The 6 Pillars of Building a 7+ Figure Online Business with Scott Oldford: An EOFire Classic from 2020

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like CEO School. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active, and we'll be breaking down the six pillars of building a seven-figure online business. To drop these value bombs, I brought Scott Olford into EO Fire Studios. Scott is a mentor, advisor, and investor for online businesses scaling past seven figures. And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about listing out your challenges every week and then fixing them, about how being patient will help you find yourself on the right path so you can create successful businesses and become a successful entrepreneur and so much more.

0:41And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Scott and our sponsors. Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Tune in for convos with leading sales experts and top performing reps to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. One of my faves, the monthly app with Jason and Ethan, where they share hacks, tips, and tricks. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Scott, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know.

1:17I'm so excited to be here, John. Well, actually, I think most people don't know. Number one, I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a farm in Newfoundland, Canada, my parents' acreage. And my parents weren't entrepreneurs literally, you know, eight months, seven months of the year. It's so snowy, so cold. Um, living in Northern California now. So a lot of difference, but came from a place where there was no one around 20 minute drive to be able to, you know, even get to school. Um, so isolation to being super connected. It's, um, it's a, it's a cool polarity. Well, I can definitely tell you, I did not know that about you, although we've been connecting for quite a few years now.

1:59So very fascinating stuff. And the Fire Nation, as I mentioned during the introduction, we're talking about the six pillars of building a seven figure plus online business. So let's just start off in the world of reality, Scott. Is it realistic to be able to scale an online business past seven figures for the ordinary entrepreneur? I think that it's more than possible. I've seen time and time again. I think that, you know, one of the things that entrepreneurs have to do if they want to be successful, there's lots of things, but one big thing is they sort of got to, you know, say goodbye to reality for a minute.

2:37And I think that a lot of people do a good job of that. They kind of put in what, you know, they always talked about Steve with Steve Jobs, reality distortion field. And so I think in many ways, you've got to stop thinking about what's necessarily realistic and what you really kind of want to work towards. But I mean, I've seen so many people, John, I'm sure you have as well, that, you know, you have the right, if you're in the right time at the right place, if you're working on your mastery, working on your skill, you have the right systems in place that we're going to be talking about right today, the right pillars, your ability to get to seven figures and pass seven figures is going to happen at some point, right?

3:17It's kind of like, I love the quote, overnight success takes, you know, 15 years. and you know my whole concept in in helping people and mentoring people has always been let's reduce how much time it takes to be able to you know small in that gap or really increase the momentum that someone has but is it possible absolutely do people do it absolutely and i also guarantee you this and and i would say that you felt this as well john once you make your first million the second's way easier the third's way easier once you've made your first million dollar business they just keep on getting easier because now you have the different mindset that gets developed from developing that first million dollar business.

3:56And you have that belief. You know, you look back to, you know, Robert or Roger Bannister running the four minute mile and it's just like, nobody thought it was possible. Like it just was not possible. Then all of a sudden this guy does it. And then like 36 people do it within the next few months. I mean, that's just the reality that he broke through that distortion field that you were talking about. And kind of once you break through that initial seven figure barrier, and I'll never forget that day. I kind of called Kate over and I'm like, Kate, look at our balance right here. Like there are seven figures in this bank balance.

4:26And she was just like, oh my God, that's absolutely insanity. And once we got there, it was just like, I felt like it wasn't the actual case, but it felt like I woke up the next day and I was at 2 million. And I felt like I woke up the next day and I was at 4 million. I was just like, obviously that took time to get to those numbers, but it was just like so much easier and so much less because, you know, we had laid down the tracks. We had gotten initial momentum. We had gotten something that I know that you're a big believer in, traction. And once you have those things, Fire Nation, now you can do a lot of things.

