In this video we're gonna go over the five-step process that you can follow to build a 100000 a year lifestyle business in under 12 months and which you can work through to build a million dollar business in hopefully, around three to five years.
So if you would like a step-by-step process that you can follow, let's dive in.
All right.
So this is what the roadmap looks like for building your multi six figure or even low seven figure lifestyle business.
Over here, we have a line of roughly what revenue is gonna be.
Everyone starts out at zero.
Over here, we have an inflection point at $100,000 a year.
Over here, we have a plateau point at around 10 million.
Over here, we have 1 million a year.
Over here is about 3 million a year.
And you can see the graph starts to plateau out around about this level, which highlights the fact that generally, lifestyle businesses don't really scale beyond 10 million a year.
So if you're okay with that, then we can continue watching this video.
And then over here between 100K and a million, we've got about 300000 and in general, every tripling of a business revenue.
Is when things start to break and when, like the paradigm shifts and when like, things become a little bit different.
So that's why we're sort of dealing in triplings rather than in other kind of units of numbers.
This is what we call phase Five, freedom.
This is where you have true financial freedom, because you've got a business that's doing somewhere between 1 million and probably 5 million in revenue.
Maybe it's somewhere between 50 and 80% margins.
So you can do the maths on that.
It's a pretty good place to be.
Over here we have phase four, which is leverage.
This is where you're scaling from. about 100,000 a year to about a million a year.
And this process takes about two to three years.
Some people do it sooner, quicker than that.
Some people do it like slower than that.
This phase, phase five.
You kind of hang around in phase five forever because if you have a lifestyle business, Once you hit like the seven figure mark, you actually just kind of want to be hanging out in this range for the longer term.
And so really this kind of range here is our ultimate destination.
We want to become a lifestyle business millionaire.
In order to get that, we have to spend a few years in phase four, scaling from 100K to a million.
But most of the people watching this video are not yet at 100K yet.
So now let's explore the initial three phases.
So we've got phase one, phase two, and phase three.
Phase one is called ideation.
Phase two is called validation.
And phase three is momentum.
The ideation phase, we ideally want to last around one to two weeks.
The validation phase generally lasts about one to three months.
And then the momentum phase, generally six to 12 months, depending on how much work you put into it.
So if we're doing this well and we are stacking the unfair advantages that we have, it's actually fairly doable getting from zero to 100K a year in business revenue, which is an 8333 a month run rate.
And it's fairly doable getting there within 12 months if you do the right things and if you're willing to put in the work.
I'm gonna say that overall, our goal here is about 12 months to go all the way from zero, all the way through to 100K a year.
When I first did this journey, it took me two years to go from zero to 100K, but I knew nothing.
I'd never read any books about business.
There was no videos about entrepreneurship.
And if I knew what I knew now, I'd probably be able to speed run that journey in probably about three months, even if I had no audience, as long as I had the skills that I have.
I have a bunch of friends who've made that journey.
Some of them have gotten there within like three months.
Some of them have gotten there within six months, some of them 12 months.
I think 12 months is a good kind of middle of the road target to shoot for.
Obviously some people are gonna get their way quicker and some people are gonna take a bit longer to get to 100K a year.
So within phase one, we have two key milestones.
The first one is we figure out what is our niche?
And once we have figured that out, the next thing we need to do is we need to figure out what is our offer.
And this is a first draft offer.
Niche answers the question of who am I helping and what am I helping them with?
And then the offer answers the question of what am I actually trying to sell to them?
And the reason it's a first draft is because in this phase we're spending one to two weeks doing a bunch of brainstorming, doing a bunch of research, maybe talking to AI to come up with a niche and an offer, but it's only when we put it out into the market to validate the offer that this becomes a more solidified offer.
And then we get to the single hardest part of the entrepreneurship game, the least fun part, which is validation.
And what we are trying to do there is we are trying to get our first sale.
So until you get a customer to actually give you money for the thing, all of this niche and offer, it's all theoretical.
You need someone to give you money to validate your business idea.
Now, in between this process of like coming up with a first draft offer and getting our first sale, what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be taking a bunch of discovery calls.
We are gonna be speaking to people in our target market and we're gonna be doing some market research on those calls and we're gonna be trying to understand what their problems are and pitching them or presenting them our offer and then refining the offer based on feedback, because then, once we have a first sale, we're now in great territory.
We're now in momentum mode where now it's just a case of like scaling from first sale to 10K in revenue, from there to 30K in revenue and then it's not too bad getting to 100K in revenue, because 100K in revenue a year is really only about 8300 a month.
So if you are selling something for, let's say 3000, you only need three clients a month in order to hit the 100K range.
