Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2577 Why You’re Stuck at $10K a Month and How to Break Through About this episode Feeling stuck at $10k a month in revenue? Wondering why your business seems to hit a ceiling at this milestone and how to get past it? If you’re searching for answers, today’s lesson is your ticket to breaking through. In this episode, Omar digs into why so many entrepreneurs get stuck at that $10k mark […] The post MBA2577 Why You’re Stuck at $10K a Month and How to Break Through appeared first on The $100 MBA.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Small business owners, listen up. You started your business, but you can't do it alone. And that means you have to hire people to help. That's where Justworks comes in. Justworks is the payroll, benefits, and global hiring platform to unburden your brain from all the complicated small business stuff. They handle the things you can't afford to get wrong, so you don't have to worry. So you can focus on the parts of running a business that you enjoy, knowing everything else is running smoothly. You don't have to worry when it just works. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me. As a marketer and business person, the show was a little bit of a disappointment.
0:45 Speaker 00 Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions. But then we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bull spend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn ads. Cut the bull spend, advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Terms apply. $10,000 a month. This is where most businesses hit a wall. Why? Because you're treating your business like a job. Today, I'm going to show you how to break through that $10,000 ceiling and shift your mindset to grow your business into something bigger, something better, something more
1:28 Speaker 00 profitable. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I give you practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. In today's episode, we're going to be tackling a challenge I see way too often: getting stuck at that $10,000 a month mark. And I'm going to show you how to break through and how to change a few small things, small but significant things, in your business that'll make all the difference. This isn't just theory. I've been there. Hitting that $10,000 a month feels great, but it's
2:10 Speaker 00 Also where many entrepreneurs get stuck, they're just in a rut, they can't get out of it. We're going to talk about why this happens and how to reframe your thinking and give you some practical steps so you can take the next step forward. You can reach the next level in your business and not just get stuck on 10K, you go to 20K, 30K, 100K, a million a month and beyond. So let's start with why people get stuck at $10,000 a month. Well, there's two main reasons why most entrepreneurs stall out at that point. The first reason is many people, they see this as a milestone to quit their job. They say, okay, I hit 10K a month, you know, maybe that's revenue
2:51 Speaker 00 and your profits like 7K, 8K, and you're like, hey, that's as much or more than what I was getting paid at my job. Makes total sense, right? You have enough to kind of pay yourself, to pay your expenses and like live the dream, right? But what happens next is where the problem lies. Once you start paying yourself a decent salary when you're making 10K, there doesn't leave much profit left for you to reinvest in your business and continue to grow. Think about it for a second. In this hypothetical situation where somebody leaves their job at the 10K mark, the month before, let's say they're making 9K and let's say their profit was 7K, $7,000 being reinvested
3:32 Speaker 00 in that business the next month to allow it to grow. You leave your job, you pay yourself, let's say you pay yourself a salary of 5K, now you're reinvesting the 2K you have left. So obviously, your business is going to stall out. It's just not going to grow, if anything at all, because you're not reinvesting enough to see it move forward. And it's like you're starting the business all over again with no traction, except now you're playing defense instead of offense. Believe it or not, the second reason why people get stuck is even worse because it's a really bad habit. And if you don't kick this habit early on in your business, it's very hard to kick down the line. And that's doing all the work yourself. Here's the thing, most of us come
4:16 Speaker 00 from a job. I came from a job, I was an educator, I was a teacher for 10 Years and in a job, you get rewarded for doing more. So when you hit that 10K a month mark in your business, we just start to think, I just need to work harder. I need to do more and then I'll grow. This is the wrong mindset. You don't need to ask yourself, how do I do more? You need to start asking yourself, who can do this for me? The how versus who mentality is the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur. And that's just the bottom line. Business owners, entrepreneurs, they understand that they're building an asset and they want to
4:58 Speaker 00 eventually not do any work and let the asset make the money itself. And this is why you have to start very early on in your business, learning how to get somebody else to do the work other than you. Don't worry. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to do this. I'm even going to show you who your first hire should be, what they should be doing, all that stuff. But the mindset is more important because if you don't get out of this mindset of, I gotta do it, I gotta figure it out, I gotta make it happen. You're never going to grow big. You're never actually going to get out of this rat race. You're going to be self-employed instead of building a business that earns a living, earns wealth for you for the long term. You want to start building an asset.
