Part of the guide: MLM Reviews: The Honest Index
I’ve read a lot of business books. The Billion Dollar Bullseye is one of the few I underlined on almost every page, and I’m biased, because the author is my friend and he once fixed my company’s finances from the inside. Jonathan Cronstedt, or Jcron, spent two years working for me. Then he left, became President of Kajabi, and helped grow it to a two billion dollar valuation. When a man like that writes down his order of operations for building a company, you read it twice. Here’s what’s in it, what I learned the hard way, and the one idea that quietly separates people who build assets from people who just stay busy.
Reviewed and updated June 2026.
Jonathan first told me about the book in early September, about two weeks before it came out. I was in Costa Rica, which makes shipping slow, so he sent me a PDF on the promise I wouldn’t pass it around. I read it in three days, September 4th to the 6th, pen in hand the whole way. It now sits in my top five business books of all time, right next to Resolved: 13 Resolutions for Life by Orrin Woodward, another friend, whose book I still owe you a review of.
You can pick up The Billion Dollar Bullseye on Amazon. Let me tell you why it’s worth your time.
In this guide
Why I trust this particular book on building a business
I met Jonathan in June of 2013, at an event in Denver with about 6,200 people, for a company I was running at the time. He came to work with me from 2013 to 2015, through one of the hardest transitions my company ever went through. I’ll say it plainly. He was the most productive, most honest person who ever worked for me. We built a close friendship, he moved on to his next thing on good terms, and the rest is the Kajabi story. Today he sits on its board and consults for software companies trying to climb toward a billion dollar valuation.
I’m telling you that not to name-drop, but because it changes how you should weigh the book. Most business authors teach theory they read somewhere. Jonathan teaches what he did, watched work, and then watched fail when it was skipped. That’s the only kind of teacher I trust, and it’s the standard I hold myself to here too.
What the Billion Dollar Bullseye is actually about
The subtitle says it: “Scale as big as you want, as fast as you want, and exit (if you want) on your terms.” The whole framework is built around seven rings, what Jonathan calls the seven rings of power. You build a billion dollar company, a unicorn in the language of the book, by filling those rings in a specific order, from the center out.
The dartboard metaphor is the heart of it. Here’s his line, and it reframed how I think about scale:
“If you’re looking at a traditional dartboard, you may think you’d win by hitting the same bullseye multiple times, but you’d be wrong. There are four spots on a dartboard worth more than the bullseye. In our case, the dartboard is a metaphor for your business, and the goal isn’t just to hit the bullseye but to expand it.”
That’s the non-obvious part. You don’t get better at hitting a small target. You make the target bigger. Each ring you master widens the bullseye, so your odds of success keep climbing. He splits the seven into a core three and four amplifiers:
“The three inner rings, Purpose, Profit, and Product, are your core three. They are foundational… The remaining rings, Prestige, Promotion, Persuasion, and People, are amplifiers. Imagine they’re like the spots on a traditional dartboard that double or triple the score.”
Treat it like the order of operations in math. Do the steps out of sequence and you get the wrong answer, no matter how hard you work. I want a company valued in the billions one day, so I read this with a pen and a wince, because I could see exactly where I’d done it right and exactly where I’d skipped a ring and paid for it.
Let me walk you through the rings I find most useful, with the places where my own scars line up with his framework. In a single post you won’t get the full book, so grab a copy if any of this lands.
Ring one: Purpose
Purpose shows up in almost every business book, so most of my readers have heard it. Jonathan’s twist is that he splits it in two. First, your internal driver:
“The mistake so many business owners make is to create mission, vision, and values for their employees at this stage… this first part is about you, no one else. Nobody will sacrifice what you will, so you need a purpose so personal it will drive you through every single barrier.”
There’s an old line, if your why doesn’t make you cry, it isn’t strong enough. The second half is your external driver, which is the problem you solve for the customer, their why, not yours. The way I hold it: where your why meets your customer’s why, that intersection is where a real business lives. You don’t get to invent a customer’s desire. You get to align with one that’s already there.
Ring two: Profit, and the ring that broke my last company
This is where Jonathan’s order departs from the usual playbook. Most books put product before profit. He doesn’t, and he quotes the poet and self-made billionaire Felix Dennis to make the point: “Expansion is vanity. Profit is sanity. Overhead begs to walk on two legs.” Then his own line:
“If you don’t have profit, you don’t control any aspect of your company. And if you don’t control your company, how can you control your destiny?”
Here’s the thing. This is the exact ring where my last company broke, and I’ll own it. I started building it in 2011. It had a powerful purpose, a real one. Hundreds of thousands of people joined it. It was wildly profitable for plenty of the people inside it. But the enterprise itself never made money, because the model had no capital to fund its own infrastructure and scale. The vision was loud. The fundamentals were broken at the core.
