Million Dollar Roadmap: If I started over I’d take these 8 steps to make $1 million

Welcome back! I'm so excited to share this with you. Call me a nerd, but I really geeked out putting this together because last week, I talked about the five strategies that I used to scale my business to my first million. And I figured I'd take a step further and I'd share the actual tactics. If I were to start from zero right now, what would I do? Having learned all that I've learned in the last five, six years growing to eight figures, what would I do? These are the eight steps that I would take to get to $1 million business if I were to start today.

So if you're excited about that, give this a like, so we can reach more people in the algorithm. This whole channel is dedicated to make the entrepreneurship available to every. This is going to be info packed and hopefully super actionable for you. And I'm really excited to hear what you think. Do me a favor too, if you like this, and you get a lot out of it, take a screenshot and share this out on your Instagram story, tag me, and I will be sure to share it on mine as well. Let's dig in.

So this is the million dollar roadmap. So these are the eight things we're going to cover today. So let me dig into the details. So first and foremost, identifying the true value of your skillset and how to identify the right pricing around that. Number two is specificity and audience building. Number three is creating an online course. And I've talked about this a lot on my channel, but I wanted to give you kind of an overview of what that would look like in order for you to start one from zero. Number four, reverse engineer your profit. So the thing that I don't think people understand about business is that it is simple and repeatable. Of course, it takes hard work, but when you know your numbers, you're actually able to reverse engineer and create consistent revenue and profit month over month. So I'm going to break that down.

And then results. So social proof and the importance of it and how to leverage results in your business to grow and to get more clients in the door. The next thing is content strategy, which I keep mine stupidly simple, and I'm going to get into why that is and why it lets me build a lot of profit in the business. So I'm excited to share that. And then number seven is systems and structure. This is a big one. This is probably the number one thing that I'm asked about from new entrepreneurs. So I'm really excited to share my little details and tips and tricks that I've learned along the way. And then finally hiring. So without further ado, let's get into it.

So number one is identifying the true value of your skillset, really honing that skillset and understanding how to charge based on the value. So I'm going to get into some equations in just a second and the nitty-gritty. But I wanted to share a little story for context. I have a client, her name is Rosie. She's incredible. She was a full-time pharmacist, making a great living, all the benefits, all the stuff. But her dream was to create a business around calligraphy because that was her real passion and calling in life. We started working together in the Authority Accelerator program. And at the time she was charging around $30 to make a cake topper that was taking her five hours to create and then send to people who had ordered it online from her.

So she was very creative. She had all these ideas and different things that she was making. And when we started working together, she really identified, okay, calligraphy is the thing that I enjoy doing the most and seems to be the thing that's the most in demand in terms of my service. So let's hone in on that one thing and I'm going to create my business around that. Today, Rosie has created an online course around that thing and she's generating regular five-figure months from that program from scratch and she's full-time calligraphy and no longer working as a pharmacist.

So when I spoke to her, she talked about how much she was undercharging. And here's the thing about undercharging.?

Undercharging leaves you in a very vulnerable state as an entrepreneur because you're constantly trying to chase after consistency and chase after making more money.?

When in reality, you can actually have less clients, clients you actually love and be charging adequately for those clients so that you're not constantly stressed about your finances. And you can really just focus on the thing that you love doing, which is the work and serving the clients that you enjoy working with. So it's really all about quality over quantity.?

And I'm going to link to the full interview I did with Rosie right here so you can check it out later. But let's get into how do you actually determine what to charge and the true value of what you're offering?

Well, I call it value-based pricing, and this is big because so many people charge based on their time, based on the end product, but they don't think about the value of what they're creating for their ideal client. And also they don't know who their ideal client is. So it's hard to determine what the real value would be. So people just randomly pick a price that leaves them in this constant cycle of undercharging and feeling frustrated and stressed and they can't grow their business. Maybe you can relate to that.

So value-based pricing goes like this, it's cost plus income goals, which is going to be personal to everyone. Your income goals of what you want to make on a monthly basis are very personal to you. And you have to really identify what are these income goals. And what's going to allow me to create a business that I can go full-time in. Maybe it's replacing your current salary. Maybe there's other factors of what you need to cover for bare minimum expenses on a monthly basis. This is really personal to you.

