How to Make your First Million Dollars
20:11 Share

So pretty much every business I've ever started that I've given a good go at for over a year has gone past a million dollars. So I think I got a good track record to teach this. And obviously, I've got a couple of companies now to 10 million. And hopefully, if you're listening to me in five years, I'll be able to say I've got a couple of companies past 100 million. But let's talk about what it takes to hit that first million, right?

- My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life.

Hey guys, what's up? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today I'm going to talk about making your first million dollars. And I'm excited to talk about this topic because it's always the hardest, right? And people talk about making your first sales the hardest. I think making your first million is the hardest. And I really want to use this podcast episode to...

hopefully empower you if you're trying to make your first million. And if you've already made your first million, I'm going to cover key points and areas of focus that you've probably not optimized or lost sight of that are going to make you hopefully many more millions, right? So it's going to be a great episode for any one of you, whether you're making your first million or trying to make a few more million, wherever you are on your journey. I've, you know, built about 10 companies and I think about eight or nine of them, a couple of them,

a newer with partners or new side businesses, but I think eight or nine of them have passed a million dollars. So pretty much every business I've ever started that I've given a good go at for over a year has gone past a million dollars. So I think I got a good...

hopefully track record to teach this. And obviously, I've got a couple of companies now to 10 million. And hopefully, if you're listening to me in five years, I'll be able to say I've got a couple of companies past 100 million. But let's talk about what it takes to hit that first million, right? And what you really need to focus on. And what's funny before I go into the tactics strategies, I'm a big mindset guy and talk about it a lot. And I didn't used to be. It's just kind of

realization over time how important it is. What's funny is the first million seems so big, right? It seems so daunting. It seems so hard. And I mean this in a non-arrogant way now, but because I've done it so many times, it's not important to me, not exciting. And it's kind of easy, right? But obviously to me, you know, going to a hundred mil is hard and seems a long way away. But, you know, if I was sat with Grant Cardone here,

He's had several companies go past that now, or at least a couple, I think, and he'd probably, or Elon Musk, right, or someone that's had multiple go to, you know, past 100 mil would probably kind of say, yeah, that's not too hard. The hundred to the billion is hard. So what I'm, and why I'm telling you that is everything is conceptualized to where you are, right? And what you've done before and the four minute mile rule that I often talk about on this show, a couple of episodes back, I did a whole episode on this.

And I want you to remember that as we go through this. And I want you to keep remembering and reminding yourself of that because a million is not hard, guys. OK, a million shouldn't seem so daunting and so far away. But it does because you've just never done it. Go and Google, pull up your phone right now or laptop.

how many million dollar businesses exist or how many millionaires there are. There's like probably hundreds of thousands or millions, right? So it's not that hard. There's a lot of people way more stupid than you are, less intelligent, less driven that have made a million dollars. And it's just because they stayed consistent or they figured out a good idea or they got lucky or they did it for 20 years, right? Whatever the reason. Now, don't get me wrong. There's tons of amazing entrepreneurs that are super smart, of course, but they're not

But my point is you can do it, right? And it's not that hard. And it's only seems far away and hard because you've not got there. And if you want to learn more about kind of that mindset side of it, go a couple of episodes back. And I teach on that just for like 20 minutes straight and understanding the stepping stones to getting there from a mindset standpoint is equally as important as what I'm going to talk today from a tactical strategy standpoint. Okay.

So first thing when it comes to let's get to a million dollars. If I was starting a new business today and I said, let's go to a million dollars.

The first thing I'm thinking about is the products and the offer, right? I always, you know, it's kind of like, you don't want to be polishing a turd, that famous old saying. It's so much easier if I can find like a really cool product, a really cool offer, a really cool business model, right? And when I'm looking at partnerships or new companies, sometimes it's like a passion project. Sometimes it's what's synergistic to what my

current companies are doing. But a lot of the time it's, is this like a cool trending offer? When I say offer, I say product, right? Service, whatever you want to classify it as. So try and find that, okay? Think about that. Spend time on that. Spend research on that. And I think I have another podcast a while ago

And I definitely have content on this on like what makes an irresistible offer and an irresistible product. Go back and listen to that. Right. And that's a good reason to make sure you are subscribed because you're going to get those notifications. So if you haven't done that, please go do that, too. So focus on the products and offer first. Right. Focus on the products and offer first. Find something that's good because everything.

