Back in 2012, I was in Oloye Akin Alabi’s office.
I just moved to Lagos and was staying on the mainland.
He would ask “What are you enjoying on that mainland sef? You should move to the Island”, but the “small boyness” in me would be thinking…
“Where do I get N4 million a year to pay house rent?”
Anyway…
On this particular day, I went to him because I was having a problem.
My online business was doing an average of N400,000 a month.
Sometimes, it would spike due to bonanzas etc but then it will come down to N400,000 a month
I was worried…
I needed to get to the N1m a month mark.
So, I asked him – what can I do to scale up my profits? He took time to answer but here is the summary:
“In as long as you are playing in a large enough market, all you need to do to scale up is by reaching more people”
Sounds simple. Right?
It is actually, but the “small boyness” in you is the enemy.
I was eventually able to understand what he was talking about when I did a campaign that made N3m in 30 days.
Basically, there are 2 ways to scale up a business.
It is either you scale up vertically or horizontally.
Scaling up vertically has to do with increasing the amount of money each customer spends with you.
Scaling up horizontally is simply about reaching more people.
The wisdom lies in going horizontal before you start to go vertical.
To scale up from N400,000 to N1.5m, you do not need any extra gimmicks.
You just need to reach more people even if it is the same product.
E.g.: Let’s say you are having a front-end product that gives you N10,000 profits per sale. 40 of those will give you N400,000.
To boost your profits to N1.5m a month, you can simply:
(1) Reach more people so that you can get 150 sales a month (Horizontal)
(2) Sell more products to the existing customers (vertical). Here is an example:
Eben Pagan made $135,000 in his first year selling his double your dating ebook.
In the second year, he went vertical (by adding a second product) and that doubled his profits instantly.
I wrote this post because I have a student who is currently running a campaign on FB where he spends N3,000 a day.
Last month, he made N630,000 in gross profits.
That is N540,000 in net profits.
And it is in a really large market.
So, he is asking me the same question I asked Oloye back in 2012.
“How do I move to N1m a month?”
Dude!
Reach more people. Damn It!
Anyway!
The main point of this post is this: Most of the time, what you need to 4X your income (E.g. move from N400,000 to N1.5m a month) is not more information.
What you need is what people call “bigger balls” or Guts.
Bigger balls is what pushes you to go hard and do things the big way.
The funny thing is you can’t have “bigger balls” by reading a book or watching a video.
It has to happen to you but you can put yourself in situations that will force you to grow bigger balls.
For me, one of the things I did was to move to Lekki and allow the high cost of things around here to push me around.
Whichever way you choose, if you can’t do what big boys do, you won’t get their results. It is that simple.
Feel free to read this twice.