Why the Power of Belief is Crucial to Your Success

This is the Momentum podcast. Belief in your business is one of the most stabilizing things you can create for yourself in your business, like if you have an undying belief in your company, undying belief in what's going on and what you're going to be able to accomplish.

It just changes things. And I'm not saying like, oh, I think we've got this or I'm really positive about this. I'm really optimistic. No. How do you create belief in your business, in your abilities, in your team's ability to execute and what you are planning on doing?

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 want to start with a story, I actually took some notes over here, I have not talked to this entrepreneur, so I'm not going to use her name, but I've worked one on one with hundreds of entrepreneurs.

And one of the things that I help entrepreneurs do is get really clear on where they're going in their business so that they have that over the top, undying belief in what's going to happen, where they're going. And I think it's probably about three or four years ago, I was working with an entrepreneur one on one.

And this some of this story might actually feel familiar to you. So she was growing a business. It was an information product company, and she had grown the business as far as she could through force of personality, as far as she could, through like showing up every day and making things happen and telling everybody what to do and checking that it got done and telling them what to do again and checking that it got done again.

And that's why I called running a business by force of personality. It's when you are the process through which everyone on your team gets stuff done. And if you've been doing this, there's really nothing wrong with that. That's OK. Some of the best businesses in the world were started through force of personality, through an entrepreneur showing up, strapping the business on every day and making things happen.

That is how a lot of us got started. My first couple of businesses. That's absolutely what I did until I figured out a better way. And this entrepreneur came she actually came to my home. We did what I used to one day, consulting sessions. I don't do a lot of those anymore. And we were doing a one day on her business and she'd grown the business to just over a million dollars. So her personality and the information products type of business, she was at a million dollars and she felt like she had hit a ceiling and she was overwhelmed. You know, it's funny, my friend Russell Brunson calls Cadey and a million dollars to Tulkarm a club, and everybody celebrates all you had to do comingled. It's so amazing.

I'm off in the corner thinking a million dollar business is like one million dollar. Businesses are so hard to run, you have million dollars worth of responsibilities. You don't have a team that can handle all of those responsibilities. You're still filling in most of the gaps and it is truly overwhelming. I actually have a podcast called Why One Million Dollars? Why one Million Dollar Businesses Feel Broken and they really do. And that's why she was coming to me, because getting up to a million, she felt confident. She knew what she was doing. She was carrying all the projects around in her head. Hey, me, thanks for being here. She was carrying the projects around in her head. She she was able to coach the team. But then about when they started to hit eight hundred, nine hundred and a million, things slowed down. They didn't just slow down. The noise level in her business went through the roof. The pressure level in the business went through the roof.

It was just too much. There was too much going on. And she was in a place where she was having the quitting fantasy, like, have you ever had the quitting fantasy? If you're an entrepreneur with a team, you know, the quitting fantasy, let me share it with you. It's that voice in your head. You get up one day and the boy says, man, things are really hard right now and having this team is really hard. And, gosh, there's so much pressure and so much noise. What if I just went back to doing it all by myself? That is the quitting fantasy. And let's get real for us as entrepreneurs. We are about growth. We are about progress. We're about making things happen. And so that quitting fantasy is just that. It is just a fantasy, because even if you got rid of your team and went back to doing it all yourself, you're going to grow to where you need help again. And so getting through how to have a team without being overwhelmed getting past that point, that's how you actually make the impact and the income that you've always wanted as an entrepreneur. And so here's what I did with this entrepreneur who came down. Let's just call her Julie and Julie.

And I hit a whiteboard and we methodically and systematically built a clear strategic plan for her business. Now, this can be done in just a few hours. In fact, in some of our modules, we, our members do it in less than a few hours. Building a clear strategic plan is far easier than you think. If you follow the right system, the right process, the right methodology, you end up with a plan that you can believe in. And so in this specific case, Joe had been running this business she'd gotten to in between seven hundred and a million and she bounced around there for months. I think it was almost eleven months that she'd been stuck in this place where she just couldn't break a million and she was going back down to seven hundred, going back up to a million. And when you're in that place with variable revenue and it's not growing, it's hard to make decisions. It's hard to have the confidence to hire. It's hard to make the solutions that you need because the business isn't growing. So it's not giving you more resources. And she felt completely and totally stuck, like I said, so much so that you wanted to quit. So we created this strategic plan. We did the three things you need to have to have a strategic plan. We made it in writing. We made sure it was easy to understand and impossible to misunderstand. And then she left my office, went back to our team and used our cadence, our communication system, to make sure everyone on her team understood the strategic plan. That act of creating massive belief in the business, that act of creating this clear strategic plan to get over the quiting fantasy, to get past the place of running the business by force of personality, to start building the business, infrastructure changed everything. Within about six months, she was at two million. So 11 months of bouncing around between seven hundred and a million and six months later, you're at two million. And she continued to grow.

