Warum Firmen bei 1 bis 3 Millionen Umsatz stecken bleiben

0:00Unternehmer/Gast I think the hardest time I we call this the swamp at acquisition.com, but it's usually between like one and three million is the swamp. And I think there's a numbers reason for why it's such a painful period for entrepreneurs. Let's say 1 million for simple math. If you have a million dollar business, let's say that you have 20% margins. So that means you're making $200,000 a year in profit. For you to get an A player, it's probably going to cost you 100% of your profit to get that A player. And so you'll have what appears to be an impossible choice. You'll have, do I sacrifice basically 100% of my profit to bring this person in or do I work another six hours a day [laughter] to to do the job that this person is doing?

0:45Both paths work. Both are painful and risky because the overworking yourself thing, you can get yourself through that hump and then now you're at maybe 3 or 4 million and that 20% is 800. You can you can spend 200. You still have cash flow. you can still live. The downside for the picking the person path is that what if you pick wrong? >> And this by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is why entrepreneurs get outsized returns is because we take on outside risk. And so this is the this is the job is that we have to be willing to make impossible choices. And the vast majority of choices for entrepreneurs in the business are impossible choices between two relatively bad scenarios because the rest of the choices aren't don't even feel like choices because they're obvious. Of course, we should call leads faster. Of course, we should follow up more. Of course, we should try and onboard faster. Okay, all these things are the obvious ones. But when you have, man, I'm trying to think of the ones that I'm not I'm not sure almost all the decisions that you get stuck with. And Elon says this really beautifully. He says um running a business is like staring out to the abyss and chewing glass.

1:54>> He said because uh the staring out to the abyss component of it is just the fact that this may never work and you're almost facing existential risk at all times to the business. And the eating glass component is that you will by nature of your role get funneled the worst problems in the business and the problems that no one else can solve. So it's one problems that people can't solve. to the worst ones [laughter] or that they don't want to solve and they suck. Yeah.

2:21>> And so you basically become a filter for the worst things. And that's why it feels like a fire every single day in the business because you're the only one who can make the tough call because no one else wants to choose between these two impossible choices. And you're like, why is it so hard? And the thing is is that it literally never stops being hard. It's that the currency that you pay for in the hardness changes. And so, you know, a lot of people have this envisionment of like the Rocky cut scene of like it must be hard for business.

2:47But I don't I don't think that's where the hardship comes. I think the hardship is that at every level of business, there's new sacrifices that you didn't know you were going to have to make. Because if it was just, oh, I have to work long hours. There's tons of people work long hours in their business and don't don't grow. And it's usually because they're unwilling to have a hard conversation. It's a different currency, right? They have to take on risk. It's a different currency. They have to um they have to they have to make some sort of bet, right, that they otherwise wouldn't have had to make. They have some sort of legal issue that they encounter. They have an employee who tries to sue them for some sort of mal whatever, right?

3:22All of a sudden you're like, "Wait, all of these things are happening and they happen on a regular basis and at each level you unlock new levels of glass [laughter] that you get to chew through." And so this is why like most entrepreneurs in my opinion don't actually quit. They fizzle. So it's not a big bang. Usually it's they just they stop seeking. So either they get content at the level that they're at and they just don't strive for more. Um and sometimes they say it just wasn't worth the trade. And I respect that. If you're like, you know what, I'm at a million dollars a year and I don't want anymore.

3:52Fine. You won. Congratulations. Like you won at life. Um but most of the times they don't really quit. They just stop trying and then they just either coast and or it just fizzles into into nothingness. And that's just my experience of having and I'm sure you've seen this having gone through like cycles of entrepreneur. It's like seasons. It's like, oh yeah, I came in through and even like in the media and influencer space, whatever. It's like there's a bunch of guys that 10 years ago, it's a different landscape now than it was 10 years ago. Some people adapted. Some of them were like, I don't like the they they just they just they weren't willing to chew the new glass, which is how do I learn Tik Tok? How do I learn? But man, blogs were so good.

4:28Alex It's like, yeah, and they're not anymore. I talked to an entrepreneur really massively many hundreds of millions a year in sales and he was like dude we were killing it on infomercials so TV and he's like we just you know we uh we just we really just have to crack YouTube and I'm thinking to myself like dude it's 2024 like what like you needed to crack YouTube 10 years ago and he had the resources to do it but it was just a different kind of hard and so most of the hard is on a level of uncertainty that that goes into it and almost certain immediate failure because the first thing you're going to do will probably not work and again it's the iterations of when you get into the new domain you have to transfer your generalized knowledge which is that as an entrepreneur I will know that this doesn't work probably because I only know four things about it and I need to know like 400 and so I will get my first shot and I need to get directionally correct and then just keep doing more of that. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so, I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate.

5:50And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this. and it works and it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free and so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you.