The Million Dollar Sprint - Zero to One Million In Revenue: How to scale a hyper-profitable service business without investment and within 12 months

By Richard Woods

In his latest book, Richard Woods shares the quickest and most viable way to scale your service business to a million in revenue.

He covers cutting-edge sales and marketing techniques - including LinkedIn automation, Facebook advertising and online event marketing - plus a whole host of other top hacks and tips that will see y

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book Brilliance Publishing
• Release date: Jul 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913770594

Richard Woods

Richard Woods is a bestselling author, award-winning entrepreneur, finalist of top BBC series 'The Apprentice', keynote speaker, radio presenter and investor. He runs the Million Dollar Sprint (TM), which works with entrepreneurs to scale their service businesses to a million in revenue and beyond. Richard's first book, 'Digital Trailblazer', went straight to being #1 bestseller on Amazon and continues to sell globally. His second book, 'Brexitpreneurship: How to Win from Brexit', also went straight to #1. In 2015 he was a finalist on BBC series 'The Apprentice', during which time he was the top seller across all tasks (winning eight out of ten, which is second on the all-time list) and broke two records: most sales in one day (GBP4.3 million); and "The best advertising task ever seen on 'The Apprentice'" - credited by Lord Sugar himself. Awards he's won to date include Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Haines Watts); Key Person of Influence (Dent Global), and Marketing Campaign of the Year (Inspire Business Awards). Richard also makes regular appearances on Eagle Radio, BBC Surrey, BBC Sussex, Marlow FM and Brooklands Radio and is a frequent speaker at large business events, trade shows and seminars. He studied Business with Entrepreneurship at Southampton Solent University where he received First-Class Honours for his final dissertation, 'Is there a link between Dyslexia and Entrepreneurship?' and was later awarded an honorary MBA for his contribution to business.

Book preview

Step 1 Part 1: Find your Colin and solve a pain point well and with a solution that scales

As a service provider you’ll already be an expert in your field with a unique feel for your industry sector. But are you sure you haven’t fallen into the ‘be everything to everyone’ trap?

The most successful service businesses know precisely who they help; the result they help their clients to achieve; and the process through which they do so.

Before starting any campaign to win new clients, first dive into your ideal client avatar to understand exactly the pain you intend to solve for them.

Go into this as deeply as you can. The more you understand, the better you’ll be able to develop your solution – and the better it will solve the pain for your clients.

Ultimately, as long as you solve the right pain point, clients will spend a considerable investment to work with you.

Stay Focused

A client once described how picking a target market and a specific pain felt like having ‘niche claustrophobia’. They believed their world was becoming too small and instead wanted to try to sell to two or three other potential client avatars.

I encouraged them to hold steady and to focus on building their sales and marketing systems: to go deep, not wide.

Once they’d actually deployed the templates and training we provided, and had done so consistently over several weeks, something triggered. Like lighting a touchpaper, their company started to scale so rapidly they even had to slow their marketing funnel to keep up with the speed of growth.

We never discussed moving away from their target-client niche again.

TIP: Scratch your own itch. Most of the world’s leading companies have been created by founders who started by solving a pain they had, and then offered it to others.

Part 1: Find your Colin and solve a pain point

I first understood the power of niche in my second business, Yomp, a marketing agency.

When I first launched, I took great pride in announcing that Yomp was a full-service digital marketing agency that worked with all types of businesses, large and small, to be the one-stop-shop that would cover all their marketing needs.

The trouble was, I got what I asked for: businesses of all shapes and sizes, all wanting different types of marketing.

One minute I’d be designing business cards for one-man bands; I even organised printing them, too. Next, I’d create an online store for a Russian faux-fur coat importer, before dashing to a meeting to discuss a Google ads campaign targeting Chinese students for a hall of residence at Southampton University.

I used to recount such stories at a local breakfast networking meeting I attended at an ungodly hour every Wednesday morning. I’d proudly report to my fellow networkers the complexity of each project, thinking they’d be impressed.

Yet after each meeting, I’d scurry round the corner to where I’d hidden my clapped-out silver Ford Mondeo Estate (lovingly named Long John Silver) and dart off before anyone could see me. Then I’d race to the office to pull another 12-14-hour day firefighting client campaigns that were all over the place.

Each day as it grew dark, the phone would finally stop ringing and my staff would go home, leaving me alone. I would reflect and know that something didn’t stack up.

As a team, we made it up as we went along. Each new client represented a new skill we needed to develop as well as a new process – perhaps even specific personnel we needed to recruit.

I would start every day not knowing who to focus on first – we were being pulled in every direction from a client-delivery front. Then there was Yomp’s sales and marketing, for which I was also responsible.

