Transcription
Hi, I'm Daniel Priestley. In my early 20s, I developed my first multi-million dollar business before the age of 25. Since then, I've had six businesses go 0 to a million. I've built three companies north of 10 million in valuation. The good news, no experience or investment is required to make this work. Give me the next 20-30 minutes and we're going to go step by step how to go from zero standing start right through to seven-figure revenue in a very methodical process. Okay.
So, let's go through these five steps. I'm going to draw out a diagram here. There's below the line and above the line. Below the line is where we are getting ready to be an entrepreneur. Now, if you're already an entrepreneur, you may just want to pay attention to this just as a way of thinking about what you might have done in your story to get ready to be an entrepreneur. But if you've not built your first company yet, here's the first two stages.
Stage one is called the apprenticeship. In an apprenticeship, you're going to do 1 to 2 years working for an experienced entrepreneur. And you're doing this to get three things. So the three things that you want is you want what's called commercial awareness. Commercial awareness is you understand how business works. The next thing you want is self-awareness. And this is where you figure out what you're good at, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, right? So that you understand how you tick. And the third thing is access to resources. And access to resources means that you've got a little bit of money or you've got a little bit of understanding about how to get money or you've got some understanding about how to run some ads or you've got understanding about how to hire a salesperson. Right? So, you've got all this understanding about how to access resources. So, commercial awareness, self-awareness, and access to resources.
I often get comments in the YouTube videos where people say that wouldn't work for me or that seems high risk. Now, if you're thinking about leaving me a comment on this video or any of my other videos, what I would like you to do is say, "Oh, that means that I need to do an apprenticeship. I need to do, call it, 6 months to 2 years working for an experienced entrepreneur and picking up commercial awareness, self-awareness, and uh access to resources." Now, how do you know you've got those things? Well, when someone says, "Do you know how businesses make sales?" You go, "Yeah, I've seen that plenty of times." Do you know how businesses look after customers? Yeah, I've seen that plenty of times. Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you're strong at? What your weaknesses are? Yep, I understand that. So, once you've been working around an entrepreneur, those things become very, very clear.
That leads us nicely into step two. And step two is the side hustle. So, what we want to do in step two is we want to do open and shut 90-day side hustles. So, the reason that they want to be 90 days is I don't want you getting permanently stuck in these. I want you to just test out your entrepreneurial skills. So, a 90-day side hustle, we're really looking for a test to see how you go at launching a little campaign. So, what you might do is you might do a pop-up agency client where you work for a client and you actually have a side hustle client. So, you want to pick something that you're interested in going after as an entrepreneur, but actually just side hustle it into existence or have a side hustle version of this. The most important thing is that you build it so that it ends at 90 days, right? So 0 to 90 days, open and shut. It's not about making money. It's about getting yourself ready to be an entrepreneur. It's about building up your confidence, building up your experience. So for me personally, I worked for a guy called John as an apprentice. I did two years working for John. We ran non-stop marketing and sales campaigns. I got commercial awareness. I got self-awareness. I got access to resources. Then I started running these nightclub parties. I did these little side hustles. I did some sales training and sales consulting where I was delivering sales training. And I would do that open and shut for 90 days. And I did all of that before launching my very first successful business, which came later. So that is the pre-work below the line before you actually become a fully-fledged entrepreneur.
We're going to call this step the chaos step. And chaos stands for concept, audience, offer, and sales. So we're going to be testing here. I want you to think about an entrepreneur as someone who is running fast and cheap experiments like a scientist. First four things that you need to experiment with is: Is this a good concept? Have I got the right audience, the type of people who find value in this and are willing to pay for it? Do I know how to offer them the thing that they uh want at a price that they're happy to pay? And am I good at selling that?
So, let's kind of break it down what you're actually going to be doing as the entrepreneur. So, the first thing is is your entrepreneurial team. I really love starting businesses with one other person and it's a two-person scout team. And the two-person scout team is essentially going through and working together to figure out these first four things. So the two of you are going to get your heads together and see if you can improve the concept, improve the audience, improve the offer, improve the sales process. So it's either a mentor, it's a co-founder, or it's an early-stage employee or or an assistant. But I want you to have someone who is your main person that you're bouncing ideas with. Okay.
