I’ve built 2 billion-dollar businesses and now I’m building my third at Acquisition(.)com.
And so today I’m going to show you how I’d build a billion-dollar business if I were starting again tomorrow.
There are four steps that I discovered, and they each go in order.
Starting with…
Step 1/ Sales
Most people wait to sell until they know they have product-market fit.
They think launching an unfinished product will alienate the market.
And they’re right. It will.
So don’t launch a shitty product.
Launch the best version you can build right now and test it fast.
Because you have to sell before you know if you have product-market fit.
And then you have to iterate on the product constantly until you do.
Now you may be wondering: “Sharran, how do I sell a product without any proof?”
Early sales have to be sales-led.
This means you’re making promises the product hasn’t earned just yet.
And the only way to find out if those promises hold is to sell and watch what happens.
This is why I said don’t launch a shitty product.
Let me tell you a story about how important getting sales right is.
Jon McNeil was the President of Global Sales, Marketing, Policy, and Services at Tesla.
Before he joined Tesla, Elon Musk told him the company had promised Wall Street 12,000 car sales.
They had sold 3 cars in six weeks…
Jon wasn’t even on payroll yet. He didn’t even have a title.
He asked Elon for a week to turn things around.
And so he mystery-shopped eight Tesla stores himself.
He went through the entire buying process to figure out what was going on.
He test-drove those cars using fake emails, but he never got a callback.
He called sales ops and asked how many people had test-driven in the last 30 days and never got called back.
The answer was 9,000…
These were people who had:
Already booked a drive
Sat in the car
And then heard nothing back
Tesla was sitting on thousands of warm leads while wondering why their sales were a disaster.
Jon McNeil immediately ordered sales teams in Asia and Europe to start calling every single lead back.
He grew Tesla from $2B in sales to $20B in 30 months.
This is why sales and marketing are the first two things a CEO should actually learn, not delegate.
They’re needed at every stage that comes after this one if you actually want to grow.
But without step 2, the growth of the business from sales and marketing could end up breaking it…
Step 2/ Operations
Only once you know the offer and sales process are working do you build:
Systems
Processes
And technology around them
If you build operations before proving the offer and sales process work, you’re just making a broken process more efficient.
You still need these systems eventually, and waiting too long to build them is its own trap.
I call this the curse of capability.
The better you are at something, the more the business relies on you being there to run.
Until eventually you’re not valuable… you’re the bottleneck.
And so this is my rule for building systems to avoid the curse of capability:
If it works and it’s worth doing more than once, build a system for it.
Think about your recurring tasks like:
Creating content
Service delivery for a client
Training a sales team
If you do it over and over again and you don’t have a system for it, you become the single point of failure your own business can’t survive without.
When I get in the cockpit as a pilot, I don’t wing it.
I follow the same checklist every single time.
That’s what a system does.
It captures what you know so you and your team can repeat it without thinking and without you.
Here’s what it looks like:
Solve the problem → prove the solution works → build the system → create time → solve bigger problems → build systems for those → repeat.
Every time you capture what you know and turn it into something reusable, you’re not just completing a task.
You’re building an asset… an insanely valuable asset.
But remember:
A weak offer doesn’t need a better sales process or system, it needs to be killed.
Before you add systems, people, or money to anything, ask if it’s actually a winning offer.
If yes?
Build real infrastructure around it.
If no?
Stop funding it because good operations only make a bad offer fail more efficiently.
But without step 3, the systems have nobody to run them.
And this is also the step that businesses struggle with the most…
3/ People
Hiring is hard.
And it’s because almost nobody has actually learned how to hire well.
The truth is, you’ll get it wrong before you get it right.
Now when you do get it wrong, your instinct may be to assume you’re better off doing everything yourself.
Your instinct is wrong. Do not do this if you’re serious about building any business.
(Let alone a billion dollar business).
It just means you hired the wrong person, and that’s a skill problem on your end.
It’s not a sign to stop delegating.
This goes wrong at scale too, and not just at small companies.
One founder lost a top candidate to a competitor who simply offered one day of remote work for childcare.
Nobody on the hiring team had thought to ask.
The solution became a standing question in every hiring conversation:
Is there anything logistical, like childcare or commute, that would make this job easier to take?
And so just like you have a funnel for your product, you also need a hiring funnel.
This includes:
Writing your job descriptions around actual pain points instead of generic bullet points.
Writing your job benefits around the things employees actually want
Preparing for the interview call so you actually know the person you’re speaking to
But this final step of building a billion dollar business is where you stop looking inside your business to grow.
You need to look outside of it for opportunities…
Step 4/ Partnerships
Partnerships are where you do deals to get asymmetric growth.
Asymmetric growth is growth where what you gain is much bigger than what you put in or risk
It’s where 1 plus 1 equals 3.
This is when you start looking at:
Mergers with other companies in your market
Buying smaller competitors
Joint ventures
Affiliate relationships
Taking on outside investment capital
These are all ways to take what you’ve built and combine it with what someone else has already built.
And so both sides come out ahead of where they started alone and where they would stay alone.
But here’s the thing:
Partnerships only work if you bring something valuable to the table.
It could be money, brand, expertise, or distribution.
This is exactly why the first three steps matter so much.
They force you to build one thing extremely well before you try to combine it with anyone else’s.
Let me give you an example.
This is exactly what we did to build Real (NASDAQ: REAX) to a $1.2B valuation.
When I joined Real, it had 6,800 real estate agents.
But we never built a recruiting department or ran a traditional PR campaign.
Our entire growth engine was three steps:
An Instagram post from my brand
A ManyChat automation to capture and qualify the response
Then a phone call
We didn’t use any paid ads or billboards.
In 30 months, Real went from 6,800 agents to 28,000.
It became the fastest-growing real estate brokerage in the world at the time.
The quick growth was built on brand and sales alone.
This is what gave Real something to bring to a negotiating table.
Three months later, Real signed a deal to acquire RE/MAX.
RE/MAX was a company many times its size.
And it created the largest real estate company in the world by agent count.
But the partnership only happened because the first two steps, sales and operational scale, had already been proven.
Because here’s the truth:
Nobody partners with you for your potential.
They partner with you for what you’ve already shown you can do.
Now here’s the final lesson I will leave you with…
The constraint changes as you grow.
Meaning, at $0 to $100K, you don’t have an offer people actually want.
At $100K to $500K, you can’t generate enough leads.
At $500K to $1M, you can’t close the leads you have.
At $1M to $3M, you can’t deliver without doing everything yourself.
At $3M to $10M, you don’t have the right people in the key roles.
At $10M to $30M, your systems can’t handle the volume you’re pushing through them.
At $30M and beyond, you need entrepreneurial leaders running each division with real incentives attached.
None of these are guaranteed to be your constraint at each stage.
But most businesses are working hard on a problem that isn’t actually the one holding them back.
So find your real constraint first.
Then focus on the four steps, in order, until it isn’t a constraint anymore.
And who knows, you may build a billion dollar business yourself…
And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about everything I learned from 30 years of business in 7 lessons in this next one:
30 Years of Business Knowledge In Just 7 Lessons
I’ve exited 5 businesses and built 2 billion-dollar businesses.
Sharaan I love your posts, thank you so much for the effort that goes into them and your amazing advice
Loved the Tesla story.
I think we just assume that many of these companies got it perfectly right from the get go so this is a great reminder.