The Magic of Passenger Status

This is the Momentum podcast. You do not have to be the tip of the spear for your business. In fact, once your business is up and running, you need to stop sacrificing for that business and make sure it is running as it's running without you. You have infrastructure in the business so that you are not the biggest liability and you can keep it going from the passenger seat. That's how you create a true empire and change the world.

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.

For most of my business career, I've been like most entrepreneurs, I take a few days off here, a few days out there, maybe I had been able to take a week off every once in a while during my career, but I've never taken considerable continuous time off, continuous time off. So like, I've never taken several weeks off at a time until a couple of years ago. I've been running businesses for my entire adult life. I've been an entrepreneur the whole way through. And in the last really about 10 years, I've started figuring out how to run a business in a totally different way, where I don't have to be beholden to the business, where I am not completely tethered to the business. And I got a massive test of being in that place a couple of years ago when my mom passed away Cadey and our vacation in Hawaii. In Hawaii, my family's in California. We were on our second day in a while in Hawaii after having talked about taking a trip for several years. We are on our second day at the Grand Willia, and I got a text message from my family that my mom had a stroke and we immediately left the island with California. So my mom at the hospital, we were there for a while. She actually for several days, I think over a week, she actually was getting released from the hospital. So we flew back to Texas and she passed away. And I think I was one of those delusional people who actually believed my mom was never going to die. And I realized that day that I was living in this massive delusion and. It was one of the most disorienting and anxiety provoking and challenging things I've ever been through in my life. And here's what I did find. My mom had passed away and messaged Haley, who was our director of operations and is absolutely extraordinary. And I let her know what had happened. And I told her I'm going to need some time. And she said, How much? I said, I don't know. But at least a month, I know that I'm not going to be back before that. And I separated completely from my business where there was only a few text messages in that time frame, which extended from a month to about 10 weeks. And the business was safe. The business was fine. It moved forward. It was great. It did what it needed to do. And I had time to process and I had to do what I needed to do. And that was a massive test of our systems and our structure and what we do as a company. And it worked. And so we're doing it again. But for a much more exciting reason. This Tuesday, Cadey and I are leaving on a three, probably four week road trip with our kids, where we are driving from Texas all the way out to California and making several stops on the way and then taking another route back and making several stops in another direction on the way back. And so we will be out of our business for about three to four weeks. And here's what I believe will happen. I actually think the business is going to grow during this time period. And I think we already have the numbers that we already have, the projects that the business is going to do extraordinarily well. And here's why. I'm in a place where I am now running my business from a passenger seat. So let me share with you what this means. So when you look at the average entrepreneur, here's what the average entrepreneur believes. The average entrepreneur believes that they are always going to have to be involved in their business. They're always going to have to own big parts of their business in the back of our minds. What an average entrepreneur. Always things like I need to know what's going on. I need to make all the decisions. I need to verify everything that's happening. I need to be involved in everything. And here's why. Like, if you feel this way, I'm not calling you average. I'm just saying that's how most entrepreneurs look at it. But there's a reason and it's not your fault. The reason we feel this way as entrepreneurs is because if you look at the simple equation of starting a business, starting a business, successfully, starting a business requires you to do everything to watch this successfully. Starting a business conditions you to do everything. We are conditioned by the early days of any business we start that we need to do everything, be involved in everything, own everything, understand everything in order for the business to be successful. Now, when we look at how businesses are really run, we look at this conditioning that happens. Here's what here's the reality of growing and scaling a business. And I want you to understand, if you want to grow in scale of business, here's what you have to do as an entrepreneur. You have to systematically, over time, do less and less in the business and let your team do more and more until entrepreneurs, until you give it up, your team can step up. And so when you if you want to grow a business to the full capacity you can, that means you have to commit to doing less every single day. That means over time you do less for the business. Over time, you're not as involved in all of the details. Over time, you don't own everything. Over time, you don't make all the decisions because if you are involved in the details, you own things and you make the decisions. The business is depending on you and you are the business's biggest liability and you are probably the biggest business's biggest bottleneck. If you're doing all of those things. There is a much better way to do this. When we as entrepreneurs systematically offload to our team and we demand that we have time back so we can go be visionaries, that is how we really grow the business. And this is a mindset shift. I want you to understand this takes a massive mindset shift. And if I look at my membership, one of the members who has there is a comment coming on in just a second. When I look at one of my members, the member of a lot of the members that we have, stand out there, extraordinary entrepreneurs. But one of the ones I'm most proud of working with and one of the ones that I personally follow and I'm inspired by on a daily basis is Rachel Rogers. Rachel is extraordinary. She's the CEO of Halo seven. She wrote the book and has the program called We Should All Be Millionaires. She's at the top of the sales list right now when it comes to books. She is she's she's just on Good Morning America the other day. She's got tons of media recently. She's just crushing it. And in our most recent summit, Rachel actually said her plan is one hundred million dollar business and she wants to see if she can do it more than one or two days a week. Now, here's why I got so excited by that statement, when I hear entrepreneurs make statements like that, like I'm going to turn it all over, I'm going to figure out how everybody else does the stuff, I'm going to figure out how the pressure is not on