Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Donald Miller on How To Make Your First Million in Business | YAPClassic
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
Donald Miller once lost all of his life savings to a bad investment. But after he decided to start taking 100% ownership of his life and business, everything changed. In this episode, Donald is back on YAP to focus on how to grow a small business! Donald will explain why we should think of our business as an airplane and why most small businesses today are failing. He will also break down how we can get ahead of missteps as business owners. In this episode, Hala and Donald will discuss: (01:00) Introduction (02:27) Donald Miller's Journey from Failure to Success (04:48) Understanding the S-Curve in Business (10:27) The Airplane Analogy for Business Structure (20:14) The Importance of a Clear Mission Statement (30:48) The Reality of Business Ownership (32:15) Core Values: The Backbone of a Strong Team (33:31) Key Characteristics and Critical Actions (35:32) The Three Essential Leadership Personalities (38:04) Making the Customer the Hero (46:49) The Power of Story in Sales (51:51) Integrity in Business Donald Miller is the CEO of StoryBrand, an agency that has helped more than 10,000 organizations clarify their brand message, and Business Made Simple, an online platform that teaches business professionals everything they need to know to grow their business and enhance their value on the open market. Donald is the host of the Business Made Simple podcast and the author of the bestsellers Building a StoryBrand, Marketing Made Simple, and Hero on a Mission. His book, How to Grow Your Small Business, provides a proven 6-step plan for growth so you can stop drowning in the details. Resources Mentioned: Donald’s Podcast Business Made Simple: youngandprofiting.co/3Eia9oJ Donald’s book How to Grow Your Small Business: A 6-Part Strategy to Help Your Business Take Off: youngandprofiting.co/42ygiHi Episode Sponsors: OpenPhone - Get 20% off 6 months at openphone.com/PROFITING Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services - yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new All Show Keywords: Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset. Career & Entrepreneurship Career, Success, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Careers, Startup, Entrepreneurs, Business Ideas, Growth Hacks, Career Development, Money Management, Opportunities, Professionals, Workplace, Career podcast, Entrepreneurship podcast
Chapter 1: What is Donald Miller's journey from failure to success?
In this episode, we unpack the secrets of building a thriving entrepreneurial venture. This conversation was back in 2023. It was the third time that Donald came on the show, and he had so many incredible tips for building out a small business.
Chapter 2: Why do most small businesses fail?
We talked about everything from crafting the perfect mission statement, when to be financially transparent with your team, and why most businesses fail today. He also explained why you should think of your business as an airplane. Okay, gang, make sure your seats are back and tray tables are in their full upright position because this episode is about to take off.
So Donald, my team tells me your new book, How to Grow Your Small Business, has already sold more copies in a pre-sale than any other book that you've ever written. So that's incredible. And I think it's a hot topic, right? The economy is not doing so well. I think a lot of businesses are struggling. So let's begin there. Why are so many small businesses failing?
Well, I'll tell you how it all started for me, and it started with failure. So failure is only a bad thing if you let it take you down, but if you let yourself learn from it, you can get somewhere. I actually, 11 years ago, lost all of my money, my entire life savings in a bad investment. I had paid off my house. I sold my house to buy another house.
The other house sold, so I was sitting on a pile of cash, put it into an investment, woke up one Monday morning, and my entire life savings was gone. And it was devastating. Eleven years later, I had a 17 million dollar company with more than 50 percent profit, 30 employees. And life was very, very different.
And one of the main reasons it was different and one of the main reasons I think businesses either succeed or fail is I 100 percent took 100 percent ownership of my career and my life and my business. Everything that negative happened, I took ownership of. Everything positive happened, I took ownership of. I didn't trust other people to make me money anymore.
And by that, I mean agents and speaking managers and the market, none of that stuff. I took ownership of it. And so as you talk about the economy... struggling, that's the economy. Your economy is different. So the economy has factors like trade wars with China, the war in Ukraine, all those kinds of things. Your economy is hardly affected by any of that.
It might be slightly, but most of us is hardly affected by any of that. It's actually more affected by our attitude. And if we take ownership of our economy, our economy can do incredibly well. So as I went from $0 to 17 million, I did a rough count, Hala. I think I did 572 things wrong and I did six things right. So the book, How to Grow Your Small Business is about the six things I did right.
So the book really walks through and I turn those six things into six steps that you need to overhaul your business and optimize it for revenue and profit. And I just laid it out so nobody has to make the 570 mistakes that I made.
