Going From $0 to $1 Million - Step By Step Guide on Growing Small Businesses

Okay, so we're getting started from scratch. We don't have a lot of money. We're trying to build a business and we're trying to do it in a capital efficient way. How do we go from $0 in revenue to $1 million in revenue? Go back to 2020, knew that I wanted to start a business and I wanted it to be profitable. I wanted it to be a good business. I wanted to get into a million dollars in revenue. The very first step that we followed was assembling the team. And look, that could be as simple as it's just gonna be you, one person. If you're like me and you don't want to CEO the business, it makes it pretty difficult to just start the business on my own because, well, I need a partner or partners to be running the business and CEO and all that kind of stuff. When we put together our founding team for this business, we discovered there were three people. One, me. And what did I bring to the table? I had a lot of business expertise. I knew how to run and structure businesses. I have a key advantage for us, which is a big social media presence. When you go into something like this, you're looking and saying, like, what am I really good at? Like, what are my strengths that I can leverage? Because ultimately, like, there's a myriad of ideas that we can eventually choose through this process to work on. So we should choose an idea that's gonna give us an unfair advantage, right? I've assembled the team. And in our case, I went and I had started to work with two folks in my organization, Hayden and Franco. Franco has a really interesting strength. He's located in Argentina. And I had hired him as part of my team and gotten to know him and known he's a great guy, super smart, a hard worker, and really somebody who could lead and also sell really well. So I knew we had that as an advantage. And then the second person that we had as part of the founding team was another one of my teammates and colleagues, Hayden Cohen. One of the things Hayden had that was really interesting was, A, a desire to build a business and be an entrepreneur, but number two, he spoke Spanish fluently. So suddenly we start to see, okay, there's some strengths here that we have. We have an audience in my case. We have two pretty smart entrepreneurs who are interested in working on an idea. We have a connection to Latin America and we have, well, some Spanish speaking capability. All right, so let's move on to step two, which is to have a prepared mind. And a prepared mind is this idea that you don't know what your idea is and you don't necessarily know where an opportunity is gonna show up, but you start going out and looking for it. And specifically, what's the most interesting to build a business around is finding a problem. So first of all, we saw that COVID had changed the world radically. See, historically people had done remote work for all these big businesses, right? And so for example, you see IBM or McKinsey or ExxonMobil or all these folks, they've been putting remote work into place for decades, right, by having teams in places like India or the Philippines or Latin America. Remote work became prevalent not only for these big corporations, but for small and medium businesses as well. And the second thing that we had started to see that was happening as a trend inside of our society was that, well, there just weren't enough workers for the opportunities that we had here in the United States. Anybody who really was good and wanted a job, well, they could get a job. So I saw those trends happening to where a lot of my fellow CEO friends and folks like that now with remote work being a thing, they should not only look in their backyard or the city where they're located to hire great employees, but they should start to think about hiring anywhere in the United States or in Canada or Latin America or beyond. So the next thing we did after we saw these trends was, well, try to go explore them and understand like, is there a real problem here? Is there something that, well, frankly, we could build a business around? And that really moved us on to step three, which was sell first, build later. And this is a principle I really love because ultimately I see so many entrepreneurs, they spend their time going out and doing things that really don't matter in terms of building a real business. They get a website, they get an LLC, they hire a lawyer, they get an office, business cards, all this kind of stuff. I call that often playing house. And don't get me wrong, you eventually need an LLC, you need all those things to be able to have a real business or open a bank account or something like that. But none of that stuff really matters early on until you know you have a viable business. So at this point, we had this idea that between Hayden, Franco, and myself, that there were small businesses who, well, frankly, they wanted to go hire overseas. And we went out and talked to a number of those people. We asked them like, what is your problem? Like, are you interested in hiring overseas? Like, how are you solving for that? How have you thought about that? And based on those conversations, we started to identify where the problem was, which was all of these corporations wanted to hire people globally, but by and large, outside of their backyard, they really didn't know how. And ultimately, they wanted a trusted partner, somebody who could be there for them to hold their hand and help them navigate things. So the very first thing we did with them at this point is we tried to go sell our first customer. Notice that we haven't really gotten a website, we haven't really launched the business, we haven't got an LLC, we haven't got a bank account. Heck, we haven't even signed a contract between us three founders. The very first thing we wanted to prove was, hey, does anybody actually want to buy this thing? Does anybody want us as a partner? And look, it's gonna work, whether I have a website or not, for those first few customers, because a lot of them are coming through our network, through people we already know, and all that sort of thing. So we sold first and got a few customers to prove to ourselves that this thing was actually gonna work before we invested in all that other stuff. Okay, so that moves us on to step four. We know some customers want this thing, and step four is get the minimum viable product out there. And the idea here for us to get this business to be profitable and growing as quickly as possible, a lot of people, well, they make a mistake. They wait around to see until everything's perfect, and only then do they launch or try to sell or even take anybody's money. And