When it comes to the question of how to become a millionaire, there are a million tips floating around out there for how to make it happen…and a million misconceptions muddling up the waters. So today, I really want to shed some light on what it actually takes to grow your business to a million dollars. First, let’s take a peek at some statistics…

The Numbers Involved in Becoming a Millionaire

If you start looking at the actual stats around becoming a millionaire, only 9% of small business owners in the US ever make a million dollars. 40% of them are not even profitable—86% of small business owners don’t make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, 19% of small business owners work more than 60 hours a week, 82% of small business owners fail because of cash flow, and 50% of small businesses don’t even make it past the five-year mark.

Clearly there are plenty of stumbling blocks on the path to becoming a millionaire, and these blocks are breaking small business owners, making it impossible for them to reach their goals. So how can you avoid this?

The Strategy for Becoming a Millionaire

Becoming a millionaire is one of the hardest milestones to reach in your business. But there are some very strategic things that you can do along the way that I want to walk you through today so that you can become a millionaire faster. Hopefully, this will help you really understand where you are in the process so you know where to focus your energy and you’re not wasting time spinning your wheels or chasing shiny objects.

My Qualifications

You might be wondering who I am, and why I’m qualified to even talk about this subject. Here in my company, my team and I help multi-six-figure businesses really break through and hit the one-million mark with a done-for-you service. We also work with multi-seven-figure businesses, people who have already broken through that million-dollar mark, and we help them scale even further.

I’ve also built and sold five businesses starting from scratch. I was able to write them up to seven figures and sell several of those businesses, and as far as my own business, we are quickly growing this company and have already blown past the seven-figure mark ourselves. I now know this process intimately.

The biggest trap I see business owners fall into on the way to becoming a millionaire is focusing on the wrong thing at the wrong time. Oftentimes, people don’t really know where to focus their attention depending on where they are in business. Luckily, I’m here today to walk you through what you need to do at each stage in your business and where to focus your energy. Let me take you through the five stages of growing your business and becoming a millionaire.

The 5 Stages From Zero to One Million

Dream-Up

The very first stage of becoming a millionaire is the Dream-Up Stage. The Dream-Up Stage is exactly what it sounds like: this is where you are dreaming up your business. You’re sitting between zero to about $50,000 or so. You’re mostly not making any money. You’re just getting started. You have a vision and you’re excited about creating something, but you’re not entirely sure what it’s going to look like.

The number one thing that you want to focus on in the Dream-Up Stage is who you want to work with. Who’s your ideal audience? Who are your ideal clients? What are you going to offer them? What is the problem that you plan to solve for them? Why does it matter to them?

This stage of becoming a millionaire is all about the person that you are actually looking to serve, not about you. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes that people make in the Dream-Up Stage; they make it all about them rather than stepping into the shoes of the people they’re looking to serve. You really want to understand what makes your audience tick here. If you can figure that out and really start hitting those pain points in your marketing strategy, you can start creating some momentum in the Dream-Up Stage.

Startup

Once you work your way past the Dream-Up Stage and you’ve figured out a little bit about the who, what, and why of your messaging, you can enter the Startup Stage. In this stage of becoming a millionaire, you are putting in ten parts effort and receiving one part return. Startup is all about trial and error. It’s about throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what’s going to stick. You’re going to test a lot of different things, and it’s probably going to feel like you’re constantly taking one step forward and two steps back, but this is a necessary stage of becoming a millionaire to go through. You need to figure out what is actually going to work for you, and you don’t really know until you try…and yes, sometimes fail. But eventually, you’ll figure out what gives your company the most success.

Now, I say to try a lot of things in this stage of becoming a millionaire, but I also say you should hire a mentor. This is when you want to get into a group-coaching program where somebody can really lay out business fundamentals for you. You need someone who can help you understand the fundamental building blocks of business. There are clear principles that you want to follow in this stage that will really help you to scale up your business and get it to the next level, and a mentor can help you get there.

The Startup Stage is around $50,000 to about $250,000. So unless you make it over a quarter million dollars, you’re still in the Startup Stage.

Besides hiring a mentor in order to educate yourself, in this stage of becoming a millionaire, you really want to focus on how to educate your audience about what it is that you do and who you are. You want to figure out how to position yourself in the marketplace; you need to look at the channels of communication you’re going to utilize and how to build a community where you can bolster that trust factor.

