In this post, I want to help creative entrepreneurs understand something that will completely alter the way they make an income and build their brand from this day forward.
(Worth the read!)
You see, it wasn’t long ago I was a broke artist at home with my five kids, feeling desperate to get out of the bad financial situation we were in.
I had a love and passion for many creative things (writing music being my top passion).
I also knew I had the potential to become a smart & savvy businesswoman – but I didn’t know how to become one and had no idea how to build the audience I knew my art deserved.
Not only that, my family was facing bankruptcy and I had to find a way to somehow turn that situation around and all I had was my art.
Previously, I hadn’t sold enough for us to live on, but this financial threat motivated my mama heart in ways nothing else did. I turned a “switch” on in my brain and in my heart — that NOTHING would stop me. I would figure it out, come hell or high water – and I’d find a way to make money from my art.
It was that burning determination that set me on fire and blazed a new trail for my family.
Five years later, I’m no longer a broke artist. I’m now a multi-millionaire with multiple businesses in different industries.
It might sound like pie-in-the-sky and like I’ve won the lottery, but let me tell you — I’ve worked my blessed a$$urance off to get here. Nothing happened by accident, and every success I’ve had I’ve worked my hiney off for.
Aside from my passion for music, artsy things, and business, I know God put me here on earth to help others get breakthroughs in their creative businesses.
I especially love creative people because of our ability to think outside the box when everyone else can’t see the forest through the trees (or however that saying goes lol!).
Plain and simple: I want to teach you how to dominate YOUR market and WIN!
My Recent ‘Million Dollar Day’ Selling a New Handmade Product – Exactly What I Did Step-by-Step (read carefully)!
In March 2020 (yes — that month!) I launched a new physical product brand, which I was making by hand at the time (we have a crew now!).
Just seven months later we have passed the $600,000 revenue mark and our annual run rate is currently 2.8 million dollars. We have a healthy profit margin and our team has grown to fifteen people. I know what it takes to get a business off the ground, but I am sometimes still in disbelief — someone pinch me!
I’m not here to brag, I’m here to share how I did it with you — because as I said, it’s part of my God-ordained purpose to help you.
READ CAREFULLY…
I’m going to share with you in DETAIL exactly what I did to get this going and what it looked like at ground zero.
My friends are shocked when I tell them my first pre-launch day I had what I call a “million-dollar day”.
What is a million-dollar day?
It’s simple math. Most small business owners & creatives never do this very simple exercise. Ready?
You need figure out how much you’d need to make per day/week/month in order to hit 1 million dollars in sales.
The main number is the same for everyone, but then we’ll take it a step further.
To make 1 million dollars, you need to sell roughly $2800 per day in product.
That might sound like a lot of sales in a day.
You might be wishing you could even make that in a month!
It’s not that far fetched, and when you…
1) Have a great product
2) Understand how to build a real brand
3) Know how to execute proper online marketing, it’s really not that difficult.
Now we take it a step further.
How much does your current product sell for? (Chances are, you’re not charging enough — in 98% cases I see).
When I first launched, my average order value was around $26, not including shipping (through hard work and testing, I increased it to $55+).
To get my average order value, I have two main product options and I add them together and then divide in half to get my average.
($30 + $22 ÷ 2 = $26)
One more step.
Now that I have my average order value, all I need to do is figure out how many units I need to sell in order to hit $2800 per day.
$2800 ÷ $26 = 107
So I would need to sell 107 units of my product every day to hit 1 million dollars in a year!
100 per day suddenly doesn’t seem so hard now!
Now, here was my very first day in pre-sales after launching my new product to a brand new COLD audience (that means they don’t know who I am and this is the first or second time they’ve interacted with me – I haven’t “warmed” them up much).
Now, when you multiply $3400 by 365 days in a year — that is 1.2 million dollars.
That’s why I call this a million-dollar day. If my sales continued like this, my new brand is already a million-dollar brand!
I can’t tell you how important it is to start thinking like this.
Most creatives think in terms of what they only made today or this week.
As an entrepreneur, I continually look at my numbers and ask myself how many millions I’ll be making – and if it’s nowhere close to my goal, I run the math and figure out how much more I need to sell. There’s a lot more you can do to increase your revenue (I’ll save that for another post!).
I have other successful businesses, and yet this was SO THRILLING for me!
Here’s why:
- Again, this was a cold audience – they were very NEW to my brand.
- I sold all of this online from my shop. I never left my house.