the exact opposite of all of that is what you should do. You should still launch your product when it's just a nascent idea, when you still haven't got it all figured out. And the reason you wanna do this is twofold. One, you don't wanna waste your time, right? If you sit around and keep working on perfecting something without any customer input, there's a pretty good chance you're building things that nobody wants. The second thing is, well, frankly, like you wanna learn what your customers think, not what you think the customers think. And the best way to do that is to actually get a product in their hand as quickly as possible. In our case with Meir, the very first thing we wanted to try to do with them is, okay, before Mr. Customer, before you even sign a contract with us, before any of this stuff, like let me go prove as a minimum viable product that I can find employees that you're gonna wanna hire. And then let me do this whole process to help shepherd them into your company. And so now we're about six months into this whole process, we've assembled our team, we've talked to customers, and now we're doing our minimum viable product, which is by hand, the hard way, without a bunch of software or automation or any of that kind of stuff, we're going through and manually trying to take care of our customers, right? Connecting the clients to potential recruits, right? And then seeing what happens with those interviews, and then taking those interviews and seeing if we can help them convert them into paying clients. Getting that out there and starting to learn, like what percentage should we charge? Like what should our rates be? Who is our ideal customer? All of that is things that we really started to learn once we really out and tried to sell things to people. And that's that minimum viable product idea that you don't wait until it's perfect and you start shipping in and try to take people's money and deliver value to them and create happy customers. Okay, so moving on, we've now graduated into step five, which is evolving and growing the business. And this is a step that really, well, it never stops, right? And I call this the evolutionary or the evolved phase of growing a business. We haven't gone from zero to one, but we've come from zero to, you know, a few tens of thousand dollars in revenue at this point. We've sold our first few customers, and this is where the business starts to evolve and grow. And this is a never ending cycle of the business improving itself to try to do better by itself, its owners, its employees, and most importantly, by its customers. We take the things that we learn and we keep doing the same process that we've seen over and over again in steps one through three by trying new experiments, for example, offering new products or trying new customer bases. So one of the things going on for near now after we're a year to a year and a half in the business is we're evolving to figure out how to deal with larger customers. So middle market, three, 500, 1,000 person enterprises are ones that are starting to be the customer base. Well, as you do that, you start to realize that those type of customers, they want different things than the little tiny enterprises that we use to launch the business. A 30 person company is really different than a 300 person company. So there's this process where we do the exact same thing. We run cheap experiments, we go see what a minimum viable product is for that type of customer base, and then we evolve it based on what we learn. And this process goes over and over again in terms of the cycle. And at the same time, we start to build out the team. We learn what sort of people we need. We run small experiments. Okay, well, this is the type of salesperson we want, or this is the type of recruiter we want. And those types of people come in, we learn and we grow from that. So it's this evolutionary phase as we've now gone from zero to a few hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue to one where we keep growing the business and evolving it over time. But it's the same process that we used to start it just happening as we continue to grow the business in our journey from going to zero dollars in revenue and just an idea to hopefully get to a million in revenue. Okay, so that moves on to step number six, which is you step aside for a new CEO or leadership if necessary. And here's the reality, like I'm a good CEO or a good leader up to a certain point, but whenever I was to say, start a business like this, like I would need to get out of the way at some point because frankly, I'm good from going to zero one, I'm bad from going from one to 10. And that's where there's an opportunity for other people to step in and grow. And this is something, if you need to do that, this is the time that after the business gets to, well, the ability to kind of support itself and the business models figured out and you know, most of how it's gonna work, that's the time potentially to get out of the way. In this case, when we built Near, I was never working in the company and that's by design, right? I've talked about how my history is one where like, I'm not really wanting to be CEOs of businesses anymore. And I find more joy in helping those people. So the good news is that the business, as it's now, you know, set up as Near is one where it's a self-perpetuating and more importantly, a self-learning machine. Like Hayden and Franco, who are CEO and COO of the business have built a great team and have built themselves in a way that they're now developing and growing the plans of the whole business. And I'm supporting them as a board member. So yeah, in this step, if you've built a business from zero to one, this is where you can potentially step aside and work on something else or step aside and put yourself into a role where the business can be its best. And I'm super excited about, well, frankly, how it's all turned out. Cause we've gone in just 24, 30 months, we've gone from zero to well in excess of a million dollars in revenue that we titled the video that cause I think it'll be sexier. But this is how you can use this process to go start an agency of your own, whether it's a staffing agency or an SEO agency or a software development agency, like these kinds of customized services businesses are beautiful ones to start as a first one because they don't require a lot of capital to get started. There's a huge market there and they can be very profitable. So that's it. So that's how to build a million dollars service business from scratch, how we did it. And hopefully we'll look back on this video in a few years and it'll be a hundred million dollars service business.