Why Most Solopreneurs Never Break Past $1M

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The last time there was a really big paradigm shift. It was called the internet >> online network called internet >> and it wiped out a lot of people. Then there's this other paradigm shift and it's called something different that most people don't talk about. It was called Apple. Apple put a lot of businesses out of business. Every 3 to 5 years your industry is going to be disrupted. So if you haven't disrupted yourself, you will be disrupted. I say 3 to 5 years, but I got caught blindsided because AI is making it faster. I do not know now how long the cycle is. So I would ask each and every one of you who's in business to be actively looking to disrupt yourself. If you don't do it, the world will.

[00:00:38]What's the best advice to give a solarreneur building their first million dollars in revenue? Here we go. What we do is we take your annual goal. We just divide it by 10. Just divide it by 10.

[00:00:47]Okay? And that would mean that you need to do $100,000 a month. Okay? We divide that also by the number of clients you can serve. The lower the better, but also it means the higher ticket. So if you serve two clients, that means you have to generate business that's like $50,000 per engagement, which for some might be a lot of money, for some it's not a lot at all. We don't want this to be 100 because you cannot turn over that many clients in a month. So the the beautiful number is somewhere between zero and probably five. More than five, I think your offer is not high enough.

[00:01:18]Yeah. So we're going to pick an easy number. We're going to pick four because that gives me 25K. Now you have to design an offer where the perceived value is much greater than 25. So you have to make a list based on a profile.

[00:01:31]So I do I build an avatar of a certain type of person who has a big big problem and they desire a solution where paying $25,000 would give them great joy. It would make them super happy. And so you have to design the offer. And there's lots of things you can design the offer.

[00:01:45]I'm going to tell you to read the book $100 million offers by Heroszi. It takes you through the process in painstaking detail. And you can do that. Okay. One thing I know which I never thought about before is how do you make it easier? How do you make it faster? And how do you reduce perceived risk? And it's perception. And perception is great because you can change perception.

[00:02:07]Whereas faster is not so uh easy to to change that. It's either fast or it's not. Okay. We have mistakenly thought to ourselves if we're in the service space that we sell time. But what we do is we're really selling result. So people want the result faster. So do anything you can to do it faster. And what I've learned also is if you can take the big result sometimes, which takes a lot of time, especially if it's $25,000 engagement, figure out what the smallest win is and put that up front so they feel like progress is being made. That will increase the perception of the result. I would say that for the million dollars, we're going to have to do the rules of one, like one offer, one profile, one promotion, one channel.

[00:02:47]That's what we got to do. Hyper hyperfocus. I don't know if you can do this as a solopreneur, but this is the blueprint. If you do high level coaching, you can do this by as one person, but I would say you're probably doing too much by yourself. My rule of thumb is if you can pay someone less money than it costs you to do it yourself, pay them because what you'll get is what you value the most, which is your free time. Now, what solarpreneurs do is they're control freaks. And sometimes, rightfully so. You're always the best at doing something the fastest possible way. So the expression is you can run fast by yourself but you can run far with people and I would rather run far. So delegate as much as you can to someone and the way that you do that is just look at where you spend the most time doing something that someone else can do. That's your first hire. How did you break through that $1 million revenue to $5 million and above in your production business? Okay, Joshua, that's a good question. So when you work with a $10,000 client, it makes approaching a $20,000 client a lot easier. And so you just keep trading up and you go to 40k and you just keep trading up and I don't know what the limit of on trading up is but you just keep doing it. You leverage one project, one relationship for a slightly better one. Now the Alexander the Great is the Gordian not he just goes straight and just solves the problem chops. And this is what my friend told me. He says basically in every industry there's the top dog. Work with a top dog. All the little dogs follow right. So on a different talk I give we wind up working with Coldplay at that time the world's biggest band maybe Beyonce and Coldplay and then basically everyone is going to work with you after that right if you work with Google all the tech companies fall in line if you work with Apple so you can go that route and it's a shortcut but depending on where you are that could be impossible so I have another way of doing this you want to work with Nike you're not going to get them to say yes but there are people that Nike work with in their supply chain that might say yes so Nike has suppli buyers and distributors, right? Everyone needs stuff and someone to sell it for them.

[00:04:39]So, in America, we have a place like Foot Locker, Champs, East Bay. Nike also buys things from other companies. Uh I don't know if they technically do, but other people buy their soles from Vibram. Vibram is a smaller company.

[00:04:52]Vibram supplies things. They might make things with Gortex waterproofing, right?