Why? Because she created massive clarity in her business. And clarity creates belief when we know what we're doing, our belief in what we're doing, our commitment to what we're doing goes through the roof. And so I want to I want you to understand I want to share with you why it is so crucially important that you have a strategic planning your business. So when you have a strategic plan like I built with Joe and you build that plan forward and you're looking at where you're going, you can actually believe in the plan itself and you can have confidence in that plan. Now, if you don't have a strategic plan in your business and you have confidence in your business, I mean, I hate to use such a dramatic term, but that's really blind faith. If you don't have a plan, if you don't know where you're going, if there's not a system, if there's not a structure, if there's not clarity as to what's happening, you have blind faith in your business, which, by the way, as entrepreneurs, that's who we are. We are optimists. We do often have blind faith in something like a business we will just keep going after and making it happen and making sure that we're moving it forward. But when we start building a team, when we bring in resources around us, when we have people that are helping us, we can expect them to have that same blind faith. And so here's why this is so important. Here's three reasons why having a strategic plan is so important. So number one. For you, for you, the entrepreneur, if you're in a place where your business isn't growing like you wanted to, if you're in a place where you feel like you're doing too much, where you're telling people what to do and then checking into got done, telling them what to do again, if you feel like you're not in the momentum that you want to do and the business has become too pressure filled in, too noisy, I call that pressure and noise if you're feeling too much pressure and noise from the business. Chances are your team doesn't have the clarity they need so that they can get out in front of you and start doing what they need to do. And so if you have a clear strategic plan, here's what I can tell you.

As entrepreneurs, we love to swing for the fences. We say things like, I'm going to do this. This is what I'm going to accomplish next in my business. Now, if you say that and you go out and accomplish it, that reinforces your belief in the business. Now, if you create a clear strategic plan that will change everything in your business, if you've never had a clear strategic plan. Here's what I want to share with you. You don't have perspective and just how game changing have a clear having a clear strategic plan is, because if you plan to accomplish something, you put it in a strategic plan, your team knocks it down. Here's what I want you to know about you and your perspective as an entrepreneur. Your next plan will be even more ambitious. Your next plan will be even more clear. Your next plan will be even more achievable, because as you create a plan, knock it down. Celebrate with your team. Then create another plan. Knock it down. Celebrate with your team. Create another plan. And you go into this process. Your confidence in your business will go up. When we as entrepreneurs have more confidence, our perspective shifts and we actually see more potential, more possibility, more probability in how to grow our business. We see more opportunities in the world. You know this. If you're an entrepreneur and you're having a bad day, we stop saying entrepreneur, we stop seeing opportunities. If you're an entrepreneur and you have a pressure and noise filled day, we get less creative. But when we create a plan and we execute the plan and we achieve with our team, our creativity goes up, our possibilities go up, our perspective gets much more clear and we can go forward fast. Now, that's just one. This second place, second place, not the second place, but the second place. For those of you listening, I held up three fingers and said second place I had to correct it. So the second place where a strategic plan changes everything is your team.

Now, I often have people tell me I don't really feel like I need a plan. I've run my business the whole time without a plan. It's just I really like to kind of free go after it kind of freestyle. Well, that is a limiting belief in a business, because if you want to have a team that trusts you, if you want to have a team that commits to you, if you want a team who gives you their discretionary time, which means they're thinking about your business outside of office hours, when they're driving, when there's showering, when they're doing other stuff, they're actually giving you time. It's very difficult for them to do that if they don't know where they're going, if they don't know what the plan is, they can't anticipate what's needed next, they can't look at where you're going and say here, these are the things that I should be thinking about. And when you do when your team has a clear strategic plan, here's what happens. You actually create the conditions for intimacy. Intimacy on a team is created by three things. Intimacy in general is created by three things time. So you must spend time with someone to create intimacy. There's no way to do it without being around them. The second is to is commitment. So commitment to a team, commitment to a partner, commitment to a marriage. And then the last one is by creating trust and you create trust by saying what you're going to do. And so committing to a plan creates trust with your team, making sure you execute that plan, increases that trust and spending the time with them to create the plan and execute those three conditions of time, commitment and trust, create intimacy on a team. And intimacy is an entrepreneurial superpower. We have intimacy on our team right now in in my leadership team. We know each other exceptionally well. When one of us says this is what's going on for me today, the others know exactly how to react and what's going to happen with that person. We know each other's personal goals. We know each other's needs, our desires, our personality types.

