Big video creation push coming over the next few months and years, first one’s script is below if it seems like a slightly different styling to usual.
I built 5 businesses worth $100,000 or more in 8 years with zero start-up capital.
But I failed at every single one to convert them into 7 figures valuation.
Which was unbelievably frustrating.
Now I know why.
In this blog I’ll explain what this mistake was, how you can avoid it pretty easily, and the 5 rules you have to follow to build a 7+ figure business and avoid all the mistakes I made.
The mistake was not understanding the real power of brand.
The mistake was being in a rush.
My first business to partly succeed was an SEO agency.
This took a really long time to get anywhere because I didn’t know anything about business or sales.
During this time I DID NOT build a brand, instead I built off the back of a keyword-based-mentality.
I built a process. An Edge.
Edges are essential in business, more on that later.
But it’s not a brand.
“If a customer searches X and I appear for X, therefore I win”.
Throw in some sales training, learn some ops and I thought we’re good to go, we’re rolling.
No.
What would have better is to decide why I actually want to work with.
Even though you’ve heard it all before, start with WHO your target audience is. Or at the very least WHAT problem you are solving.
But most importantly.
Point 1: Actually give a F*ck about your customers.
I put this first, before the more “interesting” mistakes because it’s the single most important thing you can do as a founder.
Just care.
If you actually care, everything else is downstream from this.
You make decisions based on the best interests of your customer, not yourself.
If you truly care about improving the lives of the people you sell to, you will create better products and services, market better, sales will be easier and all in all people will trust you because they can see and feel authenticity.
This is what frustrates me so much with all these drop-shipping, micro-saas creation businesses.
You don’t care about the people you are selling to, you are just trying to make a quick buck.
They are get rich quick… Without adding any value.
If you charge someone more for a product and it takes longer to get to them, isn’t that borderline a scam?
Don’t get me wrong I’ve definitely been there too, but it’s not the right way.
The SEO agency took nearly 4 years just to get to £100,000/year.
That’s 4 years of every day, not a slow side hustle.
The second business I built was off the back of the SEO agency.
The second business took 8 months.
I understood marketing properly.
I STILL did NOT understand the power of branding.
Here’s the “business name”.
It’s actually embarrassing looking back but this is the keyword-mentality version of me.
“Amazon SEO Consultant”.
That’s the actual “brand name”....?
It’s confusing as well as just bad.
It’s a keyword yes, but not a brand.
Which leads us to point 2.
Point 2: Build a brand that doesn’t confuse your customer.
The next business was almost-better.
It was an Ecommerce company that we actually exited for mid 6 figures.
It was closer to a brand but still not really there.
The reason? -- Commoditisation of customers.
We had a brand-name, the site was good, branding/design it all looked like a real brand but it didn’t really stand for anything, there wasn’t a target customer or individual that we wanted to help.
It was too broad.
Targeting too many people and hence targeting no-one.
Which brings me nicely onto point 3.
Point 3: Don’t commoditise your service OR your customer.
Let me explain a bit more.
Everyone knows not to commoditise your service or product.
A commodity’s only differentiation is price.
Think gold or petrol or flour.
You just get it from the cheapest source, it’s the same product to 99% of consumers.
There’s very little brand affinity.
But you can accidentally commoditise your product within your branding and marketing.
This is extremely dangerous as it disintegrates profit margins.
If you sell “SEO services” or “CBD Oil” for example….
It’s simply too vague.
SEO for who?
CBD for who?
It’s too broad, despite the fact you might have an elite product or service offering.
If you market it in the same way as 99% of other businesses. The consumer will group you in the same way.
The customer will shop around, they’ll just look for the cheapest version of this product as they have grouped you with competitors.
Despite this actually NOT being a commodity product.
This is personally what I ran into with both our SEO agency and our CBD business.
We didn’t differentiate in the right way.
As a result we cared less (point 1) and because we didn’t niche down our customer was confused whether this was for them (point 2).
