I remember when I first started my career, I had this strange feeling:
“I've done as I've been told. I've got a 5-year degree, I earn more than anyone I know, and yet I live in a studio in the suburbs of Paris.
And even though I have a good salary, I don't have a crazy life, either.”
It also occurred to me, “I'm an adult, why am I asking permission to leave the office? I feel like I'm still in school...”
It was when I switched from a skilled worker to a sales representative in a small IT company that I saw the other side of the coin.
When you're a sales representative, you're on the management side.
While the engineers are on assignment at the customer's site, you're in the office with the managers.
I remember one of the traditional Monday meetings, in which the managers discussed a 45-year-old colleague who was leaving the company.
It got me thinking.
To receive a full pension, you have to contribute for 42 years. If you have a 5-year degree and start working at 23 years old, that means you’ll have to work until the age of 65 to get your pension. If at 45 (halfway) you have to change jobs, it’ll be super complicated.
Another time, I had to interview a candidate for a specific job within a bank.
He was a handsome man with a great CV, mid-40s, had a nice suit and a briefcase.
I remember thinking, "When I'm his age, there's NO WAY I want to have to take my little briefcase and commute for an hour just to go and sell myself to a young graduate."
That moment gave me the clarity to know that a career in project management or management was not for me.
Later, another experience got me to reflect on that revelation.
On my first day as a sales representative, I wasn't the only newcomer; I was one of six! It was a battle royale sort of setup.
Among these new sales representatives was Patrick. At 36, he had just come off 10 years at a big service company.
He used his professional network to place engineers, and it worked. Still, I could see him struggling. It was common for him to still be on the phone after 7 or 8 pm.
I thought to myself, “He's 36 years old. He still has the energy to start again from scratch right now, but if he changes positions in 10 years, will he have the strength to rebuild everything?” I suddenly realized that being a wage-earner was a dead-end street.
And with all the development in artificial intelligence and automation, it's not going to get any better.
At the time, I came across an article that profiled some French entrepreneurs who had created a company in India.
I was only just back from my trip to Mexico, and I was dreaming of adventure. I felt that there were more opportunities outside of France.
So, after seeing an advertisement for working holiday visas in Australia, I bought a plane ticket to Sydney with just a suitcase and my own ambition.
One month after I arrived, I started a small door-to-door sales job.
The first day I saw that it was working, so that same evening I started looking for suppliers. A month later I had a car and five salesmen working for me.
There were ups and downs, but on average I managed to put aside €5,000 per month for a year.
I was in shorts and flip-flops, and I was earning three times more than my ex-pat friends who worked at Société Générale!
Because that’s what being an entrepreneur means- more freedom (more responsibility too, of course) and unlimited income.
So how do you find your business idea? That's what we're going to talk about now.
With the method I’m about to show you, I’ve had a 100% success rate in business creation.
1. How to find your business idea: The Foolproof Method
I've started four businesses in my life, and all of them have been successful.
When I arrived in Australia, I did a little job selling paintings door to door. I saw that it was going well, so I started my own business. In a year and a half, I made €200,000 in sales and set aside €50,000.
On returning to France, I met amateur bloggers who were earning between €500 and €1,000 per month through advertising and affiliations. I decided to devote myself full-time to my little blog that nobody read – six months later I was earning €1,000 monthly.
A blog post I wrote ended up being the number 1 Google result for the search query "how to learn English." That had to mean there were companies making money in this area, so I created english5minutes.fr.
After a year, I had an email list of 4,000 people and I launched my first training course, which generated €3,052 in sales.
After that, I built up the business to €3,000 per month while spending very little time on it. Apart from creating the sales pages, I delegated all other tasks, from writing articles to managing email campaigns.
For years I paid for software to manage my contact list and send emails. I knew that these companies made between 5 and 100 million dollars a year.
So, I launched my system.io to do the same. Today, we make a monthly turnover of €50,000. Do you see the common denominator?
I've NEVER had a revolutionary idea. I haven't invented anything.
I just saw that there were companies making money, and I decided to do the same thing.
When you start a new business, you often think that you have to have a new idea where there are no competitors yet.
But when there are no competitors, there typically is no market.
Think of it like opening a restaurant. You're not going to try to invent a new kitchen. Instead, you’ll choose a concept that already exists and that you like – pizza, burgers, pancakes, sushi – and you’ll do it your way. It will be your name above the door, your recipes, your decor, your personality, your energy.
In case you haven’t got it yet: you don't have to have a great idea to start a profitable business.
So then how do you know what’s profitable?
Pretty simple. You just need to be curious and observant.
For a physical business like a restaurant or shop, you just have to go to a point of sale, look at how many customers buy in an hour, and evaluate the average basket to calculate the turnover.
Then by deducting the expenses (inventory, personnel, utilities, etc.) you can estimate the company’s profitability.
Look at companies that are already doing what you want to do. Search for articles about the company and interviews with the founders.
I came up with the idea for systeme.io after listening to podcasts about entrepreneurs and realizing that these companies were making tens of millions of dollars in sales.
I was competing with companies making between 10 and 100 million dollars a year, so I thought that even if I performed badly, I was likely to make 5 million.
Once again for the people in the back: You don't need to have a revolutionary idea to create a profitable business.
2. How to find your business idea: The New Method
We’ve just seen The Foolproof Method, which allowed me to successfully create four businesses.
Now we’ll look at a more recent method developed by American entrepreneurs.
In 2011, Eric Ries published The Lean Startup, which states that it’s better to test an imperfect version of your idea as soon as possible than to spend a lot of time creating the perfect product. Subsequently, Dane Maxwell launched "The Foundation," an online training course for developing a start-up idea based on problem detection.
Sam Ovens took this course and had the brilliant idea of applying the method to services. Today, Sam Ovens makes $20 million a year selling his method, which has enabled thousands of people to create profitable businesses.
Here are the steps of the method:
a) Choose a group of customers you want to serve; it can be architects, real estate agents, business executives, etc. The important thing is that the group is well identified and able to invest in a solution.
b) Conduct telephone or face-to-face interviews with people in your target group.
Ask them questions about their daily lives to identify an important problem they are facing. Your role is to listen and give your full attention to your interviewer.
It’s imperative that conduct as many interviews as possible – a few dozen as a bare minimum. The more interviews you conduct, the more likely you are to uncover important problems.
Don't’ feel intimated by conducting interviews, people love talking about themselves, and the mere fact that you're listening to them sincerely is a gift unto itself.
c) Once you have found an important problem, make an offer to your contact person and propose a solution to solve the problem. It can be a service, coaching, or even software.
If you are afraid of not being able to find a solution, don't worry. It's normal to feel uneasy when you venture out of your comfort zone, but changing your life requires doing the scary stuff
Worst case scenario, if you don’t succeed you pay back your client.
So, you make an offer that means you ask the person you're talking to for money.
Don't ask “would you buy this product or service?” or “would you be interested in this product or service?” because it means absolutely nothing.
What actually matters in entrepreneurship to validate an offer is a firm and definitive order.
Some tips for finding an interesting problem: the greater and more urgent the pain caused by the problem, the more the client will be willing to pay. And, often one problem leads to others.
By questioning the person, you can help him/her understand how this seemingly mild problem actually leads to other problems (this is the famous selling method taught in the book Spin Selling by Neil Rackham).
d) After testing your results, you may want to adjust your offer and/or target. It is better to fail quickly so you can find an offer that works faster.
Broadly speaking, you should not be afraid to sell a product or service before you have created it.
That's the whole method: it's simple and devilishly effective.
Some entrepreneurs have made a fortune with this method.
There are dozens of testimonials from students of "The Foundation" who have sold software even before creating it. (Usually the deal is "if you start paying a subscription right away, I'll be able to finance the development of the solution and I'll offer you a lifetime discount on the normal price in exchange.")
Recently, I listened to an interview with the founder of the company Naturebox (a subscription box containing snacks).
