Brand Your Process For Freedom

This is the Momentum podcast.

One of the issues that we hear all the time from entrepreneurs is, "My customers only want to deal with me." This is one of the most limiting conditions you can have in your business. If people only want to deal with you, then the growth of your business is constrained by how much time you have. No one wants to have a business where our time equals the growth of our business since it's so limited. In this episode of the Momentum podcast, Alex is going to teach you how we teach our members to brand their process so that people purchase from them, the process, instead of time with the entrepreneur directly. I hope you enjoy.

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 check in really quick and just share a story of one of our members. I haven't asked his permission to share it so I'm just going to use the story itself but I'm not going to use details, but it's really exciting. So it's actually a transition I've been through, a few years ago I was in exactly the same place. We had a member who came to us recently that runs a business where he's a coach, a consultant, he's helping other people... Hey, Matthew. Good to see you, man. He's helping other people with what he does as an expert. This podcast works specifically well for anyone who's a coach, a consultant, an expert, a practitioner of any kind, because here's what happens, this is what happened to our member, this is what happened to me a few years ago.

When we first introduce ourselves as a coach, an expert, a practitioner, we're selling ourselves. It's how I started the business that we're running right now, that's how I started the last business Katie and I had, I was selling me. I was selling the results that I could create for people. I was saying, "I can help you." In fact, when you look at the early iterations of the coaching programs we have now, we had no platform, we had no system, we had no structure. It was just me, one-on-one most of the time, helping people and setting them up in between coaching calls. That was incredibly difficult, and our business was completely limited by how much I could do.

Our member was in a similar place. He's in the health and fitness space, so he helps people get healthier, get fit, helps them really discover what they need and what they want to do and create radical health and fitness, and it becomes an unfair advantage. Well, the challenge was the way that he was selling his business, the way that he was talking about it was he was selling himself. He was selling himself as the person who could help.

Now, here's how you can make a radical change in your business and get yourself out of the firing line, but first I want to talk about why. If you're a coach, a consultant, or an expert, one of the most limiting things you can do with your business is set yourself up as the person everyone should talk to, is set yourself up as the expert that's going to give all the answers. You actually want to stop doing this as quick as you can in your business, which is tough. Because as a coach, or a consultant, or an expert, as someone who's helping other people, a practitioner, if you're in medicine, you want to sell yourself so people will come towards you and then you immediately want them to buy the result rather than buying you. Because if everybody who deals with your company wants you, and if the brand is all around you and there's nothing that people want other than you, it makes it so that you're stuck. You're constrained. You are in a place where you really can't grow. A lot of our members come to us in this place, and what we do is we show them how to brand their process and gain their freedom.

Here's what I mean by branding your process. When I first started selling what we sell today, I was selling a one-year coaching program where I would help you grow and scale your business, and we would get things in order and we would set them up. Over the course of the beginning of selling this product, we started branding it and we called it the Charfen Cadence. The Charfen Cadence is a system to help you predictably create a strategic plan, communicate it with your team and grow your business predictably over time. When people come to us now, we don't talk about me, we talk about the Charfen Cadence. We talk about the outcome we get, we talk about this system we have, and so we share this with our members and we tell them to do the same thing.

Well, the member who had come to us in the fitness space was completely tapped out, totally overwhelmed, had been doing this for a while and really was having trouble getting out of having to do everything. In fact, the business was at this place where it was stagnant because they kept trying to sell but they couldn't sell without including him in the delivery. So they went from a non-branded method to branding the method. It went from come and get fit and get healthy to now actually having a brand name as to how to get fit and get healthy. We know there's other brand names out there like this, there's Bulletproof, there's Wild & Fit, there's all kinds of methods... The melt method. I mean, I can't think of a lot of other fitness methods right now, but there's a ton of them out there. When you look at how those are being sold, there is no thought leader that needs to be included in this sale.

So here's what happens, when you brand your system, brand your deliverables, brand your process, you actually start selling that and you're not selling yourself anymore. When you start selling the process and you start getting testimonials about the process, not you, you start having people refer people for the process, not you, and you start talking to people about the process. Again, not you. Now you create a space where you can start literally scaling the business. You can start growing the business like crazy.

Now, back to the story about our member in the fitness space, he's only been in our program, Deanna told me about 45 days. I got a message from him directly through Facebook letting me know how phenomenal his experience was because they came into our system, created a strategic plan, went from no branded method to a branded method, and he said, overnight, it's like their business has changed because now they're talking about the results, they're talking about the outcome, they're talking about the method and people are signing up for it. In the message he left me, he said, "It's like everything's changed, sales have gotten easier, delivery has gotten easier." People are buying the method, they're not buying him. It's taken the pressure off of him to be completely and totally involved in delivery.

So if you're a coach, a consultant, an expert, or a practitioner, how branded is your method or your process? Are you selling a thing or are you selling yourself? Are you selling an outcome through a process or are they buying you?

Now like I said at the beginning of this video, which will become a podcast, when you are selling yourself you are naturally limited. If you can brand it, create outcomes around it and sell that, you completely eliminate any limitations you have. So if you're a coach, practitioner, expert, or a consultant, ask yourself, how well documented is your progress? How clear is your progress... Sorry, your process. How clear is your process? How well documented is it? How clear are the steps to it?

When one of my team members, or when I talk about the Charfen Cadence, it's clear that this is an outcome you are buying because there's so much detail to it. When our member shares this new method he has to get people healthy, it's clear it's an outcome you're buying because it's a method that you're actually buying into.

See, I think that coaches, consultants, experts, practitioners, we all become entrepreneurs in some way because we want freedom. We want to be able to do what we want to do, we want to be able to have the lifestyle we want, but so many of us get caught up in this one-on-one delivery or we get trapped in delivery. When I look at most coaches, consultants, and experts, and practitioners, especially practitioners, I would say that nine out of 10 of them are doing way more in delivery than they should be, and it's a combination of things. One is they have not branded their method, but the second one is they haven't documented it to the point where it actually deserves to have a brand name so they're doing everything themselves.

If you're a coach, consultant, or expert, or practitioner who's listening to this, and at any point in time while I've been talking you've had the thought, "Well, but I'm the only one who can do this and I'm the only one who can get the outcomes. There's no way somebody else could do it", I just want to challenge that. In our coaching memberships we have this saying, we actually make stickers and send them to our members that say, you are not a unicorn. Here's what we mean by you are not a unicorn, anything you're doing, anything that you're delivering right now, can be turned into a process that somebody else can do so that you can become more strategic in your business. Whenever we, as entrepreneurs, think the opposite, when we think we're so special we have to be in the room, we're the only one who can get the outcome, we're the only one who can make this happen, we are limiting ourselves and the contribution we can make in the world in a massive and major way.

So whenever someone in one of our classes or when we have one of our events, when somebody says, "Wow, I need help with this thing because I'm the only one who can do it", you can watch around the room in our events, people who start smiling and thinking, "We know what's coming next." We say, "Oh, you know what? I just want to point out something, you're not a unicorn. Of course, somebody else can do it." I use examples that, this is kind of an outlandish example, but like Elon Musk. Can you imagine if Elon Musk was like, "Nope, I'm the only one who can do this. I need to be in the room. I'm the only person who can do this. I need to be there." Would he be able to run Tesla and SpaceX? Let's get real, he's trying to colonize Mars and end our dependence on fossil fuels at the same time. There's no way he insists on being in the room for delivery or for what a customer is experiencing. If he did, it would break the entire structure. So as a coach, consultant, practitioner, or expert, we need to learn we can do the same thing.

If you have never tried to write down your process or transfer it to somebody else so that they can help you with it, it may feel impossible, but I'm a good example. Just three years ago, when we started this business, I was doing 100% of the coaching, all of the delivery was me, there really was hardly any support or anything else there. Today, I'm barely involved in the delivery. I'm actually responsible for a couple of meetings with our members each month. I do a meeting with our growing scale group and a meeting with our accelerator group, I'm responsible for some trainings, but I am not responsible for talking to our members. In fact, if I was, it would be a disservice to them at this point.

When I was growing the business, I had the time to do some one-on-one coaching. That's how I grew the business. Now we're a multimillion dollar company, we're breaking into departments, I'm coaching executives, I'm also our thought leaders so I do a lot of our content, I do a lot of our social media, and so today it would be a disservice for me to coach someone one-on-one. I don't have the time and I also don't have the awareness or the capacity. I don't have the attention to give someone to coach them one-on-one. So I've been completely out of coaching for over a year. My team now handles the coaching, which here's what that ensures, our members get a much more consistent experience. There's always somebody there to help them. There's always someone that they can call on. It's not limited by my time, my schedule, what I'm able to do. It's helped me buy some freedom and buy a lot less pressure and a lot less noise in my life.