The next thing we're going to do is we're going to do a series of what's called MVPs. MVPs are called minimum viable products, right? This is where you get to test things in the market as though they're real, even though they're not real. An MVP is something like a slide deck or a brochure, but most of the time they're landing pages. So, a landing page is where people arrive at a page on the internet, right? They look at it on their phone and they scroll down and they see this and then they can react to what they see. So, one of the best MVPs, minimum viable products is called a waiting list. So, a waitlist campaign is where you ask people to join the waiting list for something that's coming in the future. So, let's say you're writing a book. You don't actually have to write the book to see whether people would buy it. You could just have a waiting list and says, "I'm writing a book. Would you like to get a copy when it goes live? Join the waiting list and I'll send you the information. I'll send you the first chapter as well." That would be joining a waiting list.
Now, when someone joins the waiting list, you're going to get them to answer a few key questions. One of the questions is going to be, "What type of person are you?" Right? So it might be: Which best describes your current situation? Are you a student? You an executive? Are you an entrepreneur? Are you a parent? The next question is: Which best describes the results you're trying to achieve? What are you trying to get done? Right? And you give people a little menu of options. You then want to ask: Which best describes the biggest challenge or the biggest frustration or problem that you've experienced while trying to get that result? Right? You give people some options. You might get them to choose multiple tick points. The fourth question is: What else have you tried? And the fifth question is: Which price point best describes your current budget for getting this done right now? If you can get people to answer those five questions when they join the waiting list, you now have enormous amounts of data that you can use to launch your business or even raise investment at a later date.
Some other MVP options could be registering for an event. It could be a Zoom event. It could be an online event or it could be a live event. It could be a dinner party. It could be um a launch event. It could be signing up for a trial. Okay.
The next key activity is sales meetings that are one-to-one sales meetings. So, a one-to-one sales meeting could be on Zoom where you're talking to someone one-to-one or or a Google meeting. Could be face-to-face where you go out for a coffee with someone. Uh, you could even have a group of a small group of people around a table and you can kind of address them one-to-one. That's called a focus group sales meeting. Now, the perfect scenario is that you can present someone with either a brochure or a slide deck and you can talk them through your product or service. You can talk them through a sales process and you can actually at the end of that ask them, are they willing to commit or pre-commit to buying the product or service.
Now, what you're really trying to do here is not actually make sales. What you're trying to do is get immediate feedback from customers. You want to see whether people like it or not. Now, some customers are going to say, "Oh, I really like it, but I wish it came in blue." Oh, fantastic. We can do it in blue. uh or they might say, "I really like it, but rather than it being a 6-month thing, I wish it was a 12-month thing." Okay, fantastic. We could do that. When they say they're not interested in buying something, you don't get deflated, you get excited. You want to ask them for some free consulting. What is the thing that's stopping you from going ahead, right? And you just want to listen. And don't think of it as a no. Think of it as free consulting. At this point, you're not really looking to make sales. You're looking to improve your product-market fit.
Now, how many sales meetings should you do? A minimum of 30. When you do 30 sales meetings, that's when you get data, right? So, anything less than 30, it's not what's called statistically significant. You're not getting enough data in order to get any real insight. It's only when you talk to 30 people as a minimum that you actually get enough data. What is the upper band? Well, 30 to about 150. So, what you're trying to do here is you're doing an MVP to get this product-market fit.
Now you might be asking the question, well, what idea am I even testing anyway? Aha. Now this is called something similar which is actually called founder-opportunity fit. So founder-opportunity fit is where you're looking for an opportunity that fits you as a founder. Now, what's that going to be based upon? It's going to be based upon your case study. It's going to be based upon your story. Every single founder who starts a business that's successful is doing it based upon their backstory, their past. So you're looking for a time where you solved a particular pain, right? So did you remove someone's pain? Did you solve a frustration for someone? You're looking for a time where you were paid for something. Right? So something you've been paid for. Um, you're looking for a time where you were massively passionate. Right? Now, those are the three things that will probably tell you what opportunity is a good fit for you. In fact, if you can get all three of those to overlap, you've got a really strong founder-opportunity fit.
