Just like we need food, oxygen and water to survive, your business needs money, customers and support. And most people who want to grow and scale their business focus on what they want instead of what their business needs.

But when you shift your focus to what your business needs, you’re able to take this longer-term view that sets you up for success right now and well into the future. 

Scaling your business is about taking the ceiling off, so you can continue to grow, and your business can continue to grow beyond your limits. Beyond what you’re capable of doing on your own.

And to do that, you’ve got to take consistent strategic action.

So if you’re ready to take the ceiling off your business and make a potentially unlimited amount of money and impact, watch the video above or continue reading below. 

Here are the 5 things you need to do to grow and scale your business.

#1: Kill Your Darlings

William Faulkner famously said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” Meaning you might have a scene or character or a turn of phrase that you love. But it just doesn’t fit into the novel. And he believed that once you start writing the book, the book would tell you what needed to happen next.

And I think that’s the same when it comes to business.

Sometimes, my best ideas, your best ideas, seem great in theory, but once you put them into the practice of a real-life business, your business and the market start to tell you where it wants to go. And if you’re going to grow and scale your business to a million dollars or more, you have to give the market what it wants and what it’s willing to pay for, not what you think it needs or what you wish that it wanted. 

The business world is littered with entrepreneurs who had ideas that they were uncompromising about, and because of that, they were never able to understand where they fit into the market. There’s a big difference between having an uncompromising vision for your life and your success and the impact you can have and being uncompromising about how you get there. You have to be flexible with the how, agile in your approach, and willing to listen to the market.

So in business, you’ve got to kill your darlings and make what your business needs even more important than what you need.  

#2: Build Backend or Subscription Offers

If your business is based primarily on one-time and first-time sales, you’re losing a huge revenue source. The most profitable businesses in the world make up to 80% of their revenue in repeat sales — that’s a customer coming in and buying another thing, or paying over and over again with a subscription service, for example. 

So one of the things that I teach my students is how to build what I call a message to money pathway. This pathway is all about giving people what they want. And once they have what they want, showing them how much more is possible. Then meeting their next need, their next possibility through the next product, solving that problem and showing them the next level of possibility for themselves. 

By building a message to money pathway, you’re able to step people up to bigger levels of investment, support… and ultimately transformation. 

You can do that through multiple products or a single product that people pay for on a subscription basis. This is a much better approach than having dead-ends or one-off products that are just about getting new customers in but don’t necessarily connect to all the other products and offers in your business. 

#3: Create a Blockbuster Hit Product

Next, you want to focus on creating a blockbuster hit product, not just a product that makes money.

Entrepreneurs often start with a beta product or a minimum viable product, which is important. You’ll get to test and prove your product idea… without putting in too much time and money. 

Creating a minimum viable product allows you to get clarity on what you do and who you serve. However, you often don’t make the big bucks with this type of product.

When you’re in business longer and longer, you start to develop your signature system, methodology, unique selling proposition, and what makes you different from everybody else who does something similar to what you do. And once you have that experience and expertise under your belt and understand what the market wants and is willing to pay you for, you can start dialing in and creating what I call your blockbuster hit product. 

This is a product that has the potential to make a million dollars or more in your business every single year. It’s a product that’ll make your career. 

And I had at least seven courses that I built before I built my blockbuster hit product. They always kind of sold just okay, nothing too great. There wasn’t excitement around them. Then, when I crafted my first million-dollar online course — Experience Product Masterclass — it just flew off the shelves, and it’s continued to fly off the shelves for seven years.

This changed everything for me. Suddenly, I was building a massive audience, speaking on the top stages and invited into elite masterminds. The success of this one product allowed me to develop my next multi-million dollar product line, my Momentum programs. 

When you start to think about not just creating an offer but creating a blockbuster hit product, that’s going to set you up and build more momentum in your business than all these smaller products. 

#4: Quantum Leaps

So many entrepreneurs focus on incremental progress — just how do I grow my business by 5 or 10% a year. Instead, I want you to think about the quantum leaps that can help you remove the ceiling off of your business and grow by a lot more than that. So last year, my business grew 83%. And for a multi-million dollar business, that’s a lot.

When you think about things from a quantum perspective, what’s going to allow you to make the giant leaps versus just rinsing and repeating every single year and growing by just 5 to 10%?

How did we make a quantum leap? I had an annual product launch that I’d run every single year, and I’ve used the same launch materials for three straight years. And it always did really, really well and actually beat the industry average. But I just had the intuition that I could do better. So rather than sending people to these pre-recorded videos, I decided to do a live launch and rewrite the content to speak to this exact moment in time to the challenges my audience was going through right now.

And that changed everything. My launch went from making $1.5 million to $3.1 million with extra upsells that added an additional $700,000. So I made almost $4 million in less than a month by starting to think about how I can make a quantum leap in my launch this year, versus just rolling out the same thing I had done the last three years and staying stuck at the same level.

And there’s a lot of different ways to make quantum leaps in your business.

Most of the time, it has to do with your products or with your marketing. So either making that blockbuster hit product or figuring out what’s going to be your blockbuster hit marketing campaign. And those are two of the biggest levers in your business to drive a disproportionate amount of growth. 

#5: Simplify to Scale

Simplicity scales and many of the top $5, $10 and $20 million a year businesses reach that milestone by not adding products but eliminating products and focusing on their best stuff.

Apple became the most profitable company in the world is by getting rid of most of its product lines. And even today, years after Steve Jobs’s death, if you go on apple.com, you’ll see there’s only a handful of product lines — iPhones, iPads, MacBook Pros and Airs and IMAX. And that’s about it. So it’s this incredibly profitable company, and they only have a handful of core product lines that they’re known for and can stand behind. 

So I recommend eliminating any of those one-off products, any of those dead-end products, any of those kinds of crappier outdated products, and figure out what are going to be your blockbuster hits, what are going to be your quantum leaps. Then, double down on those. And watch your business grow and scale to new heights. 

Are you ready to scale?

There you have it — the 5 things you need to focus on to grow and scale your business in 2024 and beyond. Let me know your thoughts in the comments! 

Ready to really grow your business and your impact? Then, join me for the ONLY business-building event where you’ll leave with a shorter to-do list than when you arrived! 

I’ll be sharing exactly how to hone in on what to say, do and sell next in order to grow your business — with proven strategies that I’ve spent over a decade testing.

In fact, this is the TWELTH annual Live Your Message LIVE, and many students come back year after year — because the strategies keep working! 

We’ll spend 3 days together virtually, working on your business and YOUR unique growth blueprint. 

Save the date for March 1-3, 2024. Tickets will go on sale very soon… so get on our email list so you don’t miss out on the best price!

When you join us for Live Your Message LIVE, you’ll ALSO receive your very own copy of my valuable Message to Money Pathway — your unique, highly-customized template that will guide you by the hand to your 6 or 7-figure business (regardless of where you’re starting from).

You’ll Zoom in “overwhelmed” and Zoom out with an exact roadmap for what to say, do and sell next to grow your business in 2024. 

 See you virtually March 1-3, 2024 🙂