Transcription
Big [ __ ] takes time, and I had to learn that. Like I want you to feel that, cuz it took me a long time to learn what I see happen all the time with entrepreneurs, especially when they apply to acquisition.
Comom, you know, they've got a million dollars in profit—maybe it's the bare minimum for for us to consider for investment—and they're like, "Here's my idea for how I can expand and how I want your help. I want to start all these new product lines because I've already saturated my market because I'm spending $50,000 in Facebook ads, and I can't spend any more than I currently am otherwise I lose the profitability of the ads. So I'm going to start selling more and different offers and add massive complexity to my business—business that only makes $3 million top line per year." That is a mistake, and in this video, I'm going to walk through why.
The reason this is so important is because many people hit this first plateau and then think, "Oh, I should start a new business. Oh, I should start a new product line," when really they need to confront the problem ahead, which is they don't know how to get more customers within their current niche or space. Your market isn't capped; your mindset is capped.
What I'm going to do is break down the three different frameworks I used to think through this so that you are never capped in whatever market you go after. Number one, from from the marketing perspective, you have your method, which is the biggest thing you do. It's running paid ads; it's making content; it's doing outreach; it's getting referrals; it's getting affiliates. Those are the methods that you do to get customers. Underneath of that, you've got the platforms that you do that method on. You've got Facebook, you've got phones, email, Hulu, YouTube, you've got Google ads. Underneath of that, you've got the media on the platform. So if I'm on Instagram, I can go Instagram DMs, I can go Instagram stories, I can go Instagram posts, I can go Instagram reels. I have all these different media within the platform. Platform. One level below that is how much volume am I doing within that media? Am I posting one story a day? One story a week? Multiple stories a day? Multiple posts a day? So like that chiropractor agency, if there are a hundred other agencies that market to chiropractors and they're all marketing on Facebook, then you could probably add up all of the ads spend of every one of those agencies together, and that just gives you an idea of how much there is available in terms of numbered new clients per month that all of them together are selling just on Facebook ads.
Rewind real quick: if you're trying to pick what market you're going to go in—I talk about this in my book, "$100 Million Offers"—there's four things I want to look at. Number one: Are they in pain? Am I actually solving a problem for someone? Number two: Are they easy to find? Cuz if I can't find them, I can't sell them, right? Number three: Do they have the money to spend in order to buy my thing? Because if I'm trying to sell to broke people, it's probably not going to be a good idea. Number four: Are they growing? I don't want to be selling to newspapers; I want to be selling to something like old people that are—there's more of them every single day that are retiring. If I have a market that checks all four of those boxes, then I know I'm at least in a good opportunity.
Now, once I have that in place and I looked at the four variables that I talked about earlier, can I do a new method? Can I do it on a new platform? Can I expand to multiple types of media within the platform I'm currently on? Can I increase the volume that I'm currently doing in the mediums that I have? These are the things you can do immediately to get more customers, get more leads today.
Let's say you've capped all of those things, which is probably not true, but let's say you did, because we're going into Fantasy Land here. I'm going to introduce you to what I call the Pyramid of Markets. There are five directions that you can go in any marketplace to expand. I'll tell you a story of when I learned this. I went to this Meetup of eight entrepreneurs together; we were doing $500 million a year in revenue. This was like a multi-billion dollar room, which is kind of cool, and I was one of the smallest guys there. I think I was doing 30-ish million a year at the time, and they were talking about their businesses. I was like, "These guys aren't smarter than me," and I didn't feel like they worked any harder than me, and I was like, "Why are they making so much more money than me?" Two main factors: Number one, almost all of them have been in business longer than me. Big [ __ ] takes time, and I had to learn that. Like I want you to feel that, cuz it took me a long time to learn.