First of all, you've probably come up with 10 different ideas, right, that might fit that. You've then narrowed it down to three or four, and now you're actually talking to a few people and you're launching these MVPs over here. So, you've had a founder-opportunity fit. Now, you're looking for a product-market fit over here. So, at this point, you can probably tell that your revenue is not super high here. And that's okay. It's not about revenue. It's certainly not about profit at this stage. It's early stage. From 30 to 150 sales meetings, let's say you've made 10 sales. Let's say each sale was a few thousand. So, you might have something like 10K to 100K as your revenue. It's just telling you that yeah, okay, you know what? We must have a good concept, audience, offer, and sales process if we've spoken to 30 to 150 people and 10 to 100 grand where the sales have come in. Right? So that's kind of the benchmark.
Now, as far as your tools and technologies, you're just going to use lots of free tools. So you're going to use like the Google suite or you might use all the stuff that comes free with your Apple computer, right? I would love for you to just use spreadsheets. Don't get into big databases. Don't obsess about like automation. In fact, I'd rather you just do it by hand so that you get a real feel for how things flow in your business. In fact, funny story, when we were at 7 to 8 figures of revenue, we were still using Excel spreadsheets and we're just cutting and pasting people through the Excel spreadsheet. It was well into seven figures of revenue that I started investing into all sorts of special software.
Here's what I do want you to do. I want you to have something called a Monday morning meeting. Uh, and that is where you're going to identify what are the most high-value three to six things that you're going to do for the week. And then you want to have a Friday debrief where you actually check off, did we do those three to six things? And I want you to really do that at least not just by yourself. Do that with a mentor. Do that with where you're checking in with someone or if you've got a co-founder or if you've got an assistant, you're having your three to six things uh on your Monday morning meeting and then you're checking off your three to six things on your Friday afternoon debrief. Okay.
Now, the final two stages. This is really fun. Now we're actually getting into the really fun stuff. This is where you start ramping up revenue, ramping up the team, having way more fun, making more money, and also becoming profitable. Once we get over here, you're going to have a 7-figure business. You would definitely call it a lifestyle business. It's going to be a business that has profitability. It's going to have fun, freedom, and flexibility. This is going to be really, really cool.
Okay, so here's what we're going to do. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to have a bigger team. We're going to have a four-person team. So, the four-person team is going to be what we call an associate key person of influence. This is not going to be you. This is going to be someone who's got a bigger brand than you, a bigger story than you. Um, but it's someone who you can access and you can leverage their brand and their reputation in order to grow your business. So, you're looking for someone who um could kind of lend some cache to your business. Maybe they're going to be uh on the board. Maybe they're going to be one of your key advisors in some way. They're involved and they're lending their name to your business in order to give you extra oomph uh for this launch.
Now, then we've got someone who's in sales. Hopefully, that's you, sales and marketing. We've got someone who we call customer success or delivery. And we've got what we call operations. This could also be social media. It could be um doing some marketing assistant. So, these are the people who are in the business full-time, these three. And this associate key person of influence, they're lending their name to the business. Okay? So, that's our team. And that's the key team that we want to grow with here.
So the next thing that we need is two types of products. We're going to have two types of products here. And we're going to have one type of product which is called product for prospects. And we're going to have another type of product which is called a core offer. And ideally, we will have the core offer but we will actually have it in gold, silver, and bronze or at least gold and silver. And the product for prospects will lead people to the belief that they would need that core offering.
So here's what this normally looks like. A product for prospects could be what we would call an intro workshop. It could be an assessment. Now rather than promoting what you do, you promote the introduction for what you do. You promote the product for prospects. So you don't promote the fact that you've got a cybersecurity agency, you promote the cybersecurity assessment or you promote the cybersecurity introduction workshop. Promoting what you do is very dangerous because it's expensive. It's a big commitment. It's something that takes people right out of their comfort zone. The product for prospect should feel like a low commitment, easy first step. That is an way of exploring what it is that you do. And businesses that promote the product for prospects are way more successful than businesses that run around promoting their core offering. In fact, one of the keys to me doing multiple multi-million businesses is nailing this product for prospects. Getting that product for prospects is a big key for doing seven figures later on.