And then the final thing is minus barrier to entry. Now, what exactly does that mean? Removing the barrier to entry means that you're really paying attention to what's happening in the marketplace and what other people are charging for your skillset. It doesn't mean you're comparing, but what you are going to do is identify, okay, well, they're charging all of these different amounts. I want to ensure that I am the premium option because I have nurtured this skillset. I know the value of it. And most importantly, we got to bring it back to this. What is the cost to your ideal clients of not having the skillset that you provide?

So, for example, when I first started as a social media strategist and I was working behind the scenes for a bunch of different clients, I was way undercharging. This was a long time ago when I was charging by the hour. And when I look back on it and how I really came to the place where I understood how to create this model and how my clients implemented as well, is that I looked at all of the revenue I had generated for my clients in implementing social media strategies. I had generated millions of dollars for my clients. And the cost of not having me do the work that I was doing with their social media strategy, would've cost them millions, hundreds of thousands of dollars in their business because they wouldn't have had that as a marketing tool. And they would've had to spend money on other things, et cetera, which on another level would cause them stress, financial headaches. It would cost them emotional stress. All of these things.

You have to think, what is the cost of not having what you provide for your ideal clients? And there is always a cost associated. And that is really what helps you determine the value of the price that you're going to charge. So this is a really good exercise and I challenge you to kind of sit down and really think about this. What's the cost of not having what you do and your unique genius? What are the income goals you want to hit in order to be full-time? And then what is the barrier to entry in the marketplace? Meaning what is the common industry standard and what are people charging?

And this doesn't mean doing a quick Google search. It means really going deep and looking into it and not just looking at what one service provider is charging, but looking at what agencies are charging or whoever they are, the best of the best in the industry, because the prices will vary and you want to get all of those variables and information so you can make an educated decision as to where you need to land with your pricing in order to sustain yourself and be financially stable.

And the thing I'll leave you with in terms of honing your skillset and really understanding why it's so valuable is that you have to determine the three factors I always talk about to really creating a scalable business. It's not about having a bunch of different offers, a bunch of different programs, because when you do that, you diversify your energy and you diversify your genius and it really becomes diluted, and you become super stressed out and your time is limited and all of these things.

I always say, think about your one ideal client at one specific place on their journey, where they need you the most and would be most likely to hire you, and then what is the transformation or the outcome they're seeking in working with you and how can you make it super efficient for them to get there. That is what people are paying for. So what is your skillset? What is your unique genius? What do people come to you for help with? What have you charged for in the past? What's your career expertise? Those are all big clues as to what you can actually build your business around.

The second thing I would do if I were starting over is I would get really specific about my ideal client before I did anything else, before I ever hosted on social media or ever tried to grow an audience, because the more specific you get, the faster you'll actually grow, which I know feels counterintuitive, but it is the truth. And in addition to that,?

You do NOT need a big audience to build a very successful, very profitable business.?

And I'll explain why in just a second. But the audience piece of this is that you need to know that as an entrepreneur, especially an online entrepreneur, your most valuable asset, I can't stress this enough is not on social media. It is building an email list. That allows you to build your own audience that you have control over. Because if you're just building a social media audience on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, wherever it may be, you are not in control of who sees your content, how they see it, if it's even going to be found and the algorithms can change at any moment, which we've all experienced.

So you need to really be in control of your assets and your biggest asset as a business and your biggest money maker as a business is your email list. So you need to be very mindful that your content is building that email list. And I'm not talking about anything fancy. When I first got started, my email list consisted of a spreadsheet, the person's first and last name, their email, and the best social media platform to contact them on. That is how I started building my list. The more tech you get involved as you're getting started, the more friction you create, the more complication you create, the more headache you create, and ultimately the more issues you have in actually generating an income and making revenue. You need to really focus on the simplicity of this.

So let's talk about getting specific and why it's so important. So if I could start all over again, I really mean this, I would hone in on who is this, who is my ideal client, because that ideal client is also going to be my ideal Instagram follower, my ideal YouTube subscriber, my ideal Facebook friend, whatever it may be. Because the more that I hone in on this, the more that I'm building a hyper-targeted list of those ideal clients and potential buyers and customers and long term ambassadors into my business, who believe in what I do and actually care about what I'm talking about.?

