I hope you enjoy reading this blog post. If you want my team to just do your marketing for you, click here.
I hope you enjoy reading this blog post. If you want my team to just do your marketing for you, click here.
Author: Jeremy Haynes | founder of Megalodon Marketing.
Earnings Disclaimer: You have a .1% probability of hitting million dollar months according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 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 ideas, information, programs or strategies. We don’t know you and, besides, your results in life are up to you. We’re here to help by giving you our greatest strategies to move you forward, faster. However, nothing on this page or any of our websites or emails is a promise or guarantee of future earnings. Any financial numbers referenced here, or on any of our sites or emails, are simply estimates or projections or past results, and should not be considered exact, actual or as a promise of potential earnings – all numbers are illustrative only.
Watch the full video breakdown on this topic here.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably tasted at least a modest slice of entrepreneurial success. Maybe you’ve already broken through six-figure months and have seen some nice money flowing in. That alone can be life-changing if you were previously stuck in a “traditional” wage environment, or if you were scraping by on a few thousand bucks a month. But once you reach consistent six-figure months, the game changes. Actually, it must change—because once you realize there’s an entire tier of people making over a million dollars each month, you either feel a burning drive to climb that mountain or you sit back too long and plateau.
I’m Jeremy Haynes, and I’m laying out four distinct phases you’ll encounter on your road to $1M/month. This is the same roadmap I’ve used and refined while helping multiple businesses cross the million-dollar-month line (and, in some cases, blast right past it). Each phase, from the so-called “Guppy” bracket of 100K–300K all the way to the apex of $1M+ months, has its own traps, illusions, priorities, and key hires that you can’t avoid if your ambition is real.
There’s a common misconception that a “lone wolf hustle” approach—working 14-hour days, focusing on hacking every marketing channel—will magically carry you from zero to a million-dollar month. Let me be blunt: that naive hustle-first mentality might get you to 100K a month if you’re persistent. But trust me when I say it won’t hold up at the bigger brackets. You’ll need to fix your offer so it can scale, handle your pricing so it supports deeper reinvestment, and build an actual team that can run the business at the highest levels.
Let’s dive in. We’re going to examine each bracket with surgical detail, shedding light on why people stay stuck, what illusions they let themselves believe, and how you can power through the barriers that keep so many entrepreneurs pinned under that million-dollar ceiling.
Let’s call this what it is: the stage where you have just enough money to feel like you’re a big deal, but you’re actually playing in a small pond. You may be spending more than ever before in your personal life: new condo, fine dining, random vacations, and possibly a brand-new car you’ve plastered all over social media. And because it’s likely the most money you’ve personally ever dealt with, you might slip into the delusion that you’re “set,” that you can just rinse and repeat forever.
Yet ironically, more entrepreneurs get stuck here than any other bracket. There’s a massive population in the 100K–300K zone, and most never leave. Why? Because they don’t realize how small they actually still are in the grand scheme of business and are unwilling to tear things down and rebuild bigger, sharper, and stronger.
If you’re consistently at 100K, 200K, or even 300K a month, it is very easy to wake up every day feeling like a king or queen. You can buy or do almost anything you want on a personal level. You can splash out on the best restaurants, or spontaneously hop on a flight somewhere. It’s natural to think, “If this is what 100K–300K a month feels like, maybe I’m already good. I’m already the best version of me.”
The danger is that this comfort directly conflicts with the desire to grow. Growth isn’t about living large; it’s about stepping into bigger markets, solving deeper problems for your customers, and building out real, battle-tested systems. If you ever catch yourself feeling too content with 100K–300K, give your head a shake and ask yourself, “What’s my long-term vision?” Because it sure as hell shouldn’t be a monthly revenue level that only looks massive compared to where you started—not where you’re ultimately capable of going.
Another major factor that keeps you pinned in this revenue bracket is the offer itself. I see this time and again:
Either way, you’ll never cross the boundary from a six-figure monthly hustle to a genuine seven-figure-a-month business with an offer that tops out at the capacity you’re currently hitting. It might have gotten you here, but it can’t get you where you claim you want to go. Are you willing to remodel or replace that offer entirely if that’s what’s needed? That’s the real question.
