Today we are talking about the 4 Tips to Making $ from your Startup from DAY 1!
What I’m talking about today is four tips to making money from day one in your business.
This is a unique concept that I have. I expect to make money from day one. My companies, statistically, have always made money within the first week.
Well, Sean, how do you do that?
Well, I haven’t had a billion-dollar company yet. I haven’t had a company that needed millions of dollars of seed money. They’re not the companies that I’m attracted to. I’m attracted to service companies, and so if I can stack the deck where we provide a service on day one and you pay us $100 an hour and it costs me this much money for my employee to provide that services, but there’s a margin on day one.
Get a Fast Start
Let me go through that because this is why you gotta find your niche. You gotta find out what works for you. Maybe it’s online. I love online, and I like using it as a vehicle to attract business. I see it as an incredible vehicle for marketing. I own a digital marketing company.
I think it’s the best digital marketing company in the state of Virginia, and I definitely think it’ll be the biggest. I still make money within the service end of digital marketing. I love service businesses because I like fast starts. Most people can’t afford to wait a year to make money. I like service companies because you only have to do two things, assuming you have a wanting audience for what you’re offering.
If there’s a demand for what your services provide, there are tons of small businesses that don’t understand digital marketing and they would pay for a company to provide digital marketing services and teach them how to effectively market their business online. Our unique selling proposition is we will do it in person. We’ll actually meet with you each month and go over what we’re doing. We make it a very, very, close relationship.
We make it easy to understand, so most business owners are over the age of 50, so that’s our unique selling proposition. But it’s a service, so how did we make money from day one? We made money from day one in that start-up because we knew our target customer was and we knew we could have a fast start.
I don’t pick services that I’m not sure if there’s a wanting audience already.
The whole idea is, is that you can have a fast start and why I love service companies getting back to it is because I only gotta do two things, have a wanting audience and number two, I just gotta market it.
So if I have a demand for my service and I know how to attract target customers, make the phone ring, make them fill out the estimate request, I’m going to make money from day one. I only accomplished two things!
Back to number one, how do you make money from day one in your business, you need to have a Fast Start, which can only happen if you have tested your idea, and now there is a warning audience for what you’re selling.
Start Lean
Which means you don’t see a dime on anything that doesn’t open your doors. Which means you don’t spend time and anything that doesn’t allow you to operate your business. You don’t buy that new desk or that new computer. If you don’t need it, you don’t buy it. Why? Because you need to have money to fail.
I don’t like failing. I think this idea, fail often, an idiot came up with that.
No, no, no. Fail early. You can get it out of the way. Fail forward. And fail cheaply.
So start lean, because you need to have some runway to make mistakes. You’re going to need to pivot. You’re going to have to pivot in a direction you don’t see. And if you don’t have enough money to make that pivot, that’s what puts companies out of business.
Set a Goal
Start getting clients during the start-up phase. This is the biggest part. Make profiting from day one, a must. So it’s a must now, it’s not a want. It’s a must. Number three it’s a must.
How do I do that? I pre-sell. I make sure I have a big opening. When I had a retail store, we had a big opening so we made money day one.
My service companies, I do a massive launch of marketing to pre-sell. We’re going to have customers from day one that my reps can go out and serve. In our digital marketing company, we started pre-getting clients. We started getting clients that I knew would buy from us because of my reputation.
Make Your Margin Strong
So you don’t have to sell an endless amount to make a profit. This is just me. Unless you’re Amazon or Walmart, I like good margins. Margins allow me to make money in abundance and it allows me to hire really good people to provide the services that my companies provide. I can’t make an audacious promise in my branding position and then have not-so-talented people out there representing my company. You don’t have to sell an endless amount to make some profit.
