- Systems for Business Newsletter
- Posts
- SFB Newsletter # 3
Hey, Ben Slater here 👋
This newsletter is for business owners who want to scale their businesses.
Inside each edition I take a deep dive into one business system and I’ll show you how you can use it to scale up and become more free.
These are the exact systems that over 10,000 students have tested inside our business school.
We’ve had clients scale from $0 to $20M in yearly revenue by using these systems, we’ve also had hundreds of clients use them to crack their first $10K month and I’ve personally used them to do multi 7 figures in revenue over the past 10 years of my business journey.
Most of these systems were learnt from great mentors, some of them are ‘syncretic combinations’ between different ideas, models and methods, and a few of them were ‘discovered’ by my own testing and tinkering.
This is edition # 3 of the newsletter - I’ve been building on a topic called ‘the 6 Pillars,’ - if you want to get up to speed you can access the two prior editions here >
The Three Levels on the Way to Build a 7 Figure Business.
A great mentor of mine called Scott Oldford, first taught me about the 6 Pillars system. He got me to do an exercise that was incredibly powerful. He asked me…
‘Grab a piece of paper and write out every problem you are experiencing in these areas… Don’t worry too much about the solutions just yet… just get everything down…’
This was one of the worst days I’d ever had in the business, you see I had my head in the sand in so many different areas. After getting it done, I felt so horrible, I laid down in the shower for 90 minutes.
But here is the thing, as the days and weeks went by - something amazing started to happen - one by one I noticed that I was ticking the problems off the list.
Just by becoming conscious of what the real problems were and looking them in the eye, I set my mind and resources into motion to solve them.
Within a few months I had scaled from $50K / month to $200K / month in the business.
Whenever I experience a powerful breakthrough in my business - I’m sharing it with my clients. So I started to do that. And that’s when I noticed something even more powerful.
On the calls with clients I started to notice a distinct correlation between where the client was in their monthly revenue and the pillars they were blocked in.
I saw that the 6 Pillars wasn’t just a general principle loosely affecting business owners - I realised that there was a clear hierarchy in the pillars.
I had the thought…
‘What if I could figure out the path through the pillars?’
‘What if I could chart the path through the pillars from $0 to 6 figures in yearly revenue, and then to 7 figures and beyond…’
In terms of business - this has been my real study for the past 5 years.
And the results I’ve been able to achieve for myself and my clients are a testament to this simple breakthrough.
Just as we are on ‘The Hero’s Journey’ in our personal lives with archetypical challenges we face along the road - we are also on ‘A Business Journey’ an archetypical journey with common foes.
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path.
ALL PILLARS EXIST IN THE HERE AND NOW
I want to clarify something about the pillars before diving into the levels.
At all moments in your business the pillars exist. Mindset, Sales, Product, Marketing, Operations and Finance - take any one of these out and the business ceases to function.
I’m going to share what I believe to be plateau points. I’m calling them Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3. The 6 Pillars are present at every level. What I’m advocating for is an intense focus on building systems in each area via a step by step hierarchical approach where you shift your energy onto the specific pillar defined by my system.
Level 1 - Proof of Concept - Revenue Level: $0 - $10K / Month
** Note ** Revenue levels are based on cash collected from customers and clients - not future cash flow or any other form of money - grants, loans and other finance etc.
What it feels like: Flying by the seat of your pants. You may feel like a fraud here, butting up against imposter syndrome, and that devil on the shoulder… ‘you can always turn back,’ ‘why should anyone listen to you?’… etc.
This stage of the business is very psychological - this is why it’s important to focus on your health and wellbeing during this stage - it’s the key to staying steady, and on the path.
You’ll be in one of three positions.
You saved up some money to start this: You have a little nest egg you’ve saved up from your prior job. Be careful as to where you allocate that. Branding is the most common and also the poorest choice for investment at this level. Get a mentor instead. They’ll save you tens of thousands of dollars.
You are still working another job to supplement income: This will piss you off massively, but it’s a choice you’ve made. Don’t burn the candle at both ends and sacrifice your health. Read 50 business books.
You’re going into degen mode and you’ve got no money: Your backs against the wall so this new thing needs to work or you’ll… probably try something else? Read 100 business books.
Why it’s Important to Scale Beyond $10K / Month: ‘Proof of concept’ in a business occurs when you can first support yourself and your lifestyle through the business. For most businesses this begins to happen at $10K/month.
Once you get there you are now able to go full time in your business and capitalise even more on the momentum you’ve built.
Your first goal of the business should be to support yourself and your lifestyle so you can invest yourself fully into the journey.
The Real Challenge: Keeping things simple and focussed on Mindset + Sales. You will probably have a lot of ideas flowing here. You might want to innovate a new product, quickly hire a team member, get a VA or spend the only $5K you’ve made to ‘improve your website.’
^ These are bright shiny objects distracting you from the one thing that will help you grow right now… More conversations with potential customers and clients.
The Big Problem: Every business owner I’ve ever met has some kind of trauma that is the (often unconscious) driving force of their desire to be an entrepreneur. This can rear it’s ugly head when you attempt to make yourself ‘seem successful’ in the eyes of others.
