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If I Had 12 Months to Make $10M — This is My Plan
75 Plays11 days ago
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If you’ve been in business for 3+ years and haven’t hit $10M yet, this episode breaks down exactly why—and how to fix it. I walk through the 7-step framework I’d use to add $10M in the next 12 months, based on scaling multiple companies past $100M and helping founders generate over $10B in sales. You’ll learn how to reverse-engineer a $10M goal, build a product and market that can scale, simplify traffic (including Meta ads), cut distractions, use testimonials as a growth flywheel, and avoid the inventory traps that kill fast-growing businesses. This is a practical, no-BS playbook for scaling an ecommerce or product-based business fast.
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Transcript
Introduction & Success Story
00:00:00
Speaker
If you've been in business three years and haven't made $10 million, dollars you need to stop and watch this full video right now. I've built two businesses with over $100 million dollars in sales, and each of them grew by at least $10 million dollars in a single year. I've also taught other people who have sold an estimated $10 billion, dollars including some of those who've sold over $100 million dollars in their own businesses.
00:00:22
Speaker
And in this video, I'm gonna show you the seven steps to add $10 million 12 months. So step number one is to reverse engineer your goal. A lot of people set goals, but they don't know what they actually mean and what you have to do to make them happen. To give you an example, I set the goal in 2017 of earning my helicopter pilot's license. Now, normally that takes people six months plus to be able to do, but I could really only take about a month away from my businesses before I had to get back to work. And so I decided to set the goal of doing it in just one month.
Goal Setting & Planning
00:00:53
Speaker
And then I backed into what that would mean in terms of number of hours I would have to do every single day and how I would design my life. So i actually ended up moving to Hawaii for a month and did nothing else for an entire month, literally 12 hours a day. i was either flying or learning how to fly or doing classroom work to get my license. And about four weeks later, i earned my helicopter pilot's license.
00:01:15
Speaker
Because the thing is, is that your goal determines your strategy. And so think about the goal that you want to accomplish. Maybe it is to add $10 million dollars in a single year. What is that going to mean in terms of how many products you need to sell? If you're in the physical product game, how many units are you going to have to sell? Or how many orders are you going to have to produce? And then based on that, what's your typical conversion rate? And then based on that, how much are you gonna have to spend on ads or get traffic from somewhere? And then what's that budget going to look like? When you start backing into like this, that actually gives you a plan that you can do something with rather than just hoping this goal manifests without doing
Product Selection for Growth
00:01:49
Speaker
the work.
00:01:49
Speaker
In one year, we scaled our e-commerce business from $2.5 million dollars in sales to $15.5 million dollars in sales. The only way that was possible is if we designed our operational flow so that wouldn't implode when our orders increased that much and we wouldn't have to go $2.5 scrounging around for cash. And so we put those pieces in place. We had a supply chain system where we didn't have to order inventory until we actually sold it. And then we also focused relentlessly on simplifying the business. One traffic source, one funnel, really just a handful of products on one page, And that simplicity allowed us to scale by over $10 million dollars in a single year.
00:02:28
Speaker
Step number two is you need a product that can scale. So this really became clear to me when at one point I decided to read 25 years of annual reports because it's a publicly traded company for Monster Beverage Corporation. What I found out is these two guys that still run the business today, so many decades later, they bought the business back in the 80s or 90s for about $30 million. dollars And it was actually a juice company. It's called Hanson's Natural. And they sold juices and healthy sodas and that sort of thing. And and um these guys bought this business and that's what they were doing. They were trying to expand the product line, more juices, more sodas. And that's how they were cranking along for five plus years. And then when it became the sort of late 90s, they just by chance saw this energy drink market that was kind of exploding. And so they decided to come out with their own energy drink. It was under the Hanson's name also. And so they launched that. It did really well.