If you don't and you jump into it and it's not that great, it's not that sexy, it's not that cool, it doesn't grab attention, it's not that unique, you're going to just have an uphill battle the whole time, okay? And maybe that's why you're failing right now. Or maybe you've got to that million, but it was tough and slow. And it's because you're always like, it's like kind of trying to...

ride a bike with one of the back brakes on the wheel, right? It's not fun. It's tough. It's slow. It's exhausting. And I found that the businesses where they offer some products aren't good. It feels like that. And then the businesses where it's a good product and offer a market fit, it's like going down, riding a bike downhill, right? You just go over the

the bump and the horizon and then you just kind of get it going and you're just flowing downhill and it's nice and it's the wind's blowing and it's easy your legs are resting

when you've got a great view, that's how, you know, a good business should be. Now, don't get me wrong. There's always going to be ups and downs of business. It's not just one downward hill, at least that I know of, one downward hill momentum the whole time. But you want to set yourself up on a bike ride where there's a lot of downhills, right? Versus don't set yourself up where most of your business is climbing a mountain with no downhills, right? You're going to get tired, bored, exhausted. Maybe you like climbing a mountain, you're going to pass out and quit.

So focus products and offer first, spend time, research and go listen to some of my other stuff to really like dive deeper into that. I don't want to spend all of this podcast on it.

The next thing that's really important if you want to go to a million dollars is figuring out how to probably sell more than one thing. There are some businesses where you just like if you've got this amazing, cool, unique product, you can just sell a million dollars worth of it for sure. But most of the time, most of you listening, you're going to want an array of products. OK, not too many. There's a balance like everything in life. But you're going to want a few different products that you can kind of create an ecosystem of.

So whatever you decide is your main product, okay? So I'm going to sell watches, okay? Well, I got my wrist here. I'm going to sell watches. Well, what is a bit of an ecosystem around watches? Well, I'm going to sell bracelets, necklaces. I'm going to sell different types of watches. I'm going to sell watch stands, watch cases, right? So think about it. That's an ecosystem now. Why is that important? Well, the hardest part of...

which I'm going to talk about in a second and I talk about all the time is what? Getting sales, attracting customers and eyeballs and attention, right? And if you're going to work really hard to create all these eyeballs and all this attention, blah, blah, blah, well, it's very important that hard work goes to good use. Now, it's not good use just selling one watch.

right? What's better use is you sell one watch from all that hard work and then they also buy another watch and they buy a necklace and they buy a nice display case for their watch and maybe they join your watch club and they come back and buy a new watch every three months, right?

Right? Same energy, time and effort to get the customer to the website, to promote it, right? And now you're going to get 10 times more from that customer than just buying one single watch. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode, I'm going to interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor. I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests. And I want one thing in return.

what I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests. It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business, and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks,

the knowledge and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor, if you've got any amount of value from today's episode so far, or any previous episode or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me if you hit a five star review, give us your feedback on the show, the episodes,

and subscribe and download. Plus, if you do that and send me a screenshot on Instagram at RudyMoreLife, I will send you a bunch of my free training, marketing courses, sales courses worth $499. Yes, $500 worth of courses for a simple 30-second review. It would mean the world to me. Send me that screenshot. I would love for you to leave that review and I would have

appreciate it very, very much so we can keep growing this show and make it awesome. So let's get back into the episode. I appreciate you guys. And let's dive back in. Makes sense. So that's why we need that product ecosystem. And I wish I'd learned this earlier. When I first started, I just sold one product and I did, in fact, make a million dollars from that product. But once I added in more products, I went from one million to three million.

with not a whole bunch of change. I didn't need more staff really, didn't need to change much. I didn't change my day-to-day life and I jumped my revenue significantly 'cause I had done the hard work but I wasn't reaping all the rewards. So make sure you reap all the rewards and have that ascension, right? It's called ascension or an ecosystem of product ranges.

