Why you’re getting this: I’m Ayman Al-Abdullah and this is my CEO Newsletter. You probably signed up via one of my social links:

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Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Over the next few emails, I hope to educate you about the plateaus you’ll run into on your path to building a $100m company.

We can find the way to overcome these challenges in my framework:
​
​“The 9 Steps to 9 Figures”

I split a company’s growth into three stages, with each having three separate plateaus. The three stages are: Start Up, Scale Up, and Grow Up.

These are 9 Steps to 9 Figures that you may run into as you scale your company from zero to $100m in annual revenue.

Your business is actually a different company at every stage of growth, requiring a different type of leader at each one. That doesn’t mean you need to have 9 different CEOs (one for each plateau), but the CEO does need to focus on a different set of goals at each plateau.

Each of the 9 Plateaus of Progress are challenges you must solve in order to move on to the next step in scaling your company. Many companies solve the first few, but then get stuck on one of the plateaus and hardly grow from there.

These plateaus could also be thought of as ‘limiters’; a potential inhibitor to your company growing much more if you don’t solve it. For simplicity, all of the 9 plateaus start with the letter ‘p’.

The Start Up phase is foundational for any company that wants to grow into a large company. If your business is going to someday get to 9 figures in revenue, you need to nail the product and promotion aspects when you’re a startup.

You can add people, performance, and plan later, but if your foundation wasn’t properly built, the whole business will topple.

When starting a business, you need to figure out your ideal client before anything else. There’s no business without customers.

I have created multiple businesses that have made $10k+/month without:

• A fancy Logo
• An established LLC
• A Website

Not a single one has made $10k+/month without:

• An ideal client (Person)
• An irresistible offer (Product)
• A way to market to them (Promotion)

In today’s email, let’s talk about the first stage of growth: Person.

This refers to the person that your company will serve: your client/customers.

The purpose of any company is to solve a problem. What is the problem you solve, and who are you solving it for?

Without answering those questions, you likely won’t have any company at all.

Most companies start with one person (the founder) sitting down and figuring out a solution to a common problem for a specific group of people.

Creating something without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it “To whom it may concern:”

The best businesses in the world: Apple, Tesla, Amazon are all crystal clear on who their ideal client is and they build for that individual.

In fact, Amazon symbolically leaves a chair empty in every meeting “for the customer”.

Alternatively, the worst and most hated companies: Comcast, University of Phoenix, Spirit Airlines are all examples of companies that do not have love for their ideal client. Many of their decisions seem to happen in spite of their clients.

And their business suffers accordingly.

Here are a few general requirements I use for identifying my ideal customer:

• Willingness To Pay To Solve The Problem
• Must Have Purchasing Power
• Easy To Target (Associations or Conferences)
• Growing Market Over Last 3-5 Years

Let’s give your ideal customer a name, "Marketing Agency Matt" or "Business Partner Ben" or "Overnight Success Nick"

In my last role as CEO, we ran through this exercise and decided on the following as our ideal client:

“Marketing Agency Matt”

Marketing Agency Matt was a real customer that was running a 7 figure agency and using our service to purchase lifetime deals to reduce his monthly expenses.

This is now your customer avatar - all decisions should be placed through the lens of “How does this help Marketing Agency Matt?”

Identifying your ideal customer and solving one of their problems is basically the only hurdle standing in your way of a $250k+/year business. There are countless businesses where the owner simply solves a problem for their target audience, and collects $250k+ per year with little overhead and no employees.

However, I suspect you’re reading this newsletter because you want to scale much larger than that. Identifying your ideal customer is still critical: you’ll never grow into a massive company without doing this work first.

Talk soon,