00:03:21
Speaker
Then they ended up doubling down and created another energy drink. And then the third iteration they finally created became Monster. And that business ended up becoming 90% of their sales, then 98% of their sales, and they actually sold everything that was not energy related to the Coca-Cola company so they could focus 100% on that market. So choosing the right product made all the difference in the world. Now they're 60 plus billion dollar company today. That may not be your goal. Your goal may be I just want to get to $10 million dollars in a year to add $10 million dollars in my business.
00:03:54
Speaker
You've got to make sure that the product you sell can actually support that. And the easiest way to figure that out is to see if somebody else is already doing 10 plus million dollars a year. Because if they're already doing over 10 million dollars a year, there's a good chance you
Traffic Channels & Advertising
00:04:07
Speaker
can too. There's always room to expand a market. There's very infrequently just one person that can win.
00:04:14
Speaker
But if you can't find a single other person that's doing at least what you want to do in that market, that's not a good sign. That's probably a market that you want to avoid. Let somebody else do all the experimentation and figure out if this product is ever going to work. Let them prove the market out. And you can always come in there a little bit later. And they've already done all the hard work and you can jump in there and succeed way faster. Now that you know, it's actually going work. But there's a good chance that whatever market they try out is probably not going to get to the level of sales that you want. And that means you just saved months or years of your life. Step number three is you need traffic that can scale. So you've got the right kind of product. You know what your goal means. Now you need a way to actually ramp up sales to get customers that's going to support your $10 million. dollars And so where are you going to get these customers?
00:04:59
Speaker
There's a lot of different ways to make this happen. In our business, when we scaled by over $10 million dollars in a year and then basically grew the business from $200,000 to $50 million in just six years, we started for the first year and a half with one traffic source, which is Facebook ads or meta-advertising.
00:05:15
Speaker
So with that traffic source, which is the one that I still recommend you default to today, you can scale almost infinitely. Basically, the entire world you would ever want to sell something to is on their platform. Doesn't matter. Old, young, they're on their platform and you can reach them one way or another. And so that's where I would recommend because it's infinitely scalable. And the cool thing is, is you can start with, you know, 20 bucks a day. So there's not a lot of risk. And if something works, then you double down and spend more. And so our entire process of scaling the business for the first year and a half was we had one page, we sent them there from Facebook ads, and then we tested a few different ads. And if we saw one that was working, we increased the budget.
00:05:56
Speaker
If it was not working, we cut it off and we just kept adding a few new ones. It wasn't like some super long, you know, intense work we had to do every day, grinding it out. It was more like being a scientist and watching this machine, the inputs and outputs, and then just cranking the dials up a little bit when we saw something working. That was all it took.
Focus & Prioritization
00:06:16
Speaker
to go from $17,000 a month when I first partnered with this business up to $1 million or $2 million dollars a month a couple years later. Now, a super simple way to start with Facebook advertising is just a simple three-campaign setup. And so I recommend one campaign just for images, one campaign just for videos, And one campaign just for testing. So at first, you're just going to start off testing. And so you'll test some images, some videos, whatever in the testing campaign, and make sure you set it so that Facebook optimizes budget on a can on an ad set level, not on the whole campaign level. So let yourself control. how much each ad set spends because each one is going to be a test for you. So test a handful of videos, a handful of images, see what starts converting.
00:07:03
Speaker
Then if you find a winner, move it to the video or the images campaign. This simple structure is all you need to go from spending nothing to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month like we do.
00:07:14
Speaker
Now, step four is often the hardest for most people. It's to cut the bulls**t. And so if you're trying to achieve a big goal in business, add $10 million dollars in a single year, that means all of your attention needs to go to that one thing. And there's likely other things that are interesting for you to do that are exciting, but that don't support that one goal.
00:07:32
Speaker
And sometimes you have to cut that stuff out. For me to take my business from $200,000 to $50 million, dollars I had a whole other business that I was CEO of. But I knew that if I was going to make that happen, at least for the first couple years where I really needed to figure out how to scale that thing, then I could let other people do stuff. I needed to be all in, at least for the first year or two.