So, we're going to promote the product for prospects and then the product for prospects will lead to a one-to-one sales meeting and the one-to-one sales meeting will lead to the core offering. Now, the way that you create the product for prospects and the core offering is the product for prospects is typically what's called a landing page. This landing page is where people register for the product for prospects. And the core offering is often a slide deck or it is a brochure. Now, when I say a brochure, it could be a digital PDF brochure, but it's a slide deck or a brochure that tells people: This is what we do, and this is the gold, silver, bronze version. And the landing page is the pre-registration for that.
Now, you can actually set these up really easily on scoreapp.com. The landing page is already built into the platform. Uh, you can easily set up using a template for an assessment or an introduction workshop or there's a few other options as well. I think there's about 150 different templates in scoreapp.com and that will actually give you the landing page for the product for prospects. Your job is then to create the slide deck or the PDF brochure for the core offering in a gold, silver, and bronze version.
The next step is to create what's called the perfect repeatable week. The perfect repeatable week is where you're going to set out what you're going to do every single day all through the week that will lead to a perfect repeatable week that generates between 50 and 100,000 per month. So, we want to think about what would we do over and over and over in order to just simply just repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. And if we keep repeating it, we're going to get something like 500,000 to a million per year um if we just do that perfect repeatable week.
So, one of the things that I do is I bring out a yearly planner so I can see the entire year ahead in one big image. And I also bring out like a weekly planner and we actually just plot out and we kind of like play with: What if we did uh every Wednesday we did an introduction workshop? What if we ran some Facebook campaigns uh all through the week? What if we ran ads all through the week? What if we had a group sales meeting on a Friday afternoon? So, we're just playing around with the idea of what does a perfect repeatable week look like?
So, some of the things that I want you to really think about with your perfect repeatable week is how you're going to get customers. Now, one of them could be ads. Now, obviously, you're going to use small testing budgets and then ramp them up. You're going to have something called an allowable cost per sale. So, if you sell something that's $2,000, you might say allowable cost per sale is $200. So, you're going to work out: Can we run ads at an allowable cost per sale? You're also going to do social. So, social posting, I want you posting every single day. If you're getting a business off the ground, you're going to be socially posting at least every single day. You're going to do that on at least three platforms. Uh, the next thing you're going to do is called DMs, direct messages, or direct email. And that is where you're going to fire off emails and fire off direct messages to potential customers. And you're just going to literally outreach to them. So, you're going to reach out to them, and I would like you to be sending out something like a 100 DMs or 100 emails per day. So your, you know, send, you might just go: cut, paste, send, cut, paste, send, cut, paste, send. You could join some social media groups. You could look at certain hashtags and you can just send a message that just basically says, "Hey, just want to let you know we've just created an assessment." The assessment tells you whether you can lose weight or the assessment tells you about relationships or the assessment tells you about cybersecurity. Whatever it is you do, you just let people know, "Hey, we've just launched this new assessment," or "By the way, you might be interested in our introduction workshop. We're doing an introduction workshop to blank. If you're interested in blank, come along to our introduction workshop."
Your perfect repeatable week is definitely going to include one-to-one selling. It may even uh be one to 10 group presentations. Your perfect repeatable week is going to have some sort of a team meeting, right? So, you're going to have your 3 to 6 things meeting, right? Your three to six things is where every person on the team says, "What are the three to six things they're doing this week that are the most high-value things?" Not the associate key person of influence. They're just lending their name. But the other three of you, you're going to do your 3 to 6 things meeting. And you'll also do your Friday afternoon debrief. And you also might do customer uh feedback sessions. So you might actually be sitting down with customers and finding out how they're liking what you're doing and what they want, what they need. So define your perfect repeatable week with your team, right? That's going to be one of the super powerful things that we're going to get done. Okay.
