Growing Your Business: From Product-Market Fit to $1 Million Business

Introduction

Business and entrepreneurship, in my opinion, can be divided in 2 parts:

  • Pre product-market fit. I call this the “art” side of business.
  • Post product-market fit. I call this the “science” side of business.

Pre product-market fit is the “art” side of business. You’re unprofitable, validating your idea, testing the market, improving your solution and pivoting your business often. The phase where you’re constantly experimenting and everything is trial-and-error.

Post product-market fit is the “science” side of business. You’re profitable, have loyal customers, a proven solution, expanding your business and searching for your next growth driver. The phase where you’re making consistent progress toward a clear vision.

  • The former is unclear on the “what” but clear on the “how.”
  • The latter is clear on the “what” but unclear on the “how.”

Both phases are simple and straightforward but require consistent effort. They’re simple, but not easy.

In this guide I discuss the “what” to scale an already proven (and often profitable) business (aka post product-market fit) to 7 figures and beyond, with some examples of “how” you can do each step. 

(If your business does not have recurring customers or you’re still finding a market for your product/service, you’re better off reading my Starting Your Business guide.)

This is the do-it-yourself (DIY) guide to scaling I wish I had when I had reached this point.

I included a self-assessment and self-coaching section to help you identify the most suitable growth driver for your business, without requiring my (or any coach’s) help. 

But if you get stuck at any point and would like some assistance, I’d love to help. Helping you grow yourself, your business, bringing more value to the world and living a fulfilling life is what I live for.

I wish you a happy, fulfilling and successful life,

Jim

Business 101

Some core principles of what “doing business” means. I wrote this as a reminder to myself. I hope you find it useful too.

The essence of a sustainable business

  • Get prospects or leads into your business
  • Convert them to paying clients
  • Delight them so they return

The mindset of a sustainable business

  • Put clients’ need ahead of your own
  • Offer a benefit or advantage so powerful it’ll be irrational for them to choose anyone other than you. Caveat: it must be an outcome they desire.
  • Eliminate as much risk for the client as possible. Make it easier to say yes than no.

Increasing the success rate of a new business

  • Set up the business like you don’t need the money and it’ll likely come your way
    • You’re doing it out of love/obsession and in service of others
    • Care about your customers more than about yourself and you’ll do well
  • Start simple: teach somebody something this week
    • Find someone who will pay to learn something, meet him anywhere, and begin
  • Focus on existing customers, thrill them and they’ll tell everyone
    • “How can I best help you now?”
  • Ideas are a multiplier of execution
  • Do a premortem:
    • “If this company were to fail, why would it have happened?”
    • “What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?”

When do you have product-market fit

My rule of thumb: 10+ recurring clients with positive cash flow.

Assessments

Business stages – what to focus on

  1. Idea – Is this worth pursuing? What is my unfair advantage?
  2. Validation – Talking with customers
  3. Pre product-market fit – Iterate, iterate, iterate based on market signals. Niche down.
  4. Post product-market fit (have paying clients, but unprofitable) – Focus on distribution and margins.
  5. Profitable and want to scale – Improve marketing.
  6. $1 mln annual revenue and up – Expansion of the market and business model to scale exponentially.

Simple assessment

Before thinking of improving your business, you should be able to answer these 5 questions.

  • My industry is…
  • Our client is…
  • We sell them…
  • We market by…
  • My biggest issue/untapped opportunity is…

Marketing

An assessment focused specifically on a company’s marketing efforts I like to do with stage 4 and up businesses. Thank you Jay Abraham.

  1. How does your business sell and market? 
  2. What business strategy, model, and revenue approach do you use? 
  3. What/who do you target demographically? 
  4. What selling system and mechanism do you use (e.g., mailings, cold calls)? 
  5. What processes are part of that mechanism? 
  6. Are any of those processes an industry norm? 
  7. What have you tried in the past versus recently?

Detailed assessment

A more detailed business assessment I like to do with stage 4 and up businesses. Thank you Jay Abraham.