5:40 Speaker 00 And the best way I can illustrate this is with an analogy, with an example. One of the best ways to understand this and shift your mind is to think of your business like a basketball team. Okay. Think of your favorite basketball team. Let's say it's the Chicago Bulls in the 90s or something like that. When you're just starting your business, you're in stage one. And in stage one, you are the star player. In the beginning, you're doing everything, right? You're playing offense, you're playing defense, you're running plays, you're scoring, you're doing everything you can to win. You're like Michael Jordan, right? You're all over the place. You're on the court, you're hustling hard. And this is fine when you're starting out because you've got to start kicking up some dust and make something happen, create something out of thin air is going to require
6:23 Speaker 00 that kind of effort. But quickly, when you start making some money and your business starts becoming a valid business, you validate Your idea and your product and you know, you're around that 10K mark, you gotta get off the court. Right. You gotta start becoming the coach, which is stage two. Okay. Stage two is to become the coach. So as soon as possible, you need to stop seeing yourself as the star player. You need to start seeing yourself as the coach. And the coach isn't allowed to play on the court. Right. They have to create the game plan. They have to put the right players together. They have to put them in the right position. They have to guide the team to victory. Right. That's what a coach does. And one of the best pieces of advice I got from a coach of mine, Ayman Abdullah, was try to learn to be allergic to work.
7:04 Speaker 00 I know that sounds really weird because we're all hard workers as entrepreneurs, but this concept of if I can't work, how do I make this happen? If everybody else has to do the labor, how do I still build a business that works and is profitable? Well, I gotta get other people to work. I gotta manage. I gotta coach. I gotta train. Eventually your team starts winning, your business starts winning and you start hitting stage three, which is the general manager. Right. You're the general manager. The GM builds the team. They focus on hiring, contracts, strategy. Right. They're looking for the right talent to scale their team's success. Right. The GM is thinking a little bit further ahead, not just this season, but next season, five seasons from now, 10 seasons from now.
7:45 Speaker 00 What are we going to be looking like? If we draft a player today, are they going to be a superstar in five years? Same thing for you as a general manager. Now you're hitting a different revenue mark in your business. You're starting to see your business as a vehicle that can help you win not only once, twice, but consistently. And you're less involved in the day to day. You're not sweating on the court. Right. You're not breaking clipboards and trying to motivate your team as a coach. You've got somebody else, a manager, doing that for you. You're orchestrating this and putting the right people in place and giving them the power to do their job right. Stage four is becoming the team owner. The team owner really sees the absolute biggest picture. Right.
8:28 Speaker 00 They invest in the team. They make sure the team works for them. Right. Not the other way around. The owner's role is to ensure the team is an asset that grows in value. Right. That every This business is worth more and more and more. And guess what? The team owner is sort of an investor. They see themselves as an investor in their own company. And they might have other companies they're investors in. They might be the majority or the 100% stake investor. But the point here is that they're totally removed from the day to day operations. And they're really just all about vision and strategy for growth. So this was all to say and to illustrate, if you want to break through the $10,000 a month mark,
9:10 Speaker 00 you need to stop playing and start building your team. Now, I understand that you can't make five hires right now to replace all the things you do right now. You know, you're only making $10,000 a month in revenue. Totally get that, but doesn't mean we don't do anything at all. We take the first step and make our first hire. And this first hire is critical because we want to offload as much time intensive tasks that we do that don't make us money, that don't directly impact revenue. Today's episode is supported by Rosetta Stone. I absolutely love Rosetta Stone because it's helping me learn Italian faster than I can ever imagine. Why do I want to learn Italian? Well, who doesn't love Italy?
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10:36 Speaker 00 Just the other day, she asked me, when are you traveling? And I said, dopo domani mattina, which means after tomorrow morning. She was incredibly impressed I was able to answer in Italian. How could you put a price tag on a happy mother in law? If you want to take your language skills to the next level, Don't wait to try Rosetta Stone Sapphire. The $100 ratio listeners can get 20% off the Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when they sign up today. This gets you access to Rosetta Stone Sapphire in 25 languages. The holidays are the season business owners get pulled in six directions. More calls, more requests, more chances for things to slip through the cracks. Hoping you catch it all isn't a plan. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelt Q U O. The business phone built so you never miss a call or a customer.