If you're able to sell a retainer package for, let's say, 2000 a month, you only need four or five clients period to actually get to the 100K a year rate because you're selling a recurring like retainer package.
Of course, if you're selling cheap things like 10 eBooks or 27 courses or template packs or anything like that, you need to get more sales in order to get these sorts of numbers, which is why I'm generally an advocate of recommending that you sell expensive things rather than cheap things.
Okay, so let's start by zooming into phase one, where we are figuring out our niche and our first draft offer, ideally within one to two weeks.
The thing to keep in mind here is that if you wanna start a business and you wanna make money in any way, you only make money if you solve problems for someone else who's willing to pay you to solve that problem.
All money is given to you in exchange for simply solving problems.
Now the first step here is to figure out our niche.
What a niche is, it is this sort of overlap between a group of people and a problem.
And the overlap between the group of people and the problem that they have is known as niche.
For example, with my first successful business back in the day, the people I was serving was students applying to medical school in the UK.
And the problem I was helping them solve was that I was helping them prepare for the BMAT, which was this medical admissions exam.
So there were a group of people who had a problem and they were willing to pay me to teach classroom courses, teaching them how to ace this exam so that they could get into med school.
One of my friends, Sahil.
He has software that helps video editors.
They are the people with the problem that video editing takes too damn long.
And so video editors are willing to pay him for his software that helps to speed up video editing.
The way you make money is by solving problems for people who are willing to pay to have those problems solved.
And that is the first thing that we really need to figure out with our business.
Now, how do you figure this out?
Well, there's a lot of different things you can do.
The way that I recommend you do it is firstly, you identify what are your craft skills, ie what personal or professional expertise do you already have that could help someone solve some kind of problem?
You wanna ask yourself, what are the things that you're good at?
What's the stuff on your CV?
What is your current employer actually paying you to do, right?
If you've solved problems in your personal life, if you were overweight at one point and then you managed to lose weight like one of my friends does, like this stoic weight loss type thing where he helps basically overweight people solve the problem of weight loss.
He's got the personal experience at having lost a load of weight himself.
And so now he's able to help other people solve that problem.
So what you wanna do is you wanna make a list of your craft skills.
What are the skills or expertise or experiences that I already have?
Because starting a business based on pre-existing skills means that you can get to.
You can get to this 100K a year mark a lot quicker.
That's not to say you have to have pre-existing skills.
It is totally possible to enter a brand new niche and then figure out what problems they have and then develop the skills to solve those problems.
But life becomes easier and quicker if you're trying to make money, if you are serving a niche that is served by skills that you already have rather than skills that you have to learn from scratch.
Essentially, what we wanna do is we wanna make a long list of people and problems that we could potentially help using our craft skills.
The way we do this for our students in Lifestyle Business Academy is we ask them to come up with a list of 15 to 20 potential niches.
The way this looks like is we give them like a worksheet type thing where there's like a table.
There is a column that says person, like who is the person?
What is their problem?
What is your promise?
And then we ask three questions.
I have to give a shout out to one of my mentors, Taki Moore, for giving me these three questions, because these are great in terms of like, narrowing down a niche.
And those three questions are, do I like them?
Can I actually help them?
And will they be happy to pay?
And generally what I recommend for our students is you ask yourself, will they be happy to pay at least 2000?
Because again, life becomes easier when you're trying to build a business getting to 100K a year and beyond, if you are selling expensive things, and I define expensive as about 2000 or above.
You can certainly get rich selling cheap things, it just takes longer.
So this is an excerpt from one of our workbooks where you can see we've got person problem, promise like help and pay.
For example, the people could be chiropractors.
Their problem could be not enough customers, and so the promise that our business delivers is we help them get more customers.
And then we're ranking like help and pay in terms of red, yellow, and green.
Red is like, nah, definitely not.
Yellow is kind of like maybe, and green is like, oh yeah, definitely.
So in this context, do I like chiropractors?
Nah, not really.
Can I help them get more customers?
Maybe.
Will they pay?
Well yes, they'll definitely pay because like, it's a business and we're helping them make more money.
So that one's easy.
And so what we want to do is we want to get good at problem hunting.
Because again, business is about solving problems for people who are willing to pay to have those problems solved.
So A by starting with our craft skills, but then also by thinking what are the sort of people and problems that we are already familiar with?
Let's say you've worked in tech And so you're quite familiar with other people working in tech and also probably the customers of your tech company.
You would then be trying to figure out what problems do those people have that I could potentially solve?
And what you wanna do is try and generate around 15 to 20 different niche ideas.
The reason we wanna do that is because generally, when it comes to niche selection, we wanna start out.
It's sort of this kind of thing.
