What I’ve Learned Working With Businesses That Hit Seven Figure Monthly Revenue

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I’ve been involved with dozens of businesses over the years. Some settled into consistent monthly revenue in the seven figures. Most operated in that range for extended periods.

What matters is this: there’s a specific set of patterns that showed up in every single one. The lessons fall into two categories—getting to that monthly milestone in the first place, and what happens once you’re there. This post covers the first part.

If you’re interested in how we approach this type of work, our flagship program covers these frameworks in detail.

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.

Understanding What Creates Momentum in a Business

Momentum isn’t motivational language. It’s a principle. Back when Newton identified gravity, he also defined universal laws. Momentum is one of them.

In a business context, momentum looks like this: the entire operation is functioning. Everyone’s role is clear. Problems that arise get addressed quickly. The organization is aligned.

Momentum gets created first. Then you operate within it once it exists. The creation process is what matters.

Most businesses sit in what I call the testing cycle. They’re addressing different operational challenges, trying approaches, and figuring things out. Usually businesses in this cycle operate at a certain baseline monthly revenue range.

Once you’ve reached a baseline level of consistency, you’ve generally built something that has the potential to scale if the conditions are right. According to research on business growth patterns, companies that break through revenue plateaus share specific operational characteristics.

If you have a scalable offer, the right team, and leadership that can maintain alignment, you get what I call a breakout. The breakout is the initiation of momentum. This is when there’s a collective decision across the organization to push.

This is when you make decisions that involve risk. If your usual advertising budget to maintain baseline revenue is a certain amount monthly, you might double it during this window. You might hire senior-level talent that costs significantly more than your usual payroll positions. It’s uncomfortable. This window feels uncertain. You don’t know if things are going to work. But you commit to it anyway.

Because you committed, you start to see results. Or you cycle back down to your baseline range again.

The wrong approach when you’re at baseline is to just maintain what’s happening. When you’re operating at a consistent level, you want to start testing things that feel slightly uncomfortable. You need to identify what risk you can commit to fully.

One operator I worked with in the Seattle–Bellevue region was already operating at a consistent baseline when we started working together with his information product business. He had a product at a specific price point and had just brought on a new sales team.

His specific initiation of momentum was two simultaneous decisions: a new marketing partner and a new sales operation at the exact same time. He recognized he wasn’t experiencing breakouts. He knew he was performing well organically but not on paid channels.

He committed to both simultaneously, and both produced results quickly. Right away there was a difference. Within 60 days, he reached that monthly milestone.

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 timeline is uncommon. I don’t want to set the expectation that this is probable. This particular business owner had multiple factors align. Most importantly, he had guidance from someone who had been through this process dozens of times.

The organization made two key decisions: the risk window, and then the continuation window. You need to identify the risk in that testing cycle that you can commit to fully.

How to Address Problems When They Show Up

You have to address all problems that emerge quickly. If you don’t, you slow down momentum. Treat problems like friction, because friction slows everything down.

When you’re going through that risk cycle and making that commitment, some things are going to go wrong. The businesses I’ve worked with that succeed address those problems rapidly. They don’t allow the friction of problems to interrupt the momentum they’re building.

The ones that struggle have similar patterns every time. They move slowly when it comes to problems. Problems are easy to identify. What takes time and resources is addressing those problems. That’s what holds most operators back.

I’ve worked with clients in a specific niche where offers ranged from five figures. We’d bring them dozens of qualified prospects in the first couple days onto sales schedules, and sometimes the sales process wouldn’t perform.

The operators who succeed attack problems aggressively. As soon as anything is identified as something that’s going to create drag, they address it with everything they have. They don’t hold back on time, effort, or resources to solve that problem.

They understand that whatever it costs to solve the problem will cost far more in time, effort, and resources if they don’t address it. Because what happens is you stall or contract when you don’t handle these things.

When you fail to handle problems during that risk part of the cycle, you don’t continue upward. You’ll either stall at that level or come back down to where you were. Then you repeat the testing cycle all over again until you’re ready to take another risk.

