If I Wanted to Go From $0 to $1M in 12 Months Heres What Id Do | Mark Moss

I became a cash millionaire at 30 years old and retired. But just four years later, I had to start all over. And not just from zero this time, but digging myself out of a multimillion dollar hole. So forget all the theoretical videos of if I had to start all over. Instead, this is exactly how I built it all back up in a fraction of the time. And better yet, you can use this to follow the exact same steps, the exact same roadmap to $1 million in twelve months. Now, real quick, before we dig in, if you’re new to the channel, my name is Mark Moss.

I created this channel to help others avoid the exact same mistakes that I made along the way. Now, yes, I’ve learned some valuable lessons while starting seven different businesses that have hit seven to eight figures in less than twelve months. I’ve had two high big value exits. I’ve currently run three eight figure businesses, and I’m a partner in a tech VC hedge fund. Now, before I dive right in, I just want to give you a quick a quote from Henry Ford, who said, whether you think you can or you can’t, either way, you’re right. So if you think you can’t do it, that’s okay.

This life is not for everyone. But if you’re part of the select few who are willing to do the work and build the life that they want, then this video is for you. So let’s go. All right, so we’re going to just jump right into this. And let’s just start with step number one. I’m going to give you a step by step plan, a twelve month plan, one step per month, all right? And yes, this is the exact process that I followed, and I continue to follow. So the first thing that you have to know before we get into the twelve steps is that the only reason anyone will ever give you money is because you provided them some value, right? You’ve solved their problem.

This means if you want money, then you have to have skills to solve problems. All right? Understand that core framework. And then the more skills that you have, the bigger problems you can solve and the more you’re going to make. Which leads us right into step number one, which is start with learning a high value skill. Now, the first step that you want to do is acquire a high value skill, a skill that can be monetized very quickly and it’s in high demand. People always ask me, what’s a high value skill? Well, it’s one that’s in high demand.

It’s also one that can make a high amount of income. So these are ones that are the closest to the money supply. They affect income on a profit and loss. They’re on the, they’re on the income side, not the expense side of the balance sheet. So these are typically things I would think about that would be sales, marketing, high ticket sales. Right. I think of these as digital trades. If I want to hire someone to build a house, I would hire tradesmen, a framer, roofer, plumber. If I want to start a business, I hire digital trades, copywriters, Facebook, advertisers, video editors, things like that.

Now, when I had to start over, I had no money, right? I had sold my businesses, so I no longer had income coming from the business. I lost my assets. And so I literally had to start over from zero. And so I didn’t have any money to start a business, so I had to go provide a service. Right? Now, I had a friend who had a mortgage company, and he knew that I had started Internet businesses and Internet companies before that. And so he said, hey, if you could help generate leads, if you could build like, some websites, help me generate leads for my mortgage company, I’ll split the commissions with you.

So I did, I built up a landing page. I created a Google pay per click campaign. I started generating leads for him and then I made a lot of money. And that’s what I ended up doing for years, I think six or eight years, I started doing that. All right, so here’s the action to take. Number one, read some books, figure out what are these high value skills you think you’re best suited for. I built a landing page. I had a Facebook advert or that it was a Google pay per click campaign at that time. But what skills are you best suited for? Do you like video editing? Do you like copywriting? Do you like whatever? Do you like sales? You want to do high ticket sales or the phone.

So read some books and then watch some YouTube videos, and then you want to start practicing these skills. Just like any skill, you have to go do it. Practice outside of working hours. So probably you’re working right now. So this is going to be night. Think of this as your night school. Write the copy, set up an ads account, rehearse the sales techniques. Right? You have to practice your craft. The goal here is to learn to increase your ability, to increase the value in the marketplace. So in the beginning, you’re going to learn one skill that you can take to the marketplace to make some money.

Eventually, you’ll add skills, you’ll stack those skills and provide more value to the marketplace. All right? Now, that’s month number one. Step number one, month number two. Step number two is to build a personal brand so you can build out a marketing pipeline. Now, the concept behind this isn’t to be some Kim Kardashian influencer, all right? And this part is literally non negotiable. If you don’t like this part, then don’t watch the rest of these steps, because it doesn’t matter if you do or you don’t want to be a social media influencer. Here’s the bottom line.