So next part, I'm not going to spend long on this because I have so much content on it, but it is the customer acquisition. It's the sales and the marketing side. I couldn't complete this episode without mentioning it. So I'm not going to bore you about it because you've probably heard me talk about it 10 times before. If you've not, go back through some of my podcast episodes and some of my content. I have literally entire courses for $50 or $100, right? Where you can literally learn all about customer acquisition and the front end sales and

It's what I'm very famous for. It's what I've been known for many, many years. I've done for 10 years. I've become a master at it. And I learned in my early 20s and I listened to lots of experts and I chose to become a master at that because I thought that was like the hidden skill, right? I was like, if I can master this,

I become unstoppable in any business. And it's kind of true, right? That's why I've built eight or nine companies to a million dollars now and by the age of 30 or 31, because I've mastered that skill. And if you look at Grant Cardone, he had the same idea, right? He goes, if I, and his, I was a little more on the marketing side, he's a little more on the sales side, but he was like, if I can get great at sales, I can sell anything. And whatever I go into, I can sell and I can make a lot of money selling, right? So he had that same concept.

So, and obviously mine was just a little different. So you've got to get good at the front end sales. You've got to figure out how do I sell? How do I sell this product consistently? And obviously there's lots of ways. There's social media, there's podcasts, there's Facebook ads, there's Google ads, there's any ad platform, there's opening a local store, there's affiliates, there's going on Reddit forums, there's going on Facebook groups, there's hiring sales reps and cold calling. There's so many ways to sell your product. But

But if you look at most companies starting out, they generally will do social media, they'll do paid ads, they might do giveaways, that sort of stuff. I'm obviously a paid ads guy. I like to start with paid ads. I think it's the quickest way to scale. And I mean, if you can figure it out, then you've got infinite scale, much faster scale. Obviously, organic content is great. But if you have no followers, then you're not going to get that many purchases, right?

Obviously, bringing in influencers and affiliates and all that stuff's great. Obviously, email is great. But if you have no email list, well, then you're going to have to spend money on ads to grow an email list. So everything in my eyes kind of boils down to paid ads at some degree. So figure out the acquisition strategy, figure out the ad platform you're going to launch with. It could be Facebook. It could be YouTube. It could be Snapchat. It could be TikTok.

There's a few to choose from. Generally, I like Facebook the most. YouTube's great, but it takes a lot of video work and it doesn't fit every product. Google's great. If you've got more unique products, people are searching for it. TikTok's getting better and Snapchat, if they're younger demographics, cheaper products, blah, blah, blah. So plenty of content from me on that stuff.

So we've talked about right product, good product market fit, great offer that stands out. We've talked about the ecosystem, creating a few products, right? We've talked about getting paid acquisition strategies in place. Next, after that, to make your first million, I would look at secondary revenue sources, right? And what I mean by that is there's so many more ways to

improve your sales, right? So you might have your Shopify page or your ClickFunnels page or your landing page or whatever you're sending people to. You might be sending people to DMs where you're having a messenger team. You might be sending them to a ring a phone number and you've got a phone team, whatever it is, right? Whatever it is,

there's a lot of ways to make more revenue. You probably can get to a million dollars with just those three, but I'm going to talk about secondary revenue strategies, which is where you go, okay, my first thing's ticking away well, but if I was to add this, it would add another 20, 30, 40 grand a month, and that can help boost it and get you past that million. So that might be getting on podcasts, that might be speaking on stages, that might be

really focusing on organic traffic now that paid traffic's going. It might go, "Well, Facebook's working well, but I'm going to go onto YouTube ads now." So it might be expansion of ad platform. It might be influencer marketing. So you're now really focusing on your Facebook ads are ticking away and now you're going to focus on influencer marketing and try and get 20, 30, 40, 50K of revenue there.

