Why Entrepreneurs Need Protection and Support

This is The Momentum Podcast.

One of the most dynamic and important concepts for entrepreneurs to understand is protection and support. See, as entrepreneurs, we need far more help to reach our fullest destination because we want to go farther, but any request for help leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed. For an entrepreneur, one of the most dynamic places you can be is when you have a team that will protect your strengths and provide support for your weaknesses. In this episode of The Momentum Podcast, Alex is going to show you how to achieve this with your team. I hope you enjoy.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is The Momentum Podcast, made for empire-builders, game-changers, trailblazers, shot-takers, record-breakers, world-makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how.

While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

I hope you're having an amazing day today. I wanted to jump in here and share one of our concepts called protection and support. But let me tell you where this is coming from so that you understand why I'm actually covering this subject. I have this concept that entrepreneurs need protection and support. The strengths that an entrepreneur has need to be protected and they need support everywhere else. And here's the issue for a lot of entrepreneurs. Because we do what we do, because we take the initiative, because we take the risk, we look far more capable than we actually are. I got a question from one of our incredible members. This is someone who I just have so much respect for, her name's Lorie Noga. She's a dentist. She runs three practices. They've all been closed.

She's reopening them, and here's her question. I'll read it to you. I figured it would be better to just do this here than to write Lorie a big, long response. I'm going to send her a link to this recording. And so she says, and this is in one of our groups, she says, "Hi. I'd love to start getting my practice leaders, those who aren't part of this membership, so they don't know our concepts, acquainted with the concept of protection and support for the visionary," which is her. She says, "Are there any podcasts or anything else that they can listen? This might be a new concept for some of them." Well, we do have content that they can listen to, but I figured it was just better to jump in and answer this question directly and also share it with you. Here's how I look at entrepreneurs.

When I say that we have strengths that need to be protected and we need support everywhere else, I mean that literally. Here's the issue for far too many of us. When we start a business, we have to do everything in order to be successful. When you're the only person in your business, you are literally doing everything. Here's what I always share with entrepreneurs. In order to successfully start a business, you must do everything. Well, successfully starting a business conditions you to do everything. In fact, there's psychological conditioning there that keeps you doing everything, that makes you want to do everything, that keeps you from handing things off. This is a constant conversation with our members.

We help entrepreneurs grow and scale businesses like crazy, and we talk about this all the time. This is a constant conversation on our leadership team, and Cadey, my wife and I, work together. We run our business together. This is a constant conversation between the two of us. It's interesting, just earlier today, Cadey was saying, "I need to get away from looking at what needs to be done and figuring out how I can do it to being able to get help with it." And so this is why I use this concept of protection and support. Because as an entrepreneur, once you get the business up and off the ground, once you start building a team, we have to go from doing everything to getting help with everything. And that is a massive shift. It is so hard for us to do because here's what happens.

I call this the entrepreneur's dilemma. We need far more help than the average person to reach our full destination because we want to do more. Lorie, I can tell you, is not going to stop at three practices. She has aspirations of huge outcomes, of helping tons of people, of making a massive impact. And so the entrepreneur's dilemma is we need far more help than the average person to reach our full destination, but any request for help that we make makes us feel vulnerable and exposed. Do you feel that way? I know I do. I know I do even now every time I ask for help. Every time. And there's so often that even though I teach this and I coach this, I will wake up one morning, look at my to do list and realize I'm getting back to doing tactical stuffs.

I'm not asking for protection and support. I'm not following the concepts we have because it is so instinctive for entrepreneurs to just do it all ourselves. Here's what happens, and this is why I feel like this concept is so important, especially for teams. Lorie's question was, how do you explain this to teams? Well, here's how I explain it to my team is that as the entrepreneur in charge, we are always the most vulnerable. If there's any problem in the business, it's up to us. If there's any issue going on, it's our challenge. It's our issue. Actually, it's our fault. We started the business. We're running everything. So as an entrepreneur, I take responsibility for everything going on in my business. Because no matter what happened, it is my responsibility.

And so the entrepreneur in charge is always the most vulnerable person in the room. Always. They have more exposure than anyone else. They have more responsibility than anyone else. They have to make more decisions than anyone else. Decision-making fatigue as an entrepreneur alone will slow things down and cause pressure and noise and brain fog and all types of other stuff. And so the way I explain this to teams is that job security is created through entrepreneur security. The less the entrepreneur feels obligated to do, the less they are tactically doing, or the more they're doing that the team is not doing, the more exposed the entire team is. I have this saying that I share with my members, that I share with entrepreneurs and anyone who will listen.

If your days are getting tactically harder, you're building a house of cards. Here's what that means. If every day things are getting more difficult for you, you're building a house of cards. A strong breeze will blow that over. And if you're running a business where you're doing more and more and more every day, here's what happens. You are the biggest bottleneck in the business. Most entrepreneurs already know this. We feel that we're the biggest bottlenecks. As the biggest bottleneck in the business, we need protection and support from our team. This is how you get it. First, the way to explain it to the team is that you need help. The way that I explained it to my team is I tell them openly the things that I'm not good at. I explain to them where I feel vulnerable.