In 2011, the creators published a single page that described their product and had a PayPal payment button.
Forty-eight hours later, 100 people had paid their subscription. And they didn't have a product! So, they went to the supermarket, bought some snacks, put them in bags with a sticker containing their logo, and that's how they started a business that now makes several tens of millions of dollars in sales.
If it is possible to pre-sell a software or physical product like a subscription box, then it is even easier to pre-sell a service. You can always train on the job or find a partner to help you with the implementation.
Whether you take this route or not, you’ll have to look for solutions if you want to be successful in entrepreneurship!
3. Nine indicators for whether your business idea is right for you
In addition to determining a business's revenue potential and its profitability, there are nine key indicators to help you determine whether a business idea is good for you.
Indicator #1: How do the people in this business live?
Do they earn a good living? Do they work a lot? Are they super stressed?
For example, a restaurant requires a lot of work. On top of providing the service, you have to manage purchases, administration, marketing, and employees. For me, it's an activity incompatible with a good quality of life, so I wouldn't get into it.
But this is not an absolute rule; some restaurant owners have found how to scale up their operations and open several points of sale that are operated by teams.
Indicator #2: Is the company's turnover recurring?
Almost all start-ups use a subscription model.
A lot of software has moved to subscription-based models too.
You can’t just buy Microsoft Office anymore; you have to take out a subscription. Netflix, Spotify… these are still subscription-based offers.
The advantage? More regular income for the company, and a higher valuation.
At the beginning of 2016, I read The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow. This book explains how to set up subscription-based offers in any industry.
Two months later I launched Business Pass, a revolutionary program that gives subscribers access to all my marketing training for 19 euros per month.
Then two years later I launched systeme.io, a software program for managing online businesses – as a subscription model.
Indicator #3: What is the margin on the products you sell?
The margin is the difference between the selling price and the production cost. Is the margin you make on the sale of your products high?
For example, you can record a training course on your computer for almost no cost (a few dozen euros). You then sell it in hundreds or thousands of copies.
That's what I did on my website 5minutes.fr.I created five training courses that I have been selling for several years to my email list subscribers.
It only costs me a few dozen euros per month for technical costs, yet it brings me several hundred or thousands of euros per month.
When you create software like this, you tend to have one-time fixed costs to create the software, after which you spend the same whether you sell to 100 or 10,000 people. (The cost of customer support and infrastructure will increase, but so will the gross margin.)
This model, where it’s possible to make a lot of profit with a low-margin product, is called the “supermarket model.”
For example, Amazon.com has a phenomenal sales volume with incredibly low margins. It also has Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary offering on-demand online software.
This software offers basic functions (virtual servers to host websites, send emails, back-up data) and is used by companies and start-ups to run their infrastructure.
Amazon launched this service because they realized the powerful tools they’d developed in-house might be useful to other companies.
It’s also a business with much higher margins than Amazon’s traditional distribution business. Result: In 2016, Amazon Web Services represented just 10% of Amazon’s turnover, but 50% of its profits!
Indicator #4: Does this business allow you to be geographically independent?
At the end of 2017, I took my wife and our one-year-old daughter to spend six weeks in Australia and New Zealand.
When I spoke about this trip to a client of mine – who runs franchise shops in Luxembourg – he said, "with my employees, I could never do that."
Today, we live in Portugal simply because we love it. Any time we want a change, we can.
Further, every year we go to visit my wife's family in Colombia. This doesn’t affect my business at all – I just take my laptop in my bag and bam!
Having a business online is obviously the first solution we think of to be geographically independent, but some people do it with physical businesses, too. You just need to get creative!
Indicator #5: Does this business require a lot of work?
This might sound obvious, but seriously, I’ve seen people launch themselves into careers that require working like crazy to make a living (restaurant owners, accountants, bankers, etc.).
When you start a business, it takes a lot of work in the beginning. After a while, though, you want to have the possibility to ease off (by delegation or otherwise).
If you’re going to devote time and effort to your business, you might as well go in the right direction from the start!
Indicator #6: Is this business scalable?
If you own a restaurant, most of your customers live or work within a few miles of you.
Even if you have a large number of customers, you are limited by the capacity of your premises. In this case, the only solution to develop your turnover is to open new points of sale.
On the internet, customers can come from all over the world – and some markets are absolutely huge.
For example, once I had the software for systeme.io, I could sell to 100 or 10,000 customers.
Some companies make between 10 million and 100 million a year doing what I do – so I know that it’s possible to make 10 million or more in the future.
Indicator #7: Can you resell this business?
When I was in Australia, I realized that my door-to-door sales business was a cash cow – but it was impossible to sell.
It’s typical when starting a business to only think about generating sales – we often overlook the company’s valuation.
If you can create a source of income and at the same time develop an asset that can be resold, why not do it?
A few years ago, I read Built to Sell by John Warrillow.
In this book, he tells the story of a boss of a marketing agency who discovers that his company isn’t worth much. With the help of a mentor, he changes his company's business model from a service model to a product model, which adds value to his company.
To estimate the value of your business, ask yourself the following questions:
1. What would be the value for a buyer, whether in terms of profits or in terms of synergy with the company?
2. Can the business continue to generate revenue without your presence?
In general, the value of a company is measured in terms of the number of turnover years.
A valuation of one or two years of turnover is low and indicates a company with low margins or low growth potential.
On the other hand, some start-ups can be valued at more than 10 years of turnover.
For example, a business selling online courses will generally be valued at less than an online software program.
So, ask yourself how much your company would be worth.
Indicator #8: Are there any barriers to entering the industry?
These are circumstances that prevent a company from competing in the intended market. Examples include restrictive regulations or very heavy investments.
The fewer barriers to entry, the easier it is for new companies to enter the market. This also means you’ll probably have more competition.
In my case, I was selling web marketing courses. I noticed that many of my clients went on to create profitable web-marketing training businesses – in competition with mine!
This was one of the things that pushed me to launch systeme.io. A project of this type requires at least one or two years of work and several hundreds of thousands of euros of investment, so it reduces the number of companies that can jump in and compete.
Indicator #9: Is this business sustainable in the long term?
With an expert business (where you sell your expertise in the form of services, training, or coaching), you naturally acquire more customers and offer more products over time. This in turn increases the comfort of your position.
The idea is to have a business where time works to your advantage – the more time passes, the better your position.
Of course, there is no perfect answer; it all depends on your situation. When you start your first business, you are in survival mode and you have to live it as fast as possible.
Most people don’t learn to think long-term until later on. But why not do it right away?
4. How to become a productive entrepreneur
I can't end Part Two without giving you some essential productivity tips.
Tip #1: Make decisions (even if they aren’t perfect).
A few years ago, I helped a client with individual coaching. He had a blog that yielded an average of €1,000 per month.
I noticed that in his blog posts, he was sending people directly to the sales page of his flagship product.
I told him, “I'm not sure, but I think that if instead of sending people directly to your sales page you ask for their email address and then send them a sequence of emails to sell your product, you’ll earn more.”
In theory, we could have set up an A/B test to find an exact answer, but in practice, resources were limited so we just tested our strategy outright.
Three weeks later he told me, “I set up the system and now I make three sales a day – that’s €100 per day, €3,000 per month!”
This taught me that it is better to make an imperfect decision and move forward than to wait. Too many people wait until they have the “perfect idea” before starting. As if one day a wizard will appear and tell them what idea they should choose!
Your role as an entrepreneur is to make decisions and act even if your idea is imperfect. You will always be able to improve your service or product later on.
The sooner you act (and fail), the sooner you will find what works.
I have been an entrepreneur since 2007 and a web entrepreneur since 2010, so I can give you some real-life statistics.
- Out of 10 products in general, 2 will work very well, 2 won’t work, and 6 will work moderately well.
- In the same way, most of the things you will try as an entrepreneur will fail or yield poor results. Solution: try many different things quickly.