Let’s be honest. It’s fun to start buying nicer things. It’s fun to post them on social and watch the likes roll in. Unfortunately, that euphoria can be the exact reason you cling to a model that’s fundamentally flawed. The moment you suspect that pivoting your business—raising prices, overhauling the product, or upgrading your team—might cause a short-term dip in lifestyle, you freeze.
You think, “If I do that, maybe I’ll go back under 100K/month. Then I can’t pay for X, Y, and Z.” This fear is a poison that stops you from building a stable foundation for real, scaled growth. You’ve got to be fearless enough to risk a bit of short-term pain for the sake of building a much bigger future. You’re either a hostage to the comforts you’ve built for yourself, or you’re someone who invests in tomorrow’s 10X possibility. There’s no middle ground if you want million-dollar months.
In this bracket, many entrepreneurs develop a contradictory mindset around hiring. They know they need A-level people, but they’re also deeply reluctant to shell out A-level pay. They’ll try to get by with “average” or “adequate” staff, especially if they’ve brute-forced much of the business themselves.
Sure, you might have stumbled on a few gem hires. But even those talented folks may still be far from the skill level you need to break the 300K barrier. Worse, many business owners overvalue these individuals, convincing themselves they have an “unbeatable team,” when in reality, the entire operation is filled with people who have yet to prove they can handle bigger challenges.
Remember: true A-players often command serious compensation. They want a slice of the pie when results come in. They may want commissions that would make a squeamish boss sweat bullets. But guess what? That’s exactly how you attract the closers, creative directors, marketing leads, and operators who can catapult your revenue to the next bracket. If you’re timid about investing real money in real talent, you’ll be stuck in “Guppy Land” indefinitely.
Nobody “knows it all” at 100K–300K/month. If that were true, you’d already be at half a million or a million a month. Usually, you’re missing something fundamental, whether that’s insight into mass marketing, advanced lead acquisition, or a thorough blueprint for building a robust internal sales team.
That’s why it’s so critical to remain brutally self-aware about what you don’t know. Hiring a mentor or an external consultant who’s actually taken people from 100K a month to 500K or more is one of the best steps you can take. But here’s the rub: at 100K–300K, you might think, “I’m already pulling six figures monthly, so I’m unstoppable.” That arrogance can block you from the very assistance you need.
The reality: Outside perspective forces you to see pitfalls that are invisible from the inside. It also forces you to own up to your illusions. Maybe you believed your pricing was fine, or your closers were rock stars, or your marketing funnel was maxed out. In truth, you might be sitting on a half-baked funnel or a stable of B- players, and you might need a 2–3X price increase. That “ugly truth” is precisely what sets you free to surge beyond 300K—if you have the guts to accept it and change.
Once you bust out of the Guppy Phase, you reach what I call the “Middle-of-the-Road” bracket—somewhere in the vicinity of 300K–500K monthly. This is a fascinating place because you’ve proven you can scale beyond the typical 100K plateau. You probably overcame some awkward offer or pricing issues, hired a couple of better people, or refined your marketing strategy enough to get that next wave of customers.
But you’re not at the half-million or million a month mark yet. You still have heavy lifting to do, and usually, one big new obstacle rears its head—sometimes a staffing hole, sometimes a funnel or channel constraint, or sometimes a leadership shortfall that needs addressing.
By hitting 300K–500K/month, you’ve done a few things correctly:
All of this has given you momentum. You’ve learned to reinvest consistently, push your marketing spend, and keep a closer eye on the margins. You aren’t as easily dazzled by short-term wins because you see the bigger progression on the horizon.
At this stage, you start to see how precarious your growth can be if you rely on just one or two key people. Maybe you have two excellent closers, but you struggle to find a third or fourth who can come anywhere close to matching their performance. That means you’re essentially pinned, because your top closers’ calendars are maxed, and you can’t scale calls if you don’t have more closers.
