What Are the Four Levels of Scaling to Million Dollar Months and How to Break Through Each

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There’s four different phases as you’re scaling up to million-dollar months that you’re going to come across.

So we’re going to talk about all four of them here today.

Each one has its own set of characteristics, what you need to do in order to get to the next level, and most importantly what keeps you stuck at that specific level.

We’re going to go through each one of these four different archetypes on your path to million-dollar months in detail.

It’s exciting to have you here. Thank you so much for joining in.

My name is Jeremy Haynes and for all those who don’t know, I’ve helped 40 different businesses currently hit their million-dollar months. Biggest clients spend upwards of $5.5 million a month.

All we do on this site is take the lessons from those different businesses and hand them down to you in these pieces.

So again thank you for being here. If you’re new consider following along at the end of this after you get some value.

If your business is already generating $100k+ per month, My Inner Circle is where you break through to the next level. Inside, I’ll help you identify and solve the bottlenecks holding you back so you can scale faster and with more clarity.

If you’re already following along, welcome back. It’s a pleasure to have you. Let’s dive in.

What Is the Guppy Phase from $100K to $300K Monthly and Why You Get Stuck Here

The Guppy phase. The Guppy phase is when you’re stuck somewhere between about $100K and $300K a month. About 9% of small businesses reach $1 million in annual revenue within their first five years, and most get stuck before they ever reach consistent six-figure monthly revenue.

Characteristically there’s more of these people out there than any one of these other three archetypes. People get stuck here more than anywhere else.

It’s a bunch of stuff that happens in this initial Guppy bracket that you’ve got to master.

And you have to become self-aware of and you really have to put a lot of attention into if you want to get out of it and level yourself up to the next bracket.

Number one and this one is very interesting, you have to dial in the offer.

So when you are at somewhere between like $100K and $300K a month, respectfully to you, I know you think you’re a big deal but in the grand scheme of business I mean you’re essentially at this point just a gross millionaire.

If you’re netting more than a million dollars off of maybe $300K a month that’s great. That’s about where you should be at to be clear after everything anyway.

But regardless, if you’re just doing $100K a month you’re barely scratching a million dollars.

You have to first get out of this mindset. There are a lot of mindset problems that happen in this bracket, mainly just inflating your own self-worth.

I know it kind of sounds the opposite of what you might think you need to do but I promise this will work really well for you.

If you think that you are impressive at $100K to $300K a month you have got to get out of whatever little echo chamber you’ve put yourself in and get back into the real world and really expose yourself to how little money that truly is.

I know respectfully to money that yes you can go out there and live a great life off of that little bit of money. I fully understand that. I’ve been there too.

But at the end of the day you are doing very little in the grand scheme of things.

You’re essentially in a very selfish way really only taking care of yourself. You’re going to nice dinners, you’re traveling around a lot. It’s all just lifestyle stuff in this bracket.

Generally at $100K to $300K a month, that’s what’s challenging about it. It gives you this inflated perspective of like wow my life’s awesome, this is a lot of money. But it’s not.

That’s the biggest thing you have to embrace. You have to think big and feel small.

That is one of the most critical things to the Guppy phase to get out of it. You have to start feeling like it’s not enough and you have to have genuine things that you believe in to help you understand and expose you to the fact that it’s not even remotely close to enough.

It can’t just be you taking care of yourself today. You have to find stuff that’s much more expensive, much more costly. Bigger reasons.

You have to align yourself to some kind of impact you want to genuinely make on the world and usually it takes significantly more money than a measly $100K to $300K a month in order to do it.

So a lot of mindset problems simply put in that level.

I digress though. Back to my first point, you have to dial in your offer.

There are a lot of offer problems at that $100K to $300K a month. Generally you’re selling something that might not be that scalable. That could also be a big reason that you’re stuck at that $100K to $300K a month benchmark.

You just kind of sold your upper limits and you just can’t stretch past where you’re currently at or you have an offer that’s extremely niche.

You might have a pricing issue. This is another common thing that we see in that lower bracket. The game is just a pricing problem.

You’re not charging nearly enough so it would take far too many people to buy from you and you wouldn’t stand a chance to deliver on whatever you’re selling if you priced it how you currently price it.

So you might have to make some serious adjustments.

