How to go from $0 to $100,000 in 2024
This process of going from zero to six figures over the next year is something that's most likely going to happen exponentially. You're going to start slow. It'll seem like you aren't making any progress at all at first but over time, your income will increase faster and faster. It also probably almost certainly is going to be something of a rollercoaster. You'll learn more in one month and less than next. It's going to be a two-step forward, one step back kind of experience. That might not be what you want to hear. But as far as I'm concerned, it's the truth.
One more important note before we get into all of this. This is for entrepreneurs or people who want to become entrepreneurs. I'm not going to be teaching you how to get a raise or get a promotion or get a better job or anything like that. We're gonna be focused on how to turn a business from nothing into a business that's consistently earning six figures per year.
I've broken the process of going from $0 to $100,000 into four phases.
Phase #1: Make a Plan
The first phase is the phase that you're very likely in the midst of right now it's the Make a Plan Phase. This phase can be as short as one day, or it can stretch indefinitely. Basically, you can spend as much time or as little time in this phase as you want to or choose to.
During this phase, what you need to do is you need to decide what business you're going to start. You need to decide what your business is going to sell who your target customer will be.
I have another video all about how to write a business plan. There can be a lot of unknowns when you're writing a business plan before you actually started the business. It's important that you just put something down on paper so that you know generally where you're headed.
Here's a little hint about this phase. During this phase of the process of building your business and increasing your income, you're not going to earn anything. You're not actually operating your business yet you're not selling any product. There's no reason why any dollars would be coming through the door.
Of course, you could do some sort of side hustle at the same time, you could be working a job, you could make something and sell something really fast. There are ways you could make money but in this actual phase of the process you can't really expect to be earning any money and that's okay. You just want to make sure that you keep that part of the process short for that reason.
PHASE #2: Earn Your First $1,000
Once you've finished your plan or at least the first draft of your plan, you can move on to phase two. Earn your first $1,000 as quickly as possible. During this phase, you're going to do a quick and dirty setup of your business. The reason for this is that you don't yet have proof that your business idea is really valid or that people really want the product that you're thinking about selling. So rather than waste way too much time and energy building an entire business building all the systems that are required to run a business, only to find out that maybe people don't want your product or maybe there was something flawed with your business model or your business plan.
I want you to instead get to market as quickly as possible. Sometimes people discard this as shipping as quickly as possible. You need to make a beta version of your product, something that you can make quickly and easily. You need to try to find your first few customers as quickly as possible. When you do this, you're probably not going to use sustainable scalable strategies. You're not going to use strategies that are going to take you to a million dollars and beyond.
That's completely alright because that's not what you're trying to do right now. Right now, you're just trying to prove your business idea. You're just trying to prove that there is demand for the product that you want to sell and that you can create the product that you want to sell. So focus on doing exactly that and earning your first $1,000 as quickly as possible. This phase can take anywhere from about one week up to three months but don’t spend longer than three months on it.
During this phase, you can expect to earn about $1,000 or maybe a fair bit more but at least $1,000 or else you need to go back to the drawing board with your business idea.
Once you've hit that point where you've earned at least your first $1,000 there is the proof you need that your business idea is valid, that there's demand for your products and you are ready to move on to phase three.
PHASE #3: Build Your Systems
Phase three is all about building your systems. This is where you create those systems that will actually be sustainable and scalable. These systems will take you to your first $100,000 and beyond. Now, the reason I say just the first $100,000 and not to your first million is that most likely by the time you pass $100,000 and you start working towards that million you're probably going to completely overhaul and change many of these systems.
I recently did a video about how to turn your side hustle into your full-time thing and I talked a fair amount about what these systems are and kind of the basics of what they need to involve and how to build them. If you haven't watched that video, you can click here to watch the video or you can click here to read the blog.
Now here is an unexpected spoiler about the build your systems phase and that is during this phase, you probably will not earn very much money. You might not earn any money at all. That might be surprising to you. It at least surprises a lot of people who don't think this far ahead and they don't know what these different phases are. They don't have a plan for how they're going to build their business because they think that first, they're going to earn their first $1,000 and then maybe the next month they'll earn their first $2,000 and then their first $3,000 and so on and so on.
The reality is that you use different strategies to earn that first $1,000 because most of the time when you are earning the first $1,000, you don't have an audience and you don't have a steady stream of traffic. You're just trying to earn the first $1,000 as quickly as possible so you have to use some different more grassroots-type strategies.
Now it's possible you earn a little bit of money. Maybe you have some products left from the validation stage, and a few sales keep trickling in from the marketing efforts you did in that second phase of the process. Maybe you have sold a service and because you got the word out a bit when you were trying to earn that first $1,000 you are starting to attract some of your first customers, you're getting some referrals.