Similarly, you might have an agency that served you well for a while, but you notice they can’t seem to push your returns beyond a certain level. You try a second or third agency and encounter the same “glass ceiling.” In this scenario, you start thinking about whether you need a completely new approach—maybe an in-house marketing team, or a specialized inbound channel you haven’t explored yet.
These “people or channel constraints” can be deeply frustrating, especially if your team is otherwise stable. You’re not dealing with the daily chaos you had at 100K–300K. You’re generally more mature as a business, but you just keep hitting a wall trying to double or triple your monthly revenue.
By the time you’ve reached 300K–500K, you’ve often consumed countless trainings, attended masterminds, or connected with various entrepreneurs and mentors. You’re brimming with knowledge—maybe even too much. It’s not unusual to ping-pong between strategies if you lack internal decisiveness. One day you think, “We need a giant top-of-funnel approach with YouTube ads!” Next day, you’re pitching your team on ramping an SMS campaign. Then you’re investigating LinkedIn ads. Then you circle back to your initial funnel but want to tweak 20 aspects.
That’s how you sabotage your momentum, ironically, without ever meaning to. The key skill that breaks you out of 300K–500K and up into the next bracket is learning to be the empowered, structured leader who picks a path and sees it through. You gather all that advice and funnel it into one coherent scaling plan. You maintain enough data-tracking to see if your approach is winning or faltering, and you fix what’s broken rather than chasing the next shiny tactic.
Some businesses sail right through this bracket if they’re resolute, methodical, and well-staffed. Others can hover here for months or years—trying one new solution after another, feeling like they just can’t punch through. If you’re stuck, it’s typically because you’re lacking alignment or clarity. You suspect you should “try everything,” but end up committing to nothing.
When you’re pulling in 500K–750K a month, you can practically taste the million-dollar months. Life is good, your stress levels (compared to the earlier phases) might be significantly lower because you’ve assembled better people, your offers are more cohesive, and your marketing is systematically delivering leads and clients.
In my experience, this bracket actually has the least friction for many businesses. If you can crack 500K, you have the resources to deploy the type of marketing budgets and staff that sustain strong growth. You can typically see a clear path to seven figures monthly, and every test you run either pushes you higher or reveals a problem you can fix quickly.
Once you break past half a million a month, it usually means:
That is, of course, if you’ve built carefully. If you used band-aid solutions or plugged the business with second-tier talent, you might still be trudging through chaos—but typically, that’s not the norm if you’ve legitimately gotten to half a million dollars in monthly revenue.
The biggest potential pitfall at 500K–750K is pulling yourself out of the business way too soon. You might be sick of the day-to-day, or you might have illusions of living that “CEO on a yacht” lifestyle while a brand-new CMO, COO, or business partner drives your brand.
I’ve witnessed entrepreneurs do exactly this: they bring in expensive outsiders, label them “executives,” and let them make major calls that reshape the entire model. The new hires might be incompetent or just ill-suited for your niche. They might over-inflate your expenses, change your successful marketing campaigns, or wreak havoc on your once-thriving culture by firing your best people or reorganizing roles.
What often happens? Short-term illusions of growth from the leftover momentum, and then a hard crash. Or the new executives drain your profits to the point that you can’t spend what you need on ads, can’t pay strong commissions to top closers, and can’t keep up with operational overhead. That’s why I call it a time bomb. If you put the wrong people at the top, you may not see the catastrophic effects right away—but when it hits, it hits.
If you do decide to bring in high-level leaders, they must be proven, specialized, and integrally aligned with your existing brand. Don’t chase “shiny resumes” from people with big corporate backgrounds who have never scaled your type of business. If they’ve never taken a brand from 500K to a million or more a month, they’re gambling with your success.
Even at 500K–750K, you can’t predict every future fluctuation—especially in the digital space. Suddenly, ad costs can spike (often around the holidays or specific retail seasons), or your main funnel can experience a lead quality dip, or outside events in the market can shift consumer sentiment.