We have a very intimate team. And here's what intimate teams do. They cover for each other. They have each other's backs. They anticipate what each other will need. They work very, extraordinarily hard for each other instead of top down pressure. When you create intimacy on a team, you create lateral pressure instead of people doing something because they feel like they're going to get in trouble. They're doing it because they're intimate with the other people that are on their team and they want to make sure they're OK. You know, this concept of intimacy on a team, some of the most intimate teams in the world are special forces in the military. Your intimacy might sound like kind of a soft like not not like a true entrepreneurial skill. But look at special forces. When you look at a Navy SEAL team, there is intimacy. They know each other. They don't know each other's strengths. They know each other's weaknesses. They know how each other is going to react. And so they can go into a field of battle and protect each other and have each other's backs. You want that same condition on your team. And in order to have that condition, you have to first spend time with your team in a way that's predictable, that they understand, create commitment with your team and show up committed to your team and then create trust and you'll create that intimacy. Having a strategic plan is the foundation for that intimacy. And now the third place that this is going to be game changing for you is in reinforcing your success and your team's confidence in your success, because it's predictable. Here's something that I want you to know. I've worked with hundreds of entrepreneurial teams. I'm the consultant who stays in the room once the entrepreneurs left. So I've talked to teams in every type of situation. And as an entrepreneur, if you make a big prediction in your company, like we're going to sell one hundred thousand dollars this month or whatever your prediction is and there's no plan and then you sell a hundred thousand dollars, here's the difference with how you look at that and how your team looks at that. You look at it and say, check it out. I said we were going to sell one hundred dollars. One hundred thousand dollars. We sold one hundred thousand dollars. It all came together.

Now we can do more. Now, your team, whether they tell you or not, either consciously or less unconsciously, subconsciously, they are looking at it and saying, I don't know how we really pulled it off. We didn't really have a plan. The only thing we predicted was the revenue. No, we didn't predict everything else we were going to do. And now he's saying we're going to do it again or she's saying we're going to do it again. How do we possibly create this lightning strike twice? So your team's confidence does not go up when you accomplish things that we're not done predictably, where there wasn't a plan, where it wasn't clear what was going on, especially if hitting that one hundred thousand dollars goal created last minute heroics where people were staying late or coming in early or people had to do time on weekends or people had to jump in and fix things that they normally wouldn't have to fix. That actually reduces your team's confidence. They all say, man, we had to kill ourselves for one hundred thousand dollars. Now they want this person wants to do more. The CEO saying we have to do more, the entrepreneurs and we have to do more. How do we possibly do that? I worked as hard as I possibly could on the last project. They are not excited about the next project because it wasn't done in a way that it was clear and predicted and predictable. So this is how you change this in your company. You create a clear strategic plan and distribute it to your team. As entrepreneurs, sometimes we have a hard time with planning, and I think when we plan in the planning moment, we are admitting we don't really know what's going on until we created that strategic plan and we would rather walk around with this false sense of security. Let's give people if you don't have a strategic plan, everything for your business is rattling around in your mind. And there's no organization, there's no prioritization, there's no what we should do next.

You're just hoping that you continue to get lucky moving forward with blind faith, because there really isn't a clear plan and you're hoping you can hold it all and keep it all together. As an entrepreneur, if you want to get to a place where you're growing a business and you don't feel like you're doing it all yourself, if you want to get to a place where you are making a massive impact in the world and you have a team that is helping you make that impact, they are the ones that are out there creating the massive ripple effect that you have. If you're as an entrepreneur, you truly want to leave your debt in the universe, then things should become predictable. And as you create a strategic plan and you knock it down, the predictability in your business goes through the roof. And if we go back to the story that I shared at the beginning when Jill came to me, she was frustrated. She was upset. She was confused. She felt like she was failing. She was going to mastermind's where people talked about having 10 million dollar businesses, but they didn't really talk about how they got there. And she felt like she was doing something wrong herself. Before she came to me, she was in therapy, which I recommend. But she was she was trying to fix herself. She was in therapy and personal improvement classes and self-improvement and reading books on on how to become a better leader. But the reality is what she really needed was a predictable process through which to make a plan with her team, communicated to them, go out and execute like crazy and then do it over and over again.

If you're in a situation as an entrepreneur right now where your business isn't growing like you want to do, you feel like you're probably still doing too much and you feel like you're not getting the help you need. You wish the people around you would step up and help you. This is the way to do it. Create a strategic plan, make sure you have that strategic plan. And it's easy to understand, impossible to misunderstand. Everyone in your company understands that strategic plan. So they know exactly what you're doing. They know where you're going with it. And that plan will create the predictability in your business that creates the commitment, the trust and the time with your team that creates intimacy. You'll create lateral pressure and running your business will shift for you tremendously. You will go from trying to manage everything to leading a game changing team from being overwhelmed with the day to day, to overseeing the day to day and coaching your team when they need help, and from trying to do it all yourself to finally having the help, the protection and support you need so that you can grow your business as entrepreneurs. I think we need help and we need protection and support. We all have strengths that need to be protected and we need support everywhere else. And in order to get that, when you have a clear strategic plan, your team will know exactly what to do.

I'm doing a presentation on this subject, on having a clear strategic plan called How to Grow and scale your business and make a massive impact without having to do it all yourself. And I'm going to go into detail as to exactly how you do this a lot more than I did today. Go to Charfen dot com forward, slash standby and go to Charfen dot com forward slash. Stand by. And I would love to have you join this webinar, understand how to create a strategic plan and make massive progress and incredible success in your business. Go to Charfen dot com. Stand by and we'll get some information out to you. Thanks for being here tonight.