Momentum Podcast: 237

Stop Accommodating and Justifying

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

Why do you feel like you need to justify how much money you make? The responsibility of your business is to make you wealthy.

Full Audio Transcript

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game-changers, trail-blazers, 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're 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.

Stop accommodating and justifying. This week, on one of my coaching calls, a member of our group asked a question in an interesting way that made me read far more into the question than what she intended to ask. She painted a scenario for me. She said, "Alex, I have a person on my team who's helping me grow a product and I'm paying her a fixed amount for each unit she sells, and she's been great. She's helping me a ton. She's been wonderful. I don't think I could have done this without her, and so what I'm doing is I'm raising the price of the product 50%, and so I want to know how to address that with her, how much more I should pay her, and how I should handle this."

I said, "I want to just pause for a second. We can definitely address this, but I want to take a step back and ask, why do you feel like you need to justify how much money you make and accommodate this person on your team?" She looked at me, it was on a Zoom call, and she said, "Well, I don't know. Maybe there's more here," or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. We had a discussion that I have had over and over again with entrepreneurs, with CEOs, with executives, but mostly with entrepreneurial founders, with CEOs, with the people who run the company, with the people who took all the risk, with the people who put together the business, the founders, the husband and wives.

I had this conversation over and over again with the bravest people in the world because what happens is, as soon as entrepreneurs start making any amount of money, we feel like we have to either accommodate the people around us, so pay them way more because we're making more, or justify how much we make. Or here's the worst. Hide how much we make. Hide how much the company makes from our team so that the team doesn't even understand the real metrics that you're working for because we're afraid for people to know what's really going on, and we feel like we have to justify how much we make and who we are.

Here's the fact. The responsibility of your business is to make you as much money as possible. The responsibility of your business is to make you wealthy. You as an entrepreneur, you take on more risk. You take on more noise, more pressure. You have to grow at a faster rate. You have to modify behavior faster. There's more that you have to do in order to be successful than the average person who just clocks in at a job. It's a fact. It's real. Being an entrepreneur is one of the hardest paths a human being can take. In fact, I have a hard time thinking of any that is harder.

Go back and listen to the episodes on the Billionaire Code and think of the behavioral change it takes to go through those nine levels, to go through the different levels of wealth, the different levels of learning, the different levels of leadership, the different levels of communication structure and system you have to run, the different levels of communication you're going to have with the people around you, the level of intensity and time you have to use in communication over time. All of those things modify. You have more pressure and noise in your life due to your business scaling than anyone in the building, and I don't want you to ever feel like you have to justify anything, because if you do things right or if you choose to work us, you will make an unjustifiable amount of money. That's why I've had this conversation with my clients so many times.

So you have to release the energy of justifying how much money you make. You have to release the energy of hiding how much money you make from your team. You have to release the energy that you have around this number, because here's what's going to happen. We have to decouple that number from how you treat everyone in your business, other than profit share if you want to do that eventually, because here's what you can't keep up. The types of decisions that entrepreneurs make, like every time I raise the price of my product I'm going to pay my sales team more. Hey, than sales person is making the exact same call with the exact same type of lead. They are just changing the price, and you know what's crazy? Most of the time it doesn't make a big difference until you find the right price point.

So there's nothing more that they're doing. You've just changed one element in a long sales process. You don't have to pay any more. It's your job as the business owner to raise the price to a place where you maximize your profitability and your stability, and you attract the client level that you want to attract, the number of clients you want to attract, so you should always be looking at adjusting, raising, putting your prices at the market rate where they should be. I introduced my top-level program last year in July or in April at $3,000 a month. It's now 5, and our conversion rates haven't gone down at all, so stop justifying how much you make.

You will make an unjustifiable amount. You will always make more than the people around you, and you can't attach their salaries, their compensation, any of those things to your company's profitability, unless you put together profit share or executive compensation plans that are tied to profitability, which is what you should do, but the challenge is that comes later. That's not in the moment, reactive. That's not, "Oh, I raised the price. I need to raise how much I pay my salesperson." This happens in all different types of ways with entrepreneurs, and here's who I'm talking to.