4:57And one of those things is you can double down, triple down, quadruple down on what's actually working. So let's just dive right in, Scott, because you believe that there are some significant traits that most entrepreneurs possess that are successful. Break those down for us. I've been an entrepreneur, literally, as I said, when I was seven, eight years old, I made my first$20 ,000 selling eggs on my parents' acreage. And, you know, by the time I was 16, I had a million dollar business. By the time I was 21, I was a million dollars in debt, lost it all, went backwards. And and have spent the last, you know, six, seven years really not just building back from that, but also knowing that whenever you fail, it's a lot easier to look back and look at your failures and be like, well, that's why that didn't work versus looking at your success.

5:42Success doesn't really tell you as much as failure. And so in all that time, literally being an entrepreneur for 20 years right from the get-go, I look back and a lot of the people that I mentor, the things that I see consistently is persistence. The big one is just every single day just getting up and getting up and getting up and getting up and doing the work and doing the work and not necessarily being too concerned with, which is the second one, being too concerned with the short-term results, but rather being concerned with the long-term results. The real truth is both of us here on this call, we're going to be entrepreneurs until the day we die.

6:19And if you're listening to this, more than likely, especially if you already have a business, you're going to be an entrepreneur until the day you die. So you thinking about 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, instead of then just next 30 days. And I know you may have bills to pay. I know you might have things to grow and things you want to do and goals that you want to hit. But being able to focus on that long term is so critical. The third thing is responsibility. uh, entrepreneurship is really you owning your own destiny is you really activating that DNA inside of you. That's there. That has been there by your ancestors that were all entrepreneurs just a few hundred years ago.

6:58And you taking responsibility for your emotions, you taking responsibility for what happens, you taking responsibility for what goes right and what doesn't go right. Uh, and then I'll say the fourth and I could go on with about 10 today, but you You know, I would say the fourth is self-trust and confidence and you trusting that you're making the right. You know, 99 percent of the time when an entrepreneur, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, they buy things they don't necessarily need or they get help they don't necessarily need or, you know, whatever it might be. Or they get slowed down. And what slows them down most of the time is the fact that they don't trust themselves and they don't have confidence in their decision making, which also makes it so that they can't trust others.

7:38So they can't hire a team. They don't trust their agency that they might hire or the person they might hire. And so if you go about every single day and instead of you getting out of your head and getting into your, what I call getting out of your head, getting into your belly, and you start making your decisions from a little bit more of your intuitiveness, not what necessarily is the right thing to do or what some guru might say to do, but rather do what really makes sense for you and you trusting that and you trusting that. Whatever happens, whether that looks like failure or that looks like success, that is the right way.

8:13And I found when everything started working for me, which I would consider is 2015, 2016, where things just literally at just lightning speed, it was when I went from, you know what, I'm going to disattach myself from my ego. I'm going to disattach the fact that, you know what, I don't know what path I'm on. I'm no longer going to try to control everything. And I'm rather just going to allow myself to trust myself and making that these decisions that I'm making will eventually work. And I'll just continually learn. And that not labeling failure as failure. It's really hard to do that when you win a million dollars in debt, but rather labeling failure as lessons that I can now use so that I can get more and more successful.

8:53And look, now, five years after that or seven years after that, I've been able to generate close to$40 million of my own money in that time in the past number of years. And I've helped generate half a billion dollars of revenue for other people. And it all came from me just getting to my belly instead of getting all in my head and second guessing my decisions. And then that, of course, slowing me down. Let's run through the six pillars and then break down for us that most effective process that we can actually manage these pillars within our business. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, this, when I look at this and I really came up with this a few years ago when I was mentoring people.

9:35And so, and then I wrote an article on Entrepreneur Magazine and it was my most popular. And I was like, well, that sounds like, you know, people like this. And so business comes down to this. It comes down to especially online businesses. So it comes down to marketing. So you can write these down if you're listening to this. You write these down, marketing, sales, operations slash team, finance, mindset, as well as delivery. Okay, so these six pillars really make up any online business. And in the businesses that I see that succeed the most, that get the most momentum, that get the most growth, what we're looking for is you to be able to manage these six elements and understand what your problems are, what your challenges are, what your potential challenges are, and then being able to take these.