Yeah. And I love your work, Donald, because you always just like, tell things in a way that's easy to retain. You write so clearly, it's no fluff. So I was reading through this book. And I'm like, this is great. I want to align like everything I do with my business for this book, because I also have a small business. So I really related to it. Let's go back to this question of why businesses fail.
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Chapter 3: What is the S-curve in business?
I put out an online course, and people would buy the online course. Anything I could do, I would do. And that started getting very successful, true to the S-curve, the initial rise in the S-curve. And we got to about $3.5 million or something like that. People were loving my marketing framework, the StoryBrand framework. We were consulting with giant brands, Procter & Gamble, Ford Lincoln Group.
Even the NSA and the government we began consulting with. Everything was going really well. I had a mentor who is still a very good friend. His name is Bill. And Bill scaled up his company, his father's company, into the billions and then took some of that money and bought other small companies and was mentoring some of those CEOs. He didn't buy my company, but he was mentoring me nonetheless.
And I mentioned to him, I'd love for my business to get to $100 million. We were standing in my driveway after having met for a couple hours. And for the first time in my relationship with Bill, he just kind of looked at me a little bit puzzled. And I knew that the $100 million number was really big and he didn't think I was going to hit it.
That's the first time I'd ever seen that expression in him as he looked back at me. And I said, Bill, what's going on? He said, Don, in order to hit $100 million... you are going to have to, quote, professionalize your operation. That's what he said to me.
Now, I'd never heard the phrase professionalize your operation before, but it rang absolutely true as it's ringing true to almost all of your listeners right now. What it said to me was, what Bill said to me basically was, you're making it up. You're making it up as you go along. And he also said this.
He said, Don, if you leave this company, the company is going to go down because you haven't installed the systems and processes necessary for somebody else to come and buy this company and run it. Right. And that rang so true to me that I spent the next about three to four years figuring out what the systems and processes needed to be and how the company needed to run.
And the framework that I came up with is actually really simple. And that's kind of what was missing in the market. Everything was very complicated. It took more time to sort of professionalize your operations through other systems than it did to actually build your company. You spent more time working on your company than you did catering to clients, which doesn't work. You lose money that way.
I wanted it to be really simple. And the metaphor that I came up with after I did all this stuff, when I was trying to sort of have a controlling idea to bring it all together, was the metaphor of the airplane. And every airplane has, every commercial airplane has six very important parts to it, and they have to work together. The leadership is your cockpit.
The people in that cockpit need to enter data into the flight computer that says where this airplane is going. Everything is reverse engineered from that leadership in the cockpit. The ride engine is your marketing, and that marketing needs to produce thrust to get the plane moving. The left engine is your sails. It needs to produce more thrust to get the plane moving.
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Chapter 4: How can mission statements drive business success?
Yeah. So with this analogy of the plane, I'd love for you to explain the rule of proportions. Why is it that we sort of have to look at everything at the same time and make sure we're being balanced and not just focus on one area and another area at a time?
Let's look at the airplane and talk about the airplane analogy as a decision-making filter. We know that we've got a good sales team. There's a couple people who are selling a lot of stuff for us. It's really great. But we've got this product, and we're getting many calls, many calls. Customers can't figure out how to log in or something like that, and the sales team is answering those calls.
That's a common problem in a small business. So we decide, okay, we need a customer service representative. The customer service representative, for a really good one, you're going to pay between $60,000 and $80,000. You're going to be right in there. You want somebody who can grow and run a management, manage a customer service team.
So you're going to go ahead and spend a little more money on that. That money, you've got to say, okay, is that money going to the right engine, the left engine? Is that money going to the wings? Or is that money going to the body of the airplane? A normal customer service, they're going to save you some sales.
They're certainly going to save you some negative chatter, but it's pretty hard to put that money on the wings or the right engine, the left engine. So what we're going to do is we're going to say, well, we're going to pay you a base salary of $50,000, but we're going to give you some incentives.
For every retainer purchase, that is a subscription service that sticks around, who we know calls you and talks to you or emails you or chats you, we're going to give you 10% of that. And we think you can save X number of sales a year, which is going to get you to between $65,000 and $85,000. What did we just do?
We just put a big chunk of that person's salary out of the body of the airplane and out onto the right and left engine. And we can spend a lot more money on the right and left engine than we can on the body of the airplane.
Whenever you go into a business and they've got this great facility with really beautiful furniture and all sorts of great swag, everything that I just mentioned is the body of the airplane. Really, what you're looking at, and you can see it within about 10 minutes of a conversation with the business owner.