The momentum has to continue from the beginning. There are very few times where you reach a point, experience a major problem, and then get back on track and continue. When that does happen, it takes time.

A consulting client right now came to me operating at a baseline level. I helped them reach a higher monthly level. The first problem they experienced was their sales team capacity. They failed to address it when they hit that level, so instead of maintaining it, they came back down to their previous baseline.

A second time, we got them back up to that higher monthly level. During that second month, their ad account went down due to a payment verification issue. That prevented ads from running for an entire four weeks. Same thing happened: pulled right back down to baseline.

They’re now about two to four weeks away from reaching that level for the third time. Everything is positioned correctly this time. There are risk mitigation strategies in place for the accounts and the sales team is prepared because they’ve dealt with it before.

That entire cycle from baseline, up, back down, up again, back down, and about to reach that level again took over the course of an entire year.

You don’t experience expansion and contraction rapidly. It takes a good two months for the cool down to occur and another two months to experience the upside again. That’s why you want to focus intensely on momentum and addressing problems extremely quickly.

Everything Accelerates as You Scale Operations

This pattern is typically underestimated for how it can be mathematically quantified and anticipated. Everything accelerates and everything amplifies.

If you go from one baseline to a higher level, that’s a multiple. Apply that multiple to how much faster everything moves and how amplified everything becomes.

• Multiple times the customer support volume.

• Multiple times the refunds.

• Multiple times the chargebacks.

• Multiple times the customers.

• Multiple times the team members.

• Multiple times the ad spend necessary on a month-over-month basis.

Have you considered credit limits need to be adjusted? Have you projected operational constraints that are going to occur?

One of my favorite things to quantify is the process of hiring salespeople. If we have a call funnel reliant on humans, we have to factor in there’s a good two-to-four-week training window before that individual is fully equipped and ready.

If I as the marketer can scale every third day, I need to mathematically quantify the amount of calls available to book into. I need to project that three weeks from now, based on my current cycle time, there will be no more available calls.

Right now, three weeks before I experience that problem, I need to get the sales team to hire a salesperson today. Because if they hire somebody today and start recruiting, interviewing, training, and onboarding, that’s a three-to-four-week cycle, potentially longer.

The marketer needs to mathematically quantify problems like that. The salespeople need to communicate their capacity and potential constraints. Customer support needs to anticipate if there’s multiple times the volume of tickets, are we capable of handling that?

You just have to do the math. You can anticipate problems by doing math. Most operators just won’t do it. And it moves fast.

A sales manager I work with consistently has concern as a leading factor in his decision making when it comes to hiring people. When I need him to hire people and I do the math and communicate with certainty this is the problem we’re approaching and the amount of salespeople we need by these dates, he’ll express concerns about hiring them if the volume isn’t there.

Those are real concerns, but you can’t let those kinds of considerations drive the business when you’re attempting to scale aggressively. When you let thinking like that run the operation, it acts as a form of friction.

You either deal with these things proactively or reactively. There’s no in between. Proactive comes from doing the math, proper leadership, and high standards. Reactive comes from failure to anticipate problems and dealing with things the same day they emerge.

Research from McKinsey on scaling operations confirms that businesses that anticipate capacity constraints before they occur maintain growth trajectories more consistently than those that react to problems after they arise.

Why High Standards Matter in Every Part of Your Business

There’s never been an instance where someone reached and maintained seven figure monthly revenue without high standards.

It starts with A-players. I had a speaker at one of my events in 2018 who has a large real estate portfolio. He broke down people into three categories: stallions, camels, and donkeys.

• Stallions are A-players. They’re powerful, fast, and aggressive. All a stallion needs is a direction. You give an A-player a direction and say “this is the goal, here are the resources you need, go do it.” That’s what a stallion wants.

  A stallion also only wants to be around other stallions. If you put a stallion around weak performers, you’re going to frustrate the stallion. If it adapts to that group, it’s going to think its total potential might not be as powerful as what it could have been.

