Momentum Podcast: 693

The Biggest Hurdle to Entrepreneurial Success

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

Entrepreneurs are the most consistent source of positive human evolution. We always have, and we always will be.

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.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking to grow a world-changing empire, this episode will help you overcome the biggest hurdle standing between entrepreneurs and success.

By the end of this 14-minute episode, you will understand:
Why it is difficult for entrepreneurs to see the right path to grow their business.
The two fundamental questions entrepreneurs have to answer in order to grow and scale.
How you can start to clarify your vision so you can get into momentum and start growing your business predictably.

There is nothing wrong with you, and you are not alone. Join the rally-cry of entrepreneurs around the world who are getting into momentum and bringing the rest of humanity with us by going to https://charfen.com/blind.

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.

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 —> https://charfen.com/community

There is a way to grow the business you have always known you should have, and you are just the one to grow it. Go to https://charfen.com/blind right now to find out the truth about your identity as an entrepreneur.

Full Audio Transcript

This is the Momentum podcast. If you've been struggling to grow your business up to this point, chances are the problem runs deeper than your marketing.

It's not about hiring the wrong people. It's not just about creating a better product. And it's not just about you being the biggest bottleneck. All of these things are important. But there's one issue that takes the cake above all the others. You need to correct your vision so you can see where you're going.

In other words, you need an actual plan.

In this episode of the Momentum podcast, Alex is going to talk about a fundamental concept that we teach called entrepreneurial blindness and specifically how to fix that blindness in your business, overcoming entrepreneurial blindness. We'll do two things for you.

It'll give you a clear perspective of where you're at right now, and it'll also clarify where you're going.

If you've ever wanted to predict the future, have a better night's sleep. Stop worrying about your business. Overcoming entrepreneurial blindness will help you get there. 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.

In order for you to to explain what this is, I want to explain how we are and who we are as entrepreneurs. So when you look at entrepreneurs, we are that small percentage of the population. They get up every day. We go into the future, create a new reality, come back to the present and demand it becomes real. And that journey, that that exercise takes a tremendous amount from us as entrepreneurs. And here's the challenge for us as time goes on, we travel into the future and in that future that we see gets more and more clear, more compelling, more exciting, especially as we gain experience. But how we translate it to what we need to do day to day gets more and more difficult for ourselves as individuals, and then as we build the team, it gets even more difficult because complexity increases.

And so and here's here's what's interesting about us as entrepreneurs. If we go out into the future and we talk about that future is crystallize, it is real.

We can express it with emotion and with passion. You know, we can get excited about it. But if we are asked what we're going to do today to get there, that's where it feels overwhelming in the present. In the moment is where we experience entrepreneurial blindness. We have this compelling future. But in the present, there's blindness as to what to do next is blindness as to what step to take next. It's it is one of the most challenging places to be and to cure the symptoms of entrepreneurial blindness. If you're sitting there thinking, no, I have a really clear plan. Let's just talk of three of this. Talk about three of the symptoms and there is a ton of symptoms. Having turnover with people is a symptom that you as an entrepreneur have entrepreneurial blindness, not meaning your goals or outcomes that you said. That is a symptom. There's a time. But I want to share the three that I think are most compelling to get you to pay attention to this, to get you to understand that this exists and to understand that there's actually a pretty simple way to walk out of this. And so.

Here's here's the issue with entrepreneurial blindness is that.

It triggers us as entrepreneurs and it keeps us in a place where we're triggered, where we're challenged, and it it it does that across the board with everything we do. And so the first symptom of entrepreneurial blindness is that we become a bottleneck in our business. I think about how what how high is the agitation level, the anxiety level around being a bottleneck in your business, knowing that there's more to do, knowing that you're the one slowing things down? It's incredibly challenging. See, if we have clarity about what we're doing in the moment, in the present, then. We don't have that anxiety around or we don't have that that bottleneck energy, if we have clarity and we can communicate to our team, we don't become the bottleneck. The reason that entrepreneurs are a bottleneck is this is simple. The vision is clear. They communicate the vision. A lot of cases, some entrepreneurs do it pretty well, but there's no plan that connects the vision down to what are we going to do on a day to day basis for each member of the company? There's no plan that connects the vision to here's what we're going to execute over the next 30 days, over the next quarter, over the next year, in order to predictably grow this company, to do an exponential level of success.

When you don't have those plans, here's what happens. Here's why it's like this is like math.

This is like physics. This is like laws of the universe

If you are in an entrepreneurial, an entrepreneur run business and you are the entrepreneur and you don't have a plan, you will always be the bottleneck one hundred percent of the time. Here's why.

Every time someone makes a step forward or completes a part of a project or finishes something, they have to come back to you and say, here's what I did. Tell me what to do next. And then they go do it. And then you have to tell them what to do next. We call this transactional management.

It's exhausting. It is brutal. It will tear you down. It will tear you apart. Transactional management is when entrepreneurs say, oh, I'm always having to tell my team what to do and I'm interrupted by God. And people always need to talk to me and I can't get my work done.

It's because they're in this transactional management place. And you know what's challenging is entrepreneurs. When we're working on our own, we actually transactionally manage ourselves. It's we don't create even a plan of how we're going to execute.

And so when you look at a business, if there is no plan that the team understands and if there is no plan to get from that future vision to how do we actually assign resources on a week to week, day to day basis so that we are achieving what we need to do to move closer to that higher level outcome? That is where you've committed to being a bottleneck as an entrepreneur.

Now, the second thing that happens when you don't have a plan, it goes right hand in hand with being a bottleneck. Is decision making fatigue when you don't have a clear plan?

Here's what you're literally doing as an entrepreneur. You're getting up every day and you're saying, what are we going to do today to get to this future vision? So on a daily basis, you're making a decisions about what you're going to do, how you're going to execute, what you're going to do next.

And, yes, there might be periods where, you know, you can assign something to somebody or get them to go finish part of a project. But you're consistently always back in this place where you're making decisions, where in decision making fatigue for entrepreneurs is crushing. Here's what happens. It's scientifically proven that the more decisions we made over time, the less sharp our decision making skills are.

Some some studies actually show that we can get kind of dangerous if we make too many decisions over time. And when I look at the entrepreneurial world, there's twenty nine million businesses run run by entrepreneurs in the United States.

Twenty two million of them are under one hundred thousand dollars. A lot of it is because all these smaller businesses and when you look at not just a lot of them run under a hundred thousand dollars, only three percent of businesses ever break a million. Why? Because they don't have a plan that they can clearly execute and they're asking, what do we do today, every day? And if you're the entrepreneur without a plan and you're asking, what do we do? And you're answering the question, what do we do today? Every single day, you not only are you committing to being the bottleneck and committing to decision making fatigue, here's what starts happening. The third really major symptom of entrepreneurial blindness, of not knowing the clear, sharp, like clarity, confidence committed to exactly what we're going to do next is imposter syndrome.

And we all know how painful impostor syndrome is.

Now, here's what I want you to know about being an engineer or entrepreneur. You will always feel some level of imposter syndrome Alex because we are constantly breaking new ground. We're taking these steps where we're going over another horizon. We're figuring something new out. And if we're growing in any way as people, we are always on the bleeding edge of something where we're going to feel imposter syndrome.

But when we are in that condition of entrepreneurial blindness, where, one, we feel like a bottleneck in our business, then too we have that Decision-Making fatigue, where we're making decisions all day long and we get exhausted.

It gets to the point where we don't want to make another decision and our decision making actually gets it starts to have massive diminishing returns. And we're not making decisions as well. And we get stuck at some of the revenue levels that I mentioned earlier. And then impostor syndrome kicks on like crazy and we always going to have some of it.

But if you've gone through that, then impostor syndrome is like so loud, it creates so much noise in your life that you get to a place where you have trouble doing what you need to do on a daily basis. You start procrastinating and slowing things down and not just doing the things you already know you need to do to grow your business or even maintain the business you have. And all of this is due to a lack of a plan that can be communicated and executed and have your team move forward. Now there's other elements that you need. But here's the reality of not having a plan, if you don't have a plan, you want to making a commitment to being the bottleneck and decision making fatigue and the symptoms of imposter syndrome.

And what that looks like in the business is a business where there's a lot of turnover of good people. It's a business where you're not hitting the numbers you want. It's a business where you are exhausted. Is the entrepreneur or the person who's operating your business is exhausted in the operator position? You know, sometimes I mean, entrepreneurs are like, oh, I've got this. I we must be doing this right because I'm not exhausted. Then we talk to the second in command and they're dying. And so talk to your operator if you're thinking I don't have an issue here and ask them how clear is the plan that you have. And so.

There's an easy way to shift this as an entrepreneur, you start creating strategic plans where your team understands what's going on and you communicate those plans within a structure where they know what to expect and they're not hearing word from on high.

