Job’s not finished.
"If I could get to $1M in sales...Everything would be different."
You may have said this to yourself.
The grind to find product market fit and hit that $83k a month target for $1M in revenue is all-consuming. It's a shameless and exhilarating yoyo-like reality between days where you feel like you're on top of the world to days where you wish you had been good at anything stable.
This is Act I.
Authors write Act 1 with ease. It's the rush of starting, creating the characters, hooking the audience, and the dream of one day having a finished book.
When you hit $1M in annual sales, there's a deserved moment of validation where you say to yourself, "Wow, I did it. I finished Act 1."
Then act 2 shows up at your door as an unwelcome guest. Where the excitement wanes for the author, but the demand increases from the reader. The writing becomes monotonous and slow as the story challenges the author to create depth for the characters through conversations and emotions...but the story needs it.
In Act 2, the wants of the author change into the needs of the reader. When what we want (to become an entrepreneur) becomes second fiddle to what our reader (or customer) needs (to have reliable service), writing gets hard.
When writing gets hard and complicated, the flow of ideas turns more into a trickle, and the finished story begins to feel further away. Humans have an affinity for what we want and an aversion to what others need. It's our nature. There are thousands of pages of Act 1's on people's computers who were hit with the difficulty of Act II and chose to begin another Act I.
Here are three common mistakes 7-figure founders make that are going to stop them from ever having a finished story:
"Now that I'm at a million and I've hired people I'm going to step away and be less involved."
Phew, I can finally afford to hire someone, so I get to do less work. 😂 The dream is to hire people to take tasks off your plate, but that doesn't free you up to do less.
"It doesn't?"
Hiring people means 3 things:
It frees you up to go deeper into the optimization of the processes you are now entirely focused on.
Playing every role up to this point has meant you have underserviced every activity in your business. You've provided the bare minimum required to get to $1M. Companies get through the second act by going deeper into what they previously could not.
You now have humans who are counting on you to lead them. Leading them requires managing their performance and their emotions (much harder than designing a social post in Canva).
If you make the decision to do less when you hire employees, your company will suffer. If you want to scale - you give deeper, not broader.
"Now that I've found success, I'm going to start something else."
Nothing tells me an entrepreneur has never scaled anything before like them telling me they're starting their next new thing after getting to this point. Here's the thought process with it: "I've gotten my company to this point, so everything I touch turns to gold. This doesn't need me as much."
Sure, the company itself may need you less, but the people in it who signed up for your leadership need you more. People scale companies, and they need a leader.
Imagine sitting across from a coach, recruiting you to join their team, only to see they miss the first practice because they've taken a second coaching job somewhere else. How does that make you feel?
This is what founders who want another Act 1 do. In Act 2, you must go deep into the characters; your characters are the people in your company.
$0-$1M = Product-led companies
$1-$15M = Culture-led companies
$15M+ = Process-led companies
You won't notice the negative effects of your distraction today. You'll think you can do it all, and you may be able to for a bit, but you're making one critical incorrect assumption...That your $1M business will always be there.
Keeping it is harder than building it.
Thinking you've somehow made it.
Did you accomplish your mission?
$1M is great. You should be proud of yourself. If where you are today is a mission accomplished, then you did it. But my guess is that at $1M, you haven't gotten everything you wanted when you started. Take a moment, pat yourself on the back, and get back to work. The mission isn't accomplished.
The Kings and Queens who sit in their castles thinking the walls they built once will keep them safe forget the enemy is obsessed with figuring out how to climb them. History is filled with arrogant Kings who've lost their impenetrable kingdoms. I'm proud of you, but celebrating here is thinking you've won a 7 game series after going up 2-0.
In the words of the late Kobe Bryant, the job's not finished.
Finish the story.
