Momentum Podcast: 764

How to Stop Doing It All... and Still Grow Your Business

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

In an entrepreneurial business, the most common issue I’ve encountered is that the entrepreneur in charge is buried by the responsibilities of running and growing that business on a day-to-day basis.

Alex Charfen, a business growth coach who helps entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses, gives practical, tangible, and actionable tips that you can implement into your business right now.

More often than not, entrepreneurs say that they are drowning in things that need to get done. At the end of the day, they look at what they still have left to do and wonder how in the world they are going to get it done.

It’s as if the entire business is hitting a bottleneck and there is no end in sight.

By the end of this 24-minute podcast episode, you will understand:
– What the biggest bottleneck in entrepreneurial businesses is.
– The tangible, tactical, and transformative steps you need to take to break the biggest bottleneck.
– How getting past this will grow your business exponentially.

The Momentum Podcast is created specifically for entrepreneurs like you to get into momentum and take the rest of the world with you. If this episode helped you do that, take a moment and leave a review. Let us know how we have helped you make a bigger impact on the world.

Your business has the potential to change the world, and the only way to see that potential become a reality is to implement a strategic plan. If you're ready to learn more, go to 
charfen.com/standby to get started.

Our entrepreneurial journey doesn't end here! Be sure to check out our Facebook Community filled with entrepreneurs just like you who are getting into momentum and building world-changing empires 
charfen.com/community

If you are an entrepreneur who is listening in and you can relate, then be sure and head over to 
momentumplanner.com/mps and gain access to one of the most requested business tools to grow and scale your business in any market condition, even in this one.

