The Three Factors of Success in Your Business

This is The Momentum Podcast.

As an entrepreneur, you're part of the small percentage of the population that wakes up every day, goes into the future, creates a new reality, and then comes back to the present to demand that it becomes real. That process requires a high level of decision-making on a daily basis. The responsibility is enormous and it can lead to entrepreneurs reacting to situations instead of proactively overcoming them with a plan.

In our programs, we teach a five-step process for decision-making called The Charfen Process. In the previous two episodes, we've been discussing this process in detail, and in this episode, Alex is going to talk about the three most important factors that contribute to your ability to do it consistently, especially if you have a team. Ultimately, this process is what creates success for entrepreneurs and it'll allow you to grow your business consistently and predictably.

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.

So, the third step of the process that we teach is commit. Here's what's so important about committing is that you need to create a level playing field for your team.

Here's what I mean by a level playing field for your team: you need to commit an environment where they are measured in the same way over and over again, and they know how long they have, and things are consistent, and things don't change on them. They're not constantly trying to adjust to whatever the new idea was, or whatever came up this morning, or whatever just happened. It's they have this commitment period where they can now do the fourth thing, which is execute. Here's the challenge in most businesses: execution periods are muddy, they are interrupted constantly, and they are confused and redirected. When I say muddy, the number one complaint, we've done thousands of surveys in small businesses, thousands. We've had hundreds of thousands of responses. There was a time where we ran our business on diagnostics and it was basically like thousands, and thousands, and thousands of surveys. What we found in surveying small business teams is that communication wasn't clear, it was redirected too often, they felt like they were constantly interrupted, they were confused because sometimes their work didn't get used, and those were the reasons why A players left businesses. Those were the consistent reasons why the top performers in businesses left. And so when we create this execution period, we actually create another level of protection for our team. Then the last part of this is renew. Actually, I want to say one more thing about execute. What we heard earlier from Lars, that the other system he was using got down to the 90 days. Here's the key with execution. The key with execution is you have to get down to the day. You have to get down to the day. You can't just plan to an ethereal goal or set of goals that you're all going to talk about for the next 90 days. You plan down to the day, because when you plan down to the date, every member of the team feels safe. You will know you're getting the productivity you want. You will see that the movement, the forward motion that you want and your team will understand what they're supposed to be doing. And so when you plan down to the day, that's when execution really happens. Then here's the key: when you're done doing all of this, there's data, there's progress, and then there's results. And so, you take this data, this progress, this result, and you go back and you start the analysis again. So at the end of your waterfall, you take what didn't happen on the waterfall, you add it to the analysis, you examine the five core functions, and then you go through the process again. When you look at what you didn't get in your weekly commitments meeting, what didn't happen on the weekly, you take that data, the progress, the results, you take it back to the next weekly commitments meeting, you add it back into the analysis process, and it comes with you. This is a process that I want you all to be thinking about all of the time while you're going through your business. If you're making decisions, I want you to think, am I committing before analysis and prioritization or have I done the proper analysis, the proper prioritization, and I should actually make a commitment here? Because here's what happens to us as entrepreneurs. Brad just gave us this awesome example. By the way, Brad, I've asked the same question at events. Now I think completely different, but I've asked the same question at events. Now the example that I want us to understand is that we can hear a half day's content from an event and go, "I've got to go do it." And the day that COVID-19 hit, I mean, now it's finally better for me. Like, now I've chilled out. You can ask Cadey. I really have truly, truly, truly chilled out. The first three or four weeks, I was not chilled out. I kept having a million ideas a minute and I couldn't stop. I kept telling Cadey all this stuff, and now I would say, "Wait, I'm going to go write this down and stop, like, just like yelling at you." It's because that's just who we are. That's our instinct. I write this stuff. I coach this stuff. I can see it in other people. Then a crisis hits and I start doing the exact same thing. This is the key to the future of every business in here is when you allow for analysis, prioritization, a true commitment, a real execution period, and then you allow your team to renew, it's amazing what happens. That is how you turn your business into a personal development system. This is how you absolutely grow your people. And this is how you get the most you're going to get out of your team members. So, questions on this. Do you see that there's somebody trying to get in, Eddie? Eddie: Yeah, we're just [crosstalk 00:07:29]. Alex Charfen: Okay, cool. Just making sure. And in this group, if you want to, just unmute yourself. If anybody has a question or anybody had something come up while I was just talking. Julie says, "Can you guys put that on