So, some of the tools and technologies. Once again, you're going to use all the free stuff that Google offers, that Apple offers, that Microsoft offers. Um, you're not going to be spending money on lots of different things here. Uh, you are also going to be using something like WhatsApp as a group communication tool. So, what you want to do is have a WhatsApp group with your team in there. Uh, you might also want to have a WhatsApp group for your customers, giving them a bit of community, uh, where you can actually put updates into that WhatsApp group. You're probably going to want to use all the social media profiles. So, you want to probably have a YouTube channel, you want to have an Instagram, you want to have a LinkedIn, and you want to use all of those editing suites that come free with those tools so that you can upload better content. I would highly encourage you to have an account with a labor supplier. So, a labor supplier might be someone like Upwork, uh, where for $20 an hour, you can get people doing designs, you can get people doing a little bit of um support, you might be able to find someone who can do a little bit of customer service. Um, now the other thing you may want to do is set up JV partners. Joint venture partners are really, really powerful. These are other businesses that go alongside your business. And you might have someone who is helpful for distribution. So distribution is getting your message in front of people. Maybe they've got a big email list. Maybe they're already famous. You could also have a joint venture for product. This is someone who has a complementary product that would be beneficial for your customers. So for example, if you are a fitness trainer, you might have a gym who is your complementary partner or you might have running clothing. You might do a deal where you actually get some shoes, some uh clothing, right? Or maybe some sports supplements, right? So some product that goes nicely with yours. And the third one is brand. So this is something that makes your brand feel more established, more cool, more uh in the in the spotlight. So this could be someone who's an influencer. It could be someone who uh gives you a recommendation. And something that's similar to this is called a squad. And a squad is where you get 10 similar little businesses in a squad in a WhatsApp group together. Right? So once again, we're back to a WhatsApp group. And a squad is where you basically say, "Every time I post on social media, my squad are going to like it and comment on it, but I'm going to do that for them as well." These are non-competitive businesses. They could be in completely different industries. These could be friends. They could be people who are on the same accelerator group as you. Now, one of the things that happens there is it really feeds the social media algorithms. Rather than your posts reaching a 100 people, they might reach thousands of people simply because you've got a bit of a squad strategy there.
Okay, we're at our next stage. Let's take it all the way home to a seven-figure business that has fun, freedom, flexibility. Let's get into the first thing that you'll need, which is a team. Now, over here, you've got an eight-person team. Now, what you're doing here is you personally are now going to be the key person of influence. You as the founder, this is where the founder growth really kicks in. You're going to step into the shoes of being the key person of influence. It's going to be your name, your face, your reputation that you're going to be building. Uh, and this is going to really help your business long term.
Now, who's going to be on your team? Let's have a look at the key members of the team. Well, one key member could be a general manager who runs the business. And the general manager could be someone who's previously run a coffee shop, they've run a pub, they've run a restaurant, they've got the organizational skills to run a business day-to-day. Really powerful person to have on the team. Another person you want to have on the team is your head of marketing. That person's job is to generate leads and they're going to work very closely with a salesperson. And that salesperson is going to work very closely with someone who is going to be an appointment setter. Those three people are going to be your engine of growth. Um, someone's going to generate leads, someone's going to make sales, and someone's going to make sure we don't slip up on any opportunities. They're going to make sure all those opportunities are happening.
Over here, we're going to have someone who's head of product or delivery, right? So, that is the person who's focused very much on: Are we building an excellent product? Are we delivering uh a really good service? Right? Then, we're going to have someone who is head of customer success, right? So, that customer success person is going to make sure that customers are using the product correctly or they're making sure that the relationship is sticky based upon the delivery. So if you're an agency, you might have people who are actually doing the work plus someone who's looking after the customer. And ideally, you're going to have someone who's head of IT and they're going to automate everything. They're going to make sure that this thing whole runs really, really smoothly and that we're just constantly automating. We're using AI. We're using technology. We're automating here under our general manager. We might also have someone who is an assistant for the company. So, they're going to be a bit of a Swiss Army knife. They're going to help out with all sorts of things. And we might also have someone who is our social media marketing person. I've said 10 roles, but the truth is that that can normally be covered by about 8 to 10 people. Sometimes it's as many as 12 people because you can have two people in sales or two appointment setters or two people working in customer success, but we're somewhere around, I'm just going to put here, 8 to 12 people. That's our typical strategy for for a seven-figure business. Now, you don't want to go over 12 people. Once you go over 12 people, it tends to be that you're a bigger organization. It splits into two or three groups.
