12 Months to $1 Million

Ryan Daniel Moran is the founder of Capitalism.Com, an online resource for teaching entrepreneurs how to build successful businesses and invest the profits. Ryan Moran is also the host of the One Percent podcast, and the Brand Builder podcast. More than 300 of Ryan Moran's students have now succeeded in building seven-figure companies using his 12-Months-to-$1Million methodology. He is a graduate of Indiana Wesleyan University.

So let's say you get the entrepreneurial itch and want to start your own business. That will allow you to do your own thing and call your own shots, right? Well, sure, it can be done — as long as you realize being an entrepreneur is an all-consuming adventure, never just a 9-5 job.

The reality is today if you're prepared to work harder than ever, you can in fact build a brand new business from the ground up to the million-dollar sales level and then sell it for a big payday — all within 12 months.

How? Your 1-year entrepreneurial adventure will go something like this:

There is a solid and repeatable 10-step roadmap for taking a business from zero to one million in a year and then selling it for a big payday. It can be done, thanks to the unique combination of e-commerce and social media which exists at the present time. The method works, but you have to go all in to execute on it.

1. Stage #1 — The Grind (Months1-4). You're in the Grind until you can sustainably achieve at least twenty-five sales per day on your first product. To reach that point as quickly as humanly possible, you need to make fast, bold decisions when you're first starting out. Be comfortable with the fact you won't get everything right. In the Grind, speed is your friend. Every sale matters, a lot. Focus on getting a thousand followers, at least twenty reviews on product #1, and twenty-five sales a day.

2. Stage #2 — The Growth (Months5-9). This is where the snowball is starting to build. Once you get product #1 up to a consistent twenty-five sales a day, you then want to roll out as many more products as you can comfortably handle. Just make sure you're releasing more products to the same group of customers as your first product rather than chasing rainbows. Momentum will build quickly in this stage because you won't need to make as many decisions the second time around. Don't get distracted — keep it simple and stay focused.

3. Stage #3 — The Gold (Months 10 -12). In this stage you can start experimenting with different types of advertising to figure out what really works for your type of product. This is also the stage where you can finally start paying yourself, and become a genuine full-time entrepreneur. Your job here is to build revenues, find a buyer, and walk away with a six-figure plus windfall — so you can then do it all again.

1. Building a million-dollar business in a year is not a get-rich-quick scheme. There is a solid and systematic roadmap for achieving it. The central idea is you have to focus on the customers you want to serve, not necessarily on your product or service. Find better and better ways to serve your target customers, by offering more products that help them on their journey, and the revenues will flow.
2. The real pay day in building a million-dollar business is your brand, not your business turnover. The biggest payout comes when you sell the brand you've built over the course of a year as you build your million-dollar business. That's where the benefits reside.

We summarized an awesome book this week — 12 Months to $1 Million by Capitalism.com founder and podcaster Ryan Daniel Moran. I thought the ideas in this book were impressively well thought out and practical. I guess that's to be expected from an author who walks the talk. Ryan Moran used the formula he details to build a brand which he and his partner then sold for $10 million. Impressive.

What I particularly liked was the fact that he emphasizes focusing on the customer, not your product, when you get the itch to become an entrepreneur. His methodology is to choose your customer first, and then develop a product they will love because it's made specifically for them. You then launch your gateway product #1 and focus on that until you have a consistent twenty-five or so sales a day. Once you do that, you establish your brand by launching other products. The unique angle here though is that products #2, #3, #4 and so on are not your original product in different shades or sizes. Rather, they are the next products the same customer will need to help them on their journey to what they're really trying to achieve. I'd never thought of that, but it makes so much sense now.

This book gives lots of examples of companies that have done this, but the one that exemplifies this approach is Bulletproof Coffee, founded by Dave Aspey. He launched his own brand of coffee, which is organic, certified mold-free, and which retails at more than twice the price of supermarket coffee. That was product #1, his gateway product. He then launched an MCT oil which you can add to your coffee for more health benefits. Product #3 was a ghee which, when added to coffee, slows your absorption rate so you have more energy for hours. He then rolled out protein bars and more products, all targeted at his original customers. In this way Bulletproof Coffee became a bio-hacking company worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and not just another coffee wholesaler competing against Starbucks and all the other brands.

12 Months to $1 Million is a solid, repeatable 10-step roadmap for how to take a business from zero to one million in a way that builds a brand you can then sell for more millions in the future. Very savvy formula. A highly recommended read.