It's a three-step process that I think of as diverge, converge, and emerge.
This, by the way, is a general principle for creativity in almost every field.
And it's the exact concept that we have in these like fancy pens that we've designed with Baron Fig diverge converge, emerge anyway.
This very much applies to niche selection, because diverge is like we're thinking very broad and we're thinking divergently about the 15, 20 ideally even more potential niches we could serve.
We are then following a process to converge on, like our gold silver bronze, our top one two and three niches.
And usually in the process of doing that, the correct niche emerges over time.
And then we pick a niche, we stick to it for a while.
We develop expertise within a niche.
We craft our offer within that niche.
We do validation within that niche.
We serve customers within that niche.
And then we have a successful business that gives us fun, freedom and flexibility to live life on our own terms.
Oh, by the way, if you are enjoying this video and you haven't yet subscribed to the channel you might like to.
It's completely free.
I think you click on my channel name and you hit the subscribe button and then you're more likely to see stuff like this.
Plus it lets me know that you like this sort of thing.
Once you've figured out your niche, you then have to come up with a first draft offer.
So your niche answers the question of who do I help and what do I help them with?
Your first draft offer answers the question of what do I think I want to actually sell to them?
Crucially, you are not building any kind of product yet.
We need to understand the difference between an offer and a product.
Let's take my book for example.
The product is the book itself.
It is the text in the book, the writing of the book, et cetera, et cetera.
But the offer is the packaging of the book.
It is the title.
It's the subtitle.
It's the world's most followed productivity expert.
It's the quote from Mark Manson.
The stuff at the front and the back of the book is the offer.
When someone goes to the bookstore or goes on Amazon to buy the book, they are not actually buying the product.
They are buying the offer. and then what they get is the product.
Now the mistake that a lot of noob entrepreneurs make is that they will jump to building the product before validating that people even want the offer.
And it would be such a tragedy if you spent three years writing a book only to then realize that no one wants to read it.
This is in fact the single biggest reason why most businesses fail.
At least in the early days, they are trying to sell something that no one actually wants.
So you really do not want to take the approach of build it and they will come.
You instead want to create an offer which takes like a day, because it's not that hard coming up with a title and a subtitle and like elevate a pitch.
And then you present the packaging of the thing to your prospects and you see if they're interested.
And if loads of people are like, oh my God, that sounds amazing.
Sign me up and are willing to pay you money for the thing before you've even built it.
That is when you know you have demand.
That is when you know you have a viable business, but you really do not want to be building first.
This is a thing that I wish would get into the heads of more people who are trying to start businesses.
You want to validate your offer first before you try and build the product.
Now the offer is made up of what I call the six Ps.
We have person.
Who is the person?
Who is the absolute center of your bullseye?
The way to think about this is like, let's say this is a dartboard.
And this is your kind of your niche, right?
It's sort of like the people and problem that you're solving for, which we figured out in step one.
In the offer step.
What you're trying to do is you're trying to define who is at the absolute center of the bullseye.
Now, that's not to say these are the only customers you serve but, like if you're throwing darts, you're going to be aiming for the bullseye.
I mean, in reality, you're going to be aiming for triple 20, but let's forget that.
Let's assume you're going to be aiming for the bullseye and, like some of your shots, are going to hit the bullseye, but you know that might land here or here or here, or here or here or there or whatever.
By aiming for the bullseye, you actually end up landing somewhere on the dartboard.
So what we are trying to do is define who do we think is the absolute dream client, our perfect future client, the customer that will absolutely benefit from the thing that we potentially wanna sell and who has the money to pay for it.
Once we figure out the person, we sketch out details about the problem.
Like what is the problem that they have and why is it really painful?
We wanna sketch out the pain.
Pain is not one of the six Ps.
Maybe it could be, it could be a seven piece.
Once we've defined a person and problem in more detail because we kind of knew that from our niche we then come up with a promise.
Now the promise is like less than 10 words that explains what we actually do.
And the goal of the promise is to be sufficiently intriguing to the person with the problem that they wanna find out more.
So, for example, let's take my Lifestyle Business Academy, which is sort of like our online business school.
The person we're targeting is like the corporate professional who's got skills, they've got expertise.
They're probably earning over 100K a year.
They're probably living in the US or maybe the UK.
And the problem that they have is that they feel unfulfilled and they feel a lack of freedom and flexibility in their life.
They maybe like the idea of traveling and being able to work remotely, all of that kind of stuff.
What they're optimizing for is freedom.
And so then, our promise is we'll help you build 100000 a year lifestyle business in under 12 months.
Now for that particular audience who has that particular problem, that's a compelling promise.
And that is what you want in your promise.