me. That is when businesses grow the fastest. And I know this is counterintuitive. I want you to know I know this feels counterintuitive. I know that it feels like it doesn't really make sense. But here's the reality of growing a business, is that the more we hand over, the more we give our team. The more we we have somebody else do, the less we do it and the less we are the biggest bottleneck. And if you're wondering how it's going for Rachel, she's absolutely killing it. She when we started working together a couple of years ago, she was at two million a year later, just under two million. A year later, she was at four million. That was last year. This year, she recently was at an eight million dollar run rate on Good Morning America. She said she's a ten million dollar run rate, so her business is exploding. And if you if I look at my membership, she is one of the CEOs who was handed the most over. Who is the least involved? Who is the most in the passenger seat. So let's talk about this passenger seat concept and how you get there being in the passenger seat. Here's what it means. I want you to understand something. It still means you're guiding your business. It still means you're leading your business. It still means you own the business. It just means you're doing everything from a passenger seat. I think of like Richard Branson, when you look at Richard Branson, he's not technically involved in the hundreds of businesses he's involved in. He's involved in the passenger seat. He's an adviser. He's a coach. He's there when they need them. That's how you should be with your team. And so here's how we do this over time. Number one, in order to get more into the passenger seat of your business, your team has to have a clear strategic plan. If nobody's ever told you this before, let me be the first. If you don't have a strategic plan in the business, you don't know where you're going. Your team doesn't know where you're going. That means you have to make it up on a daily basis. It will keep you the biggest bottleneck and it will suppress your growth like crazy. If your business isn't growing right now and you don't have a plan, that's probably why it's the number one problem in entrepreneurship that people don't talk about, because when we have a plan, our team is not beholden to us. If we give our team a plan, they can get out in front of us, lead the way and we can coach from behind. So no one is having a plan. Number two, it's systematically offloading everything you're doing. And I want you to understand something. If I just made that statement systematically offloading everything you're doing in the back of your mind, you heard. But I can't give up. Insert whatever it is for you. I want to challenge that statement. I want you to give everything up. I want you to have in your mind that you are going to back out of doing anything so that you build the infrastructure in your business so everything can happen without you. That is how real sustainable businesses are created. And we have the same in our group. Whenever somebody says, well, Alex, I'm the only one who can do this, there's a somebody coming in over there. I can't see who it is. But somebody says, but Alex they can't do it as good as me. Heavy sarcasm. Am I Charfen mindset's. Well, that's how we all think. It's like, oh they can't do it as good as me, as fast as me, the way I want it to be. You don't we call that. We call that calling yourself out as a unicorn. We have this saying in our group, you are not a unicorn, you are not the only person that can do it. And even furthermore, you're probably not the best person you can do it. There's probably someone out there who can do better than you can. And so get that out of your head. The more you think you're the only one, the more you will be the only one and the more you're going to limit the growth of your coffee. And then this plan, how do you get there? So one clear plan. No, to systematically offload a number three, you step into and you lead the business from the passenger seat. This means that when you're in meetings, you talk less, which means you say a lot more people hear what you say because you're not talking as much. This means that when you're in in exchanges with your team, you let them drive and you only interject or bring something up when you feel like they're going in the wrong direction. This means that when your team is looking to accomplish something, you let them create the plan showing you the plan. You verify that plan and help them move forward. And you no longer own drive and you're not the tip of the spear from your business or your business. And that when you look at the animal kingdom, there's an example of this wolf packs. When you look at a pack of wolves, the leader of a wolf pack is not in front. The leader of a wolf pack gives directions to wolves in front and leads from the back, picks up stragglers. Make sure nobody gets lost, make sure everybody is with the pack. And if I look at if I think of a CEO, successful CEO, that's how it should be. We put out a strategic plan so the right team knows where they're going. They're out in front. And then we stay behind and we coach. We we help. We give encouragement. We let people know they're going on the right path. And this is running a business from the passenger seat. And if you want to grow a business to its full capacity, I believe this is truly the only way. Here's why. As long as the building sorry, as long as the business is beholden on you, as long as the business relies on you for anything, you are the business's biggest limitation. Let's get you out of that position so the business can fly. It can soar. It can grow. It can go out and change the world. And you can coach it all from the passenger seat if you like. Some more information on what I've been talking about. If you like the. Understand where you are on the path to entrepreneurial success, and if you related to what I'm saying, that I think you'll relate to a lot more of our content and I would encourage you to go to billionaire code dotcom, answer a few questions for my team, and you will see a presentation on the true path to success as an entrepreneur. Exactly. The nine levels it takes to go from zero to one hundred million dollars. And if you go to billionaire DOT right now, you'll understand where you are on the path to success as an entrepreneur, what you should be focused on right now and what you already should have taken care of and where you'll be focused. So you know where to put your resources. Billionaire Dotcom. I'd love to have you check it out. And remember, you do not have to be the tip of the spear for your business. In fact, once your business is up and running, you need to stop sacrificing for that business and make sure it is running as it's running without you. You have infrastructure in the business so that you are not the biggest liability and you can keep it going from the passenger seat. That's how you create a true empire and change the world. Thanks for being here with me today. I appreciate you. And if what I said meant something to you or you feel like somebody else could use it, please share this post or tag the person that you feel could benefit from it. I appreciate you being here with me.