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In most of my content, I’ve recommended that you make at least $85,000 USD per year in pretax net profit from your business to ensure maximum, long-term happiness. I stand by this number, and the empirical data is very clear that if you make less than that you’ll be less happy.

I’ve also said that in terms of 100% saving you from Western civilizational collapse which is going to happen in your lifetime, you’re going to need more money than that unless your situation is unusual. A baseline for that is $10,000 per month or more.

To be clear, this means you make $10,000 per month as net profit from your business that you can spend in your personal life but before you pay any taxes. Hopefully, you’re internationalizing yourself so that you pay the minimum amount of taxes possible (like 5% in my case) instead of paying the usual 51-70% in taxes you see and taxes you don’t see like most Westerners, which is, of course, insane.

Both numbers ($85K/year or $10K/month) are relevant, depending on your goals.

The journey from starting your location-independent business from zero to $10,000 per month involves several stages. Each stage requires different actions to push through to the next stage.

Stage 1: Getting Started (Income: zero)

In this stage, you don’t have any customers/clients yet and you’re not even sure what to sell. Your goal here is to find a narrow niche with a big problem, then design a coaching offer, consulting, or some sort of service that either solves or alleviates that problem.

You want to avoid the mistakes most business owners make of looking inward and trying to figure out what to sell based on what you’re good at or what your current job is. The niche you have in mind may not give a shit about your skills or background.

Stage 2: Getting your first 1 – 3 clients (Income: zero)

In this stage, you’ve figured out exactly what to sell and are at least reasonably confident the niche will buy what you’re going to sell because of the research you’ve done.

Now, you focus on outreach to get your first one, two, or three customers or clients. You use either free methods (leveraging your current network, cold DMs, cold calls, or JVs) or if you have some money, you use paid methods (like running ads), or you can do a combination of both if you have the time.

You have either a set price for your service or you have a system for determining this price based on the individual client (as in the case of consulting or very customizable business services). However, you are very flexible about your price at this point because you’re new, and you’re happy to negotiate the price downward if it means getting those first 1 – 3 clients.

You just need the income and the clients to get the ball rolling, so you’re very flexible at this point.

Stage 3: Iteration (Income: $500 – $2500 per month)

At this stage, you’ve nailed down at least two or three customers/clients, perhaps more, who have either already paid you or are currently paying you (via retainer or several payments spread out over a few months for a flat-fee price). You’re making some money and you’re getting excited. But you’re still nervous about providing services and are still figuring out exactly what your clients want and what they don’t. You worry about making mistakes and your excitement is mixed with a little dash of anxiety, which is normal.

During this phase, you need to iterate your service and change it around based on the feedback and experience you’re getting from your first set of clients. You tweak, change, and improve.

You’re also still marketing because you’re going to need more money than this.

Stage 4: Scaling (Income: $2500 – $4000 per month)

At this stage, getting new customers/clients is almost a regular and expected thing in your business. You have a marketing method that is at least somewhat reliable. Most importantly, you’re more confident about servicing your customers and have much less fear. You start to get word-of-mouth referrals, which is great. You don’t negotiate your prices anymore. Many new business owners quit their jobs at this phase.

This is the phase where you sit down and figure out how to scale the business to hit $7K/month (the $85K/year figure), $10K/month, or more. You start to get more creative and aggressive when it comes to marketing.

Some people screw up this phase, and instead of scaling, they focus on their clients, spending 100% of their time (or damn near it) getting into their clients’ work and problems. This is a mistake because once they’re done working with those clients, their income drops to zero again because they weren’t doing any marketing to get more customers. So this phase is pretty important.

Another key part of this phase is delegation. Now that you have real money coming in, you start hiring more contractors and/or virtual assistants to take work off your plate so you can scale.

Stage 5: Product/Market Fit ($4000 to $10,000 per month)

By this phase, many customers/clients have purchased your stuff and liked it. You now know for sure that the niche loves what you have. Things are still a little choppy in your business but you’re getting super excited about the future and you’re feeling good.

It’s at this stage where your business starts to get seriously disorganized. You’re delegating some stuff but not enough because you’re still clinging on to stupid SW tasks that you shouldn’t be doing. Your hours per week start to grow. You also have complications with your books and your taxes because you’ve never made this amount of money in a business before and are still learning how to be a true business owner.

But, you’re making decent money, you set your own schedule (you dumped your bullshit 9-5 job a long time ago), and you’re location-independent now so this stuff doesn’t bother you too much.

It’s at this stage where you need to make a big decision: do you stay at the $100K/year level and just ride this out, or do you go for the big money and really scale the shit out of this? Everyone has different goals so there is no right or wrong answer, but this is the stage at which you must make this decision and adjust your work focus accordingly.

There are many other phases beyond the $10K/month phase and I’d be happy to talk about them in future articles, but for now, most of you need to focus on these five phases first.

If you want us to take you by the hand and walk you through these phases with our help so that you’re making money in 90 days or less, you should check out the 90 Day Business Builder program right here. It’s the best program in the entire world for doing this, and I mean that literally. Go look and you’ll see why.

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