I explain to them where I feel confused, what applications I don't like. The way that you give protection and support is very clear, but for entrepreneurs, it's somewhat difficult transition. We have to go from doing it all ourselves to asking for help. We have to go from being everything in the business to handing off decision-making in the business, handing off things that you had done in the business, handing off what we're actually doing on a day-to-day basis. And the way that we get this consistently is by consistently, over and over again, sharing where we feel vulnerable. Because here's how it works in most entrepreneurial organizations that I've observed before they work with us. Here's how it normally works.

The entrepreneur in charge feels like they need to gather up all the problems, figure them all out, come up with a plan, hand it to their team so that they can execute it and get it all done, but the entrepreneur feels all the responsibility for getting things done. And here's what I want you to know. When you as an entrepreneur with a team continue to take responsibility for getting everything done, you are holding your team back. Here's the flip side of that. When you start to build a team as an entrepreneur, you have to give up responsibility. Here's another phrase that I share with my members all the time. If you want someone in your company to act responsibly, then transfer responsibility.

See, far too many entrepreneurs are still trying to hold onto the outcome, trying to hold onto the process, trying to hold onto how it's going to get done, and then hand it off then. And here's what happens. Here's the path that our mind goes down, and I say goes down as an entrepreneur when we're doing that. When we're handling everything, when we're trying to solve every problem, when we take responsibility for everything, when we don't transfer responsibility, when we still feel like it's all on our shoulders, here's what happens in our business, see if you can feel this, we get to that place where we start having that fantasy. You know what I'm talking about? I call it the quitting fantasy.

The "I'm just going to go back to doing it all myself, or I'm going to get rid of all of my team and make this easier, or I wish I'd just go back to what it was in the beginning, that I didn't have all this stress, or maybe I should just stop doing this all together." And we know that's just a fantasy because people like us don't stop. We don't quit. We keep going forward. If you quit this, you're just going to open it up somewhere else and do something else. Getting through this and getting the protection and support you need is actually the pathway to becoming the entrepreneur you want to be.

And when I worked with some of the most intense and successful entrepreneurs in the world, here's what's interesting, the more successful the entrepreneur, the more protection and support they expect and demand from their team. The more successful the entrepreneur, the more their team knows how to protect and support them. The more successful the entrepreneur, the more process, structure, and routine is set up around supporting them. And so here's a path to success for you as an entrepreneur, be vulnerable with your team, tell them you need protection and support, admit you don't have all the answers, solve issues and problems with them in a group, discuss what's going on and get their input. People will support what you ask them to, but they will passionately support what they co-create.

And for the team members out there, if you're listening to this, the reason you want to protect and support your CEO is because you want your business to be successful in any timeframe or at anytime you want the business to be successful. But right now in the middle of the crisis we're in, entrepreneurs need more protection and support than they ever have. I can tell you right now, every entrepreneur I know needs so much protection and support they don't even know how to ask for it. Because in the middle of a crisis like this, decision-making fatigue starts in the beginning of the morning. And it's overwhelming to have to make all the changes and all the adjustments that you have to make. I know Lorie has been through a ton of them.

And so as a person on a team whose in leadership with a CEO, the questions to ask are, how can we offload this from you? How can we help you with this? Where is the pressure coming from? Where's the noise coming from? What can we take off of your place so that things get easier? Because here's what happens, if you're on a leadership team and you help your entrepreneur do more, show up in a better way, deliver more, make better decisions, your company's going to succeed. That's job security, protecting and supporting your CEO, protecting and supporting the entrepreneur or the couple entrepreneur, the pair of entrepreneurs that run your business if it's a couple, or whoever those people are, offering protection and support to them creates job security.

It creates momentum. It creates progress. And here's what's interesting. I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurial teams, and the teams that learn how to successfully protect and support the CEO, the entrepreneur, by asking the questions, by consistently helping, by transferring responsibility away from them, by pulling it away from them, are the teams that are closest, most successful, have the most fun, and feel the most personally fulfilled. Protection and support is crucial for an entrepreneur. What we do is not easy, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and effort and energy. So the more that you can, transfer responsibility to your team, not just a checklist. The more you can transfer outcomes to your team, not transactional management.

Transactional management is the worst way to do this. It's where we tell people what to do, check that it got done, and tell them what to do again. See, the true way to create protection and support is through transformational leadership where you give people outcomes, you transfer responsibility, you tell them what you want when it's done, then you coach success along the way. They're doing the work. They have the responsibility. You coach them so that they can get to the result you want so that they can get to the outcome you want. And if you're willing to give people clear outcomes and coach success, you'll create leveraged results. That person will get more intelligent. The two of you will be better at working together.

You'll create more momentum together as a team, and you'll move forward and create the progress you want. Protection and support is a crucial concept for us to understand as entrepreneurs because remember, we can't do it all ourselves. And if our days are getting tactically harder, we are building a house of cards. The faster we transfer responsibility and get the protection and support we need, the faster we go out and create the outcomes we've always known we could. If you're ready to start building your business and you like to get more protection and support and move forward and understand these concepts in a way that will help you actually grow, join our Facebook community.

It's Charfen Community where you can predictably grow your business in any market, even this one. We'd love to have you there. I'll see you in the community. And remember, as an entrepreneur, the more you ask for protection and support, the more momentum you and your team will have. And I'm excited for you. Charfen Community. Join us there and I look forward to seeing you.