If you're building a random audience on social media, it's not going to pay off in the long run and you're ultimately just going to be frustrated because you're building this audience and creating all this content, and it's not actually doing anything for you or your business.

How this works is, I talked about this in a prior video, which you can check out here and here about social media being rigged against you and how social media actually really works. But it's all about really cracking the code and how you crack the code on social media is this. So it starts with understanding who are you trying to reach? Every algorithm needs to know who are you trying to reach and what do you want to be known for? So first and foremost, it's your ideal client or your ideal viewer or ideal follower for your business. The next thing is making relevant content for those clients, because that increases your engagement. If you build a random audience, you're going to have random content and you're not going to even know what resonates and you're going to have low engagement.

From there, you want to make sure that this is super clear so that the algorithm can categorize you. So from here, if you make the who and the what super, super clear the algorithm then goes, oh, I know exactly who this person's trying to reach and this business is trying to reach. Let me help them reach more of them. And then the algorithm, whatever platform it is leverages its internal traffic sources to reach more people like this. And then organically without ever having to spend a dime on paid advertising, the algorithm is now helping your content reach more of your ideal viewers, followers, and clients. So that's why getting super specific on your audience is so vitally important. You do not need millions of viewers, I'm going to dive into those numbers in a second, in order to build a really successful business.

And to follow up on that, it brings me to step number three, which is?

Creating an online course, and this is 100% the first thing I would've started with, if I could start all over again?

because you do not need to start in a one-to-one setting. You do not need to start as a service provider. You absolutely, if you have a skillset and if you have experience and expertise, can start with an online course. So prior to beginning my online business, I was working with clients all over the world and all different kinds of corporations in developing their social media strategy, completely behind the scenes. Didn't have a brand, didn't have an audience, didn't really care to have one. And then when I started sharing my expertise online, everything basically blew up.

And I wish that I had done this first because for a long time, I was trying to work with people one on one, and I just ran out of time and burnt myself out. So an online course, if I were to start over, I would start it in the hybrid model, which I've touched on before. So the hybrid model is what we use for our Authority Accelerator program and what we teach our clients to build as well, because it really amalgamates the best of all of the worlds. So you have your curriculum, you have your community, which is vitally important, and then you have your support.

So how this breaks down is if you focus on a curriculum that takes people from zero to hero, which is what we always talk about, and you can think about this in your own life, what is the situation where you've experienced the transformation for yourself, that oftentimes will be the course that you want to create. The curriculum is simply bridging the gap between your ideal client's zero state and the hero state and the outcome that they want to achieve. The curriculum bridges the gap. So they can study it on their own time, at their own pace, which increases your impact and reach because people and clients don't have to wait on you to get the results they're looking for.

The next step is your community. So having a community of members in your program creates this incredible culture, where everyone's able to support each other, be on their journey with one another. We have clients in our community because we provide lifetime access who have scaled from zero all the way up to $3 million, completely organically. They're in there helping our new members and guiding our new members. And people at all different stages of their journey who've been through our program are able to assist and help, which takes a lot of the pressure off of me. And it has this built-in mastermind, mentorship feel to it, which creates this really magical community.

And then finally support, because not everybody's going to go through the curriculum and just get it in one go. A lot of people are, a lot of people don't ever need to actually speak to me to get results, but you want to be there to be able to speak to your clients directly. So we set up two support calls every week so that I can actually speak directly to my clients and answer any questions that they may have to accelerate their progress and growth. So in order to create a hybrid model online course, how I've identified it is we really break it into four sections. So you start with test, and then you build, and then you accelerate, and then you scale. So these are the four phases of how to really grow and scale an online course.

So testing means that you are figuring out what works in your business. The biggest problem that people have when they try to build any kind of online business, but particularly an online course is they start building out all these assets. They build a funnel, they build a landing page, they build all these things when they don't even know who they're serving or what the heck their messaging is. So we essentially show our clients and how I do it is, we get you to do it very bare bones, and we call it the POP Model. So it's essentially a prototype of your online program. You test it all out, you get real client feedback, you get paying clients in the door efficiently, so you can get client results because those are super vital to proving that it actually works.