It might be building an email list and starting to do email and doing email blasts and getting people to promote you as an affiliate and you're paying them. So you see there's all these secondary ways of making revenue. Okay, it might be making a new funnel. You have a single landing page. Now you're going to do a 10 minute video that sells the product too. It might be running ads on Hulu and streaming platforms. So secondary revenue platforms. So

there's not a right way there's like hey this is what i'm already doing it's working really well and then this is the most logical sensible proven second or third solution that could boost what i'm doing over here now for many of you you can probably just hit one channel if it's really a great fit and it's a scalable product and make a million from that but for some of you

You might need to add that second or third one in if you're in a smaller niche or you don't know how to scale your ads or you're scared to spend as much on one platform. There's many reasons. So second revenue channel is important. OK, and then the last thing to make a million dollars is all like the ability to scale from a

probably a mindset and systems and maybe a bit of a staff and logistics standpoint because if you just do those four things i've given you you've got the knee you've got the marketing tools and all the things you need to make a million the only thing that's going to stop you and i've had you know helped hundreds of members thousands of clients by now

grow their businesses and they've all got different results. And some have gone past a million, some have gone past 10 million. I've helped a hundred million dollar companies. I've helped celebrities, billion dollar companies, and I've helped lots of startups. And I've had lots of people that don't do what I say and don't go anywhere. So when you look at these different thousand clients,

The ones that go to a million, they do what I just said, but they really commit and they start to get aggressive. It's not good enough to just start a few ads and leave them at $50 a day. And that's like a mindset thing, an ability to spend money, to reinvest, to get more aggressive.

The next thing is the logistics and operations. They make sure inventory is sorted out. They're organized. They have good financial tracking. They make sure they're ordering new products on time. They make sure they're not providing too many services and they look back a year later and they made no money because they were given too many extra bonuses and services. Maybe they're an agency.

and now they have no margin. So it's all that kind of accessory stuff that becomes slightly more important as you grow. So hiring a couple of good team members, not trying to do it all yourself, having a good system in place to scale, having the right mindset to keep investing and keep pushing and spend money to make money. Okay. These things become important, good financial tracking. So the fifth part and final part that I'm going to finish on today

is all the boring stuff, okay? Having the mindset, the systems, the operations in place, the fulfillment, the logistics, the customer service, the data tracking, and the financial tracking in place. And that will support all the aggressive marketing and sales that you're doing on the front end and everything I discussed earlier. If you can do all of that,

That is the blueprint. If you want to go type out those four or five main things and the subcategories in the last section, I promise you if you wake up and you focus on that every day and you get a great product, you figure out a great way to sell it consistently. One ad platform is probably the best place to start for most of you. And then you figure out a backup one or a second or third one to support it. And then you just get and you have an ecosystem, right? Which was the

part that's really important to make the most of the money you're spending and all the traffic you're driving to the website. And then finally, you take care of all the boring stuff and you can hire people to do this. You can hire an operations manager and say, hey, these are the seven things Rudy said I need to get in place. If you suck at operations and logistics and boring stuff,

Hire a good COO. Well, they're probably not a COO at this level. They're like an operations manager. Say, do you have experience in all of these for an online business or whatever your business is? Okay, great. Show me you've done all of these. Okay, great. Okay, you want 80 grand a year? Okay, great. As long as you can do all these seven things, I'll pay you that. But I need to see them all done in the next, you know, start to be done in the next 30, 60, 90 days. And you hire someone to do all that and you can focus on the other three or four things.

and voila, hopefully you can scale and hit that first million dollars. And then you just scale from there and repeat the cycle. So I hope that helped. I hope that gave you a bit of a step-by-step framework

I try and simplify things. Nothing crazy sexy. I'm not going to try and sell you on this one secret that you've got to pay me money to learn. That is the foundations of business. That's what I've done continuously. That's what every smart business, successful business owner that's made many millions will tell you. And that's what it takes. Now you just got to go do it and stay consistent. And as always.

Keep living the red life. Until next time, guys. Thank you for today. I'm excited for you guys to hit your first million, hopefully. Hit me up. Keep me updated of your progress. Let me know how you're doing. And hopefully this episode helps. Instagram me if it did and you learn a few things. And until next time, I'll see you soon. Take care.