So, now that we're a seven-figure business, we're actually going to have four types of products. We're going to have something called a gift, which is free stuff that we give away. We're going to have product for prospects, which we talked about before, but these are early-stage, easy ways, low-risk ways for people to engage with us. We're going to have a core offer, which we talked about that you can have a gold, silver, bronze. This is the main thing that your business is known for. It's the main thing that you do. And we're also going to have something called a product for clients. And this is something that extends the core offering. So if someone has bought the core, they're likely to buy the product for clients as well or at some point in the future they'll buy the product for clients. It's often the case that the core offering might be something that could be thousands of dollars in order to sign up for the core offering. Product for clients could be a subscription after that. So I see a lot of agencies do a transformation as the core and then they do maintenance as the product for clients. I see software companies that do setup as the core and then they do subscription as the product for clients. So it's a core offering followed by product for clients.
Now the key is that for each of these you either need a landing page or you need a brochure/slide deck. I want people to be very, very clear: This is what's included. This is how it adds value. This is the features, advantages, and benefits that come with it. Okay.
So, what we're now going to do is rather than having a perfect repeatable week, we're going to have something called a three-part year. And a three-part year is where we're going to break up your year into three parts. And we're going to have something called a perfect repeatable week, which we talked about. But on top of that perfect repeatable week, we're going to have either three or four spotlight campaigns. So, a spotlight campaign is where every 3 to 4 months you do something special. It could be a special offer, a special sale. It could be a special event, a special campaign or promotion, but you're doing something special every 3 to 4 months. What you're doing is you're generating leads every single week at the perfect repeatable week. Those leads come into the funnel here, but then if they don't buy, you invite them back to a spotlight campaign. If they go to the spotlight campaign, but they don't buy, you invite them back to the perfect repeatable week. So people can track through your business either doing what you normally do every single week, week in, week out, or they can bounce up to a special spotlight campaign and they can experience something a little bit different every 3 to 4 months.
And the third part to the year is what we call the annual big message. And the annual big message is where you're creating content on social media. And that content is reinforcing an annual big message. One big message for the year and you're just going to go and hit it and hit it and hit it in 100 different ways. And you're going to put content on social media that reinforces the big message. So, for example, if you were selling Fitbits, you would have an annual big message about the importance of doing 10,000 steps a day, right? So, whatever it is, you're going to have a big message that is like the big picture of what you do that makes people remember you and they recognize that: Ah, you're the person who talks about that thing, right? So, you're going to do all of that. That's going to be your campaign that drives seven figures worth of revenue.
Now, once we're into tools and technologies, fine. You can now have a CRM system. You definitely want to have uh more AI automations. You might also build something called a portal. Uh, so a portal would be a customer portal where customers can log in and they can see stuff or do stuff. Uh, you might have a team portal. You might have something called Slack uh or Microsoft Teams, but I prefer Slack. Right? So this is where you're going to grow up as a business and you're going to have everything formalized. You're going to have everything filed away nicely and neatly. You're going to run the business as a tight ship. And of course, if you're going to do seven figures of revenue, you need to be averaging above 20,000 per week as a bare minimum. Probably more like 25,000 plus as your bare minimum for the week. So that you're getting to 100K plus per month, right? And that should get you obviously to your million dollars for the year. So between all of that activity and all of those people, you're averaging your 100,000 a month. Now, that might be 10 sales at 10 grand per month. It might be 20 sales at 5 grand per month. It might be 100 sales at 1,000. Right? So you're figuring out what is it you're going to do. You're going to work together as a team to figure out how many of each of these products do we need to sell in order to hit that 100,000. And you're going to have dashboards that get you there. You definitely want to have some dashboards there to say whether you're on track or off track. We like to have something called the SAND dashboard. SAND, which stands for sleep-at-night dashboard, right? So that is all the things that we need to know that we can sleep at night knowing that we're hitting uh at least seven figures of revenue.
Now, bear in mind, this particular setup will actually typically take you well beyond seven figures of revenue. So if you've gone through all these stages and steps, you're going to have laid a lot of strong foundations for you to be doing several million uh a year. At this point, you want to stop. You want to enjoy having a lot of fun, freedom, and flexibility. You want to enjoy life. You're a successful entrepreneur. Maybe you want to start a YouTube channel of your own talking about how you did it.
So, if you've enjoyed that deep dive, uh, I've got more to come. In fact, I've got several more videos that I really think are going to explain how AI is going to impact all of this. And I really want you to tune in for those videos. Stay subscribed to this channel. Leave me a comment. Give this video a like if it added value to you as an entrepreneur. And make sure that we keep in touch for the videos that I've got coming up in the weeks ahead.