And then from there you have all of the foundation built. Then you can actually build it out and build out your forever evergreen assets, your funnel, your YouTube channel, all of the things that are going to run evergreen for your program to bring in clients consistently. And then from there, you start combining your content strategy and your traffic sources to ensure that you are always getting those clients that you're looking for. And they're actually finding you, instead of you having to go search for them because your messaging is so clear at this point. And then scaling is really all about taking what you've done and then starting to remove yourself from the business so you can really enjoy the business you created and focus on your zone of genius, which is content and supporting your clients.

So number four, I harp on this a lot, focus on your numbers and reverse engineer your revenue and profits. A lot of the times as an entrepreneur, I've been through this, so again, if I were to start over, man, I wish I started doing this earlier, I would kind of just be throwing spaghetti at the wall and I'd be like, I don't know how much I'm going to make this month. Let's see, it'll be a fun surprise, but it's not a fun surprise, because it doesn't allow you to actually hire anybody or get help or have any sort of consistency or predictability in your business. So this is key to consistency and predictability. So I think I need to do an even more in-depth video on this, which I might do next week, but let me go over exactly what I mean by this and how you can start creating that consistency and predictability.

So these are all of the metrics that you really need to be focused on, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. These are the things that I look at first thing in the morning, every single day in my business. And it's what's allowed me to create this very predictable business model where we are completely evergreen, we never do launches, et cetera. So traffic, leads, clients, client results, revenue, cash collected, and profit. Profit is our best friend, right? I feel like you should know that by now, after watching me for a while. Profit is peace of mind. So reverse engineering this really comes down to one key factor. That key factor is your conversion rate.

So remember when I was talking about testing. So why that's important is because it really starts to inform what activities and platforms are generating results for your business in terms of getting paying clients in the door. And your conversion rate is indicated by how many leads and how much traffic you're getting and how many of those leads are actually converting into paying clients. And when you know what your average conversion rate is based on, let's say one month, then you're going to know how to create predictability because you can just reverse engineer it.

So let's say you want to bring in two clients a month paying $2,000 a month each for whatever your offer is, if that's the case and your average conversion rate is, let's say 20%, then you would times those two people by five. So however many clients you want in the door, you want to times it by five, because that would give you the 20% conversion rate. So two clients in the door times five equals 10 human conversations, leads in the door that turn into those two clients. If your conversion rate is higher, you're going to convert more people and ultimately make more impact and income.

So that kind of simplifies things as well, because oftentimes when you don't focus on the numbers, you feel like you constantly have to be growing, growing, growing, growing. True story, I was talking to a client of mine who has 40,000 people in her audience. And she was like, "I'm just not getting any leads," da-da-da-da-da. I was like, "Are you talking to your existing audience?" And she's already run a successful program prototype, she's good to go. And she's had clients in the door. She was like,?

"Wow, light bulb moment. No, I've been so focused on finding new people, I haven't even nurtured the audience I have."?

If you can't turn 40,000 people into two clients a month, we got a problem. So this takes the pressure off of growth, growth, growth, social media, social media, social media, content, content, content, and it helps you focus on conversions.

The fifth thing that I would do is leverage results, way more than I ever have before. I really only started to focus on this in the last couple of years and my goodness, it makes a world of difference and it also really allows you to not have to focus on growing, growing, growing. And it allows you to just focus on the credibility and the validity of what you do, which naturally and organically brings more people into your program. So when you can prove that your offer and your service works, then more people want it and it builds your authority really, really organically.

A brand is not about the number of followers you have. And I know that that's something that people freak out about. And even when I had a small audience, I'd be like, oh, I don't know if people take me seriously. The reality is the number of followers you have means diddly squat if you actually can't get people the result that they're looking for, which unfortunately happens all the time. So we have a lot of clients who have really, really teeny-tiny audiences, but they're really good at what they do. There are a lot of hidden experts out in the world. And honestly, a lot of the biggest experts in the world don't care about how many people are following them and people start following them naturally, because they're good at what they do.

