Are You Playing Business, Or Are You BUILDING One? (7-Figure Blueprint Series - Part 3)

Hey, one eye running turner, host. I'm a better life podcast. List. Three. Of the seven figure business blueprint series, been doing it for the last few weeks. Today we're talking about how to actually build a business. Like no matter what you're doing, I'm going to cover how to do it with the Lean Startup method. Why most entrepreneurs are just playing dress up and how to get paid before you build anything. Hey, DM me the word seven blueprint, like the number seven blueprint, on Instagram @beardybrandon for the full PDF summary. Let's get to it. So my six year old built a website last week, totally functioning. I'm serious. He used like AI to build an app that basically gamifies his chores. So like he gets a real world rewards now. Like if he does certain chores, he can get ice cream or a date with mom or dad. And all this cool stuff. It's super cool. Like how great is that the six year olds out there using AI to build this cool tool? However, he's not building the business. And I mean, even though it's got a logo, even though the website works, you could get it. You could use it. It's got everything. But it's not a business. He built a website. And that is the trap that most quote unquote entrepreneurs fall into these days. Welcome back to the seven figure business blueprint series. My name is Brandon Turner. And this is a six part series designed to give you every single thing you need to build a million dollar a year profit business. This is pillar number three, building a business that works. Now, if you haven't watched the first two videos, go watch those videos. They're so good. Links are in the description and probably here and here on my screen. I think we can pop those up there. But here's where we've been so far, in case you want a quicker view. In pillar one, we talked about the mental game, like getting fed up enough to decide, and then picking one thing and then preparing for the dip, and why consistency beats intensity every time, but both are required. In pillar two, we figured out what to build by seeing problems everywhere. We talked about why boring beats flashy, how solving expensive problems for people with money is the best way to go and niching down hard matters. Now, today we're talking about how to actually turn your idea that you have into a real business, or at least test it, something that can make real money. But I want to start by telling you about a trap that catches most everyone off guard. So let's start there with a trap. If you believe the people, and let's be honest, the bots on Twitter, or X, whatever they call it now, you'll think all that you have to do to launch a million dollar your business is like, vibe code something online, and you'll just make a bunch of money. Like you probably seen the post, right? Like screenshots of products and SaaS tools and companies that were built in hours, using some fancy AI tool, maybe you're not on Twitter, probably good for your mental health. But here's the part they're not telling you. Most of that stuff, like it's making nothing, no money. Even when people say that they're making money, it's fake, they're lying, or it's like one out of 10,000 that does that. Like you never hear about the losers, or maybe somebody already has a big successful business or a client list and they just sold a new thing to them. Like look, those aren't businesses. Now with the help of AI, every day hundreds of new quote unquote businesses are created, maybe thousands. I put that in the air quotes because having a website is not a business. A business has customers, a business has revenue. And the barrier to looking like looking like a business has never been lower. Like vibe coding tools, like a lovable or replete or whatever, like they let you spin up a website in minutes. And AI can write your copy, they can design your logo, it can generate a business plan for you. And here's the trap, all of that feels like progress, but it's not. Like you spend four hours building the website and you design a logo and you set up an Instagram account and you tell all your friends, you feel like an entrepreneur, but you haven't talked to a single customer. You haven't made a single dollar. You've been playing business, not building one. Now that trap existed long before AI. It was business cards. It was building your brand on social media. It was signing up for some multi-level marketing thing. So same trap, different costume. The trap is anything that feels like progress but doesn't generate revenue. It's not actually building the business. Designing logos is fun. Talking to strangers, that's uncomfortable. Building a website, super satisfying. Asking someone to buy, super scary. Posting on social media gets dopamine hits. Cold calling gets rejection. Like my nine year old daughter recently wrote and illustrated a book. She wrote it herself, used chat to be treated, illustrated and then we printed it on Canva. But when it came time to sell it, I told her, "Yeah, just call your grandparents and your relatives. No way, dad, can you call for me?" Like, she's nine. But her mentality is no different than 99% of entrepreneurs out there. It's fun to build, it's hard to sell. And the only thing that matters though is revenue, a customer. Someone who gave you money because you solved their problem. Everything else is cosplay. Like my son built that tool with AI and it's cool. It's helpful. It's helping him earn real money by doing chores and ice cream and dates and all that. But it's not a business, it's a tool. So how do you actually build a real business? So let me introduce you to a concept that made me a millionaire many times over. Eric Reese, or Rice, I think is Reese, here at a book called The Lean Startup, like over 20 years ago. If you haven't read it, read it. Let me give you the core idea here. Traditional business thinking goes like this. Come