Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:00):
Welcome to business and the podcast for people making it
all happen. Running a successful business completely takes over your life,
but I'm a believer that there is still room for
some ands like health, wealth, beauty, and maybe even some fashion.
On this podcast, I'll share with you what's working for
scaling my nine figure business while keeping you up to
date on the latest trends, news and fun finds. This
(00:23):
is a place for business and let's dive in. My
businesses generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but
if I lost everything today and had to completely start over,
it is the exact plan I would use to make
$100,000 minimum this year, using the skills and tools that
you already have. So here's the full strategy I'd use
(00:43):
if I had to start over from zero. First up
is to get ruthlessly clear on the skills that you
already have. What can you sell today that somebody would
pay you for? When you think about the target of
making $100,000 this year, I am not telling you that
you need to go to school to get some degree
in order to learn something for you to make money,
you can use the skills that you already have to
(01:04):
make $100,000. What is so beautiful about the world we
live in is you can type into ChatGPT. These are
my previous job descriptions. This is my resume and based
off of this information, what hard skills do I have
that I can use to sell a product? It is
wild because ChatGPT will tell you what skills you have.
I find that a lot of people really do struggle
(01:25):
with identifying skills that they have. They feel a lack
of confidence in the skills that they have, and they
aren't really sure of what they're good at. So let
I help you. You might think that you aren't good
at things, but you most certainly are, and whatever skills
you do have would allow you to make $100,000 this
year minimum. So here are some hard skills that would
be included on your resume. This could be anything from
(01:46):
consulting to social media to design, to graphics to sales copywriting.
But what about the intangibles? The things that you do
really well in your life, such as being the life
of the party that is a skill. So is being
super organized or having some sort of productivity system, whatever
it is that you already do, that makes you successful
(02:10):
with the people that you spend time around, not just
at work, but also personally. You can sell those skills
because there are businesses and people who are willing to
buy from people who are good at a specific thing.
You just have to nail down what that specific thing is.
Failing to identify the skills that make you money is
what leads to people believing that they need degrees or certifications,
(02:32):
and that's what delays their success. Start getting cash flow
by selling the skills that you already have. Next is
number two. In order to make money fast, you need
to pick an offer, not a business. This is how
you can easily make $100,000 this year. You see, most
people get hung up in starting a business, but what
they really need to start is selling an offer and
(02:54):
getting clear on what they can sell, and who is
interested in buying that thing from them. You are simply
looking for people who are interested parties who have a
problem that you can solve, and from there you do
the math. So think about this. Let's say you created
an offer that is $1,500 a month. Like operations consulting
or AI workflow setup. You could be ready to pitch
(03:15):
this offer to people tonight. And what I happen to
know after working with thousands of business owners, is that
there are thousands of business owners who would buy those
offers from you within minutes. People who are competent with AI,
with operations, with productivity, with organization, and their ability to
sell those things to people who are interested in them,
(03:36):
are able to make a disproportionate amount of money very quickly.
This is not a business. This is an offer. It
is a very specific offer to a business. Now, why
I'm hitting on offer is that I don't want you
to get confused with starting a business versus create an offer,
a business. You start thinking about websites and logos and
incorporating or creating your LLC. And should it be a
(03:59):
C corp? Stop the madness. When you pick an offer,
you are shortcutting. The process of actually making money creating
a business doesn't make you money. Selling an offer does.
Remember that getting to the goal that you want is
somebody saying yes and then paying you ASAP. Here are
some ideas of offers that don't require businesses. You could
(04:20):
start hiring assistants as a service. There is no shortage
of business owners who are looking for assistance, and the
deliverables could be 3 to 5 screen candidates per month,
where somebody pays you two grand a month in order
to do this for them, and then you would just
move on to the next role. Next up, you could
be a professional weekly team meeting builder. After working with
thousands of business owners, I promise you they will pay
(04:42):
you to prep and document their weekly meetings. And you
could do this with multiple business owners, and you could
do this with systems that scale utilizing AI. The deliverables
would be agenda templates, live meeting support, scorecard tracking, etc..
Next up, offer and pricing review quarterly with sales page
touch ups. Businesses would pay to have you do this.
