Dan Sullivan and Joe Polish -- the two visionaries behind 10X talk.

Dan Sullivan and Joe Polish — the two visionaries behind 10X talk.

When I like a podcast, I often go back and listen to every episode. 10X Talk is one of those.

It’s no mistake that at the Titans of Direct Response last week, a HUGE percentage of people were from either Joe Polish’s $25k Group, or Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach.

Yes, it doesn’t hurt that Brian Kurtz is a member of both groups, and so his network extends deep in both places.

However, those two people — Joe and Dan — are hugely influential business visionaries. And the students who follow them are dedicated to greatness.

Between the Joe and Dan, they’re transforming tens of thousands of lives. And that’s a conservative estimate.

(This is part of why when Brian gave me the choice to sit next to ANYBODY at the Boardroom Dinner at Titans — besides Gary B, who was already spoken for — I picked Joe. Although it turned awkward quickly when it was clear I knew everything about him, having listened to his podcasts, and he knew nothing about me. We worked it out though. Anyway…)

One of the core concepts of Strategic Coach and 10X Talk is the 10X multiplier.

In short, Dan challenges you to think…

“What would you do differently in your business if you wanted to grow it 10X?”

This is a very different question than even if you want to double your business.

Doubling your business means twice the leads, and everything stays the same.

Doubling your business means adding a 10X-the-price, back-end product, and getting 10% of customers to buy.

Doubling your business can come from all sorts of fairly simple, achievable goals.

It’s not necessarily easy, but the concept is simple…

Your business, at double what it is today, doesn’t have to look that different than it does right now. But what about 10X?

You might think you can work twice as hard, but you can’t work 10X as hard. It’s not possible.

10X requires radical changes.

If you already have leverage in your business, for example, if you’re a copywriter earning royalties, it might just be one giant hit. That sales letter that changes your life… But then what do you do from there to keep growing? And still, most copywriters I know are unlikely to write a sales letter next year that makes 10X the sales of what they did last year.

For most people, in most businesses, the idea of 10X requires so much more.

A more reliable way to 10X your business — whether you’re a copywriter or in ANY other business — is to change your business completely…

For example, the freelance copywriter who starts their own direct response company. Now, rather than simply relying on client income and 5% royalties, you’re collecting that 95% gross. Sure, you have to manage more — the products, the expenses, the staff, etc. But let’s say with your own business you’re able to make 25% net margin (conservative in many direct-to-consumer businesses)… And you generate just 2X the revenue your copy generated the year before. Only now, with double the gross and 5X the percentage of revenues, you’re making 10X what you were before.

Another example. A client of mine went into the publishing business. He did very well there, and built a large circulation newsletter. But he decided he wasn’t happy competing with the big boys at the whole $3,000 back-end trading services thing. So he created a different business. He thought about what else his customers might want. In his case, physical products. He found a way to source the products his customers would want, and built the product business on top of his publishing business. I can’t tell you exact math, but that’s a 10X transformational idea. I told him so the moment I heard it — and his results have continued to prove me right.

And another. A local connection of mine is in the website business, for a couple different verticals. And they have done very well in that business. Recognizing certain needs in their markets, they decided to augment their services with payment processing. This is also early on, and I can’t share results, but it’s definitely a 10X concept. You can only charge so much for a website. But if you’re getting a small percentage of every dollar of online revenue each of your clients generates, you’re no longer basing your financial success on your own efforts. Some of those clients are going to generate huge numbers, and by processing those payments and taking a nominal processing fee, you have huge revenue potential.

Yet another example. I’m working with a partner on a project where we’re going to go into an industry that doesn’t know how to do email marketing well, and offering up our expertise (if you’re a regular reader, you probably know which one). But instead of selling it as consulting, we’ve found a way to resell software platforms that will be highly valuable to them — necessary, in fact, to use our advice well. And so every month when they’re using our strategies, they’re paying for the software platform that’s needed to execute. Not only that, we should only have to teach strategy once, and in a scalable way. They’ll need that software indefinitely. Our effort is front-loaded, our income goes on forever. We’re just getting rolling, but this is a 10X idea compared to simple copywriting or consulting services.

These ideas are everywhere, when you start to adopt a 10X mindset.

This probably isn’t for the lazy…

The reality is that in the long term, it takes a whole lot less effort to run a 10X business than a 1X or 2X or even 5X business. Because 10X requires leverage — and it requires you to put systems in place that generate disproportionately more revenue than the effort you put in.

However, building a 10X business requires more up front. More leg work. More ingenuity to design a solution to a problem that your market may not have identified yet (but that still bugs them all the same). More cojones to make the leap in the first place.

If you’re lazy, you have to get over it before you start your 10X business. Or at least make a pact with yourself not to be lazy until you’ve built what needs to be built to support your laziness.

But I promise you’ll thank me for making you take the effort when you’re sitting on those 10X rewards!

Yours for bigger breakthroughs,

Roy Furr

Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets