Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2015, and the company figures it cites, such as BeSmartee’s more than 2 million a year and Royce’s more than 6 million a year, are from that year. Job titles may have changed since.
The truth is that a million is still a sizeable amount of money. But if you want to reach that milestone and aren’t expecting an inheritance any time soon, you will have to become an entrepreneur.
As we’ve said before, you can get to a million as an employee, saving, investing and letting compound interest do the rest. But that way it wouldn’t be a million a year, and it wouldn’t be quick either. It would be a slow, gradual climb (which isn’t a bad thing).
Since I haven’t made my first million euros yet, let’s see what some people who make a million every year in their “small” businesses (or businesses that were small once) have to tell us.
1. Love your customers
Everything you do should revolve around the customer, because obviously no company can survive without customers. That was the business philosophy of Tim Nguyen, co-founder and CEO of BeSmartee, a company that already brings in more than 2 million a year.
Once you know that the customer is your biggest asset (in fact, your business is the customer), focus solely on the customer. Not on your profits, but on what benefits the customer.
If you’re thinking of closing your company for the holidays, ask yourself how that will affect your customers. If you’re thinking of cutting staff, ask yourself how the cuts will affect your customers. Don’t worry about sales and don’t focus on the money. Worry about your customers and focus on your customers. That way the money comes much faster than if you chased it directly.
2. Focus on products and metrics
This may seem to contradict the previous point, but if we want to look after our customers and give them the best, we’ll have to create an outstanding product or service. That way we’re focusing directly on our customers.
I liked the advice of Simon Slade, CEO and co-founder of Affilorama, who talked about choosing one simple metric to measure your business’s progress. Slade’s suggestion was to use units sold or revenue as your metric, and to try to beat yesterday’s target every single day.
In other words, sell more each day than you did the day before. Look for new customers to help with your product or service every day. Remember that if your business isn’t growing, it’s slowly dying. So look for a growth strategy you can sustain over time, and get used to treating every month your business doesn’t grow as seriously as a loss.
(See: How much a business should grow each year to be profitable)
3. Understand your customers’ fears
Ted Leonhardt is a negotiation expert and author who says he has made more than a million in revenue in some years. His secret? Understanding people’s fears, and the fear that comes over someone when they face spending a large sum of money.
His strategy, then, was to understand the interpersonal problems of certain social groups (you need to identify the problem in order to sell the solution), help clients reduce their fear, and help them achieve their goals.
In short, Ted focused on his clients (on their fears and needs), and the millions came afterwards.
4. Work your business muscle
Sometimes entrepreneurship works the same way as building muscle: you probably have to wear yourself out before you see results, but the results do come if you keep at it.
Heidi Burkhart, now president of Dane Professional Consulting Group, says she started out in commercial real estate brokerage at 21.
She describes spending her first three years working practically around the clock, seven days a week, just getting by. Then, in the fourth quarter of her third year, she finally started closing deals. Since then, she says, her income has consistently been in six figures, with some periods in which she has produced more than a million.
Sometimes it feels as if we’re getting nowhere. We visit 100 customers, 50 of them say no and the other 50 haven’t made up their minds. We visit another 100 new customers and the same thing happens. But at some point customers start trickling in from here and there (as long as we still have a strategy), and eventually our hard work starts producing steady results.
That said, we also need to know when we’re being persistent and when we’re just being stubborn and foolish; sometimes the smartest thing is to change business. But there is no success without persistence.
5. Build personal relationships
We often say you shouldn’t make sales but make customers. Let’s go a step further: turn your customers into something close to friends.
We have already talked about the secret of the world’s greatest car salesman. It’s the same one used by Andrew Royce, CEO of Royce, who says he makes more than 6 million a year simply by being clear that building lasting relationships is the most important thing in business.
Royce says his company is built on human interaction with the end user, and that they try to maintain a personal relationship with every one of their customers, some of whom are almost part of the company family. In fact, they are proud to say that their company is more a family than a business serving everyone.
6. Focus on the end goal
Zach Halmstad, founder of JAMF Software, says the best advice he was ever given was to stay focused on what you want to become rather than on what might go wrong, because 99% of the things you worry about almost never happen.
We do need to know the risks we face (and there are usually plenty in business). But as a believer in focus, I start from the premise that whatever you focus on is what you’ll get.
Don’t focus on not failing, because then you will fail. Focus on succeeding and you’ll increase your chances of doing so. I always compare it to a football team: if you go out to play not to lose, you’ll rarely win. So go out to win or stay on the bench.
So I agree that most of the things we worry about almost never happen, and that we should worry much more about making plenty of other things happen.
See also: 7 things to keep in mind to make your first million
Featured image: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