(05:05):
Look through a fresh lens at their existing core offers,
and give them guidance and advice on what is and
isn't working so that their pages convert better. These are
just a couple of examples of offers, and there is
no shortage of the amount of these types of offers
that you could create for business owners that scale, that
would allow you to make $100,000 this year. Next is
(05:25):
number three, which is to actually leverage AI to build
better and faster. If you want to get rich in 2025,
AI is not optional. Workers who use AI every day
are two times more productive and earn up to 30% more.
If you're currently working alone, you are already losing. I
(05:46):
use AI for just about everything. Any hiccup that you
have in scaling your offer, you can have I tell
you what potential bumps am I going to run into
because I didn't see this one coming. It happened and
I don't want this to happen in the future. It
is magical what it can create for you and how
it can come up with phenomenal ideas to actually help
your business scale only if you know how to use it.
(06:08):
And I will tell you, just last weekend I spent
four hours going through and creating a bunch of assistants
for myself for different things that I need help with
each and every week. And yes, did it take time?
Of course it did, but it only took four hours,
and the target of investing four hours in something is
that ideally gives me 40 hours back by the end
of the month, but most business owners are not going
to put the four hours in because they don't know
(06:29):
how to use it. They're not technologically savvy, so how
can you leverage that as part of your offer, where
you become great with utilizing AI as part of your
offer so that you can scale fast? This will differentiate
you from all the service providers who are still operating
in a world pre 2023. I like to think about
AI as the only force multiplier that lets you compete
(06:52):
at scale, but without a team. That brings us to
number four sell ugly and sell fast. Focusing on perfection
over speed will ruin any chance you have of being successful.
You do not need things to look pretty in order
for them to be successful. In fact, the way you
create success is oftentimes not having the pretty thing. It's
by you overcoming objections, overcoming people's perceived obstacles in order
(07:16):
for them to move forward with your product and your service,
and then ensuring that they actually have remarkable results when
using them. That is how you create success, not with
a perfect website and the best logo, and all of
these colors that really speak to you, and creating something
that you're proud of and having it be your legacy.
You're not creating your legacy with your first freaking offer.
Get this out of your head. What you are trying
(07:37):
to do is learn how to sell something. You're trying
to find the right market for you to sell to.
And the only way that you know if somebody is
truly interested in buying from you is if you start
selling it and you sell it fast and early on,
they're not buying the brand. They are buying you. They're
buying your product, they're buying your story. They're buying the
way that you communicate it. So it does not have
to be perfect because perfect does not scale the Startup
(08:00):
Genome report in 2023 reported that 85% of startups that
iterate early succeed, while 70% that overplan fail. Most people
think that they need to look ready instead of actually
being ready. So remember that as you're doing your pitch,
it doesn't need to look perfect. It doesn't even need
to look good. It just needs to clearly solve a
(08:22):
very painful problem. And the pitch needs to be sent today,
not someday. Number five is one of the most important
strategies you need to obsess over your first customers. According
to the Nielsen Global Trust of Advertising report, 84% of
people trust referrals more than they do ads. So especially
(08:43):
obsessing over your early clients creates a compounding effect that
drives credibility. When you first launch your offer, you are
not trying to boil the ocean. This is not the
time where you have your ten year vision and your
five year roadmap and all the milestones built out. We're
scrapping that. We're going to. How do you make $100,000
this year to have the foundation to be able to
(09:04):
have $1 million and then $100 million in the future?
But in order to ever get to $100 million, you
actually have to hit your first 100,000. And so this
obsession over your clients early is the only thing that matters.
Early on. Nothing else matters. You have to obsess over
their feedback, over their perspective, over the way that they
(09:24):
use the product, and their thoughts on the branding and
the positioning, and what specific pain points your product actually solves.
Because when you're creating an offer, it's easy for you
to just create in a vacuum and you think that
you are your customer. This is a huge mistake. I
see business owners make. They think that they're the customer,
so they build it around them. But if you build
it around you, you're not actually building it for somebody
(09:44):
who's interested in buying it because you aren't your own customer,
somebody else is. So listening to those people, once you
finally get their attention and have their trust, is the
only way that you get your business to a place
where people are referring you business instead of you constantly
having to pay for new business going back to that
Nielsen report. So remember that your early clients are your
(10:05):
sales funnel. They will give you the case studies that
you need and all of the testimonials and all of
the referrals if you pay attention to them. One of
my favorite quotes around this is love the one you're with.
