you can get to 500,000 AR pretty simply by just following this game plan this is Bill Rice with Bill Rice strategies and I'm doing a little bit of a different format today tell me what you think of it um for a couple different reasons one this is just something that kind of um sparked out of some conversations that I was having with some folks about entrepreneurship um and actually starting um up a a business from scratch and I just went to my notebook and I kind of like hey if I was going to start all
over which I've done a couple of different times you know how would I go about doing it specifically um right now there are a lot of different sort of things that are available to us that were different at different times and so the topic of today's video is how to make your first 500,000 in annual reoccurring revenue and your natural first place to start here um might to just go to your calculator and take your um your 500,000 that you want to make for the year um 1,666 and change uh every single month in order
to hit that annual run rate and then from there you would back into like oh what's the the average cost per sale um and revenue and those sorts of things but I think this is kind of the wrong approach I love models and numbers as well as anybody else and kind of having an understanding of that but most times when we're starting a business if you're a founder or even in the early stages of a startup you have less Clarity around the product and the service delivery the prices that you will charge and those sorts
of things and so in my mind and my experience when I have started businesses over the years I think it's more important to get the the marketing engine started this may sound counterintuitive and a lot of startups um don't think like this but I think it's important to get the marketing engine started which will kind of go through here because um particularly as a startup you're introducing into the marketplace A A New Concept and you're having to convince people that you have something unique um that you can you know change um something significant within their
business there has to be this compelling value proposition well in order to really refine that I think it's helpful to actually start on the marketing and get a lot of those messaging um tested in the Marketplace um even before that to start building up the channels and the audience that you're going to need uh in order to really get a good significant test of the things that that you're um that you're working on as far as messaging so anyway long story short um this is the quick uh and dirty on how I would start and
and very quickly um get to and I've demonstrated this before very quickly get to that 500,000 um a mark and that's not our arbitrary um that's a a reasonably it's a number that I've hit consistently over and over again it's also the number at which point um particularly you know if that's Revenue you kept your expenses tight that you become interesting to venture capital to Angel Investors and those sorts of things so let's get to the list um first and foremost just take inventory uh of what you have um the the skills that you bring
what makes you unique um your contrarian um view on the on the marketplace or how you're going to serve the market what is that and then create a positioning statement around that concept uh and that inventory and I think it's even better I did a whole video on this um if you take that positioning statement and you blow it out into a true Manifesto and inside of that me Manifesto is going to be a couple different things Beyond just the positioning statement telling people you know what you do and how you do it how you
do it better um in a Manifesto you start to create a cultural document that talks about you know what was the original purpose and vision um what are our core values um and then ultimately how do we deliver different U what is our unique positioning you can pull all that together into a Manifesto and then make it attractive and compelling for somebody to read through it um ideally internally so that as more and more people come on board everybody's rowing in the same direction but at the same time it can also be Market facing some
great examples of this is zapo uh created something like this uh years and years ago I worked for quick and Loans Now Rocket mortgage and they had an isms book that they published every single year um that was a compilation of not just those core values and that Manifesto but also real examples of of how that sort of played out or examples of that in action throughout the year okay the next thing we're going to do and I kind of um sort of categorize it here is we want to create a body of work and
why I say that is because as you're going out into the market um the worst thing that can happen is that you have one thing that somebody trips across but there's nowhere to go to go deeper right so we know in marketing in order to create a transaction it usually takes um seven plus um interactions or Impressions and if you don't have a body of work so that they can bounce around and they can go down that Rabbit Trail get lost in the rabbit holes uh and binge on your content your philosophy um and information
about your product and service even if it is an MVP there just not going to be enough Impressions there to turn them into a customer or even to to get them to subscribe and become part of your audience so that when you do have that mvp ready um that they're ready to buy so in order to create that body of work um I always think it it begins with writing ultimately so big fan of video obviously I'm doing a video now but writing is kind of the the starting point you can see here I wrote
some ideas down um I think it's important to write and rewrite um and create those ideas uh publish them text versions um ideally at first on platforms that already have audiences uh places like LinkedIn uh you can do articles you can do posts a medium is another great solution again there's an audience there depending on you know what your positioning is and who your audience is Reddit um actually is not a bad place to start vetting some of your your ideas so um encourage you to do first and foremost to start um doing some writing