You have to be careful to not let those things distract you from building those sustainable and scalable systems. If you get distracted by just trying to make a quick buck now and you keep on doing that it's going to keep your business small and it's going to prevent you from scaling into the long term. You'll notice that at this point in the process, three out of four phases in haven't earned very much money. You earned no money at all in the first phase in, the second phase you earn $1,000 or maybe a bit more, and then in the third phase, maybe you earned a little bit or maybe you didn't earn anything at all.
Right now you're sitting at somewhere between $1,000 in revenue and maybe a few $1,000. At this point in the process somewhere midway through phase three, a lot of people are about ready to give up and a lot of people do because they feel like they've put so much time and effort, and energy into this process with little to show for it.
PHASE #4: Work Your Systems
In reality, you are so close to scaling and seeing massive growth because now has finally come the time for phase four. This is where you work your systems, this is where you start actually seeing that exponential growth happen, this is where you start growing faster and faster every single month.
So what do I mean when I say work your systems? Well, quite simply, you've built these systems that can produce consistent outputs that can produce real results. Now you get to start putting the inputs in to get those outputs app. What does that mean? It could look like purchasing supplies to produce your products. It could look like shipping out those products to your customers. It can definitely look like driving traffic to your website, or purchasing ads, or creating content to attract your customers then running these leads that you generate through a sales process.
If you follow this process, you will have built some really solid systems in your business that can produce consistent results where when you put more in you get more out when you drive more traffic to your website, you make more sales when you purchase more products, your employees are equipped to produce your products so that your products are available for your customers to purchase all of these different systems that I'm talking about.
The one that leaves the most people scratching their heads is the sales process. It's even a little bit bigger than the marketing and sales process. People aren't really sure how to produce consistent sales.
I think a lot of the time this is because they don't really understand how long this process needs to be where it really begins where they need to put the input in but it also could be just because they're not using the right tactic for each stage of this system.
Let me share with you some of your different options and perhaps some of the pros and cons and how to decide which one is right for you. First of all, somehow you need to get the word out your future customers have to hear about you and your business if they're ever going to purchase your product, depending on the type of business you're running and you're trying to build. This will look very different if you're running a mass-scale business where you're selling a lower-cost product or maybe some sort of digital product or a product that has mass appeal. Then you're going to want to use a strategy that reaches a lot of people.
An example of this would be billboards. Everyone who's driving down the highway sees the billboard. So if you're selling something that has that mass appeal, then paying for that billboard could be a great investment because you're going to reach many potential customers with that one billboard.
On the other hand, if you are selling something that has a much more narrow appeal, something that you're planning to only sell to a few people but for a higher price, then a billboard probably would not be a very good investment because you are paying to reach a ton of people who are never going to become your customers, but you're paying to reach those people.
If you have a mass appeal product, this would include sources like search engine traffic, Google traffic to your website, Pinterest, also creating traffic to your website. You could use YouTube in this capacity. You could certainly pay for ads, and you can collaborate with big brands. On the other hand, if you're selling something that is going to be more small scale something with a more narrow appeal then you'll want to use strategies like word of mouth referrals and pitching prospective clients.
You can also use the strategies that I mentioned earlier that will get you that more mass exposure, but you need to make sure that you're doing so strategically and carefully. As I mentioned before, this is all part of the final phase, which is to work your systems. You need to send that input in so that you can get the output out and the more you put in, the more you will get out if you build your systems the right way.
Something I want to point out about this process is that I'd recommend that you set your initial goal for the end of this 12 months to be earning at least $10,000 per month. You might not reach $100,000 in the first year, but if you can get up to at least 10,000 per month by the end of this year, then you will continue to see that exponential growth and quite possibly in year two, double or even quadruple your earnings.
Your next step
I'm guessing that right now you're probably at the very beginning stages of starting your business since this blog teaches you how to go from zero to $100,000. If that is the case, you might not even know what business you want to build yet. If so, here is a video that will give you a bunch of ideas for businesses that you can start that are really possible for anyone to start.
I also have a list of 50 different service-based businesses that I put together that includes information about the average annual earnings for each of those different services. Here’s the link where you can download that!
watch me break down my $10k funnel
In this free 4-video training, I'll teach you how to easily scale your course to $100,000+/year with one simple funnel. I'll take you through my entire funnel so you can see how it automatically turns a lead into a paying customer, break down the Win/Win webinar strategy, walk through our evergreen sales emails, and explain the big-picture strategy and how you can implement this whole system into your business.