  1. What business are you currently in? 
  2. What’s the market you currently address/serve? 
  3. How are you reaching that market? 
  4. How many additional practical ways can you expand, contact, or access that market?
  5. What product{s) and/or service{s) can you sell? 
  6. What additional products/services can you add/offer? 
  7. How many can you create? 
  8. Where would you turn to find outside outsourced producers? 
  9. Who else has access to the same or related prospective buyers as you? 
  10. What is the marginal net worth/lifetime value of:
    1. The initial product you sell? 
    2. The next transaction? 
    3. Your total years of revenue?

Then:

  • Write down your assets and resources. 
  • Note the skills and abilities at your disposal (yours of your team). 
  • List your other assets, such as your sales force and your strategic relationships. 
  • List your available resources, such as equipment, space, and underutilized labour.

Thorough assessment

I use the below checklist with my own and clients’ businesses that have reached post product-market fit. Any business before that stage should only focus on reaching product-market fit.

The below list gives a good overview of the business’ state and a “quick and dirty” way to find areas of improvement. It’s even more thorough than the detailed assessment above.

I use this once or twice a year for businesses in stages 4 and 5 and monthly or quarterly for businesses in stage 6. The larger the business, the more frequent you want to run through this.

  1. Vision
  2. What the company does
  3. Who the company serves
  4. USP (Unique Selling Proposition) – what’s special about you that the client values?
  5. Market size
  6. Competitors
  7. Present situation (last year + Year-To-Date) – read my Business KPIs and Financials guide if any of this is new to you
    1. Financials
      1. Revenue
      2. Net profit
      3. Cost of goods sold
      4. Expenses
        1. Gross margin
        2. Net margin
    2. KPI
      1. Number of customers
      2. LTV (Lifetime Value)
      3. Churn (or retention) rate
        1. If not, the number of new customers
      4. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
      5. Referral rate
      6. Marketing
        1. Total spend
        2. Total impressions
        3. Conversion rate each step in the funnel
        4. CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions)
        5. CPA / CPC (Cost Per Action / Cost Per Click)
    3. Marketing and sales
      1. Acquisition channels
        1. Which acquisition channels are used? (see Marketing/Distribution channels below)
        2. What is the strongest acquisition channel?
        3. How are leads generated?
        4. What are the lead magnets?
        5. Is there a CRM software in place? (Does it make sense to have one?)
      2. Your offer (a simple scorecard to start with)
        1. Have a clear avatar? – who it’s for and who it’s not for
        2. Clear articulation of their struggles, desires and objections?
        3. Clear solution?
        4. Benefits of using the solution (educating) & illustrating their future situation (future-pacing)?
        5. Testimonials & (social) proof?
        6. Pricing options? (Stick to 3 or fewer)
        7. Any guarantees? (risk-reversal)
        8. Clear CTA (call-to-action)?
        9. Any bonuses? Is the “value” of those bonuses clearly mentioned?
      3. Retention and engagement channels
        1. Engagement: Which channels are used to engage with clients and prospects?
        2. Retention: Which owned channels are used to communicate with existing or past clients?
        3. Referral: How many referral systems are being run?
        4. Referral: Are clients treated like extended family and asked to refer their loved ones?
    4. Product, pricing and business model
      1. Value equation – dream outcome x likelihood / time delay x effort and sacrifice
        1. Which of these levers can most easily be improved?
        2. To what extent do we focus on improving [time delay] or [effort and sacrifice] over [dream outcome] or [likelihood]?
      2. Any pre-sell, post-sell, up-sell, down-sell, cross-sell options?
    5. Staff
      1. How many staff in total and how many FTEs?
      2. What does each staff member do?
      3. Are automation and outsourcing being maximized?
      4. Any joint ventures?
  8. Biggest opportunity and struggle
    1. What is the biggest opportunity to pursue? (more than 1? Reduce the list to 1. Focus.)
    2. Why was this not pursued before?
    3. What has changed to make its pursuit worthwhile now?
    4. What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?
    5. If this company were to fail, why would it have happened?
    6. Are all resources dedicated to capitalizing on the biggest opportunity and addressing the biggest weakness? If not, which changes need to be made?

