What Triggers a Revenue Outbreak When You Are Plateaued

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Revenue plateaus happen to nearly every business. You’re running your operation, testing new approaches, iterating on what used to work, and nothing seems to generate the lift you need. The numbers stay flat month after month.

I call the breakthrough moments “outbreaks.”

Before an outbreak, you’re in a plateau. What got you to your current level stops producing the same results. Something fundamental needs to shift. The outbreak happens when you identify what works and growth accelerates. These outbreaks eventually settle into new plateaus where the cycle repeats.

I’ve taught these principles through my 7-week live comprehensive training to operators at vastly different revenue levels. The businesses that break through their plateaus consistently examine the same four categories.

According to research from Harvard Business Review, most businesses experience multiple growth plateaus throughout their lifecycle. Understanding how to navigate these periods separates operators who stay stuck from those who break through.

How to Change Your Strategy Without Starting Over

Strategy shifts are often the easiest to execute because they plug into your existing infrastructure.

Consider a business already running classic direct response advertising with a call funnel for a high-ticket offer. A simple strategy tweak might mean switching to a mini webinar format or testing a different VSL approach.

Analytics from Wistia or Vimeo might reveal a low play rate on your VSL. Building out a longer page that breaks down the video content into digestible sections could increase consumption, which typically drives more action.

Sometimes the shift isn’t funnel-related at all. You’ve been using classic direct response and hear about content advertising strategies—the tornado ad strategy, the Venus fly trap, the reverse fly trap, the Forester, the Harvester. Executing on one of these produces different results.

You may need to test several strategies before creating an outbreak. Strategy manifests in multiple forms.

Funnel strategy includes live webinars, challenge funnels, and classic call funnels. For e-commerce operators, it might mean testing your homepage versus a product category page versus a product lander.

Ad strategy encompasses content advertising versus direct response, DM strategies, lead forms, and website conversion strategies. According to WordStream’s advertising benchmarks, different ad formats and strategies produce vastly different engagement patterns across industries.

Sales team strategy can create substantial differences. Your salespeople have been relatively consistent, but increasing accountability changes outcomes. Morning meetings, required training videos before taking calls, role playing sessions, real-time coaching—sometimes that’s the strategy tweak that creates the outbreak.

Operational strategy matters equally. If clients typically wait several weeks to experience the result they hired you for, tweaking operations to accelerate that timeline could be the major difference. That person might buy something else from you significantly sooner.

Why Hiring the Right Person Can Change Your Entire Business Trajectory

The right hire can produce monumental shifts.

This could be a new marketer, salesperson, sales manager, operational partner, or referral partner. These additions typically generate instant, substantial differences in results.

A client was recently referred to us—a big brand with substantial organic impressions per month. Her paid advertiser couldn’t get paid advertising revenue to the level she wanted.

When people bring us in through Megalodon Marketing, we’re usually the team they call when they’re tired of stagnation. We change funnel strategy, advertising strategy, and sometimes encourage sales team adjustments.

We came in and implemented different approaches than the previous team. The difference was noticeable overnight. Lots of movement, lots of momentum.

Sometimes a new salesperson instantly outperforms everyone else. Their morale lifts the entire sales organization. Sometimes the new hire makes everyone else look average, which raises the bar for the entire department or company.

Referral partners can create outbreaks. One member in my flagship program was iterating through various approaches, trying to create a breakout. He connected with a new referral partner who started sending him deals he’d never otherwise access.

Results are not typical. Your results will vary and depend entirely on your individual capacity, business experience, expertise, and level of desire. There are no guarantees concerning the level of success you may experience. The testimonials and examples used are not intended to represent or guarantee that anyone will achieve the same or similar results. We don’t believe in get-rich-quick programs. We believe in hard work, adding value and serving others. As stated by law, we can not and do not make any guarantees about your own ability to get results or earn any money with our information, courses, programs, or strategies.

Referral partners make every deal easier. Their trust and credibility transfer to you when they recommend your services. This operator went from his previous plateau to a new level. That’s an outbreak from one new referral partner.

Operations hires can be transformative. Early in my marketing agency days, I had tremendous volume. Tons of clients, multiple services, everything running simultaneously. I brought in a COO who referred a project manager, and that project manager made all the difference.

Everything became highly efficient. Projects completed faster and easier. It removed a tremendous communication load from my plate. Instead of communicating with everyone in my organization, I communicated with one person who communicated with everyone. That cleared up stress and time, allowing me to focus on revenue-driven actions, which led to an outbreak.

Mentors can create outbreaks. Sometimes it’s one piece of advice or ongoing perspective from someone that makes all the difference. Sometimes you hire them, sometimes you meet them and they’re willing to invest their time.

I’ve created tremendous outbreaks for operators just from mentoring, providing advice, offering perspective. Not from doing the work for them.