10:23And most entrepreneurs could succeed very easily if all they did was at least once a week, and this is an exercise I try to get everyone to do, is just list down all of those issues on a weekly basis and then go fix them. Most people know, oh, you know what, I need more lead sources. Most people know, you know what, I don't really have my finances in check. But what happens? we don't take time to be present with what's going on inside of our business we don't have enough attention and awareness around these things and so we just let them drift we let them drift because there's so many things that we can do as an entrepreneur and so eventually they come and they really hurt us so let's do this scott let's go through your six pillars and either use a made-up company or something you've seen in the past with your business or one of your clients business and just give us like a specific example of how we would be able to fix something or manage something within our business based off of these pillars.

11:17Absolutely. Absolutely. We can totally do that. So, so let's go with, um, let's go with just market it. We'll go marketing onwards. Okay. So if, if, if I'm in a business, um, and I'll just use some examples of a typical online business, if I'm in an, if I'm in an online business, let's say that you've been using organic marketing and you've been using your Instagram or your email list or whatever it might be. And let's say from a lead generation perspective, you know, know that every single month you're kind of like using just your hustle in order to be able to get new leads, right? You know, it's always just about creating content, doing this, doing that.

11:49Well, that would be one of the core big issues of, you know what, we only have this way of generating leads. And then it's going, okay, well, what possibilities do I have to be able to generate more leads? And then it would be, okay, well, I'm going to use, you know, YouTube advertising, or I'm going to use this, I'm going to use that. Okay, well, now that creates a secondary, set of issues, which, well, how do I do that? Do I hire someone? Do I learn it myself? How do I do that? And so then the whole process, and as we go through here, is you figuring out all the issues and then you being like, okay, what am I going to do the next seven days?

12:20What am I going to do the next 30 days? What am I going to do the next 90 days? All right, so marketing, that would be one example. On sales, let's say it's the fact that you're just completely overwhelmed with sales calls. Let's say you fixed your marketing problem, and now you're into your sales, and you have a great close rate. You have everything that's going on there. But the problem is, is that you literally have more people that want to get on a sales call with you than you have time. And now you're working 50 hours a week because you still have to run a business. So the problem would be, well, how do I fix that?

12:47Well, you're either going to need to, you know, qualify people better. You're going to need to hire someone to make sure that people are qualified or you're going to need to hire a salesperson. And then of course that creates its own problem. Well, where am I going to find that salesperson? How am I going to hire them? How am I going to train them? And then, you know, being able to know, okay, well, that's one of the actions that I need to take care of in the next 30 days or in the next 60 days, right? Then going to, you know, let's call it operations and team. The whole business doesn't have any process.

13:16There's no SOPs, no standard operation procedures in the business. Okay, well, how am I going to get that fixed? You know what? I'm running around. My email inbox, I have 600 messages in there. I don't know how I'm ever going to get reply to that. I'm not posting on social media the way I want. Okay, well, here are all these issues. Again, I'm just kind of writing down every single issue and being like, okay, what is the possible answers to this? Or let me go find the possible answers to that. And then we go over to delivery. People are coming in and they're not getting customer experience the way that I want them to.

13:47It's taking a couple of days to reply to them. It's taking, they're not really getting the best of the best because there's not an onboarding sequence when they come in the door. Well, okay, well, how do I fix that? Is it going and, you know, buying Joey Coleman's, one of my friends, Joey Coleman's, you know, first 100 days book and figuring out how to create an amazing customer experience? Is it hiring someone to do that? So it's really, it's really, you know, in every single one of these scenarios, writing this down and then figuring out what the solution is and then giving yourself that responsibility and that trust to being able to get there.

14:16And, of course, the last one's financial and mindset. Mindset, this is just every single time that you up level. And you know this, John, any entrepreneur knows as you up level, there's just new problems. Entrepreneurship is always about just solving problems, finding new ones, solving problems. The more money you generate, the more problems you're going to have, because that's how you make money. And then the last one in speaking of money, your financials, probably the number one thing that, you know, really, really, really hurts people in the growth and everything combined. They don't have their financials in order.

