How to Scale Your Company From $0 to $10M ARR

In this newsletter

  • The Psychology of Scaling

  • The #1 reason your business isn’t scaling

  • Sean’s scaling secrets

  • Watch Jeff Mains teach you HOW to scale to $10M ARR

The Psychology of scaling

Getting Started ($0 ARR)

If you ask the average entrepreneur, their goal is to grow a large company that makes tons of money and changes the world.

While there’s nothing wrong with this mentality, the actual path to growing your business is extremely difficult and can take a very long time, which is why almost no entrepreneur actually reaches those goals (how can they if they don’t spend the time mapping out those goals in a way which can be measured).

Have you made this mistake?

The first thing entrepreneurs do when they start a company is get clients, and they end up serving those clients, then finding new clients, and often end up with too many clients and no ability to manage those clients because they are doing literally everything for the business.

Being the operator and the service provider prevents them from having the time they need to grow the business, and they get stuck on a hamster wheel.

Getting passed being the operator and provider ($100K - 300K ARR)

The main reason this happens is because of your ego (we touched upon this in our previous newsletter, so if you haven’t read it yet, stop and go read it immediately).

Your ego tells you this is YOUR business, and no one can do it better than you, but that’s absolutely not true.

Growing a business requires people who are specialized in specific areas, so of course they will be better than you at those things.

Another common misconception your ego tells you is that people are hiring YOU, they wouldn’t possibly want to work with some random person you hired, but that’s also patently false.

If they like you they will trust your team is more than capable of providing the same quality of service.

So if you are stuck here, you will absolutely never even come close to earning $1M USD annually. In fact, you're much more likely to burn out and quit.

If this is you, PLEASE allocate some time each week to document all your processes and use profit to hire people to take over those tasks ASAP!

Building a Team ($300K-$1M ARR)

If you’ve documented your processes and hired a few people to take all the responsibility that was blocking you from scaling, CONGRATULATIONS!

The secret to reaching $1M ARR is now all about people, processes, and continuing to remove yourself from daily operations.

First, you need make sure you have an operations manager who can focus on maintaining the systems and people in order to execute your vision. They will be extremely important in working with you to improve how the business runs so there can be a stable foundation for which you can try to scale later.

You should be thinking about disseminating culture to your team so they understand what the vision, where you are going, and why. This emotional buy-in makes them feel included, necessary, valuable, and appreciated, and you have to make sure they continue to feel that way so they are willing to commit to helping you build your future.

Tools these days make it very simple to automate processes in part or in whole, which can help save a lot of time.

You need to get your team to get customer feedback so you can work out how to improve your product or service and look for opportunities to increase your price, add up-sells or cross-sells.

Once you have a better sense that your operations are being managed, processes are being streamlined, your people are taking on more of the decision making and they are finding ways to increase value, you are closing on on having a more solid foundation.

By now, you should have tons of data coming in that you can use to build a dashboard that tells you in almost real-time what’s happening in the business.

You should be able to see things like the number of leads, conversions to calls, conversions to clients, customer acquisition cost, average lifetime value of the customer, how long it takes to break even from the customer, how long it takes to serve the customer, what percentage of customers buy up-sells or cross-sells, and a LOT more.

This data is crucial to being able to scale once your operations and other basic problems are fixed for now, because you can plug in different values for these things to see how if you focus on lowering your churn, or lowering your customer acquisition cost, or increasing the percentage of customers who buy up-sells, how those things affect your gross revenue.

This is where scaling can truly begin.

Do you know your numbers?

Want to learn about going beyond $1M ARR? Keep reading…

The #1 reason your business isn’t scaling passed $1M ARR

Scaling requires a lot of things to be working at the same time, and so as an individual you can’t possibly manage it all.

One of the fastest ways to uncover WHY your business isn’t scaling is to ask yourself, what is REALLY the thing blocking my business? 

Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it product? Is it onboarding times? Is it price?

Chances are there is truth to some of those things, BUT… it’s more likely that YOU are the bottleneck to your company’s success, and the ONLY reason your business isn’t scaling is because you are doing too many things.

Therefore, the less you do, the faster your company can scale to $10M ARR.

Want to learn about going beyond $1M ARR? Keep reading…

Sean’s scaling secrets

My most successful venture to date was a service agency that grossed $15M USD in 2 years of operation before I shut it down and started my next company (a B2B SaaS).

In the service agency, I learned a few important lessons:

  • Lean is best to keep profit high

  • Building a strong referral network with high commission incentivizes people to push clients to you all day long

  • Having a strong team to provide the service enables you to focus on getting out of the way, which lets you scale fast

  • Know when to walk away

Jeff Mains teaches you the secrets of scaling from $1M to $10M ARR

Jeff Mains is the Founder and CEO of Champion Leadership Group, a growth accelerator which helps entrepreneurs scale their business from $1 to $10M.

He has previously founded and sold 4 businesses that were each grossing over $10M USD annually.

In this interview, he teaches you exactly what you need to know to grow from $1M to $10M ARR, so watch that interview NOW!

In this interview, you will learn:

  • More of Sean’s scaling tips

  • Delegation

  • Learning Your Strengths and Weaknesses as CEO

  • Building Relationships and Leading Teams

  • Sustainable Business Model

  • Structured Processes

  • and much more! Not a Sprint

Listen to the podcast here:

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