Full Audio Transcript

This is the Momentum podcast. Here's why you, me and any other entrepreneur becomes the biggest bottleneck in our business is that the reality is the only person who knows where you and your team are going is you and your team must work through you. 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. If you're an entrepreneur and you're growing your business and you've gotten it to the point where you're in the multiple six figures or approaching or over seven figures, there's this massive realization that you come to that you buy the biggest bottleneck in your business, and being the biggest bottleneck in your business is frustrating and challenging and painful. And it is. It's one of those feelings like this is what it feels like to be the biggest bottleneck in your business. You know, when you first start growing your business, you have to do everything in order to be successful. You're the only person there. But then as the business grows, as opportunity increases, when you might have one two, three a few people helping you, or maybe you have a full team when you still feel like you're the biggest bottleneck, here's what happens. You're in this place where you're growing your business, and it feels overwhelming on a daily basis because you know you are the person who's slowing things down. Or maybe if you're not conscious of every every day, you feel it, you feel it in exhaustion, in the body, you feel it in anxiety that you have around what should be getting done. What are people doing? Is everything getting done in the right way? It can be triggering like you can find yourself reacting in a way that you did not intend to react because you got all this pressure from being the bottleneck in your business. It can be debilitating, like there can be days where you get up and you don't want to do anything. And it can also often feel like you're on the verge of a breakdown. You're on the verge of frustration. You're on the verge of a maybe. Just like checking out having things, not getting done, having things not happen like you need them to and you kind of feel like you're walking that razor's edge. And here are symptoms if you know if those feelings align with you. Let me give you some symptoms so you can really gut check. Are you the biggest bottleneck in your business? So the first symptom is that projects are repeatedly late or not done in the way you want them to. So your team's achieving your getting stuff done, things are happening. But then you go, look at what you got and it's not what you intended or your team maybe isn't getting as much done as you need to is the team isn't getting things done. That's a huge symptom of you, the entrepreneur. I mean, the biggest bottleneck in the company. The second symptom is procrastination or avoidance. It's where you're not getting the things you want to get done, but you also see some of that on your team, like the team members aren't getting the right things done and they're avoiding getting some things done. Maybe you're procrastinating or avoiding getting some things done. Those is a huge symptom, another one's withholding. Now this is where you're the biggest bottleneck, but the symptom actually shows up more in your team. It's where they're not telling you what's really going on. They're not telling you their project isn't going to make it until the very last minute. They're not asking for help. They're not letting you know of the issues you have. Here's why. If you're the biggest bottleneck, your team looks at you and says, Well, we can't give them any and everything else, you know, I'm just going to try and fix it all myself. And so if you haven't admitted to the team that you're the biggest bottleneck or you are in that situation, oftentimes you'll start seeing behaviors in them. And then here's another big one you can start having like some blame, some shame, some pressure on yourself like you are not doing enough. I need to be better at this. I need to go to a motivational seminar. I need to figure something else about myself, about myself to make this better. And then here's the last one that I'll share as far as symptoms. If you are the biggest bottleneck, you may create a hero culture now. A zero culture is incredibly dangerous. I've got a podcast on this if you want to hear about it, but a hero culture is where people do rescues. They stay up all night. They're they're doing heroic things or jumping in and fixing everything. They're making things happen when they weren't going to happen. And the reason is because you're in a place where you are the biggest bottleneck, so people feel like they have to overperform. Now, that might seem great to have people like jump in and do things and get stuff done in the last minute. And it is if it's an occasional issue that gets fixed. Now, if this is repeating on a weekly monthly quarterly basis and you have people who are acting like heroes all the time, you've actually created a hero culture which is dangerous because in a hero culture one gets rewarding is fixing things at the last minute. As a result, you will always find that you always have things to fix at the last minute. And so I want to help you understand why so many entrepreneurs are the biggest bottleneck in their company. And I'll share just one story of like runaway success that we've had with one of our members, and I talk about them often. It's because I love them like crazy, like like a brother. I think he's one of the most intensely intelligent entrepreneurs I've ever worked with, although he probably wouldn't say that about himself. In fact, I've heard him say things that that indicate that he wouldn't say that, but he's super humble and his name is Daniel Rose, and he runs a company called Credit Repair Cloud. Daniel and I started working together just a few years ago 20, 18 or 19. And when I when when I joke about being the biggest bottleneck in your company, it means you're wearing all the hats and doing everything. Daniel was literally going into every department in his company. The company was about $2 million. He was like looking at the customer service he gets. He was looking at all the emails that came in. He was like in this place of anxiety and anxiousness and and overworking and trying to do everything and trying to look at everything. And as a result, the company really wasn't growing and he was stressed like crazy. I. Remember just being in the room with Daniel back then, I could feel his stress. And here's what shifted for Daniel. He realized he was the biggest bottleneck, and here's why you, me and any other entrepreneur becomes the biggest bottleneck in our business is that the reality is the only person who knows where you and your team are going is you and your team must work through you. They must go through you. Here's what I mean by this. When you look at the case of Daniel and Daniel had the business plan up in his head, he had the customer service step up in his head. He had everything the company was supposed to be doing in his head, and he was going around transactionally looking at it and saying, Did this get done? OK, I'll check another thing. Check it, see if that got done, checking to see if that got done. And that is exhausting and tiring and it breaks us down and it makes us frustrated as entrepreneurs. And what Daniel did, like what so many entrepreneurs can do to get out of being the biggest bottleneck as he gave his team away to no longer no longer go through him to no longer have to check with him. See if you have an outcome that you're