up with another idea. Spend months planning it. Launch the perfect product, perfect. Launch big and then hope customers show up. But that's how most businesses fail. They burn through time and money, building something that ultimately nobody wants. In fact, just this morning, a buddy showed me an app that his friend had created. It's in the construction industry space, right? My buddy told me that his buddy has been building up for years. It has over $3 million in on the build. And they have no customers yet. They're hoping and praying and believing it's going to attract customers because it's such a great tool. And maybe it will. But I would bet it's even more likely it won't. The Lean Startup actually flips that script. You have a theory. A hypothesis about the customer wants. Maybe you think busy homeowners will pay $1,500 for a clean garage. That's a theory. You don't know if that's true yet. I don't know if that's true. We're just talking about it, right? So you test it. And not by building out a massive company with employees and trucks and debt and an app by doing the smallest possible experiment. Post it on a local Facebook group or knock on 10 doors in a nice neighborhood or tell everyone you know to see if anyone bites. You don't have to have a truck yet. I mean, you could rent one for $50 and somebody said, "Yes, that's a Lean test." And then you learn, hey, did anyone say yes? What objections did they have? What did you hear? What questions did they ask? And then you iterate, which means change something. And you adjust your offer, you adjust the product, or whatever. You basically change something based on a new theory of what people want. And then you test it again. You theory or hypothesize, you test, you learn, you iterate. And that cycle should be quick like days, not month. Let reality guide you instead of assumptions. Like speed of implementation, it beats perfection every day. So the entrepreneurs who launch ugly and iterate fast, they're going to crush the still perfect businesses that are still working on their plan. So here's an example of how that might work in that app or the construction industry. My buddy's buddy is building. Instead of spending $3 million, building a slot for first, maybe start by asking a simpler question. To construction companies actually want this bad enough to pay for it. Before writing a single line of code, they can go find 10 contractors and offer to solve that problem manually. Now if the app is supposed to help contract jobs or change orders or crews or materials, we'll then do that in a spreadsheet. Like a shared Google form, a group tax, or even a simple dashboard built in air table or lovable. Charging for it, not someday. Now, if no one's going to pay you to solve that problem manually, then there's a good chance they're not going to pay you to solve that automatically either. But if 5/0 tends to say, yeah, for sure, I really need that. Well, now you got something. Then you learn what part they actually care most about. And maybe they don't want the full all-in-ones system that you imagined. Maybe they want, I don't know, maybe faster estimating or easier scheduling or cleaner communication with their subs. I don't know. That insight can save you millions of dollars in years of time because now you're not building based on your guess and what you think is right. You're building based on actual demand, real people. That's the point of the lean startup. Don't start with code. Start with a pain. Don't build the whole machine. Prove the problem first. Then build only what people are already trying to buy. Now, relating to this, here's a principle that sounds backwards but will save you years. Validate with money. Not a thing. If you ask somebody, hey, would you buy this? People that appreciate friends are always going to say yes to be polite. And those conversations are worth money. But they're worse than worth money. They give you false confidence. Would you buy this? Gives you an opinion. Here's my Venmo, ActiveShoo reality. But whenever possible, try to get people to pay you even before you build it. Pre-sell it. Take it a positive or create a landing page that takes orders before you have inventory. If they say no, you just say just up and monster building something that nobody really wants. And if they say yes, now you got customers waiting. And now you have the ultimate motivation to figure it out and how to deliver it quickly. Money is the only vote that counts. So get your votes in a vote. All right. I want to move on to some maybe more practical business billion tips and talk about something that I am super passionate about. That I think everyone should do entrepreneur or not. Goal studying. Using most people and businesses certain goals like wishes. They think about on bag intention. I may hope that it's going to work out. But winners work backwards. I mean, let's just say you want $10,000 a month in profit within two years. Don't ask, what should I do today? Start with, what would have to happen to be true for that to happen? Like maybe it means 30 customers paying $500 a month or 100 jobs at $100 profit each. Well, I figure out the math. What does that, sixth sense actually look like at the end of the day? And then ask, what would I need to do for that to be true this year? And then what do I need to do that in 90 days? And what about this week? Now you're not guessing you were reverse engineering. So I'm going to do that. I use a simple framework, six steps, I call it RIOS, but it's step one, tell the truth. Where are you actually starting from? Not where you wish you were, where are you actually today? Be honest, step two, define your future. Like what does winning look like three years from now? Be very specific, dollar amount, lifestyle, details, the whole picture. Step three is aligning your goals. Break that three year vision into a one year target and then 90 days of focus and then weekly action