How My Simple Business Started Making $1 Million From Scratch in Two Years

You can do a test to see if it is also possible for you.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

Are you an entrepreneur? Of course, you are; I assume that is why you are reading this. But the point is, if you are reading this, you have seen the title of this story and decided that you want your business to grow to be also a multi-million dollar business.

Creating a multi-million dollar business is not an easy task. I did it with my clothing brand by following seven precepts of T. Harv Eker, writer of the books Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and SpeedWealth. T. Harv Eker explains in much of his work how to create a business from scratch and teaches you how to create a multi-million dollar business in 3 to 5 years.

If you want it, you will have to work hard. I can’t guarantee you the same level of success, or even any success, but I can tell you T. Harv Eker’s seven principles that I implemented.

1. Developing a resilient mindset.

Our beliefs and thoughts determine our actions, so the minimum to start a business, you need to believe that:

• It is possible;
• It is possible for you.

Now that I’ve reminded you that you have to believe it’s possible for you too, it’s time for you to know that things rarely work out on the first try.

When I created my clothing brand Alpha Art, I had a strategy that allowed me to envision that I would trigger a BIG BANG and have average sales of 1000 shirts monthly…

The first year was a catastrophe. The average sales were 17 shirts monthly.

As much as you have a good strategy and a good business plan, be aware that nothing in this life is obvious. Unforeseen can happen. Worry about doing your best.

Elon Musk’s Space X was founded on May 6, 2002, and managed to reach the epicenter of the reason for its creation only on December 22, 2015. Do you realize how many failures Elon Musk had to collect to accomplish the feat pre-defined as his mission during those long 13 years?

It will be a route of ups and downs. There will be times when it will seem that you are about to reach the pre-established goal, other the is light-years away, that it is better to give up. The secret is to have a resilient mindset that:

• Likes what he does;
• Has a clear vision of where he is and where he wants to go;
• Doesn’t listen to negative people;
• Works hard, to the point where you feel proud of your level of commitment;
• Do not be afraid to fail.

2. Creating and delivering value.

T. Harv Eker’s rule number one is:

Your rule is directly proportional to the size of the value you deliver to the market.

One of the greatest lessons I learned from T. Harv Eker was that many businesses that don’t work out have in common that none of them deliver enough value to the market.

The keyword here is not value but delivery. Many people have good ideas, good intentions, good execution, but the value of their products and services is not considered so valuable to the market, or they cannot deliver enough of it.

I tried to model the culture of Amazon and Zappos to make sure that my brand would have enough value for the market and that my focus would be the customer above all.

For this reason, my brand’s slogan is: Eternalizing the Faces of Legends

For my brand, every human being is a legend who deserves to be applauded at least once in a lifetime because of the countless battles that life forces us to fight daily.

If you believe that you can have a multi-million business, you must understand very well the problem you intend to solve. It needs to be the main issue, preferably a priority issue for the customer’s life. Consider whether that problem already has solutions available and evaluate each one.

Four marketing factors that determine how much you will earn:

• Demand: How much the market wants what you deliver;
• Offer: How much the market is already offering for the product or service you have;
• Quality: The quality of your value, meaning how good your products or services are;
• Quantity: The quantity of your value. Which is how much of your product or service you can deliver to the market.

The delivery of all these marketing factors inevitably results in the financial growth of your business.

3. Timing.

Timing is choosing the right business at the right time. Bill Gross gave a talk showing the results of a survey he did with more than 200 companies, some billion-dollar successes, and others astronomical failures.

Bill analyzed five factors for each of these companies:

• Timing;
• Team execution;
• Idea;
• Business model;
• Capital contribution.

After a careful analysis, he noted that 42% of all highly successful companies’ success was associated with timing.

Unfortunately, most people enter a trend when the window is already closing.

When I created Alpha Art, whose focus was to draw on clothes, I noticed this would be an opportunity to bring something different.

Therefore the convergence between timing and the absurd focus of our brand by our customers was preponderant to get where we are today and continue to project higher levels.

So your intention should be to be aware of changes around you that may generate new business opportunities because the demand will be high, which means it is time to get in.

4. Systematize your business.

Systematizing means creating a repetitive process that produces profits. The idea is to create an operational algorithm for your business to sell your product or service efficiently to more and more customers as you grow over time.

Every business consists of only three parts:

• Marketing;
• Production;
• Administration.