- I sold this based on a PROTOTYPE photo I took on my iPhone
- The capital I raised in the 2 weeks I ran my pre-order funded all my materials & supplies to create this product
- Most importantly, I validated my product & my brand and have dozens of fantastic reviews of my product, which would help to make my future official “Grand Opening” online MASSIVE.
IN TOTAL, I SOLD OVER $14,000 DURING MY 2-WEEK PRE-ORDER….. FOR A PRODUCT I HADN’T EVEN MADE YET!
Now, in any kind of launch, it’s normal for the first launch day to be your “big day” and then it drops, just like you see on the graph, and then things pick up toward the end.
In this case, it drops off radically at the end because we SOLD OUT of product.
I had to completely shut down my pre-sale because I wanted to make sure we could fulfill all these orders, and our family was also about to move!
Here’s why:
- Again, this was a cold audience – they were very NEW to my brand.
- I sold all of this online from my shop. I never left my house.
- I sold this based on a PROTOTYPE photo I took on my iPhone
- The capital I raised in the 2 weeks I ran my pre-order funded all my materials & supplies to create this product
- Most importantly, I validated my product & my brand and have dozens of fantastic reviews of my product, which would help to make my future official “Grand Opening” online MASSIVE.
Fast forward and we hit our first one million dollars by early December 2020, which is nine months since we officially opened.
This was NOT luck or timing… this was carefully executed and you can do this too when you understand what makes a business go ka-boom!
How to Re-Create What I Did in Your Own Small Business or Start-Up Brand
The Key to having a million-dollar day and YEAR is to do things in a certain order. I’ve done this many times in my multi-6-figure music business, and in my multi-7-figure company. It’s a predictable, repeatable process. All the creativity goes into the product, the message, and social posts. The rest is all repeatable processes.
First, you must, must, must start with your AUDIENCE.
Did I say MUST?????
Nothing else matters if you don’t have that.
Most brands I see have great products, but they stand for NOTHING and aren’t attracting a specific person.
This is the first fatal flaw, and the rest comes toppling down like a Jenga tower.
If your product doesn’t get a specific group of people extremely excited just by seeing a photo of it and identifying it as part of their lifestyle or common beliefs, you have not yet created a business. You just have another product in a sea of products.
Second, I put most of my focus on building an EMAIL LIST.
I launched my product to 999 people on my own email list. Remember — Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are rented land — you have to abide by THEIR rules and anything can happen. You need to control your own list of people.
Besides, email is still the #1 driver of e-commerce sales. If you don’t have an email list, you don’t have a business.
To build my list, I ran a very simple ad that said “Hey, are you interested in this? Sign up if you want to know when these launch!”. I didn’t bait anyone with free products because I wanted to make sure the product was good enough on its own just by the photo.
Third, I started a Facebook and Instagram account.
I did this so when my customers received their product, they could post about it and tag my products in their own photos and videos (also known as UGC – “user-generated content”).
Now, that all sounds pretty simple, right?
Well, it was!
It wasn’t difficult because marketing online is now second nature for me and I’ve taken the time and interest to really drill into my brain what works.
I’ve done this so much that I know what to do. And when you know what to do, you don’t feel insecure, you don’t wonder IF it will succeed, and you don’t even feel threatened by competitors — because YOU have an edge they don’t have!
I really hope this post has inspired you so far! I wish I could share more here but there’s only so much I can relay in one post!
Was this inspiring? Tell me about your business and products in the comments – I’m obsessed with startups!
I definitely like the idea of mathing out how much you need to make per day, in terms of first the sales number, and then in terms of how many items you need to sell. If you want to have a real business, you have to think like a big business!
One thing that really concerns me, as someone who makes handmade items that require a fair amount of skill, is how to plan for scaling up, because if I sold $2800 a day, that would be about 28 items for me, and even if I busted my ass and worked 40 hours a week, it’d take me 2 weeks to make them all–from one day of sales. So how can we take into account scaling, training time for new employees, etc.? Does this kind of thinking mainly work for products that don’t require a lot of time to make? Mostly I mean, for scaling your business FAST.
I am so inspired by this post! My name is Adama, I have a handmade chocolate and sweet treats business in the UK. I serve gluten and dairy free kids and families with fun treats they often miss out on. This post is a paradigm shift! Everything about it inspired me but what inspired me the most was the mindset about the million dollar day. It’s as if you have a destination for your plane to fly and as long as you focus on the trajectory and understand how to execute, you have to reach your destination. I love the clarity this post brings. Thank you Leah. 🥰❤️🙏🏼