How long does it take to build a business?

There's a well-worn line in business: it takes about ten years to become an overnight success. It sounds like a paradox, but it's just how trust works. You made something good. You deserve to sell it. So people should buy — right? That's not how it goes. People need assurance that they can trust you. They're already loyal to other brands, and sometimes you have to wait for one of those brands to disappoint them while you're standing right there when it happens.

There are early buyers— the adventurous few who'll try the new thing — but they're a small number. Agencies can promise sales instantly; that hardly ever happens, especially when a business is still broke. In the meantime, plenty of founders keep their company alive with a side hustle. When Airbnb was running out of money in 2008, its founders famously sold novelty cereal boxes — Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's — during the US election just to survive.

Starting a business is never easy, but it's worth it. And because it demands a level of patience only slightly-crazy people seem to have, it isn't for most people anyway. You want to try? Go ahead — but be ready to fail and stand up again. Most people fail and stop. That's exactly what makes the ones who don't better at business: stubbornness.

The time it takes to establish a business depends heavily on what you sell. The single biggest factor is how much trust the purchase requires — what marketers call consideration. Some things people buy on impulse; others they buy only after months of getting comfortable with you. High-consideration products are the hardest to find clients for, and the slowest to build.

The playbook is the same either way: build trust first, create demand, and be ready to convert.Once people know who you are and which problem you solve, inquiries start to come in — and that's the next step you have to be ready for. If you're selling on a site, you need conversion rate optimizationor the traffic leaks away. If you're selling in a studio or over a call, you need excellent sales and customer care. Either way, the demand has to exist before the conversion can happen.

The thing first-time owners are most shocked by is how much marketing costs. The instinct is that marketing will be a small line item — and that by the time more funds are needed, enough will have sold to cover it. That hardly ever happens. For a business still building demand, marketing is often the single largest ongoing cost, sometimes exceeding everything else put together.

This is where most first-time businesses go wrong: they pour money into production and starve marketing— then wonder why nothing sold. They run out of money quickly, and the frustration often lands on the marketing agency for not delivering sales fast enough. Here's the same launch budget, split two ways.

The split above is illustrative, not a formula — but the direction is real. Across companies in Gartner's annual CMO Spend Survey, marketing has averaged around 7.7% of total revenue in recent years, and sat closer to 11% before the pandemic. Those are established companies; a business still buildingdemand usually needs to invest more, not less. So a word of advice both ways: agencies shouldn't sign up under-funded businesses just for a small, temporary cheque — and owners, frankly, aren't yet qualified to make the allocation call. Let the expert decide how much goes to marketing, and be patient. Focus on the KPIs that actually move first: are we posting enough, are inquiries coming in, are we gaining momentum?

Revenue-percentage is a starting point, not the whole method. The budget can also work in reverse — start from the revenue you want, work back through your close rate and average order value to the number of leads required, then cost out what generating those leads actually takes. And it should account for competitors: in a category where rivals are outspending you on ads, content or SEO, matching last year's revenue percentage may still mean losing share, not holding it.

Most of what sinks a young business isn't dramatic — it's a handful of avoidable mistakes, repeated. These are the ones we see most, and each one quietly costs sales while everything looks busy.

Marketing moves through stages — commonly called the marketing funnel. First you send the message that you exist and which problem you solve; the craft is helping people understand the problem and how you solve it. But the most important part is knowing why people actually spend money.

A content strategy that gets this right can take months of work before the first piece is even produced — collaborating with your marketing team until they understand your product and your buyer takes time, and it has to be paid for. Once the word gets out, you shift focus to sales: being on top of every inquiry, comment and message. Then the data-driven stages compound — and only then does your cost per acquisition start to fall. The four stages:

Do all of this — and much more — and your marketing budget optimises, momentum builds, and the cost per acquisition comes down. Skip it, and you stay stuck in the expensive burning phase forever: costs that never fall and margins that never look healthy. Attention creates demand. Conversion captures it. Distribution scales it. Retention compounds it. Be patient, be confident, and face the problems as they come.