I'm talking to those of you who've just started making like, kind of silly money. You're hitting those months where you're hitting multiple eight figures, where you're getting 50, 60, $70,000 a month in, or those of you who are hitting six figures a month, because then it starts really getting weird, and here's what happens to a lot of my clients over time. I want you to understand where this is going if you do things right or you contract with our company, because if you join one of our programs to grow your company here's what happens to most of the clients I've had in my career.

I have a conversation with them about when you become numb to money, when money actually becomes a score to you, and where you actually just start looking at it as another number, where another million dollars in the bank really doesn't change absolutely anything in your life except for maybe a fraction more stability in the long-term, and here's the secret about that. That's the goal. That's what we want. We want to take this thing called money that has been a pressure in everyone's life for as long as we can remember, and let's be real here. I don't care who you are and what type of belief system you are. Money is either, it's pressure to you because you want it, or it's pressure to you because you don't want it and you don't know how to exist in a world that needs it, or it's pressure to you because you've never had enough, or it's pressure to you because you're finally making some and you don't know what to do next.

There's pressure around money. What would happen if we could take that type of pressure and get it to the point where you reduce it to hardly anything because you make enough money that you never have to worry about it again, and then you get to work on what you really want to, because that's where we're going. That's where I am. That's where my clients get to, fast, and that's where entrepreneurs in the world ... When we look at the population at large, the people who earn the most in the world are entrepreneurs, period. It's people just like you and me, so we need to accept that.

This year, or just in the past few months, there was a record-setting, precedent-setting deal set for employment with Elon Musk. Elon Musk and the board of Tesla put together an employment contract where they could be worth $57 billion. Let me give you a perspective. I think Gates right now, who's the second richest or third richest in the world, something like, he's 45 billion, so Elon Musk has a contract for employment that is more than Bill Gates' entire fortune. I mean, this shattered every record in the history of employment contracts. Elon Musk didn't justify anything. The board of Tesla went out to the world and justified the contract. Elon Musk didn't accommodate anyone. He didn't hide from anyone. He is proud to making that money, and Tesla is telling the world that he's worth it, because entrepreneurs are the ones who see the unique connections.

You're the one who sees the plan, who starts putting it together, who takes the risk, who puts themselves out there, who goes through the behavioral change, who is going, and by the way, you will get lied to and made fun of and talked behind your back, and you'll have friends, that have been friends of yours for a long time, quit and never talk to you again. You'll have people treat you one way one day and a different way the next day. You will be lied to. You will be embezzled from, 90% of businesses get stolen from.

All of these things are going to happen to you, so the money you're making today is payment in advance for the person you've become. Don't give it away. Pay your team a fair amount. Put together a profit share program. Put together incentive compensation programs your executives so that they know when the company does better, they do better. Instead of justifying and accommodating, hiding how much you make, flip everything on its head.

Go to full transparency in your company. Tell everyone in the organization exactly how much the company made in a month, how much the expenses were, and what the profit was. Share it with everyone. You don't have anything to hide. In fact, that's one of the most important metrics in the business, and here's what happens. As soon as you start sharing it, there might be one or two people who have a challenge or who you feel bad energy from or who you don't want to work with anymore, but the fact is it almost immediately becomes clear to the entire team and anyone new that profit is just another number you measure, and it's a really important one.

Cadey and I have owned businesses where we were making almost a half million dollars in a month. We've had a business where we've ... we've had more than one business where we made a million dollars in a month, and we had a team see that million dollars in a month. No one on the team quit. No one on the team left. In fact, every time that we've had a 500,000 or a 700,000 ... or sorry, a 500,000 or a seven-figure month, when the number comes up in our daily huddle our team goes crazy. Why? Because they're all there to make the company as profitable and as successful and as game-changing and as world-changing as they possibly can, and profitability is a metric of success in business, period.

I've been around for a long time. I don't work with companies that lose money in the beginning and then start making money. I work with bootstrapped entrepreneurs that make their money as they go, that are self-funded; they go through the levels of the Billionaire Code, who do it themselves, and it's one of the hardest things in the world to do, and it's not like taking money is easy. That's brutal as well, and so when things start going well, you don't have to accommodate, justify, or hide from anyone.

