Exactly what we would do first, whether you are trying to crack your first million-dollar month or tack on the next million
It always starts with the same question: where is the revenue coming from? Find the levers before you pull them.
If we took over your business tomorrow, we wouldn't start by posting more. We wouldn't immediately run ads. And we probably wouldn't rebuild your funnel either.
For the first few days, we'd try to answer one question:
Where is the money already trying to come from?
Most businesses don't have a complete lack of opportunity. They have opportunity hiding inside the system they already built. The owner is usually too close to it to see it.
There are always a few specific drivers of revenue. Often a very large share of customers are very specific types of buyers, coming through very specific ways you advertise. The first job is to name those ways: organic, paid, a specific funnel type, or demographic traits.
You cannot amplify what you have not found, plug a leak you have not located, or duplicate a system you never mapped.
“What would I do if I were you, and only had 30 days to do it?”
Thirty days is a real billing clock, not a motivational frame.
Almost all of the revenue came through DM ads, but not traditional DM ads:
(Individual result, not typical.)
Good data, but not enough to make key decisions. Next questions: who buys on average? What do they look like and sound like? What is their age? About 90% of the buyers are 24 to 40; about 10% are younger or a little older.
Then the simple question: out of everything you have ever spent, where did it actually go? Even if you boost posts from your phone, go into Ads Manager:
Does the spend ratio match the 90/10 buyer ratio, or not?
About $6 million spent across the two groups: $4 million on the 24–40 group that produces 90% of buyers, and $2 million on the group that produces 10%. A 66/33 split. Does it make any sense to spend 33% of your total ad spend where only 10% of your customers come from? No.
That is not a strategy. That is a bill nobody read.
Be precise, because these are not the same number. $2 million is everything that went to the 10% group; some of it did produce those buyers. $1.8 million is the gaping hole: the part that should never have had spend against it. The fix: plug it immediately and move that budget to where 90% of the customers come from.
This simple version of the math gives $1.44M on the rounded numbers; $1.8M is the figure from the actual account. Either way, you do not pocket it. Move it to where the buyers are and it becomes a multiplier.
The leak is not the whole line item. It is the part that never should have existed.
This is not just a savings play. When you first come into a business, look for two things:
Money going somewhere it should not be, like the spend on the 10% group.
Actions that multiply revenue, like moving that same money onto the group that produces 90% of sales.
The exact multiple from moving that spend is unknown, but $2 million spent where 90% of the customers come from, instead of where 10% do, will produce a lot more.
And this is a within-minutes thing. All of this came out a couple of minutes into a 30-minute conversation. The business is set up to make a lot more money and stop losing a lot. The only reason it has not happened in your business is that nobody has sat down and asked.
You do not pocket a plugged leak. You redeploy it, and the same dollars start compounding.
Once you find a key lever, put a percentage on it. How much of total revenue comes from there? From other channels? From each organic channel and each paid one?
The 80/20 rule says 20% of your efforts drive 80% of results. Sometimes reality is not that clean. Sometimes it is 99/1. Do not hold the rule too strictly; find out the reality of your situation.
Every step, little and big. Miss a piece and your next move breaks something.
Technically this business makes most of its money from Instagram and DMs, but not the way people assume. Organic is not the engine; it is what makes boosting posts possible. In reality the setter team drives most, if not all, of the revenue. Every piece is part of the system. Map all of it, then be honest about which piece is the engine.
The whole chain. Pick one piece and pour more into it.
Pick a piece above. Most people amplify one and expect the system to scale.
Then we map the entire journey, from the first moment someone sees you to recurring revenue, and look at every step for the same two things: leaks and multipliers.
Tap a step to see what we'd ask there.
Imagine a coach with 30,000 followers. They post consistently, their content gets decent engagement, and they have a $3,000 coaching offer that gets some sales. From the outside, the business looks healthy.
Then we dig deeper.
That's the problem. They're feeding the part of the machine that's already getting fed, while neglecting the parts that actually turn attention into revenue.
(Illustrative example.)
We wouldn't tell that coach to make more content. We'd ask:
Content is one component of the growth engine. Its job is to attract the right people. Then something needs to happen with that attention.
“How do I get more followers?”
“How do I increase the value of every person who enters my ecosystem?”
That's a completely different game.
Once the system is mapped for the first time, the next question is simple: what could we, clear as day, put a lot more into right now?
But you have to know the whole system. Amplify only part of it and it becomes lopsided and fails.
This is the other reason we'd map the whole system before changing anything. If your content generates attention but your follow-up is weak, doubling content doesn't double revenue. You might just create twice as many people for your backend to lose.
(Illustrative numbers: 100 interested people per unit of content, follow-up capacity of 60 conversations a month as it is, 1 in 10 conversations becomes a client.)
Same with sales: if your calls convert well but you're generating the wrong leads, more calls don't solve the problem. They amplify it.
Sometimes it is duplication: copying one thing and running it somewhere else. This is where organic operators usually go wrong. They make their money from YouTube with a call funnel, decide “my call funnel is what works”, then run direct-response ads on Meta to that same call funnel. It does awful. Then they learn the reality:
Duplicate only a fraction of what needs duplicating and it fails, and you lose money, time and resources.
They did not duplicate the system. They duplicated the last step and paid Meta to watch it fail.
That's why the first 30 days wouldn't be about randomly “doing more”. We'd want to know:
Only then would we decide what to build. There isn't one universal lever. The lever depends on where the business is actually constrained.
Which one sounds most like you?
Try this on your own business. Change the perspective you think through to unlock new ideas:
The reframe costs nothing and runs on data you already have.
New data is the fastest way to rip through this and get better results quicker. Treat yourself like a computer that needs a software update: you can only think with the data in your head. The more you load up, the more opportunities you have to think with and exploit.
Take 15 minutes before our call and look at your business through this lens. Trace the journey from the moment someone discovers you to the moment they become a customer.
You may find the biggest growth opportunity isn't somewhere you need to build something new. It might already be sitting inside something you're doing today. We'll dig into exactly that on the call.
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