Post product-market fit

Growing a business from post product-market fit (stage 4) to $1 million annual revenue and beyond (stage 6+) is a “science”: the playbook on “what” to do is quite straightforward. “How” to do it varies based on the industry and your circumstances.

I recommend:

  1. Going through the thorough assessment first. This helps you understand the state of your business (and its opportunities and struggles). If you don’t have an answer for each point, solve that first. We don’t want you to steer your ship (business) blindly.
  2. Implementing the below growth roadmap. I start with the lowest-hanging fruit, so implement/improve 1, then work your way down. Do 1 at a time. Every item on the growth roadmap can exponentially improve your business, if done well.

Growth roadmap

1. Strategy of Preeminence 

The below list is taken from legendary business consultant Jay Abraham’s book “The Sticking Point Solution.”

  1. Be a trusted, lifetime advisor. Add “in your service” to everything you do.
  2. In any transaction, tell your client, “Here’s what you’re not being told.” 
  3. Promote your achievements and value in the context of benefits it brings to the client. 
  4. List your flaws to appear real and honest.
  5. Treat each relationship as a long-term investment.
  6. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and play to the former. That’s where the leverage is. Too many focus on improving their weaknesses and lose out.
  7. Control your risk and point out the overlooked risks and dangers the market is exposed to, then help your clients reduce or eliminate these. 
  8. Use research and data to make your point, prove your advantage, and demonstrate your performance. Summarize, compare, interpret, and analyze it in a way that people can appreciate and act on. 
  9. Challenge the status quo with a fresh perspective or a better strategy for your market. 
  10. Continually add to your brand equity by doing more, caring more, contributing more. 
  11. Form alliances and advisory boards. 
  12. Get endorsements and testimonials – often – from buyers, influencers and media.
  13. Hire the best. Pay them richly. But pay them mostly on performance.
  14. Make yourself known. Do it with the right people. Make the impact worth the effort. 
  15. Project the image of true success, long before you’ve fully achieved it. It’s only a matter of time before it will occur.

Review which of the above points you’re already doing and optimize (if it works) or fix (if it doesn’t work well) those first. When optimized, add whichever you’re not doing yet. 

If you can’t be the only business to satisfy certain criteria, then be the first to tell the marketplace what those criteria are and that you satisfy them. Advertise what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and what doing it means to the betterment of the buyer.

View your business as the market’s most trusted advisor: What you do is for a greater good, and you’re being selfless in your business goal to serve the client better and more fully than any other competitor does.

2. LTV, margins and pricing

Know your financial figures and numbers. Read my Business KPIs and Financials guide for an explanation and which KPIs to track and improve. (Or watch the video version.)

To start: ensure you acquire clients at break-even (or better) and have a way to earn on the back-end.

Then: know the (financial) bottleneck in your business by calculating your hypothetical max. Hypothetical max = number of new customers x LTV

Based on this, you’ll know if your business will continue to grow, stagnate or decline if you continue doing what you’re doing.

If stagnating or declining, focus on the easiest lever to improve:

  • Increasing the number of new clients
  • Increasing the price or ARPU
  • Reducing churn

Most businesses focus on “getting more clients” but often increasing the price or reducing the churn is easier AND does more to improve the top/bottom line.

As always, focus on improving one before moving on to the next.

Another lever you can pull (to improve LTV) is improving your value proposition. You can improve the value your product/service offers or improve the client’s perception of your offer.

A simple process to improve your value proposition (a lot of the below comes from Alex Hormozi):

  1. Prerequisites
  • Define your market
  • Niche down
  • Niche even further down
  • Niche down to the point where you have a clear avatar
  1. What is your avatar’s dream outcome?
  2. What are the problems and obstacles that prohibit your avatar from reaching his/her dream outcome? This includes limiting beliefs. Whatever you write down, ask yourself “what’s next”. 
  3. Turn all problems into solutions. Think “how to [insert problem]”.
  4. Write down your ideas on how you can deliver each solution to your avatar. One-to-one, one-to-many, physical, digital….no restrictions at this point.
  5. Categorize your ideas based on low/high value and low/high profit.
  6. Cut all the low-value offers regardless of profit potential.
  7. Pick a high-value offer to start with and get to work.
  8. Don’t forget to give your offer a name that immediately tells your avatar which problem it solves (and how). No generic terms here. If the avatar doesn’t get it, the name needs to be changed. 2 reasons:
  • The offer should convince people, not us.
  • The avatar’s perception of the value is their reality. Unique names that address their pain points take you out of the crowd and make you one-of-a-kind.

