🥊Tom BilyeuTom Bilyeu: 7-figure businesses are built on tactics.
8-figure businesses are built on principles.
Here are 9 principles I used to scale my business to 10-figure exit:
1. Find Ground Truth
Reality doesn't negotiate—it reveals if your business model works or fails.
Only ask questions of reality. Reality doesn't care about credentials, experience, or how confident you sound.
What matters is what is true.
2. A Problem Well-Defined Is Half-Solved
This kills most entrepreneurs.
Keep asking "why” — the first “why” will get you an answer, the third might get you an insight, the fifth will get you ground truth.
The quality of your solution will never exceed the quality of your problem definition.
3. Know. Your. Goal.
The best GPS is worthless without a destination.
Know Your Goal (KYG) means answering:
• What exactly are you building?
• How much of it do you need?
• By when must it be done?
If you don't know where you want to go, you can't decide on the path.
4. Challenge Every Assumption
Especially the ones you're most certain about.
The century old industry best practices? Question it.
The decade old technology? Improve it.
The year old machinery? Challenge it.
Your best solution sits beyond "that would never work for us."
5. Emotions Cloud Our Decision-Making
Humans are emotional. But business is rational.
Our brain is a pattern-recognition machine that finds causation—even when patterns don't actually exist.
If you want to scale your business, anchor your decisions in data.
6. Predictions Without Timing Are Wishful Thinking
Before testing any hypothesis, write down:
• What metrics will change
• By how much
• In what timeframe
• What's an acceptable rate of progress
Without this, you’re just praying.
7. Test In Isolation
Business problems are like equations—fewer variables are easier to solve:
• Test one variable at a time
• Keep everything else constant
• Document all changes
Testing everything at once is the same as testing nothing at all.
8. Data Doesn’t Lie
Data is objective. Interpretation is subjective.
• Do you want to feel good about the data?
• Or do you want your business to grow?
You can use data to tell any story. Your job is to find the story with the highest predictive validity.
9. Talent Is Not Evenly Distributed
Your job as an entrepreneur is to:
• Hoard the most talented humans on Earth
• Let competitors wither without access to that talent
• Recognize exceptional people create exceptional results
The most expensive hire is the mediocre one preventing you from hiring the exceptional one.