How This Entrepreneur Built a Million-Dollar Business by Focusing on These 3 StrategiesStart by becoming emotional about your customers but rational with your numbers.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In this interview at Clickfunnels' Funnel Hacking Live conference, Emily Richett talks to Brandon Poulin, CEO and co-founder of LadyBoss, about how he grew his business to become one of the fastest-growing women's weight loss companies in the world.
Poulin started as an entrepreneur in network marketing, but after a series of wins and losses, found himself hardly able to cover the bills.
He and his wife, Kaelin Poulin, invested the last $1,000 of emergency savings into launching LadyBoss. Fast forward just a few years, and their business has millions in yearly revenue.
Here are three strategies that helped them do it.
1. Be emotional about your customers, not your numbers
One of Poulin's key tips for entrepreneurs to increase their companies' impact is to pull emotions away from all aspects of business, except one: the customers.
"The only thing that you should get emotional in your business about is your customers," he says. "Everything else, you should have zero emotion."
A lot of entrepreneurs get emotional about the wrong things, like the numbers or data. Instead, Poulin says you need to see the numbers as facts and let it guide your decisions but take emotion out of it. Where emotions can hurt you in some aspects of business, it can help you in others.
“道路是数学,我想说," says Poulin. "You should be very data-driven, [except for] when it comes to your customers ... understanding how they think and feel."
This is something Brandon knows very well. From their first initial customers to their nearly 200,000th customer, LadyBoss has cracked the code when it comes to understanding and empathizing with their customers.
2. Metric-based leadership
Besides "the path is math," Poulin also says metric-based leadership has helped him scale his company. "Look at just leading yourself when you're starting your company and then leading a team as you begin to grow ... because you're only one human being and you can't do everything yourself."
This means you need to have data in order to make important decisions and scale.
"There's so many decisions that you have to make as an entrepreneur," Poulin says, "and when you use numbers as like your reference point … you can't lose because they don't lie."
3. Invest in people
When Brandon and Kaelin Poulin started LadyBoss, they were wearing all the hats. Eventually, they started leveraging their time by hiring one executive assistant. And then another team member, until their team grew to more than 70 people.
Brandon's advice for any entrepreneur just starting out is to figure out where you are spending your time and what tactics you can offload to someone else. Then you can free up more of your time to work on the strategic parts of your business.
When scaling a business at the rate LadyBoss has, there aren't any magical shortcuts. But as Brandon suggests, there are areas you can prioritize to help you grow faster. It all boils down to team-building, metric-based leadership, and being emotional about the one thing that matters most: your customers.