To improve your margins, ask yourself:

  • Can I easily, quickly and cheaply add technology to
    • simplify my processes?
    • improve the customer experience?
    • improve my marketing and distribution?
    • reduce my costs? 
  • Can I outsource or partner with someone to
  • Can I improve my team or put them in a better position to succeed?

3. Doing more of what works

Do an 80/20 analysis of your business:

  • Which 20% of my clients account for 80% of my revenue/profits?
  • Which 20% of my channels drive 80% of my leads/traffic/clients?
  • Which 20% of my products/services account for 80% of my revenue/profits?
  • Which 20% of my staff drives 80% of my business?

Double-down on the real revenue/profit/growth drivers on your business. Focus accelerates progress: allocate more resources to those things that work. 

Similarly, improve the level of your staff to improve the level of your business. 

  • Hire better
  • Improve your training (manuals and checklists are helpful too)
  • Let your best people work on your biggest opportunity
  • Reassign or retrain your “worst” people – they may thrive in a different role. If not, let them go with a nice severance package. 1 B- or C-player makes an entire team of A-players B-level. 

A chain (business) is only as strong as its weakest link (person).

When in doubt, focus:

  • 1 product
  • 1 avatar
  • 1 channel (marketing and distribution)

Ask yourself:

  • What’s the least crowded channel?
  • Where is the attention arbitrage opportunity?
  • Which channel provides underpriced attention?
  • Which channel provides the biggest asymmetric opportunity? (time/money cost-to-results)

Focus on the channel with best asymmetry and where you get the “biggest bang for your buck.”

Maximizing positive asymmetrical opportunities is always the right decision.

4. Goals

Growth comes pursuing your business like a craftsman pursues his craft: with dedicated effort toward continuous improvement.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of the business. But this, over time, will lead to stagnation. And stagnation, in turn, will lead to decline. Prosper or die.

That’s why it’s important to have a vision for the future of your business. This vision also focuses the effort, and often motivates, of your team, partners and clients.

2 pieces of advice:

  1. Have 1 long-term vision (10+ years) and 1 3-month goal. Again: focus accelerates progress. History’s wealthiest entrepreneur John D. Rockefeller used this approach for years. We’d do well to learn from him.
  2. Make your goal input-based (what lies in your control) instead of output-based (what you only partly control, or don’t control at all). The former motivates; the latter either demotivates or causes unintended consequences (wrong incentives).

Identify your long-term vision, work backwards to identify a short-term goal, then work further backwards to determine what needs to be done today and this week (and by whom). 

Ask yourself: 

  • Is this goal worthy of me?
  • How might I get there?
  • What can I/we do or create in the next hour?

Some simple back-of-the-envelope math goes a long way.

5. Existing clients

The cheapest customers are your current customers: they require $0 to acquire. Before acquiring new customers, you’re better off optimizing your offer, solution and business for your existing clients. There’s often a lot that can be improved (at little to no cost).

Your offer

Review the thorough assessment earlier in this guide. It provides a checklist with ways to improve your offer.

The lowest-hanging fruit:

  • Focus on 1 USP (unique selling proposition) – simplicity brings clarity
  • Improve your messaging: speak your avatar’s language
  • Pricing – simplify your offer
  • Add testimonials, (social) proof and case studies – let your work speak for itself

Better-than-risk-free guarantee

Guarantees remove (the perception of) risk for the client. There are various types, but the most powerful is what business consultant Jay Abraham calls a better-than-risk-free guarantee. You not only return their money; you also compensate them for their dissatisfaction.

This kind of guarantee makes it easier for them to say “yes” than to say “no.” The clearer, stronger and more specific the guarantee, the more credibility an impact it will have on a prospect or client.