If you want to build a business, you need customers, right? And customers need to hear about you. So whether it’s you personally or it’s your business, you have to create content, you have to build a brand. But really, why would I say a personal brand over a business? Well, that’s because people want to do business with people, not really other businesses. Now, going back to my story, right, I started creating leads. That was the first thing I did. And I had been, he asked me to do that because I’d been on the Internet for a long time.

So I’d been on the Internet. I had the skills to build the landing pages, do the paid ads, and so I started doing marketing for him. Now, I’d been on the Internet for a decade at this point, but there was a big problem. I never built a list. So I was running paid ads. That was pretty good. But I didn’t build the list. And so I eventually got forced into it. I’ve told my story before. I’m not going to go into that. And I eventually started a YouTube channel, which, of course, you’re watching now. And all of a sudden, as I started to build an audience and I started to build a list, something shifted in my mind, and something just shifted just in the way that I viewed the world.

And I felt like I went from having, like, all these jobs where I set up an ad campaign for this guy, lead campaign for this guy, to now having a career. And that new career was now Mark Moss. And Mark Moss could do whatever he wants. Maybe Mark Moss wants to build a real estate development. Maybe Mark Moss wants to start a wine company. Maybe Mark Moss wants to start a sneaker line. Whatever. Now the brand is Mark Moss. So here’s the action to take in this month. Step number two, start digging your well. I say dig your well before you’re thirsty.

It doesn’t just come on overnight. It’s going to be digging and digging and digging before there’s water there. So start creating content around your expertise and your personal story. Right now, you’re learning a high value skill. You’re practicing it. You’re learning it and document that. Create the content around what you’re learning. You read something about sales or copywriting, talk about it. You’re focusing on documenting what you’re learning, what you’re doing, all right? And then what you want to do is not tell others what they should be doing, but rather, you’re just documenting what you’re doing. It’s nothing.

You should do this to fix your problem. It’s like, here’s what I’m doing to fix the problem. Now, during this time, you want to focus on the platforms where you can express yourself best. For me, I chose YouTube, right? It just seemed to work for me. But some people are afraid of video. Okay, so maybe you want to be on a blog. Maybe you want to be on social media. TikTok, you like the TikTok, you like the Instagram, whatever it may be. Maybe it’s just a podcast. Find the medium that seems to express yourself the best and then be consistent.

It’s the slow, steady, consistent things done over a long period of time. So be consistent with content production and then repurpose that content across all, all the other channels to maximize your reach. Okay, the goal here in this third month is to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. All right? So again, whether it’s copywriting or Facebook ads, start to really dig in by putting out content on that specifically, you’re gaining awareness during this timeframe, showing your authority. And then you want to be relating to people on a personal level with your audience to continue to grow your business.

This is why a personal brand over, I would say, a business brand. All right, now then, let’s go into the next month, the next skill, and that is mastering this skill through practice. Okay? So we’ve been learning it, we’ve been testing it on our own, but now we want to master it through practice. So the concept is simple. We want to focus on mastering this skill rather than just making money with it right away. Right in the beginning, you’re not going to be very good, and that’s okay, but you can’t expect someone to give you a lot of money when you’re just learning this.

So here the key is to just obsessively practice and then start offering those services. And this is a sticking point. This is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons why most people never make it to be a business owner and never have success is because this part is you have to offer your services for free. You have to offer services for free to gain experience and build that portfolio to prove that you can do it, to get that feedback. And most people have an employee mindset and they could never imagine working for free, but this is what it’s going to take.

All right. Now, for me, I think about this in a sense where I’ve had all kinds of people that want me to pay them so they can learn how to do a skill. But think about it from like a pro athlete standpoint. Imagine someone going to the Lakers and saying, hey, sign me on a basketball contract and I’ll go learn how to play basketball for you. It’s like, no, you got to play basketball your whole life to get good at basketball. And then maybe someone will give you a contract at the point. So that’s exactly how it is in the business world as well.