How Picking a Different Customer Type Can Transform Your Business Model

Niche changes appear constantly with marketing agencies, personal brands, info product businesses, and service-based businesses expanding into different markets. A niche shift can make a tremendous difference.

A landscaper was running a substantial operation throughout Atlanta and nearby Georgia regions. Their main niche was essentially anyone who would hire them. Lots of residential work for regular houses, nothing exceptional. He’d expanded horizontally well with lots of trucks, workers, and substantial recurring revenue.

I’d visited Beverly Hills many times, and the landscaping quality always impressed me. Every road features different trees. The homes have some of the most well-manicured landscapes anywhere. Trees shaped like gumdrops, bushes thirty to forty feet tall perfectly cubed and squared, lawns perfectly manicured with real grass, beautiful flowering trees.

I asked this operator how many affluent homeowners he was working with, how many commercial businesses, what the average order value was. Most homes he worked on were just average. The nicer parts of Atlanta he wasn’t really accessing.

I told him to take a trip to Beverly Hills and see for himself. Get inspiration. He flew out, drove around, called me excited. He secret-shopped a few businesses to get pricing.

His average job was in a certain range per month. In Beverly Hills, he was getting quotes that were substantially higher for landscaping. Some of it was based on difficulty. Being forty feet up on a ladder perfectly manicuring a bush, specialized equipment, heavy equipment, risk factors. Some homes are on the edge of hillsides. They’re importing full-grown trees via planes, boats, containers, semi-trucks, using cranes to plant them.

He’d never considered any of this as possible. It clicked for him. He needed to sell to affluent clients.

He came back and immediately started calling on different homeowners, running Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads, doing mailers with direct response advertising. He sent people door-to-door. Because he understood the market, he could speak their language. He could present incredible concepts to beautify these landscapes and offer competitive pricing.

Nobody was doing this in that market. Just targeting affluent clients added substantial recurring revenue in the first two years. First year was over a million in added recurring revenue. The following year he increased it even more from affluent homeowners alone.

What caused his outbreak wasn’t expanding to other states. That would be cash-intensive with a long cycle. It was leveraging everything he currently had. Same people, same equipment, same markets. Just picking a different demographic to sell to.

He also expanded to commercial businesses. I’ve seen this pattern in roofing, asphalt contractors, and numerous service-based businesses.

E-commerce works the same way. One operator had a red light therapy panel business selling B2C with a certain average order value. Pretty high-ticket for e-commerce. But he was experiencing plateaus. He tried new products. Different sized panels, smaller panels for specific treatments. These didn’t lead to outbreaks, just consistent plateaus.

I told him to tap into commercial businesses. Go B2B. He started working through the questions between him and an outbreak. He conceptualized a red light therapy infrared sauna. A vertical wooden box with a door and tons of red light panels on the floors, ceilings, walls, even the door.

He created an infrared light bed. Took a tanning bed, removed all the tanning lights, retrofitted it with red light therapy. That bed sells for a substantial amount per unit. Huge demand he didn’t expect. Not just commercial businesses like health and wellness centers and med spas, but affluent individuals started buying them too.

The bed and booth opened up a whole new market. Substantial additional revenue per year, increased his average order value tremendously. It outgrew and outperformed the entire B2C side of the business in under two years.

McKinsey research on B2B sales shows that businesses expanding into commercial markets often discover entirely different buying behaviors and order values compared to consumer markets.

When Creating a New Product or Service Makes Sense

Many businesses keep selling the same things they’ve historically sold. You’re at a plateau and almost afraid to change things because you don’t want revenue to decline. But testing new offers occasionally is essential.

One operator got his business up to a certain level per year, got bought out by private equity, they ran it into the ground and gave it back. He got it back to where it was and wanted to keep growing from there.

He sold to a very specific demographic with a very specific offer in the information product space. He saw other people selling everything. Sales training, business development, marketing trainings. He was excellent at all those things but only selling to one specific audience to overcome one specific problem.

He wanted to create a new info product about being a better business person. I told him he could do that without cannibalizing his existing offer. He didn’t have to change everything on the front end. Just start making more content demonstrating he’s an expert at those things.

He sold to men struggling with addiction-related issues. Making additional content about business, marketing, sales, operations, getting bought out by private equity—putting his expertise on display wouldn’t make him look bad. If anything, it made him look better for his main offer because people wanted to learn from someone well-rounded who’d overcome the problem they were struggling with.

New offers can be tested with existing customers first. This helps you test things before going front-end with them. Develop products, iterate on them, sell them to people you’re already working with. Upsell them. He already had strong upsells on the back end.

Test and iterate on the back end before trying everything on the front end.

Trend-based offers work differently. Someone like Tai Lopez excels at taking an offer that’s a trend, playing into it aggressively, sometimes building an entire trend. As that trend dies down, he’ll iterate and develop a new offer based on what people potentially want next.

