can you really build a multi-million dollar business with $100 yes you can I am proof of it so I wanted to go back to the beginning of starting my business which was just a couple of years ago when I was starting from scratch I had no money in the bank I was actually a little bit in debt at that time living in a tiny little shoebox apartment and all I had was a vision for what I wanted to create but I didn't know how I was gonna do it or what the tactics were gonna be or how it was even gonna make money so I had to get scrappy and lean and that's how I started so I thought it'd be really valuable to you to understand that I started this business I have today with less than $100 so I'm actually gonna break down the tools the things that I use the price points of all of that in this video so if you're excited about this give this a like hit the subscribe button and be sure to click the bell to be notified every single time I post a new video which is on Tuesdays and Fridays and sometimes even more than that and be sure to share this out if this is something that resonates with you or you know somebody who could use the help of watching this video so I also made this video recently about how I started my business very lean and this is basically a follow up to tell you exactly what I did step-by-step and the only things you need to start now this applies to a coaching and consulting business and an online education business because that's my businesses we have a digital course and then we also do consulting with our authority accelerator program but that's it so we have just scaled this business to you multiple seven figures a year and again it started with a hundred dollars so how did I use that first $100 well I'm gonna show you and tell you exactly how I did it and I have my notes on my phone that's why I keep looking at them but there's a lot to go through so if you have a notepad or you're on your computer take notes during this video because I know that it will be so valuable to you and getting started in a really lean way so that you can stay in the black and you don't have to go into the red in starting your business okay so if everyone is telling you that you need all of the things to start your business and you need all these tech apps and you need all these subscriptions and you need to be paying for X Y & Z it's just simply not true those things will come into play later as you scale the business but when you're first getting started you just need to make you know a couple thousand dollars a month even you know more than that you don't need much so especially in the online space so I'm gonna break this down because there's really six pillars of success in business I talked about this all but I've talked about this in a few videos but I wanted to break it down by those six pillars because in my experience it's really all you need to know as far as the categories of being successful in business so the six pillars are sales marketing finance operations and fulfillment I'm gonna make that make a lot more sense as we go so the biggest thing in the beginning when you start your business is it's not so much an investment of your money it's an investment of your time now why a coaching consulting and online education company is very easy to start with not a lot of money is because generally you're monetizing your brain and your intellectual property and you're not having to get a stock of physical products you're not even have a lot of costs upfront that's why it's easier to get this started with not a lot of money up front so the biggest thing is understanding that your time it's gonna take a lot of your time in the beginning as you get the business up and running that's the biggest cost to you so first and foremost before we dive into those six pillars the biggest thing to know is that I started my business like I said with my brain and I started it based off of my own experience my own story so if you're interested in having an online education program having a course being a coach or being a consultant it really comes down to knowing that that is based off of your experience and if you're trying to figure out what to create your course or a program around oftentimes it lies in the thing that you solved for yourself or the problem that you ran into your foot into for yourself or your own story and journey for me I started my business which now we've had thousands of clients all over the world I started it because I was struggling as a solopreneur with a tiny little consultancy tiny little marketing agency and getting past a limit and a ceiling basically basically with my clients and when I started using YouTube to share my thoughts and solve problems and answer questions for my clients things blew up and there was a huge demand to work with me and that's when I was able to package my expertise into an online course and that allowed me to scale myself and to scale the business because people could take my course and learn from me without me actually having to trade time for dollars so the first thing is I started with no physical product I didn't have a cost upfront on that front it just came from my brain my story my expertise and that's the same for you so what's the problem you solved for yourself what's the problem you solved for other people what is your story your journey what's your experience because oftentimes in those things is where your course idea or your business idea or your coaching idea lies the biggest thing is we're gonna start with sales because I say this often if you don't have sales you don't have a business so the first focus in your business no matter where you're starting you have nothing right now you didn't have a business you have to focus on sales first because in order to grow the business you have to be making money so you can put it back into the business so the first thing is client acquisition so how are you gonna find your first couple clients now again a lot of people will tell you have to have a funnel set up and you have to do X Y & Z you have to sign up for all these different things no you don't your first couple of clients are going to come from people you probably already know and from oh hello phone people you already know or they're gonna come from social networks they're gonna come from your email list if you have one even if you don't have an email list though you have people in your circle your friends and family you just need to tell everyone what you're doing and that's where you're gonna find your first couple of clients and it also comes through the beauty of the internet and the day and age that we live in like what a time to be alive truly I always say that because I wouldn't have my business if it weren't for social media I got my first clients using things like Twitter that was my first platform I really ever touched Facebook YouTube and Instagram and how I did it was by creating educational content we like to call it expert content in our business