10 years of learnings in one place.

Starting and growing a business is hard work. This guide will serve as your roadmap to avoid the common mistakes entrepreneurs often make.

The learnings from this guide apply to every entrepreneur.

If you make $0 this will help you ━ to start.

If you make $10M this will help you ━ to gain clarity.

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What’s This About?

Hey, I’m Nicolas.

I’ve been involved in over 250+ business projects and I’m currently building the largest entrepreneur community in Barcelona.

This is my personal checklist—straightforward—to quickly analyze a business.

Think of it as a diagnostic tool.

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Grab your coffee,

Let’s start.

If I had to use one word to describe a successful business, that would be “structure”.

There’s no way around it.

I still have to live the day and see a Great Business that WORKS without it.

“Fun fact about me ━ I hate chaos. I like clarity.

Let’s back off a little and see where everything starts.

The mess you have today in your business is not because of what you did yesterday.

. . . is for what you did 3 years ago.

This is where it usually starts for most of the entrepreneurs:

Mistake ━ start selling right away.

I know, I know . . . hold your horses.

Sales are VERY important, don’t get me wrong, but a business is more than that.

You can’t buy a car engine and go around your neighborhood saying that you just bought a brand-new Lamborghini. Or can you? DO what makes you happy ━ do you.

This is why jumping into sales doesn’t work when you start a business.

Because . . . you don’t even know:

• WHAT –or– WHOM you’re selling to

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

With no direction, and no plan to follow.

Look,

I get it, I was that guy.

We want things to happen fast, we don’t have time. . .

. . . we don’t want to deal with offer building, finding the right ICP or configuring the CRM.

What. does. that. even meeean?!?

That’s boring.

So, what do we do?

We have to do it anyway.

I challenge you to name ONE entrepreneur who has some level of real success / freedom and skipped this process.

If you don’t take the time to do it, you’ll never succeed.

Sorry.

Ok,

Let’s bring some HOPE back to this depressing situation.

On this page, you’ll have the simplest way to visualize and understand the complexity that goes behind a structured business.

You can read, learn and use it for your own business.

If you do this in your business, you’ll gain clarity.

And with clarity; comes hope.

HOPE is the source of unlimited energy.

And that’s all you need to keep crushing and never give up.

5000ft Overview

In a nutshell, this is how any business works.

Attract → Convert → Multiply

Traffic

Traffic strategies are plenty. . . and come in 101 shapes, but these are the most common and used by bootstrapped businesses.

Quick Traffic

• Can start for FREE + NO experience

Unscalable, but is one of the best / quickest ways to get your first 50 clients.

– join online communities
– in-person meetups
– outreach; highly personalized message to your network 1-1 (privately)

• Requires $$$ + experience

Anyone who’s saying that you can just “send 100k emails” or “run simple ADS” without any prior experience and make it work ━ he is straight up lying to your face.

– high volume email outreach
– paid advertising

Slow Traffic

• Can start for FREE + NO experience

Pick a subject to create written, audio or video content.

This content must answer your audience’s burning questions and solve their specific problems ━ if you’re consistent you’ll get traction.

– Social Media
– Podcast
– YouTube

• Requires $$$ + experience

💡 PRO Tip: Don’t force yourself for going to speak on Big Podcasts / Events if you don’t have (yet) the necessary experience ━ you’ll end up hurting your brand.

– SEO
– speak at Big Events
– guest on Podcasts

So, we have all these traffic channels

What do we do?

Ideally,

You want to pick ONE from each.

A combination of quick traffic tactics to keep food on the table today. . .

. . . and a slow (long-term) traffic strategy that gradually builds your authority, benefits you over time, and has a compounding effect.

2 Skills & 4 Levels

What you’re about to read is not easy to do, in fact. . . it might be one of the hardest things you ever did in your business ━ if you follow along.

But I know you can do it!!

First,

If your business is doing under $1M / year, you have to. . .

. . . make a difficult decision ━ PICK ONE OFFER.

It’s hard, I know. It’s extremely hard.

I had to do it multiple times, and every time. . . it s@cks.

More so, when you have to STOP other distractions, called “sources of income”.

If you’re able to do it, congrats. You have my respect.

If you’re able to do it, you are on your way to developing a very valuable skill for your future self ━Decision Making.

Next,

The decision you just made will help you nurture your second valuable skill ━FOCUS.

Here’s how it works,

You don’t do and don’t think about anything else BUT your ONE offer.

Stay focused until you absolutely nail down your business structure for that offer.

Everything else is a distraction.

I 100% guarantee you that.

Let’s proceed. . .

But, before we do that, let’s establish a few things:

• We want to build a business; not another JOB that we hate;
• We want to increase our likelihood of success;
• We will do the boring work.

Quick recap of WHY 99% of beginners fail in business.

Mistake ━ start selling right away.

Let’s take John, for example.

John got a service to sell.

All excited, and without much thinking, John starts selling, immediately.

Because

. . . everyone on the internet and their mothers says that he should start selling ASAP.

Here’s why John will fail:

– If he can’t sell any, John FAILS.
– If he sells a bunch, John FAILS.

He simply doesn’t have the structure to support growth or hire someone to help him.

John is stuck.

This is why,

Starting your business the wrong way will result in failure . . . this is why so many beginners can’t make it. . . they are destined to fail.

Now,

You’ll not be like John.

You’ll structure your business the right way.

So that when clients are coming in YOU SUCCEED.

With that out of the way ━ here’s the checklist.

Checklist

This is the exact order you should follow to build your business.

Level 1 ━ Creating an Offer & ICP

• pick a problem
• pick your ideal client
• create an irresistible offer

Level 2 ━ Building a Great System

• create a good funnel
  • modern landing page
  • seamless checkout flow
  • great welcome email
  • smart email sequences
• create a sales process
  • use a CRM
  • create a pitch structure
  • practice daily
• use tools to streamline repetitive & boring tasks
  • automate (some) internal processes
  • automate (some) social media interactions

*Automate everything that you can. Don’t overdo it.

• give your clients more attention
  • improve onboarding experience for new clients
  • improve customer experience for current clients
  • create a customer feedback loop

Level 3 ━ Developing a Back-end

• create a referral program
• build an AD retargeting campaign

Level 4 ━ Better Quality & More Volume

• improve product quality
• maximize one channel
• open a new traffic channel
  • ideally affiliates / partnerships

If your business is missing anything from the checklist ━ go ahead and fix it TODAY.

If you miss any particular skill ━ you got something to DO.

Learn it or hire someone.

But, let’s make a 🤞 pinky promise. . .

. . . until you have all these 4 levels perfectly running for ONE offer, don’t ever think about changing, adding, or doing something else.

Everything else is a distraction.

I hope this guide / checklist will help you to

Save TONS of time, money, and energy.

Thank you for your time.

Have a beautiful day,
Nicolas G.

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This article is a distilled summary of my past 10 years of learnings, experiences, and talks with many successful entrepreneurs. Very soon, this will become a book.