then um from there you're going to want to create something that's more kind of visually appealing right so that's where videos come in big fan of YouTube channels one of the things that I think um is kind of interesting uh about YouTube is um a lot of people think oh there's so much content on YouTube there's so many creators like that kind of gig is up but I found especially when I want to go deep into something um there's actually not a lot of content and there's certainly not a lot of ongoing content so if
you again wanted to binge on a particular content there's probably only one or two creators in that space um so I think YouTube has a lot of opportunity because there isn't a lot of content and it's relatively easy with fresh content on a particular subject um to to be into or get entry into that audience even easier than um straight writing and SEO on your own site and that's sort of thing the other thing that I think is really important is to create a sales deck right so basically um your sales pitch and again you
may be at the MVP you might not even have truly a product yet but I think as early as possible start to build that sales deck and practice um again your positioning your value proposition how you would present it um probably the hardest part for a for a founder or someone who is kind of like so deep into what they're bringing to Market is how do you actually simplify that and boil it to such a level that it makes it easy for someone to make a decision right and so building a sales deck going through
a few iterations of that will again pull you through um kind of that exercise and make it easier for you long term to get folks attention and then to publish it into again the marketplace right um to put it on your website to have it available for download um is still is a great way I don't like to hide sales pitches just behind salese right it's okay to publish those um forward so create a sales dick the other thing that can be kind of related to this is um maybe you're doing like a 90day strategy
or plan again an ebook or a lead magnet uh can f function in a very similar sort of way so um I think that um is another important part to building that body of work then the next thing is try to work on making buying as frictionless as possible right and so there's some block and tackling stuff here just starting to Define that product and service and again creating Clarity around you know what are the benefits what are the features what makes you kind of unique and different but then also building the actual proposal template
this is another thing that I've seen hurt a lot of early entrepreneurs is they get out there they start talking about the product they have something compelling but they're really slow when a commitments made and someone ask for a proposal like they just sit there forever kind of going around in circles trying to figure out how to present an agreement that looks professional or a proposal that is is kind of relevant to what they just said in the sales pitch so have that ready uh don't be surprised by your first sale so whatever that process
is that purchasing flow go ahead and have that set up have it thought out and kind of one of the most powerful things is if I get a commitment on a sales call to immediately within an hour be able to turn around and deliver that proposal or an agreement um or uh again some sort of presentation to help um begin that purchase flow and onboarding and then of course that's the the the kind of the third aspect of this is creating um an onboarding process having thought through what it is to bring on a a
a new client and and what are the steps and how are we going to go about doing that finally um and and this one can make a break a startup for sure is just fulfillment and retention uh again I think a lot of times entrepreneurs are surprised by their first few sales um and they haven't really thought about delivery um and they certainly haven't thought about that experience in using the product or or the service or interacting with the new company or business that you've created so go through this think about Service delivery think about
product activation again A lot of times um maybe you're giving away the product for free or you have some sort of sort of initial onboarding and implementation but truly getting the customer to to use the product to actually be activated and to start to to kind of realize the value of it um Can often be a a little bit of a a blind spot or Gap um in that fulfillment process so make sure that you have a process to activate and even see how much or what percentage of your new on boardings are actually um
activating um the prod and and taking advantage of the features value building so over time um what is it that keeps them wanting to to have the product um a lot of times this is new features or U moving with the market as it changes um one of the things that you want to kind of install inside of uh your client's mindset is hey I always want to be paying these folks because they're Innovative and I want the next thing that they think of or the next um thing that they offer or I I I
simply can't get these results outside of them in particular so value building and then of course ultimately this all rolls up to retention uh the percentage of clients that you onboard um that you retain for whatever um that that lifetime value or that time frame is to get to lifetime value um is super important because um the the more that you increase lifetime value the more you can spend on acquisition um and those things work really powerfully together and again later you can see U I want to expand more on some of those topics but
this um is precisely the plan that I have used and I would encourage anybody to use in order to get to that first um 500,000 in ARR and I will tell you if you do these things and of course you insert the product or service um in this mix um these things themselves will create the audience um and the interest um in your product that you will get to that first Mark now what you do with that afterwards and how you scale that um is significant but um most companies with just a handful of people
you can get to 500,000 AR pretty simply um by just following this game plan so hopefully that's helped um I would encourage you uh do me a favor and like And subscribe helps the channel grow and of course um gets you um in front of the latest and greatest when we publish the next video look forward to seeing you on our next video and hopefully you're starting to build um that business up to that 500,000 AR and Beyond