If you want to create a multi-million dollar business, your system must have a set of repetitive processes that produce profits and that work without you.

You have to find people who are equally or more brilliant and energetic than you are who are willing to sell some of their 24 hours.

Taking that point into consideration, when I created alpha arts, I made sure to find a production team that loves what they do.

Since I am one of the worst designers ever, I took over the marketing and administrative areas. Soon afterward, I looked for people who love art and let them do what they love most, draw.

After assembling the perfect team, we made sure to create a working algorithm because we intended to expand the brand so that each of our branches would have the same work philosophy.

To systematize your business qualitatively, you must hand-pick each member of your team. The key is for them to have knowledge and skills that you don’t have but are critical to the company’s success.

It is necessary to have a pattern of company operation that should consider the following questions:

• Are we currently operating at 100% of our capacity?
• Where can we simplify to gain more time?
• How is the current market?

5. Duplicate.

Duplication is a way for you to increase the amount of value you can offer on the market.

For example, have you ever been to a mall that did not have a McDonald’s? This company is one of the examples of duplication. McDonald’s has a business that when you consume their products, you can be anywhere in the world and you feel as if you were living the same experience:

• The architecture has the same designer;
• The food tastes the same;
• The employees treat you the same way.

It is all very similar wherever you are.

McDonald’s created a model to work once in a systematized way, and then they only needed to duplicate this same model in other regions.

Considering the point at issue, we copied the culture from the company headquarters to the branches spread throughout the remaining states in my country to double the profits of Alpha Arts.

My semi-repetitive suggestion is:

Create a working algorithm and then copy it to every branch office you open.

6. Leverage.

For you to understand better, let’s look at an example. Suppose your company is growing significantly (I hope this is true): lots of sales, production at full steam, staff increasing. Until you, the company’s controller, verify through the Cash Flow that the money from equity to sustain this growth is running out, and you know that to grow, you need to put money in the machine.

In broad terms, leverage is the strategy of using various financial instruments or third-party capital to increase the potential return on investment.

For example, Tony Robison is a speaker who has been able to give 200 seminars in a single year, but with leverage in mind, Tony decided to sell one of these seminars and sell it on TV through commercials.

Thus, Toni Robison did reach many more people, spending less money and using less of his time. One of the most impacting ways of leverage according, to T. Harv Eker, is complete utilization of your customer database.

Customer databases are all the communication channels you have with customers who already know you, have paid for your product or service, and like your work.

Some examples of customer databases are an email list, cell phone numbers, and addresses. By having these channels well-structured, you can offer your customers additional products or services to what they already bought.

7. Doing the math.

This principle is the combination of all the other principles already discussed, working together. The difference between successful entrepreneurs and failed entrepreneurs is that successful entrepreneurs already start their business thinking about the end.

According to T. Harv Eker, if you follow this method, you will get one of 3 results:

• You can maintain your business by working on the day-to-day operations or in the strategies, receiving a very high pro-labor income;
• You can keep your business and delegate the functions to someone else. In that case, you no longer receive a pro-labor but, you continue to receive profit sharing;
• You can sell part of your entire business and become a millionaire instantly;

The truth is that the most profitable product you can sell in your business is your own business.

In the case of Alpha Arts, I opted for the second option. After doing my homework, I delegated my duties to someone else, and today I continue to receive the profit sharing.

I chose this strategy because I like Warren Buffet’s strategy a lot. My goal by January 1, 2025, is to have at least 30 sources of income.

Practice the things that will make you successful in the future, now. Eventually, these practices will become habits, and habits are intrinsic to us, meaning that they exist in our natural ways without us having to think about practicing them.

Despite all this, the most important thing is to enjoy the whole process. We must associate the process of enrichment and capital accumulation to a purpose that is much bigger than ourselves. That is precisely why it will put an end to all our excuses.

There are a few extra strategies that I have implemented:

• I did not invest so much in marketing. So I created an affiliate network system, where my sponsees are entitled to 5% of the net profit of each customer they bring to me. That made my brand grow exponentially;
• I invested 30% of the company’s net profit in cryptocurrencies to buy bitcoin. That has also been leveraging our company’s equity until today;
• We plan to pay 90% of our employees by percentage according to the cash flow of each month’s net profit;

Therefore, focusing on delivering as much value as possible to your customer now is a good investment. Good luck to everyone and, I hope you will be able to use this to become a multi-millionaire.