You need to learn these skills, you need to hone these skills, and you have to start providing them for free, just like playing basketball for free. And then you need to get somebody a result until you’ve gotten them so much results that, well, it takes us to the next step, which is getting our first paying client. So at some point, hopefully we’ve gotten good enough with that skill, we’ve delivered enough value. That client should now really desire our services. And at that point, you can say, okay, our trial is over and they should be one to pay you.

Or if you’ve done a good enough job, they’re going to want to just, you know, they’re going to demand to pay you. And so you want to transition from this practicing for free to now getting paid for your work now. Now, when I think of this, I think about, again, back to these coaching businesses that want to do this. I want to help people with their time management or with their health or with their diet. But again, they haven’t built that up. They haven’t worked for free. And so that’s what’s holding them back. Now, the action here is that we want to transition from practicing.

So we’ve already found people who are more than happy to take our information for free. Right. We’ve demonstrated value upfront. Then we want to convert them to paid. So how do we do that? Well, again, we can say, hey, this contract is over, can’t offer anymore. You could make them an offer. Number two, you could continue to work for them for free and ask them for a referral. Hey, do you have a friend or an associate that might like my business? And then the best way that I would start to get that first paid client is what I call a 1130.

And really, this is a one person. I’m looking for one person that I can help them with one thing over the next seven days or 30 days. Right? So I’m looking for one person that I can help lose ten pounds in the next 30 days. I’m looking for one person that I can get one paid account going in 30 days, or whatever that is. That’s the best way to do that. And so the goal in this section is to secure your first paying client by first showing them results ahead of time and only asking on the backend to either become a paid client or refer you to somebody else who wants that.

Okay? Then that takes us to the very next step, which is we should be documenting our processes. Okay? So the concept here is that I want to move more towards the creative work and away from the technical work. And the way that I define that is technical would be anything that I do more than one time I invoice a client. And every time I invoice the client, it’s done the same way. Right, versus creative is like, I design something for them, right? And what we want to do is we want to identify all the different things that we do in our business to get a customer, acquire the customer, to fulfill the customer, and make a list of those and which ones are technical and which ones are creative, sort those.

And then what we want to do is we want to create clearly defined, I call them playbooks. You might have heard Sop, standard operating procedures. And so then all these technical tasks, I document step one, step two, step three, so that we can have consistent output. Let me give you a story. I used to have a company. I had about 65 people there working for me. And we had a really big, like, break room and cafeteria and different days, different times of the day. Like, the coffee could be, like, really good, or the coffee could be, like, really bad.

And, like, you never knew what you were going to get whenever you walked in there. And so I didn’t like that. I wanted to know what the coffee was going to be like whenever I wanted. And so we had to create a system, a playbook, a standard operating procedure for the coffee. So this many cups of grinds, this many cups of water. Right. This heat. And then it was written down. So no matter who made the coffee, if they followed the exact same playbook that we had written, then the coffee was good every single time. Okay? So the action to take here is to make a list of the most common things that you’re doing.

And I recommend starting with a step with a time study. So what I would do is I would just get like a piece of paper, maybe an excel spreadsheet, and write down like in 15 minutes increments. I set a timer on my phone, and every 15 minutes when the timer goes off, I write down what I’m doing. 15 minutes later, write down what I’m doing, and then I’ll typically do that for two weeks, and I’ll look back of all the things I was doing and I could divide that out. Okay, then once I’ve defined what are the things that are the technical ones that I could probably create these systems around, then I’d record myself doing these.

I could do that by setting up a camera on a tripod. I could use something to record my screen. Loom video works really well for this. I could record myself on a loom. And then once I have those videos, I can create processes from them. Loom actually has an AI insert that helps you with this process. It’s pretty cool. And then I want to create a folder to store all of these. So it’s a database that has all the processes. And I use notion for this. So everything’s in notion. And anybody that I ever hire in the future or on my team can go into notion and find these.

So the goal that we’re trying to achieve here is to be able to have consistent output, consistent results, but more importantly, someone else that can do the technical work. And even more importantly, when I bring on new people, I never have to train them because they have the playbooks to follow. I only have to coach them. And that brings me to the very next point, which is number six, what we want to do now at this point, with getting on our road from zero to 1 million in less than twelve months, is we need to double down.