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12:06 Speaker 00 So let's start with step one, which is to make your first hire. And I call this hire a virtual assistant. They may be not virtual, they might be local to you, an assistant, administrative assistant, whatever you want to call it. But at the end of the day, you want somebody that can do a lot of administrative tasks that you can just offload off your plate. So what could a virtual assistant handle? They can handle things like email management, scheduling, invoicing, customer support, any kind of simple website management, scheduling blog posts, scheduling podcast episodes, uploading videos to YouTube, even maybe editing, some short editing that you need, social media management, on and on and on. These things take a lot of your time right now. Imagine not having to do that anymore.
12:51 Speaker 00 These tasks don't really directly make you money, but they eat up a lot of your time. So most importantly, when you offload these tasks. You now are free to focus on revenue generating activities like sales, marketing and product development. So your first hire shouldn't be you, actually, because this is a low-cost, high-value hire, because this person alone might allow you to double your revenue and allow you then to pay yourself. So as an action step, hire a VA, okay? You don't even need a full-time one to start with. They can start part-time and then go full-time, like 10 to 20 hours a week. They can start small and you can scale with them as
13:32 Speaker 00 they start learning all the things they need to do. A part-time VA can start at $500 US dollars a month. One of my favorite job sites to find VAs in the Philippines is onlinejobs.ph. Really good talent to be found there. And in my experience, because I've made a lot of hires through that site, overall, very hardworking people that are ready to learn and ready to go. Now, word of warning, because I know a lot of you right now are thinking right now, I'm gonna make this hire, this is gonna be very time-consuming, because I have to train this person and show them how to do it, it's just faster for me to do it. Time out, time out, time out. All this thinking you're talking about right now, okay? This is dangerous, because this is gonna stop you from growing. By
14:14 Speaker 00 the way, you hiring somebody and training them, this is business, okay? This is what building and growing a business is all about, is recruitment, is training, is coaching, is building systems. So you documenting the training, documenting what they're doing, the standard operating procedures, the SOPs. This is what's building value in your business. This is what entrepreneurs do. What you're talking about, I don't want to hire a VA, I want to do it myself, this is what employees do. So I'm telling you right now, if this is what you prefer, and you just want to do it yourself, just quit right now. I'm telling you right now, just go back to your job, because you're gonna earn more. You're gonna earn more and have less risk and less responsibility by just being an employee. And there's nothing wrong with being an employee, it's fantastic, especially if you
14:58 Speaker 00 enjoy it, love. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, and you want to build wealth, this is what it's gonna take. It's gonna take you breaking this mentality and saying, okay, yes, it's time-consuming for me to train them, but once I train them- Once, then it's easy for me then to get the next person in and the next person in and next person in. And one of the biggest easiest hacks you could do is when you're training them, you could just do a screen recorder on your computer, what tasks you want them to do one by one. Get them to create a documentation, a document on Google Docs to document the steps of that procedure. You check that document, you check the procedure, and then you tell them, okay, go ahead and do the task. And they do the task based on the right procedure. Guess what? Next time around, you're going to get them to do the documentation.
15:41 Speaker 00 You shoot them the video, they're going to then write the documentation, you check the documentation, all good, go do the task over and over and over. It might take twice as long for you to get the tasks on now, but once you do that once, that's it. Forever, they're going to be doing it. All right, time back in, had to just get that out there. Step two, let's focus on revenue generating tasks. Okay, once you have your VA that clears all your busy work off your plate, now you can focus on tasks that drive growth. This is tasks like sales and marketing. This means double downing on your best performing sales channels, whether it's email marketing, content creation, maybe it's webinars. Focus on bringing in more revenue. This should be the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning. How do I make more money?
16:25 Speaker 00 That's what you do as you're the leader of the business. Number two, improving your product or service. The better your products, the happier customers, right? The more referrals you get and the higher prices you can command. Okay, so spend time refining your offer, refining your product or service. What's the third thing you need to work on now that you have some free time because the VA is taking so much off your plate after you've trained them, right? Raising your prices. If you're stuck at 10K, chances are your prices don't reflect the value you provide. Okay, and as your business improves, as you improve, as you improve your product, as you improve your service, the price should go up because now you're offering more, there's more value, therefore you can charge more.