00:07:51
Speaker
And so I ended up basically firing myself as CEO of my other company. And I hired somebody else to run it as CEO. So I basically had to do nothing other than review a few financial reports every single month. That allowed me to put all the attention on that business.
00:08:07
Speaker
The other thing that's going to happen is not just getting rid of other projects and businesses that may not be supporting you while you're pursuing this big goal. The other thing is, as you succeed, as you ramp up sales, as you grow the size of your business, inevitably, you're going to accumulate stuff that you need to get rid of. You're going to accumulate products that never worked out marketing channels that never worked out people that never worked out. You've got to relentlessly trim that stuff as you go.
00:08:32
Speaker
Or eventually, it's all going to kind of pile up And you're just going to stop growing, you're going to cap out and you're going miserable and not want to run this business anymore. So you have to cut out everything that's not supporting you products, people, marketing channels, and especially other projects. There was one guy that I coach that own a commerce business primarily selling on Amazon, doing a few million dollars a year.
00:08:53
Speaker
When he was talking to me, he's like, I'm kind of pursuing this other software thing. i'm like, how's it going? He's like, I'm just getting started. I paid this guy. 25 grand for some sort of coaching program. And um I was like, Well, how's your Amazon thing going? He's like, Well, you know, it's great. He's like, I was like, is there room for to grow? And he said, Yeah, he was like, all I have to do is add a product. Each new product I add can do a few hundred grand extra in sales per year. And I'm like, how many do you think I can add? He's like a lot.
00:09:17
Speaker
And so in his case, he had this system down for adding products to his brand. And encouraged him to go after bigger and bigger products. But the long story short was that he had a big opportunity sitting in front of him to very easily with very little work, add more value to that one business, rather than starting this whole other thing, which was eventually going to distract him from that one business. So as soon as he cut that software business out, his other business increased by 50% in that next year, just by spending a little more attention, just by spending 10% more attention there than he was diverting over to that other business, which could have been okay, but you only have so much time. And the way you leverage your time is to cut out the stuff that doesn't support your number one goal that you're
Leveraging Testimonials
00:10:01
Speaker
after. Step number five is to use the testimonials flywheel. And so I remember attending a small mastermind event with some high-level e-commerce people maybe six years ago, five, six years ago. And there was this one company in there that I hadn't heard of before called Snow Teeth Whitening. And they were apparently crushing it with e-commerce. You could see all their Facebook ads that they were running. So they were spending a lot of money on Facebook ads, which meant that they were producing a lot of sales. And so when I checked out their landing page, I noticed something interesting.
00:10:28
Speaker
It was almost entirely just social proof. It was literally just testimonial after testimonial after testimonial, influencer with a product, regular person with a product, celebrity with a product, news mention, news logo. That was the entire page was just proof after proof. Very little copy, actually. And their offer was okay. They offered some discount on your first order, but it was all about the proof. And so when we created our landing page for our e-commerce business, I modeled that technique. I included as many testimonials as possible. Now, here's what happens when you do that. When you add all those testimonials and you're relentless about gathering them and using them, then your page converts at a higher rate. When your page converts at a higher rate, you get more sales. More sales means you get more testimonials, more testimonials, more proof, higher conversion rate, more sales. And that's why I call this the testimonials flywheel. And so first, you got to sell a great product. Don't even be in business if you don't sell a product that you wouldn't recommend and you wouldn't use personally. It's just crazy not to. Your life is too short to be selling stuff you don't really believe in. So assuming you've done that, then you want to ask for reviews. And so there's a lot of tools out there. You can do this automatically. i mean, literally just following up with every single customer that buys from you one way or another automatically. on a scheduled basis to ask for a testimonial, great way to start. Just ask for a little written blurb. And then here's the thing. When they give you a written blurb, they're going to way more likely to do more for you. So next, then ask for, can you just take a quick selfie of you holding the product? Then after that, for those people to give you a selfie, ask for a quick video review. If you need to incentivize it with a coupon or a discount or gift card or whatever, like feel free to go for it.