Simply put, some of these things that I’m exposing you to with these issues that I most recently just touched on, these are business model problems.

And that can be a significant undertaking because at the end of the day you’ve cushioned your life with a significant amount of lifestyle expenses that have made you feel like well I have to keep this going.

And you’re really afraid that if you made some kind of major necessary change it would contract you and expose you to a smaller level of the game which you never want to see again.

Which is a normal thing to think of course. You can’t allow the fear or the uncertainty of the change that’s necessary to hold you back from making that change. You have to go through with it. It’s got to happen.

The other big thing and this is very important to understand, sometimes it’s a people problem where you have just the worst staff.

At the end of the day you could brute force your way up to $100K a month relatively easy.

You generally aren’t putting serious commitment on the table with the payroll you’ve got, paying true A players.

Respectfully to you, you might have recruited a few A players that you’ve had to develop to the point where they’re really good and it feels a lot better to convince yourself you’ve got top talent even if you don’t.

Being brutally honest with yourself at that Guppy level is of the utmost importance because it is what defines you to get to the levels above where you’re currently stuck.

And people are one of the number one essentially just levers to pull to help punch you up.

You could have the worst people as a part of your team in extremely key roles that you’ve convinced yourself because again you’re in the illusion that you’re a big deal.

You’re under the illusion, this spell that you’ve got it figured out. But again you’ve stayed stuck. You haven’t really punched above it.

You have to get to the point where you have good people.

When I say you haven’t put serious commitment on the table and really dished out some serious payroll, let me give you some perspective.

I paid one of my top sales guys just this last two months alone, he made $552,000 in December. He made just shy of $500,000 in January.

For the month of February since we just finished that month off, February was a slightly shorter month, he was also in the high $40Ks in terms of what he got from last month’s commissions.

We just had one of our members of our staff move down here. We almost doubled his pay, just shy of doubled his pay.

You have to hire great people and you have to pay great people extremely well. That’s the catch.

You have to either get to the point where you can actually retain some great folks and generally great folks want to be paid exceptionally well. That’s really what it all comes down to.

I have a whole piece dedicated to just A players, what it takes to hire and retain them. I’d encourage you to go check that out if you haven’t done so already after you read this one.

Back to my point, the Guppy phase is challenging. It’s this booby trap of lifestyle cost, this booby trap of you’ve got it figured out but yet at the same time you’re not really growing.

And the other big thing is scaling always fails for you.

This is the other one that’s huge that we see extremely commonly for people in this bracket.

Because at the end of the day you know that you need to scale but every time that you try to do stuff to scale, as an example let’s say you’re getting there from paid ads currently or referrals or you have some kind of method in order to get you to this point.

By the way usually in this range you have one method rather than having several methods. Or if you do have several methods, one of them is the dominating factor by far. And you know it too.

Point I’m trying to make is every time you try to push the gas on that specific dominating customer mechanism that you’ve generated for yourself here, it just doesn’t perform well.

So as a result of that, because of your mindset, because of this worldview of I’m already in a position where I’m good, I don’t need more help, I’ve got this figured out, you end up just essentially trying to brute force your way up to the next level which rarely ever works.

You have to have a sophisticated business to go from the Guppy phase to the middle of the road phase.

Even to get to the $300K to $500K a month range, it’s a totally different game. That’s why they’re separated here.

But again my point is you have to recognize that something’s obviously wrong. You don’t know what you don’t know.

And every time you’ve tried random stuff it fails for you. And again that could be a people problem, it could be an offer problem, it could just be again you just have some kind of problem with your price so you’re limited on what you can scale into just based on you charging too little.

Mainly again can’t stress this enough but it’s hard for you likely to be self-aware of, you have a mindset problem.

One of the best things you could do if you’re stuck inside that bracket, this is really important to understand, you have to put some money on the line and hire somebody who’s going to come in and reality check you.

One of the most common things that I have to do inside of my Inner Circle offer for the Guppies that are between that $100K and $300K, I’m constantly checking their mindset, helping them out with their conversion mechanisms, getting them to the point where they master a customer conversion strategy bringing in new customers in a consistent flow that actually works.

Helping expose problems in their current model, their pricing that they just can’t see themselves that I can come in and just immediately notice and say dude do this, do that, do that and get out of your own way, hire this person.