You want it to be just sufficiently intriguing.
Now, of course, once they get into the program, then I give all the caveats that like okay well, the 12 months depends on you doing 10 to 15 hours a week of work.
And like, there's this whole process you have to follow.
And then if you don't follow the process, it's gonna take longer than that.
You gotta do what we tell you and we're gonna support you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But in the promise stage, no one cares about the details.
No one cares about the caveats.
The promise just needs to be compelling enough that they want to find out more.
The promise for Firecut, which is my friend Sahil's video editing software.
The person is video editors.
The problem is editing takes too long.
And so the headline promise is something like, save four hours in every single video edit.
Like that promise is intriguing enough for video editors for them to want to find out more.
Okay.
So once we figured out our promise, our prospect is now sufficiently intrigued that they wanna find out more.
This is when we tell them the plan.
Now the way we can think about this is that let's say we've got a person and they are in a sad situation and we want to get them into a happy situation.
Let's say I don't know.
They're unfulfilled in their job and they want to build a lifestyle business.
One way of thinking about this is like they're on this cliff over here.
They want to get across to that cliff over there.
But there's this like enormous chasm between these two cliffs, which they cannot cross by themselves.
Or if they could, it would be treacherous and it would be difficult to navigate.
What our business is trying to do is basically build a bridge for them.
We're like hey, Come along into my business and we're gonna build a bridge for you that will take you from A to B, And this is what we can think of as the plan.
The promise is promising them like, what's the dream destination?
And then the plan is like okay well, step one, step two and step three.
It's the three or four or five step process that we'll follow with them to get them to the destination.
We still haven't built our product yet.
We still haven't really talked about the product.
We haven't talked about the stuff, the stuff they get.
What we are giving them is the plan, assuming they're intrigued enough by the promise.
So, for example, in our context with the Lifestyle Business Academy, the plan we give them is that hey, it's a three-step plan to get you from zero to 100K.
Phase one is ideation, phase two is validation, phase three is momentum.
Blah blah blah blah blah, blah.
And what we wanna get is buy-in from them about the plan.
We want them to have the clarity that if they follow the plan, they're able to get to the promise.
Once we have We've gotten buy-in on our plan.
At that point, we talk about the product if we want to.
This is like what you actually get.
Like with our academy, it's like you get one-on-one Slack support anytime you want.
There's coaching clinics on niches and offers and content and sales that are happening every day.
There's like a weekly workshop run by Ellie that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
There's like, you get this fancy workbook that blah, blah, blah.
You know, it's the stuff.
But the mistake people make when they're creating a business is that they over fixate on the product.
And what we need to understand is that the prospect or your hopefully hopeful future customer doesn't actually care about the product.
What they care about is the transformation that the product is going to get them.
And instead of giving them more stuff, they would ideally like less stuff.
Back in the day, the way you would sell, let's say, a course, would be like there's 300 hours of content in this course and 58 different templates, and this, that and the other.
That just doesn't work anymore because no one's got time.
We're already overloaded with content.
People would much rather get to the transformation, get to the destination, get to the promised land.
They would much rather get that with a course that has only two hours of content, rather than a course that has 200 hours of content.
Worrying about what's in the product only comes once you've nailed your person.
You figured out the problem.
You found a compelling enough promise.
You found a plan that, like high level, actually gets them to the promise.
And now we can figure out what's the stuff, the deliverables, the things we need to add to our product in order to execute on the plan.
Once we figure that out, this is where we figure out our price.
And again, my recommendation is that you charge at least 2000 US dollars.
A lot of people at this point are like, oh my God, I can't imagine charging $2,000 for anything.
And to which I would say like, okay, fair enough.
But like, let's have a little bit more creativity.
Let's see if we can find a person who has enough money and a problem that's painful enough for them to pay 2000 for it.
But once you have sketched out your first draft offer in person problem promise plan, product price you turn it into a kind of one pager.
And now congratulations.
You have graduated the ideation phase and you are now ready to actually see if there is a market for your idea.
At this point with our students in the Lifestyle Business Academy.
We give them feedback on the one pager.
We have like this list of like checklists that they go through to make sure that, like if the promise makes sense, and like all of this funky stuff.
At this point, one thing you should definitely do is read Alex Hormozy's book 100 Million Dollar Offers.
It's really, really good.
And you can run it through the value equation and you can just basically follow the step-by-step process in his book.
But the key point I wanna make is that coming up with an offer is actually not hard, because you haven't had to talk to any customers yet.
You haven't had to do anything.
You're just like doing the paperwork.
It's really not that hard to just run this process of just figure out what are some problems you could solve for some people and then just read 100 million offers, follow the process of the six Ps and just try and come up with a few first draft offers.