14:47And so when it comes to financials, it could be, you know what, we have this major liability or, you know what, we have this debt. How are we going to take care of this debt? Or it could just simply be, you know what, we really don't have somebody that's managing our financials. And if we keep on doing that, we're going to come tax time and it's going to be really bad. Or we're going to come to the point where there's not enough money in the bank account because we didn't really track it well enough. So those are just some examples, just very generic examples. But the process always is, let's list all the problems out.

15:14Let's list all the solutions out. And then let's figure out what we're going to work on this week, in the next month, and the next three months. And then, of course, if you have a team, bringing that back to your team and allowing them to see those problems, those challenges. And as you do this, my exercise is to do it at least once a month, ideally seven every week. And now you have awareness and attention on everything that's going on in the business. And you really have a better idea of how to get where you want to go. They were generic, but they were very specific. And I know that's what Fire Nation loves is when we give a specific solution to an actual problem and walking through the six pillars and you giving that specific example of how it could relate to a business in general is super, super helpful.

15:58So Fire Nation, please take heed from this, you know, be doing this at least once a month. And if you're really wanting to get to that seven figures and beyond, do it once a week. I mean, literally, it's you solving problems. It's you figuring out better systems. It's you creating better experiences. all these things that are included with these six pillars, critical, critical, critical. So we are just getting started. We're going to be talking about the ROI method. You're not going to want to miss that. We're going to talk about the number one thing you need to know when scaling to seven figures plus Fire Nation.

16:27I mean, this is some great stuff and it's all coming back as soon as we thank our sponsors. Tech is great. It can help us grow and scale our businesses in so many ways, but it can also be clunky, time consuming to manage and expensive. That's why I'm excited to introduce you to HubSpot CRM, the best platform to speed up your sales and scale your business without blowing your budget. HubSpot's all-in-one CRM helps you automate tedious tasks, keep track of all your deals in one place, and make sure your whole team has access to the same data. No need to worry about the management and cost of a massive tech stack.

17:02HubSpot gives you everything you need all in one place. Plus, with fast activation, HubSpot makes it easy for the entire team to get up to speed, saving you precious time. And best of all, you can try before you buy. No commitment, no hidden fees, not even a credit card is needed to sign up. Get started for free at HubSpot.com. That's HubSpot.com. So Scott, we're back. And as I kind of teased before the break, the ROI method, what the heck is it and how does it work? I've had a really, really deep background in psychology and marketing, and I've ran many marketing agencies and scaled many of those past multiple seven figures.

17:40And I always like to look at things. If I can create a framework, I know I'm able to help someone in a better way. So when I started really marketing online, selling online programs and courses and coaching and mentorship and these different types of things, and I started working with online entrepreneurs, I saw, okay, what's the number one issue that typically stops someone from getting the seven figures. Number one issue is going to be the fact that they do not have enough potential customers or enough potential leads to turn into customers. And so they rely on referrals or organic or whatever it might be.

18:14But further than that problem, it came down to three specific issues. And so the first is relevancy. So if you have relevancy, it's that moment of saying, you know what, Scott does that, or John does that. It's a moment of, in less than seven seconds, someone being able to articulate, oh, that's what that person does. Is that relevant to me? Yes or no. And inside of relevancy, it goes back to your having the right combination of your avatar and knowing exactly who that niche is, having the right positioning and making sure that you understand how someone needs to see you, to be able to see you as an authority, to be able to solve their problem.

18:56They have to, you know, you have to ensure that from a messaging perspective that you're talking to the right person at the right time. So think about it this way. There's three different types of leads. There's people that are in what I call the sidewalk, people that are in the slow lane and the fast lane. People in the sidewalk, they don't know what their problem or pain is. So you're educating them to that. The people in the slow lane, they know what their pain and problem is, but now they're trying to figure out really what the process is, what the methodology is, who they should trust, where the proof is to say that this is the way that this should be solved.

