The Escape Velocity Business Model

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the pod. Okay, so we’re gonna do something a little bit different in this week’s sequence of episodes. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna lay out a step by step structure, a framework that you can use that I’m calling the. We’ll call it the seven figure launchpad, and it’s the ignition sequence that you need if you’re looking to start a business. And you’re like, what do I need to know? Or maybe you’re already doing five, maybe six figures, and you’re like, okay, how can I start scaling to seven figures and beyond? What do I need to know? And so in this string of episodes, what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna lay out a blueprint that you can follow. So don’t just tune into this episode. Tune into all the episodes if you want to get the entire picture of what you need. And this is really what I call in today’s episode, what I want to talk about is the overarching framework, which is what I call the escape velocity framework.

And there’s really three key components to the escape velocity framework that if you were. If you were to think about nothing else in your entrepreneurial journey than these three things, if you were just to focus on them to the exclusion of everything else, you would be doing. All right, so I’m going to walk through that today, and then I’m going to give you the outline of what’s to come in the future episodes. But let’s dive in. So the escape velocity framework is very, very simple. In order to build a successful business, you need three things. You need you as the pilot or the entrepreneur. You need a vehicle that’s going to be the business itself.

And then, most importantly, perhaps, is you need to have a destination. Okay, so these are. These are the three things that we have to solve for. We have to have the pilot, we have to have the vehicle, and we have to have a destination. And it’s interesting because to solve for building a successful business, we actually have to start at the end. So it’s not enough to have this world class astronauts, not enough to have this beautiful rocket, because the astronaut and the rocket have to be optimized and designed for the destination we’re trying to get them to. Right. Some rockets are designed just to get to low orbit.

Some are designed to get to the moon. You wouldn’t want to try to get to the moon on a rocket that’s only designed to get to low orbit. So this is where we really need to start is we need to start with the end in mind. And I talk about this a lot in other episodes, about asking ourselves, what’s my outcome? What is the ideal end state that I’m striving for? And a lot of times when we start a business, we don’t. We don’t answer that question beyond simply saying, I would like to have time, freedom. I’d like to make more money. I’d like to be in control of my life. I’d like to be able to, you know, you know, maybe utilize this skill set or this passion that I have to bring value to the world.

And that’s about as far as we think ahead. But it’s really important that we think a little bit more deeply about the destination that we’re going to. And if we don’t do this, what can very easily happen, and this is why I think, so many entrepreneurs end up burning out, is because they start building a business that fundamentally will not get them to their destination, will get them further ahead than where they are. But going back to that example of, you have a rocket that is only designed to get to low Earth orbit, right? And you are trying to get to the moon. So you’re gonna be very, very disappointed when you get to low Earth orbit and you realize this rocket will never get you to the moon. And that’s the same with the businesses. There’s some businesses, pretty much any business can get you to the moon if you build the rocket correctly from the beginning. But if you don’t, then it’s very hard, once you’re already in orbit, to take that rocket, to modify it and turn it into something that can get you to the moon.

In a lot of cases, you might just be better off going back, landing the damn thing, reassessing, rebuilding the rocket from scratch, and then re going. Right. And so to avoid that, we want to make sure that we’re very crystal clear about what is it that we’re actually trying to achieve in terms of what types of business is this? How much revenue do we want to generate? What type of team do we want to surround ourselves in? Do you see yourself as wanting to manage a team of 100 people? Or would you rather be a solopreneur where you only have one, maybe two people on your team? Right. It’s gonna be very, very different operations, very different businesses that you’re trying to build there. Right? So one step back from that, we have our target, we have our outcome that we’re trying to get to. And in the next episode, I’m gonna walk you through some questions that you can be asking yourself to get very crystal clear about. What is that destination? One step back from that in the escape velocity framework, is the vehicle. What’s the vehicle itself look like and how do we build it out? Thankfully, pretty much every rocket in the world of entrepreneurship has the same fundamental parts.

And you could really boil this down to three parts. I think of it as you have your marketing part, you have your operations part, and you have your finance part. So marketing is getting customers in operations is delivering a product to those customers, and then finance is keeping money in the bank so that you can meet your financial obligations. And the way that you could think about this in terms of your rocket is operations is the shell of the rocket. Marketing is, let’s say, the fuel, right. The customer is coming in. That’s what’s going to propel the rocket forward. And then finance is like the GPS system.

That’s what allows you to stay on track and continue navigating correctly towards the moon. Right? So those are the three components of every rocket that we really need. We need to have the shell. We need some kind of fuel source, we need some kind of navigation component componentry, right? So in the episode coming, coming up, this will be one of the later episodes. We’ll talk about marketing, we’ll talk about operations, talk all about that stuff. But the beginning of this, the very next thing that we’re going to talk about, after talking about the destination, getting clear on that, is you, the entrepreneur. We’ve talked about this countless times, that entrepreneurship is the greatest personal development program in the world. Like, there is no such thing as a business problem.

There are simply you problems. And so what we really need to get clear on after we know what our destination is to triangulate, what are the skills, both basic foundational skills and advanced skills, do we, as the entrepreneur, the founder, need to have to be able to pilot this rocket? And we’re going to talk about that in a upcoming episode as well. But I just wanted to lay that framework. That is the escape velocity framework that I think about, which is you, the pilot, the skills, the beliefs, the habits, the rituals, whatever, that you have, the resources that you have as the pilot, the vehicle, how we design it to optimize, to get to the destination. And that finally, that destination that we’re trying to get to, it’s all important because we don’t want to rocket just flying out in space. It needs to take, take us somewhere. So if that’s interesting to you guys. Then stay tuned for the next episode.

Depending on when you’re watching this, it might already be out, so go check that out when you’re done with this one, and I’ll see you over there. And until then, stay beautiful, my friends. Bye.