is focusing exclusively on one thing until you get to a million dollars in revenue. A good thing or a bad thing? To find out, you're going to need to listen to this edition of The Inside BS Show. Hey now, it's Dave Lorenzo.

I'm the Godfather of Growth and today I'm sharing with you some feedback that I got from the advice that I gave you yesterday. So yesterday we talked about how you can go from zero or very little revenue to a million dollars in revenue in 18 months or less. And I shared with you how I do it, the guidance that I give to my clients and it's based on my 35 years of experience.

It's based on me doing this myself and my clients doing it alongside me when they're building and growing their businesses. And the advice that I gave yesterday that people are seemingly taking exception to today and I'll tell you a little bit about that in just a second. The advice that I gave that people are taking exception to is I said you need to focus on solving one problem and solving one problem exclusively until you get to the million dollar mark.

The examples I gave were an intellectual property attorney focusing on just doing intellectual property work and not doing corporate transactional work during the time when they were building up their practice to get to a million dollars in annual revenue. The advice that I gave is sound and I'm going to share the reasons why this works and I know it's counterintuitive. You're thinking to yourself, okay Dave, I go out and I get a client and I do the intellectual property work and then they come to me and they tell me they need a will so why wouldn't I learn to draft wills so I could do that for people after I do the intellectual property work? That's repeat revenue.

Why wouldn't I just go ahead and do that? There are a number of reasons why I'm telling you not to do that until you get to a million dollars in annual revenue and I'll share those with you in a moment. Let me give you another example and the example I used yesterday was a bakery. You decide you want to sell baked goods.

You're going to open up a bakery but you have no money, you have no startup capital and you've got no funding and I wouldn't want you to take funding anyway. You should try to bootstrap your business before you go out and raise money. So what I told you to do is pick one baked product, pick cakes and start making cakes and only sell cakes.

Make wedding cakes, make birthday cakes, make divorce party cakes, make retirement cakes, just make cakes. I also said you could just focus on cookies and just make cookies and focus on that one thing, solving that one problem. I need a cake for a special occasion, focus on solving that one problem until you get to a million dollars in annual revenue and then if you want to diversify from cakes into muffins, go for it.

If you want to go from cakes into cookies and muffins after you get to a million dollars in annual revenue, go for it but you need to focus on solving one problem first from zero to a million dollars. So let's get into the reasons why you need to focus on one problem exclusively when you're going from zero to a million dollars. The first reason why this is the best strategy for you is the repetition makes you outstanding at solving that problem.

If you focus exclusively on solving the one problem for however long it takes you to get to a million and a half dollars in annual revenue and you do it just over and over again, you're solving that problem constantly, you're going to get really, really good at it and when you get good at something, that benefits everyone. I want to tell you that reducing customer churn is one of the things that we talked about yesterday and the first way to reduce customer churn is deliver outstanding results, provide an outstanding experience doing it and get a reputation for being outstanding and the way you deliver outstanding results and the way you get that reputation is by doing something over and over and over again. The first time you do something you are going to suck at it and the second time you'll suck a little less and the third time you suck a little less than that and by the 20th time you're ready to stop sucking and start being just adequate.

Now there is a degree of difficulty in some skills that takes longer than 20 times but you get the idea. The repetition is what makes you excellent and this idea of repetition developing into excellence going from sucking to proficient to excellent to outstanding to world-class to number one in your field, the idea behind it was articulated by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers where he says 10,000 hours is what it takes to become exceptional at something. So think about it that way.

Think about you focusing on solving that one problem. So go to my bakery example. You go to baking school and I did go to baking school.

I went to culinary school and I took classes in baking and some of the people who graduated in my class wanted to become bakers. You go to the school and you learn how to bake cakes and you learn the basics of baking cakes and then you take a job at a bakery working for someone else and you know what you do for a year, for two years, for three years? You bake cakes and that's all you do and you get really good at baking cakes. Then you go and start your own business in a bakery and guess what? You not only have to get great at baking cakes, you have to be great at teaching other people how to be great at baking cakes and you have to be great at selling cakes and you have to be great at managing the delivery of those cakes so they don't get all smashed in the truck on the way to their destination.

So there are a whole bunch of things you need to become great at after you become great at the basics. Before you start branching out into muffins, you got to be exceptional at baking the cakes, selling the cakes, delivering the cakes, and figuring out where you're going to source all the ingredients the most cost-efficient and effective way so that you can produce the highest profit on the cakes. Before you ever move to muffins, you got to do that cake thing until you get to a million dollars so that you're an expert in all of that.

You get the idea? The repetition is what makes you an expert. Do you think from the day you graduate from cake school until you go into a bakery working for someone else and then the year later or two years or three years later when you open your own bake shop and start selling cakes, do you think after a year of selling cakes on your own you're going to have gotten an education, you're going to have received a phenomenal education on the efficiency of baking cakes? I can tell you that after 33 years of being a business builder, having built two businesses, zero to 50 million in three years for Marriott, zero to over 250 million in consulting, businesses I built for someone else with someone else's money, I went out on my own and I worked exclusively teaching lawyers how to attract clients for eight years. I learned a ton about practicing law but more importantly managing and running the business of a law firm and then I branched out into working with other businesses and now in this business with Nikki G in the last year I've learned a ton, a ton about helping business owners scale their businesses, about starting from zero and scaling a business with no venture capital, with no loans, by bootstrapping and this learning experience for me is accelerating the longer I do it.

