Get To $1 Million In Sales This Year

As I was about to take the stage in Las Vegas this past Saturday at a room full of agency owners, something remarkable hit me and I thought I would take a moment to share with YOU what I shared with that audience...

Before I do, I love using emojis just to piss off the old school geezers who hate them. Get over it. 😂

Give me a thumbs up 👍 if you'd like to get your ad agency business to $1 million dollars in sales this year.

Raise your hand 🖐 if you think you could grow your marketing businesses by 1% this year.

OK, now raise two hands 🙌 If you think you could grow your agency business by .5% this year.

Alright, then this one should give us high-fives across-the-board... How many of you think you could grow your business by roughly .001% of the whole industry this year? 🙌🙌🙌

Your million dollar piece of the pie is a rounding error against total U.S. advertising spend, which cleared well over $300 billion last year. Do the division yourself: $1,000,000 against a $300+ billion market and you're sitting at a hair over .0003% of the pie. Round up for margin of error and call it a fraction of one-tenth of one percent. Yes, your goal to hit $1 million dollars is that small a bite of the total market.

Let that sink in for a second. I watched a room full of agency owners go from "yeah right" to dead silent when I broke that math down live -- forty, fifty faces doing the arithmetic in their heads at the same time. Because when you say "$1 million in sales" out loud, it sounds like a mountain. It sounds like something other people do. People with bigger teams, bigger budgets, bigger everything. But when you say "a sliver of a fraction of one percent," it sounds like something you could trip over on your way to the coffee maker.

That's the whole trick. That's the whole talk. Big scary goals are just small boring math wearing a costume.

You're not competing with the industry. You're competing with yourself.

Here's what nobody tells you when you're staring down a revenue goal: you don't need the whole pie. You don't need 1%. You don't need to out-hustle every agency in America. You need a sliver so thin it's almost embarrassing to call it a "goal" in the first place.

So why does it still feel impossible some days? Because the math was never the problem. YOU are the problem — or more specifically, the story you've been telling yourself is the problem.

I've sat across the table from agency owners who tell me, dead serious, that they can't hit $1 million because they don't have enough clients -- while they're still chasing every client that walks in the door instead of writing the one headline that would actually make the right ones stop scrolling. I've heard 'the economy's rough right now' from owners sitting on six-figure accounts they're too scared to raise rates on. I've heard 'I need a bigger team before I can scale' from shops of three people who haven't fixed the process that lets clients ruin their own campaigns in review. None of it is the real reason. It's fear, dressed up as logic, standing at the door of your business telling you it's not ready yet.

None of that changes the math. A fraction of a percent doesn't care about your excuses. It doesn't care if you had a slow Tuesday or a client ghosted you or your ad account got flagged for the third time this month. The pie is still $300+ billion. Your slice is still tiny. The only variable in the whole equation is whether you go get it -- and whether you spend your time on work that actually earns trust instead of babysitting clients who don't trust you yet.

SO… do you have a $1 million business in you?

If you can capture a sliver of one-tenth of one percent of a $300 billion industry, the answer is yes.

Say it with me: point. Zero. Zero. Zero. Three. Percent. That's it. That's the whole mountain, and it turns out it was a molehill wearing a cape.

So, what's holding you back -- the math, or the story you keep telling yourself about the math?