Your brand is all based on this sentence. You want people to be able to say this with such clarity and it brings us back to what we were talking about earlier. "Oh my gosh, you have to go work with Jake. They're the go-to expert on email marketing and work with online business owners." So you want to have specificity in all of these areas. And that takes us back to one specific ideal client, one specific place on their journey seeking one specific transformation. That is what builds a brand and making sure that your clients are sharing the proof of what they've gotten out of working with you because you can use that to show it to potential leads so they have more trust, which is the biggest key in building relationships and relationships lead to revenue. You have to build trust and people only trust things that actually work. So leveraging your results.

One little thing that we've started doing is when people are wanting to enroll in our Authority Accelerator program, we're sending them super relevant testimonials before they ever speak with us, because then they go, oh my gosh, if it worked for that person, and I'm in the same niche, of course it's going to work for me. And it has increased our metrics across the word, which is really exciting to see. So results and relationships lead to revenue. You don't need a lot of people, but you need the right people who are actually going to get the proof for you to validate your offer.

Number six is content strategy. Ooh, I've done it all, friends. I don't do it anymore, but I have really tried everything under the sun. And I do believe in testing things and seeing what works for you specifically and what generates actual results in your business, not just vanity metrics, because vanity metrics are like monopoly money. As I said before, they don't really do anything if they're not converting. But now, I have simplified my content strategy so much. So I'm glad I tested. And I think if I were to start from zero, I would still test things, but I would really lean into the things that actually worked and do it pretty quickly.

And as I've mentioned before, subtract the things that aren't working fast. Because if you're doing all of the things and you're on all the platforms, you're just diversifying your attention, which means you're not really doing any of them well, and you're not really reaching your ideal audience on any of the platforms and you're spending all of your time on content creation and social media, as opposed to having the best possible offer and program on the market and serving your clients at the highest level, which is not ultimately helping your business grow.

So how I think about this is every business should really have a pillar platform. My pillar platform is YouTube. It has been almost since the beginning, since I brought my business online kind of accidentally, it was YouTube and I fell into this platform and obviously I've really mastered it over the last six years. I love it for so many reasons, but the biggest reason I love YouTube is that it works for you when you're not working. YouTube is my pillar. And then I have from there, other platforms that I will use, but I don't have to use. So really the two things that I use in terms of my content strategy, YouTube indicates the rest of my content. So I'm not reinventing the wheel across platforms and I'm not making new, fresh content for every single platform. What I am doing is I'm taking what I'm talking about on YouTube and I'm creating it into the format that is most native or organic to the platform I'm sharing it on. That might sound confusing.

Anyways, we have our YouTube video and then my other big platform is email. My YouTube channel builds my email list. And what's amazing about this and why this strategy works so well is that these leads are super warm because if somebody's, let's say watching this video, they have come here for a reason. So they're really warm leads as opposed to, let's say it's a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad where they're not super interested, they're kind of on the fence, but you're being pushed in front of them. So I like to determine YouTube as a pull marketing strategy, meaning that you are magnetizing the right people in, who are looking for you for help. And then push strategy is where you are pushing yourself in front of people. So YouTube and email, that's really it. And I'm going to show you weekly how my content strategy works and what I do and the other platforms that I sometimes use.

So just between these two things, this sustains the business without having to do anything else. And honing in on one platform as my pillar platform allowed me to grow this because new people are discovering my content every single day through search and suggested and browse, all the different traffic sources which we talked about earlier. My audience is growing on other platforms because people are following me from YouTube elsewhere, i.e. on my email list, Instagram, et cetera, but I don't have to use the other platforms as much because this is really working for me on a daily basis.

And the next thing to really understand is that you have basically two vehicles for marketing online, especially organically, you have on demand and you have evergreen. So YouTube is an evergreen platform. There's also platforms like Pinterest and blogging that are also evergreen because they use a search functionality, meaning that people are seeking out the content you're creating. So you don't have to do any extra work. They're coming to find you. You don't have to go find them, whereas on-demand platforms mean that you have to post to them in order to be seen. And the shelf life of that content is pretty short-lived because it's not innately being searched. So those platforms would be things like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, where they have a purpose, but they're just more of an urgent purpose as opposed to long term business building and business development.