excited about and your team wants to help you get to that outcome, but they don't understand it clearly and fully and totally, and they don't understand how to get there. They will consistently be going through you, which makes you the biggest bottleneck, which makes you get interruptions and questions. And you basically have to micromanage everything because you're the only person who really knows where you're going. So you have to have all the answers. It's exhausting and painful and frustrating and makes you feel like you really are broken down. Here's how you get around this. This is what Daniel did to go from two million when we started working with them just a few years ago to right now he's at over twenty five million. I'm so proud of him, and his team is just incredibly amazing to see $25 million and and growing and with a plan to get to 100. And here's how he did it. If you go back to this, this process that I use that if you've got an outcome you want to get to and your teams here and you're here, the only way that they can get there is to go directly through you because they have to ask you every question. They have to get clarity from you. You have to tell them how to do it. Now, the way that you overcome this is you create a strategic plan. Now, a lot of people ask me about what is the strategic planning? You know what? Here's why I want you to know. I know the words strategic plan aren't even sexy to entrepreneurs, and it's not exciting to hear that I'm going to be so much easier to go focus on marketing or something else. But here's what the strategic plan actually is. If we take this same situation I was talking about big out, come out here, you as the entrepreneur right here, your teams back here, if there is in a clear roadmap, if there isn't clear direction on exactly where the company is doing and all the projects you're achieving, if there isn't clarity about what each of those people needs to do, you will consistently be in the middle here and they will always have to go through you. Now, when you create a strategic plan, a road map, this is where all the projects are listed. This is where there's details accessible to everybody, where everybody understands what the outcomes are, what you're measuring to see if you're successful. Three things what the outcomes are, what you're measuring to see if you're successful and who's accountable for what. Like those three things are a game changer in a company. If you're taking notes on these on this video, write that down outcomes, measurement and accountability. So what are you doing? What are you measuring to see are successful and who's doing what part? If you have that strategic plan? Here's what happens as the entrepreneur. You can actually fall back into a coaching position. You can actually fall back into a position where you're helping people who kind of fall behind and your team can get out in front of you. See, when we talk about getting you out of being the biggest bottleneck. The way that we do it is we take you from being the biggest bottleneck to flipping it all the way around to where your team is out in front of you and you're coaching them from behind. I love this analogy from the or this the I guess this analogy from the from from nature, from the natural world. You know, if you look at a pack of wolves, a pack of wolves, the the alpha wolf and the wolf that runs that path and wolf that's in charge of the pack of wolves is going somewhere that wolf communicates the direction to the wolves that are out in front and then leads from behind in the animal kingdom. If somebody is falling behind, that wolf helps them keep going. They're checking on the wolf pack. They're making sure nothing's attacking from behind. But what they're really doing is they're coaching. They're guiding. They're leaning from the position at the back. And you, as the entrepreneur, when you are leading from the front, you will always be the biggest bottleneck when we can put a strategic plan in place. And have you lead from the back? And that's when you and your team will get into massive momentum and we'll flip some of these symptoms like projects are later not done. You'll see projects start getting done on time instead of procrastination and avoiding SEAL Team C team members excited about what they're doing because they have massive clarity. And if you've ever had the feeling like your team's not stepping up enough or they're not engaged enough or they're not taking enough initiative, you give them the clarity of a strategic plan where they understand outcomes. They know how they're being measured and to see if they're successful and they know what they're accountable to and what everybody else is accountable to. And you will see your team members take initiative and. Step up and do more than you ever thought possible. I know because we watch our members go through this experience every day where they put a strategic plan in place. Communicate it like crazy to their team and the momentum is almost guaranteed. And so I know it's difficult to be the biggest bottleneck. And there are process structure and routine. There are systems and tools that will get you out of that position permanently. The first one and the most important one is to come up with to create a strategic plan with your team's involvement and then have a system to renew that plan to rebuild that plan so that your team always has clarity. You know, it's funny whenever I talk to an entrepreneur who's frustrated with their team, who's frustrated with their output, he's frustrated with what's going on. I ask a few questions to show them that the team doesn't really have clarity. And after a few more questions and see if this resonates, like let this wash over you. Sometimes I find out that the entrepreneur doesn't have ultimate clarity and that in some cases they're expecting the people around them to figure it out. And when your team members in the position of figuring it out, you're literally asking them to come in every day and take a step off of a cliff and hope that the ground builds underneath them. And a lot of team members are not going to be able to do that. In fact, the ones that are most protective of the company, the ones that care about your mission wasn't care about you and what you're doing. Those are the ones who are going to withhold and pull back and make sure that it's safe to move forward. You create massive safety when you give your team a strategic plan and they understand it and they have that roadmap, they have their next steps. They know what you're looking for. They know what the right outcomes look like, and you and your team will move forward fast. And if you're interested in understanding more about a strategic plan and getting more information on what you can do, you can go to billionaire code dot com and there's a ton that you'll be able to get there, but a billionaire code dot com. You can download a copy of the billionaire code, which will show you what stage of growth you are as an entrepreneur and also what should be in your strategic plan. And then you'll also have an opportunity to watch a short video on the billionaire code and sign up for a call with my team where we will answer any questions you have around strategic planning, the bottlenecks in your business and how you can create massive momentum. And we might even be able to help you check out billionaire Echo Dot Com and thanks for being here for this video.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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