After 33 years, I'm now 35 years in business and I'm still learning because I'm focusing on solving one problem. The problem I'm solving right now is helping you scale your business and my advice to you is just focus on the one problem at least until you get to a million dollars. If you want to get to 20 million quickly, focus on the one problem forever.

Have you ever watched the show Cake Boss? If you've ever seen an episode of Cake Boss, you know that that guy in Jersey only makes cakes. He's qualified to do other things. He's qualified to make muffins but he doesn't do it.

Why? He's the Cake Boss. He's not the Muffin Boss. He focuses on one thing because that's what he's really great at and he's making a bazillion dollars and he's on TV because of it.

So you want to tell me that the only way you can get to a million dollars is by selling 30 things, is by solving 30 problems? No way. No way. Your quickest path to a million dollars is focusing on solving one problem because that's what it's going to take for you to get good at it.

You need another example? Have you ever gone to see a comedy show? If you've gone to see a professional comedian, someone that you paid money to buy a ticket to go see, not a place where you go for two drinks, you see people up on stage telling jokes. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about going to see Kevin Hart.

I'm talking about going to see Jerry Seinfeld. I'm talking about paying to see a professional comedian who knows what they're doing and delivers jokes for a living. Nikki Glazer is another one.

I could give you a million examples. Chris Rock. Those comedians work out their material hundreds of times before they ever go into an audience that's going to be paying to see them.

Professional comedians go on the road and they do guest appearances unannounced. They just show up at open mic nights. They show up at comedy clubs and they stand up there and they tell 10 or 15 jokes, gauge the reaction from the audience and adjust and go back and tell the 15 jokes over and over and over again.

Before you see someone like a Jimmy Carr on an HBO special, they have told those jokes thousands of times before hundreds of audiences so that they can be sure that their timing is right, their delivery is right, they've wordsmithed them correctly thousands of times, and they've done that one thing over and over and over again. The repetition is what makes them exceptional. That's the first reason why you focus on solving one problem.

The second reason you focus on solving one problem going from zero to a million is because you learn how to describe the problem you solve in a way that connects with clients. The first time you discuss the problem a client has with them, you're going to be fumbling all around trying to understand what the hell they're talking about. The second time it'll be a little easier.

The third time it'll be easier than that. The 300th time you'll be reading their mind. The 3000th time you will know by the third or fourth minute of your conversation how you're going to help this person.

That confidence will come out of you and it will allow you to be better at what you do. Understanding the client's problem and being able to describe the problem you solve to them in their own language takes repetition. You need to get them to feel like you're entering a conversation that's going on in their mind.

You're entering the conversation that's taking place around their kitchen table. You're entering the conversation that's going on in the boardroom because you've heard it all before. That's the thing.

That's the value in focusing on one thing. You get really good at describing that one thing. You get really good at speaking the language the client has the problem.

You can describe the language. You can describe the pain. It's amazing.

And point number four is the empathy that comes from that is that you feel the pain. You can feel it because you've lived through it with hundreds and hundreds of other clients and they feel that you feel it. It's a connection.

It's an emotional bond. It's amazing. That resonates with them because you've done this over and over and over again.

And then you develop a reputation as an expert in solving these problems. You become the expert and you earn the reputation as an expert. You build a brand as an expert.

We're going back to cakes. My wedding cake almost two decades ago when I got married we bought our wedding cake from a bakery here that only did wedding cakes. Not only did they only do cakes they only do wedding cakes.

They are experts at wedding cakes and it is the most expensive wedding cake on planet earth but it was spectacular. It was amazing. Everyone remarks about the beauty of the wedding cake and the pictures all these years later are still fantastic.

And I'm telling you about it now because that bakery focuses exclusively on wedding cakes. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands of them probably that they've done because they were in business for generations only doing wedding cakes.

Proprietary recipe design experts. They teach a class at culinary school. The people who own the bakery teach a class at culinary school on wedding cake design.

That's the reputation they have. So the four reasons again in addition to expediting your process to get from zero or wherever you are to a million dollars. The four reasons to focus on solving just one problem.

Number one the repetition makes you outstanding. Number two you learn how to describe the problem the way the client describes the problem. You enter the conversation that's going on around the boardroom table.

You enter the conversation that's going on in their mind. You enter the conversation that's going around the kitchen going on around the kitchen table. You become a mind reader.

Number three you gain empathy. You feel their pain. You can make an emotional connection with them very very easily.

And then number four you build a reputation for excellence in this area. If this has not convinced you then let the money talk. Focus exclusively on solving one problem.

You will be amazed at how quickly you can go from wherever you are now to over a million dollars in annual revenue. When you get past a million there will be other things you should do. We'll talk about it but I will tell you that there's no shame in focusing exclusively on solving one problem beyond a million.

Many people make a ton of money by doing that. All right I got a volleyball tournament to get to. I will see you tomorrow morning Monday morning at 6 a.m. Until then I'm Dave Lorenzo the Godfather of Growth and here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.