Summary
Making your first $10,000 is a crucial mental milestone, and it makes earning more much easier.
Early work experiences can lead to recurring deals. I once landed a contract at $250 an hour, earning over $1,000 for a few hours of work which turned into a $5,000 monthly deal.
You don't need to start with high-paying jobs. Even volunteer work can be used as a case study to attract paying clients later.
Focus on consulting and marketing services. Companies spend billions on ads and will pay for organic growth.
Utilize Crunchbase to find companies that recently raised money, preferably those with $5-10 million in funding. They're more likely to need and pay for marketing services.
Use tools like Ubersuggest.com to identify company marketing errors. Offer solutions for free in your initial communication to build trust.
After securing projects, aim for consistent monthly income by upselling clients on retainers based on your proven successes in brand engagement.
Hiring is key to scaling up. Look for people with promotions at competitors, as they probably know the industry well.
Once you make money, reinvest in your business rather than diversifying. Hiring help lets you focus on sales to grow faster.
Sales are crucial. Spend time on sales strategies and talking to potential customers to adjust and optimize your approach.
Keep customers satisfied through regular communication and reporting. It's easier to retain clients than find new ones.
To scale quickly, reinvest your profits back into your business and live modestly to maximize growth.
Strategic reinvestment, like hiring more salespeople or better account managers, can substantially increase your revenue.
Follow these steps, and it’s possible to make a million dollars in a year, even starting with nothing.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest making your first $10,000 a key goal. It's important because it builds your confidence and sets the stage for bigger earnings. Start small if you have to. Even unpaid work can become a great case study that you show to future paying clients.
A good way of getting started is by offering consulting or marketing services. Use free online tools like Ubersuggest.com to find and point out marketing mistakes companies make. Share your findings with them for free. This builds trust, making it easier to land paying projects.
Check out Crunchbase to find companies with $5-10 million in recent funding. They're likely to need the marketing help you offer. Reach out, highlight their marketing errors, and propose easy solutions.
Once you secure a project, aim for consistent income by upselling clients on monthly retainers. Show them real results, like increased social media engagement or higher website traffic, using tools like Google Trends and SocialBlade. Monthly reports will help you keep customers happy and loyal.
As your business grows, reinvest your profits into hiring and scaling your operations instead of diversifying too early. Bring in people who can handle simple tasks, so you can focus more on sales and strategy.
To take it further, hire experienced individuals from your industry. People with promotions at competitor companies may already have useful contacts and insights. Reinvest in roles that boost revenue, like sales or client management, to keep your momentum going. Live modestly and channel funds back into growing your business for even bigger success.
Quotes by Author
"Making a million dollars is easier once you've made your first $10,000"
"People don't struggle because of talent. They struggle because they don't know how and what to charge for or how to sell"
"Once you get your first deal, you just rinse and repeat"
"The key to building wealth though is to not just make $10,000. you need to turn it into consistent monthly income"
"Successful entrepreneurs scale by reinvesting every dollar into growth instead of chasing distractions"
Full Transcript
Making a million dollars is easier once you've made your first $10,000. With the right approach, you can turn $10,000 into a million dollars in just a matter of years. So, today I'm going to show you exactly why everything gets easier after your first $10,000 and the exact steps you need to take to turn that $10,000 into a million. Let me show you how. First, you need to understand what happens when you make your first $10,000. At the age of 16, I was able to get a contract that paid me $250 an hour. See, when I was a little kid, I went to community college because I wanted to graduate college faster. And my first class was speech 101. So, I gave a speech and how Google's algorithm worked. And it turned into a small contract where they paid me $250 an hour. And I got paid a little bit more than $1,000 for a few hours. They were happy with me. So much so that they started giving me a reoccurring contract for roughly $5,000 a month. That $5,000 a month deal was with a company called Alpac Electronics. Eventually, that corporation got acquired. Alpac generated $25 million in revenue from the traffic that I was bringing to their website. Now, of course, I did not make them $25 million in revenue. I brought traffic that was worth $25 million because their sales team then had to go close that traffic and turn them into customers. But I was part of that formula. And when you first crack the first $10,000, it's a big mental shift. People don't struggle because of talent. They struggle because they don't know how and what to charge for or how to sell. See, once I got that $5,000 a month deal and I helped that company generate $25 million in revenue, they introduced me to three more companies that all paid me $5,000 a month. That doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up to 20,000 a month. And I was able to do that all when I was 16 years old. Once you get your first deal, you just rinse and repeat. You just keep doing it and scaling up and up. Even if that company that you do well for doesn't give you more business, you can hit up other similar companies, even competitors, and offer them your services and your skills in exchange for money. You also now have case studies. Heck, if your first deal doesn't even pay you $250 an hour and only pays you hundred bucks or zero and you have to volunteer your time, that's okay if you get that case study because you can leverage that to make more money in the future. Once you understand this, you'll need to make $10,000. This is the fastest route to making your first $10,000. I love consulting and marketing services. It's one of the easiest ways to make $10,000 a month because business is already spending billions on ads and will gladly pay a fraction for that organic growth. Did you know more than $200 billion a year is spent on Google ads? Over a h 100red billion a year is spent on meta ads. That's a lot of money. Why wouldn't people want to spend a fraction of that to get that traffic organically? And just like everyone else, you're on the social web. You've created content. This is great especially for younger entrepreneurs because they can leverage social media marketing that they already understand. They understand trends, what people resonate with, and how to do well on the social web much better than the older demographic. and they can take this knowledge and give it to corporations. So, the way I would get started with this is I would go to crunchbase.com. Crunchbase is a site that breaks down every single company that recently just raised money. When someone raises money, what do they need to do? They need to invest it to grow faster to give their investors a return on their investment. So, when you go to Crunch Base, look for all the recently funded companies, not the ones that raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Look for the ones that raise a few million dollars, $5 million, 10 million max. Those are the ones that are much more likely to pay contractors. The people that are raising a hundred million, $500 million, they're later stages. They've already built out their marketing teams. With the ones that are raising a few million bucks or under 10, like I mentioned, hit them up and break down what they're doing wrong with their marketing, whether it's SEO or paid ads or even social media marketing, and break down how they can fix it step by step. If you don't know all these marketing services, that's okay. You can use tools like uberess.com, put in the company's URL, and it'll show you what they're doing wrong and all the errors they need to fix in order to increase the rankings. By breaking these things down to corporations, they're much more likely to pay you to help them fix it. And a lot of these tools like Uberess breaks down how to fix the errors step by step. And what you'll find is they'll quickly pay you 5 to 10 grand a month to fix some of their problems. But the key when you email them is to give it all away for free. Don't say, "Hey, if you pay me, I'll give you the strategies on how to fix this." Just give it to them away for free. Because if you give it away for free, it's building trust. Now, when you're emailing the founder to get their business, I also recommend that you email the investor who invested in the company because Crunchb investor as well. and you can go to their site and figure out which person led that deal. So, when you include them in the email address with the founder, you can just Google and you'll find their email address and you email them all the things they're doing wrong and how to fix it. A lot of times the investor will put pressure on that individual and founder to get it fixed and the founder usually will just turn to you because you broke down what's wrong and how to fix it. The key to building wealth though is to not just make $10,000. you need to turn it into consistent monthly income, which is really easy if you follow this blueprint. I started with many one-time deals, but I quickly upsell clients into monthly retainers by showing them real-time progress and engagement and brand awareness. If you're helping people with social media marketing, for example, and you're showcasing how you can produce better content, which you can use a lot of AI tools to do, and you can end up getting them more likes, more shares, more following. You can then use tools like Google Trends to show how more people are typing in their brand name and they're getting more brand recognition and awareness through your efforts. And this will allow you to sell them on a monthly engagement. If you can show quick wins and results, whether it's more comments, likes, engagements, people saying how they love the content, or even creating content that drives people to a website or landing page where they can collect a lead and you're showing progress, they're much more likely to be willing to pay you on a monthly basis to keep that work up. If it takes you too long to show quick wins, they won't necessarily know what they're getting for the money, and it's hard to convert that onetime fee into a monthly reoccurring revenue stream. A simple way to show your progress is to create monthly reporting tools through tools like SocialBlade or Google Trends that prove the impact of your work. For example, Google Trends shows brand queries over time. SocialB blade shows follower count over time. These are great ways to lock in monthly reoccurring deals. But don't make this mistake on your journey to $10,000 or you might never get there. Who do you think should have been the world's first trillionaire? Elon Musk? Nope. It should have been Bill Gates. Do you know Bill Gates would already been a trillionaire if he never diversified his Microsoft stock? While Steve Balmer, on the other hand, was a Microsoft employee, not the founder, had less shares than Bill Gates, and he's actually richer than Bill Gates. He's higher on the Forbes list. Why? He didn't sell shares. He bleeds Microsoft. He did not diversify. Instead, you should be reinvesting in your business rather than chasing different investments