19:28And then finally, in the fast lane, it would be somebody that's, okay, you know what, I understand this. I want to buy something. Let me figure out my objections. Let me figure out what the solution looks like. And let me look at how, what the vision of the future is, right? So being able to see something at the right time. So if you're listening to this and you don't know that you need a marketing funnel to be able to, you know, bring in leads to increase, you know, and grow your business, you're probably in the sidewalk. If you're here and you're trying to figure out how to do marketing, you're probably in the slow lane.

19:55And if you're here and you're like, you know, I'm just trying to find the right person, the right solution, what works for me and what, you know, where my business is. Well, you're in the fast lane, but your customers are also in this. So making sure you have your messaging so important for relevancy. And then the last piece is making sure that you have the right offer and making sure that you have the right offer for who you're positioning yourself to, who your avatar is and how you're talking to them. And when we do all of this, we have this moment. It's kind of like the light bulb moment. It's like that moment of relevancy.

20:23And when you get that moment of someone saying, yes, this is for me. Now you can charge what you're worth. Now you have someone's attention. Now someone is really, and of course, attention brings currency, right? Attention brings money always, wherever someone's attention goes, money flows. And so this relevancy is so important. And it's what most people lack online, whether it's the fact that you're not niching down enough, whether it's you're not really having the right messaging on your sales pages or in your webinar or whatever it might be. So that's the first, the relevancy. That's the R and the ROI method.

20:57So that's first. And second is omnipresence. And omnipresence is really the art of managing and mediating attention. And so omnipresence is the idea of if I can make something relevant to someone and then I can keep their attention over and over and over again, and I can really subliminally feed them messages that allows for me to change their mindset about different parts or different questions or different objections that they have. And I can continue being in front of them over and over and over and over and over again. All these sort of, there's essentially 15 psychological triggers that happen over time when we show up to people over and over and over and over and over again.

21:38And like the red car effect and the bandwagon effect and so on and so forth. And so omnipresence allows us to target those that are inside of our audience that are, you know, our potential leads and just showing up to them over and over and over again, almost hacking their attention. Because the more we have of someone's attention, Gary V talks about this all the time. The more of attention we have of someone, the higher chance that we're going to be able to turn them into a customer and then a repeat customer in the future. So the first part is relevancy. The second part, we need to be able to ensure we have their attention across multiple platforms.

22:13And we're really allowing for their attention to be on us so that we can help them get to that fast lane that I talked about a minute ago. So that's the O, R-O. The I, if you've ever sold anything, you might feel sometimes a little salesy, right? You get on a sales call, you get on a webinar, you're hard pitching, you're almost twisting someone's arm. And so, and John does a great job of this. And so many people that are at them, multiple seven figures do this. You know, really effective sales comes down to intimacy. And intimacy comes down to three things. It comes down to being able to have a connection, being able to have a conversation, and being able to have community.

22:52And so when these three things are present, when you're able to have conversations, whether it's through Facebook groups or whether it's through your email list or whether it's through a podcast like this. you know this this connection and this conversation this community these three things create a scenario where people feel connected to you they'll feel it feel connected to something larger and they feel the intimacy of somebody that is willing to look at them see them hear them you got to remember most people are lonely most people just want someone to be there that they can talk to whether it be a community whether it be you and we create these three things together, it creates a sales conversation that's no longer selling, but an actual opportunity.

23:30So we add these three things together. And when we're ultra relevant, when we are really attacking or, you know, hacking someone's attention, and then we're really selling with intimacy and makes it so it doesn't feel like a sale. It just really feels like an opportunity. And now this is really marketing done what I would consider the right way. And it makes everyone feel good. boom boom boom goes the dynamite fire nation relevancy omnipresence intimacy let's talk about relevancy for a second where attention grows money goes fire nation think about that when it comes to being relevant omnipresence be on multiple levels be everywhere you can and should be and then intimacy that connection that conversation that community people want to feel part of something Fire Nation.