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SNM190: If You Want to Build a Successful Business You Have to Start with a Pyramid

• Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger • Season 2 • Episode 16

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Start building a successful business using a pyramid in today's episode of Serve No Master podcast.

Nowadays more and more businesses are built without dept, they have a single product line that they run effectively but it also means that when new people come in they easily get kicked out of the market.

So, today I want to teach you how you can build a business with a dept to it. Once you build a single product line you have to add some breadth to it so you can market to a larger audience. Once you start using this strategy your business will look like a pyramid.

Structure your business like a pyramid and you will achieve great success. Find out how in today's episode.

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If you want to build a successful business, you've got to start with the pyramid. Find out how on today's episode today's episode is brought to you by Social Pilot, the social media and marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses. Join over 20,000 social media pros at serve. No master dot com Backslash social pilot today Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I'm recording a little bit earlier today in the hopes that it will be quieter, but sounds like my hopes are not gonna come true. It's windy there, birds singing, and one of my neighbors just started hammering. It's almost a so they know what I'm recording, and they start hammering the second I do. So please forgive me. I'm moving us far away from the noise as I can. But as I move away from the hammering, I'm moving toward a really loud bird, so I'm forced to choose between the bird in the hammer. One thing I notice in many of the business models around me that there's no depth to those companies have a single product line. You wrote it very, very effectively. But it also means that a lot of the people that come into their business get spun back out because they don't have the one thing that fits them. And what I want to teach you is how to build a business with a little bit more breath to it. Over the years, I've moved closer and closer that business model, so I have a little bit more of a streamlined pyramid than when I started out with. But I want you to see that there's value in the breath of offerings. Once you build a single product line, you want to add some breath to it so you can appeal to a wider audience. So more of the people who find you could get brought into your offers, your funnels, your money making strategies and the reason. I call this appear minutes cause that's the shape you could also call it a triangle. At the bottom has the greatest Brett that at the top. It's the thinnest, and you can think of this the same way as you look at military strategy. If you're in the military or if you've worked for a large corporation, maybe you've seen a t o e the table of equipment type of operations, which is a list of all the equipment people. A resource is you have available to go to battle with you, and this list is everything in the same way. You need to know what you need to build your business. So when I started out like serving a master in 2016 I sat down and I wrote my tear. We I said, Here's a list of how we want to structure my business and I spent three years building it, and since then I've spent time refining and improving it. But that foundation has served me very well. So important part is, process is toe. Have a plan, a strategy before you get started, the sooner you draw out a plan for your business, the more likely you are to succeed, and I encourage you to get a piece of paper today and draw this out. I always dropped my pyramids by hand. I was have. Maybe you're more of a my met person. That's fine. If use a mind map, you might end up with a different shape. You probably will Absolutely fine. You'll end up with a wheel with wheels and wheels around it so you could take the center of your mind map as the top of a Pearman. Totally fine. You can use any shape that you want, and you want to plan where you want your business to be. 13 and five years from now. And what we're gonna do in today's episode is create a product line, and if knowing where your business is, it could be three years from now. Gets you excited. Police hit the up vote that sums up below this video on my YouTube channel. Is that encouragement? Those thumbs up those views and those times you hit the subscribe button, all of those how to keep me afloat help to keep me listening cause I need listeners. I don't want to record these for no one here, and it just started raining exciting times when you're designing your order of operations, your order of equipment, your plan, your pyramid, what you want to build out is your dream. Say, if I had a limited funds and limited time, what would my business look like if I could put all the things in place and we're really looking at Here is your offerings everything you want to give away or sell to potential customers down the line? We're gonna build our business using this pyramid, But our initial strategy is to just put all of ideas in a single place and have a little bit of structure to them. We want to develop is a plan B or a layer defense. This means that if people don't buy one thing, there's something else taken by. This will increase your lifetime customer value. This will use the relationship you have with your audience. This will allow you to go from being a product to a business. One of the stakes many businesses make is that they have a single offer, and if anything goes wrong with that offer, if anything, changes where people get tired that offer, the market shifts go out of business, and I don't want that to happen to you. One of the core tenets of my business model is adaptability. And so the pyramid provides you depth and defense that if one plan doesn't work, you have another plan behind it. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you go through the process of creating a product, launching a product. It doesn't work, and you're suddenly scrambling because you gotta catch up on your bills Were trying to avoid that happening to you by planning advance. As they say, failure to plan is planning to fail. The danger is when your business has a single point of vulnerability. One of most common single points of vulnerability is a single traffic source. Now the rains really picking up Now, if you have a single point of vulnerability, that means your business could be taken out by a targeted strike. An example of a single point of vulnerability is if you work for a company and all of your revenue comes from that one place and that company is your single point of revenue. Many people are seeing that during the turn economic climate where ah, flu like disease from China is causing millions of people to lose their jobs around the world. A single point of vulnerability doesn't mean it's your fault. It means the opposite. It means something outside your control could put you out of business. Another single point of vulnerability is if you build a business and you have one clients. You're a consultant. Great. We have a single client. If that client goes out of business, you go out of business. You could be doing a great job. They can love your work. But if anything affects their bottom line, then you go out of business too. This is why the first thing I teach you is that once you have revenue stream is to diversify. To protect yourself from that. And this is the same idea. We have a single source of traffic and something happened to that traffic source. Imagine if you were killing it 20 years ago. Traffic from my space have been abandoned. Ship and dump to Facebook. You'd be out of business. Technically, MySpace still exist. In fact, my page from my space from the 1990 still exists. I looked it up about a year and 1/2 ago to see it one if that page is still around. I remember a time when bands didn't have websites. Bands had MySpace pages, but my space got greedy. Put too many ads on their page. At a certain point, more than 50% of your screen was ads on MySpace. Now Facebook is doing the same thing right there, shoving as many ads they can get away with. That's what everyone does. How many ads can they show you before you stop visiting their website? That's the big question turned out numbers pretty high. But when you have this single point of room ability, then you're always in danger of going out of business. The same thing happens if you have a single product eventually, either yourself to every single possible consumer or there's a market shift. This doesn't mean that you can't have a flagship product. I certainly dio, but then you want to build a bulwark around it of other offers so that people who don't buy the flagship product can still buy other stuff from you. So you may start building a silo, which is a stream of products from free to most expensive along a single line. And then you want to build a pyramid around it to bring in more traffic sources and have more offerings and to maximize your customer lifetime value. I don't want you to build a business. That's a single point of vulnerability, that a single shift could put you out of business for a long time. I ran to start changing optimization company in Nashville, Tennessee. One day Google changed the rules on all of my client's websites, dropped in the rankings, and I was out of businesses in 24 hours at a single point of vulnerability outside of my control. And so I want to talk about the pyramid, and the reason it's bigot the bottom and small at the top is because it's ranked by access to you. You could develop a very thin pyramid. That's okay, might even build almost asylum. We have one prakit each level. Right now. My focus is absolutely broadening the base. The base of your parent is your cheapest offers. So as people go up the pyramid up in levels, the price goes up and the access to you increases so people at the very bottom are people who take something for free from you, and that's the largest segment of any businesses following. I have a lot of free gifts. I gave away lots of lots of stuff for free, and you can consider this podcast part of that. I don't charge for podcast episodes. I don't have ah, Patriot account. I don't have premium podcast content. You could pay extra for access to none of that. This is totally free because it's based on my pyramid at the base of my pyramid, you can also find log posts and on my giveaways. So you go one level up from the free content for everyone, and then the level above that is the free content for people give their email address. They do a barter, which we've covered in a few of the previous episodes, and they give me that email address. I see. Okay, great. Here's your book. Here's your many course. Here's your pdf. Here's your training. And has it taught you in a previous lesson? This is a one way communication. This is an E book, so you don't get to hear my voice or see my face the bottom of the pyramid. You go one level up. That's where you have your products. Enter the 7 to $47 range here. These are the programs that takes should take a customer and afternoon to go through. It should be a good bit of content. It should teach them something really valuable. If you go through one of my programs at this level, my blueprints, you'll hear my voice. But you will see no videos as you will further up the pyramid. The next level above that is my video courses. That's where you'll see slideshow videos that I've been a lot of time designing and adding content to. There's a lot there, and as you go up, the access increases. To me, you get access to the private Facebook group, which means you can ask group questions and I answer them in a group environment. But not in real time. It's not a group coaching call, a level above that. As you work your way up, you start to move into