There’s a lot of stuff that you need but it generally comes from outer perspective.

In the links available there’s an offer for my Inner Circle program. The bare minimum you have to make to even apply to that thing is $100K a month.

The average person in there when they join in does about $200K to $300K a month. We have 15 big players in there doing more than a million a month.

Again you investing into yourself and paying enough to actually take it seriously is going to make a big difference comparatively to you just learning from Facebook groups or one of your buddies making about the same amount of money as you are.

You’re going to again just get some random advice off the internet. You have to understand it’s a huge difference to how serious you’ll take information when you pay for it from somebody who’s already been there, done that.

How many Guppies I’ve helped go from the $100K to $300K a month range to at least the level above that? It’s been in the high hundreds at a minimum.

So my point is invest into yourself, join into the Inner Circle if you haven’t considered doing so yet.

What Happens at $300K to $500K Monthly and How to Break Through to Million Dollar Months

I digress. Let’s continue on to the next one. So the middle of the road, you’ve officially gotten to the point where you’re somewhere between about $300K and $500K a month.

First of all congratulations. You’ve in most instances overcome a lot of the mindset problems.

To be fair to you at this level, you are officially dialed in. You’ve got a consistent routine. You’ve got the right people in most instances. You fixed a lot of the offer problems that held you back prior.

Maybe you increased your price or incorporated more than just a single offer. You really started to figure things out at this level.

And that’s one of the most important things that you have to point out for these types of people. They figured some stuff out.

You still haven’t figured all of it out otherwise you’d be bigger than where you’re at now. But you definitely figured out more than the Guppies did by far and you’ve started scaling.

That’s one of the most important parts about the middle of the road phase. You’ve actually started the process of consistent reinvestment and growing what you’ve got right now.

Here’s one of the downsides though. Generally something significant happens at this level if you stay stuck here.

There’s something that happens and it’s generally and unfortunately still one of the same thing. It could be a key person.

And that’s one of the big differences here. You might have as an example two, maybe one if they’re doing really well, but generally two really good closers.

But every time you try to get more they just don’t in any way come close to the skill set of the first two. That’s going to hold the business back as you’ve become aware of.

Every time you try to punch the gas, well you can’t because you don’t have more room on those closers’ calendars to fill up. And every time you go try to hire a new closer you get hurt.

And so you might have even explored a few different alternatives. As an example it might not be salespeople, it might be an agency.

Maybe the existing agency that you’re working with, they’ve only taken businesses up to that same $300K to $500K a month range and they’re really struggling to help get you up to the million-dollar month benchmark.

So again in both of these examples you’ve rotated through more than one agency and they’ve all just kind of remained stagnant for you.

You’ve rotated through more than one solution to try to get better closers into the business from paying for closers, using referrals, trying things on your own. But again you’ve just really gotten stuck here.

Something major happens with people more than anything else at this level that inhibits you from scaling beyond where you’re at now.

But things are good enough. Things are good enough to where you’ve got more resources and you’re also more willing to take risks and invest into yourself when you’re in this benchmark because simply put you just have more money.

So you’ve also gone to masterminds, you’ve hired mentors typically. You’ve started the process of investment to try to learn more about why you’re stuck and you’ve obviously gone through the process of trying to implement a lot of these things but not everything always works for you.

And so typically at this level what you’ve really got to start to learn is essentially entrepreneurial empowerment.

You’ve got to take this wide range of information that you’ve gotten exposed to at this point and you’ve got to start to really pick and choose and find ways to implement it for you that’s going to work best.

That’s one of the most interesting things that happens at that $300K to $500K level.

You can find, I want to make it very clear, you can absolutely find the right people who can come in and just scale the daylights out of that thing.

But at the end of the day there’s almost a leadership difference that you’ve got to evolve into as the charismatic person that leads the business.

You’ve got to get to the point where you feel empowered enough to take everything that you’ve learned both on your own dollars that you’ve spent from experience and all of the information that you’ve consumed beyond yourself that you’ve invested into and just ultimately conclude to, this is what we’ve got to do. This is the master plan.

So I want to call this empowerment because that’s essentially what it is.

To a degree you might have even heard this quote at this point of what got you here won’t get you there. That’s partially true at this level.

