How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Business

Ever wonder what it really takes to build a multi-million dollar business from scratch? In this video, Steve shares the unfiltered story of how he went from scrappy startup founder to building a thriving enterprise.

You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the key decisions, hard lessons, and growth strategies that shaped his journey. If you're building something big—or just dreaming about what’s possible—this is the real-world insight you’ve been waiting for.

TRANSCRIPT:

When I was 16 years old, I left home. I moved into my sister's house, specifically her basement. I started my first company. And by the time I was 20 years old, it was a multimillion dollar business. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through how I did it and how you could do it too, if you're interested in the path of entrepreneurship. So I'm going to illustrate here to keep things interesting.

But yeah, this is me when I was 16. All right. I was making $4 and 25 cents an hour at the local dairy queen. All right. I was making blizzards. I was serving ice cream, French fries, and hamburgers to people making $4 and 25 cents an hour. And trust me, it wasn't cutting it. All right. So what I decided to do instead is to start my own business.

So for a couple of summers, I worked with my buddies at this sprinkler business making 10 bucks an hour. And they told me, Hey, look, come work with us and you can take your shirt off. And I was like, I'm all in. That sounds amazing. Well, I went back to this company in my junior year and they disappeared. They're gone out of business.

So I was left with this decision, make $4.25 an hour, which I didn't want to do, or start handing out business cards in the area and perform sprinkler work. So that's what I did. I started handing out business cards at this little business card. I put my name on there. My business was called Steve's sprinklers. I was doing sprinklers and landscaping and I took my sister's garage. Here's her house. Here's her garage right here. And I converted this in to my office, right? So I built all these shelves and on these shelves, I had all my parts organized, all my sprinkler parts. I hung my pipe here and all sorts of stuff, but I converted this into my working office.

Now I went from charging $4.25 an hour to charging $50 an hour. And then plus I put a markup on all my parts. So at a minimum, I marked my parts up by 100%. Now, some parts like the smaller parts, I would mark up sometimes 200 to 300%, not because I was out to rip people off, but instead, you know, I needed to recover my overhead in this hourly rate, wasn't going to do it. And neither did I want to just work for wages. I didn't want to just swap my time for money. And if I was just doing pure hourly and passing the cost of the parts on to customers that wouldn't really work well. And it wouldn't get me there. Plus you also have to think that some parts, they get lost. They'd fall out of my car. They'd go into the dirt. They'd get just broken or become obsolete. So I had to cover that with my markup. So that's what I did here. $50 an hour plus parts. And I went out and I started performing service work for customers.

So it didn't require a lot of capital. In fact, what I did is I bought this Subaru. This is my Subaru here. I know I'm such a great artist, right? I know you're going to like my pictures. In fact, if you like my pictures and you think they're Picasso quality, can I get a yes in the comments box below? No, I'm just kidding. You don't need to put a yes, but you could give me a thumbs up or something or leave some type of comment just to amuse me here.

So I bought this Subaru. It was $1,000. It was army green, had some black on it. This thing was a total piece of crap. But what I liked is it had a tow hitch and I was able to buy a trailer. This is my trailer. And my trailer was able to tow my trencher. This is a picture of my with its teeth and the trencher enabled me to dig holes, dig the trenches for me to install the sprinkler systems. So I bought this thousand bucks down. Didn't require a lot of capital. Like I said, I filled my sister's garage with some parts. So that required some working capital and inventory. And I went out there and I started performing work. So the more money I made, the more I was able to invest in tools and start building up my savings account.

Well, inevitably I would come across other customers who would have these beautiful homes and they'd say to me, Steve, we want to plant some trees. You know, we want to have this nice, like water feature. This is a tree, right? Here's some trees. We want to do water features. We want to do some boulders. We want to build like a patio over here, whatever it is. We want it to do these beautiful landscapes. Well, I said to myself, okay, I could do that. I had no experience in it, but I could read books. I could watch videos and I could figure it out, you know?

So that's what I did. And I started quoting these projects and some jobs in the beginning were, let's just say $10,000. So what I would do is I'd go to these customers and say, look, when you sign the contract, in order to get on my schedule, you need to give me 50% down. So they'd give me a 50% down payment, which would then give me the capital that I needed to go out there and buy parts and then hire my friends and pay them while I started the project and started working. Then at the very end, I would collect the last 50%. So this was the final payment.