plans. And then step four is track your inputs. So don't just track the results, track the action that you control. How many calls did you make? How many doors did you knock? Like those inputs will actually create the outputs ultimately. Step five, you got to maximize accountability. Like tell someone, join a group, hire a coach, whatever it takes to make sure you can't just quietly fade away, which is what most people do. Step six, skip a team. So we have people repeat the steps with them. Again, everyone align, everyone clear, work backwards, and then execute forwards. And remember what we talked about in the first video, we don't need a giant hail Mary every day. Think about football. The teams that win championships aren't throwing 60 yard bombs every play. They're running the ball up the middle. Four yards, first down. Four more yards, three more yards, two more yards. It's boring stuff. Doesn't make the highlight real. But that's what wins game. Your business is the same way. Every day asks yourself, what is the most important thing I can do today to move this forward to hit my week. And then when I get my week go, what do I gotta do? Am I attracted to my quarterly goal? And do that main thing, that one thing before email, before social, before anything else. Get that sales call done or that piece of content done. Get that equipment done. Now here's the secret. Most of your competition, they're going to quit. They're going to burn hop for three weeks and disappear. You're going to hit a rough patch. And they're going to take a break that never ends. All you have to do is keep showing up. Four yards, first down, repeat. That's how you build a business. Run it lean, run it consistently. Now let's check in real quick on Jake. Now if you didn't watch the other videos in the series or you just don't remember, throughout this seven figure business blueprints series, I'm wrapping every lesson up. Wake a story of a man named Jake. He tried to build a seven figure business. We can retire his wife and increase his income and increase his work hours. And ultimately, just raise some kids. And the first video, Jake finally hit the tipping point of being sped up with his inability to fully provide for his wife, Rhea. But he's absolutely committed to doing whatever it takes to get her out. In video two, Jake looked at the problems all around him and decided to solve a simple one, cleaning and organizing garages through his new business idea, garages then. Now he needs to actually build it. Not by raising a million bucks and venture capital money and spending two years building some cool app that he was going to want. He's starting broke. The first, he sets a goal. He wants 10,000 a month profit within the next call it three years. And he works backwards. Well, in order to get that, he gets to do 15 to 20 jobs a month, that $600 average profit, it's four to five jobs a week. Who doesn't need a hell marry? He needs to test whether people actually need that service. Now he's got the outcome. Let's reverse engineer it. Will people pay for what he needs to charge? So for a source test, he goes minimal. He designs some nice flyer on Google's Gemini. It's a cool AI tool. And then he prints 100 flyers at the library, $10. Jump gone, garage cleaning, same-day service. He's been Saturday putting them on the doors in a nice neighborhood, the kind with like two car garages and boats in the driveway. And day one, he gets a nothing. Day two, he gets nothing. Day three, phone rings. Woman wants her garage cleared out before her mother in law with it. Now Jake has never done this before. He's never a truck. He's got his buddies pick up truck. He has no idea what the charge. So he just quotes her 800 bucks and his voice kind of cracks. She says yes without negotiating at all. Five hours later, two trips to the dump. His profit, $680. He's in business. Now he doesn't have a guaranteed group, but it's good evidence. And his doesn't have a truck, doesn't have a two-man team of employees, doesn't have uniforms. He doesn't need that. He needs to test his hypothesis. I'll per class people with garages will pay good money to have their garages cleaned and organized. And as he gets more and more calls, he begins to test everything, surprising. He gets to test a thousand bucks. He says to 100. He tests 2,000. He starts to get some serious pushback at two thousand. I mean, good. Now he knows. He also begins to test different flyer copies like different language, different neighborhood, Facebook groups versus Door Dog. And within a couple of months, he's done 23 jobs. He knows his average job size. He knows his best leads or he knows his closing rate on a phone call. He didn't build a business plan. He built a real business, one small test at a time. And that's business pillar number three, build a business that works. Now let me recap it. Avoid the entrepreneur's trap. That revenue was all that matters. Use the lean startup methodology to build, which is theory, I've learned, either right. Charge before you build with validate with money and out of opinions, and then work backwards from your goal. And get consistent work done. OER, three yards, five yards, a bunch of them. But here's the thing. Build the unit. You're going to be temporary. Just because your business looks cool online, and even if you ask some customers, doesn't mean you can scale up. The other 90% is sales and marketing. Can you reach people about your business and get them to buy? Well, that is what we're going to cover in the next video. Fill us for marketing, sales, and funnels. And this is going to be probably the longest video in this whole series. And the one that I think is one of the most important. I'm just sharing incredibly powerful technique for 10X in your business through funnel optimization. And this is where the real money is made. Don't make sure you're subscribed and following me at your Dbrand and I'll see you in the next video.