Love the client that you have now, not the future
clients that you want to have, or the people that
might buy. The people that are in your ecosystem and
have purchased already are the people who need your most attention,
(10:28):
especially when you're first starting out. That brings us to
number six. If you spend your first 100 K, you
are never going to make your second. Cash is your weapon.
It is not a reward. I learned this the hard
way when I first dropped out of school and started
making money. I thought I was rich because I had
$3,500 in my bank account, and I went and spent
2000 of it on a Louis Vuitton duffel bag, which
(10:50):
was ridiculous. I really thought at the time, though, that
I was rich. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm
making so much money. Why do more people not buy
Louis Vuitton bags? Because it's so easy to buy them
having $1,500 in my bank account did not make sense
to me that I was actually broke and poor. I
thought I was rich and just rolling in dough, but
when the first moment came when there was an opportunity
for me to invest money in a business, it was
(11:11):
$15,000 for me to partake in this opportunity. And instead
of having that $15,000, I didn't. I blew it on
a Louis Vuitton duffel bag that made me look cool,
but really made me look like an idiot because I
wasn't able to take part in an opportunity that would
create wealth for me, versus having some stupid bag sitting
on top of my Costco purchased carry on. So when
(11:33):
you first start making money and this whole offer thing
actually works, you're going to think it's magic and it's easy,
and all of a sudden you're rich. You are not
rich when you have made your first hundred thousand. The
next target is to make 200,000. It is not just
to spend all of that money because you think it's
the reward for your hard work. You've demonstrated to yourself
that you can sell and that you have an offer
(11:53):
that people are interested in. But there is a lot
of work to do from that $100,000, to be able
to truly scale it so that you have a business
that will consistently produce income for you, whether or not
you choose to show up. Most people just make the
mistake of inflating their lifestyle too early. So try to
keep the $100,000 that you have liquid, meaning you don't
spend it. You don't put it away someplace. You just
(12:15):
have it available to you so that you and the
business that you're building have options, and you have leverage,
and you can make room to place powerful bets instead
of staying stuck in survival mode. Last up is number seven,
which is your lack of speed kills momentum. The more
momentum you can create, the faster your business will grow.
(12:36):
And what kills momentum is pausing, is stalling, is getting distracted,
is getting complacent. So keep going. It is remarkable. It
is overperforming. If you are able to generate a business
that is doing $100,000 in revenue in its first year.
So as you grow the business, focus on the small
wins and the fast battles to keep the speed and
(12:59):
momentum going. Just whatever you do, don't stop. John Maxwell
has a law called the Law of Big Moe, and
it stands for the Law of Big Momentum. You see,
as you stack small wins, the small wins become bigger
wins and the bigger wins make you feel good and confident.
So you keep going after bigger and bigger things and
taking more risks, but having more wins. That momentum is
(13:21):
vital to your early success. You paying attention to the
small wins and saying things like, I'm on a winning
streak and reminding yourself that you are winning. You are
making progress. There is momentum is what allows the momentum
to continue to be built versus I'm stopping, I'm starting,
I'm stopping, I'm starting, I'm pausing. I'm thinking, when you
have this type of behavior, you never quite get into momentum.
(13:42):
And the challenge if you never find momentum, is that
people have a hard time trusting you because you're somebody
who's running a business, not running a business. You've started
selling things, but now you're paused on selling things and
you can never actually get consistency. You're not able to
see what is and isn't working because you yourself are
starting and stopping, so don't stop. Keep going and remind
(14:04):
yourself continually, I am broke. I do not have enough
money in order for me to achieve the life that
I want, in order for me to pay for the
things that I want, in order for me to have
financial freedom. So even though I've made it this far,
I have barely just started. And there's so much more
for me to go out and create. If you follow
these seven steps, starting over will not feel as terrifying.
If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely
(14:27):
not want to miss out on my new newsletter. It
just dropped. I just started creating this content and I
am obsessed. Every single week in your inbox I am
going to send you business and which is exactly what
it sounds like. How do you fit business and all
of the other things in your life so that you
are up to speed on fashion, beauty, wellness, all things
(14:49):
that really matter. If you want to subscribe and get
this special gift and weekly treat in your inbox, go
to Cartoon Ventures.