00:12:06
Speaker
Laddering up that way in terms of commitment rather than like, hey, everybody, we need some video testimonials. Most people are terrified of getting on camera. So you don't ask for that at first. But either way, you need to get some of these. You don't need as many video as you need photos as you need text, but you need a good chunk of all of them. I'd say roughly for every 20 text testimonials, you should have maybe four or five photos and maybe one video. and then as you scale up,
00:12:29
Speaker
scale up kind of proportionally there because nobody's going to watch 50 videos in a row but if you have 10 on your page that's all the proof you could ever possibly need from that type of testimonial and it's going to dramatically increase your conversion rate we've used websites such as influee.co and bounty.co to get third-party influencers to at least do little photos and videos and that kind of stuff with our products now you probably want to add a disclaimer that says This was paid or incentivized or whatever your arrangement is with them. But either way, that's another way to do this rather than having to wait on real customers. But when at all possible, start with some friends and family. Hey, can you hold this product for me? But then get real customers. And then if necessary, you can amplify or scale this out with platforms like those.
Overcoming Inventory Challenges
00:13:11
Speaker
Now, step six, and it really only applies if you sell physical products, is to be prepared to solve the inventory issue.
00:13:18
Speaker
So a buddy of mine started an e-commerce business and And it started scaling extremely quickly during the pandemic. was selling pet supplements. It started scaling extremely quickly, but he had to buy all of his inventory like most people ahead of time. And so he had a choice. He could either slow down the growth of his business or do something dramatic to come up with the money to buy more inventory. He ended up going into debt, personally guaranteed debt for $10 million dollars to get enough inventory to fund the growth of his company.
00:13:46
Speaker
A few years later, he sold it for around $200 million. dollars So life worked out well there. Now, that may not be the choice that you go with. But I do recommend you think about this ahead of time. The faster your business grows, if you're selling physical products, the more money you're going to need for inventory. You can use debt like he did. You can use equity, meaning either you put more money into the business, you put more of your own personal cash into the business, or you get cash from somebody else for a piece of the business. So that's another option.
00:14:13
Speaker
Or you can have customers kind of fund your growth for you. And the way you can do that is either by just getting them to pay more, increasing average order value, increasing pricing so your margins are higher, or doing pre-order campaigns, kind of like Kickstarters except you run them yourself. That's another great option to sort of fix the cash flow issue.
00:14:31
Speaker
The other way, which is the first way I actually recommend, now you may not be able to do it from day one, but you should be thinking about this and implementing it as soon as possible, is getting your suppliers or vendors to fund your growth. And this is essentially what we've done in our coffee company. It's kind of a unique quirk of the industry, but it's worked out fantastically for us where we don't actually pay for the finished products until we make a sale.
00:14:52
Speaker
Now that may not be completely possible for you from day one, but this is exactly how Costco has grown into this massive company. All those products sitting on their shelves, Costco doesn't pay in advance. They pay after those products have been on their shelves. So if you have to pay, you know, 70% upfront, 30% when your product is ready, 50% upfront, 50% when it's ready. And then hopefully later on, maybe you just pay 100% when it's ready. And hopefully if you keep negotiating and keep growing and scaling where you have more leverage, you'll be able to pay 30 days, 60 days later. After that, your cashflow is gonna be amazing. So think about
Maintaining Focus & Stability
00:15:25
Speaker
ahead of time. If you wanna add $10 million dollars in a single year, you need to be prepared to solve this inventory issue. And those are the ways you're gonna be able to address it.
00:15:33
Speaker
Now, step number seven, the final step is zero distractions. I discovered this principle when I was in college. i always did okay in school, but was never really that focused and probably never reached my full potential. But around my junior year of college, I started getting more focused, more disciplined, and I discovered the ninth floor of the library. So on campus, you could go into the library, go up to the ninth floor, And it was 100% silent. That was the rule of studying on that floor.