To get started:

  • Make a complete list of every obstacle to your clients or employers that might prevent them from purchasing, dealing with, or choosing you over your competition.
  • Break them into the following categories:
    • Financial reasons: Both the initial cost or expense of choosing you. And the potential financial loss if the transaction doesn’t work out. 
    • Emotional reasons: How bad the client or employer would look or feel if his purchase or commitment to you fails to perform. 
    • Measurability reasons: Can it be measured and evaluated to show the tangible impact you or your offering could or should have on the client’s life, business, or career? 
  • Ask yourself what the real “downside” is in offering the client that product or service or your own employment services on a risk-free basis. Or even a better than risk-free basis.

Contact inactive clients

Most people stop buying from you for one of three reasons:

  1. Something unrelated to you happened in their life or business that caused them to temporarily stop dealing with you.
  2. Their last purchase experience was problematic or unsatisfactory and they didn’t tell you.
  3. Their situation has changed to the point they no longer benefit from whatever product you sell.

Contacting people who can’t use you anymore, and nobly asking for referrals, is an easy way to increase your sales.

And by contacting inactive clients you get a wonderful bonus benefit: feedback. 

Bottleneck

What prevents you from scaling your current business? 

That’s the bottleneck to remove. Improving the rest of your business does little for you if you don’t improve your bottleneck. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Add-ons

Clients buy end results, not products or services. You can increase the value you provide to your clients (and help them achieve their desired end result more quickly/likely) by offering add-ons.

There are different types of add-ons you can think of:

  1. Timing
    1. Before your current offering
    2. After your current offering
    3. With your current offering
    4. An upgrade of your current offering (premium/luxury version)
  2. Type
    1. Upsell
    2. Downsell
    3. Cross-sell
  3. Get paid for what you’re already doing (read turning expenses into profit centers below)

Here are some proven ways to come up with your own valuable add-on:

  1. Observe what your clients do before they buy your goods or services. Can you provide that to them for a fee?
  2. Watch what people do with your service or product after they buy it, and offer to do it for them for a fee.
  3. See what people buy to go with your product or service in the pursuit of their end result. Make it available to them through you.
  4. Ask yourself how you would make a client’s end result even more complete.

Take the idea you like best and offer it to ten of your best clients as an add-on. Then take your second favourite add-on and offer it to another ten. Try four or five ideas this way. This helps you identify which add-on offers the best value and is an opportunity to pursue.

To identify an upgrade to your current offering, ask yourself:

  • Could I take any or all of the products or services I sell and reposition them to be more up-market?
  • Is there a level of my market more up-scale than the one I’m currently reaching that I should be catering to?

Referrals

No marketing channel beats word-of-mouth and referrals from clients. If you’re not systematically asking clients for referrals, you’re missing out.

To get started, write/talk with your current clients and extend your care to who they hold dear. Offer a free advisory session. Go from personal fiduciary to family fiduciary. 

This practice of clients referring you to their loved ones also increases their commitment bias, making the relationship “stickier” and longer-lasting. Become their lifetime advisor.

6. New clients

Once you’ve optimized what you’re doing (and grabbed all the low-hanging fruit), it’s time to innovate and expand.

Acquisition, engagement and retention channels

The easiest way to attract new clients is to expand your distribution/marketing channels.

Ensure you have at least 1 channel of each:

  • Acquisition: channels that let you get in front of new “eyeballs” (e.g. social media)
  • Engagement: channels that let you engage with clients and receive feedback (e.g. a community)
  • Retention: channels that let you interact with existing and past clients (e.g. newsletters, direct mail)

All marketing and distribution channels can be broken down into the below categories. 

When starting out, pick the one that best suits you and your circumstances. When expanding, pick the next best option. Focus on becoming great in that channel before adding another one. Each channel can work.

  1. Referrals
  2. Partners and affiliates
  3. Outbound (identifying your Dream 100 clients is useful for this channel)
    1. Direct mail with a simple offer (to qualify the prospect and make use of commitment bias)
    2. Telemarketing
    3. Door-to-door
  4. Attention
    1. Paid media (ads) -> focus on arbitrage opportunities
    2. Earned media (socials, 3rd party media) -> focus on attention arbitrage
    3. Market education: trade shows, speaking engagements, education-based marketing
  5. Engagement
    1. Owned media (email, SMS, podcast, written material) -> used to engage, retain and convert clients. Use another channel to “acquire” clients.

