Welcome to my weekly newsletter. I have a mentor, Joe Garrett, who I’ve read his weekly newsletter now for over 15 years and he talks about all things related to Mortgage Banking, Pop Culture, and of course his love of Baseball. For some time now, I have wanted to start a newsletter, and given our ever-growing email list here at The Real Darius, I thought, why the hell not now. 

The newsletter will focus on the different parts of life I am spending my time on these days: Entrepreneurship, Conscious Leadership, Family, Investing, and a little bit of pop culture. 

Without further adieu…

This week has been a bit of a crazy week with the launch of my ScaleM.A.P. Bootcamp coming up. Here at Team The Real Darius we have been speaking to Entrepreneurs from all over the USA and we have noticed a couple of things:

1. You all have really cool stories – We love Entrepreneurial Stories!
2. You all need a lot of help growing your companies
3. You all have a lot of passion for what you do

In general, most of the companies I speak to are entrepreneurs with companies around $1-10Mish in revenue. I noticed in speaking to entrepreneurs a consistent response when I ask them how big they want to grow their companies in the next 1,3 and 10 years…many throw big numbers at me: $10,000,000, $100,000,000, even $1B. Which I find fascinating.

This got me thinking about how big of a company I had when I first had a goal of growing a company that did $10,000,000 in revenue, the answer was $300,000 which is what I did in revenue in 2003 with my first company Twin Capital Mortgage. It wasn’t until 2007 that I actually was on track to hit $10,000,000 when disaster struck and my revenue dropped from $1M per month to $150,000….DAMN YOU! subprime mortgage meltdown (a story for another time). In the fall of 2010 when I was running my still $2M company, I had lunch with a former employee of mine named Uno Nam. She started talking about this guy in NYC that she so wonderfully called, The 100M Man. It was at that moment that I said to myself, I am going to build a company that does $100M in revenue. Now mind you I was running a $2M company that was barely breaking even at that time, and here I was proclaiming to myself that I too would build a company that did $100M in revenue. 

I think it is this unbridled vision, belief, maybe naivety that is how $2M entrepreneurs actually become $100M entrepreneurs. Now I did not know it at the time, but in just 5 short years, I would hit that goal and then exceed it by a few multiples with my company The Money Source in 2015….who would have known! 

This got me motivated to look up the odds of these hopeful entrepreneurs growing their small little 7 figure businesses, myself included in 2003 and 2010 to growing an 8 or 9 figure company…. Here is some interesting data from NAICSs (I evenly distributed those that did not report their numbers to get to these final numbers).

The numbers are pretty staggering. Only 754 out of 10,000 companies ever even get over 1M in revenue (pat yourself on the back). Just over 1% get over 10M, and less than .25% or 22 out of 10,000 will ever get to over $100M in revenue! Food for thought when we start thinking about how big we all want to grow our businesses. 

Now having been part of that cool little 22 person out of 10,000 Club. I can tell you unequivocally that the only way to hit $10M or even $100M in revenue is by having 3 to 4 things in your business: 

1. Luck (you don’t control this)
2. A strong Strategy (You DO control this)
3. Rock Solid Execution (This is the ultimate differentiating value prop)
4. Proper Performance Management (This is a skill set that most people lack)

I find most entrepreneurs, consultants, and thought leaders overcomplicate these things, except for Luck. We celebrate Luck, flexibility and quality quite a bit in the world of house cleaning business in AZ. 

“The phrase “it’s better to be lucky than good” must be one of the most ridiculous homilies ever uttered. In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.”

― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

This is why I created my ScaleM.A.P. Method. 

So, if you want to learn more about the systems we used to grow from a small little $2M company to that lucky elite group of 22. Check out a free training I put together which walks you through all the frameworks at www.dariusclass.com

Also, if you have some free time this week, check out my recent The Greatness Machine podcast interview with Hala Taha of Young and Profiting. She is a stud and a wizard when it comes to leveraging Linkedin to grow her business. She has over 100,000 followers on Linkedin! NO JOKE, she is the real deal! So many gems to be had from this interview! 

Until Next Week,

D