We have to start speeding things up now at this point. Okay? And what we want to do in order to double down is we need to bring on some help, maybe just an assistant, like a virtual assistant at this point. And the concept here is that we want to be able to do, again, more creative work because you are the genius. You’re the genius in the business, which means we need to offload the technical tasks. That’s what we’re hiring an assistant for now. One way we can do this is think about offloading. You know, tasks that are, you could pay someone $10 an hour to do or $15 an hour, 25 or 50 or $100 hours tasks.

You start passing those off. And of course, you’re working your way up. Now, everybody gets this wrong at first. So let me tell you how to do this. And here’s what everybody gets wrong. What they do is they say, hey, I started a graphic design business and I spend so much time doing graphic design, so I want to go hire a graphic designer to take off some of this workload for me, but that’s the wrong way to do it. What you want to do instead is hire someone to do everything else that’s not graphic design. Again, that’s your zone of genius.

So for me, I need to be on camera. I can’t really hire someone to be on camera for me, but I can hire other people to support all the other things that I do that are not being on camera. So here’s the action. Okay. One, perform that time audit like we just talked about. Number two, again, identify the creative versus technical tasks and identify which ones are my zone of genius. Copywriting, whatever that may be. That’s your zone of genius. And then hire an assistant to do everything else. Now, I hire assistants internationally. You can find great assistance in other parts of the world if you’re in the United States.

The Philippines and South America are great for this. They’re pretty much on the same time zone. They speak English and you can pick them up for four, five, six, $7 an hour. So really easy way to scale that. And the goal here in this module or in this month is to really focus on your high value tasks so that you can scale faster. All right? And now in light of scaling faster, that takes us to the next month. Number seven. The next step. Number seven. And now we need to really start to increase our marketing pipeline.

So now we have our product, we have, our systems are documented, we have other people helping us. And so now we’re ready to start putting some gas on that fire. And putting gas on the fire is basically using marketing to increase that pipeline. So the concept here is like, again, like, who’s going to buy your products if they don’t hear about it? Now, I built businesses doing lead generation off of paid ads, but paid ads don’t really work as good as they used to anymore. So I believe that organic marketing and organic content is the way to go.

Sort of like this YouTube video that you’re watching, but paid ads can complement it. Sort of like putting gas on an already lit fire. Okay, so the action here is that this is going to be a brand new skill set for you. So remember, we have to start stacking skills. So this is a new skill set for you. And what I’d recommend is just go binge watch a bunch of YouTube videos, set up a free account, whether that’s on Google pay per click ads or on Facebook. Turns out they have a ton of tutorials to help you because they want you to use their business.

Then set up a free account. Spend a few dollars there. I mean, you can put 15, $20, $100 on there. Think of this as your tuition. You want to learn this just so you can start to figure it out. You don’t have to be the expert, but you want to know enough about it. Then once you’ve done that, you want to create the playbooks, the Sops. Here’s how you do it. The standard operating procedure, so you can hire someone else to do it. Now, you can also hire an agency in this step. But I wouldn’t step the skip the step of learning it, because even if you hire someone, you want to know enough to be able to manage them properly.

Okay, now, the goal in this section in number seven is that, again, it’s gas on an already lit fire. This is not skipping over the need to build the organic content. I certainly would never recommend that you start with paid ads without doing the organic content first. You’re basically making organic content and then putting ad dollars behind it. And then if we want to take it to the very next level, because we need to get to a million dollars in twelve months and we’re almost there, we go to step number eight, maybe month number eight, depending on how fast you’re moving.

And that is to build a product. Okay? Now, we talked about before getting a skill and offering it as a service, but now we want to build a product. And here’s the concept, I think, of business in three different levels. All right? Level number one is I provide a service. I am a massage therapist. I’m a gardener. I paint curves. I have a pressure washer business. I write your copy. I run your ads. I’m providing a service. I’m a doctor. But at that point, I’m trading my time for money. And no matter how much I charge, I.

