Speaker 3: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School, with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Sui: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel. And today we're gonna talk about the seven essentials to building a million dollar business. So, I guess I can get started on this, thinking about a million dollar business. Well, guess what? You kind of have to have product market fit. You have to have something that people actually want. And you can validate that from sales. But also when you're doing that, even before that, you've gotta make sure you're doing the right customer development so you're not gonna lose your shirt. But a, product market fit.

Eric Sui: The thing I would tell you is if you're trying to build a million dollar business, and my hack would be go out there, go find all the competitors who have customers, go find all your competitors, go look at their customer lists, hit them up and offer the same product or service for cheaper. It's stupid, it's a grind, it really does work. I've tried it myself. This is how I grew when I first started off, because everyone's like, "Oh, you're offering SEO consulting? We're paying so and so $20 grand a month." I was like, "I'll do it for 10. I'll even throw in your first month for free." When you're starting off, you don't really have that many expenses. And you can even do cool things where it's like you do stuff for free in exchange for referrals or them to send out email blasts, assuming they're influencers and well-known.
And the other thing I would say is, look, we talk about this all the time, but ultimately any business you see around the world, it's not really ... yes, you're important, but it's ultimately the people around you that are helping you build it. So the team is important. Make sure you invest the time into building a great team. And look, if you don't know the first thing about building a team, invest resources into reading books or getting training. The book "Who?" for example, that's Who with a question mark, check that out, learn how to build a great team.

Neil Patel: The fourth tip I have for you is get an office. Everyone these days is talking about a virtual company and how you can be place everywhere, and yes, that's true, you can do well. But if you don't have your team in one place, what you'll find is the communication is inefficient; it's much harder to build a big business without an office. And yes, there are big virtual companies, but if you look at the largest companies in the world, the Apples, the Googles, the Microsofts, you keep naming them down the list, I bet you the top 100 or 1,000, none of them are virtual. They all have physical locations, offices and people coming. Not because there's not tools like Slack or Skype where they can get their employees to do work, or team members. It's because having a location with everyone in it makes communication so much more simpler. And I'm currently on my newest venture, which is an ad agency, and I kid you not, it's growing faster than any other business because the one big difference, everyone's like, "Oh, you're using your name. You've been an entrepreneur for longer." Sure, that helps. But a huge difference is this is the first time from day one we put everyone in an office. And we're just like, "Hey, as a team, we're gonna work in an office." And I kid you not, it's made the world of a difference and I never would have imagined.

Eric Sui: Actually, Neil, that's a good point. Because I think about when Single Grain was actually fluttering around, we moved out of an office. And the reason it's been growing consistently in the last couple years is because we moved back into one area, and the collaboration and "What do you think about this? What about this?" Things just move a lot faster. And I think the fact that we're both validating this right now is good enough,
Anyway, number five, This is number five, right?

Neil Patel: Yeah.

Eric Sui: Okay. Number five, you gotta become a media company. Bill Gates said this over 20 years ago. He said that in the future, every company out there is gonna be a media company. And I was hanging out with a guy that's really connected in Hollywood the other day, and he was saying, "Look, everything's going back to the influencers, especially the celebrities out there." So becoming a media company is gonna allow you to control the attention, and that's gonna allow you to figure out what your audience needs and how you can serve them best, which is part of the reason why we do this podcast.

Neil Patel: Number six, you have to have upsells and downsells. It's easier to generate more revenue from your existing customers than it is to generate new revenue. So stop trying to only close new sales. Add in upsells, add in downsells. I kid you not, you can generate anywhere from 15, 20% more revenue from your existing customers on the low end, 30 to I've seen up to 100% on the high end. But I've seen the good campaigns usually do around 30% extra revenue by just adding upsells. Like just think about that, if you're doing $10 million a year, you don't have any upsells and downsells, adding them and fine tuning them, that gives you an extra $3 million in revenue, and you didn't have to pay for those users because you already have them. Your marketing costs are lower, your profit margins are way higher. It's a simple way to grow not only your revenue, but your margins become way better as well.

Eric Sui: Number seven, since you're on the path to going to seven figures, think about focusing in one one channel. If you're really good at blogging, for example, focus in and lock in on that. If you're really good at sales outreach, for example, focus on that. But trying to do too many things at once is going to be a killer for you, especially in the early days. You've gotta figure out that one thing that works well for you, and read the book "The One Thing," by Gary Keller, and that's gonna help you grow.

Neil Patel: So, those are just seven essentials to building a million dollar business. We can give you a lot more in the future, and we'll save that for later. But go to Singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing goodies, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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