[00:04:58]They might get their shoelaces or there might be a smaller company that designs all their boxes or some of their boxes or some of their t-shirts. Those companies are way more accessible than Nike is. Here's the cool part. You work with Vibram, you work with Gortex or one of the designers or the agencies, you are just now a half step away from Nike.

[00:05:17]And it's much easier for you to get a call with Nike when you're designing things or producing things for some of their suppliers. I think it's an effective strategy. What you're trying to do is you're going for the moon shot, but go to the mountain top, right? And then when you get to the mountain top, go to Everest and then there it's like not that far away to get to the moon.

[00:05:33]And so you do this trade up idea. Okay?

[00:05:36]And how you can also do this is you call your existing clients. Maybe they're down here. And you say, "Hey, do you know anyone that works over here? I'd love to help those people." Not a competition. It's pretty cool. Okay.

[00:05:48]There's this book written by Phil M.

[00:05:50]Jones. It's called Exactly What to Say.

[00:05:52]It is probably the best version I've ever read about how to ask for a referral. It's genius. It's right in the end of the book. He goes through lots of philosophies. This book is super easy to read because it's like 48 point type.

[00:06:04]Very, very easy to read. I would highly encourage you to read it. I'll give you some really short butchered version of it. Right? When a client says thank you to you, his theory is people only say thank you where they feel a genuine need to express appreciation.

[00:06:19]you've done something great and they want to balance the scale by saying thank you. When they say thank you, you must ask for the referral right then and there. If you don't, you've missed the opportunity. So, when they're like, Joshua, love what you did or this XYZ, you did a great job. Thank you. Then you say, you wouldn't happen to know one or two people who could benefit from X what you do, would you? And you say, don't worry, I don't need their name and information right now. Like, yeah, I might. And then you say, "Well, when you said yes, who were you thinking about?"

[00:06:49]"Oh, James and Jenny." You're like, "Fantastic." You're like, "Can I ask you for one more favor?" They're like, "Yes." So that James and Jenny know who I am when I reach out, could you call them in advance and do a soft introduction for us? Like, of course.

[00:07:06]Would it be all right with you if I followed up with you, say, in a week to see if you did that? Yes, of course.

[00:07:13]This is the formula. and then in a week you reach out and said, 'Oh, Mary, it's me, Joshua.

[00:07:19]Um, I'm betting that you probably didn't have a chance to speak to James or Jenny.

[00:07:24]And then they say, "You're right. I'm going to call them right now." Or they say, "Nope, I did it." You're like, "Fantastic. I'll follow up with them right now." So, the reason why you do that is because people are lied to you.

[00:07:35]So, you already give them a way out. I bet you're so busy you didn't have time to call James and Jenny. Like, I haven't. So you remove the shame and the guilt, but then they they fix that by calling them then and there. So that's in the back of the book. If you can work with that, you don't need to read the book. I want to know from your personal experience as well, your tipping point from that like 800k, 900k, 1 million revenue a year and then that year that you broke through and like, hey, 2 mil, 3 mil, 4 mil, what was that like? I'm curious.

[00:08:07]>> Okay, you have to keep time and context in here. It's like in the '9s, right?

[00:08:11]late 90s I think I broke a million dollars in a second year business I didn't even feel like it was hard that's why I tell everybody in the world like making a million dollars is not hard making the other bar is harder and then I got to two million and that didn't feel that hard either so generally speaking the budgets we were seeing were about $200,000 getting past $200,000 per engagement was hard okay so the 200k for some reason I don't know why it just worked out to be 200k later on I find out we can win these probably 75% of the time I don't even trying. It's weird. 250K, can't win these. We dropped down to 20% close rate. I'm like, what is wrong with me? I just can't do it now. I have performance anxiety. I don't know. There's a ceiling. I can't break through. And it's not until I met my business coach. He's like, you know what? The game that you're playing is the minor leagues.

[00:08:58]This is the minors. This is the majors.

[00:09:00]And it's a big step up in professional sports. You know why I say the minors and the majors? They're not that good.

[00:09:05]So, this is a theater network for the very top to go play here. The reason why he said is because when they get the budget a certain point they can pretty much hire anybody in the country and when they go beyond that they can hire anybody in the world. And so your competition got from regional to national to international. And he says you bring in a regional game to fight in a national game. And we see this in basketball, we see this in football. We see in soccer. You're pretty good for a local town person but not in the national market. He goes you have to be a different person. So the breakthrough for me, believe it or not, wasn't the design work. Learned how to have a sales conversation. He told me, he gave me permission to ask the question that I was thinking. Prior to that, I would just never ask. I don't know why, but that was the unlock for me. The thing that we had worked on for the past two days because you appear to be different.