And this is what I did for a while, but here's the big mistake that I made in this process. I did this and my customers were holding on to the last 50%. Well, my jobs would consume, you know, 70% of the total cost before I was done. So I was floating this 20%, you know, 2000 bucks on this job. I was floating that out of my savings until I collected this last 50%. So I changed my payment terms and I made it 50% down and then 30% in the middle and 20% at the end. And then I even changed it later on to like a third, third, third. So I did a third, third, third, depending on how long the job was, or I structured it at like 50, 40, 10.

But the goal was, was to get as much cash as possible upfront in order to provide the working capital that I needed to scale my business. So the more jobs that I did, the more profit that I earned, the more people that I hired gave me more capital to reinvest in the business. And next I know I was able to buy a fleet of trucks. So these are my trucks right here. I know terrible trucks. Okay. These are all my trucks at all this equipment. I invested in a big office and we were out there and we were moving and shaking.

Here's the crazy thing though, through this entire process, when I built this million dollar business, multimillion dollar company here, I am running this business and I had all these employees and I had no clue how to read financial statements. I've said that before on my podcast, I've said it in other videos. And I share this with you now because this is really important to understand. You don't have to become a nerd with financial statements, but you have to understand the language behind the numbers. You have to understand how money flows within the company.

And I made a lot of mistakes along the way with my pricing. Sometimes my pricing was off. Sometimes my terms really hurt me from a cashflow perspective. I didn't really understand working capital and that impacted my liquidity. So understanding how numbers flowed through my business was really, really important. So here I was, I was doing these jobs and I kept increasing my quality and the value that I was delivering to my customers through design and other things, which allowed me to increase my pricing and achieve price premiums, which only increased my margin.

But here's the big thing that transformed my business that I want to share with you here. You know, I was spending so much money on customer acquisition costs. I'll abbreviate here as CAC, customer acquisition costs. It would cost me so much money. Let's just say, you know, is $3,000 to bring in a brand new customer. So I was spending all this money in marketing and advertising and sales just to bring in these new customers. Here's the problem with this. Okay. So I bring in new customers and every time I bring in a new customer, I have to spend 3K, 3K, 3K, 3K. Now that's okay. If it's recurring revenue. Okay. Did you get it? No pun intended there. That's kind of funny or not, but 3K, 3K for each person. And they would do a landscape job and they would be done.

Now, oftentimes I was able to get referrals off these customers, which led to maybe a few more customers and other jobs, which helped out with this customer acquisition costs. But it was very labor intensive to find these customers and find them at the right time when they needed landscaping services. What I realized is that it's better instead of going after individual homeowners, because I was in the residential market to go after builders. So here I have a builder and this builder builds all these homes, right? Here's a picture of a home, picture of a home, picture of a home, right? So the builder would build all these homes every year over and over again.

So when I changed my model and I stopped going after these individuals and I changed my ideal customer profile to be builders, didn't mean I stopped serving. That didn't mean that I stopped serving these individuals, but instead I got clarity on my ideal customer profile, started going after these builders here. My customer acquisition costs, let's say was the same. It was actually lower because I was just doing direct marketing and is so much more focused on these builders. All I had to do is get one builder and then they would refer me oftentimes or just have me do these projects for them, which required no additional marketing spend. So I went from investing, I'd say 15 to 20% of my revenue to grow my business through sales and marketing. And it went below 10%. I think we got it down to 6% at one point.

And this is my whole journey in the process. Like I said, I made a ton of mistakes in this process of building this business. And I had a lot of failures too, but I point this out because number one, financial literacy is critical because you can see just through this example, how many times I referred to the numbers and knowing the numbers will allow you to make certain moves to optimize profit and cashflow, which will make a huge difference in the longterm. But also I want to point out strategy. Strategy comes down to where you're going to compete, how you're going to compete, your ideal customer profile, your product market fit, all these things I had to learn along the way and that enabled me to transform my business. And I was able to take it from just doing a couple million to several million a year. And the profit margins also went up with them.

So this is how this all fits together. Does this make sense to you? What type of topics do you want me to speak on? Can you drop that down in the comments box below? Because that will help me as I go out there and record more videos. So I'd love to hear from you, but this is a topic that I'm super passionate about. Be sure to check out my other videos. You can also listen to my podcast, boosting your financial IQ and business strategy. If you want to learn more and you can always connect with me down below in the description box, I'll provide you some links. All right, thanks for tuning in. And until next time, be sure to subscribe and share. Cheers.