The best buffer against these dips is a robust backend. If you have a high-ticket offer that appeals to a meaningful percentage of your existing customers, you’ll generate extra revenue almost passively. If you structure it as a recurring subscription or membership, you can weather a random 10%–20% jump in cost per lead because you know your monthly re-bills and upsell offers are pulling in serious money to offset it.
This is typically the bracket—500K–750K—where entrepreneurs realize the front-end alone can’t reliably deliver them to the million-dollar threshold. Rather than pumping more into the front-end, you might make a bigger leap by focusing on your backend so that every front-end sale is effectively worth 2–3X over its lifetime. That’s how you can climb more confidently and maintain high margins along the way.
Welcome to the top dogs. You’re now sitting in the rare air of $1M+ months, which is more than $12 million a year. Statistically, you’re well beyond 99.9% of businesses in terms of annual revenues, and that means you have new challenges and new perks. You have all kinds of strategic possibilities open to you: deeper expansions into new markets, building entire divisions within your company, or even taking on potential investors or partners who see the unstoppable momentum behind your brand.
But do not be fooled—major monthly revenues introduce complexities that never mattered at 300K or 500K. The stakes are higher, you’re commanding a much bigger payroll, and your operational infrastructure must be watertight if you want to keep growing. Let’s peel back the layers of the million-dollar stage.
Even if you plateau at $1M a month, you’re still in a ridiculously exclusive group. But guess what? Plenty of entrepreneurs do get stuck here (especially if it was their ultimate goal and now they’ve sort of “checked out” mentally). Others realize they can push to $2M or $5M a month and beyond if they keep forging ahead.
The first major question becomes: Are you still hungry to grow? Or is it time to consider an exit? Neither answer is wrong. Some business owners want to keep scaling until they dominate an entire market, while others prefer the idea of cashing out in a high-multiple deal, collecting a massive windfall, and pivoting to a new venture.
But a word of caution: If you decide to check out too soon—intellectually or emotionally—your brand can rapidly deteriorate. The million-dollar bracket is not a place where you can easily hide mistakes. One bad hire at the top or one major strategic miscalculation can flush hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost ad spend or churned clients. The bigger the business, the bigger the consequences.
Once you’re consistently clearing $1M/month, you might notice private equity or other big-money players sniffing around. They see your success and consider offering a partial or majority buyout. For many entrepreneurs, this is exciting; it feels like “validation” that you built something worth real money. And it can be a potential path to a multi-eight-figure or even nine-figure payday.
Here’s the dark side: In many buyouts, you’re forced to remain in the business while ceding decision-making control to the new owners. That’s because private equity rarely wants you to vanish right away; they want your expertise on tap, but they also want to impose their own blueprint. In multiple real cases—both in info products and other verticals I’ve personally seen—these “big players” come in and inadvertently sabotage the brand’s momentum.
They’ll bring in their own staff, churn through your best people, and implement changes to the marketing engine that served you so well. Suddenly your once-profitable cost per lead doubles or triples, your monthly overhead skyrockets, and your brand identity warps into something you don’t even recognize. If you’re still partially an owner, you get to watch your equity value crumble. That’s hardly a dream scenario—it’s more like a waking nightmare.
Does that mean every buyout is a death sentence? Absolutely not. But if you’re aiming to sell, make sure you either secure a full buyout (so it’s no longer your headache if they run it into the ground) or you negotiate extremely careful terms ensuring you retain the decisive power to keep your brand from crashing. If you’re forced to hand over control but still have skin in the game, you can get burned badly by ignorant or arrogant investors.
Even if you never plan to sell, you can still hit surprising plateaus at $1M+ months. Sometimes your initial niche saturates, or you’ve sold your high-ticket offers to the majority of the in-market buyers. You discover you need to transition to a broader audience—mass market—and that demands an entirely different style of messaging, funnel design, and price positioning.
A message that resonated in a tight community of 50,000 potential buyers might not hold up to a mainstream audience of 5 million. The marketing angles are different, the skepticism is different, and the noise from competitors is much louder. Rather than the direct, specific approach you used to climb from 300K to $1M, you might need a new front-end that educates and convinces a more general pool of prospects.
