Breaking $1M isn’t about working more. It’s about changing how you run the business.
In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down why security business owners often get stuck between $500K and $1M in revenue and what needs to change to push through that ceiling.
They cover why taking too much cash out of the business can kill growth, how wearing every hat eventually becomes a bottleneck, and why owners need to protect their time for sales and business development. They also share how they’ve used time blocking, subcontractors, and international team members to create leverage without building a massive payroll.
In this episode:
→ Why businesses get stuck below $1M
→ Reinvesting cash instead of increasing your lifestyle
→ Getting the owner out of low-value work
→ Prioritizing sales over service and installation
→ Using time blocking to protect growth activities
→ When to use subcontractors instead of hiring
→ Using international talent to handle back-office work
→ What the owner should still be doing personally
→ A simple blueprint for breaking through $1M
Connect:
Stephen Olmon — https://x.com/stephenolmon\
Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy
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Today we're talking about breaking through the million dollar ceiling. I'm strapped. I'm doing all the things. Getting your first dollar is hard. Set the amount of money that you're gonna make and not pay yourself more until you hit a growth threshold. You know, tech companies, Jeff Bezos, read his book. He didn't pay himself for like six years. There's a reason for that.
Just kind of doing everything because you have to is the belief. But if you were trying to scale, you have to spend time doing what you are uniquely capable of doing and having other people step into some of those functions that they could do.
You may have some initial pain, customers frustrated that you're not just coming out at the drop of the hat like you normally do. You will not scale. You will not do it. Doing what you're doing now and throwing more of yourself at the business will fundamentally not work.
Welcome
to Entry and Exit. My name is Steven Ullman, and I also have the shining star, the the the Steph Curry of our team, really, uh Colin Trimble. And uh he's my co-host, he's my business partner, and um are you my best friend? I don't even know. I I think so.
I've I mean you'd be the best fan of my life.
Yeah, FFF if oh, if you got like so you you're currently married, so you get divorced. You're gonna have to get divorced.
That's actually my anniversary today, so that'd be a weird thing.
Colin's wife, if you're listening, your marriage is sacred and safe. Don't worry. Yeah. Yeah. But uh we're we're having a good time. Uh so today we're talking about breaking through the million-dollar ceiling. So that's probably more likely in a scenario where someone started a business from scratch. Um, yeah. I suppose you could have bought a very small security company and you're thinking about how do I grow it from here. But you know, we'll we'll kind of probably think of it more as someone who's started it. Maybe they're doing 500 grand, 700 grand, and they're like, man, I have no idea how to go to the next level. This is for you.
We get universally, we get the number one email we get from listeners is somebody that says, Hey, um, you know, it's just starting out. I've been doing this for a couple of years, I'm on year three or four. I can't see, I had a great first and second year. I went from zero to 250, from 250 to 500, 500 to 750, and now I just cannot break through that million dollar wall. I'm strapped. I'm I'm doing all the things. How do I grow? We did not take our business from zero to a million dollars. So I just first want to say anybody that has taken a business from zero to any amount of money greater than zero, congratulations and and job well done. Stephen and I have both green fielded businesses before, not in this industry. Getting your first dollar is hard. And if you can do it uh and you can build something, you should be proud of that. So I think there we we should start there. However, we did take a business in Alarm Masters that was um very small and required us to wear all the hats and had very few people employed by the business. And so we had to get scrappy. So we do have a lot of experience from that, plus other businesses that we've built along the way.
Um and I think there's a couple main bullet points and that we need to cover. And I think one is a universal trap that I see from a lot of entrepreneurs. This is not unique to security by any means, which is um taking too much money out of the business. Uh, and that feels like a personal thing. That's like, oh, don't that doesn't help me calm. I don't need accountability on that.