The type of person that you’ve been up to this point just doesn’t really carry you through to the million-dollar months.

You can breeze, I want to be extremely fair to say this, you can just breeze through this level too. But if you get stuck at this level these are a lot of the things that inhibit you here.

Most of the things that help you just breeze through this level are just consistently reinvesting into the ad spend, making sure that you’re profitable the entire time, not overleveraging yourself on expenses as you go, trying to keep your team lean and just chock full of A players.

More importantly taking care of yourself, making sure that you stay dialed in, not disconnected. Not in the trenches though but again you’re dialed in and very attentive to what’s happening in the business.

You can breeze right through this middle of the road level honestly pretty easily if you’ve got the right characteristics of the business set in place.

But a lot of the things that inhibit you at this level are these following things.

Some of the other things and this one’s also really interesting, you can have an offer like we talked about kind of in the Guppy phase that’s just not something that’s that scalable that you get into this range of revenue.

You manage to push it up to the $300K to $500K benchmark but there’s got to be some kind of change that occurs in order to scale up to the next level.

So you can also still in this range have some offer problems. And if you do this is going to be challenging to be fair.

You either have to come out with a new offer or you’ve got to get to the point where you make the current offer more scalable.

And again because you got to $300K to $500K a month you’re going to have a lot of attachment to what’s gotten you to this point.

And having to come out with something new that can be very troublesome but it could also be extremely exciting because again it can be built from a more knowledgeable self.

So when I talk about that empowerment point that I’ve made prior to this, that’s something that’s really important to tap into.

You should feel confident that you can come out with some great stuff and that you’re validated to a degree. I mean look, you’re doing a few million dollars a year. You’re doing $3 to $5 million a year. That’s pretty good.

Keep in mind 0.1% of businesses get to $10 million a year—research shows less than 1% of companies hit the $10 million annual revenue mark, with only 0.4% of SaaS startups reaching this milestone. 

So when I say you have to feel empowered, you have to be able to look and make decisions a lot more confidently in most instances.

That can kick you up to the almost there phase.

What Is the Almost There Phase from $500K to $750K and Why It Has the Least Friction

The almost there phase. I can’t stress this enough. If you get to the point where you’re doing $500K to $750K, you have the power, you have the ability to punch up to that million-dollar month threshold.

There’s generally very little wrong that’s at the $500K to $750K a month phase before you get to big dog.

The almost there phase, I mean it’s one of my favorite periods to be a part of when we’re working with a business because there’s so much enthusiasm. The morale is so high.

To be fair the fluctuations of a little bit of expansion and a little bit of contraction can really swing morale and how you feel about everything, your certainty levels on the whole business.

But overall you feel more optimistic than any one of these other benchmarks believe it or not.

That’s when you’re so close to achieving the outcome that you’re after of hitting the big million-dollar months that nothing really stops you in this phase.

You figured out the offer. You figured out the people. You figured out the reinvestment strategy to continue scaling. You figured out the conversion mechanisms that worked for you.

You’ve got consistency in almost everything. You’re not one of those entrepreneurs that’s just messing around and going around and traveling and hiring poor people that you convince yourself are good to run the business.

No, you’re dialed in. You’re doing good. Again your enthusiasm and your optimism and more importantly your quality of life is extremely high in this phase.

You absolutely love yourself and you love life. You love your team. You love your business. You’re just enthused. Simply put that’s one of the most optimistic phases I’ve ever seen and witnessed in the several people that we’ve helped actively literally right now in that phase.

Reflecting on it and also have historically helped too, I want to be fair though in saying this is usually just kind of a phase that happens but it’s not really a phase that people get stuck in.

This is one of the most uncommon places for a business to just stall. Very uncommon to be clear.

And if you do, and this is again although uncommon it can happen, generally when you get to this level your perception of self as it should be is validated to a pretty extreme level at this point.

You’ve gotten to the point now where again you know, $5 almost $8 million a year at least. You have great people around. Again everything’s going really well.

But the one thing and this is truer than anything else I’ve seen, the one thing that can really hurt you in this phase is taking yourself out of the business.

It is awful to witness when it occurs and we’ve seen it more than one time unfortunately.

