12 Months to $1 Million (#133)
Ryan Moran is the founder of Capitalism.com, a podcaster, and author. I recently read Ryan Moran’s book, 12 Months to $1 Million: How to Pick a Winning Product, Build a Real Business, and Become a Seven Figure Entrepreneur. As I try to build my business, the book sparked a lot of good ideas. Here are three of them that I am still thinking about.
Seven-Figure Business Math
The best idea from the book is the simple math that it takes to become a seven-figure business. A seven-figure business has to make $83,334 in sales each month. To get there — if your business has 3 to 5 products, with an average price point of $30 per unit, and you sell 25 to 30 units of each unit each day, you will have a seven-figure company. To think of it another way, you have to do $2,739 in sales every day of the year. For those that are providing a service it boils down to sales of $19,230 every week. Now for some of you that math was intuitive. For a guy who majored in history, like myself, it took a little work to get there (and a calculator).
Visionary vs. Builder
Growing a business requires both a visionary and builder. It is very rare to find an entrepreneur who is both. John D. Rockefeller is a notable exception. A visionary tends to highly energetic, generates new ideas, and has little time for the details. They make great salespeople and decision-makers, but are poor managers or leaders. A builder is stable, organized, calm, and into the details of building the systems and processes to create a great business. Builders help the company get things done.
In Post #94 I talked about Spanx. Sara Blakely was the visionary for the company. She brought on Laurie Ann Goldman, a veteran of Coca-Cola, to be the builder and help implement the processes to grow the company. Who is the visionary in your company? Who is the builder? Are you more a visionary or a builder?
The Year Long Process to Get to Seven-Figures
Ryan breaks the year into three manageable chunks to help the entrepreneur. Of course, these stages may take longer for some companies and shorter for others. The three stages are:
The Grind (Months 0 to 4) — During the early stages of a business, the company identifies its product idea, targets customers, develops funding, and makes its first sale.
The Growth (Months 5-8) — During this stage, the company uses advertising to grow sales of one product to 25 to 30 sales a day. This proves that the company has a repeatable and viable business concept.
The Gold (Months 9-12) — During this stage, the company adds three to four products to its product line and grows each to 25 sales per day. At the end of the year, the company is doing at least $2,739 in sales per day.
Conclusion
Ryan offers plenty of other ideas on how to grow your business. Check out his book and website (here) for more. In the meantime, use these three ideas to inspire you and go on the offense to build your business in 2021.