3 Keys to My First Million Dollar Year
It took 3 years, but I've never made less than a million since
I knew nothing at all about business when I went out on my own in August of 2003. I had just given birth to my second child, and there was no way I could go back to the hour long commute each way from my home in Hermosa Beach to the offices of Munger, Tolles & Olson in downtown LA.
Entrepreneurship was not the path I thought I would take, but it was clearly what Life wanted for me, and if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right.
Back then, that meant building a million dollar business, which at that time meant earning $1M+ per year in revenue.
I made my first million of revenue in 2006, and I’ve never earned less than $1M per year since then, even in the years I was going through my bankruptcy. I’ll share the whole story of how I set up my businesses so that was possible in a future post. If you haven’t subscribed yet, do that now to get notified when I write about that.
Today, I’m sharing about my first million dollar year, and the three surprising keys to how I was able to do it so fast, with two little kids at home, even though I knew nothing whatsoever about business.
The First Key to a Million: Practical Magic
In early 2004, I met my first really good mentor. His name was Scott, and he invited me into a 3-year vision planning process that I now call Practical Magic. I call it practical magic because it uses practical tools of post-it notes, sharpies, and poster board (or a wall) to create real life magic.
It was this process that was primarily responsible for my meteoric rise to a million in revenue in just three years.
Before the 3-year Practical Magic process, I had some ideas about what I wanted to create with my law practice, but they were vague, and amorphous. I thought a lot about my dreams, and even wrote them down in one spiral notebook after another, but I didn’t have any structure for creating them.
And, so much was buried in my sub-conscious that I didn’t really have any way to excavate.
The Practical Magic process took all of the dreams out of my head, and put them into a structure that operated like the banks on a river, directing the force of water that would otherwise pool into the stagnant body of a lake into a powerhouse that could fuel an entire town or city.
The most amazing thing to me about the process was that most of what I put onto my first Practical Magic board for 3-years, actually ended up occurring within 1 year … even though I really didn’t look at my board again after I created it until a year later.
When I looked back the following year, at the beginning of 2005, I was amazed by what I saw — almost everything I had dreamed into vision for 3 years had already occurred, though it would take me another 2 years to hit the million dollar mark.
Join the next Practical Magic Workshop with me (or get the recording) here.
The Second Key to a Million: How I Handled My Divorce
Curveball, right? What would divorce and earning money have to do with each other? It turns out, quite a lot. I’ve seen many many people handle their divorces in such a way where they ruin their financial reality, blaming it all on their ex. It’s not their ex who ruined their finances. It’s their choice of how they responded to their ex that ruined their finances.
And, as a rising Quing, you may end up divorced, or be in the midst of a divorce, and how you handle it will determine so much about your future results.
My Husband Was a Stay at Home Dad and I Was the Breadwinner
In early 2005, I told my husband I wanted to get divorced. My father had died the prior September, and his death brought home just how short life is and how much I wanted real love in my life. I couldn’t pretend that what my husband and I had was the kind of love I wanted.
My husband was a stay at home dad, and I was the breadwinner. It was the beginning of my Quing reality. But, we didn’t have any role models for how to navigate the stay at home dad/breadwinner mom dynamic, and our poor handling of it led to de-polarization of our relationship.
Had I known then what I know now, I think we could have saved the relationship. But, one thing I was certain about: I did not want to subject my kids to a long, drawn out, court battle. His family and friends, and our lawyers, had different ideas.
We hired “collaborative lawyers” with the desire to keep things as amicable as possible. But, he was extremely afraid I was going to screw him over financially. And, my lawyers were trying to get me to fight over what seemed to me to be nickels and dimes.
Despite the collaborative approach, the conflict was escalating, and the legal bills were getting higher and higher each month, with me footing the bill for all of it.
Even the “Collaborative Lawyers” Were Escalating the Conflict
One day, I had enough, and finally broke down literally praying to God for answers. I heard a voice. It said:
“Ask him what he needs, and give it to him.”
“What? I can’t do that. He’ll take me for everything.”
“You’ll make more.”
I sat with that for a long while … “you’ll make more.”
It was so clearly the right answer.
If I could put the conflict aside, and reclaim all of the time and energy and attention that was going to fighting with the father of my children, I could reclaim that energy and put it into earning what I’d need to pay him.
It was right.
Stop fighting, and give him what he needed.
Gulp. Okay.
Half of everything we had in the bank to “buy out” my share of the business I had only just started plus $4,000/mo. That’s what he needed, and I said okay.
And, it worked.
2006 would be my first year I’d make a million in revenue. There’s no possibility I would have earned that million if I had remained in conflict with him.
And, I’ve earned more than a million every year since then even in the year I filed bankruptcy, which I’ll detail for you in a future article because it’s critically important that you understand how to set up your businesses with this kind of protection.
The Third Key to a Million: Getting the Right Support
I’m big on using money to save time, energy, and attention whenever possible. It’s one of the primary drivers of how I make decisions about the use of my resources.
Remember: money is infinitely renewable when you know how to access it, and earn it. Time, energy and attention are non-renewable.
If you can use money to leverage someone else’s lessons to shortcut your own learnings, do it.
I didn’t always get the right support, but I always got support. And in some cases that meant investing quite a bit to learn from people who showed me exactly how I didn’t want to do things.
I’ve often learned as much from contrast as I have learning from those who showed me the way. Getting to a million was easy once I could ask the right people for the right support, and get the answers I needed.
Practically speaking, my first million came from mastering these 5 factors:
Creating a scripted and structured system for getting hired by exactly the right clients I wanted to serve nearly 100% of the time;
Pricing and packaging my services based on outcomes at the right amount for what I needed to in order to deliver on a high quality, client-centric service;
Offering an “affordable premium” pricing model that built choice into my fee quoting system so my clients were choosing the right fee for them, based on the outcome they desired;
Focusing my initial marketing in on one specific niche, and expanding out to other niches only after mastering that one (this was the hardest decision, and the most lucrative and impactful);
Hiring the right support in my office so I could focus on educating my community, learning to lead my team and handle the business aspects of the business.
If you can structure your service — any service at all — with these 5 factors, you can get to a million of revenue.
Getting to a Million Isn’t Nearly as Difficult as Leading Like a Millionaire
I learned to earn money before I learned to handle the money well, and with hindsight, I could have, should have, wish I would have done both at once - learn to make the money AND manage it well.
But, I didn’t know how to find the right people to support me with that.
I was able to hire support to help me script and structure my sales process, and nail down my marketing systems, and even show me how to hire people for my office because I knew how to ask the questions to find the support for dialing in sales, marketing and hiring.
But I didn’t know the right questions to ask when it came to managing the money part of my business. And I thought the legal parts were for big companies, not for little ole businesses like mine. Big, expensive error.
Turns out that this error is one that a lot of the million dollar business babes were making right alongside me back then.
I wonder if it’s still the case. Are all these women making millions on Insta and TikTok handling their legal and financial matters better than I did? If you know, comment here and let me know what you know because I’m curious.
And, I’m working on an update to an eBook I created years ago called the LIFT Manifesto: What I Wish I’d Known About Legal, Insurance, Financial and Tax Matters Before Losing $1M+ (I’ll likely update it to $5M at least before I republish it).
If you want to be sure to get notified as soon as it’s done, subscribe if you aren’t already subscribed.
And, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, do that for the best, most intimate content. I’m going to do something cool to support others with the money that comes in to the Quingdom. You’ll know as soon as I know, and if you are a paid subscriber, you’ll get to participate in the decision-making.