By branding the process, the Charfen Cadence, with the outcomes of creating a strategic plan, communicating it clearly with your team and predictably growing and scaling your business, it has completely shifted what people are looking for when they come to us. Before it was, "I want Alex's help." Today it is, "I want the outcomes you're getting for all of these other people and what you talked about in the podcast", or the webinar, or wherever somebody was exposed to us.

So if you're a coach, consultant, expert, or practitioner consider this, document the heck out of your process, make sure you know what all the steps are, get clear on what you're doing with people. Even if you've never tried to do it, start somewhere and you will start to create a written process. Get that process clear, pressure test it, use it with people. That's what I did at the very beginning, I started writing out what I was doing, making an outline, then I started using that outline in the one-on-one coaching I was doing. Then I hired a coach and said, "Hey, here's how we're going to do this. This is the outline. This is the structure we're using." Then we created training modules, we created documentation, we have resources around it. Today, like I said, it would be a massive disservice for me to step back in and try and coach somebody one-on-one because we have a system, and a process, and a structure that gets extraordinary results, and I don't need to be involved in it.

So if you're in a place where you feel the constraint of having to do it all yourself, if you're in a place where you're feeling the pressure of having to talk to every member or client or customer yourself, I want you to know something, here's what comes next, it's this thing called client, or member, or patient animosity. What happens is we start to actually feel animosity, we start to feel negatively towards the people we're coaching, towards the people we're helping, towards the people we love. I think every coach, expert, consultant, practitioner gets into the business for one reason or another, but part of it is we love these people. We want to help the people who we serve. We want to help them do better. We want to help them grow. We want to help them be able to make more out of what they're doing. So we love them, but if we feel beholden and constrained by them, we will develop negative feelings towards them.

I see this all the time with coaches, consultants, especially with doctors where, as the business grows, the pressure on you goes up, the pressure for you to deliver goes up, and so it gets harder and harder and those negative emotions and feelings get transferred to your members, or your clients, or your patients. I do not want to see you get into a place of animosity towards the people who are funding the growth of your business because if that happens, the challenges in your business are 100% assured. You are going to experience major issues in growing the business. You're going to have a hard time moving it forward. And as you get into that place of animosity towards your members or clients or patients, you're going to start self-sabotaging the business. Maybe it's not an absolute that you will, but there is such a high likelihood that you will start causing some challenges, some issues, some frustrations in the business. There will be days where you wake up and you don't want to be involved anymore. You'll get a text, or a boxer, or a Facebook message from a member, and it'll give you a heart palpitation like, "Ah, I don't need this pressure." I know those feelings intimately. I know them well.

So the steps to take are document the process, brand it, sell the branded process, stop selling yourself, and you will be able to scale your business, sell an outcome rather than yourself, avoid feeling animosity towards the very people that you love and you're trying to help, and you're going to get a lot better results. Today, my organization coaches over 220 businesses worldwide and we're adding members every week. There's no way I could possibly do that myself. We have a coaching team of three people full time just supporting our members so that they're there to make sure that they move forward, they can grow and scale their business and they do it in a predictable way.

So if you'd like some help with this and you'd like to understand how you can document your branded process and buy yourself freedom, but how you can create a strategic plan, communicate that plan to your team and predictably grow your business, reach out to us. We'd love to help you. Go to billionairecode.com. Here's what will happen on Billionaire Code, we have some of our best content there. The Billionaire Code is the nine levels that you go through from startup entrepreneur all the way to a $100 million. So if you're somewhere in that range, the Billionaire Code will tell you where you are in that journey, what you should be focused on right now and what is coming next. And then once you get to experience the Billionaire Code, understand where you are as an entrepreneur, you can register for a call with my team. Go to billionairecode.com, download a copy of the Billionaire Code, I think it will be life changing for you, and we'd love to talk to you as well.

Remember, when it comes to your business, selling yourself is a way to grow and it's a way to get things started, but it will stop your growth and it will cause some serious frustration and challenges. Brand your process, document it like crazy, sell that and get yourself out of the line of fire and radically lower the pressure and noise in your life so you can grow your business.