Don't judge me. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's like, hey, I get it. There's this whole like profit first, pay yourself first, movement, and that's all great. Um, but the the simple truth is um you need to leave cash into your business more than and incrementally above your working capital. So you probably leave cash in your business now. You know, maybe you make, you know, 200K in profit for a year and like, oh, I'm gonna leave 50K in the bank account. Well, that's your working capital. That floats bills and payments and collections and job, you know, whatever the things you've got to buy, uh, then you've got to have other incremental cash to be able to pay for growth. Yep. And so one thing that I think is just universally true is you should set the amount of money that you're gonna make and not pay yourself more until you hit a growth threshold. Um, because if you don't leave cash in your business to invest to grow, I'm just I'm just telling you, it is gonna be extremely hard, next to impossible to break out of your growth. You have to have cash to grow. This is why you see, you know, tech companies, Jeff Bezos, read his book. He didn't pay himself for like six years and was like, how did he make money? He did stuff on the side and just scrapped it together to figure out a way to like get the company into growth mode. And so there's a reason for that. And um maybe you're already paying yourself too little money and you don't have that extra room, and so this point would be, you know, tough for you. But but generally speaking, I would try to figure out goals that you can hit before you raise your salary. Um, because I think you gotta have money to invest, agree or discreet.
I agree. It's uh it's classic, it is um kind of the delayed gratification. So you feel like you're doing work, you're growing, and so you want to find personally, financially benefit from that improvement or that growth. And if you are wanting to run kind of a lifestyle business and you want to make a hundred K a year personally, and that's just kind of how you want to run things, then that can be fine. And you can just keep kind of taking every new dollar of profit available to you, okay. But you're not gonna scale that way. Um, so there is a delayed gratification aspect to
it. Um second thing is so that's kind of like being spread too thin or just being too thin financially in a similar way. Being spread too thin from a role in responsibility is is another thing that's going to hold you back from getting through that ceiling. Yeah. Um, we see oftentimes people are they are the head of sales and they are doing billing and they are the estimator, and they might be in the field doing some of the installs and in just kind of doing everything because you have to is the belief. Yeah. But if you were trying to scale, you have to spend time doing what you are uniquely capable of doing and and having other people step into some of those functions that they could do um in order to have any chance of scaling through seven figures.
Yeah, I that's a that's a great point. I think this is actually the most important point of the whole episode, which is um at a certain point, you are going to be restricted by your bandwidth. Um, and so a lot of times what it looks like is it's a single operator with a partner or you know, one tech or a part-time tech, and those two guys are basically doing everything. And so they and they're like, Man, I don't have time to go do sales. I barely have time to respond to the estimates that I'm already doing. Um, and so this this is a hard, this is a hard thing to break out of. And unfortunately, um the only way that you can really do this is by finding ways to automate and prioritize um the things that you're working on. And something that is incredibly urgent may not actually be the most important thing. So you may say, hey, I've got a key customer that I really like, but I've got this prospecting block that I'm supposed to do this morning to go prospect for new accounts, but this key customer really needs me to do them a favor. It probably is more important for you to do the prospecting block than to go take care of that key customer. Because if they're really a key customer, they could probably wait till tomorrow or whenever you are next available. Because what happens if you are on a job? You have to treat, and this is what universally um owners, especially guys that have come from the field, treat uh the installation and service work of the customer higher than the sales growth marketing engine of your business. And that's a reverse.
100% accurate.
Yep. And and that's coming from guys that are both growth scale sales marketing guys. So I understand that there's a bias that's associated with it, but the simple fact of the matter is you have got to find ways to prioritize your sales strategy.
It it might it might be biased, but we're right. So, you know, that's it's fine. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I agree. And I think that uh when I was early on, one of the things that I did, and this is just, I'm telling you, this is a hack, and a lot of people won't do it. And so if you want to go next level and you want to go and be the best that you can be, then you'll do it. But most of the people listening to this won't do this. So there's something called time blocking. I even do it today. Time blocking says, hey, I'm gonna go to my calendar and I'm gonna create an ideal week of like how I would structure my week, and I'm going to put blocks on my calendar for time of like this is my prospecting window, this is my proposal window, this is my service window, and you do not stray from it. And if you do, it's gonna be a very one big one-time exception, and you are gonna hold fast to those rules and you will grow. You may have some initial pain, customers frustrated that you're not just coming out at the drop of the hat like you normally do. You will not scale. You will not scale, you will not do it. Doing what you're doing now and throwing more of yourself at the business will fundamentally not work. So prioritizing your day around growth is the most important thing you can do because what's gonna happen is, especially if you don't have recurring revenue, if you don't have recurring revenue, you owe nothing to anyone. You owe everything to yourself. This is your livelihood and your family. So you need to go and and honor those time blocks to say, I'm gonna today I said I'm going to prospect. And here's the problem with sales is like it there is no magic bullet. We've talked about this a thousand times. The only magic bullet we can give you is go do face-to-face meetings. I was emailing somebody today and I said, Look, you want to go out there, go do a hundred face-to-face meetings in a month and see how much pipeline you generate and figure out the ones you did generate, why. What not just they happen to be buying? Like, were you talking to a specific role? What were they buying? Why were they buying it? What was going on? And try to find more of that. Yep. So um I think time blocking is hugely important. You've got to prioritize it. If you don't, you'll be stuck in 750 to you know 1.1 million for the rest of your life. And that's just the way that's just the way it is.