I’m going to run out of time. Step number two, or the next level up, would be having a product. So I might sell a supplement, I might sell clothes, right? And that’s better, right? Because those products can be sold while I’m sleeping. However, there’s still inventory to manage and stuff to reorder and pack and ship and sell. And then the third level, my favorite, is selling knowledge, selling information, and there’s an infinite return because I’m literally giving my information. I don’t have to buy a product to sell it. It’s infinitely scalable. Now, the concept behind this is that there’s only two ways to grow your business, right? We’re trying to rapidly scale this business in twelve months to $1 million.

And there’s only two ways to do it. Number one is to get more customers. And that’s where everybody focuses. But that’s the hardest part. The second way we can grow our business is to make those customers more valuable. How do we do that? Well, we get them to buy more things from us or increase the frequency in which they buy. So we need to sell them more products and put them on a subscription. So the action here is you need to launch a product now, you’ve been offering a service. Launch a product now. I think of it as either a lower end product or a higher end product.

So if I’m offering, you know, bookkeeping, that’s the service I’m providing. Or massage therapy, or copywriting, or video editing, that’s the service. Then I want either a higher end or a lower end product. So I think about it like a do it yourself. So here’s like, here’s a cheat sheet, a guide, a course to do it yourself. Here’s how you can start your own massage business or your own copywriting business. There’s a done with you, and this is maybe like through a group coaching program, and then there’s a done for you. And so I break them down into these areas.

Now, if you are able to do this, which you should be able to, then the goal should be able to easily increase your sales by 30% to 50% just like that. Because you already have the customers, you’re just trying to get them to buy more things. When you go through my Funnels and you buy my products, typically we offer you another product on the back end. We call it a one time offer. And typically we have about a 30% to 40% take rate on those. So that means you’re increasing your sales by 30% to 40% just by adding that on.

And in order to use that in your funnels, that takes us to the very next step, which is number nine, and you need to master sales funnels. Now, funnels are basically like a website. The difference is a website is a brick wall home. About us contact Page our services and there’s just way Too Much information. A funnel is basically like a sales rep, where there’s only one action. The only thing they can do is put their email. The only thing they can do is click buy or whatever it is. Now, we want the funnel in order to improve client acquisition.

Like I said, it moves somebody down a sequence. And what we can do with these funnels is we can increase our upsells and downsells, just like I gave you a story about. Now, my first website when I started building websites was in 2001. And there was no funnel builders, there was no Shopify back then. I had to spend, I think, about $25,000 to hire a coder to build me this e commerce store on a platform called Meva Merchant. I don’t even know if it’s out there anymore. Then as things progressed, I started building more websites, more websites to generate leads and stuff like that.

I started then I would do it on Photoshop. So I’d show, like, on Photoshop. Here’s what I wanted to look like. I’d give it to a designer and they would build it for me. But then, was it around somewhere? I think 2017. I started using click funnels. And click funnels allows me just to easily just like drag and drop and create my own funnels. And that was a game changer for me, because now all of a sudden, I could spin up a funnel in like an hour or two, and I could reiterate and optimize it over and over and over, and it allowed me to rapidly scale my growth.

Okay, so the action here is you can get a free clickfunnels account, and I don’t have an affiliate link, I should probably put one here. But you can get it for 30 days. Okay. You can play around with it for free, you can watch all the videos, and you can literally start building these funnels in order to master this. And the goal in this period is to launch a new lead capture page and launch a new product funnel. If you do those things, I mean, we’re talking a 30% to 50% increase in sales right off the bat.

And we’re almost to that million dollars within twelve months. But we still got two more steps. So step number ten, this is to build a promotion, okay? Now the concept behind this is simple. Products are cool. But what people really like is they love events. They love coming together around a theme, they love the energy around it, they love the amount of time they can spend with you, and they love the message, the deep, prolonged message that they can get from you. Now, my first promo was back in like 2017. And I went to Boise, Idaho to go study with Russell Brunson up at clickfunnels and learned how to do what he calls the perfect webinar.

Now, I had this idea to launch a program. Some of you might have heard of it. It’s called the four pillar blueprint Masterclass. And I said, well, I guess I’ll do a webinar to sell this product. I haven’t built it yet, but let’s just throw it on a webinar and see what happens. Well, I ran the webinar and I did about 30 or $35,000 in sales in one single hour, which told me, well, I guess the market wants this, I should probably build it. But I wasn’t really sure. And so I decided that maybe I should try one more of these webinars.

