How Quickly Will You Reach Your First Million Dollars?

For current or prospective  entrepreneurs, how long will it take to earn your first $1 million? And for those whose business has already passed that marker, how long did it take?

I recently re-met a stellar serial entrepreneur who’s already achieved his first two exits at age 31. His name is Ryan Westwood and he is CEO of Outbox Systems, a company that integrates SaaS applications with each other for enterprise organizations (and enables point-and-click integration with solutions like Salesforce and AtTask).

Over the past two years (in his spare time, perhaps?) Westwood launched a study to ask this question and others of 10,000 successful entrepreneurs who’d been running their ventures for a year or more. I’ll share the answer in a moment, but for nearly all 10,000 it took longer (perhaps even substantially longer) than you probably think.

In a similar vein, I was fascinated with Elaine Pofeldt’s take last Spring on The Rise of The Million Dollar One Person Business. By studying U.S. census data she discovered there were 22.5 million “nonemployer” businesses in 2011 that earned an average income of  $44,000—slightly less than the average U.S. wage of $45,790—and is even more daunting when you realize that all overhead expenses for these one-person enterprises also had to come out of that sum.

But she also discovered an encouraging—and growing—number of one person businesses with revenue of $1M or more. In 2011, there were 26,744, up from 24,945 in 2010. An impressive 209,415 had revenues of $500,00 to $999,999. 368 had even exceeded $5 million. Most of these were sole proprietorships—truly a one-person business—though the data included some partnerships and small corporations as well. On the whole, Pofeldt’s analysis, while encouraging, shows us that the dream of making it big on your own, while clearly possible and proven for a growing number of entrepreneurs, is still a very big stretch.

Now for the million dollar question.

From a base of 100,000 successful entrepreneurs with businesses running for a minimum of a year, Westwood successfully culled 10,000 responses. His biggest ask, which will serve as the genesis of the book he’s now writing, was the top personality characteristics that had helped them succeed. In order of priority they are:

1. Vision
2. Resilience (and Persistence)
3. Amazingly strong work ethic
4. Passion
5. Positive Attitude (an attitude that is almost stupidly positive, at times, he relays, as in believing in positive outcomes against all possible odds)

In a future column I’d like to examine those findings further, with Westwood’s help. But in the meantime, how long do you think it took each of these successful entrepreneurs, spanning all age ranges, to reach their first million dollars in business?

Here’s the kicker:  of the 10,000 respondents, only two individuals had successfully created companies with $1 million in revenue in less than a year. For the vast majority—62.65% of them, in fact—it occurred only after they'd been in the entrepreneurial game (whether at the same company or multiple) for 11 years or more.

What should this be telling you as a current or prospective entrepreneur?

1. Success is seldom instantaneous. The stories of fast success you keep hearing and reading are in actuality much fewer and further between.  (No wonder the five characteristics come so far into play.) And,
2. If it seems like everyone else’s business is progressing further and faster than your own, you’re probably further along on the curve than you think.  You should take heart, hone your resilience, and keep on staying the course.

So whether your own business has passed the million dollar marker or not, these statistics suggest that if you’ve made it past the first year of business and you’re actively honing these five characteristics, the chances are fairly good that it will.