00:15:59
Speaker
And it was broken up into tiny little cubicles, like little kids' desks almost that were, I guess, big enough for me to fit in. But you could literally hear a pin drop in there. And so what I would do is every single night at that point, I would go into that library up to the ninth floor, grab my little desk.
00:16:14
Speaker
And for three or four hours, I would basically work for 50 minutes studying whatever I had to study, writing whatever I had to write. Then take a 10-minute break, listen to some music, walk around silently, and then do that again and again, you know, three or four times, 50 minutes, 10, 50 minutes, 10, 50 minutes, 10.
00:16:30
Speaker
And all of a sudden, my grades shot through the roof. I was getting straight A's on everything. And it changed my entire way I look at what it takes to do better. In things that you care about Charlie Munger used to talk about a word that he liked called assiduity He said he liked the word because he said it basically means to sit on your and do it And so that word and what we're talking about here is the ability to just do the work that you know you need to do so this kind of ties back to step number one Step number one is to know the goal that you're after and know what it means to reverse engineer that goal. So now you actually have to do the work. We've talked about these other six steps. You know the process you have to go through. Now it's a matter of showing up and doing the work every day. And the cool thing is, is most people don't do this. All you have to do is sit down for two 60 to 90 minute blocks per day. That's it. 60 to 90 minutes per day twice and focus on your goal, growing your sales by $10 million dollars or any goal that you have. And you're going to get ahead of 99% of other people because everyone else is so distracted. They're looking at their phone. They're looking at social media. They're on their computer. They can't focus for more than three minutes. So if you do that, you're going to leapfrog ahead against literally everybody else that you know. You're going to get to that $10 million dollars in a single year and your whole life is going to transform.
00:17:45
Speaker
I've been able to apply this in my e-commerce training business that I used to run. Now we don't run it anymore. We have a CEO over there, so I'm not involved at all. But when I was there, I would have to sit down. we would do these big launches. you know Started off $6 million, $7 million, $16 million, $20 million, $22 million. dollars We were doing these massive launches that each one was like a week or two. And sometimes we were cramming like six months' worth of work into two weeks. So I would need to write like 100 emails.
00:18:14
Speaker
to leads to affiliates to people that had opt in all that sort of stuff and so the only way i was able to do that without losing my mind was this ability to sit down and focus for eight hours at a time and bang out a hundred emails same thing with planning the launch copy where literally be the equivalent of like a book or half a book worth of copy to create these couple hours of launch videos i would sit down and be able to do that work and that's what made all the difference in the world so it's a muscle and a skill that you can build and is going to be essential So you get into that extra $10 million dollars in a year. So in conclusion, I want to share a little secret with you.
00:18:48
Speaker
What I've noticed is that there's a certain magic that happens once you get past $10 million dollars a year in sales in any sort of business. Life feels easier. It feels much more stable because at first when you're building this thing from ground up, it feels like a struggle, a battle. And there's some truth to that. It feels like any little thing.
00:19:07
Speaker
that if it goes wrong, could derail your entire business it could all go to zero. And I've seen that happen too many times because at that stage, if you're a million, two million, three million, four million, whatever, your business is probably dependent on just a few things going right, that if any one of those things collapses,
00:19:23
Speaker
Your entire business can go to zero. But once you get up to $10 million, dollars it's likely got a much better, more stable, thicker foundation that you've built this thing on. You've got better people. You've got better products. You've got better marketing channels. Multiple marketing channels at that stage that are all cranking along. You've got some brand recognition. So you're not fighting tooth and nail for every single customer. Instead, customers are coming to you because you've been at...
Conclusion & Call to Action
00:19:50
Speaker
business for a long enough time and you've scaled to a certain level that people recognize you as one of the leaders in your space. And so I encourage you apply the steps from this video, add the next $10 million dollars to your business or get to your first $10 million dollars and life is going to get a lot easier and a lot more fun. So what I'd like you to do right now is comment below this video with which one of these seven steps is your biggest bottleneck or the biggest thing that you need to work on right now. I'll read every single comment. I look forward to hearing from you. And thanks for watching.