Kickoff Sessions

#283 How Smart Entrepreneurs Grow a Business From Zero In 2025

• Darren Lee • Episode 283

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Speaker 0:

Smart entrepreneurs are playing a completely different game in 2025. The old way of doing business with one funnel, one offer, one sales process is basically dead in 2025. This used to work. Let me clarify In 2020, all the OGs of the industry came, dominated, made their millions and left. But in 2025, if you're playing an old game with old tricks, you're going to get outnumbered and outrun by everybody else. So let's fix this in this video and I'm going to show you exactly how smart entrepreneurs are going from zero to $1 million, plus a year with a simpler model.

Speaker 0:

And look, I've been there. I've been in the point whereby I've struggled so hard to build and grow and scale my online business. It's normal, business is tough. You're going to have really difficult periods, but just because something is difficult doesn't mean it needs to be miserable forever. When I was building Voix, our media company and education business, we were hitting a ceiling over and over again. I would relive the same quarter, the same month, over and over again, and nothing would change. Nothing would change in that instance. We were getting up to roughly 100K a month consistently. We'd go up to 120K, swing back down to 80K, swing to 70K, back up to 100K, and nothing would change. The only things were changing was the complexity of the business. It would become harder to scale, the team would have much more issues and next thing I know, I'd be finding myself trying to figure out someone's Wi-Fi problems in the back ass of nowhere. This is not the right way to build a business and, to be honest, I was sick to death of it. So what's the big shift that changed everything. For us, this was the big difference from serving a tiny market in a small niche, solving one problem, to serving the entire market at a scale. This is how we went from a small one offer, one funnel approach to an ecosystem model that scales way beyond you and way beyond your own little brand, and I call this the ecosystem engine that feeds your entire business, and it also feeds your entire life, because money may not be the goal for everyone. It could be time, freedom, location freedom, financial freedom, whatever that may be. It all comes with having an ecosystem engine that drives traffic into your business. So let's look at it step by step.

Speaker 0:

The first stage is leads. The most important part of your online business is leads. Without leads, everything gets sucked up. It is the oxygen, the lifeblood. Everything inside of your business breaks down to leads, and I was in this position whereby I was hammering my head off the wall trying to get leads, and I couldn't do it right. We just had LinkedIn and, apart from just putting out more posts, which actually doesn't work, we needed to open up new client acquisition channels to get more leads. What we started to focus on was having an Instagram strategy basically the same content on LinkedIn. Having a YouTube strategy, having tactical videos on YouTube, having an email strategy, getting leads to actually go deeper down the funnel with you before taking the final step to working with you.

Speaker 0:

And this just blows up the amount of velocity and speed you can have in your business. And when I was a tiny, small, little media company, we could barely find the lead. I looked under the closet, I looked behind the couch and nothing was there. Nothing was ever there, whereas when we had more of a client acquisition focus, this is basically how every smart entrepreneur is doubling down in 2025. And this is how people are going from zero to 1 million all the way up to 10 million a year. And here's the actual brutal truth is that if you have your ecosystem well defined and well built, you don't need people to buy your stuff, because your free content solves every one of their problems and it allows them to go and build an amazing business. They can send you referrals, they can send you recommendations. They may not ever do anything, but they can leave a fantastic experience working with you. By just your free content alone, someone like yourself can watch all of my Build With Me series on YouTube and technically build a one million a year online business. People only pay for access, speed and proximity to me and my amazing team. That is the only difference and that's the beauty of having amazing content coming off the top of YouTube and all your other platforms.

Speaker 0:

Next up, we have sales, and speed sells. B2c is a speed game. B2b is a gentleman's game, and you need to get up, get off the couch and actually speak to your leads, and I like to say that sales is very like dating. Unless you're six foot four, shredded as hell with a crystal clear jawline, no one's coming to you. You have to make the first move. You have to go to your leads. You need to open up more conversations. Unless you're Alex Ramosian you sold a company for 40 million no one's coming direct to you randomly to work with you. They will eventually, but not in the beginning. You need to open more conversations on LinkedIn, on Instagram. You need to have more content coming off the top of YouTube that starts more conversations. You need to have more phone calls, you need to get on the phone and ultimately, ultimately you need to stop being a princess.

Speaker 0:

I've been diagnosing people with princess syndrome for the past couple of months and I'm seeing this over and over again Business owners too proud to create content creators, too proud of their Canva templates to actually speak to their leads and founders who need to ask their daddy to go to the bathroom. This needs to stop. It needs to stop. You need to go directly to your leads, open up more conversations and, even though it's quite cliche, the more hands you shake, the more money you make. So you're probably thinking, yes, darren, I know leads, I know sales. That makes sense. I'm just going to do all that. I already do that.