The 80/20 principle tells us that 20% of shares produce 80% of the results. So typically, 20% of revenue generates 80% of sales. Solution: launch many products quickly to find the most profitable ones.
Tip #2: If you have an online business, produce every day.
Creating a business on the internet is an excellent opportunity. Little or no investment is required, you can start from home, etc.
The problem is that it's hard to measure what you produce.
Does commenting on social media posts or blogs bring a lot of value? A lot of people start online businesses but stagnate.
For them, I have a very simple exercise: look at how much content you have produced in the last 30 days.
How many items?
How many pages of a book? How many videos?
If the answer is nothing or not much, it's not surprising that you're not moving forward. Like in television, it is the people who PRODUCE that make money.
To be successful, you have to go from CONSUMER to PRODUCER.
You need to produce content or marketing – you can produce sales pages or advertising campaigns for people who have products to sell, for example.
I believe that you can only be effective for a few hours a day. For me, that time is in the morning, so I have a simple rule.
In the morning, I go to the office. By noon, I make sure I've earned my day: it can be by having written a few pages of a book, by having created a new training course, by having written a sales page, or by having made a strategic decision.
In the afternoon I do a smaller number of less essential tasks: listening to podcasts of entrepreneurs, answering emails, going to the gym.
Look at successful entrepreneurs and try to find the reason why they succeeded. Was it by creating an extraordinary product? By attracting a lot of traffic?
Often you will find that these entrepreneurs are very good at one thing, and that is the reason for their success.
Tip #3: Look at the long term.
Last night I was listening to a report on Amazon when a certain passage caught my attention. For decades, Amazon generated little profit for its shareholders because all the company’s profits were reinvested. That’s what allowed Amazon’s almost exponential increase in turnover (and share price, by the way).
The journalist made a seemingly innocuous but in fact totally crucial comment when he said, “long-term strategies are always more profitable in the long run.”
There are tons of tips online on how to save 5 minutes here or 10 minutes there. But the model of “working more” or becoming “more efficient” is limited.
We all have 24 hours in a day, and after a while, we can't produce anymore. (And in any case, if you can work efficiently for 12 hours a day but don’t have a personal life, I don't see the point.) So how do you produce more without spending more time?
Delegate.
This could mean recruiting writers to write articles for you or developers who develop software for you.
For my English blog 5minutes.fr, I recruited writers to create articles. For systeme.io, I have developers who work every day to add new features to the software – even if I'm on vacation.
And I have a salesman who sells coaching services to our clients and a coach to help our clients.
Ask yourself the question: “How can I achieve my long-term goals without working harder?”
Tip #4: Hire rising stars.
Looking back, what has allowed me to achieve extraordinary results in my entrepreneurial career has been to hire what I call “rising stars”: talented experts who haven't gotten to the top yet. So, they still have affordable rates, but they’re great at what they do.
For example, I hired Sébastien the French Marketeer as a marketing consultant in 2011. A year later, we brought in €500,000 in an orchestrated launch.
In 2017, it was by finding talented developers that I was able to launch systeme.io.
To find these talents, you have to look at the market. When you find potential candidates, ask yourself these three questions:
1. Do they make a good impression?
2. Have they achieved results for themselves?
3. Have they achieved results for clients?
If you can answer yes to all three questions, then you can hire the candidate with minimum risk. One of the golden rules of investment is to acquire goods whose value is underestimated.
That's exactly what you're doing by recruiting rising stars. Tip #5: Make irresistible offers.
The secret to selling is making irresistible offers.
Ask yourself: what is the value of what you are proposing?
Now, look at the price you're asking, as well as the modalities at the time of purchase (shipping costs, delivery times, money-back guarantees, etc.)
The more irresistible your offer, the more sales you will make.
When I launched systeme.io, competing solutions started at €97 per month. Systeme.io starts at only €27 per month.
One year after the launch, systeme.io had 1,500 paying customers and €50,000 in monthly turnover.
Conclusion: Make irresistible offers. They pay off!
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