Going through this process will then give you a firmware update on how to come up with business ideas.
Like, even if you don't have any ideas right now and you just sort of pretend, follow this process to come up with a first draft offer for like a random thing.
I'd say I want to help people in Hong Kong who've got the problem of like they don't want to walk their dog.
I'm going to help.
My promise is going to be, I will walk your dog for you.
It's like, okay, that's kind of random, but like, sure.
Let's just craft a pretend first draft offer, just to get in the reps, to get in the experience of seeing what it actually takes to craft an offer for something.
Oh, by the way, quick thing.
If you're enjoying this video and you want to find out more about our mentorship program, the Lifestyle Business Academy, there's a link down below to the wait list.
So you can totally sign up to the wait list.
So anyway, at this point we have our niche and we have a first draft offer and hopefully this has taken less than two weeks.
Unfortunately, we do have some students in our academy that overthink this process, despite how much we try and help them not overthink the process.
And kind of like, the graph we show them is like this is like how much thinking you do when it comes to your business idea.
This is like the sweet spot.
And this range is one to two weeks.
If you spend less than about a week, mostly our students have like full-time jobs and stuff.
So like they're putting in 10 to 15 hours a week.
So maybe like 10 hours.
If you're spending less than around that time thinking about your offer, it's probably not enough time.
This is probably under thinking when it comes to your niche and offer, because it is like a really important part of the business.
This is the sweet spot.
But then over here we have overthinking.
Yes, the niche and the offer is really, really important and it is the foundation of your business, but it is all theoretical until it comes into contact with the market.
And that is what happens in phase two, validation.
Now the validation stage, as we talked about, can often take one to three months.
Sometimes less than that, sometimes a bit more than that.
Again, just depending on how much work you put into it.
And the goal of validation is to validate our offer.
To validate is there actually a market for people that actually want to pay for this thing that we have theoretically constructed on a Google Doc?
Now basically the way the validation process works.
We wanna basically have at least 10 discovery calls.
Ideally, ideally 30, maybe even more than that, but ideally 10 discovery calls.
And these are 10 calls where we are presenting our offer to someone who's genuinely in the target market for that particular offer.
So we've got our niche.
We got our offer and now we're gonna have these 10 different conversations with people.
And as a result of the conversations, we are going to refine our offer.
There's this phrase in the military that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
The idea being is that, like sure, you can theory craft a plan all you like but like, once you actually get into the arena, things are gonna change.
Similarly, I like the phrase that no offer survives first contact with the market.
We can do all the work we theoretically like to come up with the best first draft offer, but until we put it in front of real people who actually have the problem that we think we're solving and we're able to present our offer to them, to get their feedback and maybe even to try and land a sale, until we do that we won't actually know if our offer is any good.
This is why the validation process is, in many ways, the most important part about starting a business.
It's also the hardest.
It's where you have the maximum amount of imposter syndrome, because you have no idea if your offer is any good.
You haven't yet made any sales.
And so you're still sort of in the red in terms of you've invested some time and maybe some money into the process, you haven't yet made a return and you're having to go and talk to people and sort of present your offer to them to see if they would actually want to buy the thing.
Now, there are different ways of taking the pressure off of discovery calls.
The way we teach our students is that there's sort of three frames you could use for your discovery calls.
Frame number one, you could do a market research frame.
You could go up to your network or to people that you know and you say hey Johnny, you know I'm thinking of starting a business in niche X, helping X solve Y problem.
Would you be open to a quick coffee conversation or a 15 minute call where you know I know that this is somewhat relevant to you, not trying to sell you anything.
I just really want to understand more about the problem just so I can do some market research.
That's a very chill way of doing market research on an offer.
There's a wonderful book by Rob Fitzpatrick called The Mum Test, which is basically about how to run conversations like this so that you actually get real feedback from people about your business idea.
And it's called The Mum Test because it's like your mum will lie to you about whether your idea is any good.
Generally, if you ask friends and family and you don't know the process of how to actually pitch them a business idea, they will just lie to you.
Be like, oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
And then actually it sounds like a terrible idea and they're just trying to not hurt your feelings.
So what you want to do is you want to learn the process for how to have a good market research conversation and then have a bunch of market research conversations.
Frame number two you could use is you could use the frame of a free coaching call.
So one of our students in the Lifestyle Business Academy Kelsey she helps these tech people get promoted.
And so what she did is she posted on LinkedIn, basically offering 10 free coaching sessions.
That did super well.
A bunch of people signed up for her free coaching calls.
And, as a result of the free coaching, a bunch of people spontaneously asked her Can I actually work with you on more of a paid basis?
So she was able to make sales without having to feel salesy about it.
And this works if you have genuine skills or expertise to share with someone.
If you're approaching a brand new niche and you have no skills and no experience then yeah, you kind of need the market research frame.
Though the frame of market research is you are doing me a favor by getting on this call with me.
And so you frame it like that.
But the frame of a coaching call is that it's sort of like a win-win.
Like, hey, I've got some experience in this space.
Let's hop on a call.
I'd love to help you with your problems.
And in return, I'd love some feedback on this business I'm thinking of starting.
It's a win-win.
But you can only do that if you actually genuinely have some amount of skills or expertise to be able to share.
You don't have to be the world expert in your given niche.
You just need to be a couple of steps ahead of your target audience, such that it's actually valuable for them to hop on a call with you.
And then frame number three that you can do is you can actually just go for a sales call frame.
At one point we were doing interviews for applicants of our Lifestyle Business Academy and I was taking those calls, but I was framing them as interviews because what I was doing in that is I was positioning it that I am the expert and the student is applying for our academy and then I'm doing this interview to see if they're the right fit.
They knew that if they were the right fit, I was gonna tell them about the offer.
I was gonna give them the pricing on the call, but it's not framed, as you'll get free coaching from Ali Abdaal.
It's not framed as, hey, I'm starting a business and doing some market research.
It's framed as, hey, you want into this program?
I'm gonna talk to you and see if we're the right fit.
And if we are, then I'll tell you more details about the program.
It still doesn't have to feel salesy.
I did like maybe 30 or 40 of these calls and I don't think anyone felt like I was being salesy on them, but it was still a sales frame.
And this is what you do, if you have confidence in the thing that you're actually selling, because this is the one that's most likely to get you to actually get customers to give you their money.
What often students tend to do is they start off in the market research frame.
They realize very quickly that like, actually they do have skills in the niche and they transition to free coaching calls.
And then some people transition to the sales call frame, you know, once they've landed their first sale and beyond.
But this then helps solve the problem, right?
Of like.
We don't want to spend bloody ages trying to build a product that no one wants to buy, because we are validating it as we go along with our market research calls and maybe our free coaching calls and maybe our sales calls.
And, as a result, every time we get new data from the market, we're getting more insights into.
Is the thing that we are supposedly trying to sell actually solving a problem that someone has?
Because again, the single biggest reason why most businesses in the early days fail is well firstly, people just don't get started because they're like, oh my God, business scary.
Hopefully this video helps you see the process is not that scary.
But secondly, it's that they're trying to sell something that fundamentally, no one actually wants to buy.
So all this somewhat begs the question of like okay, I've got to have these 10 discovery calls, but like how?
How do I get people to have calls with me?
And this is where the concept of marketing comes in.
Like, how do you let people know about your stuff?
The word marketing or the word sales feels very scary to people.
It doesn't have to feel scary.
But broadly, there are a handful of different ways to do it.
Number one is you can and should totally reach out to your existing network.
The students in a lifestyle business academy who are succeeding the fastest are the ones who have a network within the space that they are starting a business.
So, for example, back in the day when I was starting up my medical school admissions business, On the 2nd of September 2012, this is what I posted on Facebook in the WHSP Westcliff High School for Boys Medical Society Facebook group.
Hey guys, at some point in September I'll be running a weekend crash course on the BMAT, most likely in school.
If you're applying to Oxford or Cambridge, Imperial and or UCL, you'll definitely want to come, as the BMAT will be the most important exam of your life and can make or break an application.
One day will be dedicated to sections one and three, which are basically about blah, blah, blah.
The second day will focus on section two, blah, blah, blah.
Sadly, I am gonna have to charge for it, because I need to make some money for university.
It's probably gonna be around 100 pounds for the two days, which is pretty good, considering Kaplan costs 300 pounds and sucks anyway.
If you're interested, shoot me a message on Facebook and I'll give you more details when the time comes.
This was how I got my first handful of customers for this new business that I was starting.
I just went out to the people I already knew.
If I was trying to start a business in like a random niche, like helping dog owners in the Midwest in the US, help like walk their dogs.
And I was like a teenager in the UK.
It's very difficult for me to have a network in that space.
And so it's hard for me to start a business.
But if you start a business in a niche where you already have a little bit of a network, life becomes easier.
You can see this was liked by Manu Srivastava.
He was actually one of my first customers back when he was like 17 years old.
And now, what is it?
Like 17, 15 years later, he's actually a neurologist working in Oxford last time I checked.
So it's interesting how that works.
This is an example when Alex Hormozy, the famous business guru, was starting his like personal training business.
And he's basically saying that like hey, I've got this business where I'm gonna to help people improve their fitness.
If you're interested, drop me a message.
And it's very chill.
It doesn't feel that salesy.
It feels very authentic, very nice.
But he's going out to his network on Facebook.
He is known amongst his friends and family and stuff as like the guy who's jacked.
And so he gets his first few clients for his new business from the people that he already knows.
This is scary for a lot of people.
A lot of our students in the Lifestyle Business Academy feel more terrified of telling the people that know them that they're gonna start a business compared to random strangers, because you're like, oh my God, I'm gonna post on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Colleagues are gonna see this.
What we try and do is sort of coach people through the process of getting over these fears.
So anyway, you reach out to people in your network and what ultimately happens is you have a DM conversation with them.
You exchange a few messages back and forth and if they are interested, you get them on your call or a coffee.
If it's in person.
In person generally works better, but it can of course just be a Zoom call as well.
That is method number one for getting people into your discovery calls and is by far the easiest and the quickest and the one that we always recommend.
Method number two is you start doing content.
And back in the day, content used to be hard because you would have to spend years building an audience before you were able to sell anything.
These days, it's less about social media, it's more about interest media.
These days, if your content is actually good and is solving a specific problem for a specific person, the algorithms on all of these platforms have gotten so good that it's actually relatively easy, if the content is good, for it to reach a lot of people who are in the target market.
Again.
We've got some students in our program who've just started posting content and within about two or three weeks of posting every day on LinkedIn, they started to get random strangers DMing them to have conversations with them that they were able to then get onto discovery calls.
The content was also solving the specific problem for the niche.
So let's say, my niche is helping like accounting firms automate their onboarding or something like that, so that they can save time.
The stuff I'm gonna be posting on LinkedIn is gonna be about that niche.
It's gonna be speaking to those accountants.
It's gonna be a post about like how annoying it is that like client onboarding takes so long.
And here are three tips that you can use to speed it up.
It's gonna be about like how you can use AI in your accounting firm to speed up your operations, or stuff like that.
Random people aren't gonna interact with that because they don't understand why would a random person care about helping accountants save time.
If an accountant who is like is reading that thing, they're like whoa, this is like directly targeted to me.
LinkedIn, the platform, the algorithm recognizes that, wait a minute, that person's an accountant.
Let's push this post out to similar people like that person.
And so now more and more accountants are gonna see that post.
It's never going to go viral because there's not that many accountants out there.
It's not going to get zillions of views, but it might get tens to maybe even hundreds of views from people that are squarely within your target market.
And so that is what we are trying to do with content.
We are not trying to get famous.
We are trying to become an authority within our niche by posting valuable useful, educational stuff that helps people.
As a result of our content, we are also gonna be having DM conversations with people.
So we're gonna encourage people to DM us if they wanna find out more about working with us or whatever.
But also anytime someone likes or comments or engages or follows, we're gonna send them a message.
This is why generally, I actually recommend people start out on a platform like LinkedIn or Instagram rather than YouTube.
Because you can't DM people on YouTube.
It's really hard to make compelling long-form, educational YouTube videos.
It takes absolutely ages.
Like you've got to deal with the editing.
Yes, there's AI tools, but it's still drastically easier to post on LinkedIn or Instagram than it is to make YouTube videos.
So we have a couple of students in our Lifestyle Business Academy who are doing YouTube.
Generally, those are the ones who took my YouTuber Academy course back in the day anyway.
And so they already have the skills of YouTube.
But this is why generally, I prefer LinkedIn or Instagram if I was starting today, because it's easier to start DM conversations with people.
At this point, you might be like, Why do I have to chat to so many people?
Because what we all want, right, is we want the passive income dream.
We want the idea of like, oh man, I'm just going to wake up to some Stripe notifications.
It's going to be sick.
But in reality, like that's just not how the world works anymore.
It kind of does if you're selling like super cheap things, but...
Given that, it's a lot easier to build a business selling expensive things.
We're gonna need to have conversations with people.
We're gonna probably need to have calls with people.
And that is amazing, especially in the early days, where we are still validating that there is a market for the thing that we are thinking of maybe selling.
The third source of leads to our discovery call is strangers.
Now there's a few different ways to talk to strangers.
The one I like the least is cold outreach.
We do have some students who are doing it with some level of success, but like cold outreach, cold emails, cold DMing people.
Ah, that's like a volume game.
It's a numbers game.
I've been going through Charlie Morgan stuff.
He specializes in cold outreach.
And it's just like, you gotta send hundreds of messages and face rejection every single day.
And you feel like a bit of a spammer because you're like sending cold emails and doing cold calling and stuff.
That doesn't seem like my idea of fun.
But there are other ways of reaching out to strangers.
So one thing is you can join and post in communities.
These could be online communities.
These could be offline communities.
A good offline example is one of our students, Ronke.
She's a doctor and her offer is helping corporations deal with employee burnout so that they can save like 100K a year in terms of like staff retention and medical expenses and stuff.
And she realized that she didn't know that many people in her existing network who were like heads of HR and CEOs at big corporations
So what she did is she went to some real life networking events in London where those people hung out.
And so she spoke to them.
She was an old person.
She was friendly.
She got some business cards and was then able to have conversations with those people afterwards by following up on LinkedIn and then get some of them.
Another example on the community's front is back in the day again, when I started my med school admissions business.
Initially I reached out to my network but you know, very quickly I ran out of people that I knew or friends of people I knew.
I think there were like 20 of them who became my first customers.
I didn't do content at the time because I didn't realize content was a thing five years later that I started doing content on YouTube helping people get into med school.
That was the content play.
But in the meantime, what I did to get customers was that there was a forum called the student room.
This is where university students and university applicants in the UK would like hang out.
And there was a medicine sub forum.
And what I did is that I took my brother's account on the student room and I was just posting really really, really helpful advice.
I bookmarked the Medicine Sub Forum.
I had like notifications turned on for it.
Like in school, I was like refreshing this to see if there's any new posts.
I'd get home from school and I'd have this open in like a separate window, like all day basically.
And as soon as anyone in the UK posted on this Medicine Sub Forum asking any question at all about med school in the UK, I replied to them within the forum with some really really, really helpful information.
I was not advertising my course, but I was hoping that some of them would check out my profile.
And in my profile, I mentioned that I was running one of these courses.
And I managed to get hundreds of customers by literally just being part of this community, the student room, and just being helpful.
Eventually, three years later, they cottoned on and they banned my account, which was kind of annoying.
But, like you know, I got hundreds to possibly even over a thousand customers within the three years.
So like it was fine.
And because the course was actually good.
That was the kickstart I needed, because then mostly it happened through like word of mouth, referrals and stuff.
Which is fantastic is, even if you have no one in your network and even if your content hasn't taken off yet, you can totally join offline and online communities where your niche and members of your niche are hanging out.
Be a nice person, be human, serve them.
Don't come across like a robot.
Don't like take take, take.
Don't try and sell your thing all the time.
By having sensible conversations with people, you can eventually follow up, get them into the DMs and have calls with them.
There are other methods of lukewarm outreach.
One thing that's actually quite good these days is a LinkedIn sales navigator, which is a way to reach out to strangers on LinkedIn.
You just send a bunch of connection requests to people who are in your target market.
If they accept the connection request, you then strike up a DM conversation with them.
You come across as a normal human.
Once you've developed rapport and struck up a conversation, you then try and talk to them about your thing and be like either using the market research frame or the coaching call frame or the sales call frame, whatever you want.
And we have some students in our Lifestyle Business Academy who are actually getting good success by doing LinkedIn Sales Navigator to reach out to strangers on LinkedIn.
Ultimately, All of this stuff, all of these methods of outreach, get you on discovery calls, calls or conversations or coffees with people in your target market, and you then end up refining your offer.
My brother, whose startup sold for like a few tens of millions of dollars for the first two years of building the startup.
They didn't actually build the startup.
They spent two years or like 18 months something absurd like that just having conversations and coffees with people in the target market to figure out what were they actually going to build and trying to make sure there was actually a market for it before they started programming.
If you're starting what is merely a hundred thousand dollar or like some low seven figure lifestyle business, you probably don't need to have 150 conversations, but you probably need to have at least 10, because the more of those conversations you have, the more you'll get a feel for, like how you can refine your offer And at some point what you're hoping for is someone will actually just give you money for the thing because it's so clear that it solves a problem that they have.
And now you've made your first sale.
And then once you make your first sale like, life becomes a lot easier because now like, at least you have a business that is somewhat validated, rather than just sort of theory crafting in the wind.
Once you've made your first sale, you now progress to phase three momentum.
And I realized that this video has gone on insanely long.
So I will do a video in the future about exactly how phase three momentum works.
If you're at this point in the video, I hope you've gotten some value from it.
Please do leave a comment, like what's the one major thing you took away from the video.
And if you have have any questions for future videos in the series where I kind of break down more of the details about the roadmap, please do stick them in the comments.
Now, if you're at this point in the video and you haven't yet seen my video breaking down the maths around how a business grows and, in particular, the easiest business model to start for beginners, and exactly why that is the easiest business model to start for beginners, you're going to want to check out this video right over here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Have a lovely day and I'll see you later.
Bye-bye.