Speaker 0:

If you are doing it to a high level, then you need this following point you need to track your metrics and every inch of your business. It's not sexy, it's not fun, it's not something you can post on Instagram, but it is the absolute backbone of your business. If you don't have a good hold of your numbers, you're going to fall apart. You're going to be super anxious as well, because you've no idea what's coming around the corner. I've worked with some of the biggest sales trainers in the world and some of them are absolute cowboys. They have their finger in the air picking up random, random ideas as to how they track their sales, how to track their customers, their prospects, and none of them truly actually can get into detail and actually be able to analyze the numbers, let alone close a deal. Some of these guys can't even close a door, let alone a 6k paid in full program.

Speaker 0:

So what do you need to track and take simple notes of this? You need to understand how many leads you're speaking to a day. I would say 50 new conversations a day, 50 follow-ups a day, when you get them on the calendar. You need to understand how many calls you're booking, how much people are showing up to the calls, what is your close rate, what is the lifetime value? How much people churn every month? What is the total cash collected? What is the total back-end cash collected? These are only small little things. Right, they're small things and the irony is within Apex, one of our programs.

Speaker 0:

We just give this to a lot of our members. Some of our members come in, they're making 150K a month and they don't really understand their sales process. We just give them a lot of our actual tracking sheets and instantly they're able to see the numbers and scale their business directly. After that and also other things to track is some things like how much you're spending on ads, how much does it cost you to get customers, how long did this stick around for?

Speaker 0:

Because I'll be fully honest with you, for a long time I didn't track this stuff and that's why I'm saying that I don't speak from a position up here. I've actually done the cowboy stuff for a long time. I just thought, yep, next month's gonna be better, next month's gonna be better and nothing changes. Although now, because I know, end to end, how many calls we book, how much show up, what's the problems? How do we diagnose problems? I can, for the most part, predict how much money we're going to make. Next month. An asteroid might hit and kill us all on this planet, but unless it does, I have a pretty good idea how much revenue we can generate, and it's all based on understanding your numbers. It's very simple and to give you a simple example, if you wanted to lose body weight, you would get on the scales every single day and actually measure your body weight. It is a key indicator as to are you losing body weight and fat in your body. Do the same for your business, and the second you start looking at the numbers, you will genuinely start driving them up and finally we have fulfillment.

Speaker 0:

Now you've been hearing me talk about the ecosystem engine for the past 10 minutes and you're wondering well, when do I see the products? When do I see the offers? The offers come last Because once we have our leads, sales and also our metrics dialed in, we now have different ways to solve that problem, and your first offer is going to be a high ticket offer. This is gonna be close to you because you don't have that many clients. It's gonna be fast for the client to get results and it's gonna be a lot of proximity and access to you and, as a result, you should be able to get the best results for people as a result.

Speaker 0:

So let's just give an example of a sales trainer who works with B2B companies. If you have this offer dialed in, you might physically go there and actually work with the sales team to improve their sales processes, and so on and so forth. We have a client called Jiri who's done exactly that. He has a very close proximity offer, which is a two day workshop, which is over $30,000 USD, where he goes and physically improves the sales performance. Now that same offer can be delivered in different ways. He can have a coaching program, he can have a mentorship, he can have self-paced content for people to come and work with him, and as he builds his ecosystem and gets more traffic and gets more loyal customers, they will see the full breadth of what he's doing and say, okay, I want to work with you, but I don't want to spend 30 000. What I actually want to do is go through one year programs over eight weeks or 12 weeks or 16 weeks and as a result, you have a series of miniature offers that solve the same problem at different levels throughout the game.

Speaker 0:

Now let me ask you this how would that look inside your business? Imagine that, instead of trying to find leads from everywhere, you'd have a clear and simple acquisition channel. You'd know how you're getting your leads coming in. Then you would also have a sales process to go direct to them. If you're a princess, you can just put an appointment setter, or you can put a closer on the calls if you don't want to hit the calls, then all of this data gets fed to you, fed to you as the CEO.

Speaker 0:

You're the CEO of your business and the CEO of your life and, finally and most importantly, people can pick the product that suits them best, and this is why we do not kick people through a funnel. We pull them into our ecosystem. And, look, it's not just us that's doing this. Iman Gaji, specifically, even mentioned me on one of his podcasts for the ecosystem model that we've built, and he has done the exact same thing. Iman has WAP, he has Flowzy, he has 8FL and a bunch of other programs that he's helped people pull into his ecosystem. And the same ecosystem that Iman mentored me on is exactly what we have done inside of our business, and this is how the smartest entrepreneurs in our space are scaling from zero to one million plus in 2025. Multiple offers simple, seamless and straightforward.