeess can lead you to adjacent indutries and clients and the lose of focus can destroy everything that you have built.
• Complacency1 million per year is not a big number but founders tend to relax a bit once they make it. This is a fatal mistake. You should always be on top of everything, tracking revenues and sales.

Key lessons:

Success in this stage is mainly about proper hiring & brand building.

It is more about leveraging people, capital and media and less about you as a founder.

This is how you dominate your market.

From 1 million to 10 million and beyond

In this stage I have seen many different models that can be succeful. It really depends on the industry and the market.

In retail, growth will come from expanding your physical stores geographically, first inside your country and then abroad.

In the services sector, I have seen companies go all the way to 10 millions with a small set of services in one country, especially in bigger countries.

However, most of them start considering geographical expansion after a while.

In e-commerce, the way to go forward is to include different product categories in your eshop.

Every industry has its specific needs and ways to growth that can be very obvious if you see how the biggest players of the industy are moving.

However, a must in this stage of growth is establishing a very strong management team. You now have a CEO, a COO, a CFO, a CMO, a Sales director and a Head of International expansion.

Mistakes and key lessons:

You need to get many things right to reach this far and it will take you a lot of time but I think this is feasible for anyone in business, as I have seen many people acheving this milestone. These people are not significantly smarter or richer than you or me.

They just focus relentlessly, they learn from their mistakes & they never ever ever give up.

If you dont give up, eventually the right opportunities and the right people will come to you and you will be able to leverage them to suceed.

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