Put it out there. Let your team know exactly how much your company is making. Share it with them every single month. Show them that it's a number that they should drive for, and you as the entrepreneur, who is putting themselves out there, who is going to go through incredible behavioral change through your life, and regardless of how good it's feeling right now, there are going to be times, from this point forward there's always going to be times where you are experiencing so much pressure and noise that you will have fantasies like, "I want to go back to doing it all myself." Or, "Maybe I should just go get a job." Or, "Maybe I should just sell it all and quit." Or, "Maybe ... Maybe ... " What's yours? What's the one you tell yourself? Because I know we all have them.

This whole justifying, accommodating, it's part of that whole impostor syndrome that attacks us. As soon as we start doing well, we feel like there's something wrong with it. As soon as we start finally breaking through and gaining some of the notoriety we want, we start feeling like we have to tell everyone why it's happening and make it okay for everybody else, and I want you to just understand that the whole goal of what you're doing is to make unjustifiable money in a world-changing company that goes out and makes a massive contribution, and every penny that comes into your company, you have a choice. You can either spend it, or you can prove that your business is successful by keeping that money and putting it to profit and increasing your net worth and building a massive financial backstop, because I want you to realize and recognize just how much you're capable of.

And I know there are things that you're good at. I know there are things that when you do them, you know you're one of the best out there, but I want you to understand something. When you don't have any debt, when you have a massive financial backstop, when you aren't worried about money, whatever you're good at, you just got exponentially better, because when you lower pressure and noise around one of the single most challenging things in our lives, and you get it to the point where you don't feel it anymore, you are in a totally different place than the people around you, and I'll tell you something. You vibrate at a different level. You have a different level of energy. You have a different level of magnetism about you.

I know, because I've been there and I've felt it and I've watched it, and I coach people to go from humble means to putting millions of dollars in the bank every single year and changing not only their futures, but their families' futures. I can't tell you how often I've had one of my clients pay off their parents' home or buy a home for their parents to live in — it just happened in the last month — because when you are committed to your business, making money, when you stop accommodating and justifying, when you decouple your revenues and your income and your profit from everyone else in the company other than profit share and executive compensation plans, you change everything in your business, you change everything in your life, and you finally start making what you should be and what you're worth.

Then you have a responsibility to drive that number as high as you can, because then you have all the options in the world you want, and if you want to go buy a house or buy your parents' house or buy a nice car or do any of the things you want to, or fund a charity or give money away or help other entrepreneurs around the world ... One of the things that my daughters and I do often before dinner is we go on Kiva, K-I-V-A dot com, and they each loan $25 to two entrepreneurs. We have thousands of dollars circulating in Kiva, and we have the opportunity to do that because I force my businesses to make millions. Not hundreds of thousands. Millions. That's where I feel comfortable. That's when noise goes down for me.

And I know for you, you may not have experienced it, but I can tell you from watching hundreds of entrepreneurs go through this path, it will change your life. You will show up different. You will have a completely different type of human being. You will attract a completely different crowd of people into your life. You will have a different tribe around you, and the goals you have will grow even higher and greater and bigger as you stop accommodating and justifying, because each time you do, you diminish a little piece of who you are, and we both know that doesn't help anyone.

If you're ready to build your business really fast, you don't have to struggle anymore. We've figured out how to help entrepreneurs build their business in a clear way, with a predictable structure and system that gets results, and we're proving it every single day. If you have a business where you know there's more opportunity, where you know you're leaving money on the table, that you could be doing more, that you could be helping more people, that you could be making more money, then you owe it to yourself to reach out to us.

Go to billionairecode.com. Answer a few questions, and give us your contact information, and you'll have an opportunity to sign up to talk to a member of my team. If you have an opportunity that is bigger than where you are today, then you absolutely need to reach out to us, because we help business owners build infrastructure faster than any other organization on the planet, and business opportunity is fleeting. Let us help you take advantage of it, maximize it, and make it grow before someone else does. Billionairecode.com.

Thank You For Listening!

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With gratitude,

Alex

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