areas where there's group coaching. Then there's one on one coaching that there's in person coaching at the very top, and you should price your in person coaching so that you sell very little of it. You want to make it so expensive that it's an outlier, because the last thing you want to do is sell 100 group coaching slots that you can't manage to maintain if you don't want a group coach. If you want personally, coach anyone price your one on one coaching so high that no one will do it. One of my friends went to a coach that blew my mind. I can't member who was my friend. Jamie went to hire a business coach, and here's how it works. You had to show up with a briefcase with $100,000 in cash in it and you'd have a meeting with this person. They would decide whether not to take you on as a client. If they took you on as a client, they would keep the briefcase. If they did not take you on a client, they would donate the briefcase to charity. Talk about a test. That's the highest level that I know if I do know other people that are in the $1,000,000 range for one on one coaching, but that's outside my circle. Now I want you to sit down today and start drawing out your pyramid. Say, what's every different type of thing I could give away for free what every different product idea or service that I could price at each level of the pyramid. The pyramid is not written in stone. You don't have to make a course that people don't want just because it's on your pyramid. What you're doing is writing a roadmap for the future to have a rough idea of where you're going. I use my pyramid all the time. I wrote my pyramid, I think, five years ago, 45 years ago, and I spent years building it out. I built now almost everything on my original pyramid. So now I'm modifying and adding new layers. So right now a lot of people see what I'm doing and say, That's so crazy. Wise Jonathan only doing free stuff I'm not releasing new courses are releasing new products. I'm only doing the bottom mypyramid this year because the top of my pyramid is solid. I'm really happy with where it is right now. The top of my pyramid. My coaching levels are exactly what I want. The highest thing I offer right now is my group coaching package, and I'm very happy at that level. I don't like to do a lot of one on one coaching because I don't like to have a schedule. So my pyramid is built a little bit around my desires. And once you have your pyramid built, you know that people enter the pyramid, have a certain value. Once you have all the upper pieces built. With that, I'm gonna add more layers to the bottom. So more people enter the pyramid. I was recently explaining So my team that if by value per person enters the pyramid drops in half all after his double my traffic to keep the numbers the same, it's that simple. Now use two ways you can build. Your pyramid goes from the top down in the bottom up. Do it from the top down. That's how I started. I started off selling a $2000 products on Webinars. I would get a few joint venture partners, promote, make some sales. They would keep half the money, and that funded serving a master while I built out the rest of my pyramid now I'm focusing on the other direction, so sometimes you focus the top. Sometimes you focus on the bottom. I spent the last six months building at the top, and I'm really happy with it. I built out my perfect flagship product, and now everything else leads towards that. So what I'm building is now towards a new top of the pyramid. So we're just restructuring things a little bit so I can focus more on books, blueprints, free gifts, podcast episodes, block posted all lead towards this same destination. You can modify and grow from your pyramid, but your business will always be structured this way. You will always have more people who take your free stuff that take your most expensive stuff. Now it's very possible this has happened to me that at certain times of your business, different levels of the pyramid generate the most revenue. For a while, the middle by pyramid was where all the revenue came from. Right now it's the top. But it could certainly change again. What we're designing and I'm trying to help you do is the same thing. If you read the secret they say you need to put together a Vision Board of Vision board is where you draw pictures of your dream future. Usually you cut out pictures of magazines of like rich people and beautiful people in the watch You on in the car. You want the big picture of stuff or maybe you have a picture of a beach and happy family the marriage. But it's what you're moving towards. The reason we put ah Vision Board on the wall is so you know what you're driving towards? Part of your plan for the future can be how much money you want to make per month. I can quit my job when my passive revenue equals X. I need this much money in a savings account will fly King start traveling full time. All of these numbers air ab so lutely fine. There's nothing wrong with putting these together, and I encourage you to do it. I encourage you to find your dream future by putting a pyramid in front of you. Now you have a vision for your business for the future, and this is really powerful because it takes away the vagueness from your dreams. You're no longer wanting run during what you're running towards that, you know, and you continue to solidify and concrete it because I have this outline of my business. I can continually modify and grow my business. I could say, Where do I need to put the most effort? And I'm constantly adding different components and modules and pieces to my business based on what's happened with my customers with my audience, with my sales numbers, all those statistics we talked about in the previous episode when you're planning what to build first, I want you to go back and listed by previous episodes on surveying your list and quizzing them and asking questions and finding out your audience wants. And also you should listen to the previous episode on Webinars because what you can do is find out