And when it comes to the content strategy, I really focus on three tiers and I leverage these tiers depending on what I need in the business and studying my numbers and going, okay, well, we need a bit more traffic this month. Okay, I'm going to focus on this tier for this week. Or we need hotter leads, I'm going to focus on this tier for this week. So what are they? Viral, depth, and then evergreen. So the purpose of all of these is a little bit different. This is more beginner, top of the funnel. You're going to bring in a broad audience, a bigger audience, and it's going to grow your brand awareness, but they're going to be colder leads at the top here. Depth content is really about building loyalty and depth with your existing audience. So it doesn't really necessarily mean you're going to build this huge brand awareness from it, but the people who are there are going to be very deeply nurtured through that content and make them even warmer leads for your business.

And then evergreen is speaking directly to your ideal client when they are in the most pain and when they need the most help from you, i.e., if I make a video on how to build an online course, that is evergreen content. That is for my hottest leads and it generates a ton of interest and clients in our business. And the cool thing about this content is that this content is going to last a lifetime. So if you make one evergreen video, it essentially is timeless. It's not based on a trend or anything that's urgent. It works for you for the rest of time. So I have videos that are four years old, five years old, six years old that are still bringing in hundreds of leads every single week. So that's the beauty of the organic strategy on a platform like YouTube, where you're constantly being found by new people.

And what I will say in terms of a content strategy is, it's super easy to get sucked into feeling like you need to grow your numbers and your vanity metrics, and they all are different for each tier of content, the only metrics that truly matter, and there's different iterations or versions of these on every platform is CTR. So are people actually clicking on your content? Are they using an intent to consume the content? So CTR, retention, are they paying attention? Are they staying there or are they watching your whole video? If they're not, it's kind of useless. Watch time, subscribers, viewers, and then velocity. And velocity means like, how quickly are you getting engagement? Is it having a viral effect essentially?

But all of those metrics don't necessarily matter to each piece of content. For a viral piece of content, you are looking for more velocity, you are looking to pick up more subscribers. For an evergreen piece of content, you're looking for retention, you're looking for a click-through rate, and you're looking for action. You want those people to take an action off of the video to become a lead, to become a client.

So when I'm thinking about my content strategy, as I mentioned, my pillar platform is YouTube and everything else I do is based off of that YouTube video. So I'm not having to constantly be creative and think of new things because there's lots to do in a business. And I'm going to talk about systems and structure in just a second. But in doing that on a weekly basis, I can determine, okay, the YouTube video comes out on Tuesday. I know Monday, I'm going to send an email. Tuesday's going to be the YouTube video, which also is associated with an email that I'll send out to my email list to provide value. Wednesday, I'll share social proof or testimonial on my Instagram stories and also in an email to prove the validity of what we do. And then maybe I'll turn that into a LinkedIn post on Thursday or a Facebook post on Thursday.

But all of the peripheral platforms and the on-demand platforms are optional because just between YouTube and email, which emails we do one to three a week, usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, if necessary, and then we do one YouTube video a week. And those four activities are what generate the most leads for us. So we double down on the things that work the most because that keeps things simple and it frees up a lot of my time.

And the seventh thing, if I were to start all over again, is focusing on systems and structures at the right time. I think people try to rush this process and it shouldn't be rushed because you're naturally going to find a rhythm with what you can build systems around and a structure around as you actually grow the business. So again, kind of start by testing and then you figure out what works best. And then each of those things that are working in your business to generate traffic and leads and clients and helping to smooth out your operations, those are the things that you want to create systems around and duplicatable processes so it can take you out of it and you can eventually hire somebody to do those things.

So this is what you need to understand about a business. There's really six pillars in a business. And these six pillars indicate your systems and your structure. So sales first and foremost, if you're not making sales, you don't have a business. So sales, marketing, finance, operations, fulfillment, and team. These are the six pillars that build the entire foundation of a fully functional and fully scalable business. So knowing that right off the bat, I wish that I had this information when I started my business, would've helped me remove myself from the business a lot faster so I could focus on the things that were my zone of genius.

So an easy way to think about this is anything that you find yourself repeating to a client or a strategy that you use over and over and over again, or a process that you do on a daily basis, document it because those things are systems. Something as simple as sending out an email to your list, documenting it, creating a video, creating a step-by-step Google document, it might seem like a silly thing, but these are the instructions that you're going to provide to your first hires. And oftentimes your first hires are the people who are doing a lot of the admin and busy work, as I mentioned before, to take that off your plate so you can more so focusing on your zone of genius.