because this allows you to accelerate your growth much faster. For example, if you want to offer social media consulting to people and get that 10 grand a month now that it's starting to get going, you can hire people to help you out with some of the work so you can focus on more sales and getting out there and reaching to more companies on crunchb.com to grow your income. The key is to not diversify. The key is to double down. The key is to think about all the stuff that you're spending time on that really isn't producing much of an ROI that can easily be done by someone else. Hire people for those roles. Once you hire people that can help you on the mundane and boring task, spend your time on sales. Sales is something that the founder should be doing, especially during the early days to really grow faster. Because when you talk to potential customers, you'll figure out how you can adjust your approach, your outreach, and even your pricing to increase your revenue and profitability. Once you've made your first $10,000, it's easy to turn into a million dollars over time. All you need to do is this. When I started NP Digital, my ad agency, I hired people off of LinkedIn. What I did is I look for people who work for not one, but I look for people work for two or more of my competitors. And when you interview people, they always tell you how they're amazing. So, I look for people who continually got it promoted because if someone kept getting promoted at my competition, chances are they produce good results for them to get a promotion. Especially if they got promoted not once, but twice, but three times. And if they got promoted three times, had two competitors, the chances are they're good at what they do. So I reach out to those people and I asked them, let's say their name was Mike. Hey Mike, my name is Neil from NP Digital. I'm actually interested in hiring someone like you for this role. Do you know anyone who may be interested? If you notice there, I actually didn't ask Mike if he wants a job. Because by being indirect, what you'll find is a lot of times they'll be like, hey, I'm actually interested. Would love to talk to you. and you'll get many more candidates who are interested in working for you. If you then interview them, if you feel they're a good cultural fit and they are good at what they do, you could hire them. What's great about hiring these people is they'll know the pitfalls in your own business cuz they've been in your industry for a while and they'll help you avoid making those pitfalls, which will cause you to have faster growth. Plus, they have relationships within that industry, which will allow them to help bring revenue over to you as well. And in the short run, if you can't afford to hire some of these people full-time, you can get them on a part-time basis. Whether it's editors or social media managers or assistants or people who just do sales outreach for you, you can literally get people who work part-time for many roles. But don't ignore this huge problem that will stop you from making significant money. One of the things that really helped us reduce our churn was to send weekly and monthly reports. By talking to our customers on a weekly basis and on a monthly basis, giving them proper reporting helped increase the lifetime value of our customer. Remember, it's easier to make more money by keeping your customers happy than it is to continually go and find new customers. You want to track metrics like brand queries, engagement rates, follower counts, and even how many leads and revenue social media is generating your customers. If you do this, they're much more likely to continually pay you. If you don't do this, they'll be like, "Oh, this is all cool, but what am I getting?" This is why you need constant communication and show progress reports. You can't just say, "This is what I did each month." You need to say, "This is what I did each month. Here are the results, and eventually, you should be able to show, these results cause X or Y revenue." Overall, making your first million dollars isn't really that difficult. It's just a process. Once you hit 10K, you just need to follow the system. Successful entrepreneurs scale by reinvesting every dollar into growth instead of chasing distractions. When I started off, I took all my profits and I put it back into the business and I kept doing it and I lived in a very affordable manner by pretty much driving old cars or living with my parents or eating non-expensive food and not going to restaurants so I can continually reinvest the money back into my business so it could grow faster. People who don't reinvest as aggressively won't make as much money. And this is one of the keys to my success. When I see something producing money and I know it could be profitable, I go all in. And I go all in without ever looking back. Sometimes I make some mistakes, but you pick yourself up and you learn from mistakes and you keep pushing forward. And eventually you'll be down led a path of all the stuff you should be focusing on and you'll know all the stuff you should avoid so you don't keep making those same mistakes over and over again. If you don't reinvest aggressively, you'll be stuck at that 10K mark and you won't do well. And this is the big difference from people who make a lot of money and don't. The people who aren't making a lot of money usually aren't willing to take big bets. The best way to reinvest in your business is to look at what areas will create the biggest return on investment. For example, it could be sales. Hiring more salespeople could produce more revenue. Or on the flip side, if your clients aren't staying with you long, a better reinvestment strategy could be better account managers because if you have better account managers, clients will be happier, which will cause people to stick with you longer. And that is exactly how I make a million dollars in the next 12 months, even if I was starting from zero. Follow this road map.