And I don’t want to make it sound like there’s never a chance. So again taking yourself out of the business, I don’t want to make it sound like there’s not a time that this is appropriate or can occur but this is not that time.

This is not when you ideally want to do that.

What I mean is I’ll give you a perfect example. One of my long-term friends, he was in the middle of scaling up and I remember when he got about to this phase he started to hire people that he was calling executives.

So he hired a CMO, he hired a COO, he hired two business partners to come in that he gave a pretty large chunk of equity to and he was convinced that he couldn’t get to the next level above that without a fleet of executives.

And this can happen at any level of the game to be fair for what I’m about to describe.

You’ll have these dormant versions of yourself kind of sitting in your subconscious that at different levels of revenue or at different bank balances or at different situations and circumstances that you fall into in your life will just kind of manifest and pop out of you.

And one of the most interesting things that happens at that $500K to $750K mark is, and again it’s uncommon but it happens a lot during this phase more than the other ones, you’ll start to become convinced that you’re doing totally fine to be fair but you’ll become convinced that you just can’t get to the next level without random things that you don’t have now.

Even though you’re still progressing, even though this really isn’t a phase that people get held up on, even though this really isn’t a period of time that you’ll get stuck and it’s pretty easy to just consistently grow, this is the phase where just a new identity kind of reveals itself.

And hopefully that new identity and that new version of you is beneficial comparatively to being a version of you that’s going to sabotage your business.

So back to my buddy, he hires a CMO that honestly wasn’t qualified. He hires a COO that was honestly just not even close to somebody that should have been a COO.

Keep in mind COOs are masters of operations. They’re incredible at hiring. They’re incredible at tracking. They’re incredible at managing the day-to-day operations so ideally you can step back a little bit more and not have to do all those things yourself.

This guy that he hired was not that guy.

And then he brings in these two business people who were just older, pretty old. And not to sit here and say old people are bad or don’t know what they’re doing, but he was convinced that he needed older people in his business to lend him perspective and advice.

He was a pretty young guy, late 20s. And anyway he brings in these people and he empowered these people to make decisions on behalf of the business.

They inflated the expenses of the business so high it eroded a lot of the profitability that could have otherwise been reinvested into scaling.

They would advise him on some of the most terrible decisions I’d ever witnessed in a business. Even though the business for a short time after these people being hired continued to grow so it gave a short-term illusion that this was a good choice.

And in the long run it is literally what was the ultimate demise of the business was having other people that didn’t really make much sense to bring in all of a sudden come into a business that they hadn’t grown to that point and start making very key decisions about what to do to kick it up to the next level.

I want to be fair in saying as I’ve described in these two previous phases, the right people coming in can absolutely come in and help you punch up big time.

But the wrong people at this level specifically at the almost there phase, they can contract you more than anything else.

You’ve got to understand that when I say there’s this dormant identity that comes out, there is a tremendous amount of friction. It’s usually a self-inflicted friction going from the Guppy phase to that middle of the road phase.

There’s less friction at the middle of the road phase. Usually you’ve got things figured out and there’s just some key problems that we’ve discussed and talked about.

And then you kick into this phase. This phase I can’t stress it enough, it has the least friction out of any other phase.

I see more people get stuck when they exceed a million dollars a month than I do at $500K to $750K a month comparatively. They just don’t get stuck at this level very often. It has the least friction.

So going into it being self-aware of that will help you punch up above it all the faster especially if you’ve got great offers.

Now I will say this, the one thing that I do notice helps a lot, this is a big pro tip if you’re inside of this phase and you find yourself slowing down a little bit or potentially even stuck, is sell higher ticket.

This is where you need your upsells because those little fluctuations that you experience, those little contractions that occasionally happen, those seasonal instances throughout the year where the ecom people crawl out from under their rocks and inflate ad costs for everybody, you’ve got to have opportunities to endure through those windows.

And that generally comes from the back-end offers that you’re going to sell to the surplus of customers that you can instantly generate on a month-over-month basis.

It’s no longer a game of only the front-end offer and having a back-end offer that does all right.

It’s a game of having a strong front-end offer or set of offers and an even stronger back-end offer that a lot of people are buying into and that’s very scalable.

And honestly really starts to compete with what the front-end revenue is producing on a month-over-month basis.