Let me explain what I mean by word from my. You know, I don't think the majority of entrepreneurs ever take a minute and put themselves in the seat of a contractor working with them or a team mate working with them or someone working with them, because here's what here's what it feels like to work with most entrepreneurs.

It feels like communication is sporadic. It's sometimes aggressive, it's sometimes surprising. And you don't really know what you're going to get and when you're going to get it.

And we call this waiting for word from on high. Every person in an entrepreneurial business where there isn't a way to clearly communicate the plan is waiting for word from on high. So step one is you have to have the plan and then you create a system to which is communicated to everyone on your team so that they understand what's going on. Instead of sporadic communication. You have a predetermined plan system to communicate to everybody on your team.

And when you do this, here's what happens.

You first lift yourself out of that quagmire of entrepreneurial blindness that that such it's such an incredibly frustrating place to be when you know what you want to achieve and you maybe even have the business off the ground and you can see what is going to be in the future. And you understand the potential. And as a visionary, that is such an incredible place to be. But then getting that translated to what you and a team does or contractors do or the people who are working directly with you do is.

Incredibly challenging. And.

It's one of the most frustrating and anxiety provoking places for entrepreneurs to be, because here's one, we will feel anxiety. Here's when we will show symptoms. Here's one. We will have weird things pop up in our life where it will feel our health be challenged, where we'll start to have hormonal issues is when we are spending a lot of time in the future and we're not making progress in the present.

I've worked with entrepreneurs for decades now, and it's amazing how many times we've helped entrepreneurs clear up issues that they've been having clear up medical issues clear up.

You know, the list of things is so interesting, I mean, it takes in their eyes or psoriasis symptoms or symptoms of autoimmune stuff that's going on with that or so many other like anxiety or frustration or reactivity

We've helped entrepreneurs.

Turn all of those things around through resolving entrepreneurial blindness, because for us as entrepreneurs, we were put on this planet to dream into that greater future, to create that greater future, to to live this planet out of where it is now and evolve into something even more important, even better, and to help the people around us. And so as entrepreneurs, we have this drive to contribute, to make things happen, to move things forward for a lot of us. It's like the most compelling thing we feel. And I would say when I say a lot of us, it's most of us, it's the most compelling thing we feel.

And when we are in that place of entrepreneurial blindness where we don't know the next steps, we can't communicate the clear next steps, we're not making the progress we want. It's where we feel challenged in every way we feel challenged cognitively.

It's hard to think of the next steps. It's hard to make decisions. It gets frustrating, more reactive.

We show the symptoms of a lot of what people would call disorders, what I would call an entrepreneur under massive high pressure in noise. And it's not just cognitively. We also chemically are physiologically, chemically next. Physiologically, we feel it. We feel like we feel run down. We feel frustrated, we feel we feel exhausted. And then chemically, we feel the chemical pressure of being in that place, of not being able to make progress. And it's debilitating, you know, some people would call that depression, I would call it an entrepreneur in full constraint that can't see the next steps. Because here's what's crazy, so many times we've worked with an entrepreneur to overcome this, this limitation and those other things go away. I see a cause and effect. And in no way am I telling anyone that this is medical advice. It's just a pattern I've seen over and over again with entrepreneurs. And so if you want to understand more about entrepreneurial blindness and how this is affecting your business and what you can do next to to create a plan that everybody does understand in a predictable way over and over, in the same way using a proven framework so that you get the results you want.

You can check out Charfen dot com forward slash blind and it's Charfen dot com, our website, for example. And my team put out some resources there for you and I would love for you to check them out if you can't tell.

This is something I am insanely passionate about because here's what I've witnessed my entire career. When visionary entrepreneurs have a system and a structure in place to solve vision to day to day activity and plan or any system to communicate that vision to day to day activity. That's when visionary entrepreneurs go out, make the impact they've always wanted to, that they've always known they should. They step into who they truly are and they change the world for the better. And that is my mission on this planet, is to help as many entrepreneurs as I can do exactly that. But when we can resolve entrepreneurial blindness for as many entrepreneurs as possible, we're going to see some radical changes in the world.

Thanks for being here and I'll talk to you soon.

Thank You For Listening!

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

Please feel free to reach out if you have a question or feedback via our Contact Us page.

Please leave me a review on iTunes and share my podcast with your friends and family.

With gratitude,

Alex

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