This honestly never works. You will want to move from a desire for others to see you ‘being successful’ into doing what it actually takes to be successful. Perhaps it goes without saying these are two completely separate things - however this problem is so common I’m going to say it anyway.
If you want validation from your friends and family - be careful - rather chase your first client instead. This is a subtle shift but one that is part of journey of overcoming this stage.
How to Get ‘Proof of Concept’and Move into Leverage Stage
Spend 80% of your time, resources, effort and energy developing your mindset and your sales system. 20% on everything else. 80/20 there too. 16% on Product + Marketing. 4% on Ops + Finance.
Some small tips on how to approach the pillars:
Mindset - Read and exercise every working day
Sales - Almost all of the success from this stage comes from this pillar
Product - Don’t be rigid on your product. Be prepared to sell your time
Lead Generation - Organic, rely on referrals and networking
Operations - Operation of you. Ignore others especially Lawyers
Finance - Cover Your Lifestyle. Ignore the noise especially from Accountants
Most Important System to Focus On:
It’s not ‘what you sell’ it’s how you package it that will lead to your success or failure. Learning to design and make a compelling offer is the most important piece in getting Proof of Concept.
Level 2 - Leverage - Revenue Level: $10 - $50K / Month
What it feels like: You have some traction but it can feel like you’re still living from sale to sale - especially if you have a client based business with only a few new sales coming in every month.
You want to grow to the next level but you know you need to change your approach.
You’re on a hamster wheel in the operations of the business - the more clients you get - the faster it turns. You could be sacrificing time spent with your friends and family as a result.
Why it’s Important to Scale Beyond $50K / Month: Getting a business up to $20K+ per month is a great feeling however you’ll probably be working a lot and any time you take your eye off the ball you’ll notice an immediate dip.
To build real wealth and an asset that you own instead of it owning you… You’ll need cash flow to invest into software, automation, outsourcing and delegation so you can leverage yourself. You’ll eventually need to build a team of people, tools and resources around you.
$50K + per month is an abundant place to do that.
The Real Challenge: ‘What got you to where you are, will not get you to where you’re going’ - The systems that you’ve been on reliant on will need to be thrown onto the fire - you’ll need to transcend them and build on top of them if you want to scale.
The Big Problem: The big problem with level 2 is that you’ve probably used organic marketing, networking and heavily relied on referrals to scale your business beyond $10k / month. Whilst this is great - there are huge volumes of manual human energy that goes into this. It’s simply not scalable.
‘What got you to where you are, won’t get you to where you’re going…’
Secondly you are still probably are very involved in the delivery of your product or service. For every customer or client that come onboard you’ll probably have a chunk of work you need to do.
You’re probably already working 50+ hours per week. You can’t simply scale up 5x on your hours to go from $10K to $50K / month.
And this is where business owners get tripped up…
The common thinking is this: ‘Ok I’m at $10K - $20K/month now - if I could just duplicate myself I’ll be able to double or triple my income…. I’ll just hire some team members I’ll be able to scale up…’
Here is the problem. In a small business good team members are much harder to hire because if they wanted the responsibility of creating an extra $10 - $20K / month they would start their own business and keep the profits.
You’re in a catch 22 where you can’t work more, and you realistically can’t duplicate yourself in a consistent way.
Your business is too reliant on manual human energy - which is finite, draining, hard to replicate, inconsistent, perishable and expensive.
How to Get ‘Leverage’ and Move into the Scale Stage
The solution here is to understand how to Leverage up your time to produce more output per unit of input. It’s the age old question that has perplexed entrepreneurs for thousands of years… ‘How can you do more with less?'
Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the Earth.
Here are the two primary ways to do this;
Leverage Your Product Delivery - Step away from the operational side of delivering your product. If you need to outsource some elements of your delivery - do that. If you run an agency - create an information product that can be sold thousands of times for no additional time or energy input. Work one on one with clients? Move to groups.
Automate Your Lead Generation - Move from the manual human energy systems of relying on referrals, making cold calls, manual outreach and networking and transition to building a list with ads. Build yourself a LeadFLOW that takes potential clients through a journey to get to know you, like you and trust you before doing business with you.
Spend 80% of your time, resources, effort and energy developing your product leverage and your marketing system (LeadFLOW) 20% on everything else. 80/20 there too. 16% on continued Mindset + Sales development. 4% on Ops + Finance.
Some small tips on how to approach the pillars:
Mindset - Study all you can find on the concept of ‘Leverage’ + ‘Lead Gen’
Sales - Focus on increasing your AOV + LTV of a client
Product - Leverage your product.
Lead Generation - Master automated lead gen: Invest into ads to grow your list
Operations - Keep it lean. Leverage over full time staff. Outsource all admin.
Finance - Aim for 50% profit. 10% tax. 40% OPEX.
Most Important System to Focus On:
Building a LeadFLOW funnel that automates your lead generation and conversion is the key to scaling your business beyond $50K / month.
Level 3 - Scale - Revenue Level: $50K + / Month
What it feels like: alot.