And I did about another 30 grand on the second webinar, proved it wasn’t a fluke. And I said, shoot, I guess I should build this product and deliver it. So the action here is pick which format of a promo you want to do. Is it a webinar like an hour long presentation? Is it like a launch where we do over a couple of days, we launch a product? Is it a live event, either in person at a Ydez, you know, hotel room nearby, or virtual live event or something like that? And how are you going to learn about those one? I recommend reading the book expert secrets or Google Perfect webinar.

Or you could also look at the book Jeff Walker’s product launch formula and just use them like a workbook and go from there. But the goal in this month is to choose one of those promos, webinar launch or live event and launch it in 30 days. And you should be able to make a one years of income within 30 days. Okay. And we are almost to the million dollars, but we still have a couple more things to do at this point. Business should be cranking. We have our content going, we got the paid ads going, we have our sops, we have assistants helping us do the work.

Now we want to hire a fulfillment team. The acquisition, which is sales and marketing, we’re still going to be managing most of that, but the fulfillment team is someone that’s going to help us deliver the service, right. That’s going to help us scale our operations. Now, for me, it’s always sort of been my productivity problem that I have trying to figure out how to manage that process. And so the key is to sort of wait until we’ve been doing it for a long period of time that we can document those processes so somebody has something to follow, right? We’re making money.

Now, what we want to do is figure out how much are we now making per hour. So now we’re 1011 months into this. How much have we made divided by the hours that we’ve worked? I’m making $100 an hour, $500 an hour. Or you can perform another time, study here if you want, and then again, move out of the technical tasks that are anything less than the amount of money that you’re making. The goal here really is to buy back your time. Right in the beginning, you don’t have any money, so you just have your time.

But now you’re making money, and you want to start buying back your time by outsourcing anything that’s making less than you’re making at this point. And then it takes us to our final step here, step number twelve. Month number twelve, maybe for some of you, and that is to join a coaching program. Now, the concept here is that, you know, smart people pay to save time. That’s what we pay for speed and we pay for certainty. That’s what people pay you for, to solve their problem fast and with certainty. And we should also be paying other people to solve our problems.

I believe it’s the greatest hack there is to accelerate learning and growth. And let me give you a story. The first time I went to maybe, I don’t know, maybe second time I went to funnel hacking live is their big marketing conference. I met one of my good friends, Kiana Daniel, invest Diva. You might have seen her online. She’s pretty well known. And we got started right around the same time. And I was much more advanced than her at the time. And over the course of the next year or two, you know, we stayed in contact.

And then I remember she just couldn’t get things figured out. She was falling behind. She couldn’t figure out. I was, like, helping, helping, helping. And eventually she signed up with clickfunnels coaching program, which was like $30,000. And I was like, why would you spend that money? It’s so much money. It’s a waste. You don’t need that. All the information for free. And I tried to, like, kind of poo poo on her spending that much money. Well, a year goes by, and she completely overtakes me. Another year goes by, and she completely overtakes me, and she is just blowing up.

And it’s because of the information, the coaching programs that she signed up for, but not just that one. She signed up for more and found value and signed up for more. And here I was with no coaching programs of course, I caught on very quickly and now I’m in multiple coaching programs at the same time. Action to take here is find your top niche competitors, buy their products, go to their events, make good relationships with them and the other people in their circle. And the goal here, really, you should be joining at least one high level mastermind or coaching program per year.

So in closing, that’s exactly what I did. All right. This is exactly what I did. And it’s 100% what you can do as well. It’s 100% what I would do if I wanted to go from broke to millionaire business owner in twelve months or less. And I say less because if you work hard, then this shouldn’t take you a year. You probably get all this done in a quarter. And the reason why is success and money. It loves speed. But I’d love to hear which one of these steps you would be want to be working on, maybe which one you’re stuck on.

And if you really want to accelerate your life fast, you might also want to learn my 20 cheat codes I’ve learned over the last 20 years. It’s a roadmap to compress a decade into a year or two. So go watch. Watch that video right here by clicking here and I’m going to see you over there.
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