One of my mistakes was not scaling my marketing

One of the mistakes I made as a young entrepreneur (a looonnng time ago) was not realizing how scalable marketing needs to be.

As an engineer, my operations were designed to be efficient and scalable. I would exhibit at various tradeshows and efficiently gather a few hundred leads and follow-up with them. Some would convert to customers, but most would not.

Eventually, I realized that the tradeshow route was not adding enough leads to the "top of the funnel" as it's called. And you need a lot of leads in that funnel since only a small percentage will ever convert to customers — this is typical for most businesses.

So I switched it up and started doing direct mail and email marketing, where we could reach thousands of people in a short period of time.

Think about this for your own business because sales is a volume game for most businesses. Here is how to do the math:

(1) How many of your leads convert to customers? For most businesses, it is well under 10%. Example of a 5% conversion: 100 leads convert to 5 customers.

(2) How much money does the average customer pay you? Let's say it's $500.

(3) Using the above numbers, to generate $50,000 in revenue requires 100 customers which requires 2,000 leads.

Giddy up!

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