a poster? I'll hang it on my wall." Absolutely, Julie, our five step process of analyze, prioritize, commit, execute, and renew? Absolutely. We've got some cool stuff coming out to the Accelerator group soon. Did anybody else have a question or comment on what I just went through? I never know if I've nailed it or if just no one was listening. Megan: I have a question. Alex Charfen: Let's hear it. Megan: Because I took notes on this in the last Charfen day, but where we've had problems implementing this as this is the decision-making process, correct? Alex Charfen: Yeah. Megan: So, this happens ad hoc, throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, at any point, any person should be going through this on loop in the organization, correct? Alex Charfen: Yeah. What really happens, Megan, is what you want to do is if you look at how the cadence really works, here's how the cadence protects the team and how we make it so that we're doing this in a system. If you look at once a year in your annual, you're creating your annual commitments. Then every 90 days, you're creating targets. And every 30 days, you're creating goals. And every week, you have this list of commitments. When you say, whenever somebody is making decisions, here's what we're actually trying to do, Megan. We're trying to reduce the decision making in the business and corral it, constrain it, make it happen in these places. Now, if there has to be a decision made outside of this, then yeah, we take a step back and we say, "First, let's analyze this. What are the options we could make, then let's prioritize, and then let's commit to it? And what are we going to give ourselves for an execution period? What feedback loop am I putting in place? How do I know this is going to work? Then we'll come back and renew." But the whole goal of our program is, and the whole goal of having a cadence, is to reduce decision-making. The reality of most people that are overwhelmed is decision-making fatigue. Overwhelmed usually comes from decision-making fatigue. I want to go into overwhelm in just a second to the actual feeling of overwhelm and I want to help all of you understand how to work with your team through overwhelm because of what's going on right now. But when you look at this system, these are your prioritization points. You have a point of prioritization here, then it prioritizes more here, it prioritizes more here, it prioritize is more here. So if there is a decision that has to be made in the middle of a month, the way that we do it in the cadence, Megan, is let's say that there is a decision where let's say COVID-19 hits, and you look at your weekly commitments, and you're like, "Wow, none of these even make sense anymore." That happened to us. That literally happened to us. What we did was we rolled it back to the 30 day and we said, "Hey, do the 30-day goals still make sense?" And at the time, most of them did, a couple of them didn't, so we said, "Do the 90 days still make sense?" And at the time it hit, the 90 days did. We changed some of the 30s, we changed the weeklies that we needed to, rebuilt it, and then we kept going. And so, we still went through the same analyze, prioritize, commit to be able to fix where we were going. Does that make sense, Megan? Did it answer the question? Megan: Yes, it does, because initially I was thinking that it was content that we would cover within those calls, which it is. It's how we set the annual, 90, and 30 day. It's how we get to this decision, no matter what, and then we can all also utilize it if anything changes. Alex Charfen: Right. And you can utilize the same structure. Here's something I want all of us to know, especially in a crisis, is one of the reasons that I fight and like throw rocks at two-day off sites is they're a huge liability. Not just in the day to day, they're a huge liability in March. Because you would have had your two-day offsite in sometime in December, and then you're in March, and COVID-19 hits, and the entire plan you have is now probably not real anymore, and all the stuff you were working on is all over the place. And now, you have to call a consultant and say, "When can you get out here so we can build a new plan for two days?" Am I the only one or how many people felt like every week was a whole brand new situation and you had to reevaluate everything, and sometimes two or three times a week? Especially at the beginning. And so, the key with this system is that it is crisis built. What that means is if a crisis hits, if a transition hits, if you have an opportunity come up like this, it's not just a crisis. It's really anything that comes up in the business. If it invalidates any of your weekly commitments, then you just move this way and you say, "Where are we on the 30-day goals?" If it invalidates any of the 30-day goals, you move this way and you analyze the 90-day targets. If it invalidates any of the 90-day targets, you move this way, and you analyze the objectives. If it affects the objectives, if it affects your critical number, then you have to look at your client-centric mission and say, "Hey, are we still on the same path?" And you might have to adjust. Megan, does that help? Megan: For sure. Alex Charfen: Awesome. Okay, cool. Speaker 2: What a powerful interaction and insight, and what it means to be an entrepreneur, and how to grow your business, your personal life, and your relationships in a congruent and fast way. If you're ready to unlock the code of what it means to be a successful entrepreneur, and maybe you want to attend one of our Charfen Summits, we have one coming up very soon, then go to billionairecode.com right now. Once you're there, if you answer a few questions for our team, you'll be able to book a call and speak to one of our coaches about which of our coaching programs best fits your situation right now. All of our members get to attend the Charfen Summit as part of their coaching membership, so this is an opportunity you don't want to miss. Go to billionairecode.com right now. That's billionairecode.com.