Testing and experimenting with different marketing

There are many ways you can go here. To list a few:

  1. Use data to analyze your performance on different platforms and channels, then focus on the one that offers the biggest “attention arbitrage.”
  2. Improve your copy (a great breakdown) – many are included in the thorough assessment
    1. Headline
      1. Engagement – does the reader feel the fit with a glance (subheadings & offer)?
      2. Is the avatar clear? – who it’s for and who it’s not for
      3. Specific benefit
      4. Some great examples
    2. Clear articulation of your avatar’s struggles, desires and objections
    3. Is the solution clear and perceived valuable?
    4. Benefits of using the solution (educating) & illustrating their future situation (future-pacing)?
      1. Ask “so what?” multiple times
      2. Educate & tease – reader would feel stupid not taking this offer
    5. Credibility: testimonials, proof or credentials
    6. Guarantees (risk-reversal)
    7. 1 clear CTA (call-to-action) & offer
    8. Bonuses
    9. Summarize the offer: reiterate the problem you solve, the benefits for your buyers, and the upside with no downside. Then tell them again how to act now.
  3. Improve your solution based on the value equation

Partnerships and joint-ventures

The simplest way to get (more) clients is through partnerships and joint ventures.

Ask yourself: who has the trust of my market?

If you offer a non-competitive product or service, your solution offers the other party a new income stream and way to add value to their clients – without any additional effort from their side.

Many are open to the idea of joint ventures or partnerships. I tend to give 50~100% of the first purchase revenue to the party I partner with. If it’s a subscription (i.e. recurring revenue) I usually give anywhere from 1~3 months worth of revenue upfront. This depends on my margins and the customers’ LTV (lifetime value), of course.

That said, exploring partnerships makes sense when you’ve proven your idea works. Otherwise, the risk (of losing trust) can be high for the other party and, subsequently, for you. Reputation damage is real. Focus on validating your concept before taking it system- or nation-wide.

Remember: proven concept > conjecture and speculation.

Finding partners

  1. Everyone who’s already selling something to your avatar.
  2. Everyone who’s already got access to or the trust of your avatar.
  3. Anyone who used to work there (in the case of B2B).
  4. Search on LinkedIn for anyone who services the same avatar.

Barter, middleman and triangulation

Sell/offer others’ products or services or trade your time/expertise for someone else’s. This business model is great for those just starting out as it does not require any capital.

Turning expenses into profit centers

Review all your activities. Then ask yourself: what am I already doing that benefits others?

For example: if you’re a local business (like a realtor, contractor or restaurant) that invested (and continues to invest) a lot in your digital marketing, you can turn your company’s digital marketing expertise into a consultancy or agency for similar businesses in other regions (so you don’t compete).

Similarly, if you’re collecting customer feedback and “fuzzy” data (i.e. difficult-to-obtain, usually local/offline, data like pool cleaning, home gardening or renovation services) you can probably find parties in related industries (e.g. realtors, developers, real estate investors) who don’t compete with you but would benefit from your “proprietary” data.

Follow-up

If you don’t do regular email (or direct) marketing to your list, start now. 

  • Share (market) information, FAQs and lessons learnt
  • Share updates and improvements to your products/services (in a way that’s valuable to your clients)
  • Share case studies, stories and testimonials
  • Remind them of your USP and guarantees

People buy a house, on average, once every 7~8 years in most developed countries. Regular mailings let you stay in touch with these people throughout that period. Once they’re ready to purchase a new house, who is top-of-mind (and close-to-heart) for them?

Exactly. You.

Secondary benefit: even if (old) clients don’t require your service now, they may talk with a loved one or friend who does. When the topic of buying a new house comes up, which realtor’s name do you think will come up?

Exactly. Yours.

But know: no two lists are the same. What your list considers valuable (so they stay on your list) requires trial-and-error. But the effort is more than worth it.

