$0-3M ARR: My 7 Biggest Mistakes

In 49 months, I grew my business from $0–$3M ARR.

Here are the 7 biggest mistakes I made along the way:

1. I accepted absolutely anyone as a customer

Revenue: $500k ARR

I was cash-hungry from day one. Just wanted new sales regardless of whether we could help them achieve their goals.

It took over a year to start saying no to prospects that we weren’t fit for.

2. I didn’t go all in until $1m ARR

Revenue: $1m ARR

I love starting things. In the first year or so of Fame, I had:

• Coaching clients
• Was building a SaaS
• Wrote a daily email newsletter

To make something great, it needs to be a full-time focus.

This took me nearly 18 months to learn.

3. I used to sell myself

Revenue: $1.5 ARR

I would tell clients that I would personally work with them to get them over the line.

This was fine for 1 or 2. But when it became 4-5, and I had a whole business to run…

I had to step back, which led to churn.

4. I nurtured badly behaved clients

Revenue: $2m ARR

I was a slave to the monthly revenue chart.

If firing a bad client meant that we wouldn’t beat this month's number… we would keep them. This caused pain for the team and didn’t help revenue as they would eventually leave.

Zoom out past this month’s revenue.

5. I made every big decision myself

Revenue: $2.5 ARR

My ego wanted me to be the boss.

“No one else is going to build this business for me.”

I was wrong.

We would have moved faster if I had worked with a coach sooner (e.g. someone who has done this before).

Shout out to Gellan Watt and Alan Pentz.

6. I took too long to produce clear role outcomes

Revenue: $2.5m ARR

As we scaled, team members would join, and we would have no idea if they were performing or not. We did not have clear expectations for performance.

This hurt us (kept the wrong people on longer) and our team members (they didn’t have a clear roadmap).

Having this in place would have doubled our new hire success rate.

7. It took me 4 years to become a CEO

Revenue: $3m ARR

I finally became CEO this month. 4 years since we started the business.

I didn’t trust others to do everything we needed to do to run and grow the business.

Now there is a leadership team, and I’m finally CEO.

But if we had this a year ago, we would likely be a better business today.

Growing anything is hard.

I hope I don’t make these mistakes again.

What I do know is that I’ll continue to make mistakes...

Just new ones.

Here's the trick:

Try to do 8 things right for every 7 you do wrong.