All the better if that back-end higher ticket offer is some type of recurring offer that people are going to consistently reinvest into. All the better if that’s the case.

What Happens When You Hit Million Dollar Months and What Problems Come with Big Dog Status

So again I just want to be extremely clear, once you officially transition from the almost there phase to the big dog phase, first of all congratulations.

There’s a whole different set of problems that occur at this level. It’s a whole different just life. It’s a whole different business.

This is when you have all kinds of options. One of the first ones is being bought out officially becomes a very viable option.

I want to disclose to you there’s been four different instances now over the years where we’ve been a part of businesses that are above a million a month and they get bought out.

Both info businesses, one of them was a high ticket product we were selling was an ecom offer, and then one of them is just a high ticket service business.

And out of these four different instances, this is not an exaggeration, all four had gotten bought out from private equity companies.

But they don’t get bought out all the way. What ends up happening is they get a minority or a majority buyout and they still are a part of the business.

Almost all instances of somebody getting bought out at least from what I’ve seen so far, they want you to stay a part of the business but they start to take over a lot of the decision-making.

So it’s the same kind of lesson I articulated in the previous example I provided of you being in the almost there phase and bringing in the wrong people can really hurt a business’s success and profitability and momentum. It becomes extremely problematic.

So although being bought out becomes an option, just make sure you get bought all the way out because I have seen these private equity companies come in and just run these things into the ground.

A perfect example, one of the first times it happened, a business was doing about $1.7 million a month. They get a majority buyout.

They immediately came in and had issues with one of the equity partners that they had to buy out and that was a long drawn out court process that I won’t go into detail on.

But to the person who got bought out they got a good chunk, about $20-ish million dollars. And again they were stuck being in the business.

This was a personal brand info product business in this particular case and it was some very credible people that came in and bought it out that were in the private equity deal.

They had a big fleet of staff that they immediately placed into the business. They got rid of a lot of people but we were able to stick for about a six-month transition period of time.

Man, thank goodness they transitioned me out of there. I checked in on this business because the guy who got bought out hits me up about two years later and he says “Hey Jeremy I’ve got to bring you back in. These guys ran it into the ground. They gave me back the equity for a dollar.”

And I don’t know what to do. I have to scale this thing back up.

He went from $1.7 million a month and under a year he was down to $300K a month. And under another year after that, so by the 2-year time frame they were sub $100K a month.

They had no idea what they were doing but they came in because they owned the business now with a majority of the equity and they made all the decisions. The hiring and firing choices, the what to do and what not to do. It was very problematic.

In the second instance of an info product business being bought out, it was a $40 million exit. That business was doing a little more than $2 million gross. They were doing about a million dollars a month net give or take the month and how much revenue was produced top line.

And again it was a majority buyout so the person who got bought out owned and retained a minority of the equity once bought out but they had to stay in the business and continue working for a duration of about 2 years.

But he was removed from the decision-making part of the process which I never understand why they do that. They got the business that far. What makes you think they can’t get it further?

But hey at the end of the day you’re not the person dishing out $40 million to people so you don’t really get to make the say and the choices in these instances.

This business had a fleet of 70 different staff that they used. Private equity from what I’ve learned so far kind of like agencies that just have a significant amount of cash and instead of earning deals they just buy businesses.

So this business comes in and they immediately deploy a bunch of different staff into different divisions of this business that they also use in plenty of other businesses that they bought out.

And it was the same thing. They drove the business from $2 million all the way down to sub $400K a month. They drove the cost per call from $150 all the way up to $700 to $800.

It was insane what this business was doing prior to being bought out and what happened after.

The other two instances are very similar stories. I won’t sit here and just drag on this but again I want to be clear, once you get above $750K a month and you enter into the million-dollar month plus bracket, keep in mind it takes a little over $10 million a year to make what 0.1% of businesses make on Earth according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The further you get above that benchmark the more valuable your corporation and business becomes and the more big money out there would want to buy it out for various reasons depending on how you have it structured and how you make the money and what you do and all that.

But again not to digress too much, it just becomes a huge opportunity that you can start being attentive to.

And one of the ways that we’ve seen this hurt people is they start to pay a lot of attention to it and they start to make it known to all the key players and the staff and it freaks everybody out.