Um another another thing that we have greatly benefited from uh that was one of our kind of early strategies to um I think offload some tasks and also provide more role specificity and clarification is to use international team members. Um obviously there is a uh typically there is some cost savings that you can have in you know working with international talent. And that helped us scale, especially like back office CSR collections, data projects and different things like that. And um if that's you know foreign to you, um no pun intended. But um if it is, um essentially, you know, if you have a specific task, a specific role, ideally you have like a real SOP, you know, that's defined that you can teach someone um that is um a you know actual real part of your business. It's it's not just someone answering the phones and that's it. Um then you can benefit from using international talent to scale on the labor side.
Could not agree more. Here's what we see all the time. We see a lot of people that uh finally make that first international hire, they invest a ton of time into them. It doesn't work out because hello, they're employees, and like I don't know if you've ever hired an employee before. The first one doesn't typically work out. Like it takes time to find the right person. If I were hiring my first international person today, I would use a killer, very expensive recruiting agency, and I would spend a lot of money on the first one that has a warranty or some type of thing where like they'll replace even past 90 days because uh you're gonna not know what you need on the first one. Um, and so here's what I would say: if uh there's two things that you cannot really hire for when you're under a million dollars, it's hard to uh field work. You can use subcontractors. Sometimes it's easy in dirt certain markets to find subs that will you that can work with you and you could pay like for a per project basis. If you can find subs, you should use subs as much as possible with your oversight, but you should use subs as long as you can control the quality uh because that's gonna enable you to do other work that's higher value, right? So if you're paying a sub, 35 bucks an hour, whatever the rate is that you're paying them, your value of the cost of your hour is higher than $35 an hour. Um, and then the other thing is is selling. I would absolutely not hire a salesperson that can do face-to-face. Now, sales tasks like following up, answering emails, setting appointments, doing estimates, sure, international. Face-to-face job walking, presenting the pricing, you should be doing it. So here's what I would say: here's the kind of final blueprint, and we'll close on this. Um, leave some dollars in your bank account, prioritize growth, and hire a VA. And what is the VA gonna do? Everything. What are you hiring the VA to like what is their trait? You want somebody that has a massive attention to detail that is OCD organized. You should run them through some tests, like answer some questions right here on the phone. How would you handle this? You want to find somebody that has good verbal communication skills that has a very low accent. We like to hire for the specific role in Latin America because they typically have an accent that's easier for uh English speakers and English customers. Uh, and you want them to do all of it for you. You want them to own your inbox, give them credentials to your inbox if you feel comfortable doing that, we did, and let them answer everything and call you once an hour with here's the things in your inbox, and have a rule that says every time a customer emails you, you say, Hey, received, I'm working on it. And that's the default response they send to your customer, and you win your customers by speed. So that's what you do. You go to your, you use the international employee to take everything off of your plate, everything, billing, estimation, answering phones, uh, collections, all of it, except for going face to face and meeting with the customer and installing stuff where you can't find subcontractors. And if you can nail those two things, then you will win. Like you will win and you will break through. It's gonna take some time. There's no magic formula. You have to do the reps, you've got to hire multiple international employees and to find the gym. Took us dozens until we found the first one that's been here the whole time. So um invest in that and I think you'll you know, your future self will thank you.
Your future self will thank you if you will subscribe to our newsletter, if you will subscribe to our YouTube channel and like and comment. Um our future selves will thank you for doing those things. So on behalf of our future selves, thank you.
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