We named our podcast Elite Entrepreneurs for a reason: only 3-5% of entrepreneurs ever manage to grow their businesses to the $1 million mark. If you’re part of our podcast’s target audience, you are truly an Elite Entrepreneur.
The challenge that entrepreneurs universally face at this point in the growth journey is that the skills and systems they used to get to $1 million aren’t the same ones they need to continue to grow beyond the seven figure revenue plateau. At seven figures, everything changes. And, as counterintuitive as it may seem, making more sales and acquiring more customers is not how you continue to grow beyond seven figures. I’m not saying sales and customers aren’t important, because they give you the ability to finance your continued growth.
However, the real key here is that, beyond the seven figure revenue plateau, businesses grow one person at a time, not one customer or one sale at a time. What do I mean by this? This week’s episode of the Elite Entrepreneurs podcast is all about breaking past the revenue plateau and fueling the growth of your business.
Understanding the Revenue Plateau
At a certain point, an entrepreneur must learn to be a business leader to continue growing the business. This requires a mindset shift; up to $1 million, you were probably the driving force behind your business. But now you must begin adding team members in the right positions — as well as cultivating your existing team members — if you want to continue growing beyond the seven figure revenue plateau.
As I explained in this week’s episode of the podcast, one way to understand this is to imagine that your business is a multi-speed bicycle. If you’re stuck in a lower gear, the only way to go faster is to pedal harder…and to maintain that speed you must continue pedaling harder until you exhaust yourself. It’s much easier and more effective to shift into a higher gear so that you can maintain your speed without expending more effort. Adding new employees in key positions is like adding new gears to your bicycle. They allow you to speed up in a smooth, sustainable way.
One Person at a Time
Growth beyond the seven figure revenue plateau is all about adding the right members to your team and cultivating the team members you have, and especially your leadership team. I strongly recommend that you begin having 30-minute weekly one-on-one meetings with everyone who reports directly to you, so that you can evaluate their progress and offer them direct feedback to help develop their growth.
Developing your team and acting as a catalyst for their growth is a crucial part of your role as a leader, and too few business owners spend enough time working in this part of their business. You can incorporate your development work in many aspects of your day-to-day interactions. You must also remember to continually work on leveling up your own leadership, so that you don’t inadvertently become the bottleneck holding your business back from reaching its full potential.
If you’d like to learn more strategies that can help you break through the revenue plateau and fuel the further growth of your organization, I encourage you to explore our extensive library of past episodes of the Elite Entrepreneurs podcast filled with informative interviews with business leaders and experts at https://growwithelite.com/podcast/.
Another option is looking at the Elite Circles. It is a two-day event held each quarter where we bring in experts to help give you the “elite mindset,” skills, and resources necessary to help bring your company past the plateau and begin growing even more.