17:10 Speaker 00 One of the first businesses I had when I was a full-time entrepreneur back in 2012 was a business consulting firm where I built websites for people and I was able to create these websites for bloggers. Influencers, e-commerce businesses. And every time I had a client, I would get better and better at building websites. So I could command more for the gig, for the job. So every time I got a new client, I started to increase my prices by 50%. And I just kept on doing this until somebody would say no. And when they said no, I knew, okay, I hit my limit. That's fine. We're not for each other. I'll kick it back a little bit the next time I have a client until I get better again. So don't forget, your job now is to focus on revenue generating tasks.
17:53 Speaker 00 Stop being busy and start being productive. Next, step three, change your mindset. Okay, this all works here. This all happens up here first. The hardest shift is your thinking. This is what I've been trying to do this whole lesson, this whole episode. You need to stop seeing yourself as an employee in your own business. You're not self-employed, okay? You're starting to act like a CEO. This is what you do now. So what does this mean? It means you're not a doer, you're a leader, right? I know we have this badge. I've had that badge a long time. I'm a doer, I'm a hard worker, no one can outwork me. But that's very deadly because that's not sustainable. What you need to start doing, once you've got some traction, you got some revenue,
18:37 Speaker 00 is start transitioning into a leader. You build systems, you hire great people, you set the strategy for growth. Here's a quick tip when it comes to that. Every time you're about to do a task, ask yourself, could someone else do this for me? If the answer is yes, delegate it. I do this to the day. If I'm doing something or I'm about to enter a new project, I first ask myself, who can do this for me? Where I can just manage and just say, yep, change this to this. This is my opinion, this is my thoughts. But the bulk of the work, 90% of the work, 95% of the work is done by somebody else. To prove this point, let me give you an example. I built websites for a living. Like I mentioned to you before, that's what I did in my business consulting firm. When we just did a redesign for the $100 MBA, I could have easily said, I can do that.
19:22 Speaker 00 I've done that before. I'm a professional web developer. Nope, that's not who I am. I'm an entrepreneur. I don't do it myself. I find people that are better than me to do it. I got a designer who's world-class, Rafal, love you, man. I got Sonny, amazing engineer and developer. He's worked with me for years. They both worked together and they built out the site. They do all the technical stuff. I just look over it. I like this, change this, that looks great. It's incredible. I can then focus on making money for the business. I don't have to go and tinker with the website. That is not who I am. I find the best to do the best work for my business. Step four, reinvest in growth. The reason why you're stuck at 10K is because you're taking everything out of the business, right?
20:07 Speaker 00 You gotta stop and you gotta start reinvesting in your business. And that starts with that first hire, the VA, right? Then you gotta start investing in some better tools or systems to increase your efficiency, right? Maybe invest in marketing to attract more customers. Not maybe, you should. I really believe that marketing should be the majority of your budget, if not all your budget, once you have a great product. Because if people don't know you exist, you don't exist. And the best way I could put this in a succinct sentence is treat your business like an asset, not a job. Listen, hitting 10K a month is a huge milestone. A lot of people don't do it, but it's just the beginning. If you're stuck, remember, stop trying to do everything yourself.
20:48 Speaker 00 Hire a VA to offload those low-value, time-intensive tasks. Focus on revenue generating activities like sales, marketing, and product development. And shift your mindset from star player to coach to GM to eventually the team owner. This is how you break through that 10K a month ceiling and set your business up for long-term success. Thanks for tuning into the $100 MBA Show. If you want more tools to scale your business, make sure you check out our over 2,500 business lessons that we have in our archives. We've been doing this for a while, guys, 10 years of the $100 MBA Show. So check out our website at 100mba.net. Or better yet, just subscribe to the show, whether you're listening on Spotify or Apple or any podcast app, or you're watching on YouTube.
21:32 Speaker 00 Hit that subscribe button and you get our next episode automatically. Remember, we publish every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to make sure we help you grow that business you want. I'll see you in the next episode.
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