The Seven Figure Desert: Finding Your Way Out
Jun 19, 2024
“I’ve never met an owner of a $5 million company who was happy.”
Good news: your company is thriving. Bad news: so are the challenges. This is the curse for owners overseeing 7-figure operations. You’re at a tipping point. The systems that drove your growth this far are straining (and cracking) under the current weight.
As a consultant friend of mine once said, “I’ve never met an owner of a $5 million dollar company who was happy. Happiness returns at 8 figures.”
Welcome to the 7-figure desert, where many businesses lose their way. Today, we’re sharing the key decisions we help owners make in your journey to 8 figures (and relief).
Why 7-Figure Owners Are Rarely Happy
Many seven-figure business owners are stuck in this same rut. The business is doing well (enough), but there’s a fundamental mistake growing in the shadows.
In the earlier days of your business, you were more directly involved in operations. Your impact was proportionate to the scale of your operations. For many owners, the company grows and puts an increasing amount of weight on one pressure point: you. Too much depends on you. Too much gets stuck on your desk.
Unless you find a way to step back from the daily grind, you're facing two possible outcomes.
First, you'll collapse from the sheer overload of tasks, leading to burnout and dysfunction.
Second, your revenue growth will stall, or worse, start sliding backward. Progress is too dependent on you.
This is a big problem–not just because of how it grinds you into a stressed-out pulp. I know too many owners working ~73 hours a week. They’re making good money, but the company isn’t worth anything. Remove you and it falls apart. Not exactly an attractive proposition for buyers or investors.
If you want to find the missing key to reaching 8-figures–and regaining your sanity–this is where we start.
The Path to Predictable Growth: Systems-Thinking
The difference between 7-figures and 8-figures isn’t putting out one fire at a time. It’s structural. Strategic. It’s about aligning the different parts of your company in pursuit of a clear goal with a clear, scalable process. (A key part of this is removing you where you shouldn’t be focusing your time.)
One of our clients, Matthew Hancock, president of Charter Oak Field Services, described this period of his business like this:
"There just became a lot more for me to do, wearing multiple hats like HR, CFO, and business development. I knew that I needed to find some help related to how to manage the growth."
Notice what he calls out? There are individual functions that piled up on his plate. He needed to get above the fray, empowering the right people and partners to work together toward growth.
This is why Value Prop’s proprietary process focuses on breaking down your business’ growth into individual parts. Like looking for a clog in a pipe, we need to see where growth is getting stuck in your business.
We work through this in depth with our Revenue Throughput Analyzer, that helps you quickly diagnose exactly where growth is getting derailed.
For the cliff notes, here are the top strategic problems we over and over
Misaligned Messaging
If your marketing isn’t generating results like it used to, it might not be a matter of tactics. Before you dump more money on SEO, ads, or mailers, recheck your messaging. Go to your best customers and ask them questions like:
- What would you say is the most valuable thing we do for you?
- What problem prompted you to reach out to us?
- What other wins does our solution enable you to reach?
Now ask – are these showing up in our messaging?
Misaligned Marketing + Sales
A few signs you’re losing opportunities due to misaligned marketing + sales:
- You’re getting leads, but they’re not qualified (or ideal).
- Prospects are coming to the table with little buy-in.
- You’re closing sales well–your offer is good–but you’re getting too few at-bats.
Symptoms like these show a lack of alignment between your marketing strategy and your sales process. Ideally, you’re able to get a steady stream of qualified prospects who are already motivated to work with you–and your sales process has a high conversion rate.
Talent-Dependent Sales
If you lost your best salesperson, how much of a setback would that be?
For any business, that’s a tough blow. But for a sales team with a documented, improvable process? They’ll get back to full strength much faster. They’re less dependent on rainmakers.
How is your sales funnel? Does it show you where deals are getting stuck? Does it help you accurately forecast financial data so you can make decisions?
A strategic sales process is a critical step to taking the guesswork out of your growth.
Want to See All 8 Strategic Mistakes?
The Revenue Throughput System focuses on 8 critical mistakes 7-figure owners make. You may do 7 of them well, but all it takes is one clog to back up the whole system.
We work with owner-led businesses to use the Revenue Throughput Analyzer to diagnose and prioritize the areas holding up their growth.
Backed by a few decades of hands-on experience and hundreds of millions in revenue added… it might be worth a conversation.
We invite you to schedule a 30-minute meeting with founder Jose Palomino, where you can get to know the RTS process and see if it’s a good fit for you.