And although (as always) the marketing and SEO side pushed us through to make the businesses work….. It could have been so much better by just understanding these things.
It was like pushing a boulder uphill.
That’s the power of a brand again… Or lack thereof.
Point 4: Build 1 incredible business - not 5 mediocre ones
Focus.
Don’t do 5 or 8 things well.
Do one thing incredibly well.
This is the same in business as it is for sport, or music or art.
The more you focus on one thing the better you become.
The athlete doesn’t try to compete at 4 different sports.
They would lose, however talented.
Focus on your biggest calling.
This is the whole reason I built Sharper Human.
To be my one singular focus for decades not months.
To work with a target audience I care about the most; founders (which is point 1), who want to focus and build businesses (point 2), with a product specifically designed for them (point 3), with personal accountability and focus by me (point 4).
Check it out at SharperHuman.com if you are a founder or entrepreneur.
Focus on one thing.
Building a business is complex enough with the hundreds of moving parts, don’t overcomplicate it further by trying to build multiple at the same time.
Founders who spend 20 years on one business win.
“Humans overestimate what they can achieve in 1 year and under-estimate what they can achieve in 10 years”
We saw this just this week with Mr Beast.
He posted a video he recorded back in 2015 and set it to go live exactly 10 years after.
His main goal was 1 million subscribers.
He’s currently approaching half a billion….
Human’s truly struggle with the idea of compounding and exponential growth.
It’s the idea of mastery.
Depth beats breadth.
Especially now in our AI world, all the surface level information is already so easily accessible.
I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how AI benefits the generalist , I disagree.
I see the point, you need to have a borderline understanding of a lot of things and skills, but I believe that’s just a requirement to be in the arena.
Depth and hyper specific true knowledge and skills in one area is what will set you apart, because if I can create a one paragraph prompt that results in the output of your entire life’s work and skillset - that’s the dangerous part.
People with hyper specific specialised knowledge do not have this worry, they can use AI to put all the other pieces together on top of this frame.
Having depth of knowledge and implementation is the real edge now.
Which brings me to my next point.
Point 5: Build your repeatable profitable marketing edge
This one was the one part we got right.
And why we managed to get to 6 figures instead of nothing.
This is creating the true edge.
For us, it was within marketing.
We could rank any medium competition keyword in Google (or YouTube).
In quick time with a very limited budget.
In another business it was ranking Amazon products with a custom process we created.
In another if was leveraging authority website + powering those up to create curated list type articles (that you see everywhere now, “best xxx for xxxx”).
The repeatable edge became:
Find a keyword/content topic our target audience is searching for.
Build a page or video on this topic
Run the ranking process.
Generate clicks, sign ups and sales.
Sounds great, but there’s a massive piece missing.
The product or service.
The BRAND.
There’s no knock-on value being produced.
You can be an incredible marketer and generate sales and customers quickly.
But if the brand sucks, it becomes moving the boulder uphill, with an increasingly steeper incline over time.
Our products and services were good but our brand was poor.
For a real brand, a real effective product it’s inverted.
It’s the snowball effect.
It’s tough to get started (like any business or product).
But the network effects and what I call “seeding” works in your favor.
One sale is more likely to lead to another, not less likely, if you do the little things right, the things that don’t actually scale.
Now if you drive your marketing edge and go all-in on this, you create momentum, you create velocity (in the right direction), leading to a wave of sales because you focused on the first 4 points before building the marketing edge.
That’s my biggest mistake in business, doing this the wrong way around.
I described this as a wheel.
The hub is your brand.
The spokes are your marketing/sales/operations/services/team/product etc.
We had strong spokes.
But a weak hub.
So things break.
And restarting and switching (point 4) mitigates success.
The most successful founders I know aren’t the best marketers or the best product people, they just haven’t stopped doing one business for 25 years.
Focus for decades not minutes.
If you’re a founder or entrepreneur looking to improve focus and cognition, check out Sharper Human, the only business that I started product and brand first. The forever business.
Thanks for watching, comments welcome on what point has most impacted your business journey.