Name: Ready, Fire, Aim
Author: Michael Masterson

The golden nuggets

Ready, fire, aim: get it ready enough, sell it, then make it better.

Masterson's stage-one sequence, in that order. You cannot know whether an idea works until the market tests it, so perfection comes after the first sales, not before.

Every business sits in one of four stages - and each stage has a known problem, challenge, and opportunity.

Infancy runs $0 to $1 million, childhood $1 to $10 million, adolescence $10 to $50 million, adulthood $50 million and beyond. Name your stage and you know what to work on next.

Stage one: put about 80% of your time, money, and creativity into selling.

Your main problem is that you don't really know what you are doing yet, and your main challenge is making the first profitable sale. Branding, systems, and nice offices all wait until sales exist.

Find your Optimum Selling Strategy by answering four questions.

Where will you find your customers? What product will you sell them first? How much will you charge? How will you convince them to buy? At the start, do what the competition is doing - and never decide alone what to sell; let the market decide.

You are in the want business, not the needs business.

Masterson says more than 90% of buying runs on wants, not needs. Sell one clear unique selling proposition - a big idea, a big promise, specific claims, and proof - aimed at what customers want.

Stage two: growth means a fast stream of new, profitable products.

From $1 to $10 million, the problem flips: you are only breaking even, or losing money. The fix is creating many additional products quickly - 'tipping-point' products that catch a rising trend early, staying one step removed from what you already know how to do.

The front-end sale wins the customer. The back-end sale makes the profit.

The first purchase exists to acquire a customer; most profits come from selling more to people who already bought. Build a line of back-end products for them, starting with a higher-level version of what they already own.

Speed beats polish: test ideas fast and make failure cheap.

Masterson preaches 'accelerated failure' next to ready, fire, aim - money loves speed. When you size up an idea, double the expected cost and halve the expected sales, then fire anyway if it still works.

Stage three: turn chaos into order - and change yourself first.

From $10 to $50 million, your strained systems start hurting customers. Build useful protocols, run the business on three or four simple management reports, and learn new skills: managing managers, hiring stars, and killing bottlenecks, bureaucracy, and politics.

Stage four: when sales stall, become entrepreneurial again.

Past $50 million the danger is comfort, not chaos. The goal is a business that runs itself while the founder steps back and acts as its main investor - funding fresh entrepreneurial bets instead of running daily operations.

Every business needs four personalities at the helm: a seller, an improver, an organizer, and a pusher.

One person rarely has all four. Know which ones you are and cover the rest; in the early stages the priority order is selling, pushing, improving, then organizing.

You’re halfway there

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The book, in short

Michael Masterson (the pen name of direct marketer Mark Ford) argues that almost every business grows through the same four stages, set by yearly sales: infancy ($0 to $1 million), childhood ($1 to $10 million), adolescence ($10 to $50 million), and adulthood ($50 million and beyond). Each stage has a different main problem, main challenge, and main opportunity, plus a new skill the owner must master. Most struggling businesses, he says, are simply doing the wrong job for their stage - and he writes from experience, having been a partner in two businesses that grew past $100 million, two more past $50 million, and at least a dozen past $10 million.

Stage one, infancy: your main problem is that you don't really know what you are doing, and your main challenge is making the first profitable sale. Selling is nearly the whole job - roughly 80% of your time, money, and creativity should go to it. The tool is the Optimum Selling Strategy: answer four questions (where will you find customers, what will you sell them first, how much will you charge, how will you convince them), borrow the answers from competitors at first, and follow the title sequence - get the product ready enough, sell it, then make it better. The two skills needed are getting things done and selling.