All right, there's not many billionaires under 30 that made it themselves—like 10 in the whole [ __ ] world. There's not a lot of them. Fact-checkers, maybe it's 20; it's not a lot. The second lesson that I learned is that all of them were going after bigger markets than I was, cuz at a certain point you do saturate a niche, and I'm going to give you context to what that means. So Gym Launch was a licensing company; we specifically, at the time, only focused on micro gyms. Now we do health clubs and micro gyms cuz they expanded. The market within that pie—there was only 50,000 micro gyms in the United States. We'd already spoken with 20,000 of them. We had absolutely—have really maximized every media, every channel. We call, call, we email, C to C, we run ads on Google, we run ads on YouTube, we run ads on Facebook, we run ads on Instagram, we make content—like we do all the stuff—and we have really done a good job building a market-leading business there, but again, it wasn't as big as theirs, and that's why we decided to open up another avenue.
Now let me tell you about why we decided to do health clubs. So when we looked at our adjacent markets, we could have gone down-market to personal trainers; we could have gone up-market to health clubs; we could have gone to physical therapists or chiropractors—was actually very similar—or we could have gone more narrow. Those are the directions we could have gone in. I asked our our team one question: I said, "Of these different potential avenues or avatars that we could pursue, who do we provide the most value to by dollars made?" It was no contest: health club owners. We are able to immediately make them like tens of thousands of dollars within the first like month by restructuring some of the things that we could do within their business and then doubling or tripling their bottom line by reorganizing their onboarding process, reorganizing their sales process, how they handle retention, and how they handle upsells.
So if you deal with hair salons—maybe you sell consulting services, you sell to salon owners—that's your current market. You can go in five directions. Number one is you can go up-market. That means on the pyramid, there are fewer people on the higher part of the market, and they cost more, but they spend more—typically higher-quality customers. That's where you go into enterprise sales. We're talking franchisors, as in people who have hundreds of locations under one umbrella, or multi-location or chain owners. That's up-market for salon owners. Down-market, the second direction you can go is you go to hair stylists. You talk about people who are running chairs and doing hair with their hands full-time, not running the business. There's 10 times more of them. The third direction you can go is you can go adjacent. So what's something that's similar in nature but not exactly the same? That would be like a lash and nails place. If I were a chiropractor, it might be physical therapy—like they're similar but different. You want similar business characteristics, similar avatar in terms of the owner, similar types of customer within the same larger industry. When you do that, that you just open up another vertical, and you attack it the same way you did your first one. The fourth direction you can go is you actually go broader. Now imagine a pyramid that's all the way like this and it includes all the adjacent pyramids within it, which would then just be beauty. So that includes medspa owners, lash owners, massage studios—like all of that kind of falls in the same psychographic; they serve the same customer. So that would be going broader if we wanted to really open up the net. The last direction you can go is the only one that makes your market smaller, but it doesn't necessarily mean you make less money. You could become narrower. Instead of just being all salon owners, it might be salon owners who specialize in extensions or a blow-dry hair place, you know, that they just do the Brazilian Blowouts—like they're just doing that specific thing. Often times when you do niche down, sometimes you can still make more money because if you're not even close to tapping the methods, the platform, the media, or the total amount of volume you need to do to reach all of those people within that niche, and so then when you niche down, become more specific with your messaging, your offer, and the value delivered. Because if you can make this one specific avatar 10 times more money than the broad avatar, you should absolutely niche down on that, and we've done this with companies and doubled or tripled or sometimes 5x the revenue in the business despite cutting down who they market to by like 85% by getting really specific about who we serve best.
Big picture, zooming all the way back out: if right now you're not getting as many leads as you want and you think that your market is saturated because of what you do, you should be looking the way an investor looks at the marketplace and says, "This is a $60 billion industry; I have not even 1% of this industry." My whole point here is you have your four initial levers that you can immediately pull to grow how many leads you're getting, and you probably haven't even done one of them. Do one of them, do another one of them, and then eventually try and do them all. Usually there's this big checklist that you probably already know as an entrepreneur of what I call the "should dos." I know I should be calling my leads faster; I know I should be following up better; I know I should be making more content; I know I should start a cold call thing; I know I should be running ads on more platforms, but you're not. And if you're like, "Man, that's going to take a long time," welcome to the main point I had originally, which is it takes time to build big [ __ ].