Howdy readers!
Today I’m going to walk you through how I started my company Near…
- The 6 steps to start a million dollar business
Let’s do it!
(ALSO: I made a video on this recently — give it a watch here!)
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My passion is building businesses. I’ve done it a bunch of times now, and every time I’m getting better.
Today, I want to share the six steps I use to grow a business from team to idea to reality.
We can call it the Girdley Method (mostly because all the good names were already taken!).
Here we go:
Step 1: Assemble the team.
The big question in putting together a team is: what does everyone bring to the table?
The simplest version of “team” is one person: you. That could be plenty to start with. As for me, I knew I didn’t want to be CEO. That meant I needed at least one partner.
We ended up with three people.
- Me - lots of experience running and structuring businesses, plus a big social media presence
- Hayden - strong motivation to build, be an entrepreneur, fluent in Spanish
- Franco - super smart, hard worker, can both lead and sell well, located in Argentina
This was the team we started with.
Step 2: Find the opportunity.
At this stage, you still don’t know what your idea is. So you start looking for a problem to solve. Look for trends, look for opportunities, and look for areas where your expertise or assets give you an unfair advantage.
We noticed that COVID had radically changed the working world towards remote work. Suddenly it wasn’t just big businesses like IBM or McKinsey or Exxon Mobil — it was small and medium businesses too.
At the same time, many of my CEO friends were struggling to find great people to fill their open jobs.
We had a feeling there was a business opportunity if we could convince people to look further abroad than their own backyards.
So we moved to step three.
Step 3: Sell first, build later.
I see so many entrepreneurs spending their time on stuff that doesn’t matter. I call it “playing house” — they get a website, they get an LLC, they hire a lawyer, they get an office, they buy business cards…
Waste. Of. Time.
Now don’t get me wrong: you eventually need an LLC and all that stuff. But none of that really matters until you know you have a viable business.
With Near, we started asking our networks if anyone would pay for a nearshoring service. And we sold our first few customers before we’d even signed a contract between us three founders.
Step 4: Make the minimum viable product.
Some people agonize over when they should launch their product.
The answer: sooner than you think. Launch at the idea stage for two reasons:
First, you get to build with customer input. Building in a vacuum is a great way to waste your time.
Second, you see what customers do, not just what they say. Get a product in their hands as soon as possible.
For Near’s first few customers, we were doing everything manually. No software solution or automation — we were learning firsthand how this business should work.
Finding recruits, connecting them with our clients, watching the interviews, iterating our processes, figuring out what our rates should be, narrowing down our ideal customer…
They understand the work in a profoundly personal way.
Step 5: Evolve the business.
I call this the “evolution” phase of growing a business, and it never really stops.
It’s where you enter the cycle of improving the business, observing the results, and improving again. You’re also repeating the previous four steps as you launch new products, target new customer bases, and explore new directions.
At Near, we started evolving to figure out larger customers — middle market, say, 500-1000 person enterprises. We realized those businesses have different needs than the tiny little customers we launched the company with.
So, we built another minimum viable product, and the cycle continues.
Step 6: Step aside.
Nobody’s good at everything. So, eventually, you need to step out of the way.
For me, I’m an excellent CEO up to a certain point. But my specialty is going from 0 to 1, not from 1 to 10.
Once a business can support itself financially and we have a stable business model figured out, that’s my cue to step aside and make an opportunity for other people to lead.
When we built Near, I was never working in the company. That was by design. My job is to support Hayden and Franco as a board member, so they can grow, learn, and figure out the next steps.
And they’re kicking butt — today they’re well over $1M in revenue. And hopefully in a few years they’ll be 100x that number.
That’s it! To recap those steps:
1. Assemble the team
2. Find the opportunity
3. Sell first, build later
4. Make the minimum viable product
5. Evolve
6. Step aside.
I’m thinking about building this out into a more hands-on resource to walk you through each step. If you’d be interested in something like that, hit reply and let me know!
(You can watch this article as a video here!)
3 things from this week
- Appetizer: These two guys are getting hundreds of millions of views on their videos, but struggling to make it a business. I gave them my best advice, in my first long-form YouTube video. Give it a watch!
Click to play
- Main: Starting a business, you need to solve a problem a lot of people have. Jason Cohen (2x unicorn builder) says that your problem has to exist for either 10M people or 100K companies:
- Only 1% of web impressions convert to visits
- Only 1% of site visits convert to paying customers
- So 10,000 impressions becomes 1 paying customer…
- …and a business needs 1,000 customers to succeed.
Read his whole post on problems here (and I highly recommend subscribing!) - Dessert: Bringing out the big guns.
Have a great week!
Michael