[00:09:54]If I gave you a lot of money to solve a problem in video production, you just hire the best people. You would bring on the right crew. You would not cut any corner. you'd probably shoot it on Alexa and use um Zeiss lenses and have like a script supervisor and do storyboards and all the kinds of things you need to do to create the work. So, it's not a limitation on your creativity. It's a limitation in your ability to understand what the clients want to make them feel seen, heard, and understood. That's your limitation. How do you deal with self-doubt especially after experiencing setbacks? Bar belief action that you take the result that you get. So when you have a setback like what?

[00:10:30]>> My business doesn't do that well in 2024.

[00:10:34]>> So you took a hit 2024 a decline.

[00:10:36]>> Yeah. Lost >> percentage wise. What did you go down from?

[00:10:39]>> 20.

[00:10:39]>> 20. So you just went down 20%. Okay. You think you're probably a loan and a loser.

[00:10:45]>> Did anybody have a decline in revenue from 2023 to 2024? Raise your hand.

[00:10:50]Okay. I'll tell you I lost a million dollars >> in revenue. I'm not a loser. I just haven't found a way to fix this yet.

[00:10:58]Pretty confident I will. So, some part of your life experience says when I have a setback, I'm a loser. We don't have a culture that's comfortable with failure, right? So, we interpret the failure internally versus like there's lots of things that I can't control. I need to accept that part and work on the things I can control. If you were to guess, do you have an idea as to one or two things that were in your control that you could do differently?

[00:11:22]>> Sure.

[00:11:23]>> Work on that. Now I used to try and coach people saying well your belief is X and I'll use a tool of belief and talk to change X to Y and my friends who are in therapy and coaching like you can't use a belief to change a belief it's very difficult if you're afraid of cats I'm like don't be afraid of cats like that don't work but what I can do is ask you to take a different action which will get you a different result which will change your belief so you know the one or two things that you can try Y do impact effort on those things and work on those things. Now, if you want to have a greater probability of success, find someone who's done it before and solve that problem. Pay them whatever they're worth, which is the problem here, to get you out of this. Or you can go at it your own. Either is okay. If you have some money, that's where good money is spent. If you don't have any money, then you'll have to grind it out on your own. I'm going through that myself. I just got a really disheartening email yesterday from uh somebody who one of my friends an entrepreneur says after 11 years in business we forgot to tell you we're we're this is our last year in business 2024 for a lot of people especially in the service space has been really funky and I think something that might be driving some of this I hate to say it because I'm an optimist AI the world is changing really fast the last time there was a really big paradigm shift it was called the internet and it wiped out a lot of people then there's this other paradigm shift it's called something different that most people don't talk about. It's called Apple. Apple put a lot of businesses out of business. Do you know how many technologies or things they've displaced? Back when I was in LA, I had this thing called the Thomas Guide, spiralbound notebook that was like fat thick, so I can figure out where to go in LA. As soon as a GPS was integrated into your phone, that business was gone. And you know, Garmin, who makes GPS's, their business suffered, too. And Nokia and Motorola Razer, they were all the hottest things.

[00:13:15]Nokia is barely a footnote today. Think about how many businesses Apple displaced. And you didn't know this, but MP3 CDs, uh, laser disc, all these things were replaced because MP3s got really easy to use on an Apple device.

[00:13:27]They crushed Creative Labs. You remember Creative Labs? They made, I think, the first MP3 player. I had one of them dead. Every 3 to 5 years, your industry is going to be disrupted. So, if you haven't disrupted yourself, you will be disrupted. I say 3 to 5 years, but I got caught blindsided because AI is making it faster. I do not know now how long the cycle is. So I would ask each and every one of you who's in business to be actively looking to disrupt yourself. If you don't do it, the world will. Here's the cool thing. You heard the expression fight fire with fire.

[00:13:58]>> Yeah.

[00:13:58]>> It's not always clear to me what that means. What you do is if your business is being displaced by AI, which I guarantee most of you will be, from coding to creativity to writing music, is use AI to fight itself. Say this is my business. This is what I do. This is what I charge. This is who I do it for.

[00:14:13]this impact I hope to create disrupt my own business in anticipation of the way AI is going to disrupt me. Use one robot to fight another. If you found this content to be valuable, I just want to let you know there's so much more inside the membersonly library. Workshops, whiteboard sessions, extended lessons, stuff we normally charge a lot of money for, you can have access to for $15 a month. It's all included. Hit the link below. See you on the inside.