and the expert content is content that actually educates your idea client you're not trying to reach everyone you're trying to reach your ideal client on the thing that you can solve and it gives them a call to action to work with you that's how you're gonna get your first couple of clients in the door so it's not having to set up tech or funnels or anything and that's how I did it so I didn't pay anything to get my first sales that you get to $5,000 a month I paid nothing in my business I just used social media free platforms free groups to get my first clients and I told my friends and family and they told their friends and that's how you get people in the door so that's really important to understand when it comes to sales the next thing is your end also on that note is I had an email us at the time my email list was I think less than a hundred when I got my very first client so you don't have to wait for your list to be like a hundred thousand people you have a hundred people airing 50 people that's 50 people who are interested in what you do and your first second third client are most likely going to be in that list now marketing free social platforms big thing like I talked about and your email list so the tool that I used when I was setting up my email list when I first got it started I actually just used an Excel spreadsheet to be totally honest with you when I first built my email list I didn't have any text set up and then when I wanted to get a little more sophisticated I use MailChimp and the reason I love MailChimp and I always recommend that to start with as your email marketing housing place is because it's free up until 2000 subscribers so it is an amazing platform to get your business going and like I said I had less than 100 people on my list when I got my very first paying client so MailChimp is a great option and then they also have different options for like setting up a landing page etc and it's like $14. 99 a month it is $14. 99 a month if you want to upgrade your MailChimp account to have those things set up so like basic funnels landing pages etc again in the beginning you don't even need that so it can stay free so that's really really important to understand the next thing was I used the process I use to get people onto my email list was I use YouTube to get people onto my email list and then I use canva to create my opt-ins my guides my freebies my PDF so basically that's taking somebody from a YouTube video to downloading some sort of relevant training for them that's free that gets them to sign up for your email list and that's all I use and canva is basically your your free graphic design tool it makes you look like you're a pro graphic designer I didn't have a graphic designer for like the first two years of my business and I just did everything myself and I built basically every visual asset that I had inside of canvas so canva is awesome they have amazing templates in their free version you don't even need to pay for it if you want to get a little fancy with it they do have a paid option but again you can start that for free so that's the next thing and then PDF escape is an amazing tool to create your opt-in for your email list and have links in it so you can create your option in canva and then you add in clickable links to the to the PDF you can do it in canva but that's what the paid version but for free you can use something called PDF escape and PDF escape allows you to upload your PDF and add clickable links into it so those are the the things that I use to create my opt-in to get people onto my email list and start growing my email lists really really fast so I would also email that list to get new clients I would email them regularly I would send my YouTube videos on weekly basis and I just continue to nurture the list and that's how the first clients came through and that's how my business built momentum because I was positioning myself constantly as the go-to expert so you have to get scrappy when you're first getting started to get your first couple clients here's the cool thing that happens when you get your first couple clients you do an amazing job for them and you get them really great results they then will be your best ambassadors because word-of-mouth marketing is real and they will say oh my gosh Sonny Leonard is even the best when it comes to YouTube I just started working with her look what she's done for me they'll go and tell everybody else so that's really how my business started to grow in the beginning it wasn't because of complicated tech or anything else it was because I was good at what I did and what I was offering was really really valuable to people and that's what you have to remember at the end of the day that's such a big factory growing your business because word-of-mouth marketing is always the baseline of how you're gonna grow your business so the next thing is landing pages so I didn't have a website for the first year of my business all I had was a very very basic landing page which a landing page is just basically like a one-page website and you have an image of yourself and you have a little box where people can put in their email address and they can sign up for your email list that's all I had so like I said you can build that if you upgrade MailChimp to four for $14.
99 you can build that inside of MailChimp or you can use something like WordPress which is what I use back then and there's tons of free templates that you can use for that so there's the cost associated with that which again is not a lot and that just basically collected email so I didn't even have you know anything fancy setup or a website set up it was just a landing page to collect emails because your email list is the most valuable part of an online business now my domain my sunny Leonard easy. com at the time it was about three dollars to buy that domain and I just have it on auto renew every year and make sure that I just keep ahold of it and then our hosting if you go with Bluehost which is what I was using in the beginning for the first year it's free they have a promo that they do where it's free and then it's $25 a year after that and they have different pricing tiers but that's really the basic way to get started so none of these are affiliates to me by the way they're just things that I use when I was starting my business and really didn't cost me more than $100 to set up so the next thing was camera equipment for marketing so if I was doing my videos or creating any kind of content I started with a stack of books as my tripod I would put my computer on top of the sack of books and I would use a little I've used the webcam in the actual computer and then I upgraded to the Logitech c920 webcam which I still use to this day and I just got it on Amazon and that was my little setup to create content and I used iMovie which was free on my computer to edit my videos for the first year and up until 50,000 subscribers of starting my youtube channel so again low