of people want something without building what I like to do. If I have a new product idea, first thing I do is there running by Paris. This happened actually yesterday or two days ago. I got an email this week from someone was asking about the server master graphic novel. They said, Hey, don't you have a course on how toe make comic books Right now I don't what I actually have is a bonus training on it and one of my it's a bonus for one of my courses on on authorship. I did an hour long training on my process and how I put together the Kabul but don't have an actual course on it. And I said, Oh, Paris, do you think this is a good idea? And she shot me down because its ah, one person's ever asked about it. That means it goes to the bottom of the list. So the first thing is that goes to my team or my advisers and they say, Oh, no, that's That's a crazy idea. But if it passes that test and 80% of the time ideas dio, then we survey the audience we might post in the tribe and say, Hey, what do you think of these ideas? Are you interested in any of these To get a feel if we get no response is we get no votes if no one is active. If you get all knows that we know it's a bad idea. But I do get some traction than all right. A webinar don't do a live call. It won't say Here's what a building dedicada you're the first people on board, so here's a very special price, and then I see if people buy it, I want to find out if people want to come on board for this business bottle when people aren't interested. If I sell less than 10 units, then it's not worth my time to do it live. I sell more than 10 then that defray is my costs of building the course in both time and treasure. So I build that part of my pyramid often. What I'll do when I'm posting a survey question is all list like 10 of my pyramid ideas and I'll say, vote for what you? One of these is most interesting to you. I don't even ask people what they buy because no one really knows what they'll buy. I'm just trying to get a rough barometer, see which way the wind is blowing, and then, with a live training call, is selling something before you built it. Then you don't invest unnecessary time because sometimes my ideas are wrong. Sometimes I'll run a webinar. No one wants it to go. Okay, Now I know my success does not come from. My brilliant ability to predict the future comes from my ability to adapt to change. If you have no vision for the future, you'll end up with no future. If you don't work on your business plan early, don't start working on it. Now you'll get to a point where you have toe make a pivot decision. That's only you're scrambling for ideas. There's nothing worse than tried to think of an idea and trying to create something. It's two different parts of your mind, and so you don't want to mingle those two things. You want to keep them separate. This is why I have a notebook fill with book ideas. Sometimes I just sit down and write down any idea have for a product or course or a book or a coloring book. And there's all go to a big old list. And other times I take that exact same list, and I just start writing outlines rough outlines. If using my map, that's fine. I do my map. Sometimes you just draw your inner circle than your next outer circle than the layer be around that, so it might be on three different sessions months or even years apart where you add different elements because it just depends when the creativity of the mood strikes you. Building in this way allows you to lean into your creativity and work on what you're in the mood for rather than work on what you have to see. If you've got 20 product ideas and outlines ready to go when the time comes and you need to see what people are interested in, you build something you don't have to go back into outlining phase. We're gonna create a phase you could just build. Then just find out what's the best idea. And the same concept applies to every other decision making your business. I look at pyramids or plans for the future of how we invest money. Now I direct money to different team members or different projects or different investment or different types of ads. Exact same thing. About a year ago, I wrote down a list of my ideal team and I wasn't quite perfect, and that added people to the team. I You start to see what people are really good at, not really good at, and you want people to be in their area of excellence. The other day I was having a conversation with my s CEO expert and she thought I was asking her if I wanted her to design images for social Media. I was buying this social media software. Need to sign someone on the team to do it. And she was. I'm not really good at that. I said, No, no, I would never ask you to do that. It's outside your area of excellence right now. I actually have the video editor working on these because visual stuff falls into his area of excellence. I didn't know until he did a bunch of you to find job if he could do it. But so far it turns out he can't, which is great. So I said, No, This belongs to the creative type. My video editor webs, graphics and visual elements, all of those things, and works with Photoshopped to put together some of the slides. He's already doing some visual stuff. Probably this falls into his area of skill set. It does. We may train another team member on this, but because I have ah Borden original bored with the holes I want to put people into all the different roles I want to fill. That board is now full, and now when I look, I go, OK, here's why I have a need As we're growing, there's different things we see. Oh, you know what? The business is slightly different, but that original plan help me to fill in those right pieces. Guy wrote down who I want and how many hours a week. I think the work required the salary budget they have, and we just built some that forecasting and planning and strategies like one of the things about online businesses that we could get away with not doing it in the olden days 20 years ago, if you wanted to start a business, you had to have a