Also, your “bread and butter” upsell offers might need a face-lift or an entirely new structure. Don’t assume you can keep selling the same backend product to cross into 2M–3M months. When your volume grows, your product demands can shift, or your clients at scale might clamor for alternative features, support, or advanced training you never offered before.
At $1M+ months, you’ve undoubtedly got a real roster of staff. You might have an in-house ad manager, a marketing coordinator, a handful of closers, multiple operations leads, and so on. By now, each of them usually has a well-defined role. They know the standard operating procedures, they know how to deliver on your brand’s promises, and they’re used to the month-to-month patterns.
But as you expand, you’ll notice that some of these people want big raises or major promotions to feel satisfied. Some of them deserve it. Others don’t. You have to be ruthless in your evaluations. If you’re going to pay “big dog” salaries, you need to be sure you’re dealing with “big dog” talent—otherwise, it’s time to find someone who can truly justify the cost.
The bigger your payroll and your overhead, the more lethal mediocre performance becomes. Mediocre might have been passable at 100K–300K, but at $1M+ monthly, a B-grade closer could represent tens or hundreds of thousands in lost deals. A slow operations manager might be the difference between shipping out your product in two days instead of 24 hours, costing you future referrals and messing with your brand reputation.
Finally, the math at $1M+ months is more intense. You’re dealing with ad budgets in the tens or hundreds of thousands, daily. You’re ingesting mountains of data—web metrics, call booking rates, front-end conversions, lifetime customer values that can vary significantly from offer to offer. If you can’t read your numbers precisely and interpret them into profitable, well-timed decisions, you can start wasting $50,000 a month in ad spend and not even notice until the quarter ends.
Now that we’ve dissected each bracket, let’s do a quick cross-stage summary:
There’s a reason 99.9% of businesses never reach that $1M/month threshold. It demands a psychological shift—where you realize that any illusions of success at lower brackets were just glimpses of what’s possible. It also demands a strategy shift—reworking your offer, your price, and the entire “machine” that acquires and fulfills customers at scale. Finally, it demands a people shift—you evolve from working with whoever you can afford at 100K or 300K a month to building a true A-level team that has the capacity to keep leveling up with you.
Look back at your bracket, wherever you currently sit—Guppy, Middle-of-the-Road, Almost-There, or Big Dog—and ask yourself:
As someone who has helped guide many businesses through these phases, I can promise you that stagnation isn’t inevitable—it’s just the product of illusions you choose to believe. Keep that in mind. If you catch yourself saying “I’m good,” or “This is huge money already,” or “I can’t possibly risk paying those salaries or investing that much in ads,” remember that countless owners who soared past a million dollars a month were in your shoes, facing those same fears. The difference is they recognized the illusions for what they were and pushed forward anyway.
Use this four-stage framework to diagnose why you might be stuck, to anticipate problems before they arise, and to harness your momentum when you finally crack each bracket. The more honest and aggressive you are about these transformations—scaling your offer, removing unqualified staff, doubling down on proven marketing, and keeping your personal illusions in check—the faster you’ll leap to the next level.
Jeremy Haynes is the founder of Megalodon Marketing. He is considered one of the top digital marketers and has the results to back it up. Jeremy has consistently demonstrated his expertise whether it be through his content advertising “propaganda” strategies that are originated by him, as well as his funnel and direct response marketing strategies. He’s trusted by the biggest names in the industries his agency works in and by over 4,000+ paid students that learn how to become better digital marketers and agency owners through his education products.
Jeremy Haynes is the founder of Megalodon Marketing. He is considered one of the top digital marketers and has the results to back it up. Jeremy has consistently demonstrated his expertise whether it be through his content advertising “propaganda” strategies that are originated by him, as well as his funnel and direct response marketing strategies. He’s trusted by the biggest names in the industries his agency works in and by over 4,000+ paid students that learn how to become better digital marketers and agency owners through his education products.
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