In the past, Tai had his 67 Steps program. Then he came out with SMMA, social media marketing agency. Huge opportunity. He sold that program to hundreds of thousands of people. People from celebrities to regular individuals working jobs trying to start making money online bought it. That was a massive year just off that one offer.

That business model still works today, but you don’t see Tai marketing it much anymore. Why? People are looking for something new they can take advantage of that’s in the public eye. Whenever something new emerges—crypto, AI—people abandon everything and jump on board.

Tai won’t bandwagon opportunities unless he’s an actual expert. Most recently, he’s genuinely skilled at buying businesses. He’s taken huge risks with substantial capital plus his business partner and capital fund to buy out big institutions like Bodybuilding.com and Pier One.

Because Tai took the risk and bought those businesses, several smaller influencers built entire businesses around teaching people to buy businesses. People like Roland Frasier and Cody Sanchez teach this topic. They’ve spent time and money developing interest around buying businesses.

Tai saw this happening and recognized it made sense to create an info product about it, bring in other experts who can teach within that program, and sell it. That’s exactly what he did with SMMA.

Real estate offers work the same way. There’s a collective consciousness that real estate creates wealth. According to research from the National Association of Realtors, it’s one of the top categories that creates millionaires. That’s already a thought in people’s heads, which saves you money.

I’ve seen wholesale strategies, the BRRRR strategy, rehab flipping, fix and flip. Every different real estate niche. Then I was scrolling TikTok and found someone named Tom Cruz—not the celebrity—who was a Section 8 real estate investor doing substantial monthly recurring revenue just from Section 8 properties.

He was teaching people how to do it. I’d never seen anyone talk about Section 8 real estate investing. This was a new offer. I’d already seen tremendous results generating revenue for personal brands in real estate. When a new offer comes along that no one else is discussing, it’s going to be substantial.

At the time, he was selling a one-hour call. I booked one as a real estate investor myself. Got all my questions answered. I asked if he had an info product. He didn’t. I spent the next part of the call coaching him on what to do.

In 72 hours, he developed his entire information product, filmed dozens of videos. Today he has an entire community and software paired with it. First month he did well. He does exceptionally well with his information product now.

A new offer inside a niche that already has lots of offers—wholesaling, fix and flipping, BRRRR, commercial real estate—but nobody was talking about Section 8. That’s going to generate substantial revenue.

Don’t Destroy What’s Already Working While Testing New Things

Never cannibalize existing revenue for any of these four categories. The point is to create outbreaks, not downfalls.

I run a premium mastermind where I charge operators monthly. I do quarterly masterminds at my house, weekly calls teaching lessons for about an hour, twice-a-month one-on-one calls, and we have a group chat. Everyone in there is doing exceptionally well and trying to do substantially better financially.

Results are not typical. Your results will vary and depend entirely on your individual capacity, business experience, expertise, and level of desire. There are no guarantees concerning the level of success you may experience. The testimonials and examples used are not intended to represent or guarantee that anyone will achieve the same or similar results. We don’t believe in get-rich-quick programs. We believe in hard work, adding value and serving others. As stated by law, we can not and do not make any guarantees about your own ability to get results or earn any money with our information, courses, programs, or strategies.

This doesn’t make me more than a small percentage of my revenue per month. I do it because I genuinely enjoy helping operators at this level. Intimately sharing problems helps me stay connected at the highest level to what high-level people are dealing with, which makes me better as a marketer, salesperson, expert, and business owner.

An operator came in who was running an agency. He was trying to start an education company, so he created his own version of a program like mine. Started doing masterminds four times a year, one-on-one calls. I was intimately working with some clients his agency was also working with.

His agency imploded. Almost every client fired him. Not because of bad service, but because he stopped being able to generate results. He took all his time and attention off the marketing agency—what was making him all his money—and put it into the wrong offer. That cannibalized his main revenue source.

Sometimes you look at people you think you’re competing with or inspired by, see what they’re doing, try it yourself, and it doesn’t go well. You have to be able to bail and abandon those things when that occurs. Go back to what was working. Repeat successful actions and stabilize the revenue of the existing business.

If you implement any of these four categories—new strategies, hiring new people, getting involved in a new niche, doing additional offers or changing offers—don’t bail on what’s already working. Repeat successful actions about ninety percent or more of the time in your day-to-day operations.

Consider these as tests. Don’t go all in. Test them and look for signs of the outbreak. Things starting to improve, instant differences you can recognize, an obvious uptrend in revenue.

If you’re going through the iteration cycle and something starts leading to a downfall, a downward trend break instead of an upward one, stop doing that. Pull back on that specific action so you can stabilize and get back to where you were previously. Then iterate until you create the next outbreak or at least increase the potential for it.

These four categories are what we consistently examine whenever we’re trying to create outbreaks. They should help you tremendously.

If you’re ready to work on implementing these frameworks in your business, my 7-week live comprehensive training walks through how to approach strategy changes, hiring decisions, niche selection, and offer development in a systematic way.