What you're looking at, imagine, Hala, let's say that you and your friends are going to do a great week in Hawaii, and you buy the plane ticket, and you're at the airport. You walk out on the tarmac, and that plane has a giant body, two tiny little wings, some little rubber band propellers on each of the wings. Yeah. And fuel is pouring out of the fuel tanks onto the tarmac.
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Chapter 5: What are the six essential systems for business growth?
Chapter 6: How does the airplane analogy relate to business structure?
I love this analogy. It really does help you get give a framework to kind of think of it intuitively. And I'm sure that as you're making decisions, if you learn this framework, you'll start to remember these things and not try to make your plane crash, you know, do everything you can to keep it flying.
That's right. I agree with you. That's how we got there. And 17 million, there's a lot of people listening who have a bigger company than that. We're still very, very committed to growing this one to try to get to that 100 million. But the way that we will get there is we'll continue to engineer a really great airplane.
If you're on my sales team or my marketing team, you're probably going to be paid a little bit more than if you're in the body of the airplane. And even anybody in the body of the airplane, we're trying to figure out how to incentivize you and actually have you participate in the profitability of this business so that you can make more money.
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Chapter 7: What are the key characteristics of effective leadership?
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Get everything you need for free with Microsoft Teams. So why wait? Try Microsoft Teams today and start growing your side hustle without the extra cost. Head over to aka.ms slash profiting today to sign up for free. That's aka.ms slash profiting to sign up today for free. So let's dive in. You gave a great overview of the six steps.
It's leadership, marketing, sales, products, overhead, and operations. And the last step is cash flow. So let's dive into some of these steps. I want to dive into leadership, which you say is the cockpit of the airplane. And leadership is basically in charge of getting everybody to an end destination. Your business needs to have a clear mission. And so a lot of people...
they don't have a clear mission, right? That's something that they're missing. When they first started, like I'll give myself for an example. I have a company, Yap Media. We scaled to $7 million in three years. And this year we're on track to do $8 million, which is amazing. And so my company is doing great. And when I first started, it was a team of volunteers and we were so...
so tight and everybody had a mission and I was hand training everyone and everything was great. And then year one, it was like, boom, we blew up to 60 employees. And it's like all of a sudden, like things were not smooth anymore. Like we're still running a great business, but it just wasn't like before. Like things used to just like happen like magic because we were so aligned.
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Chapter 8: Why is integrity important in business?
Well, we've worked with a number of politicians on the Republican and Democratic side. I'm not a Republican or Democrat. I find myself pretty much squarely in the middle and don't really like either party because I think they're destroying the country. But I've gone in and I've helped some folks. And a few elections ago, Hillary Clinton's tagline was, I'm with her.
OK, well, if I'm with her, the story is about her. It's not about me. I don't know where we're going. I'm with her, but I don't know where we're going. I don't know what we're trying to accomplish. I don't know what's in it for me if we get there. In fact, I don't even know where there is. She did not effectively invite people into a story. And so it's not that people liked Donald Trump more.
It's just that they didn't show up in the polls to vote for her. She had an incredibly low turnout. Donald Trump also wasn't all that much better. He also had an incredibly low turnout, but he just had more people than she did. And then you have Joe Biden later on, who's running against January 6th. He's running or he's running not against January 6th.
He's running against the spirit that led to January 6th. He's running against, you know, he had all sorts of villainous things that he could point out that he's running. It was a clearer narrative.
And so it's very important that we understand unless we're inviting people into a very clear story in which they, they, they, they get to be the good character winning the day to experience a better life, people are going to tune you out. You will see examples of that everywhere now that I just said it.
Yeah. So then the main principle of this step, Donald, is to make the person that you're selling to the hero of the story. Can you just talk to us about that a little bit of how you position somebody as a hero when you're selling?
Yeah. Well, the reality is, You probably talk to people, Hala, and I may have been one of them at some point because I'm not perfect, but you probably talk to people and it felt like the story was all about them and it really wasn't about you. And we might call that person a narcissist or something like that.
That's because they see life through a prism and the prism is they are the hero trying to win. But the reason that that rubs us wrong, because it really shouldn't rub us wrong, but the reason that it rubs us wrong is because them winning is not helping you win. In order to sit here and listen to this person who's all about them winning means that you don't get to win.
And it's not a win-win scenario. It's not a mutual thing. What we're actually looking for is somebody who enters into our story and helps us win. So let me give you an example. Let's say you're at a cocktail party and you meet two people who do the exact same thing. The first person you meet, you say, what do you do for a living? And they say, well, I'm an at-home chef.
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