When Jonathan walked in, the first thing he did was audit the books, and we didn’t have clean books to hand him. As he writes:
“If you’re not looking at a fully baked set of numbers, you might think you’re doing well and making up any losses with your volume, only to find that your bottom line is less, your expenses are more, and now you’ve got a whole set of headaches you’re not prepared for.”
It took him a long time to get the economics into working order. And the lesson stuck. Ignorance of your real numbers hands your destiny to chance. He’s blunt about not leaning on revenue to paper over a broken model:
“Cash flow fixes everything is easy to say, and while true, it also covers a multitude of sins… great cash flow may mean the business is run well, or that false cash flow confidence is covering poorly run departments.”
The most practical rule in the chapter is this one, and I’d tattoo it on a startup founder’s wall: “All money that comes into your organization must have a job. Every dollar. And it must do that job from day one… all income must be allocated the minute it comes through the door. Ideally this should be automated.”
If you’re an affiliate, a network marketer, or any kind of solo operator, that line applies to you at full strength. Get your numbers honest before you spend a dollar on growth. You can’t fix what you refuse to look at.
And here’s where the Profit ring quietly led me somewhere I didn’t expect when I first read it. Jonathan’s whole point is that you cannot control a business whose money you can’t see. Now flip that to the kind of opportunity most of my readers actually get pitched. You’re handed a comp plan you have to take on faith. You can’t read where the money settles. You can’t audit the math. The dashboard says one thing and your bank account says another. By Jonathan’s own standard, that isn’t a business you control. It’s a position you hope about.
Jonathan’s rule is simple: if you can’t see the money, you don’t control the business. So here’s the question worth asking about any opportunity you’re in. Can you read exactly where every commission settles, or are you taking it on faith? The system I use pays 100% of every commission on a public contract you can read yourself, settled in the same block as the sale, in about twelve seconds. Drop your name and I’ll send you the walkthrough so you can check the math before you believe a word I say.
Show me a comp plan I can actually read →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Ring three: Product
Again the order matters. Without profit to fund it, building a genuinely great product is hard at best. Jonathan’s test for a finished product:
“You’ll know you’ve nailed your product when you almost can’t constrain the growth… when you can’t stop people from wanting your product or buying it.”
Great products make marketing easy, and great marketing makes selling easy. The wider this ring gets, the bigger your bullseye, the easier every later step becomes. But he’s honest that it’s brutal work: “Be warned, having a great product is incredibly hard. This is why business owners go to every conference imaginable to find the ultimate social media ad hack, the next sales funnel, or the supercool whiz-bang AI that builds your business for you.”
The proof point that stuck with me: at Kajabi they once shut off around a million dollars a month in ad spend, because the marketing didn’t match their values, and growth simply kept going. That’s how he knew the product had taken on a life of its own. Great products get talked about with no incentive attached. You get there with a tight feedback loop. Listen, build the next version with what customers asked for, listen again, repeat. Don’t prop up a thin product with loud marketing.
Ring four: Prestige
He opens this one with Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Prestige is the experience customers remember you for, and it’s only buildable once purpose, profit, and product are real. The Kajabi example floored me. They offer a free 30 minute call to anyone who starts the two week trial, not outsourced, with an actual staff member, and it isn’t a sales call. The whole goal is to help that person win. I wrote “WOW” in the margin, because that level of care is what makes people talk about you for free.
He lists six things that quietly kill a prestigious experience: not revisiting and improving it over time, no differentiation, weak communication, scattered focus, no thought leadership, and an inability to build relationships. You know you’ve hit the target, he says, when reviews start carrying “surprise and delight,” when the experience is easier and better than anything else the customer has tried.
Rings five through seven: Promotion, Persuasion, People
Promotion is marketing, not sales, and Jonathan is careful about that. Because the rings run in order, by the time you get here your product can already grow on its own, so promotion becomes an amplifier rather than a crutch. He leans on Eugene Schwartz from Breakthrough Advertising, one of my favorite marketing books ever written:
“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people and focus those already existing desires on a particular product.”
You channel mass desire, you don’t manufacture it. His five marketing keys are a clear value proposition, real personalization, emotional appeal, an omnichannel presence where your customers already are, and honest incentives to act. And the warning underneath all of it: “I strongly advise against adopting indiscriminate marketing tactics, as they could potentially harm your credibility and hinder your capacity for substantial scaling.” Promotion, he says, is mostly education. The more people understand what you do and who it’s for, the more of the right ones jump in.
The last two rings, Persuasion (which is really sales) and People (the team, partners, and affiliates who let the thing run without you), get the same treatment in the book. I’ll send you there rather than flatten them into a paragraph. Jonathan’s line on talent is worth carrying out the door, though: A-players won’t board a sinking ship. “No A-player is going to willingly jump onto a sinking ship and hope for the best.” Build the stage first. The talent comes for the stage.
