When starting a business, if the idea is even reasonably good in a decent sized market and you stick to it, getting to $1M per year in revenue is not the hard part. In fact, after two companies of my own, it was almost too easy to get that far in each one. The hard part is making a decent amount of money at that revenue level because realistically you are going to have at least a few employees in the company to get there. ie: $1M isn't what it used to be.
In my experience, getting to $10M dollars should be the real goal and that proves to be quite a bit more challenging because this takes some real scale and the skills from 0 to $1M are quite a bit different that say the skills from $5M to $10M range....the job of CEO is completely different between the two and most people don't prove to be good at both types of the "jobs".....so the company hits a ceiling and never quite gets there.
In my experience, getting to $10M dollars should be the real goal and that proves to be quite a bit more challenging because this takes some real scale and the skills from 0 to $1M are quite a bit different that say the skills from $5M to $10M range....the job of CEO is completely different between the two and most people don't prove to be good at both types of the "jobs".....so the company hits a ceiling and never quite gets there.