  Keeping stallions around other stallions and staying out of their way once you give them direction is important to maximizing A-players.

• Camels are long-range, highly reliable, and low intensive on resources. You can lead them where you need them, but they don’t move without leadership. Camels need direction. They need somebody to guide them and say “we’re going this way” and be consistently guided the entire time from point A to point B.

  They’re not resource intensive, so they won’t cost as much as a stallion. Stallions can work alongside camels. Camels are reliable and long term. If you’re going to have a department in your business, they should be led by stallions and have camels within them.

• Donkeys are the worst possible thing you can have in your organization. Donkeys are stubborn, don’t listen, don’t take direction well, are unproductive, and are cheap. To get a donkey to do what you need it to do, you have to push hard.

  These would be lower-tier performers in your organization. Sure, they’re inexpensive labor and technically doing something you’re justifying keeping them on for. But these are people driving away the A-players. These are people that aren’t doing what you need them to do unless you’re constantly managing them.

You are going to drive down the standards of the organization and drive out your A-players if you have donkeys. There’s no chance you’re reaching seven figure monthly revenue with poor performers in your business.

I’ve been part of several organizations that helped me understand this lesson in practice. More of my potential comes out from being around people who all have high standards for what they expect of themselves and others. Those have been the most productive periods of my career.

You can build this and it increases the probability of reaching that monthly milestone. It all follows from there. Once you recognize what attracts an A-player, you can build around that.

I communicate this in our sales process: we structure agreements around shared performance because when you want somebody who’s going to prioritize your financial outcomes, you want alignment. I’m money driven. I care about building wealth. I want to help you build wealth so I can build more wealth too. That’s an incentive structure.

If you just pay an agency or whoever’s working in your organization a flat rate with no incentive for them to grow and do the things necessary to reach higher monthly revenue, you’re not incentivizing anybody properly. You’re lowering your probability.

Incentives are different for everybody. Not everybody is money driven. Sometimes people want status. Sometimes they want authority. Sometimes they want work–life balance. Sometimes people prioritize their families over everything else. Sometimes people just want to be supported.

It’s important to have conversations with people in the organization about what their incentives are and properly structure compensation relative to key metrics in the business.

When this is executed successfully, you have alignment. The highest set of standards. People that are all focused mentally on aggressively addressing any problem that comes up and maintaining momentum at all costs. They’re all calculating and doing math, engaged in their work alongside the fellow A-players they have within the organization.

According to Harvard Business Review’s research on high-performing teams, organizations that maintain high performance standards and clear incentive alignment consistently outperform those with misaligned compensation structures.

How to Structure an Offer That Can Scale

The right offer is scalable with a lot of potential and very few friction points when you reach certain milestones. It’s manageable to deliver. The speed to result is fast.

There is a recurring component to it where people are going to purchase it again or pay for the same thing on an ongoing basis. The recurring revenue that comes from this type of offer compounds month over month. You’re not just constantly having to scale acquisitions and new customers. You’re able to build on previous customers and stack new customers every following month.

The right offer is something that isn’t a trend. It doesn’t fade. I’ve seen businesses over the years reach seven figure monthly revenue with a trend product or service, and then as soon as the trend fades, their business contracts.

These lessons are principle-driven. This is what maintains consistent monthly revenue. It gets you there and keeps you there. I don’t want you short term attempting to reach a milestone and then falling back down.

When you think of the offers you’re advertising or putting out to the market, focus on ones that have longevity. Otherwise you’re going to experience seasonal fluctuations or significant contractions every time you have to pivot to a completely different offer.

These key lessons are high-impact drivers of stacking your probability of accomplishing that monthly milestone. Businesses I’ve worked with that execute on momentum, address problems aggressively, anticipate constraints through math, maintain high standards with A-players, and build scalable recurring offers are the ones that break through and maintain that level.

If you want to learn more about how we structure these frameworks, our 7-week live comprehensive training walks through the operational systems in detail.

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.