And so you don't need a big team, and I'm going to talk about that next. You don't need a big team. You just need to be really, really organized and start thinking about each of these and how well they're functioning and what is the missing link. If you're not making sales, okay, then we need to think, well, what are you doing on a daily basis to generate new clients? What are your revenue generating activities every single day? So often people skip this and go right to marketing. Marketing isn't necessarily going to bring in more sales. You have to figure out what are your key revenue generating activities on a daily basis. And that has to be your number one priority because without sales, marketing, finance, operations, fulfillment, and team, they don't really exist. So first and foremost, you got to focus on sales and that allows you to grow everything else and create your systems and your structure.

So in terms of structure in our business, what I've really identified is we have a very small team and the sort of key departments, content community is one bucket, operations is the other bucket, and then finance is the final bucket. And underneath that, we have people that support, but those are really the key factors to creating the structure of my team. And what's really cool now is because we built out the team, we have processes for every single role and every single department, and we've documented it inside of an internal course. Whenever we hire somebody new, the hiring process and the onboarding process is already created because we've already done it once. And then we're able to just essentially have the new hire watch that, train themselves and, of course, we're there to assist, but we don't have to kind of reinvent the wheel with every person who joins the team. And that helps you create a really dialed-in process in terms of how you build out the right team and who you hire.

Number eight, hiring. Hiring was a big question mark for me when I started. So if I were to start over, I have so much advice to give here. You want to be so intentional with everything you do in your business, but particularly in who you hire, because if you hire the wrong person, it actually creates more work and more chaos and more frustration. I always go back to the concept of having a north star. So being very clear on what the intention and mission behind my business is allows all of the noise and distraction to fall away. It also allows me to be very strategic in who I decide to work with. And what I mean by that is I've mentioned before that I want to work with people who are legacy hires and legacy clients. So people that I envision working with for the rest of my life. I know that's probably not realistic, but a lot of our team members do stay for quite a while. And I think that's because we create an environment and a culture of legacy thinking.

So I want my team to be people that I love working with every single day and I truly do. And so basing every decision of hiring and building out my team around our north star, which is really to elevate experts and allow them to increase their income, impact and authority using online course creation and organic marketing strategies. That is our north star. We want to elevate the hidden experts of the world so they can reach more people and make a greater impact. So every hire I bring onto my team supports that mission. I'm not hiring blindly because if I'm doing that, it means that I'm lost on what I'm actually hiring this person for. And if I do that, they won't really know why they're there, then that creates more work and stress for them and for me, and then you have to fire people, which isn't a fun situation.

So really centering around your north star and understanding that every person in your business that you hire has to fulfill the flywheel that grows your business, which these four things are really what we focus on every single day to make sure that our business is on track and that it's a healthy, happy culture and business. So program is number one, having the best program on the market. Enrollment, so actually getting people enrolled into the program, which means sales. Creating transformation for our clients that come in and a really great experience for them is our goal.

And then from there, these people, these clients become ambassadors. They become the people that tell everyone, you got to work with Sunny because she works with people on online course creation and she helps entrepreneurs. As I mentioned earlier, that's really the brand.?

I don't need a lot of people to know that, just the right people to know that, and that automatically brings more people into the business.?

So best program on the market, enrollment, transformation, and then ambassadors. So every person on our team that we have is fulfilling one piece of this, if not several of them. And that's how we know we're hiring the right people and hiring with a clear intention.

I feel like I had a full brain dump there. That was a lot of information, but I hope it was helpful. That was my intention behind this. And my intention really was, if I was talking to myself, when I was first getting started, how would I lay out the roadmap for myself to reach that first million dollars? Hopefully this alleviates a lot of the stress and the question marks that you have, and it makes your journey a lot easier.

Thank you so much for being here. And if you want to take this a step further and you're ready to package your experience, your story, and your skillset into a highly scalable online course, you can click right here to book a call with my team to see if we're the right fit for you. If you enjoyed this, be sure to hit that like button, the whole mission behind this channel is to make entrepreneurship available to everyone. So doing that helps us reach more people in the algorithm. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.

To apply to the Authority Accelerator today, please go to: https://sunnylenarduzzi.com/apply