really, really tight business plan. Very professional. Usually you had to go to business school or get someone to go to school to write one that's in the format to take it to your bank. To ask for a loan on a business plan is very similar. If you ever watch investing shows, it's exactly the same thing. People go to raise money before they build a business. Some do, they say. Oh, I have no revenue were pre revenue, which is really cool way of saying broke. But here's our idea. And here's our plan. If you don't have a really good plan, you have a really good idea. You don't have a really good explanation of how you're gonna turn that into a business. No one will give you money. But if you have an amazing plan, everyone will. Because where solo entrepreneurs. Because we started our own because we work from home. We skip this step. Unfortunately, I'm Justus guilty. This is anyone else. Much of what I teach you in these podcast episodes comes from my own experience or my own inadequacies. I don't want you to have to repeat my mistakes. I want you have a shorter path of success based on my experiences, my winds of my losses. You need a plan that says this is what I'm gonna build. This how long will take this? How it's gonna make money. That's how long it takes to go to profit Positive. That's how long case to go to break even this. How long until I can quit my job? Having those numbers in place will motivate you and drive you? Absolutely. So I encourage you to start your business plan was something simple, like a pyramid. But as you grow like I have, the next thing I built was my team structure. And now we're doing more and more of this organization. That's why this year most of my conversations with my team member are are about my project managers offered how we could make it better, how we can prove process flows. How you gonna prove communication, how we can have better s o ps and checklists and all that comes down to forecasting and planning for the future. Now I want to build a business that has all the pieces of real business has there. So now I have my team. I'm planning for turnover that if someone outgrows my business or decides to go on to do their own thing or has a life change, the business will continue to go on because we've built a structure and a process that's not just inside each person's head. Now that the team is so big, it's very hard for me to manage everyone with just my thoughts I have to use project managers offer last night I was giving assignment to my developer. I was outlining and road mapping How I want to improve our upped informs across the entire website across pop ups and at the end of block post appearances and our sidebars. Now, first, I want to get the tack in places. I recorded a 20 minute video. I didn't send him some instructions in our private chat software, and then I went to a project managed off when I created a card that had it. It's a task list off all the different steps in the process, and then a checklist below that of the different free gifts I want him to build around. So we put that tire process in place, and now I know that he could do it. And what I want you to understand, hopefully is coming across right now is not that I'm so lucky that I have workers because I actually got a plus that I got with midnight when my inner it turns on my entire plan was to just start building out all these things myself and I started working. I realized I don't know how to do it, cause you know it's hard to keep up with technology forever. I knew how to do it two years ago, and then a lot of things change. The software were using changes, and I'm not as good as I used to be, So I asked him to do it. I realize it's, um, or better, a better use of my time to create the plan and then pass it on to someone else to do. And then I can create the next plan. I can spend more time praying podcast episodes for you guys. So forecasting the future, planning for the future, putting structures in place every time I record one of those videos and we create a structure than the next person who comes and it has to work on that project. They have those assets, those instructions in place. That's what we're trying to build. That's how we go from pyramid to t o E to project managers offer. I want you to see that it's a process flow, and if you want to know what tools I'm currently using, you could find them in the links below this video on YouTube or links below this. The podcast episode on the served Master block, and you can also find it in the show notes and put it in all three places. So it's easy for you to find, and I encourage you to see what's the right fit for you. I've actually been through deaf 10 different project moments offers. I've tried them all. I've tried right, and I tried Trillo and have tried asana. I've been through all of them and Trela we worked with for a year, and then we outgrew. It is it's really good for a certain size team. Then, as my team started getting bigger and bigger, the bills got quite unwieldy, and I was like If I changed another platform, I can actually hiring other employees, which is definitely a sign. It's time to make some changes and some of the more powerful features we're looking for. We found on another platform, so it's very possible that will change platforms again and again and again. So that's why we're always updating links because what I'm using is always growing and modifying as my business grows. But it's all about planning for the future. That's how you build a business instead of a hobby, and I'm really, really excited to see you build your product payments. And if you want to take a picture of it or draw the line and share the link below this video, I will absolutely check it out. Thank you so much for spending some time today, and I can't wait to see your product pyramids. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss. Another episode will be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. Thank you for listening to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode.