Clear Space For Growth

Most entrepreneurs aren't busy. Most entrepreneurs are overwhelmed. They're buried. They're in over their heads. They have way too much to do, not enough time to do it in, and they fight a losing battle every day, trying to get ahead. That's why it's weird, but it's exactly what I'm aiming for when a client of mine, like Jose Pena, leaves me a message and says, "Alex, I don't know if I've delegated too much or if I've hired too many people, but things have gotten easy for me and I don't feel like I'm really busy anymore. What do I do?"

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.

Most of the entrepreneurial world is overwhelmed. In fact, the status quo, sometimes if you look at the entrepreneurial world, the status quo or maybe even the goal would seem to be overwhelmed. People brag about hustling and how many hours they're working and what they're doing and how hard they're doing things, and if you watch some people's Instagram stories, it's like a constant battle of getting as much done as you can in any given moment and always having more to do than you're able to get done.

That is one of the biggest challenges of being an entrepreneur, the overwhelm, the phrenetic activity, the fact that you never feel like you can get ahead. Here's why, if you're growing a business, not just working in a business that you own, but if you're actually growing the business that you own, your behavior has to change, your activities have to change in order for that business to grow. One of the biggest challenges that most entrepreneurs have is that they are so busy, so buried in the business that they are doing as much as they can just to keep their head above water, but they never create the space for what's coming. They never create the space for growth.

That's why it's so exciting for me when I get a message like I got from Jose, where he literally said, "Alex, I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, but I don't have enough to do anymore." This happens to me with my clients all of the time. Because here's one of the foundational goals in the programs that we've put together to show entrepreneurs how to grow and scale their business.

One of the goals we have is that we help entrepreneurs clear space and clear up currencies that they can spend on the activities that are coming, on what is going to ... what they're going to have to do, not what they're doing now, but what's coming. See, if you look at the numbers of entrepreneurial business in the United States, the numbers don't lie. Most businesses don't grow. We all can talk ourselves into, oh, everybody's business is growing, they're doing better than I am, but that's just not how it works. Let's look at the simple numbers, 29 million businesses in the United States, about 22 million of them are under six figures, are under $100,000. Of the remaining seven million, about three and a half are under a million dollars, so total there's about 25-1/2 million out of 29 million under one million dollars. It shows you how few businesses actually grow.

One of the reasons that businesses don't grow is because we as entrepreneurs get conditioned in exactly the wrong way to grow our business. Let me share with you what I call one of the biggest entrepreneurial challenges that we face is that in order to successfully start a business, you must do everything. Let's be real. There's nobody else there. But, successfully starting a business conditions an entrepreneur to do everything. This is one of those truths that we all have to internalize, realize it's running in our lives, it's a pattern that is present and it's something that we have to work really hard to overrule. Let me say it again, when you successfully start a business, you do everything and successfully starting a business will condition you to do everything.

It's just like Pavlov's dog. When he rang the bell, the dog would salivate. Well here's what happens as an entrepreneur, you start your business and it's one of the hardest things that you've ever done in your life, in fact, I often ask entrepreneurs in groups when I'm speaking how hard was it to start your business, and I think the most dramatic answer I ever got was a guy who stood up and said, "I've recovered from stage four testicular cancer and starting my business was harder." I was blown away.

Well, that difficulty, that emotion, that ambiguity of starting our business keeps us in a heightened emotional state, in a heightened connectivity state where things imprint at a very deep level and we start our business, we start working, and something happens that feels like success. Well what triggered that success? It's easy, us doing everything. The more we experience success, the more we associate, the more we condition, the more we connect doing everything to being successful, and so as an entrepreneur, here's one of your goals that no one's ever shared with you before.

One of your goals is every day to get tactical items off of your plate so that you are no longer overwhelmed, and this is one of the hardest things for us to do because it requires us to actually ask for help and we have to systematically ask the people around us to help us with what we are doing so that we can continuously free up space for what's coming next, because here's the biggest transition that happens in an entrepreneurial business as the business scales, are you ready for this? The biggest transition is in the activities of the entrepreneur, because 100% of what you do will have to shift as you grow your business, not 90%, not 80%, not 60%, 100% everything you do will have to shift as you grow your business, and it doesn't matter what you're doing in the business.

I've had people challenge me on this. They say, "Alex, well I'll always handle marketing for my business." Okay, but it's still gonna shift. Today you're marketing for a six figure business, tomorrow it will be a seven figure business, then it will be an eight figure business. The scale, the scope, the impression of your marketing all has to shift as your business grows. Everything you do as an entrepreneur to grow your business will shift over time, and one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs have is that we keep ourselves completely overwhelmed, completely occupied, we put two days worth of to-dos on every single daily to-do list and we're always playing from behind.

Well, until we put systems and strategies in place, like Jose did, where you can offload the daily tactical and start opening up room to grow, then you actually can start growing your business, but here's what is so challenging for us, but yet something we have to be aware of so that we don't let it affect us is that as we free up space, as we make the space to grow, there's going to be discomfort there. I've watched it now dozens of times, maybe hundreds of times with my clients over the years.

Every entrepreneur feels like they want more space, feels like they want more time, feels like they want to feel less pressure but then here's the issue, as soon as we feel the reduction in those things, we also feel a reduction in significance. We feel a reduction in being needed. We feel a reduction in how important we may feel to our company and here's the challenge, a lot of the time, that reduction in importance, that reduction in status, that reduction in being needed will drive us right back to getting overwhelmed, to going all in, to being completely 100% totally completely all of your time spent and all of your time used up, and I've watched entrepreneurs do it over and over again, where we finally clear some space for what's coming, we clear the space so that our business can actually grow, we clear the space so that we can move forward as human beings and then we will fill it up almost immediately because we feel that lack of significance.

Here's one of the keys of growing a business long-term is to clear space so that you have it open so that you can prepare for what's coming, because as you grow everything is going to shift. As you grow, your perspective must shift, and as you grow how you see your business must shift so the fastest way to get there is to shift your behaviors, to shift what you're doing in the business, to offload more, to get more help, to have less tactical up to you and more strategic time in the business, and the more you can move from tactical, getting things done, to strategic, deciding how they will be done, deciding the rules for how your business works, the culture with which your business works, the way you're going to manage projects, the way you're gonna execute, how you communicate with your team, how your team hears from you, how you keep everybody aligned, what type of a meeting [inaudible] you're going to have. All of those strategic things are the shift that we must move to in order to actually grow and actually scale a business long-term.

The challenge is is that nobody tells us as we're growing our business that the hustle, the grind, going all in, putting in all the time, of course those things are gonna grow the business but eventually if you just keep doing those things you get stuck, because if you're not actively freeing up your time to be more strategic, if you're not actively offloading what is tactical so that you aren't tactically overwhelmed every day, and if you aren't up-leveling what you do every single day, you'll end up hitting a plateau and your business won't grow anymore.

So every time I get a message from a client that feels like they've offloaded too much or they're not busy enough or like Jose asked if they're doing it right, I celebrate. My answer back to Jose was, "Yes, you're doing it right. This is exactly where we want to be. This is precisely what we've been aiming at." What we want to make sure of is that we clear the space so that you can grow into the business you've created, so we clear the space so you can take advantage of the opportunity you've created. We clear the space so that you can become the CEO of the company you're building, not the company you had.

So if you're overwhelmed every day, if you're "hustling" every day, if you're buried, if you can't get everything done, if there's more to-do on your to-do list than you're actually accomplishing, that may be the single biggest barrier to growing your business.

If you're ready to get out of that sense of overwhelm, if you're ready to start shifting from tactical to strategic, if you're ready to start really scaling your business at a rate that you know you can and get there fast, then reach out to us. We help entrepreneurs grow and scale businesses and grow to the point where you know you're making the impact you're capable of making. If you're ready to grow your business, build the team, do more with less, and move forward far faster than you are today in a community of people who are doing the exact same thing, go to billionairecode.com/apply and you'll be on a call with a member of me or my team. Fill out our short application which in and of itself will help you understand your business better. By the time you're finished applying, you'll understand your business far better than you do right now as you're listening to me.

Go to billionairecode.com/apply. You'll end up on a call with a member of me and my team and we will show you exactly how we can help you grow your business, scale your team, and make the biggest impact you've ever dreamed possible. Billionairecode.com/apply.