The Lord of the Rings, and a poem
Reading the book reminded me of Tolkien. One ring to rule them all. In Jonathan’s world the one ring is your Purpose, and your job is to find the next ring, and the next, in order, until you’ve forged the whole set. So I wrote my own version:
Seven rings to guide them all, in ventures bold and high,
In the realm where business dwells and unicorns touch sky.
One for Purpose, heart’s true north, to light the path ahead,
Two for Profit’s golden hearth, where enterprise is fed.
Three for Product, crafted well, the jewel of their domain,
Four for Prestige’s shining spell, to elevate their name.
Five for Promotion’s clarion call, to spread their story wide,
Six for Persuasion’s artful sway, where hearts and minds reside.
Seven for the People’s strength, united hand in hand,
Seven rings to forge the way, and in success they’ll stand.
The one idea underneath all seven rings
Here’s what I kept coming back to after I closed the book. Every one of the seven rings is a system. Purpose is a system for decisions. Profit is a system for money. Product is a system for value. Prestige is a system for trust. Jonathan didn’t write a motivation book. He wrote a systems book, and dressed it as a dartboard so you’d actually use it.
That’s the quiet line between the people who build something that lasts and the people who stay busy for years and own nothing at the end. Leaders study systems. Everyone else collects tactics and wonders why the effort never compounds. I’ve watched two people put the same hours into the same opportunity and end up in different financial universes, and the variable was never effort. It was whether one of them was running a system they could see, measure, and trust, while the other was running on hope.
If you sell or recruit for a living, sit with that. You’ve probably been handed a product and a comp plan your whole career and never once been handed a system you could verify for yourself. That’s the gap. And it’s exactly why I built my own business around a system you can audit before you trust me, instead of a position you take on faith. Every commission settles on a public contract, 100% of it, in the same block as the sale, about twelve seconds. You read the contract yourself. No skim, no “the plan changed,” no math you can’t check. The contract is the truth.
Notice how different that feels in your body. The builder who can pull up the contract on their phone and show any prospect where every dollar lands carries himself one way. The recruiter quietly praying the upline doesn’t move the rules next quarter carries himself another. One is calm. The other is braced. You already know which one you’d rather be the next time someone asks what you do for money. That calm isn’t a personality trait. It’s downstream of a system you never have to defend, because anyone can check it themselves.
You don’t need another book. You need the system the best books keep pointing at. This is how I generate leads, make sales, and build a team, with every commission settled on a public contract you can verify before you trust me. Enter your name and I’ll send you the walkthrough.
Show me the system I actually use →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Two things to do next. First, read the book. It’s on Amazon here, and it’s the cleanest map I’ve seen for building a company in the right order. It’s genuinely in my top five. Second, if you want to see the systems and tools I actually run my own business on, here are the systems and tools I actually recommend, and if you’re new here, start here.
So now you know the seven rings, or five of them clearly and two by name. The question Jonathan would put to you is the same one I’ll leave you with.
What’s your purpose?
Love,
David Wood
P.S. If you only do one thing today, get clear on ring one. The other six are easier to forge once your purpose is something you’d cry over. Then go build the system underneath it.
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The line that stopped me was ‘all money that comes in must have a job, from day one.’ Week three of my own spare-room business was exactly where that failed. I had sales but no allocation system, so the money just sat in one account until tax time told me how badly I’d mixed it up. Wish I’d read this in year one instead of year three.
Kelsey, try this before you build the allocation system: list every dollar that came in last month and write next to it what job it actually did. Most people find half their income did no job at all, it just sat there feeling like profit. That gap is usually where the fix is. What did yours show?
Sorry if this is a silly question but I’m only six months in and haven’t got past worrying whether I even have a purpose that counts, does everyone else feel like ring one alone takes forever, or is it just me being slow about it.
Bonnie, no. Take your time on ring one.
Funny thing, the dartboard metaphor made me think of the actual dartboard behind my till. Nobody in Galway is trying to expand their bullseye, they’re trying to hit triple twenty, because that’s where the real scoring lives, and any local player will tell you the bullseye is actually a sucker’s target for anyone who’s learned to aim properly. Which makes the metaphor more interesting than the post gives it credit for. Expanding the bullseye is one strategy. Getting good enough to hit the harder, higher-value spots on purpose is another, and it’s arguably the one that separates a hobbyist from a player who’s actually dangerous. Maybe the business version of that is the ring most people skip because it’s unglamorous, not because it’s hard. For a lot of us that’s the profit ring, not the flashy promotion one, and it’s the one nobody puts a poem about seven rings around.
Declan, that landed for me because I ran a diner for nineteen years and the boring ring was always the books. Not the biscuits, not the regulars who came in every morning at six, the books. The years I actually looked at them properly were the years the place stayed open. The years I trusted my gut about the till were the years I nearly didn’t.
Worth naming the rare case plainly here. Most people who start a business never get anywhere near ring two, let alone seven. That’s not a knock on the framework, it’s just the honest denominator. The order-of-operations idea is sound advice for the person who’s already profitable enough to have the argument about what comes next.