The Good: Great cash flow, stacking profits, accruing wealth, old competitors/mentors may start becoming your customers and clients. You’ll feel really validated and will probably build new connections with people who are at a similar level in their business. Your friends and family will take serious notice. You have to become a good leader to maintain it. You may also be amongst the few who’s maintained time freedom - if so you’re truly crushing it.
The Bad: If not it can feel like you’re on a never ending hamster wheel, with the scale - the problems, the risk and the team can scale too leaving you with more work and responsibility than ever. You probably want to be free to focus on the creative side of the business. You want a free calendar to impact your marketing, build new products and make more sales - but no matter what you try the staff keep pulling you into the operations… Or perhaps you allow yourself to be pulled…
Why it’s Important to Scale Beyond $300K / Month:
It may not be… Hear me out.
And look, let me also say this - I’ve only scaled beyond this level once in my business. My all time record for monthly cashflow was $360K / month.
I believe there is a shift in the business around this level where it becomes very difficult to run a ‘lifestyle business.’ Don’t get me wrong it’s still possible…
One of my friends currently lives nomadically with just his laptop and phone, travelling the world while running a $20M business.
However it’s hard to run a multi 7 figure business without an office.
For me personally, one of the goals of my business is to be able to travel the world on 8 hours notice with just my laptop… If I was to get an office I could probably ‘scale it’ further and maybe even faster… But it simply doesn’t align to my goals and I’d probably be unhappy.
In an upcoming edition of my newsletter I will speak about ‘business models’ and the ones which I believe present the best opportunities for scale and freedom.
But for now… You need to decide for yourself where you want to take things - don’t just scale things for the sake of it. Get clear and concise about how building a business gives you the life you want.
Beyond this level you might even think about selling your business - in particular if you have great systems in place and if you are doing more than 7 figures per month in your business - people will 100% want to buy it.
So one of the great benefits of transcending this stage stage is you’ve done so much of the work, you’ve built the systems and stabilised the ship - this is what makes it valuable to others and you could be in for the biggest payday of your life.
The Real Challenge and the Big Problem of Level 3: Operations.
I’m of the belief that Operations is the hardest of the 6 pillars, at least for the founders amongst us - it probably doesn’t come naturally.
The key to overpowering this issue (as cliche as it sounds) is to become a visionary and to market that vision constantly to everyone in and around the business so that they want to work for you.
Second to that, build systems that constantly communicate the why, the what, the how, the who and the when.
(my model and a training on this is below)
Once You’ve Passed Levels 1 + 2 , You Have Initial Traction and You Want to Truly Scale a Multi Million $ Businesss…
Here are some small tips on how to approach the pillars:
Mindset - Read Biographies from billionaires
Sales - Build a sales team
Product - Innovate + go global if possible
Lead Generation - Master sales funnels and strategic partnerships
Operations - Delegate, outsource, automate and eliminate from the lowest skill to the highest
Finance - Aim for 50% profit. 10% tax. 40% OPEX - You’re absolutely crushing it if you can maintain anything close to a 50% profit margin. It’s hard at level 3
Most Important System to Focus On:
To run your operation you need to be able to communicate the why, the what, the how the who and the when. It’s less about 1 system and more the collection that will come together to streamline your operations.
What’s next?
So far we’ve defined the 6 Pillars - how they work together, how they relate, which pillar to focus on depending where you are in your business.
I’ve given you some first insight into the systems we use and how (if you like) you can go a mile deep into each of these topics…
In each of the following editions I’ll be getting more into the specifics of how to improve your pillars. I’ll cover things such as ways to improve your sales, ways to find harmony in your life, of course we’ll cover marketing funnels intensely - I’ll find products I love and tell you why, I’ll share my favourite ideas and business models - amongst other things.
Twice or three times every week I’ll send you a new edition.
Stay tuned.
This newsletter is free.
As it stands I’ve invested over $500,000 of my own money to discover the principles, strategies, techniques, tools, tactics and systems I share with you in this newsletter.
This money was invested into books, courses, retreats, consulting (1 on 1 and groups), coaching, business masterminds, seminars and events over the past 10 years.
I’ve also invested ten’s of thousands of hours to get to this point. I’ve been in the trenches testing everything you can imagine for over 10 years now. I’ve made mistakes that have made and cost me millions of dollars.
I plan to share everything with you here in this newsletter.
But that’s all in the past… let’s talk about the present.
I run ads to grow the newsletter and it costs me $2 USD to gain a new subscriber.
I also spend $1,000 per month on various software platforms to be able to be able to bring this content to you.
As the newsletter grows, I’ll bring in sponsors - If I am an actual customer of the products and if I believe in them I’ll bring them to you and share my views via this newsletter.
For now the best way to support is to purchase some of our products.
Currently I have three products that I think you’ll love and that are perfect starters - they cost anywhere from $20-$67 - if just 5% of our subscribers claim one of our products I’ll break even and be able to keep producing the newsletter.
We also have offers to serve clients where we work with you in a more intimate setting. There you have direct access to me as I help you scale. If you want to learn about that you can book in a call with me below.
Above all thanks for tuning in. I know that your time is one of the most valuable resources you have an an entrepreneur. I intend to teach you how to leverage it and scale.
Talk soon,
Ben.