I had so many services and packages to promote; it was crazy. The future was not looking good, and, in a double whammy, I was about to burn out and go bust all at once.

My world looked like a set of arrows going only one inch forward but in 12 different directions. I was drained of energy.

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One morning, however, I found an enquiry in my inbox from a lad in my rugby club who worked for an IT company. They were looking at their marketing, and he mentioned that Yomp might be a good fit.

We were running out of clients who hadn’t lost patience with us so I immediately jumped in the car to head to a meeting with the IT company.

Once I got there, my friend wished me good luck and explained that as marketing wasn’t his remit, it would be over to me to take the meeting. Great, I thought, as I looked around the plush offices, this looks like an epic failure in the making. After all, why would these guys want to work with little ‘have-a-go’ heroes like us?

The boardroom where the meeting took place was full of sharp-suited, ‘proper’ grown-ups, headed by the MD, Colin, who explained that their business had big goals – and equally big expectations.

Their team of over fifty was snowballing, and they were looking for a marketing agency to generate the leads they needed to hit their targets. So, he asked, how would you do it?

Gulp …

Luckily, from the start of my career, when I launched my first website, I watched various experts talk about the new concept of content marketing and SEO. Subsequently, I was able to mix some takeaways from recent YouTube videos into my off-the-cuff presentation. I even managed to link them to client work we had recently completed for a tradeshow exhibition company.

Content is king, Colin, I said, a little self-consciously. But from looking at your website, you don’t have any videos or blogs, you don’t produce an email newsletter, and you have only posted twice in the last month on social media. How can you hope to stand out to potential clients or climb Google’s rankings if your website’s nothing more than a few boring service pages?

Spot on! Colin jumped in. It’s exactly what I’ve been saying to this lot.

From that moment, he took control of the conversation –I scribbled notes faster than a shorthand reporter at a rap convention!

Roughly, Colin already knew what would work. After all, he’d been in his industry for years and had seen it all before. He just needed someone who could see what he saw, knew how to apply it, and – equally importantly – had time to do so.

Let’s keep it simple but focused, he said. After all: ‘Simplicity scales, complexity fails.’

BAM! It hit me right between the eyes.

The last time I’d heard that was from Lord Sugar.

In the long term, I’d got lost following my downfall on The Apprentice. In the first few months after the show, my book Digital Trailblazer had become a bestseller. I’d appeared at numerous red-carpet events with the typical ‘famous for being famous’ crowd from The Only Way Is Essex, Love Island, and Made in Chelsea. Meanwhile, my company’s phone was ringing with queries from potential clients.

Work had picked up, and from the outside, things were going well – I was rushing from client meeting to stage presentation and back again.

I was a busy fool, running around saying ‘yes’ to every opportunity but making no real money.

That meeting with Colin was the slap around the face I needed.

I’d promised myself never to be too complex again, yet somehow I’d filled my life with superficial noise that neither paid the bills nor created clients who needed our services.

That meeting confirmed my understanding of what ‘simplicity’ meant and fuelled my desire to make something extraordinary. I needed to go deeper into a solution than I’d ever dreamed possible.

It was the birthplace of Yomp’s flagship lead-generation service designed for one type of client: our niche.

Essentially, Colin helped us build a service that was perfect for what his company needed.

It was ‘desired result focused’, i.e. he wanted leads, and the product created the focus on getting leads. It fulfilled the real pain point Colin experienced.

We were so blown away by the results that we went on to model (with his blessing) the solution we’d created into a repeatable product with common daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. As an additional bonus, it could also be optimised for both time and client results – which ultimately freed me from being stuck in delivery.

That first meeting with Colin was a Million-Dollar moment for us. We now had our ‘thing’ and became great at it. Our turnover – and profit – boomed.

It was my ticket out of entrepreneurial poverty and becoming a million-dollar business owner.

My world had changed. Now, it looked like this:

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ACTION: Take a moment to visit our audience training module, then complete the worksheet to find who you’re going to target and their pain point that you can solve. Scan the QR code below to download the worksheet!

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Remember: you may have worked with this person before, or they may be hypothetical; they might even be the person you were before you got to where you are today. But, whoever they are, it is vital to identify them. After all, everything starts with the pain you’re going to solve, and how can you solve a pain when you don’t know who that someone is?

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Colin Sale, the man who changed everything!

Step 1 - Part 2 A scalable solution

Now you know who to focus on and how to find a pain point to solve, how do you make it scalable?

Creating a scalable solution means understanding the hours you’re willing to dedicate to your business and crafting your service around