How to Grow a Business Fast (Tips from a $450M Founder)

A few years ago, I got invited to a private mastermind at Grant Cardone’s 10X headquarters near Miami.

Grant said something to me there that I initially laughed at, but I now think makes a profound point:

“Most people come up with an idea, create a product, then sell it. I don’t do that. I come up with an idea, sell it, then create the product.”

Grant Cardone

He gave the example of a little booklet he had an idea for that he started selling via Instagram almost immediately after coming up with the idea. Grant offered a large pre-order discount — for the book that didn’t exist even in outline form yet — and sold around 10,000.

That’s the kind of thinking that helps someone get 30,000+ people to attend a conference like his 10X event five or six years ago.

I’ve realized that I’ve been using that same idea to scale companies since I was 21 years old. I used to scale my first e-commerce business from $0 and zero experience to $2 million in two years. I used it to build my e-commerce coaching business from zero to doing $1 million in its first week to $100 million in total sales over the next eight years. I used it to grow my coffee brand from $200K to $2.5M the first year, to $16M the second year, to $25M the third year, and to over $50M today.

There’s a formula and science to scaling companies fast. If you apply these seven tips, you can scale any company in any industry ten times faster than everyone else you compete with.

Tip #1: Get a Product that Scales

I once talked with a nice older couple from Florida who needed help with their business. They’d become the #1 seller of their product in America. There was just one little problem: nobody wanted to buy their product!

They sold pop guns (the little wooden toy guns you see at some mall kiosks).​

They were #1 on Amazon and #1 in Google searches for their product. Total sales were around $30,000 per month.

You can’t scale a business with a product nobody wants.

The first step is to make sure your product has a large enough market to support your goals. The easiest way to figure that out is to see if anyone else selling a similar product is producing sales at the level you want.

If you want to build a $100 million business, but the top sellers of the product you sell only sell a maximum of $10 million, you have a problem. Either you have to expand the market — very hard and risky — or you need to get another product.

Both of my businesses that have exceeded $100 million in sales have been in very large markets: business education and coffee. Had we sold pop guns, we could have applied all the same strategies, worked just as hard, and worked just as long, but we wouldn’t have achieved 1/1000th of the results.

Tip #2: Create One Really Good Funnel

To scale sales, you need a scalable sales funnel. Fortunately, you only need one.

In fact, if you have more than one sales funnel, you won’t scale as fast.

It’s much better to have one fully optimized, bulletproof, predictable funnel than six mediocre ones.

We grew our coffee company from $200K to $50M+ per year with one funnel doing almost all of the work. (We now have multiple funnels for multiple products, but 80% of our success has come from just one funnel.)

We tested headlines, body copy, and offers all in that one funnel. Once that funnel produced the results we needed — a high revenue per visitor — we expanded traffic sources from Facebook (Meta) ads to affiliates to every other channel we could find.

Humans are humans. If you get one funnel working that convinces humans to buy, you can repeat that success anywhere else you can reach more humans.

1. Create one good page.
2. Send traffic to it.
3. Measure the results (how much you make in profit versus how much you spend on advertising or organic traffic).
4. Keep tweaking the funnel until you make more in profit than it costs for you to get customers.
5. Scale your traffic.

Tip #3: One Traffic Source

With my first $100M business, 90% of our sales came from affiliates. With my second $100M business, 90% of our sales came from paid ads, with 80% of that spend coming from one channel (Facebook ads) for the first two years.

Meta has half of the world’s population using its two primary platforms, Facebook and Instagram. No matter what business you’re in, what products you sell, or who you want to reach, you can get in front of them with Meta advertising. That’s where I’d start.

Like with your one funnel, you follow a similar process to make your one traffic source work:

1. Create 3-5 widely different ads (to test different ideas).
2. Launch them with a budget of a few hundred dollars per day maximum.
3. Spend a few thousand dollars maximum.
4. Create more ads like your top-performer. Kill all the rest.
5. Create another 3-5 unique ads.
6. Repeat until you get the results you need to scale.

Tip 4: Cut the Fat

There’s a problem with success: it makes you lazy and overconfident.

When you scale your business using the first three tips we just covered, you will scale your business. But it will all fall apart, and you’ll be back where you started if you don’t continually cut the fat.

You’ll launch products that, left in the business, will destroy your business and your focus (Coca-Cola once owned shrimp farms).

You’ll hire people who evaporate your profit and make you hire useless roles such as “HR Manager” (I once had 60+ six-figure employees in a $40,000+ per month office and an HR Manager to deal with all the people’s problems).

And, the worst mistake of all, you’ll launch new, completely unrelated businesses while your main business slowly deteriorates, then quickly deteriorates.

As they say, “keep the main thing the main thing”.

Squeeze every last dollar and new customer out of your one product, one funnel, one traffic source before doing anything else.

Then, relentlessly trim the unnecessary. Be like Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple in 1997 and immediately killed 70% of the products.

As I like to say, “When in doubt, cut it out!”

Tip 5: Get Paid First

There’s one final challenge with scaling: cash flow.

In both of my large businesses, I’ve been able to mostly get paid before paying for product costs.

In my business education company, creating training programs costs us little, and we could hire a skeleton crew of coaches and support staff before scaling up after we sell the programs.

In my coffee company, we’ve been able to negotiate an arrangement with our main supplier to only have to pay for finished bags of coffee after we sell them (they cover the cost of green, unroasted coffee beans before they prepare finished bags for us). That allows us to scale from zero to hundreds of thousands of bags per month without raising or injecting money.

You might not be so lucky, but you should try to be.

A friend of mine scaled a pet business extremely fast during the pandemic. At one point, his business grew so fast that he needed to buy $10 million of inventory. He took out a personally-guaranteed loan for $10 million that he didn’t have at the time. In the end, it worked out — he sold that business for almost $200 million a couple of years later.

The faster your business scales, the faster you’ll need to get money from somewhere to support its growth (mostly with inventory or product support costs). However, the faster your business scales, the more leverage you have because you can make suppliers make more and more money.

Make it a constant focus to improve your cash flow cycle. At first, you might have to pay for all your product costs upfront. Keep negotiating. Eventually, you might pay only half upfront, then zero upfront, then half within 30 days, and so forth.

This is Costco’s $400 billion secret. It seems like they have huge upfront costs. Sure, they have to build massive stores and hire lots of people, but the real cost in the business is inventory. But they get the inventory first and pay vendors later. Costco’s thousands of vendor brands finance their growth.

Summary

Now that you know the five most important tips to fast company growth, do one final thing right now:

Write down your current goal. Think about it. Envision it.

Then, 10X it. It’s just a number. There’s nothing scary about adding a zero. No matter what it is, there’s a 99% chance somebody else somewhere in the world has already done what you want to do. There’s no reason why you can’t, too.

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