Once your business is up and running, and you’ve proven your business model (or you’ve bought an established business), you start to form a bigger vision for the future. In this post, I will look into how you can make a million dollars with an online business.
One of the most obvious goals to hit as an entrepreneur is the $1 million mark. If you’ve done it once, you can certainly do it again, but making your first million is anything but a walk in the park.
$1 million in revenue is challenging enough – but it’s really just a vanity metric. Almost anyone can make a million by spending a million! But if you want to make $1 million in profit, you’ve got even more work cut out for you. Here are some tips from mine and Ismael’s experience running FE International and also some things I have learned from peers and successful clients such as Jeff.
Be Flexible & Iterate
Odds are the first idea you have isn’t going to help you cross the $1 million mark. Fun fact: FE International didn’t even start out as a website broker!
Although it’s a cliché, it’s also a truism: the plan that you start with isn’t the plan that will get you to where you want to go. You will fail along the way. All you can do is get back up and keep on trying. Learn from your mistakes, and push through the adversity.
Don’t give up if your ideas fail. It happens to the best of us! You have to persist if you want to make your dreams a reality. Once you find something that works, focus on that and don’t get distracted.
Surround Yourself With Positive, Supportive People
People will try to steal your dreams. There are a lot of naysayers out there, and unfortunately, their disbelief can wear on you if you’re within shooting distance. This is especially true in the online space where often the older generations don’t understand the potential – part of the reason we invest so much time into evangelizing the industry on outlets such as Entrepreneur.com such as this article that got over 8000 shares!
The hardest part is that the people who oppose you are often the people you’re closest to. Unless they’re already on their own journey of personal growth, no amount of coaxing and convincing is going to get them on your side.
Make it your goal to seek out like-minded people. They will support you through the tough times, and open your mind to possibilities you may not have considered.
Join a mastermind group, or connect with goal-oriented people in your locality. If you want to identify your strengths and weaknesses, you need to have people mirroring back to you your own thinking process, and that’s exactly what a well-functioning mastermind group is all about. As you grow, you will also open doors for more exclusive, higher value masterminds. Ismael and I have both found the YEC very helpful, for example.
You should also focus on hiring people that are smarter than you, and have skills that are complimentary to your own.
If you want to build a successful business, you’re going to need help, and you’re not going to do yourself or anyone else any favors if you don’t hire people that can do what you can’t do.
Find the very best talent available. Although it might be intimidating to think about working with people that know more than you do, that’s what successful entrepreneurs do. Never be the smartest person in the room.
Bootstrap
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of borrowing money and raising capital for a business that could be started on a shoestring budget. Don’t look at the money you’re going to need later – instead, focus on legitimizing your business as soon as possible. Successful bootstrappers, such as Rob Walling have helped increase the popularity of self-funding rather than looking for angel/VC funding as the only options.
In an ideal situation, you should be able to take every dollar you earn and put it right back into your business. The only way you’re going to make this happen is by bootstrapping.
When you don’t have loans to pay back, or a massive debt load looming over your head, you can concentrate on growing your business. Yes, it may require some sacrifices on your part, but building a debt-free business is more than worth the personal costs.
Don’t forget – you can also crowdfund instead of relying on investors and venture capitalists to take interest in what you’re looking to do. If you can drum up interest in your idea by taking advantage of one of the many crowdfunding platforms out there, you know for certain that there is an interested customer base for your product for service. Finding more people like them should prove easier after seeing a campaign through to success.
Put Your Blinders On & Do The Work
Take your eyes off of the competition. Although it’s important to keep an eye on what they’re doing, if you put all of your time and energy into following them, you’ll never outsmart and outmaneuver them. You’ll never innovate and come up with new ideas to separate yourself.
If you care too much about what others are doing, you’ll either become discouraged by how much catching up you have to do, or you’ll rest on your laurels knowing that you’re ahead of where your competition is. Either way, it puts you in a position of weakness.
Focus instead on ideas that have the opportunity to move the needle. You can’t expect every innovation to be a game-changer, but your focus should be on your own business at all times, because that’s what’s going to bring about valuable insights. Getting distracted by competitors (or anything else, for that matter) is never beneficial over time.
My Final Thoughts
Believe in your ability to build a successful business and make a million dollars. There will be naysayers and dream stealers. There will be those who say it can’t be done, and some people will leave. But there isn’t enough time in the world to get discouraged and to become self-conscious. You have to persevere in spite of the challenges you encounter and keep plugging away.
No one will ever care about your success as much as you do. If you want to make your dreams a reality, you have to sell yourself out to them.
So don’t give up faith. Be the biggest cheerleader of your own endeavors. Work hard and keep focused and success in the long run is inevitable.