An engaged list is one of your most valuable assets:

  • It reduces the risk for new products/services (because you can pre-sell/direct sell to your list)
  • It lowers your marketing spend
  • It increases the value of your business, in case you want to sell (because you “own” the data. And as mentioned before: the cheapest clients to acquire are existing/old clients.)

Consultative selling (B2B)

Restructure and improve your sales process according to sales expert Chet Holmes’ consultative selling framework:

  1. Qualify
  2. Pre-close
  3. Present

Consultative selling first qualifies the transaction: 

  1. What is the problem that needs to be solved by making this purchase? 
  2. What does the client hope to accomplish with this purchase? 
  3. Pre-close the sale by eliciting an assurance that the client will purchase from you if you are able to deliver everything discussed in the qualifying phase. 
  4. Present your product/service solution.

With this approach you work not as a salesperson but as a doctor: earning their confidence by displaying confidence in your abilities, making a thorough diagnosis of the problem, and offering your prescription without hesitation or fear of rejection.

Add to this “education-based marketing”: teaching something of value rather than trying to sell your product or service. Prospects will view you as an expert – over time – and gravitate toward you with enough exposure.

Education-based marketing works for both B2B and B2C. It – over time – establishes you as an authority. Simply put: give away your best advice for free.

Bonus: Monetization and business models

The below information is taken from my Starting Your Business guide.

All business models can be boiled down to the below categories.

When starting out, pick the one that best suits you and your circumstances. 

When expanding, you have the option to offer a different product/service using the same business model or to offer the same product/service with a different business model. 

(Note: A different product/service with a different business model is an option too, but only makes sense for larger businesses with expertise and excess resources.)

Service

Any service business makes 2 choices:

  1. Fulfilment
    1. DIY (Do-It-Yourself – teaching)
    2. DWY (Done-With-You – coaching or consulting)
    3. DFY (Done-For-You – agencies)
  2. Size
    1. 1-to-1
    2. Group or mastermind (1-to-many)
    3. Community (many-to-many, participation of clients)
    4. Subscription (recurring, longer-term 1-to-1)

Product

A product business has 3 types of products to sell:

  1. Physical
  2. Digital
  • Software (SaaS, website, plugin or extension)
  • Product (ebook, checklist, etc)
  • Course
  1. Media and content

Barter, middleman and triangulation

Sell/offer others’ products or services or trade your time/expertise for someone else’s. This business model is great for those just starting out as it does not require any capital.

Self-coaching

Regular

Pick a frequency you can stick with.

  • Daily
    • What went well?
    • What didn’t go well?
    • What and how can I improve tomorrow?
  • Weekly
    • Energy & Effectiveness Matrix
      • What gives me/drains my energy?
      • What improved/did not improve my life, business or outcomes?
    • Bottleneck removal
      • What can I easily eliminate?
      • What can I automate?
      • What can I delegate or outsource?
  • Monthly
    • What resonated most? Double down on that.

Want a more advanced system (with step-by-step explanation and how I use it)? Then you’ll enjoy my (premium) The Self-Improvement System.

When stuck

  • Reaffirm your vision and desired outcome
  • Celebrate your biggest win
  • Energy & Effectiveness Matrix
  • Bottleneck removal
    • What can I easily eliminate?
    • What can I automate?
    • What can I delegate or outsource?
  • New ideas: “what am I willing to stop doing in order to do this?”
    • If none, move idea to “to-avoid” list. Focus accelerates progress.
  • KPIs. (Read my Business KPIs and Financials guide to identify the best KPIs for your business.)

Breakthrough by learning from others

  • Who has done what I’m trying to do? What can I replicate/improve? How did they face adversity? Can I get closer to them? Proximity accelerates growth.
  • What convinced me to buy [insert product]? Figure out what compelled you.

The next step: where to go from here

If you enjoyed this guide, then you’ll probably love my weekly newsletter. It’s totally free and I share easy, practical steps to accelerate your personal growth and build a life around your passion.

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I don’t have it all figured out but I learn, self-experiment and do my best to walk the slow march toward greatness with you.

Jim Bouman