low low costs because all I heard about was actually being in the black meaning that I wasn't in debt in my business I was actually making money so that I could reinvest it back into the business to grow it to where it is today now for Instagram photos we've got a funny little throwback to how I used to do my photos on Instagram I used to just set up my camera keep it rolling do different poses up against a white wall on my tiny little apartment and I would choose screen shots and those would be my Instagram photos so again I did it all myself and I kept it very low cost and you absolutely can do the same thing and the funny thing is today I do basically the same thing I don't really do brand photo shoots I do them once in a blue moon if I need them for assets but for the most part if you go to my Instagram all the pictures or pictures I've taken myself or a bastard friends or my fiancee to take of me and then no paid ads I didn't touch paid ads for the first two years of my business and a lot of people will be like you got to use Facebook ads YouTube ads etc if you don't have an offer that people actually want if you don't have any client success stories or any client results if you're throwing money at an offer that has no proven results you're throwing money in the in the trash I call it a dumpster fire cuz you're literally just burning money you only want to start using paid ads when you have an offer that's actually proven we already had at least a thousand people in my program before I started using paid ads at all so start with your organic audience your organic traffic from places like YouTube or Instagram that's how you start selling your program and also to your email list and you have to have an email list that's a really big part of this and I hope I've made that super clear here so the best thing you can do when you're starting your business especially when it comes to the marketing piece of this is use social proof so use client results screenshot client results share them on your social platforms I do this still to this day because it's an amazing way to say I'm good at what I do I actually transform people and I transform their businesses you should work with me over the person over there who might have a pretty brand but actually doesn't know how to do the work and doesn't know how to get your results so social proof will scale you so fast in the beginning because if you can prove it you're the authority and you're the best people want to work with you alright the next thing was for marketing I would go to free networking events in Vancouver I would just google and search and ask friends if there was networking events in the marketing space and in business space and I would go to those and I meet people and that's how I started to build my network and I would cross promo content so I would cross promote content from people who had a similar size audience to me and I'd worked with them to share their content and they would share my content that was like my free little marketing tactic as well all right the next thing is Finance so for invoices I would use Google Docs but I actually started using Microsoft Word docs in the beginning for my invoices so again that was a free service at that time and I would basically as far as like taking payments I use PayPal and of course there's fees associated with that but it was the easiest way to get started now we use stripe in my business but at that time I just used PayPal and I would advise obviously for this talk to an accountant but if there's one thing I could recommend read this book as you're starting to build your business even if you haven't started one yet because it's a game-changer it's when it comes to actually making money and building wealth inside of your business for years to come and it breaks down exactly how you should organize your finances in your business so it's a really really valuable resource the next thing is operations so it was me myself and I so there wasn't really operations at that time so to be totally honest we didn't have any operations setup but what I did do and I recommend to anyone starting a business and wish I had done it sooner is I actually wrote down every process in my business that I did myself so was it whether it was uploading a YouTube video sending out a tweet creating an invoice in Microsoft Word all of that was documented in a step-by-step process just on my desktop and then I would upload it and put it on my hard drive just so I had it stored and that made it so much easier when I hired people to say okay here you go this is the exact step-by-step to follow so you're not having to rehire people all the time a retrain people all the time and the final thing is fulfillment so this means that when you get a client how do you actually deliver to that client how do you actually get them the information that they need so in the beginning all I did was I would use Skype to chat with my clients if they weren't based in Vancouver if they were based in Vancouver I would meet them here in my it wasn't this apartment it was a tiny little apartment or I would go to a coffee shop to meet with them and consult with them so again free unless I was paying for coffee which I usually did but all free things that you can use and have at your fingertips right now and I would just keep notes for each client in Microsoft Word documents so it wasn't anything fancy I wasn't you know having to use all these crazy like portals and platforms because I was just doing that one-to-one work in the beginning until I scaled into an online course at that point I use something called bank if ik but that was not in the beginning of my business I did a lot of one-to-one work and group work before I ever created an online course because I wanted to prove my offer actually worked before I packaged it so again not a lot of money over there either now the other thing would be Cowley Townley is an amazing tool for scheduling booking calls and making sure you're not actually having to go back and forth with people to get them booked into your calendar sokka scheduling things like sales calls I used calendly and I use just the free option for it and then before I would get on sales calls with people I oftentimes would want to get more information about them where their business was at etc so instead of using anything crazy fancy I used just Google forums which if you have a Google account which is what my email is setup through and how I communicate with my clients or communicated with my clients now we're we're using slack for most things but at Google if you have a Google account or gmail account then you'll have Google Forms free with it and for my domain and everything when I wanted to have like a professional email address which I do recommend having I just purchased my domain through GoDaddy and then I basically use that to like mask my gmail account so it became something more professional than just like send a hundred easy five at gmail.