And this isn’t from a place of trauma to be clear, having four different instances of companies that we’ve worked with being bought out and they all run it into the ground. No.

It’s more so that people are aware that when a business gets bought out usually everybody gets fired in almost all instances. Or usually how the deal was structured before or how it feels or the culture of the business changes dramatically.

So you’re not working with poor players up at this point when you’re at this level of the game and you’re a big dog. Your people know better. They’re smart. They’re not ineffective.

So they’ll know what’s coming simply put and they don’t like it.

And if you start really making it known that you’re going to get a buyout, again people just really start to lose a lot of enthusiasm and your people in the business kind of starts to go sideways from what I’ve seen and what I’ve been a part of over the years.

If you keep it secret it’s also like a betrayal. So it’s kind of a catch-22.

But either way you have a high probability to get bought out at this point. It is very exciting especially if you have everybody a part of it and are willing to give little pieces to everybody after the purchase actually occurs that makes everybody excited of course.

The other thing that starts to occur is some stagnancy.

You can become stagnant at this level pretty easily sometimes. You just hit these invisible ceilings and you’ve got to come out with new offers.

You have to find new channels that you can acquire customers from. You’ve got to transition from in-market demographics to the needs convinced demographics and beyond.

Sometimes you have to pivot from in-market and needs convinced to mass market. And that in itself is a completely different way of advertising, conversion mechanisms, messaging that you’ve got to go out there and deploy in order to consistently generate customers in new markets.

A lot of the times as well because there’s just so much volume happening on a month-to-month basis, people can get really bogged down in data and they start to essentially lose sight of how to actually make decisions relative to the data that they are getting because there’s just so much more data than they’ve ever got before.

The other thing and this one kind of is challenging is the people need swapped.

You’ll notice there’s a commonality by the way amongst all four of these brackets that people can be a big problem along the way no matter what level you’re at.

So anyway at this specific level though when you’re officially in the big dog bracket, the people needing swapped, this becomes problematic because everybody’s generally going to want paid more money when you reach this level.

That’s what we’ve seen almost every time. And some people to be honest with you they’re just not good enough to get paid what they want to get paid.

And if you were to pay them that amount it’d likely be better just to hire somebody who is better than that person for that amount.

That becomes something that’s really important at this level to identify and really start to think with. Do you have the right people or are you going to need to swap new people in? That’s what kind of challenging about the whole thing.

Outside of people needing swapped just from thinking too small, not thinking you can get to the next level, we had an example just recently in a business.

Their operations manager came to them and said we’ve got to slow down, we can’t keep scaling, we’re going to have problems. They fired the person.

They brought in a new operations manager and the new operations manager was like “I think we could 3x this thing easily from here. We’re good.”

That’s a great example of that.

You can’t have people freaking out about the current scale they’re at if you want to scale to the next levels above that. That’s for sure.

Anyway to continue on, once you get to the big dog level there becomes simply put a need to understand that everything that accumulated the million-dollar months, you essentially have to do the same exact thing for the next million-dollar month.

The math. You are super clear on the math.

That is the one thing that I love about working in these big businesses that do million-dollar a months. They are so crystal clear on the numbers.

They have no ifs, ands or buts about what the KPIs need to be, about how much money they need to risk every month in order to make more money.

And more importantly they have a war chest of cash at this point to deploy to make significantly more cash than they have right now.

At all different levels of the game, whether you’re at the big dog level, the almost there level, the middle of the road level or the Guppy phase level, we can help.

My Inner Circle offer, Jeremy’s Inner Circle, there’s a link available. We do twice a month one-on-one calls, weekly group calls, quarterly in-person masterminds and we have a group chat full of rich people trying to get a lot richer.

You can also train your staff through my Master Internet Marketing offer or if you’re an individual and you don’t qualify for the Inner Circle that’s also a great place to be.

I’d love for you to check both of those out. Links are available.

Check out some of my other pieces. They’re all lessons on handing down what has worked and what has not worked in these businesses that have hit million-dollar months so you don’t learn the same mistakes the hard way and so you can take the things that they do and try to create more growth for yourself.

Most business owners waste years figuring out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering copywriting, funnels, ads, and more. If you’re ready to invest $5k and get serious about your skills, apply here.

Go get richer. I’ll see you in another piece.

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