When you’re first communicating out into the world, only 1% of the people that you connect with that hear your message will be ready to buy right now. So if you don’t have a way of nurturing the other 99%, you are literally wasting your energy and time. 99% of that is being wasted because you don’t have a way of capturing those leads, nurturing them up, and moving them from skeptical to curious to committed. How do you map that out for your ideal audience and really guide them through this process? That’s what the Startup Stage is for.

Scale-Up

The next stage of becoming a millionaire is the Scale-Up Stage. This stage is when you begin moving from $250,000 to about $500,000. This is really the time when your business is ready to be scaled. You’ve figured out the messaging, you’ve figured out the channels you need to utilize to bring people in, you have an idea of what the marketing is going to look like, and now you’re really looking at the Scale-Up. This stage of becoming a millionaire is really about simplifying your systems: what kind of automations and technology do you need to put in place to help smooth out your workflow? Most people try to scale through the business model that they started off with in their business, but once you get into $250,000 to $500,000, things are inevitably going to speed up.

You’re going to have a lot more clients. There are going to be a lot more moving pieces. And if you don’t have processes and systems and workflows in place, things are going to start falling apart and it’s going to be really hard to keep the momentum of growth going.

The really cool thing about the Scale-Up Stage is that because of the momentum you built in the Startup Stage, you now get to flip the ratio of return. So now it’s one part effort, ten parts return. But the biggest thing I see that really trips people up here is that they don’t have the processes in place to actually support the growth that happens.

To avoid this, when you’re in the Startup Stage, you want to look at what would happen if you grew your business by ten right then. What would break first?

Once you have that answer, you know the things that you need to start fixing in your business in the Startup Stage so that once you get to the Scale-Up Stage, things are a little bit easier to adjust.

Lead-Up

Stage number four of becoming a millionaire is the Lead-Up stage, which is all about liberating you as the CEO.

This is about getting the right support as far as building the right team, but it’s also about finding someone to mentor you who can look over your shoulder and help you out.

Now, at this level, I do not recommend a group coaching program or mastermind. I recommend that you get one-on-one support. The reason for that is this: there are a lot of things that you are already doing really, really well in these stages. You’ve already figured some things out in earlier stages of becoming a millionaire, so now it’s more about tweaking. It’s about looking at what you need to optimize in your business, and that requires somebody to be very strategic. If you’re interested in seeing how close you are to actually scaling to one million, I highly recommend that you take the seven figure scalability assessment that we have. You can find that on our website, the Seven Figure Freedom Club.  It will tell you how close your business is to scaling into the seven figures, and it will tell you exactly where to focus your attention as you are scaling up.

Rock-On

The last stage is the Rock-On Stage. This is the stage of becoming a millionaire where you’re sitting between $750,000 to one million. Now you’re stepping into a mentoring position yourself.

You’re creating a legacy. You’re developing more freedom for yourself, and you’re becoming a master of leading this business.

In this stage, your team should be the ones driving your growth. As the CEO, you are the driver of the vision and keeping your team accountable to that vision. Those are the only two things you as the CEO should be responsible for at this stage of becoming a millionaire.

The True Journey to 7 Figure Freedom

One of the hardest things about growing from zero to one million is actually the personal journey that we as visionary CEOs have to move through to make it happen. You have to say, “I’m going to do whatever it takes.” You have to realize that yes, it’s going to be hard, but it’s going to be worth it. But you also need to do what you need to do in order to fuel yourself through this journey. What kind of support do you need as the CEO to make this easier on you? You need to be able to ask for support and have that available, or this will never happen.

If you want to make sure you never miss an episode, come follow the 7 Figure Freedom Podcast on Spotify, subscribe on Google, or head over to Apple Podcasts. In the meantime, I’d love to connect with you over on Instagram or in the 7 Figure Freedom Club Facebook group so we can chat about what you got out of this episode!

Are you wondering if you’re ready to take the next step in your business? Curious about whether you’re a good fit for our services? Take the free business assessment quiz to find out! And if you want to learn more, you can visit my website or schedule a call with me today. I can’t wait to hear from you!